Yenna didn’t see Fate leave. Perhaps it wasn’t strictly correct to say that they were there in the first place—simply a useful extension placed to facilitate communication. But all the same they were gone. Yenna didn’t know how she knew, but she could feel that Fate was still out there. Relieved of her eternal duty, and finally able to sit back and enjoy the flow of history as an observer instead of its director.

The rainbow light from her instrument consumed everything. The book had been reduced to a pile of unbound and blank sheets of ancient parchment, the power of Yenna’s strike having reduced the black metal to nothing. Then went the table and all the things on it, the floor, the walls, the ceiling, the air itself. Yenna’s vision swam with multicoloured light, her arms flailing in surprise at the sudden sensation of falling.

“Yenna! Yenna, be still!”

A gruff, urgent voice, somewhat strained with emotion, accompanied a tight squeeze around Yenna’s body. The witch felt the warmth of her bare skin pressing against the furnace heat of Narasanha’s body, the guard’s four arms clasping her close in a cradled position. Yenna blushed with surprise—in all the fuss, she had forgotten how tattered her own robes were, and how little Narasanha still wore. But, the ridiculous voice of panic in the back of her mind was quashed by the resounding trumpets of victory. Yenna reached up and threw her arms around Narasanha’s neck, embracing her tightly.

After a brief period of relaying what had happened, Yenna listened intently to the other side of the tale. Lumale, Tirk and Narasanha had tried their best to slow or hinder the Ledger, until Yenna pulled her desperate gambit by slashing the black book. The three of them had a shared gap in their memory immediately after, their recollection picking up with the group in different positions and the Ledger crumbling to pieces.

“I don’t know what you did, mage, but it worked.” Lumale’s high, sing-song voice sounded especially carefree in the moment. “The Ledger looked like it had chosen that very moment to let time catch up on it—the metal became dust, and the energy powering it faded to nothing.”

“Then we were left with you, unconscious.” 

Narasanha was still cradling Yenna, almost unwilling to let her go. Lumale seemed less attached.

“I thought your soul had gone. A silly stunt, mage.”

“I knew you were still in there. I could feel it.”

Yenna looked up and met Narasanha’s eyes, her piercing gaze staring deep into her. For a moment the guard’s face seemed so much more beautiful than normal, despite all the injuries, the battering and bruising. The witch raised herself up, bringing herself close and–

“Ahem.”

Lumale snapped them to attention, leaving Yenna and Narasanha blushing madly. The guard looked off to the side, and Yenna looked in the opposite direction to find Tirk. The little yolm boy was staring at her with wide-eyed awe, though he hadn’t said a word so far. It took a moment for Yenna to realise what was off about the boy—his normally pitch-black eyes had turned back to something more ordinary. Tirk’s eyes were a glittering blue, and he stared as though seeing the world for the first time.

It took several more minutes for the group of them to sort themselves out. Yenna conjured up simple sheets of cloth to temporarily cover herself and Narasanha, and Lumale provided a wave of healing magic to keep the pair of them going until they could seek proper medical attention. It tingled and burned like electricity as it coursed over Yenna’s body, but she could feel her aches subside. Narasanha’s bruised-shut eye reopened, and her wounds closed—though the pair still looked like they had lost a fistfight with a stone wall.

“I could do more,” she explained, “But I don’t feel like it. My apprentice shall simply have to learn to live with her mistakes. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I left something in the oven.”

With a wave of her hand, Lumale conjured up the doorway back to her home.

“W-Wait! Master Lumale.”

The silupker witch stopped and turned her head, impatiently clicking an earthenware hoof against the floor.

“Speak quickly. I’m already regretting coming to help—it’s thoroughly out of sorts for me. I’ve a reputation to uphold, you know!”

“I wanted to say thank you.” Yenna gave a small bow. “I don’t think I could have made it without you. Without your teachings, I would still be a scared mage—unable to look beyond what I considered possible and impossible. Things would have ended very differently without you.”

Lumale stared for a moment. Her blank face was unreadable, her body held perfectly still. After a long pause, the witch replied.

“Thank me by continuing your studies—you’ve still yet to master the colours betwixt, for all that you’ve done. Also, don’t forget that thing on your way out.”

The silupker pointed behind Yenna, and she turned to see the warrior Nadhan—the imposing six-armed sister of Narasanha, still trapped in the ground. By the time Yenna looked back, Lumale had left and her door winked out of existence. Yenna gave a sigh and scratched the back of her head—cleaning up at the end of the day was always the most tedious part.

“We cannot release her. I will strike her down.”

Narasanha took a step towards Nadhan, though Yenna whirled around in front of her.

