Killers to Die For

She had strayed from her pack, as all mortals make the mistake of doing eventually. A lone elf stumbling through the forest on a tall drink of nervous energy and abandonment issues, eyes flooded and blurring her path. The girl shuffled along at the pace of her defeated heart, her boots unready to avoid even the shallowest pitfall, and for these weaknesses she soon found herself deep below the forest floor, tumbling ceaselessly through cavern and burrow, just as battered by root and rock as she had already been by love and lament.

Unlike a typical fall, it did not end at the ground, since that was where it began. Instead it wasted a quarter-hour in pursuit of a depth to match her despair, and only ended when it found us, as we were, in the solitude and silence of a dirt room three miles beneath the world stage. Luma slid into our den on an avalanche of gravel, a pitiful thing lost in every way worth mentioning.

She might have simply stayed there and treated it as a grave, if she thought that was an option, for such an idea at least matched her bitterness. But she righted herself upon hearing the growl.

It was the unmistakable growl of a stomach roused from hibernation, born of a hunger so apocalyptic that dust and debris freed themselves from the ceiling upon hearing its demands. Not ten feet from her feeble elven limbs slept a beast of pure, unrecognizable darkness. An ancient, royal monstrosity designed for infinite brutality and incomparable destruction. Beneath the surface of its bulk shimmered a legion of souls and stars, long ago swallowed into a library of life stories converted down to histories. When it opened its eyes, it did not stop at two, but cascaded into a multitude, all of which opened upon her alone.

We have high expectations. We always expect screams and howls, desperate scrambling, and for mortals to bargain and plead with both us and whatever gods are known to them. Rising up for the very first time in that world, we gazed down at the puny elf and listened to her total silence.

Luma gave us only a fascinated stare, and we in turn also did the very last thing she expected from us, and spoke.

And when she did not panic, we elaborated. “In all other worlds, reduced to only a sack of broken bones and torn flesh by the time they ragdoll into our den.”

Sometimes it takes a moment for our voice to drip through a mortal skull, and light up a brain like fire-tar upon leaves. To this one, it was only a moment before she started taking slow steps towards us.

We asked, “Where is your fear, young fool?” And we let the girl reach out, getting a tiny fistful of ether to wonder at. “Do the mortals of this world not fear what they do not comprehend?”

We stamped her to the dirt, claws wringing the spongy flesh of her frame. Standing upon her, we drooled speech into her mind. “We are a Devourer. We are not part of your game, nor do we have a part to play on your stage. We are the curtain that falls over it; the storm that cancels the sport. Our hide is as invulnerable to might and magic as the night sky is to a javelin, and our bite empties horizons before we’re even grown. From here, all you know will be stolen over our edge with you. Even the rocks and rivers of your homeland will vanish into us.”

This was far more than we had said in other worlds, but Luma listened to it all with a dutiful and generous attention — without even inching for a dagger or eying for an exit. The girl held within herself a theatrical soul, and thought that our many words betrayed the same in us. She would have loved to volley jokes and questions, and make an evening of indulging us, as was her custom, but did not think it possible.

That changed when we responded to her very thoughts. “You think because the beast has language, they are a storyteller? As starved for a good listener as they are for meat and marrow?”

The girl lit up, already experienced in preparing her words to be telepathically read. She thought, Of course! Who is not captivated by a captive audience?

We blinked all across our body, and said, “You guess well. But we have already told all our stories to the gods that charged us with taking them. A new world waits on a platter. Our undeniable hunger remembers itself, and your soul is thick with the scent of sugar and dough.”

We ran a suffocating tongue of endless stars over her face, which did not startle as it should. And we learned from it.

“A bard, are you? As talented as you are sweet. But... deeply burned inside. A silenced bard, and bitter about it. You were as unlucky above the surface as you were to fall through it.”

Luma pouted. Something that must have worked often on others, as her face was made for it above all else. And while it bounced off her killer she thought, Why are you hidden in a hole? Too much beauty to bury.

“We are a precaution.” She got a story that no god would ever ask to be gathered, and no mortal was meant to know. “Worlds left alone outlive the few early eras that resonate well with gods, and spoil. Cheap worlds, half-baked and left to boil over, forget to war themselves into the ground. When their people have multiplied across the surface, and their cracks begin to show, odds demand that a stray such as yourself falls into the failsafe seeded deep below the crust, and triggers a backup armageddon. A Devourer cannot be fought even with infinite valiance, and so our feast is an unsatisfying conclusion that only we enjoy, but such is the fate of all creations that have gone off script.”

Her whole face squinted in thought, but then decided right away. What is the point of a world if it has to end?

A very elven question, though not a common one. “Is this world so young that the elves do not yet know death?” A bad sign. “New worlds are not meant for us. But we will act in our nature. If the rest of this world is still anything like you, its end will be swift.”

Luma, a being of infinite ambition, got up, rolled up one sleeve, and offered her arm to us — foolish kindness sparkling behind her eyes. If you need to chew on the defeated, I have the time!

It was not new to have bright young girls offered to us, typically strewn in garlands and perfumes and chastity. And while they always bore this inane hope their flesh could sate the void itself, very few ever believed they would survive. Fewer still idled their thoughts on us, rather than their peers. Luma nudged her arm forward and — as if we couldn’t see it a dozen times over — she stealthily placed her other hand atop us, and ruffled the void, petting our library of dead worlds and infinite ink.

“You are sweeter than the grandest confectionery.” We growled a pure and tactile wave of psychic terror that shook everything except the girl’s nerves. “All we care to know now, is if the rest of this world is still naive and ripe, like you.”

Before she could form another packet of thought, we told her, “No need. We take our answers,” and bit into her head.

Deep in that mess, beyond several surprises, past oceans of yearning, and beneath the crushing undertones of toffee and butter, waited our unwelcome answer.

For while you yourself have likely read the grandest of worlds and histories, and become familiar with the major creative gods and their works, do not let such thin exposure give you an illusion as to the whole of it. Any Devourer can testify to you (having been repeatedly seeded into whatever haphazard world) the regularity with which we find ourselves chewing upon the most pitiful creations of pantheonic habit.

Much of creation is not, in the sense that you understand it, creative. The bulk of worlds are created in chase, out of a god’s worry they must prove themselves to belong in the same pantheon as their elders, a habit that has left behind countless worlds without anything special to them. Many mortals have asked how the gods create something from nothing, but they are missing the face of it. They think the addition of mass and matter and bloodshed means a world no longer has nothing to it.

You may think that to say this is to risk the ire of our own god. But he is referred to here, candidly, and lowercase, for it is evident that even if he did not entirely forget about the project, he at least lost interest halfway through its first century, and quite possibly lost the project itself. The reason we are certain he will not return to read this world’s history is because he did not return to right it, either. Something which, being quite outside of mortal time, if he was ever going to do would have already been done. It is our opinion that this world resides nowhere grander than a cosmic storage bin, where it will likely remain for an eternity hence.

Now that you know this, the author would like to make it clear, here in the opening, that this very history of the world is being written entirely in the spirit of pure and unmitigated spite.

So it is that this account will not cover the larger histories, or even thin the timeline down to major events. We will abridge, editorialize, contextualize, digress, commentate, and forgo both the glossary and appendix in the way we have always envied of fiction authors we consumed. And we very much wish to recount the close of the eighth century, for that is when the ragged clockwork of this world finally gave up the act, opened at the seams, and fell to pieces.

As it is a rotted world that was served to us, so too will our work be rotten in its own way, and fit only for mortals, written in the flattened dimensionality of their tongue, with that tedious way it must be bitten off in sequence rather than swallowed whole. Consider it a cypher that no god as lazy as ours would bother to decrypt. Should any other divinity peer into this capsule and find so disobedient a report, let them need to squint.

According to the digested wisdoms of innumerable authors, mortals prefer their stories centered around the most relatable characters involved, even if they must be fabricated for the role. Luckily we are in need of no such deceit, and can proceed with the very same Luma. She was, at the time we choose to begin her story, listless in mind, ravenous in hunger, soon to wake from a deep hibernation, and would become instrumental in ending the grand design itself.

You might spy the pattern, and think to yourself that this list does not sound relatable to anyone but a Devourer, and so Luma has only been protagonized in a bout of favoritism and recency bias. But you would also be welcome to make your own visit to this world, and deliver to us your critique in the flesh, along with your flesh. While it is bothering you, let us note that a bard is very closely related to a storyteller, except that a bard works in song rather than ink. What a coincidence then, that Luma was entirely muted, and so happened to only speak in ink anyway.

The irony of her handicap was not lost on as many as she would’ve wished. This was the fault of her strumweave, and her fault to still carry the thing, but having had no say in parting with her voice she refused to part with what was left, even if that meant strangers asking her for song, or verse, or worse: explanation. All things she wished not to talk about, and couldn’t, anyway.

Which wasn’t to her nature. Our Luma was the type to talk often, and talk an ear off, and not fond of her new nature. So much would she not have chosen it that she chose instead to go on a most tedious quest, and spent seven years away from the warm beds of friends, on paths of dirt and stone and certainly not of soul, traveling wide and wildly in an attempt to free herself.

This was why, after exhausting her options in another unremarkable city, Luma chose to wait out her evening in the worst tavern she could think to visit, where the seats were all taken twice and the performers felt compelled to make it impossible to hear anything else. The perfect opposite to silence, for it muted everyone around her and made conversation almost as difficult for others as it was for her.

Yet through those defenses came a young mage carrying her own stool, who dropped in beside Luma, put an elbow to her table, chin in hand, and smiled at her wordlessly. An ominous entrance for which Luma returned a blank pause, having completely atrophied any instinct to take the initiative when met. But it turned out that this stand-off was a quick-draw, because the instant Luma flinched first, the girl whipped out a note, pre-printed on a card.

A handful of days prior, when Luma was in a dead sleep atop some particularly drab studies, drooling dangerously close to a valuable historic leatherbound and sitting in the trajectory of a roaming librarian, a passing student had kicked her chair leg on their way by, startling her awake just in time to instinctively wipe her mouth and look busy, or at least cognizant, and narrowly evade getting ousted or banned from the university library.

Luma pointed in recognition, right as this mage added another note, reading, I cannot imagine a worse place to be shackled at night.

Then without waiting, she placed under it, Surely there are better beds to sleep in.

Not all mages thought they were clever — the amount was really only slightly inflated from normal — but almost all mages acted like they thought they were clever, because that had been the style for all of history. This one was the former, and right about it, and clever enough to write to Luma, which even in the clamor of that tavern was as unexpected as it was appreciated.

In reaction to this, Luma — who believed herself to be an elf of great company and bardish wit — immediately and literally choked on her words, even though she didn’t have any, and possibly more because she couldn’t think of any.

Watching her once-powerful social engine fail to start stranded Luma in a desert of panic. Such an unforced error made her look unsocialized, maladjusted, or a wallflower, and these were all the worst possible things for an elf to be, especially in comparison to human company. It was one thing to forgo charming a clerk or stableboy, but quite another to be accosted by humorous wordplay and return a blank. So somewhere in between coughs she undertook a desperate need to prove that she had not dropped her charm somewhere along the many empty roads of recent years. She grabbed stationary and immediately wrote upon it, in the way that she remembered flirting to work, Sleep is rarely my plan, even in bed.

The mage smirked anew and instantly played a card reading, That would explain why it sneaks up on you so.

And Luma laughed. An ancient ability that she was born with but had forgotten about. In the din of that tavern she was able to forget it was silenced, and felt it the same as she used to. Except in this instance she laughed right in the girl’s face and forgot to refine it into a signal of anything but shock. Only remembering with a late step to cut it short for modesty, and shrink back to her own stool and the respectful mannerisms of the not-entirely desperate.

She was being charmed, and realizing it set off a warning klaxon in her head, this time not out of competitive indignity but because of the danger it presented. So Luma collected herself, and in accordance with protocol she reminded her mental faculties that they were not to — under any circumstances — fall in love. That may sound like an overreaction to you, but there was precedent.

Luma found love too easily. Luma was the type to find love under a rock. And if she let herself, she would spiral into assorted affairs in nearly any town the wind took her to, and never get anything done. It was a keen awareness of this lethal slope underneath her — her love of people which would consume her if she slipped for more than a night — that kept her head in books, studying from wake until the words blurred and her eyes mutinied between them. To manage the feat, Luma had left friends behind, and had since blocked new ones from emerging. A strategy she was not great at, and one which she herself was the greatest threat to. Most elves already found love much easier than humans did, due to the guidance of a small ancillary gland nestled amongst the intestines, of which Luma’s was abnormally sized and particularly overactive, currently steering her unconscious mind on track for a rich downwards spiral into this stranger’s eyes.

She needed to flirt no further, and so gathered everything she knew about wit and prose together for one go, threw it out the window and shuttered. She looked anywhere that was less distracting than the girl, took to her parchment and let flow the witless and casual pleasantries of the mundane. The weather and the crowds. How the nearby school threatened to swallow this town. How Luma blended in while the mage stood out. And soon enough she had written, Where did you find eyes inside which any bard could die?

There are good reasons why we begin Luma’s story not at the time of her muting but rather at this idle meeting, which demand that we explain the mage effectively.

It is imperative that you understand how incredibly sour she was to the tongue. It is true that she had a tanginess that dulled that, but it came mostly in the aftertaste. Attempting to consume her was the equivalent of throating a gaggle of lemons laced with razors, as she was not the type to go down without getting to rub acid in your wounds for the spite of it. Worth experiencing, still, and there are many other ways in which we can relate to her. For instance, she had approached our sweet Luma with an appetite, ready to bite, carrying an intent to get the bard in her mouth and enjoy her squirm.

If that does not clarify it enough, know that she was two things on the surface: entirely obfuscated by a cloak of vantablack thread, and studying Luma with eyes of pure gold. Not the color, but the metal — solid, glossy, and desireable. They held a magic that made them more reflective than mundane riches, not unlike the eyes of a cat — especially the type to bestow ill luck upon a crossed path.

Her unnatural fabrics reflected nothing but prying eyes, dragging any wandering light to an early grave, and her whole ensemble was entirely themed around this voidish near-illusion. Even the girl herself flirted with the edge of what could be considered natural, her body seeming achromatic in one moment, then suddenly remembering to include browns in its palette the next.

It was an intimidating look, or predatory. Most people existed by happenstance and learned to make it work. Because of this, many also experienced an alien sensation when meeting, in person, someone so well-funded and prepared that they had the look of being purpose-built for life. It was only by having stared at her once before that Luma evaded staring dumbly then. The mage stared at her the opposite way.

She saw through her, read between her lines, took Luma’s page of stumbling confusion and simply turned it face down. A merciful reset, beginning with, I so love your fashion.

Luma found some comfort in writing, Thank you. I hate it more than anything in this world.

For what it was that sealed Luma’s voice was a steel around her neck, and no metaphor. A collar too tall and wide to comfortably hide, and she didn’t make the attempt, anyway. Her heart still harbored a small fantasy that one day a stray pedestrian would recognize it on sight, happen to know of its rare magic, and end her quest right there, getting a thousand highly pitched thanks for their aid.

The girl placed, You must tell me where you got it. And this got a dark scowl out of the cutest elf for miles.

Somewhere between the drinking and the hangover. A sorry truth that had left her with no leads to follow.

But this didn’t faze the girl, who grinned the most perfect teeth under the sun, handing out, And yet you live?

Yes. Luma couldn’t write no, but couldn’t write the thousand pages of complex lamentations she had been refusing to process during her fruitless quest, either. So she settled for, That, and a pause, seems to be how it works.

The mage might have looked at her, or inside her, or through her — it couldn’t be known. But she saw something in Luma, and rather than attempt the poetry necessary, she let it be reduced to basic words. I see much life in you yet. And the collar fits you well. Then, Well enough to wear every day, I would say. I would not be so shy.

Luma puffed, unwittingly, as if she might float right away from this, and tried to hide how insecure she was about her own insecurity. She held her hand steady, but still wrote the biting words, You like it? Take it. I insist.

The mage put hands on herself, as if complimented. It would not fit me. She might have laughed, the way she grinned. But I can never resist a girl in chains.

Once that card was placed down, the mage then pretended to have forgotten the put word helping in the middle, and used Luma’s quill to scribble it in.

It was not uncommon for various mages to puff up at the chance to take their shots at Luma’s puzzle. Something that appealed more to the young and the apprentices than to the masters, who learned long ago that they could charge half a fortune simply to tell a pitiful bard that they couldn’t help. The latter made her feel played, while the former made her feel played in the way that a lottery is, which was not much better. In the beginning Luma had been more willing to be taken on their rides, for they gave her the only hope she ever had that wasn’t born of necessity, but that edge had worn away long ago.

This mage, by contrast, touched her collar once and the very next words played from her deck were, This cannot be unlocked. It is impossible.

Which would have been refreshing were it not terrifying, and quick to send Luma dissociating. Normally, she would write out the practiced and routine thanks that pleasantries demanded follow an attempt at charity, but this encounter left her sitting lost in herself.

Do not despair far. The girl played a full hand. What is magic if not the art of doing the impossible? I am sure there was a time it seemed impossible to shut you up. Then a mage of poor taste came along, scowled at your voice, and set about making it happen.

Luma wrote, I have not seen this. I have spent unknown years now on the roads of this kingdom, in its every library and school. If time and trial made the impossible into the possible, I would not be here. I would not be this. And even this slight vent was an indulgence.

True. But Pedesyn is not like the elven homeland, Luma. Its libraries are unlikely to hold clues for you. Compromised magics, all of them. I will tell you this much: magic is a game of secrets. I can tell you this because it is an open secret. But all the best secrets are the ones that have been kept, especially from you. They are all — like you — chained up in obscurity, where only a rare few have opportunity to know of their names and potential.

This was one of the many things that Luma knew, but couldn’t have told you, or herself.

She had acted on it in the beginning, before it was inactionable and therefore necessary to forget about. Luma wrote, I have been to every master that would see me!

And after a lingering realization dripped through her, she waved the girl’s response away and asked, You know my name? For Luma had given her name to no one in that city, nevermind in that conversation, and yet it had been so casually placed in there, professionally embossed on a card. As if to prove a point about secrets and who had them.

I know the first one, as you carry it in your pocket. The mage held up a more familiar note, the one Luma kept ready for a convenient greeting, then reached over and tucked it back from whence it was picked, patting Luma’s side neatly. But it is only the one. I expect such as you to have many more.

Luma pressed her lips and wrote, Well I don’t carry a name as recognized as yours.

I know the last one! Everyone did, on sight. For while House Menemor didn’t have its own colors, the complete absence of them worked the same.

Every other house had been founded in the first century, back when the ground was raw and the world was still deciding not to make the grass purple. House Menemor emerged from the dark sometime between the sixth and seventh, basically yesterday by comparison, and this had all the ancient and official houses watching it closely, practically baring their teeth.

Which wasn’t unearned, either. Menemor were known as a house of shadow mages, for their presence was there one moment and gone the next, impossible to find, besiege, sabotage, or tax. But this did not give it as light a touch as you might think. Unofficial as it was, the time when it was a joke to call it a real mage house was a narrow few decades. Even Luma herself did then carry one of its products upon her. The one that carried the rest of her stuff, actually: the lightweight bag of pocketed dimension that had become standard across Pedesyn, which was the reason for which this Viccipiter’s eyes were a solid gold rather than the silver of its founders.

She was handed, Then I will trade you. Along with a card introducing, Viccipiter Entraste Sandid-Opponano Pontanious Casel et Menemor.

