Hot water streamed down my face as I scrubbed vigorously with a wet washcloth. It passed over my eyelids and along the contours of my nose, with special attention toward the most oily and sweaty crevices near the corners of my eyes and nostrils. I had to give myself permission to go to town on this towel; I was used to owning just two little rags for this, neither washed frequently enough. The penthouse, by contrast, had an infinite supply of fresh, clean laundry, one of Hina’s self-imposed duties to the women she loved. And me.
I was cleaning off the sweat and filth that had accumulated while I’d dreamt up a meeting with the Vaetna. Sweat had matted my nightclothes to my skin to such a degree of crustiness that it might have actually evoked Vaetna-carapace euphoria if not for the horrible oiliness and the stomach-churning man-stench of my body odor; none of the girls had commented on the latter, but if I’d been able to smell it, then they also certainly would have, and that amplified the physical unpleasantness even further. My suggestion of a pressure washer had been a joke, but only half of one, driven by a very real and urgent need to reset all the biological membranes and fluids and films of my body, inside and out. Now I’d gotten a liter of water in me and several more scoured over my outer layer and my skin didn’t feel like sticky death, and I knew that that was about as well as I’d be able to do without being opened up like Hina and given a physiologically impossible deep cleaning. I imagined being utterly disassembled, down to each individual component, and each given their own thorough deep cleaning. Rust remover and an ultrasonic bath and careful polishing, or whatever equivalents might be possible for those pieces of the human animal I regrettably was.
Short of that, bathing really did help, as they’d said it would, a lesson that I’d always known but had struggled to implement before coming to Todai. My current bout of tourist activity was a far outlier for my lifestyle, after all; before now, spear training had been pretty much my only meaningful exercise, and that was merely gilding on the otherwise disastrous state of my self care. It had been far, far too long since I’d seen a dentist, for example. Hina had me brushing my teeth now, at least, but little things like that had slipped through the cracks for years and years as I’d slowly decayed, escaping into the logical brainspace of GWalk submenus and the companionship of the chatroom instead. I was deeply ashamed in hindsight of how that had simply become the default of my life, unbathed and unshaven and sickly pale. The only times I’d seriously cleaned up were for my annual check-ins with the PCTF-sponsored aid group that paid my disability checks, and even my efforts in that had been slipping as of last year’s. My final one, now that I thought about it. Strange.
But even compared against the worst of all that time, and even with my recent spate of excursions, I had never felt more physically rotten than I had right before getting into the shower. The steam-hazy, fittingly dreamlike inner chamber of my unit bath provided barely enough solace to make it tolerable. It went deeper than the general nastiness that had accumulated on my skin, manifesting outwardly in how I’d been feeling my face and tripping over my tongue while recounting the dream.
Many old sensations were odd. The bridge of my nose, the for-some-reason-not-orange fluff of my eyebrows, these long-familiar—if resented for how they cast my face as masculine—features of my facade felt freshly alien under my hands. I couldn’t stop seeing my nose at the bottom of my vision, and my tongue felt large in my mouth even after rectifying the mild dehydration. It was a small mercy that the warm washcloth glided smoothly along my jaw and neck with no stubble to catch on, but I was still acutely aware of how it was all soft, squishy meat, how my gut was heavy with organs and blood.
My form in the dream had felt far more graceful. Maybe that wasn’t quite the right word; I had felt optimized…for what? For killing, even though I at least consciously still felt guilt for what we had done at Thunder Horse? It must have been the Vaetna’s presence, or at least my expectation of it, that had done that. My subconscious—and possibly also my Flame, insofar as the two were even separate—had wanted to live up to their great violence, even before witnessing the paranatural, divine truth that they were their vaet in the most literal sense. And I must have taken notes from Amethyst in the mix of the mechanical and monstrous, accenting it with Vaetna-flavored white carapace and a distinct sharpness to my shape, exemplified most in the talons.
That all felt like a fairly natural extension of the revolutions in my identity that I’d had since being flametouched a month prior. The rest was more vexing, especially comparing further against Amethyst: the breasts had been conspicuously present, a far more pronounced signifier of femininity than the gemstone mecha’s mere tight waist, and of course I’d practically had a cloak of my nigh-incandescent hair, which was notable because Amane eschewed simulating her beautiful, glossy locks altogether. She had a near-total split between her attractive, delicate and cultured human form and the war machine, whereas I seemed to be blurring those lines in a way that seemed not very Vaetna. Then again, she wasn’t very mahou shoujo, as I understood it—though that understanding was almost as shallow as it got.
