I left before the preparations started.
This is the part I always said was practical. Someone had to go. The outer islands have better game than the main island has had in thirty years. Everyone knows this. No one argues with a griffin who comes back with something worth eating. I was useful. I was contributing. I was also gone from the sixth bell to well past the twelfth and nobody could say a damn thing about it.
[I knew exactly how long I could be gone. I had tested this.]
The crossing takes twenty minutes if you push it. I didn't push it. I took the long way, out past the tide shelf, low enough to feel the spray. Flying to get somewhere and flying are two different things. I was doing the second one. The dissociation goes quiet up there. Just the water below and the wind making decisions I don't have to make and the weight of my own body doing the one thing it does without me having to instruct it.
I caught two large birds and something that doesn't have a common name on the main island. They call it a runner in the outer islands. Ugly. Fast. Good eating. I caught it in eleven seconds. I know because I counted.
[I always counted. I was hiding what I could do so I counted to make sure I wasn't doing too much of it.]
The boar I found by following a sound I felt before I heard it. Something large moving through the low scrub on the north face of the second outer island. I came down out of the thermal and went still on a branch overhead and waited.
It came through the treeline.
Big. Old. Scarring across the left shoulder from something that had tried this before and failed. It had not modified its behavior. It was rooting in the undergrowth with the total confidence of an animal that had won every fight it had ever been in.
I dropped.
[I should note that I was not supposed to be this far out. The second outer island is inside the permitted range but only barely and only if you don't go past the north face. I was past the north face.]
It was fast. They always are. People who haven't hunted boar think they aren't, because the animal is heavy and low to the ground and looks like a thing that moves slowly. It does not move slowly.
I was faster.
Twelve seconds. Pin, turn, done. I noted afterward that I had not been counting during. I had just been there. Fully, completely, only there. No part of me in the elsewhere watching the rest of me perform. Just the branch. Just the drop. Just the animal and the outcome and the clean sharp silence after.
I sat with that for a moment.
Then I counted it as thirteen seconds to be safe.
I ate some of the runner on the rock. Just pulled it apart and ate it there, still warm, looking at the water. The fat was good. The outer island game eats differently than anything from the main island, something in what they feed on, something in the air out here, I don't know. It tasted like not being watched. I ate slowly. I licked my claws after and didn't think about anything in particular and that was the whole point, that was the entire point, that there was nothing in particular to think about and I was just an animal on a rock eating something it caught and the water was doing what the water does and that was sufficient. That was enough.
[I always saved some for the rock. I always told myself I hadn't planned to.]
I sat for two hours after that.
The moon was coming up early. That one specifically. I noticed I was looking at it and filed it under the pull, the usual pull, the thing I didn't have a name for yet except wrong. It has always felt like something unfinished. A sentence started somewhere above me that I couldn't hear the beginning of.
I went back.
I had an hour before I had to be there.
I used it correctly.
The texts are hidden in the false bottom of the second storage chest, the one that looks like it holds spare nesting material and does hold spare nesting material, on top. Fourteen years of accumulation. Notes on shadow theory written in my own shorthand in the margins of innocuous books about regional geology, about tidal patterns, about the migratory behavior of seabirds. I have a text on seabird migration that is almost entirely about something else.
I pulled out the current one and sat with it for an hour in the good light from the east window and I was happy.
That's the whole of it. I was just happy. The same way I was happy on the rock. No part of me in the elsewhere. No noting. No filing. Just the text and the light and the specific pleasure of understanding something, of watching a theory resolve into a fact, of finding the mechanism behind the thing the shadowveil has been doing my whole life without my permission.
[I love it. I love it the way I love flying and I have never written that down before. I love knowing what I am.]
The current working theory, the one I've been building for three years, is this: shadows are not absences of light. They are accumulations of time.
A shadow is where light isn't, yes, but it's also where everything that happened in that spot has nowhere to go. It sits. It settles. The older the shadow the more it has collected. The shadowveil isn't reading darkness, it's reading duration.
Which means.
Which means if a shadow is dense enough, old enough, if enough has happened in a single spot and none of it has dispersed, the shadow becomes something closer to a location than an absence. Not a portal exactly. I don't have a better word yet. A thickness. A place where time has pooled instead of moving through.
[I've been calling them still-points in my notes. I know that's not a technical term. I'm the only one taking notes.]
I've documented six of them. Small ones, all in the outer islands, all in places that have been places for a very long time. The ruins are full of them. I've known this for years and I have been very careful not to say it out loud.
