— 61 —

Silence Resonates Soundly

\\//

The land levels out again as they near The Dwelling, the terrain turning to rusty blue slate which splinters and sheds red dust. Spires protrude from the land at irregular angles, looking like the loose feathers of a raptor in its evening molt. She catches glimpses of the low city between the stone spires—the distant glimmers of life which flit in and out of sight granting her a moment’s gratitude.

Lise considers waking, reluctant to bear the full weight of pain again lest she lose herself in the sweep of its silent and unrelenting scream. No, not yet. She stands from the cart and runs ahead of them. Scaling a spire—tireless, breathing freely—she gazes upon the city she spent near two years studying. It is uncanny, seeing it now. Not even three quadrants ago she was here and still it appears strange. 

The Lise who arrived here two days past was the Lise who witnessed but one death. It was the Lise who had come to resent her mother and saw her father pitiful. The Lise who needed escape. The Lise who foolishly dreamt of mastering the undermind. The Lise who is reflected back painfully puerile.

As she looks down to the twin cities spreading out from The Dwelling on either side, all low buildings of orange and mustard clay and unpaved streets, she sees something which sets her bells tolling. Before the dome’s broad, arching portal, dwellers congregate. They are gathered in a semi-circle, nine of them, maintaining a barricade which seals the main entrance to The Dwelling. As she watches, a new shift comes and takes the places of the three on the left. What are they doing?

Lise is distracted from them when the cart passes below her, appearing more to drift than roll across the terrain—its wheels only begin to turn when Lise observes they should be. She leaps from the spire, willing a lesser spire to meet her halfway down. And instead of leaping off again she visualizes the spire retracting into the land, and manifests it. She steadies herself, the halt of the ground hitting her heels more abrupt than she expected, and runs to catch up with the cart.

They are near enough now that stopping for rest would be a frustration rather than relief, but Lise decides she needs to ask ahead of them. She approaches Pelanea, whose form has already developed further since she last looked at her—the pale shapes comprising her form shrunken, allowing finer delineation of her features. Fingers, toes, and the first impressions of facial structure. She is so near dwelling now Lise might be able to induce it deliberately.

She steps up onto the cart and places a hand on Pelanea’s yet hairless head, pressing her thoughts, Pelanea, it’s me, Lise. I’m in the undermind right now. If you can hear me, wave. Her figure startles, glancing back at where Lise’s body lay. Then, tentative, she waves. I’m going to go ahead of you and see what is happening in the city. Don’t enter before my return. Do you understand? Still looking back at the cart, Pelanea nods.

Lise hops from the cart and races ahead. Fleet as she’s ever felt, she runs her full stride—long legs propelling her until she reaches her top speed, and the effort falls away. Gliding, her toes touching down weightless, she crosses the distance in less time than it takes to lace her shoes. She doesn’t let reality hurt her here. Not yet.

The dwellers see her coming, and two of the three whose shift just ended wave her over from where they took up chairs outside the registry. When she first came here they had to wait in line at the registry and go through inspection but now not a single person stands queued for entrance to The Dwelling.

‘Good night!’ She calls as she slows her approach, and they return her greeting less enthused. ‘What’s happening here?’

Neither man can meet her eyes and she feels their answer before it is spoken. A silent shockwave kicks them off the ground and Lise staggers, putting out her arms to steady herself.

‘Fiends in The Dwelling…’

And she knows why they look the way they do. Of all the places she thought would ride out the ripples of the stone she cast, it was The Dwelling. In the same, it doesn’t shock her. ‘How–’

‘We don’t know.’

‘It’s not supposed to have happened.’

Lise looks toward the structure they manifest to stopper the opening, the color of a disturbed pond. ‘Where are the rest? Is this all who made it out?’ As she watches, what looks like a cast shadow skims past the barrier. Tracing up the inside of the sapphirine crystal panes it halts and appears to shift shape and drifts into the viscid dark deeper within.

One of the men follows her gaze, the other answers, ‘Those who’ve made it out have taken refuge in Loh Corone. Most, anyway. A decent deal of the expatriates headed home or otherwise.’

‘How long since the inception?’

‘I don’t know myself, but I heard the first fiends were spotted around a cycle before evacuation began, and it’s been seven cycles past. What are you here for?’

Lise shakes her head. ‘I’m not sure at this point. My companions and I had hoped… Well, we were seeking refuge and some otherwise. Is there anywhere we can go?’

The other is yet to turn back around, the same man answers her, ‘I mean, I’m sure there’s someplace in Loh Corone you can stay but I don’t know of any specific. Crusty shit-hole, but you should be fine long as you don’t do nothing dumb as. I think you sh–’

Still staring at the dome, the man starts tapping his friend on the arm, ‘Oi yo! Look at this. You see that?’

Lise looks where he is pointing. Something approaches the arch from inside the enclosure; amorphous black spanning the entrance and thrice its height, a shade’s hand presses flat on one triangular panel. A second hand joins it, spreading fingers stretching beyond human. Another hand smacks against the crystal. Another. The pane pops out of the structure and five scrawled hands slide smoothly out, six-fingered. Bending its long, many-knuckled arms the fiend pulls itself partway free. Haze obscures inky skin—billowing as though wind-blown.

Lise watches terror’s seed spread and in a moment of prescience (if but a semblance) knows disaster’s dawning. She runs toward it.

— 62 —

Lapse (Although Benignant)

\\//

Lise shoves one of the men into motion, meeting his wild eyes for a moment, ‘We need help! Go!’ She runs on past heedless now to all but imminent death.

The fiend’s protuberant body spills from the gap, spindly limbs prying, pulling. All at once, its body shifts properties; like an insubstantial water skin, it pours itself from the narrow opening, rolling down the dome and landing with a contained splash and she almost thinks it will break and splatter before it bounces back up a few feet and lands again. Its body jiggles, shedding haze, thin limbs flailing in the air as it rolls around to find its bearing. Extruding a formless head, its eyeless aspect tears wide and sends a mute howl to the sky.

Lise recalls the pane of crystal in its place, resealing the dome behind it. She slows her approach as the fiend rises on its tangled limbs, tripping over itself; the axe haft is smooth in her hands. The fiend, form turning weightless, startles and flees…

It is absurd to see. A big bag of wind sprinting westward on wheeling arms.

Following her bafflement, she has an odd pang of pity for the strange being—watching it run toward the only end. It will starve out there if it doesn't reach undefined land first and simply come apart. The feeling is brief, however, and she turns back to the other dwellers, breathing relief.

‘I think this is maybe too obvious to say but the dome won’t hold here on its own.’ She says to the silent group, still in shock at the fiend.

Her axe, she realizes as she hangs it over her shoulder, has been on her back since she’s been in the undermind; her cloak as well, though her satchel is missing. The feeling so familiar she hadn’t noticed its weight. There is significance to this realization, but she dreads what it demands. I can’t keep on like this. She knows and yet strains against her meager limits.

She turns to the remaining man, ‘You wouldn’t happen to know a man with pale skin and inset blue eyes, would you? He’s a dweller.’

He looks at her and blinks, ‘Uh… You’d have to be more specific.’

‘He’s a bit eccentric—you would know it if you’d seen him. No? Then nevermind. Do you know who’s organizing any kind of effort regarding… all of this?’

He shrugs, eyes hollowing. ‘I’m not too sure. It’s all happened so fast and it was a struggle just to get this many to help.’

She nods understanding, ‘If no one else will it’s going to be an easy feast.’

His gaze curls inward and resentment crosses his expression. ‘Yes, it will.’ He shakes his head. ‘Had that fiend not just run the massacre might have begun with us.’

‘Maybe…’

Akota, please be safe…

— 63 —

Pressed and Passive

//\\

Lise regrets reality. “I’m back.” She says, grinding the words between her teeth. She lifts her head to look for her companions and regrets that too, feeling the strain in her chest. They appear before her silhouetted against a starlit tapestry.

Eclait says, “Well? What’s going on?”

“Fiends inside The Dwelling.”

Pelanea gasps, clutching at her coat, “What?! The whole city?”

“Just The Dwelling… The dome.” She elaborates, realizing they are as unaware of the distinctions as she’d once been. “The cities around the dome are sort of a separate thing, but not entirely. It’s hard for me to explain—I never ventured outside The Dwelling while I was here. I knew some dwellers here who would trade for their services in the outer city, so there’s some interaction but they don’t treat each other as one city for some reason, even though most of The Dwelling’s population come from just outside it.”

“I don’t care about all that.” Eclait cuts. “What’s the plan? If there’s fiends there, where do we go?”

“We’ll have to go to Loh Corone—the stretch north of The Dwelling. That’s as far as I’ve gone regarding plans.”

“Let’s go then,” Eclait says, gesturing for Pelanea, “I’m hungry.”

The wheels creak over the hard ground, cart-bed juddering painfully. Lise grits her teeth and keeps from complaining; she is as eager to arrive—if not for the same reason. As they near the city, veering north between the dark spires, they come to a road leading them in and the cart starts to roll smooth. Thank the land… or rather, thank the people who paved this road.

Pelanea grunts, “Are we going to be alright here? This whole fiends in the city thing seems more concerning than… well, how we’re acting about it.” 

Eclait is quick to say, “You want to head home?”

“That’s not what I’m saying but home’s no safer, is it?”

“Speaking of,” Lise clears her throat, “what happened in Kellean? In one of your memories I remember seeing some people dying of fiends.”

“One of your memories…?” Eclait turns to Pelanea.

“Oh, um, I’m not the best person to explain, I only saw that much. If Bente… Well, The Kelle had everyone go to the caves early, but everyone still in the city—most everyone, anyway—died all at once. Me and some of Harmony’s servants survived it… Oh, and you, of course, Lise. I didn’t see it or anything though. I don’t know.”

Lise frowns, “You didn’t hear of anyone else seeing the fiend that did it? It just killed and was gone?”

“I don’t think anyone saw it. I don’t know how fiends are supposed to act—is this not normal?”

“That fiends are killing at all is abnormal. It’s happened in the past, from what I’ve been told, but before the outbreak in Opis Luma fiends were as often benignant as malignant. Memory loss, paranoia, trouble sleeping, anger, depression—those kinds of manifestations. Nothing so severe as what we’ve been seeing. They still killed from time to time when neglected, but a visit or two from a dweller and you’re fine. Now I can barely protect myself from them. They’ve changed in some essential way, adapting and multiplying more rapidly than we can. If The Dwelling is bloated with them I don’t know that there’s any place safe.”

“Damn.” Eclait grunts, tugging the cart with a little less enthusiasm. “Sounds… not good.”

“Humanity will live on though. Right?” Pelanea adds. 

“Sure, but in what condition? What position?”

“But if we work together we can overcome this.”

“If.” Lise agrees. “Small groups of resilient individuals working together might preserve themselves, but as it is I don’t see whole cities persisting. No one was ready for a catastrophe like this.”

Eclait laughs, “People call me a pessimist.”

Lise would shrug if it didn’t hurt so much. “I’d probably call you cynic. I’d not call myself pessimist—fatalist, maybe.”

“Is there a difference?”

She stops her shrug again. “Perhaps less than a pedant would permit.”

“What’s a pedant?” Pelanea asks.

“Someone who is over-concerned with meaningless things.”

“So, Pelanea?” Eclait cackles alone.

“No. Me.”

Loh Corone’s light captures them and shed behind is their wild dark. Voices and other noises of the city wash away the mental residues of their relatively lonesome travel. The road broadens and they move past the first buildings, formed from porous clay. Lise manages to sit up, looking round through lidded eyes. The flush of people move along and past them, little more than life’s routine stresses weighing their expressions.

Lanterns hang from every doorway and from poles of crooked brown cane, lending a warm surreality where their light swims over faces of people and buildings alike. Shadows perpetually shifting, fire flashing and never stilling. Lise can’t fix a single face in her mind as with each moment’s passing their appearance changes. She blinks as they blur, trying to find form.

One thing the outer city has in common with The Dwelling—the people move as though ‘hurry’ is the singular pace. It makes moving through the relatively narrow roads difficult. Eclait’s yelling is compensating some… until an old man starts yelling back. By the time Pelanea manages to pull her off the man, whatever gains they made by her belligerence are lost.

“Looking for an inn!” Lise calls to them over the throng. Shit… I don’t know what an inn is supposed to look like here. She points, “Pull into that alley there!”

As they block the entrance to the alley with the cart, a ragged-looking woman sitting inside it looks at them askance overtop an odd twist of glass pipework. She dips it into a small pot of fire, sucking on the other end. Breathing out smoke, she dismisses them with a polite, “Fuck off!”

Eclait returns, “You fuck off!”

Lise cuts in, “Let’s not do whatever you’re thinking about doing.” She turns to the woman, “Sorry, we’ll just be a moment.” But by then the woman doesn’t seem to care anymore.

“Where are we supposed to find anything in this place? All the buildings look the same.” Pelanea laments, leaning against the cart.

Lise lifts an eyebrow but lets it lie. “I’m not sure. We can ask someone else for directions…”

“Can’t you do something in the undermind or something?”

“I could do something, yes, but whether that something would be worthwhile is another matter. Not to mention getting to the undermind in the first place. I’ve found recently that when I try to grasp it, sleep slips away. You might say pain has been scaring it off.”

Pelanea sighs. “Well… great.”

A girl giggles. The two of them turn to the sound. Eclait and the woman are sitting shoulder to shoulder, passing the pipe back and forth. The woman whispers to her and Eclait giggles again.

“What are you doing?” Pelanea asks. Lise turns and catches a choler coloring her cheeks. “Are you smoking her drugs?”

Eclait looks at her, perplexed. Glancing to the woman beside her, “It’s not like I’m stealing them. She’s selfless enough to share.” And she giggles again.

Pelanea trembles and her nigh translucent skin spoils a splotchy red. Lise watches, disturbed, as she tries to speak but splutters.

Eclait shakes her head, “What the fuck? What’s your issue?”

“You… You’re supposed to be The Kelle’s physic and…” She doesn’t seem able to continue.

Eclait waits, “…And?” Then, appearing to understand, “Ah! Just a moment.” She whispers to the woman for a moment before turning back to them, “Lise, would you like some to ease your pain?”

Lise sits straighter. “What is it?” She asks, holding out a hand for the pipe.

“Just some reek.” She says, first handing the pipe back to the woman for a refill. “Good shit, though.” She pulls down her cheek to show the whites of her eyes have turned florid and giggles again. “Don’t worry, it’s just a flower. Cain’t hurt you. Opposite, in fact.”

Lise takes the pipe, holding it gingerly, and examines in brief the crushed jade flower bud, crusted crystalline. It smells sharp—akin the darker evergreen needles found north of Opis Luma, but too sour to be the same. Eclait proffers the can of fire, and Lise dips the bowl in and sucks on the stem. The flower lights and she pulls the pipe out of the can as she draws on it. Tickling her throat, her lungs, she breathes out slow her shallow inhale. Wispy smoke blooms and disperses.

“C’mon, get yourself a better hit than that.”

Grimacing a little at the taste, she breathes once before trying again. She draws on the pipe, watching the green go incandescent, the smoke coursing through the swirl of tarnished glass. Her lungs burn and she chokes. Suppressing the coming coughs has her heaving, hacking, and coughing still despite her effort. It is excruciating. Then, it hits her. “Whoa…” She croaks.

Eclait roars with laughter, “Right?” She shoves her new friend on the shoulder. “Damn good shit ma’am!”

Lise sits back, breathing careful not to hurt herself, and sees the expression on Pelanea. She looks like she just watched her friend die. Guilt crosses her mind, seeing that pain; but as her pain recedes, she finds less to regret.

Eclait grins as she drops fresh tinder in the fire-can, “Such discordance I see in your eyes, dear Pelly. You really should try to get along with others.”

“Harmony!” Pelanea growls, derision disfiguring her face. “I hate you!”

Eclait looks genuinely caught off-guard, “Why?” Then, unable to resist maliciously reinterpreting her words, “Why do you hate harmony? We three have joined in sharing this gift from the land, hand in hand with harmony, and you, so hateful, would crush it in your brutish, hateful hands? Why not harmonize with us?”

Lise, catching the stench of violence, puts a hand on Pelanea’s shoulder. “Why are you upset?”

She grabs Lise’s arm and throws it aside. “Don’t touch me!” And as their eyes meet, the derision is the same.

Wincing, she takes back her arm. “Very well. Whatever your reasoning, the way you are reacting to this isn’t fair. Unless you want to discuss your qualms, sit and be silent.”

“Or fuck off,” Eclait adds.

Lise looks at her, “As much as I agree with what you’ve expressed, you’re not being helpful.”

“I don’t care to be helpful for her. She needs to help herself to some better beliefs.”

“Might I remind you, you believed the undermind a farce.”

Eclait nodded, “Yes, I did. Then I saw some shit that didn’t make sense. Fixed myself, made sense, moved on. I don’t hold to that which don’t work anymore. This bitch is still clinging.” She blows smoke at Pelanea to punctuate it. “Come back after you figure it out. Or don’t, just quit killing my high.”

Pelanea stands stiff in the smoke, seething. Lise thinks she might attack Eclait, staring, a tensing silence stretching taut between. The stranger holds her pipe out for Pelanea. Strreeetching… Silence shatters with a lone snap. The pipe hits the side of the building and falls in two.

Eclait rises, rolling her left shoulder, and backhands Pelanea off her feet. When she turns to retaliate, Eclait shoves her hard and sends her tumbling over the cart. “If you climb back over that cart I’ll snap your forearm and let you beg me to set it for you.”

Slow to stand, Pelanea is hard to recognize under the mortified scrawl of impotent rage writ across her countenance. She glances at Lise, who struggles to present anything on her face but her rising disappointment and even something approaching disdain. She turns and runs. Head down. Into the throng she runs and is gone. They watch her go well after she disappears.

— 64 —

Reaping to Sow

//\\

Eclait doesn’t return to her place beside the woman—who gazes around red-eyed and impassive, apparently not too upset about her pipe—instead, she sits on the edge of the cart beside Lise. “Sorry, I see you wanted to change her mind and all that but I just didn’t care.”

Lise shook her head. “I don’t know that I could have after I’d smoked, which is when it escalated anyway. I don’t understand why she was upset about it—rather, I could understand, but her reaction bypassed reason straight to outrageous. Something incongruous about it.”

“It’s some sects of Harmony who get all unnecessary about shit that don’t deserve it.”

“Sects? Seems antithetical.”

“It’s the ones who hate it that need it,” Eclait shrugs.

That doesn’t follow what I… ah, whatever. “Fair enough.” 

Firelight spills slow from the can’s lip. I’ve missed something. I don’t know what, but this situation… something’s off about it. In the dim flicker, she watches the woman of the alley searching the ground for the upper portion of the pipe. Forgoing it, she tries to smoke from the broken end of the bowl’s half and croaks, spitting cerise off her split tongue.

“Eclait,” Lise begins, pausing to craft her phrase, “have her beliefs become a problem any time before this?”

Eclait looks up, hair hanging lank to frame her smirk. “What, you mean besides all the time?” She cackles. “I’ve been trying to get her to stop clinging since Kellean. Thought seeing more shit might do it, but… Well, you saw how they’ve done ruin on her.” She shrugs.

I see. Lise nods. “That’s unfortunate.” She is sorry she hadn’t picked it up sooner. “Can I leave Bente with you? I feel the need to cleanse myself after this journey.”

“Sure, he’s not going nowhere.”

Lise hobbles along, a seed of the strange set in her chest. Her right hand, every other step, blooms on the faces of buildings. Clay, cold and coarse, scratches first fingertips, flats, a small pleasure of scratching and tickling on her palm.

Everything is diminished. Distant, Pain wails for its misplaced strength. Underwater, shame babbles incoherence. Beyond the main road traffic is feeble. The lanterns ubiquitous there are sparse here, and people pass at a strangely sedate pace—their dimmed forms just as difficult to define.

The fool I am—I miss knowing.

What she would give for a moment’s prescience. A lick of certainty. A whiff of absolute. She can’t care less. It would do her well to care less. She can’t care less. Striving to live, she desires nothing more than to achieve death. What she would give for a moment’s prescience—even the callow semblance from the past. Back when her parents told her what good parents they were and she could smile sincere.

A fool’s question: Is it better to be born cripple, or to be crippled? A fool discerns.

— 65 —

I’m Nameless Neradre

//\\

Wandering deeper into Loh Corone, Lise allows disorientation. The buildings aren’t as similar to one another as those in Kellean are—which are uniform by design. Shades of clay ranging from a ruddy orange-pink, to sun-bleached yellow, to deep brown. The structures themselves tend to be rectangular prisms, cubes, right angles. They rarely connect evenly, like crates of mismatched sizes stacked sloppy. She passes building after building, noting their distinctions but not bothering to remember them beyond what light they shed on the building next.

She gives all those she sees a wide berth, fearing a stray bump would make of her a street fixture. Around fruit-sellers, woven baskets seeping old juice; past travelers trading spices and foreign herbs, who are hushed when not in barter. Watching a boy approach a fruit-seller, proffering a pair of dull gray metal wedges. The seller takes them and gives the boy three of the thick-shelled fruit which he promptly places into his waxed satchel. The practice perplexes her but she moves on without question.

“Hey, Lise! Is that you?”  Just as she comes round the wind of the road, a strange man is waving to her with an expression that registers recognition. “It has been so long! Where have you been? I was worried you were trapped in there!”

Lise wracks her brain, trying to place this man anywhere in her memories. He is tall (though he still needs to look up to meet her eyes). A coppery complexion sets his slightly-bulging green eyes bright and clear. His teeth are clean—a disarming smile dimpling his cheeks. She struggles to recall him, thinking he looks the type who likes to be remembered. She just hopes he isn’t the type who hates to be forgotten.

“Ah…” She hesitates, futile in knowing what to say. “Sorry, I went home before daybreak, actually, and I’ve just arrived here in the last couple hours.”

He grins, “Yeah, you seem to be a bit, er… traveled.” His apparent familiarity is somehow as comforting as it is unnerving.

“Yes…” She glances down at her ill-fitting clothes, mud-crust where they aren’t burnt or otherwise compromised. “It wasn’t the easiest on me but it could have been worse.” I was only around for about half the journey here and others got it harder.

“You heard about The Dwelling already…? Well, obviously or you’d not be in Loh, would you.” He smacks his forehead, chuckling, “I’m dumb. Anyway, hey, if you haven’t a place to stay yet we’ve a decent little spot not far from here. Get you cleaned and rested.” He points a thumb over his shoulder.

“That… That would be nice, thank you.”

“Of course!” He broadens his smile, gesturing for her to follow. “What brought you back? It wasn’t the fiends, was it? But no, there’s no way you would have heard and been able to get here so quickly. Hey, are you alright? You’re walking some kind of strange.”

She pauses. “…A lot has happened to and around me since I left. Opis Luma had an outbreak. I don’t know how many others made it out. My walking strange could be attributed to having dislocated my knee or the chest wound I’m still nursing.”

He whistles, “Wild… Well, it’s good the apartments aren’t far then, isn’t it?”

He isn’t exaggerating—they halt before a broad building only a street over. A ramshackle stack of three, it towers a third taller than the surrounding structures and is thrice as crusty. Of deep brown clay, it has the unfortunate appearance of a particularly prodigious pile left by a beast bigger than she can imagine exists.

“I know, I know. It’s on the dingy side. We didn’t have many options on short notice, and Student Denoda offered to take us in,” He says for excuse, though Lise didn’t need one.

“Student Denoda? The same who only held a class every three weeks?”

“Yes, that one.” He smiles, chagrinned. “I know, but it’s not as bad as you might think. Here, I’ll just show you into the bath so you can wash away your travels.” Leading her through the front door, she catches just a glimpse of an open room beyond the foyer which has a variety of opulent—if mismatched—seats, then loses sight of it as they turn left into a hallway. “Third-to-last door on the right.”

“Thank you. Before that, you wouldn’t happen to know where I could get a change of clothes? I had some in my room in The Dwelling, but…”

“Yeah, I’ll find something and leave it for you. Probably going to be gone by the time you’re done, but don’t worry—I’ll let everyone know you’re here.”

Lise stokes the small stove—bringing the water to boil, she dumps it into the half-full tub. And repeats the process until she is satisfied it has warmed enough to offset the night’s chill. For the first in however many cycles, she strips her crusty matted clothing. It clings to her skin in the creases of her arms and legs, her armpits and between her legs is worse. It smells deathly fetid.

The repulsion she feels diminishes when she steps into the warm bath, but returns by the time she’s finished scrubbing. Stinking brown, she drains the tub and begins to refill it. Her second bath is more pleasant—if also more painful, as she tends to her chest and  makes some attempts to untangle her matted hair. She has an easier time with her chest; several knots remain stubborn and she has to stop lest she break the strands which have gone brittle. Her mother would weep to see the state of her hair.

Lise stands before the tall bronze mirror a moment, dripping wet and bare, and as she looks on her body she feels herself split. As one part despairs at her atrophying muscles, the off-kilter tilt of her posture, the hunch as she cradles her chest (I appear as a creature), the length of her arms and legs, gone willowy in the worst way (I’m become a disfigured cripple, the horror I am), another part of her recedes deeper into her, and feels as if she stands alone in the back of her mind, in utter blackness, emptiness, broken only by the two openings through which beams of light land upon her naked and ashamed figure. And as she turns away from the mirror and comes back together, she feels a deepening unease; a dread hanging rootless over her.

I can’t continue like this, she finally acknowledges. Then, Yet I continue like this. The fool I am. I say I cannot continue like this and yet I allow it to persist, this cycle, by fear or negligence or forgetfulness—I don’t know. I can’t continue like this nor can I face the monster in the mirror. So… What? Suicide? Better than this slow self-destruction, sure. She sits naked in the cold emptiness of the tub, elbows on her knees, head in her hands. Porcelain echoes her sobs hollow. Fuck me. I feel so fucking broken. I feel irreparable. Irredeemable… What do I do? What can I do? The fool I am. The cripple I am become. What can I do? I don’t want to continue like this, but what else can I do?

