The saga continues! This is a big one; we've been building to it since part 7!

Many thanks to my editor, John Smith, for his eye for continuity, tone, and good grammar.

-IPD

~
I cracked open a new book and stuck my nose into the pages. "Ahh. Nothing like the smell of a freshly opened book."

Kolani groaned. "I swear, if you say that one more time..."

We'd been nested in the Royal Library for five days, and I'd opened a thousand books by now. It was either bug my fellow scribes, or shit myself from boredom. I flipped to the summary page of the book. "That sounds like a threat," I said innocently.

"Believe me, it is," she promised.

This latest book chronicled the early development of irrigation systems in the low plains surrounding Cammes. Normally I'm a sucker for that stuff. How does this giant city support itself? What's the standard of living for an average farmhand? If metal in this world only comes from animals, do chickens lay metal eggs?

But five days of reading and cataloging had ground my curiosity to dust. I could tell, because when I found an illustrated book of church-sanctioned sex positions, I just skimmed a couple pages before cataloging it as "Unimaginative Kama Sutra" and added it to the pile of books waiting to be shipped out.

Yeah, my work ethic may or may not have been slacking...All this work was supposed to get me closer to the Liberator's tomb, but I had yet to so much as pick up the trail of it. Merlin was stringing me along, suggesting book after useless book while I spent over ten hours a day doing his work for him.

I picked up the next book, a thin brown volume titled Why The Dragons Died: Cynicism in an Awakened Society. I opened the book, and glanced at Kaloni. Her pale blue bandana kept her thick hair back, beneath which she watched me with dark eyes.

I dug my nose into the pages.

"Don't do it," she warned.

I inhaled. "Ahh. Nothing like the smell of-ow!"

She'd smacked me upside the head. "We're almost done," she said, glancing ahead of us. "Stay focused."

"Stay focused?" I said, feigning indignation. "You just hit me!"

Merlin cleared his throat. "How is the sorting coming along?"

I started, and turned. The guy came from nowhere, I swear. Despite the long gray beard and the wrinkled saggy skin you'd expect of a guy of that name, he snuck up on me all the time. Kaloni was used to it, and smiled pleasantly. "It's going great. We should be finished by tomorrow."

"We'd probably finish faster if someone wasn't slapping me all the time," I said, rubbing the back of my head.

Kaloni rolled her eyes. Merlin just said, "The city will be sieged tomorrow. Our last shipment leaves at day's end."

I blinked. "You're kidding. The city's going to be attacked tomorrow?" I looked around at the thoughtful, nodding faces of the other scribes. "This is the part where we start freaking out, right?"

"Sieged," corrected Merlin, "not attacked. The King's spies tell us that the Jassanese have pushed themselves to their limit to get here this fast. Days of forced marching. They won't be looking for a fight quite yet."

Grant came over from packing boxes. The muscles of his forearms were veined and bulging, and he wiped the sweat from his brow. "Sounds like the perfect time to attack. Show them what the Knights are made of."

Merlin snorted. "We're outnumbered ten to one. The walls of Cammes are our best hope. If General Tzu has any sense in him, we won't let a single soldier past them. Work hard, scholars. We are running out of time."

I cleared my throat. "Merlin, can I-"

"Not now, Tristan," said Merlin. "Let's get this done. We'll have plenty of time for questions then."

His announcement changed the mood significantly. We turned back to our books with diligence. Merlin spent an hour sullenly parsing the last remaining boxes of books yet to be sorted, stroking his long beard and setting aside the ones he felt were less important.

It must have been hard for him. The amount of work going into this project was huge—we were working around the clock, the tail-end of a weeks long process to clear out the library before the invaders arrived. He clearly loved these books.

But I couldn't bring myself to empathize. I was working for the guy, but I had settled into a dark mood.

Kaloni picked up on it. "Ahh," she said, smelling a new book. "Nothing like the smell of...What's gotten into you?"

I sighed. "I don't know. I guess we just have to get this done."

"But this isn't why you came here," she said. "You were looking for a specific book, weren't you? Did you find it?"

I shut Why the Dragons Died, jotted down its title and summary, and placed it in the box for Grant to come get. "I must have read a hundred and fifty books about the Liberator, but not a single one gave me what I was looking for."

Kaloni smiled, kind of pitifully. "What were you looking for?"

I scratched my head. "For some kind of agreement among the books. But nobody knows where he went."

"What, you want to meet the guy and shake his hand?" she joked. "Hey, Mr. Liberator sir. Thanks for giving us free will." The scribe next to her chuckled.

It made sense why she and everyone else had been so skeptical. The Liberator was just a story to them. Not so much ancient history as a tale your grandma's grandma had thrown around.

"I was just hoping for something authoritative," I said. "A primary source. Not these large-scale, sweeping historiographies." I grasped for an example. "Something like the source text of Liberationism, you know? An early version, thousands of years old, dusted with time. That kind of thing."

Kaloni closed her volume and stacked it on top of mine. "Well of course you wouldn't find anything like that here," she said. "The Foundation was shipped out a while ago."

I blinked. "What?"

"Yeah. That's what Merlin called all the books that were absolutely critical to restarting Aarturian civilization. They were gone before you even showed up," she said. She paused, looking at me with surprise. "Do you really think Merlin would leave his most precious books until the last day before the Jassanese invade?"

I cursed my own stupidity. "Damn." I can't believe I had hoped to find the location of the Liberator's grave here. This was the dregs of the Library. Only the least important stuff was left. Non-essential irrigation techniques, shitty Kama Sutras.

And Merlin, always with the same answer. Later. We'll have time for you later.

I pushed away from the table and stood up.

"Where are you going?" she asked.

"Grant looks like he could use a hand," I said, pointing to where Grant was nailing shut a large wooden box.

I'd agreed to play by Merlin's rules in order to get access to this place. But days of work had gotten me nowhere. There were promises and assurances, but never anything concrete. I was supposed to stick to the cataloging unless told otherwise...

It would have been easier to keep doing that. To keep believing Merlin. Just get this done. There will be time for questions later. The way was clear ahead of me: finish today's work, and then learn the information I needed.

It's so seductive, having a path put in front of you. Safe.

But I couldn't trust it any more.

Meaning, what? That I had to rely on myself, I guess. It's hard to act alone. I probably would have never left my table, never started any of what followed if I hadn't been so pissed at Merlin.

But sometimes anger is a lifeline. Sometimes you get so fucking fed up with the way things are that it lets you break the mold and do your own thing. It's useful to be pissed off, because you're too busy being angry to think about how things could go to shit.

And they really could. I was going to help Grant, but I hadn't yet helped ship out the books. What if Kaloni got suspicious? What if Merlin snapped at me, or kicked me out of the library for going against the grain?

Whatever. I was starting to learn that if I felt nervous about something, it usually meant it was worth doing. It meant I was vulnerable. In the Eastern army I had fled from the fear of acting with my own agency. I'd chosen to become a monster rather than start the war myself.

But now I leaned into that fear. Because I could trust it. It wasn't fear of doing something awful. It was a reminder that I was deciding what's right.

Kaloni wasn't encouraging. "Tristan, you should really talk to Merlin about this. He would help you out, I'm sure."

Uh huh. I had been very clear that I was looking into the Liberator's disappearance, but he had neglected to mention that all the relevant books were long gone. I'm sure he would "help me out" by wasting even more of my time.

"That might be a good idea, thanks," I said to Kaloni. Sometimes your friends mean well, and you have to ignore them anyway.

I navigated through the piles of books. Ironically, the more we'd organized and shipped out books, the more the Royal Library had come to look like the Jassanese had already ransacked the place.

For a man of learning, Merlin was weirdly ignorant when it came to the Easterners. He seemed to think they'd pour through the place, burning and pillaging every page they saw. To that effect, he'd encouraged us to treat the discarded books like garbage. They were already burnt in his eyes. So we'd left them strewn across the floor, pushed to the side only in the paths we frequented, so that our comings and goings were visible like deer trails through the forest of abandoned literature.

Grant hammered the last nail into a crate and slapped it twice, a habit of his. The "nails" -- wood pieces filed like wedges that you could hammer into roughly matching slots—ingeniously replaced metal ones. Kind of IKEA-ish.

"How's the cataloging coming?" he asked, seeing me approach.

"You should have seen Merlin's face when he was deciding which books to toss," I said. "You would have thought he was picking which of his kids to kill."

Grant grimaced. "I don't envy him. He's worked hard to make this library what it is." Grant sent his gaze up the long columned shelves. They were beautifully carved, and bare of all but dust, now. "Did you need something?"

"Merlin was a bit overzealous with the amount of books he marked for 'burning,'" I said. "Cataloging's in good shape, so I figured I'd lend a hand. Can I bring this out for shipping?"

Grant looked at me warily. "Do you know where to go?"

"No," I admitted, "but you'd assemble boxes quicker than me, and anyone can push a crate down a hall."

"Fair," he acknowledged after a moment's thought. "It's pretty simple, actually." He helped me load the heavy crate onto an ingenious little dolly, and gave me directions to a storage bay. I opened a service door in the back of the library and pushed the dolly through the maze of corridors.

Freedom!

It turned out that finding the storage bay was not "pretty simple, actually." I got lost and had to retrace my steps a few times, but Grant's vague directions got me there in the end, and I finally got the box through a curtain of beads, down a short hallway, and into the great outdoors, where I promptly stepped in something squishy. I looked down.

Ugh. You know, with any huge building complex, you got your main entrances, your servant's entrances...and this. The place they carted off the royal shit and piss; a dump, foul-smelling and overrun with trash. It might have once been well kept...but not with the Jassanese so close. I had to wheel the dolly through semi-navigable piles of broken furniture and junk.

A little ways out I was met by an Ifrit that was all business. A bigger guy for his kind whose head came up to my lower ribs. He squinted at me, nodded, and put his hands on the crate. "Thanks, boss. You a new guy?" He dragged the dolly out of my hands and then pushed it over to a large, vibrantly decorated cart. Very un-sneaky, incongruous with the dirty setting.

"I've been with Merlin for five tedious days," I said. "The reading was driving me nuts, so Grant let me push the cart."

The Ifrit chuckled. "Can't blame you. Books ain't good for your eyes. Letters all small-like."

Sweat beaded the Ifrit's wrinkled skin. It was day out, and the kind of muggy hot that comes when a blanket of clouds traps in the sun's leftover heat. The cloud cover obscured the entire sky, but there was this weird thing happening where the light streaming through seemed to fluctuate. Like someone was playing with the dimming switch of the world. The Ifrit didn't seem to notice, so I figured I was just seeing things from being cooped up for so long.

Two burly humans came over and hefted the crate into the back of the colorful covered cart. I caught a glimpse inside the cover—there were several other crates I recognized that contained books, but padding those crates were small barrels with long sticks in them and baskets of festive colored strips of paper. And wafting from the cart was unmistakably the smell of something sweet and fried.

Was this cart a freaking food truck or something? This was not the way I would have sent out my secret stash of books, personally. The Jassanese army would see this cart from a mile away. Not many bright purple and red things out in the wild.

I watched as the humans packed the miscellaneous goods in front of the books, and then closed the cart. They looked at me like they were wondering what I was still doing here.

The Ifrit coughed. "That's it for now. We'll be back later for the last shipment."

I hesitated. Man, how useful would it be if I could lie? "I was hoping to come with you," I said. "I want to check to see that everything's all there." Not technically untrue...but kind of a stretch.

The Ifrit gave me a suspicious look, like I had just said something very dumb. "It's taken care of, don't worry about it. Gotta make sure we throw 'em off our tail, right?" he added, as if to explain to me something I should have already known.

I wanted to push the issue, but it didn't seem like I could without blowing my cover. So I just nodded. "Yeah, yeah. Right. Safe travels."

The three of them hopped into the driver's side of the cart. There was a whipcrack, and the horses trundled toward a side gate leading out of the palace grounds. The gate was shut, presumably to be opened at the cart's approach...meaning I couldn't follow without being seen.

But, well. Did I even want to follow?

If I left now, without warning, I was likely cutting ties with Merlin. I'd been helping at the library for five days now. I'd shown up under somewhat suspicious circumstances—only allowed in because I could read and write—so I didn't have much room to play with.

So I had to ask myself: how much did I care about Merlin's help?

Or, a better question. If this cart led me to the Liberator's tomb, would I ever see Merlin again? Probably not. So how much did I care about angering him?

I resolved my mind: I needed to go where that cart was heading. I couldn't follow directly behind it, but maybe I could run out a different gate, and then loop around.

The scene played out in my mind: me on the rooftops, frantically scanning the surrounding streets for a trace of the cart. Right before all hope is lost, I catch the barest glimpse of it disappearing around a corner. The camera zooms in on the last edge of it, then on my face. Quick! I follow it into an alleyway in the nick of time.

But I checked myself. That's not how life works. Looping around would take me at best five or six minutes. I didn't know these rooftops or these streets. Five minutes was time enough that the cart may as well have turned invisible by then.

I squinted at it leaving. The décor of the cart—it had to mean something. The purple tarp covering it, its red embroidered symbols...I'd seen that color scheme before, recently, hadn't I?

Yeah, I had. Shit. It was on the tip of my tongue.

I concentrated hard, and then it hit me—the lantern. Merlin's elemental lantern was inlaid with red and purple at the bottom. He'd won it...

At a carnival.

A loose thread, purple and red, but the theory re-contextualized the cart's other contents. The strips of paper—either for decoration, or maybe some kind of confetti? The food I'd smelled was greasy and sweet, exactly the type of food you find at a fair. And those sticks poking out of the bucket...some kind of small firework, maybe?

I couldn't fathom a place big enough to hold a proper fair in this cramped, dirty city, but I also couldn't pretend to know it well at all. I needed more information.

I didn't have the time to go back to The Ten Thousand Things and ask the innkeep, so I improvised. Even in times of war, palaces have workers, right? And workers take breaks, right?

It took me five minutes of speedwalking the circumference of the outer palace to find a pair of cooks sitting outside the entrance to the kitchens. Their aprons were spattered with oil and blood and both had long hair slicked with sweat.

I'd expected them to be smoking—they did work the restaurant industry, after all—but I found them both drinking tea at a small table, sitting in companionable silence.

I edited my image of Cammes: not just a medieval San Francisco, but one with a serious monastic foundation. I made some quick assessments and judged the best way to approach the cooks. Friendly greeting? Play the nervous, lost scholar?

In the end I thought their vibe was more peaceful than conversational, so I took a risk and just sat down next to them in the shade cast by the building's high walls. My back rested against the cool stone. I watched the thick clouds, and found myself enjoying these few seconds of quiet.

I mean, when you think about it...I hadn't had a real break since leaving Caer'Aton.

Ugh.

I breathed. I'd been inside so long that I hadn't noticed how windy this city could get. It whistled through every crack and crevice. Even inside the palace walls, it pushed a chill into my body.

I watched the sky. The thing with overcast skies is you don't think to watch them in the same way you do a sky of patchwork clouds. You can't pick something to look at, and it's too big to get a sense of the movement. But watching with some stillness I saw that the gray tapestry was moving. Not sideways, but up and down. It shifted and murmured, in turn rising and falling as if breathing. Kind of psychadelic.

"Tea?" The cook sitting on the stool next to me offered me his cup.

I hesitated, but then accepted gratefully. I took a sip, and was caught completely off guard by the flavor. Not some magical amazing mixture of seventeen fruits—quite the opposite. The tea tasted like someone had scraped the chalk off a chalkboard and dumped it into tepid water.

"Thanks," I said, forcing myself to swallow.

"You look like you need it," said the cook. "Where are you working?"

"The library," I said.

The other cook whistled. "I heard it's been non-stop over there. Sorry to hear that, friend."

These were maybe the most chilled out people in all of Haerth. It was kind of a relief just to see two people relaxing. I'd been drowning in tension and near-death experiences, and here were two people happy to share tea and sympathize.

"I appreciate you saying that," I said. Nice as this was, though, I didn't have time to enjoy it. Onwards and upwards...I changed the conversation's direction. "I'm glad to be taking a break. I was thinking of maybe popping over to the carnival." I prayed that my guess was right, that there even was one.

"Oh yeah?" The one beside me shook his head. "They're crazy to stay so long with the Easterners just over the hill."

His friend disagreed. "Everyone knows it's bad luck to mess with carnies. The Jassanese don't want things crawling from the other side to snack on their dreams. All the same...if it's true we'll be sieged tomorrow, I'm sure the carnival will be out before the soft bell."
Ah, the soft bell. My close friend every night for what felt like the past week, ringing around midnight while I was pouring over useless texts by the light of Merlin's lantern.

I didn't know where the carnival was set up, but it felt like a question I couldn't ask without betraying that I was not from here. So I took a sideways angle. "What do you guys think is the fastest way to get there? I don't want to be out for too long."

"What's the rush?" asked the cook next to me. "Aren't you scholars supposed to be the quiet, learned ones around here?"

I smiled ruefully. "Not recently. Merlin will be furious with me if I'm gone for too long." I didn't know it to be true, but it was a pretty good guess. Again, technically not lying.

"There aren't any shortcuts as far as I'm aware," said the other. "I'd take Lady all the way to Savior, and follow the signs from there."

My time here was at an end. I grudgingly stood up, and waved goodbye. "Thanks for the tea. Hope you have a good rest of the day."

The cooks raised their cups in farewell. "Angels watch you, friend," said one.

It was meant as a farewell blessing. But I remembered for an instant the image of the Angel fenced in by swords on an island in the Subfield, claws outstretched, hurtling towards me.

I shook it off. Once outside the palace gates, I sprinted, hoping to get there before the cart.

~

If you don't find the Liberator...well, it might be for the best.

I'm sorry.

~

I was panting for breath after just a minute of running. Fun fact: reading twenty-two hours a day for five days straight isn't as good of a cardio workout as you might think.

When I turned off Lady and onto Savior street, I realized that I had been here before. This tall corridor of buildings was where I'd been running from the Palm of Dawn when I first arrived in the city.

Good times.

Now that I was here, though, I realized I had to make a small detour. Without much time for it, I quickly retraced my steps until I found the small church I'd escaped into. The building's side door was still shut by my deadbolt of Clay. The edge of the door had splintered, as if someone strong had tried to pull it off its hinges. But the Clay hadn't broken.

I mean, it was set into form by my own willpower. Of course it hadn't broken.

Huh. It was nice to see some of my old smugness returning.

I ran my hands over the lock. The Clay had been set...but I'd been wondering if maybe that wasn't the end of the story. Toying with my Chi on my way to Cammes had reminded me of one of the main lessons of Caer'Aton: things are not as they seem. Appearances were deliberately put that way to encourage you to investigate them.

They'd told us that once Clay was set, that was it. It was immutable. But if I was a being of demigod-like power, and I had a forest of magic trees that I could pulp and shape into anything I wanted...wouldn't I want the ability to reshape it later?

Or, to think like Shae: What if I was reading on the couch, and I suddenly wanted to fuck someone? Sure, I could mentally summon one of my sex slaves, but for some reason now I just couldn't be bothered. Why not just Shape a dildo out of my sofa? Easy peasy.

Anyway, the chance to get my Clay back was worth the five minutes it took to get here. I figured I probably had the time—even with its lead, there's no way the cart was moving as fast as I was on these cobblestone streets.

I felt for the Clay's presence, just a passive opening of my Art. It was, obviously, not there. It was set—for all intents and purposes just a simple deadbolt.

I couldn't conduct a proper scan, or attempt to Shape it normally, because Shaping was a form of the Art, and the Art would set a billion alarm bells ring-ting-tingling all over this Palm infested city. I needed to mask my Shaping through my Chi, which Shae had deliberately designed to be hidden from regular view.

I checked both ways. I listened for footsteps. Sure that I was alone in the alley, I manifested my Chi as a small dagger in my left hand, and placed it flat against the door. I spread my awareness through the dagger, searching for a trace of the Clay's presence.

You're on the right track, said my Chi, but you can't expect to summon me as a dagger and get all my powers.

I frowned. You telling me I need all my power to unset Clay? I'm trying to be discrete.

Well, you're certainly welcome to keep trying like this, he said.

I didn't have that kind of time. I looked left and right again. I was alone in this alley, after all.

Fine.

I took a step back and let him out into his true form. My left hand suddenly gripped the cloth-wrapped hilt of a preposterously large greatsword. The blade a hand and a half wide, its faint luminescence a blue-green bloom in the dark alley. The blade's liquid texture moved subtly, like an oil slick brushed by breeze.

Adorning the pommel: a simple orange gem that hurt my heart to see.

Mmm... said my Chi. Feels good to stretch my legs.

I'll keep that in mind, I thought back dryly. Now, pressing my sword-tip against the door showed me the faintest thread of presence in the Clay.

"There you are..." I muttered, and yanked on it.

Its presence magnified in my mind, and I saw for a brief second how setting it simply covered the Clay's presence with a powerful veil. That was it. Shae had completely tricked us. With the veil gone, it was trivial for me to liquefy the Clay and command it to slide through the crack in the door. It slipped mercurially through, a thin blue-green puddy, and then collected into my outstretched palm, radiant.

I Shaped it into five coins, set them, and put them in my pocket. Then I dismissed my Chi. I chuckled, wondering what a passerby would have thought. My powers didn't rest at lightsaber level as they had in Caer'Aton, but I imagine the soft light's bloom in the narrow alley would have made me look, at a glance, like a ghost.

It was good to have the Clay back. I needed all the resources I could get.

Without the deadbolt, the door creaked open. The kitchen inside was empty, and the sight of it reminded me of one last thing. Loathe as I was to waste any more time, this was important. I crept into the building, sidled along the wall and up a flight of stairs to get to a potted plant.

The stone necklace was still there beneath the dirt. The one the Palm had used to block my Art. I smiled to myself, an old theory finally vindicated.

You know how in stories, people with something to hide always hide it somewhere it can be found? Why not just bury it two feet beneath the ground, somewhere totally random?

Or, as the case may be, an inch below the soil of a potted plant? No one would ever look there.

I put the necklace in my other pocket—superstitiously hesitant to put something anti-Art in the same pocket as Clay—and made for the kitchen exit.

I nearly collided with a middle-aged woman coming out of a door. She wore ceremonial robes, and held a book whose hilarious leather-bound cover depicted an Angel with a Buddha face. She looked confused to see me. "You're not supposed to be here," she said. "Who are you?"

Huh.

You ever have it where someone asks you a question, and it hits you a lot harder than it should? This was one of those times. I really had to mull it over, and she watched me think with a confused look.

Looking back, it's obvious why it had taken me so long. I'd been struggling to answer that question for myself for weeks now.

If she had asked me two weeks ago, Wraith-me would have lied.

If she had asked me a week ago, I would have had a mini existential crisis, and avoided the question.

But because she asked me today, I kept my head high, looked her deep in her pale gray eyes, and said, "I am myself."

She glared. "Don't throw scripture at me, boy." She craned her head to look at someone behind me. "Hey! You! Come here."

Uh...

I ran past her. I took a hard left into the kitchens and through the open door. "I am myself," I said again.

To be honest, it still didn't feel true to me. I still didn't know what it meant, you know? Who is the "me" that I am? What am I, like, literally made of?

I didn't know. But this uncomfortable, messy, uncertain feeling I had of being myself? Maybe that was good enough.

Maybe when you finally claw your way back home, your own front door looks like a threshold you've never crossed. I had been living in fear for so long, avoiding life like it was my job. And this wholeness with myself, this small scrap of integrity—it was threatening. If you're used to living in fear, then courage is terrifying. Maybe that's why people don't change very often.

Bone-deep fear at the thought of finally living without bone-deep fear. Jesus Christ...

I knew that whatever smudge of self-respect I had owed itself to starting to live by Jet's rule: Be Honest. I ran from that woman because it didn't take a genius to realize there was no way out without lying.

After all, it's not like they could catch me. That's the weird thing about being in a place where you know no one. There are next to no repercussions. If a conversation gets awkward, you can literally run away without it ever biting you in the ass.

Sound nice? It isn't. I would have traded a finger for an hour of meaningful conversation with Emmit, to say nothing of what I'd do to hear Jade's voice.

With my Clay recuperated and the necklace in my possession, I felt better. Clay was a powerful resource, and the necklace—well, I just wanted to be able to grab it on the off chance I needed it. So, keeping true to theme, I tucked the necklace under a fern on a mostly empty street.

I straightened my shirt and let out a breath. Alright. Carnival time.

Banners had been hung advertising it, long red strips of cloth with purple writing hung above the street. You just had to follow them. The city's religious vibe faded the closer I got, at least in terms of people's clothes. Skin below the neck in Cammes was a rarity, but here, occasionally, you could catch a glimpse of bare leg beneath a flowing skirt. Walking past angelically decorated churches, men wore tank tops and short shorts, which the older folks observed from the sidelines with varying degrees of distaste.

I realized, abruptly, that this was the city's last taste of freedom. It wasn't secret information; soldiers talk. The siege was tomorrow, and the city knew it in its bones.

We all process things differently. I'm sure this city's religious culture meant that many families were gathered together in prayer. That fathers and mothers and children were holding close because, for some, there is nothing else to do in the looming mountainous presence of the desolate future but press yourself into your loved ones and savor every moment, expand your view and slow time to inflate the present with all of the detail that has been there waiting for you to notice it and all of the love you've always felt but never bothered to acknowledge and in so doing attempt such immersion into what you hold close that the future never comes.

I'm sure that was happening. But I didn't see it. I wasn't in those homes—I was on the streets near the carnival.

Aaaand...it was a shitshow.

I realized it most keenly when a scruffy-bearded man in wet clothes walked out of an alley, frowned thoughtfully, and fell face-first onto the cobblestone streets. Too much cheering and laughter, of course—people were drunk. No wonder the carnival had stuck around. The money you could make off a city that thinks the world's about to end...

It wasn't just the carnival proper, though. Much like the vendors that trailed after the Jassanese army, street carts on rickety wheels were set up all across the boulevard. These hawked stale, cold foods to men and women stumbling out of the bars.

And that was festive enough, for Cammes. But when I came in sight of the carnival itself, I saw that the vendors lining its outer edges kept kebabs sizzling hot through means of fire elementals kept encased beneath their grills. Despite having one in my arm, and reading by one in the library, the glass panes advertised their forms to me for the first time.

The Ifrit's elementals didn't have bodies that I could see, but the fire did have a kind of...texture. A cousin of true fire. The writhing orange-red moved, giving the impression of skin. It was weird, but I wanted to get up close and touch it. Put my hands on the glass. Into the glass.

I shook my head, and continued scoping out the scene. There were a ton of these carts. Though not all decided to put their elementals on such display, the overall impression was inescapable wonder. The carnival took place in a hugely open space, as if an entire city block had been lifted out of Cammes. Its tall hoisted archways welcomed you inside to the bustling crowds and games within. I felt like a six year old, spellbound by the way the world simply was.

But, regrettably, I had to squash that feeling. I had work to do. A cart to spot, the Foundation to find.

I walked in—but then a thought struck me. Why, exactly, did I have to squash that feeling to move forward? That was something I did to myself constantly. As if I wasn't allowed to feel good about something and also have obligations.

No—it was more a feeling of needing to buckle down. To lasso myself from a lazy enjoyment of life and put myself back on the path.

And it was just now striking me, for the first time: why did I need to get so serious in order to get anything done?

Seeing the pattern brought me huge relief. Finding the cart? That wasn't a burdensome obligation so much as a game. Why the hell not enjoy it?

Seeing this pattern in myself—what do I even call it? Being really hard on myself to push me forward, maybe—brought to mind the other times I acted this way. Suppressed good feelings to push myself to act. I'd done it in Caer'Aton, I'd done it after I left.

I guess this was a pretty concrete example of who I was. I'm sure it would be the type of thing Jet would encourage me to look into.

Funny. When I think of a mentor encouraging me, I don't think of Rinzai. Not anymore.

I smiled. My heart open and vulnerable to the brilliant overflowing scene around me, it was time to figure out my next move.

I needed to find the cart, but that wasn't going to happen from the ground. The crowd was too thick; I needed a vantage point. I was considering Assassin's Creed-ing my way up a building that overlooked the carnival square, and that's when I realized that, fun as it might be, I didn't have to bother: the rooftops were crowded too.

It took me a minute to find my way up, but I did, walking up the stairs of what turned out to be someone's home. It was packed with people drinking and laughing and playing cards. There was an edge to it all, of course. This wasn't a regular celebration. But these people weren't avoiding reality so much as consciously getting fucked up because of a too-deep acquaintance with it.

Many of them were soldiers. The army had finally been pulled out of its training camps outside the city, and were now manning the outer walls. A group of congenial drunk soldiers waved for me to come play cards with them, mistaking me for one of their civilian friends. I could barely hold their eyes. I didn't even acknowledge them, trudging downcast to the roof.

What would they do if they knew? If they knew who I really was?

Shit, I wondered what I'd be doing if I could really internalize the truth. If I could see the stopwatch above the heads around me, with mere hours to go before zero.

But forget all that! The party's on! There are fire elementals under the stoves! Everything's just, it's just so fucking fantastic.

I pressed myself to the wall to make way for someone walking down the stairs. And I thought, What's done is done.

I mean, what's done is done, but what's done also hurts to think about. I just couldn't right now. I wished I could apologize to at least one of these people, as if it'd do something.

I unsuccessfully swallowed down the lump in my throat as I emerged onto the roof.

The rooftop afforded me a good view of the festivities, but I found a better one a few roofs over. From there I understood why the cart had been disguised as it had. It was great camouflage: every carnival cart had the same purple and red cover. Hell, the whole carnival was bathed in the colors. There were maybe twenty or thirty carts inside the fairgrounds, making this whole thing like a Where's Waldo for carnival carts.

Some had food, some carried supplies for the games. I watched people go back and forth between them, retrieving apples or skewered meat or thin mesh bags of wooden tokens that seemed to be the carnival's primary currency. The carts, I realized, functioned as makeshift buildings. Another reason the carnival could stay so late—it was ready to leave at a moment's notice.

I was never good at Where's Waldo, but after five minutes of desperately looking, I finally recognized the two human helpers come out the back of a big pavilion. A cart was backed right up next to it.

My cart.

They opened it, and two large, muscular Ifrits came out to help. It didn't have the air of something secretive; no one would have thought twice to look at them. In fact the humans brought out the barrels I'd seen with the sticks in them, and were directed to go drop them off at a stall a few tents down.

The cart was almost empty. They would be leaving for the library in a minute or two. They'd worked fast.

I needed to get into that tent. The cart's books I could care less about—I needed to know where the others were. The good ones, the primary sources. The Foundation.