Here is what happens when you stand in a still-point: the shadowveil goes quiet. Not the empty quiet of nothing to read. The quiet of too much to read, all of it speaking at once, all of it equally present. A hundred years of afternoon light behaving the same way in the same corner. A door opening and closing until the motion is just part of the shadow, part of what the shadow carries.
Time doesn't stop. But it slows. It slows the way deep water slows, the way you move differently when the weight of it is pressing from all sides.
I have sat in the still-points in the outer ruins for as long as I could stand it. The longest was forty minutes. I came out and two hours had passed above ground. I checked three times. I sat with this fact for a week before I wrote it down.
[If this theory is correct — and I believe it is correct, I have believed it for three years, I am constitutionally incapable of not believing a theory I have this much evidence for — then the ruins are not ruins. They are a collection of very old time that someone built walls around. They have been waiting for something with the right hands to walk into them and ask the right questions.]
[I don't know if I am asking the right questions. I am asking all of them. I have to believe that counts.]
I put the text away with ten minutes to spare.
I rearranged the nesting material on top.
I contributed the birds and the runner and the boar. Stood in the right cluster. Sang the long-form hymn with the verses I only know from feast nights. The fire was large. Someone's clutch-younglings were chasing each other through the adults' legs. A hierarchy official made an announcement about tide access rights on the inner islands. Everyone listened. Nobody liked it. Nobody said anything.
I ate the communal food. It was fine. Correctly seasoned, correctly proportioned, the boar prepared the way the main island prepares boar, which is thoroughly and without much interest. I ate it and noted that it was fine. I noted that I was eating it correctly. I noted that I was standing in the firelight with my clutch-mates and participating in the feast the way a griffin participates in a feast and that I was doing this correctly also.
[It didn't taste like anything. Or it tasted like something that used to taste like something.]
The moon was up by then. Full, the way it only gets once a month, or sometimes twice.
I didn't look at it more than anyone else looked at it.
[I looked at it more than anyone else looked at it.]
the shadows are whispering again.
I'm sharpening my claws on my Academy-issue Magic Tome because I have to do something with my hands and sleeping is not
I'm not going to sleep. the fledglings are playfighting outside. hunting parties coming back. ocean doing what it always does. flowers or whatever.
I hate this damn place.
Tide is back from the hunt. I know because his gold eyes are on my nest again, which is
he does this. every time. like a job he has never once considered resigning from, like he clocks in, like there is a schedule, like the watching of Dovetail's nest is written into his daily obligations somewhere between eating and breathing and
it's fine. I don't care.
[I care a little. I'm noting that I care a little and I'm filing it under: irrelevant, leaving tomorrow, his problem.]
I give my wings an unthreatened shake. he can look all he wants. glaring won't make me love his sister any less. I've been loving his sister for a long time. I will continue. he can't do anything about it and he knows he can't do anything about it and that is, honestly, the funniest part of this, that the thing he hates most about me is the one thing he has never been able to
anyway.
In the ruins tonight I'm going to tell them I'm leaving. I have a plan. I am not terrified. those are the three things I'm going to say and I am going to say them clearly and I am going to mean them, especially the last one.
[I'm a little terrified. not writing that down. already wrote it down. damn.]
[the thing I keep not writing down is this: it was working. thirty years of it and it was working. non-mage on the record. mid-tier flight. clutch meals twice a week. the hymn every morning facing the wrong direction. I had a life. it was the right size and the right shape and I fit inside it and I was going to leave it on my own terms, which was the whole point, which was the only part that was mine.]
[I was going to be the one who decided.]
[I'm filing that under: irrelevant. leaving tomorrow. done.]
when Glint flies over the territory her wings do this thing in the light.
I've spent thirty years not writing that down and I'm writing it down now because tomorrow I'm leaving and she doesn't know and I need to put it somewhere.
like a piece of the sun that doesn't hurt when I touch it. that's the thing. I've touched it. I've touched her and it didn't hurt and I keep thinking about that tonight for no reason. for no reason at all.
I told her: one last time in the ruins. I think some treasure is hiding from us.
she said
[she smiled. the low quiet one. the one she saves.]
[I'm noting: she doesn't know. she thinks this is just another night at the ruins. she has no idea I'm]
[I'm not going to finish that.]
I gave her one last time in the ruins and she said yes and she smiled and she doesn't know what I was actually saying and I
I need to go. the ruins are waiting.
