She gasped, and she looked to be so utterly horrified that it rather perplexed me. This much at least was common sense, surely… and Arianna and I should have known it better than most! But the way this simple observation affected Katherine substantially more than I could have anticipated!

  Katherine slammed her watery fist down upon the riverbank, where it disappeared into the dirt, and sent muddy water spraying out! Such a growl then came from her that she sounded almost as fierce as the ocean’s roar on a particularly stormy day!

  The river churned in response to her apparent distress, such that small waves came up to lap at the banks, and small eddies began to form as it flooded! I was beginning to think that it might be for the better if I were to leave the water, but I’d heard Katherine shout before I moved my feet,

  “That’s not even a little true! What a foul and horrible thing this is to hear!”

  I raised my arms in as placating a manner as I could, but the waters roiled around me without pause, so it came as little surprise to me when I felt my Arianna folding layers of aether beneath me. What a strange thing it was to know how aether actually looked and felt, and it would seem that Arianna wasn’t used to me being able to sense it either, for she warned me before she unleashed spell,

  “Mira, don’t panic or anything, but I’m about to lift you into the air, okay?”

  She engaged her magic before I could even nod, let alone before I could insist that she get on with it already. I was already well accustomed to her magical surprises by now, for she’d much enjoyed greeting me with such frivolous aetherial techniques for as long as we’d been together… even our first short meeting and deathly parting were arcane in nature! So I was plenty well aware of which particular trick she was going to pull this time, and I knew better than to react overmuch to what it was she’d wanted to do. 

  Still, all the preparation in the world cannot prepare a person for that loathsome feeling when unnatural flight comes over them. Naturally, as I was suddenly thrust into the air and came to such a height for me to feel uncomfortable: I let go a squeak of fright, and I could feel an immediate burst of feelings come from my Arianna in response! 

  This was among the first times that she’d done this to me while naked though, and never while both naked and covered in river water, so to be flung around in such a manner was incredibly brisk. 

  Oh how I wished that I could not feel what my beloved was feeling at that moment, for I could tell that an absolutely frisky interest was coming over her, and this I couldn’t abide lest she decide to leave me hanging in the air! It wouldn’t have been the first time, so I admonished her with my voice at a higher pitch than it usually came out with,

  “Put me down at once, you rogue!”

  So devilish my Arianna was that she cruelly let me drop down a little! Mercy, but if she still had a body: I would have wiped that smirk she made with my lips off of her face, but my body was instinctively bracing itself for an impact, and I would simply have to be at her mercy until she decided to put me down! 

  Thankfully, I didn’t have to worry for long whether that ‘eventuality’ would come to pass, since she’d shortly seized me again with that same arcane playfulness, and I was gently brought back to the ground, if a bit further away from the river than I had been.

  “This travesty, this is an affront to God in the Highest!” Katherine still shouted, as if she was entirely unobservant of my ‘short’ series of predicaments, “Whoever told you that should be ashamed of themselves! Are we not born under the same sky? Are we not shaped by His hand?!”

  The river spirit still seemed to be somewhat preoccupied with raging against the reality she must’ve not known, so I took a moment to clothe myself with an outfit that came with leggings, for I didn’t wish for any further violations of my person… though I had to wince as I felt that my Arianna’s mischievous machinations had indeed come to some fruition.

  I closed my eyes, and I tried my best to affect the ‘feeling’ of a glare back towards the perpetrator who’d been determined to cause it! My efforts were rewarded, for my Arianna rather meekly shriveled up inside me, as the feeling must have drawn her mind back to those times when she’d previously brought my retribution upon herself!

  A wistful sigh blew through my lips, and a smile came upon my face as I breathed in the autumn air, though I remained somewhat vexed by how rapidly my heartbeat still came. If Arianna was my heart now, then I had to wonder if she weren’t more directly responsible for making my blood flow in such an insistent manner!

  All the more she’d be paying for later, I supposed, but I returned my gaze to Katherine, who’d finally stopped shouting to the Heavens, and had ‘come back down’ to Earth all while never leaving the water… which reflected the sunlight upon her skin. Goodness! I should not have looked upon her with so little thought!

