Izumi gave me the exact verbal kick in the ass I needed. One I had needed for a while, in all honesty. Rushing headlong toward blood magic out of desperation was normal for inexperienced flamebearers in a crisis, but I was far more qualified than that. Even a single minute of planning and I could work wonders without sacrificing anything at all.
“The net’s across the boundary between here and the pod,” I considered aloud. “As in, bits of it are here in threespace, like the part we passed through, but the vast majority of it is stretching over the three-four boundary. That was the original purpose for it, probably, yeah?”
“Probably. So it would actually be a…three-dimensional net?”
“Yep. We’ll confirm that in a sec, but that’s the reasonable assumption. Like how a normal, flat two-dimensional net can have a three-dimensional shape to wrap around something; same principle moved one dimension up. And your pods—yours and Yuuka’s—would be inside the portion of three-dimensional space it covers out in the fourth dimension.” My confidence grew as I spoke and laid out the arrangement of each element in my head. I couldn’t visualize the fourth dimensional positioning exactly, but all we really cared about for our purposes was that the mantle pods were on the far side of the net, and enclosed so that we couldn’t just cross into the fourth dimension somewhere else to go around it. That’s how I would have done it, I figured.
“Then how did we get in?” Izumi wondered. “We did not touch it on the way in.”
“Maybe it was dormant. Or just pulled itself out of the way as it saw us come in, actually, since that’s basically what it already did with that,” I hypothesized, pointing to the hole in the roof. It had been blasted open by Yuuka, but before that it had been open to the sky initially as our point of entry.
“And it cannot act beyond the three-dimensional space of the building, it seems? Or it would have already attacked us.”
“Yeah. Who knows how far it goes in the fourth dimension, but I think it’s enclosed. It’s a net, it keeps stuff in. I’ve sort of got an inkling that it doesn’t even truly understand there is an ‘outside’ beyond itself.” Too much theorizing, I told myself; walk it back, focus on the problem at hand. “So we gotta get you two out of there, Yuuka first. Cutting it open is a bad idea, I think, if I could even get {SEVER} to do that. But that’s not really the best use of my spear, is it? It’s a net, not a wall. It’s got holes. It’s mostly holes, even. And if it has holes…I don’t think it’s actually an obstacle to me.”
She nodded, following my meaning. “You mean your rain step.”
She experimentally rolled one of her legs—the motion was twitchy and jumpy, intermittent, like you’d see in an online game with serious packet loss. I’d played a few in my day, but never for long. I watched her movements with concern. “Yeah. Hold that thought. Can you get yourself out of here?”
“…No. I am stuck.”
“How? You can control both your bodies at once, can’t you? Like, Yuuka’s probably locked into her mantle right now so she can’t weave, but you’ve got the dual-control thing going on.” Izumi did have a pod like the others, and must have been employing it to be caught in the net as she was, but I would have expected her awareness to be more distributed across both of her bodies, as it had been when we’d fought both of her at once at the festival. Her flesh in the pod shouldn’t have been as helpless as Yuuka’s with the connection disrupted by the net.
She grunted. “Since we fought Sugawara, I have been leaving as much of myself out of the other body as I can. I did not want two bodies, I want this body. Mistake.” Her mouth was a little out of sync with the words.
My heart hurt for her. “Right. Okay, that makes sense. Not a mistake,” I asserted gently. “You’re—this thing is insane, you couldn’t have—”
“We do not have time to argue. Yuuka-chan will die or lose her mind before me.”
“But you still can control both bodies if I unfuck your connection? You’re the easier one if I don’t need to fully free you and just need to unfuck your connection enough to—”
Izumi put up her hand. “I hear her. My senses are back.” She was scrambling to her feet before I could respond. “I’m going to—” She suddenly collapsed back to the ground, face-first, and groaned incoherently for a long second. “Gone. Ow, it’s—the net is shifting. It is trying to contain her and she is not fighting it.”
I swallowed. “Oh, fuck.”
Izumi groaned in pain as the net invisibly attacked her nerves. I could tell it wasn’t the incoherent, mind-breaking agony I’d gone through, but it was pain nonetheless, plain in her voice.
“Izumi?”
