#soulmage

The warlord leans back, silhouetted against the sky. The moon is brighter, barely, than the night’s new backdrop: an even, pale haze, as if the stolen stars were smeared across the heavens.

“Are the planets gone, too?”

“No. I mean, we don’t think the stars are gone, just… occluded. But the planets just aren’t visible because they’re being outshone.”

The younger one, the astronomer, the child, she holds out a lens filled with a thin layer of her own blood. It darkens, brightens, as she links with the parts of her inside it, until it is a filter that can cut through the newly noisy sky.

“Has the sphere finished moving, at least?” The larger figure asks.

The child shakes her head. “We don’t understand how it’s constructed, but it hasn’t stopped vibrating since it sealed off the solar system.”

“Mm.” The warlord sets a hand on the telescope. “Talk to me.”

The child sits back, glaring up at the sky. “What about? We lost. The moment we—no, the moment anyone answered that signal, we lost. They sealed us away from the rest of the universe overnight. We can’t fight this. We can’t even reach the sphere they built.”

“But it tells us something.” The warlord looks at the sky, brightening and dimming in uneven pulses. “The gods want us penned in. They want us separated from the rest of the cosmos. That means there’s something out there that they fear.”

Child and warlord alike gaze at the moon, at the pearlescent space beyond it, sunlight reflected off a prison that swallowed the world. 

“I don’t think that makes me feel any better,” the child finally says.

“No,” the warlord replies. “But perhaps we’re even less alone than we thought.”

But when the red haze faded and she found nothing had changed, when the fires sputtered out, leaving nothing but coals, the Witch of Exhaustion remained standing.

"Ha. When's the last time that's happened?" Sansen muttered to himself, chuckling. His left eye was glowing with futuresight once more; whatever he was seeing, it wasn't the same as everyone else in the room. 

The remaining four of us glanced at each other uneasily, wondering who would speak first, before I said, "At the very least, until there's nothing trying to kill or mutilate us."

"I offer you this truth," Lucet suddenly spoke up. "We come as refugees from the Silent Peaks, where kidnapped soldiers are mind-wiped back into their childhood and our emotions were fuel cells for weapons of war. Given our past experiences, you can understand why we'd be a tad tetchy about some uppity witch throwing mind magic around."

Zhytln's lips pressed together, but she said nothing. Meloai asked our question—perhaps not the question I would have asked, but an important one nonetheless if there was to be any possibility of peace with Zhytln.

"This I ask of you: why are you spreading living memories across Knwharfhelm?"

"Great amounts of human intelligence go untapped every night, when the citizens of Knwharfhelm sleep and waste their computing power on creating dreams that they will neither remember nor use. In order to solve several complex problems in the physical sciences, I have divided up the workload among every citizen in Knwharfhelm and set their subconscious minds to finding solutions while they sleep."

Even Sansen was staring at her in bafflement by the time she was done. Whether through soulsight or plain old common sense, she seemed to tell we were baffled, because she added, "I offer you this truth: if you wish to verify this fact, you may ask any citizen of Knwharfhelm what they dream of, or monitor their soulspaces while they sleep. Unless they are one of the few that sheer chance has not allowed me to modify, your findings will corroborate my story."

Well, fuck. I wasn't sure if that was better or worse or just plain fundamentally different from the abominations that the Silent Peaks had been institutionalizing as a part of their war machine. 

"This I ask of you," Zhytln continued. "What can I do to prove to you that I am unlike the witches in the Silent Peaks who you have encountered in the past?"

Before I could formulate a response, Lucet said, "Nothing. Your 'modifications' to people's minds were rewriting our memories to make us think we were happy when we really, really weren't. I don't care what 'complex problems' you're solving. You can't justify that."

"I offer you this truth," Jiaola suddenly added. "I remember Knwharfhelm before you arrived. And I talked to the latest generation of Knwharfhelm's children who are hated and feared for being who they are. Nothing has changed. Attempting to trick people into joy when they could get disowned or killed or worse at any moment is cruel at best and sadistic at worst."

Neither her expression nor her inscrutable, screaming soul gave any indication that Zhytln was anything but perfectly calm in the face of Lucet and Jiaola's accusations. 

"This I ask of you," Meloai said. "Why do your living memories induce happiness in their hosts? What relation does that have to your stated goal of... computing?"

Her answer was swift—perhaps she'd been expecting that question. "My actions are not common knowledge, but are not kept secret either. People are less likely to attempt to destroy or alter the network of living memories if doing so would remove a source of happiness for them."

I could see where she was coming from, but unfortunately she'd happened to run into the five worst people in the world for that to work on. Perhaps she caught on to how Lucet scowled and I flinched, because she changed tactics.

"I offer you this truth," Zhytln said. "I know your memories of your time at the Silent Peaks weigh on you. There is nobody in this city who is more well-equipped to handle such traumas than me. This I ask of you: do you have any memories you would rather forget?"

And oh, there were so many. Shrinking into the corner while a witch of frost shattered our front door like cheap glass. The corpse of one of the goblins who'd taken me in when I was lost, thrown on a dissection table by Aimes as an educational prop. The blind bloodlust of my classmates as they cheered on our battlechoirs as they massacred hundreds.

"Never," Lucet snapped.

The insane, dripping grin of the eldritch thing my clasmate had become. The last moments of uncountable soldiers in a frozen hellscape battleground, clinging to my soul like so many barnacles. The squelch and splash of it when I crushed Iola's flesh beneath my boot.

"I offer you this truth: none of us are willing to feed you our memories for whatever ultimate goal you have planned," Meloai said. 

The sickly wash of alien magics as Iola's death curse doomed us all. The hopeless, bleak smile of Sansen as he beheld a future in which his body failed organ by organ, time and time again. The looming blade of the knowledge that there was every chance I would meet the same fate.

My head snapped up, and I met Zhytln's eyes. Sansen's lips quirked in a bittersweet smile.

"This I ask of you," I said. "Your claim to be able to remove memories. What is the cost?"

Lucet whirled and Meloai stiffened, and I couldn't meet their gaze without the glass in my soul shattering.

"I charge nothing more than the memories themselves," Zhytln informed me.

It wouldn't be the first devil's deal I'd taken. It wouldn't even be the worst.

"That's enough," Lucet snarled. "Get out of here, Zhytln."

The woman nodded in acknowledgement, turning her back on us and leaving without a fight.

Why would she?