  Was I ever so ready to abandon my awareness before, or had my Arianna simply stolen my attentions such that I should have forgotten? No, these must’ve surely been some of the inclinations which had come from her, so I decided that she should be at fault for this too, as surely it could not have been my natural proclivity to look for so long upon such a fascinating sight as the droplets which came sliding down that shimmering skin!

  Of course I would be affected by her nakedness: she was simply so wonderful to see that even ‘Old-Hag-Olga’ should have struggled to look away from her! I determinedly tore my eyes away from her again while I could only cry out for Providence in my mind to deliver me mercy from this beautiful creature!

  “Sweetie, I’m really sorry for my ranting. That couldn’t have been pleasant at all. I apologize that you had to witness that.” Katherine spoke to me, and it was everything I could do to keep my eyes from naturally turning in her direction. This couldn’t keep happening, and I knew it, but I shortly invented such an easy solution that I was surprised that my Arianna hadn’t come up with it herself!

  So equipped was I with such an obviously good idea that I simply couldn’t endure it any longer, so I turned towards her with my eyes wide open, and although it took my every effort to stop my mind from stuttering into gibberish: I still maintained the image so strongly that one of Carmen’s finest dresses would appear around Katherine in a size that suited her form!

  The blackness formed around Katherine, but luckily for me she didn’t simply turn back to water, and she merely looked curious about what it was that I was doing. When at last she was clothed, I finally allowed my eyes to fall again while I took in a tremendous gasping breath of fresh air, for I had so long held my breath as I concentrated that I was in rather a dire need of it!

  A feeling of shock arose in Arianna, and I could hear her muttering to myself, “Why didn’t I think of that? Am I stupi-ack! Maybe you should’ve picked a different outfit!”

  What could've possibly been wrong with my choice of outfit now? It was one of Carmen’s favorites, and it was one of the few among her many ‘clothes’ which made her appear as chaste and virtuous! There was no conceivable path towards any of her other ones being better, but I looked at Katherine now, for she was entirely clothed and even as beautiful as she was: I should surely be able to gaze upon her without even the slightest trou—

  I… made a terrible mistake! My knees gave out from under me, and so my eyes were returned with a shock towards the ground as I was gripped with a sort of shock that brought my recent struggles to bear! 

  Katherine was a rusalka, a creature whose watery form only held the illusion of a person. Naturally, this meant that her 'skin' was made of water too, which was rather a problem with keeping any clothing placed upon her false form dry, but ordinarily it should have been a less suggestive thing to look upon than her more ‘natural’ look.

  But I’d overlooked a very important possibility, for it didn’t occur to me: I’d chosen a white blouse for her to wear! Naturally, I couldn’t even dare to look in Katherine’s direction anymore, for the mere vision of her had become a fatal weapon! I cried out for my beloved, who ‘only saw her as a bunch of agitated water’ for help,

  “Rianna… please: you must do something about this!”

  Katherine absolutely chortled while I stared at the earth I’d collapsed upon, but I felt the blackness depart me, and I had to rein in my mind as it naturally brought to my mind all of those clothes being eaten away again, the cloth coming away to reveal the bare skin beneath it! What devious trickery this was, and I had done it all to myself unknowingly, unintentionally, and worst of all: unwittingly!

  “She’s safe now, I think. Probably.” My beloved said to me, not that her saying it made my heart beat any less aggressively, “At least, I think she is. I really couldn’t say, since she really does just look like water to me. If this doesn’t work, I’m teaching you aethersight. I mean, since you’re capable of magic now anyway, I was going to do it sooner or later, but soone-”

  “Rianna?” I interrupted her, for even as afflicted as I was: she’d said something that I couldn’t possibly ignore, “What makes you think I can do magic?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” She started, and I felt a tremendous amount of panic and shame as she realized how rude it was to say, so she continued with speed, “I mean, it’s because I can use your weird aethery stuff to do like, anything. Surely, that means you can use my magic, right? I don’t really know, Mira, I’ll admit it and everything, but I just can’t see why you shouldn’t be able to?”

