While the three of us were engaging in exploratory lewdity, the other Radiances were dealing with the emerging crisis of Tamamo-no-mae, the demon freed from the stone.
The story went that Tamamo was a shapeshifter fox spirit, a kitsune, who infiltrated the Japanese royal court in the twelfth century before being eventually exposed, banished, hunted down, and killed.
Izumi’s explanation to me as we were recomposing ourselves was longer than that, but it captured the gist. The way she told it, it sounded not unlike the many rumors of flamebearers who lived normal lives in secret, right up until they were inevitably found and taken by the Peacies. Or rather, it sounded like the version of those rumors the Peacies themselves started, fearmongering of how flamebearers could secretly live among you and manipulate the lives of those around them.
Of course, there was one flamebearer in particular my mind went to immediately.
“Don’t you—the Hikanome people in general—call Hina a fox? Any relation?”
“She does remind us of a kitsune, yes.”
“Shapeshifting, cruelty, animal features, deception,” Alice summarized.
“I love our girlfriend,” I decided dreamily, earning a narrow grin from Izumi and a snort from Alice. Whether “our” was really the correct way to put it, we had yet to seriously discuss, but that wasn’t a conversation for right now. “…I wonder if she’s turning into one, the same way you’re turning into a dragon.”
Alice gave this a moment’s serious contemplation, then shrugged. “She’d be happier about it than I am. You’d have to ask her.”
“Missing the tails,” Izumi pointed out. “Unlike this one,” she added with a squeeze that drew a deeper breath from Alice. The tail-burdened hips reflexively rose backward into the touch for a moment, then were arrested by a flare of heat and a sharp snap of fingers as Alice reasserted control.
“Yamete. I’m trying to focus.”
Izumi retracted her hand obediently, though she gave me a questioning look from Alice’s other side. I was, after all, knuckle-deep. “Um. Should I stop too?”
“No,” Alice instructed breezily. “You’re still collecting data.”
I returned Izumi’s look. We all knew that wasn’t really true—any more modeling data my sensors could gather was by now redundant— and I saw a flash of jealousy cross the older girl’s mantled face. But Alice was the boss, so I kept doing what I was doing as Izumi cleared her throat. “Ahem. Eto…that is the story of Tamamo-no-mae.”
“And she’s…real,” I prompted.
“Twitter seems to think so,” Alice shrugged.
Izumi shifted impatiently. “It seems like an ill omen, to me.”
“I don’t disagree. But we’ll see what Amane says, and what Yuuka sees.”
“Hold on. Return? No,” I protested. “Not how that works! Magic is only seven years old. This is one of those cultural ripple residuals, right? She must have been created just now—yesterday, I guess—from the cultural basis of her myth, through ripple. Like the Bigfoot thing last year, or whatever the hell they keep not getting good pictures of in the ocean. She can’t have actually existed eight hundred years ago.”
“I would have agreed a week ago,” Alice said, “But we now know you have a Flame from the future.”
“Which the Vaetna think is the result of exceptional circumstances!” But even as I said that, I remembered what else they had told me in that dream: there is more to magic than glyphs. It already felt like a lifetime ago; I had undertaken a whole second dream dive in between, and that one barely felt real in retrospect, either. But both undeniably had been real in the ways that mattered. I emitted a digital sigh. “Feels like we don’t need more of those.”
“More spirits?”
“More exceptional circumstances. But also more spirits, yes.”
Izumi hesitated. “More spirits may be good for studying your theory. If she is real, then now we have two disembodied spirits in Japan. Her and him.”
“Sugawara hasn’t been found, has he?” Alice asked. “His ghost, I mean. Have I missed that?”
“Amane said she thought he was connected to Tamamo. But she didn’t give a reason, and I haven’t heard more.”
“He has been too quiet for too long,” Izumi added. “I worry.”
Alice thought about this for a moment. “So she really is the better candidate for you to learn about all that body-soul-Flame stuff you were talking about. And she’s not actively causing terror, we think?”