Twenty-two syllables was modest. Mages had complex names to fit their identities as masters of the complex arts, preferring them to sound more like incantations when spoken in full, presumably to keep their acquaintances on their toes and feeling like someone had just summoned a great serpent or cursed them with bad luck in love and hairline.

Viccipiter slid over a card that was Luma’s first name with a conspicuous blank thereafter. And our elf wrote upon it so that it then said, Luma Null.

Which wasn’t much different from saying nothing at all. Null was the family name of those who had no family, which did not, unfortunately, make them any sort of family of their own. Luma had once come from something like a family, a long time ago and across a great ocean, where the elves had a continent to themselves. But elven familial trees were eye-glossing contortions, so lost in their endless relations that no one ever considered naming their offspring by any such chaos. The necessity of secondary names was typically a surprise to newly-arriving elves, and those who made the journey alone had nothing to reference.

Viccipiter held it up to herself as if she had eyes to read it. And with her offhand she put down, This trade was a cheat. Her eyelids limited her gold to a squint. But as she turned it over in her hand, her face changed to that of equal mischief, almost as if Null seemed a preferable answer to her. (It was also likely the most welcome answer to an abductor.) And when she gave it back to Luma it had been changed to read, You are a mischievous thing. But we have mischief in common. I will trade you again. And she leapt from her seat, taking an unexpected extra step, having forgotten her intake so far that evening.

There was a minor flash every time the mage’s hands exited their cloak. Each was thickly covered in elegant tessellations of golden runes that looked so magically intense as to be questionably out of place here, trying to pick up a random musician after drinks (rather than busily sealing some great eternal demon underneath a monastery somewhere — or summoning it). Had she not been betraying eagerness with her smile and lean, Luma would have hesitated thrice to suspect such an appearance to harbor a flirt, but there was a charm to her confidence that threatened to be just as intoxicating as the girl was visibly intoxicated.

The Menemor splayed her deck and made Luma pick from it. She was not prepared for the extent to which Luma was Luma, and therefore ducked to see their undersides, rewarded by the knowledge that they were, all of them, blank. This underhanded move got a smirk, and then Luma also picked several cards at once. Each one said, Take my side for this night and I will take you anywhere in the world that you can name.

Anywhere? Luma was hit by the sudden realization that she was but a simple invitation away from a place of either many or the most secrets, and felt luck brush her neck for the first time in years. So she wrote, I will not cheat you, I promise!

So Luma got a bit giddy, and let herself shudder before writing, Take me into the shadow house, where you keep secrets chained and unnamed for those few who have the pleasure of knowing them.

Viccipiter grinned, You wish to see the shadows we cast? Her smirk crept wider, and her void crept closer. Her arm slid over Luma’s shoulders and in seconds they became half in league together. What hues had inhabited Viccipiter’s skin vanished quietly, and her face brushed against Luma’s ear. Even in the din of that tavern, her words carried the clear tone of an invitation bonded to a threat. She said, “You are not a spy, are you?”

To most, self-awareness might make that an impossible question to convincingly deny, but the larger portion of Luma’s mind had at that point become self-hypnotized into dully swimming between Viccipiter’s devilish grin and dangerous aura. What little was free from that was mostly preoccupied with a momentary fantasy that made wildly optimistic assumptions about what sort of imprisoner Viccipiter might make, which was predictably extending past the moment she had intended to allocate it. So, when Luma shook her head no, she had stars in her eyes that sold her as possessed by an innocence not even possessed by the stars in the sky, and Viccipiter did for a moment think that her own eyes might not be the most precious in the room.

A second runed arm joined its pair on her far shoulder, and the shadow mage draped over her like an obscenely expensive coat.

She was told, “You will never fit in. And worse, a Menemor sees through illusions as if they were not even there. But that does not mean you cannot be smuggled in.” And her face filled with an unreadable smirk.

Luma stared into the gold an inch from her, which looked like mirrors to the eye and felt the same to the soul, and she chose to ignore how much danger she was putting herself in. Or more specifically: the danger she was putting her quest in, by signing her starved heart up for a test of resistance. It was a troubling amount, but she had been at a maximum of trouble for longer than she dared to count, so the difference had difficulty adding in. She felt she could pretend this headlong fall was instead a calculated risk so long as it led to the slightest chance of any real leads. That was enough excuse for Luma to rebrand the indulgence as duty.

The shadow mage could see rationalization win its war inside her, and held open her cloak for Luma. She cautioned, “I can guarantee your entry, but not your safety, nor your exit.” But these words were lost on Luma, who had already stepped inside and disappeared from the tavern, from the city, and from the realm entirely.

The author would like to make it clear, here in the third chapter, that we are already drunk. Drinking is a close cousin to devouring, but of lesser apocalyptic scope and therefore infamy. You may be confused by the scale, but a Devourer does not need oceans to become intoxicated. Oceans, save for their inhabitants, merely hydrate. Believe it or not a single nervous elf will do fine.

We mention this for the disclaimer, but also because our selected characters will soon make for fitting company. That may sound misplaced to you, but stories and memories are not past nor fiction to us. They exist as real as anything else exists, and when we log them, they happen in the moment. A mortal mind simulates its surroundings in order to navigate them, and its stories to hypothecate. But a Devourer’s mind is all one simulation, impossible to differentiate. Dreams as vivid as dinner.

So it is that we are with everyone as they go through their lives, even though it is not until later that we meet them and they meet our teeth. So it is that our eyes and mind are, and were, with Luma long before she entered our mouth, back when she stepped into that shadowed house.

Luma did not actually expect to enter that, or any, area, since she saw the world through her own lens of interests and so expected to find, inside Viccipiter’s cloak, a comfy fabric in which to share a romantic walk to their destination. As such, she arrived at the greeting area of the shadow house in the form of a sprawled jumble of elf on the floor, and she only wasn’t trodden upon by her smuggler for the graces of that girl’s quick reflex.

The other thing she didn’t expect was an interior that compelled her to pen a reaction such as, Oh this is lovely!

Inside the vanta cloak of Viccipiter et Menemor was a grand lobby, circular at the walls, as if filling out one floor of a turret. There was an exceptional amount of fireplaces, each harboring the ever-popular magic of undying flame. Favored not only due to its perpetual nature, but also for such a flame was incapable of spreading itself, and therefore could go unattended with no risk of devouring its caster’s refuge and any wee children dwelling within. Despite their number, the air was perfectly comfortable and welcoming. That mysterious Menemor brand, oft seen as a house of evils and occulteries, did not show itself here on the inside. Or at least, not in this immediate greeting space, which admittedly did nothing to vouch for the presumable dungeons.

It was refreshing to need not pause and aim stationary at someone in order to say the slightest thing. Luma found that she could scribble upon anything clutched in her hand, and the shadow mage would respond without looking, often before she had even finished the sentence, and without stopping what she was doing. By the time Luma had gotten her bearings, Viccipiter was idly walking atop any furniture that was not meant to be walked upon, putting her boot to vases and candles and the like. She said, “But of course. A house must guard its reputation,” as if ignorant of House Menemor’s very opposite one. And her projectiles elastically returned to their placements behind her.

Every time the mage turned her back to her, all Luma’s instincts as a natural snoop kicked in. Which was fine. Her guide was basically her accomplice, and didn’t seem to have a line of sight to avoid, anyway. Not that Luma was a stealthy snoop. More of a brazen one who never understood the issue.

So she went straight to the next-nearest doorway and brushed aside the cover draped over it, finding a normal door behind the cloth, wooden and inconspicuous. All locks were inferior to the impossible lock upon Luma, and so she would have attempted to breach the thing except that it did not challenge her identity, bite at her agency, or refuse to cooperate in any of the normal ways that were favored in magical security. Instead it opened easily. And the third layer to this scheme was a simple wall, bare and unadorned in a naked shame, as if it was never finished or even supposed to be looked at.

Viccipiter jumped off the side of a staircase and brushed past Luma with the conditional affection of a housecat, sending a shiver of static, or magic, across their edges. She walked said door shut and then flicked it open again, gesturing performatively at the new location that lay beyond. A dawnish, foggy landscape of grass and scattered treepatch.

And she said, childishly, “It seems to work for me.” Which only did not work as bait to banter because it worked too well at impressing Luma, who became preoccupied with that instead.

Luma thought about what she was seeing, and she thought she had an idea, so she told the idea to Viccipiter. She wrote, It is a pocket house! And she very much thought she had cracked it.

“Nothing quite so simple.” A disappointing response, which might have led to something more satisfying if she had given time for Viccipiter to explain, rather than immediately bounding across the threshold to have a big lookaround.

The shadow mage closed the door behind them, its latch snapping into place and its cover befalling it, becoming another false doorway that led to nothing. Her voice adopted a spookish lisp as she slunk up behind her target, and she whispered, “This is the hunting grounds. We bring unsuspecting beings in here from time to time and let them loose. For practice.”

For sport? Luma had never played a single sport, but expressed herself like it was a lifelong passion. What do you hunt?

Her smuggler’s voice lowered further still, her hand on Luma’s back. “Only the most dangerous game.” Luma’s eyes widened, in shock and awe, and she looked frozen into Viccipiter’s eyes.

“...Yes,” said Viccipiter, not knowing what else to say. “Big, gross monsters.” She stuffed her hands back in her cloak and strolled a few steps away.

And then Luma’s hands grew quiet, and her gaze grew thoughtful. She wrote, Wait, and momentarily added, I see what you are saying. Her smuggler watched, rolling on her heels in a lost expectancy.

The inner house is moated by monsters. Because only a shadow could slip past without causing an alarm.

Viccipiter stopped biting her lip. “How sharp you are.” And she considered for a moment, before saying, “But that is not what I was getting at.”

I know, came the followup. I can see the obvious. Luma turned from her surroundings to her host and wrote, There are no monsters to be seen.

Because they are invisible! Luma rationalized wildly. It is a moat in which you sink if you rely upon sight. Because a shadow mage has no eyes.

And the aforementioned eyebrows lowered all the way down into a squint of concern. But Luma had already closed her own eyes, and so she missed this expression. She merely continued seeing unsolicited connections between everything, in the way of one who had been scouring innumerable pages of text for the slightest clues to a rare puzzle for the better part of a decade, and had forgotten that there are other ways to be.

So she wrote, I cannot see as you see. But I can hear as you see. And she forgot not to say, Maybe better. Luma became even more silent as she stuffed her stationary away, and took out her strumweave, her noisemaker. But she pressed the cords down, and held that thing tightly, like it was an antenna plugged into her hands, and her ears took on a twitch. Then she set off, across the quiet, empty grass.

As she did this, her sponsor strolled behind her, not nearly silent of foot, barely quiet of tongue, and whispered, “Does nothing escape you?” But the bard had no extra hands with which to respond. “It is no wonder you have survived traveling all over Pedesyn on your lonesome.” Luma stopped, turning this way and that before continuing. “Like, truly, I do not wonder at all.”

Viccipiter did not look for monsters, nor listen, and instead focused the entire time on Luma. It hit her, what she was trying to do. She had to say, “Bard, are you attempting to eyewander?”

A term Luma was not sure she knew, but it sounded much like her first guess, so she gave a curt nod.

The girl said, “Interesting,” again, and spoke of her own experience. “We must begin our eyewander at only a few years. Or less. You think you can pick it up on the day? With your life at stake?”

To some extent Luma resented that. She had been strumming weaves since about the same age, admittedly not as often as one used their eyes, but still. She should’ve remained an inch shy of legendarily attuned, even then.

She was asked, “Would you like a hint?” and nodded fervently enough that Viccipiter was retroactively even more bemused by her choice of strategy. “You are not doing the obviously correct thing.”

Before she could decide whether to set her strumweave aside and bargain for a better hint, it was given to her for free. Viccipiter said, “You have an eyewanderer right here with you, goof.” And the obviously correct way was revealed unto Luma, who smiled in that open-mouth way that the shameless and the elves did. She stuck out her stubby little hand that had never hit anything hard except for notes, and it was clasped in a hand of prickling, electrifying magic. The blind led the bard — who still kept her eyes closed for some reason — across the cool and damp grounds.

Viccipiter wound through the invisible maze and all its puzzles and riddles as if they weren’t even real, and her path twisted for about as long as the mage’s idle thoughts could entertain themselves. She whispered when to stop and when to go, until she was bored of it, which was twice. The problem with holding hands with Luma was that she could not write, which made it a pleasant but dull affair that the clever tired of quickly. So it was that the pair beelined to the next nearest door, which may or may not have been the same one, we will not tell you and Luma did not know, for she had been focusing on her senses and had neglected her cardinals.

And Luma marveled. She wrote hastily, What luck! I rather thought I might get eaten out here.

The only response to that which seemed appropriate to Viccipiter was, “Not... here or just yet.” But her head did not track Luma as she said it, as if she had the ability to make eye contact and therefore the ability to shy from it. Instead she occupied herself with opening the fake door, and as a reward got immediately ambushed from behind by a hug that was half a glomp and the other half a severe culture shock. She watched Luma, sightlessly, as the bard skipped cheerfully down the creaked stairs of an unlit basement.

That door, when closed, revealed itself to have been the single source of light bouncing limply down those stairs, and its betrayal was met with a silent, but emphatically fonted, I cannot see!

Viccipiter cast her signature foreshadow over Luma. She said, “You are infiltrating the shadow house. It will only get darker from here.”

Which she thought to be a humorous softball, easily bunted. “Have I, who does not perceive light, learned to cast an illuminating spell?” And there was a chuckle that came from wherever she was. Luma thought this was an answer, but it was a lie if anything, for that was a spell of such novicery that even Luma the bard might have learned it if given a middling tutor and forty-five minutes.

So Luma, who again could have just asked, bumbled around with hands outstretched until Viccipiter, realizing she was trying to follow her voice, arranged herself so as to be found. Her pockets were searched, and Luma pulled out the girl’s hands and held one. Except in this iteration of handholding it was held aloft, and used as a lantern on account of its glowing runes. With that puzzle solved, Luma snooped anew.

And Viccipiter strolled along with her, questioning how it came to be that her utility had become so antithetical to her fashion. When she voiced this, Luma rested the girl’s luminous hand on her own shoulder so that she could write an apology. She asked, Why tattoo yourself with runes that shimmer, if you are so dedicated to darkness? and was told, “Some light draws the eye. But too much light is the same as shadow, to those who have eyes to blind. So we keep a ready supply on-hand, simmering.” Luma offered to continue without it, if it truly bothered her, and for a response the shadow mage laughed at her like she couldn’t have been sincere, which she was, which was why it was funny.

“As I said,” Viccipiter’s humor always came to a rolling stop. “I do not perceive light, so light cannot trouble me.” And if Luma had looked, she would have seen her turn so voided as to be featureless, as if to prove the point. Instead her eyes caught on something much less subtle, and wrapped the girl’s hand tight around her waist so that she could fiddle with her immediate surroundings.

She wrote, There are elven wines here! Which might sound normal when you are told that they were in a wine cellar, but you should also be told that it was terribly abnormal, actually.

Why would you keep elven wines? Luma brushed them, to see the depth of their dust and the numbers underneath. These are from before elves even began sailing to Pedesyn. How do you keep elven wines here?

And in lieu of answering, Viccipiter asked, “Do you think you have found your first secret of ours?”

Already? Luma blew through her lips as she wrote, which did nothing. It would be too easy.

Her date nodded in a lulled sarcasm, and adjusted her hair. Before she could figure out the wording to an innuendo about when things would get hard, Luma whipped around, bright runes repeated in her eyes. She wrote, It is all poisoned!

Viccipiter’s face said nothing while her mouth said, “But of course. A whole wine cellar of poison, brewed for every race,” in a tone that said it already clocked out for the day, and not to call it again.

Five years ago, Luma would have caught that tone. But she was seven years into an insanity that most elves couldn’t have even survived, and so she continued, this time in the form of a question, We must drink it to proceed?

“Yes,” said Viccipiter, realizing that she needn’t have packed her creativity today. “Because shadow mages, as everyone knows, are immune to poison.” She said this because she thought it did not make sense.

But Luma made sense of it readily. What better way to convince someone to drink your poison than to drink it yourself?

Viccipiter took a bottle in her hand and pretended to look at it. Then she pretended to side-eye Luma. She said, “And you expect me to drink enough poison for two?”

The elf shook her head. No. I will drink mine. And unlike the mage, she looked at the bottle for real, with some kind of expression that only didn’t betray her thoughts on account of those thoughts being unrecognizable. I think I can take it. And then she took the wine, took her date’s hand in hers, and walked around to the far door, so that the thing could see them do this.

She needed no corkscrew. Before the mage could do any such party trick herself, Luma flicked the side of both her and Viccipiter’s bottles, sending each ringing almost as if they were already emptied, and their corks ejected themselves in rapt obedience. Her smuggler looked at her as if she had found an extra contraband in her false cargo backing. She said, “You are experienced in this?”

Luma sighed, and did not explain that she did not drink upon her quest, lest it and her life devolve in the obvious way. Instead she clacked their bottles, and locked their arms to drink in unison, as if somehow they were celebrating. This was not an elvish custom, but it was a human custom that Luma had assumed applied in any scenario.

A nod responded, one just as fierce as it was a bit lost. And Viccipiter actually had more to say, but not the time to say it before the elf began chugging a half-litre of poison. She only had the time to hurry and join, and did not at all have the experience to keep up. It seemed to her that drinking and barding must be taught in the same schools, for the elf did not even appear to swallow rather than simply pour into herself like she was emptying the thing on the side of the road. Viccipiter did not take the challenge. She took a sip, and when she was done, so was Luma, and Viccipiter expressively gagged and said, “Ew.” And upon her face was a scrunch.

But she quickly pulled herself together because it appeared from Luma’s face that the elf was choking, asphyxiating, and all-around straight-up dying. The bard fumbled for her stationary, in the way that those not long for this world wrote their last ominous warnings in blood. And her sponsor grabbed her by the arms, looking her up and down, and through, for she knew absolutely jack-all about poisons, and therefore nothing about what to do if there was some, and it got used. She hid a tangible relief when her date gasped back to life.

Without waiting to even out, Luma scribbled angers out on her pad, That was the worst wine I have ever had!

Viccipiter’s alarm converted to skepticism, and she challenged those words. “That was not disgust! You began to perish!”

Yes! A poison should have some grace, so that it is not vomited back in an assassin’s face! She crossed her arms, which for how they carried the former responsibilities of her mouth was a gesture of finality.

Viccipiter’s words succumbed to choice paralysis. She was left with only, “Well. you survived. Congratulations.”

Luma disclaimed, I am going to be a bit stupider soon. And upon her frame was already a wobble. Then she burped in the worst direction of straight forward. One that would have been grand were it not for the graces of her most hated accessory. Still, she covered her mouth in a hurry.

Viccipiter almost smiled at her, for some reason. Luma had only seen her smirk or grin before. The mistake was quickly corrected.

I am no lightweight! Luma objected, even while Viccipiter took her arm. It is only that humans are all of you such heavyweights!

Instead of leading her out, Viccipiter stalled, and asked, “Do you think you should rest a few minutes.” But Luma simply repeated her earlier comment about how she never planned her rest, which was not reassuring.

“Luma. I must caution you. This is not going to go entirely the way you think.”

The mage realized then, for the first time for real, that having a bard for a girlfriend might sometimes be annoying.

So, in chivalrous fashion, she opened the door for her, and gestured at the blank nothingness within. She said, “This is our bottomless pit.”