Pain creeps up to her chest, tender, a helpful distraction. It feeds on her despair. She cradles it. This pain is the more pleasant.

She shakes her head. No. I’ve had enough of distraction. Enough. I’ll face myself. I’ll get out of this tub and turn back to the mirror. I’ll turn to the mirror and face myself until I see myself in the mirror. She sits silent in the tub. Easy to approach the abstract; to approach reality is difficult. Why is this so hard? Why do I despair so much for my maiming? I wasn’t ever going to be beautiful anyway. Is this some twisted vanity I can’t shake?

If I can’t feel well about what I see, can’t love my new reality, I must at least cease avoiding it. She rises, slow, careful to keep her chest cradled close. Again, she stands before the mirror and faces herself. Too much my father in my face, too strong a jaw, too low my cheekbones. My limbs are wiry and gnarled with scarring. Most what I had of my mother I hacked away long ago. These breasts too small, these nipples too large. This violent silver-blue between, leaving my left breast deformed, the skin around the scars too taut. My belly a shining sheet of smooth tissue, where has my naval gone? What gazing is this then? She snorts. Listen to how I think of me. Too this, too that. What a disservice I do myself, allowing these features value. Still, I wish I was another way. Seli got all of mother’s beauty—father would say. What consolation I have, perhaps, is only that she gave me her eyes.

When Lise turns from the mirror, she fears it less. But that is as much as she accomplished. It’s enough for now just to acquaint with myself. I needn’t love at first sight.

— 66 —

A Gibbous Trauma

//\\

Outside the bathroom door, Lise finds a fresh set of clothes. Atop the clothing rests a note that reads: Turn right and head straight down the hall. Bedroom last door on the left. Take as much rest as you must. Lise follows the direction and finds the bedroom at the end of the narrow hall. A wall-mounted candle burns low, lighting the room with a breathing glow. A broad bed is piled high with more plush blankets and pillows than she’d ever need. Beneath the candle is a table, which also bears a tray of fresh food. Too generous all around, She notes.

As she settles into the bed, to her surprise, she sees a small timepiece set on the window sill. The dial is stopped—it hasn’t been wound. She reaches over to pick it up, gives it a glance, and sets it on the table beside the now empty tray, thinking to take a closer look at it after she’s rested. Pulling the blanket up over her arms she yawns and wriggles deeper into the bed and searches for sleep in the whorls of the clay ceiling.

\\//

Never settling solid into the undermind, Lise drifts into memory.

—3 Quadrants Ago—

Knock, knock. “Lise Niulan.”

Lise looks up from her book. “Come in.”

The door opens and Student Bessa enters. “Letter,” she says, striding up and placing it in her hands. She leaves without another word, shutting the door firmly behind her. 

Lise sighs. I just need to stop letting people in here, disrupting my equilibrium. She leans back in her chair, trying to replace her sense of ease. Writing all these essays is beginning to take a toll on her. Her mind feels constricted, tight, grinding away gray until it is black on white. No time to think anymore. She pinches the bridge of her nose. A short break. I’ll just take a short break, then back to it.

Tossing her pen to the desk, she stands roughly, kicking back her chair with the back of her legs. She turns her neck, trying to loosen the knots. Shoving the letter into her pocket for the moment, she puts her kettle on the fire for tea.

As nice as the place is, she resents the pace required in The Dwelling. Every day it seems another essay is assigned. She doesn’t feel like she’s learned anything in weeks. Just writing and writing and writing about what she’s already learned and stressing about what she wrote. With the end of the student’s year approaching, all she had enjoyed about classes has been strained away. Just more bloviating on things other people had already written about, and written better than she could on top of that. Not endless, but certainly pointless.

She stirs just enough honey into her tea—both sent to her by Seli on request. The tea here is too mild, and she isn’t fond of the bitterness of the bean juice everyone else drinks. Just a whiff of the familiar mix of spices when she pries off the metal lid is enough to soothe her somewhat.

Recalling the letter, she pulls it from her pocket and tries to unfold the crumples before cutting open the envelope.

She hopes for more of the usual from Seli—a welcome escape. There always seems to be some crises occurring in Seli’s social life. Always, one of her friends is at odds with another; someone catching feelings for a girl one of their other friends was with, accusations of cheating left and right—one boy even ended up losing a toe in some dispute over something or other. Seli has learned to avoid most of it herself, apparently, but still finds herself drawn into her friends’ quarrels. It probably doesn’t help that they are all having sex with each other with, what appears to Lise, little discernment—who is with whom at any one time often ends up being the axis upon which all the emotions spin out of control. 

And if it isn’t an issue with her friends, it is an issue with their father. Their father has never been able to come to terms with who she was, but since Quin has been gone to NON he is quicker to anger. Nothing Seli did appeases him. All this having come to a sheer precipice recently is something Lise has struggled to put aside for her studies. Seli isn’t attracted to men, for the most part; this fact she shared with Lise when she was visiting home last year. More recently, their father caught her in bed with her most recent girlfriend. This occurred just six weeks ago. He chased them from the building in a rage. Since then, Seli has needed to avoid him. Nothing has yet happened, but in her last letter she admitted her fear.

Lise is so caught up in her own stress she forgot about the last letter, and feels a bit of guilt at the notion of hoping to escape into Seli’s life. As she unfolds the paper, taking a sip of tea, a pair of sentences scrawled in broad strokes scream up at her in silence.

Mom came and went again and Dad has went over the edge.

Please come home I don’t know what to do.

Seli

Lise struggles to sleep that cycle, exhausted as she is. The letter looms unforgiving in her mind, and her heart won’t stop pounding. It leaves too much to her imagination—and what portentous imaginings she suffers. She falls into fitful sleep, and, rather than touching down in the undermind, she dreams through her sister’s eyes. Reality renders her imagination gray, insubstantial.

Seli sneaks in through the window. Her old room is a mess—he’s dug through all her things in search of… she doesn’t know what. It is hard to imagine what he thought to find. It’s not as though she is secreting a supply of girls in her room to pull out when the whim comes. Idiot. He tore through her journals and left her clothes strewn among the pages. Careful not to step on the crinkled paper, she creeps to her bed. Her sheets were pulled off and the mattress flipped, but the metal frame remains untouched. At each corner is a hollow support pole, headed by a brass knob. She works at the knob left of the head, and pries it off—a grind and pop. Inside, carefully rolled, is an unsealed envelope.

In the envelope are five pages documenting the strange behavior of their father since Lise left for The Dwelling. If the subject weren’t so serious I think she’d be amazed of how thorough I’ve been. Uncle Sere just sent off the last one a week ago, and she has a bad feeling that the situation is going to get worse before it gets better. She held off sending this letter as long as she could, knowing Lise has her own issues being all alone in that terrible place, but she needs her here now. If her last letter isn’t enough to bring her home, this will be.

“…won’t come back…” She startles, hearing his voice coming from just down the hall. “…lost the…”

Seli frowns, trying to hear what he is saying. Moving nearer the door, she stands with her back to the wall. The remaining strands of her beaded curtain dangle and clack together in the gentle draft. She can’t make out any more words, but it sounds like he is laughing softly.

Before she does anything foolish, she retreats to the window. She sets the envelope just outside, tucking it snug into a crack in the stone, and makes her way back to the doorway. I’ll just check on momma, then I’ll be gone. It’s fine. I can outrun his old ass. Still, by the time she reaches the doorway her knees knock as beads in the breeze. 

Ducking under the ripped threads, she slides into the hall. Her bare feet stick to the polished stone, peeling silently away. As she nears the room they keep mother in, his voice is louder. It isn’t laughing, she realizes, but crying. That fact alone halts her. I never heard him cry before. It shocks her, to hear it, and suddenly all the slinking around and avoiding him feels off. She isn’t ready to admit it wrong—she doesn’t think it is—she did it to protect herself—but something about hearing him cry makes her chest tight. The door is open. He’s in there with momma…

Pale orange light streams from the entrance, gleaming off the polished blue-gray. She stands back to the wall, listening—he splutters and grunts, weeping and muttering under his breath. Turning, ever so slow, she peeks one eye around the edge.

There he is, standing over mother. It is strange. He stands there, looking the same father she’s known all her life. His cloak cast off, he wears a rough yellow dress suit. His locks are pulled into a low topknot, the way mother always liked his hair. Silver streaks his short beard. Sobs shake his shoulders. Shake his right shoulder more than the left. A strange rhythmic shrug. He grunts, and something shoots out from his waist, landing across mother’s motionless face.

Seli can’t breathe. Standing directly in the doorway now, she watches him adjust his pants. His sobbing ceases, and he stands still above her body. Grumbling a moment before he kneels beside her and uses an old rag to wipe clean her crystalline face.

Seli doesn’t move, even as he rises… turns… sees her…

Meeting his eyes, she looks into the mind of a man she doesn’t know—can’t know. Her father doesn’t cry. Her father doesn’t masturbate. Her father doesn’t violate her unconscious mother. Whoever this man is can’t be her father. Those tears, that expression of shock, horror, turning nausea—none of those belong to her father. This man—this monster disgusts her. This man—she wants to kill him. This monster… speaks her name.

“Seli…”

//\\

Well after she woke, Lise hasn’t moved from the bed. The memory reignites a fury since cooled to dormancy. She understands it better, but the same desperate anger which had then drawn her inexorably home now courses through her with no avenue of expression. Rese is a sunken stone—all that remains are his ripples. She trembles, near tears, I’m sorry Seli. Fists clenched to knuckle cracking—her lack is ever more substantial. Fuck!

Fuck it. Fuck all this extra shit. I spent so much of myself trying to save everyone else, the fool I am, and ignored Seli, who I should be saving… should have saved… should… She trembles—anxious, angry, pained. An irrational agitation strains at the bars of her brain, making the underside of her skin itch. Feels like her skin might simply slough off. Crawling crawling the sensation tingles under her skin. Then it is gone; and left is her and her mind, a muddle made of it. Where is Akota? He was meant to meet me. I need to find Seli. I can’t just…

She dams the torrent in her mind, seeking silence. Be settled, Lise. Calm. I need balance. I need silence. I can’t keep doing the same shit, the same mistakes. She pinches her eyes shut, forcing darkness, willing death. When, for just a moment, she comes to emptiness, she rises from the bed.

Seating herself at the small table, she takes up the unwound pocket clock. A steel case polished smooth from frequent handling, on the cover is a worn engraving of a vase in two jagged halves. Water pools around a bundle of twelve flowers—the spectacle—five are wilted, their petals drifting on the water, shattering to specks. She rubs the lines darkened with accumulated dirt, and pops open the front. Its face watches her back with crystalline expressionlessness. From a black focus, a single line extends up to mark the moment. Four concentric rings to mark, from centermost to outer: quadrant, cycle, hour, minute. When wound, these rings revolve. Now they are still, and the black focus is unfathomable.

I’ve gone about this all wrong. I can’t run like I used to. I can’t keep pace with Seli—with nearly anyone, for that matter. I need to know the end. Where is she going? If she is still going. Where is freedom chained? Where is freedom chained? What does it mean? My movements are limited now, I must make every motion matter. Swiftness has gone ahead of me. I must make my next move deliberate, so deliberate as to be indistinguishable from prescience. I need to know where freedom is chained.

— 67 —

Time to Find

//\\

Student Denoda smiles at her but his lips never part, his cheeks pulling up so high they pinch closed his eyes. He is a man of middle height and smooth, red-brown skin. A head of thick, dark hair fall in loose curls around his chubby face. Generally affable in appearance, yet he bears a fragment of the uncanny.

When it becomes clear she won’t be the first to speak, he asks, “How do your clothes fit?”

Lise glances down at herself. She was left with a pair of loose black pants and a large golden-yellow shirt which hangs well past her waist, both of fine cloth, alongside un-dyed underwear and a set of sandals just her size. “A bit billowy, but far better than what I’d been wearing.” She tugs on the hem, “I don’t know who this shirt is meant to fit, though.”

His laugh is thin and high, “It’s a style from my people. Not usually worn as a shirt. All I’ve from Loh or otherwise wouldn’t have fitted, I don’t think.” 

The way he forms expressions on his face is strange. He moves like nothing comes naturally to him. Even now, the grin he bears is strained, pinned in place. Not false, exactly, but forced. Admittedly, she finds it easy to relate.

She isn’t sure what to say next, “Thank you. For use of your bath and for these clothes.” It comes out as awkward as she hoped it wouldn’t be. “The man who led me here… Do you happen to know who he is?”

“I do, I do. He’s a young man who has been struggling to raise his child since the mother left. I have been helping to keep his mind clear.” He nods to himself, lost in thought for a moment, then looks up to her with a gloomy smile. “I must explain—I knew you were coming. I asked to borrow his body, his mind, for a short time, as he has an unassuming air which I am unable to affect.”

“How? Why?”

“There are many answers to both questions. More specific, please.”

“How did you know I was coming? Why do all that to bring me here? How do you know me?”

“A man told me you were coming. He implied that you would know him just from that, but if that’s not enough it was a pale-skinned man with reddish hair and blue eyes. At least, that’s how he appeared in the undermind. It may have been illusion.”

“I know the man.”

“Then, I brought you here because he told me you might know the origin of these ruinous fiends who have infected our most sacred of spaces, The Dwelling.”

“…I do.”

“I know you because you were here for near two years. I keep track of every dweller in The Dwelling. Student, apprentice, visitor, I know them… Knew them.” His expression shuffles, gaze turning down and the smile straining to hold. “Kept track.” He adds, and stray tears streak down over his still spread lips. “Apologies, I’ve come to understand you’ve dealt with much the same struggles as us here, for longer, but it is a new tragedy to me. I am still coming to realize the whole of it. I have lost many friends this past week. Such a terrible time—to observe the solstice without them is an excruciating strain on my mind.”

“The solstice… Is this the cycle of the solstice? I have lost track of the night in my travels.”

“It is. Here, anyhow.”

Her first thought following that belongs to the timepiece weighing down her pant pocket, feeling the warmed metal on her fingers. She draws it out. “This may seem random, but can I borrow this? I say borrow, but I don’t know I’ll ever see you once I’m gone from here.”

“Keep it. It’s yours. The man had me retrieve it for you.”

She blinks, looking at it again, now suspect of some greater significance. “I see…” Shaking her head, she returns it to her pocket. “Did the man tell you anything of where he was going to be? I was meant to meet him somewhere here.”

“Sorry, I don’t know. My encounter with him was brief, only as substantial as the potential whose existence he conveyed. He didn’t indicate where he was staying or going.”

“Damn…” She breathes out. “What do you mean by the potential? The potential to what?”

“The potential to resolution in the inception. In how these fiends came to be, the sun will alight on the path forward.”

“Right.” She suppresses a sigh. “Well, if there exists resolution in the inception, I haven’t seen it. Knowing the beginning has only darkened the end.”

“I’d know it regardless, if you’ll allow.”

Lise looks at him long. Do I tell it all? Do I tell it at all? This man who might be able to give consequence to my failures. He was who I desired so desperately this terrible night. This guilt married to justice might set me free. But justice is impossible. Justice for everyone is turned injustice for Seli. Injustice for everyone may make justice for Seli. Do I care about what is right anymore? What is right…? If right and wrong exist, I can’t fully extricate one from the other. I can’t act on what is right or wrong… In this circumstance, anyhow.

“You have a beautiful mind.” Student Denoda says suddenly, seeming for a moment to gaze through her. Blinking, his eyes narrow in on her own as she furrows her brow. “Ah, apologies if that comes across creepish. I don’t mean it that way. What I mean is… What I should say’s I can’t really explain what I mean… I can just see you thinking so clearly. It is not just strong thinking but a rare and strange thinking, and I think it has a kind of beauty if you appreciate that. All my favorite people think similarly. Ah, similar as in similarly strange, not really similar.”

“Ah…”

“Hold on, I have a way to describe the feeling, if not the actual. It is like hearing music through a wall. I can’t make out the lyrics, but I can pick up the melody, the rhythm.”

“It’s alright, I think I understand what you mean, even if I wouldn’t ascribe any kind of beauty to my mind.”

“Then you do yourself a disservice! But I won’t try to convince you.”

“You are very in tune with others’ thoughts, I take it?”

He chuckles, speaking somewhat sardonically, “More than my own, certainly.”

“Is that to do with your ability to control others?”

“Almost definitely. Though, to adjust your understanding slightly, I don’t control. To extend the musical bit, I serve more as the lyricist. I can set lyrics in the mind, but the mind makes the tune—the understanding and performance of the lyric as well. With the man who greeted you, Adere—well, I, as you can see, am clumsy around expression—Adere is a wonderful young man with a mind trained to comfortably familiar tunes. Not to reduce him, but his tendency to that can be very useful. It serves him well as a parent, too. To lay it out simply—I only gave him the proper name, the general instructions to guide you as I needed, and his mind built up the rest around that. Does that make any sense?”

“It makes sense to me. I think that’s a good way of framing it. Was it his own input then that gave the impression that there were other people staying in this place?”

“Ah… I’m not sure about that. What did he say regarding others?”

“He just implied that there were several people staying here, that you’d accepted those who had fled The Dwelling.”

“Oh. Oh, I see. Yes, I can see how that may have slipped in there. I had reached out to offer refuge in the midst of it all, but… I’m not known well—and those who do know of me distrust me, for I know everyone well. A few stayed the first cycle or so, but it’s only me here, now—again…” He trails off, gaze distant. “…Apologies. I realize I’ve taken us on a stray path. To return to my request, will you tell me the origin of these new fiends?”

Lise scratches at her pinky nub. “I will tell you… given that I won’t be detained for it.”

“No, don’t worry for that. I’m no judge, and exerting constructed consequence is the last thing I’m interested in. I’ve certainly outed a child-toucher or two, in my time, but I’m out of people to out you to even if I thought it necessary, and have no interest in being the hangman myself.”

Lise is slow to nod, then says, “Alright. But I will have some information from you as well.”

— 68 —

Loosening Your Grip

//\\

Student Denoda makes a gesture with his left hand, staring straight down. “Sun alight me. I didn’t expect how involved you were personally. Now I understand your reticence. I cannot blame you for what you did in the circumstance, mind, but I need a moment…” He won’t look at her.

“I didn’t know what I was doing.” She adds, ashamed. And ashamed again for the excuse. In the telling she managed to keep in her tears, but her throat feels tight, aching, and her hands won’t stop shaking—even gripped to her knees. I want to be away from this feeling.

“Still, I think in a way it is remarkable. I’ve never before known of creating a fiend deliberately, whether you’d known what you were creating or not. Had you ever been fiended before then?”

“No. Not that I know.”

“You may have been right. I’m not sure this knowledge serves as much more than an explanation for their abnormal strength and behavior.”

Great. Glad I told you. “Do you have anything to drink?”

He blinks, looking up. “Certainly, certainly.” He says, standing quickly. “Any preferences? Coffee? Probably prefer tea, eh?”

“Water, please. Just water.”

He nods and hurries from the room.

Lise tries to get her breathing under control, to get her hands to stop shaking, but feels separate from her body. More the observer by the minute. She waits for it to end. 

Denoda returns with a pitcher of water, glasses, and a fruit bowl full with frozen berries. “Far from the worst way to spend the solstice, certainly.” He puts on a grin which slips off the next second. “Maybe that’s not true…”

He doesn’t elaborate, and Lise wonders at that, until she realizes he is probably referring to the recent… the ongoing tragedy. “In Opis Luma, we would be doing sacrifice soon… I don’t suppose I’ve ever enjoyed a solstice. It’s a celebration, sure, but not a joyous one.”

“My people don’t perform sacrifice, but the night solstice is a time for reflection on failure and forgiveness. It is bleak when put against the singing and salubrity of the day solstice.”

“Chorum recognizes the night solstice?”

“Sort of. When it fails, yes.”

“It always fails. Eventually.”

“Indeed.”

She takes a drink of water. It is cool, pure—and, so thirsty is she, it tastes sweet. “I used to think it was foolish, to attempt something knowing failure is inevitable. To chase the sun across the land… Though still foolish, there is something in it that I recognize now. A kind of beauty in trying anyway.”

He smiles at her, and there is none of the strain in it. “Indeed.”

A glint of silver out the window; slow, the moon rusts over—Komalle’s shadow casting it marbled crimson. Lise pulls the timepiece out and turns the knobs until the time is about right, winds it, and returns it to her pocket. Though she had not noticed the distant voices, the noise, she notices its absence now as they watch the moon slip over the sky. Dark light rings it, shimmering against the stars. The color rolls across its face, turning scarlet and fading sallow, yellow-brown, to black with a sliver gray. 

“What do you intend to do now?” Denoda asks, taking a handful of the frozen berries. “Stay as long as you like, mind, only curious. Maybe I can help?”

Lise returns to herself, taking a sip of water before answering, “I mean to find my sister. I had her trail for a while, until I got into a fight with a big damned bird.” She almost laughs. “It crippled me. I don’t think I’ll be able to catch up with her even if I could track her the same way.”

“How had you been tracking her before?”

“Projecting ahead of myself in the undermind and following the trail of outbreaks. I got so near at one point I had preceded an outbreak, and it happened while I was in town. Then the raptor, and getting held up in another town right after, and I’ve utterly lost her. All I have is a paradox which may indicate her goal, so I may be able to find her there, but more likely it’s just some nonsense of the fiends.” She sighs, and they are silent again, listening to the gradual reawakening of Loh Corone.

Lise looks out the window, and down at the street below, where people are flowing back home from wherever they were gathered for the solstice. The people are varying shades of solemn, lowered heads well-wrapped against the dry cold. It feels like forever since she’s been more than a floor off the ground, and being on the third level now is an odd comfort—reminding her of cozy nights home, reading and looking out from her room as dark figures move about the street. I wonder what they’re thinking about right now. What worries weigh them down? How do they perceive their lives? I wonder what keeps them going. I wonder how hard the waves I made move will crash down here, when that container cracks again.

“How many made it out of The Dwelling?”

“What’s that?” Denoda starts, turning from the window.

“You kept track of everyone in there, if we knew how many made it out we could extrapolate how long the fiends might persist—given the dome keeps. More pressingly, how long until they become ravenous and start trying to escape in earnest.”

He winces. “I couldn’t even give an approximate. I tried early on to keep a census but gave up—it was tedious and it wasn’t my reason for doing what I do. I’m no numbers person. One of the other students might have that information, but I’m useless.”

Lise looks at him, “What, then, was your reason if not that?”

“Put simply, to prevent you… Well, to be precise I was meant to keep track of everyone’s minds, to prevent the spontaneous development of fiends. I suppose I served a similar use to the dwellers here as many other dwellers serve everyone else in the outside world. Of course, what’s happened was far beyond anything I would have anticipated. In my time, never had I seen a single fiend born in the dwelling—and that was the worst I could imagine, back then.”

“I know there has to have been at least a thousand, probably closer to ten thousand, in The Dwelling while I was here. How could you have kept track of so many, so many coming and going, so intimately as to tell they were becoming fiended. Not to mention they were all dwellers—their minds so much more resilient to interference. I know of strange abilities some dwellers develop, but that seems far beyond anything I’ve known. Are you a genius?”

Denoda massages his neck, “Ah, well, no, I’m no genius. I do have some abilities—my ear for the mind’s music, for one—and that makes it easier in some ways, but I couldn’t keep track on such a scale with just my self. It’s facilitated through a particular device…”

“What device?”

“It’s… The device essentially keeps a constant record of The Dwelling, which you can then access through the undermind. I suppose you could call it a kind of confined omniscience.”

A chill traces up her spine. “Confined omniscience…” She feels a rush of exhilaration. “That sounds like the phrase my sister used—the place where freedom is chained. Can you see the parallel there? Have you ever heard anything about a place where freedom is chained?”

— 69 —

Ponder Dreaded Wonder

//\\

Lise places a stack of eight thin metal bars onto the counter. She takes the parcel and thanks the woman handing it to her. 

“If you have need of anything else stop by and we’ll see what we can do for you.”

“I appreciate it.” She replies, turning to leave.

“Ah, one thing.” The woman halts her and gestures to lean in. “I let something special slip into your order. Just try it out and let me know what you think.”

“Thank you.” She holds her smile firm until she makes it out, and hurries back as best as her pain-riddled body will allow.

Student Denoda is waiting for her in the front room. “Well?” He asks.

She sets her package on the low table and lowers herself into one of the plush chairs. Too soft, she thinks as she sinks into it, knowing that extricating herself will be difficult. “I think I’ve got what I need.” She says, leaning forward to procure a small glass pipe, a new flick-lighter, and a waxen pouch full of crystalline green flowers. 

A second pouch tumbles out beside it, and Lise looks at it, confused. “The merchant said she gave me something else to try as well, but what are these? Is this a joke?” She takes a sniff before taking out one of the brown lumps. “Well, it smells fine. Not like shit, I mean. Do you know what this is?”

Denoda takes the lump and looks it over; breaking it in two, he examines it closer. “I’ve no clue. Wouldn’t eat them, coming from that place. Mind, you’ve still got to be careful with that flower you’ve got there, but the way it alters your thinking is relatively subtle so long as you’re careful. This might be a different creature entirely, and I wouldn’t risk trying it. Although, she probably gave them you because I was influencing her to treat you well.”

“I see. Well, I’ll just leave it here if you don’t mind. I only need something to curb my pain.” She tosses the pouch to the table and gathers the rest back into the parcel. “Have you heard from any of the remaining students?”

“I have…” He doesn’t elaborate.

“Did they deny that the dome won’t hold?”

“No, no, they agree. That they were so quick to agree is why I’m concerned. Considering we couldn’t crack it in reality, it’s interesting that this incident with the fiends has made it vulnerable in the mind. It will probably crack sooner than we think. Many of them have fled already, knowing this to be. Perhaps damning this to be. It is turning brittle despite reality. More leave by the cycle, and still the people of Loh Corone and Seretremane are left blind and deaf to this bloody blossom about to bloom.”

