meowcats734

[meowcats734]

The midnight revelation was the first major lead we had on Jiaola's location, but it was still just that: midnight. Meloai didn't need to sleep, but Lucet had been practicing cold spells relentlessly, and Sansen was an old man who'd hiked through a supernatural blizzard while maintaining a permanent spell of futuresight. As much as I wanted to burst into the storm and save Jiaola myself, we were in no shape to go haring off into the wilderness just yet.

But I sure as hell couldn't sleep, so I decided to try and bleed off my nervous energy by honing my magic. I wasn't going to be able to mess with my friends' emotions for the sake of getting more attunements while they were sleeping, and besides, I'd run through pretty much every attunement that I thought I could get myself without being a massive dick to the people I cared about most. Giving Lucet a friendly prank-scare or sparking a little joy in Meloai's eyes was one thing—intentionally betraying Sansen's trust or snuffing out someone's sense of wonder was a step beyond what I felt I was willing to do in order to touch one more school of magic. And those were the tamer of the attunements I could try to grab for myself. I'd already picked all the low-hanging fruits when it came to attunement.

That being said, although my obsession with piling up attunements had paid off already with saving Mertri's soul, it was far from the only way that I could improve myself. Every spell I practiced, every memory I summoned into my soulspace, every demon I created and trained was another tool in my arsenal for the next time Iola or Mr. Ganrey or Odin showed up to ruin everyone's day. 

And besides... there was a very real possibility that I could do some good for the fallen while I trained my magic. So I told Meloai to keep an eye out and quietly slipped into the storm.

The blizzard had buried the once-fertile plains, swallowing everything from the tiniest of gnats to the light of day itself. Somehow, it almost felt fitting that even the sun would fade before the apocalyptic hailstorm. After all, what went better together than the cold and the dark?

Well. Necromancers and the dead, for one. Idly, I wondered if in some other life I would've answered something cutesy and trite like "peanut butter and jelly," or "puppies and cuddles," or "governments and corruption." Perhaps that other version of me wouldn't be shivering in sub-zero weather, a repulsion spell keeping the hail from caving in my skull, scouring the fields of the dead for souls that I could still knit back together.

Or perhaps that other version of me would have died long ago. Who knew. Not me, for sure; I wasn't an oracle. Maybe I'd ask Sansen to look into some alternate futures for the fun of it, when we were safely away from the center of a battlefield and everyone we loved was safe.

The blizzard may have been blinding to the mundane eye, but my soulsight had grown by leaps and bounds in the past few weeks, and I could see the constant puffs of death drifting up from the ground. There was where a family of mice starved to death, their sparkling souls shattering like raindrops on earth. Then was when a soldier had frozen, succumbing to the supernatural frost, a few glittering motes of fading souldust marking where he'd passed.

I stepped up to the body, closing their eyes with one hand. I wasn't here for the bodies, although I guessed that if there was anyone left to claim the fallen soldier as kin, I would happily reunite the two. As in, I'd bring the claimant to their slain family, not send them to the afterlife together. Man, people had held weird prejudices against necromancers for so long that even my subconscious felt the need to clarify. But the point was, the bodies of the dead weren't why I'd come out here.

I'd come here for the souls.

It was a feat of concentration maintaining the spell keeping the hail away while I worked another piece of magic: I had to simultaneously manage the bile of disgust pouring into the repulsion spell while digging out a shard of sorrow from my soul, slicing open a tiny rift between planes. The emotions I used to fuel my magic were rarely pleasant, and this was no exception.

But it would be worth it.

A sliver of the dead soldier's soul slipped from thoughtspace to realspace, and I concentrated, drawing it closer to me with the memory of a pair of tweezers. The sliver was barely enough to contain more than a moment of the soldier's life, but as the soul shard melded with my mind, a flash of memory shot through me—

"Leave me behind," I gasped, falling to the ground. "Get to the camp. It'll be faster without a wounded soldier weighing you down."

—and I swallowed heavily, taking in a deep, quavering breath.

Other necromancers might have tried to raise an army with the raw corpses left behind. But I was the greatest necromancer still alive beneath this unceasing storm.

I wasn't here to enslave the bodies of the dead.

I was here to remember their stories.

The greatest necromancers always were historians, after all. Any two-bit thug could raise a freshly-fallen corpse, but if you wanted to summon an army of souls bound to skeletons, there was no better way than unearthing a hidden mass grave from a war two centuries ago. I was a historian, too. Trying to catch the sparks of souls before they faded into thoughtspace.

I stood, narrowing my eyes, and plucked the memory back out from my soul. It was an art that I was still getting used to—anyone who would have taught me further soul manipulation was either as in the dark as I was, a mortal enemy, or dead—but with the help of a tweezer of soulstuff, I held the memory so that it barely skimmed the surface of my soul, still as fresh and perfect as the moment I'd absorbed it. The tracks the soldier's companions had left shone bright in my memory, even if they'd long since been swallowed by the snow, and I followed them like a dog on a hunt. Not that there were any living dogs within a hundred miles.

"Getting warmer," I muttered to myself. "Warmer... warmer... hot."

The memory ended abruptly, but it was enough of a lead that I could pick up the finer details. I was no tracker, but one of the soldier's companions must have been a fairly competent mage of freedom—now that I knew what to look for, I could see the telltale signs from here on out of where the path had been blown free of snow. I reached the end of the trail, hope rising. Maybe... maybe, for once in this fucking endless torment of chronicling the dead, I could actually save someone for once. I would dearly love nothing more than my power over death being utterly, completely useless.

"Warmer," I said, pacing towards what I dimly recognized as a snow cave—

And stopped dead.

Because my soulsight pierced all barriers as mundane as physical objects, and I could see very, very clearly that there were no living souls in the shelter.

Just the leftover fragments of shattered souls.

Despite my layers of thick mountain clothing, I suddenly felt very, very cold.

I trudged forwards, blowing aside the front wall of the shelter with a swipe of my hand and a pulse of disgust, to confirm with my eyes what my soul already knew. Two more soldiers laid dead, embracing each other beneath the snow.

Once more, I pressed against the skin of reality and made a single, incisive cut. The soul fragment that came through was disjointed, a mangled whisper, but still I made sense of the broken memory, disentangling it into a single sentence:

We died warm.

I fell still, standing beside the two frozen bodies, and some cold, calculating part of me wondered if a distant observer would be able to tell which of us were the dead and which of us were the living.

Then, mutely, I turned around to return to my shelter. It was time to put today's expedition to an end.

I was getting colder, after all.

A.N.

Soulmage is a serial written in response to writing prompts. Stick around for more episodes, or join my Discord to chat about it!

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[meowcats734]

After I'd done my best to resolve the crisis in the cabin, Vuliel had gone off to a corner to get used to his new, double-souled state. I didn't blame him—the solution I'd slapped together was haphazard at best, and it couldn't have been comfortable for either of them.

But I had helped. The constant grind of grabbing new attunements whenever I could, even if it meant making my friends angry or sad or regretful, had paid off. I was one step further away from the cowering, helpless witch of self-hatred that had hidden helplessly while different shades of grey tried to kill each other before my eyes. 

Lucet had excused herself from the cabin after watching me desperately battle to hold Mertri's dying soul together, and I had a sneaking suspicion I knew what she was doing. But the rest of the refugee soldiers in the cabin immediately burst out into a clamor of overlapping voices, asking who we were, how we'd found them, whether we knew how to get out of the storm. Our answers ranged from deflections (a traveling oracle and his children) to truths (what part of 'oracle' did you not understand) to cautious bargaining (why don't we all get settled first), but it seemed like we weren't going to get rushed by a bunch of desperate Peaks soldiers, so I let Sansen handle most of the negotiation and nudged Meloai.

"I'm going outside," I whispered, as Sansen asked if the soldiers knew about a witch of lust in the army. From the sounds of it, he wasn't getting very far. "Let me know if... I dunno, the Peaks folks get all snippy about me using regret or something."

"Will do. Hopefully none of them get mad at me for being a mimic," Meloai whispered back.

One of the sharper-eared soldiers whipped his head our way. "You're a what?" he asked.

I sighed. Sansen didn't seem too agitated, so I was sure Meloai would be fine. That was their battle to face.

I had my own.

###

Lucet was casting frost spells when I exited the cabin. Not many, and not much—none of us really understood the amplification of frost magic that raged beneath the rift, but Lucet seemed to be getting the hang of it nonetheless. 

"Are you going to say I'm reckless for using my magic right now?" Lucet asked. There wasn't even any acrimony in her voice—just resignation.

I shook my head, stepping up next to her. "No. No, I was stupid when I told you to stay away from frost magic. You're smart and capable, and a much better witch of sorrow than I am."

Even as I watched, Lucet delicately cleaved a wafer-thin sheet of sorrow from her soul, flicking it out like a throwing card. It scythed through the air, a trail of frost hissing with amplified magic. It was a respectable frostbolt, one that I certainly couldn't replicate.

"Twelve attunements," she finally said.

Neither of us had to ask what she was talking about.

"I know," I whispered.

She didn't say anything more, just slicing off another chip of sorrow from her soul, practicing the frostbolt until her hands frosted over and her sorrow ran numb.

###

Eventually, Sansen came out to tell us that we'd reached an agreement with the soldiers. By the frustration in his face, I could tell he hadn't found any news on Jiaola's whereabouts, other than confirmation that at one point, he'd been here in the army. 

"They apparently got lost in the conflict, so we gave them directions out of the storm," Sansen said. "And we're getting use of the cabin, since... well, they're not using it anymore. Everybody wins."

"Odin would be jealous," I said. Sansen just shook his head and turned to leave. I hesitated, turning to see if Lucet would stay outside, but she squeezed my hand reassuringly and followed Sansen into the cabin.

It didn't take long to get settled in. The soldiers had, with military efficiency, already set up a space for us to sleep. All we had to do was use it. 

But I'd barely hit the mattress when something struck my soul, jolting me awake.

And suddenly, I wasn't Cienne, weighed down with worries about Lucet and Jiaola.

I was Sansen, and I had just jolted awake in tears, fragments of memory spinning off from my soul.

###

My husband was—is—the strongest witch I know. He wasn't strong in the sense of fireballs or artillery strikes, but he cared, fiercely and truly, about the people he loved. About his family. And it said something about him that the two were one and the same. Even when the odds stacked against him seemed insurmountable, even when he'd been beaten down over and over again by a mocking world that hated and feared him, he still found a way, time and time again, to protect those he cared for. And that was his strength, one deeper and truer than any spell could ever be.

Is, I reminded myself. That is his strength. He's still alive, somewhere out there, in the storm.

"We'll find him," a quiet, young, high-pitched voice said from my side, interrupting the thakka-thakka-thakka of hail on the cabin roof. My nephew Cienne wasn't related to me by blood, but that wasn't what family meant to us anyway. "Jiaola's a fighter. He'd want his husband to keep his head up."

I snorted. "My head's up, kid. More than you. I'm, what, a hand taller than you? A hand and a half?"

Cienne stuck his tongue out at me, unamused. I guess he never did like it when I poked fun at his height; I made a mental note to stop. "I can tell you're running low on hope."

Ugh. This was the danger of living with witches: everyone cared so much about your emotions. It was endearing when it came from my husband, but I was the one who was supposed to be taking care of my nephew, not the other way around. "C'mon, kid," I said instead. "It's late. Head off to bed. We've got a long day tomorrow, and you need your sleep."

Cienne grumbled. "I'm supposed to be in the Academy right now. I'm practically built to pull all-nighters. You need your sleep, Sansen. Now git, before I cast a sleep spell on you."

I raised an eyebrow. "Do you actually know how to do that?"

"Sure do. A good thwack on the head should do it. Maybe I'll knock some sense into you while I'm at it." Cienne turned around, a ball of blazing witchlight in one hand, then paused. "Take care, Sansen. We'll find your husband eventually."

I closed my eyes. "Yeah. I know."

When I opened my eyes again, Cienne was gone. He'd left the light behind.

I sighed and trudged over to the repurposed dining hall that we were using as a communal bedroom. The kids were already sleeping—having the luxury of actual beds after so many weeks on the road was a potent sedative. I glanced towards my bed.

The shadows beneath it seemed to stretch and writhe.

There was a reason why I'd been getting less sleep, as of late.

But Cienne was right. Restless, nightmare-plagued sleep was still better than no sleep.

I laid down on my bed and closed my eyes, and some part of me fancied that the shadows swallowed me whole.

###

The nightmare wasn't, and then it always had been. One moment, I was dissolving into the oblivion of sleep; the next, I was standing in a crashing hailstorm, watching my husband struggle to stay alive.

"Damn you," I whispered. I tried to pinch myself awake, tried to snap out of the dream, but my body wouldn't move, my eyes wouldn't close. All I could do was curse myself and watch.

Watch as Jiaola fought for his life.

"Stay close to me!" Even in the chaos of the storm, Jiaola always did find a way to protect those around him. A squadron of soldiers in the uniform of the Silent Peaks clustered around him for shelter as the old witch held up a hand, hail smashing on a barrier maintained by nothing but Jiaola's soul. "Can any thermal-capable witches provide us with warmth?"

"It's no use!" The soldier next to him—a young woman I didn't recognize—cursed as her magic fizzled out. "The ambient frost magic—it must be interfering. We're going to freeze to death out here!"

"No. No, I refuse. We need shelter. A way to keep body heat in. Make a snow cave. I'll keep the wind out for now." Jiaola held out both hands, as if supporting some great weight, and in a massive bubble around him, the air stilled. Snow froze in air that was suddenly as solid as steel, creating a dome of shelter in the supernatural storm—

And then a comet of ice, larger than a person, rained from the sky and blasted a hole through Jiaola's sanctuary. I tried to look away by reflex. I knew what happened next. I'd lived through this fucking nightmare every day for the past four weeks.

The world went blurry and white with the impact.

When the snow settled, Jiaola was nowhere to be seen.

"I can take you to him," a voice said from behind me.

And now came the hardest part of the nightmares. I glared, my body frozen in place, as the demon stepped into view.

They were tall, masculine, barrel-chested, even human-looking. But my husband was a witch, and I was no fool. I knew the Dealmaker well, and I knew that they were a demon. One who offered things otherwise unattainable.

But the Dealmaker's offers always came with a cost, even if it was hidden at first. And my husband had personal experience with the Dealmaker's temptations. It was a terrible idea to even so much as consider taking their hand.

And yet.

And yet it had been months since I'd seen Jiaola's face. Months since I'd held his hand, since I'd last run one thumb over the wedding ring the two of us had fought so hard to be able to wear, months since I'd known he was sent off to war and lost in a blizzard and just maybe gone forever.

"No," I whispered, and it took all the strength I had left in my soul to refuse.

The demon tilted their head. "As you wish."

And the dream reset to the beginning. Jiaola stood defiant against the storm, providing shelter for the innocent, as he always did.

And the storm snuffed him out like a candle.

Like it always did.

"I can take you to him," the demon murmured once more.

I wished my body would move, so that I could close my eyes and plug my ears and not have to see my husband vanish over and over and over again. "...No..." I managed, and it was weak and feeble and still.

"As you wish."

And the dream reset again.

And again.

And again.

And each time, I felt my will erode. Each time, I felt myself slipping closer to taking the Dealmaker's hand.

On the eighth time this night, the nine hundred and sixtieth time in total, I saw my husband fall one last time.

"I can take you to him," the Dealmaker said.

My mouth never dried, my throat never roughened, but I was still so, so tired of speaking even those two tiny letters.

I opened my lips. Closed them again. Tasted the shape of my words.

"Mayb—" I began, and something in my soul burned.

I was thrown back, shocked, as the false landscape around me unravelled. The demon jolted to life, stepping back, as something shadowy and clawed and protective stirred from within my soul.

"Wh—what are—" I began to say.

"DEALMAKER," the larger demon rumbled, and its sinuous form curled around mine, glaring down at the cautious Dealmaker. "THIS ONE'S SOUL IS NOT YOURS TO SET FOOT IN. YOU HAVE NO RIGHT."

The Dealmaker gathered themself, crouching into a low combat stance. "I have no right? Who gave you entry into this man's soul?"

The serpent of shadow and flame lowered itself to the Dealmaker's eye level.

"HIS HUSBAND."

Then it surged forwards, striking the Dealmaker in a single, decisive blow that cracked my soul with the sheer force of it, sending memories flying every which way, and the illusion the Dealmaker had summoned was blown apart like icicles in a blizzard.

Leaving me alone with the serpent.

I told my beating heart to calm down as the serpent turned towards me. "MORTAL. I APOLOGIZE FOR MY... SUDDEN APPEARANCE."

"No. No, don't apologize for protecting me." Weakly, I laughed. "He... he always did that. Does that."

"YES. I AM A FRAGMENT OF YOUR HUSBAND'S ESSENCE. I HAVE INHERITED MANY OF HIS TRAITS." The serpent hesitated, then continued. "INCLUDING, AS IT SEEMS, HIS PENCHANT FOR SELF-DESTRUCTION."

"What?" I blurted out.

"MY POWER IS... LIMITED. ONCE I HAVE IGNITED MY SOUL FRAGMENT, I CANNOT EXTINGUISH IT. THE MEMORY THAT FUELS MY EXISTENCE WILL BE UNMADE IN ITS ENTIRETY SOON, AND I WILL FADE. I... APOLOGIZE, FOR MY INSUFFICIENCY."

"No." Rifts, it was absurd to be comforting a snake-monster larger than a house, but I tried my best anyway. "No, you did amazingly. You did... you did what he would have done. I... just wish that it wouldn't mean I was alone, after this."

"YOU ARE NOT ALONE," the serpent said, coiling around me. Somehow, it felt like an embrace. "YOU HAVE YOUR NEPHEW. YOUR FAMILY. AND ONE DAY, YOU WILL SEE YOUR HUSBAND AGAIN."

