The ice is cold. It is the memory of cold, all the times I’ve felt my skin sting and my fingers ache. It crawls up the soles of my feet and attacks my ankles with gnawing teeth. It is so cold that the feeling wraps back around to an unpleasant, viscous heat before the numbness begins to set in.
But this memory of frostbite does not take into account what I have become. My feet are no longer pads of flesh structured around bone, one maimed by panic and desperation. Now I stand upon talons of metal sheathed in white plastic, and the biting numbness cannot reach me. Or perhaps it seeps through me far more completely than before and becomes a part of me. Either way, I am no longer its victim.
The ice stretches flat and dark until it meets an empty horizon. The sky is a blank canvas, no sun to free what moves beneath the ice, the dance of lights that swarm beneath me. They thump and press against the sheet, craving, coveting, or just curious. None of them look like the ones I have come to know, no scintillating gems clustered together in fierce and vengeful love. I suppose it is too much to ask that they join me for this.
I am not here for the ice, nor the lights beneath it. They are not the only domain in this dream; I remember that now with certainty. I turn from the horizon to the forest. The beach lies between me and it, and between me and the beach lies a shape embedded in the ice, a mile marker. I begin to walk toward it upon my talons. As I do, I look down and become aware of the rest of my body. It is metal built skeletal and spindly, sheathed in armor on my upper legs. There is little in my core beyond a spine. Hair cascades down my back, an orange more vivid than anything else in this dream that falls all the way down to my knees. My chest is interlinked carapace, undefined in its patterning or shape until I notice that is the case, and then it has changed without deliberation nor shame. I dare not reach up to learn about my face; to touch is to define, and that is something I am yet afraid of defining.
The shape arrives quickly; I am not sure if it was one step or a thousand, but in that time, I have come to see that the one has become two. Only two, and neither were the one I’d hoped and feared would be here. The tall shape that I had first seen is a straight sword, buried by its blade, and the other is a dagger balanced atop the hilt, a hole gouged through the grip. It points away from me, toward the beach, where the sand wraps around the forest until it passes from view. Both weapons have dull, black blades. Not black as the night sky, but black as darkness; I know a word, and it is eigengrau, the color seen when there is no light at all and the eye must invent something so that the brain need not confront the idea of nothing. Like a dream, in a way. That is the color of the vaet.
I reach out to touch the weapons of something-representing-nothing. They call to me. They always have. I could not answer before. Now it is the most natural thing in the world, and it is a relief to reach out with my gauntlet.
But to touch is to define. The blades are that which cuts. They are that which cuts everything. The lines between everything are severed. The beach and the sky are cut to ribbons, the forest felled and hewn asunder. The ice shatters, and we all fall toward the water beneath. It is not there to meet us at first, severed as everything else, but it crashes back together and swallows us. Only the lights remain whole throughout, watching.
The straight sword is made to fall. It plummets downward toward me, and I witness that it has no piercing tip. The blade of the executioner knows itself to be inevitable, and needs not account for shield nor struggle, ending only in a flat and blunt horizon, the most earnest shape of death. Conflict is for lesser weapons; the guillotine need only fall. The lights know it. It should not be so! I weep, and the blade weeps with me.
The dagger falls point-first beside it. It is the opposite of the sword, its tip sharp and its edge dulled, duller than it ought to be. It has gouged a new loop through its handle, an eye that stares back at the world and at me. It has fashioned itself into a sewing needle, and from there it has learned to mimic the trowel and the plowshare. Great walls rise around it, as high as the great forest, forcing away the water until the space where we are becomes a place. A warm place, a place of safety, a place with a name. The needle weaves while something loved slumbers in its lap. When the needle must be the dagger it began as, it is for them.
Both are more than blades. They are a home I have never visited; they are knights sworn to the highest cause; they are scholars hunched before divinity; they are light that has escaped the ice. But they are still blades, and the path they cut as they fall is straight and stark and silent, even the ghost of a whisper cut apart. That-which-is-not cleaves that-which-is. It is blinding to behold, and all in the deep water is left dumbstruck and drawn into its wake. At last the blades reach me, and then they are through me, shearing root from trunk and dream from reality. It is the nature of these blades to cut all they touch, and I am no exception.
To touch is to define. The horizon-tipped blade, Judgment, slashes me open. The needle, Sanctuary, beholds me with its eye. I pass through like so much thread.