Similarly, the talons were an extension of my foot prosthetic, I figured. Maybe the spear-foot, as silly as it had been in concept, had been onto something? I was stripped of the stopgap one right now; it wasn’t rated for the shower. It really had served me well, given that apparently Ai had thrown it together in two days of design. She was supposed to present to me the integrated prototypes soon, with the translator and other tentative features. The burn had been healing up very well, perhaps preternaturally well, and even without the pain-dampening effects I was doing just fine. If you accounted for the fact that I was benefiting from in-house access to state-of-the-art prosthetic technology, I really had come out the other end of my first real use of blood magic only a little worse for wear.
So perhaps a little more couldn’t hurt—that thought came from the part of me that was still unmoored from my flesh. I countered with the assertion that I was putting too much stock in a form the back of my brain had cooked up on short notice, influenced by my especially long time in the doll and the impact of Kat’s reappearance just before. That was what I told myself to dissuade any pervading thoughts about performing just a little blood magic, as a treat. I knew that was unreasonable; short of entirely switching into a mantle or the doll, any magical solutions to realign my sense of self with my flesh were deeply, deeply inadvisable.
Inadvisable, but so very tempting. It took over an hour in the shower to soothe my aching soul enough to assure myself that I wasn’t going to take the leap without precautions or medical backup. I needed to be careful, think through which parts of my shape earnestly felt like me, separate the signal from the noise—how did Asuka, the slender anime waifu, fit into this Vaetna-Amethyst fusion and its decidedly more prominent breasts than hers? What was the ideal Ezzen, these days? I resolved to finish my mantle to trial and refine everything, ask Amane for insight on that meat-mantle divide, and of course consult Alice and Hina for their experiences in discarding and reshaping their flesh. Also, maybe they or the others would enjoy showing me some of the classic mahou shoujo anime, or Evangelion, just to clarify that aspect of it all for myself. It also just sounded nice, which I was getting better at admitting to myself.
All of that was necessary preparation, as I saw it. When I crossed that bridge for real, I would know what lay on the other side, and I would do it right.
I should have known that Izumi was going through the same thoughts—only she had access to true escapism, and as such, she’d let the problem fester until it had hit the breaking point last night and she’d passed out. I didn’t actually see her for the rest of that night, having been coaxed directly from my bed to the shower, but Hina popped in a few minutes before I was done to give an update—directly into the stream of water and naked, which raised some fascinating questions about how exactly she had been caring for her assassin-with-benefits.
Like me, the dual-bodied partygirl was suffering from acute dysmorphia, which she both treated and intensified by using her mantle continuously until it crashed like a computer gone too long without a restart. Unlike me, hers was exacerbated by truly terrible self-care habits ever since we’d driven away Sugawara’s specter, even worse than my own. She had gone to considerable lengths to ignore her original body’s existence, neglecting its well-being entirely in the process. Apparently that body had barely moved in weeks and was simply not getting enough nutrition.
That felt like my fault. I’d failed to follow through on my promise of upgrading her simulated taste buds; it was one of those earnest “let me help you with that” sentiments that fell through the cracks, voluntary responsibility that faded from memory in the span of one night. And the consequences were dire: outside of when we’d shared meals on the town, she’d apparently been subsisting on one or two nearly-pure-sugar convenience store treats a day and nothing else. The Kimura body was woefully vitamin deficient, gaunt and pallid and atrophied. The final form of the room-rotting I’d inflicted upon myself for years, amplified by a level of escapism available only to a flamebearer.
It was untenable. She was alive and stable thanks to an IV drip in the medical wing on the eighteenth floor, but that was a band-aid solution. Hina reported that she’d woken up, rebooted her mantle, and ditched the flesh again as quickly as she could.
The next morning, I forced myself out of bed with the intent of helping her fix her sense of taste as a first step toward at least keeping her body self-sufficient—alone, as I’d slept nearly sixteen hours and the Radiances were long gone. I spent a few minutes checking my phone, finding that I had two hundred chatroom pings—scrambling for the news informed me that in response to the PCTF’s proclamation of intent to kick the sandcastle, the Vaetna had made a big jenga tower of every nuclear submarine in the North Atlantic. The rest was all just fallout from the stream. My friends wanted to know what it was like having a Flame from the future.
The short answer, which I didn’t have the energy to communicate, was that it mostly consisted of loathing the fact that my bones were inside me. I eventually broke the spell by managing to roll over and move my joints enough for my personhood gauge to improve from “mineral tree with meat leaves and cursed with consciousness” to “tired guy,” which advanced to “tired enby shellcreature” after convincing myself that brushing my hair and putting on a hoodie and mask would help. That was enough to get my self-actualization to turn over and my motivation came rumbling to life, and I {AFFIX}ed my prosthetic and went to see the state of Izumi’s body for myself.