Luma looked, as if she could see anything, and nodded, as if she had. She wrote, Cool.

And Viccipiter whispered, “Ho-ly shit,” as the elf traveled through the air, and hit the stone floor in front of her.

To her credit, she very nearly landed it, and it was the wine that truly tipped her over. But it was a victory enough to have passed the trial, or whatever. Her sponsor strolled over, proclaiming, “If all of life was a test of conviction you would be the King of Pedesyn by now.” And she laughed at her.

Then she stopped, as if gutted, pulled her bard up and stuffed her in her cloak. Which did not send Luma sprawling to the lobby, but more floating in space, buffeted by cloth. And from the outer reaches of that space two voices faded into being.

They spoke of some business, as indecipherable as it seemed inane. Numbers and keywords, spoken in the way one speaks nonsense when they know another will understand it. They paused at finding our shadow mage standing alone and inactive in the center of that room.

Viccipiter quietly growled a mantra. “May the darkness envelop you, brother.”

One said, “And may it envelope you, sister,” but in a curious tone. And the other one, who was already walking away, only said, “Yeah. Okay Viccipiter.” When they had both passed through a presumably false door, Luma was dragged across an infinite expanse of space and placed down, on her feet, carefully.

Viccipiter spoke the way a proverb warned. “Nice is another shadow to mask danger within.” But when that lingered without a response, she added, “But yes. One of them is nice.”

She didn’t consider that a bard would know far more proverbs than she knew, or would improvise. Luma wrote, We must let a little danger in, now and then, lest we not recognize it when it comes on its own.

The bard had two hands holding onto her one, and was swaying gently to the lack of a tune or breeze. She was staring into Viccipiter’s surreal eyes of real gold, and there was a stupid grin upon her invincible personality.

It was then that Viccipiter decided to tell her what she had been thinking. She said, “You know, I saw you in the library many times before. Always drab, despondent, entirely unfocused on your work. After I helped you out, you smiled at me, once, and it was the smile of someone who smiles all the time. But it was only the one. It was alone like you were alone. Then I started to look for you, and I spotted you day after day, almost no matter the hour, in that drear. Studying, thoughtlessly, not seeming to absorb a word. Never again did you smile, even though you were so good at it. Until in the tavern when you realized I was flirting with you. Then you lit up like a torch, like an upcast magelight, bright as the sun. You are bright as the sun, yet you seek the dark. You did not even follow me here. You asked to come. Into a house with no windows, no candles, and no eyes. And now here you are in the thick of that, grinning in glee. Do you know how gritted I would be if I were you, and this was unfamiliar to me? I would be planning my imminent explosion.”

She peered through the beaming face of Luma, whose glee had blossomed throughout the mage’s words, taking the expression of a connoisseur or collector, finding the perfect stamp to complete themselves with. Luma’s mind was on the girl’s shimmering depth, her stalwart posture, and the subtle features of her face as they bounced the dim light softly away into the nothing that backgrounded her.

It was half a minute of dazzled staring met by suspicious squinting before Viccipiter folded. She said, “There is something else I wish to show you,” and led her back to the door they came in through, which opened to somewhere new. “Come into the dungeons.”

This time she left much more light for Luma, with both hands out of her cloak. Hundreds of shadows cut over the jagged stonelay as their source strolled through the many iron-barred rooms, flickering at the slightest change. There was a shrieking crane as she pulled open the grate of the closest one. She said, “Get in the cell,” and watched Luma’s dutiful obedience. “Put on these shackles.”

That was difficult to do on one’s own, so Viccipiter helped her with the second cuff. The bard stared up at her as she worked, thinking something unknowable. When it was ready, she tested the chain between her wrists with a few tugs.

She helped her shackles match up with the iron rungs on it, so that Viccipiter could flick its clamps into place. And then, that was that. Her abduction was complete and total.

So they stood there, and sat there, for a minute. The captor with her hands on her hips, and the captured staring up expectantly, as if a fan that had been summoned onto the stage.

Eventually the mage said, “I must reveal to you, Luma, what I have been hiding from you all along. I must now tell you what thoughts I have been truly having for some time now.”

And Viccipiter’s head listed slightly. She completed a full circle around her victim and said, “I have absolutely no idea what you think you are doing here.”

“I confess: I understand nothing about you. You realize where you have come, right? Did I not make it clear? The danger you are in? You know that an invite is no magical contract guaranteeing cozy hospitality, right? I could leave you in these shackles, here in the darkest cells of this world, where the doors lead to nowhere, an infinity away from the nearest ears that could even consider answering your pleas. Which, now that I think of it, would never hear you any which way!”

She said, “Stop nodding! This is serious. There is an intense discrepancy at play here.” Then she leaned over her mark, into her space, her voice gaining some violence. She interrogated, “How did you manage to survive seven years traveling Pedesyn alone with this complete lack of self-preservation!?” Viccipiter pulled her by her collar, beginning to laugh.

But the laughter stopped abruptly when the door across from them opened. It opened casually, but was as loud as a carriage crash in that completely dead space. They both froze.

The perfect posture of the apprentice returned to her. She answered slowly, “I am on a date.” She said, “What does it look like I am doing?”

The new voice was deep and slow, like gravel falling over the edges of a shovel. “It looks like you have abducted some poor elf.”

“I resent that. I have never done such a thing before. And: it so happens that pretty elves follow me willingly.”

There was a hum of incomplete belief. “Is that so, elf? You are living out your own wishes here, in harsh captivity?” Then there was a bright flash, as the new Menemor cast a light that was far too bright.

Luma shriveled up her eyes as they attempted to contract at record speed. Viccipiter was unaffected and said, “She does not speak.”

The senior Menemor adjusted his magelight in accordance to Luma’s reaction. He was a tall, gritted man, of mixed skin, impeccable handsomeness, and the appropriate amount of dishevelment. He responded, “And yet you are interrogating her?”

As he approached the cell door, Luma saw his eyes were silver, and that they narrowed upon her.

After a stalled moment he said, “She is manipulating you.” And it took Viccipiter’s shift in body language for Luma to realize that he was saying this to his own, rather than to her. “Can you not see the lies in her?”

And he pointed, as if they existed in places. “She has loves already, and feels she has ventured too far from home for too long. She desperately wishes to return. And, also, she is hiding her true abilities.”

And then, the two began to speak in what was obviously code. He told her, “Are you not worried for the ancient scrolls locked in the basement?”

“Of course not. No one can steal the ancient scrolls locked in the basement. It is impossible.”

“Not even someone who traveled all of Pedesyn studying every antimagic available could do such a thing.”

He said, “But what of the larger concern?” Then, when she asked, he said, like it was obvious, “Does her deceit not cast a shadow upon your romances?”

This was given a few seconds of thought, at least. “Well not yet it has not.” She said, “It is you that is casting your shadow upon my romances, hovering like this over us.”

But apparently that was the end of the conversation. For he then said, “Regardless, I need the dungeons. This is not an area for play. Make your way.” And ironically he followed this up by leaving. Although before he was past the threshold he turned to say, “And cast your date a light, for goodness sake.”

Viccipiter watched her elder go. If she was going to make her way anywhere, she wasn’t hurrying about it.

She told her victim, “Do not worry about him, he is a harmless old hoot. We only keep him around because he is insanely deadly.” She was definitely exaggerating the age of the man, which confused how the other claims should be taken.

Luma had no freedom to write, but her face said as much as it ever had. Viccipiter wasn’t sure what it was saying, only that it was expectant in some way.

She said, “What?” And when the face did not change she explained, “I am going to torture you. Wait, sorry. I am not going to torture you. There is little I could do to you that would be worse than what you have been doing to yourself. How someone chooses a life of homework is beyond me. Even if I lost everything and saw no other way, I would rather spend all my time finding that other way.” She looked at nothing when she said, “I do not understand the faintest thing about you.”

Some recreational interrogation would have been preferable. Luma knew a lot about how to squirm and strain and gasp. She knew when to resist and when to obey. But one of the worst things about being muted was that it left her with next to nothing to do when bound.

“You look great, by the way.” Her date smiled at her vulnerable state, and her humor worked on Luma, which she liked, because it didn’t work on most. “Although I suppose you do not look comfortable.” Viccipiter then set about releasing her. And Luma, having spent many years working towards conquering the impossible lock around her neck, did the gracious thing and let her be the one to do it.

When Luma was up, and had her words back in hand, she wrote, He seemed nice, too. And, Are most shadow mages friendly like you?

This time, the girl’s face stayed on Luma, and she followed with the question, “Well? You have been found out as an aspiring thief. Just how foolhardy do you intend to be now?”

“That is wise.” Viccipiter shrugged, and led her out of those dungeons by the wrist. “It is much better to wait for the right opportunity, and so only need to do it once.”

I do not actually want to steal anything, nor expose any secrets. The instant I find my freedom I will close my book on this chapter and never think about magic ever again.

“Ha!” This aspiration summoned a laugh. “You will never escape magics in this life. The same as, if you ran right now, no matter how fast, you would not be able to escape me.”

For a moment, Luma stood in the darkness again, listening to the fluttering pages of Viccipiter’s personal tome. In that awkward length of time, the mage explained, “Hold on. I have only practiced this for combat.” There was a flash, and a pat on her head as the light was placed over her, tied to her location and offset somewhat up.

After two-dozen blinks, three stumbles, and passing through one doorway, Luma found herself in the entrance of a lavish speaking hall, with a floor that was stepped at every part, mirroring a ceiling that looked as if it took the form for acoustic reasons. And more striking than that, it was busy. At least two dozen Menemors were making it their space, most with their tomes out, sharing or discussing business, far fewer sounding like they discussed magic.

Luma had the very distinct feeling of shining a conic lantern into a cave of undisturbed bats, and being voyeuristically alien, particularly for how cold and harsh her light was. It was only a few that noticed the light at all, and they seemed wholly uninterested in the intruder after a second’s distraction.

Pedesyn held many conflicting rumors as to which shadows the Menemors crawled out from, and Luma realized instantly why, for each was about as right as it was wrong. She herself was not even the only inhuman, as there were two orcs in the forum when it wasn’t even in session, and perhaps the most surprising thing was that they were not together. She spied an elf, too rich of skin to be any kin to her, and the bulk of the humans were from every cardinal on the map.

Viccipiter told her, “This is our forum. Emergencies and governance.” Luma only realized then that she was being given a real, actual tour. Her guide mistook the realization for confusion, and so gave a more candid explanation. “This is where we decide who lives and who dies. Or: which laws to respect.”

Luma started to write, but her ink was jostled into a scribble by a horde of little gremlins (see: children) that knocked into her along their run. Two of the gaggle wore blindfolds, and when they lost their balance they took another two down with them. All of them carried instruments, and so as they engaged in a floored scuffle it was set to a discordant concert, and Viccipiter laughed at it. Those who first bonked upon Luma apologized to her as they rose, in the broken language of those early in learning to speak, which was enviously more than Luma could do.

Viccipiter kept one hand on the door handle and asked, “Where are you headed?”

One said, “To the library.” And was quickly cut off (and in front of) by another who said, “To the pantry!”

So Viccipiter chose to believe the latter. She waved her hand over the door before opening it, as if spellcasting was a show to be put on, and then ushered them through, with a bid that they have a good day. She was thanked, politely, and the manners of the children stayed mostly intact until they were well into their destination. It was only as the door swung closed that Luma heard pitched squeals and the raiding of foodstuffs.

There was also an elder that passed them and went through. And then quickly returned, looked to Viccipiter and said, “Viccipiter, really. Where did you send my class?” Viccipiter told her the truth, and this wasn’t appreciated. She was told that she knew better than that.

“You are the perfect person to do that on account of your familiarity.” The squinted silver then noted Luma for a second, and whatever was thought of her, it wasn’t to be known, for she said, “I won’t even ask,” and then continued on to the pantry.

When her guide next opened a door it was to a lush garden, tightly packed with exotic flora growing over every surface and none respecting any others’ space. Luma looked at some part of it, was amazed, and then looked past that and repeated the process many times as she came to the greater realization that this garden was more of a landscape. It continued until it formed a horizon, in the way land did, but without the repetition or uniformity. An unabashedly artistic scene, but one whose artist had tripped and spilled their palette across it during an over-acted multi-stage fall.

Viccipiter held her wrist as they walked through, even though there was light enough for Luma to feel steady, since there were plants that needed even greater quantities of it. “This is, globally speaking, the most complete collection of plantstuff in existence.” She grinned then, as if proud to have contributed, which she hadn’t. “We have not inspected other houses’ gardens to compare, but seeing as ours is literally and actually complete, it has to be.”

And Luma was not listening, having been overcome by the need to point excitedly at a flowery vine that grew across her childhood town back on the opposite side of the world, which she had not seen in the better part of three decades and had expected to never see again. Viccipiter did the thieving for Luma, plucked some and slid them into her girl’s hair. There had been many years as a child when Luma had not gone a day without flowers in her hair, but at that time it might have been close to a decade of the opposite. Instead of telling her, Viccipiter asked, “Is it your color?”

She wrote, Any color in the wild is an elf’s. Her quill tapped on the paper twice, before asking, Are you colorblind? Which might have been a rude thing to suddenly ask if not from the muted.

“No, but I do not see things the way you do. I can read a color. I cannot judge it so well.” She puffed out her cloak. “Thus the black.” And she thumbed her cheek.

Now that I can see, this is all so lovely. Luma rhymed her, as if that would mask her abrupt change of subject. She walked through the grassway, brushing all the plantlife with her hand, as was the elven way.

And Viccipiter bapped her arm, “Stop touching everything, or you will eventually be poisoned.”

But this place is all so pretty, and cozy. What is worth fearing here? I can take another poison.

“A real poison, pretty one.” Viccipiter eyed her for effect, trying to gauge whether she was pretending to not know that they were pretending before. She sighed and said, “Well, we see differently. This looks to me like the most dangerous place. It looks absolutely laced with traps.”

The mage only shrugged. “The endless threat of comforts. The imminent doom of peace and quiet. The tedious boredom of a life lived correctly, safe in the shadows.”

Oh. Luma did, actually, know exactly what she meant. I came across the great ocean for reasons such as this. She left out the part where she also just really had a thing for humans.

The sights of the garden held Viccipiter’s fickle attention no better than you’d expect, and soon she backtracked them to a thick tree, and put her hand upon a gnarled door that had not been there as they had passed before. She said, “Where are you headed?”

And Luma thought about it a lot less than Viccipiter expected her to. She immediately wrote, The basement with the ancient scrolls?

“I admire your boldness, but that was not a real thing either.” She smirked. “Try again.”

“Ugh.” The mage squinted at the fool, but acquiesced, and Luma scuttered into the tree with the giddy humor of one who knew they were being spoiled.

A taller library there had never been, for there was literally no reason to design a cataloging system to run so harshly vertical. The bookshelves only started to hold books at about the height of her own head, and it couldn’t be known how high they ran because the light she wore for a hat gave up the chase at about five-hundred feet. Each was a solid and single piece, as if the library was a redwood forest seeded at the beginning of the world, and there was a dampness to the air that conflicted with the proper means of paper storage.

Viccipiter continued her tour by illuminating, in royal sarcasm, “Nerd shit.” She dropped her tone, “You... cannot sleep here,” and was about to inform the bard that she would be welcome to sleep in the next room, but hadn’t the time before Luma had skipped inside and started browsing in expectant awe.

The very first text she set her eyes upon whispered to her. She heard it in her head like a schizophrenic, a growling voice just inside her skull, reminding her in which season did reindeer mate. As she vaulted up the first shelf to listen closer, a scroll affixed above that one told her, with what she intuitively knew to be a personal importance, how to tessellate pentagonal bricks. This attempted to happen a third time but Viccipiter interrupted with a request for the far more pertinent knowledge of what the fuck she was doing.

It was only natural for an elf to climb a tree, but Luma did not have the hands or voice to respond naturally, so she simply looked down. Then she saw that Viccipiter had asked for a friend, as joining her was a presumable elder, who looked like a nun (despite wearing the same cloak as the much cooler one beside her). She looked at Luma like she was stupid, and looked at Viccipiter like she was the one climbing the walls.

Luma didn’t know the proper custom and, as her wit had always been words and therefore had left her, she had since learned that everyone can appreciate a polite little bow. But she couldn’t do that right then, so she just stared.

The woman said, “Well, take her back to her forest. She is a trespasser in this house, amongst our secrets. If you wish to date you should do it outside, in the sun and the noise.”

“We wished to date in here, amongst the secrets.” Viccipiter said this like it changed anything.

“Then you should have kept your date a better secret. Take her out of here and take her out properly, for iced cream or the petting of animals, or whatever our accursed children do now.”

The two wound up outside, in a regular landscape, placed atop a regular hill, as the remaining sunglow sputtered its way past the horizon. A landscape bereft of the peculiarities that adorned everything Luma had just toured, save for her and her date. This put Luma on her home turf, as she had always been ready to find beauty to cheer or cry over even in the most mundane of places, so long as there was good company kept there. And the truth was that Luma found this company to be already wormed into her sensibilities. Luma may have let herself go too far and drink too deep, possibly literally.

After all that spirit-killing dedication to her quest, the endless focus, the willpower to press her tired and tearless eyes against the sandpaper of endless study, she found herself next to what she knew could easily be turned into sixty years of cherished dedication, and she wanted it. She missed being found curious and entertaining, and going about life in league with a teammate. Her imagination betrayed her with wishful images of a cozy life entrenched in the confident grasp of expert magics. She could feel her quest threatened, her fast breaking, and her hibernation waning. And a voice deep inside her said, You have to run, or you will die here. The Luma that set out to make herself whole again would be no more, that precious little thing. And Luma the girlfriend of a shadow mage would be born in her place. A happy pet failure that had forgotten the faces of her past. A simple little thing. Her potential squandered on both sides.

Then she looked at Viccipiter and a voice much clearer and closer to her surface said, Ohhh she is so handsome! And dying didn’t sound that bad so long as she got to die in those eyes.

There had been so many moments that would have been perfectly appropriate to start running that evening. But then, when Luma was finally truly considering it, the threat splayed out on the grass and stared silently at the sky. And it really would have been intolerably rude to book it at full speed right then, Luma told herself. So she sat next to her, just for a minute.

A minute passed and Viccipiter didn’t say anything, so Luma felt allowed to kill the silence in her own way. She wrote, The stars are out tonight. I feel I have not seen the stars in months.

“No I mean, tell me about the stars,” Viccipiter corrected. “I have not seen them in actual forever. They are too far for eyewander.”

As Luma began to write, her date added, “I already know what they look like. I want to know what it feels like to stare at them.”

A call for poetry wasn’t something Luma could parry right then. And Viccipiter seemed so still in that moment, that Luma even did the courtesy of foregoing verse. She wrote, It feels belittling. In an easy way, that belittles your problems alike. The stars say, ‘You may be small, but your problems, they are also small. You are all so small, to us.’ And you remember that everyone dies before they’re done.

Viccipiter really liked that, but she didn’t say it. She pointed her head at Luma’s strumweave and said, “Were you any good?”

“I do not believe you.” The mage shrugged easily. “I do not think you were a star. I can see your soul, you know. It is a forest fire. A star sits in the gallery in the sky, I am told. A sun blots out the stars and causes the day, I am told. You seem more like a sun, to me.” And that was really some kind of poetry of its own.