Glint found me before I'd left the nest.
She does this. Shows up without announcing, like she has a sense for when I'm about to go somewhere without her. thirty years and it has never stopped working. I don't know how she does it. I've thought about asking. I haven't asked.
she said: you're taking the long way.
I said: obviously.
she fell in beside me without asking if she was invited because she never has to ask and we both know it. the night was thick. the kind of thick that only happens here, after a full moon feast, salt and woodsmoke and the particular sweetness of the nightbloom that grows along the path to the ruins, the one that only opens after dark, the one that smells like something you almost remember. the torches were burning low along the village edge. somewhere behind us the last of the feast fire was still going, its light orange and soft on the underside of the leaves overhead.
the trees here are loud at night. not wind — the trees themselves, insects in the bark, things that live in the canopy and only speak after dark. I have walked this path my whole life and the sound of it is so familiar it has become part of the silence. I noticed it tonight. I noticed it on purpose.
I watched her from the side. the way she moves. the particular economy of it, she never wastes a step, never puts a claw down somewhere she hasn't already decided is right. the torchlight caught the edge of her wings and did something complicated. thirty years of watching her move through the world and I still note it every time.
[I'm going to miss this specific thing. I'm noting that I'm going to miss this specific thing and I'm filing it under: known, accounted for, already grieved.]
[I haven't grieved it. I don't have time to grieve it. I'm not going to think about that right now.]
she said: what are you hoping to find in there tonight.
I said: I don't know. something that's been waiting.
she said: you always say that.
I said: it's always true.
she smiled. the low quiet one. the nightbloom smell was very strong right there, right at that moment, the path bending toward the ruins and the warm dark pressing in from both sides and her smile. I put it somewhere I won't lose it.
we walked the rest of the way without talking. the canopy closed over us. the torches ran out and the moon took over, that one specifically, the one that pulls. the ruins appeared the way they always do, not arriving, just suddenly present, like they had been there the whole time waiting for us to catch up.
it was enough. it was more than enough. it was thirty years of more than enough and I was going to leave it tomorrow and I was not going to think about that right now.
[I was thinking about it.]
I found it in the fourth chamber.
I don't know how I knew to go there. the others were in the second and third, Glint calling back about the carvings on the east wall, Vow with her torch held high, Tide quiet the way he gets quiet when he's watching. I went deeper without deciding to.
the magic was pulling and I followed it. I've been following it my whole life in secret and tonight was supposed to be the last time so I followed it one last time.
the fourth chamber was empty except for the dark.
and then it wasn't.
the walls lit up. cold pale light, shadow-blue, the kind that doesn't come from fire. I've seen it in the outer ruins before and I've always kept walking. tonight I didn't. something in the dark was warm and specific and pulling at something in my chest I've spent thirty years pretending wasn't there.
the amulet was in the floor. not buried. just there, like it had been waiting. like the ruins had been keeping it for someone with the right hands.
I picked it up.
the shadows opened.
[I don't have another way to say it. they just opened. the whole chamber. like they recognized me. like I was the right thing arriving at the right time and everything that had been waiting could finally]
[Tide was in the doorway.]
I don't know how long he'd been standing there. long enough. his gold eyes were doing something I'd never seen them do before. nothing. usually there's contempt in them, the familiar performance of the watching. this was flat. certain. decided.
he said: I always knew.
I said: Tide
he said: the mountain doesn't forget what you are.
Vow came in behind him. her eyes already guilty, which means she knew, which means she came tonight already knowing, which means the ruins were never. the last time was never.
Glint was there.
my Glint. she came in last and she looked at me and she looked at the amulet in my claw and the light still moving in the walls and she
she said nothing.
I had time to think: okay. I understand. and then Tide hit first and the thinking stopped.
I am flying.
blood on my face. hot. I know it's mine because it's everywhere and I'm the only one bleeding. the trees below are the Skorrn's trees, our trees, I have landed in every one of them, I know their names, I am bleeding on them.
I can still feel the claws.
the wind knows me. it always has. my wingspan is wider than a pure griffin's by three finger-lengths and the wind has never found this strange, the wind just grabs on and we go, and we are going, we are going right now, I am going.
Tide hit first.
the mountain doesn't forget what you are he said and his claws found my neck before I finished processing the sentence and Vow was already there, Vow who I have known since fledgling, Vow whose family are heroes in the hymn, she said I'm sorry. I truly am. she meant it. I know she meant it. it didn't
Glint was there.