As for how I was going to get that information...

You think I can pull off intimidating someone? I asked my Chi.

I don't see what other option you have, he replied.

In other words: no, but you have to all the same.

Thanks for the vote of confidence, I said. I chewed my lip. Intimidation wasn't really my strong suit. But I'd done it to the Eastern nobles, so I could damn well do it here. But it would be me this time, not Wraith-me, which wasn't a pleasant thought. I didn't want to hurt anybody, but odds were I'd have to. They weren't just going to point me in the direction of the books Merlin himself had purposely not told me about.

I needed a plan.

I looked to my left, and my right. There was no one to help me figure one out. "Where's the Man in Black when you need him?" I muttered.

~

Alas, I wasn't going to go all Dread Pirate Roberts on anyone today. In a bittersweet turn of events, it looked like I actually might get to participate in the carnival.

I had walked downstairs and wandered into the carnival when a gaggle of Ifrits scrambled up to me, chattering excitedly.

"Hey you! You're the guy!" They clamored. One pointed to another with a wrinkled red finger. "See, this is the guy. Hey you, do the thing!"

It took my brain a second to process all that was happening, but then I got it: these were the Ifrits I'd played Char with at The Ten Thousand Things.

"It's good to see you again!" I said with genuine warmth. "I was meaning to thank you for all the money you kindly gave to me. You paid for my room."

"And these clothes!" said one. He tugged on my pants. "You looked like shit before, this is much better."

I had escaped from my cart hot off several days of intense meditation, so I hadn't been in my body enough to realize that my clothes had been dirty as all hell and smelled terrible. Between my fight with the Wraiths, the Dragon, and the weeks of travel beforehand, my clothes were not holding up well. I'd thrown them in a gutter somewhere after I stole the poorly fitting clothes from the tailor.
Grant had finally given me my current outfit: an old scholar's outfit he'd used to wear, made distinct by the especially baggy sleeves of the shirt and the extra book-sized pockets on the pants. A bit short for me, but they fit the best, and were comfortable.

Wait. My old clothes...they had been made out of Clay. Clay I had thought at the time to be set, unmoldable. I'd tossed them like it was nothing.

Well, who needs all the help they can get anyway? Not me. Not this guy. I'm cool.

"But do the thing!" said Jippa.

They were referring, I assumed, to my Firearm.

"Maybe later," I said. "Look, this is my first carnival. Mind answering a question for me?"

They broke into more excited babbling. I couldn't tell if it was a different language or if they were just talking so animatedly that Shae's embedded language processor couldn't parse the words.

"Told you it was made up," was the first coherent sentence that I heard.

"It's not, it's not, he made the Char right there in front of us and we all saw it."

I held up my hands and addressed the Ifrit doubting that some random human could burn wood with his fingers. "Okay, okay! Tell you what. I'll show you, and I'll beat you in a three round game, but-" I added quickly as his yellow eyes widened and he looked about to explode with the Ifrit equivalent of "oh hell no." "Only if you tell me what's in that tent over there."

I pointed to the one my cart had been beside.

The Ifrit sniffed. "Lots of talk, human. Lots of talk. Beat me at Char, hm? I've never lost a game in my-"

The group exploded into conversation. Again.

Even though it was a roadblock on my way forward I couldn't help but smile. I remembered my time with the gang in Caer'Aton, chatting by the roaring fire in the lounge. Camaraderie. Friends.

It took a while, but eventually we waded through the boasting and the accusations of lying and I figured out what I would have to do in order to get inside that tent.

Predictably, the leader of the carnival ran things from there. He didn't often show his face—it was a staff only area.

"Unless," said an Ifrit magnanimously, "you Cross The River."

The Ifrit who'd doubted me snorted, and thin smoke puffed from his nostrils. "No human from Cammes has ever crossed it."

I smiled, and I was so caught up in the friendly vibe these guys were putting out that my flair for the dramatic nearly got the best of me, and I almost said, "Good thing I'm not from Cammes." Which might have been the stupidest thing I could possibly say with a foreign army just hours from the city.

They explained the whole process to me. Apparently the showrunner of each carnival cultivates a thick and mysterious reputation around themselves. They don't participate in the festivities outright, and they're only known by the way their carnivals are distinct from the other ones.

This carnival's showrunner, Neej, was especially old-school, which turned out to be good for me. The old school dictates that you have your own special game that attendees have to qualify for. Neej's requirement was that you Crossed The River. To do that, you had to succeed at enough of the various games and activities to qualify for it in the first place, whereupon you walked across a thin board suspended over a large tub of water, all the while being massively distracted.

Then you get to meet him.

Part of me just wanted to storm the damn tent, grab Neej by his collar and shake the Foundation's location out of him. It wasn't even a holdover from my Wraith days—I just wanted all of this to be done.

Think about it. The Liberator had wiped out all the Arasit but one. If I found him, dealing with Shae would be a piece of cake. He was in this city. Finding him would mean everything would finally go back to normal. Earth would be safe from an Arasit invasion, and I could finally go home.

It's telling that I didn't ever think to question that. Because if you'd really sat me down and asked me, I'm not sure if I would have chosen to go home. I mean, the Rift had been right there, right? Back in Caer'Aton. I could have walked through, but I didn't. And sure, that's because I knew I couldn't leave others behind in good faith.

But I'd be lying if I said that was the only reason I chose to stay.

At any rate, I didn't go with the intimidation route. I had a chance to have fun and get closer to the Liberator. How rare was that?
So I let my friends guide me through the various games. I didn't have to win every single one to be allowed the chance to Cross The River, but I did need to win a substantial number of them.

Obviously, most games were rigged. Others were flat out impossible. The Ifrits gave me the inside scoop on those ones, so I avoided them and after a short while observing everything, I came to my decision.

I started with the hot wax. My cohort insisted on paying the meager two token entrance fee for me.

"Aaagh!" I screamed theatrically as they poured the thick stuff over my hand. The onlookers cheered and laughed. The young, snappily dressed Ifrit holding the bucket of hot wax grinned at the crowd. "Not even a quarter of the bucket, and he screams!"

I stopped screaming, and regarded him with a bored expression. "Oh, I was just trying to put on a show. This was supposed to be hot, right?"

I'd offered my left hand, of course. The wax might have been hot to someone else, but with a fire elemental coursing through my veins (or making up my veins in the first place?) it didn't feel like anything more than a tingle. The Ifrit enjoyed my boast, and riposted by slowly pouring the rest of the hot wax in a trail up my arm.

I looked at the onlookers, visibly underwhelmed. That mystified them as much as it made them laugh at the pourer's growing confusion and frustration, and we walked away from that one a few tokens richer, and with a few more Ifrits following us around.

The wax had hardened by the time it was our turn at the table of a classic guess-the-cup. I picked the thick white flakes off my arm while a Wind Jhinn moved paper-thin cups around the table. I appeared concentrated, trying to track them, but really, I was thinking about performance.

I was starting to get a little paranoid about my lying. Because it cost me strength with the Art, right? To say nothing of how hard it is to trust yourself when you lie, and how hard it is to do anything when you don't trust yourself.

That meant I didn't want to lie at all. So I was on the lookout for it. Reflecting on the wax game, was it lying to scream in pain if the point was to put on a show? I wasn't intending to deceive anyone...I mean, I was, but I owned up to it, and besides, the reason I did it in the first place was to be entertaining. It wasn't deception, was it?

By the time the Jhinn had finished whirling cups around the table, I had come to the nuanced, subtle conclusion that I didn't know shit. Sure, I'd felt the lack of power that came from a broken integrity. But what about the gradient that led there? What breaks integrity and what builds it? And by how much?

How the hell did I go nearly my whole life in school, and nobody taught me how to be alive?

"Which cup has the coin?" breathed the Jhinn in a mysterious voice. Rippling robe sleeves suspended over the cups.

"None of them," I said, and before he could blow the coin back out from his sleeve, I knocked over all three cups.

The Ifrits had told me about that one. People guessed that there was no coin all the time, but it was trivial for the Jhinn to slip it under while lifting them up. I'd guessed right: the trick was to catch him by surprise.

By this point I had a modest following of two or three others on top of my Ifrit friends, encouraging folks who'd heard that I was trying to Cross The River. It was nice at first to have a dedicated audience. But things started to get out of hand when the Ifrits started betting on my success. It started as just a thing among themselves, but the carnival spirit was in the air, and a swelling group of others wanted in on the action.

And then it was time for me to play Char. The Ifrit across the table from me smiled as seductively as an Ifrit can smile—let's just say I understand there's a reason why I haven't seen any cross-breeding. She performatively asked me if I'd brought my own Char.

I pulled the same stunt as in the inn. I couldn't peel a piece off their well-varnished table though, so instead I turned to the crowd, and asked them in a stage voice if anyone had a token I could borrow. After a moment a little boy brought one up shyly.

I held it as if appraising it, unsure if it would be suitable. The boy's smile fell, and he looked comically worried. "Is it okay?" he asked. He looked to the adults next to him, who shrugged, watching me.

I adopted a look of utter concentration, frowning so hard my head started to shake as I pinched the woodchip between my fingers.

It smoldered and made a small pop, and smoke started to rise.

The kid's face lit up.

"I'll give it back to you after I win," I said with a wink.

His eyes were wide as dinner plates and he was holding his breath. Wonder, pure and plain and as good as anything. How could performing be lying when this was what you got from it?

Char was the easiest game in the world for someone with Chi enhanced skills. It consisted of a nine by nine Mancala board you flipped a coin into to "burn" territory in a pattern. The coin-flipping motion was totally changed by having my Chi. Frankly, having your Chi out would totally change the realm of any sport. Adding your mind's keenness to your body's movements resulted in a massive spike in ability. Even keeping it as just an anklet out of sight beneath the table gave me access to superhuman awareness. Putting physical objects in proportion became second nature.

Despite this, it should have been an even match between the woman and I. We were both cheating—I had my Chi, and she had two Char that were differently weighted that she subtly switched depending on which side needed to land face up. But fortunately for me, she made the mistake of trying to showboat.

I would have done the same. Some kid comes up to your booth with a crowd of people betting on him? She worked at a carnival—of course she was going to ham it up a little. So her early plays were over-aggressive. She wore a too-smug expression, and spoke boastfully about being the greatest Char player the Black Throne had ever seen, all the while leaving herself tantalizingly over-extended.

It was a classic one-two switch. Pretend to be some overconfident carnie, bait me into trying to capitalize on her mistakes, and just like that I would have fallen into her trap. A smart move, but I wasn't having any of it. There was just something in the air. It felt impossible for me to lose. In a world like Haerth it'd be easy to attribute that feeling to something supernatural, but the truth was just that I was feeling confident, because I was finally on a clear course. Play the carnival games, Cross The River, get into Neej's tent and find out where the books were.

And maybe, just maybe, it had something to do with me having fun. It had been awhile.

I pretended to be sucked into her game. I flipped my Char behind her first ones, just to the side of the positions that would have landed me into her trap. She flipped hers into my territory without looking, haphazardly appearing to forsake the basic patterns you burn to establish a foothold in the game. An experienced player would have seen what she was doing, but I was not an experienced player. So the only reason I knew she was burning the outline of a game-winning symbol was because the Ifrits had beat me with it my first game in the inn.

I let her think she was about to style on me for a few more turns, and then I showed that I had been tracing my own burns without giving them away, and that I was now three flips from Char while she still had five more to fill out the pattern.

She caught that, and that's when the game began in earnest. She extinguished my burns by landing the unburnt side of her Char onto them. I fought her for them. It was a heated battle, but she had underestimated me. She'd lost too much ground. My last flip seemed to hang suspended in the air as all eyes were on it, and when it landed, connecting the long burned lines of her territory, every onlooker screamed together: "CHAR!"

She gave me a rueful smile, and handed over her Char token. I accepted it graciously, and pretended to put it in my pocket. Then I palmed it back to her when I shook hands goodbye. She accepted it with a raised eyebrow. I shrugged. Turning, I gave the kid back his token, and the look on his face pretty much made my life. Then my friends mobbed onto me, bombarding me with chatter I could only laugh at.

We walked from her table and things got wild. I felt like a celebrity with all the people following me from game to game. But I can hardly blame them; the crowd may have also had to do with me giving away all the tokens I was winning. I just didn't have a use for them.

I fought hand to hand against a pair of Ifrits standing on each other's shoulders. I picked a hat off a tall greased pole. I managed to track down the Lost Hound and pin his tail onto him without him seeing me do it. Then had to eat a whole apple underwater, which turned out to be both the simplest yet hardest one yet.

The crowd got bigger and bigger. My Ifrit friends made a killing betting on me, but people soon learned to stop betting against me and the money dried up. I emerged gasping for air from the tank of water, holding the chewed-down apple core for all to see. People I didn't know dragged me out, cheering for me. Before I could catch my breath a beer was thrust into my hands and a toast shouted in my name: Sticks-crosser, they called me, after the weird name for the water you walk over when you Cross The River.

It was all getting to be a little much for me, but not in the way it once had. In Caer'Aton I grated against the all-eyes-on-me feeling because I didn't know what to do under the scrutiny of so many people. I felt forced to put on a show; it made me awkward.

But in this case...I was just tired of looking at so many goddamn happy couples. Whether they were just together for the day or had been dating for months, it seemed like the carnival was something everyone did together. They looked all cute, you know? I hated them all and sincerely hoped they were unhappy.

Obviously, I just missed Jade. But that didn't mean I was going to stop resenting them.

There was that, but I was also starting to get tired of all these people thinking they knew me just because they'd been watching me dominate the carnival's games. It was all good-spirited and under different circumstances I might have enjoyed it, but there was something about the wide smiles and endless offers of food and drink that just made me feel more alone than if not a single person had talked to me.

I think it's because being physically alone isn't actually the loneliest you feel. Real loneliness is when you're with someone who thinks they know you, and they just don't.

So I didn't feel the weight of expectation that I'd once felt while under the scrutiny of a crowd, but that didn't mean I liked them. I tossed aside the wet apple core, politely sipped the beer, and handed it to someone else. I checked my pockets to make sure my Clay coins were still there, and then spotted my Ifrit friends just in time to see them starting up a chant.

"River! River! River!"

Unfortunately the chant didn't catch on at all. The crowd dispersed, I was left alone, and I went about the rest of my time in the carnival in relative peace and quiet.

...

They literally carried me, sopping wet, over to the River's Crossing, chanting "River! River!" the whole time.

Riding that enthusiasm, held up by the hands of the crowd, we passed Neej's tent.

I'm coming for you, I thought. And I'm coming for your goddamn books.

~

"What a glamorous life we live," remarked Paol.

Sharles agreed. "Being a musician is very sexy."

Geralt kicked a cockroach against the peeling wall. It skittered away under the beds. "So, who's sharing?"

Sometimes they had to travel to the far corners of Nys for a gig, and walking back late at night just wasn't realistic. So a room for the evening was a part of their fee.

The accommodations were less than extraordinary, but this room might have been the grungiest. A gap in the ceiling, only two beds...to say nothing of the cockroaches.

"We'll draw straws for it later," said Sharles. "Let's drop our bags and get out of here."

They made their way to the stage, and started getting ready for the show.

"Um...What's she doing here?" asked Paol.

Sharles paused with his flute case open. "Well, I'll be damned. Didn't think I'd see that face again." He glanced at Geralt. "Lucky day for you, mate." He bit off the end of his sentence, bitter.

Geralt's eyebrows show up in surprise. "Wait. Really?"

He turned around, and hell if it wasn't her, alone at the table with a glass of water. She was more conservatively dressed than when they'd last seen her, wearing long pants, a thick shirt, a scarf, and her long hair tucked under a wool cap. His first impression of June being what it was, he didn't know what to make of this new portrait of her.

Paol pulled out his drum and sat at it, making adjustments to the placing of his chair. "So what do you guys think? My turn tonight?"

Geralt shot him an annoyed glare. "Don't be like that."

Paol grinned, looking over at June. "A man can dream."

Geralt rolled his eyes. "And other men can be annoyed by his dreams when they're childish and rude."

Sharles said, "Easy for you to be on the high horse. You're the one who-"

Geralt turned a granite stare onto Sharles. "I thought we were past this, Sharles. I apologized. And I meant it."

Sharles sniffed. "I know, Geralt. I know." He removed his long flute and shut the latches of his flute case. "Seeing her's just bringing it up again."

Geralt nodded. "I understand, and I'm sorry. But let's be honest—realistically, who's most likely to go home with someone tonight? It's not me. It's sure as hell not the drummer." Geralt jerked his thumb at Paol.

Sharles smiled. "You're right, it's the burn-victim."

"You joke, but I see how you position your chair." Geralt walked over and sat at it, pretending to be Sharles. "Tilted just so. The burn faces the audience, so that after a long solo, you can toss your hair, and show your sensitive side." He ran his hand through his much shorter hair in imitation.

Sharles put an affronted hand to his chest. "My good sir, you've mistaken me for a deviant. A scoundrel."

Geralt grinned. "Oh, there's no mistake, my friend. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go ask her what the hell she's doing on this side of town." He leveled a stare at his friends. "And that's it."

Nonetheless, Paol wolf-whistled while Geralt hopped down from the stage and threaded his way through the bar. He didn't hide that he was walking straight toward her.

Uncharacteristically unsettled, he found himself at a loss of where to look on the way over. Did he look at her the whole time? He was compelled to look at the ceiling or at the bar, but didn't that imply some sort of fear of being direct? What kind of person was he trying to project?

Hell with it, he grumbled to himself.

June kicked out a chair for him to sit when he got there. "Hey."

He'd been expecting a little more than that. He stayed standing. "Hi. How are you?"

"Good. How are you?"

"Good."

"That's good," she replied.
"Yeah, it is. So what the hell are you doing here?"

She glanced at the chair. "You're not going to sit?"

Geralt looked over his shoulder. "They'd never let me hear the end of it."

"Boys..." she said, shaking her head. "If you must know, I'm here because I heard there was supposed to be a good show tonight."

Geralt blinked. He could count on one hand the people who knew which bar they were going to perform at. A few friends, that's it.

No, and the bartender last night. Geralt barely remembered his name...a show a day was starting to be too much for him. "There's music all over Nys," he said. "The city's glutted with talent coming out of the college."

"But not everyone is as pretty as you three," she said, smiling.

Geralt rolled his eyes. "June...why are you here?"

She shifted. "I've been thinking about what you said," she said. "You weren't nothing to me. I'm here to prove it."

"By stalking us across town?" asked Geralt flatly.

"Well, what else am I supposed to do?" she demanded. "Look, I'm..." She swirled the beer in her mug in silence for a second.

"Is that a bruise?" asked Geralt, suddenly reaching out to her face. He caught himself on the way there, hand frozen in the air.

June twisted her mouth. "No, I was putting on rouge and made a horrible mistake."

Geralt put his hands in his pockets. "Shit, June. Are you okay?"

She laughed. "Geralt, I'm here because I have no friends in this city. I can't tell you what I do, but it's hard, and it's lonely. All I'm asking, in all honesty, is to please not write me off."

After a moment, Geralt nodded slowly. "I need to think about this."

"There's nothing to think about," muttered June. "Just come over here after your set's done, all of you, and have a few drinks with me. I'll ask you questions, you'll ask me questions. It'll be very normal."

Geralt snorted. "Right. Normal."

He walked back to his friends, not knowing what to think.

The bar never filled up, so they had fun with the show. Sharles went wildly experimental with his flute, and Paol went through a ten minute minimalist affair with the drums that Geralt flailed to fill with his oud. June smiled at some of their more egregious blunders. All in all, it was a good night for music, if not for money.

When they tried to finish the set early the bartender walked over and set them straight. "I haven't heard the Moth's Rising. Or are my ears mistaken?"

Geralt sighed. Yes, they'd agreed to play until ten. He grumbled something to Paol and Sharles and they played a fifteen minute inverted Moth's Rising that even the bartender couldn't help but chuckle at.

When that evening chant finally carried over the city, Paol and Sharles passed the hat while Geralt dipped out the back. When they got to June, she dropped something heavy into the cap.

"Bravo," said June. "A wonderful performance."

"Worth traveling for?" said Sharles. "Or did you just miss my beautiful face?"

"I did, actually," she said. "But the music made it worth it all over again. When you actually bothered playing," she said accusingly to Paol.

"Sometimes you get tired playing notes," he said, "and you have to play the space between them."

"The space between them?" she laughed. "I counted two minutes between drumbeats once. But what I don't get," she said, pushing out the chairs for them to sit, "is why you looked so slack-jawed the whole time."

"Paol's got drummer's face," explained Sharles. "It's a horrible medical condition for which there is no known cure."

"What'd you even put in here?" asked Paol. He reached into the hat and picked out something small. A piece of hyper-polished obsidian so smooth you could watch the stars in it. Paol hurriedly dropped it back into the hat and looked around to see if anyone had seen it. "Blackened pastures, June! Where did you get this?"

June looked genuinely puzzled. "Is it really that valuable?"

Sharles's face screwed up, as if he was looking at a talking tree. "No. It's worthless. Do you have any more? You might as well give us everything."

June rolled her eyes. "I'll get right on that. Huh. I thought they were just messing with me..."

"The Priests of Night and Day would spend a fortune on a piece this clear," marveled Paol. "We'd be set for...months, at the very least."

"If they ever send another caravan," snorted Sharles.

Geralt walked over with a bottle of something brown. He put it on the table with some glasses. "Go finish passing that around," he nudged the mostly empty hat, "then hurry back here for a drink." They looked at him. Then at June.

"Sure," said Sharles. And they went to pass the hat around.

June nodded a greeting to him, and leaned forward on her elbows. "So," she said, "Where do you go after you perform?"

Geralt poured a modest splash of brown liquor into his glass. "Anywhere but the room I played in," he said. He held the bottle over her cup, and she stopped him when hers was as full as his.

"Why?" she asked, and took a sip. She frowned thoughtfully. "Hm. This tastes like brandy watered down with bol."

Geralt tried it and pursed his lips. "Really? Just tastes free to me, courtesy of the bartender. But to your question...have you ever done any kind of art?"

June looked like she was about to say something, then deliberately stopped herself. She opened her mouth and closed it.

Geralt laughed. "What's happening?"

"I play harp," she finally said. "It's just been awhile."

"Harp," said Geralt flatly. "That's incredible. I've only heard a harp twice in my life. Visitors from Jass studying at the college. Cried both times."

June smiled, and her eyes were elsewhere for a moment in a way Geralt recognized from the night they'd spent together. "You were saying?" she said, coming back to the present.

"Well, you're a musician," said Geralt. "You know how you go somewhere else while you play?"

June nodded side to side: sort of.

"Metaphorically speaking. Well, Paol and Sharles might be able to shift back to reality at the close of the last note. That makes them performers—their eyes reach the audience the minute they finish. Me," Geralt chuckled, "my eyes don't reach an inch past my face until long after I perform. It takes time for me to come back."

June was rapt. "That's fascinating."

Geralt rolled his eyes. "It's annoying, is what it is." He took another sip of brandy.

"No, it's not. You know damn well that's a very beautiful thing you just said. Very...tortured artist."

Geralt looked at her warily. June swallowed her drink quickly and put her palms out. "Sorry! I'm not coming onto you. I promise."

Geralt shrugged. "So what kind of harp did you play?"

"I had a hand-held one. It was made for me, actually. The way it fit my hand..." she mused.

Geralt stared at her like she just said she'd owned one made of starlight.

She appeared to remember herself. "Er...it wasn't-"

"Do you still have it?" asked Geralt.

June looked up and to the side. She drank from her water to avoid making eye contact.

"You do. You still have it." He leaned forward. "You've got to show me."

She set the glass down, looked at it. "I don' t know..."

Sharles and Paol re-appeared, the hat slightly more full. Geralt told them what he'd just learned, albeit in a soft voice so as not to be overheard.

"Are you a princess?" asked Paol suspiciously. "I mean first the Hellstone, and now-"

"Hellstone?" interrupted Geralt.

"Lower your voice," said Sharles.

"Yeah." Paol took the small smooth piece from his pocket and covertly showed the group.

"I'm not a princess," said June defensively. "I'm just...Maybe I shouldn't have come."

"No, no!" said Sharles in a rush. "Guys, we've been talking about wanting a fourth. Frankly, June, we'd love to see you play."

June twisted her face, uncertain.

"You wanted friends, didn't you?" said Paol. He stood between Sharles and Geralt, an arm on each. "Well, here we are."

"We have a show at Fellover a moon from now," said Geralt. "You could come practice with us for a bit, and maybe...join?"

June swirled her brandy on the table for a moment. "If we're going to toast to this," she declared, standing up, "we're going to do it with something better than armpit-brandy."

She bought a bottle of something smooth and green that tasted like cherry. They clinked their glasses together. They laughed and made plans. It was the second time that they'd seen each other, and the second long, long night.

When June trudged hungover into Mujiria the next morning, the first thing she heard was Tamos chuckling.

"Quiet, you," she grumbled.

By the time she'd crossed the empty room to the bar, Tamos had plunked a small cup of something steaming and awful-smelling on the counter. June picked it up and took a sniff. "Mmm. My favorite." She blew on it to cool it down, sending the steam in whorls at Tamos's face.

"You're late," he said. "Again."

June sipped the drink and forced herself to swallow. Ugh, what a taste. "Actually, they're just early," she said. She leaned on the bar, letting out a sigh that undid some of the morning's tension in her body.

"It's different this time," said Tamos. "Ash is furious."

June rolled her eyes. "When isn't she?"

"June."

June groaned. "Fine..." She regarded her drink for another moment. Then she swallowed it in two large gulps, nearly scalding her throat. "Whew! I'm awake. Okay, I'm awake." She shook her head as Tamos quirked his lips into a smile. Good, plain Tamos. Neutral was as friendly as the Fallen got. She kissed him on the cheek as she walked past him, which made him blush, and gave his junk an affectionate squeeze, which made him sputter.

"Thanks for the pick-me-up," she said, and walked behind the bar. From the storeroom she opened the secret hatch, descended the damp ladder, and made her way down the long tunnel that led to the sanctuary.

She opened the door onto the damp air of the large open chamber. Its main feature was a pond big enough for a small island of wet earth. Growing from that, inexplicably, was the main centerpiece of the sanctuary, and June's favorite tree in the whole world. She loved its many-colored bark, its drooping branches that made you feel sheltered and calm.

Unfortunately, Hoph was blocking the view, the blocky man's arms crossed in front of his chest.

"Come," he said.

"Only if you make me," she replied with a wink.

He gave her a look that said Really? and turned on his heel.

"I'm starting to think you have an allergy to humor," she said. "Your eyebrows twitch every time I say something funny."

He noticed she hadn't moved to follow him yet, and he turned around, appearing stoic. But June could tell by now when he was feeling exasperated. A tightness in the jaw, that's what gave it away. "We've been waiting for an hour," he said. "It's time to start training."

June made an up and down motion with her hands. "In this?" She wore her regular clothes. "I'd sweat through my pants, my shirt would unbutton, my tits would bounce around...not that you'd mind, of course. But it is uncomfortable."

Hoph pinched his nose. "Change. Then come to Training Room A."

Another pointless victory. June returned to her sparse room and changed into her training clothes. They were tight on her in a way she wasn't thrilled about. Clothing to her was more about deciding what to show and what to hide; these clothes put her body on full display. No subtlety to it. All function, no form.

Geralt and his friends...that had been a fun night. It would have been even better if she'd actually felt comfortable with them, if she could just open up. They might have been at the same table together but she wasn't really there with them. And yes, she was looking to bridge that gap, to be close, but the fear went deep, and in all honesty she assumed she would never feel truly close to another human being.

Still. They'd practice tomorrow evening in Paol's room. She'd have to steal the harp back, since the Fallen had taken everything she owned when she'd agreed to join them. Stealing her things back wouldn't be hard; security here was trivial. The real pain was that she'd have to tune the harp again. Hopefully the tuning tool was still with the case.

Ashayah interrupted her thinking with a dangerously cool voice. "So good you found the time to join us."

June shook her head clear. Ashayah leaned on the door to the ridiculously named Training Room A. June had long ago written off Ashayah as the pretty princess trying to rule like an ice queen. It was hard not to throw her authority in her face. June smiled pleasantly. "Can I come in, or are you going to spend half an hour lecturing me?"

Ashayah's eyes were filled with rage, and her body was tense. "Why do you have to be this way?" she demanded. "Why? Don't you see-"

"The importance of all of this? Frankly...yes and no."

Ashayah paused. "No? What do you mean, no?"

"Yvenne showed me that page. The one the Dragons made, the page of pure information." June shrugged. "I get the history, the stakes of all of this. But it was just that. History. There's everything with the Angels and the Demons, sure. The world's a game that can't be upset by an Arasit, blah blah."

Ashayah visibly reddened.

"It just doesn't feel real to me," admitted June. "That's all. And yes, I know you "have someone on the inside," spying on the Arasit's every move...but I don't know, I've been doing well against the scepter, and the dagger makes me even more resilient than the Liberator's rituals..."

Ashayah actually laughed. Maybe the first time June had seen her do it. "You think you're ready?" she asked incredulously.

June gestured helplessly. "I just don't see what staying here is accomplishing. You have me practice my rituals, go through bizarre exercises, fight Hoph and the others...but without real world experience, this all means nothing."

Ashayah kicked open the door behind her. "I'll be the judge of that."

The room inside was blanketed in a thick layer of dirt to cushion falls. Hoph was strapping on the usual padding. His two assistants behind him did the same. All would wield quarter staves.

Hello, June.

Her dagger was on the podium to the side. She spared it a glance.

It was just a ludicrous scene. The Fallen were fervent in their belief that something needed to be done in the world, but they were not well organized, and their methods were amateurish at best. Not that June would have done any better, but it was all yelling and shouting and telling her she was wrong and bad and stupid. She'd had enough of that for one lifetime.

She wanted out.

Then prove to them what you can do, whispered the dagger. Tell the girl to use the scepter.

That...might do it. She didn't trust the dagger, but she wasn't going to turn down a good suggestion when she had one plopped before her. "Bring out the scepter," said June. "I'll fight physically and mentally."

Surprisingly, Ashayah did just that. When she returned she bore the scepter capped with the queasy looking pearl. The one that threw thoughts at her, that pressed at her innermost mind. The scepter may have looked crafted and beautiful to some, but to June it was a slimy thing.

Ashayah brandished it at June. "It's time you learned your lesson. You've got a long ways to go before you're ready to fight an Arasit."

Hoph and the two others crouched into a fighting stance.