Something you must know about Luma’s search is that finding its solution meant nothing to her. Finding its end was all that mattered. She did not care about winning, or learning anything, or defeating any ancient evils. If there was any way to fail her quest that would return her to her previous life and capacity she would have failed in a heartbeat, on any day. If anything, she yearned for that failure. How much harm could it be to make this night a bit easier to stomach? It would only mean as much as death.

Luma wasn’t one to yearn for death, for the sweet grace and mercy of the void. But she desperately missed the warm beds of friends, and so she very much yearned for the void that was Viccipiter. A bottomless pit of magical attention. The night had reminded her what it was to be with someone.

Luma’s hands were on her knees. They were steady, but she felt as if they trembled, not as the nervous do, but as those burdened for too long begin to tremble shortly before they collapse. She felt as if she had been cheated for a long time, and just now had the idea to stand up for herself and demand better.

Better laid next to her, and there were galaxies reflected in those mirror eyes. They looked like stilled pools, and Luma swore that if she leaned forward enough for her balance to leave her, she would plop right through, and they would swallow her under a tidy golden ripple. Falling had never called her name louder.

Luma leaned in, to the most danger she had even been in, and she could do nothing to save herself. It was hopeless, she had lost to this mage and to herself, so she did the only thing that made sense in that nonsense, and snuck in for the kiss.

Just as she did so, Viccipiter instinctively sat up, said something about the weather, the hour, and apologized for keeping her. She wished her studies to go well.

She stood and said, “Thank you for accompanying me today. I am sorry we did not find your freedom.”

It’s difficult to express how little Luma expected that reaction, at that moment, from that person, in that situation. But it did mean one very important thing had happened.

The girl said, “Close your eyes and cover your ears, I will walk you back.” And after a few steps. Luma’s boots found hardwood flooring, and she was released into the backroom of a familiar tavern.

In what Luma felt to be an unsatisfying whiplash, and an anticlimax of more than one variety, she was spared her life and set free again. Free to wander into the very same dangers and traps that laid in every other corner of the land. But the goodbye the two shared after that, it was an awkward one.

An armageddon is a feast that brings its own famine. For while in all worlds it is known as the End Times, it is not the end of time itself, only the end of everything that is not us. This is a problem for both of us. The mortals always want more time, and a Devourer always wants more everything.

There are some rare worlds made to cycle eternal, upon a rigid track, but those are as bland as they are repetitive, typically because all else is sacrificed for that sole mechanic. That design forgoes a Devourer the same as it tries to forgo an end, but there is always a rot, eventually, which requires a cleanse if it does not require a cancellation. Only one world is fabled to have persisted functionally eternal, and it is a world without humans, or human-derived races, populated by shapes and puzzles. It is, in your tongue, boring as all fucking get-out.

We would be best to draw out each armageddon as long as we can, until space contracts into punctuation and wraps itself a bow. All Devourers know this, intrinsically, and none do it. Ours is an appetite made to be infinite, and it cannot be reasoned with, or denied. It can be hibernated, but only the once. From wake, it is everything, and must become the only thing left.

In the aftermath, we are alone, in space and time, gorged and ravenous with a hunger that can no longer be sated. A famine of our own making. And we float there, digesting the histories sown into the dirt we drank, languishing in regret and hosting an all-around really very bad mood until the actual end of time. Were we in better control of ourselves, we would ration and find equilibrium, stretching out our armageddon by pruning the branches of your family trees and dieting upon them until the last moment. We would become another natural tax, and see you grow to fill your container.

But we never do. We are, fundamentally, irrational, and we become our own worst enemies for it.

So while you may feel the urge to judge Luma and her upcoming behavior, we do not. The heart wants what the stomach wants, and the stomach deeply wants the heart to get what it wants, too, but nothing shares the wants of the rational mind. It sits alone, on its throne, and always thinks it is in far more control than it ever is. And the heart, like the stomach, if left empty for too long becomes promoted into authority.

After the near-miss attempt on her life, Luma’s recovery required a heavy mourning process that spanned several long nights. But she was, if nothing else right then, a survivor, and she walked away from her date with the secret-keeper in the same way one walks away from taking a tumble down a cliff. At first she stayed down and winced and breathed. Then she crawled. Then she limped. And eventually she spent near ten miles shuffling her feet and kicking rocks. In time, Luma remembered how to fill her head with white noise, and how to forget things that previously meant much to her, as well as how to not accidentally remember them later.

Which isn’t to say she forewent the usual theatrics. She sobbed uncontrollably for a long time, and this was followed by a controlled sobbing that lasted nearly the same length. It wasn’t so much about the mage, whoever that was. It was that she missed all the friends she had lost when she had to set out into this thick fog of loneliness like the bravest warrior she was. All those friends she tried so hard not to remember, so that she could succeed and therefore return to, and whom she didn’t dare wonder if she couldn’t remember so well anymore.

Part of the process of traveling in the most oblivious mental state possible meant that Luma was just as oblivious to the tells of the weather as to anything else. And so it happened that she was at least ten miles away from any inn on the night of the most violent storm Pedesyn’s inlands had seen in a century, in which the better part of the continent was awash in rainfall of such wind that most of it was salted, having blown directly from the eastern ocean in a great arc. Our Luma was flattened by a salmon on her way up a hill to request shelter from the sole homestead she had seen for a mile.

Whether out of an abundance of caution, or of ambivalence, the residents of that house refused to open their door to even witness their visitor, and merely shouted through it, demanding to know who was there and what they wanted. “Speak! Who are you?” Not knowing they asked the impossible. Were it not for the dark and the storm itself, perhaps they would have shown more compassion (or at least less caution) for the lone elf. She was already considering disappearing when they eventually demanded she do just that.

Succumbing to the elements was not Luma’s true concern. Not so much as that, in a great storm such as this, one could find neither sleep nor distraction, which seemed a fate worth fearing when standing at the edge of a long night and a difficult repression.

If she was left alone with nothing to study she would be left alone with her thoughts. If she was left alone with her thoughts she would think about the mage. If she thought about the mage she would think about the mage’s style and wit. Then she would think about how much she liked it and she would start thinking about backtracking to that town and stalking through its university to find her. If she thought about that she’d do it, and she’d emerge from her quest, never be able to resubmerge into it again, and then never get back to her craft and her friends and her life and she’d start a new life which would mean that she’d die. In this way did her thoughts betray her in a compulsive spiral.

Ideally, she would have just kept on her way, getting pelted with hail and the occasional unlucky sealife, but that would almost certainly see her sent in a wrong direction, and possibly disconnect her from having any idea where on the map she was afterward. So, as poor Luma set to leave that property, she was trying to figure out what would be the strategy of a qualified survivalist, or at least someone above her personal method of tumbling through the worst of things. Her best thought was that this would likely have something to do with climbing trees so as to not be washed away.

The thought didn’t appeal. For an elf, Luma very seldom talked to trees. The cause wasn’t so much her own nature as it was the trees who didn’t like to talk to her. She suspected they could tell that she grew up in a city, and were ignoring her out of spite. It was an open secret that trees carried a not-insignificant bigotry. They didn’t even acknowledge bushes, which Luma felt to be very nearly trees by every metric, and they abhorred anything beyond the speed of a slug. Elves only received their parley because it was for the best that some of the peoples of the world ambassadored them. And it was mostly a one-way transaction anyway. Trees said little beyond their callous admonishments of how the world was tragically speeding up and going to pieces for it.

But she sucked it up, because that was all she could do, and very nearly all she was good at anymore. It might have worked in theory except that once she was ten paces from the house and couldn’t see anything behind nor in front of her, she quickly lost her sense of either. For a long time, she thought she was accomplishing a straight line, but when it got too long to fit the notion nor geometry, Luma had to confront that she was floundering on some unknowable spaghetti path.

It was difficult to keep pressing away after that, and upon some uncounted number of faceplants into the mud she decided to simply stay down there out of a begrudged spite. The world could just go ahead and get all this out of its system. Being an elf, she was too buoyant to worry about drowning, however being an elf also meant she was quick to bawl her many feelings out into the mud. It was in this state that he found her.

When she crossed her eyes a little, she could see the vague shape of a person. The shape didn’t help her up. It only held out a hand in an offer to do so. Luma stared at that, and considered it a hallucination, like the oasis that comes in a desert haze. Her mirage shouted over the storm the very stupid question, “Are you okay?”

If this was life’s way of implying that her choice to over-express her defeat with a great sarcastic flop was premature, then that implication came too soon, because Luma wasn’t ready to stop being stubbornly limp and dissociated just yet. At the same time, if this wasn’t a hallucination, she didn’t want to be responsible for the person being knocked simple by an overweight trout while exposing themself to the elements waiting for her to finish her emotions. Thus she gradually convinced her rebelling body to give the hand her own, and waited to see if it would materialize into the real.

It materialized in rapt fashion, hauling her up so fast and expertly that she was on her feet and held steady before she had managed to formulate her next thought. By the time she had, and was in the midst of thinking it, she was already being walked purposefully through the whirling black. With no light for the way, the best Luma could do was to hold tight onto the figure and try to do them the courtesy of slipping the fewest times possible, which it turned out was approximately seven times before she was half-carried into the shelter of a barn.

It was dark in there too, but that was something Luma had gotten used to recently. The water still flooded up to her ankles, and the noise was only halved, but at least they were not being pelted with rain or anything else. Luma stood there, pouting fiercely, and for once she thought very strongly that she would like to go to sleep. Not for any fatigue but for the things it would do to the time and weather. Only when the heavy door was wrenched closed and a lantern was lit, did she see what incredible trouble she was in.

This one, the farmhand, may be difficult to describe without god-tongue. We will tell you what we know.

The boy was spiced beyond reasonable measure. Fresh from the oven and quick to burn the roof of your mouth. The kind of hot that streams tears from even a multitudinous eldritch gallery of eyes. He who would succeed as a baker without cooking a thing for how many in a crowd would salivate at his passing by. Lean meat, perfectly cut, browned to a crisp on the outside, steaming, and to die for. The type of thing one witnesses in the parting of clouds and expects not to see again until their next spiritual episode.

He was taut, and towering, and summoned straight from her imagination. An apparition. A fantasy and a jackpot. If beauty lay in the eye of the beholder, then our Luma was beholding enough to herniate. He was almost two heads above her, toned in his muscle yet broad in his stature, as if his shoulders had prepared to accommodate for two necks, and were then stuck overcompensating for the one. He shed his overcoat, and beneath it his arms had such excess strength that they put domes where simple shoulders should have been. His muscles were of the type that looked like, if for some inspired reason Luma should stick her neck between them, they could pop her head clean off with an accidental twitch. Yet his face was refined, elegant past what was natural in a human, easily the prettiest boy Luma had ever seen that was a human and not an elf. Elves lived their lives with the muscle they were born with, and could not bulk or waste away in the manner of humans. If this one had wasted two-thirds away, he could have passed for an elf of clipped ear. But he had a face packed to the brim with character and expression, something that elves prettier than Luma possessed only in a nigh-invisible nuance.

And he had saved her. Luma had not particularly cared about being saved until the idea of it fit so well into this new context.

She was speechless. For once, being muted was a grace, for otherwise she would have likely slurred a nonsense in that moment. As it was, she wobbled something fierce, and found herself steadied by the very same strong arms that had weakened her knees in the first place, which almost did worse than help. Not knowing what else to do, she laughed, though the act made no sound.

The boy’s striking bluegreen eyes met with her own daygreen pair, but for only the briefest second before spotting the heavy metal collar around her neck and breaking into the most terrible concern, then repeating his previous question.

That was really too much, to Luma’s mind. He could not be kind, on top of the rest. He should have been a jerk. Someone with his features should have undercompensated with a character that would slap her around and blame her for their father-issues. Instead he asked, “Are you escaped? Are you pursued?” And he should have said it so that it sounded like an accusation that she had brought trouble to his door, but instead he said it like he’d just accidentally clipped the girl with his axe. He apologized for the weather as if it was a drink he’d spilled upon her outfit. The only cruel thing about him were his eyebrows, for they bent themselves in such a way that her concentration melted off her, and she could do little more than laugh, again, silent, again.

There was nothing for it. Luma stared up, with her very best moon eyes, and she fell in love at an absolutely blistering world-record pace.

Luma had no idea how the boy had managed to see her in that tempest without stepping on her and then looking under his boot. All she knew was that she had been trying to recover from a glancing blow and now learned she had strolled into the imminent impact crater of a meteorite. It wasn’t particularly fair, and it wasn’t sporting at all. In that barn, with the solid walls of rain sealing it shut, Luma was in a cage fight, with no preparation, and every desire to give in immediately.

So unready was she that she went ahead and just straight-up said, Hello, forgetting the thing that had been foremost on her mind for years. He saw this, indecipherable as it was, and recognized the small part of it. He said, “You cannot speak?” And Luma nodded excitedly, as if they weren’t discussing her most hated personal quality, such was the distraction he had caused in her.

She attempted to reassure him with her expression, which would only work this one time, for Luma’s social nature was that of bright smiles ranging all the way to bright smiles with a little hop thrown in, and so with Luma it was largely impossible to tell the difference between reactive glee and resting sobriety. Here she bobbed, and clapped her hands together.

News of the handicap seemed challenging to him, and it took a few moments before he knew what to do. Luma knew exactly what she wanted him to do, but her mind was too busy to tell him to. Her face was so busied with everything else running through it that the boy could at least deduce that she was not in shock, which was only true in the sense he was considering.

His steady grip loosened experimentally, until he was sure she would not topple into the mud the instant it left, and when that matter was squared away, the boy moved on with business, for he still thought Luma’s mind at all concerned with practical matters at that time. He looked down at her, all killer and king to Luma’s eyes, upon that muddy, defeated, and lost elf, and he said, “Let’s... get that collar off of you.”

She didn’t get around to comprehending the sentence, but really liked the words, liked being led by the hand, liked how he cleared the dark in front of them with his lantern, as if protecting her from shadow creatures. In actuality, he simply led her a few paces to where he had some tools, and sat her on a stool.

The right thing to do would have been to tell the boy that her collar was invincible, but Luma was soaring beyond such trivialities, and hushed by the idea of watching him strain. Especially for her sake. She sat bolt-straight and proper, and he got bolt cutters and pliers, and told her to stay very, very still. Anyone but Luma would have had serious doubts about putting such forces right against their fleshy, delicate neck, ready to slip the inch that separated liberation from decapitation. He said, “Don’t be concerned,” which was rich. “I have a steady hand.” And he undid the top two buttons of his shirt. Something which Luma had great concern for, and made glances to the side for, that when combined with the flush of her cheeks made her look as nervous as anyone smiling ear to ear could.

When it didn’t work, he tried with more force, and more, and this kept going so many times that Luma really questioned just how much strength he stockpiled in those arms, that he could find so many distinct checkpoints to stop at along their range. Whatever his limits were, they were not to be revealed, for when he eventually stopped, Luma got a memorable view of him quizzically pondering his warped tools, bent beyond function. It was only then that he studied her closely (though he didn’t lean rudely into her space, as the other had), tapped her collar with his twisted tools, and observed the calm shimmer this summoned across its surface. He said, “It is a magic,” and he seemed too disappointed for someone with no stake in the matter.

Then he returned to his signature, the apology without cause. He said, “I’m sorry. There is nothing I can do for you about this.” It sounded very much like he began finding another phrasing with which to apologize, but thankfully such repetition trailed off as he waited for Luma to finish shuffling through her backsack for something.

Which she didn't. The only thing she successfully found was horror, as the universe therein was just as flooded as the one in which they stood, meaning her stationary bore the same fate. And when Luma saw this, it was only half a moment before her eyes decided they wanted to join in and became similarly flooded.

That summoned a somehow higher tier of concern from her company, who widened his posture instinctively as if recognizing an ambush.

She didn’t mean to cry. Normally, she wouldn’t. That is to say, in the abnormal that she’d adopted upon her quest to get back to normal, she would have had more stoicism casked in reserve for such a thing. But she had recently gotten a bit lost, in a way that her map couldn’t help.

Luma knew that one of the good things about men of fiction like this was that you could fall apart on them, and they would always hear it as a call to righteous duty. She held up the wasted paper if just so that the boy could stop searching for cause and adversary. He expressed his apologies.

Then he sloshed over to a ladder, holding his lantern up to it as if to help guide her eye. “Come stay in the loft. It will be the only place we might dry your clothes and your pages. And your eyes.”

That sounded like the most absolutely brilliant idea to Luma, whose mind ran away with the idea. Her body, being of the same disposition, ran over with its arms out, as if a gliding dove. These rapid shifts, from ecstatic to tearful to cheerful again, installed a whiplash in the boy of steady hand, but this was the first of the many stupidities Luma had done so far that appeared to actually bemuse him.

He held the ladder for her, and when her head breached into the loft’s height she realized very quickly what was actually happening here.

It was warmlit by candles, with no seating but fluffed bedding and blanket, a bit too short of ceiling for a statuesque boy to stay vertical for too long, entirely private from the ground, and set to the calming hum of raintorrent on thatch. They were going to have to stay there together, sharing a bedding through the night, clothes banished to dry upon a clothesline, forced to become intimately familiar and perchance intimate itself in the process. There was no two ways around it: this was a ploy.

Not of the boy’s making, obviously, nor of her own, but of the gods’, mischievous and playful as they ever were, likely aloft in their rainclouds right then, sharing a cackle at having meddled into Luma’s best-laid plans. It made sense, for the boy was clearly a godsend, even if he was godsent with nefarious intent. For what other purpose would such a beautiful prince be locked away in a barn on a distant farmland? Who would stash such a thing in such an unfitting locale? Luma possessed grit and duty and absolutely no special capacity by which to combat the very will of the deities and fates themselves. She might as well forego resistance, and allow her quest to be ravaged with her body. At least that would be a comfort on the wound. If the Luma that she was had to die and be reborn, at least this was a most agreeable murder scene.

Or, whosoever had muted her had concocted this circumstance in order to stray her from inevitable vengeance upon them. Whatever mage could make an invincible collar and be petty enough to aggrieve her with it would likely be magic enough to summon historic storms and to chuck them at her as well. So be it. If a fantasy boy should be knit to life wholecloth for the seduction of one sole Luma, then: fair enough. A well-deserved win for the gods, or her personal devil. She would go ahead and begin the simple life of a wholesome farm girl foregoing any city dreams right away. No use dallying.

And so, right then, Luma was the most abducted she had ever been, which was saying something.

The first thing Luma learned about her farmhand was that he had one singular foremost interest, which was to do literally any slight thing that needed doing. He would say, “You want this?” and he would say, “You want that?” and he would set about getting it set for her. She did not even need to think of things to want, such was his hospitality.

Luma stood in the eye of his tempest of chores and scribbled ink within the margins of what she didn’t know was his favorite book. It was titled The Chronoknight’s Paradox and it was also his favorite possession altogether in the wider sense. From what she skimmed, skipping from margin to margin, it was an adventurous romp that strayed gallantly into a romantic romp near the end of most chapters.

She wrote her name as Luma and he pronounced it correctly. He said his name was “Fe,” and she spelled it incorrectly, for he pronounced it as, “Fee.” At first she felt she was being cheated out of its full variant, for she had always assumed that real names bore a three letter minimum, but he told her, “It is not much of a name, no.” And, “I’m sorry, I don’t have much for you.” He said this as he brought out another round of candles, a blanket, and a dry shirt.

Between his original soaked shirt, and this gifted one, that appeared to be the total of his shirts, for he went without from then on. Luma took the thing mindlessly, and her first two swipes whiffed for how her eyes refused to spare the time to help guide her hands.