I smiled. "Yeah. He's... he's the strongest witch I know. We'll meet again."

"SOME SUNNY DAY," the creature agreed.

And then it was gone, one moment a serpent, the next a mere shadow, fading as day broke.

My eyes jolted open, tears running down my cheeks, as the monster under my bed faded away, as did the demon it died protecting me from.

###

I blinked out of the memory, gasping, and turned to my left. It was a profoundly disconcerting experience to see Sansen from a different perspective immediately after accidentally absorbing the memory that'd been blasted off his soul in the battle—and from Sansen's pained expression as he clutched his head, it wasn't much better from his end. The fight inside his soulspace that'd blasted off his memories of the recent past probably wasn't doing him any favors.

But despite the disorientation and pain, I laughed.

Because in the memory Odin had taunted Sansen with of the place where Jiaola had fell, and I recognized the part of the Redlands where it was set.

"Hey, Sansen," I said, sitting up. "I've got good news, and I've got bad news."

A.N.

Soulmage is a serial written in response to writing prompts. Stick around for more episodes, or join my Discord to chat about it!

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[meowcats734]

(prompt response) A panicked scream of "Is anybody here a doctor?" You tentatively raise your hand. "I'm a Necromancer, if you're willing to wait a few minutes."

Unsurprisingly, the closer we got to the center of the battlefield, the more deaths there were. Lucet floated the idea of retreating to the edge of the hailstorm to camp out, but even though Sansen couldn't see that far into the future without setting up his ring of hope-inducing memorabilia, it was pretty clear that any remaining soul fragments would drift away if we spent days on end backtracking and re-entering the storm. And I wasn't going to let any information on Jiaola's whereabouts fade away if I could help it.

So at my insistence, we camped out in ramshackle tents that were battered by hail, trying our best to sleep despite the eternal thunk-thunk-thunk of falling ice.

I attuned regret later that night. I supposed my companions weren't too happy about my choice.

An indeterminate amount of time later, I heard rustling outside my tent. I hadn't been sleeping, exactly—the endless clamor of hail made it hard—so it was a matter of heartbeats to sit up and look into soulspace. Lucet's soul shone on the other side of the tent flap. I got up, put on my shirt and binder, and called out.

"I'm awake, Lucet," I said. "You can come in."

"Eep! Er, sorry." Lucet scurried into the tent, shucking off her winter coat, and gave me a confused look. "How'd you know it was me?"

"I recognized your soul," I said.

"I... I can't do that," Lucet admitted.

"Yeah, well, people's sorrow might look the same by coincidence," I said. "But when you can see someone's levels of calm, sorrow, passion, insecurity, joy, fear, spite, guilt, shame, disgust, regret, and self-hatred, it'd take one hell of a coincidence for all twelve of those emotions to look similar between two different souls."

Lucet fell quiet for a moment.

"You made another attunement," she said.

I winced. "I... yeah. I did."

"Okay." She didn't pry, which almost made it worse. Instead, she just wordlessly scooted towards me; I leaned on her shoulder and closed my eyes.

"I'm sorry if I'm keeping you up," she finally said. "I just... I couldn't sleep."

"You can't sleep because I fucking convinced you all to camp out beneath what I dearly hope is the largest rift in the world. Don't blame yourself."

"I'm not blaming myself," she whispered. "I just... don't want to be useless."

Rifts, I felt that. Because I was useless. I was worse than useless. I shivered and snuggled closer to Lucet, and there must have only been room for one or the other, because the voices seemed to shy away when she was around. "I..." I bit my lip, liquid metal roiling in my soul, then went for it. "If you... I've been having a hard time sleeping too. If you wanted to stay over for the night..."

Lucet smiled. "Yeah. I... I think I'd like that. Scoot over?"

I laid down on my side, facing Lucet, and she slipped beneath the blanket, putting one arm around my back and pulling me closer.

"Cozy," she murmured sleepily, and I nodded into her neck.

"M-hm," I said, and closed my eyes.

Our souls glittered together in the dark behind my eyes, and the clattering hail faded into the void of sleep.

###

Nobody said anything when Lucet and I came out of the same tent the next day, but I saw the dewdrops of joy and sparks of hope in Sansen's soul as he saw us smiling at each other. For some reason, passion was incredibly inefficient to use while we were under the rift, so we were stuck with mundane jackets and body heat. Thankfully, it wasn't like the conditions under the rift were that much worse than in the Silent Peaks, and the supplies we already had sufficed well enough.

I was prepared to spend another day hunting for soul fragments, but as Sansen led us deeper into the battlefield, he paused.

"Hey," he said. "There's, uh... there's an opportunity in a nearby future."

"What kind of opportunity?" Meloai asked.

"I... I really don't know what to make of this, but... there's a... settlement? No, a shelter of some kind around here. With... what looks like some soldiers who got left behind."

I rubbed my chin. "If we're trying to get information on Jiaola... interviewing living soldiers is about as good as we can hope for."

"Especially if they're stuck here," Meloai said. "I mean, I don't know about you guys, but I'd run away from the giant death-rift in the sky if I could. The fact that they're still here probably means they can't leave. Maybe... maybe we could help them, and get information in return?"

"Or, y'know, help them out because they're probably going to starve to death if they're stuck here," Lucet added.

"...Right, that too," I said. "Either way, we should check it out."

Sansen nodded. "Then we're going this way." There weren't really any landmarks in the never-ending hailstorm, so the only idea I had of where we were going was 'left,' but Sansen seemed to know where we were going. Before long, he paused, frowning, then said, "Follow me."

Then he took off in a dead sprint.

The three of us didn't hesitate—following the old oracle's directions had gotten us all saved more than once, and we'd be utterly fucked without him. It wasn't long before the future Sansen foresaw caught up to us: in the distance, I heard someone screaming for help. Something about... a medical emergency? Needing a healer?

Well. Grimly, I readied myself. None of us had attuned forgiveness, but... I had something else I could try.

I got an impression of a log cabin in the hailstorm before Sansen threw the door open, startling the collection of people inside. Before anyone else could speak, though, Sansen said, "You called?"

The group of soldiers—and they were definitely soldiers, clad in the uniform of the Silent Peaks—stared at us, baffled. They'd formed a loose semicircle around two men, one standing over the other, who was bleeding out on the floor. The one standing regained his composure first.

"Yes. I—I don't know who you are, but if any of you are a healer—"

"We're not," I brusquely said, "but... I might be able to do something after death."

There was a moment of shocked silence as everyone in the room except Sansen turned towards me.

Then the man broke the silence. "My husband died fighting necromancers!" The man screamed at me. "And you expect  me to let some junior necromancer defile his soul?"

"Your husband died fighting necromancers?" I asked.

The man nodded fiercely, standing over the gasping, bleeding body of his husband.

"Out of curiosity, who does he have to thank for coming back to life from the dead? Any school of magic in particular that could take credit for resurrections?"

He blushed furiously. I got the feeling he wasn't used to people applying silly little conventions like 'logic' and 'internal consistency' to his tirades. "That's irrelevant! I can see the greed in your eyes. You just want to steal Mertri's soul. But I won't let you!"

"Literally every single word you just said is incorrect. Look, how about this." I raised my hands in an attempt to de-escalate the situation. The man—Mertri's husband, I suppose—stood opposite me in the large wooden dining hall. Behind me, three of my friends watched Mertri's husband nervously; a handful of people I assumed were simply bystanders stood opposite us, forming a complete ring of bodies, locking Mertri's husband and I in with each other. I raised my voice to be heard over the thakka-thakka-thakka of hail on the wooden roof. "Ask around. See if literally anyone else has any relevant medical expertise. Let them have their go first. And then if they fail... let me help."

"I already asked, you idiot. You think I'd be talking to a necromancer instead of staking him through the heart if I had any better options?"

"You're thinking of vampires, not necromancers. And you've admitted it yourself—you don't have any better options." I grimaced. "I don't, either. I wish I was a normal healer. But... salvaging what's left afterwards is the best I can do."

The man started to speak, but Mertri coughed wetly from the floor. I wasn't entirely sure what the nature of his injury was, but judging by the blood on his chest, it... wasn't pretty. "Vuliel," Mertri managed.

"I'm here, love." Vuliel knelt by his husband's side, and I could see the raw anger and sorrow in his soul. "I'm listening."

"Let... the boy... try." Mertri managed a weak smile.

Vuliel jerked back, shocked. "But—if he—you could become a monster. Why would you..."

Mertri focused on his husband. "Because," he whispered. "I'll take any chance to see you again."

And before my very eyes, Mertri's soul began to fracture as the bleeding man died.

"It's now or never," I said.

Vuliel closed his eyes.

Then he stood, expression inscrutable. "Do your worst."

And I knelt by the dying man's side as his soul began to shake apart.

Necromancy was a vast and complex field, and different people had different approaches to it. I had absorbed fragments of souls on broken battlefields, trying to piece together narratives from dying memories; I had stitched together the souls of animals to form ghosts and demons of terrible light; I had even reached between planes to chase departed souls as they tried to move on from this world.

But here and now, I could prevent having to take any of those measures before they even happened. I could hold the dying man's soul together before it shattered into uncountable memories. All I had to do was draw upon the core of necromancy:

Regret.

All necromancy was, fundamentally, an act of regret. A wish that the dead never died. And I was no exception.

In order to call up necromancy, I simply had to remember the day I'd decided to fight back against death.

I closed my eyes, remembering another place, another time. A girl named Astrenn who had loved to feed crows.

My helplessness as I arrived at her cold, long-dead body, her head caved in by a falling roof beam.

The regret that had flooded my soul ever since.

The wellspring of power came sludgily at first—then as I let my regrets sing through me, it flooded from my core and down my hands and into the dying man's cracking soul. The magic was thick and swampy and fetid, but it was mine, and I hardly had to lift a finger as my regrets did what they did best.

They tried to hold together a broken heart.

And, miracle of miracles, they did.

Only those with soulsight could see what happened next, and from what I could tell, Vuliel was not one of them. But a bitter, forlorn pride swelled in my heart as the man's soul drifted free of his body, stabilized, anchored in this world.

"What... what did you do?" Vuliel whispered.

"I kept his soul from breaking," I said. "I... I'm not powerful enough to reunite it with a dead body. But... he could still live on if his possessed someone else. Someone who cared about him an awful lot. Someone who'd be willing to share their body with a man who lost his own." I gestured towards the invisible soul. "All you have to do is let him in."

Vuliel looked down at his husband's corpse.

"It's not what I wanted," he managed to say.

For a heartbeat, the only sound in the wooden hall was the crash of hail on the roof.

"But it's the best I have," he finished. He looked up, meeting my eyes, and said, "I'm ready. Tell me what to do."

I shook my head. "There's nothing simpler. Just reach out and touch his soul."

Vuliel swallowed, then stretched out a hand.

And in a flash of memories absorbed, two souls became one.

A.N.

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[meowcats734]

[Soulmage] Wanderlust is Earth

Content warning: thoughts of self-harm/suicide.

"Bad news," Sansen said.

I cracked an eye open—I hadn't quite managed to slip into a nap, but I was close enough to be cranky about the interruption. "You're not going to do the whole 'good news, bad news, which do you want to hear first' routine?"

"I'm an oracle. I've lived through this twice already. It's purely performative on my part." From behind him, Lucet giggled. I got up and erected a brief bubble of darkness, put on my binder, and then terminated the spell of fear. Being a novice witch in eleven different schools still didn't put me on par with a real witch like Sansen, but we'd all been trying to hone any skill that could help us survive, and that included casting spells and improving our techniques whenever possible.

Plus, I liked having privacy when I changed.

"So what's the bad news?" I asked.

"Well, we think we found out why there's a whole bunch of Demons of Fear hanging out in the sky," Sansen said. "We've done some observation, and there've been some aerial clashes between Demons of Fear and Angels of Arrogance. Odds are, we're not the first people to think of using soulspace entities for reconnaissance, and what we've been seeing is the Order and the Peaks brawling for control over surveillance from above."

"Yeah, I didn't think we were military geniuses either. But wait, if you observed the conflict directly..."

Sansen grinned. "Yeah, Lucet and Meloai managed to train the Demon of Joy while you were asleep, and I can look into a future where we kill it for its memories and gather all the information it would have held without having to actually kill it every time we want to know what it saw."

I exhaled, a weight lifting from my soul. "We needed a win," I said.

Lucet turned away from our little scout—a butterfly of light that fluttered towards a flower Meloai held—and gave me a gentle smile. "We did, didn't we?"

"Speaking of wins and losses," Sansen said, "the Order of Valhalla and the Peaks fought to a standstill at a nearby lake. We... there wasn't any sign of Jiaola, but if we can get closer and dig through the memory fragments..."

"You want to rummage around in an active battlefield?" I asked.

"Both sides retreated, and if we move fast, they might still be regrouping by the time we get there. Plus, there's another factor at play. From what the butterfly—"

"I'm naming him Misiel," Meloai interrupted.

"From what Misiel saw," Sansen corrected himself, "the aftermath of the battle looked... extensive. Someone tore open a massive rift into the Plane of Elemental Cold, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were more rifts hidden beneath that massive cloud of mist."

"So we think we're safe, because the battlefield's too deadly for either army to want to enter," I summarized.

"We don't have to go into the heart of that mess," Sansen said. "We just have to get in far enough that we can find a couple soul fragments, and get out. With a competent oracle, two combat witches, and a mimic, we should at the very least be able to run from any major soulspace entities before they kill us."

"Great, thanks, very reassuring." I rubbed my forehead. "What do you all think?"

"None of us would've made it out of the Silent Peaks without Sansen," Lucet said, squeezing my arm. "And... I never met Jiaola, but... he's your friend, Cienne. This is the clearest shot at finding him that we've had so far. I say we take it."

"Family's hard to come by," Meloai added, giving me a reassuring nod. "I'm not looking forward to finding out what kinds of things are going to crawl out of those rifts, but... it's worth the risk."

I swallowed heavily, feeling a familiar constriction in my throat, and some sticky, sharp part of my soul wished I'd never asked.

Lucet and Meloai were willing to throw their lives on the line for someone they'd never even met.

But I? I was scared. I was a fucking coward. I was a horrible person. They would be better off if I just disappeared one day and never came back.

I took in a deep breath, letting the familiar voices wash over me.

Then I forced my way past it, the way I'd painstakingly learned how, and said, "Alright. Let's do this."

###

The cloud cover got thicker and thicker as we approached what was left of Feardust Lake. I'd never actually been to this part of the Redlands—for most of my childhood, the area was considered uninhabitable thanks to the last clash between the Redlands and the Peaks—but it didn't seem all that different from any other section of the plains I called home. Endless waves of flowing grass? Check. Majestic open sky that felt like it could swallow you whole? Check. Rifts into other dimensions that spewed monsters and elemental destruction? You betcha.

The rift itself was hidden beneath the shroud of condensation and frost it had generated, but even from this distance, it was obvious that it was one hell of a thing. I'd be surprised if I lived to see it fade. The signature tactic of Fell witches—sowing sorrow on the battlefield and reaping it all at once to tear massive rifts in the sky—had survived for centuries, and judging by how far away the Silent Peaks had made their camp from the enormous rift, the Peaks had learned to respect it.

"Was this... a victory for the Order?" Meloai asked.

I shrugged. "No clue. If you want to go up to their camps and ask, I'm sure both sides will have their version of the story where they won."

"Hey," Lucet said, frowning. "Do you guys... Cienne. Do you... is something... wrong with sorrow right now?"

I tensed, looking at Sansen, but he shook his head—nothing imminently threatening. "From a scale of elf-Iola to eldritch-Iola, how wrong are we talking here?"

"I'm... just try casting a spell with sorrow," Lucet said. "A... a small one. Small as you can make it."

"Uh. Okay." Salt-crystal sorrow grew in abundance along the inner edge of my soul; I willed a fraction of it to chip off, then tossed it from my soul into realspace—

The frostbolt skittered a good foot before stopping, leaving a trail of swirling condensation in its path.

Even Sansen seemed surprised as the four of us stared at it.

"That is not what that spell was supposed to do," I finally said, just as Sansen's expression returned to normal. Oh, was that what had caused Sansen to be surprised? Gah, stupid oracles, reacting to my sentences before they're spoken.

"Huh." Lucet's soul stirred. "So if I try to cast a normal frostbolt, then—"

"NO!" Sansen grabbed her arm, startling Lucet, and she yelped, spinning around. "No. Just... no. We all die if you try to use a full-powered frost spell."

A chill went down my spine. "I... I don't suppose any of you have ever tried using magic near a rift this large before?"

I got three shaken heads in response.

"Maybe... maybe we should stay away from frost magic, for now. Until we're away from that ridiculously-sized rift," I said.

Lucet flinched, and I kicked myself—there was probably a way to say that that didn't render Lucet useless for the time being. But before I could open my mouth, she put on a smile and said, "Yeah. It's alright. Just until after."

Then she turned and strode towards the city-sized rift in the distance. 

Dammit. Dammit, dammit, dammit. I felt those familiar thorny vines grow around my throat, but I forged through it. Now was not the time to let my emotions get the better of me.

The consequences of what would happen if I did loomed large on the horizon, a sorrow so deep and vast it had torn two armies apart.

###

"Found one," Meloai shouted. There was thunder periodically crashing from somewhere deeper in the wrecked grasslands, and the constant crash of hail wasn't helping the noise problem either. 

"What plane?" Lucet asked. 

"No clue. But he died recently—the body's still warm."

I shuddered. "Eurgh. I know your interaction with humanity has been limited to Lady Tanryn for the first two decades of your life, but for future reference, humans generally don't like poking other humans' corpses."