Glint watched.
the tailbarb came and I was trying to rise and Tide was too strong and the blade took my cheek and then my eye and I screamed. I want the record to show I didn't intend to do that. and then they let go and I ran and
and
and the damn hymn came. without my permission. from somewhere I didn't know I was still keeping it.
wind and sky carry me
wind and sky carry me home
I don't know if it helped. I don't know if it made it worse. I have been singing that hymn since before I could fly and it has always meant: you are held, you are carried, the sky loves you.
the sky was the only thing that did tonight.
I'm still singing it. I hate that I'm still singing it. I'm so glad I'm still singing it. I can't
I found the cave by falling into it.
The ruins recognized me when I came through.
I don't know how else to say it. The walls lit up the same cold pale light as before and the shadows opened for me and the stone didn't resist and I think
I think the amulet was pulling me here. I think it has been pulling me here since I left. I think some part of me knew and came anyway because there was nowhere else.
I found the cave by falling into it.
Which is
that's very me, actually. I want the record to show I'm aware of that.
The cave is the same one. The fourth chamber, or something beneath it, something the ruins kept for themselves. The stone is warm. The shadows are loud. The amulet on my chest is humming at a frequency I can feel in my back teeth.
I'm not going to make it out of here.
I know that the way I know things through the magic — not a thought, just a fact the dark is telling me. The injury is bad. I've been running on something that isn't quite adrenaline and isn't quite shadow magic and whatever it is it's running out.
The amulet is warm.
I keep coming back to that. Everything else is cold and it's warm. Like it's trying to tell me something I don't have enough time to learn.
I want to write something important here. Something that would matter if someone found this. I've been sitting with that intention for a few minutes now and what I actually have is:
Glint's laugh. The low quiet one she saves.
Kraeven. The sky holding me. The sky not knowing what just happened and holding me anyway.
Vow on the outer wall in the gold afternoon light, saying I don't know how I hold both.
The amulet, warm in my grip in the fourth chamber, recognizing me. Those are the things I have. I think that's enough. I think
The first thing is the silence.
Not quiet. Silence is a different thing, the absence of sound so complete it has its own texture, its own weight. I have spent my whole life on an island where the ocean is always there, underneath everything, the baseline the world runs on. I did not know I was always hearing it until I wasn't.
The second thing is the size of it.
I don't have a word for what I mean. I've seen open water. I've been above the cloud line. I know what it is to be small against a large thing. This is not that. This is — the horizon goes the wrong way. The sky is below me and above me at once and the ground, if it's ground, is the color of something that has never been warm. The scale doesn't resolve. I keep trying to find an edge to measure against and there isn't one. There is just more. More in every direction, more than I can hold, more than my eyes know what to do with.
I am dead, I think. I was just dead. I am standing on the moon.
[I want the record to show that I am handling this extremely well.]
The cold is not like island cold, not like the cold of high altitude or deep water. It is the cold of something that has never been otherwise. Not the absence of warmth. The presence of a temperature that existed before warmth was a concept anything had thought of yet. It goes through me the way the shadowveil goes through shadows. Like I'm not entirely solid. Like I might not be.
I look down at my claws. They look like my claws. I count them. Still the right number.
Oterra is below me.
I can see it. The whole of it, or enough of it to understand that I have been living on something very small in something very large and I never once — I couldn't have — there was no way to know from down there how small it was. The archipelago is a handful of specks in a dark ocean. I have spent thirty years on those specks believing the specks were everything there was.
I am still looking at it when I notice the statue.
It is enormous. That is the first thing, the only thing, for a long moment: the scale of it. Taller than anything I have seen built, taller than the hierarchy hall, taller than the old ruins on the outer islands. Nocthaari in shape, or something like it, the proportions slightly wrong at this size, the way anything gets wrong when you make it large enough. It is facing away from me. It has been facing away from me this entire time and I didn't see it because everything here is large and wrong and I was busy counting my claws.
It is not made of stone.
I understand this slowly. The way you understand something that you don't have a category for. It is the shape of stone, the stillness of stone, but there is shadow moving inside it. Slow and deep, the way shadow moves in very old places. Like a still-point. Like the oldest still-point I have ever stood next to, like something that has been collecting time since before the archipelago existed.
I say: hello.
Nothing.
I say, louder: hello.