“Ah, I can’t move my arms. I can’t move my arms,” she repeated in a simulated gasp, despair soaking through her voice as she lay slumped and unmoving. “I—what did you ask?”
She was losing her connection with reality in both magical and literal ways. “Cut her out? Cut you out?” I asked.
“I will live. Her first.”
“What about you? I can’t just leave you here if it’s—what’s it even doing? Choking you out? Talk to me. I can draw up a ward or something for you.”
“She’s…migi, yonjuu, gojuudo.” She was silent for a long moment, and in that time I understood that she would not allow herself to be helped before Yuuka. “Forty or fifty degrees right from where my head is pointing. About twenty meters kata from the edge of the roof. She is not fighting it, Ezzen.”
“…Alright. Let me at least move you a bit.” I grabbed her shoulders and rolled her over so she was facing up as something grim and furious settled in my chest. “Okay, uh—I’m—I guess I’m going to do it now. Try to get through, get to her.”
She stared at the sky as she spoke. Her mouth didn’t move with her reply. “Try.”
I babbled out the plan. “Okay. I’ll get her, then you, then we’re getting the fuck out of here. So, rain step,” I reoriented. “Get my spear to the other side of the fourspace barrier which is hopefully also the net, then teleport across. Should work if I can figure out exactly where I’m going ahead of time,” I hedged. “I just need a gap wide enough for the spear to get over there.”
She didn’t respond. I had the horrible feeling she couldn’t anymore. But she had given me a target to aim for, a place to scan and find the exact location of Yuuka’s pod so I could shift my spear straight there instead of merely across the barrier. I looked at the spot she indicated and ignited my Flame, preparing to weave—
We had thought the net-entity was limited to the physical three-dimensional boundaries of the building, which was why it hadn’t attacked us for the past few minutes. But my Flame was a beacon, a lighthouse, plainly visible to such an extent that it could illuminate even Yuuka’s foresight. So when I ignited my spool of thread, it lit me up like a Christmas tree in whatever ripple-senses this thing had. For the first time it understood that there was an “outside”, that there could be food out there.
Space distorted. The mindless intelligence of this ambush predator converted red ripple to orange and reached outside of itself, extending a metaphysical limb of hunger to grasp my little area of “outside” and drag it “inside.” The roof collapsed beneath me as well, of course, but what happened this time was profoundly more paranatural. That frantic half-heartbeat of sudden weightlessness saw the treeline around me contort in dizzying vertigo, bare branches folding and rippling downward and inward.
Before I had even begun my first glyph, I was falling into the gullet once more.
I did not consider myself good at being fast. A life lived on the forums meant I was used to having time to consider, to pause, to zoom out and decide what I wanted to say or how best to approach a particular knot of glyphcraft. I thought of myself as a slow thinker, a problem solver given to contemplation punctuated with flashes of insight that gave me the chance to repeatedly optimize bad ideas into better ones. I rarely knew what to do and exactly how to do it, and tended to second guess myself and weigh my options even when it seemed like the best option was plain. Since being flametouched I’d discovered that I also had a rather serious impulsive streak, but that wasn’t quite the same thing as being quick on my feet; that tended to be “not thinking” rather than “thinking fast,” and by now it had repeatedly bitten me and taken chunks of flesh with it each time. True urgency, where I had to be clever quickly, was a growth point for me, in my own estimation.
I hadn’t given myself enough credit. I absolutely did benefit from time to think, and those few minutes of talking with Izumi were all the preparation I needed to make this different from how helpless I’d been on the way up. In that split second of the rooftop turning to rubble, before I hit the net again, my mind made a series of intuitive leaps. Ideas strung together in my brain faster than gravity could pull me into the gullet. Pain; red ripple; pure red ripple; red-consuming ward; red to orange to separate me from the net; using {DIFFERENTIATE} for the spine would pigeonhole sufficiently; use a 4-1 Z-twist. Alt-M, G, right click, T, left click, stretch my left hand a bit for alt-E-M-T.