"I... I know. I'm sorry. I just... thought I could help." Meloai's crestfallen expression made me want to fucking stab myself, but... I could keep the voices at bay for just a little longer. Until we got to a place where I felt absolutely safe sharing the secret of attunement with Lucet and Meloai and Sansen, and then I'd be redundant and they wouldn't need me anymore and I could just fall into a dream and vanish—

"Shame," Sansen said. "It's a memory of shame."

Oh, great. "Does opening a rift into the Plane of Elemental Transparency kill us all?"

Sansen shook his head. "Not in the immediate future."

Well, 'not killing myself in the immediate future' was good enough. I'd take it. I drew glass shards of shame from my soul and cut the skin of reality, my skin momentarily shining like glass as I reached between worlds—

And I was no longer the husk of self-hatred that I'd grown into over the weeks since we'd fled the Peaks. Or worse, that I'd always been.

I was Fein, soldier under the Silent Peaks, and I had a promise to keep.

###

I could ignore the pounding hail, I could tune out the screams of dying soldiers, I could ignore the distant flashes of artillery bombardments so long as that burning compulsion stayed at the front of my mind.

I had a promise to keep, and nothing would stand in my way until it was fulfilled.

"Soldier!" The black-and-white regalia of my commanding officer stood out like a skeleton in a closet as I dashed through the battlefield. The chaos that led up to the war had been a tumultuous landslide of impossible promises and contradictory demands, but somehow, we still found enough energy to wind up the old war machines. "You're breaking position."

I met the staunch commander's gaze and evenly said, "I have a promise to keep."

The commander's gaze softened as he searched my soul. "...I understand. We're retreating under artillery cover; you'll be surrounded and bombarded by your own forces."

I knew. But some things superseded simple matters like being turned to drifting bits of gas by an artillery strike.

"Where did the Second Battlechoir fall?" I asked.

"By the southern shore of the lake," the commander said, pointing off into the distance. The miasma of mist and hail made it difficult to see, but I'd seen the maps and fought here before. I would find my way.

"It's been a pleasure to serve," I lied, and dashed out into the hellishly cold warzone.

I had a promise to keep, but that promise said nothing about telling the truth. Quite the opposite, in fact.

I was lucky enough not to stumble on any enemy soldiers as I waded through the mire of corpses and ice that marked the Battle of Promiseshard. The distant, disturbingly silent columns of light that marked where artillery strikes were wiping random spots from existence was probably why—nobody was stupid enough to charge through a field under constant bombardment.

Unless they had a promise to keep.

The steady jog was over less than half a mile, but through a muddy, torn-up battlefield, it may as well have been a sprint to the moon and back. Progress was slow, and I nearly got burned to a crisp twice, but it was worth it.

Thirty minutes of painstaking slogging later, I reached the place where the Second Battlechoir had been surrounded and broken.

Broken—but if I was to have any hope of living with myself after this, not destroyed.

I hurried to the ruined encampment, dust and frozen blood slipping beneath my feet, and called out, "Emi? Emi, are you there?"

In response, I heard a weak exhalation, nearly lost in the tumult of the battle, weak as a newborn kitten.

I rushed over to a collapsed wooden barricade and tried heaving the logs aside—but they were simply too heavy. "Emi? Emi, are you under there? Please, I can get you out, just tell me you're—"

"Fein," Emi whispered, and I saw her dark eyes glittering from under the logs. "Its okay."

My stomach dropped. "Wh—of course you're going to be okay. I—I told you you were going to come back from the war just fine, eh? Just... gotta put my back into it..."

"Stop," Emi said, and she reached out through a crack in the slots. "I'm... it's okay. I don't have much time left. Just... spend it with me. Please."

I clenched my fists. "No. No, Emi, don't talk like that. I promised. I promised you that you'd be okay." I felt something deep, deep in my soul begin to ache, as if my very being was tearing itself apart, and I stood. "If—if I can get enough leverage, or—or if I can find some more survivors to help—"

"I can't feel my legs, Fein." Emi coughed, and I hated how wet and red and lethal it was. "Just... be with me until the end, Fein. Can you do that for me?"

I swallowed.

Then I closed my eyes, placed my hand over hers, and I could pretend that the blood was nothing but rain.

"I promise, Emi. I promise."

And I spent the rest of my life letting one promise live so another could die, until the light faded from Emi's eyes.

###

"Cienne. Cienne. Cienne!"

Lucet was shaking me, but I barely felt it. I was just... so damn tired. How many more times would I have to die and die and die again, reliving the memories of better people than I? Hell, even the fucking crow was better at not casually hurting everyone around her. 

"I can't," I whispered.

Lucet stilled. "I'm—can you speak up, Cienne? I can't hear you."

I was worthless. All those people who'd died before me, all those glorious souls who outshone the entirety of my being with a fragment of their life, they had died for something. They had gone out with meaning.

Perhaps that was it. If there was one thing I could make myself good for, it was taking that hit, over and over again, until Jiaola was safe and I was no longer needed.

"I didn't see Jiaola," I managed to say, clearing my throat. "Sorry. The memory disoriented me." I plastered a smile on my face and stood up. "Let's... let's find another soul fragment, shall we?" Better people than me traded worried glances, but before they could speak, I left.

I turned my back, trodding deeper into the darkness and the frost, the souls of the fallen dispersing like blood in rain.

A.N.

Soulmage is a serial written in response to writing prompts. Stick around for more episodes, or join my Discord to chat about it!

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[meowcats734]

(prompt response) A ghost still finds themselves on the mortal plane, unable to cross over to the other side. Instead of spending its days haunting derelict buildings or unsuspecting families, it turns its eyes skyward, ready to travel among the stars.

We saw three more ruined villages in the next few weeks. Mairel's ghost must have ran out of nostalgia, because he stopped responding to Sansen and opening doors. None of us could know for sure, since none of us had an attunement to nostalgia and I sure as hell wasn't able to make one, but it was one less luxury on our little adventure. We had to fall back on the Redlands foraging I'd been born and raised with. 

It was almost worse that Lucet stopped complaining about the food. As if the food was the real problem here. 

Although we were doing a pretty good job of getting the fuck away from the Silent Peaks, we were still no closer to reuniting with Jiaola, and our lack of progress was starting to wear on morale. It was disturbing how easy it was to quantify that, with the ten attunements I now held. I could see Lucet's wells of passion dry up, Sansen's flames of hope guttering and dying, Meloai's liquid-metal insecurity practically spilling out of what was undeniably her soul. I almost felt as if I could reach out and measure each value as it rose and fell, plot them on a chart like we did in Elementary Sciences 103. Here was where a soul fragment pointed us towards the Silent Peaks' main army. There was where hope fell as Meloai asked if we were certain we should be going towards the people who had left four towns lifeless ruins in their wake. Then was the last time Sansen had spoken in days.

I wondered when the falling lines would cross. When the fear and sorrow and shame would consume the passion and joy and hope, and we'd finally be forced to leave a good man behind for no other reason than us being fucking cowards.

I'd like to say that it was one of us who pulled through, one last time. That Sansen gave a rousing speech, that Meloai asked a simple and silly question, that Lucet's quiet hugs at night broke through to me, hell, that I was able to dig myself out of the pit of thorns my soul was ensnared in.

But that would have been asking too much. It wasn't any of us who broke us out of our shambling, aimless stalemate, as we chased the trail of an army that was weeks or months cold.

It was Mairel's fucking ghost returning that kicked us back into motion. The old butler was hardly even sapient at that point, and he still did a better job of holding us together. If that didn't say something about how utterly fucked up we were, I didn't know what did. 

Sansen was shambling along doing his future-scanning thing when he whirled around like he'd been bitten. The last time that happened, some random fell witch had tried to harvest our souls, so the three of us started looking around for the hammer to drop—but Sansen shook his head.

"Mairel," Sansen managed to say, one eye tracking a dizzying array of futures. "His ghost is back."

"Where?" Meloai looked around. "I don't see him."

We all turned to look at her for a moment.

"...right, invisible. So how do you know if—"

"His soul shatters," Sansen said, "and in a nearby future, you catch one of the fragments."

Of course it would be me. Because I had all the attunements. Because I still was too scared of Big Bad Odin listening in and becoming even scarier than they already were, back when they were making the Peaks chase their own tails without spending a single soldier. "What plane?" I asked, idly wondering what would happen if it was one of the planes I couldn't reach right now. Not due to lack of attunement, but because none of us had a drop left of the right emotions.

"Fear," Sansen said.

Yeah. Yeah, I could do that. I gave Lucet a questioning look, and she nodded, stepping closer to me. I drew the shimmering red blood of fear from her soul and slashed through the world with it, leaving a rift large enough for me to stick my hand through where Sansen pointed for just a heartbeat—

And I was no longer Cienne. Good. I didn't want to be.

I was Mairel's ghost, and this was the story of how I died.

###

I always had loved the stars. Even as a baby, my first words were (while pointing at the North Star) "I want to be up there!" According to my mother, of course; this was seventy years back, when I was still alive and still a child and still too young to remember the precious things that would one day be all I had left.

I never did reach the stars. I lived and died a butler to some minor nobleman—excuse me, his Lordship Tanryn, third of his name—and never even got to kiss that pretty boy who lived down the street.

Mm. That pretty little boy was now a kindly old man. I'd followed him out from the basement where I'd died, where I'd stayed in stasis for decades, and saw the stars for the first time since I'd entered Lord Tanryn's service. And bit by bit, week by week, the little bits of a child that had once wanted to see the stars... remembered.

I was nothing but a memory now. I had weight only if I believed I did. That child's wish upon a star could at last come true.

It was slow going, at first. Say what you would about haunting the living, but at least it was never boring. At first I could track the crowds of people underneath me, but before long, they faded into nothing but specks. The clouds were pretty from below, and then from above, but staring at the endless sea of fluffy white got a bit repetitive eventually. I'd stayed stuck in a basement for the better part of two decades, though, so it was, at the very least, a nice change of scenery.

Idly, some part of me wondered why more ghosts didn't try this at least once in their lives. Unlives. Afterlives. The proper terminology for what laid beyond the veil was not part of my education as a butler. Where was I? Ah, yes. The streaks of darkness were so mesmerizing, the stars that blinked like eyes, the creatures that flitted just beyond where air and light ended so tempting to join—

I jolted out of my trance, finding myself floating in the void between earth and sun, surrounded by dark, drooling, hungry shapes.

Ah. So that was why no ghosts came up here.

Something else had gotten there first.

The things from beyond the stars lashed out at me, strange spiracles and tendrils of void reaching out to strike. I remembered I had weight and dropped like a stone, but the predators between worlds must have expected that—four excellently aimed lances like the tines of a salad fork speared my soul, and I felt the entities from the void eat at the memories that were all I had left. There went the day I first looked up at the stars. That was the name of the boy I never got to kiss. Farewell, proper ordering of the spoons and forks on a well-set table.

Somehow, that last thing made me angriest of all. Take away my childhood dreams, take away my one-time crushes, but I. Was. A. Butler. Eldritch abominations from beyond the void or not, nobody took that from me.

I closed my eyes and remembered that, once upon a time, I had lived inside a mansion.

And the ghostly form of Lord Tanryn's estates crashed into existence around me, swatting the eldritch entities away like a spider beneath a flyswatter.

The memory I had left behind dissipated within moments, more hungry mouths of darkness consuming them, but I held onto myself as I plummeted back to earth. There was one last thing I had to do. One final service to the living I could still provide.

I had to warn them. Had to warn them about the things beyond the stars.

The clouds parted beneath me, the world fading into view. My memories were bleeding from my stricken soul, but I held on to those last moments for just a little longer. The length of a waltz. That was all I needed to hold myself together for. Just the length of a waltz.

The boy whose name I would never know, the boy who'd grown up into a wry old man while I was dead, was walking along a road with three children in a wide, fertile plains. I would slip through the ground and plummet forever if I didn't do something—but the one thing I could do would surely end me for good. Ghosts didn't leave ghosts, after all.

Ah well. I was a butler. It was in my nature to serve.

I remembered the earth, its solidity and form, and I splattered against the ground exactly how a living human who'd fallen from the sky would.

The man who'd once been a boy jumped, looking around, one eye glowing strangely, and I could have sworn he saw me. No matter. I grinned weakly and strained to whisper the last letter I'd ever run delivery for.

"Do not venture beyond the stars."

Then my soul shattered like a poorly-handled chalice, and I faded into the infinite dream of oblivion.

The things between the stars had gotten me. My leg of the journey was over.

It was in the hands of the living now.

###

The soul fragment faded from my awareness, returning me to my body. Lucet and Meloai were waiting for me to snap out of the memory, carefully not giving me impatient glances as if that fooled anyone, while weary old Sansen just stared into the future, knowing he'd seen it all before. 

So not only were we stuck in the middle of a warzone, not only was Iola the Unkillable Eldritch Horror probably going to hunt us down and obliterate us, not only was Jiaola a conscript on what was probably the wrong and definitely not the right side of the war, the skies were filled with Demons of Fear that were eating ghosts, and said ghost—who was probably one of the last friendly faces we'd see for quite a while—had just gotten slaughtered in front of my very eyes.

"Ha," I said.

Lucet gave me a worried look. "...Cienne? Are... are you okay?"

"Ha," I repeated, and even though my soul was dry as a bone, I still managed to crack a smile. "Ha, ha, ha."

"Sansen?" Meloai asked. "Is... is he going to have a stroke, or... something?"

Sansen shook his head, but I saw the flicker of hope reignite in his soul as he saw what I did.

"Mairel's ghost decided to fuck off into the stars, because as a child he had a dream about doing that, or something. Screw the why, it doesn't help us find Jiaola. But. While Mairel was up there, before he got eaten by the Demons of Fear that just seem to be hanging out up there—"

"Before he what?" Lucet exclaimed.

I waved a hand. "Not the point. Before he got eaten, he saw something from above. The positions of both armies."

"Okay, but... that information has to be outdated by now. How is that any better than the memory fragments we've been collecting from the villages?" Meloai asked.

I grinned. "Because, my dear friends, until now, we've been wandering from site to site and just hoping that something died at just the right time to give us a glimpse of where the army might have been, weeks ago. But you all were there for Ritual Magic 201. We can make our own soulspace entities, and Mairel just proved that if you can tell gravity to go fuck itself, you make an excellent scout." 

Magics I hadn't felt in weeks slowly woke up in Lucet and Meloai's souls, and even though I felt nothing, I still let my eyes twinkle as though I did. "We can find Jiaola," I said, "and best of all? The Silent Academy is the one who showed us how."

A.N.

Soulmage is a serial written in response to writing prompts. Stick around for more episodes, or join my Discord to chat about it!

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[meowcats734]

(prompt response) A tiny dragon and a crow fight over a gold coin. They’re both equally strong, and both can fly. The crow is smart enough to dodge the fire, and the dragon is trying not to melt the coin. They tussle on the street.

We were set for shelter thanks to the Redlands' forgiving climate, and Mairel's ghost combined with my foraging skills meant we were good for food and water. I wasn't exactly sure what the limitations of the ghost were, but Sansen assured me that the soulspace entity from the Plane of Nostalgia was limited in what it could do—mostly, bringing memories from its past to life, spending them one by one.

I felt a little sad taking advantage of the ghost of Sansen's old crush like that, but it was clear from experimentation that the clump of soul fragments that made up Mairel's ghost wasn't sentient, and was perfectly happy to help us in any way it could. If we could have a slightly higher chance of not dying before we found Jiaola and got the hell away from this nightmare war, I'd gladly sacrifice a hundred ghosts and memories to save one living person. 

"So how come it's not sentient, but people like Odin and I am?" Meloai asked. I had no idea how her clockwork body repaired itself, but she seemed to have recovered from her flight through the Plane of Elemental Cold, because she could walk longer than any of us—and for the entire day, too. She offered to shapeshift into a horse and give us all a ride, but... something about that just felt sleazy, and it was pretty clear that she had no idea how to control a horse's body anyway, so we all walked for now until we could think up a faster method of transport.

"I think it has something to do with the number of memories that happened to agglutinate at that point in soulspace," Sansen said. "Or maybe the diversity of memories? I could tell that Mairel's ghost was... well, Mairel's. There weren't any elements from other people's minds, as far as I can tell."

"Hey, yeah. And that creepy little mimic I, er, threw into the void way back when—the only soul fragment that came out of that was my mother's. And it sure as hell wasn't sentient."

"That reminds me—what were you doing in the Plane of Elemental Falsehood in the first place?" Lucet asked, tilting her head towards me.

"Odin was fucking with me," I said. It was the safe response. Liquid metal flushed through my soul, but I ignored it. "So, wait, Meloai, when we're feeding you the soul fragments from the animals we hunt, is that making you... smarter, or something?"

Meloai giggled awkwardly. "Sort of? But not in the way you think! I have to, uh, consume a certain amount of memories per day. In theory, I could survive indefinitely by consuming my memories as quickly as I produced them—that's how most soulspace entities just sort of keep existing—but then I wouldn't get to form new memories with you guys, having a good time and learning about the world. So... I consume other things' memories, instead." She paused, frowning. "It's not very efficient, though. I need to eat the right... kind... of memories. Ones charged with insecurity."

"Huh." Lucet turned to Sansen. "Hey, speaking of which, do you have any idea where memories that get eaten by soulspace entities... go? Our old teacher sort of stonewalled us on the topic."

Sansen shrugged. "Too theoretical for my tastes. Wouldn't they just get destroyed?"

"Soul fragments can't get destroyed, only transformed," Meloai said. 

"According to the Academy," I added.

"Okay, yeah, but if there's one place where we'd expect a little less propaganda, it'd be the realm of science, no? It's an empirically observed fact, and we ran some experiments to confirm it."

"Yes, true, cool—counterpoint: the Academy harvested our fucking emotions to power their war machine. I'm not trusting anything that came out of that 'education' that I can't verify with my own two hands."