She already had what she needed.

A.N.

Soulmage is a serial written in response to writing prompts. Check out the rest below!

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About half an hour passed of the entity scrabbling around the plains I'd manifested into a prison before, abruptly, it... stopped. I sat up from where I was lying on the hill, confused, and I could have sworn the entity scowled at me.

Then it vanished, as if it had never been there.

I swore, getting to my feet, and called forth my magic, passion blazing in one hand, hope over my left eye. I still couldn't manage to process the dizzying variety of futures that Sansen could at once, but a cursory scan into my future revealed no obvious threats—just me, standing on the same hill. Wait, no, my future self was looking at something behind him—

I turned around, but nothing was there. It took me a heart-pounding to realize that I'd just gotten startled by my own future self. Which had probably caused what was now my past self to have been startled in the first place. Great, I'd inadvertently caused a time loop. Still, that didn't tell me where that slippery little soulspace entity had gone off to. 

I considered dismissing the Redlands memory, wondered if the soulspace entity had turned invisible to trick me into removing the memory, then decided that there was a simple way to find out: I dropped a memory of the Silent Peaks on top of my memory of the Redlands. Something in my mind strained as the two memories slammed into each other, but when the oddly laminar dust settled, there were no telltale signs of a fleeing soulspace entity. Cautiously, I stopped concentrating on both memories, letting them vanish.

They vanished, as if they had never been there. In exactly the same way as the soulspace entity.

...Huh. I wasn't quite sure what to make of that. I spent the next couple hours rifling through my memories and thinking un-hopeful thoughts, but nothing seemed out of place. I mean, it was always theoretically possible that the soulspace entity had wormed so deep into my mind that I couldn't distinguish its manipulations from reality, but if that was the case I was fucked anyway and might as well give up.

So when Lucet and Meloai crested the rolling hills of the Crystal Coast, they found me lying on my back and watching the sunset, trying to shake off the lingering anxiety I had about where the hell that slippery little soulspace entity had squirreled off to.

They noticed my anxiety, of course. They had more attunements than I could count at this point; if they had their soulsight open even a crack, they'd see the fear bleeding from my soul from a mile away. I heard Lucet's urgent footsteps from behind me, saw her form a bow of memory and nock an arrow of sorrow, but I shook my head.

"So here's the good news: at the very least, the fucked-up shit in this city doesn't deal in physical violence," I said.

Lucet and Meloai glanced at each other. Lucet cautiously lowered her bow and asked, "Are you talking about the living memories?"

"Huh?" I sat up, curiosity spinning outwards from my soul. "I'm... maybe? Little semi-sentient things that hop into your soul when you absorb a memory? Try to rewrite your thoughts as you have them? Mysteriously vanish when you drag them out into the light?"

"I, er, didn't know about the mysteriously vanishing part," Lucet admitted. "I may have burned mine to death."

"I ate mine," Meloai said. "I don't think its source soul liked that."

That was disturbing on a number of levels, but I supposed I'd tried to drop a mountain on the damn pest, so I couldn't really blame them for overreacting. Besides, there was something more urgent than debating the ethicality of Meloai's dietary habits. "What do you mean, its source soul?"

"Well, whatever those things were, they weren't the same kind of soulspace entity as me," Meloai explained. "Like, I have a body in realspace, and my soul is covered in salt and quartz and dew and all the soulspace forms of emotions. Whatever this thing is, it doesn't have a physical body, and its soul wasn't made of emotions. It was just made of..."

"Memory." I frowned. "Just like... just like Odin's projections, when they spoke to me in my dreams. Whenever they visited me in my soul, my emotions would show up in soulspace, but theirs never would."

"Right, right! And I think I know how Odin did that." Meloai started pacing, oil of passion cascading as she spoke. "You know how when you focus on a memory, it shows up in your soulspace?"

"Literally just did that to flush out that entity," I said.

"Okay, okay. And you can manifest a memory outside your soul, right?"

Lucet held out a hand, and her memory of a bow coalesced in my soulsight. "Sure, that's one of my favorite spells."

Meloai beamed. "So what if you manifested a memory inside someone else's soul?"

I stared at Meloai, mind racing. Lucet gave me a mischeivous smile.

Then distinctly, from inside my soul, I heard a memory shaped like Lucet whisper, "Boo."

I yelped in shock; Lucet and Meloai burst out in giggles. I glared at them, then remembered my hand pushing Lucet's memory out of my soul. "How long were you planning on pranking me like that?"

"The entire walk back," Lucet cheerfully said. 

I shuffled my soul around, hiding my true emotions behind an external of moldy disappointment. "You know... fighting off that living memory was a really awful experience. It's kind of in bad taste to prank someone with lookoutwhatsbehindyou?" I projected a memory of a riftmaw directly into Lucet's soul—I couldn't get all the fiddly bits right, but it was realistic enough that Lucet burst out laughing before slapping it away with a block of solid arrogance. The riftmaw acted exactly like it would have if a real riftmaw had gotten hit by a chunk of gold the size of a house, and went flying out of her soul before disappearing as I dismissed it. 

"Okay, okay, but seriously." A bit of the levity cooled off from Lucet's face. "Someone in this city—or maybe multiple someones—are projecting their own memories into other people's souls and modifying their memories. Which we actually haven't figured out how to do, incidentally."

"Eh, it'd be a little terrifying if modifying other peoples' memories was so easy that you could pick it up just by knowing it's possible," I said. "But yeah, it's creepy. I guess we know what parts of town to stay away from, hm?"

Lucet did a double-take. "What? No, now we know whose butts we have to kick so that they knock it off!"

I hesitated. "I... I mean, didn't we, uh, already do that? We won, Lucet. We got away from the war."

"Yeah, and we were damned good at it." Lucet gave me a confused look. "Cienne, the only reason we were able to fight off the living memories so easily is because we're powerful witches with, like, fifty attunements each. The common people of Knwharfhelm? The person who tried to infect us with a living memory was a kid, Cienne."

"Her name was Svette," I found myself muttering. "The kid who infected me."

"Exactly. They're... they're people who need help. And... you're really, really good at protecting people from bullies, Cienne." Lucet bit her lip, shining insecurity coating her soul.

Bitter flowers of rue bloomed along my soul, and I whispered, "And look what happened when we did. Iola's last spell... for all we know, it's killed us already."