Muscle memory translated that abstract GWalk intention into thread. Too slowly; one second of falling became two, and pain slammed against the battered bulwark of my mind. My eardrums felt like they would burst. Something wet was dripping out of my nose and I was going to die and it would hurt the whole time and it saw me—and all the while my hands kept moving. Back, forth, around, in just the right shapes with just the right tension. Glyphs had to double back on each other with specific angles, layering, ordering. The pressure kept ratcheting up, the gasworks of my soul creaking and shuddering under the flood of agony eagerly shared through the net.
My hands slipped; my movements became shoddy. Thread went to the wrong places, my desperate haste birthing misaligned and ugly approximations that I hoped against hope would be good enough. Too sloppy, my lack of skill laid bare when it mattered most. It was not possible to complete the ward properly before I succumbed. I would die painfully to my own novice incompetence.
And yet, the glyphs did come together. The pressure did abate, leaving me strangely hollow for long seconds, all my mental and emotional systems still suspended in that moment of desperation to escape the pain. My faculties returned haltingly—my eyes saw structural charnel writhing around me, within arm’s reach and no closer as it tried to swallow me, crush me to a pulp and drink me down, all pretense of an organic pitcher plant gullet abandoned in favor of raw hunger. But I’d managed to block the building, and the net, from touching me with my slapdash recreation of a mantle pod’s most essential protection.
The ward sparked around me with little bits of blue ripple, surplus leakage from the red-to-orange conversion that was using the net’s own energy to keep it from entering the space around me. It wasn’t perfect; my foot hurt from the tiny fraction of red that was still leaking in, and some of the output blue was giving the air the distinct scent of ozone as it broke down the volatiles in the air, a warning of how it would kill me violently if I was still present when it collapsed, when it would destabilize under the strain and slip from orange-dominant to blue-dominant. The back of the napkin said I had at most twenty seconds before the equilibrium failed.
So there was no time to marvel at my unlikely success of dexterity or savor the pain’s retreat; I had to get to Yuuka, free her, and get us both out of there. The good news was that I was at least within the building’s three-dimensional space once more, so all I had to do was get my spear across the fourspace barrier. Even with the ward, I didn’t dare chance pushing myself across directly; my ward’s spatial distortions would not protect me so close to that jagged, ill-behaved seam where the fourth dimension had been stitched to ours.
I had been hoping that I could find the optimal transit location, the place where the boundary had the simplest geometry and the net had gaps in its coverage—nowhere near enough time for that. Nor did I have the time to scan for what the net was doing in fourspace between the boundary and the pod. I’d just have to send my spear straight toward Yuuka and it’d cross the barrier wherever it crossed the barrier.
Finding coordinates for Yuuka’s pod was easy, at least. I already had a rough idea of where to aim, so with her ensnared in the net, I was certain to find her at the highest nearby concentration of red ripple. I’d just get the coordinates for that, have my spear transit the boundary and move through fourspace to that point in a straight line—a true straight line, not the chaotic geodesics of the fourspace continuum, which was insanity to attempt—then I’d rain step to it.
Four diagrams of ripple meters flashed through my head; I picked the one with the fewest second-order glyphs and got my hands moving while I decided on the actual input parameters. I targeted a five meter hypersphere around the three-coordinates of the point on the roof Izumi had indicated and shunted thirty meters kata—the standard offset the pods used, far enough to be unassailable by most weaponry that could even skim the barrier but close enough that control wasn’t disrupted. And since I only cared about the point of maximum ripple density and not the information for the whole region, I could cheat the hierarchy and cut out a whole {DISTRIBUTE} from the standard design, saving precious seconds of weaving as the building tried to crush me to a pulp and the ward continued to deny it.
It at least had the decency to fail slowly instead of all at once; grasping fingers of stinging agony were steadily crawling up my leg and the taste of iron had crept into my mouth from no apparent source. In the corner of my eye I saw little shreds of skin surface from between the churning rubble. Instead of dry corpse-leather those glimpses of flesh looked supple and inviting; some other fragment of the memories that had made it. It felt like the building was gaping its maw at me, saying come on inside, won’t it feel so good?
I pushed the grisly temptation aside and screwed my eyes shut to keep imagining the GWalk window in front of me, the flurry of keyboard shortcuts to insert and connect and parameterize everything. I fed the target coordinates into the most blunt and fundamental kinetic shunter possible, barely more than a vector. I sometimes reflected that throwing rocks was the beginning of human warfare and had stuck with us in one fashion or another all the way to the advent of magic; glyphcraft was depressingly, tellingly well-suited to the task, stripping out all the hardware of muscles or lever arms or gunpowder and leaving just the pure intent. Direction and magnitude, target and force.