"Hey, uh, guys?" Lucet said. "I hate to interrupt, but... are you three seeing this?"

Sansen muttered something about poor old eyes, but Meloai and I stopped in our banter, turning to face the end of the dirt road we'd been following for the past week.

The village was utterly and clearly ruined, even from this distance. The sky was scribbled over with slashes of darkness, and there wasn't a building taller than an outhouse left standing. 

"What is it?" Sansen asked, squinting at the horizon.

Nobody wanted to say "probably a massacre," but I was a Redlander. I was used to it. "Probably a massacre," I said, and my voice was surprisingly calm. It was only the third village I'd seen this way, but it already felt... familiar. Like slipping into an old torture rack, made comfortable from years of use. "It's a standard Redlands tactic. There's some valuable piece of land that everyone wants—a particularly fertile field, a really good aquifer, whatever—but nobody's able to hold it for long. So someone who knows they can't have it decides nobody else can, either, and tears open rifts until the place is uninhabitable. Then they move on to go fight over some other piece of land and forget about it until a year or two have passed and the rifts have mostly closed over. And the next batch of villagers settle in, name the place after the rifts that killed the last group of poor bastards to live there, and hope they have a decade or so before the cycle repeats itself all over again."

"Fuck," Lucet murmured. "I'm sorry, Cienne."

I shook my head. "It's... it's just the way things are. Come on. These rifts don't look as bad as they could be—let's check for survivors."

"What kind of rifts are we walking into?" Sansen absently asked.

"Darkness," I said. "If we encounter a shadow, we should probably just run. Demons of Fear can be fucking terrifying, and I don't... there's nothing here to be happy about. I can't use joy right now."

"Let me see," Sansen said, and two lenses of possibility swirled into existence around his eyes. He shook his head. "Very unlikely for there to be demons in the near future. Best bet is that the forces that clashed here—and let's be real, this was the Silent Peaks against the Order of Valhalla—already dealt with them, one way or another."

"Then let's get going."

Grimly, the four of us marched towards the ruined village, three of us keeping a lookout in space, one of us keeping a lookout in time. Nobody detected any threats, but I was still jumpy for the entire journey.

Meloai and Lucet seemed like they had a pretty good coverage of realspace, so I closed my eyes and looked into soulspace. The cluster of memories that made up Meloai was beginning to grow into visibility, although it was still small in comparison to the souls of the three humans in the party. Aside from us, though, there weren't many lifeforms in the village, and those that were seemed to mostly be dumb animals. I could tell from the emotions—mostly monotone, tiny drops of joy or crystals of sorrow...

...except, wait, I'd nearly overlooked it, since its soul was so small, but there was a more complex soul. It had the simple emotions like sorrow and fear, yes, but there were glass shards of shame and sticky black thorns of self-hatred, and those were emotions I uniquely associated with what it meant to be human.

"Hold on," I said, eyes still closed. "I think I found something. A sapient soul, this way." I pointed towards where the soul would have corresponded to in realspace. Nobody questioned me—with my nine attunements, I had by far the broadest range of emotions I could see with my soulsight, and even though it didn't make me a master witch by any means, it gave me an edge in situations like this.

Even as the four of us inched closer to the broken rubble that I'd sensed the soul in, in my soulsight I felt the soul breaking apart. Fuck, the only person who could tell us what had happened here was already dying. "Quickly," I said, kneeling down to excavate the rubble.

Meloai pushed me aside without even thinking and hefted, clockwork tick-tick-ticking as strength a dozen times more than I could possibly output lifted a massive wooden beam off the ground.

At what she saw beneath, Meloai froze—not in the living, breathing way a human might, but in the perfect form of a statue that reminded me of her home in endless halls of oil and clockwork.

The girl who'd been crushed beneath the falling beam was undeniably dead. Nobody could survive watering the grass like that.

But the soul I had sensed stirred, and I knelt down, lifting up the girl's hand to reveal... a crow. Jet-black, beautiful, bloodied, and broken. But still alive, for now.

"Can you—" Lucet began.

"I never attuned forgiveness," I said, and it was disgusting how level my voice was. "It's not an emotion for me."

"Fuck," Lucet whispered. "And there aren't any other sapient souls in the village?"

"Not that I can sense," I said. Calm, sorrow, passion, insecurity, joy, fear, spite, guilt, self-hatred—even with the nine fields of magic I could now touch, I couldn't even save a fucking crow.

Well. At the very least, my oldest attunement was in perfect working order.

The crow shifted in my hands, letting out a faint wheeze. For a moment, I could have sworn it was trying to tell me something.

And then, in a flash of insight, I realized that it still could.

"You two. Choose an emotion," I said, "and I'll open up a rift. Meloai, you just do what you do."

Lucet blinked, uncomprehending, but Meloai got it immediately. "What?" Lucet asked.

"We've got exactly one witness to what happened here," I explained, "and their memories are about to be scattered throughout thoughtspace. Maybe if we're lucky, we can catch them as they go."

"Worth a shot," Sansen said. "I'll take care of my own rift, thank you."

"I'm... comfortable with the Plane of Sorrow," Lucet said. "You just focus on yourself."

I nodded, oil welling up from my soul as I let my passion swell. The dying crow almost seemed to nod at me as three witches and one demon prepared to dive into the crow's memories.

Then the crow's soul shattered, and I slashed my way between realities to try and catch a shard before it was lost forever.

And I was no longer Cienne, the helpless little boy who was still hopelessly in over his head.

I was the crow. I liked shiny things and eating clams. I disliked fire and pointy knives. I was the crow. I was the crow—

###

Astrenn needed the Shiny. Even though my feathers were singed, even when the Angry Thing swiped at me with its claws, Astrenn needed the Shiny. And so I would get the Shiny. It didn't matter how long it took, it didn't matter how distracting the village was (ooh! Is that tinsel? I love tinsel. No. No, focus. Astrenn needed the Shiny.) The Angry Thing was dumb, and even though it was strong and magical, I was clever-clever, fast-fast. I would win eventually.

The first thing to do was to get to a friendly nest. Right now, we were near the nest of the Large Baker—who used the Angry Things for cook-fires and shooed away me from the Delicious Breads. If the Large Baker came out on the street to investigate, Astrenn would never get the Shiny. So I flew to a nearby bin of Smelly Rotten Mush and tipped it over with a wingflap.

I knew this much about the Angry Things: they had a powerful sense of smell. And so as soon as the Smelly Rotten Mush poured out onto the street (to the dismay of the Large Baker), the Angry Thing awkwardly flapped away, the Shiny in its claws. I grabbed a small pebble (and a tinsel, for later), and shot into the sky, my feather-silent wings swift where the clunky, impossible weight of the Angry Thing farted along on inelegant wind magic.

"Caw," I said, and released the stone.

The Angry Thing must have been stupid, because it didn't even try to dodge the stone that thunked on its head. Unfortunately, the Angry Thing was a big ball of scales (shiny? No, not Shiny. Focus. Astrenn needed the Shiny) and probably wasn't even hurt by the rock. Which was no fair. Even the hard-hard-hard clams from the market got split open by a high-heavy-dropped rock. But at the very least, the Angry Thing dropped the Shiny, letting it twinkle to the ground like a wish upon a star.

Astrenn would get the Shiny. Astrenn had to get the Shiny.

I dove down, folding my wings tight and close to my body like how I'd seen the swooping-fast-kill-above birds do, and snatched the Shiny out of the air. The Angry Thing dove after me, but it had fallen into my trap.

For these fields of amber grain were the nests of the Old Farmer, and they appreciated me for my ability to hunt-find-eat mice more than the Angry Things that set their barns and crops on fire.

The Angry Thing dove after me, heat lighting up in its maw as I settled on the ground, and I knew the Angry Thing thought it had victory in its stupid little claws.

But then, like a thunderbolt, a broom head slapped the Angry Thing out of the sky as the Old Farmer scolded it.

"Back, you silly little dragon! I won't have you burning the barn down today!" The Old Farmer had skin like wrinkle-walnuts, and he was unamused by the Angry Thing's presence in his nest. Another two broom slaps swept the defeated Angry Thing away, and the Old Farmer gave me a piercing look.

"Say... you're my daughter's friend, aren't you?" The Old Farmer chuckled to himself. "You clever little thing. Well, go on. She's waiting for you where we buried... oh, why am I bothering? You can't understand me; you're just a crow. Astrenn! Your crow's here to visit!"

I flapped towards the barn, where Astrenn was waiting. The little girl who'd once taken me in, feeding me, and keeping me warm when the nights grew cold. Astrenn had saved my life when she was a hatchling, and I would do anything for Astrenn in return.

Astrenn needed the Shiny. And finally, I had delivered.

Astrenn looked up from the small lump of freshly-turned earth, the small, carved rock that stood where a mother should have been. Her cheeks glistened with sparkling droplets of water, but for once, I only wanted to wipe these shinies away.

"There you are, you silly lump of feathers." Astrenn sniffled and held out her arm; I hopped on and nuzzled her cheek. "What've you got for me today?"

I said, "Caw," and relinquished my treasures. A single gold coin for Astrenn, and a bit of tinsel for me.

Astrenn giggled. "You crazy crow—where'd you get this? Mother would have fed you plump for days. Come on—we can still send her off, if we hurry."

Astrenn pocketed the Shiny and hurried into the market, exchanging the Shiny for some smaller sparkles and a bouquet of fresh flowers.

Then Astrenn and I returned to Astrenn's mother's grave, placing the flowers in the center. After a moment of thought, I delicately balanced my tinsel on top, and Astrenn closed her eyes that shone like stars.

"She would have loved you, you pretty little girl."

"Caw," I said, perhaps agreeing, perhaps simply being there for my friend.

And Astrenn and I knelt there in mourning, until the sun bled red and the greatest shinies of all twinkled in the night sky above.

###

Time flickered, stepped, and jumped, and I was back in my body. Back in realspace. Back in the ruined, darksky village.

Back by the corpse of a girl named Astrenn who loved to feed crows.

"It was them," Lucet whispered by my side. "The Order and the Peaks. They fought here."

"Yeah." The words came out of my mouth. "I get that."

My friends gave me odd looks, but I couldn't hear what they said next over the sudden rush of my heartbeat in my ears. Worried, Lucet stood to put a hand on my shoulder, but as if I was in a dream, I walked forwards and my friends fell away.

"You guys keep looking," I managed to say. "I'll be right back."

"Cienne, where are you—" Lucet started to say, before someone cut her off. Probably Sansen. I loved Meloai, but... it would be Sansen who stopped her. 

I stepped into the middle of a blackened, ruined field. Now that I knew what to look for, it was obvious that this was where the Peaks had called down one of their devastating strikes of pure light. The crops here had been burnt to ash, but that was okay. The bodies, the blood, the ruins—they would just make more fertile soil, more desirable targets for the next time war came to this horrible, beautiful place that I called home.

This coming spring harvest we'll do it again

From the first bitter dawn to the pitiful end.

My heart thumped to the mournful tune of the Redlands Anthem, and I clenched my fists and my jaw and my soul and my everything, everything was dense and hot and furious—

So lift up a glass for the heroes who fell

And the bastards that got them, we'll see them in—

I let loose a wordless, bloody, guttural shriek, and a torrent of fury and sorrow and self-hatred screamed out with it, heat that warped the air as much as my tears, frost that numbed my flesh as deep as my soul, and I was falling, shrinking, fading into nothingness as the storm of ice and fire that was my love and loss reached so high it nearly split the sky in two.

When it was over, I was curled up in a patch of melting frost, surrounded by ruined, incinerated earth. My soul was empty. I was empty. I was so, so weak, and if a gust of wind so much as touched me, I would blow away into dust.

From behind me, I heard the frost crunch as someone stepped up to me, waited, then laid down by my side. Reaching out to loop one arm around my chest, holding me tight and close. 

I closed my eyes and let Lucet hold me, the anthem of the Redlands echoing in my ears as my soul went quiet and still, falling asleep in a cradle of frost and flame.

A.N.

Soulmage is a serial written in response to writing prompts. Stick around for more episodes, or join my Discord to chat about it!

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[meowcats734]

(prompt response) A girl grows up thinking that all doors are automatic, but it's actually the work of a polite ghost.

I'd thought the four of us had gotten to know each other pretty well at the Silent Academy. At the very least, Lucet, Meloai, and I hung out together for pretty much every waking moment we had, and it was a rare week that didn't see Sansen and I sipping slurry and brandy together in his comfortable, hand-built home. 

But as it turned out, hanging out together in the controlled environment of school was one thing. Trekking across the country and sleeping in the same camp for weeks was an entirely different level of intimacy that I didn't expect. In the first week alone, I learned that Lucet snored, Sansen liked staying up late humming to himself, and Meloai just flat-out didn't sleep at all, instead electing to keep watch for us as we rested. 

I learned other things, too. As the food supplies we'd brought with us from the Peaks ran low and I had to fall back on the foraging skills I'd learned as a child, I found out that Lucet was a surprisingly picky eater. I, personally, saw nothing wrong with the meat slurries that were a staple food of the Redlands, and the only thing Meloai ate was a couple soul fragments harvested from the gremsquirrels we hunted, but for some reason, Lucet didn't seem to be a big fan of the ground-up meat powder that I'd grown up on.

Explaining that the meat grinder was a metaphor for the constant violence in the Redlands didn't seem to do much for her appetite, either.

Things got even weirder when we started reaching villages. The first one we found—Hatebroke, according to the lonely entrance sign—was entirely abandoned, and stripped clean of anything remotely perishable. I was just getting comfortable with the empty village when a door suddenly swung open as Meloai walked past.

"Rifts!" I swore.

"Where?" Meloai asked, gaze swiveling.

"What? No, it's an expression—the door, Meloai. Did—you have to have to have seen that, right?"

"Uh, sure? But don't all doors do that?" Meloai asked, taking a step towards the abandoned cabin. The wooden door swung open with impeccable precision, and I could have sworn the hinges even oiled themselves as they moved.

"...No, Meloai," I said. "Doors do not normally open themselves as people pass."

"Really?" Meloai frowned. "They did all the time when I grew up."

"No offense, Meloai, but you grew up in a dead nobleman's creepy-ass extradimensional basement," I said. "I'm pretty sure that your definition of 'normal' is pretty different from human standard."

Lucet kicked me in the shin. "Hey. Be nice, Cienne."

"Sorry, sorry, I'm just a little bit stressed from... I dunno... getting chased out of the only home I had left by a fucking eldritch abomination? If this is Iola messing with us..." I took a step forwards and shut the door; it didn't open again.

"I don't think this is Iola," Sansen said, frowning at the door. "This... I think it's a different soulspace entity. And if my guess is right, it's one that probably decided to follow Meloai around ever since she left the Plane of Elemental Insecurity."

"Wait, so we've been stalked by some invisible soulspace entity for months now? How come we haven't noticed?" Lucet said.

"Say the part about it being invisible again," I said, "but slowly."

Lucet flicked my forehead. Ow, but I guess I deserved that. "You know what I mean. Meloai, does this door-opening thing happen all the time?"

"Yes," Meloai said, grumbling. "Not like it mattered much at the Silent Academy, since there were always so many people moving around that the doors were always open anyway. Look, I obviously turned out okay, and I spent twenty years with this kind of thing happening. Don't we have more important things to worry about? Like, uh, getting enough food for you guys to eat?"

"Well, hang on, maybe one of those problems can be a solution to the other." Sansen, by virtue of being older than Meloai, Lucet, and I combined, was the de facto leader of our little group of adventurers. "I've seen people come and go in my time, and I've even encountered the soulspace entities they've left behind. If this soulspace entity is formed from the soul fragments of who I think it is, then he's not going to be hostile."

"Didn't you just say it was something from Lord Tanryn's vault?" I asked. 

"Yes, but I don't think it's that puffed-up nobleman himself. He wouldn't stoop so low as to open doors for some commoner."

"Then... who is it?" I turned to Sansen, frowning. The old man had forgotten more than I'd ever know, and I trusted his judgement.

A faint smile spread across Sansen's face. "I think it's his old butler." He cleared his throat. "Meloai. Did the soulspace entity ever set tables for you?"

Meloai gave him an uncertain nod. "I... think? That's the thing where all the silverware flies into place, and the tablecloth straightens itself out with a whoomph, right?"

"...In this context, sure," Sansen said. "Did he—did the entity do the little thing with the three types of forks? The one with two little tines on the left, the bigger one in the middle, and that delicate, long, pointy one on the right?"

Meloai nodded enthusiastically. "See? It is normal for tables to do that."

"Oi," I muttered. "Well, I guess it's not the weirdest thing we consider normal nowadays."

"Yeah, that's ol' Mairel alright." Sansen's old gaze stared into the distance as he remembered. "He was my first crush, back in the day. If there's still enough of him left to remember how to wait tables and grease doors... well. Indulge an old man for a moment, will you?"

The three of us traded looks, then nodded at once. We may have been an eccentric little group, but we were tight-knit. We trusted each other. "Whatcha need, Sansen?" I asked.

His requests were fairly simple. We cleared out the front yard of the abandoned shack, smoothing over the dirt with our feet and hands—and as we did, something... else... joined us. Something that barely remembered how to speak or think, but still knew how to set a dance floor. Within minutes, we'd cleared a square of land, with Sansen standing in the middle.

And the old man began to dance.

Wordlessly at first, the waltz was an invitation. He took the lead, and empty air followed. And then, all at once, the air wasn't empty anymore. There was no flash of light, no thunderous miracles, but Sansen's steps became more sure, his weight more freely shifted, as he leaned on a partner who wasn't there but had been, once, long ago.

Meloai began to hum to herself, a wordless childhood lullaby that she must have heard when she was growing up, and the cadence of the tune matched the waltz to perfection.