June grabbed the dagger. The handle was warm. But in a weird way—more spicy, almost prickly, than actually hot.

"I'll be the judge of that," said June.

The addition of the scepter made the fight only mildly more interesting. June had stopped giving her all a couple weeks ago. At first it had been because she had grown by such leaps and bounds that she didn't know what to do with herself. But soon after it was because she simply felt bad for the Fallen. They meant well. But she was fast losing sight of the purpose of any of this.

So today, she would not hold back.

Finally, said the dagger in a voice on the edge of its seat.

Hoph, predictably, advanced head on. The other two went to either side of her. Ashayah leveled the scepter.

I am nothing, thought June, and opened herself to the angelic dagger's power. It stampeded into her. Raw force, raw instinct, raw power with a vicious edge that made her question if Angels were all they'd been cracked up to be. The boy on her right lunged first, and she had to redirect a sudden impulse to rip out his throat into a trip that knocked him flat on his back.

Then Hoph bull-rushed her and she had to jump over his head. She'd enjoy the feeling of weightlessness a lot more if it didn't feel so purposefully murderous. She landed and felt like an Efreeti the way she anticipated the next threat. Like she was eager for it.

The last fighter grabbed her by the arm. He made a pitiful attempt to twist it behind her back. She let him, spinning with it with enough momentum that when she cracked his head with her elbow, he slumped immediately.

Ashayah had been waiting, expression furiously concentrated. She still held the scepter out. Her arm was shaking.

"Can't get it working?" said June. I am nothing. "Need some help?" I am nothing.

"Shut it," snarled Ashayah. She thrust the scepter at June's face and maybe that helped, because June was extending her left arm out without meaning to. Changing her grip of the dagger in her right hand, getting ready to make a jagged bloody cut.

She'd really like it if I died, reflected June. But nothing cannot die.

The spell broke, and she flicked her eyes back at Ashayah. "Nice try."

Hoph's burly arms encircled her body completely from behind. June struggled against his bear's embrace.

Ashayah smirked. She sauntered forward. "Careless. You talk big, June, but an Arasit will be ten times more clever than me. You need to see past your own ego. You think that you're nothing...but you don't act like it."

The boy that first lunged at her stepped forward. Ashayah nudged him forward. "Punch her."

The boy flexed his grip. Spared June a brief glance in her eyes. Then struck her in her stomach. She was flexing, but it still hurt.

"Not her torso, idiot. Her face."

The boy hesitated, looking back at Ashayah. "Yes?" she asked.

"She's still bruised from last time..." he said.

Ashayah leveled the scepter at him. "Do it. Or I'll make you."

The boy shivered, and turned back to June. He met her eyes again, and it was clear he wasn't sure what to do.

"Does she threaten you with that a lot?" asked June. "You'd think a good leader wouldn't have to."

The boy frowned. He balled his hands into fists, breathed in through his nose.

"What was your name again?" asked June. "I'm June. That's Hoph." June jerked her head behind her.

The boy punched her across the chin. He winced, and shook his hand. "Fuck..."

"Again," said Ashayah.

"Why don't you try it yourself, Ash?" said June. Ashayah, in response, raised the scepter and pushed on her mind.

The boy stepped up, eyes flinty and resolute. He punched again.

The moment after his fist connected with her cheek, June felt the scepter's power slide past her defenses. She opened her mouth. "My name is June, and I think I'm so special. Just because I'm so pretty I get to treat people however I like, and I'm never grateful for anything anyone ever does for me."

Nothing. I am nothing.

June blinked her eyes, clearing them. She realized what she'd just said, and laughed. "You really think that's how I think? You don't know anything, Ash."

Ashayah pushed the boy out of the way and walked up to June's face. "How can you be this stupid? I'm getting under your skin on purpose. That's what the Arasit do. That's—fuck..."
June smiled, and returned the dagger to her side. Too late, Hoph roughly threw her away from Ashayah. But she'd already been cut.

June stood to her feet. "I know, Ash."

Hoph examined the wound. "It's not deep. You'll be okay."

Ashayah spat. "A shallow cut. You still would have lost the fight."

June was at a loss. "I...what did you want from me? To wound you?"

Ashayah glared.

"You did," said June, stupified. "You really did, didn't you?" She shook her head. Things were starting to come to a head. "This is so pointless. So meaningless. I'm not learning anything anymore."

She felt something flare inside of her. A direction. A desire. Something she wanted to do. She grasped it hurriedly, like a freezing woman clutching a soft flame, and acted. She turned on her heel.

"June," said Hoph.

"I'm still with you," she said, "but I can't keep doing this. It's just not amounting to anything. And that's not what I want. I see that now."

She paused at the door. "Oh. By the way. Where's my harp?"

~

If I could undo it, I would. I would. I think about it all the time. I can't stop thinking about it.

My actions consume me. Even if they weren't mine.

How do you escape your past? How, Tristan?

~

The old Ifrit had a stiff ashy beard and bags under his yellow eyes, and he held up a pipe for me to smoke.

"Is this Haerth-reefer?" I asked. "Pastor Willis told me reefer makes you blind."

The Ifrit blinked, pushed the pipe at me. It was like Rinzai's, a long stem with a bowl in the shape of a caricature demon.

"Good point," I said, and switched to a terrible Bill Clinton impersonation. "I'll just say that I didn't inhale."

The old Ifrit blinked at me.

Tough crowd.

I didn't know what I was about to smoke, but it was red and pink and yellow. Like a sunset where none of the colors were blending. He pushed his thumb onto it, and I heard the stuff sizzle and crackle and pop.

Welp. I brought it to my lips, and inhaled.

It felt like the smoke had claws, and it raked my throat going down. I tried to hold it in out of some belief that I was supposed to, but I ended up coughing uncontrollably before even a few seconds had passed. This wasn't regular smoke; it was like knives had been dragged down my throat and chili powder had been poured in the wound. Everything was on fire and I just wanted to cough it out.

The crowd loved it, naturally. They all laughed as I was bent over and near-vomiting. The old Ifrit who'd given me the pipe—the guy who led you through Crossing The River—clapped me on my lower back. At first I thought he was trying to help me cough it out, and I was going to politely tell him that slapping someone's back while they're coughing has literally never done anyone any good at all ever.

Then I realized he was pushing me toward the ladder. "Up," he said. "Quickly now."

If I'd been all alone I would have sat my ass on the ground for a few more minutes while I coughed out most of my major organs. Fortunately for me, I was still a sucker for attention, and I dragged myself over and climbed the ladder, coughing all the way.

It was a short thing that brought me to the lip of a small pool. Wooden planks propped up to hang a large sinuous canvas that held the water—a makeshift pool, and in the 'S' shape of a river. Longer than it was wide, the wooden board I was meant to cross was merely fifteen feet across. It wasn't even particularly narrow.

I looked down at the old Ifrit, covering my mouth for another cough. "...Just cross it?" I managed to ask between fits.

He nodded. Behind him, the crowd of Ifrits and humans and even a few Jhinn all regarded me. I saw a lot of soldiers in the mix.

I couldn't face them without feeling like I was lying. A baffling feeling. If the truth was that I'd sent this Eastern army at their walls, then not speaking it felt dishonest. To the point that meeting a soldier's eyes and not blurting out what I'd done felt like a lie. I'm sure you've had the feeling before, where withholding something you did makes you feel slimy and awful. But shit, is an absence of speaking still a lie? I wasn't wondering it as if there was an objectively right answer, because that was obviously something I was determining for myself. I guess what I was asking was: do I think that?

And how come I don't know everything I think?

Focus, Tristan. You have a river to cross. What a weird challenge. Get you coughing horribly in the hopes that it would make walking a somewhat narrow wooden plank challenging? But balance was trivial for me, even without my Chi.

But looking out at the water I was supposed to cross, I had to squint. Maybe whatever I'd smoked was starting to kick in, because my vision was getting a little hazy. Like everything was melting. The faces of the crowd across from me blurred and melted and the water I had to cross stretched on and on like it was made of taffy and I was tempted to reach out and grab it somehow to stop it from moving away from me. And the plank, the plank wasn't a plank anymore—it was hard to say—but no, there it was starting to resolve into something...

A bridge. I was standing on a bridge.

Hmm. This was slightly concerning.

"This is some really top shelf stuff, guys," I said. "I...uh oh."

The bridge was only slightly above the water. So I could see clearly that the water was darkening. It wasn't blue anymore, but...black. I looked up, but doing so made me so abruptly nauseous that I didn't even see what was above us such that the water would look that color.

And shapes were rising from it. At first I thought it was steam. But the steam became shapes, bodies, translucent ashen bodies coagulating as if from a dream.

They looked at me, people now. Dead sunken eyes, the kind you get when you've given up. I used to see a shade of those eyes at home when I looked in the mirror. But it was never this bad. These ghostly people—Ifrits and humans mostly, but Droll too, and some animals were there when I looked for them—their eyes were hollowed pits in their faces.

The wind howled.

I took a step forward just to see what would happen. The spirits pressed close to the bridge's rails.

"Help us," they whispered.

I blinked. "Um."

"Please." The words were spoken so softly and so breathily I might have thought it'd come from a Jhinn, even though there were no Jhinn here. "Please." The single word spoken once at first but then taken up by the ghosts around that first speaker, a rising chorus that swelled unevenly around me.

"Look, I'd love to," I said, "but I'm pretty sure you guys are just figments of my imagination. And don't get me wrong, I'm the world's leading expert on talking to yourself, believe me. But I don't know what part of me you are, and I don't know what I can do to help you."

"Pay."

"The toll."

"Pay our way across."

"The toll, pay the toll."

The wind howled again, a piercing whistle that ignored my clothes and my skin and seemed to brush against my veins. "What toll?" I asked.

Look, I didn't have the first clue of what was going on, but if I'd learned anything in my travels, it was to roll with the punches. Yeah, this was all a drug trip, but maybe the Ifrit had some way of seeing what I was doing in this hallucinatory world. Safer to play along.

"The ferryman."

"A coin for the ferryman."

"Placed in his palm like so."

Coins...damn, I'd given away all my tokens.

Wait a second. How had I not seen this before? I knew some basic Greek mythology...what had they called me? Sticks-crosser?

You mean Styx crosser? The river Styx that separated the underworld from whatever the fuck? You had to pay the ferryman a coin to cross or something.

I nodded to myself. "Okay. I think I'm starting to get the hang of this. All the famous stories bleed over. Angels, Demons, King Arthur, this Greek mythology shit right here..." But it wasn't a clear carryover. Something got messed up on the way here. It wasn't Arthur, but Aartur. Not Camelot, but...

Ah. That explains Cammes, then. And the river Styx wasn't an actual place, but a hallucination you saw when you played a game at an Ifrit carnival.

"Please."

"Pay our way."

"The ferryman. The coin."

I didn't have any tokens with me—I assumed they would have counted since they were the carnival's primary currency—but I did have my five coins of Clay. I fished them out of my pocket.

"Hopefully these will work," I said.

And then I was faced with kind of a messed up problem: who do I give them to? There were thousands upon thousands of these spirits. What was I supposed to do, have them line up in order of who'd stayed in the river the longest?

"Here you go." I plopped a coin in the hands of each of the closest spirits, one after the other. "I'd make a terrible philosopher," I said. "Some ethical questions just aren't worth asking. Let sleeping moral conundrums lie, that's my motto."

When I got to the fifth spirit though, they withdrew their hand. All of the rest did too.

"What?" I asked. I looked at the Clay coin. "Is this one any different?"

A voice spoke behind me, on the bridge. "A coin for the giver."

Another. "You too must cross."

"Lead the way."

The spirits to whom I'd given coins were now on the wooden bridge.

"Oh, right," I said. "Close one." Strange that the spirits didn't want to capitalize on my mistake, take the coin and leave me standing on the bridge with my thumb up my ass.

Lucky me—these were some real honest spirits.

The whole thing still felt like a game, though. I wondered what I looked like in the real world—if I was just standing on the beam walking in place like an idiot, or what.

The bridge ran out, a crumbling wet edge to it like the river had taken a bite. There was a narrow desk at the edge of the broken bridge and a tall slim man in a business suit sitting behind it, patiently waiting our arrival.

"Welcome, welcome, so good of you to make it. And you brought friends! Wow. Magnificent." The guy's smile was the kind you could get express shipped from Amazon and his voice may as well have been lifted straight out of a Vegas performance. He invited me to have a seat at the bare table, and I did, the spirits standing behind me.

"Good, good. So as you've probably been told, there's a minor fee to be charged for crossing the river. Just a single coin to cover the risks involved."

"Risks?" I asked. "In all the stories, the ferryman just takes you across."

The man laughed. He whipped out a comb from nowhere and combed back his already slicked back hair. "I don't know where you hear your stories, but these waters are far from safe. Depends on the sky, of course, but we don't often have many problems. I'm Ron, by the way." We were suddenly shaking hands. "I'm Tristan."

"Nice to meet you Tristan, a real pleasure, and also it's only a modest deposit, just a single coin, which it looks like you've all got...wonderful. Okay, so I just need you to sign here, here, and then in the same places on pages twelve, twenty four, and thirty five."

Where the hell had he whipped out this fat stack of paper from? "Hold on," I said. "That's not how we're going to do this. Let's go page by page."

"Sure, sure, you're the boss! Customer's always right, that's our motto."

I read over the first page, taking my time. Crossing the river Styx led you to the Underworld in Greek mythology, and I don't think I've ever heard of a conception of Hell where they weren't all about tricking you.

I tried my best to understand what I was reading, but I kept getting that "I've read the whole page, but I have no idea what I just read" feeling.

It wasn't indecipherable legalese; it didn't need to be. The sentences were long and confusing and perfectly understandable until you got to the fourth line of microscopic print and you weren't sure where you began so you went back to the beginning to try to remember how the sentence first started and then when you got there you remembered that of course, that's what we were talking about, and you figure maybe you don't have to re-read the rest of it so you skip back to where you were but you skip to the wrong line because the print's so damn small and then all of a sudden you're lost again so you have to re-read it and anyway there were no commas anywhere so it was pretty much impossible to follow although I do remember something about my eternal soul and life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness being mentioned and it did all feel important but sometimes you just have to let the devil get the best of you because fighting him is too damn exhausting.

I signed on the dotted lines. He flipped through the pages, pointing variously, and I signed there too.

"I know what you just did," I said. "That was very tricky. But I just want you to know that you will sorely regret it if you pull anything on either me or my friends." I nodded my head to the spirits waffling in the air behind me.

Ron smiled pleasantly. "Now that that's all taken care of, we can address the matter of your payment." He held out a soft purple sachet. I dropped my coin in it, which he acknowledged with a nod. The spirits did the same.

"Right, then!" he said. "Onto the ferry. Fun fact: the heroes that get tricked the worst are the ones who know they've been fooled. Onwards!"

Maybe that should have sounded more ominous than it did. But it sounded more dramatic than threatening to me, and I wasn't going to let some random ferryman intimidate me.

Ropes stretched from one end of the broken bridge to the other, which was so far away as to be barely visible. He whistled, and the ferry swiftly rolled over. It was a simple, rickety thing made of driftwood, twine, and prayer.

"Looks safe," I commented.

"Safer than swimming," quipped Ron.

It came to a stop a short hop from the broken edge of the bridge. The spirits merely glided over to it. Ron made the leap effortlessly. I was slightly more skeptical, so I did mine with a running start. The landing was tricky, since the flooring was uneven, but I put a steadying hand on the short railing.

"This counts as Crossing The River, right?" I said.

"We're not on the other side yet," said the ferryman.

The spirits fidgeted nervously. I glared at them. "Stop it. Everything's fine. Yes, we're crossing to the Underworld, yes we've explicitly been told these waters are dangerous. But come on. What are the odds that something actually happens?"

A geyser of water exploded thirty feet from the raft, showering us with black water. It passed right through Ron and the spirits, but it stuck to me.

"I knew it," I said. "I knew they were just waiting for the right moment." Based on Ron's shmoozing, plus the fact that all of this was taking place in a carnival, I'd guessed that whatever happened next would do so on the right dramatic beat. I'd asked the question to try to speed things along.

But maybe I was going to regret that. The source of the enormous splash revealed itself to be an enormous flying fish. I barely caught a glimpse of its sleek bone-white scales and single red eye. Another splash resulted as it fell back to water.

"The hell is that?" I said.

The spirits crowded the far side of the raft, looking hunched and anxious out at the water.

"To be honest," said Ron, "I'm not sure what the damn thing is. It snacks on spirits. But what it loves most is visitors."

"Visitors? Like myself?"

"Yeah."

I ducked just in time for the pale fish to soar over the raft, rows of needle-like teeth gnashing the air. It managed a bite of one spirit, a tall woman with a feathered cap. It didn't leave a bite mark on her form, but where its teeth grazed her shoulder, she looked more faint. Partially erased. She winced in response, the kind you do when it's a pain you know well.

And it pissed me off how used to it she seemed. That she and all these other lost souls spent God knows how long in this river, life force nibbled at by however many of these things there were. Even as a hallucination it upset me, and I wasn't going to let this stand.

I went to the railing as the spirits floated to the other side. "Hey! Moby Dick! I'm right here. Come get me."

Ron chuckled behind me. "This will be quick."

What I did next didn't make all that much sense. Here was my thinking: in the real world I was on the lip of the "river" in the carnival. But in this drug-addled haze, I needed my Chi. Problem being, if I manifested my Chi here, odds were I'd also manifest it in the real world. And that wouldn't do at all. There's no way I'd get a meeting with Neej once it turned out I was basically a mythical creature.

So I needed a way to stop this fish from eating these spirits, and from trying to eat me. A non-sword way. But besides my Chi, my only other resources...were the Clay coins I'd used to pay passage for all of us.

I snapped my Chi into reality as a small gem inside my clenched fist—the anklet was too risky, too visible with me standing on a ledge in full view of everyone. Holding my Chi like this, the black river came into clearer focus. It wasn't liquid in the way water was supposed to be liquid. The light that glinted off of it seemed to be more a part of the water than a reflection, and the ripples looked sharp.

I channeled my will through my Chi and reached out for the Clay. Maybe because I'd shaped it so recently, I easily found their five similar presences jostling together at Ron's hip.

In the real world, they were probably still in my pocket. So odds were, I could mess with them in this hallucination with no real world corollary. Hopefully?

I yanked on the Clay. The pouch tugged at his hip, but was tied there. He put a hand to it, uncertain. New tactic: I jingled the coins around so that they bumped and nudged his hand. Curious, he opened the pouch to see what was going on.

The coins flew out of the pouch. It was a wobbly uncertain flight—Clay manipulation had never been my strong suit. Once they were in my hand their presences flared to life in my mind, and they glowed softly in my color.

"Who are you?" demanded Ron. "What did you just do?"

I melted the coins into one formless blob, trying to find a trace of the creature in the water. "Sorry, can't hear you over the sound of me...ah-ha!"

My Chi-enhanced senses showed me the ripples in the water suddenly shooting toward us—the fish was getting ready for another jump. Seeing it early gave me the few seconds I needed to realize that I couldn't shape the Clay into something sharp enough to kill it, since my Shaping was awful and I probably couldn't make it hold an edge to save my life. I only had five small coins worth of Clay.

So instead I did what any rational human would do, and made a small, thin, hand-sized shield, flew it airborne a little, and reinforced it with enough of my willpower such that when the pale fish made its leap it collided with the Clay.

It was like being punched in the head. I ground my teeth and shoved back at its tremendous force. The fish fell, and hit the raft. I'd succeeded in my logical, normal, very smart goal of getting the giant demon fish onto the raft.

You know how fish are out of water. They flail. This one was huge, its huge muscles clear despite the slick dark scales.

And you know how dilapidated driftwood rafts are. Not exactly known for their strength.

"You're insane," said Ron. "What kind of magic-"

The fish's tail slapped his legs out from under him.

I jumped as the tail came for me. Then I jumped again on its way back. I heard the snap of a rope becoming untied. I had to hope my gamble was right. "Uh oh. Looks like we might fall in," I shouted over the sound of the fish's scraping the ferry. "Tell me, as a ferryman, how often do you think this fish has wanted to eat you? What do you think your odds are if we fall into the river?"
Ron cursed. He didn't even dignify me with a response. He merely pushed himself up, walked over to the fish's middle where it wasn't spasming as much, and put his hand on its white scales. It was as if he'd dropped purple dye onto them. The color spread, diffuse. He was already turning his anger onto me, as if he'd just solved the problem. "You dare steal from me."

I watched the fish with a look of growing worry. "Not to interrupt, but is that supposed to happen?"

Ron smirked and looked back at what he'd done. The diffuse purple coagulated in five or six points, and the scales there rippled. "Yes. Watch, Tristan. I'll do the same to you in just a moment."

Small lavender worms erupted from the scales, open mouths gaping and hungry. Finding no food they writhed for a moment before realizing that the food was back where they'd came, and they plunged into the spasming fish like a hot knife through butter, devouring its scales and flesh like they were made of yogurt. The worst part was how long the damn things were. They burrowed and they just kept coming out and out from the hole they'd first emerged from.

Ron turned his slimy smile to me. "Looks fun, doesn't it? You'll enjoy—what did you just do?"

My expression was all What, me? "Looks real horrifying, Ron. But I think I'll have to pass on that. Oh, by the way, we found your coins."

At my ushering the spirits floated forward hands outstretched with the newly reshaped coins. I'll admit it wasn't my finest work, but hey, I hadn't had much time to do it. And they looked like coins, damnit, even if they weren't smooth or perfectly circular.

I held mine out too. "Sorry about that. Not sure what happened."

Ron glared at us. Then he snatched the pouch from my hand, and grabbed the coins from each of the spirits. "Hmph. Very clever. Now get the fuck off my ferry."

"Take my coin!" I said, thrusting it at him.

He gave me a frank look and quoted, "This document does not constitute a promise for R—that's me—to bring the undersigned—you—across the river Styx. Rather, by signing this document the undersigned agrees to be given the "experience" of crossing the river, an experience which does not require the arrival at the other shore but the departure from the first one whereupon this document was signed."

"You're kidding me," I said.

"Devil's in the details," said Ron. He slicked back his hair one last time, straightened his suit, and then thrust his fist in the direction of my forehead. I felt a spike of pressure there, and then I was thrust off of the raft. My surroundings changed, the river receded, the bridge was gone-

I was flailing my arms wildly, trying to keep balance on the beam. There was just one more step to take.

"Hrrg!" I grunted, barely managing to right myself. I practically jumped to the edge of the pool of water, and steadied myself on the ladder's rungs.

And the crowd went wild.

A few minutes later I was skeptically examining a cup of tea with the Ifrit who'd given me the pipe to smoke. "This isn't going to send me into another hallucination, is it?"

The Ifrit chuckled, and shook his head.

"Good." I took a sip, and swallowed. Then I was back to coughing again, which was all the worse since my throat had been ravaged by smoke just minutes before. "Spicy tea? What is wrong with-"

Laughter all around as I doubled over. The Ifrits had recounted me the story. Lucky for me, I hadn't whipped out my coins and had them floating in the air to block a fish that hadn't existed in this world.

Instead, I'd simply stood at the edge of the plank, eyes wide as hell, pupils inflated and hugely black and paranoid and afraid. I'd swayed a little, almost falling in. Then I moved, taking hesitant steps forward, one at a time. The end had come abruptly, when I started to fall backwards with no apparent reason for it. I'd snapped out of the drug haze just in time to catch myself and get to the other side.

My guess was the Ifrit couldn't tell that I got kicked off the raft. The hallucination had corresponded to me walking across the plank. If that was good enough for him, I wasn't going to be the one to correct him.

Another omission, another uneasy feeling of not being sure if I was lying or not...was I costing myself power?

There was no denying that my Chi had some kick to it. That fish had jumped with force, and it was heavy, so holding my Clay strong enough in the air to stop it from moving meant I wasn't totally broken, right?

I just wished there was a meter I could look at that would tell me if something was a lie or not. At this point, all this uncertainty had me wondering if the uncertainty itself could fracture me.

I tried to sneakily put the mug of tea out of sight behind my chair, but the silent old Ifrit made insistent motions that I keep drinking. I grudgingly took my time with it, burning the everloving fuck out of my mouth and throat. But when the cup was finished, I felt like myself again, like the tea had burned the fog from my mind.

"Oh. It's spicy on purpose?" I asked. "To bring you back to your body?"

The Ifrit just smiled at me. Then he led me away from the pool. When we approached Neej's tent I realized that this was it. This was the very significant make or break moment where I'd either hit a dead end or find out where he was hiding the Foundation. Sometimes the weighty meaningful trials of your life sneak up on you. They wait in silence and then leap all of a sudden, reminding you of the stakes.

Never seems to help much. I'd rather go in blind.

The old Ifrit ushered me into the tent with his bony hands, then turned and stopped the crowd with a glare. Inside was for my eyes only.

"Good luck, crazy human!" shouted my Ifrit buddies.

"This won't take long," I promised, and entered the large tent.

Neej, presumably, was the Ifrit standing on the tent's main table. He turned around and took off his glasses. Rubbing the tiredness from his eyes, he said "I'm sorry for the mess. Please make yourself comfortable, if you can."

The tent was packed with crates that I recognized from the Royal Library. There was hardly any space to move. Were the books I was looking for in here, at the bottom of some pile?

Holy crap. Was this it?

Patience. There was an open chair next to the table he was standing on, so I went there, and rested my hands on its back. "Looks like you're getting ready to leave the city."

Neej appeared to be counting the boxes. His finger bobbed, pointing at each one in turn while his lips mouthed ten, eleven, twelve... "Yes. Frankly, we probably should have left yesterday."

Probably—but there had still been books to ship out. "What kept you?" I asked, seeing if he'd tell me.

"Outside forces," he replied. "Believe me, if it were up to me, we would have been long gone. Forgive me, I'll be done counting in just a minute."

I was tempted to ask, "What's in the boxes?" But although I'm sure he had a plausible explanation, I didn't want to force the issue. So far he hadn't outright lied to me.

It was important to pick up every detail that I could. This guy had all the knowledge. I could Art it out of him if I was willing to totally blow my cover, but that was a last resort. So I needed to analyze him down to his core, and come out with the best way of approaching things.

Start neutral. "Hell of a test you put me through," I commented.

"Yes, well, it's designed to be difficult," replied Neej. "I heard the chanting and applause from here. That kind of fervor and attention doesn't get riled up if the river is crossed every day, now does it?"

"Of course not," I said. Play to his theatrics, maybe? "It also probably didn't help that I put on a bit of a show."

Neej smiled, turning slowly as he continued counting. "I was told you were a bit of a performer. Giving away your tokens, too. A nice gesture. Are you a man of theater?"

Appreciates generosity, cares about showmanship. "Just someone who gets awkward under pressure."

"Please. From what I've heard, it seemed like you had the crowd wrapped around your finger."

Let's see how he deals with honesty; vulnerability. "Yes," I granted, "but that's like a protective measure for me. A way to stay safe."

Finished with his count, Neej gingerly lowered himself. He didn't have the wiry ashy hair or red wrinkles of an older Ifrit, but his popping knees betrayed that he was past his prime. I gave him a hand down from the table. "Thank you," he said. He sat down across from me on a stool. "You're an observant fellow, to know that about yourself."

Values...insight? Hard to pin that one down. I spread my hands. "I owe it all to my training."

"Don't we all?" He leaned back in his chair, and I wondered what this last game was supposed to be. Were we in it already? "Performance as a shield..." he mused out loud. "Performance is, inherently, a lie. I think most actors have to begin there."

"Funny you should mention that," I said, "because I've been thinking the same thing. Honesty is important to me. Uh, really important. But it seems like life is filled with a thousand little performances. And if performance starts as a lie, a shield...I guess I'm wondering what you think it matures into?"

"I can't claim to value honesty in the same way that you do," said Neej. "This carnival's foundation is illusion, cheating, and charlatanry. Almost every game is rigged."

"Even the underwater apple?" I joked.

Neej chuckled. "I'm sure you noticed it was not a particularly ripe apple."

Lightheartedness. This was good. "Yeah, my jaw is still sore..." I muttered.

"The point being that people come here to be fooled," he said. "But they are fooled in safety. Failure is the loss of a few tokens, and even that doesn't feel as real since it's not "money" anymore. You come, you try to beat the system. You leave. There's the honesty."

I screwed my face up. "But...it's all lies."

"We aren't pretending otherwise," said Neej. "You know what to expect when you come to the carnival."

"But you're still deceiving."

"We are honestly deceiving. Remind me of your name?"

"Tristan."

He leaned back in his chair and kicked his legs onto the table with some difficulty. "Well, Tristan, I hate to break this to you, but truth is self-determined. If we're honest about our lies, then we are not liars. We are playing a game. Speaking of which, my assistant should be here at any moment..."

Privately, I didn't agree with his point. If you're lying, you're lying. It'd be one thing if carnivals were upfront about their "charlatanry," but he was relying on a broad, cultural understanding of carnivals as dishonest places to validate his claim to honesty.

But if he was going to move things along, then I wasn't going to stop him. I wasn't here to philosophize.

Shortly after, his assistant materialized. An unfamiliar human, luckily, not someone who'd recognize me from loading up the cart. I should have assumed she would be as beautiful as she was. Short and long-haired and stacked, wearing a pale purple dress with the sides cut out. The magician's assistant was a distraction by definition.

Also distracting: she was carrying two elemental lanterns. One in each hand. Those things were not light, and her strong muscles showed the strain. That being said her face showed none of it, and she was all smiles.

"Thank you, Maria." She put them on the table, two thuds. Then she opened their lids and dropped kindling into both. Two hungry crackles resulted, and messy uneven light bloomed inside the lanterns. She dropped in more kindling and the light swelled. My left arm twitched, and my eyes were transfixed by the fire. Neej noticed. "Beautiful, aren't they?"

Not quite as beautiful as Merlin's lantern, no. Made of the same containing stone, yes, but much smaller. The fire, though, was what mesmerized me. Like one of those videos of the sun's undulous plasmic roiling, burnt oranges folding into melted yellows limned with angry red. For the first time, the lantern light looked psychedelic, like moving putty.

I couldn't help myself. I reached out my left hand and touched the glass. Neej started to exclaim something but stopped himself when he saw that my hand was comfortably against the surface.

Maria raised her eyebrows. "...How?"

I felt a yearning in the palm of my hand, the way the body sometimes wants things on its own. I wanted the glass gone. To sink my arm inside the lantern.

Well, if my arm was an elemental...being trapped inside my body would be an awfully lonely existence, wouldn't it? I'd want friends too, if I was in its position.