The shadow inside it shifts. A long pause, the kind that has nothing to do with the time it takes to hear something and everything to do with where a mind was before it got called back. Then it turns. Slowly, the way something turns when it has forgotten it has a body and is remembering on the way around.
It looks at me.
I look at it.
it says: well.
[he showed up in my notes. he is IN MY NOTES. I have questions.]
This is earlier than I expected. Considerably earlier. I had a whole — there was a speech. I had prepared remarks. Years of prepared remarks, actually, very good ones, and you've arrived ahead of schedule and now I have to improvise, which I can do, I am exceptional at improvising, but I want it noted that this is your fault.
You are dead. Temporarily. I've caught your soul — you're welcome, that was extremely difficult and I did it flawlessly and the situation is recoverable if you stop panicking and listen to me.
I am very good at this. You are in excellent hands. Metaphorically. I don't currently have hands.
[he showed up in my notes. he is IN MY NOTES. i have questions]
[there is also someone else here. nocthaari. his head is not attached to his body. it's floating. he hasn't said anything. he's just watching me with an expression I can only describe as tired.]
I can see your annotations. Yes. The notes are — well. You've been writing into the void for quite some time and I am, as it happens, considerably more interesting than a void. I've been listening for years. You have a good voice. You get that from my side of the family.
My name is Callisto. You don't know me, which is frankly a failing of your upbringing rather than mine, but we'll set that aside. I am your father's brother. I was, before my untimely and entirely avoidable death — avoidable by others, I mean, I made all the correct decisions — the most powerful shadow mage in our bloodline's recorded history. Possibly the most powerful shadow mage in this hemisphere. The records are incomplete but the evidence strongly suggests.
I have been anchored to the moon for eleven years watching events unfold through the amulet. It has been, at times, extremely frustrating. You'll understand why shortly.
I have a proposal. The window is narrow. Try to keep up.
[he's my WHAT]
[also "adjacent to the void" is genuinely the most insufferable thing anyone has ever said to me and I've met hierarchy officials]
Yes, yes. The situation is as follows:
You are dying. Your soul is — hold on, I'm catching it, stop moving — there. Caught. You're welcome. That was, again, exceptionally well executed on my part given the circumstances.
The amulet is a tether between your bloodline and the moon. Your grandmother made it that way. She was talented, though not on my level. When you die with it around your neck, your soul comes to me. I can send you back. Your body is — the eye is gone, I've already attempted to restore it three times because I am thorough and I do not accept failure gracefully, but it won't take. Everything else I can manage. I have managed it. Already. While talking to you. You're welcome.
The question is whether you want to go back, to which I imagine the answer is yes, so let's discuss terms.
I need someone in the world. My power is diminished — anchored here, limited, it's a deeply undignified situation that I will not be describing in detail. I need artifacts. Specific ones, scattered across the wider world, and I need someone with shadow magic and sufficient resourcefulness to retrieve them. I have a list. I've had eleven years to make lists and I have made excellent ones.
In exchange: your life. My knowledge, which is extensive and frankly worth more than you currently appreciate. And my company, which you will come to find indispensable.
Do we have a deal.
Also, Bracken said, he's not as difficult as he sounds. That —
is, said Callisto, an extraordinary thing to say. I'm setting expectations.
I am extremely easy to work with.
She should know.
...
Fine. He's occasionally difficult.
[okay]
[okay I'm listening]
[I hate this so much]
The deal is simple. You go back. You live. You retrieve the artifacts — I'll provide full specifications, locations, historical context, relevant warnings, everything, I have prepared extraordinarily thorough documentation — and in exchange I restore your life and share with you the accumulated knowledge of the greatest shadow mage of this generation.
Conditions: keep the amulet on your person at all times. Don't do anything cataclysmically fatal in the first week while your body finishes reknitting. Listen to me when I tell you things, which I will be doing frequently because I am right about most things and the sooner you accept that the more efficiently we'll operate.
Those are the main ones.
Well. Do we have a deal or would you prefer to simply be dead. I should mention I've been waiting eleven years for this conversation and I'd rather not have it end there.
[he's been watching me for ELEVEN YEARS]
[through my NECKLACE]
[I have so many questions and none of them are about the deal the deal is fine.]
[obviously yes. what else am I going to do, stay dead? I'm going to be so annoying about this]
I can still see your annotations.
Yes. The deal is yes. Excellent decision. I want to be clear that this is going to work out extremely well, primarily because I am involved.