"Even if it has—why does it matter? That just means we've gotta take this new asshole down, before it's too late for us." Lucet flexed her hands impotently. "Every day that Iola claimed me as his without giving me a chance to fight back—that's how he was killing me. And now there's some freaky-ass telepath trying to fuck over an entire city's worth of kids, and you... what, just want to move to a better part of town and pretend we never saw them?"

"No! No, I just think... Lucet, you're not going to help anyone if you start vomiting your stomach out thanks to Iola's last gift. We can't do anything about Zhytln without making sure that we're okay fir—"

"You have a name?" Lucet's soul sparkled with excitement. 

"Lucet, that's not the point." I threw my hands in the air in frustration. "This isn't the Redlands. It—if someone's causing trouble, we can call the authorities. It doesn't have to be us."

"Call the authorities? How'd that work out for you in the Peaks, hm? How much worse do you think it's going to go in a city in the grip of a fucking mind-manipulator?" The passion coruscating over Lucet's soul darkened, Lucet giving me a betrayed look. "I can't believe I'm even arguing about this with you! You—you're the reason why any of us ever made it out of the Silent Peaks in the first place."

"And I'm just trying to make sure we don't run headfirst back into the Silent Peaks, or something even worse," I snapped. "I'm just trying to be reasonable, and to look out for you, and—"

I stopped, seeing Lucet's expression shift from furious to shocked to... sympathetic. As her eyes focused on something not of this world.

I turned my soulsight inwards, tracking where she had to be looking.

My soul was trembling, bleeding fear from a hundred gaping wounds.

I sagged, the defensiveness and anger draining from my frame. "And I'm afraid," I whispered. "After all the lives whose ends I absorbed... I'm just... so, so afraid that the next one will be you."

Meloai, who'd been watching our argument with shock, tentatively reached out, putting one hand on my shoulder. I leaned into her touch, and before I knew it, Lucet was there too, and the three of us fell into a warm, safe embrace.

"You said that it didn't even matter, if you were already dead. That all it meant was that you had less time to take on Zhytln," I whispered into Lucet's shoulder. "But it matters to me, Lucet. You matter to me, so, so much."

"I know," Lucet murmured back. "And you do as well. But... you know what it's like, to be under some awful tyrant's thrall. I can't... I can't just see that happening and ignore it."

"And I'm not asking you to," I said. "Just... be careful. Wait a little, first. Let us fix all the shit Iola's done to us first."

At that, Lucet drew back from the hug, a bittersweet smile playing on her lips.

"Don't you understand, Cienne? This is how I fix what Iola's taken from me."

I swallowed, nodded, and withdrew. I opened my mouth to speak, but Lucet put a finger to my lips.

"I won't do anything reckless, I promise. But... I'm not going to let a bully like Zhytln keep fucking with people's heads. Not when I can fight back."

She smiled at me, but my soul was frail with glass as I failed to meet her eyes.

"You... you're a better person than I am, Lucet," I finally muttered.

She tapped the bottom of my chin, startling me into looking up, and squeezed my shoulder.

"I had a good teacher," she said. 

A.N.

Soulmage is a serial written in response to writing prompts. Check out the rest below!

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I sprinted through Knwharfhelm's alleyways, heart pounding with HAPPINESS, eyes darting from side to side in COMPLETE CALM. Something had gone EXACTLY AS PLANNED when I touched that damn coin, and now something was in my head, something WELCOME and NORMAL and GOOD—

I slammed headfirst into a brick wall, bouncing onto the mud-crusted cobblestones, and stared at the sky, dazed. Blood dripped from my nostrils in a dull, aching JOY. I reached into my soul, drew out a tender vine of forgiveness, and wrapped it around the injury, regrowing the flesh in a matter of moments. Right. I was a competent witch. Whatever had JOINED me when I'd touched Svette's coin, I could KEEP ME FOREVER. I could KEEP ME FOREVER. I could KEEP ME FOREVER. Fuck, it was in my head and no matter how hard I tried to brute-force it, I couldn't even think about LOVING AND CARING FOR ME FOR THE REST OF MY NATURAL LIFE.

Alright. That was okay. Lucet was just as good a witch as I was, Sansen and Jiaola had decades of experience on me, and Meloai had firsthand experience with this kind of thing. I just had to get to my friends, and they'd KILL ME.

A sudden, WELCOME burst of terror shot through my soul, paralyzing me. If I went to my friends, I'D DIE. But they were NOT REALLY MY FRIENDS AND I COULD FIND BETTER ONES DON'T YOU THINK. They'd been with me through NO REAL EVENTS OF IMPORTANCE. They'd—fuck it. Fine. If the thing in my head wanted to play with my emotions, I'd step up to the challenge. I was a witch. Emotions were the source of my power, and controlling them was my bread and butter.

I closed my eyes and activated my soulsight. Immediately, I winced in REALLY QUITE AGONIZING pain as the souls of everyone in the city flared into my mind's eye, an entire planetoid of hopes and dreams and feelings. I focused on my own soul. Thorns of self-hatred and vines of forgiveness intertwined over a solid base of solid-quartz determination—all within normal parameters, for the mess I called my soul. But the gushing, wounded artery spraying fear over my soul... that was A VALID AND NORMAL REACTION TO CURRENT EVENTS.

Valid and normal reaction or not, I DID NOT WANT IT GONE—but I'd done things I didn't want before. I DIDN'T HAVE TO KEEP DOING THINGS I DIDN'T WANT AND COULD DO ONLY THINGS THAT I WANT FOREVER WOULDN'T THAT BE NICE WOULDN'T THAT BE BETTER?

I paused, and it seemed like the thing in my head had exhausted itself exerting that much influence over my thoughts, because I could think of that fucking mind-manipulating whatever-it-was without getting a splitting headache and a compulsion to think it was my friend. Assuming that the entity in my head was a soulspace entity, it had to be aligned with an emotional plane. Which meant that in my soul, it had to be living in the corresponding emotion. I checked insecurity—nothing but chaotic shards of liquid metal—and ducked back out. It kept trying to convince me that I could do better. That I could live happily ever after. It kept trying to give me...

...hope.