"We were wondering how you managed the wax challenge," said Neej. "We don't make it boiling, of course, but no one has ever been as placid as you. Have you lost sensation in your left arm?"

I smiled. And then it hit me—he was curious about this. Really curious. As full of wonder as the other Ifrits had been about my ability to make my own Char.

Do you smell that? Does it smell like leverage to anyone else?

"These lamps are amazing," I said. I decided to play this one a little slower than I would with an ordinary Ifrit. "How do you get the elementals in here?"

But Neej wanted answers. "Don't dodge the question. How are you doing this?"

I adapted. "Tell you what. Let's play your game. I don't have any tokens to lose, so those can't be our stakes. How about this: the winner gets to ask a question of the loser, and the loser has to answer it honestly. And not your brand of honesty," I added. "The real stuff. No frills, no performance. Just the truth."

Neej pondered for a second. His assistant was smiling. "Hook, line, and..."

"Bah. You," he addressed Maria, "know me far too well. And you," speaking to me now, "are lucky that I never turn from a good mystery. So." He rubbed his hands together eagerly. "Let's make this quick. Move your chair between the lanterns. A little more. Yes, just like that. In the light of two fires..."

He looked at me and I felt observed in a way I really didn't like. Like he was taking in every pore. I kept my face carefully blank.

"Now I will show you what I know of honesty," said Neej in a new tone of voice. The kind someone on stage uses to unveil their final trick. "Here is your last challenge: tell me three stories."

I blinked. What?

"Two true ones, and one lie." He put a hand to his chin, affecting thoughtfulness. "Oh—forgive me. You don't lie, is that right?"

What a way to make his point. In the context of a game like this, it was hard to see how lying would cause my power to fragment. It went against everything I was taught...but even if I was wrong, I could take the hit. It was worth it. "I'll be okay," I said. "But, you're serious? Two truths and a lie? That's the final game?"

Neej allowed himself a small smirk. "You sound incredulous. But you should know...that I have never lost this game."

"Well," I said, rolling up my sleeves, "you've also never played it against me."

"Oh-ho!" Neej grinned. Maria chuckled behind him, shaking her head. "I'll give you time to think of your stories. Make sure they're-"

"No need," I said. I already had an idea. I dug in my pocket for my coins.

And I was stunned to only find one.

I checked the other pocket. Empty. My back pocket had some loose change, but no coins of Clay.

Shit. Had they fallen out of my pocket? Not really possible; the pants pocket I'd put them in was the big one meant for books. Scholar's pockets, as Grant had called them. Heavily sewn, buttoned shut...

It's not like the ferryman actually took them from me. That four random spirits had now crossed the river Styx. That had been a hallucination. A literal pipe dream.

...Right?

I couldn't think about it now. I made a slight change to my plan, and put my hands on the table. Closed fists, palms down. I summoned my Chi again onto my ankle, to help me mute my emotions. Then I said, "I'll keep them short."

~

"My first story has many beginnings. But today, let's say it began about a week ago. I stood in a forest grove surrounded by people I had never seen before. A huge bonfire lit the place and I did not feel like myself. I deeply regret what I did that night, because now, a week later, I walk in this city filled with young soldiers, and I walk in this carnival filled with people who are not sure if this is their last carnival. I meet the somber downcast eyes with apology, and the eyes of the laughing and ignorant with guilt.

"My second story is shorter. There is a streak of ember orange that was painted on my heart. The color meant many things to me. It meant fantasy, it meant reality, and it meant pain. Some things are only known to us by the hole they leave when we leave them. We all know this somewhere. And orange—not the single color, but the rippling spectrum of it—is an absence it hurts to see, and a presence I wonder if I will ever truly know.

"My final story is the shortest of all. Before speaking, I put a small coin in my left hand. But over the course of telling my first two stories, I've moved it to my right."

~

Neej looked at me for a whole minute. Yellow unblinking eyes. Hands steepled under his chin. I'd spoken every word inflected in the exact same monotone.

There was a lot at stake here. My third answer skirted the definition of the word 'story,' but I was playing a game with his game, and I had a hunch he would respect it. I waited.

Finally he broke silence with a curse. "Lahein. He's good. Very good. None of the typical human tells." He was saying this to Maria.

"It's the last one," she said. "The last one is the lie."

I raised my eyebrow. "I wasn't aware that you were in on this too."

"I did say she was my assistant," said Neej. "But rest assured, I will make my decision purely based on my own reasoning. Let us begin: what we have here are three different forms of truth. The narrative, the poetic, and the factual."

"Oh no," groaned Maria, "I hate it when you do this." To me, she added, "We might be here for a while."

"I first thought the lie was the second story," said Neej like a lecturing professor, "because it is the only one of the three to contain a general truism. 'Some things are only known to us by the hole they leave when we leave them.' Can such a vague sentiment be described as "true"? Is that the type of thing we can say is true or false? Tristan here is self-professedly an honest man, after all.

"But that's a warren best undived into, isn't it? To ask if that question is true is to call into question every part of it, and to call into question the first part of the phrase, 'Some things are only known to us,' we would have to wonder if anything could be known to us at all. And forgive me for saying so, but I don't think that's a level our friend here is operating at."

"He gets like this," said Maria apologetically.

"Or what about the last sentence? 'An absence it hurts to see.' Can one see an absence? But these questions are irrelevant." His assistant shot me a see what I mean look. All this camaraderie, we-are-both-victims-here stuff was her trying break my composure, I realized. To give Neej more data to analyze. Brilliant. I stayed stone-faced, and stone-hearted.

"Yes, irrelevant because Tristan is making a claim to emotional truth: he is saying he either does or does not resonate with the poetic imagery he is evoking. Whether or not story two is a lie depends on that, and so it is the easiest to dismiss, because I believed in the poetic truth of what he said. I also doubt he could lie that convincingly, to be able to conjure such emotions out of thin air, and so I choose to believe that he is simply an emotional man with a bizarre affection for the color orange, or, more likely, what it represents."
Maria laughed. "Maybe he just loves fire that much. He did touch a burning lantern, after all."

"Leaving us with options one and three," continued Neej. "Three being another good choice, yes, my lovely assistant, but also the most difficult to evaluate, seeing as it is impossible. We did not see him move his hands. So tell me, my assistant, to speak to the first story: do you see guilt in this man?"

"I don't see a damn thing in his eyes," she said. "It's disconcerting. But three broke the pattern of the first two. I'd expect him to think that this would cause it to stand out, and by being distinct from the other two trick us into choosing it. But I also imagine he'd be one step past that, thinking its obviousness would make it unlikely, and so I chose to pick it anyway since I don't think it's really possible to nitpick the phrasing or the delivery. Plus, we both watched him. He didn't move his hands at all."

"Ah, my dear, but what you're not taking into consideration-"

"Just pick a story, please," she said. "I've got two elementals out there that need feeding, and one cart with a crack in the glass."

"The first," sighed Neej. "The first is the lie."

Yes!

I opened my hands. Both had been holding orange lotus flowers. Nothing like what Jade could do, but as good as it was going to get under the circumstance. I was proud of some of the minute shading in there. A yellower orange in the middle unfurling into the more papaya colors on the edge.

"Told you," said his assistant, and turned on her heel.

Neej looked absolutely perplexed. "But...you're so young. What kind of guilt could you possibly have on your shoulders? About this war? About these people?"

Maria left the tent, and her footsteps departed.

I pocketed the flowers, and leaned forward, fixing Neej with my most solemn, most no-nonsense stare. "Where did Merlin send the Foundation?"

Neej's jaw dropped. "What?"

"Answer the question," I demanded. "That was our agreement."

Neej was baffled.

I pushed, maybe harder than needed. But I couldn't help myself. "I promise I won't do any harm to the books. I really won't. I'm not your enemy, I swear, I'm just trying to help and I need you to keep your side of this bargain, Neej. Please. I know he ships the books out to you. Where is the Foundation?" It was all pouring out of me. "Where is it?"

He was silent for a long time. His thinking showed in how he moved his tongue around the inside of his mouth. And there was this moment where I saw something click into place for him, and looked at me like he'd just realized who I was. That I was somehow familiar to him.

But then he told me what I'd come to find.

"The Foundation was sent to the inner palace. It is guarded by King Aartur's elite guard. One of the Knights is there too. You didn't think we'd send them to Nys, did you? With everything else? To get to the books...you have to go through the King."

I let out a long exhale, awash in relief. "Thank you. Thank you so much."

"Be careful, Tristan," he said. "I'm telling you this because I don't go back on my promises. But I wish I could. Not for the books' sake, but yours."

"Don't worry about me," I said. "I'm clever."

"As I well know," he said. "But the Palm of Dawn will stop you."

My breath caught in my throat.

"I'm not fool enough to fight you by myself," he said. "You removed the necklace, you escaped the cage...clearly we are underprepared for the return of your kind."

Neej was with the Palm. That meant Merlin would be too.

"But why, Tristan?" His voice begging. "What do you want from us?"

If he was with the Palm, that meant there were others. Nearby, too. Maybe Maria was one. Maybe they had ways of communicating with each other that I couldn't detect.

"I am not an Arasit," I said, backing to the tent. "But there is still one in existence. I'm going to stop her. I give you my word that this is true. I promise that I am on your side."

I didn't have time to talk to him. Even if he was the most sympathetic Palmie around, even if he seemed to trust me...he was just one man. The Palm of Dawn was an organization, and you just can't trust the collective. Not when all but one are convinced that you're a monster.

So I ran. I had to get to the King before he got word of me. Convince him I was on his side, somehow.

I left the carnival grounds. I headed for the main road. And then I saw Merlin stooped over in conversation with an Ifrit running a food cart. Merlin's outfit was completely different, adorned with the purple and red sash of the carnival revelers. He wore a wide-brimmed cap that cast most of his face in shade. His beard was even gone. But I'd spent five days with the guy, and I knew his face like the back of my hand.

Merlin was here in disguise. Probably looking for me. That wasn't good.

But it did give me an idea...

~

It's not fair, but sometimes I want to forget everything. Even you.

~

I strolled up to the entrance to the outer palace. There were four new guards now instead of the two who'd first seen me enter days ago. The extra security gave me a bad feeling. The old guards had looked tired and barely cared who I was.

But these four were upright and alert. Their weapons leveled at my face. Two halberds, two swords. All metal, all exquisitely sharp.

"No visitors allowed," said one in the back. A gruff voice, made resonant by the full helmet he wore. The wide slit would have shown me his eyes, if the day was a little brighter. "Return to your home, civilian."

Good. I wasn't recognized. Either the word hadn't gotten back about me, or my shitty attempt at a Sherlock was paying off. I'd stolen a gray scarf off a well dressed man in the nicer quarters by the palace, and a Quaker-type hat from his friend who tried to stop me. I'd smeared my hands in dirt and then rubbed my pants, shirt, and face to approximate looking like I'd been on the road for a while.

"Make way," I said. A little brash, a little tired. "I have information for the King."

The guard grunted. "Speak, then. We'll pass it on for you."

Yeah, I'm sure you will. "It's about the Eastern army," I said, like I was confused why he was still in my way. "The King needs to know what I have learned as soon as possible."

"If you're a returning spy," he said slowly, like I was an idiot, "tell us which code you were given."

I sighed. "I'm not one of your spies. I was with the Jassanese. I've talked with their leaders, drank with their men, and been to the most secret meetings of their nobles."

The guards laughed. "You've talked with their leaders, eh?"

"Yes," I said flatly. "Both Dessine and Treoss."

"They're lead by the High Jassan, idiot," said the guard. "Get a better story next time. Leave before-"

"The High Jassan is dead," I said. "Dessine runs the show, now."

Dessine...a warmongering profiteering selfish idiot who didn't deserve anything Wraith-me did to her.

That I did to her.

I was anticipating that the guards would do the classic thing and bar me entrance anyways, but thankfully they were human beings with a shred of common sense, and they begrudgingly organized a five soldier escort to bring me to the inner sanctum. One of whom was the captain of the guard.

"I appreciate the security," I said on the way, "but you already patted me down. I'm not a threat. Doesn't five seem a little over the top? Don't you have walls to patrol? Straw dummies to swing at?"

My escort was predictably silent. Some people just don't know how to take feedback.

Approaching the inner palace, I understood why the security was so lax on the outer edges. I'd been able to get to the Royal Library because they knew that all the important things were behind an impenetrable defense. I counted fifty crossbowmen at a glance, manning towers and their connecting walkways. So many spearmen on the ground that the place looked like a damn thicket.

But most impressively, the inner palace—itself the child of a castle and a mansion—was crawling with soldiers in full plate armor. A jaw-dropping display of metal. I'd been stunned by the armor of the three Jassanese Wraiths I'd fought. But the Aarturian army seemed to have enough of the stuff that it wasn't just reserved for the Angel-blessed fighters who don't die when you kill them.

We were stopped multiple times, weapons thrust in our faces. Questions asked of my escort. You could see the strain of the approaching army even here. People were tense. Rightfully so. If what I'd heard was true, the Jassanese had the numbers advantage ten to one. City walls would make up part of that deficit, I'm sure. But ten to one...I don't know.

Finally we came to a pair of huge doors that had "throne room" written all over them. A pair of angel wings had been worked into the wood, such that opening the doors would probably make the wings look like they were opening to welcome you in. Perfect—that was exactly where I wanted to go.

We turned left.

"Wait. Isn't the King in there?" I asked.

The captain ahead of me turned his helmeted head. "You don't need to see the King."

"Every moment of my time that you waste," I said through clenched teeth, "is more time that this nation goes without the valuable knowledge I have to offer."

"If it's so important, then it really ought to go to the Council of War, don't you think?" responded the guard blithely. We came to a nondescript door encroached by vines. He knocked twice.

"Come in if it's important," called a man's voice from inside.

It wasn't addressed to me, but the question made me reconsider. My plan involved befriending the King to gain access to the books. So going through this door meant convincing this next guy to bring me to the King. Yet another hoop to jump through.

But what if he never did?

Plus. I did have relevant information. I'd learned a lot just by being in the Eastern army for those few days. And telling it to the right person—someone who could actually use it—could end the war outright. And as much as I did want to stop it...

I had to put my faith in Rinzai. Even though everything in me screamed not to. Despite his apparent betrayals, I had to trust that there was a reason for this invasion. A good one. Because I knew that Rinzai was against senseless violence. He loathed killing and preferred diplomacy. Chewed me out for letting the people in the Traveler's Tavern die and made me fight with a quarterstaff. He wouldn't have done this without cause.

So...hard as it was to stomach, I didn't actually want the war to end. Meaning I didn't want this information in the best possible hands.

So as the door opened and the guards ahead of me filed inside, I decided to throw my eggs in one basket.

I bolted.

The guards shouted. The whole time they'd been escorting me, I'd manipulated my single coin of Clay to push and nudge and loosen the rope tying my hands behind my back. It had been hard work, but with some more effort I was able to pull one hand free, leaving the rope tied on the other.

The shouting alerted the hive of soldiers around me, but I had a meaningful breadth of seconds where the only guards I had to deal with were the two positioned before the throne room doors. Hulking men no doubt chosen for their size, they carried large swords and smooth broad shields of reflective metal.

It is the weirdest goddamn feeling in the world to channel Shaping through a Chi-bracelet. I was so used to the feeling coming out of my hands, but here I was pushing willpower out the back of my wrist.

The Clay melted off my wrist, split in two, and shifted from its camouflaging flesh color to the shiny silver of the guard's polished armor. As they put their swords into guard position, I shot each strand of Clay at the narrow slit of their visors, covering it. I was really spreading it thin, and keeping it bound together took more of my concentration than I'd hoped.

But I'd effectively blinded the door guards. I slipped in between their flailing swings, dropped into Stonekin, and shouldered open the throne room door with all the might of the Earth.

It's hard to explain what being fused to the ground has anything to do with upper body strength. It's about alignment. Punch not with your fist, goes the wisdom, but with your stomach. Your hips. Your whole upper body.

So if you're fused to the ground, you shoulder open a door, and you align your body so the resistance of the door goes through your shoulder, down your center and into your legs and finally hits the ground, it can't go anywhere.

Well, anywhere but back from where it came.

Wood cracked loudly as the huge door flung open. The door crashed against the wall at the end of its arc, causing the building to shake slightly.

Maybe I'd overdone it a little.

The room's distinctive feature was a table that ringed an enormous pocked stone that looked like the moon. A simple unimpressive sword looked surreal, resting point first on top of the rock.

I took three long strides into the throne room and knelt, eyes on the cold stone floor.

"My lord. Forgive my intrusion. I come with pressing information for your ears only."

The room fell silent and I heard my heart thumping in my ears. This was happening so fast.

A guard screamed behind me. "Protect the King!"

Swift footsteps, a grunt of exertion that I knew meant he was lifting a weapon to end my life.

I let the blade fall.

Clang!

Metal hit metal, six inches above my neck.

A woman's voice, ragged and breathy: "Let him speak."

I'd bent my elbow, hand at my shoulder a millisecond from summoning my Chi to block the strike. Which would have raised some pretty unanswerable questions. Thank God this woman had blocked the strike.

The metal scraped. The swords were still in tension above my neck. I was tempted to crawl away, but the moment was suspended on a string.

"Kill the assassin!" shouted the same guard.

More cries sounded from outside as my escort caught up. "Kill him!" they shouted, thundering into the cavernous room.

Then, a halt. "What is the meaning of this?" demanded the guard captain who'd done all the talking.

"Your man's arm acted before his head," said the same voice, the woman's, of smoke and gravel and ash.

"He threatened the King!" The swords scraped. "He lied, and broke his bonds. He-"

I glanced to the side just in time to see a woman in armor of heavenly light six inches from my face. A sheet of black hair ended at her waist. Her sword on fire, her shield radiating blinding sunlight. She took a step forward. She punched the guard captain across his helmeted face, the blow trailed by threads of golden light. The punch spun his neck. Knocked out instantly, he fell to the ground with a clash.

And the noise shook me out of my reverie: the woman was just in regular armor. There was a slight silver filigree to it, actually, but nothing like the light or the fire I'd seen. I guess the carnival drugs weren't out of my system yet.

I stayed looking at the floor. Seemed like these people had some stuff to sort out. Plus, maybe I could save the head raise for a dramatic moment. The knight whose sword she'd blocked stiffened. Every other knight around did too.

"You would have killed a kneeling man," she rasped, with difficulty. "You do not deserve the armor you wear."

"That's enough, Joan."

The King, when he spoke, spoke like a storm. His voice like a boiling mass of clouds. So much presence you could cut it. "You. Convince me not to expel you from the palace, and do it quickly."

"The High Jassan is dead." I said.

Then I looked up at him.

The Aarturian King did not look impressed. He was a handsome guy, crown topping the brown locks that framed his kind of perfect face. "You have proof, I assume."

Uh.

I shook my head. "Only that I heard it with my own ears from Dessine and Treoss. He was also absent from every meeting I took part in. He's gone, my lord."

The King waved a dismissive hand. "Not good enough. Take him away, and then cut off his legs."

Gulp. I needed those. "Wait! You have spies, don't you? Were they present at the meeting in the forest?"

Metal hands grabbed my arms and hauled me too my feet so hard I nearly dislocated my shoulder.

The King stroked his short thick beard. "Forest meeting?"

"More of an orgy," I said, desperation edging into my voice. "Giant bonfire in the middle of it? The boy who showed up and burned the High Jassan's sigil into that noble's throat? You hear of any of this?"

I swear the King knew what I was talking about. But he didn't stop the guards from starting to drag me out of the room.

"Hearsay," said the King. He turned to an advisor next to his stone throne. "Now, Gwayne will man the Western wall-"

"He was lying!" I shouted. "He didn't know shit about the High Jassan. It was a bluff, their leader is dead, their army is fractured, they-"

The guards dragged me out of the room and threw me into the dirt. The doors slammed shut.

"Can't believe we let this asshole get so far," said a guard towering over me.

His friend grunted in assent.

"Let's drag him off, then."

"Legs first?" asked the friend. Others came behind them, looking down at me. "Lighter to carry that way."

They chuckled. I pushed myself up on one hand. "Guys-"

A plated foot kicked me in my elbow, and my arm buckled. "Shut up, spy." I fell on the shoulder that'd been nearly sprained, adding a layer of dull pain to the already tender spot.

Why does no one realize that I'm on their side? What a pain in the ass, being sandbagged by the people I was trying to help.

Of course, it'd be a different story if I just told them outright what I was doing. But they'd never believe me.

What's the fucking point. And also, what's that?

I squinted, just in time to see an armored figure jump thirty feet into the air and land on the throne room's upper window. I blinked. Another guard joined the ring around me, blocking my view.

"Wait-"

Glass shattered above. The sound came from where I'd seen the figure, but also further to the left where the next window was.

The guards spun. Through the cluster of their shining helmets I saw that the stained window had been broken.

"To arms!" shouted the guard captain. "Protect the King!"

To their credit, they mobilized quickly. I was left on the ground, suddenly not encircled by guards.

But when I got up, a mailed hand descended on my shoulder. "Not so fast. This is your doing, isn't it? Think you can distract us?"

Something was itching in the back of my mind. The armor of the knight who'd jumped so high...it was different from that of the Aarturian knights. I'd seen it before. That jump had defied gravity, and been so graceful...

"Turn around, prisoner."

I didn't have time for this guy. My instincts took over as I grabbed his gauntleted hand, pressed it tight to my shoulder, stepped back, lowered my hips, and then Judo-threw him onto the ground. He landed with a crash.

He was in full armor, and I was way out of practice. The flip tweaked my lower back. It hurt, but there was no time for that: I had to protect the King.

Because if I did...he might trust me.

"I just wanted to read a few books," I grumbled. "Why is this so goddamn hard?"

I reached to the guard's scabbard on the ground, and summoned my Chi in tandem with pretending to draw his sword. I shaped my Chi into a broad, two-handed metal blade. Anyone watching closely would probably see through the trick, but it was all I could do given the circumstances.

I ran behind the tide of guards flowing into the throne room, and walked into the beginning of a massacre.

I then remembered another reason I knew the High Jassan was dead.
His Wraiths had told me so.

Of course he would have more. These three wore the same unadorned armor of dark, unreflective steel. One, a human, stood on a window opposite me, shooting shrieking arrows out of what I guessed was an Angel's wing. It looked like a long white ribbon bent into an arc by an unseen mystical force.

The other two were Droll that butchered every knight within striking distance of their decorative rapiers. Those who managed to get closer met a similarly gruesome fate by their offhand weapon, a short dagger. The weapons were Droll-sized, so their beauty and grace was incongruous with how damn heavy they looked. You could hammer a nail with that rapier.

I tried to push my way to the front, but a guard saw me. He bellowed, and bullrushed me out of the mass of guards, pinning me to the stone wall. It knocked the wind out of me. He reared back to punch my face.

I was dazed from being slammed into the wall. From being thrown out of the room. I wasn't used to this kind of conflict. Wraith-me might have been. But this was real, this was my life or death.

I guess all I was reflecting on, was that as this punch was coming to smash my head into the wall...I had to act. Only me. Fear could push me to run, anger could push me to fight.

But if I wanted to do this and not give power to my emotions, if I wanted to be responsible for my own damn life, then I had to get out of the way of the punch. I don't know if that makes any sense. But it was just a powerful feeling, like the easy way out was to let panic run the show. But that this was not the warrior's path.

And it was not mine.

I ducked the punch, still dazed. I swept behind the guard and pulled him off balance and threw him to the ground. I was having a hard time placing where everybody was, and what was going on. Shouting, the clash of metal on metal, a rising cloying smell of blood and the shrieking of arrow after arrow.

I couldn't pretend any longer. I needed all my strength for this.

"Let's do this," I said. Taking sight of the archer up on the windowsill, I lowered my sword behind me, then in tandem with a step forward I swung it in an overhead strike, pouring all of my soul into my Chi and letting it manifest unbridled.

The metal shed from the blade like a snakeskin mid-strike, evaporating into thin air and revealing the brilliant blue-green greatsword that was at its heart. The force of the strike sent a thick arc of blue-green light at the archer.

I know, right? Pretty dope. The first time I'd done it had been in an ineffectual attempt to stop the Dragon from killing Aidin. I'd been so damn worried for him that I hadn't really had the chance to appreciate the new development in my Chi. It wasn't easy or subtle, but it shored up one of my biggest weaknesses: fighting at range.

She didn't see it coming, and the arc blasted her off her perch in the window. The arc was wider than the window, and smashed the surrounding stone to pieces.

One down. I advanced on the Wraiths embroiled in the melee. Joan, the knight who'd saved me from the guard, stood protectively in front of the King on the far edge of the room as he sidled along the wall. He was looking at me, and I was pleased to see him wildly baffled.

If you're going to break cover, you better do it in style. And if you do it in style, you might as well be noticed.

Joan, though, smoldered with anger. I could tell from here that she would have much rather been in the melee.

One of the two remaining Wraiths took note of me, and snapped its head in my direction. A zombielike movement that wasn't followed by its torso until a moment after.

"You guys didn't stand a chance three on one," I said, shuddering as the boast also evoked the memory of my hands soaked in blood, and of how long it had taken to hack apart their bodies. "Are you sure you want to do this alone?"

The Droll Wraith raised his helmet. His eyes were flat, lifeless. But he spoke in a Droll's typical low rumble. "You? You're the one that ended the others?"

I smirked. "You're welcome to retreat." Translation: please, please for the love of God just run away. Don't make me kill you twenty times.

"Do you have any idea what you did?" he hissed. "We are the arbiters of this world."

"First I've heard of it." I leveled my sword.

"I mean only that if you kill us...you upset a very delicate balance."

"I'd love to not kill you," I said warmly. "Just stop attacking all of these people, and you've got yourself a deal."

He twisted his mouth, and then shut his helmet. "Angels...give me strength." Then, instead of charging me with his Droll strength, he extended a hand at me. His voice, so calm and so soft but so huge, obliterated all other sound in the throne room:

F U N I S / L U X

The words trumpeted into the room. Two sparkling golden motes of light appeared in the air, and orbited around my Chi's liquid blade. Cords of sunlight began to writhe from the motes like worms as they orbited. And those cords slowly wrapped themselves around the blade, mummifying it.

"Oh hell no," I said. Before my Chi could be completely encased, I took swift forward steps and swung with devastating strength, so unsubtle that Jet would have cringed.

I was counting on the Wraith to think he could block, and my bet paid off. He crossed his rapier and dagger and caught my blade at their intersection. There was a sudden spark at the clash, and liquid sunlight splattered from where our weapons met, gold splashing past my blue-green blade.

I bore down, not having it. My blade brightened, glowing. Whatever the fuck the Wraith's power was, it wasn't wielded with any skill. He was still counting on his old crutch of being a Droll, and therefore being stronger than anyone.

But he wasn't stronger than my mind.

Ignore, for the moment, that in my current scarf and wide hat, I looked like a hipster-Quaker-Jedi.

I was overpowering a Droll.

The enlacing golden cords had wrapped halfway up my blade. The downside of my Chi is that it's still a conduit to my mind. This Angelic magic touching the blade resulted in a feeling like a kiss on my brain. Warm, enfolding. A bright warm day of laying down on the warm grass.

Give up...let go...A pressure on my mind like hot cinnamon bread and fresh honey. Like everything sweet I've ever wanted.

Unfortunately for the Droll, I wasn't in the business of choosing the easy way out anymore. "Sorry," I said through gritted teeth. "These days I'm more of a sprouted rye kind of guy." In a flash, I zigged over the dagger's short blade and then zagged back under it with an added twist of my hips that cut him from his lower rib to the middle of his pelvis.

The golden sparks faded the minute our weapons left each other. I drew my blade out of his body. He made a few more pitiful swings at me, which I easily parried as I walked to the other Wraith. Then he collapsed, legs buckling out from underneath him.

I knew, though, that his wounds were already starting to heal.

The sound of his crash caused his partner to snap his head to look at us. That opened a window to the knights who'd been nervously facing the Droll, so timid they hadn't even encircled it.

One knight screamed, "Rush it!" and the soldiers charged the massive creature.

The Droll's head snapped back to face the tide of knights. With a single sweep of his giant rapier, he knocked them all tumbling to the ground.

Even for how big he was, he shouldn't have had that kind of strength. For some reason, these Wraiths had powers the others hadn't. I had to be careful.

Speaking of which...

I looked back to the window the archer had been firing from. Still empty. She might be relocating.

I needed her out of the picture. She could kill the king from up high and there would be nothing I could do about it.

But I couldn't split my attention between her and these Droll. Well, I could. But not safely, not until I knew what they were capable of.

My head was fuzzy, and the other Droll was moving to deal with me. I suddenly realized that my Chi was fully wrapped by the golden cord. And my brain was so fuzzy I wasn't sure if there was anything but cotton balls up there.

"Wait a second," I mumbled, "how am I supposed to cut with this?"

The Droll lumbered at me, ready to fight. It did what I was waiting for, and made a cocky lunge with the type of speed that would have confounded a lesser opponent.

I, however, was not a lesser opponent. When I could be bothered to not mope around in self-pity, I was a fucking ninja.

I vanished my Chi, dodged left, and then re-manifested the blade mid-cut. A blue-green glow bloomed on the Droll's armor, and then my sword sheared through his sword-arm and bit into his chest.

He grunted, and stepped forward. I got worried. But not because he kept fighting. That, I was used to, and I dispatched him with another swift cut.

I was worried because even though I'd vanished my Chi and brought it back...the motes of light were still there. The golden cords were still pouring out, wrapping it from the base once again.

Shit.

My instincts flared and I spun, ready to block the strike from the Droll I'd already downed. Instead, I turned just in time to see the archer Wraith on a separate windowsill, loosing a shrieking arrow at me.

In the minute window of time I had, I tilted my sword flat-side out, and the silver arrow splintered against my Chi, rippling the watery surface.

I countered, swinging another arc of energy at the archer. This time, she saw it coming, and avoided the impact with a leap that landed her somewhere on the roof.

And this time, my Chi didn't even break the stone. These cords were sapping my strength.

"Well done," exclaimed the King. He was walking back into the Throne room from where Joan had sequestered him. Clapping politely. "An exquisite performance."

"Your Majesty, it's not safe," Joan was trailing him, protesting.

"Nonsense," he said. "This young warrior did what not even my guard-"

"Get the fuck out of here," I shouted. "What the fuck is wrong with you?"

The King looked at me, unimpressed. He might have said something, but thankfully Joan got the message, and thrust him behind her.

The Wraiths were standing up.