The old man and the ghost finished their dance, and I felt a whisper of wind rustle around the impromptu dance floor.

Then the miracle was over, and suddenly, Sansen was holding nothing but empty air. He let out a long, contented sigh, memory coursing through him.

Then he opened his eyes, smiling.

"You wanted food, kids?" He stepped forwards, opening the door to the abandoned shack. Behind it, impossibly, incongruously, was a fully-set banquet table, resplendent with rich foods from an era long past, with three delicate forks set precisely by each setting. "Seems like there's something left of Mairel after all."

And the four of us ate gratefully, sustained by the memory of a ghost of an old man's friend.

A.N.

Soulmage is a serial written in response to writing prompts. Stick around for more episodes, or join my Discord to chat about it!

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[meowcats734]

(prompt response) "You're right, we are peaceful." He said, slowly standing up and lifting an axe that dwarfed him in size. "For you're only 'peaceful' if you're capable of great violence. Otherwise, the word is 'Harmless'."

We were jumpy in the days after we trapped Iola in the Plane of Elemental Calm. Even with Sansen sacrificing his hope and mental health to scan futures—coming up clean every time—and Meloai staying up all night on watch, I still had nightmares of the bubble-skinned thing Iola had become melting a hole in the fabric of space and doing... well, the nightmares were never clear on what, exactly, but it probably wasn't pleasant, judging by the way I shot awake in a cold sweat. 

Tension in the party was at an all-time high, especially since none of us had, er, talked about what we'd glimpsed in the Plane of Elemental Possibility. Lucet had deliberately made a note of making her sleeping bag as far away from mine as humanly possible, and I took the hint that she didn't want to chat about it now. Or maybe ever. 

So we needed a bit of old-fashioned banter to unwind every now and then, and old-fashioned banter was exactly what we got.

"I say the elves should be the most peaceful species, at least on paper," Meloai grated out as she clambered down the mountain. Our ragtag little adventuring party wasn't at its best right now, but we still had the energy to talk while we climbed. Meloai in particular seemed to have been hurt in the Plane of Elemental Cold, although I... wasn't really sure how mimic biology worked, and neither was she. Still, she managed to keep up a lighthearted expression as we inched down the Silent Peaks.

Lucet scoffed, hammering a rope into a cliff face and casting it down with ease of long practice. A native-born Peaks child probably forgot more than I'd ever know about rock climbing. "An elf? Are you crazy? Right after Iola just tried to light-magic us out of existence, too?"

"I don't think that was traditional light magic," Meloai said. "The last person he used that spell on started bleeding and vomiting, and that was before he became an eldritch abomination."

"See? Does that sound peaceful to you?"

"All I'm saying is that elves are supposed to feel joy. I don't think Iola's a very good example of what elves are normally like. They sound like they'd be... I dunno, better people, on average. Better than Iola, at least."

"Well, that one elf in particular is pretty peaceful now," I said, piping up, "because we violence'd his ass into a place where he won't be hurting anyone."

Meloai and Lucet chuckled, while Sansen merely grunted. The wrinkled old man was the most experienced of the four of us when it came to adventures like this, and I had a feeling he was about to put our banter to shame. "If you want a real answer? I think the Fey are the most peaceful of all the human-derived species. They just live in their forests and grow their crops and bugger off whenever someone threatens them."

"No, see, that's not peaceful." I tested the rope Lucet had nailed down, then started absailing down the sheer cliff face. I had to speak up to be heard over the wind. "That's just passive. I'm pretty sure the fey are, like, mentally incapable of not immediately forgiving anyone they meet. It's part of their biology. Magicology?"

"You're looking for 'mythology'," Meloai absently said.

"Yeah, that." Ugh, I'd even taken a class called Mythology of Magical Beings, way back in what seemed to be an age and a half ago. "Forgiveness is Regrowth and all that. The fey physically cannot do anything but forgive tresspassers in their forests. I don't think that's peaceful so much as helpless."

"So... what, in order to be peaceful, you have to be capable of immense violence, just... choosing to hold back for the time being?" Meloai mused, rubbing her chin. The shapeshifter currently in the form of a young girl grinned. "Because I can do that." Quick as a flash, her left arm morphed into an axe taller than she was—partly because she grew shorter to compensate for the lost mass.

"Well, rifts, by that measure, we're probably the most peaceful adventuring party in the whole of the Silent Peaks!" Lucet chimed in.

I couldn't see Sansen from my position climbing down the cliff face, but I could imagine the gruff grimace in the old man's face. "I don't think that's what peaceful means," he mused, and I could almost imagine him back at home with a cup of brandy, eyes twinkling as he philosophized, instead of running around with three violent teenagers who called themselves an adventuring party. "I think that being peaceful is... something for people who've managed to forget violence. For children whose greatest concern is how they will go to school, or what their friends will think of their new clothes. I think that being peaceful is something that we fight for, not for ourselves, but for the next generation. We die in violence so they can live in peace."

The only sound to follow that was the whistling of the desolate winter winds around the empty Silent Peaks.

Then Meloai hefted her axe. "So, uh, no incredible violence for me, then?"

And just like that, we were back to laughing and chuckling and climbing down the next section of rope. "I just said we'd die in violence," Sansen said, expertly navigating the rocky cliff with the help of the rope.

"Rifts, that is not what you want to hear from the party oracle," I muttered.

"But we die for a purpose." I could hear the smile in Lucet's voice. "I like that. So the most peaceful people in the world... is not the people of today."

"It's the children of tomorrow," Sansen agreed. "That's what we fight for."

Burning with determination, our ragtag adventuring party continued crawling down the side of the Silent Peaks, to whatever death awaited us and whatever peace we would find after.

A.N.

Soulmage is a serial written in response to writing prompts. Stick around for more episodes, or join my Discord to chat about it!

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[meowcats734]

(prompt response) You can see everyone's Deaths following them, arriving to offer their hands right as they die. Today, you saw something new; someone chasing after their Death, who is fleeing at a dead sprint.

"Plane of Insecurity," Sansen snapped, and we jolted into action, clustering into a circle while I gathered the liquid-metal insecurity that shivered in my soulspace. None of us bothered to ask things like how did Iola find out or what if he's just here to talk?

It was Iola. For all I knew, he'd just snapped and randomly decided to murder us. Or maybe his newfound eldritch form let him spy on us from afar. Or Odin wanted to put pressure on us, or the Silent Parliament, or some third faction that I didn't even know about. This clusterfuck of a war was exactly why we needed to get as far away from here as humanly possible, and probably further, since I was willing to bet Iola didn't count as anything remotely human anymore. 

"Knock, knock," sang Iola from the door, and his voice was garbled and fleshy and wow did I not want to find out what kind of bullshit he was going to get us into this time. With a flash of magic, we shifted into the Plane of Elemental Insecurity. Lucet let out a sigh of relief as Iola vanished, replaced by cotton-fake snow on cardboard stone—

"Keep moving," Sansen snapped, sprinting off towards the borders of town. A tiny rift into the Plane of Elemental Possibility blazed over his left eye, trailing behind sparks like a golden comet. 

"But he can't reach us here," Meloai asked, her tone more pleading than assertive as she ran. I wasn't entirely sure how her clockwork body differed from human standard, but she had no trouble speaking during our flat-out sprint.

Behind us, I got the nauseating feeling that space itself squelched. Meloai turned around, abandoning the illusion of humanity to swivel her head a full hundred and eighty degrees, then snapped her head back to normal and pushed forwards, a wordless, shocked horror on her face as she fled.

"Yeah," I panted, "evidence says otherwise."

"Why are you running?" Iola's voice was disconcertingly wet, but it was still unmistakably his voice. Morbid curiosity made me want to turn and look and see the terrible beauty of whatever abomination Iola had become—but I had to stay focused. I had to keep moving. "You wouldn't happen to be depriving a wartime effort of crucial emotional power sources, would you? Because if you were..."

"Close your eyes and follow me," Sansen interrupted, skidding to a halt. "We're plane-shifting again."

"To where?" Meloai asked. "This is the only safe plane out of—wait. Wait, no, you couldn't possibly be—"

Sansen threw both arms out, as if opening a door, and the rift over his eye exploded outwards, tearing a hole into the Plane of Elemental Possibility. Right before the rift swallowed me, I turned around, just to catch a glimpse of what was coming after us.

I really wish I hadn't.

The thing that had once called itself Iola stood in a puddle of... melted space. There was no other way to describe it—it was as if everything around where he'd entered the Plane of Elemental Falsehood had become limp and liquid and dead. I'd once seen a painting of clocks flopped over a desolate landscape like so many pancakes; what Iola had done when he'd clawed his way into this place reminded me of it so intensely I almost thought I was back in Art and Culture 102. 

But I never would be again, if Iola had anything to say about it.

His body bubbled like soup on a stove, bulges of skin forming and snapping and regenerating all along his once-perfect body. Who knew, maybe the Silent Parliament would declare this the new perfect once we were gone. His cruel smile ballooned and shrank like a frog's throat, and the corrupted arm he pointed at us shed bits and pieces of amorphous flesh even as he moved it. And yet, the transformations the Eldritch Initiative had wreaked on his body weren't even the worst part.

Because I was a witch, and I could see what they had done to his soul.

Joy should have been dew. Joy should have been pure, clear water, and it always worried me that Iola's version of the stuff was sickly and tainted. But now, the droplets that jittered through Iola's soul were infested, tiny, jittering swimming-things squirming in the inhuman emotion Iola now felt instead of joy.

In a horrible insight, I realized what those liquid, living orbs were.

They were eggs.

And at Iola's command, they began to hatch.

Thankfully, the rift into the Plane of Elemental Possibility swallowed us before I could see what that spell did. At the last minute, I remembered Sansen's instructions, closing my eyes and holding my breath—

And a cacophony of voices from every possible timeline assaulted my ears.

"Get away from me!" Lucet shrieked/shrieks/will shriek. "You're a monster—can't you see that? Can't you see what they've done to you?"

"I'm very sorry," Odin mused/muses/will muse, "but that's not the bargaining chip you think it is. Aim higher."

"Can I kiss you?" I asked/ask/will ask, my voice uncertain and frail. Lucet replies with a quiet little "m-hm!" and I can hear the smile in her voice—

That last one nearly shocked me into opening my eyes, but—fuck, I couldn't afford to get distracted, and presumably, that was exactly why Sansen had told us to close our eyes. I locked onto Sansen's soul in the chaos, following him towards the rift, and he shouted, "Lucet! Plane shift!"

From Lucet's momentary silence, I could tell she was shocked from what we'd heard as well, but—

"Gotcha," Iola said/says/will say, and his voice is disgustingly pleased as something squishes and I scream—

"Right. Everyone, gather close and hold your breath."

As Lucet prepared the rift, Sansen grabbed my arm and said, "Listen. When I give you the signal, send Lucet and I to the Plane of Calm, then take Meloai and yourself back to realspace."

I creased my brows. "What signal?"

Sansen drew in breath to speak—

Behind us, a hundred futures died screaming as Iola forced his way into the Plane of Elemental Possibility, and even though I was facing away from him, with so much of my concentration on my soulsight, I saw what he did to bore a hole between planes. The oil-droplets that normally comprised passion had turned rancid and rotten, matted with strange algae and molds, and he used that living, inhuman emotion to melt holes through thoughtspace itself. I sensed his soul shift, that infested not-joy rising to the surface, and though his next attack spell moved at the speed of thought, Sansen's futuresight was faster. Lucet's spell ended before his even begun, and we leapt between planes again, landing in the Plane of Elemental Cold.

Immediately, my entire body burned as I came into contact with air that had never known heat or light, and I instinctively flared up with passion, not that it was of much use. I had little passion left in me now, and spread thin over the four of us as it was, it only slowed the inevitable. Still, Sansen directed us to struggle onwards, stumbling over uneven, rock-hard snow, putting a little more distance between us and Iola while the heat leeched from our flesh. In the distance, through my tightly closed eyes, I sensed the soul fragments of skeletal deaths, Demons of Sorrow reaching out to take our hands and slay us with a touch—

And then, right as my lungs were about to give out and suck in a breath of deadly, thin air, Sansen squeezed my arm, and his instructions flashed into my mind. The last of my calm went into sending Sansen and Lucet into the Plane of Elemental Antimagic, while my plentiful sorrow tore a rift for Meloai and I to step back into realspace. As the rift rose around us, I sensed Iola burst into the Plane of Elemental Cold too late, the deaths scattering as Iola gleefully cast a spell—

We landed outside the boundaries of the city in a snowy plains, and it was a testament to the absolute chill of the Plane of Elemental Frost that the snow felt hot to the touch compared to my numbed, frozen skin. I cracked my eyes open—fuck, that hurt—and tried to gather my thoughts.

"What's going on? Why'd you separate us?" Meloai asked.

"I don't know," I muttered, pacing. "It was part of Sansen's plan—"

"If you don't have a plan, then we should keep running," Meloai snapped. She started to slog forwards through the snow. Her joints were seizing up and her metal body sank deeper than mine, so I got one shoulder beneath hers and helped haul her along. 

"The Plane of Calm is pretty safe," I said, thinking aloud, "but, uh, magic doesn't work in there. Even if they had an attunement to calm, they'd be trapped—you can't open a rift from inside the Plane of Elemental Antimagic. You have to coordinate with someone on the other side to open a rift from realspace."

Meloai flicked me on the back of the head. "You dunce—you're the person he sent to the other side! It's a trap for Iola, and Lucet's the bait—if you take them out of thoughtspace from this side, Iola will be stranded in the Plane of Elemental Antimagic!"

That made sense, and would be glorious if it worked, but... "I have no way to tell them where to meet up," I said.

Meloai gave me an incredulous look. "No way to tell... Cienne. Sansen is an oracle. He probably looked into the future and saw where you'd open the rift way back at the beginning."

My eyes shot open, and despite how it stretched and bloodied my cracked, frozen skin, I grinned. My heartbeat began to slow as, finally, I started to accept that maybe, just maybe, we'd done it. "Oh," I simply said, and tore open two person-sized rifts into the Plane of Elemental Antimagic.

And the four of us were reunited in realspace, exhausted, battered, and mentally shaken from our trawl through the planes. I felt like I was about to collapse, Lucet wouldn't meet my gaze, Meloai's movement was jamming up, and Sansen's eye-rift had extinguished, but the four of us were still, somehow, alive.

"He took the bait," Sansen gasped. "He's stuck in the Plane of Calm until someone thinks to dig him out."

"So we're safe," I finished. "For now, at least, we're safe."

Meloai nodded, extending a hand to Sansen and Lucet. With a weary smile, the four of us embraced, huddling together in the snow for a quiet, eternal moment.

And then the four of us began the long, tired slog from the Silent Peaks, wondering if the madness that had overtaken it would yet swallow us whole.

A.N.

Soulmage is a serial written in response to writing prompts. Stick around for more episodes, or join my Discord to chat about it! This prompt was chosen by my Patreons.

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[meowcats734]

(prompt response) “Depressed? Anxious? Unhappy?” The sign shouted at you, “Why not become an amorphous entity and shirk the confines of time and space? Embrace your Eldritch Nature today!”

The plan was simple, because it had to be. We had little to no idea what kind of countermeasures the Silent Peaks would inflict on people who tried to flee their little paradise, so we cheated. Sansen was still wrung out from the last time he'd gone deep into an oracular trance, but he still agreed to put his mind through the wringer of living through the same three days over and over again for our sake.

So Lucet, Sansen, Meloai, and I all gathered in the safe room's ritual circle, holding hands so that Sansen could draw on our hope. Sansen touched the paintings and carved wooden tokens that Jiaola had made for him, laid in a neat circle around him, and even though I couldn't see the hope coruscating through his soulspace, his straightened back and sharp, clear gaze told me he was ready.

Then he set down a wooden pair of glasses and, without touching them, carefully mimed lifting them to his face.

"What's he doing?" Meloai whispered.

I concentrated on my soulsight, slipping for a moment between realspace and soulspace, and in Sansen's soulspace, I saw him lift the memory of the glasses to his face. It was a technique I'd only seen once before, but intuitively, I knew what he was doing.

"He's using the memory of the glasses to channel the spell," I whispered back. "He doesn't need to open a massive rift into the Plane of Elemental Possibility—he just needs to be able to see the future. It's more energy-efficient to make two tiny rifts over his eyes than a larger one further away."

And as I spoke, I felt Sansen tug at our souls, and the future seemed a little less bright as hope drained from my soulspace. But it was worth it. A dizzying rift into another timeline coalesced and stabilized in the form of two swirling lenses, held firm by the memory of a pair of glasses. Sansen's eyes flickered, darting left and right as future after future sang to him. His brow furrowed into a scowl, and his jaw began to twitch.

"That doesn't look good," Lucet muttered. 

"We're supposed to stay hopeful," Meloai said.

"You can't just force yourself to feel hope," I grumbled. "Come on, just shush and let Sansen do his thing."

As I spoke, I noticed something begin to... change. Sansen flinched, then started whispering something. Over and over again, he murmured beneath his breath, and I couldn't help but lean in to hear him say:

Sorry. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I'll do better next time. I'll keep them safe. I'm so, so sorry.

"Sansen?" I hesitantly asked. "Are you o—"

Sansen jerked back, swearing, and clutched his head, waving away the memory of the glasses and letting the tiny rifts unravel. Lucet yelped in surprise; Meloai blurred with clockwork precision to keep him from falling. I just waited for Sansen to come back from the trance, and though it was a slow, dazed process, come back he eventually did.

"I kept dying," he finally managed to say, "because our future held something so deadly it killed me just by looking at it." He managed a weak smile. "That... that's new, at least."

Meloai frowned. "Wait. If you looked at a future that kills you if you see it... why aren't you dead?"