It was with that intent that I wove. I was barely even aware of what my hands were doing at this point, giving myself fully to the command window and sub-panels, keystrokes rather than tension, dialog boxes rather than self-intersections, the need to help Yuuka rather than the temptation to let this entity flood me with its energy and fight it on its terms. I blotted out as much of the world as I could, everything but the taste of blood and scent of ozone in my ragged lungs.
I wouldn’t realize until afterward that I was rediscovering one method of snapweaving from first principles. Glyphs were a language that both I and the Flame understood, an abstraction to bridge from intention to design to ripple via preordained arrangements of extruded thread, and I was discovering that the physical act of arranging the thread was something my Flame itself could handle, was eager to handle, as long as my intention was pure and my designs ironclad. Which they were. My hands still moved, but it was only in the broad suggestion of the lattice rather than each parameter and detail. The luminous threads followed along the chain of my intentions to fill in the gaps of their own accord.
That was for later. I was so close now, seconds before the ward reached the critical failure point—a thrum of foreign heat rolled up my spine, too molten to be distinguishable as pain or pleasure and either way deeply unwelcome inside my frail sensorium. It failed to break my concentration. I summoned my spear at my side, confined against me in the shrinking bubble of the ward, and imagined it into the interface. C, T, Escape, Enter, Enter, and it was designated as the payload. The last turns of thread tugged themselves into place.
That was the end of the lattice. It triggered immediately and violently. My spear launched as though from a ballista in a tremendous shock of motion and a muted snap of rushing air, vanishing from right against my body in what my senses firmly insisted to be a violent acceleration—but a total mystery of direction since it immediately left my slice of the W-axis. I didn’t get to observe its trajectory from there, whether it had successfully transited the boundary intact and found Yuuka, worse than blind as I forced myself to wait one more second, then two, then three—
The ward collapsed into sparks. Blue sparks, fittingly, so bright that they were visible straight through my eyelids—perhaps even in my eye like Cherenkov radiation, or perhaps that’s what it literally was. Either way, it was my cue. I didn’t know where my spear was, but that didn’t matter. Wherever it was, so was I.
The rain step truly was instant, no nausea-inducing lurch of motion. One moment I was surrounded by a shell of rubble about to consume me, the next I was somewhere entirely different, with my spear in my hand, seemingly whole and unmarred. My false vaet had crossed the barrier successfully; I knew this even before opening my eyes because my first breath was not of ozone but of familiar, oily not-air. I’d never been happier to feel so plainly out of my evolved environment. Victorious relief surged through me even as I brandished my spear in both hands, my carapace-clad forearm still blazing with my Flame, preparing for the net to pursue me, and opened my eyes.
Mercifully, I was greeted by stillness. And horror, more subtly.
Before me floated a thick knot of skin, easily three meters in diameter. Gaps here and there revealed the shine of Yuuka’s pod, the silver eggshell of LM glinting from the light of my Flame but almost entirely choked out by the net’s avarice. A few strips of the skin were furled off in random directions before suddenly terminating in wobbly undulations where they must have been changing direction to move along the fourth axis. Even looking at the thing was suffocating—I remembered a moment during the festival when Yuuka had attempted to restrain Izumi with some kind of LM rope bondage gear. This was that, stripped of all of the performative artifice and instead replaced with pure, greedy hunger, visible desperation to cover and constrict and consume.
It had gotten inside. It was hard to tell at first, but the longer I looked, the more the pit in my stomach grew. The shell was supposed to be sealed in all four dimensions when the Radiances weren’t actively transferring in or out of it, and though the pod was too covered to obviously see a breach, the knot of skin was just a little too oblong to be evenly covering the unbroken pod’s normal shape, too many leathery strands dipping under themselves toward its surface around the same point. Wrapping around the pod had cut Yuuka off from her mantle as it had with Izumi, but getting inside meant it was eating her. Every line of skin seemed to flow inward and upward toward her head.
Toward her eye.