The archer, the archer...where was she going to go next...

Damn.

I blinked my Chi—vanishing it, then re-manifesting it again—and took out the first Droll. Then I walked over and knocked out the second again.

The king's guard had gotten to its feet by now. They split up into groups that protected the king, and groups that stood guard over the downed Wraiths. Thankfully they had the brains to see by this point that I was not their enemy.

The situation seemed somewhat under control. Those Wraiths were contained. I could fend the archer off if she attacked again. That is, unless she...

The whistle of the Wraith's arrows shrieked through the open door and broken windows of the throne room.

Unless she started shooting somewhere else.

There were fifty crossbows out there. Surely they'd deal with her.

Another shriek, another scream. People were dying.

I searched the room for the guard-captain. "Hey!" I shouted. He didn't hear me over the clamor of the room. Metal boots clanking on stone floor, a hundred voices trying to figure out what to do. He was dispensing orders. "HEY!" I shouted louder, stalking toward him.

He gestured to two tall knights that flanked him, and they peeled toward me.

No, I wasn't really looking to be detained. Thanks, though. "You two," I told them, "I'm holding you personally responsible for this: the minute either of the Wraiths twitch, you kill them again. They come back to life. Got it? I'm going to deal with the archer." They paused, and nodded hesitantly.

I stepped over a knight who'd had his armor dented into his stomach, and walked out of the building. My Chi was fully wrapped again, and my vision was fuzzy because of it. I dismissed it.

This was getting taxing.

If inside was a massacre, outside was chaos. Confusion strangled the palace as people could hardly tell where the shots were coming from. Were we under attack? Were the Jassanese here? The question was written in the directionless running and the sound of screams. The shrieking arrows seemed omnipresent, sourceless. Firing far faster than should have been possible.

But I had to find her.

I exerted my mind to summon my Chi, again. Motes still rotating, cords starting to wrap around the blade. I used my mental acuity to sharpen my hearing, and after a minute I got it. The archer was so hard to find because she was moving incredibly fast. Each shot from a different place, designed to make the soldiers panic.

A body fell into the dirt in front of me. A gaping wound through the chest. Dust and blood spattered my pant legs. The crossbowman's glassy eyes stared fixedly from his lolling head.

My fault, I said. Don't hide from it. Don't pretend like this isn't happening.

A fwip of movement like an accelerated wingflap above me. I looked up. The Wraith took the shot. I lunged forward, Chi flat-side up, and the silver arrow struck the cords wrapping my blade.

Beneath it, a quivering armorless soldier looked up at me with wild eyes. His dagger was drawn; he hadn't got the memo yet and had been about to stab me. I'd blocked the arrow from shooting him, but he looked like he still might.

"I'm on your side," I whispered. "Please, please believe me."

Fwip.

The archer was gone. Two crossbow bolts sailed through the space she'd been in just seconds before.

My Chi felt like it weighed a hundred pounds. Something about the arrow, it had strengthened the binding cords of light. The rope engulfed my Chi already.

I dismissed it.

Or, I tried. Because nothing happened.

Hanging from the tip of my chi was a lock of gold and silver. The lock bound the ends of the rope. The motes surrounding the weapon pulsed. I swear I heard an echo of a harp, somewhere in my head.

I tried again to unmanifest it. But I was so tired, and it was so goddamn heavy.

Fuck.

I let it fall.

The sword hit the ground softly. I had a thought, somewhere, and it felt important to me. But it was lost in a haze.

No. No. Think. Fuck.

"Watch out!"

The soldier tackled me to the ground. Moments later, a silver arrow sprouted from the earth where I'd stood. Fwip. The archer was gone.

I looked at the soldier, surprised. "Why'd you do that?"

I expected him to have taken a hit. But he just stood up, brushed himself off, and offered me a hand up. "We have to find cover."

I took the hand up. In the shock of being tackled to the ground, my tenuous connection to my Chi had faltered and it had vanished. But I had a feeling that bringing it back would be harder than ever, and pointless: that lock was there to stay.

It's saying something that losing my Chi resulted in a net positive to my awareness. Whatever magic the Wraiths had worked on it, that Funis Lux thing—though to just call it by the words he'd said was a great injustice to the triumphant encompassing enormity of the sound—it was a warm embrace, a smothering hug you never wanted to end.

But with it gone, I was free to have my fucking thought.

Something had been bothering me this whole time. Something was off. The Wraiths had burst into the throne room, yes, but...they'd only bothered fighting the guards.

Hmm.

"I'm headed back to the throne room," I said to the guard who'd saved me. I gripped his shoulder. "Thank you. I promise, I'm on your side."

He nodded. "I...trust you."

That gave me a rush like nothing else. Someone had faith in me. I instinctively thought of Jed, my old mentor back on Earth. The way strangers looked him in the eye and knew he'd always return a dropped twenty, that he would never tell a lie.

I doubt I carried myself with that bearing. This soldier's faith probably had more to do with my otherworldly sword as much as it did my composure. But I couldn't help but feel that he wouldn't have saved my life if I had still worn Wraith-me like a mask.

I booked it into the throne room. Bristling spears met my entrance.

"Let me in," I demanded, "or that son of a bitch is going to murder every person out here."

Thing about a scene like this, is people don't know what the hell is going on. They grab onto any life-raft they can. The log these soldiers were clinging to in order not to drown in the chaos: defending the entrance to the throne room.

So when I met them—unarmed and non-threatening, mind you—with utter certainty, they folded. I walked inside. The Wraith Drolls, comically, had been rolled onto the giant asteroid-looking rock at the center of the room. Their limbs were contorted in strange positions, and it took me a second to realize that it was because the stone must have been magnetic.

I glanced at the sword sticking out of it. The Sword Fused to the Stone by Magnetic Force doesn't have the same ring to it as the original, but the parallel was obvious.

Knights circled the downed Wraiths at some distance. More Aarturian soldiers had died, so I had to assume the Wraiths returned to life more furiously than the ones I'd first fought over a week ago.

The captain oversaw all of this from a few paces away. He was instructing a nervous looking knight, telling her something about Merlin. Then he saw me. He dismissed her and spoke flatly. "If you are no traitor, you will tell me what these things are."

"Well, they've got feathers in their chests," I said casually. "Makes 'em all spooky-like."

I strode past the captain. He caught my arm and spun me around. "Answer my question," he said through gritted teeth, "or you will die. Joan won't save you again."

I met his eyes. "They worked for the High Jassan, before he died. I'm not sure, but...gun to my head, I'd guess that they're connected to the Angels somehow. I've killed three others. They weren't as strong as these ones."

A nearby soldier babbled, wide-eyed. "Peace be upon Haerth. Peace be upon the three great nations. For the next war will be great and terrible indeed..."

"Quiet," snapped the captain. "The enemy is upon us. And you preach scripture?" To me, he said, "It's not Angels supporting them. Angels don't watch over Eastern scum. How did you kill them before?"

I didn't have time for this. "Questions later," I said. "Right now you need to let me go. I know how to save the soldiers outside."

The captain grimaced, but let go of his vicegrip on my arm.

"You kill these two recently?" I asked.

"Seconds before you arrived," he replied.

"Good." I rubbed my arm, sore from where he'd been grabbing me. "Geez, you must be a rightie." I made a jerking off motion. "That's one hell of a grip."

The captain's incredulous look was everything I needed to restore my spirits.

"Right!" I said. "Make way, 'scuse me, coming through. Big man, important man over here." I stepped through the knights. And asked my mind, just one last time, to manifest into the world.

Please, I told my Chi. I need you.

Go away, he replied. I got a flash of the last image I would have expected: me, naked, on a bed with five clones of Jade.

Wraith-magic, ladies and gentlemen...

"Fine," I said. I snapped my fingers in front of the mask of a knight kneeling by his dead companion. "Hey. You. Need your sword."

He was gone. Mentally vacant. Shit, everyone here was probably going to get some kind of PTSD. That anyone was still holding up was a miracle.

I took his sword from his sheathe. The tip fell to the ground with a clank.
"How the hell do you guys use these things?" I asked, bewildered. The sword was actually heavy, nothing like the feather-light weight of my Chi. "You really ought to invest in the weightless model." Then I positioned the blade over a huge crack in the Droll's badly damaged armor, and stabbed down. The body jerked slightly.

"Hey!" I shouted. "Wraith, you on the roof!" I stabbed down again. "I'm asking you for a truce. Just for two minutes, let me talk to you. Otherwise..." I stabbed again, higher. "I'm carving the feather out of your friend."

I was regarded by the people around me like a madman. And in fairness, maybe I was. These Wraiths could revive at any instant and kill me.

Fwip.

The Wraith stood in the window. She watched me motionlessly.

I watched her right back, and said, "I know you can't attack the King."

No response. She stood as a shadow on the sill, the window like a mouth, broken shards of stained glass like teeth.

"Meaning you can't accomplish your mission," I said again. "Meaning I have a proposal for you. Leave, and I'll spare these two. Continue this, and you have my word, I will end them both, forever."

The whole room was silent of all save the dying and the mourning. A low sound of complaint.

"How long have you all known each other?" I pushed. "How many hundreds of years? I don't know why you're doing this...but it can't be worth dying for. Please. End this with me."

The Wraith raised the white Wing. She placed an arrow on the Wing and drew it back, which tightened the Wing and bent it.

"Don't," I said.

She loosed. True to my word, I cut open the Droll's chest, and then tried to get out of the way.

Without my Chi, my dodge was pathetically slow. The arrow shrieked through my arm, leaving a numb feeling where it struck. Knights around me clamored for long-ranged weaponry even as the Wraith was struck through the thigh by a crossbow from behind her. This time I got to watch her move—it was a supersonic leap to the other windowsill. There, she drew another arrow.

An Angel feather—a single strip of soft white ribbon—had erupted from the Droll's chest with a sickening crunch of breaking bones and sheared metal.

"No one touch it," I shouted.

The archer might have hit me with the next arrow. But wreathed in golden light, sword bathed in fire, Joan leaped looking like a meteor all the way up to the windowsill. She toppled the archer off the sill and the two crashed outside.

"Huh. Cool." I said.

Why did an Aarturian guard and an Eastern Wraith both have the same powers?

"With me! Protect Joan!" shouted the knight captain. The dude was a broken record, I swear.

I was looking dumbfounded at my newfound arrow wound. The shot had pierced through my skin and muscle, tearing a messy hole...through my Firearm. It didn't hurt.

But I was bleeding magma. A thick orange goop that oozed like molasses out of the hole surrounded by my smoldering shirt. The wound didn't hurt. It didn't feel like anything, actually. Numb.

But something was wrong with it. It was bubbling and hissing and turning blue and then white. Smoke wafted off of it. This was the stuff that was inside of me?

The archer was brought in, killed by a heavily breathing Joan. "That feather," she said, watching it. "What is that?"

I shook my head. "I don't know. I think it might belong to an Angel."

The feather had risen slowly the whole time. After a moment of us watching it, though, it suddenly broke apart into solid rectangles of white light that shot through the ceiling.

With military efficacy, Joan hacked apart the archer Wraith and its feather exploded out of its chest as well. The Wing it had used for a bow raised with the feather. The guard captain moved to secure it. I stopped him.

"You ever see Frozen?" I asked.

He was nonplussed. "What?"

"Just let it go, man. Let it go."

The Wing and the feather met the same fate, deconstructing into rectangles of ascendant light.

Just like Aidin's spirit, I realized. The one that had been sacrificed to the Dragon's scales.

What the hell was this? This ascendence...was it a Dragon thing? An Angel thing? If it was an Angel thing, then that meant either the Dragon's scales were affiliated with the Angels, or that the spirit had been an Angel, or at least Angel-affiliated.

Wait. Holy shit. The spirit had been described as a guardian. And I'd found it in Sicil, the town closest to the Wastelands. Which, judging from the Ifrit who'd crawled up from beneath its surface and mentioned that he'd filed the paperwork to make the road through the Wastes disappear...odds were that the spirit had been a guardian of Hell. Some kind of Angel left to watch over it.

Jesus.

"And now for the last one," rasped Joan.

"...way, make way! Stop!" The King's voice stopped Joan, her blade paused in the air. She had lost her heavenly glow, and her sword wasn't on fire anymore. I was now pretty sure that I hadn't been seeing things as an after-effect from the carnival drugs in my system. "Send for Merlin," commanded the King. "He can study this creature."

Just at that moment, the guards crowding the door parted and Merlin walked in like a storm, holding his large stone lantern in one hand.

Trailing him was Two Scars. The Palm of Dawn cultist I'd escaped from. He recognized me and set his mouth into a grim line.

The King rubbed his hands together. "Ah, perfect. Merlin, old friend, what do you think-"

Merlin flung open the lid of the lantern, and endless fire poured out.

Much more than should have been inside. A torrent of fire in all its hues and textures. Magma, ember, cinder, coal. Flickering rippling crackling in a shapeless gush that tumbled and surged over the remaining bodies of slain knights toward me.

"Merlin. Cease this." The King had to shout over the fire's sound.

"Shut up, Aartur," snarled Merlin. He made a rising motion with his right hand, in front of which floated a pinprick of fire, and the raging elemental rose in tandem. It took form, grew arms, a face. It opened a white-hot maw.

So I had to pick real quick between two options. I could either go nuclear on this and use the Art, hoping that Merlin and Two Scars weren't immune. Or, I could double down on securing the King's loyalty...if my hunch was right.

The fire elemental spewed a gout of fire at me. I got out of the way, but made the debatably idiotic decision of letting my left arm get hit by the fire.

Predictably, I wasn't burned by it. If anything, it felt good, returning sensation to the numb area of my arm.

If memory serves, making my arm had required an Ifrit heart. Meaning it was probably sort of demon-affiliated. And I'd been shot with an arrow launched from an Angel wing. Did that explain the numbness? The bubbling and hissing?

No time. I reached my Firearm out to the elemental. The familiar feeling was back, the one I got every time I saw an elemental, the feeling telling me to touch it. To dunk my arm in the rearing elemental fire.

I followed that feeling. Let my arm be a channel for it. A dot of fire appeared before my outstretched palm, hissing and flaring like a newly lit match.

And then I subverted that ache, that desire to reach out, pushed it down old familiar tracks in my mind. Following my intuition I melded that feeling with all my practice manipulating Clay, and touching another person's mind.

I felt it. The elemental. The connection was exhilarating, nothing like the connection of Art or Clay. It felt like if I messed up for a moment, I would be disintegrated. So I firmed my resolve and gave it the simplest command I could think of.

Sit.

The roaring fire elemental cindered and smoked and growled. And it lowered itself to its haunches, tense.

Merlin looked absolutely flabbergasted by my response. He'd assumed he was the only one who could control the thing. Two Scars started moving at me but Merlin shouted at him to stay put and "hold the field," whatever that meant.

Two Scars held a green crystal. He held it cupped between both palms and started to murmur something under his breath. If this was the thing that controlled the necklace, then I was damn grateful to have it off of my neck.

Then Merlin and I fought in earnest, wrestling for control of the elemental. He was more powerful, and the thing was loyal to him. But he was out of practice. He'd never faced a real threat in his life, was my guess. His strength went against my skill and the struggle manifested as surging back and forth of the tremendous fire that lit up the faces of all who watched. The soldiers had formed a ring around us, a makeshift arena.

The elemental rapidly lost its shape in the push and pull. It became a molten raging writhing cylinder that we tried our hardest to push at each other. We must have looked like two magicians fighting over control of some terrible and formless fiery dragon.

I pushed the fire far over to Merlin, and he was sweating with the strain of keeping it off of him. He screamed with the effort, and then finally wrested control of the flame from me. It sprouted yellow slits for eyes; claws manifested in the wall of flame, outstretching to come annihilate me.

But the King stepped between us. "Merlin. Stop this."

Merlin's beard was smoldering, burnt unevenly. His face was twisted in impatient anger. "I'm saving your life, Aartur. Maybe the life of all of Aartur. Get out of my way."

"He is a loyal man," said the King. "He saved us all."

"He's an Arasit," spat Merlin. "Neej confirmed it himself. This proves it once and for all. The spy I told you about? Who said he had probably given Fue to an Arasit? This is him. Get out of my way."

I could only see the King from behind. But from how he spoke, I did not want to be in front of him. "Since when have you become this thickheaded? An Arasit would not be embroiled in this childish buffoonery. If the Arasit were truly returned, it would be sitting on that throne." He pointed.

Merlin shook his head. "You don't understand. It doesn't have to sit on the throne. You would never know you were a slave to this foul creature."

"He saved my life. He prevented the deaths of my soldiers. And...he has information." At this, the King turned to me.

I understood. He needed me to further support my case. He could force the issue if he needed to, but not without some doubting him. I had a chance.

Good thing I hadn't killed Merlin when I'd had the chance...I had been wondering when the King was going to interfere.

Time to be convincing. "The High Jassan is dead, as I told you," I said. "But do you know that a substantial majority of the Jassanese army does not want to fight?"

The King's stare was clear: That's not good enough.

"I don't mean your usual, I-wish-I-was-home-with-my-kids type of reluctance. There was so much tension I thought there might have been a civil war. The generals were at each others' throats. One may have come out on top, but the underlying sentiment hasn't changed. All you need to do is deal them one single severe blow. Give the majority a case for peace. Then, feed them. Clothe them. Give them the help they would never have given you."

The King narrowed his eyes. "Is that all?"

I took a breath. "No. The only reason they can continue this war is because the nobles are backing it. They think the High Jassan will reward them with all the riches of this city. Lies were told about stockpiles of wealth. But other Wraiths must have come afterward, and told the nobles that it was all lies. But they pressed on anyways. Meaning the nobles still think there is an economic benefit to investing in all of this."

"We aren't Nys," said the King. "We have no riches. If we can convince the nobles that the spoils of war won't be enough to warrant a siege, then we can avoid all of this."

All the while, the fire crackled and roared.

The King said something I couldn't hear under the bellowing flames. And then all of a sudden the bright fire receded into the lantern. Merlin glared daggers at me. Two Scars remained focused on his green crystal.

The King had me follow him to a section of the round table that had been cut out to allow access to the meteorite. I waited there while he climbed past the last Wraith to the top of the boulder. There, he regarded the sword for a moment. It was probably fancy by Haerth standards—symbols had been etched into the creamy steel of the blade. But personally, I thought my Chi was cooler than Haerth-Excalibur.

He pulled the blade from the rock.

"He's the King!" I exclaimed. "He took the sword from the stone!"

The King gave me a weird look. Then he had me kneel. He touched the sword to my shoulders. "For service to the realm and a display of martial prowess unlike any we have seen, I dub you..." he paused. "Your name, again?"

Uh... "There's already a Sir Tristan, isn't there?"

The King frowned. "You might be thinking of Sir Tirisden? He is the Knight of Isolation."

So there's still room for Sir Tristan? I sighed, brushed Excalibur off my shoulder, and stood up. "You know, we can just skip all of this. No offense, but how about instead of knighting me, you help me with two things."

The King looked me in the eyes with a rock-solidness that made Emmit's eyes look like putty. "Swear fealty, Tristan, and I will do what I can."

I shook my head. "I don't make promises I can't keep. I won't be your knight, my lord." I swear I'd been about to say "dude," but something about the way he held himself just puts the "my lord" in your mouth. "What I promise to you is this: I am not your enemy. I am not here to hurt you."

The King watched me, measured my words.

Before he said anything, I reached for my Chi.

Still busy, came his muffled voice.

Get out here right fucking now, or I will fucking KILL YOU.

Whatever, he replied. A splitting headache ensued that sent me to my knees. But the sword was in my hand. Mummified in golden thread. A lock hanging off the tip. Two motes of sunlight orbiting the blade.

I pushed myself up with the sword, and then showed it to the King, gritting my teeth hard against the pounding in my skull. "I need you...to undo this."

The King, to his credit, did not look like a man who'd just had a massive mummified greatsword manifested in front of his very eyes. "I'm afraid I've never seen anything like this before."

"Look, I grant that I helped you," I said, "but that archer could have killed you at a moment's notice. Could have killed Joan too. But she didn't. Now you tell me: does it make sense to send your elite fighting force into the heart of the enemy's capital just to kill a few soldiers?"

"No, of course not," said the King. But he was thinking about it.

"One of those Droll," I pressed, "he said 'Angels give me strength.' And you know what? Right after that, he did this to my sword." I waggled the blade, and the lock jiggled. "I think the Angels are watching."

Here I remembered Rinzai's zero-explanation policy. He'd once said, Some things, if you learn about them, have a tendency to learn about you in return. At the time, I didn't really buy it. I figured he was just trying to get me off his back. But now...

"I think you're blessed by them," I said. "And I think Joan was blessed by the same magic."

The King gestured for Joan to come over. "He raises a good point. What happened to you?" he asked. "You did jump...rather high."

She looked at me skeptically. "...The voices whispered to me," she said finally. "They told me to fly."

Let's put aside how fucking terrifying that was to hear, that Angels were directly involved in the affairs around me, because, hey! It proved my point!

I made my final argument. "The Wraiths were here to kill you because the Easterners sent them to kill you," I said. "They came because of their Haerth allegiances. But then they found you. You and Joan, for some reason, have an older allegiance that trumps the Haerth one. That's my guess. You guys are affiliated with the Angels somehow. Meaning," I jiggled the lock on my Chi again, "you can probably undo this."

The King shook his head. "What you say is sound, but I don't know..."

"For what it's worth," interrupted Merlin, "I agree with him. Old magic is afoot."

That resigned the King. "Well. Then I guess there's nothing more to do but try."

He touched the lock. A frown furrowed his brow. His eyes went elsewhere.

Then the lock broke. The motes blinked out of existence and I felt a rush of clarity surge into my mind like a tide of Windex cleansing a dirty mirror.

The rope uncoiled, and fell to the ground. It was regular rope now.

Dude...muttered my Chi. Where did everybody go?

Party's over, I said.

Fuck. Where am I? I had never heard my Chi sound so confused, so lost.

The King's eyes were faraway, and he looked like he'd just come off some strong drugs. He leaned on Joan all of a sudden, and she looked at him with concern. And maybe, just maybe, with love.

I coughed, and turned to Merlin. "Now, my last request. Tell me where the goddamn books are."

His mouth twisted, but I spoke before he could. "Because you know what? There is an Arasit." His eyes widened. The room went quiet. "Yes, you heard it here first. There's an Arasit in the world. And you know what? I'm your best shot at killing it. But to do that, I need to find the Liberator. For everyone's sake."

The King's voice was distant. "Grant the request, Merlin. Then return to take apart this creature for study." He gestured to the last Wraith, who was still stuck to the magnetic stone in the center of the room.

Merlin glowered. "Follow me."

Merlin and Two Scars escorted me out of the room.

I cracked a smile. "After that week of reading, I never thought I would be so excited to pick up another book."

"Oh, you won't be touching the Foundation," said Merlin.

I bristled. "Excuse me?"

"Why take you to the books," he asked, "when I could take you to the tomb itself?"

Oh.

Fuck.

~

But how can I forget when Shae makes me relive it every day? That is one of the softer horrors that has become my life.

~

I didn't realize that my arm was healed until we were five minutes away from the room. I scratched at the place where I'd been bleeding magma. The skin was re-knit, like nothing had been there at all.

"Take your hat off," said Merlin as we crept through damp stone corridor.

"But then I'll lose my cover and you'll realize that I..." I removed the hat, and let it fall to the ground. "...Was your assistant! The one from the library!"

Merlin sighed. "You wouldn't have fooled a single person that could have recognized you."

"And yet, here we are," I said, not bothering to hide some smugness. "So, uh, you have any idea why my arm got healed?" I lifted it. Also, come to think of it, I'd tweaked my back throwing that knight, hadn't I? And I felt fine.

Merlin looked at my arm, then put his hand through his burnt beard. I wondered, belatedly, how he'd hid the beard when he went to the carnival. "According to some philosophies, fire is the healing element." He glanced at Two Scars.

I frowned. "Isn't it usually water?"

Merlin stopped. He turned around and held the lantern up to my face. It was bewitching. I instinctively took a step toward it, even as I felt ridiculous for acting like a freaking moth.

"Look me in my eyes," he said, "and tell me that you are not an Arasit."

I calmly regarded him. "I am one hundred percent, free range, organic, USDA approved human."

He blinked.

"I'm not an Arasit," I said. "I swear on the soul of my father, Domingo Montoya."
Merlin shouted suddenly. "You speak nonsense! Why? Why? Do you not see the severity of all of this? Nations are at war that should never be fighting. Angels are imbuing their soldiers with strength, breaking a Peace that's been held since before the written word."

I coughed. "Uh. No, I get that this is serious. I have this whole coping thing that I do-"

Merlin continued on, oblivious. "I thought to myself, "Why take him to the Foundation when I could bring him to the tomb itself?" But now I see that you are exactly as foolish as you seem. How you have meddled so deeply in matters beyond your understanding is beyond me. Did they not teach you basic history in your education?"

"You know how it is with public schools," I said. "They never get enough funding, and it's always the humanities that are first to go."

"I could cut out his tongue," offered Two Scars, breaking his long silence.

"Stay focused," said Merlin sharply. "I still don't believe him."

"Yeah, what's up with the crystal?" I asked. "You seem really focused on it."

Merlin said, "Protection. That's all." Two Scars returned his attention to the glowing green crystal he was holding.

We took secret passage after secret passage. There was no way in hell anyone was going to find whatever was down here.

And then we came to a room. Unguarded, but heavily locked. Three chains, metal chains, were tightly threaded through loops limning the door. A lock hung from each, arranged asymmetrically as if they'd been locked in a hurry.

"Why the hell does Cammes have so much metal?" I wondered out loud. "The Easterners are really starved for the stuff."

Merlin withdrew a thin long key and unlocked the first lock. The tumbler clicked open, echoing in the corridor in a way that made me want to look over my shoulder. But Merlin turned his head. He looked, for the first time, like he was out of his depth. Like he was looking at someone alien.

Two Scars spoke first. "Some kinda Arasit you are. Can't you just read my mind and find out?"

"Not while that rock's working," I said.

Two Scars stiffened. Merlin narrowed his eyes.

"It's a joke! Geez, guys."

Merlin unlocked another lock, and the chain rattled loudly as he pulled it through. "We breed our metal. I'm not sure how you haven't heard of the Glinting Pastures...It all started with the Lodestone, really."

"That rock in the throne room?" I asked for clarification.

Two Scars scoffed. "Ancients above..."

"Yes, Tristan. 'That rock' in the throne room was a gift from the Angels. A resource that allowed Aartur to rise from a collected band of savages barely surviving in a world of creatures that could kill us at a moment's notice...to an empire."

The last chain rattled through the loops, and Merlin led us into a long, dead-ended corridor. The walls were lined with books. The shelves were meticulously organized; nothing like the chaos of the Royal Library I'd spent so many hours in. I was surprised to find candles and candle-holders too, but I guess unless Merlin brought his lantern, they didn't exactly have headlamps.

Even so, it was funny that Merlin was lighting the way with a lantern of elemental fire. After what I'd just seen it do, he had to be pretty confident to bring it down here. I'd spent a long time with him; I knew what he thought of these books.

Merlin let his fingers drag along the names of organizing shelf labels. "Where to start..."

I mean, at this point, I didn't care so much about these books. There was a powerful voice in my head screaming at me to rip the information from Merlin's mind, and get to the Liberator's tomb at any cost. But I had to rein in my anticipation—I would soon be in the tomb. I could wait another hour.

"It all started..." Merlin said, suddenly grabbing a tome from the shelf, "with the Weeping War."

"You mean the Big Bang?" I said.

He paused, mid speech. "The Big Bang?"

"Uh, forget it. Go on."

He frowned at me. "You ought to listen, Tristan. If you are, as you insist, on our side...then you ought to know whose side you're on."

"Which side is that?"

He opened the tome, turned the pages, and then presented the book to me. I saw a depiction of a beautiful winged woman cradling her tear stained face in her hands. Her skin seemed to radiate light, while all the page around her was covered with a dark cloister of storm clouds.

"The side of light."

~

You know the etymology of the term 'Angel,' don't you? No? What about-

Ah, what am I thinking? I've forgotten who I'm talking to.

Long ago—very long ago—Haerth was dominated by the power struggles of mythical creatures long lost to time. The Ancients, from whom we derive the phrase "Ancients above."

Only a few stories were passed down long enough to be recorded. From those recordings, we hear tell of horrifying acts committed by Titans and Dryads, of trickster Gods and wise Sphinxes. And watching it all: the Daemons.

We don't know much about Daemons, but all the old accounts—which, if you're interested, is a whopping four accounts, two of which are incomplete and one of which is dubiously translated—depict a single common fact: that the Daemons never fought one another. They acted as one being. Some even speculated that they acted as a hive mind.

And then came the Weeping War. The Daemons turned on themselves, splitting into two factions: Angels and Demons. All other Ancients save the Dragons perished in the process of this awful battle.

It was a fight that lasted a thousand years. So long that whatever force compelled them to fight each other—some scholars attribute this force to God, but that's just lazy thinking—changed its mind. Nobody knows why it happened. But every Daemon was banished. Just like that, the de facto rulers of the world disappeared.

And within the next hundred years, economic ledgers suggest that three distinct cities formed.

Cammes, city of wind; city of bells. Populated by Jhinn, children of Angels.

Nys, city of music; city of sin. Strewn with malicious demonspawn: the Ifrits.

And Jass, city of dirt. Plagued by Droll, which the Earth shits out to bother the civilized world.

Life proceeded for a very, very long time. Then a verminous species crossed from the other side of the world. At the time, nobody knew there was an other side of the world.

Small wonder that they overtook Haerth. Humanity was enslaved for so long it didn't remember that it was enslaved.

Then, salvation: the Angels sent the Liberator to free us from enslavement. This was the War of Awakening, which was a resounding defeat for the Arasit. Near the end of it they turned to killing their hosts, human and animal alike, to threaten the Liberator. They mistook him for a being of mercy, but they were wrong, and then they died.

The Angels sent the Liberator deep underground to protect his power from being abused. Before his disappearance, we were left with instructions to preserve the protections the Liberator offered us. They would keep us safe us, should the Arasit ever return, and they would also nurture society to thrive. Important maxims to safeguard.

And we have, but there is only so long the traditions can survive without being corrupted into uselessness. Modern Liberationism is a stain on the Liberator's legacy; controlled by our friend Aartur in the background to manipulate the masses to his whims.

The Liberator has slumbered ever since. He will awaken when Haerth is threatened anew. And when he does, there will be a reckoning.

