VM

by demonicgallade

for listening

6. 81-100

Forest Ecosystem

"There you two are!"

Norah runs our way as soon as Penelope and I enter the guild hall, giving us a friendly wave.

"Everyone else is with the boss already! It looks like our mission this time is going to be real big."

"Of course it's big," Penelope scoffs. "Every mission is going to be big with a third of the guild dead."

"The singing lady told me we're going after that talking Hiverock monster we let get away last time," I say. "I sure hope if that's true, we aren't going alone. We don't really have the firepower to put that thing down."

"Oh, I wouldn't worry about firepower this time," Norah answers with a grin, leading us into the room where everyone else is standing.

I assume she means that the three super powerful souls inside are going to be part of our team. I'm definitely a fan of that; any of them feel like they could match that creepy monster on their own. I recognize them, though I'm not exactly sure from where. One soul like a dark whirlpool, another a glow of pure heat, and the last one feels like some sort of bladed pastry. A sword cake. I like that one, that one's my favorite.

"Welcome Penelope, Vita!" the branch leader says, opening his arms to us in greeting. "This is Alan, Mateo, and Netta. Your teams are going to be joining each other for this mission."

"We've met," Penelope dismisses. "We were all in here to decide distribution on the last mission, remember? Please make sure you're getting enough sleep, Khoren."

"Who's Khoren?" I ask.

Everyone in the room turns to stare at me.

"That would be me," the branch leader says.

Oh. That makes sense.

"Orville, how is your team still alive?" the whirlpool-soul person says. Netta, I'm guessing, since I think Alan and Mateo are boy's names.

"She's much more competent in the forest than she is in a conversation, master," Orville answers, diligently coming to my defense. "Vita, what's your sensory range up to?"

"About seven hundred and fifty yards," I answer immediately.

"Wait, wait, wait," the heat-souled man says. "Before the last mission I explicitly remember you saying four hundred and fifty."

"Yeah, that's right," I agree, staring at him blankly. "I improved. I'm hoping to get up to eight hundred this trip."

"Vita recently got reprimanded for spending a few days in the forest alone," Norah adds, wrapping an arm around my shoulders. "She's a genius hunter. Don't worry about the vacant expression."

"Vacant expression?" I ask. "Wait a minute, I got reprimanded?"

"You receive less pay the days you're in-city but don't report in," the branch leader... er, Khoren, I guess, answers. "New policy."

"Do I at least get a cut from that pentapede hide I brought back?"

He sighs.

"Yes. You do. But anyway, regarding your actual mission: it's clear that our traditional team compositions are no longer effective against the current threat. So we are switching to a new strategy where we combine multiple complementary teams into larger forces that take on fewer missions. It's not ideal, but we need to focus on success rates even with the dire number of missions coming in at once. I won't lie to you, we have been getting crushed out there. Templar squads are coming back barely intact, and the King is considering placing us in a state of war and mobilizing the army. Your mission is fairly simple: find and slay the monster that killed Second Lord and Second Lady Taftan in New Talsi... as well as every damn vrothizo between here and there."

Everyone except Penelope and I nod in affirmation. I glance in her direction, quickly realizing that she doesn't want to vocally admit that she also has no idea what that word is.

"What's a vroh-thee-zoh?" I ask.

"It's the name of the evolving creatures from Hiverock," the branch leader answers. "Apparently one of the off-island traders recognized them, and they had very bad news for us. Not only do these monsters grow fast, but they breed fast too. The larger they are, the more eggs the females can lay. So we're dealing with a potentially exponential threat here. It is imperative that you seek out and slay as many of them as possible."

We all nod. I'm not sure how to feel about this revelation. On one hand, more food for me. On the other, well... I just wish the food wasn't so frighteningly competent at biting back. These vrothizo are capable of damaging souls, which really puts me on the back foot against them compared to every other kind of monster. As dangerous as they are, however, my plan doesn't really change. I'm going to outgrow them. I won't let them stand in my way.

"Shall we head out, then?" mister sword-cake-soul asks. "Or does anyone have something they need to take care of before we leave? If you have any loved ones, it may be a good idea to visit them, just in case."

"I'm good," Orville grunts, glancing up at Netta.

"My mom's on the way, if that's all right," Norah says. "We live on one of the farms outside the walls, I think it's the same direction."

"I should definitely go say goodbye!" Bently insists. "I'll be right back, I promise!"

"In that case, I should go apologize to my girlfriend," fire-soul-guy sighs. "I won't be long either."

They run off, the rest of us exiting the room somewhat more slowly after them.

"What about you, Vita?" Norah asks. "Gonna go visit the kiddos?"

"Nah," I shrug. "I'll be back to see them afterwards."

"It's best not to be overconfident," cake-soul says. "Any of us could end up in the Mistwatcher's clutches before mission's end. You should meet him without regrets, if it comes to that."

I snort incredulously, not bothering to respond.

"Vita isn't exactly what you'd call religious," Penelope tells him, chuckling lightly. "And neither am I. We have no intentions to end up dead, and I've no one to tell anyway. We won't hold you up."

"Now Penny I expect that from," Norah says, "but you're really not religious at all, Vita?"

"I told you not to call me Penny," Penelope grumbles.

"Why would I be?" I ask. "The church has never done anything for me."

"But how can you not believe in the Mistwatcher? You've been to the edge, right?"

I scowl over Norah and the cake soul guy, both of whom seem a bit confused and disappointed in me.

"I mean, I know there is a Mistwatcher," I tell them. "The islands certainly only exist because that thing tolerates them, and I know it gives people souls and takes them when people die and all that shit. I just don't want to worship it."

Alan scowls as I call his god 'that thing,' apparently less than pleased by the description. Oops.

"Huh," Norah murmurs. "I don't know, I just find it comforting. I'm glad that my family is in a better place now."

"I really don't want to talk about that," I grumble, unwilling to correct her.

Norah's eyes go wide as she misinterprets what I meant.

"Oh, shit, I'm so sorry, Vita. I shouldn't… sorry."

I sigh. Angelien. Norah thinks Angelien's soul is with the Mistwatcher, but I'll never let that become a reality.

"It's fine," I tell her. "Let's just talk about something else."

Norah looks around, awkwardly scratching her head as she seeks another topic of conversation.

"So! Orville! And… Netta, right? Is she your teacher, Orville?"

He nods.

"Master Netta taught me everything I know," he confirms. "She basically does what I do, except a thousand times better."

"I suppose that's one way to describe it," Netta grunts.

"You call her 'Master?'" Penelope asks. "Seems a bit old-fashioned for an apprentice."

"He calls me 'Master' because I bought him," Netta answers, crossing her arms. "He's my slave. A Siguldian. You'd best have improved yourself since last time, Orville."

Orville smiles a little at that, nodding.

"You're going to be impressed, Master Netta. I promise."

"Wow, that's... a lot at once," Norah breathes. "How come you never told us you were a slave, Orville?"

He sighs.

"I mean, it's not really relevant? I hold a normal job the same as the rest of you. My birth parents were both prisoners of war so I never really got to meet them. They weren't legally allowed to have me, so... I was sold off. I hardly remember any of it. Master Netta is basically my mom."

Netta claps him on the back of the head.

"None of that," she snaps. "No one else was going to buy a talentless foreign brat like you, that's all. You were cheap."

"Yeah, yeah," he answers, smiling to himself.

"What's a Siguldian?" I ask. "Also, woo, slave buddies."

"Woo," Orville responds flatly, half-heartedly raising a fist in a cheer.

"Siguldia is one of the countries we fought a war with forty years ago, Vita," Penelope answers. "We defeated them, claiming a significant amount of their former territory, and understandably we have had poor relations with them ever since. Orville has white hair, as I'm sure you've noticed, which is a trait mostly exclusive to native Siguldians and Baldonese."

"Huh," I say. "What's a—"

"Baldone is the other country we fought with, Vita," Penelope sighs. "Although they have, of course, cut off all reasonable possibility for either alliance or hostility, so they're mostly out of the picture."

"Neat," I decide.

Eventually, the others return and our mission officially begins. Norah runs off to a nearby farmhouse after we exit the city, catching up with us before we hit the forest proper. Conversations start, our team notably unafraid of the shallow parts of the forest, and before I know it a few hours have passed on our journey.

"Ugh, she's just so pissed and I don't know what to do about it," Mateo complains loudly. He's been doing so the entire trip so far, though I mostly haven't been listening.

"If she's not going to figure out what it means that she's dating a hunter, the hunter shouldn't be dating her," Alan answers. "You work too hard to be going home to someone that berates you for working too hard."

"I know, I know. But I can't just dump her! Other than this one problem, she's amazing!"

"Ah yes," Netta prods, "other than the one small problem of her personality, she's amazing in bed!"

"Netta!" Alan chides.

"What? I'm just translating for the kids here."

"M'not a kid," I affirm.

"Yeah, well, at least she's that much, Netta," Mateo snaps back, rudely ignoring me. "Watcher's eyes, never date your co-workers..."

"This way," I say, pointing towards the next closest monster I can detect.

With three senior hunters on our side, the parts of the forest close to the city are no trouble whatsoever. In the interest of optimizing my power gain, I'm purposefully steering us all into monster nests. Between myself and team sword-cake-soul-guy, things haven't been difficult until very recently. As the day drags on, we get deeper into the forest and I start feeling souls that we do actually need to make sure we avoid. As tempted as I am to go after bigger and bigger prey, my self-preservation kicks in eventually. If things get too hot to handle, I can't throw an army of disposable zombies in as a distraction. Instead I have an extremely not disposable team that mostly thinks animancy is evil. ...Besides Penelope, I guess.

"I don't know what this one is," I inform the team, "but it feels big and slow. I'm not even sure if it knows we're coming, and we're getting pretty close... oh, okay, it's coming towards us now."

As if on cue, miniscule crystals of frost starts to creep over bits of the forest in the direction I feel the monster. I can't say I'm too surprised; there is a distinct chilliness to the green, slowly oscillating soul, along with an inherent desire to seek out sources of heat. Like, say, us.

"I think it's some kind of thermomancy creature," I say.

"Shit," Mateo growls. "Hot or cold?"

"Cold, but looking for heat."

"Watcher damn it, it's a frigid ozoid, isn't it? I'm putting twenty on frigid ozoid."

"No bet," Netta sighs, drawing an arrow. "I hate those fucking things."

"You hate them?" Mateo whines. "I'm useless against these bastards."

"Does your team have much experience against slimes?" sword-cake… I mean, Alan asks.

Penelope and I both glance at each other. She smirks. Do we have much experience against slimes? Ah, what a question.

"W-well, yes, but not this kind," I answer, choking down a laugh. "What do you recommend?"

"Well, against most we'd just have Mateo incinerate the fucking thing, but the frigid ones are thermovores. If we shoot fire at it, it's just going to get stronger."

"That's why it's so watcher-damn cold," Mateo grumbles. "It eats heat. My talent doesn't really cover making things colder—"

"Since you are a pathetic excuse for a thermomancer," Netta grumbles.

"—so I can't do much against these things. Hey, shove it up your ass, Netta!"

"Can your talent kill it, Vita?" Alan asks.

I shrug, putting a hungering shard into my spear with a tendril.

"Eventually? My talent can kill anything. What happens if we stab these things?"

"Nothing much, unless you do it hard enough to splash them across the horizon."

I nod, stepping around a tree to bring the creature in sight. A giant, transparent pile of sludge oozes in front of me, leaving a film of ice everywhere it touches. The similarity to Penta's true form is striking and obvious, although this creature is substantially easier to see both from the frosted terrain around it and from the fact that it is about three times my size. It creeps towards me at a glacial pace, though I suspect if I actually touch it, things will go poorly for me.

"Are these things always this slow?" I ask. "Maybe we can just walk around it."

"We could, but it would follow us and catch up when we camp," Alan explains. "They're slow, but they never get slower, never tire. They have limitless endurance up until the point they die, and with Mateo here it's unlikely it'll veer off to seek other prey."

I sigh, getting close enough to flick my spear inside the thing. Immediately, the shaft of my weapon drops in temperature, and when I pull it out the spearhead is covered in a layer of ice. I did successfully carve out a chunk of soul, however, causing the ozoid to recoil in pain. It's still too big.

"It's a shame we don't have the time to study it," Penelope sighs. "Ozoids are some of the only truly magical creatures out there, you know. Considering the pervasiveness of mana, it would be expected that many species develop a reliance on it, but this isn't actually the case. They are functional without magic, even if they are capable of magical feats. Certainly, they may lose out on incredibly important day-to-day functions without magic, but they won't outright die. Ozoids are among the only exceptions to this, being completely reliant on magic to even remain intact."

I glance at her, a wordless communication passing between us.

"Oh yeah?" I say. "Hit me with that mana sight spell, would you?"

"Oh no, they're both smiling," Norah says. "Everyone be on guard!"

Bently laughs at the joke, but Orville climbs up in a tree to create some distance. ...We're not that bad, are we? Penelope taps me on the hand and the thick fog of color representing magic of the world descends around my vision. Sure enough, the ozoid has mana constantly flowing through its entire body, no doubt getting consumed into the spell that allows it to soak up far more heat than basic physics would allow. I kneel down, moving my soul into my hand to stretch my tendrils out as far as I can. Then, I start pulling mana. Arm outstretched, I sink my tendrils into the goopy creature in front of us, then inject it with as much of my mana as I can.

With a wretched screeching sound, a whole quarter of the blob around where I'm touching explodes. Goop showers over my companions, and so the senior hunters immediately panic and try to get it off. Maybe the goop normally remains active, but I can tell it's long dead before it touches them and doesn't seem to be hurting them at all. Which is good, because now I'm completely splattered with the stuff.

"This is why I got in the tree," Orville comments, the only one of us still dry.

"You didn't know that was going to happen!" I snap at him. "I didn't even know that was going to happen!"

"I'm not sure why you seem to think that somehow makes it a better idea to stay near you when you try stuff like this," Orville counters.

The ozoid starts slowly flowing away from us, whatever sort of menial intelligence it possesses apparently enough to recognize that it is in over its head. I want to eat it though, so I step forward and shove power into it again. This is great! I can just do this, and it won't make anyone suspicious of me! After all, it's not soul magic. If anyone tries to figure out what I'm doing it's just going to look like…

"…Some kind of metamancy," Mateo mumbles, apparently also having turned on mana sight.

"Yep," Netta agrees. "Disrupting the magic inside the ozoid. Probably wouldn't be deadly to any other sort of creature, but magic is the only thing holding this one together."

"Yeah, things don't normally explode when I do this," I agree. "Although, I pretty much only figured it out this morning, so maybe it's more common than we think."

Another burst of mana into the ozoid is all I need to weaken it enough for a soul grab, so I gleefully chomp down on it and watch with satisfaction as the rest of its body loses cohesion and spills out over the forest floor. Tasty!

...Wait, shit, soul grabs are definitely not metamancy. And I'm being watched.

Fuck.

I hurriedly glance backwards at the two senior hunter mages, feeling at their souls to be ready the moment they try to cast anything… but they just seem mildly perplexed, not aggressive. Of course. Even Theodora didn't identify the snippets of my talent she saw as animancy, because nobody knows what animancy looks like since nobody is allowed to use it. Hopefully this just lends credibility to the metamancy lie.

"Well, it's dead," I say nervously. "Next we should probably go—"

Something suddenly pops into my radius. One of the vrothizo, a big one. It's approaching fast from… above the trees?

"Incoming!" I bark. "Flyer, high threat, contact in twenty seconds! It's a target!"

I point, running back behind Norah to get in our combat formation. The senior hunters prepare in their own way, absurd amounts of mana flowing into the two casters as Alan readies his blade.

A war screech shakes the entire forest, rattling my skull. This is easily the largest Hiverock monster I've ever felt, and I can't even imagine what sort of terrifying creatures it has eaten. I feel another grin blooming on my face. These things might have very strange souls, but they're just as edible as any other kind. I confirmed that on the way here. This is going to be a wonderful meal.

"If it's big, it won't have room to divebomb us through all the trees," Alan shouts above the roar. "Keep near cover and expect ranged attacks!"

Sure enough, at his words, a scattered spray of black, bone-like shards tears down through the canopy in a cone-shaped blast, smashing into anything in the way. Hiding behind Norah, Penelope and I are perfectly unharmed. Alan defends Mateo while a swirl of wind redirects all the shards away from Netta. Bently and Orville, however, both get perforated, the strikes punching clean through their armor, their bodies, and out the other side. Orville falls from his perch immediately, reduced to a bloody mess. Alive, thankfully, but unconscious and on a collision course with the ground. Despite his many wounds, Bently manages to jump and catch him.

"Get behind that tree!" Alan orders.

Bently nods, rushing that way as Norah follows to give cover to Penelope as she retreats to heal our team. We're just in time, too, as a follow-up spray smashes into the dirt around us just as we make it behind cover. Netta and Mateo both unleash retaliatory fire in the direction of the attack, eliciting a screech from our assailant. It doesn't feel like the monster got more than clipped, however. The dense forest may protect us from getting divebombed, but the tradeoff is that we can't see the fucking thing past it. I can feel it, but the tree canopy is too thick and we don't have a clearing that will give us a visual on whatever is attacking us from above. Both sides are stuck shooting blind at each other. I don't know our odds in a blind shoot-out, but maybe we don't need one. Nearly every Vrothizo we've encountered is the furthest thing from patient, so perhaps we can bring it down where its mobility should be next to nothing. Sure enough, we don't have to wait long.

"It's diving!" I announce. "Port side, dropping below the canopy!"

"Got it!" Alan barks, moving to intercept. He must have had the same idea I did, as it feels like he's been waiting for this.

Still, I'm not happy with this for some reason. It's incredibly difficult catching the emotions of most Hiverock monsters since they tend to exclusively just feel hungry, but they have some subtlety to them. I can tell they feel pain when hurt, and sometimes they even feel fear when in danger, though this is rarely enough to get them to stop attacking. This one feels a little different. It feels a bit too… confident. And as it dives down out of sight, where it should be far too large to fly at all, it doesn't seem to be slowing down. Why isn't it diving on top of us?

The vrothizo finishes its dive, quickly leveling off just above the ground and shooting straight forward, utterly ignoring the half-dozen adult trees in the way. It flies right through them, and I don't even have enough time to shout a warning before black, bladed wings slice through the rock-hard wood that should be protecting us like it's not even there.

Norah blocks, her talent as immutable as always. She crashes into the rest of our team, knocking us flat and saving our lives in the process as the dark edge passes above us in an instant. Alan's sword meets the wing head-on and is cut just as easily, leaving the powerful yet suddenly-weaponless fighter only an instant to dodge the wing. He barely manages.

Mateo and Netta aren't quite so lucky. The last two pieces of our ranged offense die before their pieces hit the ground.

Inevitable Decision

Another screech shakes the forest as I watch a torn-off chunk of Mateo's soul disappear down the vrothizo's gullet. With him and Netta dead, our ability to strike back at the flying monster is next to nil. Orville is still unconscious, and from my brief glimpse at the monster's absurdly tough hide, I don't know if he would be able to hurt it with one of his arrows anyway.

Mateo's soul is pretty fucked up; Netta was killed by one of the wings, dead because she was a little too slow to duck and had a third of her skull carved off. Mateo, however, was bitten in half. His corpse is missing an arm and most of his torso, head and legs both still technically attached to the same body but without a spine between them. A solid third of his soul is outright missing in a single bite. It might be enough to function, but who knows exactly what parts of himself the guy is going to be missing.

Sword cake guy... er, Alan, is handling the deaths of his teammates fairly professionally, at least, but with his sword destroyed I'm not sure how much good he'll be in a fight. If that thing divebombs us again, we'll need him to be ready.

"Norah," I order. "Sword. Now."

"W-what?" Norah stammers, glancing my way.

I grab Penelope and Orville, yanking them away from the newly-created clearing of felled trees and tossing them behind cover right before another spray of black bone shards crashes down around us. It tears right through my armor as I try to leap out of the way, and I get a few nasty gashes in my legs.

"Throw me your sword!" I snap.

She recovers from the shock of the attack, thank fuck, and does as I say without further questioning. I shove one of my hungering shards into the blade and then throw it back at Alan.

"Alan! Catch!"

He does so without even looking my way, nodding in acknowledgment as his eyes stay peeled on the canopy, face hard. His team and his friends are dead, and he's out for revenge. Good. He's pretty much the only one of us that stands a chance at killing that thing. Another spray of shards explodes around us, but I keep myself and my team in cover.

"Penelope, ETA to Orville?" I snap.

"Two minutes, as a conservative estimate. I assume that means the others are dead?"

"Very dead, yes."

"Two minutes and ten seconds, then," Penelope says. "You're going to be a lot more important. Hold still."

I scowl, but do as she says. Is there something I can do? I rack my brain for strategies. The vrothizo is up in the air again, pestering us with more ranged attacks, but no doubt it's going to divebomb us again soon. So if it's going to charge right at us...

"Whatever buff you're casting, give it to Norah," I tell her, shoving my speartip with an entire cluster of hungering shards. "Norah, when that thing comes down on us again, plant and reinforce my spear. Let the motherfucker impale itself."

Norah nods in assent, finally having met back up with our cluster after getting knocked over a couple times by the incoming scattershot. Penelope hits Norah with a spell and she takes my spear, moving in towards the monster's likely next target: Alan. The vrothizo like to go after the bigger-souled targets first, and Alan is definitely the strongest one here... other than the vrothizo itself.

I fucking warned everyone this thing is high threat level. That means stronger than us!

A lot stronger, really. I am definitely looking forward to this meal. There's no chance I'm letting this fucking thing get away, or get the better of me.

"It's diving again!" I announce. "Coming from aft-port!"

I point, everyone but Norah and Alan getting themselves flat to the ground. I am well aware that there is a solid chance this thing has more than two strategies and we are all about to get completely fucked, but we're just going to have to prepare as best we can and hope we're fast enough when that inevitably happens.

The dive comes. With so many collapsed trees all around us, I can see its approach this time and really get a good look at this monster. Pitch black, like every other vrothizo has been, it descends as a crescent shadow against the trees. Wide and flat, its wings are splayed outward like a giant bat. The front side of the bones giving them shape juts out through the skin, creating an obsidian-bladed edge with magical energy flowing through it like water. The creature barely seems to have limbs, so I don't know how it would land from the air. Claretta reported that vrothizo never seem to sleep, so perhaps it never does. The monster opens its jagged-toothed mouth as the dive levels off, and in an instant all that speed it had been gathering is turned directly towards us.

Or more accurately, towards Alan. Norah is ready, however, bracing the spear against the ground just in time to have it tear into the monster's wing. Its own speed and weight used against it, Norah's talent prevents the spear from snapping as it gouges through the beast. I may have miscalculated how truly massive the vrothizo is, however. Even with my many shards tearing the life from it, my tendrils find no purchase on the soul as I lie on my back, the wing passing barely a couple feet above me.

Worse, my spear gets stuck inside the wing, the tip pushed through the membrane and clear out the other side. As the vrothizo passes us, it takes my weapon with it... and therefore my last idea on how to kill the damn thing.

Along with Alan's life.

Perhaps he was blinded by rage and grief, perhaps he made a miscalculation, or perhaps the vrothizo was simply too fast for him. I wasn't watching and didn't see, but he's dead now, one arm and his entire head disappearing down the vrothizo's throat. I do note, at least, that he managed to give the bastard one last thing to regret. I feel the shard in Norah's sword wedged inside the creature's mouth, dangerously close to passing through the monster's head entirely.

Just not close enough.

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. From here on out I have nothing but batshit crazy ideas. As we cower from another scattershot, I look up and note with fury that now all the damn trees are out of the way, Netta would have had a clear shot to murder this thing if she had only fucking survived. But no, our goddamn senior hunters had to die in the first two passes! What kind of bullshit is this? I guess credit where credit is due, literally all of us other than Alan would have died if not for Norah's talent. But it was just delaying the inevitable. We're out of options, out of weapons since they're all either broken or lodged inside the vrothizo. All we have left is Bently's axe, which I doubt will be of any use in cutting the vrothizo unless it's being held by Alan, and Orville's bow and arrows, which the rest of us aren't trained in using. And the only person that could damage the thing with them anyway is fucking dead!

I scowl, taking only a moment to grind my teeth in frustration before I make the inevitable decision. I refuse to die here. If this gets me killed later, well, I'll figure that out then.

"Norah!" I bark. "Cover me! We're going to the senior hunters!"

A thunderous crash deafens us for a moment as Norah blocks a blast from above, staggering as she approaches me.

"They're dead!" she shrieks.

"I know!" I yell back, ears still ringing as I sprint underneath the safety of her upraised shield. "Trust me?"

She swallows, nodding immediately. We start to run, Orville's bow and arrows in my hands, just in case Netta's broke when she had part of her head carved off.

"You got a plan, V?" Norah asks, barely managing to avoid falling on me as another spray from above almost knocks her over.

"Yes, but you are going to hate it," I mumble. "In terms of your talent, do corpses count as objects?"

"Probably? I've never tried!"

I gather three soul shards, each in their own tentacle.

"Well try, and also try not to freak out."

"What does that mean!? Vita!"

Another spray of bone crashes around us, and immediately afterwards I burst forward, tentacle-enhanced limbs drastically stronger and faster than Norah's best pace. Scooping up the souls of the senior hunters, I smash them together with a shard, shove all three back into their mangled bodies, and turn to point right up at our ravenous assailant.

"Shoot to kill," I order, just in case my three new Revenants need a little push.

Netta only has one eye now, a diagonal chunk of her skull from scalp to cheekbone having been sheared clean off over the nose. Even without depth perception and with a brain exposed to the open air, however, her movements lack the slightest touch of hesitation as she retrieves her bow, draws mana, and fires a thunderous shot up at the visible vrothizo. Her arrow punches a hole right through its left wing, causing the monster to shriek in fury and retaliate with another cone of deadly shards, blasting out from its mouth. Norah having not quite reached us, Alan jumps to my defense, the shards crashing into him with the same clang caused when they hit Norah's shield. I shoot a grin her way, thankful for the timely ranged reinforce that I know is so difficult for her to pull off. It probably saved my life, since the shards had a good chance of punching right through Alan's body and subsequently my own without her intervention.

I don't think she's smiling back, though. Her eyes are locked on mine, and though I cannot see her face through her helmet, the terror, revulsion, and betrayal I feel in her soul paint a clear picture.

My smile drops. That's a problem I'll have to handle later. She's on my side for now, which means I and the rest of us all get to live. Netta wastes no time firing another shot, then another, which is followed up by a massive gout of fire from Mateo, having finally used his one arm to flip the top half of his body face-up. The vrothizo's flight finally fails, an impotent scream erupting from the monster's throat as it falls into a tailspin and finally dies as it crashes headfirst into the ground. Gleefully, I run over to pick up its soul as well as the pieces of it my hungering shards have collected. It's genuinely incredible how massive and how powerful this monster has gotten in the short time it's been alive. And now that power is all mine! I start breaking apart the massive, void-like soul into more easily digestible chunks, knowing I don't have a chance of being able to store something this large for later. Not that I want to! Ooh, this is gonna be—

"Vita!"

"What!?" I snap, glaring backwards. I'm eating here!

Norah glances back and forth between me and my Revenants, each of whom seem to be examining themselves with a mix of confusion and dread. Mateo can't stand, his legs somewhat useless as only a smattering of abdominal oblique muscle connects his chest to his hips. Without the threat of danger or the demand of one of my orders on his consciousness, he has defaulted to staring in vacant horror at his own intestines, which dribble out from the wide nothingness where his stomach and ribs once were. Netta flexes one hand, her other feeling at the new cavity in her skull and the useless lump of matter that was once her brain which rests inside. Alan, meanwhile, is completely headless. He seems to be trying to look around, as if he is somehow aware of his surroundings. I suppose, now that I think about it, my Revenants are unlikely to have ever been using their eyes to see. It is not as though the eyes still work, even if they happen to remain inside the body.

"Tell me this isn't what it looks like," Norah pleads.

"And what does it look like?" I ask, sighing. "Because it looks to me like I just saved your and everyone else's life. You're welcome!"

"You're a necromancer," she accuses, spitting the word.

I know I expected it, but it still hurts a lot more than I thought it would.

"It's my talent," I growl. "I didn't ask for this. I didn't seek it out or learn any of it on purpose. Don't look at me like that!"

I point an accusatory finger at her, causing her to take a step back. Again, I can't actually see her expression, but I can tell. She's judging me, coming up with all sorts of crazy nonsense in her head. After everything we've been through, is it really all wiped away because of this?

"There's no such thing as an animancy talent," Norah counters, parroting bullshit as if I'm not walking proof of its falsehood.

"Well I have one anyway," I snap. "I'm obviously not casting! What do you want me to say?"

My tendrils finish peeling off an edible chunk of the vrothizo soul and I slurp it down, shuddering a little as the power flows into me. Netta's head snaps my way, her eyes wide. Heh, I must register on her danger sense. I shoot her a grin. Only a bit hesitantly, she smiles back. Wow! It feels so nice to have people that are supportive!

"U-um, I believe her," Bently stammers.

Glancing back over where Bently, Orville, and Penelope are, I see that Orville is healed but not conscious, his head resting on Bently's lap. Penelope's attention is now on Bently's wounds, which she is quickly repairing.

"It's Vita," he says. "She's our friend."

"She just made a bunch of zombies!" Norah blurts, her voice shrill.

"Revenants," I correct.

"They have to go back to the Watcher! This is wrong. She's trapping people's souls in agony!"

"Agony?" I scoff. "Hey Netta, are you in agony?"

"Surprisingly, no," Netta answers. "Not even the hole in my head hurts. This is a bit surreal, but overall I feel fine."

Bently and Norah both gape at the talking Revenant. Mateo doesn't have lungs and Alan doesn't have a fucking head, so they can't talk, but I can ask them later. Not that I don't already know their answer.

"Look, Norah," I start, "I get that this is heresy or whatever, but without Netta, Mateo, and sword-cake, we will fucking die out here. Right? This is an emergency. We need this, not just for ourselves but to kill the monster currently terrorizing a town!"

"Sword cake…?" Penelope asks, raising an eyebrow.

"I mean Alan."

"I just can't believe you hid this from us," Norah breathes.

"You can't believe I hid this from you!?" I ask incredulously. "I just saved your life and you're treating me like I ate your fucking firstborn! Why the fuck do you think I didn't want to tell you? This is exactly what I was afraid of! We've fought together for months now! Can't you give me the benefit of the doubt here?"

"She's right," Bently agrees. "Please, Norah? I'm freaked out too, but... it's Vita. It'll be okay."

I inhale another chunk of vrothizo soul, having more than said my piece. I'm a little miffed that Penelope isn't rushing to my defense, though knowing her propensity for scheming she's probably just trying to set up a better situation. ...Or keeping plausible deniability. Coming from Bently, the words probably hold more weight anyway. Besides, I don't want to be fucking defending my right to be myself. I just want to finish eating this soul. Is it really too much to ask?

"Okay. Fine," Norah relents. "We'll use them to help save the people of New Talsi. Someone has to, and... Bently's right. You're still you, V. Yeah?"

"Of course," I confirm, swallowing more soul. I smile a little, feeling out Penelope and finally getting the impression that she's weaker than I am. About time.

"And you're not gonna just... wipe our memory or something?" Norah asks.

"I can't even do that," I say. "That's cognimancy. My talent only covers necromancy. I bring the dead back to life, sure, but all the really spooky stuff is out of my wheelhouse."

Not strictly true, but true enough. Norah nods slowly.

"Okay," she says. "I guess… I guess we'll do this. For now. Until we don't have to anymore. But then we need to release these people to the Mistwatcher, okay?"

I shrug, crawling over the body of the vrothizo as I physically retrieve the weapons stuck inside it. Miraculously, my spear didn't get smashed to smithereens during the crash, which is quite a relief. I reabsorb the hungering shards in it and the sword, saving the last bit of vrothizo for dessert.

"We can worry about that if we survive," I grumble noncommittally. "I doubt this is going to be the last monster between here and New Talsi, not to mention having to deal with that creepy talking one."

"Fine," Norah relents. "I'm sorry I freaked out, it's just… it's a lot, okay? I know you're trying to do the right thing, and I'm sorry. We'll… we'll talk, okay?"

Oh, good. I can feel she's gone from 'purge the heretic' to 'teach the sinner, for she knows not what she does.' I suppose that's an improvement. I'll take it. Maybe I can teach her a thing or two instead.

"Just don't let anyone else die," I tell her. "Or re-die, for that matter. Can you keep the Revenants protected if they get attacked again? We absolutely need their firepower."

"I can try, I suppose," Norah hedges, casting another nervous glance in the direction of the undead. "I definitely can't protect all three at once, though."

"That's fine," I shrug. "You probably won't have to. Vrothizo seem to target the strongest person first."

I finish off the last of the soul, feeling the absurd amount of power swell within me. Holy shit, I feel invincible. Stretching them out, I can see my tentacles reaching up to six feet away! My sensory distance is so much farther now as well, though I won't be able to figure out how far until we get home and measure it. I take a deep breath and make an experimental jab with my spear, the might of my soul moving my body so effortlessly that my muscles barely contribute. I'm faster, stronger. Drastically so. Just a few months ago, my eyes wouldn't have even been able to follow the blow.

My soul stirs, a threshold of power reached. Something new starts to grow inside me.

"If they attack the strongest person first, would that not be the undead?" Penelope asks.

"Not anymore," I answer, unable to suppress a grin.

Three people died in this fight, my secrets got revealed to the whole team and there's no way this isn't going to bite me hard in the ass. Yet despite all of that, even though I know I shouldn't…

It's hard not to feel it was worth it.

Monster

"Ready to go, Lark?" August asks, smiling my way. I nod, reaching up to grasp his outstretched hand as we walk together.

I gave into hunger and hunted last night. But… I didn't hunt humans. I never sought a target, never followed someone home. I almost did, but flashes of memory stopped me dead in my tracks whenever I tried. Sharif's sobbing face. The words I spoke to make it worse. The look of utter hatred in his father's eyes as I devoured his wife in front of his eyes.

Humans seem to forget things, to lose information over time. I don't. Every memory is recalled with perfect clarity, from the taste of blood to the muffled screams to the beads of sweat glistening on the faces of my victims. But now, I understand so much more of what these things mean. It seems as though every day I learn something that brings a new and fresh horror to old memories.

And yet, I still must eat.

The forest holds many creatures. It is not as though I lack options. But I catch something and wonder: what if this makes me grow or change? What if this meal is the tipping point which ruins my flimsy disguise? I settled on a small creature, one that flew yet was not a bird. The meal was not enough, but I feared to consume any more. Part of me says: what does it matter? If I'm not eating humans, why am I here? Was that not my goal? Just return to the forest, devour and become strong.

Then August squeezes my hand, and the shivering in my body stops as my thoughts are pulled back towards the present. We're returning to the church, the place of funerals. Yet today, August wants to show me a less solemn event. One he goes to every week. He was very pleased when I asked to come. Today, the community gets together to rest, to be taught, to appreciate each other, and to offer prayers to the Mistwatcher.

Whatever that is.

We file into the massive room, taking seats instead of crowding the center aisle like we had during the funeral. Rather than pictures of my victims, the front of the room holds a podium with an older woman standing behind it, smiling warmly at all of us. She even meets my eyes as we walk in, though I quickly turn away. I still have my cloak and mask, despite August's gentle prodding that, today at least, I should wear something else. As if I had the option. None of the other clothes he suggested were baggy enough to hide my extra pair of arms, not to mention the rest of me. My hair has started to get a bit out of control, peeking out through my hood even when I try to bind it up in webbing, but this doesn't seem to be an issue. Plenty of humans have black hair.

"Welcome!" the woman behind the podium announces, her voice startlingly loud. I suppose it has to be to reach everyone in this enormous room, but I've never heard anyone that loud before! How does she do it?

"Welcome, all of you, to this glorious day of meditation and worship," the woman continues. "I know our community is still reeling from the loss of our ruling Lord and Lady, may they be given their place in the Watcher's embrace. Lord Taftan's skill at managing our bountiful mines will be sorely missed, though in the coming weeks we will have the incredible honor of hosting First Lady Etna and her wife to take up the task. Risen to her station for designing and installing the Litia grain gate, there is little doubt she will be fully capable of supporting our vibrant community."

She pauses for a while as murmurs spread through the crowd, voicing everything from excitement to concern to irritation. When the woman starts talking again, however, they all go silent.

"In far less happy but no less important news," she intones, "reports confirm that Lord and Lady Taftan, as well as their brave protectors, were slain by one of the living weapons from Hiverock."

The room erupts into murmurs again, this time much louder than before. Hiverock? What's Hiverock? I killed them. Are they saying that's where I'm from? But I'm from the forest!

"Fear not, New Talsi!" the woman says, silencing the room again. "The King's wroth is mighty and just. Hunters have already been dispatched to protect our lands. Hiverock will not go unpunished for their evil. Not in this life, and not in the next."

Shouts of approval echo through the room, the woman behind the podium smiling with approval at the sight of it. Now that I'm thinking about it, she seems dressed quite differently than any other human I've seen. She wears a flowing robe of pure white that tapers into a dancing series of strands around the legs, evocative of the tentacular pillars around the building itself. A simple hat on her head is the only color in her outfit, as it is adorned with a brilliant representation of a human eye.

"We are battered, we are fearful, and we are stressed. It is times like these, more than any other, when we are tempted to question and rage against our creator. And so I have chosen my sermon today to discuss the hardship and pain in our world. If the Mistwatcher is good, why does our world, the world He created, have so much evil?"