We replied with shrugs. From here in the bedroom, we only knew what the other Radiances told us. Of course, the internet was abuzz, but so much of that was hearsay or too ill-informed about magic to draw any serious conclusions.
“Alright. Well, I’d love to go out and see for myself, but none of us are in a condition to go out and join them. Ezzen, tell them to wrap up for now and come back so we can strategize. Between this and the Peacies, it’s time for a war council.”
“On it.”
“And then turn up the intensity two notches. And Izumi,” she commanded with another snap of her fingers that made my partner-in-submission jerk like a puppet, “Come around to my front and suck my tits like you’ll get milk out of them. I want to be stone cold sober and have the air free of red five minutes from now, and I need at least one more climax to make that happen on schedule.”
I had a chance to do a little reading while Alice cleaned up from the mess we’d made of her.
Tamamo-no-mae’s myth was ancient, descended from mirrors across Asia, tales of a malevolent courtesan fox spirit that had been carried across the Sea of Japan by fishermen in eras gone by. Japan’s addition to the tale was a separate myth from some time later, which claimed that after Tamamo-no-mae had been hunted down, the now-disembodied demon embedded herself in a particular stone, the Sessho-seki, the “Killing Stone” which Amane had mentioned. The stone had eventually been exorcised by a monk, and the demon laid to rest at last, wrapping the tale up neatly. The apocryphal boulder in question was in a town not far north of Tokyo and less than ten kilometers from Sugawara’s hospital-compound-turned-skin-monstrosity-turned-ground-zero, and as far as actual history went, it was inert, unremarkable other than as a culturally significant location that attracted tourists and small offerings. It even looked unremarkable; some exceptionally speedy Wikipedia editor had already added new photos to the article, and both before and after splitting in half it looked largely indistinguishable from the other rocks around it, save for being slightly bigger and the thick rope symbolically tied around it.
Of course it was just a rock. Because, again, magic was only seven years old, and therein lay the paradox.
By now, it was understood by the world at large that ripple could be both emanated and amplified by locations and objects of cultural significance, since at a fundamental level ripple was correlated with things that “matter”—an infuriatingly nebulous concept whose enormity I was only barely beginning to grasp at the time—but in all cases, the cutoff point was the beginning of the firestorms in 2015, the day Dad died, the day ripple and the Flame became things that could affect reality. An object could only have become magical after that point. The Killing Stone, like countless other sites, had become a very minor nexus of ambient ripple in the last seven years, but had not already been magical before then, regardless of what the myths claimed.
Thus, reason dictated the breaking of the Killing Stone had not freed Tamamo-no-mae, because she had not existed in the distant past to be bound in the first place. Rather, I thought that she must have been gestating inside the stone across the last seven years, and then kickstarted by another, external source of ripple—the obvious candidate was the backwash of Alice’s grand display of destruction.
“But I concede the timing makes no sense,” I was clarifying to Izumi in the upper level common area. “Two days between Alice’s blast and the stone breaking. It should have broken immediately.”
“That is my point, yes. Ripple does not last that long, so far from the source,” she agreed. “A third party, then. Which must be Sugawara.”
An overhead thump signaled the return of our away party. Chalkboard footsteps rushed down the stairs from the rooftop landing pad, the sharp and solid impact of gemstones on concrete. Amethyst strode over to us, all three meters of her crossing the space at speed. She stopped in front of us, looked us up and down, and warbled a greeting in her jewel tones. It barely even sounded like Japanese to me, but the way Izumi hunched in embarrassment told me that she understood just fine.
“Yeah, we had a good time,” I replied for both of us, surprised at how even-keeled I felt about acknowledging it. It sort of felt like I was reporting back to the boss, which was ironic after Alice had practically had us on leashes for the last hour. “But, um, we’re trying to focus up. Alice will be out in a minute. Team meeting.”
The language barrier went both ways; I was still a little unsure of whether Amethyst caught 100% of what I was saying in English when we were face-to-face. The translation software was only good in text, as far as I was aware. I spoke with a little more enunciation and separation between my thoughts than I did with everybody else, just in case. Izumi had her own reasons to be shy as she replied directly in Japanese. I gave her a sidelong glance; whatever she said was making Amethyst titter more than I’d have expected if she was merely translating for me.