Fe’s eyes, by contrast, were entirely absorbed with the process of wandering away and getting politely lost in some (surely entirely inferior) wooden construction, rather than doing the simple selfish courtesy of glancing at the soaken elf changing. He did actually do this once, but only because there was a concerning sound when Luma was halfway through fighting her shirt for her freedom and the battle took a fumble.

On him, it had been an altogether sillily tight shirt. Not in the way of sizes or growth years, but in the way a shirtmaker might fail to premonish or scry that such a circumference of bicep and pec might come along and demand so much of their work. On Luma it was a bit of a sack dress that barely got past her hips. And with its buttons loosed, the neck was only an inch from wide enough to slip right across her length. She gave it one shoulder instead, in her endless ambition. The getup was a minefield for slip-ups and inappropriate revelations, and that was what made it entirely perfect for the occasion. Plus, she thought it made her look like she was his.

He asked, “Is there anything else you need?” And he said it almost as if he was expecting to be dismissed.

And he took that far too seriously. His list began in earnest, and she realized with a start that she needed to cut it off. Luma was not cruel enough to string together endless requests to pin him down, and she had a soft heart anyway, so she wrote, No- I jest! You are too kind already! Then she realized with a panic that this sent him to the ladder.

At the top of it, he stopped, mostly because the elf had scampered after him and her expression was the same as if someone was holding a bow to her head.

And when he read that, he explained, “They say sleep is spoiled if it is not in safety. I was going to lift the ladder up, so that you could be secluded.”

This would have been a reasonable concern for a cute girl trapped and isolated with a stranger of many muscles, but his thoughtfulness whiffed upon Luma, who had just a month prior wandered herself into a werewolf den on the night of a full moon. The nearby town had clutched their pitchforks all through the night and wondered, as they watched the sun crest the mountains and mark the morning, what had distracted their cursed adversaries into sparing them for once. Luma stumbled out under the sun much later and hadn’t particularly thought about it since.

Words failed Luma. Something they had learned to do recently, and without permission. So she simply tugged at him, and he obliged confusedly. He guessed, “You would feel more secure with me here?” And Luma scribbled, Yes of course! You are my savior! A massive exaggeration that worked tidily. He was at least some amount humored. He questioned, “There is more to be saved from tonight?” as if the answer was obviously no. Luma’s answer was absolutely massively yes, please. On the trail, she had passed the silence with a library’s worth of lesser texts stuffed into her pocketed backsack, all of which were currently in a slowly draining pile of mush.

So it was a gift that the boy let her lead him, and move him, like a mannequin or a lump of putty. She sat his perfect ass down at the edge of the hay and she wrote, Honestly: where were you even going to go?

He said, "I would find something,” which Luma had not become so rusty with the art of words so as not to understand to mean he had no idea, and might have just wound up standing heroically in a corner through the night.

Now that he was talking, Luma set about the practiced interrogation techniques of the extroverted. She asked him, Where are you from?

And the interrogation went absolutely to shit. He answered like he was lined up against a wall, and he didn’t have any mind to alter her questions into those which he might actually have something to say about.

She asked, Do you even exist? And he said, “Maybe...” Which was the absolutely fucking weirdest thing to say. But perhaps it meant something to her that he was fully alone in this world. Perhaps it meant that he was her kin in a way. Another Null. Or maybe it meant that nobody would ever tell him she was being pushy if she decided to be pushy and do something a bit inappropriate like drape her bare legs across his lap. Which she did.

And she did not regret it because, praise to the Crown, he was so warm! He was glowing coals under her thighs and he was a savior.

Fe for his part would not have known he was being flirted with if the heavens above had opened and the gods sang to him an instructive chorus on copulation. But as his rescue shivered and heated up, the boy had one singular bright idea. He took all fifty-seven hints Luma had laid out across his loft and he realized he should reciprocate by asking her at least one single mundane question in return. He said, “Have you traveled far?” and of course it was a question that basically meant “Do you need anything?” in different words, but at least he asked it.

She wrote in an emotional vent, I’ve been all across Pedesyn. I have very nearly run out of places that I have not traveled to. And she pouted professionally.

To this he said, “You must be weary,” and he looked at the legs in his lap, successfully finding another chore. Luma thought that the right thing for him to do would have been to turn her over and make well sure that she couldn’t walk straight in the morning and therefore be forced to finally take a day’s rest. But instead he did the actually right and righteous thing and massaged her travelweary body in repair. His hands were gentle and firm, easy upon her thighs, and ever careful not to stray.

Luma’s legs had not informed her that they were weary, in the same way that she never thought she was tired until sleep came upon her and she realized it in full. So when his hands kneaded upon her muscles she realized the neglect accumulated in them, and moaned silently. Luma was not the person Luma was trying to seduce, but it was happening quite smoothly.

And Luma said, Oh. And she said, Ohhhh. And she was very glad these moans were being held back for her and she didn’t need to do it herself.

Perhaps because Fe had returned to the familiarity of busywork, he began to get the slightest hang of things, if by that we mean: marginally copying Luma’s example on speechcraft. He asked, “Where were you last?”

She wrote, Ontolo, and he hadn’t heard of it, even though it was the closest civilization to him.

So he continued the trick and asked what she did in this Ontolo place. Luma decided to tell him that she was dramatically betrayed. And she got to see his face sour exactly one pace behind her own. “Betrayed?” He worried the word across his tongue like he might pick up the chore of avenging a stranger’s honor.

The passion of Luma’s vent caused her to gouge through a page. Someone I was very fond of, who said they were very fond of me. But when I became vulnerable to them, they turned on me! Fe read along, amazed. They saw me wounded and left me for dead! She slunk against his arm. I can’t help but feel that I barely made it out alive.

“What a fool.” The boy scowled the exact way Luma had. “I can’t imagine you would make anywhere near as good an enemy as you would a friend.”

And Luma yelled, Yes! She pointed at where his words had come out of him, and she wrote, Yes! also.

They were a fool! They were a silly goon! Thank you! She leaned into him like he was a life raft, and sighed, writing, Thank you for saving me.

While the boy said some useless thing downplaying his heroism and not to worry about anything like that either, Luma sunk in and fell apart against him, totally relaxed. She became vulnerable to him as if she had learned nothing at all. And as his warmth sank into her, she scribbled, You are so kind, and warm, and I don’t know if you know this, but you are beautiful...

Whether or not Fe knew that, he didn’t know what to say to it. But he guessed, and he guessed right. He said thank you, softly, and then repeated the compliment back with a slight change of phrasing.

Luma giggled, and deflated, and became her own lump of putty to fit how she was being kneaded upon. It was something that had not happened for longer than she could have told you. And she hadn’t known that she’d developed such a weakness to being taken care of, by refusing to take care of herself.

But with that, Luma did the only right thing to do, and did it by accident. She slipped right out of consciousness and drooled all over her plans for the night. The least of which was sleep, especially in that bed.

Just like the Chronoknight, whose story she had written her own in between the lines of, Luma found herself jettisoned forwards in time.

Dawn brought clarity, time brought sobriety, and weird dreams brought paranoia, uninvited. In those early moments, where reality stitches back together and wakefulness remembers your real and current self, Luma picked up the correct pieces and became a determined little quest-goer: rested, and concerned for her progress and chances. Fe was pressing her awake, and when her eyes opened she looked up and saw him, and her face said, AH!

This didn’t startle him, as he thought it was her reaction to what he was saying. A natural mistake, because what he was saying was that it was dawn and the master of the house was walking this way to inspect the storm’s damage.

She heard him, but in her sleep she was dreaming of a life after her quest was completed and voice returned. In it, she didn’t sing, and couldn’t remember exactly what it was that she had found to be her solution at the end. It was in the middle of worrying over this mystery that she opened her eyes to the beautiful face of a perfect boy of fiction, felt its draw upon her, underwent a sudden panic, then scampered to her feet and ran for her life.

This was, of course, rude. But it was not an opportune time to suffer the luxury of good manners. Luma grabbed her drained backsack, her clothes from the line, and she would have vaulted right off the loft if it wouldn’t have gotten her spotted, and likely gotten the boy in trouble. So she skipped across ceiling beams for the far window.

The boy Fe unconsciously grabbed the air in front of him, nearly certain he was about to watch this stranger fall to an early paralysis. His voice trailed off as he couldn’t help but say, “Oh! I meant... you should hide...” But despite an unnerving wobble on the second-to-last footing, she made it to the far sill in only half a moment. There was no time for Luma to have second thoughts, or to look back or wave goodbye, which was fortunate, for something like that would stick in her mind and eat at her dedication if it happened. The barn’s door was wrenched open and Luma immediately flopped out its other window and disappeared from view, from the scene, and from the boy's life entirely.

For such a jump, Fe had later half expected to find her incapacitated on the grass, and went out of his way to check for this. But the mystery girl had left him nothing but his own shirt and a memory, one which he admittedly had little idea whether to appreciate with romance or humor.

That was because it wasn’t a city. It was a town that was egregiously mislabeled on Luma’s map, in her opinion. Esbern had for itself a bridge, which was admittedly the only (respectable) bridge over a fissure that went for many miles. This made it a natural gathering point for travelers who couldn’t find other means of safely crossing a giant crack in the earth, and therefore a distinctly unmagical place whose library was useless to her.

It was only three days before she had finished skimming all their texts on magic, antimagic, and locks in general, all of which were rudimentary, and reminded her very much of the warning she had been given about her chances of finding secrets in public spaces. The whole process was not in any way worth doing. But that was the theme of this quest, really. And it wasn’t like anything so far had truly been worthwhile or progressed Luma’s return to noisemaking in the slightest.

Perhaps it was what she needed, though. An easy checkmark for the list and the map, to get her back into the groove of studious focus. She felt stupid while she was working on it, but she also found pride in each day she managed, and that compounded together when she got to put a big X over the fake city and its maybe thirty buildings, as well as put it behind her, and put everything she’d read there out of her mind forever.

Luma left the city of Esbern at the very first ray of sunlight, having prepared the night before and calculated that she could reach the next town before sundown. On her way out, she spied a bookstore to visit, and by evening she found herself at the edge of the farmstead that had unwittingly sheltered her but a few nights before.

Luma’s several moments of clarity (in which she’d realize the mistake she was intentionally making) came and went earlier in the trip, as had the few hours of admonishing herself and considering resetting to the proper course. When she finally set eyes on the barn, everything but excitement had been purged, and she was over it. No use crying over a setback that couldn’t be helped now that she had already disposed of any opportunity to salvage it. The wisest course of action at that point was to seek a place for the night, and the only source of that nearby was the farmhand Fe, so it couldn’t be helped and was therefore an innocent thing to do.

To her humor, he was startled. It was almost as if he didn’t receive many visitors at his serfdom. Or at least not many potential romantic partners, smiling, and sneaking up on him while he wielded a pitchfork. Were he not so gentle a soul he might have skewered her right then, the way he jumped to the touch. He said, “Oh!” and he said, “Luma!” And he remembered her name, which was nearly the height of Luma’s bar for him already.

He was concerned as always, this time as to whether anyone was spectating her arrival, but he became assured by the low angle of the sun, for which the lords and ladies and overseers of any sort were heading indoors if they were not there already, where there was candlelight and cheese-boards (or whatever one busied themselves with when bereft of hay and horses and the like. Fe was not privy). It was close to a timing that a visitor might have cleverly, if unconsciously, planned. Not that Luma was one to concern much over such a thing. Fe was, according to her customs, already a friend, and there were at least five elven laws ensuring the right to visit friends, even if she was a great ocean removed from their application. They certainly should apply here, and that was a hill she was more than willing to get yelled at on.

Normally she might have bothered to request entry, asked if it was a good time, offered to come back later, and all the standard pleasantries. With Fe, Luma was pretty sure she could just do whatever she wanted and he would adjust his standards to hers. So she did that.

And what she wanted to do, right then, was pelt him with gifts. Our Luma presented him with a container of plain packaging, which he inspected as if it was a problem he had been enlisted to help solve. This likely added to his difficulty in finding the right expression when realizing what he was actually looking at. For your kindness, she had written. And he sort-of turned to stone but for a moment.

Fe said, “Luma you do not need to thank me. It was what anyone would do.” This was probably truer than false, but it was an annoying statement that Luma ignored.

She pulled the box of ciders out, and uncorked one, since this predetermined that he would have to enjoy it now, and not sit them all on a shelf to horde until they went sour, as Luma was starting to suspect was his character. If it was, it broke as he saw that packed underneath them was a stack of seven quite indulgent novels, which Luma had gotten the proprietor of the bookstore to curate for her. There was only one that she had picked for herself, and his every instinct to refuse the gift vaporized when his eyes fell upon The Chronoknight’s Paradox: Return to Past Zero, and he visibly swallowed. He would later find that she had written in this one, too. But only in the front, with a poem and little hearts. She did this so that he couldn’t argue that it should be returned, but apparently that wouldn’t be necessary.

This was how Luma wound up right back in the danger she’d so narrowly escaped a few days before. Sucked into the aura of her fantasy boy Fe, a man of striking jaw and cabled muscles, who spoke so strong and so gentle, in the way that any Luma (nevermind this Luma) couldn’t help but drink too deeply of.

Ignoring all the irony in the world, she played the part of a valuable catch. His part. She was the desirable mate, curved and bright and warm and loving. That which a farmhand had no real right to expect to court in their lifetime, before they had an aged spine and no whisper of prospects. He did not, of course, know any better. But he did not seem like he would ever get around to actually doing any better, either, no matter how easily he could, so it was an innocent omission, and omissions weren’t even lies, were they?

As the new treasures were being put carefully away, displacing half the old ones and creating the chore of finding them a new home, Luma held his most valued text in her hands and, being Luma, she skipped to the end. But she became too distracted to spoil it for herself because she found the twist to be that, in the margins, there were now drawings of an elven girl.

This was curious for multiple reasons. For one thing, it was a human’s rendering of an elf, so it should have looked like any other elf, but this one had the slightly pudgy cheeks, rounded eyes, and undyed roots that were very definitely and unquestionably hers. Somehow the characteristics that made her look like herself (typically indescribable and only recognized unconsciously) were realized in only so many lines, on only a small patch of paper. In the last pages, they were also described, too, by brief instructive notes, as if the work was meant to teach the skill to another.

When she held this up to him (mimicking the face of glee that he had captured on the page), he said, “I knew I would forget your face if I didn't learn how to render it in ink. This way it will never be forgotten, so it is the obvious thing to do.”

She scribbled, You are good at this! I should have brought you a sketchbook. And then she doodled him terribly, once, before quickly moving on. She labeled it, <-Fe if he was not perfect. Then she closed it before he could see it well, and decided to stick to what she was good at.

Silently, in the background of the last few days, a shamelessness had defeated Luma, and in the endless depths of that defeat she prepared to do what she had found too shameful to do for seven uncounted years. She took out her strumweave, undid its bindings, and tuned it to play.

But this long-awaited event ended abruptly, because Fe gripped her. Luma ambitiously mistook his reasons, but they were merely a concern over being heard and investigated. He said, “This may not be the best place,” which was a statement Luma very much disagreed with until he suggested they abscond to a more secluded spot, and her curiosity won out.

At first, on account of being led back into the woods she had just trudged through, she was a bit soured, but that taste left her entirely as she was brought to an incomparably romantic cliffside, and shown a somehow even more perfect place. A great smooth rock that perched out from the trees, doused thick in moonlight, which oversaw the expanse of forests and rivers trailing to the horizon. He carried her up with one arm like the baby she was, and from the top they could see everything, in a romantic privacy, only exposed to the horizon and the stars. Fe took to sitting there as if it was his routine spot for experiencing soul palpitations, while Luma herself first jumped around in a few circles to get her own feelings out before joining.

Which she did by jumping straight into his lap without any sort of working up to the idea. She did it poorly, so that he would have to steady her, and so-in was his embrace acquired and achieved. Despite whatever Luma would have told you, or herself, she did actually know exactly what she was doing.

And the best thing she could think to do next was to write him some questions she knew would not go particularly well. It was custom in all cultures to first ask your conversational partner of themselves, and there was some limit to how rude Luma was choosing to be, plus it was clear to her that Fe would need a lot of work to open up. Fe was both the jar with a stuck lid and the muscled man she needed to help her open him. And while Luma was no mage, she felt there were some impossible things that were within her purview to do. She knew there to be no better first step towards a currently impossible task but to fail at it, so that she could begin learning the steps to make it possible.

She wrote, Is this your secret place? Is this where you fell from the heavens? How did you find it? Her approach was scattershot. Any one question may have no good answer, but maybe one in a bunch would. Maybe if she strung seven questions into one, each thin answer would layer together into a single one of some substance.

He said, “I know every inch of this land.” And then to her surprise, he also said, “I come here at night, when I have feelings.”

That was something, even if straightforwardly featureless. Luma was going to have to forego her poetic license to match this language. She asked, What sort of feelings? And immediately by his expression she knew it was a failed question.

And Luma shrugged, letting her shoulders stay up for a sarcastically long time. She wrote, Good? Bad?

“Maybe.” He looked at her looking at him, with what were uncharacteristically narrow eyes for her, and he said, “Right now, the feeling I am having is that I am supposed to know the answers to these sorts of questions.”

The thing was: that was only partly true right then. She wrote to him, You don’t need to know what your feelings are. But you should know who you are! You should know if you truly exist!

He looked surprised by that last part, and repeated it back. Then he remembered. He rumbled out the words, “Oh. I ... don’t know why I said that.” He said, “Obviously I exist,” in the half-jovial way of someone who didn't believe their words. In the way of the currently-rationalizing.

Luma patted him, but changed the subject. I wasn’t so sure. I nearly expected to return to find that I had imagined you. To find the same house with nothing but empty grass down its hill.

I think I wished I had, in a way, not found you but found out you were imaginary. Then I could have found you again on any night I needed to, in any land. When I got stranded, or lost, or had no shelter, I would stumble upon Fe and his cozy hospitality.

He said, “You are so good with words.” And he didn’t know how perfect his own choice of words was right then. Luma puffed up.

And she knew that moment was the absolute perfect time to show that she was good at another thing, and so therefore was probably good at a lot of things, if you extrapolated the pattern outwards. So she pulled her beloved strumweave from her back and if fell easily into its rightful place in her hands.

Luma played at a low level, because the higher levels could be chaotic, and typically took much more preamble into far later hours to get right. So far, Fe had shown ignorance of the larger world, and Luma was confident that even in her most incapacitated state she could still easily impress someone whose life was largely silence, and to whom the most common music they heard was likely the result of a strong breeze and some tweedlebirds at dawn.

As soon as she picked a melody, she was proven right, as his eyes immediately said many compliments his voice politely withheld so as to not interrupt the art. Which didn’t work. When she saw them in him, she interrupted herself, feeling just as lucky as she was, and requisitioned Fe for any song he might know.

“There is one.” He peered upwards. “I believe it’s called A Cavalcade of Calvary.”

A horse song, of course. But Luma was the least picky she’d ever been, and pulled the twangy thing from her encyclopedic musical recollection, pasting over anything she was missing with an easy improvisation. Somehow, there and then, this was a million times easier than it had been in years. Everything fell into place. Everything went for her how she expected it, or better.

Or the best ever: when her polite audience filled in the lyrics she could not. And his voice wasn’t just good: it was both natural and practiced. It was exactly the voice a talent scout would wish to hear, everything but the professional bells and whistles, everything but the schooling. Luma nearly jumped out of his lap in excitement, and she pointed at him. He knew what she was thinking, but he didn’t want to be the one to say it when it was a flattery, so she had to write it herself. She wrote, You can sing!