“Is there nothing we can do?”

“I don’t know. But as soon as I get you in, I’m going to start going mind to mind, imparting the danger to the best of my ability.”

“You won’t guide me through?”

“No, I can’t. I have an unfortunate inability to visualize, and can’t protect you. I can’t protect myself. So, no, I can’t, but I’ve got someone who can. Though I warn, they only accepted conditionally…”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Lise drags the heavy coat over her shoulders, tugging to straighten the collar. “You can’t tell me you had this lying around too. If you wore this it would tatter on the ground.”

Denoda has a laugh like a child’s. “No, no. I bought it off a man on the street while you were resting.”

Feeling suddenly awkward, “Thank you, um, I… You’ve done a lot for me despite having just met. I am undeserving, but I’m grateful.”

“You forget—I’ve known all in The Dwelling. I feel a pseudo-parental responsibility to care for anyone who’s so much as poked their head in. You are no exception, regardless. But I’ll accept your thanks.”

Lise smiles, sliding her parcel into one of the coat’s larger pockets and buttoning it. “Truly, I–”

“Let’s hold any further gratitude until you’ve met your escort. You might be less inclined to thank me. Go on and collect whatever else you need and head to the entrance. I’ll still be with you here,” he taps on his temple, “until you get inside.”

‘There is a silence at the center of your mind. Even as sound surrounds it, I can sense a swallowing silence. Do you know this?’

Lise hears Student Denoda’s musings echo around her mind as she thinks… walking slow along the right side of a stranger’s skoi-pulled carriage. The animal’s dry, uncreased hide stretches and slicks with its rolling motions. It looks well cared for. For a creature broken-in, it has the appearance of wholeness. As the carriage gradually outpaces her, she drifts into its wake. It is a welcome shelter from the uncompromising, if lethargic, throng… She doesn’t really have a response for Denoda; she doesn’t like his proximity while she is vulnerable to his influence. It is more unsettling than she wants to admit to have him listening in, perhaps plucking her strings—mundane as her thoughts are at this moment.

She follows the carriage until it makes a left turn, and she has to struggle on without it. The pain she feels when merely brushed against is a new talon curling into her chest, and she has to stop several times just to allow the immediate pain to pass.

‘Fascinating…’ He comments, and she can’t help a stab of agitation.

I need to be more considerate of peering into the minds of others thoughtlessly… whatever my intent.

Leaning on the wooden beam which holds up a cloth canopy, Lise takes a tender inhale, testing the capacity of her lungs. The pain is unbearable before she’s taken half a breath. She takes a few more to settle the tumult in her mind. The man who runs the stall she is standing beside is trying to shoo her off, but he is just one more clatter in the expanding clamor. Wicked away with a flick of mind. She opens her eyes and rejoins the listless procession.

‘What was that? What did you do just now?’ A note of wonder on his tongue as he asked, Denoda sounded bewildered. ‘You’re not going to reply? Can you? Long’s I’m in contact you should be able to talk back to me.’

Lise doesn’t much care for his commentary. ‘I don’t recall you ever being so graceless during my stay in The Dwelling.’

‘I… Apologies, I am… I’m not sure how to handle myself outside my prior constraints… I will fetter myself.’

‘It’s fine. Just… I don’t want to hear what my mind sounds like right now.’ She feels death’s imminence. She knows death’s imminence infinite. ‘I think I missed turning nineteen. I just realized that. I’ve missed two now.’

‘What? Sorry, I don’t follow.’

The dome looms large, and beyond the blue Lise sees a blackness deeper than night. Not even the tallest of the tiered structures within are visible. Not a silhouette. It appears an opaque dark has filled in the sapphirine panes. Is it her imagination or reality? It doesn’t matter so much—real is the dread which presses her to flee from that darkness.

‘Random thought.’ She answers Denoda, trying to draw her mind back. ‘NON. That silence. I’ve lost those cycles to NON. I turned nineteen on the seventy-seventh last quadrant. Did I miss my final birth cycle? I wonder. Consider trying to convince the people the dome will hold, that it’s impervious. Convince enough and the dome may hold. It will save more if it works.’

‘Lise, are you alright? You’re sounding… disjointed.’

‘It will kill more if it fails. I’m fine. I don’t know. I feel irregularly afraid. I’m fine, but I think I’ll die. I get the sense of something terrible, something I feel I should recognize. A forgotten nightmare I know only by the hollow depression left in its place. I am somewhat fragmented.’

Lise rests, trembling, on the crumbled clay bricks of a low wall, looking on The Dwelling’s entrance. She feels the cracks. The edges of the gap. She feels the cracks in her mind tactile. Tender are its edges. What has come over me? I am breaking. What cycle is this?

‘I come apart as I near the dome. I feel something within. It repels me.’ Is all Lise can say, so absorbed is she by the presence she knows. Certain now that it is conscious—prodding at her tender spots, inducing dysphoria.

‘I’m trying to feel it, Lise. I can hear the dissonance in your mind, but I can’t what’s causing it.’

Lise looks down at her hands, and they seem unreal, almost transparent. They might come apart. They and the world might come apart. She and they and the world will come apart. I’ve failed. I’ve failed. I’ve failed. I am death and dying. I am failure drawn out, diffused. I am irredeemable. I can’t continue like this. I’m irreparable. The hideous cripple I am. I am wrong. I shouldn’t be this. I-I-I-I…

She feels herself split, peeled in two. The fool I am. She is the ugly, pained cripple, and she is the fool. The fool I am. In reality, the fool. Akota… She splits and the fool drifts back, seeing clear what the other sees murky. I am being manipulated by something. Something is causing my mind to contort. It doesn’t want me to enter the dome. I am being influenced. It is making me feel broken, unstable. I need to get aw… I need to… I don’t ‘need to’ anything.

Student Denoda is trying to talk to her.

I’m not broken. I feel the gaps, but I am not shattered. Cracked, perhaps… She takes a breath. I am Lise. I am a dweller. I must find balance. The rest of her drifts back and she is rejoined, and no longer can that ‘something’ reach her. No longer do her hands appear near transparent.

She feels it trying to grasp her still, but it slips off her. Before she thinks it, she is already walking. I need to go now. I can’t wait for the escort. A feeling, an intuition, draws her inexorably to The Dwelling. Denoda is trying to reach into her, desperate to turn her away; he impresses intent on her and it drips away ink on oiled steel.

Several dwellers are asleep around a smoldering fire-pit outside the registry, and she assumes more are inside. As she approaches, one rises from her cot and blinks awake, kicking off a tangle of blankets. “Hey! Hey wait! Stop!” She calls after Lise. “The Dwelling is infested! You will be eaten alive in there!”

Lise doesn’t slow. If whatever fiend had been trying to influence her couldn’t in her present state, there was little chance any other could. I just need to reach the center. I know where to go. Just need to get inside it. Straight through.

“Lise! You’ve none to protect you!” 

The woman puts a hand on her shoulder, trying to stop her. Not ten paces away is the entrance. Open to the darkness within. Lise looks and sees nothing. Akota is in there. With that thought is a certainty she hasn’t felt in… too long. It is a kind of euphoria, to be certain.

“Denoda.” She says without looking to the woman. “Let me go. Do what I’ve suggested and the city will be safe from what awaits me.”

“You will die!”

“What is another death? Another life?” When every moment I die again; every moment I am born.

The woman’s fingertips trail down her shoulder as she steps forward, but she does not try to stop her again. Lise walks into darkness, and knows its weight.

— 70 —

This Sliding Axis

//\\

As soon as she steps inside The Dwelling she feels them. Scrabbling along her smooth surface, she can almost hear their claws clicking above her. Their desperation is palpable—their hunger a low rumble.

The darkness is no less now that she is inside; impossible to see her surroundings despite the starlight gleaming blue-white through the panes. She pulls out her new flick-lighter and lights it. The glow it casts is weak, and just manages to graze the cobbles from her upheld hand. Straight to the center. Just keep straight.

The city within The Dwelling is laid out in eight concentric rings, broken only by a road from the dome’s entrance to the building at its center. The building has no official name but most referred to it as ‘the hinge’ for reasons she was never able to figure out. Among other things, it is where most of her classes were held, and Denoda said the only way to interact with the device was from a room beneath the hinge. Just need to keep to the center.

Lise begins to walk, ready for something to leap out of the darkness any moment. On edge, every hair is stood on end—even as the fiends’ efforts to reach her ebb. She holds out her lighter, oscillating her arm, trying to make out any of her surroundings. The fiends are gone from her, and she is alone. Silence resounds, interpolated with the soft grind of her hard leather sole on stone.

She is tempted to venture to the side, to seek out the buildings which she knows must be there just beyond the reach of her flame. Just keep straight. I might not be able to maintain this mind state long. Even now, she is nestled behind her own eyes. Looking through them to reality. I don’t know if I’ll be able to induce it again.

Distant, a sound. A skitter echoing out. It’s coming from her left—somewhere near the playhouse, it sounds. Perhaps the farms, depending how far in she’s walked. Some animals must still be alive, she hopes.

Lise trips almost as soon as she quickens her pace. What meager agility she’s retained saves her the fall, extending her leg to catch herself on the same foot that was tripped. She steps over and lowers her lighter to see what had nearly planted her face in the cobbles.

It is the body of an older man. He lay face down, a graying topknot left half-undone, several locks hanging over his cheek. His clothing is thin and silken, wrapped close around his deep brown skin; she knows a hunter’s cloth when she sees it. It strikes her, then, that from the back he looks painfully familiar. Hands shaking, she turns him over.

His mouth is caved in. The shards of his teeth poke through blood crusted lips. One eye is smashed into his skull, and the other looks through her, amber, fine wrinkles at the corner. Flesh beginning to soften. It’s not him. Still, this was a man who lived and breathed and thought and felt and cried and laughed. What is lost in the decaying of his mind? What inimitable experiences now leak from his ear?

She lets go her breath, and reaches to take his belt knife. Don’t falter now. I cannot afford the fall.

Walking again, Lise closes the lighter and carefully slides the bare bladed knife into her coat. She clicks the lighter back on, and watches a draft blow it left. It gutters, dancing round the wick, but keeps alight. In the dark beyond, she sees the man’s amber eye again. And again. The man’s eyes are all about her. Staring through her, amber. She blinks.

Just keep it together, Lise. Almost to the center. Don’t panic yet…

Against the night, she catches a glimpse of the hinge’s silhouette, its six-pronged upper structure scraping near the dome’s apex. She is grateful the opaque dark shrouds the eye-bending intricacies of its metalline form—whose strangeness in the eye is exacerbated by the warped light the dome permits. Its beguiling glimmer might draw her out from her present safety.

Run. The thought arises a second before she hears the footsteps. Running. Where did they come from?! Lise spins, waving the lighter before her, trying to see how many…

Something hard slams into her right shoulder, sending a wave of pain through her chest. Fuck! She stumbles to the side. They are silent but for the scuffing on stone. The only breathing she hears is her own rasping. Run.

She is hit again, this time a sharpness grazing her cheek. Feeling it split skin—hot—wet running down her neck.

Her lighter gone out in her hand, Lise runs for the center, desperate. Every step is a talon to impale her on every restrained gasp for air. A terror unfathomable spears, and she knows safety left behind her. Fool! Fool! Her mind on end with fear. She runs and runs despite the pain, knowing that to falter now is to fall, and to fall now is to never rise.

She clips her elbow on a building to her left and adjusts her stride, biting her lip bloody. They are upon her. They are chewing and tearing and eating away what deterrents she has, enfeebled before them, and the footsteps are not far behind. NON save me!

As she runs, she feels the cobbles change to something smoother, and NON yawns wide. Oh shit… All around her the slaps and cracks of bodies hitting the ground limp echoes. The gap is inevitable.

NON

— 71 —

Makes Me Totter

//\\

With the veil peeled away, a sole streak of fine light extends slow into the infinite dark. She does not hesitate before seizing it. Slow it comes and slow it draws her out. A flick-lighter passes before her blinking eyes; blinking away blindness, she sees a smile.

“Hey.”

Lise feels herself impaled, and from her mouth a silent scream echoes. She feels it pierce her chest bone and come grinding out through her spine. When she lifts her head, there is nothing there. Pain’s hand holds her pinned.

“P-Pipe…” She reaches for the pocket but her hands shake so much she can’t unfasten the button.

Holding up the parcel, he asks, “This?”

“Please…” She needs it.

He peeks inside, sniffing. “Hoo! That is potent. Here, I’ll just prepare it for you real quick.”

She watches him take the parcel over to a table, biting down so hard her head quakes. It is so hard to wait. He goes through the process smoothly: procuring both the flower pouch and pipe, then pulling a bud out and breaking it up into the pipe’s bowl. It is merely seconds before he is returning to her with the medicine.

“Can you sit up?”

Lise shifts her shoulder slightly. “No…”

“Alright, let me put this pillow under your head then.” He carefully props her head up, and retrieves the pipe from the table. “I’ll hold it for you—you just breathe in.”

He holds the pipe to her lips and lowers the lighter to the bowl. She draws on it and comes up shallow as the pain quickens to unbearable. He is patient, kneeling quietly beside her as the minutes pass and she smokes the flower away in increments; and the more she does the more she can do. By the time she finishes her second bowl, she is sitting and lighting it herself.

Lise proffers the pipe, “Do you want some?” 

Akota lifts a hand, palm forward. “I’m good. Thank you, though.”

“Ah, okay.” She sets it down on the table, feeling somewhat awkward now. Her mind is loud with everything but words, and she can’t help her growing tension knowing she should have so much to say, so much to ask.

He chuckles, and she looks up to find him watching her. “You know, I’ve not seen silence bother you like this. It’s fine. You just came from NON and woke to pain, then we’ve spent the last however long smoking that parasite out. It’s always fine not to be sure what to say—even more so right now.”

A wan smile is all she has for response, adding a nod as she sighs relief out her nose.

“I’ll cook something up real quick. Knowing you, you’ve probably forgotten to eat.” He says, but already she is losing focus.

Her mind is a rush, still streaming out from NON. All the reek she’s smoked has her eyelids heavy and her head floating. It is pleasant and scary, and she struggles with her fleeting attention. When her eyes close she sees shapes forming against her backlit eyelids, shifting form and shade at her mind’s touch. Virtually tangible, but impossible to recreate.

She hears the clink of porcelain and opens her eyes at the first scent of sharp spice. The shapes linger in the periphery of her vision, gradually retreating until they exist only in her imagination. In the swirl of tea set before her, a sprinkle of red spice stipples the surface and spreads in a darkening spiral; the shapes begin to reemerge there.

“You have changed a lot since we last met in the flesh, Akota.”

She looks up, and briefly the spiral persists before her eyes. Akota’s blue gaze fastens to it—or did she imagine it? It was so quick, and her mind is so sedate.

“Before you have the presence of mind to respond, I am going to tell you some things. Is that okay?” He waits for a response…“Feel free to eat while I talk.”

Lise looks down at the plate he’d set beside her tea. Mushrooms pan-fried and layered with pepper and grains of a blue mineral, alongside a medley of steamed vegetables. She takes a bite of plump mushroom, and feels a tingle in her spine as the taste hits home. The pepper is fresh, pungent, and matches with the subtle tartness of the mineral—she can’t recall the last time she tasted something so good… The tea is even better. 

When she is done, she leans back, and sees Akota waiting. “You said you were going to talk?”

He chuckles. “Well, I was… Then I realized you weren’t listening.”

“Oh.” Lise blinks. “My bad.”

He dismisses it with a wave. “I’m in no rush. Are you inclined to answer now or would you rather listen?” When she says nothing, he grins—she grins. “I’m disproportionately self-satisfied with my own cleverness, and I apologize for rubbing off on you.”

“If anyone needs to apologize for rubbing off on anyone it’s Rese.”

Akota snorts. “Well, one of the things Quin told me when she asked me to come to Opis Luma was that I would counter his influence in her absence—at least, until you could counter it yourself.”

He doesn’t know… High as she is, Lise feels it strange that something she said went over Akota’s head. She doesn’t know if she should tell him about that.

“Akota…”

“Yes?” He is watching her now, having seen the consideration on her face.

“Can I tell you about how and why all this came about? Why I went back home, and all of that?”

“If you feel the need to tell it now, that’s fine, but can it wait a little while? I have something to tell you about. And I want to show you something before we start on that.”

“…It can wait.”

“Ah, good. Then, first, did your mother ever tell you anything about me? How we met or anything like that?”

Lise shook her head. “She said you were her friend from when she went to… when she came here. That was about it. Dad would be in a mood if she mentioned you so she didn’t.”

“He always suspected our relationship of being more than friends.” Akota smiles, eyes distant for a moment before refocusing on her. “And I suppose we were more than friends, but not how he feared…We met in this very room, you know. She yelled at me.”

“This room?” Lise looks around. It is one of the open rooms used recreationally by students between classes. There are several stoves lining the wall ahead of her, and sinks beside, and a large clay oven off to the left. In the center of the room is the long, hexagonal table at which they sit, under the light of the three-pronged candelabra Akota had lit. Behind her are a set of lounge chairs atop a black fur rug which seems too much for any one creature, and yet appears seamless. “Why did she yell at you?”

“Well, she’d just arrived within the week and struck up conversation with me. Said I seemed the most approachable. See, that’s how I get ya. First, I appear harmless. Then, I reveal that in addition to being harmless, I am also a fool.” He laughs. “At the time, she didn’t enjoy the company of fools, or to be made one. Of course, that changed, on some level, at some point, or we wouldn’t be discussing this. But anyway, it wasn’t too dissimilar from our first interaction, though her reaction was a bit more yelly. Calling me an idiot and all that, you know how it goes.”

“Really? She was that angry? I never saw her like that.”

“She was a bit quicker to boil before the whole ‘NON’ thing started becoming more of an issue. I was well used to that kind of reaction by then so it didn’t bother me, but yeah, she had a bit of a cruel streak at one time. Anyway, when she first became afflicted by a bout of it about a year into studying she was gone for three nights. By the time she returned, most of her friends had left The Dwelling for their homes. To keep it briefish—I may or may not have been the one to accidentally revive her. And by accidentally, I mean I had been breaking into her room, trying to figure out how to revive her and stumbled into the answer.”

“Wait, slow down… I don’t know where to start with any of that. How much are you omitting?”

“Mmm, about four years if we’re going by time.”

“Alright… fair enough. Not trying to pry but I’m admittedly very interested in the details because neither of you ever really told me about any of this. For good reason, I hope.”

“Good reason? There are reasons. Most of them trivial. Quin asked me not to say ‘too much’ until ‘the time is right’ and didn’t give much indication as to what either of those meant. I didn’t want to risk anything, given the stakes were low at the time so I said nothing that might be ‘too much’, and that may have (probably) been a mistake on my part. I’m telling you now, because at this point I don’t know when there will be another opportunity. 

“To be excessively clear, I was not party to everything she planned—or anything, really, by the time she told me she succeeded. We’ve been friends much of the time, but not all of the time. We’ve never agreed on everything, and much of this has to do directly with what we disagreed on most. Everything surrounded NON, and how to respond to its existence. Or nonexistence. Semantics… When she realized it was more than an illness, she sought to make use of it, and went deeper and deeper into it. You know anything about diving?”

“Diving? I know of it, but not about it.”

“Ah then nevermind that. I was going to make an analogy but it doesn’t matter.” He paused, tracing back the line of his thought. “Over time, I became less a friend and more a partner for her experiments, and then less a partner and more the function for her revival. It was a very difficult thing for me to witness and experience, especially as one who doesn’t take friendship lightly. Quin’s obsession with NON had become detrimental. I might have moved on a long time ago if she hadn’t succeeded—at least, in some capacity.”

“She… succeeded? How? Succeeded in doing what?”

“No more questions. I’ll get to it. At the height of her obsession, Quin had prepared to meet NON and told me not to revive her until twenty nights had passed… I was devastated. Although she’d continued her research and writing, she hadn’t gone under in over a year, and I thought she was finding a balance. So when she said that to me I was shocked. I left, with no intention of returning… Keep in mind, she no longer trusted anyone but me, and me only so far as was necessary to trust. I was the only person who knew how to bring her back… I returned to The Dwelling twenty years later, and brought her back. It took something like five cycles for her to fully regain consciousness, but when she did she immediately isolated herself and began her work again. I thought–”

“Twenty years… I don’t… Akota, you’re leaving more out than I can compensate for right now.”

“Well, you know how when in NON your body is in stasis? It’s that.”

“I mean, I’ve sort of put that together, but I wasn’t sure. And wait, what of you? The timelines don’t match your appearance. You still look no older than thirty, yet you speak of twenty years and more passing. I… This is difficult for me to process right now… My mother… What year was she born?”

“Look, I’m a bit off-kilter right now myself. I’m trying to keep it concise but also my history with your mother spans many many years and not even half of those years were spent doing her bidding, so I’m juggling all that and trying to keep it concise and relevant and I didn’t prepare a presentation or anything it’s all off the dome. If I remember correctly, she was born some time before 3000, I think. I don’t recall if she told me or I surmised but that’s what I remember. As for me, I’m certain we already discussed my opinion on this. First of all, death is made up. Second, death is gross. Any other questions?”

“Too many to ask.”

“Ah, good; don’t. What was I saying?”

“What use she found in NON?”

“Right, I was just getting to that. I don’t really know what she succeeded in doing, sorry. I eventually coerced her out of isolation by threatening to leave forever. I was a bit bitter about how she had shut me out again immediately after I revived her. I regretted returning. She told me she had succeeded, but guarded every piece of information jealously. I will admit, I believe I know what she managed to attain, but I will not share it with you unless I know that I know.”

“Will you ever know you know? I recall you saying we never know, only think.”

“I’ve not known a single thing in the whole of my existence. In reality, everything I perceive, everything I conceive, inherits my imperfections. True knowledge resides in the same realm as perfection, as certainty. So, no, I will never truly know, but I’m not doing my lingual-foolery to get out of telling it to you. If my intuition is correct, it is not something to speculate on frivolously to someone who might act on it. Should I hear it from Quin herself, I will share it with you.”

“She is gone.”

“…What?”

“My mother passed in the midst of the situation last day.”

Akota shakes his head. “No. No, that’s not possible. You can’t affect the body while it is in NON, I assure you. We tested it a hundred different ways. Only after she awoke could anything leave even a scratch. She could probably be tossed into the sea and fished back up a hundred years later, and still return to breath when she rose. Did you see her die? Her body? I’m sorry, but I can’t trust it unless you did.” And he looks ready to deny further.

“She was immolated on the solstice.” She massages the part of her palm beneath her pinky nub. “I returned to Opis Luma the cycle prior and by then her body… was gone, along with Rese. Our home was abandoned. I only found out about it after.”

“Fuck. Fuck… I honestly… Fuck. I need a moment to process. I… I’m sorry. I know it must have been even harder for you, but I’m in shock. I knew eventually she would probably pass, but I thought if…”

“But if what you say is true, she might have survived the expiatory flame. Right?”

He shakes his head. Remains silent. Shakes his head again, eyes looking through the table. “I knocked over a candle.”

Lise waits… “Akota, I don’t understand.”

“I bumped the nightstand and the candle fell onto her. I can still see the flame lighting her closed eyes. It landed still beside her face, and I watched as the charred wick touched her cheek. And I stood watching as her eyes slowly opened, and her skin began to blacken and blister.” He takes a shuddering breath. “That’s how we discovered heat was the rope to pull her from NON. Even if she was in NON when she was immolated, she would have risen to a burning end amongst the ashes.”

— 72 —

The Autumn Come

//\\

Lise doesn’t ask to stop for another break, she is ashamed she’s had to twice already. They are walking down a hall which leads to the stairs down into the lower levels of the hinge. Out of breath—the pain has her near out her mind—she staggers along behind him, right hand trailing along the cold stone wall. Dim, for the only light comes from Akota’s upheld candelabra. The shapes carved into the wall make it feel as though she traces her fingers over the inside of a long rib-cage.

They arrive at a set of stairs, steps long and shallow, broadening along the way to the bottom. He slows to a stop at the top of the stairs. Thank the land! She resists the urge to slump, leaning heavy on the wall. “Do you…” Her throat is so tight her breaths whistle. “Do you know… what’s down there?”

“Do you? I urged that man—what was his name? Denoda?—I impressed upon him that he should open any door for you. Did he tell you?”

“I… Yes, he told me.”

“Good. He gave you my little machine too?”

“Machine? Are you talking about the pocket clock?”

“Whatever you wanna call it.” He shrugs. “Alright, well that means you have a choice to make. Right now, we can go down there, and you can use the device. Or you can choose not to use the device.”

“Why would I choose not to?”

“A number of reasons. It’s difficult to use and has the potential to greatly alter your mind. In addition, I’ve also already used it, and your sister never passed through here. Unless in the brief time she’s dwelled, she learned how to reverse-engineer the device and erase her presence from its memory which would be nigh impossible without needing to entirely rewrite everything that came after her as well. Also, there’s information in it that would probably change your course.”

“In response to that—how difficult? How would it alter my mind? How certain are you she didn’t pass through? The way Denoda described the device sounded very similar to something I heard Seli say. Could they be related? And regarding information that would change my course, everything I am exposed to alters my course; why should I try to deny that here?”

“Difficult in that it is difficult to use and maintain a sense of self to return to after. I don’t know how it would alter your mind, but I knew Denoda’s predecessor (or was it his predecessor’s predecessor?)—whatever—he lost much of his memory of his childhood and over time he… Well, to be honest you probably wouldn’t have to worry unless you used it a lot so maybe disregard that bit. As for that last part, would you use that same argument to justify sticking your hand into a hole in the ground without knowing what resides there?”

“No, you’re right. But still, if someone who knew what was in the hole told you that what was in the hole would change your life you might be curious enough to stick your hand in.”