Instead, as I walked toward the penthouse’s upper elevator doors and peered over the railing, I saw her actual body—that is, the mantle—sitting at one of the high chairs bordering the gargantuan kitchen island, doomscrolling some social media or another, and generally looking like a million bucks as usual, which I now understood to be on loan from her main body’s health. She waved me down, and wasted no time once I came into earshot.
“Help me get rid of it.”
“Your…body,” I replied pointlessly while navigating the last few steps.
“Yes. I can’t go back to it. I’ve been thinking that I could do what Takehara-san did, and change its shape, turning it into this form instead,” she gestured at her own figure, “or we could simply find a way to move my mind and Flame into this mantle permanently and get rid of the biological body completely. Your thoughts?”
I had a sinking feeling that she would brook no half-measures. “My thoughts are that those are both…really risky, with the Peacies breathing down our necks. You don’t really care about that, do you?”
“Our fox told me you would help me.” There was an edge of nervousness in her voice. “Because you understand what it’s like. Everything becomes suddenly wrong. I don’t want to be that. I don’t want to be him.”
I took a deep breath, looked at her with all the empathy I could muster. “I’m helping you no matter what, yeah. There’s all the, y’know, consequences, politics, all that stuff, whether we or Hikanome need the public figure of Kimura to stick around. But that’s not my wheelhouse—all I’m really good at is magic. That’s what they pay me for,” I managed to joke. They didn’t pay me so much as give me unlimited access to company funds, and I’d hardly even done anything resembling work. “And I will help you with magic, to the fullest extent I know how. Just…can we take a step back from sanguimantic options for a second? And can I sit down?”
She directed a pointed look at my corona of orange hair, freshly brushed over my shoulders. Then she nodded toward one of the seats next to her, extending a delicate shin to shove it out a bit so I could gingerly hop up.
I sighed. “Okay, yeah, I’ve gotten off pretty light when it comes to sanguimancy. My Flame seems to like it when I do st—desperate things to my body. I don’t know if yours is the same. Alice is evidence that transition by incredible gore is a thing the Flame will permit, but that’s…derived from believing really hard in mahou shoujo? Is that the mechanism?” That didn’t sound right, but I didn’t know enough to dispute it. “Do magical girls transform by horrific blood explosion in the shows?”
“…Have you seen a magical girl anime?” She looked vexed. “You’ve been here for a month, living with them, and they haven’t shown you Precure?” She pronounced it in Japanese. “Or, with how this new magic is so…murderous, at least Madoka?”
“No. I mean, I know, um, ‘goretastic’—Hina’s words, not mine—transformations aren’t the norm, it’s usually all sparkles, but since Alice seems to really be into the whole look, I kind of assumed there was some kernel of truth there? Or, if not a kernel, at least, like, something obvious to reference.”
“No, it’s not how it usually works,” she confirmed. “Not the classic ones she loves, at least. She knows that her mahou shoujo-pposa, the one she shows to the world and makes the others live, is fake. Or, not fake,” she corrected guiltily. “Real, because she believes in it, but the Light does not believe in love and purity. It is fire and blood, and I don’t know if it would be as kind to me as it would to her. She is young, and I am…old, Ezzen.” Izumi, gorgeous and trendy twenty-something, looked tired. “That matters to whatever I will do to get rid of that body. Most flamebearers are much younger than me. The Flame wants potential, it wants change, and when I am in that body I feel like I have neither.”
I had no emotional frame of reference for that. I’d decayed my way through my teens, procrastinating life itself, justifying it with the back-burner knowledge that I had plenty of time, that when I finally got off my ass and did something with my life it would be when I still had several good decades ahead of me. I’d still felt like I had infinite potential.
“You’re not that old,” was the first thing that came out of my mouth. That was my earnest reaction, recollected from when we’d spoken at the barbecue. Kimura had come off as stately, not elderly or doddering, and had looked legitimately good for somebody over fifty at the time. If she was even over fifty—I realized I wasn’t sure. It was very difficult to have a conversation about identity when you knew so little about the other person. I resisted the urge to pull out my phone to raid Wikipedia, and instead, the second thing I said was more thought out and empathetic. “Okay, um, let me rephrase that. Why do you feel like you’re old? What was your life like before you were a flamebearer? Uh—I don’t know if there’s a delicate way to ask, so: were you trans before the age of magic? Sorry, I’m realizing those aren’t actually the same question.”