Sansen tiredly waved a hand at me, so I took over to explain. "In order to look multiple days into the future, you kind of have to cheat. The amount of hope you'd need to directly look three days into the future is obscene; maybe the Peaks could manage it with a specially-trained battlechoir, but our ragtag little band definitely can't."

"But there's a workaround," Sansen said, pushing himself to his feet and giving Meloai a grateful nod. "If I can look five seconds into the future, I can choose to look into a timeline where my future self is also looking five seconds into the future, and telling me what he sees."

"And you can chain that until you reach the point in the future you want," Meloai said, eyes lighting up. 

"Well, the inaccuracies introduced are exponentially compounding with each link in the chain, so I try to make the links as large as possible. But yes, it's a very potent oracular technique. It also provides some insulation from... whatever one of my future selves died looking at."

The four of us traded nervous glances.

"And what would that be?" Meloai finally asked.

Sansen shrugged. "Not a damn clue. But whatever my future self saw through the rift, it must've been horrible. He started vomiting and bleeding and seizing up, and..." He trailed off at our horrified expressions. "What? What is it?"

"Iola," I hissed, and it was more a curse than a name.

###

Class the next day was an awkward, fearful thing. I sat down in Ritual Magic 201, in the same room as the boy who killed us in some timeline that never was, and wondered if firing a frostbolt through his head now would be worth getting mind-wiped if it meant letting Lucet and Meloai and Sansen go free.

"Now, class," Mr. Ganrey said, "I'd like to share an exciting opportunity with you all. Thanks to an exciting new legislation from the Silent Parliament, there are some new opportunities for those of us on the home front to assist with the war. Thanks to our angelic partners, I'm glad to announce a brand-new way for excited young soldiers to become combat-ready in no time."

Mr. Ganrey stepped to the side, and a rift between planes opened, letting a pale-white agglutination of flesh step into the classroom. Somehow, the Angel of Arrogance reminded me of a half-melted candle.

"Thanks to new advancements in our understanding of human soul fragment absorption," the Angel of Arrogance said, "we have discovered that it is now possible to hybridize a soulspace entity and a realspace creature, resulting in a soul capable of feats of witchcraft hitherto unimagined. Preliminary animal trials and oracular divinations have yielded promising data, and we are now looking for human volunteers."

The Angel of Arrogance went on about the possible benefits of joining the Eldritch Initiative, but I had eyes for only one person. One gleeful elf who'd been raring for a chance to join in on the war since the day it had begun.

Iola's soul twitched with corrupted glee, and I knew I had to stop him from joining the Eldritch Initiative before he killed us all.

###

"Hi, I'm here to inquire about the Eldritch Initiative?" I asked, tentatively sidling into the... distressingly organic clinic in the center of the Silent City. Pulses of power languorously pumped across its skin—its walls, I told myself, buildings have walls—and the amorphous blob of pale white flesh that served as its receptionist.

"Wonderful, wonderful! We could use every hand, tentacle, and other grasping appendage we can get. May I start by asking how you heard about it?"

"OH THAT WAS ME," the sign from outside shrieked. Its fleshy, bulbous lips looked like they were going to pop, and for a heartbeat, I had an insane urge to take a pin to them. "I SHOUTED AT THEM LIKE YOU TOLD ME TO SHOUT AND FOR SOME REASON INSTEAD OF RUNNING AWAY THIS ONE CAME HERE."

"Er, yeah, I have a... a 'friend' who came here earlier. I was wondering if—"

"Well, hold your horses, thestrals, Bearers of the Apocalypse, or other metaphysical equestrian-equivalents!" I got a distinct impression that the blob at the desk was trying to smile. "You can't leave—"

"What?" I burst out.

"—without hearing about the wide array of possible benefits that the Eldritch Initiative can have for you. Ask your doctor if becoming a demon from outside realspace is right for you," the receptionist finished smoothly, as if I hadn't said anything.

"WHY DO PEOPLE KEEP INTERRUPTING AT THAT PART?" The sign screamed. I still wasn't sure how its locomotion worked, to be honest, but it had managed to find a way to wriggle closer to me while I wasn't looking.

"Use your inside-spacetime voice, A." Ugh, all the soulspace entities around here had such bizarre names. This one was pronounced 'Albin,' too. Like that wasn't going to get confusing. "You see, we here at the Eldritch Initiative don't just offer suppression of undesirable emotions and enhancement of Academic emotions. We actually offer an entirely original broadening of your emotional spectrum!"

Uh... what? "Like... as in... uh... no, honestly, I have no idea what that's like."

"We have a helpful procedure to explain." The receptionist elongated their body—or maybe contracted spacetime—and pulled over a cup of what I hoped was water. "This, here, represents the spectrum of all humanly possible emotions." Then they drank the water, gulping it down, satisfied. "And that represents the scope of the emotions you'll have after your partnership with the Eldritch Initiative. Any questions?"

"Yes," I said slowly. "What... what on Earth does that mean?"

"It doesn't mean anything on Earth! You have to transcend realspace in order to have access to most of these emotions, after all. In addition to normal human feelings such as happiness, relief, awambuk, and ikstuarpok, we offer expanded emotions, normally inaccessible to single sapient minds, such as: Humber. Nage. Dorcelessness. Kindness. Ponnish. Harfam. Loric..."

The receptionist just kept going, and I found my vision swimming. I tried to stand, but the receptionist's droning voice and the pulsating heat of the room blended together, and I found myself tipping over—

"Andric. Varination. Kyne."

"UH. HEY. THE HUMAN DOESN'T SEEM SO GOOD."

"Trantiveness. Teluge." The receptionist paused. "Oh, dear. Was that too much for—"

And I blacked out, squelching on the tongue of the building's mouth.

###

"I'm scared," I admitted. "No, scratch that—I'm fucking terrified."

"They wouldn't let me stop him," Lucet admitted. She'd tried after I'd—somewhat embarrassingly—fainted with fear as the receptionist rattled off the monstrosities that Iola would have access to now that he'd gone from human to elf to eldritch fusion. "Maybe... maybe we can't leave. Maybe we just have to hunker down and try to survive."

"Yeah, and maybe the Silent Peaks are going to stop mind-wiping us, harvesting our emotions for war, and getting increasingly close to letting Iola murder us on principle," Meloai said.

Nobody really had anything to say in response to that.

"Iola's got it out for me," I admitted, "and it's pretty fucking clear that the administration no longer cares if their golden boy decides to do some vigilante justice on the troublemaking Redlander. I'm done for if I stay."

"Being a Fell witch isn't much more popular around here, either," Lucet said. "And... I don't want to think about what Iola would do if he got his hands on me again."

"According to your school's terminology, I'm technically a demon," Meloai added. "Iola's going to, ah, 'disassemble' me if I don't get out of here as quickly as possible."

"People have been giving Jiaola and I a blind eye ever since the Redlanders became the city's newest punching bag," Sansen said, "but I'm no fool. I've seen this before. Once they've ran out of newcomers to hate, they'll fall back on old prejudices. It's certain death if I stay; at least there's a chance if we make a break for it while we still can."

"I can take us through the Plane of Elemental Falsehood," I said. Of the planes I had access to, it was the only one that was remotely close to being safe for us to traverse. "Unless Iola's got an attunement to insecurity, he shouldn't be able to follow us there."

Meloai grimaced. "We'll have to deal with the mimics if we route through Falsehood."

"We'd already get our asses killed dealing with Iola Classic. I don't want to try our luck against Iola, Eldritch Edition. We can handle mimics."

"I'll scan the future to see how true that is," Sansen said, wearily getting to his feet. I grimaced—it was obvious that seeing his death over and over was taking a toll on the old man—but we had no choice. If we were to flee the Silent Peaks, we needed every edge we could get.

"You've packed everything you need?" I asked Lucet. I was pretty sure Meloai didn't have any belongings, anyway. 

Lucet nodded and was about to speak when Sansen, pale-faced, burst up from the safe room, swearing under his breath. That... that was not what you wanted to see from an oracle.

"He knows," Sansen said, panting for breath. "He's already coming. Iola's already here."

A.N.

Soulmage is a serial written in response to writing prompts. Stick around for more episodes, or join my Discord to chat about it!

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[meowcats734]

(prompt response) "But...this place is my home!" He stopped pacing around and stared at me in annoyance, "You've died 349 times in this place...and yet still you call this place 'home'?"

"I'm sorry, I've done what three hundred and forty-nine times?" I asked, blanching.

Sansen grimaced. "Sorry. The oracular trance... I've seen you die here, three hundred and forty-nine times. In three hundred and forty-eight futures that never were."

"Wait." I set down my cup of slurry. "How did I die three hundred and forty-nine times if you only looked into three hundred and forty-eight futures?"

"Necromancer in one of them," Sansen idly said, waving a hand. "Look, the point is this. Remember the Battle of Silentfell?"

I shuddered. "How could I not? I still have nightmares about Odin and his forces tromping up and down the streets and blowing up everything in sight."

"Yeah. Well. I was an oracle trying to keep the people I love safe. I'm not trying to diminish your traumas or anything, but... you only lived through that battle in real time, once. I died through it more times than you can count."

"But you can count them," I murmured.

Sansen closed his eyes. "Every single one," he agreed.

Put that way... I could totally see why Sansen had hidden his oracular abilities when the draft for the war came. If the poor old man had gone through hell and back just to survive one battle, I shuddered to think what those freaks in the Silent Parliament would do if they got their hands on him for the course of an entire war.

And I could see why Sansen wanted to leave the city.

"This place..." I hesitated, then continued. "It's the closest thing I have to a home. Ever since Sorrowfell was destroyed for the last time."

Sansen tilted his head, and for some reason the old man looked curiously puppyish.

"But..." Memories flashed behind my eyes as I stared around the old, solid wooden house. Here was where I'd hidden in the saferoom with Sansen as Odin's forces entered the mountain. There was the church where I'd been shoved out of the teleportation circle and stranded in the middle of a warzone. "It's getting worse," I finally said. "The only thing that makes this home is my friends and family."

Sansen gave me a tired smile. "You can take those with you," he said.

"I can take them with me," I agreed.

He stood and held out a hand. "I'll be packing. Three days from today."

I raised an eyebrow. "That an oracle's prediction?"

"It's your uncle's promise."

I smiled and took his hand, and the old man hauled me to my feet.

Then I left the house that Sansen and his husband had built with their own two hands, to gather my friends and tell them to flee.

A.N.

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[meowcats734]

(prompt response) You're the villain that the Chosen One is meant to defeat. Once they arrive, you notice they're just a teenager who barely knows how to swing a sword. Angered by your opponents sending children to do all their dirty work, you decide to help the teen get revenge.

The Silent Parliament may have been ruthless, but they weren't stupid. They knew that Odin was turning their populace against them, and they remembered that Odin's opening move in the war was contacting possible sympathizers through the vehicle of dreams. So they'd taken countermeasures. While I was gone, they'd erected obelisks at the barriers of the city, and although I couldn't make heads or tails of how they worked, it was clear what the end result was. The few times that Odin did try to show up in people's dreams, the reports were that they were fuzzy and incomprehensible, their attempts to reach out to anyone in the Silent Peaks stymied.

But all that changed after our classmate went crazy and tried to blow us off the side of the mountain.

It frustrated me that I not only had absolutely no idea what the Silent Parliament was doing to keep Odin's dreams out, I hadn't the faintest clue what Odin had done to counteract that. Trying to catch any true information about the war through the waves of confusion and propaganda was like chasing my shadow around a dying fire.

But it was undeniable that after Odin played their hand and turned the Silent Academy's mind-wiped soldiers against them, the dream-wards on the outskirts of town were no longer effective.

So when I went to sleep next, something touched my soul, and I was no longer Cienne, witch of six magics, a student of the Silent Academy who was just trying to survive the war.

I was Odin, Demon of Empathy, and I had come to expose the Silent Peaks for their hypocrisy and lies.

###

"Prepare to meet your end, foul demon!" The slim, wobbly-kneed teenager tried to swing her blade at me. Unimpressed, I simply took a single, surefooted step back, navigating the corpse-strewn, muddy battlefield with ease. Nobody had taken the time to teach the poor girl the importance of a good pair of boots, and her pitiful slog through the mud would take ages to catch up with me.

"I have a name, you know," I said mildly.

"The only name you deserve is barbarian, you monster!" The girl shrieked as she charged at me. One of my soldiers appeared, brandishing a ball of fire, but I shook my head. This was the fourth would-be hero the Silent Parliament had thrown at me, and I'd given all of the first three a nice pat on the back, a reassuring pep talk, and in one case taken in a runaway who had no stomach for the churn of endless violence that made up an active battlefront.

I may have been a demon, but I was a Demon of Empathy. On occasion, I let others into my heart—which was more than I could say for my enemies.

"I recommend you stop following me," I said, taking another calm step back.

"Never!" The girl snapped. "They said you would try to sway me from my path with your wicked words of deceit!"

"Actually, I'm just trying to point out that you've been following me into enemy lines for the past two minutes." The girl froze as she looked around and realized that the black-and-white emblem of the Silent Parliament was nowhere to be found. "On the plus side," I mused, "it's not exactly as if you can get any more surrounded than you already are."

"Then I shall go down in a blaze of glory!" The girl leapt at me, blade crackling with heat, and I raised an eyebrow. This one knew some magic, evidently. Nevertheless, it was fruitless; she'd misjudged her leap and landed in a sprawl on the floor.

I sighed, walking towards her—ostensibly to give her a hand, but this was the fourth time I'd played out this pattern, and my enemies would be predicting me. I kept my eyes on the sky, watching for the telltale flash of—

There.

Quick as a flash, I slashed one hand through the air, tearing open a rift between here and the Plane of Elemental Darkness. A fraction of a heartbeat later, an eerily silent column of holy light struck the ground around us, crisping the mud into brick and setting the corpses aflame—but beneath the shelter of the rift of darkness, the girl and I were kept safe.

"That was an artillery strike," I gently explained, "ordered by your army's commanding officer on your position, in the hopes of taking me out while I gave a fallen child a hand. Scorn me all you like, but do yourself a favor."

The girl's eyes were wide and shellshocked as they met mine.

"As long as you continue working for the Silent Parliament? Don't think of yourself as the hero."

I stood, leaving the shocked girl staring at the destruction her own commander had wrought—the destruction that I had protected her from—and went to exit the battlefield.

But before I could return to my warcamp, the girl croaked, "Wait."

I stopped, then turned, raising an eyebrow. "What is it?"

"I..." The girl swallowed. "This can't be right. They wouldn't just... they wouldn't just throw me away..."

"But they have." My gaze was not unkind as I knelt by her side. "Would you like to see how?"

The girl got to her feet, sword abandoned in the mud, and mutely nodded.

Then I closed my eyes—trusting her not to strike me—and reached into my soulspace, delicately carving away a portion of my memories. The memories of the first three heroes who had come to stop me, who I had spared, and who had been quietly vanished by their superiors without a trace.

The first one, of course, didn't believe me. Neither did the second, even when I presented him with the memories of his predecessors. The third simply broke down when I showed him the names and faces of the previous "heroes" who had challenged me.

But the fourth?

The fourth grew angry.

"This... this isn't right." The girl clenched her fists. "The Silent Parliament—they can't get away with this."

"They have so far," I gently said. "And they will, if nobody stops them."

The girl trembled with fury. "You told me that I could not call myself a hero, so long as I worked for the Silent Parliament."

Slowly, I nodded.

"Then let me call myself a hero." She held on to the fragment of my soul that I had gifted her. "Let me show everyone what happened here, so that another child like me is never tricked onto this battlefield again."

A quiet, fierce grin spread across my face, and I squeezed the girl's arm.

"I will remember you," I said. "My name is Odin, and I am the greatest Demon of Empathy to walk this world."

"My name is Haionn," she said, "and I am a hero."

Then Haionn strode to her own side of the battlefield, wielding memory and truth where once she held a blade.

###

"I don't buy it," I said the next morning.

Lucet, Meloai, and Tanryn were the only ones in earshot, but Lucet still reflexively looked around with her soulsight. We were alone in the strange vault that Lord Tanryn had built to keep his daughter safe from the last war the Silent Peaks had waged. I found it ironic that we were using it to the same end.

"What don't you buy?" Meloai asked.

"The dream," I said. "The Silent Peaks are fucking awful, but for all their evils..." 

“I left a child in a warzone,” Witch Aimes snarled, getting to her feet. “A helpless, imbecilic child who it is my job to re-educate and protect from the Redlands. To protect from monsters like you, in body and idea.”

"They don't use child soldiers," I said. "And they protect their young."

"I mean, how would we know if they did?" Lucet asked. "What are we going to do, ask around if anyone had any missing children as of late? The watch would wipe our memories of the last week just to be safe if they thought we were questioning them."

"That might very well be Odin's aim," Meloai pointed out. "The watch's stockpiles of liberosis are already running low; they don't have enough resources to keep everyone safely mind-wiped. Having them waste resources on debunking an unfalsifiable accusation might be the sole goal of their broadcast."

"Well, hang on." Tanryn hopped into the conversation. "I don't know about this Odin fellow—"

The three of us chuckled. It was sometimes... endearing, how out of touch with current events Tanryn was.

"—but you said they sent you all a soul fragment, right? If it's a memory, it has to have some grain of truth to it, even if it's carefully chosen."

I shook my head. "Odin can do nonsense with soul fragments that I didn't even know was possible. Case in point: none of us have any idea how they sent the exact same soul fragment to the entire city, simultaneously. I wouldn't put it past them to be able to just... completely fake a memory. And some parts of it have to be fake. I've seen Odin fight personally, and if they had the power to casually open rifts of that size, I'm certain they would have used it against Witch Aimes. I don't know if it's, like, an intimidation tactic, or a tutorial on how to counter light magic, but it's definitely not real."