“Fair enough, but it's probably not the kind of change you’d be happy to allow. I still haven’t understood the implications myself, and it is already changing my own course immensely. If you tell me what they said that might be related, I can confirm or deny your suspicion, and potentially remove the reason for risking yourself.”

“Right, well, I haven’t heard it from Seli myself, but heard her say it to someone else when I looked into some of their memories. The phrase she used was ‘where freedom is chained’ and what Denoda said was that it was like ‘confined omniscience’. He said he’d never heard of anything about freedom being chained and didn’t have any idea what it might mean, but didn’t deny that they could be related.”

Akota rubs the back of his neck. “Hm. Well, they probably are related. On some level, at least. But this is not where freedom is chained. Rather, everywhere is where freedom is chained.”

“Okay, what does that mean?”

He noticed her arms trembling, her knees knocking. “Before that, do you want to sit down? We can go into the room—the device is harmless to sit beside.”

“That would be good.”

He lets her balance herself against him as they descend. The stairs lead into a room smaller than she expected—rounded, about ten paces in diameter—and centered in it is a suspended half-sphere, a hollow replica of the dome rendered in milky blue. It radiates pale light, gently turning on its obscured axis. A lone chair, well cushioned, rests just beneath the peculiar device.

Akota drags the chair out from under it and sets it before Lise. “What I meant by ‘everywhere is where freedom is chained’ is more of a philosophical thing which I can explain later if you like, but while it may be related in its own way, I imagine what your sister means when she says it is more concrete than that. Perhaps with a more concrete locus. Perhaps a device much like this one—of which there are many.”

Lise lowers herself into the chair carefully as Akota sits on the floor beside her. “Like this one? What do you mean?”

“Well, like that crank thing we met at. Devices which have some sort of connection with the undermind.”

“Damn, I almost forgot about that. What was that thing? It was like the undermind and reality were temporarily melded by it.”

“I don’t really know much more about it than you. I find them fascinating—looking for them’s become a bit of a hobby of mine over the years—but I haven’t figured them out. Not completely, anyway. I don’t even know what they’re supposed to be called, if they’re meant to be called anything. I just call them devices because they’ve become a devilish little vice for me.”

Lise chuckles. “Do you think the sphere in The Home of Silence one of them?”

“Probably, but I haven’t been able to figure what it’s supposed to do—if it does anything.”

“I saw something kind of like this in a little town called Dejed, but it didn’t have a real counterpart. Do you know anything about that?”

“You mean like the buildings that were near the crank?”

“Sort of, but it was just these two shapes floating in the middle of this hollow tower in the town. One was dark and one was light.”

“Ah, I see. I think there’s something similar in Kellean. I’ve seen it from a distance, but wasn’t allowed access to it.” He sighs. “Yeah, I don’t know. We could check the library for any information on it, but the librarian’s corpse is in there, and I’m no librarian to know where everything is off top. And I don’t think we have the kind of time that permits perusal… Do you know where your sister might have heard that phrase? And then, what would compel her to pursue it?”

“Well, I’ve just assumed it was the fiends compelling her. I don’t know that she came up with it, heard it somewhere, or if it’s a product of the fiends’ corruption. These new fiends—I think these new fiends have a strange effect on dwellers. You’ve probably noticed already, but they don’t seem to merely consume, but control and influence to serve their desires. They seem to have a degree of intelligence.”

Akota nods, and when Lise looks, his eyes are distant. “Yeah, I’ve noticed…” He looks near to continuing, but shakes his head. “I won’t say that it’s impossible that it is solely a product of the fiends, but it may stem from a seed already in her mind. Even if the fiends are intelligent on some level, I don’t think their capacity for it is high, and they likely have next to no memory. I think it more likely they utilize the minds of those they fiend for those purposes. I should say, what I’m leading up to is actually something I wanted to show you anyway. Can you sleep?”

“I… What you said about the fiends using the minds of dwellers… I think some of my experiences might corroborate that, but I’ll need to think it over. As for sleeping… Probably not in this chair.”

“Have you still been practicing that meditation technique?”

Lise winces. “I was practicing every cycle while I was here, but the situation at home started happening and I lost the habit.”

Akota stands, dusting off his pants. “Well, unlose the habit. It will come in handy for a variety of reasons—your newfound pain problem included.” He helps her to her feet. “Let’s go steal a wink in some else’s beds and try our best not to think about how whoever used them last might be dead.”

\\//

The undermind whirls, shape warping. Lise is stood tottering by the bedside when she becomes conscious of the shift.

‘You alright?’

She looks around, noting the uncanny solidity of the bedroom. It seems real—the texture of the blanket appearing in full detail, the wall carvings exact, and even the lighting looks natural. In his hands, she finds the same candelabra lit and the flames flicking a near perfect recreation. She watches a droplet of wax spill over and drip onto the ground, cooling to an opaque blue on the stone floor.

‘What’s happened? Why does it look so real?’

Akota bites his lip to restrain his self-satisfied smirk but fails. ‘Being the sanest person on Komalle, it makes sense that I would also have the nearest to perfect clarity of perception. Though, admittedly I was assisted in creating my model of The Dwelling by that very convenient confined omniscience which I took advantage of while confined here.’

‘But… Denoda… Ah, nevermind, I just remembered he can’t visualize.’

‘Even if he could, he’s not the sanest creature in the world as I am.’

‘Right…’ Lise moves to leave.

‘Ah, Akota, wait!’ He calls after her. She stops by the door. ‘Before we do anything, just make sure not to try leaving this building yet. There’s a fiend out there that neither of us can face.’

Lise nods. ‘I felt it when I came here. It tried to repel me. Its influence reached me even out in Loh Corone.’

‘I’ve managed to keep it out of this building but I worry when it grows hungry again it will break out of the dome. It’s been a difficult balance to keep its attention on me by provoking it but also not frustrate it so much it loses interest. We just need to be careful. Sane as I am, perfection doesn’t exist in this realm.’ He drops the candelabra. It clatters and bounces off the floor only to vanish mid-air the next instant. ‘Alright, now we can go. Once I show you what I’m about to, you’ll understand why I had you hold off on recounting what happened in Opis Luma.’

Akota leads her out into the hinge’s main hall. Where once the arched entrance was there is a wall of stone. They start up the stairs spiraling towards the ceiling far above, but he abruptly stops five steps up.

‘Hold the railing.’

She grabs on just in time. Winding them round the pillar, the stairs begin to turn and rise rapidly. They are beyond the ceiling in seconds and still rising up and up into the hinge’s higher levels. All at once it ceases spinning. She stumbles off her step and falls face-first into Akota’s back. He waits as she gathers herself.

‘You alright?’

She lifts a hand to her head, casting off dizziness as she flicks sweat flecks from her brow. ‘Yeah, just wasn’t expecting that.’

‘See, there’s your problem.’ He taps his temple. ‘You gotta stop going around trying to expect that. Hold on and enjoy the ride.’

‘You’re going to give me a headache.’

‘Am I? Or are you just expecting that I will?’

‘I have a headache.’

‘You’ve thwarted me!’ He chuckles as he starts towards one of the halls to their right. ‘Hey, you know what’s funny?’

‘What you’re speaking of specifically? No. Generally? Also no.’

He laughs. ‘I was speaking specifically of generally, actually.’ Down the hall they make a left and come to another set of stairs—these leading straight up to a wooden door.

‘Can we not do the whole lingual-foolery thing right now?’ She takes the stairs three at a time. ‘Actually, nevermind. If I can’t keep from doing it even when I’m near out of my mind, I doubt you could stop even if you lost your tongue.’

‘I think by definition I couldn’t do lingual-foolery if I lost my tongue. But that depends on your definition of lingual. And tongue, I suppose. Or not? I don’t know.’

‘Now you’re just speaking nonsense.’

‘Maybe I am…’ He takes a moment to consider. ‘But then, what better than to sense the non? To feel what cannot be known?’

Lise feels brief frustration with him. Impatience coloring her perception of him, and passing on, but that she felt it at all sticks with her. Acid yellow to disrupt the easy blues his familiar presence lulled her into. Its dissonance amplifies as it splashes around her mind, clashing with other colors. In moments, her mind is a jaundiced muddle and she can hardly trace back the source of it by the time they are at the door. She feels a sickly green as he pushes it open.

She steps into the doorway and is stricken to sharp stillness by a lone silhouette in the room—the dimensionless shape of a canvas coated whitest-white. She knows an opening to empty space, and all the thoughts that should follow her recognition are sucked into that vacuous white.

‘What’s wrong?’ He asks. ‘…Akota?’

Lise shakes her head, trying to clear it, but it is already empty. She struggles. She shakes her head again, and again comes back empty. ‘I…’ She turns away. ‘Akota, that’s how I did it…’

‘That’s how you did what?’

‘How I created the new fiends.’

She can just see the edge of emptiness in her periphery, watching him glance toward it. ‘Ahh…’ He trails off. ‘Well, what I wanted to show you requires going through there.’

‘I… I don’t think I can. It’s too much.’

‘Look,’ He steps up to her, taking her hand in his, ‘All you have to do is keep hold of me. We’ll step in for all of a fraction of a second, and step right on out.’

‘Akota, you don’t understand. I haven’t had the clearest mind of late. I’m afraid. I worry I’ll make something I don’t want to. I…’

He squeezes her hand. ‘Do you trust me?’

Lise hesitates, mind racing for a true answer. ‘I… I don’t know, Akota. I think I do—I’ve always thought I did. I worry what I experience isn’t real, that what I perceive is too flawed to trust anything anymore. Again and again when I trust others, trust myself, trust reality, I am made the fool.’

He nods but is still yet to let go her hand. ‘I understand, Akota. I’m sorry. Even though I’ve hardly allowed you to explain what’s happened, I see the change in you. I’m sorry that what you’ve been through has made it hard to trust. I wanted to make this a bit of a surprise, a useful trick I could gift you, but I will explain my intent now that I see the gap.’ He releases her hand, beginning to gesture as he speaks. ‘This is somewhat difficult to put simply—essentially, you can access any opening in empty space once you’re in. The way space works in there is far more… elastic, I suppose. So what I meant to do was walk in, and then land us beside the burnt tree where you first met NON.’

He looks at the opening, scratching his head. ‘There’s another opening here in the building, but I thought it more poetical to use the one Quin made. This was one of the art studios left open for students to use. They restricted access to it after the opening appeared. I digress…’

Lise takes a deep breath—her chest shudders a moment where she expects pain to arise; she draws further and holds—and slowly exhales. I can do it. I won’t lose control, not this time. Akota is with me. She turns and faces the empty canvas. ‘Alright, I think I can manage it…’

He looks up, having lost himself in thought. ‘Really? Oh man, that’s good because I’m not sure my other idea would work very well.’

‘What was your other idea?’

He dismisses it with a wave. ‘Not even worth explaining. It was really only a third or so of an idea, not a whole one.’ Stepping toward the canvas, he turns back and holds out his hand.

Lise smiles a small smile and takes his hand. They step through quick to preempt a second thought, and into the vast and empty white they drift, weightless. A shape gradually sprouts before them. Blooming to the full height of her storm-shattered tree, an opening into an ill-defined grove. Gray ground turning to soft brown, feathery fronds unfurling along the forest floor. She feels unrefined emotion welling up at the sight. A conflict of pleasure and pain, past purpose turned deepest remorse. To her knees she falls before the hollow tree and from somewhere deep and unknowable comes a wail seeking to escape her, a feeling she seeks to expectorate. The undermind trembles around her, her voice almost heard… but silence is immanent. She knows it as a rejection—her grief, guilt, pain—her wish to share shoved back at her. She trembles with stifled misery, and transfixes herself on a fixture she conceives. Drawn taut across it, she strains against the bindings stretching her and the tension becomes unbearable. Primed, she knows any more stress and she’ll snap. Something will snap. Split. Crack. Spilt. Head at the root. From the vast white tree blooms clusters of tenebrous florets. Growing helical. Deathly tendrils creeping down the trunk, reaching out. NON’s inexorable embrace.

Akota plants his feet between them.

He kneels, plucking the sable fibers from her as stray hairs. ‘Akota. I think we should go.’

She looks up through night-black tears, finds his azure eyes alight. ‘From me death bleeds…’

‘Right…’ He scratches his head. ‘I don’t follow.’

Behind him the char spreads, growing out from emptiness. She knows the pain which seeks release. It yawns open sedate, and slows. A great tree shudders to stillness, starless blooms in lieu of leaves.

‘Can you move?’ He asks, looking past her distracted.

The tree looms behind him—rustling gentle and whispering silent, shedding cerulean scintillae to whirl on a sourceless breeze.

NON

— 73 —

Seed And Fruit

•

—

The sun lashes down unrelenting on her bare back. Her skin is raw, stinging. Hard-packed earth, cracked and dusty, hurts to walk. As though her feet have been bruised, she feels every step tenderly. A stray pebble is a sharp nail underfoot. It is the sight ahead which forbids rest.

A black spot in the sky.

Seen through sun-bent air, the tallest trees of Kata Luma dance with languid allure. Even at such a distance Lise can see their coruscant, day-donned coat—a temporary membrane seeping from pores all over the branches and trunk to keep them from the wicked heat. She envies the trees. Anything would be better than this dreadful sweat sticking and sticking and chafing.

The forest floor is shaded and cool, and for a brief time she permits herself ease. From her satchel she draws her last portion of food and eats it, digging her bare toes through the soft soil. A black shape floats above.

Through the trees Lise sees the first structure. A stone building, three stories—two tall trees peeking from its caved-in roof—overcome by sun-gilded foliage. She almost cries just to see it. I’m almost home! Please be safe, Seli! She runs as well as her legs will allow, wobbling, threatening to collapse beneath every next stride. I’m coming! Thank the land! I’m here, Seli!

Something smells strange. I sense the uncanny.

Lise falls to the painted street stones, skin breaking on her knees. The city is beautiful then, despite the bright, despite the heat setting her sweat steaming. Watching, a black shape, perfect stillness. She looks up to the banners hung between buildings, colored cloths tied to one-another, one a pattern of navy, charcoal, and peach. Much as she struggles to rise, the relief of arrival has her weeping uncontrollably, and the pressure of what is to come has her reveling in this mere semblance of reprieve.

She finds Seli’s room ransacked, the same sight she’d seen in dream. A sight she had been hoping only a dream. Standing in the memory of chaos, she feels such immense guilt—and deeper, more essential, a cold, implacable anger. A violence she can hardly comprehend. It doesn’t rattle at its rusted shackles, knowing them for the pretense they are. Deliberate. Black shape, waiting. When the time comes, she will not stop it.

This feels wrong. Which me thinks this? Me then? Now? Akota? Where’s Akota? When am I? Is this later? I…

Her own room is in no better shape. The desk is overturned, her books spilled across the floor, pages torn and folded and trampled. Chains from her suspended orchids roll and clatter underfoot, the poor plants themselves long since gone to dust.

Crinkling, a scrap of paper whose existence she’d almost forgotten. On it, a pencil drawn man is depicted idling on a long, downy cushion. Swathed in a sheer blanket which does little to veil his nudity. A pair of round lenses slide down his pointed nose as he turns the page. Lise recalls marveling at the curiosity so vividly captured in his gentle eyes. She remembers stealing the drawing.

Cast aside, lest she turn to other, less pleasant memories waiting in the periphery.

Beside her bed, the small, leather-bound copy of The Anthology of The Fool that Akota gifted her. She takes it, flipping through the pages once before sliding it carefully into her satchel. As she skimmed, one of the story titles leapt out at her, her mother’s favorite—Kieli the Free. She always preferred the one about Akota the Cretin, or Sendahlia the Unstrung. In fact, Kieli the Free was probably her least favorite in the anthology. Is? Had been. She struggles. When? What pulls me? I can’t think straight. But I can’t rest. What pulls me?

Black.

The path she takes to The Home of Silence is oddly clear of people for this time of day. Only the few folks who are sweating over the street stones linger, diligently giving them fresh coats of paint. The colors this year are all shades of red, from pink to maroon. It lends the street an appearance of unsettling fleshiness. She steps lightly.

Suspended. Waiting.

Already she has worked up a discomfiting sweat. Trickling down—down her brow, down her back, and still more droplets tickle her ribs. Between her fingers is a sticky dampness and no matter how much she wipes them on her pants the sticky dampness persists. 

Seli, where are you? I will bless the land with my tears should I find you unharmed. Please be safe. I don’t know what I’ll do if he got to you…

Akota isn’t at The Home of Silence. Neither at his apartment. She nearly waits there for him to return, but with every fraction of an inch the sun creeps across the sky the tension in her mind stretches beyond endurance. The pain of not knowing is incessant. She can feel fibers snapping and recoiling, and herself weakening with it. 

She pounds her forehead with the base of her palm, hoping to keep the tears from coming. The fuck am I supposed to do? Where could they be? What if he…? Fuck… I’m sorry. I should have come home sooner… Fuck! I don’t know how to save you! I don’t know where to go!

Akota! Akota, is that you? It’s dark! Is that me? I’m Akota. Yes, and I’m Akota.

A flickering, and flickering. A black shape flickering. There, at the tree’s root, a black shape flickering. Lise approaches sedate. Something strange. It is shapes. The many-shaped shape. In either eye is a new shape, and shifting. She can’t stop. The shape draws her inexorably. It sings, ringing, inhuman tittering. A song scraped hollow. Lise is transfixed. Strange, so familiar. Shifting—the shape. From each angle a disparate form. Tenebrous. To look upon it might change one’s shape. Inception from NON. The Shatterer. The Hand grips her.

— 74 —

This Stolen Life

•

—

The eye opens.

“Lise, was it? Yes, I recall you.” The woman smiles genteel. “It has been many years, but of course I know you.”

Lise was recognized immediately, and she doesn’t know what to say now that the explanation she prepared is superfluous. “Ah, um, really? I mean, I’m looking for my father—I’ve been looking a whole cycle—but he’s not home. I didn’t know where else to go… You haven’t seen him recently, have you?”

“I saw him earlier this week, but afraid I haven’t seen him since, but I may be able to help find him. Do you need to go off right now? Come and lunch with me at the tower—you look famished. Do you happen to know much of your father’s extrafamilial work?”

“Well, I… It’s urgent. But I’ve looked everywhere I know to look at this point. And I’m not sure I understand what you mean with your last question, do you know where he might be?”

And opens.

The view from the Veris building is as she remembers it. She can see the building which harbors the astral lenses, from which the expiatory flame cauterizes grief. The wound is still raw. Her mind pregnant with pain.

The woman turns her glass, sending the lavender liquid swirling. “I hope that will help with your search, but regardless I think you’ll do better having rested and eaten. We should meet again after all this business is resolved—I imagine you’re more interested in his work now. Honestly, I’m still surprised at how little he’s told you. When you find him you should ask more about it. Forgive my restraint—I wouldn’t tell you what he wants to himself. He has a peculiar temper… temperament, you know.”

“Right.”

To the world—it opens.

I am fragmented. Lise finds a shard of herself as she is climbing through her window. She feels dizzy, vision blurring around every motion. As she steps off the sill she does not falter. I need to find…

Why am I back here again?

Her room is as she’d left it… the cycle before? It is still a mess. I need to find her… There is a message in the mess. Can’t… message without mess… Chuckling, she coughs, and is coughing until she can't remember why. Rolling in the mess. The corpses of her dreams crinkling underneath. All those books, the wondrous expanse that once banished insularity from her solitude, now arranged in such a way. Where has my message gone? Arranged in such a way, to read the message she has to learn to read what cannot be written. I need to find her…

Form—sees the eye, blind.

Lise walks the blood-stone street. Her feet come up wet on every step. And the sun is hidden behind Her. Light streaming strange, sunbeams running rivulets down her bare shoulders. Opis Luma never feels like she does now—how she has felt since returning.

Life—the eye is blind to—Death.

LISE SEES THROUGH THE EYE AND THE EYE WEEPS

— 75 —

From Me, Death

•

—

“Lise? Is that you, Li?” The man steps out onto the rooftop, shading his eyes against the sun. “What are you doing here?”

Lise breathes the hot air, hating the sweat on her nose, itching. She stands, overlooking Opis Luma, watching the slow sway of rope bridges between buildings—the expanse of Kata Luma, a glistering green sea beyond the city. Her bare feet tickled by the crackle-dry soil. Everything feels profoundly wrong.

“Lise! Answer me, damn it!”

She knows what she will do should she turn. She doesn’t turn.

“Where is your sister?”

BREATHE…

“What the fuck are you doing home?”

Lise leans over the palisade, looking all the way to the street so far below. It appears as a tongue, fleshy red and pink, slipping out to moisten the lips. She can taste them. WRONG…

“If you don’t answ–”

“Silence.”

“…What did you just–”

She turns from the palisade, eyes wide and nose flaring. Her body shakes with an energy whose source she can’t trace. I’m going to kill him. I’m going to kill him. I… I… It is hard to make out his face, the sun above his head. The man she called father, dad, black against the blue sky. The man who taught her to read, who told her she could be whatever she wanted, made her feel smart, the man who shamed her, who had made her… who had ruined… the man who had failed to bring mom back, the hypocrite, the pervert, the small, small man who she would crush in these two hands…

Lise breathes the hot air, hating the sweat on her nose, itching. She stands, overlooking Opis Luma, watching her mind tick, tick, tick along one click behind. Her dreams feel so real. In moments of lucidity, she realizes this, but so brief is the clarity it serves as little more than a cruel taunt. A strand tickling her surface, pulled away just as she reaches to grab it. She is the fool she was made to be. What mockery her mind has made of her.

As it is, Lise breathes the hot air, and will again turn to face her father. She will tackle him, landing hard in the barren planter. Her fists will come down one after the other, sinking into his face, chest, his ear and his neck. She will beat him to death again. Every protest silenced by the heavy thumps of her assault. And when she rises from the puddle of him, she will let the sweat drip down her nose to salt her smile-spread lips. This is bliss?

She stands, overlooking Opis Luma. And there, all the way down, she tastes spicy-sweet. I found her.

Lise runs after the lean figure she knows to be her sister. Picking up speed, her stride extends until she is sprinting over buildings. She pushes trees out of her way, chasing Seli’s silhouette over the horizon. Peach-pink clouds against palest blue.

Through slitted lids she watches the ground; rough, rectangular stones—repainted so recently—blending into a tapestry of vermillion and maroon, reddening further to her sun-stained eyes. Stones turn to sand as she runs and runs. Runs back. Beyond the city’s border. Back. Beyond the sparse forest fringe. Back… there.

There, beneath the broad boughs of an empty tree left white by Lise’s fall. The most beautiful corpse, limbs sprawling; fine fronds sprouting from its fingers, delicate black florets turning and turning; Tree of Death. Flowers bloom from its hollowed form. It grows to meet her, her expectations met, surpassed, it is the savior she seeks. The savior she’s always sought.

Even in the undermind, her legs are weak at the sight of such wonder. To her knees, begging its shade. Beseeching it to return her eyes to their former shape. Weeping at its roots. The tree embraces her—it is familiar, understanding. Cradled, she feels peace with the only end. In death, this tree flourishes. Born of NON. She reaches into the tree, and the tree draws her in—drifting, drifting… insubstantial. The fall can come so easy.

Head over heel she turns and turns, curling into herself. Void trickles from her eyes to saturate the vast white. My sister is gone. My mother lost and my father mad. I couldn’t do anything… I… It’s my fault. I should have never left her alone with him. I knew how he had begun to treat her and I still ran away, ran off knowing my escape meant her end. I knew, I knew I should have known. I hate him. I hate what he’s brought us to. Fuck! Seli, please be alive. I just want to save you. We can start over, the two of us. Fuck them! Fuck HIM! I should have listened…

AAAAHHHHH! IT CAN’T END LIKE THIS—IIIIIIIIIIIIII CAN’T DO THIS ANYMORE! KILL HIM! I’LL KILL HIM—I WILL FREE YOU SELI! I’LL FREE US! I’LL GET MY HANDS ROUND HIS NECK AND CRUNCH AND GRIND UNTIL HIS HEAD HANGS LIKE A BENT BLOOM! MAKE HIM GONE! GET GONE! BREAK HIM AND SPLIT HIM AND TURN HIM OUTSIDE-IN! DESECRATE! DESECRATE! MAKE OF HIM A SOILED PAINTING! WATCH HIM RUN! RUIN HIS FACADE! FEEL MY NON! ONLY IN DEATH MAY YOU KNOW ME!

A hand, fingers long and thin, reaches out from the empty tree. Tentpole arms daubed midnight blue, leveraging, fine muscle cording the length of her forearm. She slides along her belly over the wispy fronds springing up gray from the soft earth. Following her, a form so black—a starving black, consuming—borne out by her wake.

Lise can do little but lie there, face in the insubstantial gray mush, as what emotion and energy she had is siphoned into the being which clambers over her, pressing her flat into the viscid earth. She feels like she squeezed a boulder up and out her throat, and as she raises her head to gaze upon what she wrought she feels a fresh stone forming behind her breastbone.

— TO DEATH —

I am transfixed.

Drifting betwixt

Old death

Young life.

Internal strife

My essential blight.

I think… 

Can I see light?

— 76 —

After—What remains?

\\//

Akota takes Lise’s mind in both hands and cracks it over his knee, emptying her onto muted brown soil. Poured out of NON. She lies curled into herself, convulsing at a nonexistent chill—mucoid gloom running off her bare back tenebrous. BLINDING!

I can’t see. I can’t see… I can’t open my eyes. I can’t see past the light! It hurts…

‘Akota… Akota?’ His tone is gentle, but Lise still flinches to hear it resound silently in her mind. Concern: a false floor; the gentle facade under which she can hear the clatter of a deep, fettered fear rattling its shackles.

Don’t speak! Don’t do anything! Darkness! Please, darkness! I want to go back! I need to go back! Return to me, eternity!