Izumi gave this a long moment’s consideration, staring at her pale and perfect hands. When she spoke, there was regret in her voice. “Transgender and transsexual and those were not concepts that I knew when I was young. In Japan, it’s only a thing people learned about recently. Looking back…yes, I think I was, but I didn’t have a word for it. In high school and college I was a crossdresser, an otokonoko. I wanted to be a girl, but didn’t have…permission? I was a coward. I felt like I would have to throw away my whole life for it to be real, and in the 2000s, when I turned thirty, I just…stopped trying.”
“Until the Flame,” I prompted.
“Until the Flame,” she agreed. “Hi kara no megumi. A blessing from fire—the original kanji was hi as in fire, now it’s hi as in the sun,” she explained. “Branding. For us, for me and Hongo-kun and Miyoko-chan and him, we were suddenly able to do new things, to be new things. And I was a coward, again. Izumi came back to life, but she was secret. I was still Kimura. Still a coward. And then…and then…” she winced and physically recoiled from something only she could see.
I knew what she couldn’t say. Sugawara had essentially blackmailed her with her second identity, pressganged her into his service, and then driven those barbs of control deeper and deeper through magic. It occurred to me that his ability to pillage her dreams had been a twisted evolution of the same phenomenon that allowed me to speak with Holton and the Vaetna. She’d never spoken about the full extent of his control over her, how far it had extended beyond that in magical terms, but knowing what had happened to Yuuka let me fill in the most grievous violations for myself. Izumi’s body and soul had been defiled and desecrated.
No wonder she wanted to part ways utterly with that part of her life. To Izumi, the Kimura body represented failure to self-actualize and memorialized such comprehensive abuse—I kicked myself for ever suspecting that she’d betray us. Amethyst had been right about that; we’d made a ride-or-die ally that night when we’d torched Sugawara and incinerated his magical hold over her.
“Getting rid of that body is the only way you’ll feel truly free from him,” I surmised. “Fuck me, that’s dark, sorry. And presumptuous.”
“It’s correct.”
That immediately brought up a new question. Somebody as violated and as capable as Izumi ought to have been digging two graves and then embarking on an epic quest of vengeance, not partying. “Wait, then if he’s the root cause of all this, why haven’t we gone and found him? Finished the job? He’s still out there, isn’t he? We laid those traps, but…”
“He is already dead.”
“In the sense that he doesn’t have a heartbeat? Yeah, I guess. But like, that was definitely an evil ghost we fought. Are you saying that the thing that escaped from us really isn’t him anymore, magically speaking?”
“I am saying that I wanted him gone, and now he is. Sugawara, the Savior, the founder of Hikanome, the man who raped me and a thousand others, he is dead. That ghost cannot lead any more monsters, and he is not inside me anymore. To me, that means he is dead. What is left is an echo. It has to be. He cannot survive that as himself, it wouldn’t be—fair,” she sighed, slumping forward to rest her forehead on the countertop. “It would not be fair. So he is dead. Does that make me a coward still?”
“Oh,” I whispered, a heavy sadness lodging itself in my chest. I wasn’t going to point out how her reasoning was very motivated, how the thing that was out there could probably still inflict evil regardless of whether or not it was Sugawara in a philosophical sense—she clearly already knew all that. I only answered the direct question, as honestly as I could. “Maybe? You’d rather destroy your past self than destroy him—or your present self, rather, because even if it’s not your body, it’s still the body keeping you alive,” I reminded her. Then I hesitated. “Can I pose a question?”
Still face-down, she motioned for me to go ahead.
I took a deep breath. “…Do you want to be done with all this flamebearer stuff?” For myself, such a notion was absurd, but Izumi’s path was different from mine. “Like, let’s say you do destroy your old body and assume this form permanently. Given the choice, would you rather abandon all VNT activities, or even your Flame completely, somehow? A clean break that lets you abdicate responsibility for Japan’s future and so on?”
That made her sit back up. “No.”
“Quick answer.” And the one I had been expecting.
She leaned back in her chair and stared across the kitchen at nothing in particular. “I thought about it every night he was in my head. Leaving all of this, starting over as a normal, young girl. And perhaps, if we had killed him the first time, four years ago, I might have done that. But—we did not, and I remained his pawn, both from magic and because…I am dutiful,” she sighed. “To Hikanome’s leaders and its people. With him gone I now feel like I can leave that behind. But to Japan, as the PCTF prepare to eat us? To you and those beautiful ones who are going to show them that we are the bitterest poison? I am loyal to that. I won’t leave. I will party like there’s no tomorrow, because I have lost too much of my youth already, but when Toudai goes to war, I will be there with you.”