  Academic, I thought blankly. We were going to have an academic discussion now, of all times, and so I briefly had to debate the merits of my options at hand! Option one was that I could ignore this absolutely thrilling new discovery, or hypothesis, as it were… and I could desperately plead that Arianna build us up a contained area somewhere not too far away to relieve this horrible strain I’d been burdened with! 

  Tempting that, oh so unbelievably tempting the first option was, but there was another, almost equally delicious option which came to me, which was to simply let it burn — and there I had to shudder with a terrible trepidation!

  This would not do, I thought as I forced myself to turn into that ridiculous fear, for the simple words and ideas that now brought me to fear were so very unlike the terrible experience which had spawned them, and I would not allow for this to continue! 

  The sooner I could put that event behind me, the less stress I could be under. So I tried to channel it through a better place for me, just how I’d done with those horrifying pains from before. I forced myself to endure the thought of being consumed with fire even as it brought me to shiver uncomfortably, and I tried to overlap it with the fiery passion that I was nonetheless still taken with in that moment, and as I opened my mind to the possibilities: I felt a grin take me.

  I’d decided then and there that if fire was so fearful a thing, then at the least I should not have to fear my own, for it was of my make! I knew so little of how intricate spells really worked, but the basics I’d heard so many times that I simply couldn’t do this wrongly, if indeed I was capable of it, and as my Arianna had said: there was no actual reason I shouldn’t be! 

  So I stared at the air a short distance above my hand, and I imagined that the air there would be engulfed with a red flame as high and tall as I was. This fire wouldn’t hurt me, and even if it somehow did: I would make it submit before me!

  “Wait, why are you trying it out with fire?! Are you crazy?! Mira, talk to me, please, you’re not really going to use fire, right?” Arianna spoke to me with a fear for me rising within her, and she hurried to re-explain everything that would surely go wrong with the process to me, even though I already well knew,

  “Mira, what are you not understanding about undead being weak to fire?! Stop already, you’ll only hurt yourself!”

  “I won’t stand for shuddering every time I think of fire, Rianna.” I told my beloved in no uncertain terms, for I really was not about to let myself balk in the face of a little pain, and it wasn't as if I couldn’t find a way to enjoy it anyhow, “I will not just lie down and take everything this unlife throws at me! It’s time I took it into my own hands, don’t you agree?”

  Arianna absolutely balked at my arguments, and she responded to me with a dreadful seriousness as she formed up a dozen spells around me at once, “Mira, I don’t care how you try to frame it: I’m still not letting you do this to yourself!”

  Finally, when I was just about to let go the full force of will that I could muster, and feed it with the very passion that I had been forced to endure, of all the interruptions I didn’t expect to have on dry land: I heard Katherine speak as her gorgeous face appeared right before mine,

  “Where’s this Rianna you’ve been talking to? I don’t see her at all!”

  I’d never so much as thought of being able to cast a spell before, and so it was a great relief to me that either the lapse in focus she’d given me had made the primed aether fizzle out, or that I’d been doing it wrongly from the start! Such an incredible proximity Katherine’s lips and eyes suddenly had with mine that I could only be thankful for the instinctive step I’d taken away from her!

  She was thankfully clothed now, in some dark and mysterious costume Carmen used to wear, but even then it took me a few moments to descend again from that precipitous situation I’d been engaged with, and the surprise of the unexpected third party’s interruption had left me rather short of breath!

  Quaking breaths entered my lungs, and they took me between nausea and a feeling of exhaustion, so it would seem that I really hadn’t exactly been in my right mind when I’d escalated that situation, and all the while I could still feel Arianna’s overbearing readiness to cast any number of spells to put out any sudden explosions of fire upon my person!

  But I did recover some, and Katherine looked unable to so much as step towards me, so I got to wondering how she even got over here, when the river lay some twenty meters away, so I asked her to the best of my current ability,

  “Katherine, how did you get over… here?”