The Mistwatcher created the world? I sit forward, attention rapt. Something created the whole world! I never even thought of that before!

"This world is often dark," the woman says. "Our lands are often dangerous. We struggle and we fight, enemies attacking from within and without. Children are torn from their parents, parents separated from their children. Death, no matter how temporary, is a tragedy that pulls us apart. But we must always remember that death is temporary. Our ultimate destination is not here, in this harsh land, but with our Creator."

She pauses again, but there are no murmurs in the crowd this time.

"Goodness is deserved by the good, not the cruel. Yet by what metric do we judge the worth of a person? How do we see who we are, deep in our souls, and know without a doubt the fate we deserve?"

Her ever-present smile grows wider.

"It is in times of struggle that our true colors are shown. The truly good do not lend their aid only when they have aid to spare, but in the darkest hours, where they have nothing at all. And though this sounds difficult, impossible even, there is truly no greater way to live. The man who looks out only for himself has only a single man looking out for him, but when we all uplift each other, we have all people looking out for us. And in this, we become unbreakable. This is the virtue of Community, and it is the harshness of our world that teaches us the importance of this lesson. We need each other, in times like these more than any other. In the world beyond, we will live in a community far larger than we can imagine, consisting of everyone that has ever lived. There is no place for selfishness in this union, no tolerance for a cruel fool to spoil the harmony."

"Watcher bless us," dozens of people in the crowd mutter together.

"Community," the woman repeats, "is the first of our great virtues. Wisdom is the next. To act rightly is not something we are born with. We must learn, we must be taught, and we must each personally develop the skill to think and act in accordance with the other virtues. Industriousness, the third virtue, is the keystone on which Wisdom and Community rest. We must each do our part to develop ourselves and our community into one we can be proud of. The Watcher smiles on the studious, the strong, the creative, the tireless. Our society must advance forward, we must tame these challenges the Watcher has given us, as that is their purpose. Every effort, from the lowliest washer to the mightiest warrior, is essential to our goal. Work with vigor and pride."

She takes a deep breath, eyes scanning over the still-silent crowd. I soak in every word, catching them in my memory forever.

"The fourth is Forgiveness. The Watcher judges the damned, but we do not. All people fail, all people stray. Our world would not be a test if we did not first have to learn. Those that falter must be encouraged to try again, to grow beyond their failings and join our glorious community in full. Yet do not confuse Forgiveness for apathy. A teacher must often be harsh. A generous person need not be a fool. And thus I remind you all of our fifth and final virtue."

She smiles no longer, her face taking on a harsh look as her voice trembles with emotion.

"Righteous Indignation," she intones. "A fury we reserve for the truly heinous. This is a dangerous thing to cherish. To give in to anger is too often the path of a fool, and so commonly are people tricked by jealousy, greed, selfishness, and sloth into an unjust rage. Yet when a child lies starving in the streets, when we uncover dark bruises around a woman's neck, when our beloved leaders are stolen from us in the night, their son left an orphan… the feeling that bubbles within us is not sin, but justice. To have the drive and the will to correct what is wrong, that is Righteous Indignation. Those who fail to stand up to evil are the closest thing to evil itself."

I sit stunned as I take it all in. So many of August's words… did they come from here? I don't have long to think about it, however. After a few more words from the woman, a number of other people walk on stage… and they start singing. It's beautiful. One voice had enraptured me, back what seems like so long ago. A couple dozen voices together make something even more beautiful, even more complex. It is the most wonderful thing I have ever heard.

And it is agony.

Claretta. Claretta. I grip the top of my head, pressing down on my ears and trying to drown the sound out. No, no, no! My breathing becomes shallow and fast, my eyes squeeze shut. Yet that can't stop me from seeing and hearing the past. The time we spent together returns unbidden, the sound of her song washing over me as I tore the flesh from her limbs. The desperate screams from her lips the many times I nearly killed Fulvia. The way she looked at me, perfect pictures of the expressions haunting my now-clear understanding.

Why did I come to this stupid town? I hate this. I hate this! Why couldn't I have just stayed in the forest where I was happy? Why couldn't those humans leave me alone? Why, why, w—

"Lark?"

August's voice is barely audible over the music, but instantly I look his way. I'm shaking again, breath moving too fast for me to speak back.

"Would you like to leave?" he asks.

I nod rapidly. August whispers a polite apology to those near us, who make room for us to squeeze between the pews and retreat from the church. I sprint away as soon as I'm able, shooting out the back of the church and continuing to flee until I can no longer hear even a hint of the singing.

My hearing is very good. By the time I make it, I'm close enough to August's house that I enter without even thinking about it, locking myself in the bathroom and removing my mask. The tears are making it soggy.

"Lark? Lark, are you in here?"

August is much, much slower than I am, and he takes quite some time to catch up with me. I don't want to answer, but my still-sobbing body betrays me, gasps for air alerting him to my presence.

"Lark! Hey, are you all right?"

Fulvia. Please. You're all I have.

"I-I'm fine!" I choke.

You ate me!

I hear him approach the door. This is it, this is where it all ends. He breaks his promise, enters the room, sees me and—

I hear him sit down carefully on the other side of the wooden door. Just… nearby. Saying nothing else, doing nothing else. He hasn't ever wronged me.

And she didn't either.

You made me choose between torturing my friend and watching her die.

"I didn't know," I whisper.

I hope they bring me your corpse.

"I didn't know!" I shout back.

Not that the memory answers. Still, I wail at it, rage and fear and regret pouring out with the tears.

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry! No one told me!"

I remember every bite, every moment of teeth piercing through skin and shattering bone. Blood splatters into my mouth, dribbles down my face, my throat. The screams, the tears, the way she wailed and begged for it all to end…

It's such a happy memory. I loved it. Even now, my hunger stirs at the glorious sensations, the unparalleled feeling of a successful hunt.

"I'm sorry."

A long time passes before my eyes dry, leaving me thirsty as well as hungry. I want blood as well as meat. But I'm afraid. I don't want to hunt. Humans, animals, monsters… I don't want to hunt anything.

"You can be forgiven," August says quietly.

My breath catches in my throat. August has been there the whole time, sitting right on the other side of the door. Of course he has. The thought puts a special sort of warmth in my heart, prodding away just that little bit of pain.

"I can't be the one to forgive you, of course," August says. "To me, Lark, you have done nothing wrong. You are curious, energetic, brash… just what an old man needs to put a bit more life into his days. In the short time we've been together, I've seen you grow so much. I don't know your past, but… I know you're strong. Strong enough to make it here on your own. And I know many young children make grave and terrible mistakes with strength. Sometimes, the Watcher tests us before we're ready. Sometimes, we fail. But you can be forgiven. You have kindness in you, Lark."

I'm quiet for a while, slowly getting my mask back on over my face. I stand up, and slowly open the door. August is there, smiling at me. Waiting. He reaches out a hand and I grasp it, helping him to his feet. He's very, very weak for some reason. It's good to help him with things like that.

"W-what if I can't?" I ask him, croaking out the words. "What if I deserve R-righteous Indignation?"

"Oh, Lark," he answers, looking so horribly sad I thought he might start crying too. "You don't. Of course you don't. No matter what, I could never believe it. It's not about what you do. It's about who you are."

Who I am? But… that's not good. That's worse! I'm Lark!

And Lark is a monster.

Trust and Respect

"Woo-hoo!"

I can't help but whoop out a cheer as I leap up above the branches, power flowing through my body feeling like a warm fire after a rainstorm. A bone-deep chill leaks out of me, replaced more and more by the beautiful strength in my limbs. The core of my soul churns out energy as I fall back to the ground, landing with a thump and a stagger, my startled teammates staring at me with a wide mix of expressions as I fail to stick the landing and fall on my butt, laughing.

"Vita! Quit messing around!" Norah snaps.

"Sorry, sorry!" I laugh, completely unrepentant.

How high did I just jump? Ten feet? Twenty? My soul is moving my body. Muscles, flesh… it helps a little on instinct, but I have been unleashed. This feels so much more natural! I must have hit some kind of threshold, because my core just started growing strands into every part of my body, filling me with a power I can move as easily as a tendril. Everywhere below my skin is my domain. I could move my internal organs around if I felt like it, although that seems, uh, stupid, so I'm not going to.

To my senses, the inside of my body looks like one of my Revenants now. The soul-strands that allow my shards to move the bodies of the dead now move me, but not with some miniscule fraction of my soul's power. Oh, no. I get the good stuff. I feel so fucking alive!

"Vita, stay still," Penelope orders in her 'I am your healer' voice.

I stop laughing, stop moving as she rushes over, hitting me with a diagnostic spell. She scowls, glowering at me.

"...Do you feel any pain, anywhere?" she asks.

I shrug.

"Not really? A little in my ankle and butt, I guess. Mighta landed on it funny."

"Your tailbone is fractured and you have a torn ligament in your leg," she snaps.

I blink in surprise.

"That sounds bad?" I hedge.

"Of course it's bad, you witless imbecile!" she snaps back, starting to heal me. "What were you thinking, jumping that high? Of course you'll hurt yourself! You're faster, you're stronger. I can see you are very excited about that, but you aren't any tougher, Vita. If you tried to walk on this leg you'd eventually lose the use of it."

I pout, watching her work. Is it really that bad? It barely even hurts.

"...Does it even matter anymore?" I ask.

"Does what matter?" Penelope asks idly.

"Injury!" I whisper excitedly, leaning in close to her and ignoring the resulting flash of emotion. "I'm like… a living Revenant now. I can move without using muscle!"

She glowers at me, blushing slightly but distinctly unimpressed.

"Of course it matters, you dolt. Are you mad? Don't let power get into your head. You're still a living person. Besides..."

She jabs me in the forehead with a finger between spell casts.

"I've been working hard on that body. Don't ruin it."

"Fine," I relent, rolling my eyes. It's not like I'd been serious.

Maybe a bit excited about the idea, but not serious. Revenants are destroyed forever if their bodies are damaged enough; for all I know, I have the same weakness now. I'm disappointed that the increased strength doesn't come with increased durability, though. What's the point in that? There's got to be some way to mitigate the damage I take from hopping around. I probably just need better technique.

I sigh, glancing around at everyone else while I wait for Penelope to repair my body. Bently is awkwardly and nervously carrying around the upper half of Mateo that we managed to salvage. He keeps glancing with worry over at Alan, who's standing next to him, still headless. Alan seems to notice Bently's discomfort, so he turns his body to face the guy and gives him a thumbs-up.

For some reason, this doesn't seem to help.

My two mute and mutilated male revenants are adapting to undeath pleasantly well, all things considered. I'll have to find a monster we can kill that can approximate human speech, or let them take turns with Netta's body, though. It can't be fun being mute, or immobile like Mateo is. A good queen has to care for her subjects.

Speaking of Netta, she seems to be doing all right as well, if a bit… unbearably awkward. Orville is awake, and while his expression on seeing Netta's brain leaking out of her skull was absolutely priceless, the tumultuous storm of emotions and conversations that followed are less pleasant. And they don't stop.

"I just can't believe you're okay with this!" Orville grumbles, exasperated.

Netta raises an eyebrow.

"Would you rather I was dead-dead? I wouldn't."

"No, I wouldn't either, it's just…" he glances up at her head, then looks away for what must be the fiftieth time. "You're acting like nothing is wrong, like nothing even happened. It's… concerning."

"A second chance at life after fucking up that bad is more than I thought I deserved," Netta answers. "You don't live a good life by scorning fortune."

"Hug, already!" I shout, cupping both hands to my mouth. They both glare at me.

"You are rather feisty all of a sudden," Penelope comments, her voice sounding annoyed.

I know better, of course. She likes it. I grin her way.

"Of course I am!" I insist. "I haven't felt this good since I hatched! We're in the forest and I don't feel anything threatening in my range. A bunch of stuff is even running away from us!"

"Hatched?" Norah asks incredulously.

Yeah, Norah's not happy about all this blasphemy stuff. I haven't told her I got more power by eating a soul yet. ...I'm probably not going to. But surely it's okay to tell her a bit more about myself?

"Oh, um… yeah, so my soul is a little… weird," I hedge. "I can see and feel souls, you know? That's how my scouting works. Yours is pretty, by the way! It feels like solid water."

"You mean ice?" Penelope asks flatly.

"No!" I protest. "No, not ice, just um… solid water? Like it's unbreakable, yet it flows. I don't know, it's kind of hard to describe, souls don't always have a composition that makes sense. But I've always liked it."

Norah clearly isn't quite sure how to take that information.

"Thanks, I think?" she ends up going with. "But Vita, all this animancy… it's not good. You really shouldn't be relying on it."

I raise an eyebrow.

"Uh… it's not like I can turn it off, Norah," I say. "I'm not casting a spell to do this, I just see souls. Always. I can't even close my eyes, or cover my ears, or pinch my nose or anything like that to make it stop. Seeing souls is part of my soul. What do you want me to do about it?"

"It's just… that shouldn't be possible," Norah mutters, looking away.

I nearly snap at her again, but Penelope speaks first.

"I suspect that normally it isn't, Norah," Penelope says. "Given my position, I would be aware if there were some sort of secret group of natural animancers. There aren't. Yet I and I'm sure Orville can confirm that Vita is using her magic as a talent. She doesn't know a single animancy spell. I have a few hypotheses as to why this is, but… suffice to say she is not a normal human. You can stand up now, Vita."

I do so, stretching and moving my ankle. I guess it was better I learned the dangers of overusing strength before we fight any more monsters, rather than during.

"What sort of hypotheses, Penny?" Norah asks.

"Don't call me Penny. The most likely is that she's a victim of some other powerful animancer," Penelope answers, shrugging. "A human experiment with an artificial talent."

Norah's eyes go wide.

"What? That's… holy shit, that's horrible!"

"Wait, hold on," I protest. "What are you talking about? I feel like I'd remember being a fucking human experiment. For someone other than you, I mean."

Penelope gives me a glance, half-annoyed and half-amused.

"You think you'd remember being a cognimancer's experiment? One powerful enough to place artificially constructed talents into a soul?"

I blink.

"Uh… huh," I mutter, stroking my chin thoughtfully with a tendril. "...Fuck."

"Anyway, unless you'd like to get another animancer involved to try and quote-unquote 'fix' her," Penelope continues, staring at Norah, "I personally think it makes a lot more sense to treat her as a victim, not a criminal. You can call what she is 'evil,' but we both know she has gone out of her way to use her abilities to help the very people that would scorn her. She's not going around mind controlling people, she's taking something imposed on her by a madman and directing all her efforts to protect the city with it. If you're going to judge her, at least judge her by that."

Norah doesn't respond to that, looking away and seeming thoughtful. I open my mouth to ask Penelope about all her other theories about me, but she shoots me a glare and subtly shakes her head. Oh. Is this a scheme? She must be doing something to get Norah off my back, and doesn't want me to ruin it. Well, cool! It's nice to have a friend to do all of the social bullshit for me.

"How about my soul?" Bently asks out of nowhere. "Do you like mine?"

I grin and nod.

"Yours is weird!" I tell him. "It kind of feels like you barely even using it? I think there's something more to your talent. Just a feeling I get."

He seems surprised for a moment, then thoughtful. I'm so glad I get to talk about this stuff now!

"What's Penelope's soul like?" Orville asks, he and Netta approaching us as we all prepare to start walking again.

"Oh, Penelope's is the cutest!" I insist. "It's all hard and spiky at the top, but the underside is just so soft, bubbly, and fun to play with!"

"Play with!?" Penelope snaps incredulously. "I'll thank you to not 'play' around anything regarding—"

"Boop!" I say, poking her in the bubbles. She yelps and jumps backwards.

"What was that!?" Norah demands. "What did she do?"

"Calm down, Norah," I say. "I didn't do anything. My soul just has these… tentacles? And I can touch other souls with them. But it's fine, it's not any more dangerous than like... poking you in the neck, I guess?"

Orville clears his throat.

"Why the neck, specifically?" He asks.

"Well, I mean if I wrapped something around either and squeezed really hard, you'd die," I explain.

Silence.

"N-not that I'd do that!" I quickly add. "I'm just saying it's a good analogy, because it doesn't hurt anybody to poke them in the neck even though it's generally a super vulnerable part of your flesh?"

I glance around at my teammates, all of whom are staring at me.

"I'm getting the impression that I am not as reassuring as I was trying to be," I hedge.

"Maybe not that great, no," Norah confirms.

I groan.

"Come on, guys!" I complain. "The soul stuff is new, okay, fine. But all of you already knew that I could kill you with a thought! Why are you being weird about it now?"

Penelope pinches the bridge of her nose. Netta laughs.

"She's an earnest little thing, you've got to give her that!" the senior hunter chuckles.

"…Let's just get going," Norah grumbles, looking away. "The sooner we get this over with, the sooner we can stop desecrating the dead."

"And what if I don't want to stop being 'desecrated?'" Netta asks. "I can't say I love being a zombie, but it's sure better than being dead. Do you want Vita to just un-save my life? Don't I get a say in that?"

Norah doesn't respond. Nor do I interrupt. I have been as careful as I can to not give orders or talk much to my Revenants at all. By unspoken agreement, Penelope and I have been keeping the whole 'they follow my orders and instinctively love me' thing under wraps.

I can't honestly say that doesn't factor into Netta's desire to stay alive, either. My shards have been integrating quite well with the three senior hunters, not at all like Theodora. And even Theodora has never considered death to be a good alternative to serving me.

"…We should be going either way," Bently murmurs hesitantly. "We have to go save that town from monsters, remember?"

"Right," Norah answers quietly. "Of course."

Frustration churns within her, her mind forming plans and hypotheticals brought upon by a clear distaste for the entire situation. What should I do? I might honestly be able to take that vrothizo on my own with all this new power, but it feels like a pretty stupid thing to rely on when I could also have three senior hunters as backup instead. Besides, why should I have to do whatever she wants after I just saved her life?

I guess maybe I should just shut up and hold back my urges to be as open with my powers as I want to be, now that everyone knows about them. Clearly, that isn't a free pass to use them. I send a pleading glance at Penelope, who rolls her eyes. If this goes tits up, it's your fault. Not mine. ...Is probably what she's thinking.

So annoying. I just want to let loose again, make myself an army and crush every fucking monster in this forest! But no, Norah's petulant insistence on superstition might ruin everything if I set her off.

"...I thought we were close," I mumble.

She glances down at me, an armored giant I have to crane my head to see something other than the soul of. So I don't bother, staring only with the eye I have within.

"...Yeah," she answers. "I did too."

"You're mad at me," I say. "But I'm not hurting anybody, am I? I don't understand."

She sighs.

"I know you don't. But the rest of you—" she motions at the team "—should know better. Vita, I expect not to get this stuff. But why are you all on her side with this? I shouldn't be the only one who feels the need to explain to her why this is wrong."

Bently just looks away, unwilling to engage in the conflict. Orville glances at Netta. Penelope snorts.

"…So that's it, then?" Norah snaps at them. "Nothing? Our teammate is a soul rapist, and none of you think this warrants a bit more scrutiny?"

"Woah, Norah..." Orville starts.

"Don't 'woah, Norah' me! The woman who raised you is walking around missing half of her fucking skull! Does that not strike you as even a little bit unnatural? These people should be with the Watcher, not walking around with their heads cut off! They're trapped souls! Zombies! Undead monsters that hunt and kill the living!"

"Revenants," I correct again. "And my Revenants do not hunt and kill the living. ...Unless I ask them to, I guess."

"Watcher's eyes," Penelope mutters, burying her face in her hands. "Vita, shut up."

"I'm just saying!" I protest. "It's our job to hunt and kill the living anyway!"

"Vita…" Norah starts.

"Norah!" I press, cutting her off. "Norah, come on! We're teammates! We eat together, we fight together, we watch each other's backs. I… I like you a lot, you know? I respect you, and I don't respect a lot of people. Can't you just trust me on all this? I know that the church says I'm a monster. But I'm not stupid, Norah, and I'm not evil. You know that! Right?"

She sighs.

"Of course I know that, Vita, but this is one of those things you don't get. You know? You're cute as a button and you're amazing at so many things but you just don't get shit sometimes. This?"

She gestures at the Revenants.

"This is one of those things! You don't see what makes this wrong, and… and I know that's not your fault, but Vita you can't do this!"

I scowl at her. That… hurt a bit.

"...It's true I don't understand a lot of stuff," I say slowly. "I know that. But… if you see more than I do, it's just because I'm looking at stuff you're not. I don't know what you think you know about souls, or gods, or… or right and wrong! But Norah, I have looked off the edge and seen the soul of the Mistwatcher."

I look up at her, making the conscious effort to look in her eyes, pleading to be understood.

"Your church is wrong," I tell her. "Your god's true nature is a mass of hungry mouths, and the only thing it offers you after death is digestion. I know it. I have seen it. You want an afterlife?"

I gesture to my Revenants, same as she did.

"This is the only one there is. What you want me to do won't save anyone. It will murder them."

Norah sighs. She opens her mouth to speak, but I already feel her response and it infuriates me. I cut her off.

"Don't pity me!" I shout. I'm done with this! "I'm not some misguided child spouting fantasies! I'm not one of your fucking dead sisters!"

The words stab her and she steps back.

"Vita… I don't—"

"Yes! You! Do!" I correct, jabbing a finger into her breastplate to punctuate every word. "I can see your damn soul, Norah. I may not know why people feel the crazy shit they feel, but I sure fucking know how they're feeling."

Penelope squirms uncomfortably, but I don't have time for that right now. It all starts pouring out, all of a sudden, the horrifying secrets I've had to keep in fear. Because here is Norah, the one who always had my back, always protected me, treating me like a goddamn crazy person!

"You see them in me. You always have! But if you joined the hunters because you were looking forward to dying some honorable death and seeing them again in the afterlife… too damn bad! They're gone forever, Norah, reduced to fucking dust and ashes in your so-called god's divine belly! I have seen the Mistwatcher, I have nearly been killed by the Mistwatcher, I have been fucking molested by the Mistwatcher, and yet I can't tell anyone about any of it because your stupid batshit religion will kill me if I do! Don't fucking tell me I don't know what I'm talking about, don't tell me about right and wrong! You don't know anything!"

I huff furiously, breathing hard by the end of the tirade. I started yelling at some point there, which normally isn't a good idea in the forest, but… well, the creatures that weren't fleeing before are now.

"Vita," Norah answers quietly. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to belittle you. But… I think you should maybe talk to a priest. Someone that can… explain things better than I can? I just… I know this isn't—"

She's not listening. Did she not hear the part where her church will literally fucking kill me? No, she just doesn't believe me, believe any of it. I can't take this anymore. This is my allotment of social bullshit for the day, filled and exceeded.

"Enough," I snarl, walking past her. "I can't do this anymore. We have a monster to kill."

Penelope clears her throat, intending to try and smooth the heavy mood over. Begrudgingly, in fact, since she seemed to really enjoy my rant. At least I can count on her.

"...Approximately where is the closest monster, scout?" she asks.

I glance backwards at my team.

"Right in front of you," I answer. "Scary animancer, remember? So stay behind me, and stay out of my way."

I draw my spear and start leading my team directly towards the next closest monster I can sense. It's running, but it will tire before we will.

And I need a fucking meal right now. Unlike my body, my soul is never full.

Spooky Sensations

A nightmarish beast towers before me, reeling up on its snake-like body. It must be over twenty feet long from tip to tip, with a tail ending in a wicked spike and a head fused seamlessly to its torso, jawless and horrifying. The monster's mouth extends well down the length of its body, opening sideways like a valve to reveal rows and rows of vicious teeth. Surrounding the lips of the wretched maw are limbs halfway between giant centipede legs and human fingers, dexterous and multi-jointed enough to grab nearly anything and doom any attempt at escape. Most of the others stare in horror as it rises, inhaling and exhaling a putrid, wet stench.

"How are you feeling, Mateo?" I ask the monster.

A few more ragged breaths are the only answer I get for a while, though soon my confused and slightly overwhelmed Revenant starts to figure out the vocal cords of his new body. It was a pain in the ass finding a monster that might have vocal cords in the first place, but these things tend to mimic other creatures to lure them into its territory so I figured it would be a safe bet. They're known as liar wyrms.

And Mateo is now a very cute one, if I do say so myself.

"Thhhingsss… weird…" Mateo hisses.

"Better or worse than your old body?" I ask.

He flexes his new form, slapping his massive tail across the ground and undulating his many rows of mandible-fingers. My team steps back, except for Penelope who looks… well, I don't know how she looks but she is excited to the point of giddy.

"Bettterrrr…" Mateo ultimately concludes, and then he suddenly catches on fire.

This terrifies my team even more, although I can't fathom why since they all know Mateo is a friggin' natural thermomancer.

"Talent… weaker…" he reports once the flames die down. "Harder… to use…"

I raise my eyebrows, brushing hair out of my face with a tendril as I peer into his soul.

"Hmm… this body is much bigger than your last one," I point out. "A lot more of your soul's power is going into movement. Also… do the fire thing again?"

He does the fire thing again, blistering heat wafting over us. I nod, feeling out the workings of his soul as best I can, noticing extra power getting diverted into his new body's skin.

"...I think you're converting a lot more power into not burning yourself, too," I say. "Your soul probably had a lot of time to improve your body's natural heat resistance, or maybe you were just more used to it. Do you think you can cast learned spells like that?"

"Yessss," Mateo intones, sinking his belly down to the ground so he's more at eye-level with me. "Need… practice. But. Shhhould be… possible."

I smile and nod, patting his brown, chitinous carapace.

"Great. Sorry things are weird now, and thanks for trying this out. Anything else you need?"

He thinks for a moment, twisting around this way and that to get a better look at himself.

"...Clothesssss?" he asks hopefully.

I regard his massive, serpentine form with a mouth larger than I am, scratching my cheek. Then I turn back to look at my team, shrugging helplessly at them. I can't think of anything we could possibly dress this in, or how we'd even accomplish that… and it looks like they can't either. Norah and Bently are both transfixed to the point of unresponsiveness, and Orville manages to only give me a shrug back.

"We might have to figure that one out later, Mateo," I answer him. "Sorry. You're kind of bigger than my house."

"Not anymore, he isn't," Penelope comments, approaching Mateo and calmly hopping onto his back. "I got you and your family a new house, remember?"

"Oh yeah," I say. "Thanks again for that, by the way. Are you, uh…"

She sits sidesaddle on my enormous sapient snake-Revenant, calmly holding onto one of the interlocking armored plates that form his body as he practices how to slither.

"...Are you comfy up there?"

"Walking has always been my least favorite part of being a hunter," she admits, stretching and massaging her legs. "You don't mind, do you Mateo?"

She's about eighty percent lying about not wanting to walk; she needs contact to cast the spells she uses to preserve the corpses of my Revenants, and she starts subtly doing exactly that the moment she hops on. It's an unspoken agreement between Penelope and I that we don't let on how much she already knew about all of this. If this blows up in my face, there's no sense dragging her down too.

Fortunately, Mateo doesn't seem to mind being used as a mount… at least not by someone as beautiful as Penelope. He responds with a hissing laugh, clearly amused, though the reactions of the others indicate I'm maybe the only one who picks up on that.

"Healer… the only… non-coward," he jeers, slithering around the others and putting his dead maw close enough to breathe on them. Norah squeaks when he gets close, actually squeaks like a bunny. It's hilarious.

"You sure you don't want a monster body, Alan?" I ask. "I'm sure we could find a good one."

The headless Alan gives me two thumbs down, then indicates his sword. Well, Norah's former sword, which he's still holding since his old one broke. No way on a monster body, I need hands to be able to use my skills, is probably what he means. I nod back to him.

"Your call, no worries."

I join Penelope on Mateo's back, and together we slither off towards our destination. I've spent the last couple of days on our forest journey acclimating to my new abilities and consuming every single creature I could get my hands on. Penelope even taught me the meat preparation spell, although I'm surprised how crazy complicated it actually is. Apparently, biomancy in general tends to have some of the longest and most precise spellcasting commands, making it a huge pain to learn. Also problematic is the fact that while I cannot be harmed by overfilling myself with mana, I absolutely can be harmed if I form a spell incorrectly.

Penelope likens casting a spell to constructing an essay. I pointed out that I've never written an essay, so she rolled her eyes and told me to just imagine a really long sentence. If you change even a single word in a sentence, it's possible to make the sentence mean something completely different, or more likely become absolute nonsense. But unlike humans, who can usually figure out what a sentence is supposed to mean if it only has one or two errors, magic is apparently much more… pedantic than that. How you shape the spell is what it will become, and if the shape is wrong, you could end up with a spell that does something unintentional, or worse, you could end up with chaos magic.

Chaos magic is what happens when you tell magic to do something that doesn't make any sense and it tries to do that anyway. The results are usually just an explosive release of energy as the magic gets converted into who knows what without any consistent guiding factors. Very rarely, however, chaos magic will randomly produce complicated spell effects that are a lot more dangerous than a simple explosion.

Apparently, one of the prevailing pieces of evidence that talents are granted by the Mistwatcher with purpose and intent is simply the fact that, if talents were random, nearly everyone with a spellcasting talent would end up with chaos magic and probably kill themselves. Instead, there are no chaos magic talents at all. Just like animancy talents.

"So, what's our actual plan in terms of killing this monster we've been sent to hunt?" Netta asks. "If it's attacking people in a city, we dead folk probably shouldn't be waltzing in to fight it. That's going to cause a bit of trouble."

"Maybe just a bit," Norah comments, looking in Mateo's direction.

He grins at her, or at least the closest equivalent he's capable of attempting with a sideways-opening mouth surrounded by bug fingers. I'm almost thankful I don't need to pay any attention to his expression.

"Obviously, we want to lure the target into the forest," I say. "We would want to do that regardless of how many undead make up our team. If we fight this thing in the city, what do you think it's going to do the moment it gets hurt?"

"Eat someone," Orville answers immediately, nodding. "Yeah, we definitely need to find it and catch it somewhere it can't hurt anyone. I'm going to guess it probably has a nest somewhere in the forest and it leaves to hunt the city at night?"

"Guess or hope?" Penelope scoffs. "If the information we've gathered is correct and these creatures never sleep, it could very easily be hiding itself in the city during the day and hunting at night without ever leaving itself in a position where we can isolate it. Since our foe is intelligent, this is likely exactly what it will do. The sheer concentration of edible meat in a human city is going to so vastly outstrip that of the forest that I would be surprised if a vrothizo would willingly retreat from it."

"You know a lot about these things, Penny?" Norah asks.

"If you call me Penny again you won't shit solid for a week," Penelope answers, delivering her threat with all the inflection of saying hello to an acquaintance. "And yes, I've consulted Claretta extensively on the matter. Although her time was spent with an abnormal variant, that abnormal variant is most likely our target, and even if it isn't Claretta is still far and away the person with the most experience watching vrothizo in their natural habitat. We should expect to find our quarry in the city, not the forest surrounding it."

"How are we going to lure it away from people, then?" Netta asks.

"I guess I'll be bait," I sigh. "As the person with the biggest soul, I'm going to smell the tastiest."

"Biggest soul?" Norah asks. "What does that have to do with anything?"

"Oh, did I not mention?" I shrug. "Vrothizo eat souls. That's why they leave their victims alive and don't eat corpses. Try not to get bit."

Only silence and fear answer me, and I'm disinclined to explain any other details on the matter. Even if I'm just being informative, Norah and also Bently seem to get pretty freaked out when I talk about animancy. Bently I'll forgive, since he is a giant puppy dog and also has not suggested at any point that I should be handed over to murderous zealots. He's torn, though. I don't think he thinks Norah is wrong, exactly, just that he's loyal to the idea of our team staying together. It'll have to do. Orville seems to have minimal attachment to the church, and combined with Netta only being alive so long as I will it, I think if push comes to shove he will support me. Animancy still freaks him out, and I don't think he likes anything about the situation, but Orville is nothing if not a realist. When the alternative is the destruction of the only mother he has ever known, he knows where he stands.

Time seems to pass quickly, our many-day trip through the forest soon comes to a close. The forest starkly and suddenly ends, revealing the flat, dry land where not even the ravenous flora of Verdantop dares to grow. The earth is hard and thick with salt, the only life successfully managing to survive here being the stupid and ever-industrious humans in the city of New Talsi.

New Talsi is an interesting-looking place, lacking the massive defensive walls of Skyhope but instead being surrounded with enormous wooden guard towers that dwarf the many buildings behind them. Any monster that even tries to exit the forest could be pelted with hundreds of arrows from expert bowmen before even reaching the towers themselves, let alone the city proper. Many of them certainly look our way as we emerge from the forest, minus my Revenants of course, and we quickly locate and walk to the road to give the guards plenty of time to prepare for us. No one else is on the road today, which I suspect is fairly normal.

What I'm not sure is normal is how nervous all the guards suddenly become as we get closer to the city. A guard in one tower holds flags, signaling to the others and suddenly putting every other tower on edge. Armed and armored people emerge from the city, blocking off the road, a few people from the towers descending to join them.

"Is something the matter?" Penelope asks, once we get in polite shouting distance of the guards.

"State your business!" a guard orders.

"We're the hunters that have been sent to deal with your monster problem," I answer.

"Told you so," another guard mutters, nudging one of the men from the towers. "Of course hunters are going to feel weird."

"We've had strong hunters before, and one of them does not feel like a hunter," he protests.

"Just to be sure, we're going to ask to submit you to a biomancy test," the guard that first spoke grunts. "Sorry for the inconvenience."

"This is your fault, isn't it?" Orville whispers to me.

"Probably," I reluctantly admit. "I was already pinging as spooky after my solo trip, so I can't imagine what I feel like now."

"You should be doing biomancy tests on all travelers anyway," Penelope says, answering the guard. "The capital had trouble with some nasty parasites from the forest."

"We don't have the capital's luck when it comes to having a lot of biomancers available," the guard grumbles. "You'll have to wait for us to fetch one."

"Fucking hell," I grumble. "If there's another Nawra colony here, I'll scream."

"If there's another Nawra colony here, you are not to try to adopt one," Penelope says firmly.

"Fine," I groan, rolling my eye. Not that she can see it.

"Seriously, what happened to you two on that mission we didn't get to go on?" Orville mutters.

"Eh, we just had a nice, rousing round of genocide against a sapient species after nearly being killed by the Mistwatcher and subsequently a very grumpy Galdra the Annihilator. Also, Penelope enslaved me."

"I believe you mean 'also, Penelope saved my life,'" Penelope chimes in haughtily. "Twice. One method of which just so happened to make ingenious use of property law."

"Woo, slave buddies," Orville intones blandly.

"Actually, are you still a slave now that your mom is dead?" I ask.

"Watcher's eyes, Vita..." Norah mutters, face in her hands.

"What? I just don't know how that works."

Unfortunately, the biomancer arrives before I can learn more about slave law. We sit through their excruciatingly slow examinations before ultimately being allowed into the city. I am, after all, still physically human as Penelope refuses to stop reminding me. I'm starting to wonder if our team has been taking her for granted. Considering how much faster she is than the random person they got to scan us just now, I wouldn't be surprised if the average biomancer would have failed to save us from the kind of things Penelope routinely helps us shrug off.

Now in the city proper, however, it's time to stretch out my senses. We have a vrothizo to find, and if it's really holed up somewhere near people like Penelope suspects, I'm going to need to be the one to sniff it out. Not that I wouldn't have been the one to find it either way, I suppose, but it is what it is. To no one's surprise, however, I seem to mostly be sensing human souls in the human city. Hours of wandering later, I still haven't sensed anything abnormal.

Hmm... maybe I'm going about this wrong. That monster was collecting chunks of the souls it bit and slapping them haphazardly onto its own. Maybe it will feel mostly like a human now? I make sure to take more than a cursory glance at the souls in my range, and after another hour I finally find it.

No... I finally find her. The shell of human shards she has been collecting with her teeth have almost completed a full shell around the infinitely ravenous nothingness of her soul's core. Not only that, but they are much less the haphazard hodgepodge they were before, fusing and melting together slowly but surely into something more cohesive. Like one of my own shards melding seamlessly together with a Revenant until there is no conflict between their desire to follow my orders and their base nature, each separate segment of person that this small girl has victimized are slowly becoming one. Even more than that, they grow on their own, just like Fulvia's broken soul. When that shell becomes whole, what will that mean?

My team seems to notice that I found something, as in my ruminations I have completely stopped moving. I let them know that I've probably found the target, and we approach in silence. The vrothizo's hearing is exceptionally good, and we don't want to give ourselves away. As much as my former revulsion at having to worry about fellow soul-eaters has been replaced with curiosity, we still have a job to do and I still intend to take it very, very seriously.

How can I hold back when that sick monster has surrounded herself with children?

Monster vs. Monster

"Rawr! Got you, Lark!"

"No you didn't!" I protest. "I dodged!"

"You can't always dodge, Lark!" one of the other kids protests. His name is Danny. "It's no fun that way!"

"But I'm the hunter!" I protest. "The hunter gets to win! Pchew pew!"

I fire some more invisible arrows at the menagerie of whiny monsters before me, many of whom shriek excitedly and pretend to dodge, many more of whom gasp dramatically, lolling out their tongues as they roll over in a comically tame facsimile of death.

"But it's more fun if we get to hurt you sometimes!" Danny insists.

I leap and teeth sink into flesh, ripping out a delicious, oozing chunk of human meat as I rush by. I am too fast, and five different retaliations miss me at once as I swallow my prize. Humans taste so good! Dashing back through a bush, breaking line of sight and fleeing to strike again at the next moment of vulnerability, I laugh with joy. This is so much—

"Fun, huh?" I mutter softly.