I was standing on the beach. I realized this so suddenly that I thought I had woken up, because things no longer had the dreamlike haze, the abstraction and metaphor. Everything was whole once again, and I felt awake—yet the beach was still here, and I was standing on it. The dream had ended, but I had not woken up.
What-Had-Been-Judgment and What-Had-Been-Sanctuary were now in their more familiar forms as the Vaetna Sani and Brianna. I mentally mapped them as the eldest and the youngest siblings respectively. They had done something to me, and to the dream. Everything felt too sharp, too real. But it felt so alien, unnaturally natural, the sensation I had heard people attribute to white ripple. I could feel them sharpening everything around me as though every color and shape had felt the kiss of a whetstone, every grain of sand its own cragged boulder and each tree behind them a pillar of the heavens. And they had cut it all down at my merest touch.
“So it’s literal,” I heard myself say, my first words to the something-beyond-people I’d built my entire personality around. I’d always hoped I’d be able to present a first impression as somebody cool and knowledgeable, but I was overwhelmed and disoriented, and could only find it in me to speak the closest thing I could identify to a general truth about…anything. “Vaet-na. Blade people.”
Bri raised a hand and waggled it indecisively. I saw that each and every one of the thousands of segments of her carapace was its own intricate masterwork that would consume my vision if I stared too deep. I forced myself to zoom out and realized that they were sitting in…a pair of beach chairs. Cheap ones, at that. A sandcastle also sat between them, waist-high and very sophisticated. I had no clue if they’d done that or if it was part of my dreamscape.
“Eh. More of a side effect, really. Can’t cut without being cut, can’t define without being defined. That’s what the armor is for,” Bri explained with what felt like a grin, rapping her knuckles against her other forearm. “And we like what we see. That’s good news, for you and for us!”
I wanted to believe her, but good news implied there could be bad news, and I was remembering that I was only here because of some very bad news indeed. Mortal terror flowed easily now that this was no longer a dream. “Does—does that mean you’re not going to kill us? That I’m not a threat to you? I answered—I’m here, and that’s supposed to be enough, right?”
Sani leaned forward in his chair. His voice was deep, and he spoke with the same articulation Kat did. “We are not here to kill you, Ezzen. We wanted to learn what we could about your Flame, and we’re relieved to find that it doesn’t want to sting us the way it did Kat.”
Relief surged through me. I had no choice but to believe them; surely if they had planned to kill me, they would have done so already, when they had inspected what was inside me—my Flame, I corrected myself. They had inspected my Flame, and apparently it had been good enough for them, or else I’d be dead, cut apart, annihilated utterly. I looked between the two of them, suddenly gladdened. This wasn’t a death knell; we were to have a conversation. “Thank you. That’s—The Spire Stands, I don’t know how else to say how much of a relief that is. Is that—did you get what you came for? My Flame…”
“Is from the future,” Sani confirmed. “But you knew that already, since you were listening to Kat. And it is Vaetna Flame.”
That sent my heartrate up, even though we’d already strongly suspected it. “I…thought so,” I hazarded. “From you, from the future.”
“Not from us,” Bri corrected. “That’s the tricky part. It’s our Flame, unmistakably.” She looked around the impossible landscape, then pointed past me at the ice. “I’m not a hundred percent on all the metaphor you’ve dreamt up here, but that’s definitely the Frozen Flame, collectively, and you’re up here for the same reason we are, or at least your nugget of it seems to think so. But it’s wild, willful. Unsure, and it wants, so badly. That’s enough reason to think it didn’t come from us at some point in the future.”
There was a lot to unpack there. The Vaetna was implying that their Flame was more passive or obedient. I’d assumed that their proficiency with weaving was a product of pure technique—maybe it was something more fundamental. Something fundamental which I apparently didn’t share. But that didn’t make sense, because:
“Even though it’s turning me into one of you,” I blurted.
“Is it?” Sani asked. “Look at yourself.”
I did, and was surprised, then elated. The feeling of having crashed back to reality, or at least this unreality freed from the dream’s metaphors, had led me to assume that I had been stuffed back into the meat and slapped with the metaphysical label that that was the “real” me. But the Vaetna were armor right now, not fundamental blades, and that should have tipped me off that for all this place was no longer a dream, it still reflected something of my consciousness, or my Flame, or both.
I was something very similar to the doll, covered in rigid plates that lacked the fractal depth of Vaetna dermis. But my form had taken on a more agile structure, and my legs still ended in talons. I had my hair, the orange locks that went down my back. And I had breasts, anonymous and simple, the only softness on my body. This time I did reach up and feel my face. No mouth, no nose, yes eyes. I was something between a Vaetna and a Radiance and something else altogether. Sani could tell I was shocked and confused and fascinated.