~

I just...I need you to get this letter. Soon.

Before you find the Liberator.

~

Hmm.

This was bad news. The Liberator's been sleeping for ages...and, what, I was going to walk in, and he'd wake up from his nap? Hey, Mr. Guy-Who-Saved-The-World, you missed a spot, and she's, uh, going to take over the world again...if you could just, you know...do your thing...

But this was Rinzai's plan. I had to trust that he wouldn't have sent us here without a chance of succeeding.

At my urging, Merlin escorted me through the tunnels to the Liberator's tomb, and all the while the dead Wraith's words echoed in my ears: You will upset a very delicate balance.

"So the Angels are gone?" I asked quietly.

"Weren't you paying attention?" snapped Merlin. "Did you not-"

"I'm just saying," I interrupted, "that we saw some pretty supernatural shit in that battle. Maybe they're not all the way gone."

"Of course they're not," he replied. "The Angels watch over us all. To be frank, I think there might be something to your theory about the Wraith and Aartur being birds of a feather. It's unlikely, given that I've never heard any theory purporting that the Angels watched over anyone but Aartur. Much less those Eastern savages. But at the very least, I'll do more research about the matter if I survive the siege."

"Research?" I said, choking out a laugh. "Angels are literally imbuing your soldiers with superpowers, and you want to read books about it."

"Would you rather I talk to them directly? There's no other access to the Ancients than what has been recorded," replied Merlin. "Besides, there is more to research than long nights with dusty tomes. Though I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, given your prior ignorance, that you would have no knowledge of these other fields of study."

Blah blah blah. I thought about the time I saw the Angel in the Subfield. I thought about the rising feathers, about where they went when they ascended skyward. I thought about Joan and the Wraiths and the King, about the meteor in the middle of the throne room. Everything whirled together, the pieces of a puzzle that no one in the entire world knew anything about.

You will upset a very delicate balance.

But most of all, I thought of the Liberator. There was something...rabid in me. Something gnawing at me to find him, to just finally fucking find him, and-

Merlin brought us to a dead end. He put his palm on a stone, and whispered, "I am nothing."

The stone shifted beneath us. Then it lowered, slowly, painfully slowly scraping its way further into the earth. The segment of corridor that was lowering itself was quite small, so we were kind of cramped together.

Scraaaape.

Man, where's the elevator music when you need it?

"So..." I said, overly awkward. "What's the story behind your Firearm?"

Merlin glared at me. "My what?"

I was well accustomed to his glaring by now. "Your arm's made of fire. From a wyvern, right? You had to use an Ifrit heart to-"

Two Scars snorted. "He's a wizard, kid. Controlling an elemental ain't nothing."

Ah. I shot Merlin a look that said, Really? but he wouldn't meet my eyes.

The rest of the ride was passed in tense silence. Then the world's slowest elevator finally brought us to the bottom, a low-ceilinged cave. The floor was spotted with stalagmites bathed in Merlin's lantern light. The air was surprisingly fresh for how damp it was.

"Woah," I said, looking across the room. "Are you aware that your tree's upside down?"

"Has anyone told you how tiresome you are?" Merlin scratched his patchy beard.

"They used to. It's been far too long...I kind of miss it, to be honest."

The tree hung from the ceiling, but the branches refused to droop down. The bark was slivered and rainbow colored, and just from a visual standpoint I was certain that this was the same type of tree that had sent me a piece of itself to transform into Clay. An older, more mature version of the trees in the Stone Giant grove. But that being said, I felt no presence emanating from it.

I glanced at Scars' green crystal. That was probably why.

And there were people down here. Dark robed people sitting in quiet, closed-eyed meditation amid the stalagmites. A lot of them, actually; maybe twenty. How the hell were they breathing? Where was the oxygen coming from?

There was a minimalist office space over in the corner, a long table bearing some books, and a bag with a rolled up paper poking out of it. It looked familiar, but I couldn't place it.

Because something was happening inside of me. My cheeks were flush with heat, and I was sweating profusely. It felt like I was venting heat from my chest. I billowed my shirt to cool myself off. "Is it hot in here, or is that just me? Not trying to come onto you, I'm asking sincerely."

Merlin navigated the stalagmites. "Hot? We make the robes extra thick to ward against the cold. Come with me."

In the center of the stalagmite filled cavern there was a walled off stone room. A monk—

—no, a cultist, a worshipper of a false God—

—sat cross legged before the door.

I blinked. Uh, what?

Other...cultists...were seated among the stalagmites. They rose, watching us silently. Merlin brought me to the door of the center room, and bade the monk guarding it to move out of the way. "Neej told me with certainty that you were not an Arasit," whispered Merlin. "And I trust him. But Peyter felt their magic on you. I swore I felt their magic when you were in my library, just once. It was so faint I didn't know what to make of it."

That was when I'd stupidly reached out to Zodiac. "Okay," I said. "Why are you telling me this?"

Merlin paused with his hand on the door. "Because I want you to know something. If you've lied to us, then you have made a colossal mistake. Because you cannot lie to the Liberator. If he smells Arasit on you, you will die."

Something...something was happening inside of me. Words bubbled unbidden to my mouth: Let me out. But they left as soon as they arose. I didn't know what to make of them.

"But if you are truly with us," said Merlin, pushing the stone slab door, "then I hope you can convince him to wake up."

The tomb door opened. The only feature of the room inside was a gigantic stone bell, five times larger than me. It encased a hunched, shadowed figure. The bell was latticed like a pie crust, but Merlin's light didn't extend far enough to let me see through the holes.

My sword hand was twitching. I looked at it.

And I spoke almost without meaning to. "That's him? Inside?"

"You can't feel him?" replied Merlin archly.

I hadn't noticed. I wasn't feeling hot so much as drowning in sweat. Shivering too. Merlin's face though showed none of these symptoms—if anything, he looked blissed out. More at peace than I had ever seen him. "I think we're feeling different things," I said. "I think...maybe, I should..." Leave. Leave. Leave leave leave leave-

"Even asleep, the Liberator radiates freedom," said Merlin.

"So that's him," I said again. The words just coming out my mouth. It didn't sound like me. It sounded ferocious. The same kind of ferocity that possessed my hunger to just find him. Merlin detected it and looked at me strangely.

"...Yes."

Something reared inside of me—no, unfurled, like a flower, like...What was...

My Chi summoned itself. It blazed, not a liquid blade but a blade-shaped blue-green roar of fire. Not a flickering flame. The fire of a jet lighter. Of a welding tool. The hilt's orange pommel stone had been replaced with a dark amethyst embroidered by a rose and sky blue butterfly.

Sorry, Tristan, he said. You should close your eyes.

When I killed Merlin, the blade did not so much cut through his body as disintegrate it.

I took a step to the encased Liberator, blade firmly gripped, and thought, Oh my God. What is happening to me?

~

Do you remember that letter I sent? Right as you and Rinzai left us behind. I wrote it in my own hand, Sang to the bird myself and sent it just hoping to say goodbye.

But Tristan...it wasn't a bird that brought it to you.

It was Shae.

~

I had lost control of my body and mind. Someone else pulled the strings while I was thrust into the backseat of myself. Locked behind a thousand doors, trapped in a room inside a room inside infinite other rooms.

Shae's power funneled into my burning Chi. Two Scars stared at me, astonished. "I knew it. I knew you-"

But it was not right to say that someone else pulled the strings because I cut him down. I did it. But I didn't—there was...someone else, someone was in my head, someone...no. This was me. This was what I wanted. This...

No!

I get so emotional sometimes. I kicked away the green crystal that fell from his hands. It skittered behind a stalagmite, dimming.

No. Fuck. I can't say truly that it was me doing all of this. But even when I saw that I was being controlled, I couldn't not feel responsible. After all, it was my Chi being swung. My hand holding it.

And I raged. I raged against the binds that Shae had wormed deep into my psyche. Some part of her control sensed my growing resistance, and it acted. No, I acted. I was doing this to myself. But she was making me do it, making me be this way—fuck.

I saw my vision recede as I plummeted out of the real world and into the mental landscape into which Shae had trapped me.

After a minute spent shouting and screaming, I realized that at least here, I was whole. Her manipulation had first attempted to synchronize me somehow to her will. But once it saw that I was hostile, the trap was sealed, and I was barred from my body.

The first mental landscape—Castles, we'd called them in Caer'Aton—was a simple room, the walls and the ceilings all mirage-like images of Jade's face. I cursed myself for leaving Caer'Aton before getting familiar with how Castles worked. I knew they were physicalized mental representations of the Art, a way to trap you without you realizing you were ever trapped. The key was to disbelieve the illusion. That's what I'd done when I fought Colin. And that's what I did now.

Working past that first room took what felt like eons. But it was just the first of many. The next Castle put me atop a glass wall that stretched to the horizon, cutting across a grassy plains.

She had withdrawn all her power, I told myself. She was fighting the Odieh. Rinzai was right there. She can't have implanted this into me with all her strength. I have a chance. I do.

I had to believe it. Otherwise, I'd go insane.

That second Castle was inlaid with a deeper suggestion—it set the terms that if I came to the end of the wall, then I would be free of the trap. I found myself running a mile down the wall, feeling like I'd really made some good progress, before I realized what was going on.

No.

I tore out of that with sheer force of will. It was a false promise. The wall would never end.

That finally brought me back to the real world. My Chi was out. The Liberator was ahead of me. I concentrated long enough to make my Chi disappear. Then I ran over to the Liberator. "Hey!" I shouted. "Wake up! There's still an Arasit! Your job isn't over!"

The Liberator's eye sockets brightened with red light. "You have done well to come to me," he said. "We will eliminate the creature together."

"Yes!" Mission accomplished. We did it.

We walked out of Cammes together, holding hands. He told me about his long sleep, and his dreams. People waved at us as we passed by. Onwards, to Caer'Aton!

Fuck. Fuck!

I wrenched myself out of that one too.

"What was your name again?"

I shook my head in a double-take. Jade was looking at me with the pleasant, unsure smile you give to someone who greets you by your name and you don't remember them at all. We were...at a party? "Tristan," was all I could say. She looked good. She looked like the kind of hurt you pay for.

"That's right! Tristan. You were in Caer'Aton." She tossed her hair behind her. "I heard stories about you."
"Nothing good, I hope," I joked.

"Yeah, it was a lot of bad, actually..."

I looked at her. She flipped her hair over her shoulder. "What are you staring at?"

"It's just been a while. You seem so real."

"Are you okay?" she asked. She brushed her hair over her shoulder. "You seem pretty out of it."

"Why..." I muttered.

She flipped her hair over-

"Stop doing that!" I said suddenly.

Her hand paused, about to brush her hair over her shoulder. "What?"

Some of the traps, their whole thing was that you didn't want to escape. Jade was right in front of me, in the flesh. And I had to break out of the trance...for what? So that I could watch as a dormant Suggestion controlled my body, doing God knows what in the real world?

Yes. Exactly that. Break out of what's comfortable, and return to what's fucking real.

I'd wanted her to stop glitching like that, to be a more believable illusion. We all want to dupe ourselves from time to time. But ultimately it just made saying farewell that much easier—I wasn't as attached to her image, plus the glitching confirmed my suspicion that Shae hadn't executed this perfectly. I clawed out of that layer.

And I landed in an orgy. This layer held a powerful psychic component to it, where my sex drive was shot through the roof. I turned to where Alice was on her back, squeezing one of her tits as she bit her lip. She rubbed her clit with her other hand, and she was looking at me.

I was naked. I walked over, threw her hands off her body. She looked up at me with eyes just begging to be fucked. I flipped her over with strength I didn't normally possess, and I sunk into her pussy. She moaned, and tried to look back at me. But my sex drive, it was charged with something else, something telling me to control her. To control everyone. I shoved her face into the pillow—had there even been a pillow there a moment ago; I don't know—and muffled her screams as I picked up the pace.

Then I realized I didn't need to keep my hand there. I was a God. I was the most powerful being in this room. I kept her face pinned there with my mind. Then I reached her hands up above her and shackled them to the mattress.

I slipped out of her. Fucking Alice, that was nothing. That was just pleasure. But power, real power, that's what this was about. Alice moaned at my departure, so I made her believe she was still being fucked. She started bucking her hips, and let out a moan of an entirely different sort. Pathetic. For good measure, I undid the compulsion pushing her into the pillow, grabbed her by the hair, and fucked her mouth.

Then I saw Tori across the way, making out with Thomas of all people. At my call, she pushed him away, and crawled over to me. I picked her up by her throat, held her dangling off the floor. This was the bitch who'd tricked me. Asked me for help in the Course, then spat on me. Now who was in control, Tori? I threw her onto the bed.

But before I could do anything else, I saw Jade across the room. Derrik was holding her up, fucking her against the wall. I saw red. I forgot Alice and Tori completely and was across the room in an instant, and I flung Derrik so hard across the room that he shattered a bed into sawdust. Jade looked at me with tears in her eyes. "Thank you," she said. "You're my savior."

I don't know why, but I made her walk out of the room. Where, you might ask? By which door?

I couldn't tell you. Castles work like a dream. Though there was a substantial part of me thinking of nothing but fucking her, for some reason, I wanted her gone. And just like that, she was.

I turned back to the room. After denying myself like that, the power in me roared fiercely and firmly put itself in the drivers seat. I noticed Claire nearby; pale, dark haired Claire, and I dragged her off the bed by the wrist.

I don't know how long it took me to break out of that room. But when I did, I felt disgusting. Covered in something I could never wash off. It wasn't me, I told myself. I didn't want that, I don't want that.

But I quickly realized that beating myself up for being a terrible person was just another trap. None of that had actually happened. I had to believe that that was not who I truly was. Even if it didn't feel true, I clung to that faith, and resumed my breakout.

The next Castle was an escape room. After that, a video game. Then back to the Dragon's lair where Aidin was prone on the ground and dying and insisting that I could save him-

But I don't have time, I just don't, and I'm sorry-

And I went up and up out of these endless Castles, all the way until I realized that this whole process, this whole goddamn track I was on was itself a Castle. Right? Just like the wall that stretched to infinity, the belief that I was ascending out of the mire of traps was itself a trap. Damn damn damn.

How the hell was I supposed to get out of here?

Like an idiot, I asked my Chi for help.

I'm sorry, Tristan.

"Get in here," I growled. At this point in my doomed escape I had landed back in Caer'Aton. I was in the lounge, lying down on the cushions my friends and I used to occupy. The ones by the roaring fire.

I heard my Chi sigh inside my mind. I can't. I'm sorry.

"You're sorry?" I shouted into the room. My voice reverberated. "You killed Merlin."

It's not my fault. I'm being controlled just as much as you.

No, no, no. "You're lying. You were always Shae's tool, always. I can't believe...God. Fuck. Fuck!"

I kicked the cushion closest to me. It went flying comically far, and crashed into the opposite wall. "I can't. I can't go dark again."

It's not your fault, either.

"Shut the fuck up."

It was. This was my responsibility. It was me, acting in the real world.

But what is the real world? Came an intrusive thought. Isn't this as real as anything?

People appeared into the room as if from mist. Talon crowded together, laughing in small groups next to Stone. Tower sprawled on their usual couches. Lotus...my friends...

They were talking. Sailor said something funny and everyone laughed. They laughed the way they would, too. Emmit shook his head as he smiled. Alice a high pitch that carried over the room. Jade smiling, blushing. Thomas walked over, had Sailor repeat the joke. His laughter was booming. Everyone was having a great time. What a wonderful life. Thomas turned around and looked directly at me, as if he'd just noticed me there. "Tristan!" he said. "You've got to come over here."

And it was all as real as anything. Jade turned around, looked at me and her eyes went wide as she took a sudden breath. "Oh my god," she said. "You're back."

I knew, knew, that if I walked over here and kissed her then I would feel her soft lips on mine. If I stroked her hair I would feel every fiber. This wasn't a perfect simulation, this was literally the same as...it was...

I don't know what happened next. I only know that it would not, and could not have ever happened if I was not desirous of wanting to be myself. To wholly and fully be myself.

Because a pulse of energy exploded out of me. It evaporated the room on contact, disintegrated the chairs where it touched the chairs. Again, it pulsed. Blue-green. Eradicating this illusion.

My subconscious was helping me out. Something deeper inside of me than I could see was not in the mood for an existential crisis.

I seized it.

I can't tell you how many times I've seen me throw myself a lifeline and shrink away from it. How many times I've opened a door for myself and not stepped through. I'd stared at the Eastern army amassed on the plains and seen a future where I could move it off its ass and I had shrunk away from that future. And I knew where that road led.

I didn't know it like a wise old sage. I knew it like a young, terrified man. Not the bedrock wisdom of someone who has seen their principals proven time and time again by the world, but the tremulous uncertain desire that's as much hope as it is determination to seize the opportunity I was giving myself because I knew who I'd be if I didn't.

The surfacing power saw that in me and something broke down, a barrier, and I felt myself become whole in a way I never had before. Aligned. I don't know how to describe it, but I do know the next pulse of blue-green light that emerged from me obliterated the lounge, and left me in familiar territory.

Blue platforms floating in dark, empty space. My mindscape.

My home.

They were shallow platforms that together formed the bare outline of the Course, no longer the tall established columns I'd developed with meditation. I'd lost much of my connection to this place, since I hadn't been here in a week. But I was here. I had a home base. Some deep part of me knew that this wasn't a simulation. If I ever made it out of here, I swore to get to know that part of myself.

Though around me all was familiarly dark, the ceiling wasn't. It was pastel blue and blushing pink and orange, rose red and the kind of purple a queen would wear. And the colors were dripping. No, plummeting.

Oh, I thought. So this is what Castles are for.

I was in my own space, and I had the power here. The threat, Shae's influence, was made physical.

Wait—if it was up there, that meant it wasn't on me. Did that mean I wasn't under Shae's spell anymore?

Just to check, I switched my perceptions back to the real world. I had to assume that it was possible to have both perceptions going on simultaneously, but I just wasn't practiced enough. So I'd just make it a quick switch, and I'd return back to Shae's descending attack in a second.

In the real world I had only taken three steps into the room. That meant my perception of time was being slowed way down inside of my mind.

But the Liberator wasn't sitting encased by a stone bell anymore. He was kneeling, surrounded by fresh rubble. Dust was still rising from what must have been a colossal crash. Thus revealed, I was astonished by what he looked like.

Because the Liberator was a Stone Giant. A much bigger one—which is saying something—and made of darker stone closer to charcoal than granite. Nonetheless he was constructed the same; misshapen boulders fused together to form an uneven but two-legged creature. His eyes were empty sockets, rather than slits in the stone. They looked neutrally forward while his boulder-like fists were on the ceiling, in an Atlas pose, as if he was trying to push up the whole world.

Uhhhhh...

The Liberator. The thing that had exterminated an entire race of mind controlling creatures. The thing that had been sent by either the Angels or by the Earth itself to bring balance to the world.

Errrr...

The Liberator stood upright in one swift motion, and the ceiling moved with him.

Fuck?

He'd pushed up the entire earth. The hundred or so odd feet of dense dirt and stone below Cammes. I'm surprised I wasn't hearing the bells shaking from here, because that must have caused a massive earthquake.

I stepped backwards. I needed to leave.

Except...I didn't. I stepped forwards. It was time to kill this nuisance, once and for all.

Shit.

I fled back into my mindscape to buy myself time. Switching to visual perception must have left me more vulnerable, because Shae's sunset colored influence had almost entirely encased my blue-green platforms. Damn, why had I left this place when I'd just found it...I kicked myself.

I worked like crazy to banish Shae's colors. How, you ask? I have no freaking idea. In my own mind, actions weren't deliberated or thought of in the same way. What I didn't realize was the power of a Castle lay in that it let you make all the rules. I'd trapped Shae's power in here, and so when I followed a whim and tried to push it away as if I had the force to do that, it actually worked.

But even that wouldn't have saved me without the practice I'd done in the cage. The thing that bought me enough time to figure out how to fight back was my ability to move around my mind. To move from platform to platform without having to summon each memory or feeling that they represented.

Because every time I switched, Shae's colorized Suggestion lost the scent. I could move further away from it. I think once I strategically added a platform, and it was a feeling/memory of what I was doing now, in this moment—fear, mostly, but also the feeling like maybe I had a shot at this.

When the colors caught up to me, I pushed them away, and ran. It took me a minute of acting out a made-up Tai Chi set, a lone figure on the blue platform pushing away the colors with sweeping gestures, to realize that I was merely delaying the inevitable resurgence of color that happened after I pushed it away. So I had to adjust; my motions became more severe, I made a fist of my hand to signify a dissolving of her power.

And it worked. Her color steadily vanished from my mindscape. I worked at it, building confidence, until there was no more left.

I was breathing heavily. "Next time, you...should have asked. If you wanted to color...with me. Fucking, didn't you learn that...in kindergarten?" I wheezed. Being in my mindscape, expending mental energy corresponded to physical tiredness. "That was a terrible joke. At least I'm alive."

Exhausted, I switched perceptions back to the real world. Free of her influence, I dismissed my Chi.

It didn't work.

I took a step back, toward the door. Away from here.

Except that I didn't.

"FUCK!" I screamed. Except, predictably, my mouth stayed silent and pressed into a grim line as I advanced on the Liberator, who was lowering his hands. His eye sockets were empty of eye—did that mean he was blind? Shit shit shit, I was about to kill him. I could feel the drive to do it churn inside of me. My Chi could dissolve metal at this intensity; Shae had somehow hidden that much power in me?

There's no way Rinzai hadn't known. I don't know how this happened but there's no way that after months of being together Rinzai didn't at least sense that this was going on. He wasn't a puppet; I had felt Shae withdraw all her powers. He was clean. Wasn't he? Maybe this had been an embedded manipulation? Just like the languages she gave me.

Or maybe this wasn't Shae's. It felt like Shae's, but it wasn't out of the question at all that Rinzai could mask his Art as Shae's. Maybe Rinzai had been dumping metric fucktons of Art manipulation into me without my knowing.

I was trapped in my body. I wanted to cry. I thought—I thought I beat it, I thought I disintegrated the invading colors from my mind. Why could I still not move? Didn't I use the Castles right? Didn't I, I mean, fuck, how, how...

How the hell does this work?! Why did no one prepare me for this fight!? Why did Rinzai send me here? Why didn't I think to question it—"Yeah, Tristan, since you just made such a colossal mistake in Sicil by letting all those people die, now you need to go to Cammes and I'm going to need to go do other stuff." I was an idiot.

I stepped into the room against my will. The Liberator still had his hands on the ceiling, and he was still as the statue he barely resembled. With my Chi as powerful and blazing as it was, I doubted he stood a chance. He wasn't moving. I couldn't watch. I couldn't see it. I could make another Wraith, make another person, make someone else-

No. I won't hide. I won't.

I made myself watch. If I had been in control of my body I would have been crying. But from all outer appearances, I looked like the murderer that I was. I took grim steps forward.

The Liberator's tomb was austere. Bare of all decoration; an implicit critique of the gaudy churches above. Where he had raised the ceiling to allow for his towering height, roots protruded from the shorn earth.

"Hello, child."

It was not his mouth speaking, but the earth. The ground itself communicating in a tremor, sort of like the Stonekin talk.

But I replied out loud. "I do this for my mother, who saved me. Elean. That was her name, you monster."

I blinked. The words had felt like a script. Had Shae really embedded a "You killed my father, prepare to die" in me in tandem with the Suggestion? Weirder still was that the longer I was watching myself, the more I felt like it was me doing this. I wanted to turn from that, to merely observe...but I had a gut sense that I wouldn't be able to.

"I know her name," said the Liberator. "and it is Gaia. Her fragments do not suffer. And they do not die."

"Liar," I snarled. I felt the fury in me. The knot of anger and pain that had twisted Shae over a thousand years into who she was today. This was the source of...wait, this was the kernel that was pushing me, this anger. No, this hurt. If I could touch it, if I could...

My Chi's brightness dimmed. I felt lost. What...what had I been thinking about?

"Your mind is troubled, little Arasit. Let me help you."

The Liberator knelt. The motion somewhere between fluid and avalanche. The difference between a Stone Giant and this guy was the head. I'd seen the depictions all across town, but before that, I'd seen them back home. The Buddha's eyes were empty sockets where something should have slotted in, but somehow they still managed to look at me with radiant compassion.

"You are forgiven," said the Liberator. And with that, I felt the powerful ripple of energy emanating from the Liberator. It brought tears to my eyes. Peace to my soul. I realized that I had never done anything wrong in my life. That there was no such thing even as right and wrong. That the Earth holds you neither in contempt nor in praise.

He was extending a rocky lump of hand to me. I faked as if to touch it.

"Sorry," I said, "but peace is for chumps." I made a sudden, swift cut.

His hand was shorn clean off, molten at the edge my Chi had touched. I was elated. My weapon could hurt him. I had a chance at ending this millennia old feud, at serving my queen.

He reared back. "You have grown in my absence. Perverted Gaia further still."

I felt an inrush of power. Something—the Subfield?—poured into him, as if he'd ripped a mile-wide hole centered around his body. Power moved into him as water does in the ocean. Complexly, invisible seen from atop. But felt...it was huge. He amassed so much energy that it nearly blinded my senses.

Then, the entire earth seemed to speak at once:

-- a w a k e n --

The energy exploded outward. Behind me. I felt it become shaped, molded, and then infused into receptacles that had been there all along. No, presences. People. Their minds, power was pouring into them.

The earth shook.

I turned around. The Palm of Dawn...the few of them I could see through the door, their eyes were glowing wondrously leaf green. Not the kind of nature-green you like to gaze at. The kind that slowly, inexorably, will destroy everything we ever make, and will last millions of years after every human has gone.

The Palm of Dawn was coming for me. And maybe, just maybe, I was fucked.

I heard the air rush subtly, and I dodged out of the way of the Liberator's crashing fist. I had a shot at another cut on his hand, and I went to fuse myself to Stonekin to make it a brutal one.

Except that as I sunk into the ground, the ground reached back to me.

It's a testament to the power that had laid dormant in me, now rising, that my reflexes were fast enough to jump off the ground. Nope nope nope. Not having any of that, thank you.

So he could touch my Stonekin? Yeah, not getting many Angelic or Demonic vibes from the Liberator. This guy was made by the Earth.
"And I'm going to send you back to it," I growled.

Except I had the small problem of a bunch of Palmies infused with the Liberator's magic to worry about.

Look, I'm an amazing fighter. But I can't take on twenty Earth-enhanced cultists and a mythical species-ending godlike being with just a sword.

I was desperate. So even though I was next to the Liberator—who I had to assume was immune to the Art—I figured I might as well try to use the Art on his subjects. I had nothing left to lose—because as of right now, the fight was lost.

I ran out of the way of another of the Liberator's slow but bone-pulverizingly strong slams. The earth shuddered with the impact. Then I reached out to the minds of the first possessed Palmies funneling through the tomb door.

And dear god did I reach. My Art was as precise as a surgeon's scalpel, and the act of tapping someone else's mind was totally different with this power imbued in me. I didn't reach out to touch it. I reached inside myself, and became it.

But as I'd expected, there was resistance. Not as much as I'd assumed—the Liberator's magic wasn't an invincible shield, like what Zodiac had. This was merely really fucking hard to pierce. As strong as I was, I only ensnared the first two of the advancing cultists.

Meaning I was now three people. Inhabiting three simultaneous experiences.

It was both completely normal to me, and deeply fucking strange. And it was a wobbly connection, so I hurried to give them their instructions before breaking the connection. They immediately turned on the cultists coming in behind them, causing a traffic jam. Buying me some time, and taking me from twenty inevitable pursuers to about fifteen.

Still too many. I could do that trick again, maybe, but I was due for another...

Yep. This time the Liberator swept his enormous arm at me, and my only option to not get hit by it was to suddenly launch an arc of force at the arm. I swung my blade, flinging a crescent of manifested power.

But there was a lurch inside of me. Something not cohesive. The blast didn't carry my full power, and merely met the Liberator's arm with equal force. That stopped it in its tracks, but didn't obliterate the stone as I'd hoped.

I had only a few more seconds before I was crawling in Palmies. Yes, I could easily dispatch a few by launching arcs of energy at them, but not without exposing myself to the Liberator. If I knew everything he was capable of, then maybe it'd be a different story. But I had to watch out for surprises, and that limited my options.

And meant I really needed to find an answer to this.

Too late. A cultist made it through the others and ran up to me, looking freakish with bright green eyes and veins pumping with bright green blood that stood out against her fair skin. I slipped into her mind as quickly as I could, and then I jumped into the other advancing cultists. Then I broke the connection, and watched as her jump took her sprawling into the others, buying me a precious few more seconds.

"Your suffering...it is pointless," said the Liberator's flat, all-encompassing voice.

"Some teacher you are," I spat. "Devaluing my feelings like that. Aren't you supposed to tell me that I matter?"

Shae's manipulation hadn't robbed me of my snark, it seemed. This whole thing was so surreal. Moment by moment I felt this course of action become more natural. Felt my priorities shift, and my past shift to match it. Hadn't I always come here to kill the Liberator? When had I had any other goal?

This adjustment was not without cost, though. I didn't have a feel for it at the time, but of course there was friction within myself. Only later would I realize that this was just another example of Jet's honesty principle at work. When you're not whole, your mind can't work as powerfully. It's as simple as that.

That friction would turn out to be the thing that saved my life.

I'd lost track of one of the cultists. She had snuck over to the Liberator, who bent over and lifted her up to his face in the crook of his rocky arm. I didn't like the look of that even before I saw a glint of bright green clutched in one of her hands, so I launched another arc of bright energy with a swing of my sword.

The Liberator looked preoccupied with her so before I saw what happened, I used my reprieve from his slams and turned back to the advancing cultists. I reached out to dominate another mind, but struggled. The more I tried, the less able I was. The harder it was to overcome the Liberator's shield.

"KNEEL," I shouted, suddenly explosive and furious that my will was being withstood by this petty Earth magic. I broke through the mental shields of half of them, and suddenly became eight people.

Which I absolutely could not sustain. I'd never done this before. I remembered one requirement of becoming Odieh was to become all the humans Caer'Aton without them noticing, and I found myself desperately wishing I'd had that practice. Here, I didn't know what to look at. I didn't know how to be multiple people, to walk as several pairs of legs at once or perform any kind of basic bodily movement, much less to perceive and analyze through their minds.

It was impossible for me, which was strange, because I had this nagging sense that I'd been a thousand people before. A relic of Shae's memory tagging along the power for the ride; maybe an attempt to help me become more comfortable with this.