It used to be, didn't it? I wonder how fun it would be to eat Danny, right here and right now. Humans would go on high alert instantly, they'd converge on me from all sides. But I know now that all humans are different, and the vast majority of them don't even begin to approach the kind of strength that I have consistently outmaneuvered in the past. It would be exciting, in a way. To prove my superiority over every single human in this massive city.

No matter how much the hunger in my belly screams me to do it, however, I know that there's not a chance I could convince myself to follow through. Not anymore. Only revulsion, only heart-clenching agony remains, no matter how vivid my memories of joy.

Once again, I have gone many days without eating. The constant hunger is joined by pain, an aching need that gets progressively more and more difficult to resist with each passing hour. I suspect I am probably starting to die.

"Lark! We're going to get you!" a girl named Sabrina giggles, jumping at me from behind.

I step to the side, and she careens past me, laughing all the while.

"Pew pew," I say, shooting two more arrows. "I have slain all the monsters. Someone else can be the hunter now."

The kids erupt into a gleeful contest over the right to be the next hero in the story. Most of them, I know, are between five and six years old. Six years. I can't possibly understand that much time. It's so strange to me that humans take so long to learn and to grow. Is it because they forget? August said that he's many many times that age. I am only a few months old, not even one year, and yet I'm already starting to feel like these human children are a bit… simple.

Maybe that's the hunger talking, however. These games are usually super fun. Humans apparently get pretty grumpy when they are hungry, and perhaps I am the same. I am different from humans in many ways, but it is the similarities that hurt me. In some ways I wish I'd never met August, never learned his lessons. But I did. And now, I can't forget. Ever.

As I settle back into pretending to be the monster, getting comfortable in my role as a thing to be killed, I suddenly feel death start to approach. Not the fictional death I expected or even death from starvation. No, this is the kind of death I faced in the forest all those days ago. I shiver, muscles instinctively tensing. Another monster is coming for me, it seems.

This is a very odd feeling. I never expected to encounter another monster within the human city. I smell it, though. In some ways it is familiar, but in most ways it is new. What sort of monster would be in the city and not cause a panic? I suppose the answer to that is obvious: a monster like me. A monster that the humans do not see or do not recognize as not one of them.

Indecision keeps my body still. Okay, so I smell a monster in the city. So what? If the humans haven't noticed it, it probably isn't hurting anyone. So do I just… stay here and keep playing? Sure, why not. I like playing. It may as well be what I do while I starve to death.

Unfortunately, however, it soon becomes clear that the monster is getting closer to me. In fact, though it's certainly taking its sweet time, I'm pretty sure it's headed right for me. I glance at the others. My friends, I think, even if I don't know any of them particularly well. I don't know what to do. Do I stay and try to protect them? Do I leave and lure the monster somewhere else?

I spend so long hesitating that the decision is made for me. I feel the monster circling around the clearing. Er, the courtyard, I suppose it's called.

It smells much more powerful than I am. Not that I'm particularly intimidated by this; fighting things stronger than I am is how I survived the forest. But as it moves, I soon find myself assaulted with more familiar scents. It's the group that took Claretta! They're also here, albeit missing two members. Hopefully I can just hide and they'll fight the monster for me.

Although… if it's a monster disguised as a person, could that possibly be the ideal meal? Strength and food without losing the body I feel so attached to now. Yet as the monster finally gets close enough for me to spot, all that anticipation drops to nothing.

As she steps into the courtyard I and my friends have monopolized for a rousing game of hunter versus monster, I recognize the person approaching me. She smells like a monster, but I've met this one before and called her human. Thinking back, the smell is an obvious evolution from that of my memories. The hunter that always knew where I was, that foiled every ambush, is back. There's no chance she doesn't recognize me in kind.

As the last time we met, she is dressed for battle. Unlike other humans that wear many things, the short woman's leather armor fits her so naturally that I struggle to imagine her wearing anything else. Her long, black hair is tamed only by the cheap, hole-covered hooded cloak that trails lightly behind her as she approaches. Uncaring for the stares it evokes, her spear is drawn, something about the tip catching my eye in the same way that I keep trying to focus on invisible flashes of movement around her body. Her face is blank and expressionless, almost frighteningly so compared to the variety of emotional displays I'm used to seeing on humans. And her eyes… they're different from last time. Blue instead of green, with the pupil elongated ever so slightly on the top and bottom in a way that reminds me somewhat of the many katzels I once consumed. Yet it's still unmistakably her. I did not think humans ever changed their eye color, but perhaps I am wrong.

Or perhaps I should trust my smell, and not consider her human. Still, no sense being impolite. August insists I always be polite.

"Hello, Vita," I greet her, nodding politely once she gets close enough.

Her head tilts to the side as an expression of very mild surprise passes over it for a moment. The reaction is a bit chilling, however, considering that she does not at all look in my direction as she makes it. Nor when she responds. She's here to fight me to the death but it's like I'm barely even being considered.

"Hey," Vita answers me. "This… isn't really what I expected, but I can work with it. Sorry, kids, but you're all going to have to leave now."

"Lark, do you know this person?" Danny whispers to me.

"Yeah," I say. "She's a hunter. She kills monsters."

"That's so cool!" Danny fawns.

"You should listen to her and leave," I tell them, "because she has a spear."

The other kids consider my impeccable logic and agree that yes, they should probably listen to the hunter with the spear. Regretfully they disperse, seeking other areas to pretend to stab or eat each other. Vita's gaze sweeps around as they leave, eventually settling partly on me… though still not entirely.

"My team didn't think that would work," Vita comments. "They thought you would take hostages, or just outright start having snacks. But you changed a lot, didn't you? I'm surprised you remember my name."

I swallow, stepping back as she steps forward.

"I remember everything," I tell her. "My memory is perfect."

"Really?" she wonders. "That must suck."

I can't help but laugh at that, for some reason. There's just some dark humor in the knowledge that this person somehow understood immediately. She and her team are the only ones in this city that know what I am and understand what it means, so naturally they're here to kill me. How can I not laugh?

She takes that opening to attack.

I expected her to be faster than before, but not this fast. The spear jabs outwards and I twist away, catching a cut across my upper-left arm. My blood stains the tip of the spear black, and as it pulls away I feel some part of me go with it, hunger taking a firmer hold on my mind.

I leap backwards to try and make as much space as I can as shocked and outraged gasps erupt around us. Vita may have cleared the immediate area, but we're hardly alone. Very few places in the human city are, and now I know it looks like she just randomly tried to skewer a child.

"Hunter business!" Vita shouts at them.

I don't really have the luxury of sticking around to figure out how effective that is, nor do I really care. My limbs feel like they're moving through water as I agonizingly push myself to flee, only to find that this hunter can keep up with me! I'm fairly injured and have barely started to move, but already I'm panting for breath and feeling the burden of exhaustion. I haven't eaten anything! I've been waiting for death, yet now the only thing on my mind is the fear of it.

The spear stabs me again, and I get hungrier. Perhaps more importantly, it tears through my cloak, revealing one of my extra arms hidden underneath. I suppose I shouldn't bother holding back anyway. I tear my mask from my face, expecting to need peripheral vision… not to mention access to my teeth. My blood starts to boil, filled with the certainty that everything I have started to love here is now, in this singular moment, gone forever. With the thing behind the mask revealed, I can never return to this city. I would have left them all alone! I would have died peacefully. But if this... Vita, whatever Vita is, wants to force my hunger out?

She can be the one to quiet it again.

Something invisible streaks towards me and I bite down on it, eliciting a wince from the hunter. Finally, I reach the edge of the courtyard, clambering straight up the side of the building. Humans struggle with the vertical, and I need to make as much space as possible so I have the time to fight smart.

Here I go again, I suppose. Already, the thought of victory against unassailable odds fills me with unwanted anticipation. It's fun to fight hunters, but... that's wrong. Hunters are good guys and they're supposed to win in the end. ...No, no time for these stupid thoughts. I need to focus.

Now atop a roof, my assumption that I've bought myself a little time is swiftly shaken as Vita attempts to leap up to the top of the building in a single bound. She doesn't quite make it, says one of the words August insists I should never say, and presumably starts to fall, though I don't stick around to watch. I'm halfway to the other side of the building when she jumps a second time, more than exceeding the height of the building on her follow-up bound, swearing again as she lands hard on the stone roof. Woah! I've never seen a human do that before! At least she seems bad at it. When I reach the edge of the roof I immediately jump off of it back to ground level, which to my mild amusement elicits another exasperated curse from Vita.

Now in an alley between two buildings, I can start actually fighting. I shoot a spread of webs from one hand, anchoring them to the wall of one building before pressing their other end into the opposite. When Vita runs down this path after me, she will inevitably hit my webs or at least be forced to cut them, which will give me an opening to—

I look up, eyes going wide as a chitinous, hungering speartip plunges towards them. I dodge too slowly, avoiding the deathblow to my skull at the cost of letting the spear open a gash from my sternum to my belly, maybe twenty degrees off from impaling me through the chest.

Rather than jump off the building where I did, the hunter leapt all the way to another rooftop, bypassed the alley entirely, and struck from above. Like she knew what I was planning! I forgot, I'm not fighting monsters. I'm fighting creatures as smart as I am with the strength of monsters.

I'm no stranger to deadly fights, though. Even as the cut sprays my blood on the ground, I see the inevitable outcome. Vita is falling. She can't change her trajectory, and the landing won't be something she can instantly move out of. I've sacrificed a nasty wound for it, but in return I can bite out her throat. Her mistake, her loss.

But I take one look at her face, even as blank as it is and I bind her in webs instead of ending her life. With the swipe of my claws, five threads get planted on her body, elongating at my command and letting me circle around her, binding her tight. I feel multiple invisible things jab towards me, and though I manage to bite one the other two push into me, filling me with such insurmountable dread I cannot choose any option other than to cut my threads short and leap away as fast as possible. I've lost my chance to tie her up as thoroughly as I'd hoped to, but my threads are still on her and they are strong. It should be enough to stop her from—

"Untie me," Vita orders.

At first I'm confused. I don't follow that command, because why would I?

But my threads do. Impossibly, they obey her. They come apart of their own apparent volition as I scurry away, a grin blooming on the Hunter's lips as for the first time her eyes lock directly onto mine.

Not a human, my instincts scream. Not a human at all!

"Catch her!" the monster orders.

She lunges at me again, a burst of speed so fast I'm sure I hear something in her body crack. Even expecting it, I fail to dodge, her weapon opening a deep gash right above my hip bone, once again rousing the ever-present roar of my hunger to greater heights. Fine. If that's what she wants, fine! My own threads, attached to her body, reach for me as I leap towards her in kind, but nothing cuts through my threads as easily as my own claws. I destroy the traitorous strands, mouth aiming for my favorite target: the knee. Once again, Vita's wild strike gives me a clean opening to make my assault, and this time I don't hold back. Teeth tearing easily through layers of armor and muscle, I quickly swallow the first bite of proper meat I've had in days, feeling it charge my body with ecstasy. It's the greatest thing I've ever tasted, so much power flowing through so little space that my smaller wounds close in mere moments, the blood I've been losing replenished as my mind and my strength greedily drink that power dry to return me to working order. And best of all, I've hamstrung her, which means I've as good as won. The back of her knee is gouged so deep I see more bone than tendon. That whole leg is useless.

Then Vita draws a knife and pivots on that leg anyway, cleaving straight through my bicep and removing one of my arms above the elbow. Immediately, I feel the invisible force surrounding her strike towards me again, but I don't bother to bite at one this time. She's not human. She's barely even a monster! I think back to just seconds before when I had the arrogant idea that not biting out her throat was sparing her and almost laugh at myself. Would that have even done anything? What can I do if injury doesn't injure!? Fear far outstrips my instinct, my apathy, and my hunger, and I turn to flee as fast as I possibly can.

I don't know why I bother. I've lost everything now, so why not my life too? The monster moves to chase me, but a shout slows her.

"Vita! Don't you dare!"

"Wh— Penelope? I've almost got her!" Vita protests.

"No!" comes the responding shriek, rapidly getting quieter as I make distance. "Let the others handle it! You are going to stay right there and let me treat you before you bleed out all over the road! What were you thinking, starting the fight here? Why didn't you stick to the plan?"

"Stuff happened, I improvised. Don't worry, she's not going to..."

Gasps of shock and screams of terror drown out the rest of the conversation as I dash through the city, bleeding and exposed for what I truly am. Nothing but blind panic fuels my decisions now. Down on five limbs I sprint outside the city, flee past the merchant stalls, and soon find myself in the only place I have left to go. The one spot in the world that I've been promised will always be safe for me.

Clothes torn, mask lost, body dripping darkness, I lock myself in the bathroom of August's hut and start to cry.

No Escape

Dripping tears mix with black splotches of blood as I sob quietly on the floor, one lower arm clutching the stub of my other in a half-hearted attempt to prevent myself from bleeding out. My fight with Vita left me broken, and I know her biomancer ally will heal off all the damage I managed to do to her. This isn't even accounting for the rest of her team, any of which could easily slay me now. Even if they didn't see where I went, which I doubt, I left a trail of my blood here. Lightheaded and woozy, I can barely even think straight. I wonder what it will be like to experience unconsciousness like humans do. This isn't my nest. I don't have a stored meal to retreat to. I haven't had a meal at all in… in… ugh, I could count the days, but I just want to do nothing at all.

It's safe here, he told me. Well I'm here, but I doubt it will be safe. I'm not sure I want it to be. I am so, so tired. So… done. I hear the door to the cabin open. I wonder which hunter is here to slay the monster first?

"Lark?" August asks. "Are you in here?"

My breath catches. No, no no no. Not him. Not now. He can't see me like this. Yet I hear him move further inside, closing the outer door behind him.

"Is everything alright?"

Of course nothing is alright! I want him, need him to leave! I'm dying, August. Just let me. I try to be as quiet as I can, hoping he'll leave me alone, but a sob shakes out of me. My body, ever the betrayer to my mind.

"Lark?" August calls again. "Lark, is that you? Are you hurt?"

Am I hurt? Just a few bites on any of the hundreds of people I passed on the way here, and I would be fighting fit! Yet I didn't. I can't. I can't ever go back, and the thought of even opening my jaws at them crushes my heart.

He knocks on the door to the bathroom.

"Lark? Let me know you're here or I'm coming in."

"Go away!" I snap at him.

Before August, I'd never even thought about things this way. I had a plan. But I abandoned it. Why?

"Lark, what's this on the floor?" August asks seriously, once again listening but refusing to obey. He's always been like this!

I abandoned the plan because I was happy. He taught me what happiness is. Why couldn't he have stopped there? Why wasn't that enough? I hear him kneel down, investigating the splotches of blood I trailed on his floor. There's a lot more of it now, here in the bathroom. I'm sitting in quite the puddle. It is so, so hard to think.

"Lark? Lark! Is this blood? Lark!"

"Go away!" I demand again. "Leave!"

There's a pause, the only sound in the house my ragged, slowing breaths.

"Tell me you're okay," August says, fear in his voice. "Or I'm coming in there."

I'm not going to lie to August. I can't. But I can tell him something I know is true.

"You promised you wouldn't come in," I remind him. "Not unless I said you could."

"I also promised this place would be safe for you," he counters. "So tell me you're okay, and I will leave you alone."

How can I get him to hate me, to leave me to die?

"The black stuff is my blood," I admit. "I'm not human. I never was."

Moments later, there's a crash as August slams his body into the bathroom door, breaking the lock. He spots me then, a look of horror on his face. He sees what I am. The last thing I wanted was to know the look on his face when he sees what I am.

But he does not flee. He tears his shirt off his body, the slightest splash ringing in the small room as he quickly kneels beside me, staining his pants with my blood. Grabbing my stump of an arm, he starts tying cloth around it, stemming the flow. Why?

He smells so good.

"Stop it," I snarl at him, baring my teeth. Teeth still stained red with a hunter's blood. Why doesn't he run?

"Don't try to talk," August huffs back, false calm obvious in his voice.

Does he think I won't notice? His terror? What is he trying to prove? I try to push him away, but my arms are so heavy.

"I killed Sharif's family," I choke out, and for an instant he pauses.

Good. Leave! Let me die! But just a moment later, he continues his work.

"Did you now," is all he says, tightening and securing the bandages over my arm before moving the rest of my body.

"I did," I confirm. "I watched the father scream while I ate his wife."

My imagination runs wild with similar things I could do to August. I'm so hungry. So cold. He's just an old man, and it would be so easy.

"That's an awfully cruel and evil thing to do," August opines, and though I already knew it to be true hearing it feels like an arrow carved open my heart.

But he doesn't stop binding my wounds.

"Then let me die," I beg him. "Run away! I can tell you're afraid!"

"I am," he retorts. "I'm afraid of leaving you here alone. I'm afraid you'll die before I do."

"I'm a monster!" I shout at him, as best I'm able. "You don't know what I've done!"

"No, but I know you," he says firmly. "I suspected for a long time you probably weren't human. And it sounds like you have much to be held to account for, if you killed Sharif's family."

With one hand, he pushes my chin very lightly up, to help me look him in the eyes.

"But as far as I'm concerned, you are my family."

My eyes go wide. No. No, anything but that.

"Why," I breathe, fearing I know the answer.

"Because from the moment I met you I knew you needed one," August answers. "How could I not give it to you? You knew so little of the world. You are a child, Lark. And all children need parents, because a child can't be expected to know anything if they are not taught and shown. To love, you must be loved. To grow wise, you must see wisdom. To respect others, you must be given respect. A parent leads by example. If I could not teach you in time to prevent you from making a mistake, then it is I—"

No.

"—who—"

No!

"—erred."

"Shut up!" I screech, jumping my feet and stepping away only to stumble and collapse again a second later.

August catches me, and I nearly bite his throat out. He can't do this. He can't do this again.

"Don't make me regret this, too," I beg him.

He just looks at me with sad eyes, and no weapon in the world could hurt more.

"You learn too fast for your own good," he says quietly. "You were not this mature just a tenday ago. Time normally helps us process and forget."

"I don't forget anything," I tell him. "I can't. I can't handle anything more. Please. Just leave."

Woozy and hysterical, I barely understand myself anymore. Everything is just hunger and sadness and bubbling rage. I hate all this. I hate ever learning any of it.

"I just want it all to end," I whisper. "Let me die."

He looks at me again, eyes far too piercing.

"If you truly wanted to die," he asks softly, "why would you have come all this way to a safe place?"

Because while I hate life, I fear death, and no matter how I try to pretend I'm just as much of a slave to instinct as I was when I was born. None of these words can leave me, though, because as if to prove the point my body erupts again into uncontrollable sobs. Two old arms wrap around me, pulling me into a hug.

"You have your whole life ahead of you, Lark," August says, and it sounds like a curse. "There is yet more good you can do for this world than the good you have taken from it. You must always believe this. You can always grow to be better. And I know you have the potential to be great at anything you choose to be."

But why should I have to, a dark thought asks inside me. I did not care before this. I was happy here, with him, but I was happy before, too! I was happy with my flowers and my Claretta and my home long before anyone came by to destroy my things and chase me away. Why should I have to hate myself now for things I loved before? Why does that matter? How is that fair? My wounds drip blacker as my heart starts to beat faster in my chest. It's not fair. It's not right.

And it's because of August, the hunger in me sneers.

It's his fault, isn't it? All because he had to take me in and be kind to me and make me care until he could show me every way I deserve the torture promised to the worst souls in the world. What sort of kindness is that, what sort of family?

Something screams inside me to stop, but as my wounds throb harder and my head feels lighter those thoughts become less and less distinct, flittering and fraying as fight or flight replaces them with anger. He broke his promise because he came into this room. And he broke his promise because he hurt me. He's hurt me more than everyone else in my life combined, and now he wants me to hurt more. How have I not seen this!? He wants me to spend an entire lifetime, incomprehensible years of existence, in an unending, unceasing torture! He wants me to regret this forever, to hate myself forever, to fight against a memory that I can never unsee! How dare he? How dare he!?

My teeth clamp down, the oh-so-familiar taste of blood flowing into my mouth. August's body stiffens in shock, but he doesn't release the embrace. My teeth finish cutting through his shoulder, and I swallow. It hurts so much. How dare he. He doesn't have the right.

A familiar scent wafts into my nose. The hunter. The monster that kills monsters. She's here. I bite down again, rage to the point of insanity filling my body. She found me. This isn't even a safe place. Liar. Liar! I swallow again, August's left arm going limp, now only able to hug me with half his body. I want to scream.

I bite again. There's a slam as something hits the front door and fails to break it. I bite again as the door shatters, a shouting voice entering our once-home. I bite again and my missing arm starts to regrow fast enough to tear the makeshift bandages he used to save my life. I bite again, and feel his one remaining arm softly stroke the back of my head.

I bite again, and the flesh tastes like ash.

Sobbing into the bloody shoulder of a dead man, it takes me a moment to register that the Hunter is in the room. Vita stares at nothing, wearing the slightest expression of confusion and bewilderment. Her spear is in hand, but not pointing at me. No attack comes.

I leap past her, claws scraping into the wood floor as I turn to bolt out of the building. Glancing behind me, an odd pain hits when I see that she does not chase me. Instead, she kneels down, staring at the corpse I left behind with interest.

I turn, fleeing into the forest, and immediately an arrow nearly tears me in two, knocking me to the ground by the sheer force of it passing. What was that!? I leap away and instant later a gout of fire devours the spot I just stood, but as I dodge a sword catches the motion and cleaves through my rib. But still, alas, not enough to kill. Twisting, I grab the arm holding the blade and let the momentum of the strike drag me away from another arrow as I bite down. The flesh is strange and stale and bloodless, attached to a man with no head. But it still tastes wonderful. No time to question it, I take another bite to fill the hole punched through my lung and rush out of the forest, dodging two more arrows that crack the ground less than an inch from my body.

Forest apparently hostile to me, I'm nearly blinded by tears as I find myself forced back towards the city. Countless arrows rain from the guard towers as I return, but they lack both the force and the accuracy of what I can only suspect was Netta. So, was the swordsman Alan? How is he alive with no blood and no head? I've no time or real desire to consider it. I avoid or simply claw the barrage of arrows out of the sky and breach the city. Swarms of humans both furious and frightened span this place, kicked into a frenzy by my presence. But they are slow and I am clever. Many of the buildings, both large and small, have no people inside for much if not all of each day.

And I must find a safe place to hide, because when I let myself think what I am about to think I will be crippled forever. Inside a two-room shed full of tools, I lock myself in, web the entrance, and curl up in a ball to die.

The unforgivable, unassailable weight of what I have done is too much. How could I… no. What a stupid question. Of course this is how it turned out. I am a monster. This was going to happen from the start, and it didn't become any less inevitable just because I loved him.

The reality is, I did know. I'm not stupid. From the moment Claretta taught me to speak I understood that other creatures feel things. That they have emotions, that if I were in their situation I would suffer. The thought was just so abstract it was no more noteworthy than the acknowledgment that the sky is yellow. It was a fact I was aware of, not one I gave any significant care or thought. But I knew. I knew when Fulvia screamed, I understood when Claretta wished me death, and I recognized the pain when I made a man watch me eat his wife. I knew. The only thing I truly didn't understand was why any of my atrocities started to hurt. But they do now and they will. Not. Stop!

I should not be alive. I should not exist. August was wrong about me. I can't change, I can't improve, and I would not deserve any sort of peace I could acquire from those actions. But I just can't seem to let myself die. Perhaps I'm being kept alive in order to ensure that I suffer more. I suppose I deserve it.

It just wasn't enough to eat my first friend's father. I had to go and eat my own, too.

The door behind me is suddenly forced open. I relax. The hunter is here, I smell her. Yet I am not running or fighting. Finally, finally, it can end. I wait in silence as she hacks away at my webs, slicing them apart with a blade and raw strength. She walks slowly into the room, closing the door behind herself. And then I find myself cursed once more, as she sits down next to me instead of ending my life.

Silence stretches between us, my back to her as I remain curled up on the floor. What is she doing here? Why am I alive? I feel watched, judged, but I can't bring myself to ask. Why do I have to be curious? Really, that failing is what ruined me, not the only man to ever treat me with respect.

Eventually, Vita reaches over and grabs one of my ears. She yanks it painfully, eliciting a snarl from me but nothing else. I'm not going to move. I'm not going to do anything. I'm done. Even when she takes her knife and saws the ear completely off, I barely let even a pained hiss escape my lips.

"Hmm..." Vita hums to herself, pocketing the chunk of my body. "All right, then."

Yanking on my hair, she pulls me out of my curled-up position on the floor, making me look at her face. Then, she grabs my jaw in one hand and forces it open. With the butt of her knife, she slams down on my teeth. Pain shoots through my skull, but still I refuse to move. After a few hard strikes, she sets the knife down, sticks her hand inside my mouth, grabs the loosened tooth, and starts to pull. Slowly, it tears out from my gums until it is finally free, blood gushing into my mouth as she pockets the tooth as well. I could so easily bite off her hand, but I don't. Not even when she batterers and grabs the next tooth, or the next, or the next.

Half my skull's worth of teeth later, the monster grins, her eyes as unfocused as ever.

"There," she says with a hint of self-satisfaction, "that should be enough to fake your death."

It takes me a moment to register the words, before the horror of them finally dawns on me.

"No," I whisper, bloody mouth gurgling slightly. "You're supposed to kill me."

The hunter shrugs.

"I have been convinced not to," she says.

"I'm a monster!" I snap. "I'm not going to do anything but hurt people! Kill me!"

Vita responds by grabbing my hair again, and shoving her other arm down my throat. The movement is instant, expressionless, and devoid of fear. Food, I think to myself! So close, so easy!

"Bite my arm off," she dares me, "and I will happily slay you here and now."

I shiver. Bite down, I order myself. Let it all end. I killed August! Biting her should be easy! I deserve this! She smells delicious, she tastes delicious. I remember the chunk I swallowed from her, how beautiful and rich and dense with power it was! Just bite! Bite!

"Go on," the hunter presses. "I'm waiting. It's a free meal, monster."

The horrible certainty in her smile brings tears to my eyes again. I won't, I can't, and she knows it. How? Why would anyone trust me? I don't trust me!

She extracts the arm, dropping me back to the ground.

"Well, that settles that," Vita says smugly.

"I've killed people before," I hiss impotently.

"Me too," the hunter dismisses. "So what?"

"I have tortured them," I snarl. "I've eaten them."

"Me too," the monster smiles. "So what?"

I have nothing to say to that, so she reaches into another pocket and pulls out what appears to be a dead field mouse. She looks at it, something invisible around her moves, and suddenly I smell the creature with that sense of mine that knows food from fodder. Yet far unlike what I would expect from a mouse, it smells heavenly.

"Such a big and beautiful soul," my fellow monster comments, stroking the dead rodent lovingly. "A deep and gleaming light, smelling of fresh wood. We can't let something like that go to the fucking Watcher, can we?"

I don't know what she's talking about, but before I can ask she holds the mouse out to me, dangling it with its tail pinched between two fingers. A true meal, made from a mouse. How? I salivate. It… it's just a rat, right? I could eat it. There can't be anything wrong with that. I don't deserve to eat it, but I could eat it, right?

Before I know it, she's placed it in my hands. It waits, as if expecting and accepting its fate. It smells familiar.

"Eat up," she says softly. "I have a friend that I think would be very mad at me if I didn't extend to you a bit of solidarity between monsters. She lost her life trying to find a way to get people like you to stop hurting others."

"If you don't want me to hurt others," I whisper, "then you should kill me."

Despite my words, I bring the mouse up to my mouth. Something inside me trembles, fearing it's too good to be true. Yet into my mouth it goes. I am missing many teeth, but my teeth are more for cutting and tearing than chewing anyway. I swallow the creature whole, and though I know that it lived, that it could move, it does not resist in the slightest as it is pushed down my throat into my void of a stomach. The usual tingling of regrowth tickles my ears and gums as a memory screams inside me.

I know this flavor.

"What did you do," I whisper in horror.

"I let him choose," the vacant-eyed monster answers, entirely unsympathetic. "He could be with me, or with you. Considering what I have to do to someone to even ask, he must have loved you quite a lot to make this choice. If he came with me I wasn't even going to eat him."

I'm shaking, my breath too shallow to take in any meaningful amount of air. This is impossible.

"How... What…"

"He had some last words for you," Vita continues, tone as flat as ever. "Two things, really. The first is this: justice is not about punishment, it is about making things right. But we cannot make the past right. All we can affect is the present and the future. An evil person's greatest redemption is not in removing their evil from the world, but in replacing it with good."

My only response is a wordless wail. Again, I don't understand. I don't understand anything.

"The second thing he wanted me to tell you," the monster intones, "is that he forgives you."

She stands up and starts to walk away. No, stop. I don't understand. What did she do to him? What did I just...

"Why?" I sob at her. "Why would..."

"I just told you why," she answers. "Besides, what was he going to do with half a soul if not complete yours?"

She makes it to the door and I stand up, turning to face her.

"What is wrong with you!?" I shriek at her.

She looks back at me, actually focusing with her eyes before tossing a wooden owl mask at my feet. The same one I discarded in our fight.

"Have fun being human, Lark," she says. "It will be night soon. Make your escape then, and don't get caught. If you still want to die, there's always the edge."

She exits, closing and locking the door behind her, leaving me alone but for the screams inside my head. I expect the tears to start again, but, ever unpredictable, I find them dry. Numb. My mind is nothing but torment but my body has given up, wracked with an exhaustion beyond any other I have felt. I wish I could sleep, but I'm simply not capable. Each and every moment of this agony lodges itself in my memory forever, brutally slow hours passing until darkness envelops the town.

Then I get up. I don't know why. August wanted me to live, but what does that matter? I killed him, and then a monster made me do it again. There is no more August. He shouldn't matter anymore. So I tell myself as I find my feet padding silently through the darkness, mask on my face as I look for ways to leave the city unseen.

...He shouldn't matter anymore? No. He does, he will, and that is absolutely how it should be. This pain is what I deserve. No sleep, no forgetting, no death… no escape. Not from what matters. I was a fool to try.

Though I suppose that hunter had a point. There's always the edge.

Good Deed

It always feels nice to do a good deed.

I walk away from the storage shed with a spring in my step. I admit to being a bit leery to let Lark go, but I'll trust my instincts on the matter. Ultimately, isn't our job as hunters to protect people from monsters by any means necessary, not specifically by just killing them? That kid isn't going to bite another person. No way, no how.

Frankly, she's more human than I am now.

Maybe not physically, sure, but she is where it counts. That August guy… I was genuinely surprised to feel him die. Once Penelope finally healed me and I chased after Lark, I couldn't help but pause and wait a bit when I sensed their souls. August was not a fighter, not any sort of warrior, and yet he had one of the brightest souls I've ever felt. It reminded me so much of Lyn, his warmth and his love. It was obvious how much they cared about each other. When he died… I don't know, it just didn't feel right to pocket him like I do most souls. He deserved more than that. He deserved a conversation.

I am extremely frustrated with his decision, but never let it be said that I'm not fair to those that are mine. Lark's fragmented shell of a soul just needed one more push to be complete, and he wanted to be a part of that. Well, more a part of that. And now it's done. A hollow human soul, completely surrounding the void of her nature. I wonder what that means, what it will do. But unfortunately, I can't stick around to find out because I need to convince everyone else that she's fucking dead.

"Vita!"

Ah, speak of the teammate. Orville dashes into view, waving an arm at me. He feels a bit frazzled.

"Vita, please stop running off!" he pants.

"It's not my fault you guys are all slow," I protest, holding up Lark's severed ear. "Job's done."

Surprise, confusion. Disappointment? Guilt? Orville's emotions are strange.

"Really? On your own? You should've at least let us back you up, Vita. What did you do with the rest of the body?"

"I mean, I didn't raise it if that's what you're asking."

"What? No, I mean what happened to it?"

"I… killed it?" I hedge.

He sighs, rubbing at the bridge of his nose.

"Okay, nevermind, I'm sure someone will find it. It's definitely dead?"

"The monster is no more," I assure him. "That thing won't hurt anyone ever again."

"All right, well, good I guess," he huffs, flicking his fingers a bit before firing a piercing whistle of a wind spell up into the sky. Our all-clear signal. "You should have still waited for the rest of us. We're a team, aren't we?"

"I mean, yeah, but you guys couldn't keep up," I point out. "And I had it, so it's fine."

A pause. He's nervous, worried, uncertain. My eye vaguely recognizes the motion of him sucking on the inside of his lip through my soul sight, his physical form mostly a silhouette.

"Penelope says you broke your own legs and nearly bled to death," Orville says slowly.

I scoff.

"I wasn't going to bleed to death," I argue.

When the bite happened, I wrapped the outside of my leg in tendrils. My blood is still part of me, so they held it all inside.

Orville sighs.

"Penelope told me that you'd probably say something like that, and that if you did I'm to inform you that you're a, quote, 'useless idiot that knows less about biology than she does about table manners.' End quote."

I blink. Huh.

"You do a pretty good Penelope impression," I admit.

"Thanks, I think. Anyway, you can still die of blood loss even if all of your blood is still inside your body. You had a severed artery. Apparently, whatever you were doing was just pooling all the blood like a giant bruise. You were still going to pass out eventually."

"Huh," I manage. I guess I'm not as clever as I thought.

"Speaking of," Orville continues, "since you ran off again, you wouldn't happen to have any other injuries, would you?"

I shrug.

"Vita, look at me," Orville says firmly.

"I am looking at you," I insist, a bit confused.

"No, you aren't. You're looking at... a rock or something, I don't know. Vita, are you okay?"

What is he... oh, right. I lift my head and meet his physical eyes with my own. I take a deep breath, trying to focus. Right. Physical pain. I pick up and move my leg around a little, wincing as I feel bone scrape bone.

"Yeah, I might have cracked my legs a little maybe," I admit sheepishly. "I'm still getting a handle on this, but I'm okay! I only got bit a few times, and only once anywhere important."

Getting chomped on the tentacles hurt like hell, but those will regrow just fine. Only Lark's bite on my leg tore anything out of important parts of my soul, and I'm treating that wound already, breaking shards off of my usual spot and dusting them so my soul can recover the places that matter more quickly. My soul's power flows so thickly through my body now that the vrothizo bite damaged me much more than it would a normal person, but it was still just one bite. I'll be fine.

Orville, however, doesn't seem particularly mollified. He rushes over, holding his arms out like he's about to hug me. I step back. Betrayer! I could always count on Orville to be the least touchy member of the team! I used to be able to count on Penelope, but now she's hugging me too!

...I guess it's fine in her case, though. Mostly.

"I am carrying you back to Penelope," Orville insists, his tone brokering no argument.

"What!?" I argue anyway, "I'm fine, I just said so!"

He gives me a weird look—oh hey, I'm still looking at his face, go me—and tries to figure out how to convince me.

"Vita," he eventually starts, "I have been a deadweight all trip. I got knocked out immediately in the only forest fight that mattered, and I only managed to get one shot at our target which she just fucking backhanded out of the sky. At least let me make Penelope's job easier by stopping you from messing up your legs more than they already are."

I scowl, an expression that I stick and keep firmly on my face as my teammate turns around and coaxes me into a piggyback ride. Indignantly, I climb on and he carries me halfway across the city. Penelope, Bently, and Norah are all there, standing near a guard tower that we agreed upon as our rendezvous point.

"Aw, hey you two!" Norah says, waving. "You look cute together."

Penelope's face scrunches together in irritation. I blink, not expecting to see Norah so… cheerful. I thought she was still mad at me.

"I am way too heavily armed to be cute," I protest. "Also, my legs are probably broken."

"Did you… is she dead?" Bently asks hesitantly.

"Yeah, I got her. Took proof and some souvenirs, too!" I wave the severed ear around, to Norah and Bently's obvious discomfort.

"Stupid. Reckless. Foolish," Penelope chides angrily, approaching us. "Orville, did she try to act like her injuries were no big deal?"

"Yeah, I told her what you said," he grunts.

Penelope nods, a bit of anger bubbling up in her. Worry, fear... something else I don't really want to think about.

"All right, put her down, I'll fix her again," she snaps.

Orville does as instructed, squatting so he can plop my butt onto the ground. Penelope approaches as she usually does, pulling mana into her soul in order to start casting a spell… and then she slaps me in the face.

I blink, stunned.

"Didn't see that coming, did you?" Penelope sneers. "Couldn't read my intent?"

"Why would I expect someone worried about me to slap me?" I grumble back. Is she already figuring out ways to fool me? No, that's a supid question, of course she is.

"You are not invincible, you insufferable, arrogant, thing," she hisses, actually starting to cast the healing spell this time. "Whatever you're doing to detach yourself from pain, stop. You need to come back and pay attention to the fucking physical, or sooner rather than later I won't catch up to you fast enough to save your foolish hide again. Do you understand?"

I scowl, tempted to smack her back but… I don't actually want to hurt her. Geez, this is a blast from the past. I figured we were done with the slapping. Still, she's probably got a point.

"Sorry," I manage to force myself to say. "I just… ever since the Nawra, ever since I could just step back and not worry about this stupid body I've wanted to go back to that. It feels like I'm in a fucking cage, like this nagging feeling that I'm not supposed to be in here anyway. I'm trapped in this... this gross meat sack that's just too weak and too rigid to do anything. But now I'm suddenly so full of energy! I want to use it. It's... I don't know. A leap forward? A glimpse into whatever I'm supposed to be? I hate holding back, Penelope. It feels like hiding from the truth and it hurts."

Penelope lets out an indignant huff of air.

"The only person that gets to decide what you're supposed to be is you." A pause. "And to a lesser extent me, since I own you."

The rest of our team immediately gets uncomfortable, but I just roll my eyes.