"So we're left with two competing sources of obviously false news," Lucet summed up. "Well, I suppose that's better than one."

"Not strictly true," Meloai pointed out. "I could add as many sources of obviously fake news as you want, and the situation wouldn't improve." At our blank looks, she elaborated. "As some examples of unhelpful false reports: bees are fish, snow is hot, and Iola is a good person."

I couldn't help but giggle at that. Meloai's sense of humor took some getting used to, but... I was glad we had her, during these times. I could use a smile every now and then. "Odin's lies are a little more subtle than 'bees are fish', but I take your point. We shouldn't take *anything—*either from the broadcasts or the dreams—at face value."

"So then... what do we trust?" Lucet asked. She folded her knees inwards, hugging her legs as if she was a giant egg. Tanryn gave her a scandalized look for putting her shoes on one of House Tanryn's precious chairs, but Lucet didn't even notice. "I mean, for all we know, we've already lost the war and Odin's about to kill us all. Or we won yesterday, and the only reason the Silent Academy is still showing those broadcasts is to fuel some completely unrelated conflict. And I hate that. I hate that so much."

I bit my lip, thinking. "Well," I slowly said. "The last time I didn't trust the Academy's narrative on things..." I almost laughed from how much simpler those times were, when all I had to worry about was what counted as Academic and what counted as Fell magic. "I asked someone who had been there personally."

Meloai and Tanryn gave me confused looks, but Lucet straightened up. "I thought you said Jiaola hadn't come back yet."

"He hasn't," I agreed, "but there's one person with oracular powers and a highly motivated interest in knowing what happened to him."

I stood, stretching my back, and prepared to open a rift back to realspace.

"I think it's time I paid Uncle Sansen a visit," I finished, and tore open a gate back into the Silent Peaks.

A.N.

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[meowcats734]

(prompt response) You're God, reborn as a baby without memories. You grew up as atheist, but you're now remembering.

The hijacked broadcast was the first of Odin's strikes on the home front, but it was far from the last. Odin never sent soldiers or demons or witches, but their moves were devastating nonetheless.

The first sign that something was wrong was how the school curriculum stuttered. One day, we were learning about how the Redlanders were barbaric savages and possibly even slavers; the next, Mr. Ganrey was reluctantly telling us that, actually, Redlanders weren't culturally homogeneous and there was no evidence that the majority of Redlander civilization owned slaves. In Ritual Magic 201, we'd be learning how to incite joy and passion to help empower the front line, then hastily drop that lesson in favor of studying theory of magic instead. 

The penny dropped when a member of the Silent Parliament was tried for treason and consorting with the enemy. I wasn't sure what Odin had offered her to get her to try and change the home front policy away from militarization, and I didn't need to.

They were the Dealmaker, after all. Whatever the woman's price was, I was sure Odin had matched it.

But that was just Odin's opening move. The second broadcast they hijiacked was short—it had to be, before the censors could cut them off—and was released right after the Silent Parliament declared victory over the traitor in their ranks. And with four words, Odin threw the home front of the Silent Peaks into chaos.

"Now find the rest," Odin said, a hard, cruel glint in their eyes.

###

If being the Redlander boy who spoke out in defense of history was unpopular before, it was downright lethal nowadays. The Silent Parliament and the city watch were tearing themselves apart trying to stop civilians from conducting witch hunts in the streets while hurriedly conducting witch hunts of their own, and the fact that everyone was a witch didn't help matters at all. Everyone with the faintest attunement to anything was constantly scanning everyone else's emotions in hope of catching a traitor—and it didn't help matters that the constant suspicion and fear was wrecking the battlechoirs' ability to cast their grand works of passion and joy. Anyone who went around endangering the limited supply of happiness and drive that we still possessed was regarded with suspicion at the very least, and outright violence at the worst.

Which meant, of course, that fucking Iola was more important than ever.

I was pretty sure he'd taken the rejection from the army personally, because he'd taken it upon himself to uproot every traitor he could find—and because he was Iola, that more or less meant doing his utmost to make life for Lucet and I as miserable as he possibly could. At the very least, he seemed to leave Meloai out of it, and Freio had silently moved away from us once he realized that staying too close was an easy way to become the target of Iola's ire.

So it was just Lucet and I in the House of Warp and Weft, after Iola had badgered Mr. Ganrey into assigning us cleanup duty now that Albin was off at the war.

"One of these days, something more powerful's going to come through this damn rift, and we're all going to regret sending Albin to the front lines," Lucet grumbled. The amorphous blob of shifting flesh we were currently trying to kill sent a weak ripple in space our way, but we weren't helpless ourselves. I dissolved the attack with a field of calm while Lucet fired a frostbolt into the pulsating mass; it squelched in displeasure and turned to flee.

"Oh no you don't," I snapped at the minor Demon of Arrogance as it squished towards the nearest door. I hurled a bead of silvery insecurity at the door, and the power of insecurity washed over it, transforming it into a solid facade. The transformation would revert with time, but it did what it had to, rendering the door impassable for the time it took for us to catch up with the Demon of Arrogance. I followed up Lucet's frostbolt with a blast of heat, and the Demon of Arrogance shriveled and died, leaving behind a floating soul fragment and its corpse.

"Rifts, Cienne. How many new attunements do you have?"

I hesitated. Even with my closest friends, I was still anxious about letting slip the fact that I held the secret of attunement. Thankfully, the mystery surrounding attunements meant that it wasn't even that out of the ordinary to randomly pick up a couple overnight; people had assumed I'd simply gotten lucky with whatever forces governed witchcraft. "Five," I said. "Calm, sorrow, passion, joy, and insecurity."

Lucet whistled. "Damn. You're on your way to becoming a bloody terrifying witch."

I laughed awkwardly. "I mean, a spearmaster who trains one move a thousand times will beat a soldier who trains a thousand moves once, right? Iola could probably cook me from the inside out, if he wanted." 

"Not before you gave him a frostbolt to the face," Lucet said. Her expression turned rueful. "Seems like you became the riftmaw before I stopped being the hearth dragon."

I bit my lip guiltily. I... I wanted to tell her, I really did, but... Odin already terrified me enough. They'd wrapped me around their finger, got me to spill my heart out to them, and then fucking abandoned me like yesterday's trash. For all I knew, they were listening to us as we spoke. Instead, I said, "Hey. You're getting damn good with your frost magic. Someone tries to hurt you, you can freeze their face off."

Lucet gave me a savage grin. "Yeah. I'd like to see Iola walk that off. Now come on." She picked up the Demon of Arrogance's corpse, grimacing as it squelched. "We've got three more to go before we fill our quota."

Lucet and I talked and laughed and bantered as we patrolled the House of Warp and Weft, and for three blissful hours, we could fool ourselves into thinking we were ready for anything life could throw at us.

Then the second phase of Odin's counterattacks came.

###

"I AM GOD!" Our newest classmate hurled a gale-force burst of wind at Mr. Ganrey, sending him flying backwards into the pavement with a crunch, and Lucet swore as the mind-wiped Redlands soldier turned towards where the three of us were hiding. I fired a frostbolt off, but I wasn't feeling sad so much as fucking terrified right now, and it was so weak that I don't think the ex-soldier even noticed. "BOW BEFORE ME!"

"Who would've thought that trying to mind-wipe and re-educate enemy soldiers would backfire?" I muttered to myself. 

"I suspected it would," Meloai helpfully added. "Although we didn't know Odin could slip soul fragments past mind-wipes before."

"I think something went wrong with this soul fragment's reintegration," Lucet said. "Why would Odin want a raving madman who thinks he's God? Wouldn't covert agents be a better choice?"

"Bloody hell if I know. Odin's been running circles around the Silent Parliament this whole time. I wouldn't underestimate them," I said. The self-proclaimed god rose on a column of wind, turning towards us with a snarl, and I swore. "Get behind me," I said, breathing out a misty veil of calm.

It came just in time, and even with my newfound attunement, it was really quite hard to stay calm while a madman was trying to huff and puff and blow me off the side of the mountain. Even with the shroud of calm struggling to enervate the torrential winds, I could barely breathe, and my skin felt like it was being pulled off of my cheeks. So for once in my lifetime, I was grateful to see Iola amongst the cowering classmates as he stood and pointed at the student, those sickly dewdrops of joy accelerating to impossible speeds as a beam of invisible light struck the mind-wiped soldier in the head.

For a minute, the poor soldier didn't even notice—but he was already a dead man walking. Less than a minute after the spell was cast, he wobbled in the air and vomited, seizing up before falling to the ground. Reddened, weeping sores marked where the beam of deadly, invisible light had passed through his skull.

Lucet and I traded glances as Iola gave the rest of the class a satisfied, self-congratulatory grin.

"He's going to be fucking insufferable after this, isn't he?" Lucet asked rhetorically. 

And just like that, the first week of the war had passed.

A.N.

This prompt was written by my Patreons!

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[meowcats734]

(prompt response) Demons gain power from the fear they inflict upon others. The more people are afraid of a certain demon, the stronger they will become. For this reason, Kingdoms employ, not Knights and Warriors, but Bards and Minstrels to combat the Demons.

The war was broadcast, because it had to be. The magic of the battlechoirs was fueled by emotion, after all, and every viewer at home was a potential power source. When the battlechoirs hurled grand fireballs at the enemy ramparts, it was our passion they drew on to feed the flames; when they called down great sunbeams to blind and burn soldiers, it was our joy they converted into sunshine.

And when the battlechoirs summoned walls of repulsive force to crush entire villages and shove the broken corpses aside, it was our nationalism they stole to fuel their war machine.

I felt vaguely sick at how my fellow classmates whooped and cheered on the battle being broadcast in the matrix of light spells in the center of the auditorium. As if the battle was a sports match, and the dark red mud was an aesthetic choice. Even poor Freio in the corner was confusedly smiling, simply from the sheer inertia of the crowd.

At first, the Order of Valhalla had fielded foot soldiers and witches against the forces of the Silent Peaks, but after the first battle resulted in a resounding victory for "us"—or, at least, the side that got to broadcast their version of the war to me and my classmates—the Order of Valhalla switched tactics. They had numbers and logistics, but the Silent Peaks had a vast edge in spellcraft, and the Order of Valhalla hadn't expected the seven-meter-wide fireballs fueled by the rage of an entire city.

So the Order of Valhalla began summoning demons. On screen, the Demon of Fear manifested as a vast, many-tendriled darkness, spearing soldiers with rays of absolute void that made whatever they touched just... fall apart. The view quickly panned away from the carnage, but it was too late. The image of a bard's insides being sprayed into the wind like a farmer sowing seeds had already been burned into my head.

Mr. Ganrey looked at the private, smaller broadcast he was receiving straight from the battlechoir's conductor, and said, "Alright, class, our brave battlechoirs on the front lines need us to supply them with joy. Remember that we will win this battle. That the Order of Valhalla will be crushed beneath our boot. Their children will be re-educated into a more civilized culture, and their war-leaders will be executed for their crimes against the Silent Peaks."

The majority of my classmates whooped in joy, but to my left, Lucet grimaced. "He wants us to be happy about that?" she whispered.

"There's no evidence to support the idea that the culture of the Silent Peaks is any more or less 'civilized' than that of the Redlands," Meloai added from my right. The three of us were a minority, though, and not a very vocal one at that. I grimaced as, through my soulsight, I saw the little dewdrops of joy on my classmates' souls condense and flow together, being siphoned into great magical channels all the way to the battlefront.

Mere minutes later, the battlechoir sang a triumphant chord, and a column of light so bright it left the grasses as nothing more than smoking ash struck the Demon of Fear. My classmates cheered as the feed zoomed in on the ruined, dissolving body of the Demon of Fear—

And revealed something much, much worse standing in its remnants.

The entity didn't have the same looming, formless menace as the Demon of Fear. They were large for a person, but still roughly human-sized, even with the faintly glowing runic armor they wore. They bore no weapon, and had no army to back them up, but a shiver went down my spine regardless.

For there stood a Demon of Empathy, and it was the first time since the war begun that they had taken to the field.

Odin wasted no time, looking straight at the projection as if they could see right into our souls. "Peoples of the Silent Peaks," they began. "Your government is lying to you. They are manipulating your emotions in order to continue the war crimes they commit on the active front. Exit your city's boundaries and sleep. I will inform you of more in your dreams. The Silent Peaks is—"

I heard someone on the other end snap, "Cut the feed."

Moments later, the image dissolved into smoke and light.

Silence reigned in the classroom.

Then Mr. Ganrey cleared his throat. "Now, class. Let's... forget that last part happened, shall we?"

And here came the part I hated the most.

My classmates' eyes glazed over as a spell struck them all at once, and I felt Mr. Ganrey's magic assaulting my mind. But I had come prepared, and with a calm, misty breath, I shrouded my soul in antimagic, dulling the weak forgetfulness spell. If Mr. Ganrey noticed, he didn't say anything. Around me, Lucet and Meloai came back to life, and my classmates began eagerly discussing how we'd totally annihilated the enemy and how we were guaranteed victory within months.

"Cienne?" Lucet asked from my side. "Are you okay? You look like you've seen a ghost."

"I'm fine," I managed to choke out. "Just... give me a minute."

I sprinted out of the classroom. Down the hall, to the left, through the door, and fumble at the lock.

I barely made it to the outhouse before I threw up with fear.

A.N.

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[meowcats734]

(prompt response) Instead of jail time, crime is punished by the erasure of memories. Depending on severity, the criminal may lose days, weeks, or even decades. No matter how long a span of time, the lost memories always include the entirety of the crime itself.

Even though the Silent Academy did its best to keep us away from the war, it still showed up in every aspect of our lives. It echoed in Jiaola's absence whenever I swung by Sansen's place for tea. It rang in every word as Mr. Ganrey gave the lectures that Witch Aimes was supposed to teach. 

And barely a week into the campaign, it showed up in the middle of our classroom, in the form of a brand-new student.

"Howdy," said the teenager in a fifty-year-old's body. He looked painfully awkward at the head of class, introducing himself as a brand new student when he could have passed for a tenured teacher. "I'm Freio, most of the time. Sometimes I go by Jan, and I'll tell you when that is. I'm, uh, I'm a second chancer. If you couldn't already tell."

Iola raised a perfect hand, then before our substitute teacher could call on him, said, "How'd you manage to fuck up so badly you lost thirty years of your memory?"

Freio winced. "I, uh... truth is, I don't rightfully know. They didn't tell me, and I didn't ask. The way I see it, I went to bed thirty years ago as a teenager, woke up in the modern day." Insecurity roiled around him like a blanket. "I... I'm just glad to have a second chance. I guess. Better'n nothing."

"Alright, class, let's settle down. Freio, find yourself a seat," Mr. Ganrey said. 

"We should offer him a place to sit," Lucet whispered from my left.

Meloai, overhearing, said, "Hey, Freio! Want to sit with us?"

Lucet winced, and I sighed. I loved Meloai and Lucet, but Meloai's straightforwardness didn't mesh well with Lucet's shy nature. Meloai had successfully caught Freio's attention, but she'd turned the heads of everyone in the class as well.

"Uh..." Freio looked torn between wanting to jump down a deep hole and wanting to just close his eyes and pretend everything was just a bad dream. I sympathized. "I... okay. If you say so."

Iola turned to watch the old man's body stumble across the classroom desks, the teenager's soul piloting it still confused about why he was half a foot taller than he was used to. His body scrunched up to fit into the wooden school desk, and a few classmates giggled at how ridiculous he looked, knees half-raised to his chest. The humiliated expression on his face burned me to see, and I wished I could do something more for him.

"Now, class," Mr. Ganrey began. "In light of the recent war against the Redlands aggressors, I think that it's pertinent to cover the history of these barbaric savages..."

Ah, that sounded like a perfect time to draw away some attention from the poor second-chancer. Abruptly, I raised my hand. I'd gone with a more confrontational approach in history classes before, but that had gotten me nowhere, so I tried a more diplomatic tone when I spoke up.

"Mr. Ganrey?" I asked. "Your characterization of Redlanders as aggressive savages... doesn't the recent work by Anenne show that Redland culture is no more intrinsically aggressive than any other?"

The class tittered and oohed, shifting their attention from Freio to me, and even though my cheeks burned from the stares, the relief on Freio's face as he was no longer in the spotlight was evident. He flashed me a grateful smile as Mr. Ganrey cleared his throat and began his counterargument.

"Well, I must say you're rather well-read, but consider this: would the Redlanders invade us without provocation if they really were a developed and cultured people? As Chentrenne once wrote..."

###

The classes blurred by, and although Freio stuck out like a sore thumb in each of them, Lucet, Meloai, and I took turns deflecting attention from the school's newest second-chancer. Since the war had begun in earnest, more and more of the second-chancers had been showing up, and it was my hope that eventually, either people would get used to them or the Silent Parliament would stop churning them out.

Regardless of what the future held, however, the four of us were content to spend the present eating lunch in a quiet nook. Freio was still somewhat stunned by what was, from his perspective, a leap thirty years into the future—but Meloai had already gotten him to laugh a few times, and Lucet had bonded with him by sheer virtue of being able to hold a comfortable silence.

Of course, nothing lasted forever, and the momentary respite we'd found in our shady little corner was no exception. Iola and his new cronies—all men who'd been rejected from the war draft for being too young, and felt like they had something to prove because of it—sauntered up to us in a vaguely predatory triangle, fanning out to block the only exit.

"Well, well, well. If it isn't the freak squad," Iola drawled. He pointed at us one at a time. "Redlands-fucker. Soulless girl. My ex-toy. And of course, the enemy soldier." Me, Meloai, Lucet, and Freio respectively. Lovely.

"What do you mean, enemy?" Freio whispered.

I winced. Meloai shook her head. "You don't want to know this one, Freio," she warned.

