Arianna’s words offended me greatly, for she had delivered them amidst Katherine’s dreadful heartache, and I saw no reason for her to behave in so heartless a manner! I could not help but to hiss at my beloved’s suggestion as I tried to hold and comfort Katherine’s wet form, which still sobbed and shook with loneliness even as she was wrapped all around my body for support!

  What a horrible thing Arianna had said, and I felt a growl forming in my throat outside of my control! Just this once, I was glad that Arianna couldn’t speak for herself anymore, as it meant she had no way to inflict that cruel notion upon Katherine — I would not have the water spirit’s mood be uplifted by such false pretenses, only to later fall to despair and horror once presented with the truth! — but I could not keep my silence, for I simply had to respond to my Arianna, or else I’d soon be shouting thunder!

  “Rianna!” An indignant whisper carried all of my anger, for I could not bear to hold it entirely inside of myself, and I demanded that she justify her insensitive proposal that we test a ‘solution’ upon such a pleasant spirit as Katherine! 

  She’d suffered from that terrible loneliness for so long a time, such that she’d quaked with wracking sobs all through my efforts to comfort her, as if the mere contact with another person’s skin had such a terrible nostalgia upon her memory! I would not have her suffer from Arianna’s curiosity as well, so with retribution thick upon my voice, I demanded of my beloved,

  “You will explain yourself.”

  “It-it’s not what you think, Mira! It really isn’t!” Arianna actually stood her ground on this matter, even as I could feel her recoiling sharply from the righteous anger which raged within me, and I was so impressed with her backbone in the face of my absolute displeasure that I came to believe her.

  It was certainly not an unlikely enough condition recently for me to have been wrong, and though a new part of decried my rational response, for it could never be mistaken: I denied its continued purchase upon my reason. It fought me then for control over my belief in Arianna, but its battle was rather short-lived, as I was no stranger to discarding my feelings, and it was a feeble new thing that hadn’t yet known it had no chance in a contest against my very wits! Perhaps it might have learned some humility from this defeat, but I very much doubted it, even as the relief of its departure washed over me.

  A tightness which had arrested my chest thankfully relented as I was freed from my own fury. I truly hated this new anger of mine, for it was so very difficult to control when it came upon me, and it combined so very dreadfully with my paranoia: I’d never been so fast to leap to my worst conclusions as I was now!

  I let it go with a sorrowful sigh, for really: there was no reason that I should’ve been holding her at fault for a mere suggestion — no matter how poorly it came across to me — for it was myself who was primed toward the negative, and this was certainly no fault of hers! I wouldn’t have let this feeling of disgust turn to anger so readily if I could have helped it, but it seemed that I was quite unable to quit that deep-rooted hatred which held me!

  Would that I could’ve also stopped seeking an argument in favor of my inhumanity so easily as I’d dismissed the symptoms my self-loathing had brought forth… but the back of my mind did not seem to appreciate this necessary return to pragmatism, for it was so oppressively insistent upon being right! This poisonous ill-will was filling me up past my capacity to keep anymore, and this was becoming an alarmingly common occurrence of late — though I used to be the very image of self-control, except for in the particularly extreme circumstances which actually warranted intense response!

  This wasn’t like me at all, for I’d blown up with anger again despite my promising myself that I wouldn’t! What of my promise to Luca that I would hurt nobody? Was that trust he’d shown me then so utterly dismissable for me as my word was to myself? Were all of my determinations so false and paltry to me as this last one all along? If so, then I’d become a liar, for my assurances had all been made in self-deceit, and I was evolving into such a wrothful terror for my loved ones that all of the kept promises in the world couldn’t let me still pretend that I was a good and righteous person!

  Mercy, please tell me… which important part of myself should be revealed to have vanished next? Was I lying to myself about my own qualities all along? What more of my life and person would yet be ceded to these new emotions of mine?! What else did I stand to lose… and just what was to become of me… Oh, what was I to become, Lord?