"My point is," Penelope continues, "whatever it is you're seeking is not set in stone, and you aren't going to get whatever it is if you gallivant off and get yourself killed! Be patient! Think! You can bloody well work through your identity crisis without breaking your fucking legs! Is that so much to ask?"

I scowl.

"Fine. I get your point," I grumble. "You were much less naggy before you got a crush on me. At least Orville's never been weird about it."

Silence. Then Norah wheezes like she suddenly can't breathe and I become surrounded by emotional chaos. Embarrassment, fury, despair, manic joy… Bently stares with sad puppy-dog eyes at Orville, who glances between Penelope and I in mounting horror as Penelope starts turning so red I'm worried her entire head will turn into a bruise.

"Fine!" Penelope all but shrieks. "Fine, I'm done! Go get yourself killed, tear your legs to shreds, I don't care!"

She gets up and starts walking away towards the forest.

"I think my legs are still broken!" I call out to her.

"Then get someone to carry you!" Penelope snaps back.

"Holy shit, I can't believe you just said that!" Norah wheezes, leaning down to lift me up by the armpits. I yelp a little as she puts me up on her shoulders. Fuck, she's so tall, how does she live like this?

"It's just true," I grumble.

"I know, I know," Norah laughs. "It just really hits home how... Vita you are. You know? You've been even more Vita than usual lately."

I wrinkle my nose.

"You say that like it's a bad thing."

"No, no!" Norah insists, starting to walk after Penelope. "Just… the way you think differently from other people, it feels like that's been getting more prominent. I don't know, it is what it is. There's bad parts maybe, but there's good parts too."

"Maybe I just don't want to put in as much effort to pretend to be something I'm not anymore," I answer, shrugging. "Honestly, I haven't really noticed. It just feels natural to me."

Norah nods slowly.

"I've been thinking about all that, you know?" she says. "About how Penelope thinks you're a human experiment. About… I don't know, I guess all the stuff you just said about feeling trapped and wanting to be yourself and stuff. Some bastard shoved a talent in you that you never asked for. That's not fair, that's not your fault."

"Well, I think it might be a little more complicated than that," I say. "My soul is all kinds of weird. But, um, are we still friends?"

"Of course we are, Vita," Norah insists, and I know she means it. "I don't think I can agree with everything I'm afraid you might be doing, but... Bently is right. You're not a bad person. You're our Vita."

"Please stop injuring yourself, though," Bently chimes in.

"How long have you known?" Orville mutters quietly at me.

"Known what?" I ask him.

"How long have you known he's had a crush on you, Vita?" Norah translates for me, suppressing another chuckle.

"Oh. I don't know," I shrug. "Like a month I guess? It's okay Orville, I don't really care."

Unfortunately that just makes him feel worse for some reason, and Norah starts hooting with laughter again. Bently gives Orville a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. I look around at everyone with confusion.

"I… sorry?" I hedge.

"No, no!" Norah chokes between howls of laughter. "You're fine, Vita! Go ahead and let him down easy!"

…And then she starts laughing harder. Well, I guess that's okay. It seems like we've made up, which is really good! I was worried. Norah is a really important friend. We've fought together, saved each other, and helped each other in a lot of places. I really don't want animancy to push the team apart.

We start our journey back to Skyhope. It takes a day for Penelope to be willing to heal my legs, and another day for her to talk to anyone without biting their head off. Apparently, publicly announcing other people's crushes is a social no-no. I will do my best to remember that, I guess.

Still, my body feels fresher and better, more my own. My team is being less weird about it, even asking me stuff about how my abilities work with genuine interest. They're talking to the Revenants more, with even Norah treating them like people. I'm happy. The trip home is a good one.

On the last night of our journey before returning to Skyhope, I wake up in horror to the feeling of Alan being shattered into innumerable pieces, his soul destroyed forever as Norah and Bently stomp his bones to dust.

Rhetorical Questions

I explode into motion, fueled by panic and terror. As is our habit, I sleep when most of the rest of the team is awake to ensure that while the longest-range scout is down, we are at our best versus potential ambushes. This time, I had been in a particularly deep and comfortable sleep thanks to Mateo curling around me like a loyal snake-monster cocoon. I think I was even having a nice dream for once, though I don't really remember it.

This all ends in an instant as Alan's soul becomes dust. Body raging and tentacles writhing, I leap over Mateo's flank and burst towards Norah and Bently, furious scream ripping itself from my throat.

"You fucking monsters!" I shriek, tackling Bently in the gut. "You dusted him! You killed him permanently!"

Bently staggers backwards but catches me without falling, grabbing my comparatively tiny wrists and struggling to fight my soul-enhanced strength. Snarling, I wrap tendrils around his core, causing him to immediately drop me in terror. Should I do it? Do I kill him? No, no, what am I thinking? It's Bently. I can't… but why would they do this, how could they do this?

"Vita!" Norah shouts, "Vita, stop! He told us to! Look, I'll show you!"

She points in front of the body— oh fuck, he's dust, he's nothing but dust now, my beautiful cake full of swords— and my eyes focus on part of the ground that looks like someone scratched half a conversation with a stick into the dirt.

Hello to you too, Norah.

I am all right, all things considered. Yourself?

Strange, but not as bad as you'd think.

I do, yes.

Just a nice, normal conversation. Alan can't talk but he can write. There's no one writing back, Norah and Bently were presumably speaking aloud and waiting politely for the words to be scratched into the dirt. The conversation continues, neat and orderly. It doesn't take long until it's about me.

Miss Vita is an odd sort, but a good sort.

In general? Well, animancy is illegal of course.

I don't think there's any need to worry about Miss Vita.

My good, loyal Revenants. I know I shouldn't think like that, I know that forcing loyalty on someone is messed up. But I also know that I love it. It's just what I am, I suppose. They are comfortable, they are safe. They are so much easier than normal people.

I'm not sure. It just feels wrong to not use a title, I suppose.

Norah must have asked about the name. "Miss Vita." Honestly, I don't even know why so many of them like calling me that.

She saved my life. Should I not be grateful?

Of course you should! You're welcome!

I suppose that isn't untrue.

Why would she be messing with my head?

Not on purpose?

The fuck is this shit? Are they purposefully steering the conversation towards my Revenants being mind controlled? I explicitly tried to not let on… ugh. I glance up at Norah with my soul-eye, physical ones still reading. She's scared. No, mortified. She suspected I'd been mind controlling for a while now and wanted to be wrong. Turns out she wasn't.

I just want to live. I know the Watcher waits for me, but when I look at her I just want

Cut off, huh? Didn't even let him finish.

You might be right.

You're right. How did I not

I love her so much

I'm an abomination.

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck! She twisted him! She… she took him from me! I… okay, maybe I twisted him first. He was religious. I knew that. He probably would have agreed with Norah had he been alive. But he was wrong! Their religion is wrong! And now he's dust and he won't ever get to… aagh!

You have to destroy me.

No! When she wakes up I'll see her face and

Yes. I mean it. Send me to the Watcher. The others too.

Free us.

"Fuck you, Norah!" I hiss. Am I crying?

"Vita, he asked us to do this," Norah snaps back. "You were messing with his head! Bently and I agreed on this, this is beyond fucked up! They need to move on to the afterlife, you never told us you were—"

"You shattered him you stupid bitch!" I shriek. "Even if your god wasn't going to eat him anyway there is nothing left. Everything was linked to the bones and you crushed them and now he's gone forever! He doesn't get an afterlife anymore!"

Pangs of hostility behind me caused me to tear my gaze off of Norah, rotating my inner eye completely around to stare at Mateo and Netta. The latter has knocked and drawn her bow, face furious as she aims at Norah. Mateo coils towards Bently, power gathering in his soul as his massive body slithers forward, shaking with grief. A split second later, Orville draws his bow as well, aiming towards Mateo. Penelope, who has been napping even though she's not technically supposed to, rouses quickly, blinking twice at the scene and scowling with the sort of bland irritation she might have at an overcooked meal.

"What did I miss?" she grumbles.

"Two of yours killed one of ours," Netta growls, air magic already starting to swirl around her arrow.

"We'll sssee how they like it," Mateo hisses.

"Netta, hey, don't..." Orville begs, swallowing nervously. "Don't make me fight you."

"You're being mind controlled!" Norah shouts, drawing and raising her shield. "Can't you see that?"

"I just… he asked us to," Bently whines. "He was in so much pain. He was shaking. I just thought—"

"Everyone shut up and stand down!" I shout.

Mateo halts immediately, but Netta twitches, fighting to keep her bow drawn.

"Down, Netta," I snap again, and with a shutter she releases the tension in her body, pointing her weapon back down to the ground.

"Do you see what I mean?" Norah hisses, gesturing to me.

"Fuck! You!" I fume, turning my eye back her way. "I just saved your life, again, and you're fucking demonizing me for it! Again! Do you think I asked for this? Do you think I did this on purpose? This is just how my power works!"

"So you knew that your power mind controls people and you just didn't tell us?" Norah asks. "Is that supposed to make me feel better?"

Damnit, I thought it was a good thing that Norah was finally starting to talk with the Revenants and treat them like people, but it was just giving her the chance to figure out how weird being a Revenant makes them! I thought it would be unfair to trap them inside me rather than let them walk around since we're in the forest anyway and everybody knows about them. Why do I keep getting my ass bitten off whenever I try to do something nice!?

"I'm sorry," Bently squeaks, somehow seeming so tiny despite his massive frame. "Alan was just so scared and Norah was freaking out and Alan begged us, he begged us to—"

"So correct me if I'm mistaken here," Penelope chimes in, stretching and adjusting her armor as she stands, "but you're saying that someone requested an assisted suicide, someone who hadn't wanted to die mere minutes beforehand, someone that you definitively identified as being mentally compromised... and you said yes?"

Bently tries to shrink even further.

"It's not a fucking suicide, he's already dead!" Norah snaps.

"Oh, shove it five feet up your ass!" Netta barks. "I'm missing an eye and I can see that's bullshit!"

"You can't fucking tell me that Vita isn't messing with your head," Norah counters. "She literally just forced you to do something. Right in front of all of us."

"Yeah, you're fucking welcome," I growl.

"Of course I know that, I'm not an idiot," Netta spits back, and she probably would have spat more literally if she was still capable. "I just don't see why that means you get to stomp my teammate's bones into powder like a Watcher-damn barbarian! There are reasons for what we do, for the laws we have and the policies we follow. Hunters destroy the undead because the souls are tortured and violent, a danger to everyone. Do I look tortured or violent to you?"

"You just aimed a bow my head!"

"And you just murdered my team leader. What's your fucking point?"

We're all drowning in shit now, and I don't know how to swim. Part of me just wants to rip the souls out of Norah and Bently and call it even, but I push that part down and bottle it up. What went wrong here? How can I make it right? I don't understand enough about people to know what Norah wants from me, but I have to try something.

"Norah, if you had talked to me about this we could've worked something out," I try.

"Then why didn't you say anything?" she counters.

"Well… I was afraid you'd freak out!" I defend honestly. "Which you did!"

"I freaked out because you didn't tell me! Why the fuck would you expect me to not freak out when I learn my friend has mind control powers!?"

"I don't have 'mind control powers!'" I insist. "That's cognimancy, and I can't do that. It's just that when I bring someone back from the dead, I have to take out a bit of my own soul and put it in them to make them work, so—"

"You've been mutilating your own soul!?" Norah yelps. "Vita we need to get you in to see someone that can help you!"

"You will do no sssuch thing," Mateo warns, slithering closer. "Vita hasss made herssself clear on the matter."

"Siccing the monster you made out of a human on me is not going to change my opinion on how badly you need help," Norah growls, activating her talent in anticipation of an attack.

"I am not siccing anyone!" I insist. "And don't call him a monster! My Revenants are just instinctively loyal, okay? It's not on purpose! I'm trying to figure out how to fix it!"

"You should just be letting the Watcher fix it!" Norah snaps at me.

"What, like you? You didn't leave anything for the Mistwatcher to collect! I saved his soul, but you shattered it!"

"You can't just smack someone hard enough that they don't go to the afterlife, Vita!"

I narrow my eyes, lips twisting into a snarl. She really thinks she knows better than me here, huh?

"You wanna bet?" I ask coldly, walking towards her. "Are you going to let the animancer educate you on how fucking souls work? Or are you going to keep acting like I don't know as much as a random idiot preaching in a fancy hat?"

"Vita," Norah breathes, "don't make me—"

"Don't make you what?"

I stare her down for a few moments, remembering to use the eyes in my head to make sure she knows it. Then I walk right past her, pull a shard from my body, and stick it into a nearby tree. The web of veins extruded from my shard twist up into each and every branch and down through the deepest root.

"Bodies are just objects," I tell her, projecting my voice so everyone can hear. "They're special only in that when a soul is inside one, the Mistwatcher doesn't reach up to eat it. But I can technically make a zombie out of anything, as long as it isn't already alive in the way that matters. Bend towards me, Dreg."

I order my tree and it obeys, branches creaking and crackling as every single one of them attempts to twist in my direction. My team watches in silence, having finally shut the fuck up.

"Zombies don't use eyes to see, they don't use ears to hear, they don't use noses to smell, and they don't use muscles to move. A tree can't normally move itself, but as you can see this one moves anyway because I gave it a soul, and the structure of that soul is shaped to snake through it, anchor to it, meld with it and become tangible to it and only it. The soul moves the vessel. But the vessel also moves the soul."

I am furious, and I take my time with the lecture just to give myself something to help calm me down. She doesn't believe souls can break, that souls can become irrecoverable. Norah thinks she did a good thing, rather than dooming a kind man to permanent nonexistence. I can't fucking believe her. I reach up to a branch, grab it, and break it off.

"Snap," I say. "Oops, this part of the soul is broken now. Disconnected. Gone. Most souls can recover from that. Living souls aren't damaged when the body is damaged because they don't act like this, at least not usually. But in the undead, the soul is tied to each and every bit. So when you smash too much of it..."

I glance up at the tree.

"Bend," I order again.

My Revenants flinch, both of them twisting their bodies a little to fulfill the letter of the order, but the Dreg I made from this tree has no such intelligence. The branches creak as they twist, and soon they start to break. Snapping and shattering, one by one at first, but soon they start to clatter like a waterfall to the forest floor in a horrible cacophony of death. A second of this passes until finally the tension is too much and the strength of the remaining soul is too little. My shard shatters, the tree jerking suddenly back into its prior position, well over half its limbs splintered on the ground. A small price to pay to make my point heard.

No one speaks. No one even moves.

"It breaks," I explain. "You can't put a fucking soul back together like a bunch of puzzle pieces, Norah. Souls can be sturdy. Souls can recover from a lot of damage. But when I say a soul is shattered, what I mean is that the constituent parts left of what it once was have become so small that they no longer hold form. They lose whatever fragments of memory and personhood they used to possess, returning to nothing but raw energy that can be slurped up like the last bits of stew in a bowl. That is why you can smack someone hard enough to deny them the afterlife. That is what you fucking did to Alan. That is why you needed to talk to someone that actually knows what they're doing instead of assuming that that person is you!"

I glower at everyone, Penelope having taken particular interest in my rant while the others just seem shocked and mildly mortified. I let the silence stretch, having already said everything I intend to.

"…Fine, we'll do things your way," Norah manages quietly. "I'm sorry. We just did what he asked us to do what we thought was right. Yeah?"

She glances over to Bently with that, who nods in agreement despite his obvious horror at the entire situation.

"He asked us to free the others too," Norah says slowly, "but I guess you're right that it's not his call. I'll back off."

"You expect usss to just let you get away with it?" Mateo growls. "He wasss my best friend."

"Seconded on that, you overgrown bitch," Netta agrees sharply.

Norah glances at me and I scoff with disgust. Now she wants me to save her with mind control? As Netta and Mateo tense for combat, however, Orville, Norah, and a hesitant Bently do the same. I'm tempted to just let them all fight it out; it's not like my Revenants would lose and the whole thing would officially become not my problem. However, as I glance around I notice behind me that Penelope shakes her head, ever so subtly. Her soul is insisting that no, fighting here would be a terrible idea. I suck on the inside of my lip and think for a second. Yeah, it's not exactly a great look if Penelope and I come back as the only survivors. Could the Templars use that as an excuse to pound through the wall of bureaucracy Penelope and her fiancé set up and start officially investigating me? It's probably not worth the risk.

"Sorry Mateo, Netta, but I do expect you to let her get away with it. Or at least keep her alive. On the condition, of course, that she agrees to not tell anyone when we get back to Skyhope."

"Vita, are you fucking serious?" Norah hisses at me.

"Why would I not be serious? If you go and blab to the church about me, I die. It seems like a pretty serious situation to me."

"You're not going to fucking die!" Norah insists. "The Templars aren't evil maniacs! The church can help you, Vita! You're a victim, they'll understand that!"

"Norah, I am Penelope's slave because Galdra the fucking Annihilator picked me up by the throat while a Templar captain prepared to skewer me through the spine!"

"I can confirm that," Penelope agrees blandly. "After we were nearly killed by the Mistwatcher, the High Templar blamed Vita for causing it and would have executed her on the spot if I hadn't intervened."

"Well we don't have to go to Galdra of all—"

"Norah," I intone dangerously. "Do you agree to keep this secret or not? For that matter, Bently? Orville? Penelope? Are any of you going to get me fucking killed?"

After only a few seconds, Orville shakes his head no and relaxes his body. I figured he would fall in my camp, considering how much he cares for Netta. Bently caves soon after, completely crumpling under the social pressure. I'm confident he'll keep the secret. I of course already know where Penelope stands, I just didn't want to single her out via exclusion. After nearly half a minute, Norah agrees to not tell anyone as well. We pack up and we start the last leg of the journey back to Skyhope.

The only problem being that Norah was lying.

An hour later, I ask her again if she plans to tell anyone. She says no, still lying. Half an hour after that, I ask again. Lying. When we're almost to the edge of the forest I ask her one final time.

"Watcher's eyes, Vita, no! I'm not going to tell anyone! Why the fuck do you keep asking?"

"Because I can see your soul, Norah," I sigh. "I told you guys that already. I can tell when you don't believe what you say."

"Vita, come on, don't give me that shit. I won't sell you out or betray you or whatever you're afraid of!"

I step in front of her, halting our progress through the forest.

"Norah, this is a matter of life and death for me. You know that. I need you to give me an honest answer."

"I did," Norah snaps. "Vita, I'm serious."

"I feel you making justifications," I growl. "You writhe and twist, you feel hard and hollow. You're lying."

"Vita…" she starts.

"Give me an honest answer or I will kill you," I tell her frankly.

Silence. Everyone turns to stare at me. Shock, grim resignation, fear… agreement from Penelope, which is reassuring. Still, I don't want to do this. The last thing I want is to do this. But I will not sit back and let her get me killed, even if it means getting her first. I cannot die. Not when I'm the only hope for Penta, for Angelien, for Lyn, for Rowan, for all the kids, for every human I've picked up and stored inside me. I will not let their souls get crushed to dust by the monster that waits below. So I will not, must not die.

"W-what do you expect me to say?" Norah asks me, stepping back.

I step forward, tendrils coiled and ready.

"Tell me the truth. Change your mind before you say no again, or tell me the honest yes and let me convince you otherwise."

"You just want me to... to stand here and wait for you to convince me that animancy is okay?" she asks incredulously.

"Yes," I say simply. "I don't want to kill you, Norah, but I will not let you kill me."

"Hey, isn't this a little… extreme?" Orville hedges.

"She's making it about me or her," I snap. "What do you expect me to do, fall over and wait to get skewered by Templars?"

"Sh-she could be telling the truth," Bently stammers. "What if you're wrong?"

"I'm. Not. Wrong," I answer through clenched teeth. "I am very, very tired of having to explain that I'm not wrong."

"Vita," Norah pleads, reaching a hand out towards my shoulder, "I promise you, I—"

The moment she touches me her talent activates, solidifying and hardening every joint in my armor. My whole body freezes like a statue as she kneels, bringing my body to the ground. I'm well aware that no amount of straining will allow my limbs to move the hardened shell she has created around me, even with my enhanced strength. As I'm laid carefully on my back, my Revenants burst into action immediately. Yet they're too close to her. She activates her hardening talent on their bodies, something not possible for her with living flesh but apparently easy enough to use on two dead Revenants at once. Her talent is strained to the absolute limit, but even the massive Mateo falls.

"Bently!" Norah orders. "Pull them closer so I can touch them, or I won't be able to keep this up! We're going to get Vita to someone that can help and keep her safe. Okay? No one has to—"

"What did you expect this to accomplish?" I ask, and rip out her soul.

Silence falls along with her body as I stand back up, cracking my neck. I nestle her inside me, carefully inserting her in that special place right next to Angelien and Penta. Norah had been my friend, one of the few I have ever had.

"What?" I snap at my team, refusing to cry. "I warned her."

Disgusting

"W-what did you just do?"

Bently stands shaking, so overwhelmed by confusion and terror that he denies the obvious reality I made sure to keep explicitly clear. Norah's corpse lies face down in the grass and dirt of the forest, collapsed like a doll after I cut her strings. The inflexibility of her armor forces her into an awkwardly slumped-over position, her knee caught under her belly and her arm splayed at an awkward angle that keeps her chest up off the ground. Only after a slight nudge from my boot does she finish her collapse.

"I killed her," I say clearly.

Orville looks away. There's a slight spasm in Bently's body as he suppresses an urge to vomit.

"She was our friend," Bently whispers.

"Yes," I agree. "She was. But she was going to get me and lots of people I care about killed. She wouldn't listen."

"I just…" Orville starts, his breath catching. "It's so sudden. Just like that and she's gone?"

Sudden? I warned her. She just didn't listen to that either.

"Wasn't there some other way?" Orville presses.

I scowl at him.

"I tried using words. I'm not good at words, you both know that! But I mean what I say. She was going to get me killed. It was her or me if she kept pushing. I told her. I told all of you! And none of the rest of you said or did a damn thing!"

That shuts them up. Fine. All I need from them is to shut up.

"So now I have to ask again," I growl. "Is anyone else going to make the same mistake?"

I'm going to start getting used to being stared at, at this rate. Orville takes a few moments, staring at what was once Norah, before slowly shaking his head. Before, he just didn't think I was in the wrong. Now there's a bit of fear mixed in, but he's smart. I don't think he'll betray me. Bently, unfortunately, is not smart... but at this point he's broken.

I watch in real time as his mind starts to unravel and snap at the seams. It's not as dramatic as it sounds; just the tearing apart of a fundamentally good person who until now saw everyone else the same way. Someone who genuinely believed that there would always be a way to resolve our conflicts. Someone who thought his axe would only ever be for big, scary monsters that thump around in forests and nightmares.

Frankly, I'm not opposed to disabusing him of that ridiculous notion. So long as he doesn't seem willing to raise that axe to me, I don't care. And as I stare at him, I know there isn't a chance he'd risk losing another one of us to this. That would be too far. The puppy is still loyal.

"Good," I say, nodding.

Next item on the agenda would be the body, then. I have an idea, but it involves Mateo and I don't want to accidentally force him into agreeing. I glance at Penelope, then indicate Norah's corpse with my head, hoping she has a similar train of thought. She smiles.

"Mateo, I realize this is somewhat distasteful, but would you be so kind as to take a bite out of Norah for us?" she asks.

Good old Penelope. I can always count on her. I mean, that's super brutal and not what I was going to say at all, but it works! Mateo squirms uncomfortably, which is honestly pretty cute to watch on a twenty foot long murder serpent.

"I sssee the logic, but dissstasssteful doesss not begin to cover it," he rumbles. "It would not be a proper hunter'sss burial."

"We should strip the armor," Netta says. "And then we should poison the body and use it as bait. A good hunter protects the city even in death."

I look around, seeing a lot of nods of assent. A Hunter's death. People who die in the city tend to be burned, but a hunter's body, already out in the forest, can be used for more.

It's tempting to keep Norah's body. Perhaps much later, when I no longer have to worry about her, I can put her back in it. But there's just no way to justify dragging the body back and bringing it with the others. How are we to make the case that Norah died to a monster when we have her corpse, completely intact, brought back with us to the city? We'll probably have to throw away a fair chunk of her armor for the same reason. Well, we could get Mateo to munch that probably. A lot less distasteful to smash the armor than it is to bite a human body, I suppose. I personally don't see the fuss, but I have to agree using the corpse as bait is a better idea anyway.

Penelope apparently does too, as she heads over to the body to cast on it, filling it with who knows what sort of terrifying cocktail of diseases. I should still offer what I was going to, so I decide on how I'm going to word it and then do so.

"Before we get too far into this, I was actually going to ask if you want Norah's body, Mateo," I say.

He has been getting a lot more comfortable as a big spooky monster these past few days, but I figure I should still ask if he prefers a humanoid form. Everybody just gives me a really weird look though, including Mateo.

"I guess that's a no?" I hedge.

"I would be lesss than comfortable in the body of a teenage girl," Mateo says slowly. "And I sssuspect no one else would be comfortable with that either."

"For many reasons," Netta agrees, disapproval radiating at me from all sides.

"Okay, geez, I was just asking," I grumble defensively. "It's not like she's gonna be using it."

Bently starts to cry, and I take that as my cue to shut up. Humans are weird. I wait for Penelope to finish casting before addressing the next item we have to take care of before finally heading home from this bullshit journey.

"Mateo, Netta, what do you guys want to do? I can keep your souls safe until we find somewhere safe you can live, you can hang out in the forest if you want, or you could die-die, I guess."

"Forest," Netta answers immediately, and Mateo nods his agreement. "Didn't I just say? A good hunter protects the city even in death."

I nod. Good on them.

"Okay. You can't last forever like this, you will eventually degrade. We'll have to meet up every once in a while so I can feed you and keep you on your feet. You might be able to recharge by killing other undead, though, if you find any. Basically, smash them and you can take their soul dust. Otherwise, I can give you more of my soul to feed you. Don't worry, it doesn't really hurt me."

They nod.

"You're of course free to come with me if you want, Orville," I tell him. "Instead of visiting my family all the time, we can visit yours!"

He sighs, glancing between people, corpses, and those who are both.

"…Not quite how I imagined it would go," Orville mutters to himself.

"I never had much use for all the money the hunter's guild kept throwing at me," Netta grunts, "but legally it's all yours now, Orville. My will is at the guild and it says you are your own man."

He frowns.

"Thank you. Won't my heritage fuck with that?" he asks.

"I'll make sure it doesn't," Penelope dismisses. "There's no one better at abusing bureaucracy than my fiancé. You'll find the proper paperwork in your hands, Orville. One way or another."

He nods a thank-you and we finally depart for home, Bently remaining silent for the rest of the trip. I wave goodbye to Netta and Mateo, and before long the walls of Skyhope are in sight. Many of the guards watch me nervously as we wait at the gate, Penelope grumbling about the inadequacies of the biomancer checking us for parasites. I grin at one of the gate workers giving me a worried look to try and put them at ease, but he jumps a little and quickly looks away. I guess that backfired. Oh well.

We trudge through the streets of the city, returning to the guild and letting Orville give the report to our grim-faced branch leader. The loss of Netta, Alan, and Mateo is a heavy blow to the already struggling guild. I mostly don't bother to pay attention, a bit on edge from being watched by so many of my fellow scouts in the building. I know I feel dangerous and all, but this is getting ridiculous.

When Orville is done and the branch leader grimly instructs us to stand by, Bently finally speaks up.

"I-I would like to resign, sir," he stammers.

The branch leader seems entirely unsurprised, too exhausted to put up an argument even with our lack of staffing. He's not the kind of man to beg someone to go die for him if they didn't volunteer. I've always liked our branch leader, frankly. He's a good man, trying his best to keep our city together in the places he can. Bently's request is agreed to immediately, and our former teammate walks out, leaving Orville, Penelope, and I without anyone to act as a frontline. Well, I suppose I could do it, but I'm happy to not get sent on missions for a while. That one was... rough.

So Bently leaves. Penelope begrudgingly makes her way to the infirmary, where I can feel Claretta currently managing things. Fulvia is nowhere within my range. Orville heads to his room, and I to mine, quickly stripping out of my armor before digging Rosco out from under my pillow.

I sit down on my bed, squeezing my stuffed bird as hard as I can, tentacles poking and prodding the inert souls inside my body. I don't feel like myself. The starving, tiny girl who panicked and tried to give the soul back to a man who nearly beat me to death is a distant, embarrassing memory. Norah's bed taunts me from across the room, thoughts of what I could have said to just make her listen dancing in the back of my mind, arguments replaying over and over. Norah. Huge, beautiful, reliable Norah. She was my friend. She was my teammate. She was my lifeline. A good person, through and through.

But she just didn't believe me where it counted. She couldn't take the one step I needed her to take to stay friends. And now she's dead. I should feel sad, but I'm mostly just… angry. Furious at her stubbornness and her stupidity, her inability to just trust me with my own life and the seriousness of the things I do.

I suppose in some ways I can hardly blame her for not believing I know what I'm doing. So often, I really don't. Things just feel so out of hand, so out of my control. I keep trying to make the best choices I can, do the right thing as often as possible, and everything keeps blowing up in my face. I don't know what to do anymore. I don't know how to be the Vita that grabs the reins of her own life that I want to be. It just feels like every step ends in disaster.

At some point, I'm curled up on top of the bed, head on my pillow. At some point, I'm crying again. I hate this all so much. I hate my life, I hate my body, I hate this city, and I hate everything and everyone who keeps getting in my way. I wish I could just be free, take some time to think, let everything slow down so I can figure out what I even am before deciding on all the things I need to do. But life just doesn't want to wait for me.

I fall asleep, my pathetic body exhausted after days of fighting and travel with minimal rest. When I finally wake up, the darkness of an island above blackening my room, it's not to an emergency. It's just to the realization that for the last day and a half I seem to have forgotten to pee.

I extract myself from bed with an uncomfortable grumble, my soul sight unbothered by the lack of light as I make my way through the building and to the bathroom outside. I must spend at least half an hour there between exhaustion and constipation. I try to focus, trying to do what Penelope demanded I do and pay attention to my body. I can't just ignore this disgusting bag of flesh and organs that I regretfully require to house my true self. It used to be so much easier, even a month ago, but now it feels like trying to scrape myself raw. It can't ever truly be the same, not with the veins of energy extruding from my core and wrapping through each and every nook and cranny in the meat sack other people see as me. In some ways I seem stuck between either feeling too little of my body or feeling far, far too much. My soul wraps around my heart, feeling it beat. It twists within my stomach, the sloshing acid inside far more apparent to me now than could possibly be helpful. The kinds of things my mundane senses are explicitly designed to ignore are all too apparent to the new senses in my soul. And yet, the information that's actually helpful, the things my body needs to know in order to ensure that I function correctly, like pain and hunger and dizziness and bloat… these things do not have an equivalent soul sense.

It's not that I'm avoiding paying attention to what my body tells me, it's that I seem to be forgetting how. I don't want to admit that, but I am. Like Norah said, I'm just getting more Vita-like. I don't know what that means, but I hope it hurries up. The euphoria I got from achieving this stage of my metamorphosis wore off days ago. Only the displeasure is left, the irritation of not knowing what I'm supposed to be but knowing without a doubt that this isn't it. I let air out of my lungs, and perhaps against my better judgment I delve back into the deep blue abyss of my soul. If I forget to breathe and start suffocating to death, hopefully falling into the toilet will wake me up.

I pull at the mana, filling the spiritual veins and capillaries snaking through me as I trace their path backwards to the ocean of my true self. The channel is still too thin, too far. But for a single short minute, I can bask in the one part of myself that doesn't feel hideous and wrong.

My meat falls forward, and with a gasp of breath I return to the grim immediacy of the bathroom. Finishing my business, I stand up and prepare to depart, a scowl on my face. Something powerful, dangerous, and very annoying has approached me in the time I was too distracted to notice, although I don't sense ill intentions from him so perhaps that's why I didn't bother to acknowledge it. I open the bathroom door, willing myself to maintain focus on my body.

"Do you often stalk young women using the restroom?" I ask, staring up at the sky.

Or just at Sky, rather.

"Please excuse my terrible timing," the mob boss answers, floating in the air a solid ten feet above the rooftops. "We both seem to have quite busy schedules, and it has been so difficult arranging a conversation with you."

His soul just radiates ego. In some ways it's an invigorating sort of feeling, an arrogance built on a powerful enough backing to be almost attractive. Put a big, big emphasis on that 'almost,' though. Even the stupid meat part of me that occasionally, annoyingly cares about such things finds little to appreciate in his almost comically feminine frame. He's floating at an angle that lets the coming light of dawn silhouette his body, I think for dramatic effect? Yet all it does is make me realize that he has fuller hips than I do. Not that it's much of a contest, but still.

"That's too bad," I say. "Good night."

Then I walk back into the guildhouse while he's still surprised, letting him fume. I'm tired, and fuck if I'm dealing with him before getting at least another three hours of sleep.

Personal Day arrives too soon, light oozing in through the windows and frustrating my body enough to force it awake. I lie motionlessly in bed for quite some time after, however, not paying attention to my soul sense or meditating or cycling mana or thinking or planning or anything at all. I just stay still, holding Rosco and wishing that I was still unconscious.

I haven't done this sort of thing in a long time. Back when I was starving, back when I was alone on the street with nothing to look forward to, some days were like this. Days when I lacked the energy to even beg for food, mustering only enough attention to pray for the ground to open and drop me to my demise. It was Lyn who ultimately chased those days away, who gave me something to live for and eventually kept me alive long enough for my true self to awaken, a moment which has dictated the entirety of my life since.

I suppose I should get up and go see her, now that I'm back. No doubt she's worried sick.

Half an hour later, I manage to rise to my feet and start strapping on my armor. No one pilfered it in the night to get it cleaned. That was probably something Norah used to do. I don't personally care if my armor is covered in blood or not. If anything, having viscera all over me is probably a good deterrent against getting mugged, in the rare cases the armor and weapon alone aren't enough. You have to be ten kinds of stupid or desperate to draw a knife on someone already splattered with death and expect anything to work out for you. Of course, all of the blood on my armor is either from that giant flying vrothizo, from my own team, or— mostly— from me. Everything else I just killed with a soul pull or avoided. There's still a huge hole in the armor, on the back of the left knee, where Lark bit me. I wonder how she's doing. Probably terrible. But what do I know? I've had three conversations with her and two of them ended with fights to the death.

I spend another five minutes staring at Norah's bed before grabbing my spear and exiting my room. I feel Penelope in the medical ward and… wow. Sky is still here. Has he just been waiting this whole time? I thought he said he was busy. Actually, it's more likely that he left and just came back before I actually started moving. I suppose I should go talk to him.

Instead of doing that, I head to the medical ward. Penelope seems exhausted, and I should drag her with me to get some breakfast so she doesn't forget to eat. If there's one aspect of my stupid meat sack that I don't have to worry about forgetting, it's eating. The need to consume food is drilled so thoroughly into me after a decade and a half of starvation that I don't need to feel hunger to know when it is time to eat. Which is to say, it's always time to eat.

"Good morning, Vita," Penelope sighs, and I remember to glance up and actually take in how she looks. I would describe her as 'haggard,' insofar as anyone who puts as much effort into their appearance as Penelope can be. Her normally done-up hair is slowly coming apart, ever so slightly frazzled. She moves with exhausted purpose, pushing herself hard. She's not looking at me as she says hello, busy casting spells on a man with a missing leg.

In other words, I find her doing all the things that I've been told not to do. I let myself smile a little at that.

"Breakfast time, Penelope," I tell her.

She pauses for a moment, turning to face me with a soul radiating bemusement.

"Since when do you fetch other people for breakfast?" she asks. "Doesn't it cut into your valuable eating time?"

"You told me to pay more attention to the physical," I say. "That includes you."

A very small, slight blush stains her cheeks, accompanied by a surge of attraction in her soul. My immediate emotional response to this is revulsion. I shouldn't have asked, I should have just… no, that's me falling into a bad habit again. Why do I feel like this?

I certainly don't find Penelope physically attractive, but if anything that's a point in her favor. Finally hitting puberty has been more an annoyance than anything, and though I have to say I find the physical changes least pleasant the physical inclinations are a close second. My eyes like to linger on men now, soaking in sights that fill me with new sorts of feelings. They are innocuous enough on their own, even weirdly pleasant, but then my brain skips further in daydreams or night dreams and the resulting fantasies fill me with indescribable revulsion. It's an infuriating paradox, wherein my body wants to do things it also desperately does not want at all. The idea of physical intimacy makes me shiver with dread.

So is that why I find these feelings from Penelope so offensive? I don't think so. This feels separate, and I don't know why. If anything, this takes my already-loyal best friend and makes her even more reliably on my side. It's like…

It's like the way that Revenants feel about me. Except I can't order her around or know that she'll forgive anything. She is still her own person, so rather than reducing the degree to which I need to worry about her it does the opposite. It's an obligation, not a boon. Something I have to manage, something that alters our relationship in a way that I don't know how to and don't want to handle. She wants things now that I very vividly do not want, and I have no idea how my arrogant noble friend might handle rejection. But surely she's insightful enough to recognize that I might feel this way? I don't know. Penelope is very, very important to me. I might even love her. But I do so like I love Lyn, not like how Lyn loves Rowan. I respect Penelope, I owe Penelope, and if anyone hurts Penelope I will deliver unto their soul the most malicious torture I can conceive before ripping it asunder. But I don't really want to date Penelope.

Or at least, I don't think so. That's how it feels, but in truth I have no idea why that is a distinction that matters to me, or even what that distinction means.

"Well," Penelope manages after a brief pause. "I have been working all night, so I suppose it would be acceptable to take a break to eat."