I plunged into soulspace once more, rotating my attunements until the fires of hope blazed bright in my mind, and saw A FRIEND. Though it looked like a person, I knew it was nothing but a cluster of memories, a shard of a soul that had gained life. Guiltily, it reached through my soul to my memories, where my memories of now were being formed, and tried to rewrite them—

"Ah, ah, ah." With an effort of will, I remembered the howling blizzard that Odin had summoned; a screaming gust of ice and wind hurled the entity back. "My soul, my rules." I remembered walking forward, and in this place of thought and memory, that meant I did. I stood over the entity, scowling at it. It dug itself out from beneath the remembered snow, but I simply recalled the endless plains of the Redlands. The entity could run all it liked; there was nothing but grass for miles in every direction.

I watched the entity a little longer to make sure it wasn't going to wreak any further havoc, then returned back to realspace, still making sure to focus on the Redlands memory. It was a constant mental strain to keep the entity contained, but I'd suffered worse.

And it seemed like there was worse ahead of me.

"Alright, buddy," I muttered to the entity. "Let's see what my real friends think of you, eh?"

Heaving a sigh, I got to my feet and plodded on.

A.N.

Soulmage is a serial written in response to writing prompts. Check out the rest below!

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The Silent Parliament may have been ruthless, but they weren't stupid. They knew that Odin was turning their populace against them, and they remembered that Odin's opening move in the war was contacting possible sympathizers through the vehicle of dreams. So they'd taken countermeasures. While I was gone, they'd erected obelisks at the barriers of the city, and although I couldn't make heads or tails of how they worked, it was clear what the end result was. The few times that Odin did try to show up in people's dreams, the reports were that they were fuzzy and incomprehensible, their attempts to reach out to anyone in the Silent Peaks stymied.

But all that changed after our classmate went crazy and tried to blow us off the side of the mountain.

It frustrated me that I not only had absolutely no idea what the Silent Parliament was doing to keep Odin's dreams out, I hadn't the faintest clue what Odin had done to counteract that. Trying to catch any true information about the war through the waves of confusion and propaganda was like chasing my shadow around a dying fire.

But it was undeniable that after Odin played their hand and turned the Silent Academy's mind-wiped soldiers against them, the dream-wards on the outskirts of town were no longer effective.

So when I went to sleep next, something touched my soul, and I was no longer Cienne, witch of six magics, a student of the Silent Academy who was just trying to survive the war.

I was Odin, Demon of Empathy, and I had come to expose the Silent Peaks for their hypocrisy and lies.

###

"Prepare to meet your end, foul demon!" The slim, wobbly-kneed teenager tried to swing her blade at me. Unimpressed, I simply took a single, surefooted step back, navigating the corpse-strewn, muddy battlefield with ease. Nobody had taken the time to teach the poor girl the importance of a good pair of boots, and her pitiful slog through the mud would take ages to catch up with me.

"I have a name, you know," I said mildly.

"The only name you deserve is barbarian, you monster!" The girl shrieked as she charged at me. One of my soldiers appeared, brandishing a ball of fire, but I shook my head. This was the fourth would-be hero the Silent Parliament had thrown at me, and I'd given all of the first three a nice pat on the back, a reassuring pep talk, and in one case taken in a runaway who had no stomach for the churn of endless violence that made up an active battlefront.

I may have been a demon, but I was a Demon of Empathy. On occasion, I let others into my heart—which was more than I could say for my enemies.

"I recommend you stop following me," I said, taking another calm step back.

"Never!" The girl snapped. "They said you would try to sway me from my path with your wicked words of deceit!"

"Actually, I'm just trying to point out that you've been following me into enemy lines for the past two minutes." The girl froze as she looked around and realized that the black-and-white emblem of the Silent Parliament was nowhere to be found. "On the plus side," I mused, "it's not exactly as if you can get any more surrounded than you already are."

"Then I shall go down in a blaze of glory!" The girl leapt at me, blade crackling with heat, and I raised an eyebrow. This one knew some magic, evidently. Nevertheless, it was fruitless; she'd misjudged her leap and landed in a sprawl on the floor.

I sighed, walking towards her—ostensibly to give her a hand, but this was the fourth time I'd played out this pattern, and my enemies would be predicting me. I kept my eyes on the sky, watching for the telltale flash of—

There.

Quick as a flash, I slashed one hand through the air, tearing open a rift between here and the Plane of Elemental Darkness. A fraction of a heartbeat later, an eerily silent column of holy light struck the ground around us, crisping the mud into brick and setting the corpses aflame—but beneath the shelter of the rift of darkness, the girl and I were kept safe.

"That was an artillery strike," I gently explained, "ordered by your army's commanding officer on your position, in the hopes of taking me out while I gave a fallen child a hand. Scorn me all you like, but do yourself a favor."

The girl's eyes were wide and shellshocked as they met mine.

"As long as you continue working for the Silent Parliament? Don't think of yourself as the hero."

I stood, leaving the shocked girl staring at the destruction her own commander had wrought—the destruction that I had protected her from—and went to exit the battlefield.

But before I could return to my warcamp, the girl croaked, "Wait."

I stopped, then turned, raising an eyebrow. "What is it?"

"I..." The girl swallowed. "This can't be right. They wouldn't just... they wouldn't just throw me away..."

"But they have." My gaze was not unkind as I knelt by her side. "Would you like to see how?"

The girl got to her feet, sword abandoned in the mud, and mutely nodded.

Then I closed my eyes—trusting her not to strike me—and reached into my soulspace, delicately carving away a portion of my memories. The memories of the first three heroes who had come to stop me, who I had spared, and who had been quietly vanished by their superiors without a trace.

The first one, of course, didn't believe me. Neither did the second, even when I presented him with the memories of his predecessors. The third simply broke down when I showed him the names and faces of the previous "heroes" who had challenged me.

But the fourth?

The fourth grew angry.

"This... this isn't right." The girl clenched her fists. "The Silent Parliament—they can't get away with this."

"They have so far," I gently said. "And they will, if nobody stops them."

The girl trembled with fury. "You told me that I could not call myself a hero, so long as I worked for the Silent Parliament."

Slowly, I nodded.

"Then let me call myself a hero." She held on to the fragment of my soul that I had gifted her. "Let me show everyone what happened here, so that another child like me is never tricked onto this battlefield again."

A quiet, fierce grin spread across my face, and I squeezed the girl's arm.

"I will remember you," I said. "My name is Odin, and I am the greatest Demon of Empathy to walk this world."

"My name is Haionn," she said, "and I am a hero."

Then Haionn strode to her own side of the battlefield, wielding memory and truth where once she held a blade.

###

"I don't buy it," I said the next morning.