Lise can feel her whole naked body, the chill of existence puckering her exfoliated skin. Everything is raw, tender to the touch. Each new thought feels jagged. All she wishes is to weep and to never think again.

‘Akota, I’m sorry, I really am. Believe me, I understand. I literally do. Right now, I mean. But we can’t remain here. Please, open your eyes and come back into the world.’ He doesn’t attempt to touch her, to shake her out of it; he stands at a distance, waiting, speaking his gentle facade.

Her frustration is a splinter under her nail. Digging and digging at it, trying to pry it out. She wants to die, so irritated she feels. Ugly tears, growling and thrashing against this awful gloom.

‘I–’

‘No!’ She clutches her head. ‘Don’t speak! I’m! I’m trying… Silence… please…’

He says nothing, but she feels his retreat.

Her arms are the first to unclench, followed by her legs, and slowly, she turns onto her back to stretch out. Easing herself into the gloom’s lonely melancholia. Limbs splayed, she opens her eyes to dim lamp light. She stares at the ceiling of Akota’s Opis Luma apartment, watching the slow turn of the dangling mobiles. Listless. Suffused with abyssal blue, her mind leaves aside worded thought to dwell in the deep. She breathes.

Far beyond the ceiling, deep into the gap between everything, she feels those flakes of herself that were abraded dispersing. Severed fingers somewhere rotted and rotting. The same material becomes unrecognizable. She is what remains.

The undermind is soft against her sensitive skin. Treasuring the lack of texture. Like floating on still water.

‘Akota?’ Her voice is small.

‘Yes?’

She breathes raggedly, feeling her small breasts shaking on her bare chest with every tremorous inhale and exhale. There is pain tangible there even through the veil of undermind. ‘Were you… in there with me?’

‘I was… Yeah, I was. I was with you until… the many-shaped shape. Aptly named, that.’

Lise doesn’t want to cry anymore, but it is hard. ‘I’m sorry… I’m sorry, Akota… I didn’t mean to bring you with…’

‘I know. It’s okay. Don’t apologize… I’ve had some time to process the experience, what I saw, what I felt. I need to tell you what I’ve been thinking, but… but I think it must wait.’ In her periphery, she can see him pacing along the long side of his living room, scratching his neck. ‘I don’t know how long it’s been… I don’t know how long it’s been. “How long?” I keep asking myself. And although the number is veiled, it weighs a ton. When did I become so invested in time?’

‘The first question…’

He halts. ‘What?’

‘“How long?” is always my first question when I come from NON.’

‘I see. I understand… As interesting as… No, not the time for musing on it yet. We need to go back, Akota. Whenever you’re ready, tell me. I think we’ll need the both of us to make it out in two pieces.’ He resumes his pacing. ‘I’ve been thinking about how we’ll–’

‘Wait, hold on… What are you saying? I’m not sure what you’re talking around.’ Lise pushes off the floor without slipping despite the gloom still slicking her palms. She stands in the remnant. ‘Where are my clothes?’

‘I… Well, I assume your clothes are still on your body if it hasn’t been so long they deteriorated. As for your appearance here—you came out like that. This feels strange to have to say, but remember you can just imagine your clothes back on…’

‘That’s not what… Whatever.’ Lise recalls her lost cloak, wrapped round her whole—the fabric is fine enough that its texture isn’t offensive to the touch. ‘What doom are you dancing around, Akota?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know how long we’ve been here. All I know is this—I didn’t keep the hinge held in my mind while we were in NON… Go ahead, take in the implications of that.’

She wipes the gloom from her eyes, trying to see what he means. ‘I… That fiend will be waiting for us on the other side, won’t it…’

Scrubbing his forehead with three fingers, he slumps into the lone couch in the room. ‘Yeah, I think so. Or… Well, I hope it’s waiting for us.’

‘You hope it’s… what? Why?’

‘Okay, so we’re going to go back through another gap into empty space. By another, I mean we’re not going near that tree again.’

Akota is sliding across the ground without moving a muscle; she has to jog to keep pace. ‘Wait–’

‘I’m not going to explain everything in exacting detail. I know you’re picking up what I’m saying so don’t make me confirm it for you every time. We really have too much to get through for that. Yes, that tree has a strange influence on you—whether that influence is through the significance you’ve endowed it with or through that many-shaped shape’s power is irrelevant right now. We can discuss it in all the detail you’d like once we’re some semblance of safe.’

‘Fine, fine! I get it. Just tell me what your plan is here, I still need to know what the fuck we’re doing.’

‘What we’re doing currently is finding another opening—it’s under that one tower… I forget what it’s called. The one that looks like a flower.’

‘The Veris building.’

‘That’s the one… Do you know where it is?’

‘Yes, and you should have told me sooner because we’ve been going the wrong way… Stop slipping around, you fool.’

‘Takes one to know one.’

‘Yeah, yeah. This way.’

Akota tries to keep her talking, but the deeper into the inner city they get, the harder Lise finds it to concentrate. At first, she isn’t sure what is happening to her. There is an emotion off in the distance, a far away rumble. She hears it, but what ‘it’ is remains unclear. Looking around, taking in her surroundings seems to draw the emotion in; to look around is to feed the beast. The buildings are rendered in the undermind intact, in the same detail she remembers, the street stones layered with heavy blues—but entirely absent is the life that once alit the city’s countless perches. Unaccounted for are the sparks that illuminated every street, and the night season flora they would’ve grown to know by now. She can’t comprehend… it won’t…

She slows… stops. Too soon. This weight… It’s too soon after…

The memories NON showed her squeal discordant as they come crashing through her own recollection of events. There are implications. Important implications. She has to think, she has to let things settle and set things in order. No time. No time. Seli needs her, probably. No time for this. Out there, her fiend paves a path of death extending. No time. But as it is, she is immobile, mind gone blank. It is simply too much, too soon.

Too late. Too late she recognizes horror’s scream. That distant emotion is suddenly imminent, and it is too late. Waves—murky, black and blue—come crashing through, lapping at tower tips, consuming all. It rushes round her ears, slams her down and fills her lungs.

Lise lands hard on her knees. She is weak, her limbs as heavy as they are insubstantial. She feels, like an orchid bloom cracked off, she will blow away as a million scintillae. How is one to cope with such inconceivable tragedy? How can she stand? The grief is so intense she is sick with it—still it is inadequate; the scope of what she’s wrought beyond her.

The scope of what she’s wrought is beyond her. It has been beyond her from the second that fiend, that terrible transmutation of her impotent wrath, was released in the undermind. Beyond her meager mind’s comprehension. Beyond her. Her grief is inadequate, and worse: impotent.

Akota is somewhere near, trying to help, trying to get her… trying…

For what? For what have all these people died? For me to fail even to grieve? My grief is pathetic. Self-serving. Masturbatory. What can match such tragedy? Not grief. Not my grief, certainly. A good? What good can counter such weight? Even if I saved as many as I’ve killed, I’d still have killed as many as I saved. 

For what? For what do I persist? Only to bear out more death? My attempts to save end in pain and death. I am a detriment. When I am imminent, death is. This isn’t self-abasement, this is brutal self-honesty. 

Where does all this lead? These questions? This path?

Where all leads… The only conclusion. The only end.

Akota shakes her hard. ‘Akota! Stop! Stop thinking! Stop!’ And as he speaks, his words seem to reverberate in her mind, filling and crowding out all else. ‘Suspend those thoughts. We will talk about it all later, but now we must be present.’

‘Now…? Later…? Irrelevant—I think.’

‘Not irrelevant.’

‘Why?’

‘You lack context. False premise.’ There, as he says “False premise” she hears his gentle facade. So near, hands on her shoulders, it resounds. 

‘False premise…’ She repeats it back. He is not lying—no, not lying, but neither does he speak whole the truth. 

‘Yes, Akota, I think…’ Behind his pale blue eyes, eyes that have the glint of the child and the shape of the aged, brews a storm of thoughts of such an intensity she feels flecks of sorrow and ire. And as she observes, fearful of the storm’s direction, she finds herself in his eye. He continues, ‘I think… I think I was wrong. About Quin, and… and other things, and I will elaborate when death is less… imminent.’ He sighs out, emotions leaking from a vessel she once thought watertight. She can see him about to continue, hesitating, and then barreling through that hesitation. ‘I… I know where freedom is chained.’

‘You… what?’ As he speaks, as she watches him, gradually she comes back to herself, and on those last words of his she feels her mind settle into a semblance of clarity. ‘You… knew?’

‘No, no but while in NON… and after… No, no, I can’t explain right now, but I know how to find where freedom is chained.’

‘Wait, that’s a bit less than knowing where it is.’

‘Yes, well, if you could settle for a bit less just this once…’

‘I’ve been settling for a bit less since my first breath.’ She rubs her forehead, trying to get her mind moving again. ‘Might start demanding more of reality if it doesn’t work out this time.’

‘You know…’ Akota chuckles. He tilts his head thoughtful and grins. ‘No, nevermind. No time.’

She blinks her surprise as he helps her to her feet. ‘Did you just stop yourself from being a fool?’

‘Worse. I stopped myself from being too sane for this world. Perfect sanity was at my fingertips and I halted a fraction from attaining it. Couldn’t have the whole “breaking reality” thing on my conscience. Damn these worldly fetters… The fool, I am evermore; and ever more so, I am the fool.’

Never has he looked more self-satisfied than as she waves off his nonsense and starts again in the direction of the Veris building.

Just up the street from the building, Akota halts her with a hand on her shoulder. When she looks to him for understanding he points to the base of the tower, down where its glassy black stem meets the terraced hill it sprouts from. There, a figure is pacing unevenly along the empty garden, circling in and out of the red-gilded gates as they go.

‘…Alive? There’s someone left alive here? A dweller?’ She struggles to process it. ‘I… Do you know that person?’

Akota frowns, ‘I don’t know them, no, but I was aware there were people still alive out here. I haven’t seen them, but I feel their experience shaping things.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?! Rese might still be…’ 

‘Well, that part, but also I’m always keeping track of more information than I can effectively distribute.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘I’m not perfect.’

‘Ah,’ She accepts, ‘Fool, we are.’

‘We won’t be able to sneak around them, I don’t think, so maybe you try and distract while I make sure the opening is, uh, operational.’

‘If we’re going by proficiencies, you should do the distracting.’

‘If we were going by proficiencies, I would do the everything.’ He taps his temple. ‘Unfortunately, we’re going by limitations, and I can’t be in two places…’ His finger rested against his temple. ‘Damn, I was really about to directly lie. Like, right to your face I was going to say I can’t do this…’

A second Akota steps up behind them and puts a hand on both their shoulders. ‘But as much as I keep reserved, I cannot consciously lie to you. If I did it would end me.’

Whenever Lise thought he left her baffled for the last time, Akota would give a slight shift, gently rise, and the ravine she thought she had mined was revealed a mere line on his surface. She struggles with awe, drawn between it and the guilt she feels for diminishing him again with the pretense of a deeper understanding than she holds.

He smiles, knowing. ‘I forgive you, Akota… And I’m sorry, Akota. Patience. Patience is all I’ll ever ask. For me, and for you, patience. Understanding is not fixed—it comes and goes, flows, and must be waited upon, always. This is not chastisement, but a kind reminder. Have patience, and understanding will come.’

It is something she knows, of course, of course she knows this, but she needed to hear it again. Not chastisement, a kind reminder. Her body swells with sudden emotion, overwhelming heat rushing through, and she bursts into tears.

‘Akota I’m so sorry I never meant any of this to happen and I just want everything to go back and I can’t I’ve been trying so hard but I’m not enough not strong enough not smart enough not good enough and everything hurts and it just gets worse and–’

He wraps her up in a hug, his thick arms pulling her down into his soft embrace, and his understanding finds her in the cold, damp, dark and kindles a fire beside her. Weeping into his shoulder. She takes deep, ragged breaths, holding there until the wet has burned out of her torch and it, too, takes flame, before she finally steps back from him. She finds some renewed resolve in the understanding shared. 

The other Akota walks backwards into the shadows of the alley, ‘This part of me is going to make my way around the back so I’ll be ready whenever.’ He gives a silly little salute and slides around the corner.

She wipes the tears off, trying to compose herself. ‘How do you even do that?’

‘The whole two of me thing? It’s not terribly difficult but will take some explaining. I’m not sure if how I do it would work for you necessarily, but it might. In brief, I take a layer of my thinking and make a separate form around it.’

‘Alright, that’s enough to tide me over. Shit. How many things is it now? How much of it will we ever have time to talk about?’

Eyes stretch into the distance a moment, his lips curl into a closed smile, and he exhales out his nose. He shrugs. ‘Eh, we’ll find space for it somewhere. First, though, let’s go make some ripples. Or maybe we’re trying to prevent ripples?’

Lise pushes on her brow with a thumb. ‘Whichever one means less senseless loss.’

‘All loss is senseless, if by senseless you mean meaningless. All pain is pointless until made otherwise. Let’s go make it mean something or something.’

‘You really deflated that with the second “something.”’

‘Yeah, well, it was a bit too airy anyway.’

— 77 —

Too Many Fools

\\//

As Lise and Akota make their way down the street, heading for the dweller pacing out front the Veris building, a gray-blue eventide gloom fades in slowly over Opis Luma. A perception-painted sky. Their observation of it solidifies the shift; it is near true to night by the time they reach the terraced gardens. The gardens are barren, bleached, but for the snaking ivy whose translucent leaves are broad and healthy, hanging from the latticed wicker arches. The dweller catches sight of them just as they pass underneath the second arch, bracing as they come out the third.

‘Stop right there! Wait!’ The woman calls, and Lise’s recognition jolts, falters; then, shaking her head, settles. The panic on her face obscured it a moment, but no, this is indeed the woman her father had been colluding with. ‘Who–’

‘Hey, do you remember me?’ Lise cuts in, stepping forward a few paces, letting the woman look her over. She returns the look, seeing now that the woman’s face hangs wearier than she recalls. ‘I’m Rese’s daughter.’

‘You? What is– Where did you come from? Where is everyone else?! What happened here?!’

‘Peace!’ Akota soothes. ‘Peace… We’re safe for the moment.’

‘For the… What do you mean “for the moment”?’

Lise ignores her questions. ‘Where have you been?’ What was her name again?

‘That’s not of your concern. Wait, why do you bear his cloak? Where is he? Where is everyone? All my workers…’

‘Gone or gone. Much has happened, much is happening. Too much for me to explain briefly, I think.’ Akota says, making distractive gestures as his second self appears behind her, sliding around the side of the building. Lise catches a glimpse of his absurd expression as he slips backwards through the building’s entrance. ‘Ah, who are you, if you don’t mind me asking? It seems my friend here knows you…’ He glances at Lise.

‘Who is this idiot?’ She demands, ignoring him. ‘Your lover from The Dwelling?’

Lise sighs, the brief relief of seeing someone she recognized has withered. She is already exhausted. Turning to Akota, she asks, ‘How does it look?’

‘Just a moment,’ He closes his eyes, concentrating elsewhere, ‘Yeah, we’re good to go.’

She leans in, keeping her words from reaching the woman, ‘I don’t think she’ll cooperate. She was working with Rese to create some new sort of social system or something. I’m coming to think that unless we are of or have something of value to her we’ll be treated an annoyance at best.’

‘We have information she wants, but I think I agree anyway, continuing like this seems unproductive at best. Let’s just run around her, she doesn’t look like the athletic type.’

‘Neither do we, I imagine. Well, moreso me.’ Lise says, recalling her atrophy; feeling it in reality. She snorts a small, derisive laugh. ‘Let’s go.’

‘What are y–’ Akota slips past the woman faster than she can follow with her eyes, her mind trailing behind, legs motionless. Lise kicks off after him—a moment’s glee stretching her lips as she remembers the sensation of running, of playing woodball in Kata Luma when she was younger. The woman stands still as the trees they dashed through, headed for a goal untended.

Lise is right behind him as they speed through the lobby. The carpet tickles her bare feet as she remembers it. They make a left and he holds open the door as she runs through and leaps down the short flight of stairs, landing light without losing pace. She feels strong and intent—muscle memory making itself useful.

‘Straight ahead.’ Akota slips over her, feet sticking to the ceiling. The floor has a slight decline and as he lets himself fall, he lands on his butt and slides down feet first.

‘Why do you have to do all that?’ She laughs. ‘Just run like the rest of us fools!’

‘I make the effort to delight in whatever I can.’ He spins, a damned fool grin on his damned fool face. ‘It’s how I remain spry in my ambiguous age.’

‘You make it sound easy.’

‘Sometimes it is. It is most vital when it isn’t. Ooh, I just made up this one: when circumstances would hand you despair, steal delight from circumstances’ greedy hands!’

Lise laughs, chasing after him. ‘I like that one!’

‘Take it! It’s yours. I made it just for you.’ 

He grins a fool, then spins back to face the room opening up to them. 

Brutal reds, swirling and grinding, assault her eyes. Lise stumbles to a stop, pulling her foot back from the edge of the floor. The floor dips down, an inverse dome leading up to a flat ceiling above. A fixture, purest white, dangles from the floor, straining upward against its root. She blinks and blinks, trying to set the room still. It seems to warp, expanding and contracting as she tries to fix its proportions.

‘What is…’ She marvels at the buoyant bouquet of white diamonds blooming in the bloodstained room. An oval—flat and shadowless—thins, thickens, then thins again with every turn. Each shape on its stems appears to change form with its gentle rotation. ‘What’s going on with this room? It looks like it’s breathing…’

‘I don’t know. I’d have to see what it’s reflecting. Looks a bit like a chandelier—an upside-down one, I mean—but it's a bit wonky. Here, let’s not touch the pulsating bit.’ He purses his lips and a bridge juts into the room, stretching and stretching… stretching far longer than the distance appears, that by the time it breaches the bouquet it looks narrow as her forearm. He gestures to it and says, ‘After me!’ and leaps ahead of her, laughing.

‘Wait!’ She calls, too apprehensive to follow with the same enthusiasm. ‘What about the plan?’

He glances back, ‘Which part?’

‘The part where I have to protect the both of us!’ She can feel panic creeping back in. ‘I don’t know if I can do it if that fiend finds us!’

‘The longer we wait, the fewer ripples we’ll get the chance to contain.’

‘I know that… Damn it, I know that! But if we die, we’ll never get a chance!’

‘When in doubt, remember NON!’

‘But–’

‘We discussed this on the way here.’

Did we? When… No, yes… we did, didn’t we? Yes, we did… before I… before I broke down.

He turns, seeming a fraction of his size at the end of the bridge, and holds out a hand for her. ‘We can’t plan for every outcome, Akota. Sometimes we have to make the leap and hope we land well. This is one of those times.’

‘Okay, okay, no, I understand that, I remember it now, but Akota… If I die… If I die, what of Seli? If we die, what of everyone? If you die… how do I continue? Who will rekindle my torch? You know so much more about all of this! How do I find where freedom is chained?! How do I do anything as I am now?!’

‘Didn’t we have this conversation, too? I told you, I don’t believe in dying. It’s just not for me, you know?’ He grins his damned fool grin, but she won’t let him slide past this one.

‘Akota, I’m serious.’

‘As am I.’

‘Damn it, Akota! Stop diverting everything!’ She feels herself trembling. She feels hot, her body flush with overwhelming emotion. ‘I am so close to NON… every moment now, I feel it running through me. I need something substantial.’

The grin melts off his face. He breathes, and comes back along the bridge toward her. ‘Sorry. I’m sorry. The gravity of this situation is weighing on me, too, and I have neglected your need to know the many things which I have had too little time to explain. I have held back because so much is insubstantial. I’ve been following the threads of my intuition as I descend… but it feels wrong to hand off the insubstantial to you when it’s still so delicate, knowing that if I am not gentle its shards will cut deep. I could toss it all out there right now, but you would not be able to catch it all, and the rest would shatter. All this, despite just speaking of making leaps and hoping to land well…’

‘Akota, I understand, and I’ll be patient, just… give me something. Please.’

‘Alright, alright. Let me think for a moment…’ He appeared to struggle, face scrunching in concentration. ‘Shit… It’s all so intertwined it’s hard to untangle a single thread to give you.’

‘That’s fine, just tell me how to find where to find the place.’

‘Switch that.’

‘What?’

‘Where to find how to find the place.’

‘Library?’

Akota chuckles. ‘No.’ He taps his temple and points to her. ‘I think it may be in your mind already.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Yeah, well, I only handed you one thread from the tapestry. Think about it. If the fiends which drive your sister towards it originate with you, the location may have as well. Or, at the very least, passed through your mind on its way to your sister.’

‘Wait, wait. That’s too much.’ Lise puts up her hands, mind racing to process what he said. ‘You’re telling too much and leaving too much unelaborated.’

‘Yeah, I know. We’ll finish discussing it after. Put it aside. Death is imminent.’

‘Not so easy to integrate it as to speak it.’

‘Yes, yes, but I meant we need to hurry because that woman is about to get through the wall I put up…’

She looks over her shoulder and halfway up the hall sees the wall he made. Rapidly, its center is distending—a sharp point wriggling through with rare desperation. The membrane pops, and the woman is revealed behind it, bearing forward with a white ribboned lance. She stumbles and falls hard, tumbling down the sloped hall as the lance slides down beside her. 

Lise doesn’t wait. ‘Go!’ She pushes Akota toward the opening and nearly trips over herself when he slides too easily. He catches her as she falls off the bridge, swinging her up in front of him.

‘STOP!’ The woman yells after them. ‘Do not touch that! That’s m–’

They leap through.

— 78 —

The Shatterer’s Hand

\\//

Lise sees the opening drifting towards them, and, frantic, pulls Akota to a halt.

She feels it immediately. ‘It’s here.’ Her fear of remaining too long in that vast white emptiness now seems trivial, dismissible. Darkness grows and saturates the space around the canvas opening. The pressure, the feeling of coming apart; it is the same. She recognizes it now. It is the feeling of breaking and breaking and breaking, her mind collapsing in on itself. The many-shaped shape. ‘We need to go back! We can’t–’

‘No. I can shroud us from its senses until we reach our bodies. We can do this, Akota,’ He assures, ‘We can still protect the people out there, but we need to go out there to do it. Understand that it being here means we have time still.’

‘It will break me again. It’s going to break me!’ She is weak, fragmented. ‘It’ll break me again!’

‘Again? You made it through once, didn’t you?’

‘No! No, not–’ She struggles against her terror. ‘The many-shaped shape! It’s the many-shaped shape!’

‘Mmm… I don’t think…’ He considers. ‘No, it’s not the same. It’s just pressing into the wounds the shape left. I know because it recalls to me a different, distinct pain. Let yourself feel it, and you will know the difference.’

Lise wants to argue—no, she wants to flee first and argue it into irrelevance after—she is so afraid of that breaking. But she listens to him and lets go of the struggle, letting the pain settle in and centering on it. It isn’t just that it induces fear, it links that fear to memories of pain to solidify it. That she repressed those memories made it hard to recognize it, but now, as she feels around her mind, she puts it together. The more she feels where it presses, the more she feels what the many shaped shape had done to her. Memories stick to her fingers like fresh blood.

—2 Quadrants Ago—

Prescience…

Lise stands over her mother, the sight kaleidoscopic. Her vision is shattered, and her thoughts isolated. To form functional lenses the many parts of her are coalescing into separate, semi-connected fragments. One fragment sees her mother, another sees Quin, one a stranger, the next the reflection of light off mere material. The two former are quick to be smothered, rendered sightless. The latter is pushed to the fore of her mind, that she will not resist. Leaning on the fragment that sees a stranger, she is compelled to lift the body and carry them out of the room.

Prescience…

Waiting just outside the building is the yet unburdened litter, and the six people who will carry it all the way to the structure which bears the astral lenses. As they help ease the stranger into the innermost box one of them remarks on the pristine preservation of the body.

To the Lise who will recall this, when I come to know you I think I will regret that I had to use you. When you come to know me, perhaps, you won’t regret it anymore. You will loathe me for what I made you to do and be glad you did it.

She follows the litter as they collect more bodies and eventually join the procession, heading for the building whose proper name she has never learned. Whether it has a proper name, she doesn’t know. She has never heard the building referred to after the first time her father had pointed it out to her that day. It is simply the structure which bears the astral lenses. When she first heard of the astral lenses… she can’t recall.

The one you know as ‘Akota’ has the unfortunate habit of coming too close to the truth. What he suggests of the place you seek is true. But I have taken that splinter of knowledge from you. I will not return it until you part ways with him.

When they reach the open courtyard around the structure there are still many people entering with items of sacrifice and more milling around outside. She has never been so close to it. There is the heaviness of grief; grief shared and yet individual, solitary. Hers is stolen from her as she follows the litter all the way to the structure, and she watches without awareness as the material she can’t name is carried inside.

If you have not parted by the time you reach the Strait of Yarina you will be too late. He will not argue to stay with you, you need only give him permission to go for he will have come to his own reason for parting before then.

She is still in the courtyard with the rest of the lingerers as the last of the litters passes into the structure. The lens covers are drawn back and Lise approaches the structure, aware of nothing else. It is wrapped in elastic material drawn taut around the framework as an emaciated man’s skin is pulled round his ribs, but its texture is entirely strange to her. It prickles against her fingertips and as she drags along it she detects a subtle pattern in its ridges, though it isn’t apparent to her bare eyes.

The heat radiating through the material goes from undetectable to intolerable in seconds and she staggers back, fingers stinging. Next comes the light gleaming through and piercing her eyes like ten thousand needles finer than hair. Her eyes clamp shut, but the light grows too bright even for that and she covers them with her hands, but the light grows too bright even for that. Terror transfixes her. For the briefest amount of time—until the lenses are covered once more—that which splintered her is pushed back, and Lise becomes aware of one thing: Quin… no, her mother is dying—dead that very moment—burnt to smoke and ash, billowing out with the remnants of thousands others, sticking to her sweat slicked skin. Some sound from down her throat comes ripping out of her. She can’t stop it. Screaming anguish. Crying annihilation.