“Whatever she’s done, we can’t just execute her! If we have to leave her here until we have help, then so be it, but I won’t allow you to kill her.”

For a dreadful moment Yenna thought the bodyguard was going to push her aside and do the deed anyway. Narasanha’s muscles tensed as though to leap, and the witch began to spool up a magic circle to stop her. Then the moment passed, and all the tension flowed out of Narasanha like water. She straightened up and nodded, her eyes never leaving Nadhan for a moment.

“Fine. One day I shall tell you of her crimes. For now…” Narasanha grit her teeth, and forcibly turned her gaze towards Yenna. “I will trust your judgement.”

—

The three of them made the long trek back out of the chamber. All that remained there was Nadhan, the countless corpses of the ghouls, and Mulvari’s lifeless body—the black books were gone, and the Ledger along with them. Yenna let Tirk ride on her back. The boy hadn’t spoken a word, not on his own or in response to anything Yenna had said. The witch suspected that it would take some time for him to process everything that had happened, and that he would need the help of a mentor—Yenna hoped she had what it took to help him.

Strangely, the journey back up felt a lot quicker than the journey down, a fact Yenna attributed more to her mood than actual distance. Though she was exhausted inside and out, the witch was walking alongside her allies instead of her enemies, heading victoriously unto peace instead of conflict. So, when their small group stepped out of the portal and came face-to-face with another friendly band stepping inside at the same moment, Yenna quietly wondered if Fate hadn’t performed one last coincidence for them.

The stone doors Yenna had observed on her way down into the portal had burst open, with exactly the people she had wished to see the first time. Captain Eone stood resplendent in a polished breastplate, her sword drawn at the head of a squad of similarly armed and armoured yolm women. They had been in the process of bursting in, Eone’s foot falling to the floor from the motion of kicking in the heavy stone doors, the captain’s face rising in mirrored astonishment as she saw the very people she came to rescue.

“Narasanha! Yenna! Tirk, too! Are you safe?”

Her squad fanned out immediately, standing by doors and laying eyes on every corner of the room. When Yenna gave a nod, the captain nodded back—when Narasanha nodded, Eone put away her sword.

“Where’s Jiin? Valkh?”

“They…!” Yenna squeaked in surprise. She hadn’t forgotten her friends’ plight—infected with the strange madness that came from staring at the words of the black book, or strapped to Mulvari’s machine—but in her excitement to be free and her joy at seeing Eone, she had nearly neglected a friend. Her mind had been so laser-focused on escape that she had put them out of her mind. A sense of guilt crept up on the witch, leaving her unable to reply. Narasanha did so instead.

“They caged Valkh, and Jiin is below. They should be fine.”

A second squad of Deepstar soldiers came through the door, and the pair of squads coordinated on sweeping through the other rooms. As soon as she was able to calm herself, Yenna filled Eone in on what had happened. The captain’s worried glances turned quickly into a decidedly cheeky grin as she listened eagerly.

“Mage, if this was anyone else telling me, I’d bet they were down a few leaves on liquor. Ha! Something to write in that diary of yours, then? Or, forget that—something for the news sheets!”

The captain looked over her shoulder and shouted to the leader of the other squad to bring up the rear once they were done checking for any leftover surprises, and Eone’s questions turned to more practical ones.

“Have they left traps? Guards? How many are imprisoned here? Are there other ways in and out?”

Yenna scrambled to answer them all, though the answer to one felt odd to her. There hadn’t been guards, not really—it had been Mulvari, Nadhan, the Ledger and the ghouls, the latter group having fallen without whatever dark forces kept them animated. The only other paths Yenna could think of that took one in and out of here was the temporary portal the Ledger had made, and–

“Down below! There were ghouls coming in from other places.” Yenna turned to Eone in a panic. “Given that it seems to be a sub-planar destination, the portals could possibly circumvent the Great Wall’s limitations on travel—a hugely costly trip, but it could mean that those portals could lead elsewhere!”

Eone looked thoughtful, and turned back to her squad-mates.

“Guard the entrance to that portal—don’t let anything in or out! We’ll investigate later. Jini, head out and bring in the rest of the back-up to help. The Shrine Authority is already going to be pissed off, let them blame me for the consequences.”

“Ma’am!” A short, spiral-horned yolm woman gave a small bow of the head and ran out.

“Shrine Authority…?” Yenna felt ridiculous worrying about some city council in the face of what was going on, but she had to know.

“Ah. S’pose you didn’t see where we are, hey? We’re in the Shrines District—Milahan. All the old and new temples, the ones they can’t knock down without pissing off the gods and what-not. This little hidey-hole was thought to be an old mausoleum under a statue of one of the old gods of Milur. We’re, uh, trampling sacred ground with the boots of soldiers.”