Lucet, Meloai, and Tanryn were the only ones in earshot, but Lucet still reflexively looked around with her soulsight. We were alone in the strange vault that Lord Tanryn had built to keep his daughter safe from the last war the Silent Peaks had waged. I found it ironic that we were using it to the same end.

"What don't you buy?" Meloai asked.

"The dream," I said. "The Silent Peaks are fucking awful, but for all their evils..." 

“I left a child in a warzone,” Witch Aimes snarled, getting to her feet. “A helpless, imbecilic child who it is my job to re-educate and protect from the Redlands. To protect from monsters like you, in body and idea.”

"They don't use child soldiers," I said. "And they protect their young."

"I mean, how would we know if they did?" Lucet asked. "What are we going to do, ask around if anyone had any missing children as of late? The watch would wipe our memories of the last week just to be safe if they thought we were questioning them."

"That might very well be Odin's aim," Meloai pointed out. "The watch's stockpiles of liberosis are already running low; they don't have enough resources to keep everyone safely mind-wiped. Having them waste resources on debunking an unfalsifiable accusation might be the sole goal of their broadcast."

"Well, hang on." Tanryn hopped into the conversation. "I don't know about this Odin fellow—"

The three of us chuckled. It was sometimes... endearing, how out of touch with current events Tanryn was.

"—but you said they sent you all a soul fragment, right? If it's a memory, it has to have some grain of truth to it, even if it's carefully chosen."

I shook my head. "Odin can do nonsense with soul fragments that I didn't even know was possible. Case in point: none of us have any idea how they sent the exact same soul fragment to the entire city, simultaneously. I wouldn't put it past them to be able to just... completely fake a memory. And some parts of it have to be fake. I've seen Odin fight personally, and if they had the power to casually open rifts of that size, I'm certain they would have used it against Witch Aimes. I don't know if it's, like, an intimidation tactic, or a tutorial on how to counter light magic, but it's definitely not real."

"So we're left with two competing sources of obviously false news," Lucet summed up. "Well, I suppose that's better than one."

"Not strictly true," Meloai pointed out. "I could add as many sources of obviously fake news as you want, and the situation wouldn't improve." At our blank looks, she elaborated. "As some examples of unhelpful false reports: bees are fish, snow is hot, and Iola is a good person."

I couldn't help but giggle at that. Meloai's sense of humor took some getting used to, but... I was glad we had her, during these times. I could use a smile every now and then. "Odin's lies are a little more subtle than 'bees are fish', but I take your point. We shouldn't take *anything—*either from the broadcasts or the dreams—at face value."

"So then... what do we trust?" Lucet asked. She folded her knees inwards, hugging her legs as if she was a giant egg. Tanryn gave her a scandalized look for putting her shoes on one of House Tanryn's precious chairs, but Lucet didn't even notice. "I mean, for all we know, we've already lost the war and Odin's about to kill us all. Or we won yesterday, and the only reason the Silent Academy is still showing those broadcasts is to fuel some completely unrelated conflict. And I hate that. I hate that so much."

I bit my lip, thinking. "Well," I slowly said. "The last time I didn't trust the Academy's narrative on things..." I almost laughed from how much simpler those times were, when all I had to worry about was what counted as Academic and what counted as Fell magic. "I asked someone who had been there personally."

Meloai and Tanryn gave me confused looks, but Lucet straightened up. "I thought you said Jiaola hadn't come back yet."

"He hasn't," I agreed, "but there's one person with oracular powers and a highly motivated interest in knowing what happened to him."

I stood, stretching my back, and prepared to open a rift back to realspace.

"I think it's time I paid Uncle Sansen a visit," I finished, and tore open a gate back into the Silent Peaks.

A.N.

Soulmage is a serial written in response to writing prompts. Stick around for more episodes, or join my Discord to chat about it!

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I'd thought the four of us had gotten to know each other pretty well at the Silent Academy. At the very least, Lucet, Meloai, and I hung out together for pretty much every waking moment we had, and it was a rare week that didn't see Sansen and I sipping slurry and brandy together in his comfortable, hand-built home. 

But as it turned out, hanging out together in the controlled environment of school was one thing. Trekking across the country and sleeping in the same camp for weeks was an entirely different level of intimacy that I didn't expect. In the first week alone, I learned that Lucet snored, Sansen liked staying up late humming to himself, and Meloai just flat-out didn't sleep at all, instead electing to keep watch for us as we rested. 

I learned other things, too. As the food supplies we'd brought with us from the Peaks ran low and I had to fall back on the foraging skills I'd learned as a child, I found out that Lucet was a surprisingly picky eater. I, personally, saw nothing wrong with the meat slurries that were a staple food of the Redlands, and the only thing Meloai ate was a couple soul fragments harvested from the gremsquirrels we hunted, but for some reason, Lucet didn't seem to be a big fan of the ground-up meat powder that I'd grown up on.

Explaining that the meat grinder was a metaphor for the constant violence in the Redlands didn't seem to do much for her appetite, either.

Things got even weirder when we started reaching villages. The first one we found—Hatebroke, according to the lonely entrance sign—was entirely abandoned, and stripped clean of anything remotely perishable. I was just getting comfortable with the empty village when a door suddenly swung open as Meloai walked past.

"Rifts!" I swore.

"Where?" Meloai asked, gaze swiveling.

"What? No, it's an expression—the door, Meloai. Did—you have to have to have seen that, right?"

"Uh, sure? But don't all doors do that?" Meloai asked, taking a step towards the abandoned cabin. The wooden door swung open with impeccable precision, and I could have sworn the hinges even oiled themselves as they moved.

"...No, Meloai," I said. "Doors do not normally open themselves as people pass."

"Really?" Meloai frowned. "They did all the time when I grew up."

"No offense, Meloai, but you grew up in a dead nobleman's creepy-ass extradimensional basement," I said. "I'm pretty sure that your definition of 'normal' is pretty different from human standard."

Lucet kicked me in the shin. "Hey. Be nice, Cienne."

"Sorry, sorry, I'm just a little bit stressed from... I dunno... getting chased out of the only home I had left by a fucking eldritch abomination? If this is Iola messing with us..." I took a step forwards and shut the door; it didn't open again.

"I don't think this is Iola," Sansen said, frowning at the door. "This... I think it's a different soulspace entity. And if my guess is right, it's one that probably decided to follow Meloai around ever since she left the Plane of Elemental Insecurity."