“What did you tell her?”
“Oh, she asked how much Pretty Cure we saw.”
“Ah. Right. We only made it…what, two episodes, didn’t we.”
“And then we…how do you say it? Abandoned the pretense, yes. Alice-sama is a very powerful force.”
Amethyst spoke carefully in her gemstone timbre. “Is she better?”
“She was very different. I…think we cured her burnout, or something along the lines, but I think the pendulum has swung the other way somewhat, because she was…intense. You may be surprised. Or not, I don’t know, you’ve known her a lot longer than I have. But also, she’s certainly physically different than before.”
“The tail?” Amethyst asked.
“Longer. Thicker. It’s a good tail.” I felt that summed it up well enough for the moment. I was sure she would grill Izumi for the salacious details later, but I did make sure to mention: “Ah, we did make scans. I don’t know how to send them over, though? If there’s some kind of file transfer protocol built into the doll, I don’t have a control panel for it or anything like that.”
Amethyst nodded. “Leave and turn it off.”
“Gotcha. With the external controls. After the meeting, then.” I bit back a sigh, not relishing the notion of returning to my body and all the associated pain from my burns and the hole in my stomach. Escaping had been nice, but reality was rapidly—actually, no, there it was already, heralded by another thump from overhead and another clunk of the door, as well as the highest, faintest edges of the jetbike’s engine spinning down. The pattering of human-scale footsteps descended to bring us Yuuka, hurrying after her friend on her much, much shorter legs.
She did not look like she had dressed for a paranatural investigation, nor for a public appearance. Indeed, the soft pants, lack of particular makeup or ornamentation, and form-occluding jacket told me that she had been called to Tamamo-no-mae’s stone directly from university. She had at some point removed the accompanying eyepatch and opted not to don it again on the way home; the crystalline eye glared at all of us—though her human eye did glance my way with something that might have been relief. Whatever the emotion, it was much less vigilant than I was used to from her. I’d hardly seen her since the hospital, and spoken to her even less, but that was a good sign.
Yuuka did not stop as she approached us and instead brushed right past. “It’s bad,” she said simply, heading for the stairs. “And I’m gonna have a killer headache by the time we’re done. Gonna medicate, then Ezza, I’m gonna need your lamp so I can see how bad. Then I’m gonna pass out.”
Izumi turned from watching her trot downstairs to cast a worried look at Amethyst. “So it is him.”
“Tabun.” The gemstone mecha hesitated, then said something else to Izumi.
“But it may not be. Yuuka has been very paranoid,” the assassin translated for me. “On edge.”
“Not surprising.”
Amane dropped out of her mantle. A flash of purple light hid the swap from LM-woven warform back to bionics-augmented young woman. She looked a little tousled, in terms of her hair and clothing—like bedhead, I thought. There was a stiffness to her stance, like she was braced for something. After a moment, she blinked in surprise. “Aka…nai? Yuuka-chan no yogenshita koto na no ni…?”
“Zenzen,” Izumi replied. “No red. We were careful.”
“Might be some in the bedroom,” I hedged. “But I’m in the doll, Izumi is in her mantle, so it’s just one person’s worth, and I think Alice is taking her time because she’s weaving some ward to drink up whatever’s left.”
“Thank you,” Amane said, stepping over to seat herself in one of the actual chairs of the common area with the tiniest wince. “The weather…is better indoors. Nasu-machi was very bad.” She suddenly looked peeved, an expression I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen on her before. Her delicate features compressed into thin displeasure. “It is not only him,” she added in slow, careful English. “Tamamo-no-mae exists. I saw her in Nasu-machi.”
“Did she look like Sugawara did?” I pictured the sickly yellow, bramble-woven silhouette of Japan’s boogeyman.
“No. Red fox.”