It was Eone’s turn to look a bit sheepish, though she laughed it off.

“I’m sure your god can forgive us,” Narasanha rumbled, “We are cleansing their holy grounds of vermin.”

“Yes, I suspect old Mother Winter would raise her mug of soup to us, but the Authority is likely to fine House Deepstar. Now, prisoners?”

They moved ahead, into the room with the cages. Without being hurried through, Yenna was finally able to get a sense for the scale of the prisoners here. It seemed to her more of a set of holding cells than anything else, people waiting to be turned into one of the countless ghouls that were down below. The room was now filled with a dreadful cacophony of distressed voices, animal yelps and cries for help—not the addled murmuring of those consigned to mental oblivion by the Word.

“Everyone, hear me now!”

Eone’s voice boomed, loud and commanding—most of the voices stopped, but the whines of animal distress and the panic of claustrophobic prisoners still rattled against her.

“I am Eone of House Deepstar! The finest soldiers of Milur have come to your aid! Sit tight, and you will be shortly freed!”

Much of the panic in the air quieted down, devolving to quivering thanks and shuddering tears. As Yenna and company stepped in, several more people followed them in to assist—more yolm, some in priestly vestment and others in doctor’s garb, as well as a small squad of mereu. Yenna even recognised some of them, attendees and guards stationed at Highshine in the brief time she was there.

Among the flight of miniscule messengers was Mysilia, though the determined woman seemed too fixed on her duties to stop and say hello. Her small squad carried wavy metal rods, which Yenna quickly realised were lockpicks—under Mysilia’s command, the set to attacking the heavy locks that held the prisoners with practised ease.

Yenna cast her gaze across the yolm, and recognised a familiar face.

“Mayi!”

The doctor’s professional expression had been mired in a dark cloud of worry, lines of stress running across her soft face. At Yenna’s voice Mayi brightened with a hint of hope, looking first at and then immediately around the kesh. Her expression soured once again, fraught with intense worry.

“Where is she?”

Mayi’s voice was shaking, a thin veil of professionalism keeping her in check. Yenna didn’t need to ask who ‘she’ was.

“Jiin’s downstairs. She’s not injured, but…”

Yenna pointed, and Mayi barely waited—tearing past them, the doctor sprinted for the staircase despite the shouting of a soldier asking her to wait.

“Go with her.” Narasanha pressed a hand on Yenna’s back. “From what you told me, they may need you down there. I will help up here.”

With a nod, Yenna trotted after Mayi. A soldier helped Yenna with the stairs, and the witch quietly resolved to make some sort of stair-climbing spell for situations such as these. She caught up with the doctor in the corridor, as Mayi realised there was more than one direction to go in.

“Door at the end, doctor.” Yenna trotted to keep up. “She’ll be fine, I’m sure of it. Just… there was some sedative gas and… and Demvya…?”

Demvya! Yenna had actually forgotten, and felt all the more guilty for it. The spirit had jumped back into the strange tube through Jiin for reasons unknown. The witch hurried herself up, nearly galloping down the hall alongside Mayi to see if both of her friends were okay.

As it turned out, their haste was all for nothing.

“Hiya– uh?”

Jiin, still as naked as before, had been waiting to one side of the doorway to ambush whoever came through with a two-handed strike. Her slightly wobbly swing was terminated in a maneuver that nearly threw the stonecarver off her feet as she realised who had stepped through. Mayi didn’t hesitate, and threw her arms around her love. Jiin hugged her back and looked over Mayi’s shoulder at Yenna, bewildered.

“Ye’re alive! Unless I’m halluc’natin’ again.” Jiin blinked with wide eyes, one of her hands instinctively stroking Mayi’s head—the doctor could do little more than cry in her arms.

“I’m very real… and would really like to not be in this room. Everything’s safe out there. Is Demvya with you?”

Jiin gave another big grin, and shook her head. 

“Nope. She said she was waitin’ fer you. Or maybe she wanted us to plow the fields or somethin’. S’kinda hard to understand her from in there.”

She gestured back towards the green glass tube. There was a soft golden glow deep within, piercing through murky clouds of ichorous green goop like a light in the depths of the ocean. Yenna approached, and could feel magic from deep within—Demvya’s magic.

“Demvya? You were waiting—am I meant to free you?”

A sensation similar to a cool breeze on a warm summer’s day washed over Yenna with the scent of fields at harvest-time—a smell that might have been nostalgic if the witch had ever spent much time in the fields herself. A movement within the liquid drew Yenna’s gaze closer.

Thud. “Ack!”