Now. First artifact. There is a settlement beyond the mercury river called Irontrees — named for the black cylinders in the fog cavern beneath it, which are not trees, whoever named them had clearly never seen a tree, but the name has stuck and we're all living with it. One of those towers contains something I need. I don't know which one. I trust you to find it.
You'll know it when you touch it. Shadow magic. It will recognize you the way the ruins did.
Cross the mercury river carefully. You have compromised depth perception now and mercury is not forgiving. Beyond that — I trust your judgment.
Bracken, he added, do you have anything to add.
No, said Bracken.
Useful as always.
You told her everything.
...
Yes. Fine. Go. The amulet will reach me when you need me. Try not to need me too often in the first week.
Hold on. This part is going to feel very strange. I've done this before — well, not this exactly, this specific situation is unprecedented, but I've done comparable things and they went fine. Mostly fine. The relevant ones went fine.
Hold on.
[it felt very strange]
[I'm alive]
[one eye. cold all over. cave floor. alive.]
[hi void. hi uncle I didn't know I had. hi amulet that has apparently been a telephone this whole time.]
the floating head man watched the whole thing without saying a word. when it was done he looked at me for a long moment and then looked at Callisto and then back at me.
he nodded once. like
welcome. or maybe like
I'm sorry. or maybe both.
I'm going to need a minute.
one eye. cold all over. cave floor. alive.
I say it in that order because that's the order it matters.
the stone under me is warm. that's the first thing I notice after the inventory, the warmth of it, which is wrong, which is the ruins doing something I don't have language for yet. I put my claw flat against it and the warmth comes through like something breathing.
the amulet is warm too. different kind of warm.
I take stock.
right eye: gone. the mending sealed the socket, no blood, just absence. I test the depth perception by holding up a claw and reaching for it with the other. I get it wrong. I note: this is going to be a problem. I file it under: problem, ongoing, deal with it.
wings: intact. that's the one that matters most and I make myself check last on purpose because I was afraid to.
the hymn is still going somewhere in the back of my chest. I don't know when it stopped being something I was singing and became something that was just. running. I let it run. it's not hurting anything.
I sit up.
the fourth chamber is quiet the way it was quiet when I fell into it, that ruins-specific silence with memory in it. the walls are not lit anymore. just stone now, ordinary dark, the cold pale light gone with whatever I was before I woke up. the amulet did something in here and the ruins recognized it and now it's over and I'm the only living thing in the fourth chamber and I have to get up.
I get up.
it takes two attempts. I want the record to show I'm aware of that. the body is newly mended and has opinions about being vertical and I have opinions back and eventually we come to an agreement.
the passage out is longer than I remember. I walked it bleeding, which means I wasn't counting, which means I have no baseline. I count now. forty-three steps to where the passage opens into the outer chamber. the outer chamber to the entrance another thirty-one.
at the entrance I stop.
dawn. the archipelago doing what it does in the early light, gold on the water, the outer trees catching it. I have seen this light my entire life. I know exactly what it looks like from exactly this angle because I have been coming to these ruins since I was a fledgling and I have stood in this doorway before.
I stand in it now and I breathe.
somewhere out there Tide went home. Vow went home. Glint went home and I am not going to think about that right now, I am standing in a doorway breathing and the sky is doing what it always does and I am doing the inventory again: one eye. cold all over. alive. wings intact. the problem is ongoing. the deal is real. Callisto is in the amulet that is warm against my chest and I have to cross a mercury river.
I step out.
the ruins let me go.
I walked.
That's the part I need to write down first because it is the part I keep not thinking about. I walked. For most of it I walked, which is not how a griffin is supposed to move through a world, which is fine, which is a thing I'm noting and not thinking about yet.
Flying hurt. Not the wings, the wings held, Callisto mended the wings, but the eye changed the math in ways I hadn't finished calculating and the first time I tried to get above the canopy I listed badly to the right and came down fast and landed in something that wasn't quite undergrowth and wasn't quite anything I have a name for and lay there for a moment with my cheek against something cool and damp and thought: okay. walking then.
The forest on this side of the archipelago's outer boundary is not the forest I know.
I know this immediately and keep knowing it. There is no part of it that lets me forget. The trees are wrong in ways that start specific and get general. The bark is the wrong texture. The smell is the wrong combination of things. The light comes through at angles that suggest the canopy overhead is arranged differently than any canopy I've spent thirty years under, and I know light, I know how it moves through trees, I have been studying shadows since before I had words for what I was doing.