She explained in more detail in Japanese to Izumi, who translated. “Large, and the silhouette was…foggy? Wispy? All the bystanders say they saw the same thing. She’s been circling the town for a week.” Amane added something else that made Izumi cross her arms in concern. “And she spoke to Amane-chan and Yuuka-chan. She told them directly that another spirit had been there yesterday.”
“Sugawara,” Amane spat. If Izumi said the name with loathing, Amane was downright scary. For a moment it felt like the full-size mecha was sitting in the chair in front of us.
“Yes. But it’s stranger,” Izumi continued to explain. “She knew what flamebearers were. As in, although she called him a rei, a ghost, she literally called Radiances fureimube-ra-, flamebearer, from English.”
That surprised me as well. If she had purely been formed from the gestalt understanding of her myth, I would have expected her to feel very much of the era that story took place in. Knowing about flamebearers, and using the word directly borrowed from English, implied she had also absorbed at least a modicum of knowledge of how the world worked post-magic. “Did she learn it from him?”
Amane shook her head. “She did not like him.”
That was oddly relieving. “So she’s got some sense in her. Might be doing something with pink ripple to siphon information. Sounds like you didn’t see him directly, though?”
“No. We asked her,” Amane said. “She said he is going north.”
“What’s north for him to go to?”
Amane looked like she already knew the answer, but deferred to Izumi, who was frowning. Several long, quiet seconds passed, during which some commotion in the kitchen was faintly audible as Yuuka mugged Ebi’s drone body for some painkillers. I also heard the elevator bell below us. Maybe Ai—I wasn’t sure what was keeping her. Izumi’s frown eventually reached critical mass and transformed into a scowl. “Trickster spirit,” she decided. “We shouldn’t believe her.”
“Meaning…?”
“Hikanome’s grand temple!” Hina’s voice chirped. She pranced around a corner that didn’t exist and beamed a grin at us as she sidled up to her girlfriend. “The question is, why?”
“He learned from Tamamo how myths and ripple can make spirits,” I surmised. “Hey, Hina.”
“Cutie! Ah, wow, Tamamo! Gosh, I wanna meet her. Foxy fox, so many fluffy tails! I bet she fucks like a racehorse, though. She’s all myth-juiced, right? He wants the same thing. The myth-juicing, I mean, not to fuck like a racehorse.” Hina had managed to maneuver both of Izumi’s hands onto her waist, though the mantled woman was making a remarkable effort to avoid her blue, blue eyes. “What’s wrong, Izu?”
Such extremely close contact with Hina could make anybody relent. “I—it would make sense. But I do not want to go to the temple.”
That puzzled me. It was easy to understand why the ex-assassin wanted nothing to do with one of Hikanome’s primary bases of operations anymore, but: “Who said you have to?”
“Outsiders are not allowed,” Amane explained.
“Including us,” Hina finished. “Even though we’re basically saints to them. And it’s not like they could actually stop us from just walking in anyway.”
“DO NOT FUCKING WALK IN,” Yuuka yelled as she raced back up the stairs. “That’s such a bad idea it made my eye actually hurt, Hina.”
“Listen to the prophet,” Alice declared from her door. She’d changed into fresh clothes—a full business suit. “We still need as much of Hikanome’s goodwill as we can get.”
“Damn, Ally!” Hina chirped. “Your tail! And the suit! Where are you off to?”
“Nowhere. I’m just trying to, ah, get back in the zone. Feel like the leader I am, you know?”
“Mmm. That suit isn’t gonna stay on you for long once I—”
“I’m all orgasmed out, thank you very much,” the dragon interrupted.
“Ah,” Yuuka realized. “That’s what that is. Fingerbanging.”
“What?” Izumi asked, turning red.
“You and Ezza. You fucked our dragon, did you.”
Hina emitted a delighted squealing noise, rounding on me with eyes like sapphire dinner plates.
I hesitated, then figured there was no point in hiding it. Funny, I was expecting to be more ashamed than anything. “Sure, whatever, yes. And it worked, I’ll have you know. Alice is back on her feet.”
“They’re very good at it,” Alice added. “With proper direction.”