So I wiped my plate of that shared consciousness all at once: I set them all fighting each other. I made it vicious and bloody. My vision snapped back to my own body as their dark cloaks darkened further with fresh blood. Eyes were gouged. Nails scraped at necks. It was disgustingly pleasurable to watch. It would not be the last time that lesser life forms would fight for me, I hoped. I deserved whatever spectacle I wanted.

Blood ran down my nose. God damn—what was hampering my power? Some part of me was resisting, inside. Weakness. I returned from my body and into my Castle to deal with it...

...and became a gibbering, sputtering, terrified me. You know, the actual me.

Holy fuck. This was fucking insane. This was fucking insane. That cultist just crushed that man's windpipe with her knee. Smiling the whole time. Smiling so wide. Every single person whose mind I touched looked like they were having the time of their lives. First time on a roller-coaster and loving it type of fun.

I returned to my body, because these thoughts were useless to me and I had to kill the Liberator. Kill the Liberator. Kill-

RUN. GET OUT.

I shook off the intrusive thoughts, dismissed them as mere fear, and refocused. Looking at the Liberator I saw the crook of his arm blanketed in dark dirt, which definitely hadn't been there before. And the cultist was gone. And the green crystal was placed in his eye.

It swirled, screwing in half of a turn. Then a pinprick of green sparked in its center, and quickly spread until the whole crystal was shining and green. And the color flooded the room, illuminating the tomb and the roiling mass of cultists.

I felt my Art snuff out. The cultists still remaining, about twelve of them, snapped out of the reverie. They refocused onto me with disturbing clarity.

Shiiit. I'd been wondering why I was able to break through the Liberator's shield. How could he have possibly beat all the Arasit when I was dealing with him fine one on one? Something about that eye, it had brought him back to full strength. My Art was dead.

No wonder the Arasit got wiped out. Mother Earth did not fuck around: when it wanted a species dead, their graves were already dug.

Other options. I needed other options. There was a way out of this, I just had to...

Tristan, you idiot. I had all the resources I could ever ask for in the form of the tree hanging from the ceiling outside. I reached out to it through my Chi, trying to remember the exact process by which I'd turned wood to Clay when I'd been locked up.

The tree did not respond to me. Not even close. While the other one had had a presence so loud it distracted me from my meditation, this one's presence was totally dead. Were they different things? Was I wrong, and it was just a regular-ass tree?

Or maybe...just as the one above ground had helped me, this one was deciding not to help me.

Either way, I wrote it off. Okay, okay, okay...

Wait a second. Those bags on the table, with the rolled up paper sticking out of them. Those were my saddlebags! I can't believe I didn't think of it before—the Palm of Dawn had taken all my belongings from me back when I'd first been captured. That included my old gear from Caer'Aton.

Which was made entirely out of Clay.

And my Chi still had the workaround I'd invented in the cage. I had a chance.

See? What did I say? Being kidnapped was one of the best things that could have happened to me. A nice, relaxing span of days where I could finally just focus on what matters in life. The little things, like reprogramming your anime-blade to also be like a wizard's wand for shaping mind-controllable silly putty.

You know. The little things.

Through my Chi, I melted my possessions in the other room. I could break them apart into twelve needles and pierce each cultist through the brain and it would be so easy to do that.

To do that.

To turn them onto myself.

I cocked my head, unsure what I was doing. Onto myself? I felt the Clay break apart and diverge into razor sharp irregular lengths. They raced into this room, floating in the air. Angled not at the cultists, but at me.

The Liberator intoned, "This is not the way."

They hovered there. Jagged and blue-green. This was death. Something inside of me wanted to launch them all at top speed. My brain said no. And I said no, I was definitely saying no. But I wasn't sure. Was that what I wanted? Death?

No. My queen needed me. The Liberator would finally fall. Our reign would rule a thousand years.

YES, EXACTLY. DO IT. FUCKING DO IT.

The Clay needles twitched. The cultists rushed at me. The Liberator's stony fist was raised above my head, about to pound me into the dirt. And it all came to a head. My decisions laid out before me.

Live, or die.

Inside my Castle I had made peace with death. If I died, the Liberator would survive. And he would kill Shae, I was certain of it. My death would protect the free will of the entire world. So it was no question that it was the right thing to do.

And the version of myself twisted by Shae's dormant manipulation, it wanted none of that. We had the Clay. This was over, if we wanted it to be.

We? What did I mean, we? I was one person. I was myself.

And I knew what I wanted.

I didn't even have to send the needles at myself. I didn't have to do anything. I could just wait. Accept my fate.

The Liberator's fist fell toward my head. The first cultist got his green-veined hands on my shirt.

This was it.

Jade...forgive me.

~

And if you don't get this in time, that's okay. We'll find each other. We'll make it right, together.

~

Imagine my surprise when I blocked the Liberator's fist with my Chi, and shoved all the cultists away by turning the hovering Clay into flat blocks that pushed them off of me.

Was this Shae's magic? Had I lost control of myself again?

I had to search my feelings, and there I saw it in me.

I couldn't die. I couldn't choose that road. I wanted life. Even if it meant killing the Liberator, I wanted to live. I chose life, in that moment, embracing my selfishness. I couldn't die.

Shae's power crept back over me and I didn't care. It would let me survive. And you know what? I was going to kill the fucking Liberator.

And then I was going to kill Shae. I would take that burden for myself. Because me dying here, it was just like turning into a Wraith again. Getting rid of myself so someone else can do the work that needs to be done.

And here's the truth: choosing life means choosing a weight on your shoulders. It means choosing obligation, morality, original sin. In exchange for the selfishness of wanting to live, I offer myself to the world. I commit my life to saving everybody.

Just let me live.

I had struck a new balance with Shae's influence. Because I had decided all on my own to kill the Liberator. I had to. Her power wouldn't let me do anything less.

And as I agreed to it, it released its command on me. Just a little. Enough so that I could subvert what I had been about to do—kill every cultist with the hovering needles of Clay—and instead lasso them all together by melding the Clay into one long rope. They struggled briefly, then toppled to the ground.

That left just me and the Liberator.

"Child," he said. "You cannot choose selfishness. There is no self to choose."

"Then die by no one's hand." My Chi flared, and my overhead block turned into a ridiculous brightness that disintegrated the stone.

"Fight it," urged the Liberator. "Fight the infection."

"No."

"My child, I can open a door for you to return home. But I cannot make you step through it."

"Pass," I said, and launched an arc at his head. It fizzled where it struck the crystal. Oops.

"You can stop this," he insisted. "You are not what she has done to you."

"I know that," I growled. "And for what it's worth, I'm sorry."

"It is not enough to know it," said the Liberator. "There is no knowing. What you must do is un-know everything. Then you will see that you are not what she has made you. I am sorry, it is no longer her magic. I would dispel it if it were. It is maia. And only you can disbelieve the illusion."

It sounded good in theory, but I was past disbelief. I embraced the illusion. The Liberator was out of tricks. I was going to win this fight, and it was all because of my Chi, Shae's perfect weapon, invented after she'd watched everyone she knew die to the Liberator.

He hadn't evolved at all in his slumber. She had. And the new magic left the old in the dust.

He was too slow, and couldn't compete. His slams came, but I dodged them. I worked my way close to his feet. Then, shouting with all my guilt and anger and determination to undo the wrong I was in the process of doing, I cut out his legs. He fell to the ground, toppled over on his side.

I put my hands on his body, and switched over to my view of the Subfield. My Art couldn't touch the guy, but he registered there. I'd never looked at the Subfield with this much power coursing through me. It was perfectly ordered. Shapes and powers and presences were distinct. I saw that he was anchored to something so large I couldn't touch it, something under the ground. I couldn't touch the source.

But I could fuck up the channel. No wonder my Chi was burning like this. Shae knew. I had to dissolve the stone.

And I did. I pressed my Chi against the green gem of his eye. First, it brightened. Then it cracked. And finally, it shattered.

The Liberator's body turned to dirt.

Behind me, the cultists passed out. Their veins, however, continued to glow green. Which was probably not a good sign.

I took a breath. Shae's influence, I saw it start to leave me. At this juncture its effectiveness broke down, and I had the weird experience of suddenly inhabiting the part of me she had warped. I felt the satisfaction of a job well done, and looked forward to going home. All that traveling had finally paid off.

And I was also not that person. Ugh. I took my consciousness out of that previously hidden corner of my mind. That was just a piece of me she had somehow entrusted to safeguard some of her power until the right moment. I don't know how this could have been possible; she'd lost all influence on me when we turned on her in Caer'Aton. Wouldn't Rinzai have said something if he'd noticed?

The Suggestion lost its sway on me, and I felt it leave. But since it was Shae, it didn't simply vanish. No, she left me with the sudden image of her, sitting on a throne. She looked perfect. Like everything I've ever wanted.

"You have done well, young one," she said in her voice. A voice that makes it known how badly you'll try to seduce her. "Come home to me. We have much to discuss."

But I wasn't fooled. She had dumped all the power into forcing me to kill the guy—when the compulsion to return home hit me, I laughed. It went away.

I would come home, though. But not to serve her.

To end this. Once and for all.

~

Rinzai sat in a church in the poor quadrant of the city, eating a bowl of rice he'd prepared in the church's empty kitchen. All the monks were gone, now.

He had felt it happen halfway through his meal. A Being so large he could sense it across the city, snuffed out like a match.

It was done.

He finished his rice, taking his time. An implanted image threatened to rise within him. He saw that it was safe, so he let it bubble forth: Shae, on a throne, entreating him to return home.

He put his bowl to the side, and stood up, stretching his arms. He walked to the front door. All the clouds were gone from the naked blue sky. The wind was fierce and howling.

Then, he looked directly at the sun.

"So," he said aloud, knowing they were listening, "what is your next move?"

~

June let the last notes hang in the air. Good form dictated that it was immodest to let a harp ring for more than a few seconds, but June was miles away from her old teacher, and miles away from anyone who might care for Eastern convention.

She curled her hair over her ear. "I'm a little out of practice. But it feels good to have my fingers on the strings again."

Sharles had buried his head in his hands. Paol was looking at her like she was from the other side of the world.

Geralt just smiled and shook his head. "Wow."

After that first practice, music flowered once again as a force in her life. Scurrying from the Fallen's sanctuary to practice sessions with the boys took all her time outside of her training. And she loved it, the kind of love that surprises you with its fierceness.

Practice was great. Performance was even better. The show at the Fellover brought new life to June's veins. She wanted more. When she missed an entire half-day of training for a rehearsal, Ashayah's head nearly exploded. But there was nothing they could do. A new chapter was blooming in June's life: two days later when she did it again, June's only response to Ashayah's helpless fury was an invitation to the band's next show.

And to her utter amazement, Hoph, of all people, actually showed up. It was her fifth performance, and word was starting to circulate about the Devils' new beautiful Eastern harpist. So there was a crowd, but Hoph was easy to spot in it, and they shared a tense moment of eye contact. Behind her, the boys were complaining.

"We can't even rightly be called The Three Devils anymore," grumbled Paol.

"If she's going to stick around, we need a name change," said Sharles. "And not Four Devils. Lookin' at you, Paol."

"I still don't understand why you hate the name so much."

"Look, "The Four Devils" sounds ten times worse than "The Three Devils,"" said Sharles. "That's just a fact."

"Yeah...not seeing the difference."

"Geralt, can you weigh in on this?" said Sharles.

Geralt tuned the peg of his oud, strumming lightly. "What did that little girl suggest the other day?"

Sharles thought for a second. "You mean 'Three Devils and a Silver Bell?'"

Geralt shrugged. "I liked that."

Paol mumbled, "I don't see how that's any different from Four Devils..."

"And that's why you're the drummer," said Sharles drily.

June had come to love her boys. Hoph being here was putting her on edge, though, and she found herself nervously playing with her hair.
Geralt set his oud down, and put a hand on her shoulder. "What's wrong?"

June's hand unconsciously touched his. "Nothing."

"You're nervous. Your back is tense."

June sighed. Damn Geralt. She brushed his hand off her shoulder. "I'm fine." She was surprised by how much Hoph was unsettling her. She wasn't used to being nervous. She'd been riding the high of her newfound freedom ever since escaping the High Jassan. But now that she was settling into a routine, that feeling of invincibility was starting to leave her.

She didn't even care for Hoph. He was...if not nice, then at least one of the least mean of the Fallen. They fought regularly. And there's a certain bond, there.

But I've never performed in front of him before.

She'd always had this sense that you became both a truer and less real version of yourself when playing music. Easy to show your rebellious, confident side to people you don't like. Much harder to play harp for them with the vulnerability June was finding made the difference between good and great performances.

June swallowed, and spoke before she could stop herself. "Hey. I think I want to sing."

Yeah. Maybe being more vulnerable was the way to stop feeling nervous. Great idea.

Paol asked, "Do you know any songs? The Siren's Call, maybe? Or An Ode to Nys?"

Sharles snorted. "I'd rather die than sing Ode."

"No," admitted June. "But I sing to myself sometimes. Words just...come out."

Paol and Sharles were sharply against it. "Another time," they said. "You have to practice something to be able to improv it. You can't..." Sharles was waving his hand airily. "Just improv an improv piece."

Now that it was being denied of her, she wanted it even more. June crossed her arms. "I want to sing. Let me sing in the last song."

Geralt spread his hands apologetically. "I think they're right, June. We've never even heard you sing."

She glanced at Hoph in the audience. He was sitting at a table in the back. "Look. I'm going to sing in the last song. If it's awful, then you all join me to cover it up. But I think it will be fine. I've just got something inside of me that needs to get out."

They couldn't argue with that. She'd either have it her way or not play at all. And they knew that a portion of this crowd was here just for her. They put her front and center for a reason. She'd suggested it herself. Sharles liked to joke that half the men in the audience were too busy mentally replacing her harp with their dicks to hear a single note of music.

So she would sing. It didn't feel good to twist their arms like this, but she'd apologize later.

The performance began well. Sharles started things with a flute solo to quiet the room. Then Geralt came in on his huge oud, picking a complex melody that filled the now empty space. Paol's drums gave the melody a spine. And then June turned the whole thing on its head, adding ethereal notes with the harp that seemed designed to make you uncomfortable. Sharles had no choice but to layer in his flute in as ghostly a fashion.

The result was mesmerizing, a profoundly strange mix of instruments and an even stranger way to arrange them. No one played like this. The crowd was spellbound.

But in the back, Hoph downed his drink and put on his hat. He was going to leave? June panicked. No! Something needed to burst out of her chest. Some part of her needed to be seen by the Fallen.

Hoph stood up.

So she started singing, only halfway through the set. It caught the boys by surprise, and the rhythm hiccupped. The music's spell broken.

But her voice was weaving a spell of its own.

For all of those who do no wrong,

I pray, and ask this song

To weep and bare

Old wounds to open air,

For the past

Is never gone.

It was sung as if she'd die tomorrow. Random words were drawn out to the end of their lives, stretched so thin you couldn't tell when they disappeared. Some, like "I pray," were repeated over and over with escalating pitch and fever.

After the first verses it became clear that she was telling a story.

The tale was vivid. Really vivid. The eyes of the audience glazed over as if they were actually seeing the narrative she wove. The bartender stopped pouring drinks. Patrons stopped ordering them. People walked into the bar as if magnetized from the street, until not a single other soul could fit inside. And even then, more crowded the windows.

It was the story of the High Jassan, the late ruler of the Eastern Kingdoms.

No. It was the story of what he'd done to her.

She named him by name. Called him a tragedy; a failure of a world that never cured him of the evil in his heart. Her voice was soft and slow as a heartbeat as the song poured out of her.

The canvas closes,

and the sound of roses

closing, and footsteps,

and hope breaks anew.

A rose never opened,

never bloomed,

but drank sunlight nonetheless

in the dark, dark room.

The listeners would never question how they knew what the verse referred to. They merely wept with her, each in their own way. The emotional masks of strong men and women cracking for the first time in ages. Others who knew too well what June had gone through, they remembered.

The song rolled forward from June's lips. It wore a groove in the listeners' hearts with its weight.

And it might not have ended for hours, if not for the earthquake.

It shook the whole city, though miraculously not even so much as a vase broke. Screams erupted; June stopped singing. Then there was utter silence. The discordant screams of the packed bar were compelled by some force to quiet.

And then for a full minute, the only sound in all of Nys was the frantic, broken-apart music that Ifrits loved to dance to. The cheerful kind of song you'd hear at a carnival. Too loud to be coming from any mortal instrument, the song was somehow being played over all of Nys.

With time, everyone would come to see the hole at the center of the city.

What had once been a town square was now a hole the size of the square, stairs carved into its edges that wound down, and down, and down...

When June and the boys finally pushed through the crowd to get within viewing distance of the hole, her heart skipped a beat.

A tall sign jutted out of the ground. A huge, towering, lit up sign limned in strange tubes of red light and dotted with flame. It read in huge red letters:

Hael Is Open For Business!

Age Reversal -- Endless Riches -- Love Potions

Commune With Dead Family! Learn The Day You'll Die!

Also See Our New Gift Shop

Others gibbered with fear and excitement. June bit her lip. From what she'd learned reading the Fallen's texts, an open connection between Haerth and Hael was...very bad news. That meant the Peace was breaking.

What happened to break the balance? Who acted first? Angels, or Gaia? And why?

The Red Guard established a quick perimeter around the hole. June and her boys were sent away, where they drank, and talked. June kept mostly to herself.

For a few days everyone thought things were more or less safe. As safe as they can get when a hole to the Underworld is drilled in the middle of the town square.

But word got out. An apprentice fletcher started making flawless arrows. A young anxious mother lost twenty pounds and literally radiated calm onto anyone in the room with her. An old man acquired a preposterously young and surreally beautiful body, and women couldn't help but throw themselves at him.

And that's when Nys became aware of the other entrances. Cellar walls that had collapsed, and newly appeared basement trapdoors that revealed inviting tunnels which smelled of saffron and sex. Out of which you could hear the occasional sound of a woman's distant laughter. The Red Guard routed out their locations and shut them down.

"And the Red Guard are above corruption," said Sharles sarcastically, "so everything's just fucking fine. Just great." He downed another whiskey.

June's heart was pounding. She'd felt on edge ever since the hole opened.

"I have to go," she said.

She ran out of the bar. She ran across town, and she was in the Fallen's sanctuary before she knew what she was doing. Her hand on the door handle of the training room.

She pushed the door open.

Hello, June. The dagger's whisper was friendly, cordial. How have you been?

June stole inside and shut the door silently. She drew close to where the dagger was kept on a pedestal, covered by a white lace cloth.

"You're an artifact of great power, left to us by the Angels," she stated.

You flatter me.

"A hole just opened in the middle of the city. A hole to Hael."

Sounds dangerous. That's where demons come from, isn't it?

"That's why you're going to be extra helpful," said June.

So, we're finally leaving, are we? The dagger's voice was unabashedly eager. You're finally embracing your destiny.

"I still don't want you influencing me," warned June. "If I catch you touching my emotions, or if I get so much as a bad dream, then I'm burying you under ten pounds of Hellstone."

Ancients above, darling. There's no need for that. I am at your service.

June smiled, and peeled back the white cloth. The dagger's material was silver and gold, but so purified that the colors looked creamy. Like you could dip your finger in them.

She grabbed the handle.

The training room door opened. Ashayah stood framed in the doorway.

"So you are here," she said. "I thought you'd forgotten us."

June straightened her back. "I'm leaving, Ash. Thank you for everything you taught me."

Ashayah had been holding the scepter behind her back. Now its pearl-tip was leveled at June's face. "The gateway to Hael is open, and now you want to leave us."

June spread her hands. "That's precisely why. All you care about is one lone Arasit, miles and miles away from here. But-"

"Miles mean nothing to an Arasit, when-"

"-your own city, Ash, Nys itself is under threat and what do you do? Nothing."

Ashayah shook her head. "June...helping Nys would be like putting antiseptic on a lethal wound. You might feel a bit better, but you won't have done a thing to forestall death. Do you have any idea what's necessary for this to have happened?"

June rolled her eyes. "I've read the papers, Ash."

"So if this is the kind of force exerted by Hael, what do you think the Angels are doing? Or Gaia? Do you think we're safe from them? No. Ancients above, June, let's first deal with the problem we can solve. Then, once you've killed the Arasit, we worry about the problems we can do next to nothing about."

June shook her head. "No. I'm sorry, Ash. I can't." She put the dagger at her hip. It was time to go.

Ash's eyes flickered. "I told you what would happen if you ever tried to leave."

June sighed. "I know you need to kill me to bond the dagger to someone else. But that's just the thing. I don't think you can."

Ashayah pressed her mouth into a flat line. "We'll see about that."

June held the mantra firm in her mind: I am nothing.

When Ashayah pointed the scepter, she pointed it at nothing. No matter how hard she concentrated, Ashayah was alone in the room, for June was no one.

Kill her, whispered the dagger.

But what reason was there for it? None. Ashayah fell to the floor, her legs taken out from underneath her. The scepter clattered out of her hands. She tried to get up, but she found the point of a dagger pressed at her throat. She eased back to the floor.

A few minutes later when Hoph rushed to Ashayah's aid, she was alone in the room, and the scepter was gone.

June went to the roofs that overlooked the night markets. The sky was dark, with not a single star to be found. Somewhere in the crowded stalls below her there was the sound of a soft flute. The air was hotter than usual. Something new and trembling had taken root in her chest.

A hole appears in the middle of Nys and people think they're safe. As if all Hell would do is open the door, and humanity would waltz right in.

No. The Fallen's texts were clear: Demons nudge you into the pits they open for you.

So she watched, and waited. Nothing happened that night on the roof. Nor did it happen the next day, when she skipped a rehearsal with the boys to walk the city's dark alleys.

But the next day, she was up before the morning song, drinking coffee near Hot and Bothered, a boutique whose cellar, it was rumored, had recently become a mouth of hell. And that's when she saw it. A well-dressed man walking out the front door. A man with no shadow.

What she'd been waiting for this whole time.

She followed him. She saw him knock on the door of a house, exchange a few brief words, and then walk inside. Creeping around the side of the house, she looked in through a window.

The well-dressed man was in a bedroom, standing next to an in-house physician. Both looked down at a bedridden old woman. The physician stood stock still as the man put his hand on the woman's heart. Her eyes opened, bulged, and then she stopped moving.

Being shadowless would have been good enough, but this confirmed June's suspicions.

She waited until the right moment. The man walked outside and lit a pipe with his thumb, just like an Ifrit would.

He gave her a once over as she approached. He did not see the dagger coming, the slash it made at his throat.

Thick inky shadow spilled out in whorls. He gave her a confused look.

The expression went wider as the spilling shadow touched her skin. Because it reacted to it, hissing and sputtering yellow sparks.

"I can't believe I'm going to miss this..." he said. "Just my luck."

And then something strange happened. His body split. The upper half turned into golden rectangles of light, which shot heavenward. The bottom half sunk into the ground like a spear into water.

June blinked. Ancients above...what was that?

When she asked the dagger, it was uncharacteristically silent.

She would need to ask the Fallen about that. But she couldn't bring herself to do it now, not when she was finally distancing herself from them.

Until she could get over her pride, maybe another method would be better. A method she had shied from. She became conscious of her left arm, where the scepter was hidden in her long sleeve.

She needed practice.

She started with animals. The little creatures that skittered furtive across the dirt streets. It took her a long time to figure out that the itch on the tip of her nose was awfully consistent with the times she was trying to tap into their minds. But nothing came of it until, thinking of how the dagger made her resilient to Ashayah's deployment of the scepter on her, she put the artifact on the ground some distance from her.

That's when the staff started working. First a rat tripped on nothing and laid twitching in the middle of the street. Then a bird flew into a window. She knew she was getting somewhere when she made fine shifts to a spider's web.

But that wasn't enough. She figured she'd knock out two birds with one stone and address her growing unrest. Since promising Geralt that her intentions were pure, she hadn't had sex in over a week. She'd been distracted enough with her harp that her horniness wasn't a big deal, but it was becoming a problem.

So she found a man attractive and drunk enough for her purposes at a bar. When she had him take her home to his apartment, he could barely get up the front stairs.

She grasped the scepter's handle in her sleeve as the door closed. "So," she said, "this is your place."

"Mhm. My place."

"That's great. We're having sex, right?"

He coughed. "Uh, yesh. Yeah."

She smiled. "Great. I'm really into weird stuff. You know. Ropes and stuff. You're cool with that, right?"

He smiled, then his smile fell. "Yup. Uh, but, what 'bout 'nother drink?"

She shook her head. "No thank you. And you don't need one either. Let's just get to it." She started to unbutton her shirt.

He rubbed his eyes. "Ancients above, you're beautiful. I can't believe thish happening...so fast."

"I like fast," said June. She couldn't take the shirt all the way off, on account of the scepter, so she just did one more button and then kissed him. He tasted like beer.

"Cool," he said.

She pushed his chest. "Sit there."

There was a chair in the corner. He sat in it.

She walked behind him.

"Oh, uh. I thought-"

"What? Don't be silly. Just sit still, I have the rope right here." She pointed the scepter right at the base of his skull. She'd found that it had an energy of its own, and that it wasn't something she reached for so much as let in.

It took the whole night, but she treated herself. Gave herself the time of her life.

When he was too drunk to get hard, she fixed that. That on its own made her re-evaluate the scepter. It had once been so slimy and horrible in her mind, the intruder into her own thoughts.

That was before it was giving her dick on demand. Sex was a totally different affair when you didn't have to rely on the man for it.

Naturally, that was a little much for the poor guy. When he freaked out about not being in control of his own body, she calmed him. In fact, she made it her priority that he would walk away from this night with nothing but good memories.

By the end of the evening, she didn't even have to point the scepter at him anymore. She just had to be touching it. The only thing that would explain Ashayah's ineptitude with the scepter's magic was how hard she tried. How much she was trying to control June. But the scepter was more about aligning yourself with the other person than telling them what to do.

She breathed, while the man was going down on her for the third—or fourth, she couldn't remember—time. There was something so beautiful about that alignment. Terrifying and bizarre too...but the closeness of it. Of touching that man's mind. She didn't care for him at all, and she loved it. She couldn't even imagine what it would be to share minds with the boys.

What would it be like to play music with their minds in synchronicity?

Ashayah thought June was rebelling. But this, this was power she could use to fight an Arasit. And if Hell kept sending creatures into Nys?

Well. She'd be waiting for them.

~

So I got out of the tomb just fine. I had all my old Clay back, plus the map the Dragon had given me.

But guess what? Remember how the Liberator sent all those warm fuzzy feel-good vibes to the Palm of Dawn to turn them into Art-resistant, supernaturally strong fighting machines?

What if—and this is totally hypothetical—what if the whole city was affected. Not just the cultists. Meaning the entire city of Cammes had blazing green eyes, green glowing blood stark in their skin. Thousands upon thousands of super-soldiers.

That'd be crazy. Right? Haha.

But, in this entirely theoretical situation, imagine that the Liberator waking up, for whatever reason, meant that some other ancient power also got to make a play. Like, say, the Angels.

That'd be cool. And even though Cammes was supposed to be the city of Angels, let's say that, for some weird reason, the Angels actually sided with the attacking Eastern army.

And then both of these powerful, magically imbued armies fought each other in a climactic battle, a proxy war for powers that have been around since the dawn of time. And I was caught in the middle of that fight.
I don't know what you'd do in that situation. But me? I had my priorities straight.

"How's your sandwich?" asked my Chi.

We swung our legs off the edge of a rooftop, taking in the view. The Aarturians and Jassanese were tangled in messy clashes all over the city. Soldiers were jumping fifty feet through the air, vaulting over buildings with ease. I watched two small groups collide, and saw a Jassanese soldier punch straight through Aarturian plate armor like it was made of paper.

"Go away," I said, and took another bite. The sandwich was great, but I just couldn't talk to my Chi right now.

The city was burning. The outer walls—the stone outer walls—were bathed in smokeless fire.

"Tristan...I'm sorry. I know you don't want to believe me, but I am."

"I believe you," I said. "But I wish I didn't."

Shae's influence on me died shortly after the Liberator turned to dirt. And I was left with the fact of what I'd done.

There was no one to stop Shae from returning, now. She could leave Caer'Aton, secure in her eventual dominion of the world, and it was my fault. When the Art forces you to do something, you do it. When you snap out of the haze, your attachment to that personhood doesn't vanish at the same time. I was left looking at the blood on my hands, and it didn't do me much good to know I'd been controlled.

It's just like when you fuck up in real life. You can always blame your misbehavior on the parents and teachers who raised you, on the life circumstances you were born in. And you're not wrong. But you're also not getting anywhere.

I couldn't put the blame on anyone else but me. The price for a commitment to being yourself: sometimes you take it too far, shoulder too much blame.

And then you break down. Exhibit A: after escaping the palace grounds, with the city under siege, I'd broken into the nearest corner market and made myself a sandwich.

No one was inside. All the doors were open; they were everywhere. Even the citizenry, green eyed and powerful, was fighting the battle.

I took my sandwich to the roof, and watched the unfolding of what I'd done.

"I was controlled by her just as much as you," explained my Chi. As a projection of my mind, he had taken various forms that depended on how I regarded him. They changed over time. When we'd first met he was bigger than me, more confident, sharp-eyed and clear. Then as I grew he'd started to resemble me as I looked—I considered us equals.

And now, despite the sun blazing high overhead, the sky empty of all clouds as if the Earth were welcoming the light, my Chi was cast in shadow. His back slouched, his eyes baggy and sad. He wouldn't stop apologizing. Excusing himself, since he was just the sword that did the deed.

"I know," I said. "But maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe I'm still in one of her traps."

He gave a mirthless chuckle. "I'm telling you, Tristan. You have to get Enlightened."

Another bite of my sandwich caused the bread to crumble a little, and I swept it off the roof. It fell slowly to the street below.

"I don't know, man."

"You'll never know what's real and what's Shae without it."

I held out the rest of my sandwich and let it drop. It hit the ground, and fell apart. Lettuce and tomato and bread splayed like intestines.

My Chi sighed. "Tristan..."

"An hour ago I was trying to sabotage myself to lose that fight," I said. "I came to the conclusion that the world would literally be better off with me dead. So you'll forgive me if it's hard to contemplate my next fun and grand spiritual undertaking."

To this, my Chi had nothing to say. I slipped the heel of my shoe off my foot, and let it dangle off the toes. Let it dangle over the long fall.

"Tristan."

"I'm alive," I said. "I'm here because I chose to live. I had all this resolve when I did it, you know? Fuck the Liberator, I'll save the world myself. But that was probably just Shae co-opting my fear of death. She warped it to her ends, and now here I am."