A tiny hand smacked against the inside of the glass, dark skin visible in the gloom only by the threadwork of shimmering golden strands covering it. It was quickly joined by another hand and a face, floating strands of white hair forming a halo around her smiling gaze. The woman inside was as large as a mereu, yet her appearance lent itself to the undeniable fact that it was Demvya, the spirit herself given form. Demvya silently mouthed something at Yenna, and pointed to the floor.

Yenna looked down to the inscriptions that covered the room, the spirit’s meaning dawning on her.

“Register command: open tube…?”

The symbols lit up for a moment at the activation phrase, but quickly fizzled out. Yenna tried a few more variations, murmuring nonsense at the walls as Demvya gave encouragement in the form of inscrutable yet pleasant sensations. The smell of warm bread, the feeling of a spring rain, the sound of leaves through fields of wheat, the taste of vegetable soup—it was a little distracting, but Yenna couldn’t fault the spirit’s enthusiasm. After a few more tries, the witch hit upon the correct verbiage and the glass tube drained its liquid away before allowing half of it to hinge open.

Now visible, Demvya’s solid form reminded Yenna even more of a mereu. She hovered gently in midair on a set of wings that the witch momentarily mistook for having golden feathers—closer inspection revealed that each ‘feather’ was an autumnal leaf, her wing-flaps making a quiet rustling noise with each beat. Demvya gestured for Yenna to hold out her hand, and landed softly upon it when she did so.

“We thank thee for thy help. I worried that we would never leave that dreaded chamber.”

“... We? Demvya, what are you right now?”

“We are yet to discern a good answer. Yea, this vessel may have been all but empty when I arrived, but now I am we, and we are saved by thee.”

Yenna frowned. “That answers very little. Why did you leave before?”

“This life was destined for death’s embrace without the keen hand of a goddess of growth. I could not leave it to wither and die, even if it was made for vilest purpose—now we are one, and we may accompany thee.”

Demvya turned her head to where Mayi was frantically inspecting Jiin for injuries and illness. The doctor looked to be nearly beside herself, but Jiin was in high spirits, laughing freely and reassuring Mayi.

“Besides, we think it a vital measure of growth for yon girl to mature into a fine woman if she standeth on her own feet. Dost thou not agree?”

Yenna and Demvya watched and saw the confidence in Jiin’s bearing—her open love and free laughter soothing Mayi’s tattered nerves, bringing joy to the doctor’s stressed soul. It wasn’t going to solve every problem of Jiin’s to be free of Demvya’s presence, but it felt a step in the right direction.

—

It took about an hour all up for the buzzing excitement of rescue to die down. Everyone in cages had been released and checked over with both magic and medicine. Medically, the worst of it was malnutrition and untreated existing illnesses, though all of the people there had larger problems ahead of them—the trauma of their abduction was not entirely abated by their freedom, for many were far from home. Eone left them in the care of the House doctors, to be returned to where they needed to be. 

The animals and beasts were also taken to be treated and returned to the wild, or kept safe where that wasn’t possible—Yenna insisted that even the magical beasts, creatures that were normally considered too dangerous to let wander, were shown kindness and care. The vision of another Yenna, the young girl with the army of beasts she had tamed and made her friends, still lingered at the back of her mind.

However, it was not all good news. By the time the soldiers got around to investigating the portal into the strange space in which Yenna had confronted the Ledger, it seemed that it had begun to collapse. The squad sent ahead to investigate were forced to make a hasty retreat before they could reach the end of the ramp as the dimension began to close up in front of them. Yenna’s heart sank—it meant Nadhan was trapped down there.

“The collapse means that space is lost, untethered from our reality,” Yenna explained. “It will be absorbed and destroyed… along with everything in it. Damn it!”

“Do not be so sure that Nadhan is dead, Yenna.” 

Narasanha’s tone insisted she meant it as a threat, but the witch took it as subtle reassurance—if Nadhan was alive, it meant that Yenna hadn’t caused her death.

“But, no one could survive a dimensional collapse. That’s just not possible.”

“Nadhan would slap the gods across the face just to live another moment. She is alive, of that I am certain. The evil to which she is beholden could not perish by mere accident.”

Narasanha refused to elaborate, though her tone brooked no argument. With little more to do, the whole group began their procession back through the streets of Milur to return to Highshine. Tirk still had not spoken a single word the entire time, though he held Demvya on his lap in the same fashion one would hold a plush toy for comfort.

—

A week passed. A week of decompression, of quiet contemplation and small distractions from witnessed horrors and grand implications.