Hina’s eyes slid to Alice’s enlarged tail. She gasped as though she had just noticed the difference. “Oh, gosh, Ally, we have to do a full check-up on this, pronto! And what misfortune, too, I just ran out of gloves so we’ll have to—”
I reached out to grab the hyena’s shoulder gently before she could fully descend into a feeding frenzy. “Can we stay on track? Hina, Alice’s tail isn’t going anywhere, you can touch it later, I promise.” After extracting a faux-glum resigned whine from her, I turned to our prophet. “Yuuka, what did you mean by ‘it’s bad?’ We were under the impression Tamamo hasn’t really done anything yet.”
“She hasn’t done anything, but she sure was saying shit. But what’s more important is that I was seeing weird things in Nasu that I can’t make sense of. I don’t think she was lying about Sugawara going north, for one, and I want to know where. And my eye keeps telling me she wants to go to the capital.”
“Here?” Alice asked thoughtfully. “To us, or to something else? The palace?”
“Or Kyoto?” Izumi put in.
That confused me. “Isn’t Tokyo the capital?”
“Yes, but Kyoto was the capital before then, back when her story takes place,” Alice supplied. “Do you have a timeline, Yuuka? For either of them?”
“Tomorrow. And wherever she’s gonna be, that fucking Condor is gonna be there too. I need to know exactly where and when.”
The mention of the Peacies’ mobile forward operating base shut everybody up. They’d somewhat fallen into the background since the midnight Vaetna stream—they’d declared they were “kicking the sandcastle,” as Bri had put it, but nothing earth-shattering had come of that in the days since, and at least as far as I was aware, they hadn’t made any moves to grab me. The Condor had been an observer at the hospital inferno and little else.
I had almost hoped that the PCTF had simply abandoned their pursuit of me altogether, deeming it not worth the effort since they reportedly already had another from my cluster in custody and cooperating. That would still be bad news for the Spire, of course, but would have been good for me. That was a poor trade, in my mind, but it was preferable to them going after both me and them simultaneously.
But if Yuuka thought they were going to get active on Todai’s turf, then we had to be there.
“Right, yeah,” I sighed dejectedly. “That is bad. I can swap back to my body. Sure.”
Hina pouted. “Aw, cutie.”
“Hey, why are you upset?” I asked. “It’ll hurt like hell, isn’t that good in your book?”
“Yeah, but you hate it in there.”
“I wouldn’t say I—okay, yeah, well. Maybe I’ll hate it less with the dermis stuff that’s growing all over my burns. Come on, Yuuka, let’s get this over with.”
I practically stomped my mechanical legs toward the elevator.
I couldn’t switch back.
The tunnel between bodies, that infinite non-space, created the harshest possible contrast between its perfect absence of anything and the flashbang cacophony of inhabiting a vessel that could feel pain, even one on a medically inadvisable dosage of morphine. I tried crossing over once, was immediately struck with a hammer-blow of burning sensations, and retreated back to the relative tranquility of the doll’s head in pure, animal terror. I probingly attempted it a second time, hoping it would be less awful now that I knew what to expect, but recoiled just as hard.
Now I sat in a chair beside my hospital bed, with my metaphorical thought-hand hovering over the emergency eject button we had set up in my brain for exactly this purpose. Next to me, Yuuka stood, pinching the bridge of her nose in annoyance. “It’s not that hard.”
Amane and Izumi had joined us after the problem had become apparent. We didn’t want to crowd my hospital room with the entire team of Radiances, and Alice had felt like neither she nor Hina would be much help. Ai was apologizing profusely in the group chat that she wasn’t around for any of this—the 4D CNC manufacturing machine had apparently crashed in the middle of a very complicated project and she was actively weaving the appropriate repairs. She couldn’t be pulled away to come upstairs.
“Don’t look at your body,” Izumi suggested. “It makes the anticipation worse. Just turn away.”