I don't know this light.
I walk through it anyway.
The path I find is not a Skorrn path. I know what Skorrn paths look like, the particular width of them, the way they're maintained, the markers at intervals that say: you are permitted here, you are not permitted there. This path is wider. The surface is different, packed differently, and at the edges there are stones I almost walk past before I realize they're placed. Someone put them there. Not a griffin, the spacing is wrong for griffin stride, something else, something with a different gait entirely, and there are a lot of them which means whoever laid this path expected it to be used.
I stop and look at the stones for a moment.
I have spent thirty years on four islands. I know the paths, the buildings, the objects, the tools. I know what griffin-made looks like and I know what the hierarchy-approved version of griffin-made looks like and I know what gets smuggled in from the inner outer islands and how to tell the difference.
I don't know what made this.
I keep walking.
There are structures deeper in the trees. Not buildings exactly. Platforms at height, connected by something that might be rope or might be something I don't have a word for yet, and things hanging from them that move in a wind I can't feel from down here. I watch them from below. I try the shadowveil on the nearest platform and get age, patience, and use. Whatever lives up there has been living up there for a long time and goes up and comes down regularly and is not here right now.
I keep walking.
My eye socket aches. It starts specific, the sealed edge of the mending, and spreads into something less specific that I don't have useful language for. I keep walking. The body is newly mended and has opinions and I have opinions back and we are negotiating as we go.
I eat something I find growing low to the ground. I don't know what it is. It is not poisonous, or if it is I'll know later, and I was hungry in a way that stopped being a background fact and became a foreground one. It tastes like nothing I have eaten. It tastes fine. I eat three more and keep moving.
I hear things in the canopy I don't have names for.
I hear something on the path behind me once, footsteps, heavy and irregular and gone before I finish turning, and I press the shadowveil out into the dark between the trees and get: large, cautious, and more curious than hungry. Not a problem right now. I keep walking.
The river announces itself before I see it. The smell first, metal and something older than metal, and then the light changing, the canopy opening, and then the path ending at the edge of something the texts at mage school described in three careful sentences and completely failed to prepare me for.
The mercury river.
I stand at the edge of it for a moment. The surface moves the way water moves except it doesn't. The light it throws back is wrong. I have been noting things all morning and I add this to the list and cross it.
Low. Lower than I want to be. One eye means depth perception is a theory I'm still field-testing and mercury is not a substance that forgives a theory. I feel the weight of the wing on my right side compensating for the eye I no longer have and I let it compensate. My body knows something my head is still catching up to. I am letting my body be in charge for now. It seems to have opinions about survival.
The crossing takes longer than it should. I don't know how long. My sense of time did something strange in the cave and hasn't entirely come back. I get to the other side and I stand on the ground and I breathe and I think: okay. okay. I'm across.
Then I look up.
There is a Cannidaeri standing about twenty feet away watching me.
He is taller than the illustrations suggested. Thinner. He has been there long enough that he is not surprised by my landing, which was not good, which involved one wing overcorrecting and a stumble I am not going to think about. He watched it happen with an expression I cannot read. He is still watching me now.
I say: who are you.
He says: Oleander. Are you hurt anywhere that isn't obvious.
I say: why are you here.
He says: I know someone in Irontrees who keeps a good room. You look like you could use a good room.
I look at him. He looks back. His expression is open, pleasant, the particular pleasantness of someone who has decided to be helpful and would like that to be the whole of the conversation.
I say: you were waiting at this river.
He says: the light is nice here in the mornings. Are you going to be able to walk.
I say: yes.
He says: good. It's not far.
He says it the way you say something that is true and also not the whole truth and he knows you know and he's decided that's fine. I note this. I note that he has a second name he hasn't given me yet. I note that he is not surprised by what I am, not by the wings, not by the eye, not by any of it, which means he was expecting something specific to come across this river and I was close enough to it.
I say: fine.
He turns and starts walking.
I follow because I don't know the direction and I am not going to ask.
The amulet is warm against my chest. Through it Callisto is quiet. He has been quiet since I crossed. I don't know if it's giving me something or if he's just watching. I don't have the bandwidth to figure it out right now.
My body is working. I note that specifically. Everything Callisto mended is holding. I am walking on solid ground behind a stranger toward somewhere I have never been with one eye and no money and the list of things I'm not thinking about yet and my body is working and that is going to have to be enough for now.