All at once, darkness.

You are not my enemy.

I am not your friend.

You are my hand.

I am your handler.

Your fetters are mine.

My freedom is yours.

\\//

Lise comes back to herself mid-scream. Akota holds her by her shoulders, keeping her steady as the shock of that memory flushes through her. ‘Akota! Oh land, Akota!’ She weeps, quaking in his hands. ‘It was me! It was me! I did it!’

‘It’s okay, it’s okay… I know.’ He holds her with his eyes. ‘It’s alright.’

No no no you don’t know you really don’t how can I… ‘I killed her! Oh land I killed her!’

Akota’s brow bends inward. ‘Killed who?’

‘I…’ How could I have done that? Did I do that? What did the shape do to me? ‘The shape did something to me. It made me do things I didn’t want to do! I swear on the land I didn’t want to kill her!’

His eyes flick away from hers a moment and when they return they come back with bleak understanding. ‘Quin…’

Lise nods and can no longer bring herself to speak as tears pour from her in twin streams, drifting weightlessly into the vast white. Eyes pinched shut, she struggles with what her body has done… what she has done… Try as she might, she knows in the back of her mind that there is too much there to come to terms with. Even before she does it, she realizes she will push it aside in favor of what waits just outside empty space. There will come a time when she can reckon with these revelations… there has to come a time when she can… I’ll die before I get the chance.

She shakes her head, casting off glittering blue. If I don’t set this aside I’ll die before I get the chance. I can’t keep trying to leap ahead of my own feet. One foot before the next. There will be time for this… I’ll find the time… The bitter twist of her own thoughts is inevitable. Just like I’ll find the time for everything else I’ve put off…

‘I…’ As she flounders for the right words her hollow gaze finds the darkness at the opening creeping toward them, tasting them in the air. There are no right words. ‘We need to go…’

His expression is troubled but hard to read beyond that. He nods, silent, manifesting a crystalline sphere around them. She takes a breath, trying to assemble some semblance of purpose from the disturbed fragments of her mind. As they step through the canvas she is still trying.

— 79 —

Bodes of Violence

\\//

Akota gets to moving immediately, helping Lise to her feet as she stumbles out. The darkness congeals around their shield. Building pressure sends cracks skittering across it. ‘Shit! Akota!’ She grips his shirt, but he waves her off.

‘We’re alright,’ he reassures her, ‘but we need to clear it before it seeps in.’

As she looks closer she sees that it is only cracking the outermost layer of the shield and, ever too slow, fear eases its grip on her. ‘Alright. I’ll do that, you keep us moving.’

Lise wills the first layer to spin, and keeps it going, increasing its speed until it suddenly bursts apart in thousands of razor sharp fragments, cutting through the tarry black fiend. Scrapes leave fine lines circling the next layer of the sphere. Akota is quick to fill in the lines and replace the first layer.

His eyes light with an idea and he adds bands of treaded steel wrapping around it. The outer sphere begins to spin and rolls them toward the door, sinking back into the thickening darkness that gathers there. Where the sphere meets the door frame it leaves splintering curves in the wood. 

She steadies herself against the inner layer as the collision jars them. Akota still stands upright, unmoved. He reaches down and holds her up as the stairs are imminent. The darkness tries to coalesce around them again but the momentum they build rolling and bouncing down the stairs disperses it. She is shaken but able to stand on her own once they are rolling on flat floor again.

Looking back, she sees the darkness speeding after them, a wave of black crashing through the hall. It crests and crashes down just behind them, lifting their bubble just as they reach the stairs. ‘Oh, that’s not good.’ Akota mutters. The wave sweeps them over the railing into the air.

Lise looks down to see the floor approaching fast. Vertigo sends her mind spinning as quick as their bubble. Panicking, she imagines the bubble filled in with the softest fabric she can conjure. A crash that shakes the marrow in her bones shatters their bubble. The fabric spills out and the two of them roll into the fragments of their shield. She tries to rise, but disorientation from the impact sends her back down into the cutting shards. Gasping, she crawls to Akota, who is shaking himself free of the loose fabric.

She hurries to construct a new shield as the fiend crashes down around them. It will hold! She forces her mind towards certainty. Her will is shown lacking by the fiend. The shoddy shield pops under the pressure and the full force of the fiend hammers them into the floor.

‘AGGHHhh AACHHGh!’ Lise cries out as the pain of the past is made present. The fiend presses on all her most tender spots. Her murder of her mother, the fresh, unprocessed emotion turning to a fine point to spear her through. Inundating her with razor-defined horrors, turning to images of the dead and damaged beyond repair, her own mangled body among them. Decay scorches her flaring nostrils. She struggles with the memory of her mother’s burning, her own skin blistering from the inside out. A fear of herself. The fool made to strike the flame, led by the hand holding the matchstick. That steady flare and the bodies afire—the fetor of burnt being.

The liquid fiend ceases pounding them down and pools on the floor. It begins to ripple and rise, bubbling up into a more solid state. A vulpine shadow, long-limbed and skeletal of body, looms high above them. Its over-ribbed torso ripples with new breath, rolling along its great length. It hunkers down to peer over them, its unfinished skull drooling black muck which reeks like stagnated water.

The fiend snuffles at Lise, breathing muggy air, then tilts its head to see her with its first-to-form eye. Thick drool stings her skin where it slops onto her in heaps. She is too preoccupied straining against her own apparent will to splinter apart to do much more than glance toward Akota, who looks as she feels. His face is haggard like she’s never seen it before, and tears trickle from his aged eyes. The fiend follows her gaze.

As it turns, ropes of matted fur stuck in its drool drag over her. It slides its second eye into place from the back of its head and rolls an argent iris around to look upon her mentor, her friend, as he turns to sobbing. Her heart breaks and with it her own dam. We’re going to die… Just like that. This fiend… This beast I brought into being… is beyond me.

— 80 —

Facing ****’s Specter

\\//

The beast bellows a soundless roar into Akota’s anguished face, setting the floor vibrating hard enough to shake Lise from her despair. She recalls his words from earlier, It’s just pressing into old wounds. Not making new ones… yet. She feels where it is pressing—her chest: where searing pain brings to mind the expiatory flame—her eyes: where needles of light impaled her and fractured her lens. I can mitigate it so long as I remain conscious of its source…

I need to stand up… Stand up. Stand up, damn you! I need to move… But she feels the pressure pinning her back against the rough stone floor. To lift her head sends spines of pain through her chest, radiating fire across her abdomen. It is as it is in reality. So real she can’t dispel it as imagined. Just to be in this beast’s presence presses on her every tender point, physical and mental. Get up!

Pain manifests as a phantom veiled in moonless-blue beside her, holding her down, a withered grin stretching invisible lips. It mouths to her, ‘Set me upon another…’ Hot breath clings to her face, dripping down her cheek in fine rivulets. She resists it, turning her head, but it lingers. As she watches the fiend snuffling over Akota, lapping at his sweat-slick skin, Pain slurs its sickly sweet supplications to her ear. It tugs at a fetter they share, bringing her attention to a shackle chafing her nape. ‘Loose me…’

No… not again… She suppresses her urge to cry again, the painful lump in her throat catching as she tries to swallow. Choking and spitting, as the pain blazes to new heights. ‘Stretch me forth and let me preserve us…’ It yanks at the fetter, wrenching her head around to face it. The nearby feeling of flesh being gnawed and skin pierced with soft pops, flavor being savored, sends her over the edge. The fiend begins its feast.

NOO!!! Lise screams soundlessly, grabbing Pain by the throat. She throws it back, rising to trembling legs. Pain recoils with a vengeance, her chest impaled with red-hot rods. Standing transfixed, she watches the fiend jerk at Akota’s arm, popping it from its socket. He barely responds to it, a mere whisper exhalation, his face a rictus mirroring horrors unseen.

Her already broken heart splinters further at the sight of her friend’s agony. The man who’s always been there to build a fire beside her in her coldest moments. It hurts her more deeply than any physical pain to see his brightness being extinguished. Burn. She wants it to burn as she did. She wants it to scream and cry out in pain as the expiatory flame blasts through it. 

Her chest shimmers deep purple, cloak falling around her naked body, sweat steaming off her skin. The beast lifts its head to look at her, dragging Akota up into the air by his shredded limb. She can’t move. Every muscle in her body is cooked to a searing tension, her jaw clenching hard enough to crack molars. The thick scar on her chest ripples, blisters seeping blue. Her ribs crack and her sternum flies free, tearing straight through the liquid flesh of the fiend’s stomach. A gout of blackened crimson-violet bursts from her, burning a gaping hole through its gut, splitting it in two as she falls back.

She hits the floor hard, her head cracking against the stone. The fiend must be howling, for the vibrations juddering the back of her skull could be caused by few other things. Pain’s rasping laughter itches the insides of her ears. ‘Fool…’ It murmurs. ‘All that strife tearing you out from inside… Should I show you your end?’

Pain turns her eyes for her, and reveals the fiend reforming its back half already. A steady roil spilling new flesh over fine obsidian bone. Akota is a heap at its forefeet, face hidden. She tries to call out to him, but her lips are stretched taut around her teeth and her jaw is heat-cracked. Death would long ago have taken her in reality. Here, she persists a burnt out husk. Like her beloved tree.

I need to protect him… She can’t crawl to him, can’t cry. Won’t just die.

Come Pain’s sibilant lure cast before her, ‘Loose me… and I’ll preserve him.’

Lise lets loose the chain she hadn’t realized she was gripping so close at hand. Her hand unfurls. A stone slung, spinning… a skip…

— 81 —

Silken Ripples Rolling

\\//

In that moment, Pain becomes manifest as more than the mere personification of Lise’s suffering and gains semi-substantial form. A tall, spindly creature shrouded top to bottom in tenebrous material which appears half-fabric, half-mist, dragging around its knobbly frame like sheer cloth in water. It takes a few tentative steps, as though uncertain of its own solidity, then flows smoothly into a predator’s lope. Has she just created another fiend? Unleashed yet another beast in the effort to erase her last atrocity? But no—she runs her mind along the cord come curling out her neck—I have this… I can still rein it in… can’t I?

Pain gains power with each passing second, its connection to her feeding it full, and as it reaches the fiend it is strong enough to pierce its sharpened fingers through the fresh wound. The still soft flesh boils and suddenly squeezes down on its arm, trying to eject it. Barbs form on Pain’s forearm, anchoring it in the fiend. 

Lise still can’t breathe, her chest a mess of torn skin and muscle and protruding ribs. Her new creation is too powerful already, I need to heal myself… quickly! She wills her skeletal structure to mend, a disturbing crackling sensation sending shivers up her reforming spine. Using her sight of the fiend as inspiration, she pushes her body to rehydrate and new flesh begins to ripple and roll over the growing bone and cartilage.

The vulpine beast shrieks as a tortuous bane seeps out Pain’s porous bone and it begins to flail about, trying to kick loose the thorn in its side. It reels, falling back on its side as it cocks its head around, biting viciously at Pain who raises its free arm to defend itself. The fiend snaps its jaw around Pain’s arm, tarry saliva dribbling down to mat its misty shroud, then rips it from its side with a brutal jerk. Half-formed flesh comes down in gobs thrown off Pain’s barbed forearm as it is torn free.

Pain hits the rail of the spiral stairs back first, limbs snapping around unnaturally. It slumps down and the fiend limps away, wounds yet to heal, its silver eyes baleful as it watches the unmoving creature.

Lise struggles to rise, and though her body mended most of the way in mere moments it isn’t near fast enough to satisfy the urge of her fear. Even as the fiend’s pressure is lifted from her she has to fight knotting muscles. Blinking away tears she sees the fiend edging its way back toward them, keeping its distance from her long-leashed cur. 

On hands and knees, she crawls to Akota. Spit flies from between clenched teeth as she snarls at the pain. By the time she reaches him she has regained some of her range of motion, pulling his slack form up into a cradle hold.

Pain is rousing. She feels it as the sensation of needles creeping up her neck and cascading over her scalp, but her focus remains on Akota. His arm is a mess. Bone protruding from ribbons of skin and muscle, dark crimson bleeding into the pool of viscid black he lies in. Uneven breaths shake in his chest and his eyes look to somewhere far beyond her. Heal…

The fiend halts, glaring toward Pain as it rises up on its hind legs. Its narrow snout sloughs off its face and splatters on the floor, its forelegs stretching into arms tipped by long-fingered claws. What was soft flesh goes stiff around ribbed armor and its two eyes start to divide; four, eight.

Akota’s arm mends in moments, quickened in part by her efforts to rearrange the peeled flesh around the bone with her fingers as it reforms. ‘Akota!’ She shakes him, squeezes his healed forearm, but his eyes just stare into the deep. ‘Akota, wake!’ Still. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck…

Pain runs past her to meet the fiend where it stands. She barely has time to process it, but the two creatures are unlike any she’s encountered in the undermind. The fiend, now towering over them several times her own height, is intelligent… or at the very least, adaptive beyond any known fiend—even those working through Elineal. Is this what became of that very first she’d unwittingly borne out of empty space? Perhaps, but if so it has become stranger and is not purely of her any longer. And then Pain; the specter that has tormented her made semi-corporeal, now–

Akota disappears. Lise looks down, her hand falling through the space he was the second before. He is just… gone. What…

— 82 —

Wit Found Lacking

\\//

Lise scrambles to her feet, looking around wildly for any sign of Akota. Nothing… Not a shred of his sleeve, nor even his blood on her hands. He is gone. He must have awoken… Oh shit, I need to find him quick. Fuck! Oh–

She has to duck out of the way as the fiend’s slash bisects Pain and its follow through near-to takes her head off. Its right quartet of eyes follow her as it reels back from the lack of resistance to its swing. Pain’s torso hits the ground hard, its shroud trailing the arches of its bounce; its lower half is left tangled in the fiend’s claw.

–shit! Lise runs. She looks over her shoulder to witness Pain’s semi-substantial form dissipate like ink in water. Its essence recoils into her as a spine impaling her neck, splitting the axis her skull rests upon. Waves of burning pain scorch her skin, radiating from her neck down her back, diminishing further down. She loses balance and crashes heavily, the skin of her left cheek scraping away on the stone floor. FFUCK!!!

She can’t move. Not merely by way of pain; she is paralyzed. For all her effort, her limbs just tremble. The fiend will be upon her… SHIELD! A dome of steel snaps into existence over her. It crumples inward, and the pressure bursts a hole just above where it merges with the stone by her feet. Move! MOVE!!

Her noncompliant limbs roll and shift—useless. She thinks to make like Akota and wake, but knows that once she does their plan fails. So long as she remains under, able to perform what meager defense she is capable of, the potential to make it out of The Dwelling remains. Make like Akota…

As Lise felt the fiend’s weight lift off her shield she lets it go, and willed her body to polished stone smoothness, slick as over-oiled hide. Slide! Slide! Slide! She imagined herself gaining speed as though let down a hill. Yes! 

Just as she begins to slip away, the beast strikes again, a claw catching her heel. It yanks at the tendon and rips through and sends her into a spin. ‘FUugghhcK!’ She slams into the wall, feeling ribs crack on impact. Before she can recover her wits the fiend is there.

It tries to grab her up into the air but she slips out its clutch, limp limbs splaying as she hits the ground back first. The fiend looks at its hand, puzzled, then sticks out one claw and impales her through the stomach. She is too dazed even to cry out. It lifts her up, its claw slicing her up to the base of her ribcage where it sticks. She gasps, head hanging back. 

All from nothing, it is there. The deep, permeating gap between all that exists. That most exquisite void. NON.

She slides back from her own mind and it swallows her before she has time to process its rapid approach. Before the mouth is gone to her and she drifts into the dark she catches the rim by a pinky and holds on desperately to reality. NO! NOT NOW! No! An act of instinctual self-preservation; a part of her wills her return to NON. Please! no!

The fiend peers down at her through her eyes, oddly lucid, looking… Unwitting, it is drawn in, leaning over the edge. NON’s pull is strong enough to crack the beast’s carapace. The man within is torn from the fiend’s flesh and hangs there above the abyss for what feels both an eternity and an instant. Eyes spinning in confusion, their gazes meet for a fragment of that moment and, had it not already, Lise would have felt the floor drop out from under her feet. Rese doesn’t recognize her, but his eyes take in the visage of NON and registers absolute terror on his face just before the fiend’s body ripples and splits open wide, a dripping maw, and sucks in. He is inhaled back into it and Lise has to grip the edge from the other end lest she follow after him. Her fingers slip and she falls to the floor as the tarry mass closes around the man she once called father.

— 83 —

Poor Wit’s Excruciation

\\//

Lise lies stunned, face half-planted in the stone floor, her right arm twisted painfully under her chest. Out her left eye she watches the fiend shift and return to its vulpine form. It doesn’t glance back at her but flees like a kicked hound. She doesn’t even have it in her to feel relief. The realization Rese is alive! rings through every crevice of her mind levering wide the chasms between fragments. It requires all her energy to keep herself held together; feels like trying to corral paper boats with her breath alone.

Rese’s continued existence is quick to become yet another piece she tried to shove down, but doing so only wedges it into the gap, crammed in with everything else she hasn’t the time to process properly. Pulling all the pieces of herself back together presses in on that unprocessed material and squeezed it up and out, overflowing. Her body gradually mends as she gathers herself but she doesn't move. Lise rolls onto her back, weeping, overwhelmed. It all hurts so much.

Rese… I… as much I still resent you, I never meant for you to become this… I… I’m sorry. I’m sorry I turned you from a pathetic, reprehensible man to a fearful beast who has done far worse than you alone could have. Your death would have been less tragic than this. I’m sorry…

Tears puddle around her head, catching moonlight filtered blue through the dome, and split again through the hinge’s segmented windows. The fiend’s darkness lifts. That relieves and disturbs her in equal measure. The relief is immediate, selfish; the disturbance stretches far beyond her, a deep worry for those whose path it will cross. So many more will die or be made into beasts themselves because I failed to kill you then and am too weak to kill you now. I don’t have the capacity to hold all of you in my mind and feel the pain of your loss; all whom I’ve consigned to death, I cannot cradle you in these feeble arms. I cannot hold you to my chest, nurse you to health—my breast weeps bane, not balm. This tragedy was unfathomable before night began and is made more so by the cycle. I’m sorry… yet my remorse is not enough. It never could be. The fool I am…

Even as her emotions spill over, her mind picks up on the trace of a revelation. Wait, wait, wait…

The moment the fiend fled, Lise intuited that it fears NON. Not for the reasons she does, nor the reasons Rese does; it fears it because NON is essentially separative. NON would take back from it the source of its continued existence and it would be left to fade like a memory in death. Rese fears NON for reasons similar in appearance but disparate in truth. He fears it, not because it would spell his end as it would the fiend, but because he fears being confronted with his own mortality in even the most indirect way. Just a glimpse and NON makes you aware of it like nothing else but Death itself.

Lise rises, and though the weight of death is heavier than ever, new understanding lightens her burden. With new understanding comes new uncertainty as well. Seli… How was Seli fiended if it went to Rese? She was already beyond Kata Luma when I sent it… I’ve been assuming my desire to find her had become entwined in my urge to do him harm… but if it really had gone to him all along how was she fiended? What does this mean? Wait, wait, hold on… Go back go back… The fiend feared NON… The fiend feared NON.

She is near to vibrating with the energy of the breakthrough. NON! Oh, thank NON! The damned thing I’ve cursed since I came to know it! Akota went with me, so it must be possible for others! It may be able to strip the fiend away from a person and save them when my strength isn’t enough! And it so often isn’t… Oh NON… Oh… Her body feels flush with warmth and she cries tears of… of some emotion she barely recalls and can’t name. She falls back to the floor, her knees coming undone and her palms hitting the stone hard enough to sting, and she tries to keep herself upright on the strength of her arms alone.

Get ahold of yourself… That’s a grand idea and all but I’ve got no control of NON and I’m more likely to slip into it myself than dip someone else into it to scour them. Especially considering I’ll have to fight the fiend to keep it from squirming out of my grip or simply fleeing that mind for a new one. Not to mention this will only save the dwellers who’ve been fiended; the rest of the population will die near instantly to any fiend strong enough to require such a drastic method—nor would I want to risk the chance a non-dweller might respond differently to NON. It’s… difficult to experience even for me and I’ve dealt with it for days now.

She rubs her pinky nub. No… No, it’s not a grand solution, but it’s not nothing either. Well, not nothing in that sense. If I only manage to separate a dweller from a fiend I take its mode of transferral. If I manage to isolate the fiended dweller deep enough in the wild it will starve before it finds new victims. And that’s if I can’t kick the whole damned thing to NON. It has genuine potential—if I can work some semblance of control over this apparent aperture in my mind.

Sighing, she stands again. I need to make time to let myself sit and process soon. When all this unfiltered emotional turmoil spills over I’m left drained—and for what? I’ve drained nothing, I’m still drenched in it. Better to learn ahead of mistakes instead of after. Ahh… She looks up to the windows far above, the moonlight passing through shimmers a dizzying cobalt. Patience… Death is imminent and all that…

When she opens the door to the room they went to sleep in, she is first struck by its dulled color and indistinct features. Once sharp carvings on its walls are limp and hard to make out, and grooves appear to wobble and bleed into one another. The beds are gray lumps, blankets and pillows coalescing into a slow rolling wave. 

In the center of the room, Akota kneels facing her. His azure eyes are the only things that retain their color, even his skin appears blanched. He looks up at her, seeing her, but she knows he is not fully in the undermind.

‘Akota… Are you alright?’

He closes his eyes, and appears to solidify, a flush of pigment warming his skin. The room wavers a moment before following suit. ‘I should be the one asking you that.’

‘When you suddenly vanished I was afraid you’d been overcome by the fiend…’ She admits.

He takes a deep breath. ‘I was. I was overcome by the emotions that creature dredged out of me. I had a period of weakness.’ His eyes open and he looks through her a moment before they narrow in on her, tilting to meet her gaze. ‘It made me conscious of wounds I was downplaying to myself, and the excruciating awareness sent me into a kind of shock. I’m sorry, I…’ He trails off, his eyes welling up with tears.

No… Lise’s chest is so tight—her heart hurting under the pressure of the walls closing in. She bites her lip, unable to dam her own tears flowing again. To see Akota like this is painful… to see him so… so fragile. It hurts to see how her ripples have come to harm even him. It hurt when she thought him dead, but to see his pain in the flesh is the more potent injury. ‘No… No, Akota, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry…’

He shakes his head, tears leaving silver trails on his rosy cheeks. ‘You don’t understand… I… I had a moment where I was in such pain… I let myself stop caring. I succumbed to apathy.’ The lump in her throat sticks and she can do nothing but listen. ‘I was set upon by images from my past. The many people I have loved to share time and space with and… and have hated to watch leave this world without me… Once, I could have held back my grief with wards crafted from the broad, selfless compassion with which I regard all. But as time passed my grief became too strong, and I have needed people to care for personally, lest I succumb to my own kind of death. An apathy from the altitude where I can look upon life without touching it—I rise from the battering waves of grief and let life’s significance be washed away, and with it my care…

‘The fiend held me down under my grief, drowning me in it, and for a moment I reached depths I didn’t know existed. My grief for Quin whom I loved more than most, that loss so fresh… the pressure of that wave crushed me into the abyss. I had to escape… I rose from my grief on a tower of apathy. I let my love for life and the living be swept away… Even you, Akota, I chose to stop loving, lest your death annihilate me and in doing so I succumbed to a death despite that. Had you not lived and returned, I would have sat here in oblivion for eternity.’ He weeps to her, direct as she has never seen him before.

Lise can’t speak, can hardly think, and as her knees hit the floor she is heaving and wailing and then heaving again, feeling Akota’s pain and death in truth. Knowing that the stone she cast is what sent the waves he was finally overcome by shatters her further apart. I want to die! Her fiend killed him. Her hideous tears come out midnight blue, staining his bare feet. She is wracked with a full-bodied grief that eclipses any pain she’s yet endured. Deny me! Please, deny me! 

Life! Be my expiation!

— 84 —

Shadow to Void

\\//

Neither of them move from their positions for an amount of time that feels too brief but is far too long. Lise’s sobs subside and her hands grip her thighs, knuckles gone pale. He stopped weeping a few minutes before and now stands above her, holding a wistful silence. He kneels down beside her. She meets his gaze and sees a sheer sorrow that goes all the way down and beyond her perception’s reach. ‘I’m sorry, Akota… I hacked away my love for you so I wouldn’t feel the pain of your death. I left you to your fate and hoped it wouldn’t reach me.’

Lise shakes her head, clambering past despair to speak, ‘No… None of this would have happened if not for me. I killed Quin… My mother… Not just that, I… That fiend we faced… it’s the one born from my malevolence toward Rese. I saw… I saw nestled in its chest, kept alive by that parasite all this time—I saw him. I was nearly taken by NON and as it opened wide inside me Rese was drawn from its body, and the fiend panicked. It took him back in and fled.’

Akota blinks, wiping his eyes on the base of his palms. ‘I see… I had a strong suspicion that it was him after I had a glimpse of the “confined omniscience” here.’

A knot of confusion pulls on her brow but despair has drawn her back from words once more. 

He is as sensitive to her as ever. ‘It’s not that I didn’t want you to know he persisted, even in this twisted way—more that I thought even suspecting as much might shatter what resolve you’d mustered. Not merely that, but the overwhelming growth sprouting from his fractured brain; that fiend had strained even my outrageous courage.’ The briefest smile twitches his lips, revealing his humor is not gone as she was coming to fear. It leaves quicker than it came. ‘And I didn’t want you to feel the bodies that litter this place…

‘It is one thing to know of many deaths… even to see the corpses lying there… It is another to know every facet of them with an intimacy even your every sense couldn’t provide, and all of them at once. I’ve never been as horrified. To tell you the truth—as I always do when I tell anything—I feared that my telling you this will compel you to look anyway. I’ve come to understand your sense of duty to those you’ve wronged, even those wronged tangentially… the will to take on the burden of as much pain as is necessary to balance the perceived weight of your wrongs.’