“You’re growing, as flamebearers do. But it’s growth toward aspiration, and it’s gradual and uncertain. Sometimes it’s just change for the sake of change. It’s happening fast for you, make no mistake, because you’ve landed in circumstances ripe for it. But that’s not how we took these shapes we wear.”
“So I’m not becoming a Vaetna?”
“You’re not not becoming a Vaetna. You want to—which we find flattering, I would like to add, since Bri is glaring at me—and your Flame seems to want to, but you both also want other things. It’s all quite a work in progress. And as Bri put it, that’s a reason to think that even if it is truly our Flame, something got lost in translation. It did get launched back through time, after all. But if we had done this, it would not have been so haphazard.” He looked past me, across the sea. “But speculating about who sent it is not why we contacted you so urgently. How much do you know about silver ripple?”
“Sani,” Bri cut in. “You’re talking to magic’s number one fan here, don’t waste time.”
He put up a hand to shush her. I boggled at him, unsure of how to answer such an open-ended question and flustered by Bri’s faith in me. “Um. It’s ripple from the future, or many futures, the part that echoes backward and gets muddled together because you can’t discern the color anymore. Probably responsible for overall conservation of energy when it comes to magic, somehow, models disagree. And, um, I know that you know that somebody in Todai can see it, because that’s how you chose to contact me. The—from how you sound, it sounds like you didn’t intend to kill us in the first place? Which means that you can somehow manipulate the silver directly, I guess that’s not all that shocking—”
“If you didn’t pick up, you would have been killed, make no mistake,” Sani interrupted.
My blood ran cold. “…Really? But what we were shown is that it would be one of you, and you just said—you don’t want the power to fall into the wrong hands, but we’re not the problem, the Peacies are, and they have somebody like me, somebody else who also has your Flame. And they’ve had her for weeks! Why me instead?”
“Things are changing. You’ve seen us as we are, Ezzen, so let me tell you a secret: we’re just two of ten, and even if I’m the leader, I don’t control us. We’re not a hive mind. Even Bri and I, our hearts are in different places. Some of the others think that what we’re doing right here, right now, is very stupid indeed. And it may be. They think we should kill all three of you and wash our hands of all of this, just to be safe.” He sat back in the cheap beach chair. I’d never seen him look worried before; it was plain even through the armor. His voice was heavy. “But I believe that this is all happening for a reason. The three of you who have our Flame, you’re positioned too conveniently, too intentionally. Do you see it? You, arguably our number one fan, struck through a camera and immediately whisked away to the other side of the world, to one of the most capable groups outside of the Spire. On the other side, Ana Baker, a loyal and willing weapon for the PCTF. Third, Noah Holton, whose career was outmoded by magic and has no particular love for either side, now…somewhere. And the last, who was burned away. As haphazard as your Flames appear to be, they were given to you with precision.”
My world was spinning. “Somebody’s trying to change the timeline through us?”
Bri shrugged. “We don’t know. You said it yourself, silver ripple shows potential futures, not one solid future that can reach back and mess with us. Maybe this is a time loop to begin with, or maybe it’s all just chaos. Check this thing out.”
She directed my attention down to the sandcastle between her and her counterpart, which had gone unremarked this whole conversation.
“That’s…the Spire? I’d assume.”
Bri reached her leg out and poked it with a boot. “I’m pretty sure this is a sandcastle.”
We stared at each other for a long moment. She tapped her helm’s chin thoughtfully.
“But yeah, let’s say it represents the Spire. Hell, it might be the Spire, in some sense—it’s your dream, mediated by your Flame, and I’m not sure why else it would be here. But it’s hopefully not the actual Spire as it’s known to your Flame’s understanding of the future, because, well,” she flicked her ankle to devastate a curtain wall. “That would be bad, and I’d like to think we do better work than that. We do better work than that, it won’t crumble so easily. But suppose it did.” She kicked the sandcastle down. “Suppose that was all it took, and suppose it’s destined to happen, that your Flame comes from the future where it does. Would you build a new one?”
“I would try,” I ventured.
“And if someone walks up to kick it down again?”
“I’d cut off their foot.” I was startled at my own bloodlust.