It was true; my body looked like shit. Much of it was covered in bandages, and the parts that weren’t still showed the signs of a body that was investing all its resources into healing. Inflammation and redness reigned, save for the paler parts where I had once had body hair and was now growing more of the plating that already covered my forearm. My Flame was in the process of leaving its mark after what I had done to rescue Yuuka. Frankly, it sort of felt like cheating the system to be able to look at it from the third person perspective, and I was extremely reluctant to let go of that privilege. I turned my head away to look at the wall instead, the boring grey-beige that was the first thing I had ever seen upon waking up at Todai.
Amane nodded sympathetically next to Izumi. She asked the room, “Itamidome wa?”
Ebi’s voice replied from the walls. “Maxed out already. I can’t sanely pump them any more of chemical painkillers than this, and turning on the analgesoid lattices before they’ve already switched over—”
“Would completely fuck the connection in ways that would be way worse than this,” I finished. “Like at the hospital. They all use {NULL}, and that’s the most antipodal glyph to pink.” Izumi flinched; Yuuka scowled. I cursed that my mind had gone directly to the hospital. “Sorry. I mean I just have to knuckle down and do it.”
Yuuka sighed. “Well, if there’s one silver lining, at least now this isn’t gonna be the worst thing you’ve had to experience in a hospital.” She seemed to regret further invoking that morbid thought, and added, “for what it’s worth, I’m not happy about you having to switch either.”
That was her way of saying she liked me better in this body, and I shared the sentiment. I was starting to get a little desperate. “One of you could re-weave the connection for me in situ. Izumi, you can toggle your senses, I could copy that chain and just turn off my pain receptors.”
“Even if you could re-weave it like that—which I think is a very bad idea—that lattice controls from body to mantle, not mantle to body. Reversing it would be like…a second layer of remote control.”
“Like emulating a remote connection locally,” Ebi supplied. “While changing the protocol for that connection in real-time. Stop messing around and just bite the bullet. I can count down, if it’s helpful.”
“I’m aware I’m being a baby,” I groused. “And there’s no avoiding this, I’d have to do it sometime. Just…really, really don’t want to.”
Izumi crossed her arms. “You should not have to.”
Yuuka glanced at her. “Is that some clever magical insight, or just being supportive?”
“Supportive. A mantle should be a…full body, a true self, not separated from your Flame.”
“That separation is why the mantles are such good weapons,” Yuuka countered. “And even then, it’s not like they’re fully separate. Can still fuck up your brain plenty. Got a nasty reminder of that the other day.”
She injected a little bitterness into those words, maybe unintentionally, and it seemed to hit Izumi harder than intended. The memories hung over the room like storm clouds. She and Izumi had both been rendered insensate by the hospital-monster messing with their mantle connections. My digital gaze swept across the uniform wallpaper.
“Those were exceptional circumstances,” I offered, trying to prop up the atmosphere from falling on our heads. “And I never much liked hospitals anyway.”
“Hey.” Ebi protested.
“That one was especially an asshole.” Yuuka agreed. “But if you’re trying to talk about it, I don’t wanna. It’ll fuck up my foresight. I’m trying to be positive now, remember?”
Amane frowned and drew her phone to type something to me.
Amethyst: This is what I was talking about. That girl is anxious.
ezzen: it was a bad time
Amethyst: Yuuka hasn’t talked to me about specifically what happened at the hospital, but I’ve gathered that you saved her
ezzen: i helped her. she mostly saved herself from there
Amethyst: wrong
Amethyst: That’s what they say about me, but it’s not true.
Amethyst: They saved me, and then they had to keep saving me. I could not heal alone.
Amethyst: And she was saved, but I think she still has to heal.
Amethyst: I don’t like hospitals either. Even though they help you heal, if you’re there, you’re sick.
Amethyst: So it’s a place of sickness rather than a place of healing. A place where you expect to hurt.
Amethyst: Every time I had a prosthetic fitting, or underwent surgery, or was prescribed new medicine that makes me feel terrible but prevents my kidneys from melting, I was angry that I had to be there.
ezzen: yeah
ezzen: same with my hand. hated physical therapy the whole time
ezzen: and probably with my foot. haven’t been doing pretty much any physical therapy with it, so i was fucked when the stabilizer broke
“You’ve both gone very quiet.”