Iola tsked. "Ah-ah-ah! You're not the one in control here, soulless girl. Whaddya think? Wanna know who you used to be, freak?" Despite Freio's body being nearly a head taller, he backed down, intimidated, as Iola grabbed him by the shirt.

"Don't touch him," I snapped, starting forwards, but Iola just kept speaking.

"You used to be an enemy soldier," Iola crooned. "You were a prisoner of war. And the powers that be decided it was more trouble ransoming you than wiping your memory to when you were nothing more than an impressionable child and re-educating you into their very own killing machine, so that they could fire you right back at the enemy they'd stolen you from."

"Iola, that's enough!" I snapped, and shoved him backwards.

With an ooh of anticipation, Iola's new cronies stepped back, giving Iola space as his face twisted into a jitterbugging, lopsided, manic grin. Meloai stepped forwards, flexing a fist that went tick-tick-tick, but Iola said, "Kino? Lantenne? If that thing lays a hand on me, disassemble it."

I held out a hand as Iola's goons stepped forwards. The Cienne of two weeks ago would have simply gotten beaten into a pulp, but I was done with letting people strongarm and manipulate me. "I wouldn't do that if I were you," I warned. Freio snapped back to his senses as Lucet grimly got between him and the staredown, salt-crystals of sorrow precipitating around her soul like bracers.

Iola scoffed, and through my enhanced soulsight, I saw him ready the same bizarre, mutated light spell that had cooked that poor vole from the inside out. Simultaneously, oil-drops of passion streaked into Kino and Lantenne's palms. "You know, I'm not sure why I was ever mad about getting booted from the army," Iola said. "If I want to kill a Redlander, I've got a domestic supply of them right here."

In response, I simply took a deep breath in, one of my new attunements flaring to life as I gathered misty calm behind my nostrils.

Then I exhaled, and my steady, rolling calmness spread out across the tiny alleyway, eating at and weakening every spell present. 

Lucet shot me a startled glance as the icetouch she was preparing was disrupted, and from Meloai's sudden stiffness, I gathered that I'd accidentally weakened the magic that animated her body, too. Uh, oops. Just because I had a half-dozen attunements now didn't mean I was proficient in their use. I'd used up my reserves of calm, too, and now I was jittery and nervous. Plus, Iola had the raw power of an elf; I was pretty sure my little calm spell had barely shaken his magical abilities. Man, I really needed to get better at casting spells; if I couldn't even shoo away Iola, I'd have no chance if—when—Odin returned to wrench the secrets of attunement out of my head.

I had scared the fuck out of Kino and Lantenne, though, who had suddenly found themselves holding fistfuls of nothing as their spells fizzled out. That was good enough for now. They took an uneasy step back, and Iola must not have liked the odds of pissing off all three of us without any backup, because he shot me a glare and stepped back, drawing the feverish, corrupted joy back into the core of his soul.

"Piss off," I said. 

Iola just grinned wider. "Fine. Enjoy hanging out with a mind-wiped enemy soldier. I look forward to him snapping and killing you all."

Then he spun around and left, laughing to himself as if he'd told the best joke that anyone had ever heard, leaving us alone with a stunned, horrified Freio.

Hesitantly, the three of us moved closer to Freio. The shock on his face had morphed into something bleak and empty.

"Is that true?" Freio asked. "Am I... am I really just... a prisoner of war?"

"It is," said an elderly voice from behind us.

The four of us spun to see Mr. Ganrey stumping towards Freio, and his clouded eyes seemed sharp as a tack for once.

Freio balled his fists. "How can you... how can you do this to me? To us? How can you get away with this?"

"Like this," he said, and tapped Freio on the forehead once.

And just like that, the last three minutes were wiped from his memory.

"We're at war, kids." Mr. Ganrey gave us all a warning look. "Sacrifices must be made. Don't forget it."

The substitute teacher walked away, leaving three faces grim and one face confused in our shady little corner of the Silent Academy.

A.N.

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[meowcats734]

(prompt response) The ritual would be much easier to complete if his "friends" weren't cooking with the sacrificial knife and rare spices...

"Welcome to Ritual Magic 201," Mr. Ganrey said, tapping his cane on the floor as he walked down the rows of chairs. He was old, arthritic, and practically blind, and had probably been disqualified from fighting in the war for at least one of those reasons, but at least he could still help by training up the next generation of soldiers to throw into the grinder. Whoopee.

Still, despite my misgivings about the Silent Academy's less-than-noble intentions, I couldn't help but be excited for today's class. School was a lot less lonely with Lucet and Meloai to hang out with, and RM201 was a lab class; we didn't get to choose our partners for ourselves, but the class only had twenty or so people in it. Odds were we'd be spending quite a bit of time with each other.

Plus, this was the first course I'd taken at the Silent Academy that went beyond theory and into practice. I'd spent the past few weeks grabbing every attunement I could get my grubby little hands on, and I was itching to try them out.

No more helpless running and hiding from every threat. No more getting outmatched at every turn. This Cienne was growing claws, and the next time the world tried to bite me in the ass, I was going to swipe back.

"In light of recent events," Mr. Ganrey said, as if he was referring to a sports match and not a war, "we've decided to rearrange the curriculum a little. Topics such as realspace-anchored soul manipulation and memory-aided spell foci were deemed too theoretical in a time when we need immediate results, and as such, the first half of this course will focus on the creation and empowerment of friendly soulspace entities. In other words, the focus of today's lesson will be the summoning and binding of demons, angels, and other extraplanar creatures."

Meloai raised a hand, but Mr. Ganrey didn't see, despite looking straight at her. I grimaced. Mr. Ganrey's mundane eyesight was nearly gone, so he relied on his soulsight—but even though Meloai's soul fragment was beginning to grow in complexity, it was still tiny in comparison to a born human soul. I wouldn't be surprised if Meloai was entirely invisible to the poor teacher. 

"Please disperse to your assigned seats," Mr. Ganrey continued. In the corner, Iola and two of his new friends snickered as Meloai patiently kept her hand in the air.

"Just ask the question," Lucet whispered.

"Hm? Oh, okay. Mr. Ganrey?" she asked.

"Raise your hand first, Meloai," Mr. Ganrey said. More laughter from Iola's corner.

"I am," Meloai said, unperturbed.

Mr. Ganrey paused, adjusted his glasses, and cleared his throat. "Mm. Ah. Yes. Well. Your question, then, young lady?"

"I'm a soulspace entity myself—is what we're doing today going to be hazardous to me?"

"What planar domain?" Mr. Ganrey asked, absent-mindedly.

"Insecurity," Meloai said.

Mr. Ganrey shook his head. "The projection of the vectors of happiness and insecurity onto each other is present, but small. Don't assimilate any soul fragments you sense, but you should be otherwise fine. Alright, class, hop to it."

To my disgust, my assigned lab seat was next to Iola. Ugh, the man was worse than Odin. At least they'd left me alone after they'd stranded me in the Plane of Elemental Falsehood. I still had no idea what that was all about.

Iola waggled his eyebrows at me as I approached the lab desk, which held a utilitarian kitchen knife, a small, caged vole, and a bundle of sweet-smelling joyweed.

"If it isn't my favorite Redlander," Iola drawled, his elven halo pulsing in time with his words. "How're you enjoying my sloppy seconds? She's terrible in bed, isn't she?"

"I wouldn't know. Unlike you, I have a modicum of respect for other human beings. How're you enjoying the draft? Still begging to be let onto the front lines?" I shot back. The corners of Iola's eyes twitched as I brought up the draft—he'd been all too eager to go out and start killing people until the Academy told him that they weren't sending barely-trained students out to war. 

"The goal of today's class will be to create, empower, and summon a minor Demon of Happiness," Mr. Ganrey interrupted. "As you should have learned from Elemental Theory, demons, like all soulspace entities, are comprised of the memories of the dead."

"Wonder what kind of demon would pop up if I used this on you," Iola mused, tapping the knife on the desk.

"Dunno," I said. "What do elves summon when they die?"

"Over the centuries," Mr. Ganrey continued, "this has resulted in many a cult or nation deliberately inducing certain emotionally-charged memories in human subjects, then slaying them in order to form or feed demons of their desired emotion. Demons of Fear were a particularly notable historical example. However, memories are not a uniquely human notion, and in the modern day, human sacrifices are not needed to create such entities. We will be creating such an entity by training non-sentient animals to associate certain memories with joy, then sacrificing the animals and feeding the resulting, joy-charged soul shards to the entity that coalesces as a result." 

Huh. Made sense. To my left, Meloai raised her hand again—this time, Lucet raised her hand as well, so that Mr. Ganrey would see. "Yes, Lucet?" Mr. Ganrey asked.

"Actually, that was me, sir," Meloai said. "I have a question. By the first law of thaumatology, souls cannot be destroyed."

"Only changed in form," Mr. Ganrey agreed.

"So when we feed these soul fragments to a soulspace entity... or when, in general, a soulspace entity consumes a soul fragment... what happens?"

"An excellent observation," Mr. Ganrey said, "but one that is outside the scope of this class." Meloai pouted as Mr. Ganrey walked down through the aisles. "Now, in order to form the associated memories, we will have to perform some mundane classical conditioning upon the test subjects..."

The lab began, the small class of twenty laboring to form an association in the voles' tiny minds between the ringing of a bell and a sensation of sudden joy. To my surprise, Iola was a natural when it came to associating reward with a stimulus. Or punishment, for that matter, not that that was part of the lab—he just seemed to delight in watching the vole flinch whenever he snapped his fingers after the third time he'd struck the poor creature while doing so.

My budding attunements gave me greater insight into the soulspace of the vole, so I could tell when the vole's soul bloomed with dewdrops of joy at the ring of a bell, even when no herbs were supplied to follow it up with. Not wanting to let Iola have the dubious honor of sacrificing the vole—knowing him, he'd drag it out just to watch the poor thing suffer—I slit its throat with the sacrificial blade, killing it instantly.

The rest of the class was still catching up to Iola's freakishly good conditioning abilities, which left me some time to wait. I was going to ask if we were supposed to get started on a second vole when Iola picked up the corpse of the sacrifice and... started... cooking it.

Through my newfound suite of attunements, I could see the outlines of the spell he was using. Though joy normally manifested as dewdrops in soulsight, Iola's was something... different. Feverish, sickly, somehow. He pumped it into the vole, the dewdrops accelerating to terrifying speeds as they neared its body, and the vole's body started smoking. Was he... was he cooking the vole with light? Was that even possible?

"What... what are you doing?" I asked, faintly nauseated.

"Hmm?" Iola started skinning the vole with the sacrificial knife. "I'm hungry. Want some?"

"No!" I shuddered, turning away as he rolled up the joyweed into a rough lump and ignited it with a focused beam of light, then tried to smoke it. I was pretty sure he miserably failed by the spluttering that ensued, but I didn't want to know. 

"You should all be done with your voles by now," Mr. Ganrey said. "Fanwyn, you killed yours too early. Iola, take that out of your mouth."

Iola took the magically-cooked vole out of his mouth, scowling, as Mr. Ganrey stepped into the center of the room. A small metal box stood on a dais.

"None of you, with the possible exception of Iola, are capable of opening a sustained rift into the Plane of Elemental Radiance," Mr. Ganrey said. "As such, I will perform this part myself."

The dewdrops that Mr. Ganrey used weren't the strange, sickly, endless torrent of joy that flowed through Iola's soul. But they were far, far more controlled. I watched as the tiny droplets of joy were, somehow, compressed, becoming dense, almost-solid specks before being flung into the metal box.

There was no sound when the rift opened. But the beams of pure, unceasing light that slipped through the cracks at the corners were painfully bright to look at, and I instinctively turned away.

Mr. Ganrey rang a bell—the same bell that we had used to train the voles—and waited for one heartbeat, two. The terrible light from within the box began to fade.

Then he opened the box's door.

A small, chittering vole made of pure light was sniffing around in the center of the box. When Mr. Ganrey rang the bell, its head perked up, and it scampered onto Mr. Ganrey's arm to reach it.

Moments later, the period bell rang, and the Demon of Joy scampered away in search of another, larger bell to follow. Mr. Ganrey tried to grab at it, but the nimble little creature effortlessly avoided his grasp. He rubbed his forehead, grumbling to himself, before regaining his composure.

"That concludes today's lab section on demon summoning," Mr. Ganrey finished. "Be back here the same time tomorrow." He paused, sighed, and added one last thing.

"Oh. And five points extra credit to anyone who can track down that damn demon. We'll need it for tomorrow's class."

A.N.

This prompt was written by my Patreons!

Soulmage is a serial written in response to writing prompts. Stick around for more episodes, or join my Discord to chat about it!

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[Soulmage] Book 1 Epilogue

The gold-plated mimic watched Tanryn sulk as she turned the pages of a worn fantasy novel. The mimic had no concept of sulking or novels, of course, but the entity piloting it did. Though the mimic had no eyes—they stood out somewhat obviously on what was supposed to be a gold bar—it watched through soulsight as Tanryn's eyes drooped closed, the whirlwind of emotions from her friends' departure settling into a deep, slow slumber.

Then it was time.

The mimic stood up, sprouting delicate clockwork legs, and began scuttling across the wall.

The slowstone that the walls were forged from was all but impervious to physical damage, which was how the late Lord Tanryn's vaults had survived the Plane of Elemental Falsehood's attempts to synchronize with realspace over the decades. As such, the mimic couldn't just tunnel through the walls like it had done to the rest of the surrounding area, but there was a reason why the mimic had been coerced into shedding most of its body mass. With a tick-tick-tick of impossible clockwork and bones that had never known biology, the gold-plated mimic flattened itself to the thickness of a hair, slipping underneath the crack between solid oak and slowstone, then reconstituting itself on the other side of the door. 

Curious mimics, powered by soul fragments of varying strength, turned towards the tiny golden creature as it rebuilt its body, hungry to tear out and consume the soul shard that kept the mimic alive. But the matrix of magic and memory that someone had wrapped around its soul activated, and all at once, the curiosity in every mimic within a ten-foot radius dropped to zero, the ambling predators returning to their eternal patrol of the oil-stained halls. Satisfied that it was in no physical danger, the golden mimic dug through the flimsy plastic walls, crawling into its painstakingly-dug network of tunnels.

The spiraling, web-like tunnel network wove in and out of twisted halls and slippery staircases until it breached the surface, the gold-plated mimic shaking itself free of cotton-ball snow beneath an angry lamplight sky. Orienting itself by the painted stars on the ceiling of reality, the golden mimic dug back down into the cardboard stone and began tunneling. It was mostly safe to travel out in the open; the reflection of the Silent Peaks into the Plane of Elemental Falsehood had few inherent hazards, other than the mimics. 

Still, the golden mimic had a critical mission, and it would harbor no needless risks.

Twenty-eight hours of tireless digging later, the golden mimic's soul fragment was ragged and fading. It would need to feed soon, if it wanted to survive. Thankfully, as it dug out of the ground and reached a tiny, stable rift, a kindly, waiting face had a fresh meal waiting in the palm of their hand.

"I thank you for your service, little one," Odin murmured, teasing the soul fragment into the golden mimic's body. The golden mimic waved one leg in gratitude.

Then, as it had been taught to do, it unfolded like a flower, exposing its soul to Odin.

Soulspace entities were, in theory, capable of sustaining themselves indefinitely by consuming the new memories they produced, but Odin had strictly forbidden the golden mimic from burning any of its new memories for fuel. The fruit of the golden mimic's patience was plucked all at once, Odin scraping the fresh memories off the surface of the mimic's soul and absorbing them. They closed their eyes as their ancient mind effortlessly assimilated the soul fragments, sifting through them until they found the data they needed.

One of the reasons attunement was so easy to come by yet so tricky to research was because it was impossible to predict when an attunement would occur. Odin had watched the souls of growing witches for their entire lives, waiting for an attunement to form, but there was only so much time they could spend in each day, and the data points they gathered were few and far between. Even when the Order of Valhalla took root, and their resources skyrocketed, it was still nearly impossible to glean anything useful from the fistful of lucky coincidences that had led to Odin observing an attunement being formed in real time.

Unless you had someone who knew exactly how attunements were formed, and deliberately went through the steps to create one.

Odin watched through the golden mimic's eyes as the gallium insecurity in Cienne's body swelled and boiled—then, as his mother's soul fragment burned away, how that insecurity was drained from his soul by lances of diamond catharsis. How Cienne stood, attunement fresh in his mind, and used what was left of his insecurity as a needle to pierce the bubble Odin had trapped him in.

Odin stopped the memory, rewound it to the beginning, and replayed it.

"How counterintuitive," Odin murmured. "In order to gain attunement to an emotion, you must first rid yourself of it to the greatest degree you can."

Then their eyes snapped open. The humble office they used instead of a throne room was warded with the strongest spells they knew, but they'd made some exceptions for spells routing through the Plane of Empathy. Concentrating on the endless ocean of empathy-thread that roiled in their soul, they sent out a message to the team they'd sent across thoughtspace to track down and capture Cienne.

"Cienne clawed his way out of the box," Odin sent to the hunt-and-capture team. "Plan A was a success. No need to capture the child."

After a heartbeat's delay, Odin sensed the other end of the empathic link jiggle in acknowledgement. The witch of empathy Odin had sent with the team was nowhere near as skilled as Odin, but instantaneous transdimensional communication still did wonders for logistics. 

Odin steepled their fingers in thought. Through another rift, a crow poked her head into Odin's office—the Silent City's forces must have been on the move already, sweeping into the Redlands to uproot their organization and unmake everything they had tried to accomplish.

Somewhere in Odin's soul, a tiny, anticipatory flame sparked.

"Then let the games begin," murmured Odin, and a hundred empathic links flared to life at once.

A.N.

Soulmage is a serial written in response to writing prompts. Stick around for more episodes, or join my Discord to chat about it!

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