The needle looked to her counterpart. “See? Told you they were a good kid. Yeah, that’s where we ended up. And you’d expect that after you do it the first time, people would get the picture and let you build your sandcastle in peace. But it turns out that people practically line up to take a swing and lose their foot, even when they see the guy right in front of them has just traded walking for hopping. And they do it for stuff like money, or patriotism, or just a belief that the sandcastle shouldn’t be there. Do that enough times and, well…you become us, real good at cutting off feet and building sandcastles and not a whole lot else. We’re not sure there’s a fix for it without basically taking over the world, which you’ll notice we haven’t done.”
“And…I don’t follow,” I admitted, puzzled. “I mean, I get the theory, killing people doesn’t necessarily solve systemic issues. How’s that relate to time travel?”
“Well, consider that they—maybe we—sent some of our Flame back, and to here, and now. They didn’t send a person who’s good at kicking, or fancy greaves that can keep us from cutting off their foot, nor did they bulldoze the beach in the first place. They basically just sent more sand—maybe sand that’s secretly bad for building sandcastles, but still just sand. That means that first, there’s limits on what time travel can do. And second, whoever is behind this maybe didn’t intend for it to be weaponized against us, and that might just be a side effect of the whole time travel business. Silver’s not a fun color. But we don’t know that for sure, or what the endgame is—for the moment, all we can do is fortify the castle and keep cutting off people’s feet. You know how hard it is to admit that you’re in the dark when you’re us?”
“…I can imagine,” I empathized. The Vaetna were not human—or at least not anymore, I felt I hadn’t seen their past, only what they were now—but they certainly seemed diminished by the situation. And for me, of course, this was the most terrifying thing in the world, to know that there was something happening around us and them which they could neither control nor explain. We were all floundering, and while I was sure it would comfort Yuuka to know the Vaetna thought that time travel could only do so much, it was still unnerving to feel the ground shifting beneath us. “So—what changed? Why are things suddenly happening now, right during Kat’s stream, and not weeks ago? Things looked…fine, on her end.”
“The Department of Defense tweeted that they’re going to kick the sandcastle. Kat was implying everything was good, and they didn’t like that, so they’re moving up the schedule.”
Dread rolled through me. Since we’d been on my laptop, I hadn’t had the chat up perpetually, and I’d gotten dragged into arguing with Yuuka about how time worked for the last few minutes before she’d seen death, panicked, and ordered me to enter this dream. I reflexively reached for my phone; I didn’t have it here, of course, and it was mostly unnecessary anyway. “Ana Baker,” I breathed, despite lacking a mouth and nose. “You said my Flame couldn’t hurt you. But hers can?”
“We said yours didn’t want to, which may or may not be the same thing. Hers might, though. Or they may be bluffing as usual, we don’t know yet. But if they’re not, then the Spire could be going to war, real war, the first one that may pose a true existential threat, depending on what’s coming. We could be facing a world where the sandcastle can be knocked down.”
My stomach lurched. Despite everything, despite how relatively well this conversation had gone, my worst fears were still being realized. I scrambled for what I could do. “Then—then study me, figure out how the weapon works. Kat said you patched out whatever made her take damage from the inferno, do that again. Bring me to the Spire and take me apart if you have to.”
“Damn,” Bri chirped. “Straight to that?”
“I mean—it would also take the pressure off the Radiances if I’m not here anymore.”
“Oh, altruism. You really are a good kid.”
“We just did study you, and it’s given us some ideas,” Sani reassured me. “But we—Bri and I—believe you’re right where you should be already.”
“Because of whatever plan is making all this happen?”
Sani’s tone changed in an instant. The signature Vaetna storyteller lilt became a thunderhead of dark fable, and the bright clarity of the non-dream began to wilt.
“Because if we are coming to a world where the Spire may no longer stand, they-of-power must not feel like they have won, that we were just a momentary blip before history returned to its natural course, boots to necks. The old order is already broken and burned, and they must remember that that cannot be undone so easily, no matter what they build with the tools we gave them. They have spat in all our good faith and cling to the belief that all who bear the Flame except us are just another resource, like oil, like flesh. I believe you were granted a Flame and placed with those vengeful gems that you might demonstrate the error in those monsters’ judgment. You would teach them that this will not end when we fall.”
Bri put her arm on the executioner’s shoulder. “Sani.”
He sat back, the specter of the final blade fading. “Apologies. I shouldn’t speak in certainties that thrust so much upon you.”