"I'll take over, then."

Claretta has been lying in one of the patient beds, but at her words she grabs a cane off the floor and carefully, shakily stands up. Penelope scowls at her.

"You're supposed to be sleeping," she chides.

"Tried," Claretta grunts. "Didn't work out. Go eat."

Penelope opens her mouth to protest before glancing at me, another flash of desire changing her mind. I don't like that either. Penelope is supposed to be the logical one, the smart one, the one I can always rely on to have done the thinking on anything she says or does. Perhaps I'm being overdramatic, though. She's still Penelope, of course she's still smart. We head to the cafeteria together, Penelope clearing her throat to speak as I shovel stew into the biggest bowl I can get my hands on.

"So… how are you holding up?" she asks.

"Fine?" I answer. "I haven't had any problems since you healed me."

"Not physically, Vita," she clarifies. "We lost a lot of people on that mission. How are you holding up?"

I frown, wrapping Norah's soul in a tentacle and rotating it idly in my grasp.

"People die," I remind her simply.

Penelope raises an eyebrow, somehow managing to look dainty and proper as she hastily inhales breakfast.

"That's an interesting coping phrase you've got there," she comments between bites.

I glower at her but don't respond, using the stew as an excuse to keep my mouth shut. Coping phrase? It's just true.

"Well, take heart I suppose," Penelope mutters after another couple bites. "You did everything you had to. We made the best choices we could. I believe that. So I think it's a good sign that we both feel like shit anyway."

I exert the effort to glance at her. She glances back, giving me a shrug and a halfhearted smirk.

"Woo," I say flatly. "Not psychopaths."

"Not psychopaths," she sighs, lifting her cup of water in a toast.

I tap my cup to hers and we drink, trying to wash down the guilt with water. It is predictably ineffective. I suppose I can afford to buy beer now, but it seems like a waste. I'm not sure how getting drunk would affect me, if even at all. I'm tempted to ask, just to see if Penelope wants to try out an experiment or two on the matter. It might be a fun distraction.

"Want to meet a mob boss with me?" I ask instead.

"Sure," she shrugs again. "May as well."

I eat two more bowls of stew in the time it takes for Penelope to finish her one, and we depart together. Penelope is apparently quite shaken by yesterday's events, as she doesn't even change out of the messy armor that she's been wearing since we left on the mission in the first place. I don't think I've ever seen her so lacking in composure.

We exit the guild and I immediately track each soul that turns to pay attention to me. Sky has flown away during the time it took for Penelope and I to eat, but he hasn't left the guild unwatched. As one man turns down an alley with the intention of reporting my departure, I burst forward, crossing the crowded street in a moment and appearing in front of the now-startled member of the Drakens.

"Where's Sky?" I ask him, keeping most of my attention on the streets and alleyways. The sudden movement has attracted a lot of attention, but nearly all of it is irrelevant so I ignore it.

"I-I'm supposed to go get him so he can come to you," the man stammers, his vomit-chartreuse soul quivering.

"Fine by me. Is there somewhere in particular he wanted to meet?"

After a brief conversation, he scurries off and Penelope rushes over to heal the tendons I apparently just pulled.

"At least you didn't crack your bones again," she grumbles. "I'm going to add bone density adjustments to the modifications I've been making on you. Which is of course not to say that you don't need to learn how to use your strength properly. I'm not always going to be by your side, Vita, I have things to do."

"Yeah, sorry," I mumble. "I tried to be careful but I mostly just moved on instinct there."

"The strength of your soul is far outstripping the strength of your body," Penelope chides. "You can't be using anywhere close to your full strength like this. Your body should naturally grow to try and compensate, and I'll help it along for you, but it's a slow process."

"How slow?"

She shakes her head.

"Most people could never dream of growing their soul as quickly as you do, so I haven't the faintest idea. Even if we had records of other people with similar growth rates, considering how quickly your eyes changed and are still changing, it's likely you run on entirely different rules anyway."

"Oh yeah, what's up with my eyes?" I ask. "Are they still changing?"

"Yes, every day," Penelope confirms. "More today than usual. Your iris is growing outward into your sclera, while your pupil continues to elongate. It will likely be a problem for you in the near future."

"Wait, what?" I ask, not understanding what any of that meant. "Am I going to go blind or something?"

"No, the problem will be exclusively social. Your eyes should work fine, they just won't look human anymore," Penelope says. "You'll likely have clearer night vision due to increased maximum pupil size, perhaps you'll experience some alterations to how you interpret color, etcetera. The problem is that it's just going to be very obvious in the near future, and since our cover story is that I'm doing it to you, it will be a pain to keep up that pretense when I don't actually have any idea how to make someone's eyes look like that."

"Well, let me know if you want to operate on mine or something," I offer, shrugging.

She nods, managing a genuine smile.

"I'll likely take you up on that," she agrees.

After healing me, Penelope and I make our way to the spot we were told to wait for Sky. A small barely-courtyard-like area nestled out of sight between buildings, the kind of place where legal activity just doesn't tend to occur. We are alone when we first arrive, but it takes little time before Sky simply appears above us, blinking into my senses as he is presumably teleported by Capita. I look up physically, leading Penelope to follow my gaze and spot him.

"Huh," she tuts. "That's quite the powerful young woman, if she can fly already. Is that one of the criminals?"

"Penelope, that's Sky," I tell her. "He's a man."

She raises an eyebrow at me.

"…Are you sure?"

"Yes, I'm sure," I tell her as he floats down to speak with us. "He just looks like a woman."

"Ah yes," Sky sneers, hands in his pockets as he glowers down from above. "My favorite conversation. And you're having it with a noblewoman, one of my favorite sorts of people. You really do like to make a game out of pissing me off, don't you Vita?"

"No, not really," I say honestly.

"I assure you, it just comes naturally to her," Penelope confirms.

"Shut the fuck up, Vesuvius," Sky snaps. "You were very much not invited."

"No," I correct, "I definitely invited her. Believe it or not, you're just not a man I trust very much, Sky."

He smirks at that, floating over to one of the buildings and sitting down on the lip of the roof, legs crossed and dangling.

"And then you say shit like that," he says, narrowing his eyes with a considering glare. "I've never met a ruder, more insufferable cunt than you and I still find it difficult to hate you. You're just so rare. I begrudgingly have to admit I see why even after you nearly killed her, she still vouches for you."

Penelope frowns, feeling as though she's solved some sort of puzzle and doesn't like the solution. I, meanwhile, am just confused and have no idea what this guy is talking about.

"After I nearly killed who?" I ask. "Capita? She kicked my ass and then mindfucked herself. I wouldn't trust her interpretation of events if I were you."

"Well, thankfully for her, you're not me," Sky counters, flashing a roguish grin. "But enough pleasantries, let's get down to business, shall we? You've been rudely declining my invitations for quite some time, but we're both from the streets. A certain amount of rudeness must necessarily be excused in a world where power rules all."

"If this is the part where you try to convince her to join your organization again, I'm afraid she's already mine," Penelope butts in coldly.

"Impatient fucking noble!" Sky addresses her happily, in the same sort of tone one might greet a long-lost friend. "Of course we're not doing that, I have a matter of honor to correct first. Our main order of business is an apology."

He snaps his fingers, and a split second later a man appears in the air next to him. Bound, gagged, and heavily bruised, he immediately falls to ground level. Neither Penelope nor I move to catch him, and he impacts the ground with a dull thud, whimpering in pain.

"This is the man we assigned to watch your family, and decided it was an acceptable task to fuck up at," Sky explains, an undercurrent of fury in every word. "He's yours to do with as you please."

I spend a moment rooting through the man's soul for telltale guilt, and find enough nestled behind pain and fear that I'm willing to believe this is indeed the person he's claimed to be.

"That's a start," I concede. "But it doesn't bring Angelien back. Nor does it negate the starvation we suffered or the abuse Lyn endured. You paid us in protection and threats, not food or money, so every shred of justification you had for our pain is dust."

Sky shrugs, his face hard, but… not entirely unsympathetic.

"If I had enough food and money for everyone, I wouldn't very well need to do this, would I? We have nothing in our part of town, Vita. There is nothing to go around."

"Bullshit," I growl. "The inside of your fucking casino had the kind of opulence that would impress Penelope here."

"And it is all being used," Sky insists. "I assure you, I'm not sitting on mountains of decadence. The casino leeches money from the undeserving. I built it to be a parasite, a poison. If I want to take money from the rich, I have to look rich. They would never deign to be seen anywhere lesser."

"Yet here I am," Penelope counters, indicating our less-than-opulent surroundings. "There is certainly a degree of shallowness prevalent within the nobility, I will grant you that. But you're not doing anything to fix it, are you? You're just trying to exploit more than you can be exploited, and that is not a game you will be able to win."

Sky glances at me.

"Vita, if you don't shut your damn pet noble's mouth I'm afraid I might lose my temper."

"That's an awfully casual threat from a man so careful to stay out of my kill range," I answer, smiling mockingly back at him.

He glares down his nose at me, lifting himself up from his sitting position and slowly starting to float down. I thought he was going to stand on the roof, but where his feet would have otherwise made contact, the stone building is instead ripped apart. He continues to descend not in front of the building but through it, shards of stone tearing up in a thin oval around him, caught as if in a cyclone. Jagged pebbles whirl around him fast enough to be nothing but a blur, more and more joining the chaotic vortex as he continues to carve the building wall in half. By the time he gets to the ground, his body is surrounded by a shield of debris moving at such a high speed it's barely visible... but there's no doubt in my mind that if I stuck a hand in there I'd pull out a ragged stump.

Then he points a hand towards me. I see the faintest flicker of movement, a crack of sound, and then blood starts dripping from what was once my earlobe.

"The powerful get to be rude," Sky says evenly, "because no one can stop them. It's a habit people like you form. Do not mistake my tolerance for it as a lack of capacity to end it."

I nod slowly, blood dripping down on my shoulder. That was... fast. Faster than Remus by quite a margin. Even as I am now, I can't dodge something like that. I suppose I let myself forget that he rules a big part of the city's criminal underworld for a reason.

Penelope calmly steps over to me and starts healing my ear, looking thoroughly bored with the entire situation. Sky immediately aims at her face, intending to make his point lethally clear.

"Let her bleed," he orders.

Penelope flashes a smile that stops him short, ignoring the command.

"Go ahead and shoot," she says. "But you'd best make sure you kill me instantly and burn the corpse. You have an impressive defense there, but it won't stop me from rotting your insides until your lungs spill out your anus."

"You're known to us, plague mage," Sky growls. "You can't kill me without killing half the city."

"Debatable," Penelope argues. "Believe it or not, I have remarkably little experience with killing people. I won't know until I try. But if I'm going to end up dead anyway, well, what do I care for the consequences?"

Slowly he lowers his arm, his storm of debris still whirling.

"Why are you even here?" Sky spits. "What's your game, noble?"

"I am here because Vita asked, and I quote, 'want to meet a mob boss with me?'" Penelope answers. "And she is my… friend, I suppose, so I said yes. As for my game… I am posturing, obviously. Just like both of you have been doing, except you're both horrible at it so I'm taking over now."

"You don't get to—"

"You want Vita on your team, don't you?" Penelope asks. "Then quit faffing about and make your pitch. You want to kill the King, right? Your Capita spilled the beans on that already, by the way. In riddle, admittedly, but it was not very difficult to figure out. Well, sell us on it. Go on!"

"If you're so sure of this," Sky asks slowly, "why don't I have the Army or the Templars on my doorstep?"

"A bit naive of you to assume that either the nobles or the Templars would mind if the King suffered an unfortunate accident," Penelope answers smoothly. "I wouldn't be surprised if a dozen nobles know of your plan, or are even covertly funding it. Your hatred of our government is not poorly founded, your response is just poorly considered."

"You know nothing of what I intend," Sky dismisses.

"Then make. Your. Pitch," Penelope insists. "I have better things to do today than entertain a terrorist."

Penelope smiles serenely as Sky stares her down.

"Don't bother," I say, walking forward. "I really don't care."

I step past Sky and grab the battered, bruised man that took the bribe so my sister could die by the collar of his shirt.

"It doesn't matter if you'll turn this city into a fucking utopia," I tell him. "I'm not going to join you."

Sky scowls.

"The suffering in your life, the wretched pain of starvation and disease and neglect… that is also worthy of revenge, isn't it? I failed to protect your family. I admit to that. But where I failed for a single, horrible moment, the fat pigs that ran this city into the ground for no reason beyond their own greed failed your family for your entire life. They have a responsibility in the same way I did."

I frown. That's… annoyingly true. Sure, they didn't get anyone in my family killed, but I know a lot of dead children in general that could have very well been a brother or sister in the same way Angelien was.

"That's admittedly convincing," I concede. "But I see no reason to view you as the solution. I'm not going to just drop everything and join up with people that have only made my life worse."

I lift the bribe taker off his feet, which of course requires me to hold him above my head. I'm not sure what I'll do with him. I probably should use him to experiment with animancy, and see what other sorts of shards I can make. I just don't like the idea of giving his life any sort of worth.

"An understandable position," Sky answers me. "So I have a proposition for you. Don't join us, but don't stop us either. We'll quit bothering you, you quit bothering us. No more murdering my men, no more getting in our way, and I leave you and your family alone."

I frown, considering that.

"You still have to pay for Angelien," I answer. "But I can agree to wait while you kill people both of us don't like. You go do your plan, take over the city or whatever, and we can resume our beef afterwards. How long will it take you?"

Sky thinks for only a short moment.

"Three months," he answers. "Let's establish a three-month truce."

"Deal," I say, shaking the bastard in my hands. "Your peace offering here is worth three months at the least. You got a bag for this guy?"

The talk doesn't last much longer after that. Sky seems a bit grumpy with the outcome, but I get the feeling the whole conversation is just a favor to his crazy, riddle-spewing girlfriend more than anything. He'd personally be happy blasting a hole through my head. Which is, of course, why I take the truce. I need time to get stronger still, so I can kill him without taking too large of a risk.

He's eloquent. He talks a good game, acting all honorable and whatnot. But he made my family work for him and beat them when they failed. He used cognimancy on them to ensure their loyalty. He is, no matter what he says, an evil fucking monster.

So I think I'll strike at the two-month mark to catch him by surprise. Hopefully I can fuck up his plans, too.

Lady in Waiting

"So, Penelope," Vita tells me, speaking up as soon as I finish weaving a bubble of silence around us. "I think the two month mark is a good time to betray him. What do you think? I want to fuck up his plans but I figure he probably gave himself a buffer."

I glance down at my short little companion, at her smooth, unblemished skin. At the toned muscles growing underneath it. Her frame, her face, pointed away from me of course, all of it part of my own design except the two piercing blue eyes that gaze insistently in every direction but my own. I hear the whispering knowledge in the back of my mind that I would need a very special disease indeed to destroy her, ignore it like I do all the others, and focus instead on the excitement I feel at a good plot.

I can't help but grin. Of course she's planning to betray him. I should have never doubted her.

"Earlier is of course better," I opine. "It frankly depends on the amount of time you need to be ready for such a betrayal."

She says nothing, thoughts whirring behind those beautiful, inhuman eyes.

"Okay, I'll try to figure that out. I have a good idea of how much his soul can take now. By the way, do you want this guy Sky gave us? I don't really want to be anywhere near him, so you can experiment on him as much as you like."

A shudder of anticipation, alongside many other feelings fills my body with a foreign warmth. How can she just say that? How can she just give me a human as a gift, not only knowing about but being perfectly content with the sort of horrors I long to enact upon his flesh?

I am Third Lady Penelope Vesuvius, and I must regretfully admit that I have rather inconveniently fallen in love. I'm even tempted to remove the failsafe I implanted that lets me quickly kill her, but I know that would just be madness.

Love. What a strange emotion. At least, assuming what I feel is love, it is. This is different, very different, to anything I have ever experienced before. Her presence is a comfort and an ease the likes of which I cannot remember ever feeling. Why did it have to be Vita, of all people? I suppose she appeals to the broken, clawing parts of me, makes my instincts feel content and understood. I feel like a child, clinging to the first imbecile that offered me a smidgen of affection. Look at her. A self-destructive, ignorant fool that personifies the very kind of monster that I've been taught I must never be. Powerful and confident, utterly irreverent of the very society that I must one day rule. Even as my slave she is no follower, no servant. Some sick part of me wants to see her as Queen.

I almost make myself chuckle. Vita. Queen. Watcher's eyes, that would be such a disaster. Yet what an amusing and beautiful disaster it would be. Not that it is possible, of course. The lines of royal succession are so complicated and interwoven within the political structure of Skyhope that it would take an event of near apocalyptic scale to disrupt the churning bureaucracy that defines my life. I can no more break them than I could beat a Templar in a fistfight.

"Having a living human subject would undoubtedly be invaluable for our research," I agree, allowing my prior train of thought to unravel. Such flights of fancy are a waste of a woman's time.

"Theodora probably won't like it if we hand her a living human to work on," Vita points out in an uncharacteristically accurate assessment of a possible social issue. I suppose she is prone to being much more caring and observant when it comes to her own servants.

…If I already love her, would it make any significant difference were I her servant myself?

I clamp down on the idea immediately, allowing myself to feel a surge of frustration for even letting it complete. Obviously, there would be differences. I wouldn't be fucking alive, for one. Stupid, foolish, pathetic! Am I really so desperate for even a minuscule dripping of increased attention that I would consider abandoning all reason?

"That's a valid point," I respond, "but unfortunately I don't have anywhere else to store a human that I intend to perform live experiments on. I'm not sure if you were aware, but that is in fact illegal."

Vita blinks in surprise, one of the few facial expressions she still uses with regularity. The poor girl slips deeper into her talent every day, and I am not sure I like what it is doing to her.

"You seriously don't have anywhere else you perform illegal experiments?" she asks me. I have to laugh at that, selecting and executing the appropriate chuckle for a private conversation between friends. Not that my audience will ever appreciate the work and effort necessary to train that to the point where it is automatic.

"I don't! You're too much of an indulgence, Vita."

To anyone else, I would have been quite pleased with myself regarding the double meaning there, but Vita cheats. Not being able to dance words around her is her one great flaw, and it robs me of no end of entertainment. What a cruel irony that such a powerful empath has such a profound lack of empathy. She could be such a perfectly ruthless noble, if only her talent was not animancy.

"Okay, well, I don't have anything else to do with him so the offer is open. We can just boil his skin off in an alleyway if you want. I kind of want to see that too."

How am I supposed to not fall in love with this girl if she keeps saying things like that!? I feel my heart rate elevate just thinking about it. Watching that forbidden temptation, unleashing my most ruinous diseases that I plan alone in the dark hours I'm unable to sleep and the thoughts are too much to resist. A catalog of a hundred cruel and inhuman deaths waits inside my mind, each begging to be unleashed just so I can see them blossom into rapturous perfection, reducing the infinite, glorious complexity of life into a maddened playground, with her standing beside me and not judging, but joining—

Vita shrinks a bit herself, eyes unfocusing and pace slowing, ever so slightly. Her face remains as expressionless as ever, but I have made a point of paying attention to this odd little person's habits and I know she is suddenly, profoundly uncomfortable. She's disassociating with her body, putting up the same walls of unawareness that she uses as an automatic reaction to pain. I clamp down on my fantasy. Again. Damn me and my pathetic lack of control, where did it all go?

I hate making her uncomfortable like this. I make myself uncomfortable with this, but that is an acceptable and expected part of living. It should be enough that my emotions torture me, but to have them torture my one and only friend? Beyond inexcusable. I've never felt this about anyone before, I don't know how to deal with it! Until now, I didn't think I could be attracted to anyone. I thought it was just another part of me that was broken. Yet here I am, seventeen years old and experiencing a childish crush for the first time ever. I laughed at others, honestly I did. The unimaginable self-destruction my so-called peers would get up to in the name of love or even just sex baffled me to the core. Nothing but the expected stupidity of fools, I thought. Yet I am slowly starting to see where their utter abandonment of sense comes from.

Now I need to figure out how the fuck to stop it.

As far as I can see, there are two primary paths for reconciliation. The first being to change myself, deny my emotions, use self control to avoid mishaps, and allow myself to return our relationship to how it was before whatever insane thing in my head activated and decided to make me stupid. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be working, so perhaps it is time to move on to the second option.

Changing Vita.

Not biologically, of course. If I knew how to create or destroy love I would simply do it to myself. But with the right approach, it should be possible to warm her up to the idea of… warming me up. So to speak. As far as I can tell, what activated my feelings was intense comfort and understanding more so than any particular interest in her physical body. I was not attracted to Vita before; I've seen her naked enough times to be fully confident with that. Yet it creeped up on me somewhere, and it took nearly our entire trip home from New Talsi after the fool girl publicly announced my feelings to admit that she's right. I feel like I can be myself with her, regardless of what persona I wish to adopt, and that is somehow attractive? No one else is like that, certainly, but that is not how I was ever taught to believe attraction works. Perhaps it's one of those things people allow their biases to misinterpret for them. So under that assumption, I can posit that her lack of reciprocation is simply because such comfort is not mutual?

"Vita, you know I would love to do that, but I think using him as a test subject is going to be ideal," I tell her, continuing the conversation with appropriate timing. Conversations are slow. Part of me wishes to know cognimancy simply so that I can inject information into people's brains instead of going through the exasperating oversimplification of concepts required by converting thought to language. "Would you like to drop him off at our lab first, or should we head straight to see your family? The house I got them is fairly nearby."

Vita shrugs, still in her unfocused state. Why is her comfort not the same as my own? She likes me, she trusts me. She has demonstrated each. There are parts of her I understand that I know no one else does, for they are the very parts no one but her understands about me. Is this not enough?

"Either is fine," Vita answers.

I suppose there are many parts of who I am which she does not and will never understand, but they are the parts that are… differently me. I am Third Lady Penelope Vesuvius, for I was forged into Third Lady Penelope Vesuvius. She is a careful and exquisite sculpture, the result of intense effort and tutelage. She is the wall between the world and my true self, a dear and essential aspect of who I am, but due to her inherent nature as an artificial front she is not a part of me that I ever want to be understood. She is a mask, an enigma, the natural result of a person born and raised to rule, and I use her as my sword and shield. So what front that Vita puts on have I failed to crack? What truth to her person is she not comfortable placing in my hands?

"Try again," I tell her, snapping my fingers in front of her face. "Does your family want to see you dragging in a body bag containing the man that got your sister killed?"

She thinks about that for a moment, focusing once more. I wonder if I'm going to need to end up killing Johan. The man seems to genuinely care about me, so ideally I could trust him to remain an ally even after I call off the marriage, but the risk of him interfering is significant. My backup plan is an interesting enough man, but the very thought of marrying him is revolting. Not because I find him personally distasteful, but because resorting to such a thing will only happen if I fail to make myself First Lady Vesuvius on my own merits. I cannot stomach such weakness, yet I cannot justify removing my safety net either. Perhaps I should just push Johan to eliminate as much power from the Church as possible and see if they assassinate him in retaliation. That would be the ideal outcome.

"Right, you're right," Vita says casually. "I should definitely see if Lyn or the kids want to beat him up at all."

Not at all what I was expecting, but that puts a smile on my face. Predictable people are droll. Still, I have wasted enough time pontificating about pursuing my own slave as a love interest, especially considering the all-pervasiveness of the thought lately. I force my mind to busy itself with more practical spell designs, theorizing and categorizing, chipping slowly away at problems I would normally be writing down if not for the risk of my notes being discovered.

Soon we arrive at the home I picked out for her, the result of a painstaking number of hours analyzing and weighing the many aspects I knew she would most value in a place to live with the practicalities of location, cost, and social status. I do not mention nor anticipate recognition for this work, knowing better than to expect more than a mumbled thank you from the tactless girl, but I derive my satisfaction from seeing the visible approval in her posture, eyes actually taking in the location with excitement and awe. It's a proper stone house, single-story, but spacious enough to avoid the cramped conditions inherent to her life before now. The front of the building is visible enough to deter crime, and the back of the building has easily defensible windows, connecting to an alleyway with long enough sightlines to prevent any unwanted guests from hanging about unseen. The indoor bathroom is properly and professionally connected to Skyhope's sewer system to prevent both unwanted smells in the house and unwanted vulnerability for anyone needing to relieve themselves in the night. Two hidden, lockable stone coverings hide hatches into a safe house and sewer access, respectively, giving her family a place to hide the questionably legal goods they will no doubt acquire and a method of entering and exiting the abode unseen. It is perfect, it is thanks to me, and her whole family knows it.

"Vita!" Lyn the fucking Metal Thief cheers happily, ushering us both inside. "I felt that horrifying threat of death claw at my heart and I just knew that you were finally home!"

Lyn the Metal Thief. One of the most wanted people in Skyhope, living in a home I purchased for the purpose of hiding and protecting her. I truly am crazy. Still, Vita lights up with joy as the two of them grab each other into an embrace, and it all feels worth it. I quickly close the door behind myself, watching as eleven children suddenly rush into the room and swarm us all. Lyn laughs alongside them, brushing locks of red hair out from in front of her face and behind the bandanna she perpetually wears. Even indoors, surrounded only by people she loves, the woman wears light armor and has at least a half-dozen knives strapped around her body. Like mother like daughter, I suppose. How the fuck did we let our city fall so far as to make this normal for them?

Three of the children approach me. Basra, Jari, and Sonja, I believe. Each of them hold likely-stolen gifts: two bundles of flowers and a small pastry. Pointless and wasteful, considering I have nowhere to put flowers and no need to eat an inexpertly constructed dessert, but Third Lady Penelope Vesuvius accepts them with dignity, as one must do when receiving thanks. The interaction gives me time to look over the state of their health, allowing myself to be satisfied by the progress I have made. Each one of the children possesses different modifications, experimental improvements to their bodies which hypothetically should not impact them negatively but still needed testing on someone. Jari in particular possesses the enhanced bone structure I have been considering applying to Vita, and eventually myself, so I am very pleased to see he seems hearty and healthy. I am growing a few smaller, redundant hearts in Basra, which will be the first step towards enabling her to survive a significant chest wound. One of the other children, Jarod, possesses the other step, a rapid sealant that should greatly improve his ability to stem blood loss if his body goes into shock. I have of course tested all of these improvements on animals in my spare time, and inferior versions of these current designs are present within my own body, but having more willing subjects to experiment on has allowed me to significantly speed up my learning process.

Well, for a certain definition of willing, I suppose. I'm sure they wouldn't mind. It's going to make them harder to kill, ideally, and that has been a contentious point in this household lately.

"Glad to see you're home safe, Vita," Rowan says, emerging from a side room behind the tide of children. "How did the mission go?"

Vita winces, actually visibly winces. Poor thing.

"We were sent out with three senior hunters, all of whom died. So I sort of had to… do my thing, and then the whole team knew, and then…"

"And then Norah also tragically died to the monster," I intone for her.

I watch as Lyn and Rowan both let shock and sadness bloom on their faces, each more than capable of interpreting my implication. The children react with mixtures of indifference and mild disappointment, already quite hardened against the shock of death. Norah hadn't even been one of their own, just a nice woman who played with them. This is the sort of stock Vita hails from. A dull fury warms my chest, reminding me that every virtue a noble is called to strive for has never manifested in actions, not outside the walls of the center city. The country I love is well and truly rotten.

So like with all things, my job is to heal it, as no one else seems competent enough for the task.

I kneel down, motioning one of the kids over so I can start my casting. Vita makes me feel comfortable and safe, but the rest of her family are just people to me, more chaff important only by their relationship to her and my obligations to them. I have no desire and a very limited patience for engaging in pleasantries, so I am quick to immerse myself in work.

First, the diagnostic spells. A beautiful and intricate mix of biomancy, metamancy, and very technically a small dab of cognimancy—though it is the kind everyone is quick to make arguments over why it is not technically cognimancy to stream information into one's own mind, in the same way that is not really an inherent form of natural animancy to manipulate one's own soul. And true enough, that small portion of the spell which interprets biological data into a form the caster can understand has been of little help towards my actual forays into researching cognimancy, but the hypocrisy amuses me nonetheless. I run my hand over the child's body, analyzing bone and muscle and comparing the two with my mental records of the subject's prior examination, marking growth and change. I note each red flag which pops up in my mind, a weakness here, a minor injury there. I track unnatural alterations I applied, which on this child take the form of what will eventually be an extra-human level of flexibility. I follow the diagnostic spell with more direct physical examination, bending their fingers back and watching the joints twist the other way, lying with easy reassurances about how some people are just like this and it's perfectly normal, and surely you can make all the other kids jealous with the cool tricks only you will be able to do. They seem immediately mischievous on the matter, which will hopefully prove enjoyable enough to prevent any problems from coming back my way.

Is human experimentation really wrong if my experiments are happy about it? I say no! Besides, the sort of work I'm doing on these children would beggar a lesser merchant, let alone the family of my slave. I'm entitled to this other form of recompense, surely. Even odds on whether Vita would be approving or furious about these alterations, however, so I'll keep them a secret. Promising to tell her things is a bit difficult when there is so much I don't want her to know.

The rest is fairly routine. Spell upon spell upon spell to encourage the body to heal itself not in the way it thinks it should heal, but in the way I know it must. Many claim that the Mistwatcher designed our bodies, and if that is true I can only laugh at how pathetic a god it must be. Those that tout our forms as if they are indescribably perfect temples could not possibly be more ignorant as to how fundamentally moronic the human being is. An incalculable number of diseases and disorders are merely the result of our bodies being incredibly stupid, following some insane programming that does not apply to the situation that requires fixing. There is no wisdom in our creation, only a chaotic mess which cares little if we die or suffer. The intellect is exceedingly superior to nature, and in a quarter of an hour I have removed more pain from the body of this child then years of natural healing could have even started to dent.

Then I do it ten more times. I am intensely aware that it used to be eleven, memories of a sobbing Vita holding a child's corpse in her arms fresh and fiery in my mind. Angelien was only going to be able to regenerate new teeth in the event that hers were damaged, at least, so she's far from the worst of them that we could have lost.

Then I finally get to work on Vita herself. It's so very odd how it feels now. She used to just be another patient, another thing to correct. Now I find myself second guessing each alteration, crafting a list in my mind of what I wish to do to her so long that her treatments might start taking hours. Yet today, that is not even my only set of tasks. Today I get to view one of her eyes and observe a rare and beautiful example of natural biomancy. Natural biomancy! As if Vita did not have enough talents! She sits down in front of me and I have to pull her face closer to mine to get a proper look at her evolving visual structure. ...Although, I am not immune to appreciating other advantages of this position.

"I am going to use a light bit of kineticism to grab your eye and move it, if that's all right," I tell her, adding the last bit mostly because it's polite. I'm already casting the spell.

"Sure," Vita acquiesces immediately, shrugging with indifference. Goodness gracious do people tend to panic when I grab their eyeballs and start pulling them around, but Vita couldn't care less.

…Why the fuck is that a turn on? No, don't think about that, it's time to focus.

One hand gripped firmly around her chin and the other directing my spell, I ensure that my mana sight is on and set it to see both natural mana and Vita's unique variation before snatching her eye and holding it still. Vita does not so much as flinch, her body going just slack enough to allow me to move it however I need without being too floppy to stay in position. Even when I turn her head to the side and start pulling on the eye enough to stretch it slightly out of the socket, she doesn't react. Which is good, because it gives me the time I need to see minute fractions of her mana passing through little invisible channels in her body, entering the eye and being formed as if by a talent into glorious, beautifully complex biomancy. As I suspected, her iris is becoming substantially larger, blending in with her rapidly-darkening sclera in a manner that evokes an image of the blue consuming the white, infecting and overcoming it. Not that this is at all literally occurring, as the vast majority of her eye structure is staying the same, merely changing in color, size, and minute differences in shape. I can see the form her mana takes as it coaxes the eyes to gently conform to whatever bit of her soul insists they must look a new way, and I resolve to decode the structure in my spare time.

"You mind if I take this eye?" I ask. "I can regenerate it in a week or so."

"Go for it," Vita grunts, and I quickly sever her optic nerve and pop it out, weaving a spell to halt her blood flow only to see her not start to bleed.

"…I see you've improved that technique," I murmur.

"Yeah, gotta pinch off the major blood squirty bits rather than just try to hold the blood in," she explains. "It was obvious once you pointed it out."

I am immediately stuck between a bit of indignation at hearing her call arteries and veins "blood squirty bits" and a bit of a rush at knowing Vita can locate and precisely interact with them after two tries, just because I pointed it out. I still cast the spell, of course, healing her up as I quickly seal her eyeball into a small glass container. If I'm honest, I'm not actually sure why I wanted to take it. It was just a whim. No more mana flows within it, it's merely a former part of Vita. A physical representation of the edge she and I both teeter on, half human and half something else. I place it firmly back in a pocket underneath my armor, trying to ignore the twinge in my head that shouts about how I should not be seen in public with such an unclean, unadorned outfit.

The rest of my work on her is routine and uninteresting, if a bit time-consuming. First comes the practical improvements to her health: bone enhancement, antibody production, forcibly flushing and replacing parts of her that grew wrong as a result of the wretched environment they developed in. A smattering of mismade cells, benign and fully expected, are selectively annihilated nonetheless. I will not let even a single trillionth of my friend stay faulty. Next come the alterations and improvements: shaping her muscles so they grow denser before they grow larger, ensuring a soft and shapely layer of thin fat maintains the illusion of someone thin, petite, and vulnerable. Fat developing around her belly is moved, banished from forming and placed instead in her thighs and breasts. She is, to my annoyance, developing very little fat in general, despite her absurd appetite. Can I encourage her to eat more? Is that even possible? This morning she ate three bowls of stew larger than her head and it's nearly all fully digested already. Well, I'm sure I will find a way. She will no doubt be furious when she eventually figures out I'm responsible for her breast size—I wonder if she even made the connection between that and my claim that I was making her conventionally attractive—but I spend the next five minutes ensuring she won't get any period cramps this month and consider that even.

I recognize the intense satisfaction I get from being able to customize the appearance of the person I am attracted to as a bit perverse, but every noble has her vices. And speaking of appearance customization…

"All right, I'm done," I announce. "Miss Lyn, if it is not too much trouble, I would like to change your face."

Vita silently gets up and starts to stretch, winking her empty eye socket and wrinkling her nose. Lyn and Rowan both turn to stare at me, once again quickly picking up on my implications but not seeming terribly enthused about the matter.

"Your current one is plastered in quite a few guard houses," I remind her. "And if you are caught, you are no longer the only one that will get in trouble."

"Yeah, it's just… a weird thing to ask someone out of the blue, you know?" Lyn hedges.

"I like your face as is," Rowan agrees.

I huff in annoyance, suppressing an undignified roll of my eyes as I wait for them to stop letting stupid noises fall out of their mouth.

"You love her, Rowan," I say, avoiding my desire to gag as I supply an appropriate platitude to the situation, "so you are going to love her face no matter what it is."

That traps him out of the conversation. It is not as though he can argue that point, even if it happens to be untrue. I focus my attention on Lyn, as she actually matters and is still on the fence. At least I can take heart in the fact that he is a smart enough man to not suggest using an illusion to mask her. Anyone with an illusory face would be detected immediately by a half-decent magic-wielding guard, since it would require a persistent enchantment. Altering the face, however, only requires a spell to initiate change, and the time to allow that change to settle permanently, after which her face will be no more magical than it is currently.

She hedges and whines a little, but after a few more quick twists of rhetoric I have her on my side, pushing magic into her head. I will have to return every day for a week or two to finish the work, but I should be doing that anyway for the children and it will result in one less problem when I'm done.

In the end, it turns out that Vita's family wanted nothing to do with the man in the bag who got her sister killed. So, once I am done with my work, the two of us depart for our laboratory with the living baggage in tow. I'm genuinely impressed at how casually Vita can walk around with a human being in a sack and make it seem natural. We make it downstairs, Vita's disturbing undead slime child hopping onto her shoulders. Even carrying a man twice her weight she doesn't seem impacted, although she quickly dumps our new experiment out on the floor as if she was tossing sewage over the outer walls.

Theodora and Margarette, both emerging at the time, jump in surprise to see the bound and bruised man lying unconscious on the floor.

"Who's that, Mom?" Vitamin asks.

"This is the fucker that let your aunt Angelien die," Vita explains as if reading off a damn accounting report. "A mob boss gave him to me as a gift."

If Theodora was capable of paling any further, I have no doubt she would. The woman is not only a remarkable genius, but a fantastic case study on animancy and its effects on the mind in general. She is for whatever reason remarkably capable of maintaining autonomy in the face of forces constantly eroding her individual impulses. A lot of what we do here is against her personal morals, but much like so many people with metamancy talents of her ilk, the temptation to learn and experiment has little trouble finding purchase on any excuse. Vita's mental alterations provide that excuse quite easily, most of the time. This might be a little over her limit, however.

"Not to worry, I will handle the live subject personally," I reassure her. "No one is going to be asking you to work on him."

It's not enough; obviously, Theodora would prefer us to not have the man at all. But it helps, and she nods a brief thank you in my direction. If anyone is liable to ruin this operation, it is Theodora. All she has to do is step outside and start yelling for attention, and everything we have done is gone. I have therefore made it a priority to try and befriend her—obviously not something I consider a strength, but I have been making slow progress. If Vita passes Theodora's personal moral event horizon, I will hopefully be enough to dissuade her from taking drastic action. This is assuming, of course, that Theodora is physically capable of acting directly against Vita at all, but one does not plan for the best case scenario and nothing else.

"W-well, um," Theodora starts, "we believe—"

"We figured out the soul sight spell!" Margarette blurts. "Vita! Can we see your soul?"