Yenna spent that week writing. They had found Yenna’s bag and belongings tucked away in a corner of a makeshift study and bedroom in the cult lair, and the witch had been more than eager to record every event in as fine detail as she could into her little journal. Still, she kept her promise—the past promise to a future self that ensured her victory over the Ledger. An entire section of silence, of vague detail that skipped over the specifics of battle. Yenna wrote only of the end result, feeling a certain closure at being on the other side of that victorious plan. Despite her overwhelming urge to experiment, to discover by what mechanics of time this event allowed her to influence past actions, Yenna left those questions unanswered. With the black book destroyed, was it even possible for her current writing to influence those events? The witch thought it best to be safe instead of sorry.

Mayi and Jiin were inseparable during that week, for what little Yenna saw of them. In brief conversations, over hasty meals or in chance meetings in the hallways of Highshine, she learned that the pair were helping the former prisoners of the cult with the mental impact of their imprisonment—Mayi from her position as a medical professional, and Jiin as a prisoner herself.

Similarly bonded were Tirk and Demvya. While the boy still refused to speak, he was still bright and smiling, playing happily with the harvest spirit. Sometimes, when Yenna caught the pair of them in the belief that they were alone, the witch caught Tirk whispering quietly into the spirit’s ear. Yenna held high hopes that Tirk would be okay, though she wondered how he would fare in a world beyond Fate’s design—as an angel made as Fate’s envoy, what did it mean for him for Fate to not exist?

Then, there was Eone. The captain, along with Muut and Mysilia, busied themselves with various affairs around Highshine. Yet, as the week went on, the tall and boisterous woman grew increasingly restless. She avoided her mother and other noble guests, she hurried constantly from place to place, and she rarely stopped to rest.

“She’s always like this,” Mysilia had explained to Yenna in a rare conversation. “Right before finding some ridiculous new adventure to go on. Would that I could convince her to just sit still for a moment!”

The pair of them had just happened to be at the same place at the same time—the witch had found a nice, somewhat secluded balcony at which to take her lunch and look over the city, only to discover it was something of a regular haunt for the haughty mereu.

“Then why doesn’t she go?” Yenna had asked the question with an oblivious innocence, but realised how it sounded as soon as the words left her lips. “N-Not that she isn’t doing anything important here.”

Mysilia rolled her eyes. “She’s waiting for you, mage. Jiin and Mayi will be right at home back on the road, in the comfort of their routine. Tirk too, I suspect. Narasanha would follow my lady to the ends of the world even if you lopped off her legs. She cares about you too much to leave you behind. And…” 

Mysilia trailed off with a huff.

“And…?”

“And so do I, damn you!” The mereu put her hands on her hips and looked away. “So, recover your strength already. Then, my lady will stop her endless pacing—it is quite irritating.”

With another huff, the tiny woman fluttered away with a ruffle of her fine dress, leaving behind a rather bemused Yenna and half of her lunch.

—

Despite Mysilia’s insistence on her haste, it still took Yenna another two weeks to truly consider herself recovered. The witch threw herself into research, tore through books in the Highshine library by the dozen, and even coaxed Valkh back into her own lab. 

Together they looked into Yenna’s own powers, and studied the key differences between the emphatic power of witchcraft that surged from her soul and the formalised browbeating of natural laws that constituted magecraft. All of these notes the mage compiled into a series of letters to old professors back in the Aulprean capital, letters she kept until she was ready to deliver them herself.

It wasn’t until the pair of them were sitting in the glow of a peaceful afternoon, during a break from strenuous study of the difference between Stasis and elemental Ice, that Yenna felt it—the twinge of desire to move on.

“I can’t stay here forever,” Yenna had said unprompted.

“What do you mean?” Valkh sipped a warm drink, recovering from the chill of the partially frozen lab.

“I mean, I could—but all the books in the library and all the tools in the research chamber just can’t compare to all the things I learned out there. Here in Highshine, I’m not finding anything new—just unpacking the things I found. We’re starting to run out of things, and I’ve just got this feeling. I want to head out again.”

“Well, that makes this a bit easier.”

Eone’s voice made both Yenna and Valkh jump in surprise. The captain had poked her head around the corner, holding an opened envelope in her hand. The witch looked at it, wide-eyed and burning with curiosity.

“Captain! Care to sit for a moment?”

“Hm, don’t quite have the time for it. Just came to show you this.”

Yenna raised an eyebrow. “And that is…?”

“A letter from an old friend, asking for a spot of help. Say, Yenna, how would you like to come on a proper expedition? Consider it my apology for how the last one ended. A proper journey, no secret destinations.”

The witch hopped to her feet, heart pounding in her chest. A broad smile crept up onto her face, excitement coursing through her limbs.

“Of course! When do we leave?”