  She laughed, though I wasn’t quite sure what was so appealing about what I’d said that it’d inspired such a jovial response, but she informed me as she pointed out a small hole that was filled with water, which one of her toes was inside of,

  “I drilled my way over! It’s pretty unreliable if I go too far, but this close to the river? It’s easy!”

  That raised a lot of questions for me, but before I was exactly able to form them, let alone to postulate them to her, she’d again asked me that question from before,

  “Are you on the phone with Rianna? Does she have an invisibility cloak? Why can’t I see her?”

  I’d only rarely read about the first in Ancient texts, and the second sounded so strange that I didn’t know what it meant at all, so I didn’t know how to even address the questions she was putting to me! At least the answer to the third question was something I could certainly try to demystify for her, though as I was so distracted by the strangeness of her first two questions: it didn’t go exactly as expected,

  “Well, she’s inside me.”

  Katherine gave me a sagely nod as a ponderous look came over her, and she mused as if to herself, “So she’s got a split personality then?”

  My eyes bulged as she said this, for she actually thought I was disturbed — of all things! I could feel an outrage so enormous building up within me at her accusation, but I couldn’t help but to think of how I’d been acting, and I instead broke off into peals of laughter! Katherine looked me over as if she really had to reassess me, and so I had to fight through the giggles to deny her ridiculous misunderstanding,

  “Not at all! Rianna’s really in my heart, Katherine.”

  She gave me a look that scorched so with pity in that moment, as if I were only reinforcing her misguided conclusion! My laughter died out as my mouth opened in horror at her unstoppable delusion when she asked me,

  “I already knew that you loved her, though?”

  This really wasn’t working out at all well, and Arianna was being of no use whatsoever, as she’d been reduced to a fit of giggles all on her own while I'd panicked to find a way to explain my sound and rational belief that my dearly departed really spoke with me to the drowned spirit before me!

  I was desperate at this point, so I declared to her despite knowing that I was only digging this hole of disbelief in her deeper by using this evidence she couldn't possibly understand,

  “Rianna’s in a phylactery, like this one here,” I pointed with my hand to showcase the jewel around my neck, “she’s really been talking to me!

  This was the end of whatever chance I had to impress my sanity upon Katherine, for I well knew that once a person believed another was actually crazy: there was no argument on this Earth which could rein them back in, for the human experience is simply riddled with such insanity! There was surely no chance to appeal to reason anymore once a person had been deemed by another to be insane!

  It was to my surprise then, that a bright look of recognition formed upon Katherine’s red lips and eyes, and she made a motion with her hand to show that she completely understood now, only after revealing a deeply secret and dark magical ritual to her,

  “A phylactery! So what you’re saying is she’s a Lich!”

  Even Arianna ended with her giggling at this, and I felt her suddenly become so overly wary and protective of me that hundreds of aetherial constructs worked themselves into being around Katherine! I was entirely too dumbfounded to do more than nod, but Katherine decided to take it one step further than I could really understand,

  “So why isn’t she floating around wearing a pile of bones?”

  What gibberish was she saying this time? I could feel that Arianna felt insulted, for she was absolutely thrumming with the desire to speak for herself, but since she couldn’t, I had to stand in for her despite only having a question of my own to answer Katherine with,

  “Exactly what are you trying to say?”

  Katherine smiled at me happily as she answered me, almost as if she were excited to converse with someone else who shared in the same dark and terrible knowledge as her! She acted so like my dearly departed as she unveiled these secret truths that tread upon God’s realm, and cheerfully elucidated them for me, 

  “Well, it’s what Liches do, right? They raise an army of the dead, and manipulate for themselves an avatar of bones to interact with the world while their real body is safe within a phylactery!”

  She finished and nodded to herself, then she looked at my astounded face, and then continued on as if to defend her interest in some occult matter, “I’m not only a missionary, you know.”

  Among all of the out of place words and terminologies she’d used: this one had truly flown past me. If she’d told me before that she was a missionary, then she must have said it while I was talking to my Arianna, for I most certainly never heard her say such a thing! 