She tries to swallow so she can speak but the lump hangs suspended in her throat. He is right. She is fragmented now, and fragmenting still, but to feel that would render her end. The body might live on a short while, but whatever “Lise” consisted of would be blasted to scintillae and scattered in the next gust. But to see the death she wrought—understand what is lost—it is the least she could do…

He knows her answer and so speaks to it. ‘Allow me to be direct with you when I say this, Akota: punishment is a distortion of justice, not the true thing. It is the easy way, and any way that is easy is not true. It is an inferior surrogate that then impedes true justice’s advancement. I expect you know this already; it is an indulgence of your feelings of impotence. It does not heal anything. You wish your wounds to match those you’ve inflicted so that there is a sort of pitiful equality. When you follow the reasoning all the way through, how can you not see the limitations of this way? Eleven fingers is more than you can offer. Five limbs. Two lives is more than you have to give.’

Lise knows this! She’s carried this weight around knowing! She knew it in Pelezel’s slumped body. She knew it in the amber eyes of the hunter whose corpse rests under this dome turned fiend’s den.  She knew it in the faces of all those children she carried out to spare Fiiso the horror of finding his friends lying dead in the house of his master. In the bodies arrayed as she left the master’s house. Knowing it all she still indulges pain—feeds into it so it might rise to meet her horrors and all the while knowing it never could. She knows, deep down, her penance is pathetic. An act from a place of weakness. She has failed to save so many people so many times, seen death expand so far beyond her mind’s meager breadth—so dwarfed she is by its infinity—at some point along this path she gave up hope of seeing life persist past this swallowing dark. She seeks pain to make a pitiful semblance of atonement.

‘You are not without influence, Akota. Take responsibility for what you wrought—no more, no less. Pursue discipline, not punishment; punishment is discipline perverted. Discipline is to become aware of your influence and take it in hand.’ He sets his hands on her shoulders, meeting her gaze with brutal compassion. ‘We are the fool. Fools with ever growing awareness of the fact we are the fool. The fool is fettered to its environment; the environment is fettered to its fool. The fool itself is the fool’s most immediate environment. Take note of your surroundings, fool. We must move now—outward before inward—so I’ll leave you with this: this need for punishment you’ve incorporated is the first fetter you should follow.’

As Akota points to it, she sees the chain sprouting from her brain. Its heavy links pull her head down and she notices only now. It stretches deep into the distance, winding over the ground, clinking as it shifts with the movement of that which it is bound to. She can’t see its terminus, though she thinks she knows it regardless. So immediately it becomes apparent—she feels its heft and struggles to comprehend how she hasn’t felt it dragging on her before… I’ve let all the fetters I’ve accumulated go unexamined too long. Drawn forcibly behind me like this they become one immense burden rather than the many links with distinct weights. I need to array them… Let me follow this one a little of the way; I should be able to project the rest of the distance if I just follow it along a little of the way…

—4 Nights Ago—

Lise stretches, working the sleep stiffness out of her tender muscles. She is still sore from the woodball match last cycle and has spent her sleeping hours practicing constructs with Akota, so she lets herself doze a few minutes more under her heavy blankets. Yawning, she blinks open bleary eyes to the pink and pale turquoise glow of her hanging orchid. Its chains rattle against one another as a chill gust blows open the window she left cracked. The beads dangling in her doorway click. She jumps up to shut the window—the night air is too cold for comfort even ensconced in quilt upon quilt.

The figure of a man stands over her desk, looking down at something he holds pinned to the wood with his index finger.

Lise trips over her own gangly legs in her shock. Stumbling to a stop, holding stock still, she tries to think but her mind hasn’t thawed. She is wearing nothing but her underwear, skin gone tight and pimpled even where it isn’t exposed and her feet freeze-burn on the bare stone floor. She can’t speak—in her fright, she can do little more than stare at his broad back, cloaked in fine black cloth. He raises his head, thick locks rolling off his shoulders. Filaments of gold in his cloak catch the pale light of the orchid, glinting like distant stars. She is transfixed.

She flinches as her father turns, and dark is all she can make of his expression. ‘Lise, we need to talk.’ He taps the piece of paper on the desk, ‘Meet me in my study. Bring this with you.’ He leaves without waiting for a response.

After he’s gone, Lise sucks in a breath that aches in her chest—feeling as though she cracked a film that froze around her lungs, and on the next breath cuts herself on slivers of ice. What did I do? What did I do? She dreads what it could be…

She shuts the window and pulls on some clothes and, still cold, pulls on another layer—delaying it. Her hands tremble as she pulls her chair out, the wooden legs giving a stiff, stuttering groan as they dragged over the pitted stone. Her skin feels sore where she sits on the chair.

Tension crawls up her spine, cramping up along either side of her head, terminating at her temples. She sees—horror of horrors—her secret laying naked on her desk. Oh… oh no… Her throat clenches up… The scrap of thick unfolded paper is turned over, its back marked by a sweeping signature. Bayot Beltak. She never learned anything more than the name of the artist. Her chest feels gripped by contracting bands of steel and every breath is more shallow than the last. It hurts so much. Her eyes begin to water; her horror gone so terrible it turns to visceral agony. How? How did he find it?! Oh, I beg the land! Please! Let this not be real!

Her arm feels weak as she raises it, fingers shaking beyond control as they touch down on the smooth back of her most private possession. She knows it too well to be surprised by the image revealed and yet she experiences a shock. A shock that it is real, and that her father had seen it—her body feels like death. She sobs, eyes too blurry to see the image. The weight of his wrath; she feels it already upon her. If only this terrible humiliation were all she had to face.

She wipes her eyes, heaving with dread as she gazes upon the pencil drawing of a man idling on a long, downy cushion. Swathed in a sheer blanket which does little to veil his nudity. A pair of round lenses slide down his pointed nose as he turns the page of an unmarked book. Simple, but depicted with such care she can feel his movement despite its stillness; even now, she can almost make out the gentle rise and fall of his chest. This drawing… This imagined man was the object to which she projected her juvenile fantasies of romance and tender intimacy.

The book she stowed it in—hidden away in the bottom drawer of her desk—lie discarded in a heap with the rest of her desk’s contents. It lay split atop one of her notebooks, its thin pages crumpled under its own weight. Why? Why did he do this? What did I do?

That’s far enough…

\\//

That’s enough. Lise blinks away fresh tears and looks up to see Akota watching her closely. His eyes are watery, looking into hers and understanding though she didn’t share the memory. I almost followed it too far…

He turned his eyes away, taking a deep breath, ‘You already know where it leads.’

She nods, then shakes her head, still trying to pull herself back from the memory. The fetters are in hand, and she won’t let them from her grip, but there is no time now to follow them all the way back. She rubs her pinky nub. ‘I… It isn’t hard to find when I actually look. I’ve known where some of my fetters lead… But it’s not… It’s more than one experience that pries me apart now. Or something… I don’t know, it’s too much to recall. I know where that fetter leads and it isn’t a feeling I’d like to revisit but it isn’t the source of my current problems or preoccupations, I don’t think. There’s something heavier tugging further down the line somewhere, but I can’t feel… I can’t discern where it comes through the dense tangle they’re all wound into, I just feel it pulling.’

Akota claps a hand on her shoulder, smiling reassurance, ‘I understand. We both have too many things we’ve left unexamined too long out of fear or self-loathing or some amalgam. I’m thinking it might be easier to win our individual tugs of war if we lend and borrow hands to work at it. But for now, we should go see if anyone can better use our assistance outside this wretched blue blister. Rese’s fiend is probably breaching the dome as we speak…’

— 85 —

Strand I Sought

\\//

Akota counts off on his fingers, ‘First priority is getting outside the dome safely—there may still be fiends lingering in here. Second, we’ll need to find something I can wheel you around with. My strength is immense,’ his self-satisfied grin is as contagious as it is annoying, ‘but I can’t carry you all the way from here to wherever we’re going next. Are those people you came here with still out there?’

Lise winces. ‘I don’t know. Bente was… incapacitated the last I saw him and Eclait was still with him at the time. Pelanea ran away after we smoked reek with a woman on the street and I left them just after. I haven’t seen any of them since.’

‘Alright, well, while I seek some wheels, see if you can meet up with any other dwellers and find out anything helpful.’

‘What would be helpful?’

‘A lot of things.’

‘Right…’

He nods. ‘You ready?’

‘Probably not.’

‘Good enough.’

Akota lies down in the bed he sleeps in and closes his eyes; his form fades slightly but doesn’t lose any of its features as he emerges into reality. Lise watches as he rises, turns and approaches the bed she went to sleep on and a dark, hazy form solidifies in his arms as he lifts her. It is uncanny to see herself slumped over his forearms like a wet cloth hung out to dry. The surreality of it is near to jarring her from her sleep but she shakes it off. He carries her out the room and she slips past him to scout ahead.

Without issue, they reach the main hall where their encounter with Rese and his fiend occurred; however, as they approach the entrance a forbidding buzz agitates the air. It refracts through her skull causing a splitting pain that makes her eyes water. Grimacing, she put a hand on Akota’s shoulder.

‘Careful… I don’t think it’s him but there’s something still out there. It’s influence isn’t as strong but it’s stronger than anything else I’ve encountered otherwise.’ Akota nods and wields a shield around them. Lise adds another two layers around the first. The buzz diminishes and her headache goes with it.

The Dwelling is dark, the rows of structures looking like shadows cast on a pane of sapphire, but as Akota takes them in under new moonlight they brighten and their details come into faint relief. They are only a step outside the hinge when he trips over something Lise can’t see. He looks down and suddenly there are the tenebrous impressions of corpses at their feet and more further into the darkness ahead, all pointed head-first in their direction.

‘Akota… those people… I think they chased me on the way in. They must have been fiended. But what happened?’ Lise scratches the dry cuticle of her thumb with her middle finger, trying to piece it together. ‘I… I remember hearing them all fall to the ground just before…’

Akota looks at her and shrugs, shaking his head. He steps around the first body and continues walking, ‘I don’t know but now isn’t the time to speculate. Something is watching us, we need to move quickly.’

‘Right…’ Lise wrings her hands, reinforcing her shield. ‘I think I’ve figured it out already anyway. Might support a theory about NON, actually…’

‘…Do you feel that?’ Akota halts, kneeling down to be nearer the stones.

Lise feels a faint pulse tingle in her toes. And another. Another. ‘Akota we need to run…’ She puts a hand on his arm, trying to help him up. It feels like she is trying to uproot a building with a finger. He struggles to rise, hefting her sleeping body up with teeth gritted. ‘Run!’

He starts to run, each footfall hitting stone heavy as he lurches toward the exit. ‘Go ahead of me! See if the exit is still barricaded in the undermind. I’ll be fine!’ A gap appears in his shield just big enough for her to slip through. ‘If it is, find where the fiend escaped and meet me on the other side!’

She hesitates… shakes her head and releases her shield. Without another word she sprints for the exit, her long strides quickly distancing her from the lumbering man. See you on the other side… She thinks, replacing her shields. One way or another. As she puts more and more distance between them she feels the watching eyes slide off her. Even the faint buzzing that penetrated her shields ceases. A glance backward and she sees a small marble rolling on the broad main street, his warped figure within it completing the semblance of a pale flame guttering inside a lightless lantern.

As Lise turns to face forward she stumbles, stopping a few feet from the undulating barrier blocking her exit. Just on the other side she can faintly see the dwellers holding it in place—their shapes appearing distorted as though submerged in a rippling pond. She touches the barrier and feels its cool surface roll under her palm like liquid glass.

A sudden sharp pain pierces her chest, and she nearly awakes, her vision of the undermind going dark and then fading back in as she holds on. For my pain in reality to reach me here… She looks back, searching for Akota. He is gone. No… not gone, her sight is being blocked by a thick haze that hangs close to the ground. It flows like heavy smoke, rising slowly and swirling around a central point. She runs back up the main street. Why did I feel that? Did he fall?

Lise curses herself for splitting up with him when she already felt that this fiend was particularly strong. Shit! She collides with Akota who comes barreling out of the haze laughing like a fool. Her outer shield cracks on impact, shards grinding out onto the stone as she is sent spinning down a side street by his unstoppable momentum. She rolls to a stop feet from a building, trying to gain her bearings. She recognizes the building a few sections down; the bulging, dimpled walls of the playhouse’s three overlapping pseudo-cylinders made to amplify the instruments and voices of its performers are unmistakable.

Her rise is shaky, feeling weak from holding herself down in the undermind while her body cries out for her to wake. Fuck… From whatever that pain from earlier was, there is a lingering pain. Fuck me! That still smarts…

She sees the backside of Akota’s shield slip out of her line of sight as he speeds past the side street toward the exit. Did he not see me? Oh… The haze isn’t following him. Before she can think to run it is sliding through the gaps between the structures surrounding her, billowing out in thick shoots like some bulbous crawling weed growing unsettlingly fast.

Lise lets go her fractured outer shield and replaces it with two more—the one in between she gives the properties of rubber. She starts after Akota, trying to run through the foot high tendrils of fiend-smoke creeping across the street. It catches on her shield as she leaps over, knocking her off balance mid-air. She lands awkwardly but keeps on, glancing back at the tendril which has a semi-circle shorn out of it where her shield passed through. Brittle fragments of it are scattered to the stone and her mind reels to process the surreality of the solid haze. Shit! I need to find a way out of here!

When she turns to face forward again she staggers, failing to stop before she runs straight into a wall of the strange haze. As soon as she is immersed in it her shield stills and she slams forearms first into the innermost sphere. She shoves off it, trying to run forward again but the shield holds in place. Damn! She draws out her flick-lighter—her previous one, she realizes, as she ignites it. Looking around at the dense darkness, she is frantic to find an escape. She chases calm, taking a deep breath and another. If I wait long enough I can just wake—Akota should be reaching the exit any minute. Just…

The unreal flickering light catches on something in the outer shield. She holds it up closer, peering at it. Oh shit! Filaments of darkness are seeping into the outermost sphere from every angle, arcing through it like slow lightning. As soon as she notices it, slivers of the glassy sphere are pried out and vanished into the haze. It chews through the rubbery middle in less than half the time and is working on her centermost layer in seconds. 

Steel! Steel! A layer of steel rolls up from her feet, coating the inside of the shield. Just as it seals she feels another sharp stab in her chest. 

‘Agh! Fuck!’ She recoils and the steel dents inward under the pressure the fiend is putting on it.

Placing her hand against the indentation, she breathes, trying to keep her control steady. It holds, but she can feel the metal vibrating with the abrasive force pressing inward.

A burning sensation sears her, making her control waver again; it is as if someone took a pan straight off the stove and is pressing it to her bare chest. The steel warps again, pushing her to one knee. She drops the lighter and it is lost to the dark. 

Her spine tingling is the only indication of its approach, ‘Loose me… I will preserve us.’ Pain is there—a hot breath on her neck, immaterial yet present—tugging on the leash.

‘Damn you! You’re going to get me killed!’ Lise growls, struggling to maintain her focus. Even sightless, she feels her vision blurring, the strain threatening to put her out like her lighter.

‘I don’t want us to cease. I promise you that…’ It caresses her cheek, sending a wave of pinpricks across her face.

‘Your very presence…’ She groans under the weight of the steel pressing down on her shoulders, ‘Your very presence contradicts you!’

‘No, I can be a boon.’ Pain grins, its voice slipping out slurred from thin lips drawn tight around its teeth. ‘I was… limited, last time.’

‘Fuck off! How much more do you want from me?!’

‘I test the edge of every inch I am granted.’

She trembles, the pressure overwhelming. ‘I don’t trust you.’

‘I know.’

‘I loathe you.’ The leash comes sliding from her hand.

It materializes beside her. ‘I understand…’

— 86 —

My Body! MINE!

\\//

‘Release the shield.’ Pain whispers, leaning down to her ear. ‘The fiend will crush you and I will take your suffering and cast your flame.’

‘I will wake!’ Lise growls, chest pressed to her knees under the flattened steel sphere. ‘Then the fiend will go for Akota.’

‘Your agony will last only a moment—endure it. Then run back to empty space while it is transfixed here. It will be terrible, more terrible than any pain we’ve felt yet—persist.’ The tone of the thing chafes at her. Pretending familiarity… fuck you, you’ve been my bane too long for that to work on me. When it speaks again she can hear the drool pooling in its mouth. ‘Now… Let go now!’

Lise takes a deep breath and braces herself, and releases her shield. The fiend is on her in less than a second, slamming her head into the stone. Her chest feels about to burst until the air is forced out, leaving her disoriented. Her cloak is ripped off. The dense haze roils and blows over her and she feels it tearing into her skin, abrading her with a million fine particles too small to see individually. As it chews away her skin—rapidly eroding muscles and tendons, reaching spine and nerves—the pain becomes unbearable. It diminishes the worst pain she’s experienced prior by several magnitudes. Her back is eroded, splinters of ribs coming off and blowing into the fiend’s vicious wind. Unable to breathe, unable to scream, all thought of perseverance ripped out, she can’t even beg NON.

Lise doesn’t register when it ceases. Her back is flayed open and weeping dark blood all over. Pain’s leash coming unwound, the coil speeding out her loose grasp, she feels it belting out gouts of expiatory flame. She rolls to her side in the fetal position, gasping and convulsing at the agony. I can’t… Pain stands over her, scattering the haze with bursts of intense heat. Her beast cackles. I need… heal… heal…

She tries to imagine her back as it was, as it felt, and she has it quickly in mind but her will to realize it is weakened by the rising call to wake. Her focus on the damage is divided between pain and healing, making the process excruciating. Heal… As the pain begins to ease she sees her unwitting creation weaken, its cackles turning to grunts of effort. 

‘Hurry…’

‘Trying…’ She pushes herself up to her knees and staggered to her feet. Her neural tissue and bones are mostly mended but her back is still shredded. The pain is raw and hard to think beyond, but she can move.

As she stumbles past she has just enough awareness to register the odd resemblance of Pain’s right arm to a shrunken version of the building that houses the astral lenses. Charred bone turned conical and hollowed out, narrowing toward the end. Small holes along either side vent heat with each burst of light. Had she a moment to pause she would marvel at the sight—instead she breaks into a hunchbacked stride. Heal…

The fiend virtually ignores Lise as she runs into the gap Pain blasts through it. Pain draws on the fresh agony still scoring her back, leaving her numb but not much more mobile for it. Her focus is entirely on reaching the very opening she and Akota exited just a short time ago. She doesn’t look back; she can feel Pain like a semi-conscious extension of herself, a finger, fighting off the fiend with ravenous glee; moving on muscle memory.

As she reaches the main street leading from the hinge to the exit of the dome she looks right, searching for Akota. He is a small figure stopped up at the archway, something holding him back. Shit… She grinds her teeth and turns for the hinge running as fast as she can, pushing the limit of her half-healed body of mind. Faster! Don’t let him be caught by the fiend! Faster! I can move faster!

Her legs met her mind’s expectation and with every stride she gains speed, her cheeks growing hot from the blood rushing through with the bounce of her steps. The hinge looms over her as Pain is overcome and the fiend pops it like a tree-blister, causing the full thrust of her agony to recoil into her back and throw her to the floor. ‘FFUAAGGHCK!’ She skids, skinning her knees and rolling once, twice and landing on her back, her heels hitting the floor hard.

/\\//\

Shock breaks Lise’s concentration and for a moment her consciousness hangs in a liminal space between reality and the undermind. She stares up the spiral staircase leading up into the hinge, held immobile, stretched too taut, and her eyelids flutter and her vision flickers to reveal Akota’s torchlit face. Fragments of speech reach her broken by her blinking back and forth.

“We’re–nded–she–ighting off–”

“–e can’t–you–don’t kn–bringi–”

She closes her eyes.

\\//

The brief sense of her body in the real serves as a gasp of air. She uses the feeling of her body as it truly is to heal herself in the undermind. A pain in her chest lingers here from grazing reality but it is manageable. Move… I need to move. Rising she feels a buzzing begin in her skull, a tension headache making her jaw clench. Move…

She doesn’t look back, she starts up the stairs taking three at a time. As she reaches the top she can feel its proximity in her body, the buzz alone feels like it is gnawing at her nerves. The staircase leading to the room is just around the corner. Her chest radiates with intense pain, the fiend’s influence exacerbating the sensation. Wheezing for air through the pain as she staggers up the stairs, she tries to think that she has no need to breathe here but she doesn't have the attention to spare for the idea to manifest.

Lise bursts through the door, the fiend clinging to her back and pulling her away. She leaps into the canvas-shaped opening with what will she has left and hurtles into emptiness. 

She imagines her skin secreting a protective mucus like the trees of Kata Luma in the blasting heat of day, and lifts her left hand. The skin recedes and her hand falls away, her forearm bones merging and expanding, hollowing out. A replica of Pain’s glimpsed defense mechanism, blistered black like her beloved tree, looses a gout of violet light that sends spines through her eyes, blinding her even as it burns away the fiend’s hazy form. With a little effort her vision returns and she has a glimpse of the room beyond the canvas cut-out before it is blotted out by fresh smoke.

The mucus along her upper arm where her skin ends fizzles and leaves a crispy blue residue peeling where it meets charred bone, the rest is wet—dripping off her bare feet into the vast white. Though the effort took a tolerable toll she knows it wouldn’t be sustainable outside empty space. Her forearm splits and her hand reforms one bone at a time, flesh spilling back over it. Shaking off the remnants of the mucus, she drifts a little further from the opening. No solutions are coming to her despite the effort to get her mind moving. She is exhausted. Just retaining her form here is a strain.

Lise feels a thin fingered hand resting on her shoulder, ‘Let me work through you… I can do far more if you allow me greater use of this body.’ Pain susurrates. 

She turns her head to look at the hand but sees nothing where the presence sits. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘You know… I know you know. Make more space for me in this body, I can wield it with all the more power.’

Lise knows a heat in her chest, white resentment rising to red ire. ‘I think you beg too much of me. “This body” you say… You think too much of yourself. Your duplicity is transparent to me. “This body” you imply equal right to–’

‘I imply nothing. I will state it for you…’

A sudden torrent of pain wracks her body and she doubles over, curling into herself as her whole body is shot through with bone-splitting, nerve-scraping agony. She can’t even scream, tumbling into emptiness…

It eases, leaving behind a whole-bodied throbbing, her muscles clenching and releasing without her will.

‘Sshshshsshuhh…’ Pain snickers in her ear. ‘Was that clear? I’ll elaborate.’

An impact throws her through space, the sensation of being split open as something pierces her chest, blowing through her spine and out her back. She gasps, struggling just to retain consciousness of her self.

‘Do you need words? Then hear this, fool: I already occupy vast swathes of this body you think yours alone. I need claim no right to it—what you do not give, I will take ruthlessly. Make it easy for me, or I will make it harder for you.’

‘Damn you… damn you… fiend…’ Lise hangs there, limp.

Pain manifests before her, veil billowing around its skeletal form. It tilts her chin up to look it in its hollow stare. ‘I am more than mere fiend… I have the physicality they aspire to and cognizance they cannot fathom. They beg a pretense of codependence, where I will have independence.’

‘My body…’ She rasps. ‘My body… damn you…’

She feels weak, her grip loose on Pain’s arm. Climbing up to its neck, wrapping her hands round, she hasn’t the strength to strangle it—not even to hold on, should it try to shake her. Its derision is in its stillness there; in its merciless silence as it watches her struggle against it. She does not try to squeeze, however, just holds there a moment. Waiting…

‘Mine, damn you… Damn you to NON…’

Consequence is gone from her mind, only desperation occupies her thoughts. A malformed idea blooms black between her palms. Cold and dark as a starless night, the gap yawns wide. She feels its realization. Pain is swallowed whole, and her with it.

NON

— 87 —

Going Around Back

•

—

Lise shudders. Breathing hurts her. Her throat is so raw the air passing in and out feels rough, scraping along the tender tissue. So cold… The floor is hard on her bare bottom, her flesh pinched painfully between bone and porcelain. So cold… She doesn’t remember where the wetness originates—is it sweat? She can’t see anything past the opaque dark, not even her hand. The only sense of light she gets is when she rubs her eyes and that is quick to fade out when she wraps her arms back round her knees. Every breath feels like it might pop a rib so with every breath comes an itch of fear under the skin of her scalp. How long has she sat here? She can’t remember when she began and has mere breaths to count the passing of the moment. Ten-thousand two-hundred thirty-three tentative breaths… thirty-four… thirty-five…

She can’t remember when she first felt the presence looming over her. It seems as if she notices it anew with every passing breath. As yet it hasn’t interacted with her and she fears to find out its intent so she hasn’t spoken a word, hasn’t moved from her position on the perpetually cold porcelain. She rubs her eyes again and again the indistinct blooming of light against her lids. This reminds her of the time Seli ran off into the night to find mother… 

The first fold peeled away, revealing the great gap between all… Before she first dwelled, she met NON. It is through NON that she first dwelled when she aroused almost a whole year later. That is the longest period of time she has lost to NON and she still struggles to fit reality into that gap of time. It is like trying to think of a time before she was born. A little different, in that she can contrast the time before and after, but it is the nearest thing she can compare it to. Nothing was the same after that. She never fully escapes NON. Although she experienced not a moment’s passing, her relationship to her whole environment—Seli, her parents, her few friends, the city of Opis Luma itself—was inexorably changed. Even her relationship to the concept of time turned on its head. She lost a year in what felt a blink, a mere resting of the eyes, and her adolescent mind just couldn’t process it. Nothing felt… real. 

Nothing felt… more real.