And you’re good, too! She shook him, meaning that she shook his shirt over his unmoving frame. And she had to stop it to write, You did not think to mention this to me!? And she was too excited to fall back into his lap, so she straddled him, as a Luma does when there is serious business to conduct.

He smiled a bit. It was always only a bit. He said, “That... would be rude.” Which was true. But Luma didn’t care. She wrote, A voice is exactly what I need!

Because of this, he offered her his own, of course, obviously. He said, “Well, then mine is yours to request.” So she did.

She picked up her instrument and picked up where she left off, and she quickly got carried away, making the melody elaborate and escalating the pace, watching with glee every time that her company kept up with her. It felt like he said everything he didn’t know how to say before. Not in the words of the songs he knew, but in how he sang them. In his tone and face and inflections, she could see him so vividly. And he was as beautiful inside as his outside made him look. When she finally got a real smile from him, that was when his pieces all came together and he seemed like Fe. Like there was a full person behind that name.

Long before Luma had enough of that, she took a moment to write what she had already thought through several times and come to think of as obvious. You must come with me! And he looked confused, so she walked him through it, too. You make a perfect partner! We can tour Pedesyn, wherever you want to go! And I will play the music and you will sing for us, and we will be a great band!

He didn’t smile. Or at least, the smile he made wasn’t the right kind. He was gentle when he replied, “I can’t.” And he was sorry, obviously. Except he truly looked sorry, in the way of someone who is sorry not just for the thing, but for their role in it too, and maybe a little for themself.

She wrote, But you have nothing holding you here! No friends or family. You can be so much more, and you deserve so much more. I can make it amazing! She gave him a gesture of total confidence. I promise!

He looked around, largely as an excuse to look away. “These lands... they are where I will stay. Please do not hate me for that.”

What a terrible request. Luma couldn’t hate him, but she was definitely going to hate a lot, in sporadic directions, especially come morning. Perhaps towards the gods, vented into the heavens, or she would dump it into the void, all options in sequence. Whatever history kept this fine-tuned machine wed to hay and unlovened sweat was to be damned.

So Luma challenged it, in the way that Luma did, where she did not let the implications slip away. She wrote, You have something keeping you here? and she held the note right up to him.

“I don’t know. But... they are coming, I can always feel it. Someone is going to come by, eventually, and change everything. Or… ruin everything, I am not sure. I just need to stay here for some time longer.”

Luma submerged into awe, unsure what type of insanity the boy was suffering from. Whether he was told some cultish lies, harbored some latent prophetic talent, or had internalized too many fictions. Then she had a brilliant eureka that brought the whole puzzle together and explained everything. She told him, with great joy, That’s me!

He laughed. He laughed at her. The type of laugh that comes after someone makes a joke by saying the stupidest possible thing they can think of. Then he realized himself and stopped it short. “It... isn’t.” He said, “I wouldn’t hurt you.”

He knew that wasn’t enough, which must have been why he added the useless, “But I will be here, if you ever come through again.”

When he saw how entirely unsatisfactory this was, and how Luma’s spirit fell right through it and into the abyss, he panicked a bit at having failed her. In an internal scramble, he thought to offer, “But... how about I make you a song now? Something of me that you can take with you, if you would like that?”

Responding was beyond her despondency. The elf pouted and stared through the ground, making this as awkward as possible. Making the rejection as difficult for the boy to go through with as possible. Trying to make the impossible possible, as she was told could be done. The mage had neglected to mention that it took excruciating time and repeated failures. She gave it only the time it took the boy to frantically scrape together a poetry to gift her.

Minutes of dead air later, and Fe wound up with a script that was more cross-outs than surviving text. As he got further in, and his anxiety became too pitiable, Luma finally sighed her entitlement out in a torrent of breath and took the quill to help wrap up his effort with her expertise. Within two minutes, she had overtaken the soul of the project and had to backtrack to find where she’d left her companion behind.

Luma turned it from a love song into a hate song, which was also still trying to be a love song, and therefore highly confused about itself. A reflection of her mind and heart tearing themselves apart on this quest. It aimed affections one way, and aggressions the other, on a silhouetted stand-in for whoever forced her into this life and then absconded into the wind, without even anything so intimate as a beating.

And he said, “If you asked me to. I just wouldn’t think the same of you.” He had gotten into the rhyming habit.

It was and wasn’t a joke, that the boy who would do anything for her would even murder her enemies before he joined her to enjoy a fun and happy life. Luma was not convinced that these lands he was tethered to were any more important than Esbern and its bridge.

The song was a bit tacky. It was angsty, and neither of them really knew what it was saying, plus it was mostly Luma expressing herself mixed in with Fe’s attempts to also express her for her, while forgetting about himself. But it was honest, and in truth, what it was didn’t actually matter so long as one of the things it was was theirs, and that they liked it.

Fe looked at her as if he’d just ridden his first horse, or maybe like he’d said his first words. He said, “This is what you do?” And she nodded, even though it wasn’t really a question. He said, “It’s grand!” and he grinned wide.

Luma looked at him as if he’d died in a carriage crash five years ago, and it ruined his glee. He said, “What is it?” and he was his over-concerned self once more.

And he asked her again not to hate him for this, which she felt she couldn’t rightly pretend to forget to answer again. So she had to actually agree to that request with her pen, while she decided with her thoughts what she would do next. Her decision was to try one final time, without games or wit.

And he did. He joined her close and he looked at her with the precious care she wished.

She told him, Kiss me. She bid her eyes to twinkle as she stared up at her shining knight, with the moonlight beyond him pooling in her eyes. And in that perfect setting, finally, Fe the dream boy leaned into Luma, and pecked her politely on the cheek.

As Luma stormed alone down her outset path she wrestled with her pack and could have thrown it to the wind, such was her discontent. So long had she managed to avoid potential lovers clouding her mind, and when she had finally relinquished what did they achieve? Abstinence! Kind and respectful distance! It was a cruel joke, this continent.

And it was the shadow mage that drove her to that barn, she saw now. The girl — for all her wit and cunning used to summon Luma close — had shied from capitalizing on the seduction, no matter how wishful and begged-for it was. The shadow mage turned coat the moment she finally had Luma’s heart in her hands, eyes lost and staring in adoration, a willing conquest waiting for her use. Traitor and coward!

Luma worked too hard for an elf (whose lifespan was worth less than it seemed when you didn’t take the advantage of taking your time), and, right then, she needed quite more release than she could afford, and apparently more than these lands would afford her. It would be rude to call elves simple creatures, but Luma oft thought of herself as such. Not as a result of self-deprecation but as a result of wishful-thinking. Life in Pedesyn was a great magnitude more complicated than she wished, and she pined for the ages when she could rely on many a friend’s open invitation to recharge in their pit of soft pillows and rough grasps. Humans were so taut in their relations. It was as if one encounter could discolor their whole life, and they must stiff it out for the sake of keeping its total recipe unsullied.

It was in this mind that Luma felt the letter in her jacket. She paused right there on the trail, forgetting her charges. Fe must have slipped it into her things during the night (as he was quite awake when Luma awoke, sitting across her as if on-guard (guarding her imagined virginity, most likely)). She ripped it open with no hesitation. There was much Fe seemed unable to say to her, and it must’ve been written in here, for her to read when she was too far for him to suffer her reaction. Luma was not beyond taking words written in quiet confidence and returning to question them in loud person. Enclosed was a single card, in fine print.

At the request of Viccipiter please oblige to visit our house upon your earliest convenience.

The letter received a good few minutes of eyeing. Many things were wrong here. Why hadn’t she discovered its existence earlier, when she was bored out of her mind in Esbern? Mere coincidence was unsatisfactory. And the invitation was misled: Luma had already traveled quite far, and it would be a great inconvenience to turn around and revisit Ontolo. As easily as she might be emotionally convinced to make the journey, she had already spent her budget for procrastination (which was technically zero and so now breached the negatives) and couldn’t feasibly justify another.

So she continued ahead, perturbed as she already was, but now with more itch to her. Only to find another letter brushing up against her side, this time stuffed in the opposite pocket. The odds of mere coincidence thinned.

At the request of Viccipiter please oblige to visit our house upon your earliest convenience.

The average announcement of nearby friends would have met a more charitable Luma. But this met a more annoyed Luma, who did not wish to continue to find distracting letters in her boots, or hair, and so with overcast sarcasm went through the motions of walking past the nearest trees, gesturing at the absence of friends lurking behind them, and then stomping over to others to reinforce her frustration.

It was only on the next bend in the road that her tantrum was interrupted by a great clearing with a tower installed into its center. It was a single-width tower, made of oversized stones and grown in moss, which seemed as isolated as it did tranquil, being erected this far from civilization. Luma had not the time to consider it suspicious before it proved itself so. The front door opened, and out leaned a mage. A certain young, shadowy mage, with a bright smile who waved to her in what could have been the friendly wave of a charitable soul, or the mischievous and taunting wave of a prankster.

Regardless, Luma — being the soul she was — became immediately unburdened by her angst, and her nature did bid her to wave back, with her own smile, which was solidly of the former variety for it was never elsewise. Viccipiter’s cutting betrayal was forgiven and forgotten on sight, before Luma had even finished her sharp intake of excited breath. She ran across the clearing and was brought inside by her cohort, who could’ve been of any intent, it did not matter to Luma at this time. Abduction was fine, as well as assassination, so long as it was intimate.

The mage looked changed, already, even though it was only a week that had passed. Luma remembered her as taller, and darker, and only realized at a close distance that her hair, which had previously fallen straight and glossy upon her shoulders, was now much briefer, done into plaited locks with golden caps.

Her old accomplice invited her in with a gesture that Luma knew was not an invitation to embrace but decided was similar enough and so took as such, perfectly willing to appear to have misunderstood. Luma was never beyond looking the fool so long as she received affection for it. This time she was rewarded with a surprisingly violent squeeze, which was an attack Luma was immune to, in the way one develops immunity to a poison procedurally ingested over time.

I was on the trail! Luma established her perceptions, so as to illustrate her reactions. Is your house here, and there, and unmapped, for confusion (or secrecy)?

“It is, and it is not.” Viccipier slid a hand through the air, like she was caressing something unbeknownst to a common mind such as Luma’s. “We removed its location from it. It is, really, nowhere. But one can find it- under the right conditions.” She eyed Luma’s childlike reaction. Her glimmering awestruck eyes. It warmed the mage’s pride and greed alike and, in the sense of worship she received from the bard, Viccipiter could not help but desire to help Luma with whatever she also desired. An inverse play of power, ironic in all ways worth appreciating. An irony the mage was not yet privy to, but quite enjoying in the moment.

Despite worshipping the mage on sight, Luma was jealous and in great need of venting. Such was the custom of elves, and more intuitively understood by them — that one should listen to the complaints of their friends even when those complaints bore no relevance to their audience and had no avenue to be addressed with action nor advice. I am jealous! she wrote.

In my travels I sleep on rocks —on wet land —or in trees —and sometimes not at all! Sometimes I awake elsewhere! In cages —or in piles of slain prey...! She would have continued with a gallery of examples but these were enough to alarm her host.

“Goodness!” Viccipiter made an awkward face, but giggled, either of humor that Luma was joking or of nerves that she was not, it was not clear. It should be noted that such hiccups were plainly visible to Luma, but she simply did not snag easily upon these things, in this type of moment. Luma was with a friend, who did care for her and see her as valuable (presumably) and so she was at that moment, invincible and could have done anything.

“Then you should come here. You should share my bed on so harsh of nights. You should come find me.”

Find you? Luma questioned the underlying magic, but Viccipiter had at least one card up her sleeve.

“All it really takes is a connection to the family. Actually...” She considered the bard for a moment, pretending she had not pre-concluded her thoughts during sober contemplation the night before. She then took advantage of Luma’s willingness, took her face by its cheeks, and kissed her. She kissed her as one casts a spell: with her focus and intent on the effect of it. Long enough for Luma to process some sort of deep-set shiver, and kiss back, completing the ritual.

“There!” the mage beamed, proud of her work as one is proud of a concoction or invention. “Now you can find my home anywhere you look for it.”

There were two confusing things for Luma to parse here. One that she didn’t want to start questioning and so just accepted, and another she chose to focus on because it helped distract from questioning the first: that such a gift seemed implausibly large. She wrote, Forever? Is that okay?

“Well,” Viccipiter admitted, “so long as we share this connection.” The words melted in Luma’s ears, and she felt just as fluid in Viccipiter’s hands. Before she could stumble into a well of emotion, and fall endlessly into hopeless imprisonment within her friend’s chest, the mage snickered and flitted away, summoning her catch to follow her into the unknown of the house. “All it takes is an invitation, and then we are anywhere you look for us. So like this, you are always invited, always welcome, and need not be slipped more letters.”

Luma loved her, and she wrote, I think you must’ve cast a spell on me... which she meant as poetry.

“Not all magic is spells.” The shadow mage turned back and winked, confident, competent, and took her hand. This time, she took them straight from the lobby to what it took Luma some time to realize was her bedroom, because it seemed the same size as the lobby. The same as all the rooms, if she thought about it, except that it was doused entirely in warm lighting, having been prepared to accommodate Luma and her big eyes. Tall complex ceilings over many levels and dividers, and far too tidy for the character it should have reflected. Far too big for necessity, and in some parts feeling more like a warehouse.

Viccipiter skipped to a table at the far end, and Luma nursed the absurdity of a bedroom that could be skipped across. She fell behind as she wrote, and had to fall back further to avoid the clattering of items being swept off a table. Each of which, after a moment unattended, then replaced themself upon wherever was appropriate for the room’s aesthetic, which explained the otherwise unknown source of tidiness.

And Viccipiter interrupted with, “One second—” which was only to instruct Luma that she was distracted. Something that was already uniquely obvious since Luma could never be heard enough to go unheard, and Viccipiter was simply pretending not to read the stationary right out of her hand. When she returned, and did so, she tossed the whole pad of it aside in the secure carelessness of one with a plan.

She said, “Have you come upon anything such as this?” And it was quickly evident that she said this in modesty and nothing else, not even the expectation of a response.

In her hand was a ring, of ruby and a bit of silver, aligned just so. Luma turned it over twice, and found Luma et compro engraved on its inner side, which the mage later told her was meant to mean Luma’s compromise. But Luma, being easily entertained, was so excited by her name being on it that she held the ring out to show its maker, like they hadn’t noticed. Viccipiter simply pulled her hand in close to install it for her, for little other reason than to make a nefariously intimate moment.

Woah. She thought. Or she wrote — as a pen would speak. Writing into the air, Wait...

“It is perspective-irrespective,” Viccipiter volunteered in pride. “You see it written for you, but I see it written for me. So it is with anyone who sees it at all.” She had explanations quicker than Luma had questions.

Once it was on, she found that the construct worked seamlessly, with no trick or incantation. It was as effortless as the mage had made the deck of cards seem, but, while those were inert to Luma’s touch, this ring was as easy as an instrument to her. Easier, actually. Luma couldn’t make it not work.

What ease! This is difficult to believe! I merely think and — there! There it is! Oh— Viccipiter Something-Something et Menemor! This is beloved.

That smirk! What a smirk! In the short time I’ve known you, you have shown such a library of smirks. I should write a dictionary to contain them and their meanings. This one is so kind —and loving —and possessive —and greedy. It is one of your best smirks. So far to each side, further than all the others. I would like its render. Oh! And there it goes. Gods, I am rambling then? I have not said so much so fast in ages. I should give pause? I should give a moment for you? Oh but I do not know if I can stop! I do not want to stop — you cannot make me stop! I will talk and you can talk over me? It should be easy, since I am writ and you are sound. Oh do not hate me I so love your gift. I will name it! How is Soundladen? Or Harketh? Or—

With a hand over her ring, Viccipiter cast a block for a moment. “Know that it will write what you intend to say, and will try not to write what you intend not to say. There should be a divide there, somewhere, in your mind. Try to nurse that divide.”

She released her block and, for a moment, Luma managed to stem Soundladen down to a persistent string of, Hmmmmmm. Which broke into, Oh! It still tells that I am thinking, even if— oh! Then another pause and extended, Hmmmmmmm. What I should say —and what I should not say. Oh but I want to say everything. Hmmmmmm. I should not ask her why she pulled away from me the other night. She does not seem to like that question. And it is not my business (I think). Oh it is not working. I am writing this all. She is looking at me. Hello? I should apologize for this. Though I think she’d rather I just stopped talking. Or said something else. Anything else. Think! No— not like that. What else is on my mind? A floor. A wall. Viccipiter. Hello! She is so cool. I have feelings, they are— no no no. That is not appropriate. She does not want to hear about her aesthetics. Or does she? Well, of course— but not like this! Humans loathe straight compliments! There is an art to it —a poetry. Not even elven poetry reads like, “Hey your skin looks really touchable.” That is gross, I am told. (I mean— I tell myself.) Oh! There is a new smirk! I should add it to the study! It will be called, “Humored by a fool.”

Finally, Viccipiter showed mercy and interrupted the poor stammerer with a sputtering laugh that could no longer be contained. One which she then was told all about how much Luma did love it, as Luma did all Viccipiter’s laughs, and how each one was different and special. “I can see that this will take time and practice. Do not fret. I am not cruel or simple enough to drill you on that which you do not mean to write.” She laughed again, “But take care. I know not any forgetfulness magic. If I was slipped some dark secret...” Viccipiter smirked a meaningful smirk that took over her eyes.

The mage strolled away and flopped into a recline on a thick window sill that was afluff with pillows, outside of which was pure black without a single star in the sky, making the window feel as if false like the doors.

Luma joined her in an unpracticed climb, finally free to write at the same time as she fumbled around. Still silent, but less awkward for it. You think I have dark secrets to let slip?

Viccipiter pretended to watch as she made her way up into the sink of padding. “I am sure there are things you consider dark — even if they were bright to others, or to the world, which you would fret about as if they were the same.”

Her chin upon a tall pillow, Luma practiced her capacity for a fake pout. The ring wrote, Well you may drill me as much as you like. If you give such gifts then it’s your right to make fun of me whenever you wish! And I have heard it said that the curse of a fool is that they are too foolish to hide it. Well then — why should I? Perhaps I shall be a fool on the face of it. And then you can laugh at me, and I will get to hear your laughter all the time. This is a good trade.

“There is an ocean of difference between being a fool, and acting a fool. And I could see some wisdom to the latter.”

Hmmmmm. Luma’s face puffed up while she involuntarily held her breath as a result of trying to hold her thoughts inside. HMMMMM. And Viccipiter was malevolent enough to stay silent as she did this, which stretched out the effort until she folded and gasped for air, writing, Oh, you are cruel! (Something which Viccipiter then admitted.) And I have not the lungs I used to.

She stared at the newly-named Soundladen, thumbing it around her finger. How did you find this so quickly? she wrote, and she thought. You must’ve already known of it, and withheld that from me! Which she also wrote, by thinking. Then she wrote about realizing she did this, and not meaning it.

“I knew parts. But of course I did need to search, which is the part that I hate the most. That is why I do things a faster way.”

Luma became captured by an urgency. The search was literally all she did, and she fucking hated it. She hated it far more than this girl could possibly hate it. (Another thing she didn’t mean to write.) And as Viccipiter stayed cruelly silent, Luma grew in expectation, gathering up her pitifulness until it was too much for the mage to ignore.