She turns to face them, eye focusing. Vita smiles, warm and genuine and very nearly human.

"Of course! I would love you to."

Oh. Is that what I'm missing? I focus very, very carefully on Margarette's hands as she casts our first step into true learned animancy, an utterly and completely illegal branch of magic that is without a doubt our best bet for achieving true immortality. Immortality! The ultimate goal of medicine, an undoubtable, inarguable feat of worth, the future First Lady Vesuvius's gift to the throne, and a power that I want more than anything.

Right now, however, I just want to see what she sees. Margarette finishes her cast and her eyes go wide, letting a shaky breath into her dead flesh as she gazes upon a small girl with such rapturous reverence that I am certain she's moments away from falling on her knees. Theodora very pointedly does not cast, though I know she must be capable of the spell. She fears it. She fears what she will see. I take her aside, serving the dual purpose of allowing her an excuse to avoid looking and getting her to ensure I am casting the spell correctly. She guides my hands, and even with my skill it takes nearly ten minutes before we are comfortable with having me try to cast the spell for real. Neither of us have any idea what kind of chaos magic we might risk from a failed animancy spell, and neither of us wants to know.

Then I cast it. A brilliant sapphire blue, as deep as eternity, stares back at me as my breath catches, my mind racing desperately to identify the metaphors I require to comprehend the sight before me. Five yet ten yet twenty shimmering translucent tentacles extrude from an eye-like core, of which I see now that Vita's physical eyes are becoming but a pathetic, fractional imitation. Each spiritual limb twists and moves in purposeful patterns, scratching her skin, pushing stray hairs from her eyes, wrapping around her arms and legs, grasping through the floor and walls, pulling out tiny souls of the insects and vermin hiding within. I cannot count them; there are as many as there need to be, never giving the impression that they appear or disappear yet somehow gone when no longer in use.

Not even that is the whole of her, however. Veins of energy pulse through her body, twisting through where I know bone and muscle and organ and heart reside, an intricate web of mastery over her physical form, waiting to be unlocked and perfected. Oh, if I had known! If I had known she could be this! This changes so many of my plans, so many of my enhancements were far from the perfection I thought they could be to her! She is so much more than I could have possibly dreamed of! I want that. I want that power. I want to wrap my heart with that energy and feel it beat the way she does. What glorious gift is this? What is she?

What more can she become?

Dozens of motes of light in all colors softly glimmer within her, a gorgeous artistic beauty in their own right if not for how thoroughly she overshadows them. She notices my staring, and for the first time ever I see her react with that pleasant sort of embarrassment one gets when complimented about something both private and dear to the heart. This is not an emotion she can duck away from her body to avoid, because I finally see the truth of her.

The eye remaining in her head looks at nothing, but her true eye, not the imitative grasping of her flesh, stares my way. She doesn't need to ask anything. No shy yet preening 'do you like it?' coming from a boring fool girl trying on clothes her mother won't approve of. This is Vita, and she feels my overwhelming awe. In that moment, I can truly believe she is a goddess.

Then I snap out of that stupid idea.

"This will… certainly help with the experimentation," I say, clearing my throat. "A first great step. Excellent work, Theodora, Margarette."

I manage to tear my gaze away from her long enough to nod their way, forcing my thoughts out of their grinding halt and back into something resembling a professional demeanor. I have important work to do here and I can't let myself be distracted, no matter my feelings. With a quick request to Vitamin, I obtain her assistance lifting and transporting our live subject into a side room, away from the others. I have two major problems I need to solve: one, how to utilize our new human subject in a non-wasteful way, which is to say 'how to take advantage of him in a manner that could not be substituted by an animal.'

And two, how the fuck I'm going to convince the most oblivious person in Skyhope to go on a date. This is no longer a flight of fancy, after all. Not after that.

I must have her.

Being Seen

After all the crap I've been getting lately about not looking at people, finally someone is looking at me. Two people, actually, and they feel the same way about the sight.

I feel very differently about each reaction, however.

The response from my Revenant is to be expected. They love me and they are in awe of me by nature. It is a comforting and happy feeling, one that makes me want to love them back. They are so pure, so pleasant, so mine. Vitamin is mine, my beautiful daughter for as long as she wishes to be. Margarette is mine, my sweet and earnest little genius. Theodora is mine, no matter how much she strays, and she will always have a place at my side whenever she desires it. Yes, I know I forced these feelings on them. Yes, I know that's wrong, that's fake, and that I will destroy anyone who tries to do the same to anyone I care about. But the artificial, forcibly imposed source of that affection doesn't make them any less comforting to me. The disturbing implications are a secondary issue, one that contrasts but does not lessen the love. So ultimately, warmth and appreciation fill me when Margarette calls me beautiful, even though I can expect no less.

Yet when Penelope feels the same, that is… I don't know what that is. I didn't believe that she would look at me with anything more than the clinical, barely passing interest she tends to show every part of the reality I live when I describe it to her. She wants to be an animancer herself, a position that we both know is unlikely to be healthy or wise. Still, she strives for it, and to her my whole world was nothing but a stepping stone on her path to power.

Which I was okay with. She didn't treat me like a freak or a monster, she didn't tell the guard or the Templars. Instead she helped me cover for my mistakes, distracted the team when I ran over to grab every soul we slew, and saved my life over and over. She's a callous bitch, but she's my callous bitch. Not in the same way the Revenants are mine, but… things were okay. They were comfy. They were fine as they were.

I was sort of hoping they'd go back to that when Penelope saw me. I thought Penelope would take the same clinical stance as always, see how utterly inhuman I am, and fall out of love. 'Ah yes, my friend Vita, the tentacle eyeball. Nevermind about trying to fuck that.' Yet that is not what happened. When she peered past the shell I thought she loved and we actually locked eyes, her emotions actually magnified.

I don't have the time to process any of this before she and Vitamin emerge from the side room after securing the man I brought. Immediately, she starts staring at me again. I can't believe she's staring at me. Actually at me. What do I do? In a moment of confused panic I break the stare-off by waving a tentacle her way.

An amused, twitching smile invades her expression and after only a brief delay she waves back. The moment passes, and so does the intense weight of her attention. She approaches, pulling a chair up next to me and sitting down, leaning forward so she's eye-level not with my head, but the soul in my belly.

"So," she says to me, carefully keeping the overwhelming emotion bubbling through her out of her voice. "Tentacle eyeball. I see what you mean about being similar to the Mistwatcher more than ever, now. So to say hello, do I, um...?"

She holds out a hand as if to shake. Hah. Didn't I tell her before? I know I did. Still, I respond with an amused shrug and pass a tentacle through it.

"I can only touch myself and souls," I say.

The disappointment in Penelope is real, yet she reacts as if she expected the answer. Already, she's plotting something.

"So what allows you to touch yourself?" Penelope asks slowly. "It seems like an awfully arbitrary distinction. Your body is made of… hrm. Are you perhaps actually touching the veins of soul lining throughout your body?"

"No," I explain, using my tendrils to poke around at some exposed skin. "I didn't used to have those anyway. I'm definitely touching my body. Do you think there might be some way for me to touch other things?"

I ask the obvious question and feel her slide another piece of her plan into place. Damn it! She's supposed to make plots for me, not about me! What is this for!?

"I don't see why it wouldn't be possible," Penelope confirms, "but I don't have the faintest idea how it works. Certainly something to look into. Assuming you'd like to be able to touch other things, of course."

I would. Of course I would. The less I have to rely on meat the better. I nod to tell her as such, and another piece falls into place for her. I… guess it's okay if her plot revolves around helping me learn cool tentacle tricks?

"Well, I would be… more than happy to investigate and see if we can figure out a way to make that work," Penelope offers. "As well as any other ideas you might have on… improvements. I can see that… your own plans for that body substantially outstrip my former ambition."

I blink. Hmm. She's back to normal. Okay, that's good. Don't know what she means, though.

"My plans?"

"You're not… you're not doing it on purpose," she mumbles, mostly to herself. "Vita. You are far more than a natural animancer. This… what you're doing to yourself, the eyes but also inside, it's biomancy. You are changing yourself from within, far more than a normal human enhancing themselves via a powerful soul could manage."

I frown, thinking about that. My initial reaction is to argue no, I'm just pulling myself around with my soul rather than my muscles mostly. But Penelope is a genius biomancer, and she probably knows what she's talking about.

"What sort of things am I doing to myself?" I ask, not sure what I want her to say.

"Well, that's the thing. A lot of it is fairly standard, like the natural improvements to durability I told you to expect eventually. A lot of the rest… I don't know. It's truly fascinating, I've never seen biomantic mana formations that look like this. They are biomancy, that much I can be certain of. The basic structure is comprehensible to me, but on a whole it is far more complicated than any spell I know. It's a full-blown talent in its own right, a powerful one. Your body is doing something to itself and I don't know what. But I am… certainly excited to find out. I would love to investigate, even help it along as much as I can if you want me to."

"I guess whether or not I want it helped along depends on whether or not I like what it's doing," I hedge. "Could you not see this before the soul stuff?"

"Well, that's the interesting part. These veins of soul flowing through your body, they are not just animantic faux musculature. They are mana channels, delivering your…"

She trails off for a moment, suddenly coming to the realization.

"Same color blue," she mumbles to herself. "Would it make the atmosphere… no, there's no way to test that, not without a kynamancer of impeccable precision."

"Penelope, I don't know what any of that means," I answer, squirming uncomfortably. "Look, do you need me for anything right now? You guys figured out the soul sight spell and that's cool. Does that mean you have any work for me to do or not?"

A flash of frustrated disappointment fills my friend but she shakes her head.

"You are welcome to go, we have plenty of biomancy problems to solve. Apologies for the fit of fervor, Vita. I just feel as though I certainly understand you a lot better. You are actually quite good at eye contact, aren't you?"

I scratch my cheek with a tentacle, embarrassed despite myself.

"Well, it's much easier to see emotions with my core pointed in the right direction," I explain. "I can usually figure it out, but my directional soul sight is a lot more precise."

"Yes… precise," Penelope mutters to herself, eyes peering deeply within me.

I watch her stare as if at a gorgeous vista, like the awe I first felt when I gazed beyond the confines of Skyhope's walls. She gazes as if seeing a world opening up, a beauty unlike anything her life had ever previously comprehended, and it's at me. I don't know if I've ever felt this self-conscious before. She continues to stare until it's finally too much for me to handle. Squirming and blushing, I cover my core in my own tentacles, using them as a writhing wall against further examination. This doesn't seem to make Penelope any less interested, but it does make her snap out of her fugue and recognize my discomfort. I feel her chide herself immediately, a spark of self-directed fury passing in an instant before she primly smiles as if none of it happened.

"Well! This is truly an impressive spell," she says, trying and failing to mask the source of her emotion, "but we should get back to work. Margarette, Theodora, we have much to plan. What are you going to do, Vita?"

"U-uh, um, I don't know?" I stammer, still flustered, still hiding in my cocoon of tendrils.

"I know!" Vitamin announces happily. "Take me to see grandma and grandpa! Theodora and Margarette and Penelope finished my cool girl tats! I'm not going to be detected as a creepy magical construct! Probably."

Penelope glances over my way with obvious disapproval, but Theodora shrugs.

"You'll have to test it eventually," the metamancer says, genuinely approving of taking the Revenant outside. "May as well get her some fresh air."

Aw, she likes Vitamin! My little girl must have grown on her.

"Ugh, I wish I had my tattoos back," Margarette complains.

"They are my tattoos and always were," Theodora snaps.

"Yeah, yeah, I know," Margarette grumbles. "Sorry. It just doesn't feel that way. It's a Nawra thing. But, I mean, if we can spare some of the metal…"

"I think we will need it for the current project," Penelope insists. "What we are doing is not something we can skimp on power for."

"Of course, yeah," Margarette sighs.

"We'll see what we can do, but I think I've asked mom for enough metal for now," I say. "I hope she takes it easy. Although she probably won't. I guess I'm off, then. Come on, Vitamin!"

"Heck yeah!" Vitamin cheers. "I get to see the city for the first time!"

She hops up on my shoulders and I chuckle a bit, giving her a friendly soul tickle before heading up the stairs. It's not a very long walk between the lab and my family's home anymore, which is very convenient.

"Me again!" I announce, rapping on the front door. "And I brought someone special!"

Rowan opens the door, jumping back a little as he sees Vitamin laughing playfully on my shoulders. He quickly ushers me inside.

"Should you be having her… you know?" he hisses softly.

"Sure!" I say. "Some really smart dead people think it'll be fine."

The kids swarm out from around the house and I lift Vitamin off my shoulders and place her on the ground.

"Now you be good, Vitamin! Normal people are very fragile, so don't accidentally break anyone's neck or something, okay?"

I give her some crushed delicious soul dust, knowing that she will of course not harm a fly if I don't want her to. Her soul drinks it greedily, apparently quite eager to grow. So I crush another shard for her! I can't let my poor zombie daughter go hungry, can I? If occasionally tossing food at and otherwise ignoring my child isn't parenting, I don't know what is.

Speaking of, Lyn grabs me from behind and lifts me up into a hug.

"Well, hello again! We get to see you twice before you gallivant off into the wilderness again, do we? That's quite a treat!"

"Mom! I'm just busy!" I yelp, kicking my legs. "You don't have to worry or anything, I kick forest monster butt!"

"Oh? Do you now? Let's see!"

She drags me past the gaggle of children into an empty part of the house before dropping me, leaning back, and earning herself mother of the year by tossing a knife at me. I jump in surprise a little, but catch it by the handle before even turning around to face her. It was just a slow lob, nothing that could have ever actually hit me.

"What's this for?" I ask.

"Rowan told me you've been picking fights with powerful people," Lyn says, all smiles as she draws another knife. "I'm ashamed to have let you develop such bad habits at such a young age. Do you really think I'm going to feel safe seeing you leave the city when you do things like that?"

I scowl a bit.

"I'm one of the strongest people in the guild now, mom. Can't you feel that?"

"Sure, sure," Lyn answers casually, hopping on the balls of her feet, "my danger sense tells me to shit my britches and run until I jump off the edge. But I'll believe it when I see it. Let's fight."

Fight? Fight Lyn? Why the fuck would I ever want to do that? Lyn is Lyn. I don't want to hurt her. Is she just feeling antsy being cooped up in a nice home for once?

"I'm not going to fight you," I grumble.

"Why not, kiddo?" Lyn asks immediately, flashing shit-eating grin.

I scowl.

"I'm not a kiddo."

"I don't know, it takes a pretty small kid to not even be able to beat up a grandmother. Little baby kiddo."

"I don't want to hurt you," I say, narrowing my eyes.

"Well good news!" Lyn answers. "Kids can't hurt me. You've got nothing to worry about!"

Okay, maybe I'll just hurt her a little bit.

"Um, Lyn?" Rowan asks, hesitantly stepping into the room. "I think you shouldn't—"

"No, it's fine," I growl, cutting him off. "Let's spar, mom."

"Oh, fuck, least don't use the real kn—"

Rowan doesn't get a chance to finish his sentence, because I'm already lunging in for a stab.

Hindsight and Forethought

Obviously I pull my blow on Lyn, not wanting to hurt her or myself. I'm not moving as fast as I can, I'm not stabbing as directly at a vital as I might otherwise. Yet when my mom flashes me a contemptuous grin and easily steps to the side, I start to wonder if I'm about to once again get a lesson on arrogance.

Even with the way my soul's core grows much denser than a human's does, I have significantly surpassed the size of my mother's soul. Lyn is powerful, extremely powerful by most metrics, really, but I suspect if I really put my back into it I could rip her from her flesh with only minimal trouble. That is the skill I am best at, the skill that I use most often, and my most devastating offensive capability. As I make another lunge, which Lyn sidesteps by barely an inch without seeming the slightest bit worried, I can't help but be a little tempted to use that power.

I don't, of course. This is about landing a hit on her, and she is trying to prove that I can't. I'm not interested in just sitting back and letting someone walk over me. I have recently reached the next stage in what I sort of think of as my lifecycle, considering that the first step was hatching from a soul egg. I am a bit proud of my advancement, happy I finally get to stop using my hideous, inefficient muscles for everything. I want to prove my superiority. I want to beat her.

To my annoyance, however, it is clear that Lyn is very, very good at dodging.

"So obvious!" she taunts stepping around another stab and punching me just under the ribs.

I barely feel it, and try to grab her with my free hand only to watch her leap out of the way again, cackling all the while. Damnit! I should be stronger than her! It doesn't help that I have much less practice using a knife than I do with using my spear. Lyn doesn't even feel that fast, it's just that she seems to always be barely fast enough to avoid whatever it is I'm doing. I could maybe surprise her by suddenly using my full speed, but of course then I would have to go see Penelope to get my body unbroken again. Plus, I think there's another secret here. Despite how much I care for her, Lyn and I don't exactly talk a lot and I don't even know what exactly her talent is. Or, as I'm starting to suspect, what her talents are—the longer we fight the more I'm sure she has two separate ones. One of them she keeps on a constant low purr, ramping it slightly up in power every time I lunge for her. I don't know what it is, other than clearly not being offensive. The other just turns on and off, and I'm pretty sure that's her speed talent. Whenever she makes a little burst of movement, that one flares.

The problem is that, even though I know this in advance, I don't have any idea what to do about it. She's using both talents at once, which Capita never did, and both of them seem to be useful in a brawl. She's not trying to stab me, despite the knife in her hand. If anything she's using it as a handicap, giving her one less arm to punch with. But I am still getting my butt kicked.

"You're trying to teach me that no matter how strong I am, I lose to someone whose talent is specific to the current situation," I deduce.

"No, trying to teach you that you are slow as shit and I'm better than you," Lyn answers immediately.

Rowan facepalms, and I try to stab my mother again.

Lyn laughs, dancing around me. Our fight is indoors, and the room is not very large, yet she always seems to have exactly as much space as she needs. Can I box her in somehow? Get her into a corner? I start directing my thrusts, encouraging her to dodge closer and closer to the edge of the room. The moment I think she's cornered, though, she just vaults over me, sticking her tongue out at me as I track her through the air.

"Quit trying to fight me like I'm a monster!" Lyn says. "You know I have a brain too, right? I'm not going to move without a plan."

She dashes in for the first time and I jump back in surprise. Now all of a sudden, I'm the one cornered! It looks like she's going to punch me in the face, but she feints and brings up the knife instead, the blade barely kissing against the skin of my neck without drawing blood.

"Dead," she tells me, bursting backwards before I can stab her back.

"Does that count?" I ask, grinding my teeth. "Because if so…"

I burst forward again, lunging for another stab at bringing my tentacles into the mix as well. To my surprise, Lyn seems to notice and jump backwards, but I press the attack and soon the only place she can dodge within the small room is inside my range. She avoids five of the eight tentacles I try to grab her with, but three wrap around her and squeeze lightly.

"Dead," I hiss back. "I'm surprised you dodged any."

Lyn shudders, pawing at her belly as if trying to rub some warmth into it as I let her go.

"Danger sense, remember? I can't see any of what you do but if I listen to my instincts I can feel something is coming at me. So. Point in your favor, I'll grant you. But you still haven't touched me."

I scowl, tossing my knife to the side and flexing my fingers.

"Fine," I growl, right before feeling the snap in my right leg as I lunge at Lyn as fast as I can.

I'm not a knife fighter, as much as I should probably learn to use them a bit since I have them as a backup weapon. But ultimately, if I am going full power, I would rather not accidentally kill my mother with a blade.

Her eyes go wide for an instant as I close the distance far faster than I have up to this point, but her surprise is not quite enough for me to capitalize on. I swipe at her, miss, then break my other leg performing an instant change in direction. Penelope won't be happy, but she'll deal with it. I wrap the breaks with tentacles as a makeshift splint, bearing down on her again and very, very nearly catching her. She was surprised at my speed before but isn't now, bumping up the power in her own talent to compensate. That's fine by me. She's not moving at levels beyond my perception, and I don't need to keep up with her perfectly. I just need a particular kind of opening.

If our family actually owned anything, everything in this room would have been destroyed by our engagement as we blast around, me always on the offensive. Rowan has been functionally forced out, he and many of the kids peeking hesitant pairs of eyeballs around the doorframe, trying to avoid becoming collateral damage. There's one more reason I dropped my knife, and I'm just waiting for Lyn to give me the chance to take advantage of it. She's right. She's not a beast, and I need to treat her as someone thinking a few steps ahead. If I can't dismantle her soul, I will dismantle her plan instead.

"What's politics like?" I had once asked Penelope.

Our team had been walking through the forest silently for a few hours, the monsters either fleeing in fear from me or dying instantly whenever they tried to engage. I was thoroughly bored and feeling safe enough to start a conversation. Penelope turned to me slowly, her languid glare and pattering soul indicating she was still a bit miffed about me telling the whole team that she had a crush on me. Still, she deigned to answer.

"Hiverock dropped an estimated ten thousand or so eggs on us," she said, which sounded like a complete non-sequitur but this was Penelope so I knew she was going somewhere with this. "The drops were all in groups, yes? About fifty to a couple hundred eggs per group. According to reports, our best guess as to what happens the moment those eggs start to hatch is that every single one of the newborn vrothizo immediately tries to kill and eat all of the other ones. As soon as I finished reading that I thought to myself: damn. And here I've been trying to go to the forest to avoid politics."

I blinked in confusion, but Norah immediately busted out laughing. Along with Mateo, of all people, though his hissy monster laugh seemed to kill the mood for everyone else.

"I don't get it," I said.

"I know," Penelope answered flatly. "But despite the laughter I do not at all mean it as a joke. Politics is about seeing how much aggressive cannibalism you can get away with in your path to power. Figuratively, I mean. While I would not be terribly surprised to learn of a noble engaging in literal cannibalism, I do not personally know of any."

"That's… good?" I hedged.

Penelope sighed.

"Yes Vita, the fact that our government does not openly engage in literal cannibalism is good. Anyway, on the subject of specifically Valka politics, I would have to describe the three major factions as the Royalists, the Church, and… everyone else, really. Let's call them the Mercantile faction, although they are—well, we are, I suppose, but if anyone asks I'm a Royalist—they are only a faction insofar as being united by a common hatred of the other two and a general desire to leech specific powers from each of them. For example, the Church de facto controls the entire metal trade due to the religious significance of metal. Because it is the duty of the Templars to prevent a perception event, and perception events can be caused by an overabundance of metal in a single place, the Church has decided they therefore possess a divine mandate to control every single gram of metal on the market and micromanage who is allowed to buy any given amount of it. And if this sounds like an open power grab more so than an actual devotion to a deity, that's because it very certainly is. And yet somehow the audacious bastards actually get away with it!"

Norah scowled, but didn't respond.

"But you're asking about politics in general, aren't you?" Penelope continued. "The crux of the metaphor is thus: political power is finite. To acquire it, you must necessarily take it from others. The more people with power, the less power everyone has. It is possible to increase the maximum available quantity of political power, but to do so you have to actually contribute to society and that tends to be rather more difficult than simply eating your rivals. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on your proclivities, rather than soul-rending teeth politicians fight with schemes. To defeat a rival and claim their power, you must understand what they want, how they intend to get what they want, and how to make their methods of gaining what they want destroy them rather than help them. Considering the degree to which vrothizo are single-mindedly obsessed with constantly eating every living thing they come across, I imagine the pleasure they get from the act of consumption may very nearly be comparable with that a politician gets from twisting a former rival into a pawn by correctly anticipating and manipulating their actions with indirect levers that cannot possibly be traced back to their original source."

I blinked.

"Um, any chance you could maybe repeat all that but exclusively using words that a homeless street kid could understand?"

Penelope smiled a little.

"If you and someone else both want the same chunk of bread, Vita, true victory is not found in taking it from them, but in learning how to make them give it to you."

She quickly glanced over at our trio of Revenants.

"…Generally without using animancy."

My fight with Lyn continues, my attacks getting more and more reckless as I push to get my hands on her. Going barehanded against someone with a knife tends to be a poor decision, but Lyn has been completely refusing to cut me, leaving her as the one with the handicap. At least until suddenly and without warning, this changes.

I'm not stupid. I'll admit that I usually don't understand people very well, but a large part of that is me not putting any effort into it. Well, I shouldn't say that. It's hard to put effort into it, harder than it is to put effort into most things, and I feel very little desire to try, even if I know it would be helpful. But I'm still clever, I can still read emotions, and I'm still a trained conwoman. Lyn makes a jab towards my hand with her knife in order to force me to abandon the attack, and I barely avoid grinning in triumph.

My recklessness is real, but it's calculated. I want her to think I'm taking advantage of the fact that she won't attack with her knife, but what I actually want is for her to commit to a defense with her knife so I can capitalize on it in a way I know she won't expect. I don't abandon my attack, doubling down and letting her blade impale my palm. From there I grab the hand holding the knife in my own, and it's over. She tries to squirm and escape, but while she may be faster than me I am much, much stronger. Despite the difference in size I force her to the ground.

"There," I hiss in triumph. "Fooled you. Got you. I win."

Lyn, breathing hard, glances at my hand before backup to my grinning face.

"That you did," she admits coolly. "Was it worth it?"

I blink in surprise, not entirely understanding the question.

"Was what worth it?"

"Well, you beat me in a fight," Lyn says again, and she doesn't feel like she thinks she's lost at all. "It took ten minutes of your time, plus a hand, and therefore however much effort it will be to get that healed. Assuming you don't start to bleed out."

I extract my hand from her knife, blocking off the blood vessels so my hand is barely stained red from the initial stab and nothing else. I flex my fingers.

"I'll be fine," I insist, declining to mention that I also broke both of my legs.

"So you'll be fine," Lyn says. "But was it worth it? Did you really have to take this fight? I goaded you into this. You didn't want to, but it didn't take much pushing to change that. And what do you get out of this? The satisfaction of knowing you can beat up your mother?"

I scowl.

"So… this was the lesson," I mumble. "I thought you were trying to teach me to fight better."

Lyn shrugs, getting up off the floor.

"Well if I did that, that's great too. But what Rowan and I are really concerned about is more that you keep getting into fights in the first place. You've killed thirteen people since Angelien, hon. That we know about. Have you thought about that at all? I know Rowan wants to give you the moral spiel, and I can't say I'm super happy about you using your talent that way, but I get that sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. I've killed people on jobs before. I've hidden bodies, I've stabbed folks that probably don't deserve it. What I want to know is how much that's been eating you up inside, Vita. I want to know why you keep doing it. I want to know if it was worth it."

I swallow, chewing a little on my lower lip.

"I didn't have a choice," I say quietly. "Norah was going to forcibly take me into the church, or at least tell them about me. I would die, mom. The Templars already tried to kill me once, they're just looking for an excuse."

Lyn nods.

"What about the group that killed Angelien?"

A chill settles over the whole house, even the youngest of us icey with fury.

"Yes," I answer firmly. "That was worth it. If anything, I should have killed them sooner."

Lyn nods again.

"And the group with Capita?" she asks. "The whole fight with Capita, really. Was it worth it?"

I open my mouth and almost say yes, again, of course it was worth it, I had good reasons for what I was doing and the men I killed all pulled weapons on me. I just made a point of thinking about how I'm not stupid, however, so I think about it first instead.

"No," I conclude reluctantly. "It all made sense at the time, but in retrospect I could have avoided the fight entirely. I nearly died fighting Capita and didn't actually get anything out of it other than a bit of information, which wasn't worth it."

Lyn walks up close to me, patting me on top of the head.

"Okay. That's all I wanted to say, really. Don't forget why you became a hunter in the first place, kiddo."

What? I became a hunter to eat monster souls and become strong.

"I'm not a kiddo," I insist again.

Lyn smiles.

"Go back to your friend Penelope," she says. "There's a hole in your hand, honey."

I look down at my palm. Oh yeah. Nodding, I exit my home, lost in thought.

Most of my life, the question of 'is a fight worth it' has always been the same as 'can I win this fight,' the answer to which was almost always no, so every other aspect of a fight was obviously not worth it. I lacked power, so I could not fight. Now I have power, so I do fight. And in the forest, that's a strategy that works pretty well. Monsters need killing, and if we can kill them without being hurt we generally always should. But that's not at all how people work, is it? There are other ways to deal with people, none of which I'm good at, but it's also simply much more difficult to know if I can win the fight. Monsters are stupid, so power is everything. People are not stupid, so power is just one of many tricks in the toolbox that can be used to hurt me or the people I care about. I know this, I'm just… bad at it. I have no experience thinking this way.

I had been considering avoiding Penelope in order to try and minimize the awkwardness of… whatever is going on there. That's not going to cut it though, is it? Between how often I get myself hurt and how much I need the help of someone that can actually think about this stuff with any competence, I kind of need her, don't I? The realization doesn't rankle as much as I thought it would, at least. I'm okay with relying on Penelope, even if she can be weird sometimes.

I sigh, opening up our lab and heading downstairs. Time to get another rant on why I shouldn't be breaking my own legs, I guess.

Weird Mask Day

About a tenday later, as I sit through the incredibly surreal experience of eating breakfast with my family, I'm mildly surprised to hear a knock on the door.

Not in the sense that I don't see it coming, since of course I can feel a person approaching our house from anywhere within a thousand yards and this is especially notable when that person happens to be Penelope, but in the sense that this is not at all the time Penelope normally drops by every day. Penelope likes to stick to a firm schedule, and usually waits until about four or five hours after the end of night to perform the daily biomancy treatments for everyone. Day more or less just broke, and we're all sitting around a table preparing to chow down on the food that we have stored in our house. Even Vitamin has a meal ready for her, although I'm the only one that can prepare it.

Seriously. We have spare food. Inside the house! Something freaks us all out about that, it just feels wrong. Shouldn't we be eating it, if for no other reason than to prevent someone else from coming by and stealing it all? But no, we have a house now, not a shack. It's made of stone, and people can't just push the door down. Lyn and Rowan are usually home instead of usually not home, and can kick the ass of anyone stupid enough to try and rob them… but actually we can just legitimately expect to not be robbed, because everybody nearby is in the same situation! Hell, if something bad happens to us the guard might even actually help! Or at least Penelope says so, though we know better than to believe her.

"Come in!" I shout at her, and she lets herself in with her key. "What brings you around so early?"

Penelope smirks. Unlike usual, she's got some kind of satchel around one shoulder, a fancy, rich, expensively-dyed accessory that I've never seen her with before.

"You have absolutely no idea what day it is today, do you?" she asks.

I frown, trying to remember which island passes over us next.

"Shattered Stones?" I answer. It's not so much an island as it is a collection of enormous boulders in the sky, but it blocks out the light when it passes over so it still counts.

"Correct!" Penelope says happily. "Which means it is also…?"

All of us stare blankly for a moment before my little brother Jari chimes in. Actually spending time with them has done wonders for helping me remember their names.

"It's weird mask day," he says.

Oh yeah! Weird mask day. Once a year all the rich people put this crap on their faces, and a bunch of fancy stalls get set up and tons of people all crowd the streets and everything just becomes a smorgasbord for stealing. Weird mask day is a good day. Penelope chuckles, apparently thinking this is quite amusing.

"It's the Skyhope Festival," she corrects. "The day celebrating the foundation of our city?"

"Yeah, for sure," Lyn agrees. "Weird mask day."

"None of you seem terribly excited," Penelope pouts with fake disappointment.

We shrug. We aren't supposed to steal things anymore, since Penelope is providing us food and whatnot, so it doesn't really impact us much.

"It's kind of a rich people holiday," Basra dismisses.

"Well," Penelope says, opening up her satchel and pulling out a spread of animal and monster masks, "how would you all like to be rich people for a day?"

Squeals of excitement erupt from around the table, and before I know it breakfast has been devoured, everyone is masked up, and the family plus Penelope are dashing excitedly down one of the city's main thoroughfares, being greeted by stall owners with pleasant smiles rather than the suspicious glares we're used to. The street is loud and busy, exactly the sort of ideal place for pickpocketing. Today, though, we are here to have fun, so some of the kids actually resist the urge to do so.

"Thanks again for doing this, Penelope," Lyn says from behind her smiling cat mask. "Honestly, I've had no idea what to do with the kids lately. They're all used to being cooped up at home, but now that they aren't starving to death they seem to have all kinds of energy that they didn't before. Makes parenting a little harder."

"Funny how that works," Penelope answers dryly. She picked an intricate snake mask for herself, each scale delicately carved into the wood. "I suppose I could always stop feeding them, if it's too much trouble."

"Well, I'll think about it," Lyn jokes. "Seriously though. Thank you so much. You are pretty much the best thing that will ever happen to them. There's no way we can possibly repay you, you know."

I don't need to see Penelope's face to know that she's smirking.

"Oh, I'm sure I'll find something for someone with your skills to do."

Lyn laughs.

"Not so much of an altruist after all, huh?" she asks.

"Am I not? I imagine you're dying to have some way to spend your time," Penelope responds coyly. "Your boyfriend makes a better homebody than you do. Surely finding you some work is but another favor?"

That makes my mom laugh even harder, and she slaps me on the back.

"Vita, catch this one while you can, I want to make sure she sticks around."

"Okay?" I answer hesitantly, not quite sure I understand. Then a flash of embarrassment passes through Penelope, and I figure it out, causing the same to happen to me.

"I'll leave you two alone then," Lyn taunts, placing her hand on my head and rubbing around a little before running off. "Katie! Honey, we pay for those now!"

With Rowan already off wrangling some of my other siblings and Vitamin staying close to him in case anyone gets suspicious of her, that does indeed leave Penelope and I alone. That used to be relaxing, but now it's just… weird. What's with everybody pushing me into, well, whatever it is I'm being pushed into? I don't want to think about it. I like Penelope. I do. I just don't—

"So, how do you like your mask?" Penelope asks quickly, interrupting my train of thought. "I had it custom-made."

I reach up to feel the art strapped to my face. I hardly need her to tell me that she had it made especially for me, considering what it is. A great blue eye, wrapped up in tentacles so that it's barely peeking out from behind, shyly peering at the world with an abnormally piercing gaze. The tendrils are wrapped around each other as well, intertwined and swirling in complex, beautiful patterns.

It's a depiction of my soul, obviously, and though the wood and dye are a pale imitation of the real thing, I can't deny that I love it. I love it a lot.

"It's good," I mumble. "Thank you."

Satisfaction fills her, both from my joy and from the usual smugness she feels from being right about something. It relaxes me a bit. It's not attraction, not really. She's just happy I'm happy, and I'm happy to be happy about that.

"Any of the stalls catch your interest?" Penelope asks. "Smell any food you want? Any games you want to try?"

"Not picky about food," I answer, shrugging. "You know that. I see a cups stall, over there. That might be worth a laugh."

Penelope raises an eyebrow, and I lift an arm to point after briefly trying to indicate the direction with a tentacle. Unfortunately, it's not safe for Penelope to have the soul sight spell active in public. If a metamancer saw it and knew what they were looking at, we'd immediately be in trouble. Penelope can't use the metal tattoo strategy either, because she might actually be under some scrutiny and the magic we use to block other people from detecting our magic is apparently also illegal, at least to have on an individual. We're only risking it on Vitamin because she's illegal anyway.

"That ball and cup game?" Penelope asks. "Sure, if you like. Why?"

"Rowan used to run games like that all the time," I tell her. "I helped out for a while before becoming a hunter. It's how our family used to get most of our money. Anyway, I know all the tricks, so it should be a fun and easy win."

"Well, I do like winning," Penelope agrees with a nod. "Lead the way."

We push through the crowd, a somewhat slow and frustrating endeavor for someone as short as I am. Honestly, it's kind of a miracle I can see any of the stalls behind the mass of celebrating people. At first, moving around was pretty stressful, not because everybody is huge and in my way (I'm used to that), but because every once in a while someone in my range nearby will randomly freak out as if they're under attack. That raises my hackles, and I have to try and figure out how much danger we're in before inevitably figuring out that they're scared of me. Everybody with a danger sense goes on high alert when I walk nearby, which is starting to get a little annoying. Thankfully, most people do not have one, so I should be fine.

We get in the line for the cups stall, which thankfully isn't very long. It's much fancier than Rowan's ever was, though, with a big sign and a rack of prizes that you can win sitting behind the guy running the games. He's clearly a bit of a weasel, what with a murky, shifty soul that's slippery and hard to see through. I don't blame the guy, though. Sometimes you just have to make an honest living by cheating everyone else out of their money. The game is set up a little differently from Rowan's, the premise being that you could bet three, six, or twelve in a row, with the expectation that each game of cups would get progressively harder. If you get every single game that you bet correctly, you win a prize, with better quality more games in a row you got.

"Well, that's cute," Penelope says, pointing at one of the prizes. "A stuffed Little Disciple. Perhaps Rosco would like a friend?"

"Rosco is a loner," I answer matter-of-factly. "He needs no friends, only hugs."

"But what is he supposed to get hugs from, if not a friend?" Penelope counters.

I hum, considering this. She makes a very valid point. Penelope truly is a master of rhetoric.

"Twelve games please," I tell the stand owner, dropping the chitin coins for it on the counter.

"And someone takes the twelve game challenge!" the stand owner announces loudly, trying to gather as much attention and spectacle as he can to try and draw in more customers. "Could this little girl be the first person today to get twelve in a row?"

"Fifteen," I correct.

"Hmmm?" he prompts, confused.

"I'm going to get fifteen in a row," I tell him. "Just to humiliate you for calling me little girl."