"That wasn't Shae. You felt that. You made that choice."

"I don't know, man. I just don't."

He was silent for a while. To the east, the fire spread from the wall to the buildings closest to it. Not an orange fire, but yellow and white. A group of three women ran down the street beneath me, their giant leaping strides making them appear more like gazelle than human.

"You chose life," said my Chi. "You're not allowed to undo that decision."

Then something dropped into my lap. Something small and light. I looked down and saw a little red bird lying on its side. Small breast expanding and contracting fast. So fast.

A little red bird.

"Holy shit," said my Chi.

There was a message tied to its foot.

"Great," I said. "Just great."

I cupped the bird as gently as I could and cradled it as I went downstairs.

"Aren't you going to open it?" called my Chi. I finished climbing the ladder down to the upper floor and he was there, looking excited.

"In a bit."
I took the bird to the bottom floor and found my Chi standing in the kitchen. "What? That bird is from Jade. She sent more than one! Damn, there were a bunch of them in her tree, weren't there?"

"It's exhausted."

"So?" he looked genuinely perplexed. "Read the damn letter."

"The only reason it got to me is because Rinzai let it," I said. I filled a small bowl with water from a bucket in the back, and then scraped the seeds off a loaf of bread and put those in a saucer next to the water. I put the bird next to both, but it didn't show signs of interest.

"Yeah. That's great for us. Either he slipped up-"

"Rinzai doesn't slip up," I said. "Come on."

"Okay. So it was deliberate."

I looked up at him. "Right. So he sent Zodiac to stop the letter from reaching me before, but now he doesn't. What's changed?"

My Chi scratched his head. "You're depressed?"

I glared at him, and then returned my attention to the bird. I reached out to its mind.

It was panicked. A once delicate Suggestion had urged it to carry the message from Caer'Aton. But the Suggestion had broken down and been warped over time.

Even so. I could recognize Jade's mind anywhere. It smelled like her. Felt like her and her attention to subtlety and care. My Art had been stronger than Jade's, but I could never have gotten a small bird this far. My Suggestions were blunt hammers. Hers were diplomatic.

Even though it was in shreds I could pick apart some of her Suggestion's components. An element that kept the bird calm. A drive to go north-west, to a big busy place. An element that urged it forward, but that was kept in check by another piece ceding power to biological need.

Most interesting was that the object of its search wasn't a visual thing, or a known thing. To get the bird to find me, Jade had somehow given it eyes to discern someone's Being. But she'd given it horse-blinders that would only detect mine, and only then from short range.

I couldn't understand its complexity, to be honest. The Suggestion was no one thing, but a multi-faceted drive tailor-made to find me as fast and as safely as possible. An incredible work of Art.

But it was breaking apart. The emotional regulator had flipped into one that pushed the bird harder than ever before. The one that acknowledged biological need was even stronger, putting it in tension with the urge to move forward. I could imagine the poor thing's experience. The minute it got the least bit drowsy or tired it would be met first with a compulsion to rest, then immediately after with a drive to persevere against that tiredness, and in tandem the two conflicting drives were probably driving it crazy.

"It's okay. You're safe, now. It's over." I spoke as I followed old impulses I hadn't used in ages. I braided my Art to Jade's leftover power and tears rose unbidden to my eyes as I did so. She was so easy, so effortless to work with. It only took me a few seconds to get the bird calm again. I didn't know how to heal it all the way, but I'd done what I could.

I untied the letter from its food, and nudged the part of its mind that needed to take care of itself. It dipped its beak into the water.

"Good birdie."

This wasn't one of those things where I felt like I had to help the bird because of all the bad shit I'd done. It wasn't guilt motivated. In truth, I was too tired to feel guilty. I think you only feel guilt when you aren't willing to right your wrongs. You subconsciously make yourself feel like shit so that you get off your ass and do something. But to be honest, I knew my heart was in the right place. I wanted to do right by the world. And no matter what I said to my Chi, I knew that there was more to do.

So I opened her letter.

~

And if this gets to you too late, then I hope you forgive yourself. It's not your fault. It's mine. Maybe I'll never get the chance to atone for my sins.

But I hope you know it in your heart the way I know it in mine: I will see you. Soon.

With love,

Jade

~

I read the whole thing. When the handwriting shifted to Emmit's, I couldn't help but smile. But it wasn't much of a silver lining.

I looked at the bird. At the letter. Back at the bird.

"Shae?" I asked. "Is that you?"

The bird dipped its beak in the water again. Then it ate some seeds, pecking at them in abrupt jittery motions.

I got no sense of Shae about the bird, but then again, it would be trivial for her to mask herself to me. For her to be guiding every one of my thoughts right now.

I had no way to know.

"You need to get Enlightened," said my Chi again. "Otherwise, this is going to eat you alive."

"It's not that bad," I said. "I had to confront the 'what is real' question right off the bat in Caer'Aton, and I've kind of made my peace with it."

"That's not reason to put off getting Enlightened."

"Look, either life is fake, or it's real. Either elements of it are fake, or they're real. I can't control that. The only thing I can do is be a person I can trust. A person I love. Then, no matter the circumstance, I know I'll do what I think is right. Whether I'm dreaming or awake, I'll die with a clean conscience."

My Chi looked at me. "I see now what Dante was saying. You've got things way too figured out."

I shrugged. "Let's go. It's a long way back to Caer'Aton."

Because that was the only place to go, right? Now was the part where I returned home and killed Shae, or died trying.

I packed a bag of supplies stolen from the grocery store. I had no idea how long they'd last me, and to be honest, I didn't really know the way back. I was fairly certain I knew which road to take, but without an army or a Rinzai to follow, I would have to depend on asking for help as I went. And with an army having crossed much of that terrain, I could only hope there would still be people and food enough to help me home.

I loaded up a real rucksack and kept my Clay shaped as several rough approximations of apples. Then I left, and was so preoccupied with wondering how I was going to get out of the city that I audibly yelped when an arrow the size of a baseball bat exploded into the street in front of me.

Another Angel? I looked around wildly and summoned my Chi in an instant.

Tristan, said my Chi. The arrow.

I glanced at it. There was a small scroll tied to the end.

And I could feel its presence. The scroll was made of Clay.

It was tied to the arrow with a string that faded from blue-green to ember orange.

I'd lost the other one somewhere in my travels. The one she'd sent me with the first bird.

I grabbed the scroll. The arrow it had been attached to was really something to look at. It was a gray body streaked with straight lines of ocean blue. Deep ocean blue, the kind that looks like it could swallow you. The kind that...that I'd seen before. I'd seen it when...

Emmit?

Hope surged in my chest. Emmit. That was Emmit's color. I knew it, I just knew that it wasn't some random Angel. The blue was, it was, it was pensive, it was calm, it was hurt and deep and troubled and it was Emmit and there was no way it wasn't, and if Emmit was here, then-

I saw them. Following the arrow's angle back to source I saw two figures standing on a rooftop down the long wide street. A man and a woman. The woman's hair a deep orange flung to the side like a flag in the wind.

I was running before I knew what my legs were doing. Jade. Emmit. My friends were here. My friends-

Another arrow crashed into the ground in front of me, spraying bits of cobblestone into my legs. I paused, and dread settled into my stomach.

Shae had taken control of them. And they were here to kill me.

No. Emmit didn't miss his shots.

Unless he was fighting Shae's control. Just like you fighting Wraith-you, or struggling against Shae's power while you fought the Liberator.

Shit. How was I supposed to-

I kicked myself for forgetting the letter. I'd already forgotten it. I hastily unraveled the string, which I made sure to pocket, and then I scanned the brief sheet of paper.

Hey. It's us.

Stay far, far away. We're contagious.

There's a dormant manipulation in you. Shae put it there right as you were leaving. It's going to make you kill the Liberator. You have to leave Cammes.

If you're ready to leave, go through the western gate.

If we're too late, plant your Chi in the ground.

-E

I shook my head. Damn.

I stabbed my Chi into the cobblestones, and let it stand there. I watched them, tried to pick out what they were doing. What they looked like. But we were too far.

Another arrow came. This message was clearer.

Leave through the western gate. Stay out in the open, and we'll support you from afar.

Holy crap. I didn't have to go all the way back to Caer'Aton. My friends were here. We had a plan. A voice in my head nagged at me: Why isn't Jade adding anything to these messages?

I could ask her later. Right now, we had to leave.

With the sun so directly dead-center in the sky it was hard to tell which way was West. But I oriented myself by using the palace as a North Star, and then made my way to the edge of the city.

I avoided the sounds of combat where I could, but as I approached the edges the sounds encompassed me. It was unclear which way I could go to stay undercover. I picked a street at random, hoping that Emmit and Jade were able to both track me and keep their distance.

There was fighting at the far end of the street. I'm sure there was a way I could have skirted around the clashing forces, but with all this optimism coursing through me I felt like there just had to be a way that I could stop their fighting. Stop at least some of the deaths I'd unintentionally been responsible for.

I crept up until they were in sight. Fifty yards away, both sides skirmishing. A Jassanese soldier was launched into the air by a punch from a green-veined Aarturian civilian. The soldier spread his arms and legs, which somehow stopped his mid-air flight, and then he careened earthward with all the force of a rocket.

Jesus Christ.

I reached out to them to stop their fighting, and imagine my surprise when, in response to my first probe with the Art, they stopped fighting. To turn on me.

"Not what I was going for, guys," I said. I put out a Field to stop them from moving advancing, and to strip them of the power infusing them. But since I knew next to nothing about their powers, and my practice with Fields was next to zilch, predictably, nothing happened.

Oh well. I tried. And if at first you don't succeed?

Trick question: everyone who responded "try, try again" just got mobbed to death.

Me? I ran.

Perhaps for the last time I threw myself into the wet, disgusting alleys of Cammes. Perhaps for the last time I dodged human waste and piles of sodden garbage and threaded my way through the twisting narrow corridors formed by the tall stone buildings.

There's no way Jade and Emmit could see me now. I needed to get visible again. So I burst out onto a main street and looked behind me to see if they were following.

I didn't see them. But I heard my pursuers. I was back to normal, now, and my Art senses were nauseated by the immense presence tailing me. They weren't far.

But I needed to stay visible. Okay. I could make a scene, hold them off until Jade and Emmit heard the clash and spotted me again? Hopefully?

The first to find me was an Angelically infused Droll, which definitely would have been my last choice for first encounter. This was as tough as it was going to get.

Wait, what was I thinking? I didn't need to hold back anymore. I reached for his mind, and found it blocked. The shield was different from the Liberator's. More shield than shroud. He barreled down the street, bellowing. I slipped past his mental shield before he got very far. I had him.

It was way different than when I'd been infused with Shae's power. I wasn't struggling to be both him and me. I just had his mind at my disposal. And that was fine with me; I'd happily do away with the finer points of the Art so long as I could still have my way.

In this case, my way had to be the shortest and most profound change. I didn't have time for anything subtle. So, I went with the emotion that was closest to my heart, and I made the Droll love me.

Like, really love me.

Maybe in a slapstick comedy that would have made him bullrush me again to give me a hug, or something. But love being what it was, he saw the danger I was in and acted to protect me from it. When a green-eyed Aarturian emerged from the alley, the Droll roared, and punched him so hard the guy broke through a wall.

Then the rest came. I snagged two minds, then three, and turned them to my purpose. But it wasn't going to be enough. Even if each of my corrupted soldiers distracted two others, that left me with three I had to fight on my own.

Which would have been doable if more weren't coming. I heard shouts from the opposite side of the street, toward where I'd been running. This was not a great spot to make my last stand. I had to pray that Emmit and Jade had seen me, and then I started running again.

I had so many questions. How did they find me? How did they know how far away to be? What contamination would occur if we came close together?

The questions plagued me until I came to the western gate. Behind me was an enormous weight of presence. Both sides had dropped what they were doing and teamed up the minute they saw me, which hardly struck me as fair. But ahead? That's where the real war was happening.

Hard to describe a warzone, especially when you're running through it. Seeing it at a glance. The most striking parts hit you first—the flaming walls, for instance. I had to assume they'd all been doused in kerosene, but that was, of course, not a thing in Haerth. Likelier that another element of Angel magic was to ignite things that had no business catching fire.

So there's that halo of the gate's being aflame with yellow and white fire, and through the gate is the blue sky and below that, fighting so dense you could hardly parse it.

A contingent of people from both sides detached from the fighting and ran over in my direction, blocking off the gate. The word was spreading somehow—the Arasit was here. The Liberator's forces, them I understood. I'd killed their God. But the Angels, I had no idea why they were so interested in me.

Then, a Jhinn floated down before me. Its robes were golden and silver. Its inner body, usually a cloudlike swirl, was the orange of an angry sun. "For the crimes committed against our Wraiths and by the powers invested in me by the lords above, I, Haffazh, judge you guilty. Lay down your weapon, and submit to us."
Oh. Right. That whole thing where I was responsible for six of the Angel's lackeys.

"I'm not going to submit," I said. "I don't know what it is with you guys, but all you want to do is fight. Are you sure the Angels would be happy with that?"

It was kind of a bluff, in that I'm pretty sure I'd seen an Angel in the Subfield, and they did not look like nice people.

The Jhinn and I faced off in what must have looked like a beautiful fight. The hallmark of a Jhinn's fighting is that it has no edges. Edges come from friction, and a Jhinn is made of air, giving its fighting a grace you don't find anywhere else. My fight with Haffazh brought me back to my time fighting Erë back in Caer'Aton. I'd been the better fighter, and his weapon was invisible.

So Haffazh didn't stand much chance. I would have ended it a lot sooner if I hadn't had to devote my Art to keeping people off of me.
I would have won the fight. But—and this was as abrupt and ridiculous as it sounds—I took an arrow to the arm. My sword arm. I don't even know who shot it; all there was a sudden lancing pain. I shut it off with my mind, and blinked my Chi to my left hand. But it was awkward there, and I couldn't effectively play the Jhinn's fighting game. I blocked the subtle series of feints and thrusts, but tripped, of all things, and fell on my ass.

Telling the story later, I liked to play up the unfairness of having your sword arm taken out of commission from an enemy you hadn't even seen. And I'd wrap up the story by saying something like, "I thought that war meant a test of skill against your enemies, but it's not. There's no preset path to war. No one sees the whole picture. It's gruesome, it's random, and then it's done."

I liked to frame it that way. It wasn't a lie, either. But it was just the easier story to tell. The true one wasn't something I could ever share with someone else. Because I was on the ground, dazed, and surrounded by the enemy. The Angelic Jhinn stood above me, looking up as he murmured something in a language I didn't understand. More of his allies formed a perimeter around my body, and they were joining his chant. I felt a ripple, something building in the Subfield.

And then the arrows came. The outer ring of Jassanese soldiers dropped like flies. But the Jhinn interrupted his chant to put out a call for archers to return fire, and they must have put Emmit under pressure because he didn't shoot any more, and the Jassanese resumed their chanting.

I tried to get up, but my limbs felt like lead. And now that I was coming out of my daze, I saw golden thread starting a slow wrap around my waist, binding my arms to my sides. I groaned, and fell into what felt like a dream state.

That's why I never took the story any further. Because words cannot touch our dreams, neither the ones we have in our sleep nor the ones we cradle while waking, those hopes beyond all other hopes.

Jade's face filled my vision. She was all I saw, and I wondered if this was just the Angel's magic, seducing me into a stupor. But...it wasn't. She was real, she was sitting on me. Her eyes were bloodshot and her hair was messy and matted down with sweat. Was she crying? I was crying. Weren't we surrounded?

Then I saw it. Behind her, the motes of iridescence I'd taken for hallucination were pieces of her Chi. I could feel them. They...they were petals, her long rapier broken into a hundred petals whirling in the air behind her with soft grace. The soldiers dropped like flies.

The Jhinn, when he realized he could not beat the beautiful razor-edged storm, flew away.

Jade stood, and helped me up. Her face was tanned from her travels, and the sun had brought out more freckles than I could remember.

"Nine hundred and thirty seven," I said. "Kiara's assignment. I counted them all."

Jade grabbed my arm. The arrow had gouged out a chunk of the flesh, and it was bleeding. Badly. "Tori has healing brew," she said. Then she looked up at me and her eyes got shockingly wide.

I was at a loss for words. Those were her first words for me?

Wait, Tori? Why the hell-

"Tristan! I can talk!" exclaimed Jade. She flung her hands around me.

I hugged her fiercely. My arms pressing into her waist; that was a feeling I promised myself I'd never forget again.

"I'm so glad," I said, thinking fast. "Did Shae take your voice away?"

Jade started to pull away to explain, but I didn't let go of her. She laughed into my collarbone. "Yes. Yes, she did. And replaced it with God knows what drivel. I don't even know where to start."

"How about we start with leaving?" said Emmit, coming up to us. His mop of brown hair was kept back by a headband, and he wore the same loose, tan clothing as Jade.

I let go of Jade, not without some reluctance. "It's so, so good to see you both. Uh, wow. There's a lot of dead people around us."

There were. It was a bloodbath. Between Jade's still-floating petals and Emmit's arrows, all the soldiers around us were dead. Actually, the only bodies we saw were the Jassanese. The Liberator-infused Aarturians? They were piles of dirt now, all of them. With a single small green sapling poking from the earth of each.

"So much for the cute reunion I was hoping for," said Jade. Her eyes were worried, though, as she looked at me. "Tristan, are you okay? I know this is a lot of death for you."

I blinked. It's a hell of a thing to be treated like the self you've moved past. "We have a lot to talk about," I said. Especially since, as I recalled, Emmit and Jade weren't exactly the kind of people who could comfortably kill twenty soldiers and chit-chat through the whole thing.

Emmit's mouth pressed into a line. "We have to leave. Now. We are in the middle of a war, and Shae is polluting Tristan through us as we speak."

I bit my lip. "Shit."

Where before the main gate had been clogged with advancing soldiers, now, there were three people that it looked like no one wanted to fuck with. We ran over there. On the way, Jade's swirl of a Chi flew to her hip, forming into a long narrow iridescent sword.

"Where'd the arrows go?" I wondered. I'd had my Chi out and ready to deflect.

"Hard to be hit by an arrow when there's no one left to shoot them," said Emmit.

"Nice humblebrag, Emmit," said Jade, smiling. "I'm sorry, I didn't really mean that. It just feels good to talk."

"No problem," said Emmit.

We came under the gate. Before I could recognize the three others, Jade said, "Wait. Tristan?"

"Yeah?"
She put a hand on my shoulder, and stopped us. Her eyes bored into mine. Was this Shae's inner manipulations about to come out? I hadn't noticed anything yet.

"I love you."

I heard my heart thumping in my ears. "I love you too."

Jade smiled. "Good."

We caught up to Emmit, where he was reuniting with Alice, Tori, and Sailor.

I can't even describe the relief. I said it. I got to tell her, just one last time. Even if I died now...at least I'd gotten the chance to tell her. After leaving her with no goodbye, after traveling for as long as I'd traveled with no idea if she was even alive anymore...I'd seen her face. I'd said what needed to be said. And...

"Wait," I said suddenly. "Jade?"

"Yeah? What are you-mmf!"

And I'd kissed her.

Suddenly Jade was pushed off of me, and Sailor shouted, "My turn!" He pressed his pursed lips onto mine.

"Dude!" I pulled away, laughing. I looked into his brown eyes, took in his wide smile. "I can't believe you're here. It's so good to see you."
"Come on, everybody," said Sailor, gesturing to the group. "Get in here."

Tori rolled her eyes, in classic Tori fashion, but she and the rest of the gang got together for a group hug.

"You owe me five bucks, Emmit," said Sailor.

Emmit groaned.

"Why?" I asked.

"He believed that Shae was more powerful than this," explained Sailor. "That we'd be quivering on the ground if we came next to you. But there's nothing more powerful than the magic of a group hug."

We all laughed. God damn. Holy mother of what the actual Jesus freaking Christ. I was laughing...with my friends. I was glad for the group hug, because no one saw me tearing up. "We are surrounded by enemies, right?" I asked. "That's still a thing?"

"They're fighting each other again. Tori made sure they wouldn't bug us," said Alice.

"Hi Alice," I said through the hug.

"Heyy," she said, sing-song.

We all let go of each other. I gave Alice a proper hug, and awkwardly nodded to Tori. We hadn't been quite as close.

She matched my nod, and then said, "You're hurt."

I looked at my sword arm. "Oh, yeah."

She gave me a look. "What, did you forget?"

I did, actually. And looking at the wound, I could see why. The edge of the wound looked...cauterized? Was my Firearm healing the other parts of my body? That was worrying. I didn't have time to explain it all, though, so I just thanked her as she offered a vial of healing brew to me. "Just a sip," she warned. "We don't have much."

I took just a small sip, but even so it was like molten ice flowing down my throat and into my veins. My eyes went wide as dinner plates. I'd forgotten how strong the stuff was. I coughed, and shook my arms. Warmth bloomed on my wound, and I didn't need to look at it to know that it would be healing already.

"So, what did you do to keep them away?" I asked. Because it was true—though there may have been troops to either side of us, none of the forces wanted anything to do with our group. "A mass Suggestion?"

"Skinned a guy," said Tori.

I blinked.

"They're immune to the Art," she said. "What else was I supposed to do?"

Geez. "No, yeah, that's totally normal. I would have done the same..."

New piece of information: my friends weren't strong enough to pierce the Angel and the Liberator's shields. That wasn't great news.

Because we weren't out of the forest yet. They might have intimidated the small contingent of fighters out here, but more were coming. For whatever reason, the Ancients had a bone to pick with people they thought were Arasit.

The point was hammered home by the distant pounding of hooves.

"Guys?" I said. "I'm not saying that I'm worried per se, but...do we have an escape plan?"

"The horses are tied up at the forest." Emmit pointed.

"Then what are we waiting for?"

We ran, all of us together. And that was a moment I'll never forget. The sound of our feet hitting the ground all at once. Running as a group, for the first time in what felt like ages. Something wolf-like in our communal flight. Not that we were a pack, or that the change that distance fosters hadn't wrapped us in its presence. We were strangers to each other again. But running from that amassing host of soldiers, the weight wasn't lifted off my present, but off my future. That's when the wind really starts to lift your footsteps for you. When all of a sudden tomorrow had Jade in it.

"Holy shit," said Sailor. "Why do they hate us so much?"

He'd looked over his shoulder. I did the same, and was astonished. For some reason, the two sides had brokered a truce, and people were pouring toward us. From Cammes, from the surrounding battles...was every soldier coming our way?

I looked ahead of us, at the distance we had yet to cross to the forest, and the horses.

I looked back, at the running force.

At the horsemen breaking from it.

"RUN!" I shouted. Our gang against a whole army? No contest: we lose, and the Ancients involved get whatever they get out of dealing with us. Did they think we were all Arasit? Did that somehow make us a piece of their game?

We made it to the treeline with seconds to spare. Our horses were tied up, and laden with supplies.

My heart sank. I could practically see the spittle on the approaching horses. Next to me Alice was hurrying to get hers untied from the tree.

"We don't have enough time," I said to myself.

Jade hopped on hers first and rode it over to me. She reached down. "Get up!"

"They're almost here!" I shouted.

Hundreds of horsemen. I could see from here that even the horses had eyes of glowing gold and green. Even they would be shielded from the Art to all but me, and I could only affect...five? If I really tried for it?

"I had hoped to avoid this," said a familiar voice.

I looked up. And I shit you not, there he was. Rinzai sitting on a tree branch, leaning against the trunk, chewing on a twig. Zodiac lying panther-like on a tree branch next to him, tail swishing.

Jade visibly tensed. "Rinzai, we don't want any trouble."

He effortlessly dropped from the tree in a flutter of robes. He managed to look at all of us in the eyes, with great solemnity. "I want you all to know something. None of this is your fault."

"Uh, no shit?" said Tori. "They were fighting before we got here."

The bellow of hooves surged. They were a hundred feet away, and closing.

Rinzai shook his head, and faced the oncoming tide. He stepped out from the shade of the trees into the sunlit plains.

A pair of pistols manifested in his hands. Sleek and black and long-barreled. The energy it took to bring them to existence gave all of us splitting headaches, and put heat waves in the air around him.

"Not what happened before you arrived," he said. "This."

Oh, no.

He gunned down the horsemen. Every shot the sound of a cannon. The others wilted under the sheer force of it. Jade fell off her horse, and I just barely caught her before I sank to one knee. I looked up in horror-struck awe.

Rinzai the modern reaper with his pistols shooting. After a moment of grim observation I sensed that his pistols weren't actually projecting a bullet. In the same way that I had braided my Chi to Shaping Clay...he'd braided his Chi to that aspect of the Art we had never been told about. The power I'd seen him try to use, just once, and the power I had copied to escape Caer'Aton.

The Art could end life itself. Rinzai's guns shot literal death. No suffering involved, not even any time. The wind picked up around him, whipping his dark robes. The horsemen were all dead and we thought he was done. But then he walked toward the advancing soldiers, the ones running toward us on foot. Thousands of them. Literal thousands of Ancient-infused soldiers running, screaming, and I learned something about Rinzai that day when I realized that not a single one of them would make it past him.

"Come on," I said, gritting my teeth. "Get up. Let's go." I heaved myself to my feet. The further Rinzai walked from us, the more I could form coherent thoughts. "Jade. Jade, wake up!"

She was dazed, eyes moving erratic, unseeing. The mere act of bringing his Chi into the world had knocked out all of my friends.

For all that I'd been thinking about facing the world, shouldering weight, not hiding...I'm not afraid to admit that I didn't look at the battlefield. The only pride I can take is that I didn't use the Art to take away my hearing, to take away the incessant, rapid-fire canon boom of Rinzai's monstrous Chi.

Jade got to her feet. She looked foggy, distant. Looked at me curiously. She said something, but I couldn't hear it over Rinzai's firing. She had to shout for me to hear her say, "Who are you?"

My heart sunk. "Jade, it's me. It's Tristan." I was trying to shout while looking as reassuring as possible. "We just...we were just..."

"Tristan? You're one of us?" she asked. She looked around, then saw Rinzai. "Why is Rinzai doing that? Where are the others?"

I just stared at her.

"Emmit! Sailor!" Jade walked over to the others as they picked themselves off the ground. "Guys, wake up! Rinzai's here. We have to go, it's time to go."

I swallowed. Emmit stood up and brushed himself off. He looked at me. "Are you okay?" he asked.

"Do you remember me?" I asked hoarsely.

He gave me a weird look. Then it softened, and he glanced at Jade. "I told you. The old stuff must have gotten messed up by infecting you. But looks like she's back to normal."

Jade frowned at him. "I'm right here. What are you talking about?"

Emmit pinched his nose. "We don't have time for this. Get on your horses everybody. Tristan, you're with me."

The sound of cannons stopped. We all looked over at Rinzai. He was staring at the sun. "NOW WHAT?" he shouted. "LOOK WHAT HAPPENS TO YOUR GAME. LOOK. WHO WINS?"

Emmit swung himself onto his horse, and I joined him.

"We're leaving him?" I said.

"He's not on our team," said Emmit. "We can't trust him."

But the cannons didn't pick up. I ducked my head to look past the low hanging branches, and saw that the army had stopped. The green and yellow auras clinging to both sides was fading.

Rinzai's Chi disappeared, and we took a huge breath, all of us, all at once, as if we'd been underwater.

Emmit urged his horse to leave. Everyone else did, too. But the horses were stoic. Unmoving.

Then they trotted together, putting us in a semi circle that Rinzai was at the center of.

"I see that you all brought some baggage from Shae," he said. "That's very kind of you. It will give us a chance to practice one of the most important aspects of the Art: healing."

We were silent for a moment. "Are we in class right now?" said Sailor.

I just watched Rinzai, wary. Unsure. "Rinzai," I began.

"No, Tristan," he said. "Don't open your mouth. You managed to lose both artifacts that could have helped us. It's not your fault, but I'm afraid I'm not stable at the moment, and I would hate to kill you."

I blinked. Both artifacts? He had to be referring to the necklace...oh, and the Liberator's eye, maybe? I opened my mouth to say something, but Emmit elbowed me in the ribs. I shut my mouth.

"I'm currently staving off the worst of it," continued Rinzai. "As is, you all contain compulsions to kill each other. Anybody feel like doing that?"

We shook our heads. No.

He spread his hands. "You're welcome. I can't hold her off forever. Unfortunately, most of Shae's embedded manipulations are designed to target me, so I am currently bearing the brunt of her assault. I know you do not trust me, but you should."

"This is what I ask of you. I have given you the space and the time to heal each other. Once you're finished, you need to come save me. Shae was preoccupied; these manipulations are not her finest work, nothing like what's embedded in me. Since she is not here to invest any more power into them, then if we all work together...we might retain our sanity."

Alice spoke up first. "But how do we heal each other? We can't beat Shae's Art. We tried on the way here."

Rinzai clapped his hands. "An excellent question. No surprise that it would come from one of Medical's finest. The answer is rather complicated, so I'll require your full attention. And," he added, "your trust. Can we do this?"

The field of bodies behind him, bodies and dirt.

I looked next to me, to Jade.

The fog cleared from her eyes. She looked at me with sudden recognition, emerald eyes sparkling. "Hey." She reached over, squeezed my hand. "We'll do this. Me and you."

I looked at Rinzai. He met my gaze evenly. Ten bucks said he'd just lifted the veil from Jade's eyes to persuade me to be on board. A cheap trick it may have been, but I knew how the Art worked. Him devoting the energy to lift her veil for a moment must have cost him ground somewhere else. It wasn't a trivial thing. He was sending a signal to me: this is important.

"I love you," was all I could say to Jade. And I tried to put everything I had into saying it. Because she was lucid now, she could hear me now. And even if Shae took her mind away from me in the next second, I needed her to know one thing.

I was coming to save her.
~

The gang's back together! WOOOOOOOOOOO! Can't tell you how long I have been waiting for this moment.

Tristan's Tale is made possible by my Patrons. To all of you, a heartfelt thanks.


A further thank you to the following ridiculously generous humans: Signet, Chris, Tariq A, Aurora Borealis, Champ13316, Blake Jezioro, pilohshopprincess, Jacques Hickey, AnonGuy, Toxicsooner, DiscoMcDisco, Timothy L, Mike Nixon, Foxy of Fucking Loxly, Steven Forget, Jacob Osgood, Vergard, Slappy, Madcatter996, Puffinking O'connor, John Smith, Robert Jacobs, and Frikkie.

You guys are incredible. Thank you.

-IPD