  Even in this wretched undeath, was I to forever be haunted by the memory of whom I once was, and could never again be? These awful thoughts burdened me so much as Katherine’s form tightened around me in still tighter a hug, her tears far quieter now, and I was so sick of these ludicrous anxieties that I could have thrown them! I would have cast them far away if I could, oh but if only I could have, for they clung to me like thistles to clothes!

  Of all the things I’d never meant to be: I’d become unfaithful to my family and my very self! What other precious qualities would I abandon in this unlife: all that I had left to lose was my Love, my Faith, and my Practice, and for how much longer would I be able to keep those from the self-made menace that was my ego?! What a wretched thing it is to have changed so completely that I can no longer recognize myself!

  A lump formed in my throat as my teeth pressed against each other painfully, but I shook the forming tears from my eyes — for I would not allow these emotions to take my tears from me as well! — and I turned towards my dearly departed in my heart. With all of my being invested, I sent her as warm and sorrowful a feeling as I could, before I finally let it out with a low voice,

  “I’m so very sorry, Rianna. Go on then, I won’t…” I caught myself as I was about to make another promise, but I refused to do such a thing in the face of the one I’d just broken, and my teeth gnashed so bitterly against each other at the thought that my jaw ached! I swallowed my assurances back inside me with all the force I could yet muster, for I couldn’t be certain of anything anymore, and of myself least of all! A number of seconds of quiet followed in which even Katherine’s crying seemed to have been muted, but it was broken as I finally finished my apology,

  “No. I’m sorry my love. Please tell me?”

  Warmth came back to me now, from a source near to my heart, and I was affected with the thought that she wanted very much to hold my hand. An impossible dream now, but it was a pleasant thought nonetheless, and it did well for me to feel forgiven, despite how horribly I’d been acting lately. Arianna’s voice came out carefully all the same, as she’d been the one primarily affected by my spontaneous temper, and this… this more than anything made me feel such a misery for what I’d done, and I was viciously determined that I should not come to a rise again, promise or none!

  “Mira?” She spoke with an uncertain caution, as if waiting for me to simply explode at the moment she spoke, and when I didn’t: she continued, “Umm, so… do you remember the last time I tried to make an elemental?”

  My nose snorted so despite my attempts to restrain any emotion, for a laugh had forced its way out of me, and since my mouth was already closed taught: it only had one path to take. My chest heaved with it, and a tear came down my cheek, for it was such a drastic and total change in emotion that I could only let it fall as a mix of guilt and mirth. Did I remember, of course I remembered,

  “How could I forget, Rianna! You absolutely obliterated our house! You sent our roof to Heaven!”

  She attempted to sulk at my laughter, though I could tell that she was trying to hide the funny feeling beneath it — even Katherine who still held onto me was beginning to rouse from her wretched state as I erupted with laughter — and Arianna muttered her tired old excuse to me as she tried so not to smile,

  “It was an accident… how could I have known how a salamander would interact with your sulfuric acid?”

  I shook my head at hearing the same defense she’d always used, for even a decade after it had happened: she’d still never fully admitted to herself that it was her recklessness that’d caused it. She’d avoided to think of the lab’s detonation whenever it was possible, and she’d never once attempted to summon forth an elemental again, for the danger it could have represented had been a torment on her mind for years after. It was rather strange that she brought it up now, and while trying so hard not to smile, of all things… but perhaps this was the impact of my soul upon hers: that she should be able to laugh even at so potentially terrible an event?

  We’d sent Luca off to play with the other boys his age earlier in the day, and thankfully he was able to sleep over at Fredricksons until we’d rebuilt, for his room had been the one which had suffered the brunt of the damage, being immediately beside the lab. It was empty of someone so important to us, and it was almost totally destroyed: even the roof had collapsed in on it.

  What if things had been different? What if she’d hurt him in that accident? She’d done enough damage to me that she’d felt ashamed to be near me, but what if she’d actually killed me? These questions plagued my beloved then, and she would awake with nightmares of losing us even years later.

  It’d only been a few short years since Carmen had left us, and she’d never fully recovered from the sight of her corpse hanging from the ceiling tresses. She likely still blamed herself for it, somewhere deep inside, as was revealed in her attempt to bring her back, and she probably just wanted to apologize to Carmen for not having been good enough, or for doing whatever-it-was that she must’ve done wrong enough to make Carmen leave us in so haunting a way. She never could forgive herself for her ‘potential’ crimes, my Arianna… let alone the ones she could see and touch the reality of.