I turned away from the wall to see Yuuka attempting to peek over the taller girl’s shoulder to look at her phone. She was gently elbowed away with the bionic arm and relented. “Okay, mou, ii. Just don’t like the feeling I’m being gossiped about when I’m standing right here.”
Amethyst: :\
Amethyst: I always wondered “why can’t I just be healthy? Why does it have to hurt? Why do I have to go through this?”
Amethyst: And those are weak thoughts. They are normal, but they don’t help me.
ezzen: grim but i get it
Amethyst: But I’ve learned that it was never actually as bad as I was afraid it was. The anticipation of pain is always worse than the pain itself.
Amethyst: And that is Yuuka’s problem.
Amethyst: The anticipation is worse because the anticipation is something she can only experience by herself.
ezzen: ah
ezzen: The anticipation is worse because the anticipation is something she can only experience by herself.
Amethyst: Until you. You can see some of what her eye does, can’t you?
ezzen: at the barbecue, yeah, and going into her dream happened in the eye
Amethyst: That is what she needs right now.
Amethyst: If you go back to your body, it will hurt, but you will know you’re healing, and you can help her heal too.
ezzen: …so you’re basically just gonna keep throwing me at your teammates?
Amethyst: wwww
Amethyst: Until they get therapy, yes.
Amethyst: You’re good at it.
Amethyst: She told me the future makes more sense with you in it.
ezzen: i uh
ezzen: i sure hope so
I mentally backed out of the chat conversation before I could lose my nerve. As Amane lowered her phone in kind, Yuuka snorted. “Be honest, how much of that conversation could be summarized as her telling you ‘you’re not made of glass?’” Yuuka asked. “I’m betting around seventy percent.”
I shook my head at her and turned to properly survey my burned, bandaged body.
“Looking is bad,” Izumi reminded me.
“For you,” I replied evenly, lost in thought. “And usually for me. But I’m becoming a Vaetna under all that gauze. There’s something beautiful there. In the future. I want to go see it before I become too scared to look.” I extended a mechanical hand to Yuuka. “But I don’t have eyes to see it, not really. All I can really do is light the way. So get a good look for me, yeah?”
She looked down at my hand, then over at Amane. Radiance Amethyst gave her an encouraging nod. Yuuka reached out and touched my hand.
That was the cue. I slammed the eject button in my head. My hand pushed down until the button stopped, and I felt it actuating the intricate and invisible magical machinery that puppeteered me—
And on impulse, I kept going. My mental limb crashed through the control panel and into the pit of razors beneath. Through the ice and into the dark water.
No amount of eloquence or psychological prep could really brace me for the transfer. Pain flooded into me. Or, more accurately, I flooded into the pain, my selfhood screaming across the interstitial void of the link and splashing down into the electrochemical haystack of needles that was my brain. Burns and bruises and paranatural growth made themselves known with all their procrastinated violence, making to shred me like a shoal of piranhas.
But my imagined hand was sheathed in armor, and could not be cut so easily. I pushed down, reaching into the cutting chaos, past my wrist, up the elbow, burying myself to the shoulder. I grasped my Flame within the razor-pit and, with blood pounding through my skull, heaved the light out from the depths, back out of the pit, into the open air above the ice. It was crystalline and latticed, frozen solid, and it burned like the sun. It shone the future onto me, and I could not stare directly at it. I witnessed it only as fragments, reflections in the shards of ice, seen through a borrowed eye.
It showed me killing shapes, minds and anchors and digestion. Brambles that refused to burn. Lust and sentencing. Bright, purest blue, shadowed by something vast. Prostheses for the body and the soul. Two spears, one that was me and one that was not. A fox, laughing through the storm. A cry for help that would go unanswered.
It showed Yuuka far more.
Author’s Note:
That’s a wrap! Mostly. There will be a long end-of-arc postmortem author’s note pseudo-chapter in the coming days (including some new art!), as has become tradition for Sunspot, so I don’t have a lot to say down here other than thank you all so so much for supporting the story.
And, as always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
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