“How dare,” I whispered almost involuntarily, speaking as much for my Flame as for myself. The same repugnance inspired in me by Sugawara was surfacing upon my soul again, displacing the threadbare desperation that had gotten me this far and burning hotter and brighter through me. The eye was the window to the soul, more literally for her than for most, and this thing had colonized it.
I knew what she was seeing, what it had shown me glimpses of in our previous contact: a dream of every atrocity that had made it, collapsed down to a single point in time, its past and present and future all at once, so intensely inscribed in ripple that to Yuuka’s eye it was the future. She could not have seen this coming any more than the building itself could, and once ensnared, it had subsumed her entire reality into the dream.
Hina’s voice returned to my ear, hissing how dare you hurt my sister-wife-friend and growling at me to tear and ruin and save Yuuka by any means necessary.
I suspected cutting her out would kill her, either from unpredictable behavior from her Flame or the simple shock. The entity hadn’t digested her yet, truly made her or her Flame a part of itself as far as I could tell, not yet, but I couldn’t risk killing her by simply shredding this thing, even though in my heart I knew I could.
The entity had already demonstrated that it wanted me. On the roof it had wanted me badly enough that it had surpassed its own nature and moved beyond the boundaries of the building. Perhaps I had taught this predator something terrible, that there was an outside and that there was bright blazing Flame there for it to hunt if it could learn to move and stalk instead of merely wait—but what mattered now was that it hungered for me very, very badly. I had lost its attention when I’d teleported, a trick it had likely never seen before, and its attention where I was now was fully focused on Yuuka.
So I made myself a juicier target than her. It was easy when I was angry. I did what was most natural, a mix of reflexes from spear training, inspiration from the Heron, and simple conjoined instinct from my Flame. I shifted my grip on my spear, sliding the contained inferno of my hand to where the haft met the burnt tip, and set it ablaze with all the fury in my heart and the desire to make the false vaet as true as I could, the weapon that was me. The flame leapt along the blackened edges of the blade and for a moment made me feel like a proper Vaetna.
But I wasn’t. Too soft, too vulnerable. I needed armor to match. The bonfire in my chest responded to that thought by racing back up my arm, over my shoulders and chest and up my throat, anchoring itself in every vacated pore where there had once been hair follicles. A thin, cold outer shell of burning energy wreathed my flesh. Perhaps I should have done this from the beginning.
That got the entity’s attention. Some of those outboard strands of leather began to reach toward me, slowly and probingly, more cautious or simply less active than the parts of the net that controlled the building, the pitcher plant. Then that central knot surrounding the breach in the pod began to loosen and unfurl, leather opening up like a nightmare jellyfish. More and more of the pod became visible as the entity opened its true mouth, or perhaps its stomach, revealing the silhouette of Yuuka’s body inside, still utterly surrounded by skin packed within the pod. Now it was plain to see how every flap of skin converged on her eye, using it as a conduit to dream a solipsistic feedback loop of its own past-present-future on loop forever, making Yuuka into an engine of pain.
Those deepest feeders did not detach themselves, but it was enough. I had my opening.
I kicked forward off of nothing, too fast for these lazy feeder-tentacles to react, and plunged my blazing spear into the exposed heart of the pod. Into Yuuka, into her eye. Not literally, just as I had not really stabbed out my own eye when I had first been flametouched, but the same principle. It was a terribly violent connection.
I dove into the dream, spear-first, to lead her out.
Author’s Note:
“honestly about fucking time the main character of this serial does something” – one of the beta readers upon finishing this chapter
Ezzen is cooking. Literally, it’s being cooked by its Flame. But it’s finally seizing its destiny, and that’s what we’re all here for, isn’t it? Seems like it’s finally also figured out how to do weaving without weaving and the secret is to simply have turbo autism about your particular keybind setup. Yuuka, by contrast is in a bad, bad way, full damsel in distress mode, poor girl. But she’s just having a bad dream, and as we’ve seen, even magical dreams are nothing to a Vaetna.
Lotta yonic imagery in this chapter if you keep your eyes peeled for it. I promise that’s not the only reason it took me two full weeks to write this chapter, but it definitely contributed. Huge thanks to the beta readers for helping me through it!