Penelope gets a flush of excitement over that, causing me to regret it a little, but some things I refuse to stand for. The cups guy grins a showman's grin, and we're off to the races. The first few games are pathetically easy, but of course that's part of how he gets customers. The more people watch the twelve-set, the more people are going to think they can easily do three in a row, which will end up harder than they expected from watching me. Of course, even if they succeed, the amount of money they pay to play the game isn't worth the prize they get, so it's really a win-win for the guy. The speed he can move the cups around is legitimately impressive, and after the fifth game I wouldn't be surprised if many normal people would lose track of the ball even if he wasn't cheating. After the eighth game, of course, the cheating comes out and he secretly palms the ball before moving it into a new cup once or twice during the rotation.

Obviously, I'm also cheating, having reached out with a tentacle and put a small soul shard in the ball, as well as the backup balls he occasionally replaces it with. Every round I point at the correct cup immediately, without even bothering to look his way, enjoying how increasingly flustered he becomes as a result. He starts using kynamancy after the eleventh game, and considering how stressed he is about it I imagine he probably doesn't have a license. It's actually kind of interesting watching him do it with all three eyes, since my soul eye doesn't use light to see and is totally unaffected by the illusion, while my physical eyes see whatever his spell wants me to see. Thankfully, he doesn't use illusions to mask the end result, only to make it look like cups are spinning in places where they actually aren't, so I don't need to call him out on his cheating in order to win. He's smart enough to cut his losses. After all fifteen games, I become the proud owner of a new tentacular stuffed animal, which I squeeze snugly while mentally promising to make it up to Rosco with some double hugs.

"Your name is Jermaine," I tell my new friend, and then put him on my head as a hat. The little stuffed tentacles wrap around my scalp snugly and securely.

Penelope says nothing, and I pointedly ignore her cacophony of embarrassing emotional reactions. Mostly because they are embarrassing for me, not for her, though I know in my heart of hearts I don't actually have a reason to be embarrassed. Stuffed animals, particularly Roscos, are the ideal companion and friend and I will not deign to pretend otherwise. When you hug a stuffed animal you get all the comfort of a proper cuddle without having to worry about getting touched in weird places or if the other person is sick or if they're about to put a knife in your back or if they're just trying to steal something from you. I do not at all like being put in a position of vulnerability, but with a stuffed animal I am always safe and in control. It is a welcome change from the constant, ever-present danger of normal life.

Penelope and I continue to enjoy festival games, though neither of us find any of them very interesting unless we can use our abilities to handedly win, which is always quite entertaining. I also keep slurping down endless piles of sweet and fatty festival food, which Penelope refuses to stop buying for me and I find myself unable to protest against that attitude on principle. I definitely like food, and as long as I eat it slowly enough maybe I won't get full before I run out of it. Honestly, things are going really, really great. At least until we step into an alleyway to take a break from the crowds and a certain familiar soul suddenly pops into existence beside us.

I jump back and draw my spear, glowering ineffectively at a pink-haired, fox-masked crazy lady who I can only assume has been waiting just outside my sensory range for precisely this opportunity.

"Hello again, friend!" Capita says cheerfully, waving with excited energy. "Can I celebrate with you too?"

Making Headway

"Capita," I growl, spear still raised. "What are you doing here?"

She doesn't feel hostile, but emotionally, Capita is one of the most complicated people I've ever tried to read. Something about being two fragments of a person spliced together makes it difficult for me to understand her as a singular entity, as her emotional responses are spread between two souls that demonstrate those responses in very different ways, not to mention the purple ooze between them which sort of acts like a third soul fragment and sort of doesn't. In short, Capita is just different from every other person I've ever met, to such a large degree that I will need to spend more time around her before I can pick up the skills necessary to understand what she's feeling.

In the meantime, she's a wildcard, and I don't trust her. Though in classic wildcard fashion, she immediately does something absurd.

"Who?" Capita asks. "If you seek to get ahead, you'll find no such head here! I am… the fox!"

I blink. Did she forget who she is again or something? No, wait, she called me a friend. And I did sort of promise to be her friend. Mostly because I was getting information out of her, but still.

I might be able to just kill her as I am now. But then Sky would come after me for sure, and he would without question be coming for the kill. I'm not ready to fight Sky yet. So… fighting here isn't worth it, I guess.

"I distinctly recall our agreement with your boss being that you would not bother us," Penelope says from behind me, her voice venomous.

"Does a friend bother a friend when saying hello?" Capita giggles. "I mean…a fox makes no agreements! I know not of this boss you speak, for I am just a wandering companion!"

"I don't think she has her story straight," Penelope deadpans.

"What do you want?" I ask.

"Listen, listen! The work of art... um. I mean, life must listen! The fox has already told you her purpose, has she not? It is a day of celebration. What better time to make merry with friends?"

I sigh, putting my spear away.

"Sorry, I don't know a fox. But if you see my friend Capita, be sure to send her my way."

She reacts with apparent shock, scrambling to fix her story. What a weirdo.

"I-I am, arguably maybe, if one were to look behind the mask, which may I say is against the spirit of this wonderful holiday, potentially perhaps possibly someone named Capita," she whimpers.

"And therefore, as per the terms of our nonaggression pact, you are supposed to leave us alone," Penelope repeats flatly. "We were having a nice day."

"But!" Capita retorts, "I might also not be someone named Capita!"

"Why aren't you with Sky?" I ask her. "Shouldn't you be spending the holiday with him? Isn't it normal to spend holidays with your lover, or something?"

Mild surprise and massive amounts of embarrassment erupt from Penelope at that. Why the heck? I don't get her sometimes. What about what I said would—

Oh.

Oh.

"I will… also spend time today with Sky," Capita protests defensively. "But is it not also a wonderful thing to—"

"You can come with," I answer her.

Capita absolutely lights up with joy, it's easy to feel even with how strange her soul is. It's also easy to see, because she starts hopping up and down and clapping her hands while making an excited screeching noise. Penelope steps next to me, lips pursed in frustration about the introduction of this third party. So it's as I thought. I make a quick decision, one that I hope I don't end up regretting later.

"I think we might want to introduce her to another friend of ours," I murmur to Penelope.

That gets her back on track, picking up on my meaning immediately. Theodora. If Capita really is as friendly as she claims, we stand to gain a lot by having Theodora watch her use her talents. Teleportation magic is unfathomably rare, and Theodora's ability to rapidly convert any magic she sees into a usable spell is equally absurd. It's difficult to abuse considering that we can't allow most people to know Theodora exists, but since Capita is an animancer she is unlikely to take offense at all of the animancy I've been doing. Speaking of, she is and continues to be our best link to cognimancy, and Theodora's ability to copy that could advance our research tremendously. This has been part of our goal from the start, the only difference being that originally I was going to bring in Capita as a Revenant.

Penelope nods back. So she thinks the risks are worth it? A living Capita that we can't know the loyalties of is a significant risk, but perhaps if we spend the day with her I can figure out her soul enough to know whether she's being upfront enough with her intentions.

More importantly, this also turns today into a day about accomplishing goals rather than possibly having a date, which I am so much more comfortable with.

"Such a joy it is for the palette to have the art!" Capita coos, spinning with dance-like movements between strangers in the crowd when we return to the street. "My every smear evidence of a greater perfection!"

We make our way to the next game, where we are apparently supposed to throw discs at targets. The discs, naturally, seem to randomly wobble off course. Obviously the person behind the stall just has a weak kineticism talent, but he's subtle enough with it that people don't seem to notice. Unless those people are watching his soul use it, that is.

"Do you seriously think that I was made artificially, let alone by the same person as you?" I grumble at Capita's sing-song musings. "We are nothing alike."

Honestly, if I'm trying to win her allegiance, I probably shouldn't argue against her assertion that we are both made by some sort of 'artist.' The idea just pisses me off, though. She's two souls chopped in half and glued together. It's a hackneyed job at best, a blind flailing at worst. I can sort of see how it works, the more I look at it. The two souls aren't communicating properly, because they can't. The way each of them functions, the pathways each of them uses, are fundamentally incompatible with one another, at least on the level required to be a person. The purple goop in the middle acts as both an adhesive to prevent Capita from just falling the fuck apart but also as a translator. A shitty translator. The soul halves send garbled, incomplete messages to each other, expecting to find their actual counterparts on the other end to help complete the thought. But there is nothing there, nothing that can understand them, so the message has to pass through the middle and get interpreted by something that barely knows the language before getting spat out the other end. It's no wonder she's crazy.

"Why would the palette look like the masterpiece?" Capita counters. "Why would a sketch bear resemblance to a painting? The signature left on us is the same. That is all that matters."

I scowl, paying the stall owner with Penelope's money and tossing a disc. As expected, it misses. I still don't like the implication that Capita and I are both created by some singular person. It feels insulting to be compared to her. Besides…

"If what you say is true, we're not really friends, are we?" I wonder out loud. "We would be more like sisters."

I try to toss a second disc, but the stall owner doesn't even need to cheat as my throw is knocked wildly off course when Capita grabs me in a crushing hug, instantly sending my whole body into fight or flight. Danger! Danger danger danger danger—

"Sister!?" Capita squeals. "Oh, yes, yes, yes! For the most beautiful of all paintings to accept a family of sketches, there could be no greater joy!"

"Get off me!" I shout, driving the base of my palm up into her chin hard enough to feel something crack in her face. She just keeps on giggling, though, giving me one final squeeze before I force her away.

The commotion earns us quite a few stares from other people in and around the stall, but with her having let go I quickly calm myself back down. There is no danger, she's just weird. I return to throwing and soon the interest in us dissipates. Each disc wobbles in the air before moving realistically off-course. It's a pretty good con, and I didn't expect myself to be annoyed by it, but I'm starting to get frustrated. When I have only three throws left, I poke a tendril into the body of the stall owner and tap his soul as I throw, causing him to jump in sudden terror and allowing me to get a hit on a target. I grin at him. That'll teach them.

An exasperated and for some reason slightly curious Penelope grabs and sets Capita's jaw as I make my second to last throw, though to my frustration the stall owner has not learned his lesson and he knocks it off course again. Annoyed, I tap his soul a second time and, without really thinking about it, try to push a bunch of my mana into it. I fail at first, but now I'm kind of interested in seeing what happens so I push harder and force myself inside. It's… odd. I can still move the mana around as if it was in me, although it's substantially more difficult. If I wanted to, I could probably damage or break his soul like this.

Not that there would be any point. Pushing mana into his soul took a lot more work than just ripping it out would have, and I bet it would be comparably more difficult for anyone with a stronger soul as well. He places a hand over his sternum, surprised at the feeling but other than the tentacle touch not terribly disquieted by it. How odd. I throw my last disc and, still somehow not suspicious enough to just let me, the stall owner's soul activates his talent and starts shaping some mana.

Specifically, he shapes my mana. It acts just like I've seen the Mistwatcher's mana act, except without the unruly, almost angry vibrations I've come to expect from someone channeling. He executes the talent normally, my mana gets consumed in the spell (which annoys me, but I don't do anything about it) and the disc is knocked off course as per usual. Interesting! There's even a little bit of my mana left over inside him, since the spell is all finesse and almost no power.

The amount left over isn't enough for a second use of his talent, though. I didn't give him very much. He starts channeling mana to activate his talent for one of the other people throwing discs, doesn't have enough of mine, and so pulls in some of the mana from outside.

A muffled screech sounds from inside his chest as the two kinds of mana collide and he collapses in pain. Whoops.

"Um, are you okay?" I ask hesitantly. I really hadn't intended to do that. I hope he didn't get hurt.

He waves me off, insisting that he is fine and giving me the one-hit prize, some cheap ring made of twine. I give Penelope a pleading glance and she correctly figures out that whatever happened was entirely my fault, so she offers to check the guy anyway. He agrees, because when a biomancer offers you a free checkup you fucking say yes. Afterwards, Penelope says he "only" had a mild case of something called "heartburn" which sounds absolutely terrifying but she acts like it's not really that serious of a condition. Also, she's lying, presumably because we are in public and the answer isn't the kind of thing we say here. I'll have to ask her about it in private later. Then the three of us leave together, a fascinated Capita having watched the entire thing with apparent glee.

"Experience begets wisdom, wisdom begets progress," she chirps, failing to hold back a few more giggles. "Have you become wiser, littlest sister?"

I scowl. That had better not be a short joke. I'm four foot ten, now! I don't know how tall I used to be, but I'm going to choose to believe that I'm growing.

"Capita. You're going to tell Sky pretty much everything we do today, right?" I ask.

She stiffens, with what I think is a mixture of surprise and embarrassment. I'm getting pretty good at figuring people out, so I'll probably crack her soon enough. Er, no pun intended.

"Few secrets survive a lover's bed," she hesitantly admits. "But so too does a family gossip at dinner!"

"Penelope," I ask my friend, "is there anything we care about Sky knowing?"

She thinks for a moment, then sighs.

"No, I suppose not. It's mutually assured destruction if he informs on us, considering how guilty he is of the same crimes. We may as well return now, if this vapid, pink-haired prat is going to ruin the holiday for us either way."

Capita titters, hand over her mouth as she uses her other hand to pat the top of Penelope's head, which surprises the biomancer so thoroughly that I get to witness nearly a full second of her flailing to bat away Capita's arm before she primly steps around to the other side of me and starts plotting revenge like a proper noble instead. I grin behind my mask, because I know Penelope is blushing behind hers.

"Fear not, oh lady of bubbles and glass," Capita coos. "I would never harm you."

"I'm not afraid of you, mad thing," Penelope hisses. "I just don't want you to touch me."

Capita laughs again.

"Of course, of course! An honor reserved only for one. But how does a mortal catch infinity?"

"By leaving bait without a trap," Penelope counters, and the conversation officially starts going above my head.

"You think a god is like a stray that you can feed until it comes on command?" Capita says, and then suddenly starts laughing even harder. "So to speak!"

The discordant tune of Penelope's soul plays a sliding, rising note of embarrassment.

"With the right food?" Penelope asks, not a hint of her true feelings in her serious tone. "Yes, if you know what they're hungry for. But that would require some capacity to understand the world around you, wouldn't it?"

"Would the two of you quit with the riddles?" I snap. "I don't have any idea what you're saying!"

"I suspect the lady knows that well," Capita taunts, but Penelope just scoffs and doesn't rise to what I assume was a jab at her.

The three of us soon break away from the bustling festival streets and slink towards our laboratory, letting Capita inside. We make our way downstairs and call out the all-clear to team metamancy. Theodora and Margarette emerge soon after, reacting with surprise when they see us but not for the reason I was expecting.

"Why are you all wearing masks?" Theodora asks, seeming a little worried. "It can't be Skyhope day already, can it?"

"I'm afraid it can be," Penelope answers. "Why? Is something the matter?"

She scratches the back of her neck, seeming temporarily lost.

"No, I just… it feels like it hasn't been anywhere near that long since I woke up down here."

I frown, moving my mask away from my face as Capita and Penelope do the same. I guess my Revenants have sort of been stuck down here for a really long time, haven't they? They have no way to know when it's day or night, they don't get tired, and they have plenty of work to distract themselves with. It must be odd to have the world slip by unannounced.

"Vitamin seems to be blending in okay thanks to the tattoos you gave her," I say. "Maybe we can get you two some time off as well? Let you see the sky and stuff."

"Yes, let's do that," Penelope agrees, though apparently quite reluctantly considering all the risks for what she sees is very little gain. "But not right now. Theodora, Margarette, this is Capita. She is a splice and a cognimancer. Capita, by any chance would you be willing to demonstrate your abilities for us?"

Capita tilts her head.

"For my youngest sister, I would be honored. But to mold a mind I need a mind to mold; the dead will not do."

"Oh, I wouldn't worry," Penelope says, motioning for all of us to follow her into the room where we keep Sky's gift. "We have a volunteer."

We file in, a bound and gagged man, doomed from the moment he had failed Angelien, looking increasingly terrified as each of us enters. Capita grins a vulpine grin that would have fit just as easily on her fox mask.

"This will do nicely," she agrees, and we start to learn the most illegal of all blasphemies.

Heretic House

"You don't need to do anything, Theodora. You just need to watch."

Ironically, the person least excited to be performing animancy is one of the two people here who happens to be animated by it. Theodora seems to quite enjoy the biomancy research she and Penelope have been getting up to most of every day now, but messing with a living man's soul crosses a line for her, apparently. Penelope, who has been trying to convince her to help, turns slightly to give me a meaningful look.

I suppose it would be trivial to get Theodora to help. As poorly as my shard has integrated with her soul, it's still in her and she cannot change that. Not unless, ironically, she learns animancy. And she knows that. It's part of why she agreed to help us. Seeing the terror of the man we have tied up in our basement who we intend to use as a learning experience, however, has given her cold feet. Still, it's clearly best for her to stay. Having her watch here would help us out immensely, and it would also bring her closer to her own goals of being free from me.

"Don't look at me," I say. "I'm staying neutral on this."

My whole life I've had to fight to keep the clothes on my back. Every trinket, every coin, every chunk of bread that was ever mine was a struggle against death. Everything I call my own is precious to me, be it a home, an object, or a person. Theodora is mine, and she wants to make her own choices. So I'm going to let her.

Though ironically, that seems to be the best way to control her.

"Th-thank you, Vita," Theodora says, her appreciation giving my shard the purchase to grow deeper within her. "Penelope, you have to know this isn't the animancy that we wanted to make. This isn't something I want to be able to do."

"I don't disagree," Penelope answers soothingly, an expertly-crafted smile on her lips. "It's a horrible temptation, one that we would be better off without. But we have been making no headway. One must understand the basics before they can develop their own methods, is that not so?"

Margarette stands next to me, even less inclined to join the conversation than I am. Her mix of irritation and open jealousy in Theodora's direction is probably caused by how she considers Theodora's valuable talent to be rightfully hers. Margarette told us back in Litia that she had to fight dozens of her own kin for supremacy inside Theodora's body. It must've been one of the first things she ever did after being born, considering that at the time every Nawra besides Penta and the one controlling Remus would have been less than a couple tendays old. What must it be like to have someone else's memories but consider them all your own?

"You know I hate when you're right about these things, Penelope," Theodora grumbles.

"And you know I rely on you to make sure I really am right," Penelope responds, her words both truth and carefully-calculated manipulation. "If I am wrong somewhere, you're the one I need to point it out."

"No, you're right," Theodora sighs. "Of course you're right, and you're going to do it whether I help or not anyway, aren't you? Fine."

She glances hesitantly at me, but starts casting mana sight and, for the first time while I'm around, soul sight... though she avoids looking my way.

"Okay!" Capita says cheerfully, clapping her hands once. "Now is the family blasphemy session, yes?"

"That's one way to put it," Margarette snorts. "So would you be Auntie Capita in this fucked up found family?"

I raise an eyebrow at her. I don't remember adopting Margarette.

"Vitamin said we're sisters," Margarette answers defensively.

I guess I stand corrected, apparently I have adopted Margarette. She gasps and hops excitedly as I smash a small chunk of myself and pass her the resulting soul dust. I can't help but crack a grin at the sight. The former slimes are quite easy to please, and it never stops being cute.

"Let's begin," Penelope says, attempting to get everyone back on track.

Capita nods, a grin splitting her face as tiny purple threads of soul creep out from her broken core. She turns to face our bound and gagged victim, who squirms futilely at the attention.

"A man looks in the mirror," Capita intones, stepping forward and leaning close to the bound man, "and he sees his reflection. He does this often, always checking, lest he forget what he looks like."

She wraps one hand around the struggling man's neck, though she does not squeeze. His fear alone causes his struggles to cease, and he stares at her in motionless terror.

"Why does he check? Perhaps he is obsessed. Perhaps he is cursed. But always, he checks the mirror, over and over, and what he sees there he knows to be himself. But what happens when I change the reflection?"

Her threads slip into the disgusting soul of the man who failed my family, slithering in through minuscule cracks and channels, like a snake hunting moles within their own tunnels. She pushes into him, violates him, and prepares to break him from the inside.

"Shall I make the reflection look like a frog?" Capita coos. "I could do so, but no matter how beautifully the reflection croaks, what would happen when the man sees it? If your mirror showed you a frog, would you believe yourself to be a frog? No. You still have the wisdom of a man. But if your skin was just a little greener, your tongue just the tiniest fraction longer, would you notice? Or would you believe what you see in the mirror to be strange, new, but still clearly you?"

"Wait, cognimancy can't actually turn people and frogs, can it?" I ask.

"No, obviously not. She's just saying major changes don't take," Penelope explains.

Capita frowns, swaying slightly as her soul sparks, trying to form her thoughts into something coherent.

"…No. The mirror is important," she insists. "The mirror is always there. What separates cognimancy and necromancy is the presence of the man. The dead are but a reflection, burned into glass. Twist the reflection, and there is no viewer to disbelieve the mirror. Necromancy is power, necromancy is control. Whereas cognimancy is subtlety, cognimancy is patience. It is to make an illusion so real it ceases to be an illusion at all. Yes?"

I frown, trying to parse that.

"You're saying that, if I could put one of my shards into someone currently alive, it wouldn't make them devoted to me because they would be able to... what? Notice that something was affecting them and change their soul back?"

Capita gives me a smile of confirmation, her hand briefly squeezing tighter on the man's neck as his shivers of discomfort start becoming more serious twitches. Her hold lightens again when he calms down, enabling the man to take a gasp of air.

"Perhaps. The living have two selves, the mirror and the man. Each can change the other. This is how people grow. To mold and control a mind, we do not force the result, we control the growth."

Penelope nods thoughtfully.

"That makes a lot of sense. Biomancy is similar, in that making massive or rapid alterations to the body only does more harm than good. Biomancy spells must be applied with patience, as their effects take a while to bear fruit."

Capita nods back happily.

"Except perhaps for the masters of our disciplines, this is so. The artist's skill is incomparable to his sketches, but I only teach you what I know. To that end… watch."

Her threads have invaded deep into the soul at this point, and one has finally found what she seems to have been looking for. The tip of the thread digs into the soul, carving a purple gouge inside it. Theodora flinches.

"Scratch the reflection. Simplicity itself," Capita hums, turning to smile at Theodora. "Do you see, scholar's soul? That is the first spell."

Slowly, Theodora nods, her eyes flicking in different directions as her talent rapidly processes information in a way that no one else can.

"It's not… it's not one hundred percent replicable," Theodora mutters slowly. "Whatever you're doing to reach into the soul isn't a spell, only the scratch is."

Capita nods.

"The soul is a plant. Mana is water, the body is soil. You hold power over fruit, but not the plant itself. There are some things only your Queen's ilk can grow. But! Fear not, the artist did his weaving without a single thread. There is a way, though I cannot teach it."

Theodora swallows, her body going through with the nervous gesture despite no longer being able to make a single drop of saliva or digest a single grain of wheat.

"Valka has a king," she says.

Capita shrugs.

"You don't."

"As interesting as this all is," Penelope interrupts, "we ultimately do not care very much about using cognimancy to control people. We are only interested in acquiring the spells necessary to manipulate a living soul, regardless of whether the manipulation affects personality or memory. Ultimately, we want to be able to remove and replace souls from one body into another without harming or killing them, not any of the rest of this. If anything, we want to be able to remove the sorts of manipulations you describe."

Capita quickly cycles through surprise, consideration, and excitement as Theodora sends Penelope a thankful look.

"A pleasant ambition," Capita giggles. "Then I shall cut my lessons as short as my sister, and skip to the meat."

"Hey!" I snap.

She laughs, and from there she moves on to a series of quicker demonstrations, adding and removing parts of the soul at Theodora's request. Penelope watches intently, only occasionally glancing my way to look me in the eye with soul sight active. It's embarrassing, but I focus on Capita's lessons, learning everything I can about cognimancy. A couple hours later, Capita declares that she's shown everything she has to offer, to which Penelope asks her to demonstrate her teleportation talent as well.

"For this favor," Capita answers slowly, "I would wish a favor returned."

"Not content to offer anything to your little sister after all?" Penelope presses.

"Penelope, don't call me that," I grumble.

"'Tis not the work of art who requests this of me, and 'tis not her I request the favor from. Oh woman of armored heart, noble master of the body, I wish from you a boon."

Penelope raises an eyebrow.

"I assume you mean me?" Her face remains impassive as she starts rapidly deciding exactly how much she'd be willing to trade for a teleportation spell. "What exactly do you want?"

Capita scratches her cheek, embarrassed and hesitant.

"I am of the understanding that you, too, are an artist. One of flesh, rather than spirit."

"I would not describe myself as such, but much of my personal wealth has been gained from spells I use to manipulate appearance, if that's what you mean," Penelope answers tersely. "Were you looking for a makeover?"

"Yes…" Capita murmurs, "but not for me. I beseech you to shape the Sky."

She nervously taps her fingers together while Penelope makes a slow, incredulous blink.

"Your lover and I openly despise each other," Penelope points out.

"Yeeees..." Capita hedges, "but what if… you didn't?"

"Just like that?" Penelope answers flatly. "Oh of course, let's break out the scones and tea for the person that wants to kill my entire family. We'll sing nursery rhymes and play hopscotch together right before you both assassinate the King."

"Yes!" Capita agrees happily. "Yes, exactly! And then he won't kill you and then none of us have to be sad!"

My eyes narrow, tentacles clenching for war. So he plans to kill Penelope? He'll regret ever even thinking about it. Penelope, for her part, just gives an unimpressed huff.

"You will be sorely disappointed if you attempt to convince me with threats," she says firmly.

"Not… not threats!" Capita insists. "Fears. The sky is as vast as his anger. But you are the work of art's. You must be spared, and… well, you are one of the few that could change wrath to gratitude. It is… for both of you. Please?"

"Sky doesn't even know you're asking this, does he?" I realize.

"Favor to me," Capita agrees. "But all for him. Please, flesh shaper. Make him himself."

Penelope pinches the bridge of her nose.

"Assuming you can even put the two of us in the same room without starting a fight, what do you want me to do exactly? Make your lover look more like a man? It's obvious that Sky isn't even a man in the first place."

I blink my eyes in surprise as Capita narrows hers dangerously.

"He is," she insists.

"Is that really a lie you want to tell to someone you're asking to perform biological modifications?" Penelope fires back immediately. "Honestly, think long and hard on that one, I know you need time to get your head working."

Capita hesitates at that, drumming her fingertips together as her soul struggles to come to a decision.

"Are there not… famous true nobles that opted not to disclose the content of their trousers?" Capita murmurs in answer, squirming uncomfortably.

"Yes, quite a few, but I imagine they still told any biomancer that needed to muck around with their hormones!" Penelope snaps. "The scale of the task alters rather drastically depending on whether or not your lover has any testicles. I can't give you an answer unless I know."

Capita scowls, refusing to look Penelope in the eyes.

"He is a he," she insists.

"Okay! Fine!" Penelope snaps. "But...?"

"But… his second belly button might be more of an innie than an outie," she hedges.

"You guys are doing the thing again," I grumble. "Could someone explain?"

Capita gives me a worried smile, increasingly uncomfortable to have to explain any of this and terrified of what my answer will be.

"His soul does not match his body," Capita says.

"Oh. Yeah, I feel that," I answer honestly. "That really sucks."

"I think your situation might be a little different, Vita," Penelope says dryly. "Anyway, my answer is no."

Capita makes a pleading face.

"What? Why?"

"Because you can't afford my time," Penelope says, crossing her arms. "I've done something like this once before, you know. It wasn't easy, it wasn't complete, and it wasn't worth the paltry sum exchanged for either me or my client because most of what I did started reverting itself, at least partially, without continuous treatment. Which they couldn't pay for! One favor isn't worth the time you're asking of me if you expect me to cast on Sky every other day, and if you want me to do anything permanent I will need time to research it. It will take months of my time, at minimum, and if you haven't noticed my research schedule is currently rather busy."

I only half-listen to Penelope's whole explanation because I'm busy trying to parse the pulse of emotion she's trying to make as obvious as possible. Leave it to Penelope to figure out a way to turn my lie detector into a secret messaging system. She wants me to contradict her.

"You should do it anyway," I say, seeing no reason not to go along with her scheme.

Penelope false-scowls.

"Why? Immortality research is obviously more important."

"But this is more immediate," I argue, and find myself believing it. "Better to have Sky like us, isn't it?"

Being stuck in a shitty body sucks. Also, it would help us since we're planning to doublecross him before the truce ends. If anyone can convince him to lower his guard, it's Penelope.

"You don't think that your situation is very different after all, do you Vita?" Penelope asks, chewing on the inside of her lip.

I start to try to figure out what I'm supposed to say but realize that her question is honest this time. Does she mean the body thing?

"I mean, yeah I guess," I admit. "It sounds the same to me."

Penelope looks between me and Capita, then back to me.

"Do you want me to… alter your treatments?" she asks.

I blink.

"You mean to look like a man? No? I mean, I don't really care. You can if you want to, but you can also not if you don't want to. It doesn't matter if I look male or female, I still don't look like me."

The feeling of revulsion at myself has been growing slowly ever since I hatched, but there is nothing Penelope can do to fix that. It's not that my body is wrong, it's that I don't want a body at all. I just don't think about it wherever I can. Somehow, it's both easier and more difficult ever since my soul spread through the inside of my body: on one hand, I'm significantly more me-shaped, not because my body changed to look like me but because I changed to look more like my body. On the other hand, I now have to more intimately feel this increasingly disgusting meat vessel, and it is less than pleasant.

Penelope stares thoughtfully at me for a while longer before finally turning back to Capita.

"Fine," she says. "I make no promises, but I will look him over and see what I can come up with. If nothing else, it will be an excellent learning experience."

With a squeal of joy, Capita immediately starts teleporting circles around Theodora before finally teleporting next to Penelope and scooping her up into a big hug.

"Thank you, spiky bubbles!"

"Get off of me before I give you more warts than hair follicles!"

This has been my weirdest weird mask day yet.

Time to Think

I take a deep breath and hold it, pulling in mana from my ocean. The warm waters of my true self wash through me, calming and reassuring. I am more than what I seem to be, and this truth is unassailable.

Regretfully, I return focus to my meat, specifically my hands as I move and shape the mana into intricate patterns. I open my eyes, let out my breath, and let the spell complete. A dazzling blue copy of my eye appears in the air, tentacles writhing, and I smile as I watch Rowan's eyebrows raise in a mixture of pride and surprise.

"Nice work, Vita. It's pretty obviously an illusion, but a very complex one. Lots of moving parts. You're visualizing all of this at once?"

"I'm cheating a little," I admit.

"Well, I'd be quite the hypocrite to disapprove of cheating, but what do you mean, exactly?"

"This is me!" I tell him happily, pushing the core of my soul down my arm and overlapping it with the illusion so that he can see me move in real time. "I'm visualizing it by watching myself move. This is my soul."

It's been about a month since weird mask day, or 'The Skyhope Festival' as Penelope incorrectly insists that it is called, and during that time I have been very busy doing a lot of nothing. I spar with Lyn sometimes, and I have been learning kynamancy from Rowan, but frankly most of that has just been excuses to hang out with my family as much as possible. It's… honestly really weird doing so. I actually know the names of all my siblings now, though that took quite a bit of effort to memorize. Having food, energy, and free time seems to have turned the kids into completely different people, but I suppose that's to be expected. We no longer have significant blocks of the day spent cowering or begging or stealing, so there are new things to do.

Of course, that doesn't stop a lot of the kids from trying to go out and steal things anyway, which I understand. It's the one skill many of them have, and it feels like we have nothing else to do with our time. Others are training to fight, watching Lyn and I spar and taking lessons. I can't say I'm a big fan of that, but it will be years before any of them actually get into danger unless one of them happens on a lucky talent, so it's a problem that I can kick down the road.

Unfortunately, kicking problems down the road seems to continue being a habit. I am… really happy lately. It's nice to not have anything I have to kill, it's nice to just be able to feel my family be happy, to soak in that satisfying joy that I accomplished. But in the back of my head, there's a constant tapping. A little reminder that won't stay quiet, telling me that I don't have much time left to become more powerful than Sky. That my deadline for betrayal is closing, that every moment I waste not getting more powerful is a moment I will regret when danger once more knocks on my door.

This joy is wonderful, but it is wrong. I shouldn't be sitting here feeling satisfied, because that complacency is exactly the flaw that caused so many of my problems up until this point. I'm not fulfilling my promise to myself. I'm not being proactive. I'm going with the flow, reacting with whatever feels right in the moment, and I know it's wrong no matter how much I love it. I should not be here.

I am really, really happy I finally have this kynamancy spell down, though.

"That's what you look like?" Rowan asks. "Well! It's nice to see you, I suppose."

He makes an illusion of his own, a copy of himself, and pretends to shake one of my tentacles with it.

"Ooh!" Ronnie cheers, running up to us. He's one of the youngest ones, probably only five or six. "What's my soul look like?"

There was a minor token effort on behalf of Lyn, Rowan, and I to not let the kids know that I'm an animancer, since their ignorance is very literally for their own protection. Under Skyhope law, knowing about what I am and not reporting it is a serious crime, potentially even treason based on the circumstances, but frankly the kids are too smart and I am too shitty at keeping secrets for that façade to last very long. It's probably fine. Lyn and Rowan didn't raise snitches.

"Well, your soul is still growing and developing, but currently it looks like this," I say, shifting the illusion showing my tentacular beauty into a small, black sphere with hints of dark purples blooming around the outside.

"I look like a bruise," Ronnie whines.

"That just means you're tough," I answer, grinning at him.

That earns me a grin back, and soon I have every kid currently in the house running up and asking me to show them souls. Most of them are similar to Ronnie's, mainly black with splashes of one other color growing out of it. For a few of them, I can make educated guesses on what their talents might be based on the feel, but I don't voice that information out loud in fear of disappointing anyone if I'm wrong, or worse, having to tell some of the kids that I don't think they'll get talents at all. A knock on the door from Penelope spares most such worries, thankfully. She's a little early for the usual checkup, but not by much. The rest of the kids should be trickling in soon so they can receive their treatments.

"Good morning, everyone," Penelope says, nodding politely.

"Morning, Penelope," I respond, grinning her way. Emoting is annoying, but I'm relearning it.

She smiles back, and it's always nice to see the rare occasions where her face matches her true emotions. Usually her feelings are squeezed, constrained, and regulated. She's always spending a background amount of effort ensuring whatever her body shows holds some advantage for her rather than just letting it react to how she really feels. When she discards that, though, her emotions come through brighter, her song plays clearer. It's pleasantly soothing.

She has a backpack today, though she just sets it down when she sits and grabs the first volunteer for treatments, smacking any hands that reach out to grab it. From there, the treatments proceed as normal. When it's my turn, Penelope spends a lot more time yanking around my eye than usual, making considering hums to herself.

"Looks like your eyes are more or less done," she says. "It's all blue now. Have you been getting any odd looks?"

"A few more than usual, I guess," I answer with a shrug. "Does it really look that weird?"

"It's rather striking, yes. In a good way, I think, but you're certainly hard to forget. I wouldn't be surprised if you have somewhat of a reputation."

I nod glumly. I'm out of the house a lot, doing things like buying food or picking up my wages from the Hunter's Guild, earned from the solo missions I do around town nowadays. They're all pathetically easy, but no one else seems to want to do them since about ninety percent of the monsters in the city are in the sewers. Our team is more or less gone forever, and I've yet to be placed on a new one. Teams that lose their scout tend to not come back at all, so it's difficult to slot me into a damaged group and I've made it clear that I'm not currently looking for a new one anyway. Penelope keeps to the medical ward, Orville has joined a different team, and I haven't seen Bently since he quit. I kind of want to track him down, but what would I say? Thanks for not outing me to the Templars?

Anyway, Penelope is right. Between my eyes and the fact that everyone with the danger sense nearly shits themselves when I walk by, I am quickly becoming a known quantity. The reactions I get are becoming less "what the fuck is that" and more "oh no, it's her again." I don't really know what to do about it, though, so I just do nothing. Seems to be working out so far.

Penelope's treatments have been lasting longer and longer, but I don't really mind. I have no idea what all she's doing to me, but I trust her. I like that I can trust her. She pokes me and prods me all over, but I never feel like I'm in danger like I do with anyone else. It's kind of nice, especially since she rarely lapses into bursts of uncomfortable emotions while working, staying primly professional or at least distracted throughout our procedures. It's comfortable, and we have plenty of time to talk.

"You've done a few procedures on Sky now, right?" I ask. "How has that been going?"

"Infuriatingly annoying," Penelope grumbles. "He insists on keeping two other biomancers in the room with us, and he wants me to teach them everything I do to him. They are barely competent enough to prevent me from just lying about it."

"So you regretfully admit he's not stupid enough to just let you walk in and kill him?" I snort.

"I regretfully admit he's not stupid enough to just let me walk in and kill him," Penelope sighs. "Which I expected, but it's still somewhat disappointing. No slowly weakening his heart until he passes out from normal exertion while I'm on the other side of the city. I could still kill him with a disease, and it's hilarious to me that he thinks his pathetic excuses for biomancers could do anything about it, but it's the same sort of situation as the one you described to me shortly after we first met."

"He would die, but not fast enough," I recall. "And when he realizes he's dying, it's mutually assured destruction."

"Exactly," Penelope confirms. "I've ensured that you and I are going to be an absolute mess for anyone to try and kill; a lot of these procedures will improve your capacity to survive even if I'm not there to heal you. Still, if anyone could manage it, Sky could. His talent is one of the strongest I've ever seen."

"Oh, you can do stuff that makes people harder to kill?" I ask. "Would you mind doing that for the kids?"

Penelope gives a very slight chuckle, soft and quick, as some worry in her soul gets a little lighter.

"Why Vita, I would love to."

"Thanks!" I say. "That takes a load off my mind. But are you still doing the thing with Sky?"

"Yes. I didn't actually expect to be able to cleanly assassinate him this way, so it's no real loss. Though at the same time, I didn't expect him to agree either. I figured Capita would try to convince him to work with me and just... fail miserably. Yet she persisted for damn near a month, and now I spend nearly an hour of every other day getting berated by a petite two-bit hoodlum. Turns out he's lying to you about not having many funds, however. Either that or I'm draining his operation dry."