  She couldn’t truly face having left a scar upon my person, for to have admitted that she’d caused the accident by skipping a precaution: she would’ve had to have seen herself as being guilty of the ‘same crime’ she’d killed a man for, and she could not have endured the comparison! It so disgusted her for anyone to have hurt me, and all the more for her to have done it herself!

  This was a rather silly thought of hers, for I’d very well known the difference between an accident and a wicked interest in torture, but she never would accept my opinion on the matter, no matter how often I’d presented it to her. She’d always been possessed with the doubt that someone with senses so maligned as mine could have anything more than a distorted impression on the subject, as how could someone who derived pleasure from pain and the reverse as well possibly understand what was so terrible about what she’d done to me!

  But how could I not have understood, to see her so overcome with remorse? Sometimes she would ‘secretly’ kiss those blemishes that ran across my arms in apology, for she’d figured that she could disguise the gesture with her sweetness. She was wrong, of course, but I never minded the attentions she would give me, for they were magnificent even when she held onto that small note of sadness all the while.

  Although she was certainly technically at fault for the explosion: she was right to have called it an accident in my mind, for it truly was outside of her expectations, and she’d really never meant to hurt me. I’d never once blamed her for it in my heart, not even in the moment it’d happened, though given that I was rather overcome with the superheated acid burning through my skin and flesh at the time: it would have been extraordinarily unfair of me to have harboured such thoughts during that misadventure! 

  What an ordeal it was, and it’d caused quite the commotion in the village! It wasn’t every day that all of the houses around us felt such a report as that; I was later told by Amadeus that he’d believed the cause to have been a severe earthquake at first! I’d only just started to patch myself up after her emergency cleaning, when she went to address the shouting Orlovs who were demanding an explanation for the ruination of our house.

  Arianna was so terribly affected with the shock of having hurt me, that she was rather more amenable to their badgering than usual, and so as the shouting only escalated, my curiosity led me to take a peek out of the door to our room, despite being only dressed in my sodden underthings. I was then presented with the strange scene of my proud Arianna genuflecting before the assembling villagers with her head against the dirt, as if in apology for disrupting the peaceful day of those who’d been driven to investigate!

  Seeing her prostrate before others brought a jealousy and a pique untold upon me, and not even the elder Orlovs could continue exclaiming their irritation against my Arianna when the sight of my freshly burned flesh came into their eyes, and I was entirely without a care for my relative nakedness. I’d pulled her swiftly back to her feet in a rough manner, and I’d shortly taken her back to our room with such a passionate fervor that I’d slammed the door in the process — the door which was in plain sight of most of the arrayed villagers through the gaping holes in the walls of our house!

  Her pride was so low then that she could not have defied me, and her guilt was so high that she could not bring herself to resist even a single one of my actions! This combination of ‘rightful retribution’ and the ‘popular awareness’ of exactly what kind of compensation I was extracting from her was wonderfully addictive. If there were a single person present in the village that did not then know exactly which sin my Arianna and I shared in, then I couldn’t name them, and my goodness was that empowering!

  “You could have made it outside, Rianna.” I admonished her regardless, because although it didn’t matter in present times: it was a delightful distraction to have this useless old argument to ‘clash’ over, as it wouldn’t arouse any new feelings for us to suffer from, for we’d long made a game of old fights, and so I continued my criticism,

  “It wouldn’t have done such damage if it wasn’t contained, and none the sulfuric acid you’d helped to make would have been present whatsoever.”

  Arianna scoffed at my judgement of the situation, for she was surely the master of the arcane between the two of us, and since I’d been born amongst plebeians who’d reviled the arcane: that was surely indicative of our difference in aetherial knowledge, so I’d heard her reply to my reproach in her haughtiest and huffiest voice,

  “Certainly, I could have done as you suggest, commoner… but only if I wanted to risk the natural aether turning my precious little salamander into a fat and ugly gnome! The lab was the perfect place for a friendly salamander to come to be, as it admirably demonstrated by… setting it on fire.”