And she said, “Alright, see, instead of looking through our library, or asking our masters, I go into the basement...”

Yes! I can do that! I mean, hold on. For anything you need, you read the same texts? As if they contain everything?

“As if is exactly right. You could say they contain whatever I need to know, so long as I can find it and figure it out.”

Not in anger, but in delight, Luma said, That is such cheating! and she leaned on the mage’s knees and was in her space. But also, you told me those weren’t real!

“Luma— If you read the ancient scrolls, you would fall over dead. You would not make it to the next town before stumbling to an early demise.”

“Because I know what I am doing, and do not lack basic self-preservation. I am steady, and cautious, and patient.”

Hmmm. That is a lie, even if it says what it needs to say. I will ask when she becomes less guarded. Wait, forget that. Well I can say: I suppose it is no wonder Menemor competes with ancient houses, when the source of your magic knowledge is a fountain of all magics!

“No no. That would be ridiculous,” Viccipiter chuckled, and Luma breathed out.

But while she was thinking that, Viccipiter also said, “The ancient scrolls are just for me.” And Luma squinted, which looked unnatural on her, but in this instance she pulled it off fiercely.

It forced out the fuller explanation, “See, Luma, the houses all guard snippets of magic that are as old as the world itself, so they think they have prevented any further competition. But that is exactly their failing: they have not thought to use magic older than the world. None have thought to look before the past.” Viccipiter laughed at them, then.

This didn’t relax Luma’s unnatural squint. She wrote, What could... There is nothing older than the past.

“Not that you can see. But imagine if your feet could take you into the past: what if you just kept walking? Where does the adventurer who sails west go, if they then continue sailing west from there, but east?”

After careful consideration, Luma concluded, I don’t think that makes sense.

The mage shrugged. “That is why it is magic. If sensible fields performed better, we would use them instead, but we do not, for that reason.”

Well then I hate magic! Luma took this back immediately. No offense. But it has been such a nuisance.

“Ha! No it does not. Music makes feelings, and force, and sometimes rain. It is magic from another angle. It is the will of the wielder over the will of the world, and a claim to know better than her.” Viccipiter raised up, and flopped the other way, alongside Luma. She held the girl’s ring hand up in front of them. “See, perhaps the magic for this ring is in the past somewhere. Perhaps it has a name. But how long would it have taken me to find it in a mountain of text? Months? Longer by your account. Instead I found it only a few days into my future. I found several, actually. At first I found some quite poor ones. Then I found better and better ones, until this one which seemed suitable for you, and now you have it.”

Luma was not looking at the ring, but instead at Viccipiter, and she thought, I love the way you talk when you are caught up in something you care about.

This was a better reaction than Viccipiter had gotten when she had discussed this with other friends two times before, which both resulted in being stared at in much less admiring manners and thus prevented there from being a third time until someone far less critical stumbled into her crosshairs.

I have been quite happy to look at you and enjoy that you look very clever and talented. I would not have asked for you to be so, as well, but I am enjoying finding out that you are.

“Wow,” said Viccipiter. “Is that how you meant to phrase that in your head?"

Luma grinned stupidly at her, I have become accustomed to having a great swath of time to choose my words and am now enjoying having a great swath of words instead. Her smile lit the room in a way even Viccipiter could see. I shall worry about their quality later.

“That is good enough.” Viccipiter shrugged in her own easy pride, saying, “You needed a middle ground, since the collar is impossible. And I very much got the impression you were not going to look for anything middling on your own.”

Viccipiter tempered her with cold logic. “Look at it this way: in the capital city, there is a mageknight who is said to wear invincible armor, and is known to make many enemies. Perhaps there is a way to kill them, somewhere out there, and perhaps I could find it if I gave it all my attention. But so long as all the world’s unfettered attention does not scratch one such as that, it is unlikely that I will find a way to crack your collar anytime soon.”

Luma didn’t hear the part about the level of futility at hand. She heard one specific part and caught upon that, eyes wide. You are searching? For me!? The bard looked as if a trained beast having their lure dangled over them.

Luma wormed her torso into Viccipiter’s lap and squeezed her around the waist as if that qualified as a response. She wrote, You’re the best mage I have ever met!

The best mage ever said, “No wonder the world is falling to pieces.” But she grinned like it was falling into place.

Against what she would have predicted, Viccipiter found that her partially-liberated Luma only jibbered more with time. Evidence gathered that she was not so much burning a backlog as she was returning to form. Before then, Viccipiter had never so clearly been witness to the wildness of elven chemistry. It was a mere ten minutes before Luma began to race through her emotional woes as if Viccipiter was expected to take notes. It was twenty before she began to rhyme.

At first the mage thought to sit back and see how long the bard could do it for. If she pretended to take notes maybe the poem would prove eternal. It was uncommon among humans to see one get emotional as if it were a recreational activity or way to pass the time. She put her legs in the girl’s lap to be annoying, but Luma was a particularly difficult soul to annoy. Viccipiter wound up getting absentmindedly massaged, which was a decent enough trade for her services as an audience. She did the courtesy of not closing her eyes and drifting off, which was less than it sounded as closing her eyes made little difference.

Viccipiter broke the fourth wall of this play to ask, “Wait, when was this?”

“Do not call me V,” said Viccipiter etc et Menemor, which halted the bard, and the mage realized she may have sounded more offended than she meant. Not more offended than she was, but more than she would communicate.

I’m sorry. It is just too many syllables to fit its size, and would take up half a line.

“I would not say humans love solitude. But solitude is most ideal when one needs to think.”

Viccipiter reread her sparse mental notes to confirm this part of the story. “No... It does not seem a decision in need of much thought. Why do you think he refused?”

Luma blinked away whatever reflexive jerk motion had produced this thought. And Viccipiter laughed at her, as if she was the fool she had offered to be.

The mage’s legs jerked, and she outputted a sort of delayed gasp that led to a silence of more than one moment. For it took the fullness of a moment for Luma to realize her hands had strayed from the legs she was tending to.

Oh! I apologize twice! And she wrung her hands together in a manner that befitted both the scheming and those who have been caught scheming, admitting, Though I have been among humans for years, I am still not good at you.

The mage tucked hands behind her head and blinked. “Be still. I am sure you know more of humans than I know of elves.” She crossed her legs. “Although if you were human, I might think you intoxicated.”

Luma wrote, I am just excited. And angry, and bid her body to cooperate. In truth, elven physiology was such to intoxicate itself when anticipating important company and sensing itself not entirely prepared to capitalize. Socialization was often life-and-death in elven history and so such fallbacks were developed for the archetypical race, in many worlds after many extinctions. But it was not in Luma’s character to explain that her guts were throwing her a crutch — and that, if it was of perturbation to Viccipiter, the only solutions would have been in the league of sobering concoctions or a hearty slap across the face. So her eyes sank and she thought her thoughts so limply that for once Soundladen did not even adapt them into a hum.

“It sounds like an enslavement spell,” said Viccipiter, who was merely percolating on Luma’s lyrics and coming to what she felt was an obvious observation.

“If they were only a farmhand, with no family, and were offered a career based upon an unrelated but far more enjoyable talent, the decision should be obvious. So either they have something buried there (so to speak), or they are being manipulated. If they refused to tell you even a small summary, hint, or really even a lie, then it is likely that they are being kept from saying anything at all.”

This was enough of a slap for Luma, it seemed. For she had not thought through Viccipiter’s words what seemed like even once fully before she was upright. Then he must be helped!

Which reminded Viccipiter that this person was not quite hypothetical. The mage blinked, and said, “Right now?”

Luma thought, Yes of course! while gathering her traveling effects, and Soundladen wrote it with all its pushiness. She wrote, Sorry. You don’t need to come. I can do this myself.

Her mage laughed less than she would have if she was alone. “What are you going to do? Play a ditty at him? You already did that.”

Luma wrote, I wasn’t thinking there was anything wrong with him! And she thought, I didn’t think there could be!

In a sarcasm, Viccipiter summarized her as saying, “So the perfect boy has no family, no friends, no prospects, no other options, and no knowledge of the outside world.”

Viccipiter watched the hurry go on for half a minute, until it was near completion, trying not to say the obvious thing about how little thinking Luma must have been doing altogether. Unlike her, Viccipiter was ready to go only by standing up, her one outfit the only one needed for any activity, her boots strapped before they hit the floor, and her cloak being her bag in some unexplained way. Seeing this and staring at it made Luma’s straps fumble and take longer.

They left through one of the doors that before led to nothing, and Viccipiter let Luma go ahead of her to open the door. Only after they stepped out under the sun did she clarify that this was necessary. “Eventually, I will have a good enough grasp on your presence to find it around a corner. But for now, I can only find you yourself. I do not know where you were. But the house is helpful, it will see you out so long as it saw you in. Point the way from here.”

Luma wrote, It is back this way, from whence I came, and pointed down the path that the Menemor tower had interrupted, thinking she was now the one to lead.

Viccipiter asked, “On this path?” and when Luma nodded she said, “Perfect,” and took the lead back.

Then they walked in circles for a while. Which is something people not too different from these do when hopelessly lost, except Viccipiter did it in an entirely unrelated way. As soon as they stepped upon the path, she turned and left it, then crossed behind a tree. She led Luma around that tree several times before the elf realized it was not the same tree, and not the same length of path. In a dozen rotations, they skipped across the land at near a mile a minute, each time moving as far as the mage’s golden eyes could wander. So Luma got herself lost and a bit dizzy, but thankfully not for too long before Viccipiter stopped the cycle to stare through a thick of trees for a moment. She then asked, “A handsome boy, you said? One tall, and suspiciously bulbous?” because she had not Luma’s poetry.

“Nevermind,” she was told, “I do not know why I asked.” The mage began walking that way. “There is no mistaking this one...”

Soundladen was the greatest gift Luma had ever been given that could be wrapped. Not simply for its utility, convenience, novelty, and the obvious things, but because it came with a new paradigm. Her quest now had a volunteer, who had signed up to look for solutions for her, rather than simply give it a look, even though that search might prove futile — and indefinite. It was a situation she couldn’t have sought out, mostly due to the danger of getting lost in the dating half of it. But having a Viccipiter that stole her occasional weekend was more than worth having a shadow mage poke around the restricted and proper magics she couldn’t access herself.

Soundladen was also a far greater gift than she knew. Particularly in the historical sense — as the ring would become critical to Luma, and Luma would become critical to history, to making history, and to making things history. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Not an hour later, and she was on the verge of getting all the things she didn’t want to want as badly as she did, and was giddy as could be about it.

There was no helping it of course. She was morally bound to explore whether the boy needed rescue. Especially since he had done the same for her prior. And for that she was allowed to indulge herself carelessly, without concern or second thoughts. So the same did she not concern for anything else and skipped into that barn like it was her home and her right.

Fe still showed surprise when he found himself ambushed by the silent elf yet again. His first thought was of the time, for it was many hours before the covers of night would be tucked in. Still he grinned, though his grin did not fit his words, which were “Luma, no more gifts, please.” Then, while he was in the middle of figuring out how to tell her that she was welcome while at the same time communicating that she probably wasn’t, a shadow mage casually strolled into his barn, looking around like she’d never seen the inside of a barn before (which she had not). And he straightened himself in the sort of panic the lowly do when their betters catch them existing.

But the mage was young, and not of the house who policed that land, and was following in Luma’s footsteps. At least, until they led to Fe, at which point she circled him as might a predator at the shops. Her otherworldly cloak took none of the dirt of his home upon itself. And he stayed in place there, unready with his fight-or-flight, only moving his head in response to the gold, dead eyes that scanned him.

Luma added herself to him, which made Viccipiter’s circle oblong. She wrote, Fe! I know that you have turned my offer down, and I respect that. But I am also fairly certain that your rejection was not genuine, so I’ve brought a mage to inspect it! Which was logically suspect, and more than she meant to say, so it might have been lucky that he processed little of the spiel by nature of having his attention split between her new ability to inscribe upon the air itself, and the occultist that was presently flanking him.

He didn’t say anything about that because, somewhere in him, he was keenly aware that the mage hadn’t spoken to him yet. In a moment, when she’d finished circling, she spoke to Luma instead. She put hands on hips and said, “What a perfect slave boy you have brought me!” And she laughed.

But there was more. “And I do not mean he is a perfect boy who is also a slave. I mean that he is the perfect slave. Look at his design. Not only the obvious, there are enchantments for surplus energy and obedience. He is even bound to be obsessive. Which is likely to ensure all work is over-completed, and that most tasks do not even need to be ordered in the first place. I am not sure he even needs to be fed, and of course there is no possible lineage-”

Luma stomped a foot and made tiny fists. She wrote, My poor boy! You shouldn’t be here!

To that, he was going to respond with some useless thing, but was spoken over. “Exactly right. He should be in a royal appointment, or at the head of some frontline specialist force, charging valiantly to his death. It is a mystery that he is here in this barn.”

“Oh there is no doubt we must free him. Look at him. Look at this horse.” Viccipiter punched Fe in the arm, hard, and to absolutely zero perceptible effect. “He needs to be free to frolic across the great fields. Anything less would be a tragedy.” She leaned across his line of sight and said, “Besides, you are not bound to this land at all.”

He met her gold, and said, “I assure you I am,” with the calm professionalism of a subordinate.

“And yet you’re not. Which means...” Viccipiter leaned in for a closer look at his head, getting within an alarming proximity, as if she needed to read something writ fine on his skin. “Here.” She pointed to the part of his brain that she considered fucked. “Someone has made you think that you are. That is... weird.”

Viccipiter leaned back into her own space, and her hands flashed around as she gestured a guess. “Because it is truly inefficient. Far more expensive than need be. The simple way to enslave would be to make the boy’s location permanent. Or at least: that is what I would do. Others would do else. But the mind would be a late target on the list. The mind... it is far more complicated.” And she asked the man of a boy, “How did you end up here?”

“I don’t know.” Fe said this as if it was a silly question with an obvious answer. "Everyone has to be somewhere. Why should I have happened somewhere else?”

Viccipiter discarded this thread with a flick, and continued her analysis, “Slavery is low-quality labor. Its only real use case is for labor which is already cheap because the quality does not matter. So the cost to enslave must also be low.” She drew an imaginary circle around the boy’s head, like a teacher illuminating a highly curious species of rock. “This is not a low-cost method.”

“Oh yeah. Easily! Anyone could do it. They did not bother to encrypt or trap it at all. It is a simple stamp.”

Then she lost the fun that was in her tone, and lowered it to fit. “But you will both have to submit to a gag spell and never tell anyone that I helped you with this. Okay?”

Fe looked to Luma as if he did not see the value of the proposition, but when Luma agreed in tight certainty, he followed along. He followed her game with the charitable patience of one humoring a child’s latest random obsession.

So Viccipiter slipped her hands out of her cloak, obliging the brief pullback of Fe as he felt the static in them invade his air. Fe realized only then that this endeavor might have been of a truly serious nature. Then he let her prod him.

Her eyes closed, as if she was in deep concentration, but she continued talking as if she were rather performing some routine magic. “Perhaps your captors knew a cognition mage nearby with little to do. Or perhaps they had one in their party.” As she hypothesized, Fe settled into a stare, becoming lost in the distance beyond her. “Perhaps they needed something to dampen you.”

Luma watched with great interest, seemingly too much to listen. Fe did neither. His face had changed near the start of the operation, and he neither moved nor spoke after that, but he was definitely thinking, and lost in those thoughts. Not so much as one having a realization but as one who already had their realization and was contemplating what to do with it.

He interrupted the mage as she was saying, “Or perhaps you were too much trouble, and would not submit to your position even after shackled to it. It would make sense for—” Both her words and her work stopped when Fe grabbed her wrist, his eyes affixed on the horizon.

The boy lowered the mage’s hand to give it back to her, done with her help. “Thank you,” he said, his voice suddenly cut from stone.

The two stood together at the doorway of that barn and watched the farmhand walk away, across the wide grass. Viccipiter leaned into Luma and said, “No wonder you thought you had found the perfect boy,” and she gestured lightly, as if there was any chance Luma would appreciate the humor, “you found a slave boy! As enchanting as he had been enchanted to serve every request that came to him!” And she elbowed her in a tease.

Luma made a face which, if it hadn’t been muted, would have sounded like, “Meep.”

They watched the farmhand proceed up the grassy hill of the house that owned that land. At the crest, he went up to the front door and bashed it clean off its hinges with a great and terrifying kick that shattered the windows two walls across.

Luma did not know what to do but stare, and listen to the great crashes and yells that echoed outward into the clearing. Her Viccipiter made a ponderous face that Luma was hesitant to glance to.

After a minute, the boy re-emerged from the homestead, holding a longsword in its scabbard and a thick pack that clanked as it jostled. He strode with the stride of two men, the same number of men that then came running out of the house, as elevated as could be. One of them only made two strides of his own before finding himself flat on his back, with no idea which direction was up, and the shape of the longsword’s hilt printed into his forehead. The other tripped on his own after seeing Fe’s weight shift towards him, and the three younger boys that followed them out the house stayed put on the threshold.

Viccipiter was humored to about the same extent that Luma was horrified, and she laughed through the words, “I can see why you like him,” with a grin that was common for her.

“Shriek as you like. I have taken a mere tenth what I’m owed!” Fe snarled at the remaining conscious man. “And if you scum had not Lilly and Henry to look after, I would declare rights to carve my remaining due from your very flesh.”

In a remarkably short amount of steps, Fe returned to his finder and his liberator. Viccipiter took a step back. Luma did not. But upon joining them he thrust himself into a kneel before them, which they had no idea what to do with. Then, in what he had thought was a soft enough tone but the others felt as a punch to the air, he declared, “My Luma and my Liberator, my life is yours. I pledge myself to thine and thine alike. I will serve until death.”

Luma, for her part, gestured wildly into the air, producing the words, No no no no!

While Viccipiter laughed and laughed and laughed. When she had her fill of laughter, she said, “Did I not just free you? And you want to immediately go back to being subservient?” This got Fe to meet her glossy eyes. They peered down across a smirk of great humor, and she said, “Is that not a bit rude?”

For a minute, Fe’s two masters failed to find a combination of words that could convince him to stop kneeling to them and saying things like, “A debt must be paid,” and “Think not of me,” (whatever that meant). Viccipiter’s restraint turned out to have limits, and eventually she bid him do a flip.

Which he did, without question and in spectacular fashion. After the flip he did question the flip, but only once, and took the explanation of, “No reason,” in remarkable stride. Viccipiter then bid him to lick his own eyeball and he at least hesitated long enough for Luma to violently belay the order. His two masters then bickered briefly and he watched the back-and-forth with a dutiful attention few others could have summoned were they he.

This was interrupted by the arrival of a carriage, twaddling up the wheelruts of the property, which bore on its side a light-orange insignia depicting a blindfold. Viccipiter went as if to wave and was pulled away, along with Luma, as Fe dragged them to the other side of the barn. “Shit,” he swore, “It’s the cassers.”

“Already?” Viccipiter peered through the barn. “We are in Lidohade’s jurisdiction? That explains a few things —but not the response time.” She turned her head back to Fi. “And you think they are here for you?”

“It’s Saturday.” He pulled armor from his pack and began doing its straps. “They’re here for dinner.”

Hoots and hollers took the clearing as Fe’s betters ran out to the carriage, pointing and waving towards the barn, parking the cassers short. Their visitors stepped into the sun; bulked-out mages in combat robes, with bronze gauntlets strung about the waist. They glared at their own friends before turning those glares along to the far end of the barn. Then the carriage doors were slapped shut.