"Well, I trust that you'll be able to get some information out of it," I say. "Thanks for doing it. Are you sure you're going to be safe without me there?"

"You don't need to worry about me, Vita," Penelope scoffs. "I'm not stupid enough to let him take me anywhere he could attack without consequences. Besides, mutually assured destruction goes both ways."

I give her a considering look.

"If someone actually does manage to kill you, what will happen?" I ask.

She just laughs, and though the rest of the house gives her worried glances at the sound of it, I'm just happy she's looking forward to it.

"If someone is that dumb, I'll do my best to make sure you get to watch the aftermath," I promise.

"Much appreciated, Vita," she chuckles. "So, I was wondering. Do you have any plans for the rest of the day?"

I frown. She knows that I don't, but I tell her so anyway because that's a social thing people do.

"In that case," Penelope says slowly, "I was wondering if you wanted to go out?"

I freeze. Did I hear that right? No. Oh no. She's actually doing it. What do I say? I want to say no. It's not personal, I care about Penelope. She's amazing. She literally changed my life. But I'm not attracted to women, I'm attracted to men against my will, and I don't want to date anybody! Certainly not a noble! I don't want to go to fancy dinners or plays, I don't want to hobnob with the upper-class, I don't want to have to be a part of some clandestine plot to hide from and/or murder her current fiancé.

But I don't want to tell her no either. I don't want to lose her. What do I—

"Vita," Penelope says, her lips pursed with amusement. "I meant outside the walls. To the forest?"

Oh. Well… I guess that sounds pretty fun. I've been meaning to do that anyway.

"You want to come with?" I ask her.

She chuckles.

"That's what I'm asking, yes." She taps her chest with her knuckles, letting the dull thud-thud show she's armored and ready. "You think I'm going to let you break your legs alone out there? The backpack has plenty of water and some food that I can actually stomach, and I've taken the liberty of giving notice to the guild. We should be good to rampage for a few days, if you like."

I grin and immediately lean in to give her a huge hug, which she returns while radiating an aura of overwhelming smugness.

"I'd love to!" I say. "What brought this on all of a sudden?"

"Stress. And of course Johan has been bugging me to get some damn time off, so I figured why not commit some morally blameless genocide with my best friend?"

"And partner in crime!" I add.

"And queen among slaves," she finishes, eminently amused. "Indeed. I know we get to see each other every day for the treatments, but it's always work, work, work. I think we deserve a little fun, and you deserve a lot of food. I promise not to complain about whatever insane thing you decide to put in your mouth if you promise to leave a few monsters alive for me to experiment on."

"Deal, as long as you help me prepare it all for eating!"

She sighs extra dramatically.

"Fine. If you must twist my arm over it."

"Heck yes!" I cheer.

I'm already in my armor, since I always dress in my armor, so I just grab a bit more gear and then the two of us are ready to go. This is exciting! With Penelope's help, I'll be eating the whole forest in no time. We wander out to the walls, chatting about what we did yesterday and other nothings. A quick check by the guards and we are outside, vast tans and greens replacing the dirt and stone of the city. The forest is ahead of us, and I do my best to focus on the scents in the air, the colors on the ground, the feeling of wind on my skin. These things aren't as beautiful to me as they used to be. I can see that, when I look for it, and I realize it's a loss. I don't really know what to do about it, though. I wish I didn't hate my body. I wish I wasn't disgusted by things that I never used to despise.

My hatching changed me, took humanity away from me and crushed it. I knew that from the start, and frankly I would never dream of going back. I just wish I could have kept the best of both worlds. I wish I could feel the wind and smell the air without the background of dread and wrongness. I want to retreat back into my comfortable soul, ignore my body, ignore its upsides because they really aren't worth the so many parts of it that I hate. But that has its own problems. I'm stuck. Trapped between two imperfect aspects, faulty flesh and half-grown soul. Neither is a substitute for the other, no matter how much I wish they were.

We enter the forest together, and I take a slow, deliberate breath, feeling the hollow, wet pair of sacks inside me expand as they suck in foul, mana-saturated air, then push it out as reedy bands of muscle press them back together. Suffer through it. I may not like my body, but I still need it.

"So," Penelope asks, glancing slightly down at me. Actually at me. She'd casted soul sight once we got away from the city. "Where to first?"

"Everywhere," I answer with a shrug. "We're just looking for a monster too dumb to run or too slow to succeed. And then…"

I cut myself off a little, knowing that she's really going to like what I have to say next but fearing that it might be one of those things she likes a little bit too much. Oh, screw it. This is Penelope. She saved my life, she saved my whole family, and there probably isn't anyone in the world that understands me better. She deserves this.

"…Would you like an army?" I ask her.

I swear, her grin nearly splits her head in half.

Humanity Overrated

"Look at them twitch!" Penelope crows, barely managing to speak coherently between her gasping breaths as she tries not to roll off the giant undead beetle we're both sitting on. "This is the first onset! It starts with muscle spasms, so pretty soon they'll—"

Her words are cut off as she erupts into gleeful laughter, the colony of little disciples in front of us falling into severe seizures. The many-limbed creatures, being boneless except for the mostly spherical core all their tentacles attach to, flail and writhe like snakes struck by lightning. Far from the occasional jerky movements I expected, the monsters violently slam their bodies across the ground, twitching and jerking with their full strength. Their skin smashes into hard dirt, scrapes over rocks, and injuries pile up internally and externally as their muscles rebel with unnatural fury. A few of them let out brief screams of pain and terror before their lungs are also seized into uncontrollable action and ultimately, fatally, their hearts. The macabre slapstick lasts nearly five minutes before all of them die, and I wait in silence as Penelope fails to stop laughing throughout the entire test.

I'll have to apologize to Jermaine when I get home, but despite how cute little disciples are I can't help but find Penelope's joy to be infectious. No pun intended.

"It all worked!" Penelope exclaims, small beads of water pooling in the corners of her eyes due to how hard she's laughing. "It all went exactly how I thought it would! No, even better! They skidded along the ground like—"

She burst into uncontrolled laughter again, and 'uncontrolled' is not a word I ever thought I would be using to describe Penelope unless things start going very, very wrong. Here she is though, testing out what she described as 'the less professional pathogen concepts.' Apparently, she has a large collection of diseases that she'd otherwise never get to use because they're impractical or inefficient in accomplishing their final result. Killing the little disciples over the course of a few minutes in which they make a horrible racket would certainly be a terrible way to contribute to how we traditionally worked with our team. Stealth was so much more important back when this part of the forest was threatening.

"I'm impressed," I say honestly, sitting cross-legged beside her. "I remember back on our first mission you couldn't infect the little disciples at all."

"And I never forgave myself for it," she agrees. "I've thought up twenty viable diseases to attack their unique immune systems since that day. I think I like this one best."

I laugh and hop off the beetle. It's not a particularly impressive creature, and I just made it a Dreg, but it's the first thing we found that was large enough to carry both of us and stupid enough to not run away from me before I killed it. I have to admit, I find it a rather pleasant ride. Approaching the pack of about thirty little disciples, I swiftly grab all their souls, stick shards in them, and shove them back into their bodies. Once they're all awake and surrounding me, I point back towards Penelope.

"You will not hurt her," I order. "You will treat her as you would me."

My new undead respond with frustrated chittering noises, as while they can't actually understand language they are intelligent enough to have opinions on things and my orders seem to convey enough meaning to work as a rudimentary communication method. They remember being infected, most of them have figured out that Penelope is the source, as a result they don't particularly like her… at least for a few moments, until my shard more thoroughly infects them and enforces my words. By the time I make it back to the beetle, those that aren't crawling all over me happily want to do the same to her, and she lets them.

"You can be Jermaine Junior," I tell the first one to crawl up and rest on my head.

"They're still warm," Penelope comments. "I know that isn't surprising, considering how many recent corpses we've both been wrist deep in, but still. It's like having pets again."

"You even used these for experiments as well," I comment, recalling how she claimed to have killed her previous family pets.

"Exactly!" Penelope laughs. "Except this situation is somewhat reversed, in that I get to keep the pet only after I perform the experiment. Much preferred, I must say."

I chuckle at that, scratching Jermaine Junior at the base of her tentacles, which elicits a delighted coo. Our army has expanded considerably in the five or so hours we've been in the forest, although we've been largely lacking in variety. A significant percentage of monsters seem to have some kind of danger sense, which I suppose is completely understandable for all the same reasons hunters don't go out into the forest without someone that can sense problems before they get close. Unfortunately, my diet today is limited to whatever creatures can't tell that certain death approaches them, which is mostly an uninteresting smattering of scavengers. Penelope theorizes that the ability to detect how dangerous something is when alive just isn't as useful when your main diet is dead things, but who knows? Either way, little disciples are the only creatures I've opted to make Risen instead of Dregs.

Of course, at some point the low quality of each individual member of the army is overshadowed by the fact that we have about two hundred enlisted. Penelope is loving it.

"How are you not out here all the time?" she asks, her laughter having finally settled down into a content smile. "I knew you had to hold back the sake of the team, but this… this isn't being a hunter at all. Watcher's eyes, we could expand into the forest with power like yours. We can get enough fertile ground to solve the food crisis."

"I guess?" I answer noncommittally. "Why couldn't someone like Galdra do the same? She threatened to destroy all of Litia and I'm pretty sure she has the power to do it. Surely she could win some more ground against the forest."

"She could, without a doubt," Penelope agrees. "The problem is that we wouldn't have the forces necessary to keep the ground. The boundaries between the forest and our growing zones need constant maintenance. Poisons must be set and refreshed, patrols must keep constant watch… the manpower required is immense, and while it's nowhere near as bad as being a hunter the job tends to have a high, lethal turnover. If we expand deeper into the forest, that necessitates stronger guards to deal with the more serious threats, but the majority of our current labor is relatively weak slaves. We wouldn't be able to afford it otherwise."

"And undead are basically free expendable slave labor," I finish. "Which could provide the sort of defense Galdra can't just because she's one person and she has to sleep. Yeah, that makes sense. But that's not what you were talking about when you asked why I'm not out here all the time, is it?"

She sighs, her eyes drifting up towards the canopy. I watch her with all three eyes, taking effort to pay attention to anything I think might be a social cue. The abnormal lack of tension in her muscles, the way she sits with her knees bent and both legs to one side, the looseness of the straps on her armor. It all speaks to her being relaxed, a feeling her soul clearly matches. Too clearly, almost, to the point that I think she's going out of her way to match her actions with her feelings as much as possible. It's kind of funny; she puts so much effort into letting herself do what feels natural that it kind of undermines the entire endeavor… but she does seem to enjoy it anyway. Like she's stretching a muscle that has been slept on wrong, so that every movement is both pain and relief in equal measure.

"There are no Templars here," she eventually answers me. "No other nobles, no laboratories, no obligations and no witnesses. We can do anything here, and it will never get back to anyone. You are the only person that will ever know, and you understand. I love that."

I nod, letting my hands go through the motions of the meat-treating spell as I listen. I cast it on one of the little disciples, petting it softly as I bring it up to my mouth, bite off one of its tentacles, and slurp it down like a super thick piece of pasta along with the strands of soul trapped inside. My Risen whimpers in pain a bit, but quickly stops as I continue to give it scratches. Holy shit, this tastes so good. No wonder vrothizo have ensouled flesh as their only diet.

"It is pretty great out here," I agree. "Let's not underestimate the forest, we can still totally die. I can feel some crazy things, you know. But being surrounded by hundreds of undead… I don't know, it just makes me feel really safe and comfortable. I can just spread out my senses and know that there's a wall of loyalty in every direction. It's awesome."

"I get the impression that there is a 'but' coming," Penelope muses.

"But I don't feel like I really need that anymore, I guess," I confirm, shrugging. "When I first came out here to feast, I was just… trying to get away from everything. Because of Angelien, you know? I love devouring shit out here, and I feel a lot safer when it's both of us, but the first time it was a pretty aggressive lack of self-preservation."

She nods.

"I understand. I'm glad you're starting to look ahead towards your survival, because I must say it has never been as strong a trait in you as I'd like."

I laugh at that.

"Guilty as charged, call the guards," I joke. "I think living at home, the new home, has helped a lot. I've had time to think, time to focus on myself a little. Lyn and Rowan are especially nice to be around, because they know everything but they're both a bit more… I don't know, normal? Not like us, but in a good way. Being able to have a safe home with everyone is such a dream come true."

I feel her already substantial pride swell at that, so I decide to indulge it.

"I know, I know," I tell her. "It's all thanks to you. The house is perfect. You did incredible. You are incredible, you know that?"

I feel, in order, her notice that her body is about to blush, her instinct to physically suppress it, and her ultimate decision to just let it happen. Her face blooms just the slightest bit red as she gives me a smug smile.

"I do know that," she confirms haughtily. "But it means quite a lot to hear it from you."

I grin back, but we are quickly interrupted as my senses detect multiple Dregs dying to a soul that doesn't feel like it should be strong enough to accomplish the feat.

"Contact with something interesting," I announce, hopping off the beetle.

I scoop Penelope up in my arms, which surprises her enough to elicit a hilariously squeaky yelp before I run off towards the soul. It only takes about twenty seconds until we're there, my horde stepping out of my way long before they have a chance of slowing me down. When we arrive I immediately spot the culprit: a huge mass of transparent slime that is slowly glooping its way over the flailing body of one of my Dregs, which immediately starts to dissolve all the way down to the bones. Another Dreg tries to attack, although it does so by running directly into the slime because it is really fucking stupid.

"Retreat," I order, and my army stops committing suicide.

"It's a carnivorous ozoid," Penelope comments as I set her down. "Could you do me a favor and cut off a small bit of it before you kill the main body? I'd like to keep some for testing."

I raise an eyebrow at her, smirking a little as she pulls out a fairly large glass jar.

"Traditionally, you're not much of a proponent for keeping slimes around."

"Very funny," she deadpans, handing me the container. "Ozoids have an interesting and intimate connection to magic that might be useful to research, and if not the carnivorous ones are at least made of one of the most powerful flesh dissolving acids known to man... although it likely isn't technically an acid, since it loses its properties when it ceases to live. Perhaps it's even natural biomancy."

I nod. As usual, Penelope has good reasons. Given that my spear is chitin, this thing can probably burn right through it, so I order some zombies to sacrifice themselves by smacking the ozoid hard enough to make pieces fly off. One of the decent-sized globules actually pulls a chunk of the ozoid's soul with it, so I coax it inside the jar with a few pokes from my tentacle and then kill the big one with another.

"Here you go," I say, handing the jar back to her. Hopefully it won't break and kill her somehow. "You know, on the subject oozes... I still have Penta's soul. You realize she's going to be one of the first people I revive, right?"

"I know," Penelope sighs, sitting down by the trunk of a nearby tree as she swirls the small, captured ozoid in its jar. "I wish you wouldn't, but I understand. If we don't revive her as a Nawra, most of my objections go away. But honestly, Vita, why do you hold her in such a high regard? I'm fairly certain she didn't even like you."

I wince a little at that.

"Yeah, I don't know if she did either, at least not until Litia. I just kinda didn't pick up on it until she told me. I don't know what to say. I just wanted to be friends with her, I guess, and just before the end I think we really were starting to become that. It feels like I failed her. And… I don't want to fail my friends, you know?"

Penelope nods slowly, her soul starting to do indecisive flip-flops. I give her some time, sitting down next to her and taking a deep breath of air. Fuck, I hate breathing.

"I… suppose I have been failing you as a friend," Penelope eventually says.

I blink in surprise, making sure to turn and physically stare at her so she can see all of my incredulity.

"Didn't we just get done talking about how you're basically the most awesome thing that has happened to me?" I ask.

"Well! Not… in so many words, but I'm referring to something more specific," she explains, blushing a bit again. "Back when we first got home after Litia you made me promise to try and to be honest with you. To believe that I can trust you with the things I keep secret from everyone. I have not been doing so, because so many of my secrets are about you."

I'm not sure what to say, so I say nothing. She soon realizes that's an indication to continue.

"So… I want to change that. I have a few things I want to get off my chest."

"Don't look at me," I tell her. "Your breast size is your own fault."

She laughs at that, shaking her head.

"Well, let's start with that. I know that you hate your chest, but I have been the one making it increase in size anyway. While it is true I believe this offers you advantages, at least part of my motivation is selfish. In reality, the benefits it provides are probably not worth the degree to which you find them distasteful, and I have persisted with the alterations anyway."

"Huh," I say. "Well, quit doing that then."

Again, she chuckles at my response.

"I shall."

"Then we're square," I answer, shrugging. "Thanks for telling me."

"I started the operations to experimentally alter your family's biology months ago, not recently as I have allowed you to believe," Penelope admits. "I did not ask for their permission, your permission, or the permission of your guardians until well after already starting."

"But you think these alterations will make them more likely to survive?" I ask.

"…I do, yes. Not all of them improve survival, but they are all designed to be beneficial. However, they are also the first human test subjects I have used, so there is significant risk. I chose to do so anyway."

"Well, if whatever you do fucks them up and you don't fix it, I'll kill you," I tell her frankly. "But if you do, and they're okay, and it helps them, well… thank you."

She swallows.

"I honestly think they help," she tells me. "There have been no negative complications so far."

"Then thank you!" I say again. "I trust you not to hurt them. Always have."

Her lip trembles for a moment as a swell of emotion pushes its way through her, but she pushes it right back, swallowing the joy and relief from hearing my words to move on to the next thing she's been afraid to tell me. I guess there are a lot more than I thought, but I know this is hard for her.

"For all intents and purposes," she manages to say, "I murdered Penta."

That one takes me by surprise. The others I suspected, but this hits me like a slap to the face. Murdered Penta? What does that even mean? She did kill her, that's true, but she was forced to as a consequence of my own failure. She would have never needed to put an anti-Nawra infection in my body if I hadn't gotten myself infected by Remus's slime and trapped as a result.

"I anticipated the likelihood that you wouldn't drink the poison and get infected long before the dinner," she explains. "When the dinner began, I took the first excuse to leave and go to the bridge. I knew you would be unable to cross the bridge if I made you believe the mists were down. I planned to use your possession as an excuse to kill Penta from the start."

"How did you know I wouldn't drink the poison?" I ask, dumbfounded. "We had a rat to hide Penta in, that's what I was supposed to have done instead of letting her have that speech."

"I didn't know," Penelope answers, shrugging. "I had a number of excuses prepared. Reasons it would seem like I was forced to infect you in nearly any outcome. In the worst-case scenario, I was prepared to leverage my position as your only defense against the Templars in order to just murder her without attempting to hide it. I knew that the dinner plan had a high likelihood of creating the outcome I wanted, so I let you go through with it without reminding you about the poison, without talking to you or strategizing with you at all. That was entirely intentional. I could have easily prevented you from getting possessed in the first place, but I left the possibility open because it was the most convenient to my personal vendetta."

Shit. That's the truth. I know it's the truth, but it's still kind of hard to believe it. I've been blaming myself for Penta's death this whole time, and ultimately I still made the mistake that led to it. But the admittance that she would have killed her anyway…

"Why?" I ask her. "I thought you liked the poetic justice of trapping her in my body the way she trapped you in yours."

She sighs.

"A number of reasons. Most of them irrelevant. I hated her, Vita. I still hate her, hate knowing that she'll be back, but it has faded a bit since then. I won't… I promise I won't interfere with her resurrection. The ultimate problem is that while I certainly hated her for the torture she inflicted on me, that was only a fraction of my objection, in truth."

"What do you mean?" I ask. I can almost, almost see how the things Penta did to Penelope justify Penelope's actions, but it still seems so... wrong.

"Vita, I…" she stumbles over her words a bit, which is so very unlike her that my focus is taken off my thoughts. "I desperately wish, with everything in my heart, to be a good person."

"I don't understand," I say. "I think you're pretty great?"

"Still?" she asks sardonically. "You're more than I deserve. And that's the thing. I wish I was good, but I'm not. I'm really, really not. On a personal level I don't think I give a shit about anyone on this damn island except you. Not for lack of trying, either. I believe that this world should be better, and I believe that this world becomes better when people make an effort for each other. Care about each other. Try for each other. But no matter what I do, my head just doesn't seem to work that way. I look at a child starving in the streets and think to myself 'this is an inexcusable failure of the nobility,' not 'oh no, this human person is suffering.' I don't feel it. Instead I convince myself of all these reasons why the rational response is to use the kid as an experiment, why that helps, why it's not the action of completely fucking insane monster, and then I do it. Even though I know, obviously, that nearly any right-thinking person in the world would be utterly disgusted."

"Are you saying I'm not a right-thinking person?" I ask, wrinkling my nose.

"I mean, are you? You're here in the forest with me, eating zombies like candy and preparing to betray a man not because he's protecting a cognimancer or because he's about to assassinate the fucking King, oh no that's fine. You just don't like him personally."

"Hey, he beat up my mom," I protest.

"Well, I would probably kill someone for an opportunity to 'beat up' my own mother without consequence, so that just sort of proves my point, doesn't it? I'm on his level. Below it! I try very hard to make this world a better place, I believe the reason I exist is to make this world a better place, but I just fucking don't like people. And then some monster, a literal actual monster from the forest, takes over my life and in a few days she has made more friends than I have ever even attempted to acquire. She takes all my memories, all my experiences, and becomes an actual fucking person instead of an emotionally deficient shell. She robbed me of the ability to pretend I'm a victim of circumstance. She was proof that all my failures are my own. And then every damn day I kept getting reminders thrown in my face about how much you like her better."

I nod slowly, chewing that over. I know this is something I will fume about later. But right now I just look at her and wonder… does this actually change what I think of the Penelope I know? The Penelope I care about?

"If it makes you feel any better, I like you a heck of a lot more now than I used to like her," I tell her.

Her knees are hooked up to her chest, having rested watering eyes on them after saying her peace. She stops staring at them, turning to me with a war of hope and disbelief inside her.

"Even now? Even after that?" she asks. "I murdered your friend."

I shrug.

"We'll make her better," I say. "Right? Norah was our friend, and I murdered her. Can you forgive me for that?"

"Of course," she says, almost breathlessly. "That was a matter of necessity."

"I fucked up. When you put that disease in me, it was a matter of necessity, too."

"I would have killed her anyway," Penelope presses.

I shrug.

"You would have tried. And then I guess our relationship might've been really different. I don't know. But given things as they are, even if it's not fair to Penta, it's difficult to not be happy with how things turned out. Like I said, you're pretty great."

She stares blankly at me for a moment, then suddenly bursts into uproarious, full-body laughter. Tears stream down her cheeks as she howls with amusement, the harmony of incredulity in her soul drowned by a melody of pure relief.

"You're insane!" Penelope insists. "You're completely inhuman. No one should just be okay with this! I was afraid you would kill me!"

"I might have a few months ago, I guess," I agree. "But I forgive you. You've earned that much."

"Completely fucking inhuman," she repeats, shaking her head.

"Humanity is overrated anyway," I answer with a shrug.

That gets her to laugh some more, wiping tears from her eyes.

"It is, isn't it?" she agrees softly. "It really is."

I say nothing for a while, letting the last vestiges of her sobs trail away as we sit shoulder to shoulder under the tree.

"So… any more island-shattering dark revelations you have for me today in order to try and make me attack you?" I ask when she finishes.

She laughs, voice still shaky.

"It's not how I thought any of this would go, but… fuck it. One more for now."

"For now?" I ask hesitantly.

She responds with a coy smile, the effect only slightly diminished by the way her cheeks still glisten with water. Her fingers start to move in the complex patterns of a spell I don't recognize, and when it completes I see a change start to occur in her soul. Power flows out of it, noticeably weakening her in exchange for a different sort of strength. The spiritual energy fills the rest of her body, flowing into her limbs and forming a lattice inside her skin.

"What is this?" I ask, scratching my cheek. "A spell version of the way warriors enhance their bodies with their soul?"

"Not quite," Penelope answers, and then she slowly reaches out with her hands to the tentacle I've been scratching myself with.

And she grabs it.

My breath catches. My body freezes. She holds on to me, the real me, and pulls that part of me close. I wrap my tentacle around her arm, squeezing lightly and feeling the resistance, the contact.

"What," I barely breathe.

"I knew it had to be possible," Penelope explains softly. "By studying your body and the vrothizo teeth you brought back, I figured out how it works. It is the first original animancy spell I designed."

"How does this… help your research?" I whisper.

"It doesn't, really," she answers with a shrug. "Arguably, I wasted a month on this. But I knew that going in."

"Why would you...?"

I swallow. No, I know why. I know what she's going to say.

"Well that ties into my last confession, doesn't it?" Penelope says. "The one I'm sure you already know."

Countless tentacles emerge from my core, wanting to poke her, feel her, touch her, but all I do with them is hide my eye and hide my face, overwhelmed with emotion and embarrassment.

"I love you, Vita," Penelope says. "All of you, real and fake, material and immaterial. I know it makes you uncomfortable, but I have to ask. Would you consider a relationship with me?"

Life and Death

"Would you consider a relationship with me?"

The very words fill me with fear. No. No, I don't want that. I just want to be friends. Best friends, maybe, something special I have with no one else, but every aspect of dating, everything that I know of what a relationship is just isn't me.

But I can touch her. I can feel her. I can hold something and not have the person I'm holding freak out with an unrelenting dread like people do when I touch their souls. How did she do this? She's too special, too important, I don't want to say yes but I don't want to tell her no and I don't know what to do!

"W-wait," Penelope says hurriedly, squeezing me—the real me, the part I feel truly in control of—just the slightest bit harder. "Whatever you're thinking of, give me a moment to…"

She licks her lips nervously, eyes flicking around as she rapidly tries to decide on what to say. Like a coward, I focus on her, doing everything I can to avoid thinking about her question. I should just say no. Right?

"I know that you're… nonstandard," she continues slowly. "Whatever you think I mean by the question, it doesn't have to be that. You're different. I'm different. We can do things... differently."

I swallow, nervously peeling a few tentacles away from my face.

"Differently how?" I ask.

"Well, ah, if you're open to the idea we would… have to explore that, I suppose. Figure out what we want and don't want out of… us. I mean, I know that to some degree things I want are not always the same things you want but I believe that we— oop?"

She cuts off with surprise as I poke her cheek with a tentacle.

"Sorry," I squeak. "Continue."

Her lips twitch into a smile, a bit more confidence filling her as a bit more embarrassment does the same with me. She scoots a little closer, idly winding my tentacle around her arm.

"When I talk about a relationship, what does that mean to you?" she asks.

I shrug, squirming slightly as I fail to resist the urge to wrap part of me around her ankle.

"I don't know," I mumble. "I guess what Lyn and Rowan have? Where they hang out together all the time and smooch a lot and have sex every few nights? Or… I don't know, I guess what you and Lord Erebus have where he's always trying to get you to go to fancy stuff and eat dinner together and spend time with you even if you're busy and you're sort of obligated to do it because it's a relationship? I mean, can you even ask me this if you have a fiancé?"

Penelope gives me kind of a sad look.

"Vita, I promise you, no matter how this plays out you and I are never going to be anything like Johan and I," she insists. "You don't need to worry about him. I'll take care of him."

She obviously means the murdery kind of taking care of him, not the kind with actual caring about someone involved. Figures, but whatever.

"I don't like fancy dinners, I don't want to monopolize your time," she continues. "Yes, my relationship with him is one built around obligation, but that's not the kind of relationship I want any more than you do. You know I don't particularly like the man."

I shrug.

"Maybe that's a bad example," I admit. "But it's like… you know, Mateo went and got berated by his girlfriend before our mission because he felt obligated to subject himself to it. Relationships are more serious than friendships, right? It's not just about liking someone. You have to put all this effort into catering to them. With most people I don't even understand how they feel, I'm not gonna be able to do any of that for you."

"But you already do that for me," Penelope says. "I… I don't think you understand the degree to which just being around you is an emotional relief. It's like I'm relearning to be myself. I know what you're like, Vita. I don't love you in spite of that, I love you because of it. The way you think about people differently is beautiful to me. Have I ever asked you for anything you felt like you couldn't provide?"

I wrap another tendril around her waist. She scoots closer to me, so we're touching shoulder to shoulder.

"No," I admit. "You've never asked. But I know you want some things like that. You want the Lyn and Rowan stuff too. I… no. I can't do that."

She purses her lips, considering for a moment how blunt to be.

"Kissing and sex?" she asks.

I nod. She nods back, slowly, taking the confirmation of what she already suspected in silence for a while.

"Is it because I'm a woman?" she eventually asks. "Because I am in the process of learning how to change that, if that's what you prefer."

I shake my head, perhaps much more vigorously than I need to. I can tell Penelope hates the idea, but she would still do it if it meant she would get what she wants from me. It isn't the problem though.

"I don't find you attractive," I admit. "And, I... do find a lot of men attractive. But that doesn't change anything. I would still never want to do that kind of thing with them. It's just…"

"…Gross human stuff?" Penelope supplies after I trail off.

I shake my head again.

"No, it's not that either. I just don't want anyone touching me in those places. Ever. It freaks me out. Like, I mean I've…"

I trail off again. This conversation is just nothing but uncomfortable.

"I don't know how to explain it," I tell her. "It's weird talking about this."

"I promise you, I will never speak a word to anyone else about anything we discuss here today," she says solemnly, and means it. "I'd like to understand you better."

I nod slowly, working the words over in my mind as I slowly convince myself to say them.

"I've, you know, tried that kind of thing with myself. Alone?" I admit hesitantly.

Penelope shrugs.

"Everybody masturbates," she answers simply. "Eminently normal."

"Right," I nod. "I mean, I know that, I feel people do it all the time. I didn't really get why nobody talks about it until now, where I'm trying to talk about it I guess."

She chuckles.

"A lot of things are like that. It feels different when it's about you."

"Yeah," I agree. "Anyway, um, it's kind of nice at first but… I don't know, does your body have, uh, spasms? Not the kind you had the little disciples do, a lot less than that. But it's still, you know, involuntary?"

"Yes," Penelope says, already starting to understand. "Most people do. That makes you uncomfortable?"

"It freaks me the fuck out," I admit. "I don't like losing control. And then it's not fun anymore and it all just feels like a huge waste. Everybody else seems to enjoy it but it only makes me feel... scared? It's not even just the spasms, those are the worst, but I hate everything that starts to happen. I hate knowing that just from touching certain places my whole body can start doing things that I don't want to do? And it's not even all that great beforehand, really, maybe because everything I feel from myself is kinda muted, and…"

I trail off, my thoughts stalling as a result of having thought I had more to say than I actually do. The words just fell out, dropped in a heap at Penelope's feet. It's not something I ever expected to explain to anyone. She waits patiently, making absolutely certain that I'm done before responding.

"That's not a necessary part of our relationship," Penelope answers simply.

I make a face at her, not quite believing that.

"Everybody seems to do it," I counter. "And again, it's something you want, isn't it? I can tell it is."

She frowns a little, but doesn't deny it. She's too smart to lie like that.

"I have been taught from a young age that, for a noblewoman, sex is more an act of manipulation than it is pleasure," Penelope says instead. "That is what my relationship is like with Johan. It's not displeasing, but it's not really intimate either, at least not for me. I have to make him feel like it is, of course. You are, I think, the first person I have ever known that makes me feel like I want that intimacy. I want to give genuinely, and receive in kind. And that is not something I know how to do, really, but perhaps it wouldn't require anything that would make you uncomfortable. If you are interested in trying, I mean."

"I don't really know what that means," I admit.

"Well…" Penelope hums, putting an arm around my shoulders, "does this make you uncomfortable?"

"No," I tell her, grabbing the hand with yet another tentacle and continuing to marvel at my ability to do so. "Shoulders are fine. At least, they are for you, but that's what matters here."

"Okay, so I have special shoulder permissions," Penelope says, grinning at me. "Good to know. But do you like this, or do you just tolerate it?"

I take a deep breath. Turns out breathing really does help with focus, just not for the things I usually want to focus on. I keep my mind on Penelope's arm around my body, the pressure and very slight warmth making its way through my armor, the assurance to my deeply ingrained instincts that yes, this is safe. She is safe.

"This is nice," I decide.

"Okay," Penelope murmurs, her grin turning mischievous. "And what about this?"

She lifts her arm off my shoulders, and I regretfully let her, my tentacle unwinding from that arm. Then she stands up, brushes off her butt, then to my great surprise she swiftly turns and plops herself down into my lap.

"Um?" I squeak, feeling my face turn red.

I'm a very small person, and though Penelope isn't all that much taller she's still larger than me and she weighs more than I do. The weight is surprising, and briefly causes me to panic before I remind myself that I can quite effortlessly throw Penelope off of me if I want to. Heck, I could remove her with only tentacles if I really felt like it, unless whatever conditions that end the spell come to pass. I'm a bit hesitant to touch her more than I already am, though, because I am increasingly aware of the fact that while her spell allows me to touch her body it does nothing to make my tentacles tangible to anything else, most notably including her clothing.

"Too much?" she asks seriously.

I wrap my arms, both physical and a few immaterial, around her waist to hug her in place.

"…No," I whisper. "It's nice."

Her smile grows wider, and she places one hand on my shoulder before wrapping the other under my chin, holding my head in place like she does when examining my eyes. Again, I know that the support is not a trap, the pressure is far from inescapable. It's just there to guide.

"Then," she whispers, leaning slowly in closer to me, "what about this?"

For a good few moments I'm utterly dumbfounded as to what she's doing, moving her body forward and closing her eyes. Even after her lips pucker out it takes me a beat to register the terrifying realization that she is about to kiss me. My brain stalls as I feel her breath on my face.

In a moment of panic, I thrust a tentacle up between her lips and mine. She realizes what it is as soon as she touches it and she opens her eyes, moving her body away.

"…No kissing, then?" she asks, trying and failing to hide her disappointment.

"Sorry," I whisper. "N-no kissing."

She nods, a soft smile returning to her features.

"But cuddling is okay?"

"Cuddling… is okay," I confirm, my arms still around her.

She sighs, relaxing her body and leaning up against mine.

"That's a win for me then," she murmurs. "I'll gladly take it."

I hold her for a while, incomplete thoughts fluttering around the inside of my head, unable to be voiced. It is nice, even if it is also many, many other things. Penelope is warm, and holding her body against mine is somehow a comfort that not even an army of ten thousand Risen could match. Still, thoughts keep nagging at me.

"This isn't all you wanted," I remind her.

She shrugs, not moving away.

"I've never fucked anyone I was actually in love with," she answers lazily. "If you aren't going to be the exception, I will be fine living with that, I think. I could probably figure out a way to remove my libido, a lot of my research for Sky seems like it will be relevant for that, at least tangentially."

"You shouldn't have to do that," I protest.

She snorts in a rather unladylike display of bemusement.

"Well, unless I want to spend my whole life rather sexually frustrated, the only other alternative is that I keep a few politically relevant people on the side who can be swayed by that sort of thing. I feel it would be rather crass to go through all this effort to date you just to turn around and grab a few self-important concubines that think they're lords, though." She wrinkles her nose. "Or ladies, I suppose, but the two gay ones I know are moving out of city."

"I mean, I don't really care if you do that kind of thing," I say frankly. "As far as I'm concerned you can have sex with anybody you want as long as it isn't me."

Penelope laughs.

"Why Vita, I think that's the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me," she jokes. "By the way, just a quick reminder that I love you."

I think about that, squirming a little as I adjust her weight. This is weird and different, not at all something I ever imagined myself doing. No matter how I look at Penelope, I really don't find her attractive at all.

But I do like having her close. I like holding her, I like being able to press my soul against her skin. Beyond that, I can see how she's more than a friend. She's a partner. I don't consider myself stupid, but she's smart in all the ways I'm not. More than anyone else, she understands me and what I need. She cares. That's special, unique to her, not induced by a feeling of obligation or outright mind control. Maybe I don't love her in exactly the same way she loves me, but...

"I love you too," I tell her with certainty.

It's hard to describe what hearing those words does to her. In some ways, if I'm being reductive, they do nothing. She's still exactly the same Penelope, in every way that matters. But the rush of relief and joy that fills her is warmer than the tightest squeeze I could give her.

"Is that a yes, then?" she asks.

"Yeah," I decide. "I'm still not sure what all it means. I'm probably just going to default to treating you exactly like I always have, if we're being honest."

"That's fine," she says. "That's more than fine. Although fair warning: while it's wonderful that you're open to letting me be with other people, I suspect I'm more the murderously jealous type."

"Uh," I blink. "Huh."

"So maybe don't cuddle like this with anyone else," she says pleasantly, absolutely dead serious.

"What about with Rosco?" I ask immediately, eyes narrowing.

She blinks, taken aback a little.

"Well. I suppose that's a reasonable exception?"

"And Jermaine?" I ask.

"Jermaine too, yes," she grumbles. "You can cuddle with as many stuffed animals as you like."

That's a relief. The important stuff is taken care of.

"What about Vitamin?" I ask.

She gives an exasperated sigh, irritated at being forced to renege on her threat.

"Physical intimacy with family is different, and any amount you previously displayed in my presence is also acceptable. Okay?"

I nod.

"Okay. Want to go kill some more monsters?"

"Yes," she answers, chuckling, but instead of getting up she rolls off my body, picking me up and moving me with her so that we end up switching places, me curled up on top of her.

"But I'd like to stay here a little while longer, if that's all right," she murmurs.

I'm still for a moment, but slowly I wrap my multitudinous self around her, settling in comfortably. My eyes close as she starts to stroke my hair.

Yeah. Staying here is good too.