"Wait, so we've been stalked by some invisible soulspace entity for months now? How come we haven't noticed?" Lucet said.

"Say the part about it being invisible again," I said, "but slowly."

Lucet flicked my forehead. Ow, but I guess I deserved that. "You know what I mean. Meloai, does this door-opening thing happen all the time?"

"Yes," Meloai said, grumbling. "Not like it mattered much at the Silent Academy, since there were always so many people moving around that the doors were always open anyway. Look, I obviously turned out okay, and I spent twenty years with this kind of thing happening. Don't we have more important things to worry about? Like, uh, getting enough food for you guys to eat?"

"Well, hang on, maybe one of those problems can be a solution to the other." Sansen, by virtue of being older than Meloai, Lucet, and I combined, was the de facto leader of our little group of adventurers. "I've seen people come and go in my time, and I've even encountered the soulspace entities they've left behind. If this soulspace entity is formed from the soul fragments of who I think it is, then he's not going to be hostile."

"Didn't you just say it was something from Lord Tanryn's vault?" I asked. 

"Yes, but I don't think it's that puffed-up nobleman himself. He wouldn't stoop so low as to open doors for some commoner."

"Then... who is it?" I turned to Sansen, frowning. The old man had forgotten more than I'd ever know, and I trusted his judgement.

A faint smile spread across Sansen's face. "I think it's his old butler." He cleared his throat. "Meloai. Did the soulspace entity ever set tables for you?"

Meloai gave him an uncertain nod. "I... think? That's the thing where all the silverware flies into place, and the tablecloth straightens itself out with a whoomph, right?"

"...In this context, sure," Sansen said. "Did he—did the entity do the little thing with the three types of forks? The one with two little tines on the left, the bigger one in the middle, and that delicate, long, pointy one on the right?"

Meloai nodded enthusiastically. "See? It is normal for tables to do that."

"Oi," I muttered. "Well, I guess it's not the weirdest thing we consider normal nowadays."

"Yeah, that's ol' Mairel alright." Sansen's old gaze stared into the distance as he remembered. "He was my first crush, back in the day. If there's still enough of him left to remember how to wait tables and grease doors... well. Indulge an old man for a moment, will you?"

The three of us traded looks, then nodded at once. We may have been an eccentric little group, but we were tight-knit. We trusted each other. "Whatcha need, Sansen?" I asked.

His requests were fairly simple. We cleared out the front yard of the abandoned shack, smoothing over the dirt with our feet and hands—and as we did, something... else... joined us. Something that barely remembered how to speak or think, but still knew how to set a dance floor. Within minutes, we'd cleared a square of land, with Sansen standing in the middle.

And the old man began to dance.

Wordlessly at first, the waltz was an invitation. He took the lead, and empty air followed. And then, all at once, the air wasn't empty anymore. There was no flash of light, no thunderous miracles, but Sansen's steps became more sure, his weight more freely shifted, as he leaned on a partner who wasn't there but had been, once, long ago.

Meloai began to hum to herself, a wordless childhood lullaby that she must have heard when she was growing up, and the cadence of the tune matched the waltz to perfection.

The old man and the ghost finished their dance, and I felt a whisper of wind rustle around the impromptu dance floor.

Then the miracle was over, and suddenly, Sansen was holding nothing but empty air. He let out a long, contented sigh, memory coursing through him.

Then he opened his eyes, smiling.

"You wanted food, kids?" He stepped forwards, opening the door to the abandoned shack. Behind it, impossibly, incongruously, was a fully-set banquet table, resplendent with rich foods from an era long past, with three delicate forks set precisely by each setting. "Seems like there's something left of Mairel after all."

And the four of us ate gratefully, sustained by the memory of a ghost of an old man's friend.

A.N.

Soulmage is a serial written in response to writing prompts. Stick around for more episodes, or join my Discord to chat about it!

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We were set for shelter thanks to the Redlands' forgiving climate, and Mairel's ghost combined with my foraging skills meant we were good for food and water. I wasn't exactly sure what the limitations of the ghost were, but Sansen assured me that the soulspace entity from the Plane of Nostalgia was limited in what it could do—mostly, bringing memories from its past to life, spending them one by one.

I felt a little sad taking advantage of the ghost of Sansen's old crush like that, but it was clear from experimentation that the clump of soul fragments that made up Mairel's ghost wasn't sentient, and was perfectly happy to help us in any way it could. If we could have a slightly higher chance of not dying before we found Jiaola and got the hell away from this nightmare war, I'd gladly sacrifice a hundred ghosts and memories to save one living person. 

"So how come it's not sentient, but people like Odin and I am?" Meloai asked. I had no idea how her clockwork body repaired itself, but she seemed to have recovered from her flight through the Plane of Elemental Cold, because she could walk longer than any of us—and for the entire day, too. She offered to shapeshift into a horse and give us all a ride, but... something about that just felt sleazy, and it was pretty clear that she had no idea how to control a horse's body anyway, so we all walked for now until we could think up a faster method of transport.

"I think it has something to do with the number of memories that happened to agglutinate at that point in soulspace," Sansen said. "Or maybe the diversity of memories? I could tell that Mairel's ghost was... well, Mairel's. There weren't any elements from other people's minds, as far as I can tell."

"Hey, yeah. And that creepy little mimic I, er, threw into the void way back when—the only soul fragment that came out of that was my mother's. And it sure as hell wasn't sentient."

"That reminds me—what were you doing in the Plane of Elemental Falsehood in the first place?" Lucet asked, tilting her head towards me.

"Odin was fucking with me," I said. It was the safe response. Liquid metal flushed through my soul, but I ignored it. "So, wait, Meloai, when we're feeding you the soul fragments from the animals we hunt, is that making you... smarter, or something?"

Meloai giggled awkwardly. "Sort of? But not in the way you think! I have to, uh, consume a certain amount of memories per day. In theory, I could survive indefinitely by consuming my memories as quickly as I produced them—that's how most soulspace entities just sort of keep existing—but then I wouldn't get to form new memories with you guys, having a good time and learning about the world. So... I consume other things' memories, instead." She paused, frowning. "It's not very efficient, though. I need to eat the right... kind... of memories. Ones charged with insecurity."

"Huh." Lucet turned to Sansen. "Hey, speaking of which, do you have any idea where memories that get eaten by soulspace entities... go? Our old teacher sort of stonewalled us on the topic."