“Wisdom would flee,” Fe said, finishing with armoring himself. “Fall into the forest. I will sacrifice myself.”

His nobleness falling flat, he reasoned, “What is it? A life for a life,” and pulled the sheathe off his longsword.

Viccipiter et Menemor, being of her own sovereign and competing mage house to the Lidohades, folded her arms dismissively. “Yeah— they cannot arrest me. They do not have the authority.” Words which caused Fe to look as if they were spoken in alien tongue.

He looked instead to Luma, who was Luma and therefore smiling, but not in an about-to-get-arrested smile, as she was seeing the romance through the trees in this scenario. However when she saw Viccipiter’s stance, she hurriedly switched to folding her arms and acting serious.

Fe said, “Such is not how this works...” and began to attempt to reason unreasonably. But he was cut off by Luma, who wrote, No sacrificing! She pointed to the forest, sternly, and resorted to using his sworn service to command, Flee! Now!

He looked to Viccipiter in hopes that she would contradict again, not knowing that the previous bickering of the two was sport, and was over. Instead she was looking at the wall, saying, “I do not think you guys have time for this.” A growl was his final protest.

Although perhaps also in protest, he took a loose definition of the word flee. Banned from sacrificing himself, he sacrificed his bag of loot upon the ground to dissuade pursuit, scooped up Luma to replace it, and ran off with her.

Being held tightly in strong arms had an effect on Luma of a potency she had almost forgotten, but which had not waned an inch. If anything, she had become much weaker to it, and had only the spare mindfulness to try and stop Soundladen from drawing hearts in the air, which did not work. Instead it drew so many that Fe had to crane underneath them when looking backwards for their mage friend. Immune though she claimed to be, he could not leave her either.

Nor could he find her, and he paused his run to get a clear view. Luma had not the mind to remove her ring, but Viccipiter had the mind to whistle from the tree line. Causing Fe to spin around again in even greater confusion, for even with the elf for baggage there seemed no way the twig-like girl could have outpaced him. But there was no time to question reality, so he bit his tongue and bid onward.

And then, as he passed Viccipiter, she did not head onward, but instead in a totally wrong direction, and then he lost sight of her again. Being a quick study, he spit this from his mind and continued in his own way. Running in his own manner, which resembled the grace of an elk in flight, combined with the purpose of a boulder on its way down a hill. Except he did not find her ahead of him again. He found her sprinting aside him after he passed a large tree.

She called, “Do you know where you are headed?” Her obfuscating hat was on its strings behind her, and the cloak, which had hidden all but her head before, billowed in her wake. Underneath it she looked nothing like a mage. Formfit arachno-weave, scaled lamellar, and steel cleats. She would not have been capable of Fe’s speed even if unburdened by such gear, and had to keep disappearing behind him so that she could reappear from a tree before him.

There was a nonchalance to Viccipiter’s talk of their plight which did not sit well with Fe. And she said, “I do not think that is where you are headed”

They burst over a crest and onto a steep decline that ended against a pathway. There, a carriage was stopped, with two elves standing near the front of it, where also there was a downed tree that blocked their path. One was crouched down, inspecting where the tree had split, which had the clear appearance of having been axed, and they both startled when the trio leapt out of the treeline and skidded downwards towards them. The one who had been inspecting the stump jumped to his feet and yelled “It’s an ambush!” The other yelled, “Scatter!” And they both whipped the bows from their backs and started wildly loosing arrows.

The three each did their respective thing. Viccipiter lazily protected herself from arrows by letting them miss her. Luma was tossed into cover, and upon her subsequent tumble Fe realized he had been misled as to her grace for making landings. He then abandoned the way of the elk, following only the way of the boulder and careened into the foremost elf and their carriage, rocking it with the impact, in reaction to which several pitched voices inside squealed, “Eeek!”

A less pitched, but still elven, voice squealed, “Damn you!” from underneath Fe’s headlock, where it had been tucked.

“Abandon your threats!” said Fe, careless for the dozen ineffective punches flurrying at his abdomen. “You are under no ambush.”

Not seeing the mage. and therefore seeing that the mage was not covering Fe, the second elven man spun around the carriage with bow drawn, and loosed it into Fe’s exposed side. Or at least that was his intent. He soon realized that he loosed nothing, for the mage had stepped out from behind him and plucked the arrow from his bow. She flicked it to the side and corrected Fe.

“Actually,” she pointed across the elf’s arms, to the far side of the path, into the trees, “you are.” And all peered to the far side, where, after a silence that lasted about as long as it takes a realization to sink through a skull the thickness of a common bandit’s, what looked like the most common of bandits peeked from behind his tree and cursed. “Shit.”

That first volley of arrows was the most dangerous, as every aggressor in the rather large band of bandits fired in unison. They cracked the carriage’s small windows, and otherwise pocked its frame with an enormous amount of new ornamentation. Luck had each of them on the cover side of it already (with Luma still behind a rock further away) so no one was harmed at the outset. There was no second volley fired in unison on account of Fe launching himself overtop the carriage and charging the aggressors with longsword aloft, which it was clear not a single one amongst them expected and which caused such a disruption that the whole order of the battle was cast into disarray and backfoot improvisation.

For that distraction, none of the elves had a chance to notice the mage slipping into their carriage, especially as she used no door. She might have never been spotted at all had she not made herself known by leaning over the family within and closing their window curtains for them. “Excuse me.” Polite, but sarcastic. It was fortunate that, though Viccipiter looked as dangerous as any seasoned occultist, she did not look in any way like a bandit, or someone a bandit could afford, nevermind receptive to activities as uninspired or pedestrian as ambush-and-loot. So the shock they undertook was a civil one, and she used that frozen pause to pull from behind the youngest child’s pointed ear a fistful of arrows.

Wondrous and shrieking alarm was summoned in response, especially when it turned out that there was another fistful of arrows behind the other ear, and stuffed in the sleeve of the next child, and up the nose of a third. For how ridiculous was the revelation that their siblings had stashed such things in such places? Raucous. The tinier mortal minds always find such concepts to be of supreme innovation, and are therefore easily manipulated. But because of this act, very little attention was left for the sounds and screams of battle that muffled in through the curtains.

The bandits had stuck a whole of five arrows into Fe, and a whole of seven of them laid dead on the dirt and leaves for it, which put a marked hesitance in the steps of the others. They attempted to circle him but it seemed geometrically impossible, for he was rarely a point and more often a ray. His speed was not unlike his strength, and more than one ambusher had paid their life to reveal that he needn’t two hands to wield his longsword. As well that he needn’t two hands for much anything else, such that when his weapon was in one way, his other way was not an opening but more of an invitation to have your approaching appendage bent in whichever way it was least happy to bend.

So while Viccipiter was pulling the contents of an entire quiver out of an excited child’s schoolbag, their awe was backgrounded by such shouts as, “We can’t fucking get near him!” and, “This isn’t worth it!” and, “Just keep loosing!” along with various other realizations, rationalizations, and the sounds of bones crunching and joints prying.

“It is good that all of these went misplaced.” Viccipiter winked. “If the bandits had actually remembered to bring them they might have been able to fight the one, single boy that is embarrassing them outside.” And her audience laughed, in their shrill and pitched way, despite not understanding.

So Viccipiter hopped out into the open, into air that was now completely devoid of projectiles and free to walkabout. She waved unto Luma, and then turned and waved unto Fe, who glanced from his bloodshed with a wild-eyed fervor that clearly expected there to be more purpose to that address. Instead she cheered, “You are doing great, Fe!” and he huffed, and amputated a man his legs.

There was little more fighting to do, however, as the remaining bandits found themselves dry of both munitions and nerve, and suddenly rich in sense, and so fled into the woods while telling themselves they would write their mothers and undertake honest jobs at next light, as they told themselves often.

It was clear to Viccipiter exactly how much time remained before they were accosted by the far more organized banditry of House Lidohade. For its members were well known to be criminals entrenched in the role of peacekeepers, protected by the authority awarded to better actors before them. The type that wielded their authority the way one wields a club during an extortion. Something that Fe and the elves — and even to some extent Luma — knew personally, but Viccipiter knew only in theory, having never needed to concern herself with however they wielded something that did not apply to her and her house. So she stood there and grinned while Fe arrived back at the carriage in an easily-counted number of steps, or possibly the one step that is a great leap.

The elven travelers were all of them unharmed, although alarmed, and in awe of the fearless boy that was busy bleeding all over the forest. Without prompting, he grabbed the tree in the road by its low end and heaved it out of the pathway in one thrust, which stole all attention again. As he turned back, he asked, “Is any soul harmed?” And he spoke as solidly as iron, as it seemed he always did, such that his words were clear upon the air even though he breathed heavy enough that he seemed a great engine. When he addressed the elf he grabbed before, he touched him again and caused a fright he did not intend, apologizing, “We did not mean to startle you.” Once composed, the elf balked at this and decided to say, “You must jest. You have saved our lives.”

“We have not the time for thanks,” Fe dismissed. “We must continue our flight.” And only then did he take the time to yank an arrow from his breast. Which he only did because he noticed its feather brush the elf’s nose, but he then needed apologize again, as blood crossed the elf’s face.

At that time, their Viccipiter was reassuring the parents that they had many an arrow to trade when they next made to market, and that this may pay the damage to their carriage. She took it back upon taking a closer look at the bandited arrows and loudly doubting the quality of their craftsmanship.

Viccipiter had considered her safe behind her rock out of the way of the whole ordeal, and only upon meeting her close did she then fret. The bard was unharmed but her outfit bore cuts from stray arrows, as Luma was particularly poor at the concept of taking cover and hadn’t shied from the danger nearly enough. “How did this even happen?” She made a note to heighten her concern for Luma’s bodily safety, on account of it housing the apparent mind of a child.

The three were welcomed to take refuge in the elven carriage so as to throw off their own pursuit, and due to the hurry of the situation they all got ushered in while Viccipiter continued her fret. Only when the other two were sat down did she shift into frowning at the streams of blood emptying out of Fe. “What happened to No sacrifices?” And she continued her scolding as the floor underneath them lurched into motion. “For someone so desperate to become subservient you are a terror at following instruction.”

The great engine needed to sit far forward so as to keep from plunging the arrows in his back deeper into his chest. Viccipiter stood through the turbulent ride, her balance unsurprised by even the sharpest bumps, and she prodded his wounds almost more in criticism than aid. “I cannot tell whether you think yourself invincible or worthless.” She yanked the arrows from his back as if just to spite him, but he did not even satisfy her with a grunt, then she clotted their absence. “I am but a novice for healing, you fool.” And she threw her glance at Luma as she said it, who only then realized she was herself in the line for scolding.

Soon the atmosphere in the carriage was lighter, as children had a habit of causing their elders to hide the seriousness of times. Other elves were not as Luma-like as you might be thinking, though it did seem that the task of getting to know each other was of comparable importance to their safe escape.

The small boy from whose ear Viccipiter had first pulled arrows was particularly unfiltered in nature, and very much wanted to know why Fe was so pretty when he was also blunt of ear. They were new to the continent and the boy thought Fe to be some type of foreign elf native to Pedesyn, which grew up to be not only refined but also massive. Fe paused only as long as he ever paused, which was miniscule, and said, "Such knowledge is beyond me,” which was a fine answer for children but much the wrong answer for adults. Though the adults had their filters, and so didn’t ask such brute questions. They merely politely reminded their spawn that, sometimes, some humans were pretty too.

Instead one dared ask, “Why is it that cassers pursue you, if you don’t mind?” To which Viccipiter volunteered, “Oh, we freed a slave they did not wish freed.” This led the attention directly to Luma, who had been sitting at the end, quite politely in silence, as she had removed Soundladen so as not to distract everyone (and allow Viccipiter and Fe their time in the spotlight). Not removed, as always, was the bulky metal collar, which only looked belonging on her as much as it was not cast-iron but a refined steel and purposefully detailed.

Luma threw up her hands and smiled sheepishly, replacing Soundladen and writing, Oh! It was not me. She pointed then to Fe, redirecting the attention. But this was clearly much less understandable, as Fe no longer looked anything like a soul that could be enslaved without the efforts of a grand collection of special forces. They said only, “Oh!” And Viccipiter had the sense to occupy the elves with questions of what brought them to Pedesyn, and why, and when. For she knew how easily elders were enthralled by the logistics of each others’ travel.

As they recounted their story, which was mostly to do with trade and obligation to distant relatives, there was an awkward moment where the children gawked at the writings of Soundladen, as it wrote the idle thoughts of a Luma that had forgotten she’d re-equipped it. First in the nature of a detailed study of Fe’s physique, as he had been half-stripped for medical attention. Casual calculations as to how easily he might toss and pin an elf, which had favorable conclusions considering what he had just done to many human men. After this, she drifted further from hearing the conversation, and considered Viccipiter’s expert hands and the energy they held — whether their magic might tickle in a preferable way. She was in the middle of running this circumstance through her imagination when she realized (after the parents had realized) that she had written it into the air, and hurriedly pulled her ring from her finger in a poorly constructed casualness. Such things were innocent to elves, but awkward to humans, so it was fortunate that the ring didn’t write its way into the sight of anyone her thoughts weren’t meant for, and that she was seated at the far end of her friends. If Viccipiter saw this happen behind her, she kept to her word by keeping quiet.

They exchanged names, but Fe objected to his when it came. Which was somewhat silly because at the time he had no ideas for alternative names, and thoroughly failed to come up with any, even when pressed. One of the elves joked, “Then we shall just call you Hero,” which he objected to and described as, “—so much worse.” So Viccipiter named him “Fi,” as she thought this the logical next name after Fe, and she called it, “temporary,” and Fi allowed this.

For, having many reasons to be unsatisfied with a name he didn’t remember the origin of and likely had received in captivity, those reasons whiffed wildly upon a similar name handed to him by his liberator, even when it had so little thought put into it. Were he Fe from a mere hour before he would have cherished a free name with a rich sadness for the past, but now he cherished it with a bright fondness of the present, and that distinction did not escape him one bit.

There was concern when the carriage stopped and the driver whispered through a frontward slit for them all to hush. Since the windows were busted and the curtains drawn, none but Viccipiter had knowledge of what exactly had paused their travel. Though all suspected correctly.

Outside, the same two Lidohade mages questioned the elves driving the stopped carriage. There was no pretending they had not just recently been in a scrape, as their ride had taken the resemblance of a porcupine. But the two elven men were excellent at their act, and immediately became ecstatic to tell the cassers all about the ambush they were in, as if their audience may be able to use the information. Moreover they did not play dumb but instead were very willing to tell everything about the trio who had crossed into the scrape. Three troublemakers who nearly upended their carriage before getting in a great fight with bandits, in the chaos of which the poor elves managed to slip away. “This gang violence is getting worse,” one said, and the other appended, “And our families are increasingly caught in the crossfire.” They received a grunt from the cassers, who then strode past and to the back of the ride and thrust open its door to look inside.

“How did you do it?” they asked Viccipiter, as she jumped needlessly high out of the carriage to create a good splash. By then, even they were catching on to Viccipiter’s nature and were not thrown by her averting with, “Do what?”

She answered, “Maybe they saw right. Maybe you saw wrong. But a mage never reveals their secrets.” And she smirked classically, despite putting that whole line of questioning to death.

A few minutes later, after many friendly waves and kind words, after the trio got soaked to the knee for the sake of masking their tracks in a wide but shallow stream, she asked as they walked, “So you know who you are now?”

He thought about this, but could only say, “I could not say.” Which bid her and Luma to meet their eyes.

Their eyes decided Viccipiter would speak for them. She said, “I appreciate a mystery, but know that if you cannot give an answer you must give a reason instead.”

He spoke from his heart. He said, “I doubt I could put it to words. It is more a feeling. I feel as if I know exactly who I am.”

“Oh,” said Viccipiter, squinting in annoyance. “That is wholly unremarkable. And not what I meant.”

And then he understood. He said, “I do remember what I was doing, as I remember how it felt to do it.”

Both liberators stopped to listen, as Fi looked inside himself. He was silent for more than one moment, and stared hard into nothing.

And Viccipiter turned on her heel and walked away, dragging Luma with her. This bid Fi to quit his pondering. He sloshed back into speed with them. He looked at Viccipiter and she did not look at him. The silence was filled with wading splashes and Luma went against herself to avoid writing on it, for it seemed important to Viccipiter that it loomed large.

Eventually he attempted to further the case. He volunteered, “I do not think they were important horses.” For which the mage interrupted him at the fourth word, asking in a singsong tone, “So what of your future, then? What will you do now, O Fi?”

And of this he was quite sure and specific. His shoulders curled as he said, “I shall aid Luma on her quest.”

They gave time for Luma to fumble to don Soundladen. She wrote, Oh you need not do any such thing! It would be such a great bore for you. We might best do something better, that will leave your newborn soul uncrushed.

But before Fi could respond Viccipiter saw what useless thing he would say and intervened, translating Luma’s words as, “She wants you to do what you want to do.” Which made no sense to Fi.

He idled in that cold stream and considered no alternatives for even a single second. He said, “That is what I want to do.”

“Oh my gods.” Viccipiter threw her hands up, which was always more effective a gesture from her, as they emerged from her dark as if flaring into being.

For this, Fi relented at least to say, in a hypothetical tense, “I suppose... I would wish to see how different things can be.”

“From my own experience. From the fields, farms, and forests, interrupted only by books and imagination. I would travel to the greatest of cities, even if only to look upon one and realize the difference.”

Viccipiter gave him the obvious answer, “Then you trek to the capital, to Kellophar.”

But he said, “But no.” He said, “I will trek wherever does Luma, until her voice is returned.” And so, obviously, and after a brief hesitation in which the girls’ eyes exchanged short words, Luma wrote, What luck! I am headed to Kellophar! And Fi at that time did not know Luma well enough to see her for the liar she was. Viccipiter’s squint called this very convenient, which she meant in both ways.

So Fi inflated and looked between them, saying, “Then we travel to the capital!” He deflated when Viccipiter corrected him. She said, “Yeah no. I have school tomorrow. This is where I leave you.”

For once, Fi only expressed himself in the more subtle language of body. But since it was still Fi, he looked at her as if his favorite leg had been cheated from him.

She winced from it, but quickly gathered the charm to announce, “So: goodbye. This was fun, and it was other things. And, unlike some people, I will remember it.”

Fi dropped to one knee in a way that might incapacitate another man, and spoke in the cadence of a curse. He said, “I will never forget you, Viccipiter. My Liberator.” And he stared only into the water. In silence, behind him, Luma put a hand to her mouth and stifled glee.

Even Viccipiter did not tease him then. She merely made a face he could not see and then turned a half turn to go, saying, “Uh, yeah. I will see you in a week or so.” Which brought Fi’s eyes and spirits back up. Only then did she laugh at him, just once, and said, “Luma: If he gives you any trouble, find my home. Fi... you may keep the cloak.”

Which was confusing in the way that she liked to be: to create a need for answers that she could give away charitably. In this case she unclasped her cloak and flicked it over her head, letting it bloom over her departure and then fall dramatically upon the water’s surface, revealing her disappearance from the party. Their shadow mage abandoned them there to the tedium of travel, not to be seen again until the next free weekend.

Thanks for reading!

The full book is available on Kindle, including Kindle Unlimited.

If you don't use Kindle, or want a print copy, join the mailing list to be notified.

:)