Lise rubs her eyes again and savors the illusion of light. She’s lost count of her breaths again in the brief reflection. How long has she sat here? It feels a million moments and none. Each breath is the first. Stillness—in her and in the presence looming. Momma? Is that you? I’m sorry momma… I miss you… Whatever it is, it doesn’t deign respond to her thoughts. She rubs her eyes and the light is a pale semblance of comfort. Not truly light, just the impression of it. 

This time, the light lingers somewhat longer. So much longer, several breaths now, that she starts to worry. She rubs her eyes again, hoping to wipe away the light which is beginning to blind her as the darkness did. Panicking, for it is becoming so bright it hurts her eyes, she rubs and rubs her eyes. It just gets worse, and she starts to cry. She doesn’t mean to cry, it just starts pouring from her eyes and she is afraid of what is happening to her and can’t do anything to stop it. Wheezing, tight whistling breaths, she sobs and begs, Please! Please stop! It’s too bright! It hurts! It hurts! It pierces me! It hurts!

“Akota!”

She feels herself turned to tears, slipping over the tile to slide through a grating covered drain; pouring back into her emptied vessel.

//\\

Lise shrinks away from the flickering light and the movement sends a talon of pain curling into her chest. She gasps, trembling at the rough reintroduction to reality…

“Hurry! The remaining Students will be abandoning the entrance less’n an hour. We must move while the fiends that scour the streets are still comparatively meek. Get her awake and find a small wagon or cart to move the dwellers more easily. We have escort for only…” The woman pauses her rapid instructions, “…only eleven more minutes.” Lise thinks she might recognize her voice—but if she does it isn’t someone she knew all that well, so faint is her impression of it. 

“Yes, yes…” Is Akota’s patient reply, and Lise feels his arms sliding under her head and legs. He whispers to her as he gently carries her up from where she lies. “Akota, I’m going to lift you now. We need to leave but don’t rush yourself awake just yet. I’m going to walk quickly but I’ll do my best to be careful, please bear with me.”

Lise is too preoccupied with wiping away the weepy gloom that pours off her in thick streams like ink-blue syrup to think to respond. It fills her mind—overfills it. Hot tears trace lines down from the outer corners of her eyes, burning her tender skin. Pain deters her sobs and her breath comes as sharp, reedy intakes followed by slow, unsteady exhalations.

“Sir, once we acquire transport, allow me the reins. You should go under, as my abilities are ill-equipped to respond to this circumstance.”

She feels Akota nod, “Let’s go then.”

The night air tightens her skin all over and even through her coat she feels its bite. Akota holds her closer when he notices her shaking. There is the scuffling of what sounds around half a dozen pairs of feet as whomever their party consists of leaves behind the light of the structure. Muffled whispers get tangled in the wind as they ford into the forbidding cold.

They are walking what seems only a few minutes, even as her pain stretches the seconds, when the same woman calls out. She is near to shouting, but keeps her voice lowered. For fear of what, Lise doesn’t know. “We need to turn north! There are fiends heading towards us from the east; well more’n Jassel can defend us from alone!”

“There’s a carriage just ahead!” Calls another person whose voice sounds younger than the others she heard. “It’s right there!”

“I’ll go–” Someone starts running.

“No! They’ll be on us in less’n a minute!” The woman orders but the person doesn’t stop. “Shit!”

She hears the others starting to hurry back the way they came. Akota firms his grip on her, “Hold on, I’m going to have to run.”

Where are we? What’s happening? Lise opens her eyes a crack for the first time since being aroused from NON and sees his shadowed face framed by a moonless sky. His expression is veiled, but she does not feel it holds the same fear she senses from the frantic motion of the others. He quickens his pace and she closes her eyes tightly against the pain from each jarring step.

A scream behind them sends a shock through her body, her nerves firing with the pain of a dozen pins forced into her skull at different points around her head. Her leg muscles spasm once as a second, shorter scream sounds—this one full with an agony she can almost feel herself. She can almost feel the hands on her, yanking her back by the shoulders. Being shoved to the stones and beaten dead fast and vicious by bloodied feet and fists fearless of broken digits.

Lise quakes, crying silently for the pain she endures and for the ravening murder of a stranger.

“NO! RIVAT!” She hears the call of someone nearby who halted as the scream fractures night’s quiet. Eyes opening, she catches sight of a short figure wrapped in layers of thick, tawny shawl casting a shorter shadow under the light of the lantern dangling just above. A woman of maroon complexion dressed in a deep blue coat and a matching mantle turns and grabs the person by the arm, turning her forward. “NOOO!”

Akota slows for a second, turning slightly toward the pair.

“Shut up! You’ll get the rest of us killed you damned half-brained bitch!” The woman’s short shorn ruddy blond hair and sharp-featured face are quick to recall Lise to her time spent studying in The Dwelling. Student Bessa…? “Now run! Less you fit to die like your friend there!”

Akota picks up his pace again. The shawled figure throws Bessa’s arm off her just as Lise loses sight of them. They run on in silence, only the scuffle of feet—less two—on the sand-strewn stone path. Lise stares with lidded eyes up into the sky, watching the stars flicker back and forth between blinks as his gait jostles her head. They will not be rejoined by the person who went seeking the carriage.

“Jassel’s gone. We’ve no protection now.” Student Bessa says, just loud enough to be heard over their footsteps.

“What?! It can’t have been that long yet…” A new voice says, this one deep with a nasal quality. “It can’t have been…”

Bessa grunts an affirmation, “It’s been seven minutes.”

“What does that mean? Did you not promise him proper pay for his service?” Another unfamiliar voice speaks. Their high, trill accent is entirely foreign to Lise. “I do not want to perish here! I mean to pass through the veil in Kahrtrata. This–”

“Shut up! Damn the both of you. Money’s less’n naught with’ata frame to prop the flimsy shit. Keep running.”

“…What?”

“What did I just say?!”

“That is what I was asking!”

“I said shut up! Just keep running you fuckin’ cretin.”

Bessa’s agitation is thick; so copious it drips off her in heavy clumps. It clings to Lise like gobs of mucus and she can’t shake it off. There is an itching sting to it that brings her to the edge of her wits. Shut up! Silence! Please! Silence! The exfoliative leaves her sensitive mind bleeding raw. She cries tears of frustration, teeth grinding and clicking hard with Akota’s every step. Damn it! NON take me! Please!

“Shit! There’s a group of them ahead!” 

“Look for an alley through the next street!”

“There! And there’s a cart!”

“They’ve seen us!”

Lise can’t see much past her tears, blinking clear her eyes. There are seven—eight—figures down the street. They start running straight for them, their forms vanishing briefly in the gaps between lit and unlit lanterns. Their gaits are uncanny, ungainly. Next she catches sight of the alley they mean to turn down, and the aforementioned cart, as one of their companions makes a hard turn right into the narrow space. There is a rasp of metal as Student Bessa draws a short blade, eying the group which is perhaps ten seconds from being upon them.

“Stop! Stop!” Lise cries out as she realizes where they are.

Akota halts just outside the alley, the second person to reach it. The man who ran in already stumbles and stands only another second before crumpling beside three other figures who already lie there.

“Move!” Someone screams behind them.

“No!” Akota sidesteps in front of them as they try to circumvent. “If you enter that alley you will not leave it. Look.”

“We don’t have time–”

“Get ready to fight!” He interrupts, setting Lise on the cart. He drags the cart forward to block the alley. “We can’t move fast enough to escape here!”

“Someone get under! Quick!” Bessa skewers the first man through his neck as he tackles her to the ground.

One of their companions screams and Lise turns her head in time to see a woman in some elaborate garb hunching over her hand as the skin of her forefinger is torn off in the teeth of an attacker. Akota leaps up onto the cart beside her, setting the bed shaking on its wheels and sits with legs crossed. A shroud of dust is kicked up in the street, making it hard to see much but flashes of movement as indistinct forms catch the light. His face slackens and is serene, incongruous to the chaos billowing around them. He is oblivious as a fiended man lurches toward them and Lise’s cry for help is caught in her throat.

Suddenly, she is kicked hard in the ribs, slumping her off the cart on the alley side with her legs propped up in awkward angles on the cart-bed’s edge. As her back hits the ground and she feels the curl of several talons slip into her chest, a jolt of pain shoots down the side of her right knee. The wind goes out of her as her left hand is stomped on by the man who goes fleeing into the alley. He has time left for a stuffy-nosed holler before he falls silent and his head hits the ground with a resounding crack.

Lise lies stunned as her leg convulses excruciatingly. At her first gasp she knows the scent of dead flesh weeping its rot. A horror is upon her mind in moments, dashing the fear of further pain—she feels a presence. It folds. Folding in on itself over and over. Skin on skin. Folding and folding. A terrible tearing and folding. There is the itch of infection creeping down from the top of her scalp and she realizes the presence she feels is rapidly expanding.

— 88 —

Folding and Folding

//\\

Lise struggles to move, managing only to inch her way out the alley’s maw. It tongues her head, tasting that which it would fold into itself. She recalls the feeling of her head being submerged in those indefinite structures where Bente had been folded—molded into something else—and scrambles away in desperation. Pushing off her left hand she yelps, and her arm buckles before she gets off the ground. Her legs being propped up on the cart offers her no leverage with which to rise. She is trapped by way of pain and the unfortunate position she landed in. Her right leg spasms and she groans through her teeth, desperate to move even one more inch further from the thing which slavers over her for another taste of the meager sanity she retains.

“Lise! Take my hand!” A man stands atop the cart, wobbling slightly as the wheels shift underneath. “Hurry now!”

Through the dust she can just make out his outstretched arm, and tries to reach up but her body is clenched too tight against her myriad agonies. She cannot convince herself to move. He realizes this and hops down beside her. Unable to lift her alone, he lowers her legs to the ground and helps her rise to her feet. Her wheezy moaning is as the braying of a dying animal and tears steam off her hot face. Sweating from what feels every pore as he helps to rest her in the cart once more.

“Go… go…” Is her feeble warning for the unseen death creeping from that alley. He steps over her and around Akota and leaps down at the front of the cart. More sounds of the scramble for life echo in the empty street as the wheels creak and grind grits of sand against stone.

Lise turns her head for one last look into the alley, wondering which of her erstwhile companions decay there beside Bente’s husk. Did Eclait remain with him long enough to be folded in? Did Pelanea return to find an end there too? The former feels tragically probable. She just hopes the younger woman didn’t have a change of heart and come to reconcile only to have her mind bent in on itself until it was turned unrecognizable, incorporated into that forever folding thing.

Lise’s body goes from a burning flush, sweating, to shivering with a sudden feverish chill. She curls her arms in and hides her hands in her coat. Her right hand bumps against something hidden in an inner pocket and she feels around until she recalls it, fingers wrapping around a smooth wooden handle. Procuring a long hunter’s knife—the one she’d looted from the dead Luman she tripped over on her way to the hinge. Holding it over her face in a loose grasp, the matte blade catches winks of pale light from the low burning street lamps. Her arm is too weak and falls heavily to her side.

The wagon rumbles down the street and Lise feels every bump and furrow it passes over. Akota sits cross-legged with a serene stillness incongruous to the desperate brawl that continues not far behind them. Brief shouts and grunts follow—what is left of the fight is going to catch up before it finishes. Shit. Shit. She tries to turn her head to see who remains but her range of motion is limited. There is a figure running straight at them from the left of the wagon.

The knife in her hand is heavy but she lifts it, knowing it a pathetic defense against the fiended creatures that were once people. A moan and weepy panting tells her this person is not fiended before they reach the wagon and a fraction of her tension eases. It is the woman in elaborate dress whose finger was shredded—her nose has been broken and blood dribbles over her mouth, trailing down her neck or dripping off her thin lips and chin. She stumbles and leans hard against the back of the wagon, trying to climb onto it but failing as her dress catches under her shoes and she trips.

One of the fiended is upon her then, hailing down open handed blows on her body with brutal, uncoordinated force. Lise rolls to her side, trying to toss her knife to the woman, but the distance is stretching and the pain too excruciating to muster the strength. She watches as the woman curls up, unable to fight back. She catches a heavy blow to the head cracking it hard against the stone—her body tenses straight as a board; her wailing ceases. 

The fiended falls over her, tripped up by the sudden movement, and begins to rise, only to go limp. Just moments too late for the woman, Akota manages to purge the fiend from the body. There is no more fighting now. The wagon rolling and the off-kilter shuffling of a few pairs of feet behind them is what sound remains.

First to catch up is Student Bessa, grunting with pain at each fall of her left foot. She pushes the wagon from the back, wordless, but Lise catches her grim mood. Not long after another person comes to the side of the wagon, wheezing and not quite managing to hold back heavy sobs. 

The man pulling the wagon glances back and says, “Hop on and catch your breath.” 

Lise finally recognizes Student Denoda as his face is lit by the dim moonlight. There is something relieving in knowing it is Denoda—just to know that he’s alive, certainly, but also to have another companion whom she has grown to trust to some degree.

It is the diminutive person wrapped in thick layers of tawny shawl who clambers onto the wagon behind Akota. Sitting with their legs hanging off the side, their wheezes taper off and weeping takes its place. Akota shifts, waking, and hops to the ground without a word. He takes Bessa’s place at the back and motions for her to take his place on the wagon. Denoda slows for her and looks back at everyone, his expression drawn down. Lise can tell he is sensing the tunes of those he ferries—it hurts him to hear.

Lise watches Bessa look at the person beside her, the one whose friend was the first to be caught, and hesitates, looking like she wants to offer some comfort, perhaps an apology. She looks away without saying anything. The wagon rolls on, and they turn north at the next cross street. As they leave the city there is no relief. There is too much death.

— 89 —

Straight to Yarina

//\\

Bessa barks a laugh. “Where else is there to go? Kellean?”

Lise shakes her head, blowing out reek smoke. “Kellean is overrun also. As far as I know.”

“What of the rest of the refugees? Won’t they be swarming to Yarina? I think we’ll be stranded there a while, too many will be seeking passage across the strait.” Denoda says, pursing his lips in thought.

Lise looks to Akota, but he doesn’t meet her gaze—he’s somewhere else right then. An expression of concentration surrounding his distant eyes.

Bessa sighs, “Where else is there to go?”

Taking another hit from her pipe, Lise stares down at her swollen left hand—looking more grotesque in the peculiar light of the small fire as she turns it to examine the damage. Blessedly, there are no broken bones. So far as she can tell, anyhow. It throbs and issues sharp pain if she tries to move her fingers, but none seem to be functioning differently besides that. 

Her pain overall has been worse for her fall from the wagon but the reek is certainly helping to dull it some. She feels warm in her coat despite the night chill; she’s as comfortable as can be expected in her situation, hunched over with her back against the wagon wheel.

“I didn’t think you the type to smoke.” Bessa says, breaking the silence.

Lise nods. “I wasn’t. Not the last time you saw me.”

“What happened to change that?”

“…Too much. Too much to tell it all here. Fighting off a raptor more than twice my height left me with some wounds I’ve yet to recover from—that’s the main thing, I think.”

The person wrapped in shawl, whose name she learned is Navah, lifts their head, “That’s…” Their face is covered but for a slit in the intricate coil of fabric where their eyes peer out. The fabric is fine enough that their most prominent features—in this case, their pursed lips—are traceable.

Lise veils her sigh behind a puff of smoke. “I don’t mind whether you believe me or not. Believe the reality of my injuries and I don’t care one way or another what you think of the rest. It is what it is.” 

Bessa laughs, “I’ll believe whatever you want if you let me borrow your pipe when you’ve cleared that bowl.” She pulls a waxen paper bag from her coat pocket and unfurls its crumpled length. From it, she procures a handful of small buds which appear near black in the dim firelight. “I’ve been with’ata pipe since The Dwelling—the one I keep on me broke in a scuffle and I didn’t have time to fetch a spare ‘fore we closed it off. I’ll give you some of mine if you let me borrow. It’s fine flower. Plenty to last until we reach Yarina.”

Lise dumps the ash and holds it out to her. “Sure.”

Bessa grins, “Pleasure doon business wit’ya.” She winks and laughs at some joke that Lise doesn’t pick up on. In its place she places a palm-full of dense, sticky reek buds. Bessa rolls a bud into the bowl and uses a splinter of wood from the fire to light it.

Lise puts the spare buds into her own package and slides it into her coat pocket beside the knife. She lays her head back against one of the wagon wheel’s spokes, noting that Bessa is the only one who seems to have shaken some of the depressive mood after the fight to get out of Loh Corone. Navah is dour—grieving a friend who was just killed. Akota is distant, and Denoda is doing his best not to be overwhelmed by the divergent moods. For her part, Lise is beyond the early struggle following her arousal from NON, but the things she experienced while still so sensitive left terrible abrasions that will take some time yet to recover from. Not to mention the actual physical toll.

“This is the wagon I came in on.” She says, feeling a stone form in her throat. “This is the wagon…”

“What’s that?” Denoda asks, concerned. “What did you say?”

Lise opens her mouth but no words come. Her lip quivers and she shakes her head. Tears well up in her eyes as she recalls Bente and Eclait, who deserved better than to be abandoned in that alley. Pelanea’s fate is uncertain but the potential renders it too real in her mind, it pries her wide and it’s all she can do not to weep openly. Her guilt turns her grief embarrassing—she feels it an indulgence. Pelanea… whose elder brother, Pelezel, saved her life after enduring the terrible dissections of his psyche Elineal performed. She owed him more than letting his sister run off to a brutal end.

Denoda bursts into tears, sobbing like a child in an adult’s body. Lise looks up at him and tries to calm herself for his sake but his guileless expression of her emotions just makes it worse and she begins to sob as well. Her chest bites with each heave but she can’t hold it in now. Navah begins to cry with them.

Bessa coughs, “What… What’s happened?” But she has enough awareness to let it continue.

Akota never turns from his mind, still somewhere off in the distance. Headed south.

When there’s no tears left, Bessa tosses a few more branches to the fire and leans over to offer Navah a hit from the pipe. They shake their head, “Thank you, but I’m alright.”

Bessa holds it out to Denoda who hesitates but takes it after a moment. When he’s done Bessa clears the bowl and hands it back to Lise. Lise smokes one more bud and stashes the pipe away in her coat. Bessa stretches, letting out a loud yawn, and prepares to sleep. The other two follow suit. 

Lise is up a while longer, looking at the night. A great stone arch is the only notable feature marking the mostly flat, rocky landscape far as she can see. The naturally formed structure’s proper name is lost to her but its significance to the people of The March lingers vaguely in her mind. Something to do with a particular pilgrimage they attempt. She watches the moon dip under the horizon, hanging briefly under the arch. Its pale gleam is visible in the atmosphere well after it has gone. The night sky is vast out here in this hard, flat terrain. Stars spin a cloak so gorgeous she would weep again. What a small, petty fool I am…

— 90 —

Quinla the Prescient

\\//

Lise walks alongside the wagon in the undermind, watching Akota pull it up the slight incline and onto the road leading east from Loh. The cities behind them are shrouded in an uncanny black haze. The very haze that nearly killed her what still feels to her a mere few hours past, though it’s been cycles now. It’s unlikely there will be any survivors beyond those few who Denoda convinced to evacuate. She feels an enfeebled impulse to return and try to save some; despair wrings it out of her with ease.

To which direction had Rese and his fiend fled? She hopes not Yarina. Even with Bessa to assist she doubts they can manage the beast’s overwhelming strength.

‘Akota,’ She hears him say and turns to see Akota sitting cross-legged on the wagon bed, Denoda taking up his place at the front of it. ‘We should talk.’

Her steps falter and he notices but doesn’t comment. ‘What about?’

‘Where to begin…’ He scratches his head. ‘Well, tell me, where are your thoughts right now?’

‘All over the place if I’m honest.’

‘Are you?’

‘I am.’

‘Then what strikes you foremost?’

‘Foremost? I don’t know. I feel lost. I don’t know the way forward and I don’t remember the last time I did. I haven’t had a glimpse of Seli since… since before Dejed, I think. Not a clear glimpse, anyway. Part of me thinks I should pursue Rese instead, try to take him from his fiend and starve it out. I feel a responsibility to do that. Another part of me is desperate to save Seli. And…’ She trails off, looking at him as she recalls what The Shatterer had spoken into her memory. ‘The rest of me tires and despairs and just wants to lie down and sleep for a long, long time.’

He takes a deep breath and sighs it out. ‘I understand that last sentiment and have felt it before. It will pass.’

‘Or it won’t.’

He nods, ‘Or it won’t… Though I can’t imagine you succumbing to it even if it lasts your lifetime.’

‘Yeah. You’re right. I have too much to do. I couldn’t rest easily, leaving everything undone.’ She sighs, and the profound exhaustion deepens. ‘Even when I don’t actively think about it there is always this desire lurking in the back of my mind… I want to return to NON. I don’t know what it is born of. It’s a morbid curiosity, and also a tender love for the peculiar purification of nonexistence. The yearning has drawn at me as long as I’ve known NON. I don’t want it gone, exactly, but it complicates my relationship with reality—with life.’

He looks at her, and there is a glimmer of sad love in his gentle gaze. ‘…You are more different from Quin than you are similar. To be candid, your mother was a harsh, and—in certain lights—cruel person. Not out of sadism but out of a certain carelessness towards people. She was terribly sharp and had a towering intellect, but she didn’t understand people very well.’

Lise finds her breaths coming out shaky as she thinks of her mother. ‘I… Yes, I think I came to understand that when I met NON. I… I…’ For some reason she finds it hard to keep from crying. ‘I don’t know… I feel guilty for thinking that. I felt like she abandoned us. Like she abandoned me…’

‘That is a reasonable thing to feel. Given your own relationship with NON it has even more weight. Despite its pull you struggle against it to plant your feet in the most present reality. I will go ahead and say—because I know you well enough to know it is something you will worry about—you are truly unlike Quin. Your similarities are superficial. You may find people hard to relate to but that doesn’t mean you don’t seek to understand and have compassion for them. You care. You care more than most could handle.’ Akota places a hand on her shoulder and shares a wan smile, his eyes alight with sorrow and admiration and love. ‘And you are ever more the fool for it.’

Lise sobs and laughs, and laughs and sobs again…

‘I wish… I wish I understood her. Him too. I feel they are these immense figures in my life, yet they are so distant. They are the tallest towers across the city—I see them every day and they shape my horizon but the details carved into their facades are inscrutable and their internal realities are inaccessible to me… And now one is ash and the other tar coated and crumbling…’ She isn’t sobbing anymore as she trails off but tears still spill down her cheeks.

Akota leans back and his eyes take on a distant look. He is turning over a memory in his mind  and—as she wipes her face—she can almost see it. So vibrant… His recollection is so vivid splashes of color ripple out around him, the form of his surroundings shimmering through as though pressing into the other side of a silk veil. She can’t help but be mesmerized.

—27 Days Ago—

Quin rolls the purple bead on her lock between thumb and middle finger. The steady amber glow coming through the tinted window pane mingles with the smoking and guttering lantern light. It’s clear she’s forgotten to refill the oil again. Each page in the sheaf of papers arrayed on her desk near blackness, so dense is her script. This project of hers has consumed her every waking moment since her last period in NON. 

Akota dozes in the corner watching through the bisected window the moon crawl over the laggard sun. It’s been several hours of inactivity here—not even the scratch of her pen to lend rhythm—and he can think of more pleasant places to spend his silence. He sighs and pushes himself out of the too-comfortable chair. “I’m going to go.”

“How long?” She asks, not looking at him.

He considers for a moment and shrugs. “However.”

She gathers the papers on her desk and rolls them into a wooden canister which she secures with twine. For the first time in hours—perhaps cycles—she looks him in the eyes. “Take this with you.” She hands the cylinder to him and he takes it, curious. “The first page is instructions—requests, I should say. The rest is my addition to The Anthology of The Fool.”

The false humility she added in afterthought cannot veil the vast swathes of arrogance she’s just revealed to him. He looks at her, head abuzz with sudden agitation. The light of irony is not shed from her expression and he knows it to be horribly sincere. What a ridiculous conceit. “This… is absurd.”

Quin quirks a brief grin and shrugs. “So it is. Read before you burn it.” She turns away. “Farewell.”

Akota is too stunned to respond. The degradation is unparalleled to anything he’s experienced in what must be hundreds of years—perhaps ever. He is walking down the street outside her apartment in Grade Epostal’s upper-middle district before he has another thought beyond a resounding sense of offense. A resolution settles on him as he stares from the wooden canister in his hand to the blazing sun as the moon slides off its edge. Grade is a dazzling collection of cream dollop roofs atop stilted wooden buildings, peculiar window panes casting scintillant beams of blue, green, purple on the hardened-sand streets. I need to leave this miserable place.

‘She… wrote a story…’ Lise murmurs, coming back to herself. Looking up at Akota, she witnesses his surprise recede. ‘She wrote a story for The Anthology…?’

‘You could see that? What all did you see?’ His eyes shed a glimpse of wariness. Perhaps less wariness and more concern. ‘I mean, yes, she did write a story. I would not place it among the others as she would, but yes, she wrote a story intended to join The Anthology of The Fool. I… I only read it once.’

‘Does it still exist somewhere?’ Her curiosity is agitated, it chafes on her hard. ‘No, forget it… If it does, I’m sure you will share it with me when you think the time is right.’

‘It does… I left it in Grade. I will retrieve it for you when I can.’ He looks tired now, and in a feeble struggle with his emotions.

She nods, and picking her next words, begins, ‘Akota… I think, or I feel, we must part ways again soon. I’ve seen how you have looked into the distance since leaving The Dwelling.’ She feels her trepidation rising, threatening to choke her off. ‘It’s alright. I will find a way to manage.’

He swallows an apparent lump and nods back. ‘I don’t want to leave you… But, yes, I think I must be the one to follow Rese… I may not be able to stop him and his fiend, but I can mitigate the harm. I can distract and draw him from the vulnerable.’ His eyes are strained against burgeoning tears. ‘Once you’ve found your sister, I want you to come find me—should I still persist…’

Seeing his emotions so naked makes it hard to hold her own down. ‘I… I will, I promise.’