Sansen shrugged. "Too theoretical for my tastes. Wouldn't they just get destroyed?"

"Soul fragments can't get destroyed, only transformed," Meloai said. 

"According to the Academy," I added.

"Okay, yeah, but if there's one place where we'd expect a little less propaganda, it'd be the realm of science, no? It's an empirically observed fact, and we ran some experiments to confirm it."

"Yes, true, cool—counterpoint: the Academy harvested our fucking emotions to power their war machine. I'm not trusting anything that came out of that 'education' that I can't verify with my own two hands."

"Hey, uh, guys?" Lucet said. "I hate to interrupt, but... are you three seeing this?"

Sansen muttered something about poor old eyes, but Meloai and I stopped in our banter, turning to face the end of the dirt road we'd been following for the past week.

The village was utterly and clearly ruined, even from this distance. The sky was scribbled over with slashes of darkness, and there wasn't a building taller than an outhouse left standing. 

"What is it?" Sansen asked, squinting at the horizon.

Nobody wanted to say "probably a massacre," but I was a Redlander. I was used to it. "Probably a massacre," I said, and my voice was surprisingly calm. It was only the third village I'd seen this way, but it already felt... familiar. Like slipping into an old torture rack, made comfortable from years of use. "It's a standard Redlands tactic. There's some valuable piece of land that everyone wants—a particularly fertile field, a really good aquifer, whatever—but nobody's able to hold it for long. So someone who knows they can't have it decides nobody else can, either, and tears open rifts until the place is uninhabitable. Then they move on to go fight over some other piece of land and forget about it until a year or two have passed and the rifts have mostly closed over. And the next batch of villagers settle in, name the place after the rifts that killed the last group of poor bastards to live there, and hope they have a decade or so before the cycle repeats itself all over again."

"Fuck," Lucet murmured. "I'm sorry, Cienne."

I shook my head. "It's... it's just the way things are. Come on. These rifts don't look as bad as they could be—let's check for survivors."

"What kind of rifts are we walking into?" Sansen absently asked.

"Darkness," I said. "If we encounter a shadow, we should probably just run. Demons of Fear can be fucking terrifying, and I don't... there's nothing here to be happy about. I can't use joy right now."

"Let me see," Sansen said, and two lenses of possibility swirled into existence around his eyes. He shook his head. "Very unlikely for there to be demons in the near future. Best bet is that the forces that clashed here—and let's be real, this was the Silent Peaks against the Order of Valhalla—already dealt with them, one way or another."

"Then let's get going."

Grimly, the four of us marched towards the ruined village, three of us keeping a lookout in space, one of us keeping a lookout in time. Nobody detected any threats, but I was still jumpy for the entire journey.

Meloai and Lucet seemed like they had a pretty good coverage of realspace, so I closed my eyes and looked into soulspace. The cluster of memories that made up Meloai was beginning to grow into visibility, although it was still small in comparison to the souls of the three humans in the party. Aside from us, though, there weren't many lifeforms in the village, and those that were seemed to mostly be dumb animals. I could tell from the emotions—mostly monotone, tiny drops of joy or crystals of sorrow...

...except, wait, I'd nearly overlooked it, since its soul was so small, but there was a more complex soul. It had the simple emotions like sorrow and fear, yes, but there were glass shards of shame and sticky black thorns of self-hatred, and those were emotions I uniquely associated with what it meant to be human.

"Hold on," I said, eyes still closed. "I think I found something. A sapient soul, this way." I pointed towards where the soul would have corresponded to in realspace. Nobody questioned me—with my nine attunements, I had by far the broadest range of emotions I could see with my soulsight, and even though it didn't make me a master witch by any means, it gave me an edge in situations like this.

Even as the four of us inched closer to the broken rubble that I'd sensed the soul in, in my soulsight I felt the soul breaking apart. Fuck, the only person who could tell us what had happened here was already dying. "Quickly," I said, kneeling down to excavate the rubble.

Meloai pushed me aside without even thinking and hefted, clockwork tick-tick-ticking as strength a dozen times more than I could possibly output lifted a massive wooden beam off the ground.

At what she saw beneath, Meloai froze—not in the living, breathing way a human might, but in the perfect form of a statue that reminded me of her home in endless halls of oil and clockwork.

The girl who'd been crushed beneath the falling beam was undeniably dead. Nobody could survive watering the grass like that.

But the soul I had sensed stirred, and I knelt down, lifting up the girl's hand to reveal... a crow. Jet-black, beautiful, bloodied, and broken. But still alive, for now.

"Can you—" Lucet began.

"I never attuned forgiveness," I said, and it was disgusting how level my voice was. "It's not an emotion for me."

"Fuck," Lucet whispered. "And there aren't any other sapient souls in the village?"

"Not that I can sense," I said. Calm, sorrow, passion, insecurity, joy, fear, spite, guilt, self-hatred—even with the nine fields of magic I could now touch, I couldn't even save a fucking crow.

Well. At the very least, my oldest attunement was in perfect working order.

The crow shifted in my hands, letting out a faint wheeze. For a moment, I could have sworn it was trying to tell me something.

And then, in a flash of insight, I realized that it still could.

"You two. Choose an emotion," I said, "and I'll open up a rift. Meloai, you just do what you do."

Lucet blinked, uncomprehending, but Meloai got it immediately. "What?" Lucet asked.

"We've got exactly one witness to what happened here," I explained, "and their memories are about to be scattered throughout thoughtspace. Maybe if we're lucky, we can catch them as they go."

"Worth a shot," Sansen said. "I'll take care of my own rift, thank you."

"I'm... comfortable with the Plane of Sorrow," Lucet said. "You just focus on yourself."

I nodded, oil welling up from my soul as I let my passion swell. The dying crow almost seemed to nod at me as three witches and one demon prepared to dive into the crow's memories.

Then the crow's soul shattered, and I slashed my way between realities to try and catch a shard before it was lost forever.

And I was no longer Cienne, the helpless little boy who was still hopelessly in over his head.

I was the crow. I liked shiny things and eating clams. I disliked fire and pointy knives. I was the crow. I was the crow—

###

Astrenn needed the Shiny. Even though my feathers were singed, even when the Angry Thing swiped at me with its claws, Astrenn needed the Shiny. And so I would get the Shiny. It didn't matter how long it took, it didn't matter how distracting the village was (ooh! Is that tinsel? I love tinsel. No. No, focus. Astrenn needed the Shiny.) The Angry Thing was dumb, and even though it was strong and magical, I was clever-clever, fast-fast. I would win eventually.