  Oh, so we were playing this game, and it seemed she was going for ‘the aristocrat hoodwinks the unlearned peasant through her trickery with words’, given that my typical response to such a gamble was currently denied to me, but she’d made such a fumble with her ending, and I was absolutely aiming to roast up my princess and eat her! I opened my mouth with excitement, but my wonderful opportunity for victory disappeared in that short moment as someone else spoke,

  “What are you-” a warbly sniff came from Katherine who still held me in her watery embrace, “talking about?”

  Despite the chill she’d inflicted upon my body, and the way that my hands moved through the water that made up her person to comfort her, it seemed that I’d quite forgotten about Katherine. How that was possible, given that she’d soaked through all of my clothing and still rippled across my skin: I did not know, but my answer came full of speed and honesty for her,

  “Rianna was just explaining to me that she was entirely responsible for the disaster in which she’d exploded our labora-” 

  Garbled speech exited my mouth and I was unable to continue to inform Katherine about the reality of the situation, for Arianna had dumped quite a lot of water onto my head, as if she didn’t even consider that I might’ve mistaken her behavior for the rusalka’s having finally decided to drown me… but I could feel the aetherial current which stretched away from us, and it was definitely my beloved who was responsible!

  When the torrent of water finally stopped pouring over me, I took in a great breath of air, and it was to my surprise that the only water which still stuck to me was natural. I nearly started looking around, but I’d learned my lesson well after the last few times, so I closed my eyes as calmly as I could, and I asked my dearly departed,

  “I know that I deserved that, Rianna… but is she dressed yet?”

  “So long as you’re aware,” she responded without a moment’s hesitation, and I felt a mischievous urge arise within her before she’d suppressed it and turned more serious, “and no, she hasn’t reformed yet, but like: we should tell her.”

  Perhaps I’d grown incapable of understanding my Arianna over the years, for I was rather lost as to exactly what it was I was supposed to be telling Katherine, and it seemed that my dearest could tell, because she’d shortly continued,

  “Mira, just think about it, I mean: really think about it… imagine the kind elemental I could make with this much aether! Powerful, right? Scarily so, even, but still as difficult to control as ever. But we can solve that, Mira! Right now, you and I could solve the core problem with elementals!”

  She’d… lost me. I felt that I should have known what she’d meant, but between learning that I might be capable of magic, that I’d been born with aether of an unknown variety, that spirits of the drowned don’t necessarily seek to drown a person, and that she’d resurrected Bart as some strange abomination which seemed to have retained his soul: I was having a great deal of trouble keeping up, let alone puzzling out something like this.

  Ants seemed to dance all around my heart as she considered how to explain this to me, since I wasn’t putting the pieces together at all. I felt a black force go out from inside of me, but I didn’t dare to turn and look, so I stood there and considered the matter until I at last happened upon what felt like the question she’d been waiting for me to ask her,

  “You want us to give an elemental a soul?”

  My beloved cheerily babbled expressively to the affirmative at such a speed that it was almost entirely eclipsed by what the reformed and surely reclothed rusalka said from behind me,

  “But I already have a soul, don't I? Really, what are you two talking about? Your pretty face is turning all kinds of scary, sweetheart.”

  Katherine probably wasn’t wrong, for I was quite horrified by the implications that stretched on ahead of me. At least I wasn’t shouting at my beloved, or even at all angry this time, but I was extremely concerned nonetheless, and I couldn’t be sure why Arianna was suggesting this path forward.

  People had tried before to force a vampiric spirit to merge with an elemental, for one was entirely constructed of their soul, and the other was entirely absent a soul, so it’d been reasoned that it would have worked to have relaxed the worst elements of both of them! Unfortunately for the theory: either the elemental consumed the soul to no positive effect aside from a growth in power, or the spirit was the more powerful, and the body simply vanished inside of the vampire.