I stared at him and suddenly felt glad. That was the Vaetna I had been wanting to see. This whole conversation had brought on a subtle, creeping fear that the power and certainty I had known them for was just a mask for the sake of the public, that in reality they were as fractured and fearful as any other flamebearer might be under threat of annihilation, as dysfunctional as Todai could be, building a castle out of sand. And those things may have still been true, and that would haunt me for a long while—but the conviction behind Sani’s words rang truer. There was the thing I believed in, what had captured my imagination, what I had been desperate to live up to if only I had the means, that ineffable sense that these people were out to do something truly good with their power. And now I had the means, granted from some unknown origin from on high.
“It’s—I understand,” I said.
“Do you?”
“Sani,” Bri repeated, more forcefully. “I think it’s time to go. To review, Ezzen: we’re not gonna kill you, but we’re also not going to bail you out. Show them that you’re less afraid of losing your foot than they are.”
“Will—hold on, I don’t remember these dreams,” I warned. “I never do. I can’t forget this, it’s too important.”
“You won’t forget,” Sani replied, standing with that Vaetna ease, not so much hefting himself out of the chair as simply rising. “Because this is not a dream. Flame-shared dreams are one of the things we gave up to become what we are. To even come here as anything resembling ourselves, we had to cut this one apart, as you saw, and stitch it back together with white ripple, and broke several rules in the process. And for similar reasons, I don’t believe we’ll be able to contact you again like this.”
“Then—email? Just, anything,” I pleaded. “I understand you can’t risk or just can’t help us over here. But if my Flame is something like yours, show me how to use it. How to be worthy of it.”
Bri stood. “Our ways won’t help you much. Really bad idea to share them, frankly, you’d land us all in even bigger trouble. You’re too clever for your own good. All I can say is this: learn about silver and white and how they’re connected. There’s more to magic than glyphs, and it starts with those. And…” she twisted to face the dark, impenetrable forest. “There’s something in here, something we couldn’t cut. I’d love to figure out what, but it’s your problem now.”
Sani brought a fist to his chest in a gesture of respect. “Goodbye, Ezzen, and good luck.”
And then they were gone. I was alone once more, the two empty chairs before me and the ruins of a sandcastle between them the only proof that they had been here. That and the broken dream around me, which was beginning to crumble and dim, unable to maintain its paradoxical state without the Vaetna binding it together. Would it even persist once I was gone?
I gazed at the forest past the beach, up at the vast trees. The Vaetna had suggested that it was important that I explore this dream further, that I venture into the darkness. Why? The sea behind me was the Flame, that I understood, and it was real enough that the lights beneath the ice seemed to be the true presence of other flamebearers, however distant—had they seen any of what had just transpired here? The empty, rotting sky was just itself, and the beach was a border from sea to forest, but the nature of that murky wood eluded me. Was it the fourth dimension, so obstinately unnavigable and crudely stapled to the reality that had existed before magic? The uncertain future, that which the Vaetna could not cut?
I had never had the freedom of mind to enter it of my own accord to investigate before now, and now I had the freedom, but not the time. It was time for me to go from this place as well, back to reality, to face the music.
No time left to venture deep, and the Vaetna had offered little certainty that I would return. So I would make that certainty. I stepped across the beach on my talons and up to the edge of the forest. I found a fallen branch, one that was straight and strong, and reached down and cut, redefining it with the memory of whittling tools and splinters, establishing the notion of a haft and a piercing tip. That was certainty.
I set the spear across the ruins of the sandcastle. If this place was real enough, I would be able to find it again.
Then, at last, I woke. And I told the Radiances everything.
Author’s Note:
This is not the end of the arc; it’s more of a mid-arc climax. The sand is shifting. Aren’t the Vaetna neat? I sure think they’re neat, and so does Ezzen, though perhaps for different reasons. I hope you enjoy them too, because this isn’t the last we’ll be seeing of them. Thanks to the betas, they really helped my sanity on this one. One of them also scribbled this art of Ez as it appeared in this chapter:
What an adorable critter! We’ll see if this version of them is reflected in reality at all.
To reiterate, Sunspot is on its usual break this next week, so the next chapter will be March 1st. That is, unless you’re a Patreon supporter — that’s right, I’m FINALLY getting ahead of public releases again. This chapter only went up like 9 hours ahead of public, but for patrons 4.11 will be this coming Sunday, February 22nd, a full week ahead of when it’ll release here on RR! And I intend to keep extending the backlog beyond that until we’re back to a full three chapters ahead. Cower at my might. Also, you’ll get some of the upcoming art early.
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