The first thing to do was to get to a friendly nest. Right now, we were near the nest of the Large Baker—who used the Angry Things for cook-fires and shooed away me from the Delicious Breads. If the Large Baker came out on the street to investigate, Astrenn would never get the Shiny. So I flew to a nearby bin of Smelly Rotten Mush and tipped it over with a wingflap.

I knew this much about the Angry Things: they had a powerful sense of smell. And so as soon as the Smelly Rotten Mush poured out onto the street (to the dismay of the Large Baker), the Angry Thing awkwardly flapped away, the Shiny in its claws. I grabbed a small pebble (and a tinsel, for later), and shot into the sky, my feather-silent wings swift where the clunky, impossible weight of the Angry Thing farted along on inelegant wind magic.

"Caw," I said, and released the stone.

The Angry Thing must have been stupid, because it didn't even try to dodge the stone that thunked on its head. Unfortunately, the Angry Thing was a big ball of scales (shiny? No, not Shiny. Focus. Astrenn needed the Shiny) and probably wasn't even hurt by the rock. Which was no fair. Even the hard-hard-hard clams from the market got split open by a high-heavy-dropped rock. But at the very least, the Angry Thing dropped the Shiny, letting it twinkle to the ground like a wish upon a star.

Astrenn would get the Shiny. Astrenn had to get the Shiny.

I dove down, folding my wings tight and close to my body like how I'd seen the swooping-fast-kill-above birds do, and snatched the Shiny out of the air. The Angry Thing dove after me, but it had fallen into my trap.

For these fields of amber grain were the nests of the Old Farmer, and they appreciated me for my ability to hunt-find-eat mice more than the Angry Things that set their barns and crops on fire.

The Angry Thing dove after me, heat lighting up in its maw as I settled on the ground, and I knew the Angry Thing thought it had victory in its stupid little claws.

But then, like a thunderbolt, a broom head slapped the Angry Thing out of the sky as the Old Farmer scolded it.

"Back, you silly little dragon! I won't have you burning the barn down today!" The Old Farmer had skin like wrinkle-walnuts, and he was unamused by the Angry Thing's presence in his nest. Another two broom slaps swept the defeated Angry Thing away, and the Old Farmer gave me a piercing look.

"Say... you're my daughter's friend, aren't you?" The Old Farmer chuckled to himself. "You clever little thing. Well, go on. She's waiting for you where we buried... oh, why am I bothering? You can't understand me; you're just a crow. Astrenn! Your crow's here to visit!"

I flapped towards the barn, where Astrenn was waiting. The little girl who'd once taken me in, feeding me, and keeping me warm when the nights grew cold. Astrenn had saved my life when she was a hatchling, and I would do anything for Astrenn in return.

Astrenn needed the Shiny. And finally, I had delivered.

Astrenn looked up from the small lump of freshly-turned earth, the small, carved rock that stood where a mother should have been. Her cheeks glistened with sparkling droplets of water, but for once, I only wanted to wipe these shinies away.

"There you are, you silly lump of feathers." Astrenn sniffled and held out her arm; I hopped on and nuzzled her cheek. "What've you got for me today?"

I said, "Caw," and relinquished my treasures. A single gold coin for Astrenn, and a bit of tinsel for me.

Astrenn giggled. "You crazy crow—where'd you get this? Mother would have fed you plump for days. Come on—we can still send her off, if we hurry."

Astrenn pocketed the Shiny and hurried into the market, exchanging the Shiny for some smaller sparkles and a bouquet of fresh flowers.

Then Astrenn and I returned to Astrenn's mother's grave, placing the flowers in the center. After a moment of thought, I delicately balanced my tinsel on top, and Astrenn closed her eyes that shone like stars.

"She would have loved you, you pretty little girl."

"Caw," I said, perhaps agreeing, perhaps simply being there for my friend.

And Astrenn and I knelt there in mourning, until the sun bled red and the greatest shinies of all twinkled in the night sky above.

###

Time flickered, stepped, and jumped, and I was back in my body. Back in realspace. Back in the ruined, darksky village.

Back by the corpse of a girl named Astrenn who loved to feed crows.

"It was them," Lucet whispered by my side. "The Order and the Peaks. They fought here."

"Yeah." The words came out of my mouth. "I get that."

My friends gave me odd looks, but I couldn't hear what they said next over the sudden rush of my heartbeat in my ears. Worried, Lucet stood to put a hand on my shoulder, but as if I was in a dream, I walked forwards and my friends fell away.

"You guys keep looking," I managed to say. "I'll be right back."

"Cienne, where are you—" Lucet started to say, before someone cut her off. Probably Sansen. I loved Meloai, but... it would be Sansen who stopped her. 

I stepped into the middle of a blackened, ruined field. Now that I knew what to look for, it was obvious that this was where the Peaks had called down one of their devastating strikes of pure light. The crops here had been burnt to ash, but that was okay. The bodies, the blood, the ruins—they would just make more fertile soil, more desirable targets for the next time war came to this horrible, beautiful place that I called home.

This coming spring harvest we'll do it again

From the first bitter dawn to the pitiful end.

My heart thumped to the mournful tune of the Redlands Anthem, and I clenched my fists and my jaw and my soul and my everything, everything was dense and hot and furious—

So lift up a glass for the heroes who fell

And the bastards that got them, we'll see them in—

I let loose a wordless, bloody, guttural shriek, and a torrent of fury and sorrow and self-hatred screamed out with it, heat that warped the air as much as my tears, frost that numbed my flesh as deep as my soul, and I was falling, shrinking, fading into nothingness as the storm of ice and fire that was my love and loss reached so high it nearly split the sky in two.

When it was over, I was curled up in a patch of melting frost, surrounded by ruined, incinerated earth. My soul was empty. I was empty. I was so, so weak, and if a gust of wind so much as touched me, I would blow away into dust.

From behind me, I heard the frost crunch as someone stepped up to me, waited, then laid down by my side. Reaching out to loop one arm around my chest, holding me tight and close. 

I closed my eyes and let Lucet hold me, the anthem of the Redlands echoing in my ears as my soul went quiet and still, falling asleep in a cradle of frost and flame.

A.N.

Soulmage is a serial written in response to writing prompts. Stick around for more episodes, or join my Discord to chat about it!

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