  His Holiness himself had banned all research upon the soul, and it seemed that only the Ispanian Clans still dared to openly defy this verdict, as news would occasionally come from that part of the world that horrifically mighty vampire lords and elemental storms would arise. Even the ruler of the Deadlands was rumoured to have been one such disastrous affront to God, and the Maelstrom which rent both the skies above Gibraltar and the seas beneath it was such a terrible Sylph that it was reputed to have developed a religious following!

  Not that my beloved cared what His Holiness decreed, for being his niece had afforded her with a rather different view of him… not so much as Christ’s representative on this Earth, but as a man, and even as a friendly uncle in her family, for in her own words not long after I’d met her, ‘He poops same as everyone.’

  Still, it certainly remained that the last time my Arianna had gone against one of his decrees: His Holiness and the Cardinal had been the ones who sent her to death on our own doorstep! Although her ritual was a ‘success’ in that neither of us were nearly so dead as we’d previously been: we were also fused together in places, and she could not manifest a body of her own.

  I wouldn’t blame either of us for that, for this was far harder to trace to the Lord working in strange ways than it was to the work of men, and although I was rather loath to put the blame on His Holiness: who else was more deserving of it than him? Either he didn’t stop the Cardinal’s strange mission, or he’d enabled such an excursion out into the frontier! I felt my anger rising again, and I clamped down on it hard to answer Katherine,

  “Rianna believes that we can affect a significant change upon your form, which could potentially free you from the river,” I revealed to her as forthrightly as I could, for I was not one to obfuscate upon a person’s future, “however, the method she’s been suggesting to me is entirely untested, which is to say that it’s extremely unsafe, and that your ultimate demise is extraordinarily likely to result from it. But there are a few other options, do you have any interest in hearing them?”

  “Mira!” Arianna complained to me, as if she hadn’t known that I could never have allowed such a dangerous elective procedure without first informing the prospective patient of the risks entailed, as that would’ve run counter to the ethics I believed in. Regardless, she lamented my having done it, for it’d rather interfered with her scientific excitement, 

  “You can’t just present this life-changing — well, unlife-changing transformation in such a clinical way! Nobody would ever agree to it if you frame it like that!" Arianna was feeling rather cross with me, as if I'd done something unjustified by protecting Katherine, but I was actually incredibly relieved that the lovely rusalka wouldn't be tricked for curiosity's sake, even as my Arianna continued to berate me endlessly for it, "For a doctor, your bedside manner is just terrible, and I really don’t know why anyone agrees to be treated by you, and I don’t mean like back in the city-”

  “Yes!” Katherine surprised us both with a shout full of exuberance, and it interrupted my beloved’s rant quite entirely. Katherine’s illusory form wrapped around me again as she hugged me from behind with a strength like the tide, and her voice came clamouring over itself like the rushing water of a deluge, 

“Choice-I have choices?! What are my choi-You’re seriously my fairy godmother right n-I’d totally kiss you if you weren’t marri-well… you’re unmarried, but you’re still taken. Don’t worry, beautiful: I’ll help you out with that soo-Am I going to evolve? Will it hurt?”

  My eyes spun as I was squeezed by a liquid form which belied Katherine's solid grip around me, and I grew awfully short of breath. I didn’t know why she felt that it was necessary to speak such gibberish at such a speed right next to my ear, but I would have rather preferred she hadn’t! Ultimately, she responded to my desperate attempts with my hands to peaceably suggest that I’d have appreciated it if she were ever so slightly gentler with me, and I was released!

  I took in a few deep breaths of air, and I had to think to myself that it was no wonder rusalka were believed to be such drowning risks: Katherine didn’t even have to cover my mouth to have almost completely taken my ability to breathe from me, and in an entirely friendly setting! Still, my breath came back to me, and no small pondering on the ultimate fate of the young men other rusalka might’ve absconded with could prevent me from answering Katherine’s core question,

  “The first option I see is vampirism.” I took air in again, for she’d really done a number on me with that hug, and I set myself in a serious manner as I elucidated, “You’re most of the way there already, actually, Katherine. You’re an unclea, ah… you’re a spirit that’s been disconnected from your original body. All that remains is to conjure up a suitable human corpse, and you should be nearly able to wholly integrate with it regardless of our assistance.”