“Not a coward, then. Simple as.” I felt very clever.
Izumi’s head swiveled, owl-like, to face me. “Oh. Yes, well, ah, when you put it that way—”
“But also, it’s not cowardice to, like, chill out and party for a while, right? I mean, you’ve been through the fucking wringer in a way that blows all my shit completely out of the water. You were pretty much trying to convince me of that a few days ago. I think it’d only be cowardice to avoid dealing with whatever remains of Sugawara if he was actually out there hurting people right now, which he’s not…as far as I’m aware. I don’t keep up with Japanese news—area of growth for me, under the circumstances—but I think I’d still have heard about hauntings or more random ripple stuff via the Radiances, if it was happening.”
Izumi blinked. “You’re very eloquent when you try, Ezzen.”
That shut me down hard. I physically recoiled into my hoodie a bit. “Um, uh. No. What? Back on topic. We started this convo with you asking me to help annihilate your body downstairs. Whatever happens with Sugawara, I intend to help you do that much. So, enough philosophizing about death and cowardice,” I declared. “There’s a lot of questions about the mechanism that would take time to research. I assume you’ve done some of your own already? You laid out those two paths, metamorphosis or transmigration, if I wanted to give them fancy names.”
“I have ideas for both. No diagrams.”
“Because sanguimancy?”
“…Maybe. What did Brianna tell you? ‘Magic is more than glyphs?’ She is right, and I have some ideas.”
“…Okay…” I wasn’t sure where this was going. “Alice is qualified to tell us about the metamorphosis version, or at least as qualified as we’re going to find, I imagine. I think Sky did something similar. But, uh, the transmigration version, fully pulling your soul and Flame out of your body…the only thing that’s coming to mind would be what Sugawara did to himself, and we just established that you consider that, like, actual death, no continuity of identity or whatever people call it. It’s fundamentally different from using a mantle, so I don’t think the Radiances would be much help.” I blinked. “Oops, you said you had ideas.”
She grinned thinly. “And now I don’t need to say them.” As I half-performatively reeled from that, she rapped her fingernails along the countertop. “We will have to speak to Miyoko. She knows souls and death better than anyone else in Japan.”
That sobered me immediately. “Oh. Right. My dad.”
“Yes. I believe we’ve put that off as long as we can—the meeting of Japan’s flamebearers, my trial, it must happen soon.”
“How soon?”
“I don’t know.”
“That…sucks!” I decided. “I’m going to sound like an idiot now: could this meeting be an email instead? Like, with proper infomantic encryption, all that good stuff?”
Izumi hesitated for a long moment, genuinely caught off guard. I had the sense that much of the interaction between Japan’s VNTs was steeped in ritual—but none of those rituals could be more than seven years old, when you thought about it. They were hand-me-downs from culture, fictional expectations about being Important Magical People that were much older than any of their organizations or magic itself. And those didn’t have to actually reflect reality, did they? I would never begrudge Alice her mahou shoujo when it came to her guiding principles in life, but for actually getting stuff done, surely we could do better.
“Not the whole meeting,” Izumi eventually said. “But for my body, yes.”
And just like that, she sent the email. It took about five minutes, flurries of typing separated by long spans of sitting and thinking, then deleting. When she put down her phone, she looked a little sick. “I am still a coward. I sent that as Kimura.”
“She doesn’t know? Wait, what does she think you—either of your ‘you’s—have been up to since the barbecue?”
“…We’ll find out.”
“Actually, you won’t,” came a new voice from overhead. Ebi’s, from the speakers. “First of all, that email was not encrypted enough, so be grateful I sniped it. And I don’t feel like letting you debase yourself like that, Izumi, come on. But more importantly, if you want to ask about souls without bodies, I’m right here.”
Author’s Note:
Sometimes you really do just have to let the characters talk to each other until change happens. Ez and Izumi are two peas in a pod; it’s really no wonder Hina’s into both of them. And boy oh boy, Ebi sure is coming out swinging. Did you miss her? I missed her!
Apologies again for the delayed chapter. I was sick! And then executive dysfunction (and Deep Rock Galactic) got its wretched claws into me. I think the next chapter of Sunspot will skip this Sunday and instead go up the following Sunday, March 23, so I can give myself the time I need to write ahead a little bit. Thank you for your patience, it means the world to me.
Thank you also to the beta readers who helped me navigate what this chapter should be doing. They also helped me refine the next commission — if all goes well, I should be able to release it on the update after we hit 5000 followers between RR and Shub! It’s Amethyst and Heliotrope. I’m very excited.
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