  “People still have to live out their lives on this Earth before they can join our Father in Heaven, and so I’ve played a few games with some of my friends.” Katherine said to me as she carried a touch of sentiment upon her voice, “They’d have been amazed if they knew that you had your girlfriend’s phylactery hanging around your neck!”

  I couldn’t help to feel that my head was ready to explode with the pressure of something building in my subconscious, though what it was I couldn’t quite get a grasp on, but I again had to correct a silly mistake that the rusalka had managed to make,

  “No, that’s my phylactery. Rianna’s is where my heart used to be.”

  What I said tore Katherine out of her reflective mindset, and she stared at me for perhaps an entire score of seconds before the pieces she was missing tumbled out as an uncertain statement,

  “You’re looking pretty lively for a Lich, sweetheart.”

  Mercy! First it was Lisset, and now even a ghostly woman was saying it to me! I probably should have taken it as a compliment, but it was rather a challenging thing to endure hearing, because ‘looking’ alive didn’t change the fact that I’d had to eat human bodies and drained my friend of her lifeblood!

  “I’m not human anymore, Katherine.” I finally said it, as even if it had been in question before, when I was merely considered Cursed and likened to the Fae: it was indisputable now, and I was owning it, if only for myself. I mused about it to myself for a short while, but my present company apparently wouldn’t let me leave it like that without contestation,

  “I’m confused,” Katherine began with a shake of her head, “I understand that you died, but you still look human, and you still act human, and you certainly feel human to me. I haven’t given up my humanity simply because I’ve also become something else, and neither should you!”

  As angry as what she'd said made me, I couldn’t bear any of the childish arguments that came out of my mind while it was so affected by emotions! I was only just willing to admit this truth to myself, and this rusalka thought she could just snatch it away from me?! My mind traipsed through myriad responses, and they each came back lacking… none of them were capable of landing me a sure and certain victory for the truth of my inhumanity, but I simply knew it must've been present, if I could only just have seized upon it!

  I would have argued that I wasn’t any longer a human since I’d eaten those corpses, but other people didn’t simply lose their humanity by taking the lives of their fellows, and what of the cannibal tribes? They don’t lose their human status, even though they sometimes cooked the other humans before eating them — an utterly disgusting thing to do, and certainly depraved, but it was not in and of itself inhuman!

  I could have then asserted that I wasn’t human because I would burn in the sunlight if Arianna wasn’t helping me, but so did a few ordinary persons with unfortunate deficiencies in their skin! I might have even insisted that I'd demonstrated inhuman tendencies when I'd stolen the lifeblood from Lisset, but she’d given it freely to me, and the Ancient texts had spoken much of the usefulness of ‘blood transfusion’ — not that it’d been replicated since.

  Although I would likely soon figure out an argument which could not be disputed — for surely even in humanity’s dark and sordid past there must be something which even people would not do to each other! — Katherine’s teary voice cracked, and it completely cut across my failure to find an immediate argument,

  “I do miss it, don’t get me wrong. I miss being entirely human; to be able to leave the water whenever I wanted to. I didn’t mean to die, all those years ago; nobody did back then. If I could up and walk away from this river, I would never look back!”

  A chill came over me in that moment, and for all the unlife of me, I could not place it. What I did know is that I couldn’t let such a beautiful and wonderful woman cry like this before me, so I shortly had her in my arms, even though simply leaning against her in such a manner sent chilly water all across my form, and she collapsed again into her natural form to better cling to me as she sobbed against me!

  The source of that awful feeling soon revealed itself to have been coming from inside me, as I’d again been preemptively disturbed by something that Arianna was thinking! I watched as each of her intricate spells faded out of existence in short succession, as if she was not even the slightest bit worried for my safety despite a rusalka absolutely submerging my entire body in her tears besides for my very face!

  That dreadfully distressing suspicion I’d had turned out to have been well-founded when my dearly departed finally spoke again to me, after maintaining her silence for so long,

  “Mira? I think we can actually grant her wish.”