  Arianna’s defeatist attitude clearly hadn’t entirely worn off despite Katherine’s sustained interest in reincarnation, for my dearly departed seemed particularly unenthused by this ‘safe’ and ‘reasonable’ option I’d prescribed, though she shortly revealed to me why,

  “She’d be a shtriga if she did that, Mira. Seriously, don’t let her try to take a corpse. There’s a lot of important differences, you see, between unclean spirits of nature and vampires: the former could never store the power of life in the first place, and so if they take a body: they’re always perilously close to falling apart. Their bite is like a poison for the living, and every feeding kills.”

  Naturally, I’d never heard of this horrible creature, of these so-called shtriga, so I had to ask my Arianna, “Where did you learn that from, honey?”

  Katherine started to speak to me, as if she’d thought that I’d been speaking to her, but I held up a finger for her to be silent, and she conveniently opted to stop talking for me, as Arianna explained exactly where she’d heard it from in her usually overly-informative manner,

  “Clan Velez of Ispania found in December of 2346 that when a group of naiads, that’s nymphs Mira, were forced into the bodies of the deceased: they retained all the negative elements vampires experience with holding their bodies together, but they didn’t show any massings of power… which meant that they needed to change out corpses frequently, or they had to feed more often. It was… it was really bad, Mira.”

  That was putting it rather lightly, I thought, for the heathen Ispanians probably tested the effects of both possibilities extensively, and likely ended the experiments by butchering a few dozen slaves in a celebration of ceremonial blood sacrifice! I turned to Katherine with a grim feeling, and I delivered to her the terrible news,

  “Actually, you can’t become a vampire, so that really reduces the options to ‘Rianna’s really sketchy idea’ and ‘wait for us to come up with a different solution.’ Any other solutions coming to you, Rianna?”

  My beloved’s thinking ants didn’t even have to skitter once around my heart before she’d exclaimed an ‘interesting’ possibility to me, “Phylactery! Mira, we could make her a lich, couldn’t we? Yeah, that’d work, perfectly safe things aren’t they, liches.”

  This pretend ‘discovery’ of hers didn’t fool me for a second, for I’d long guessed which method she’d planned to use: she almost certainly wanted to exploit our new ability to seamlessly join aetherial bodies together to combine the rusalka with an elemental of water. But what if something had gone wrong in the process? Surely the ‘addition’ of a phylactery to her original idea would have assuaged my concerns regarding Katherine’s safety.

  Arianna knew better than to leave things ‘to chance’, as even with all of her precautions for us: she’d still ended up failing in many ways, though through no fault of her own whatsoever! What better way to protect Katherine’s lonesome soul than to bind her to a phylactery prior to the attempt? What better way to stabilize an awaiting undine than to typify regulations into something it could not affect? 

  A phylactery was a good idea by itself when it came to staving off death, and the obvious benefits it provided for Arianna’s desired experiment were merely coincidental, and would have had absolutely no bearing whatsoever on whether or not I might’ve agreed to continue once we’d already gone so far as to make a reliquary!

  Sometimes I had to wonder if my Arianna had forgotten that she’d spent the last fifteen years excitedly babbling more to me about phylacteries than I’d ever wanted to know. But then, she did successfully sneak my own resurrection into mine from the start without having revealed it to me, and although it didn’t work quite as she’d intended: I had been ‘saved’.

  For her own interests, she was absolutely right to have suggested it, as there was no better solution for ‘bridging the gap that separated the essences of spirit and matter without damaging either the soul or the body in the integration process’ than to put a mass of aether between them. It would act very much like a lubricant or cushion might have done for preventing damage from scraping or crashing together at speed!

  To her credit, this wasn’t a necessarily terrible idea, and it actually intrigued me considerably. The question then, was whether it fascinated me enough that I should feign ignorance in going along with it, or if I should instead tell Katherine who was being very much left in the dark on this matter?

  As if there was ever any doubt as to which I would choose, and so I finally presented her with the only two options she really had for escaping this river short of following it out to sea,

  “Katherine, would you rather be an ordinary lich, or an elemental with a soul crystal at its core?”