It is enough for now.
The bridge is longer than anything I've crossed on foot.
I don't say this. I don't say anything. I have not said anything since fine and I intend to maintain that.
It is made of the same metal as the trees, or something related to it, the surface of it catching the light at the wrong angles, and it extends out into the fog in a straight line until it disappears. I cannot see the other end. I cannot see anything past about forty feet in any direction. The fog is not the fog I know, not sea-fog or morning-fog, it has a different quality, a different weight, it sits at the level of the bridge and doesn't move the way fog moves and I press the shadowveil into it and get: old, old, old.
I walk.
Oleander walks beside me. He doesn't try to fill the silence. Most people fill silence. He matches it instead, which is either respectful or tactical and I don't know him well enough yet to know which.
I count my steps. I lose count somewhere around four hundred and start again.
The bridge hums. Faintly, under the feet, a vibration that might be wind or might be something else entirely, something the metal is doing that I don't have a category for. I feel it in my back teeth the way I feel the amulet when it's active. I look down at the amulet. It's warm but not warmer than usual.
I keep walking.
Oleander glances at me once. I don't look back. He looks forward again.
The shadowveil reads him as homesickness so old it has stopped hurting. Just texture now, just part of what he carries, the way scar tissue is part of skin. I don't know what to do with it.
I am about to start counting again when the trees appear.
Not gradually. Not the way things emerge from fog, slow and incremental, giving you time to prepare. One moment there is fog and the next there is a trunk wider than the longhouses back home and I stop walking before I decide to and my neck goes back and back and back and the tree just keeps going, up into the fog, past the fog, I cannot see where it ends, I cannot see if it ends, it is simply there in the way that mountains are there, in the way that the moon is there, a thing that does not require my acknowledgment to be enormous.
I look at it for a long time.
Oleander stops beside me. He doesn't say anything either. He lets me look.
That's the first thing he does that I file under: maybe not tactical.
The settlement is built around the trees and through them and, in places, inside them. I can see windows in the trunks at height, lit from within, warm against the strange light outside. There are species I don't have names for. There are smells I don't have words for. There is a sound the settlement makes, a kind of layered hum, that I feel in my sternum more than I hear with my remaining ear.
And then it goes quiet.
Not all of it. Just the immediate space around me, rippling outward as heads turn. I have been stared at before. In the village, in the school, at the outer ruins where I was not supposed to be. I have been stared at my whole life, and I know what it means when the eyes that find me carry suspicion. Threat assessment. The particular exhaustion of being someone else's problem before I have said a word.
This is not that.
This is wonder. I watch it move across faces I can't read fully, species I've never seen, and it is uncomplicated, in them. Just wonder. Just: what is that. Just: I have never seen anything like that.
The distinction should feel better than it does.
The elsewhere happens somewhere between the third and fourth trunk. I've been compensating for the right side since the forest, turning my head too far, catching nothing, recalibrating, and the recalibrating takes something, some background process that was apparently also holding me in my body. When both fail at once it happens without my permission. I come back already walking. I have moved thirty feet without being present for it. The irontrees are real. The scale is real. My mind doesn't go to the elsewhere for things that aren't genuinely too big. The eye was already struggling and then there was something that had been built to that size, deliberately, by something that thought that size was reasonable, and something had to give.
It hasn't landed yet.
Oleander takes me to a place to eat. He knows the proprietor. He knows the route, the turns, which streets to avoid. He nods to people as we pass and they nod back, and I count the nods and I count the times he deflects when I ask a direct question and I keep both numbers.
He says he was passing through when he found me at the river.
People who are passing through do not navigate like this.
I eat. The food is wrong in ways I don't have the context to name — not bad, just built from different assumptions. I eat all of it. My body is newly mended and has opinions about fuel.
Later, Oleander steps out.
The room is small. The window looks onto an interior canal I didn't know was there, water moving slow and dark below. I sit on the edge of the sleeping platform and I am very tired in a way that sleep won't fix, and then Callisto speaks.
You made it, he says.
I don't answer.
The amulet is warm. His presence through it is a particular kind of weight I have been feeling it since the moon and I don't have a name for it yet. Like standing near something that generates heat without fire. Like the pull the moon used to exert on my magic before I understood what it was, which was him, which I am still integrating.
He doesn't say anything else.
I don't take the amulet off.
the room is small. the window looks onto an interior canal I didn't know was there, water moving slow and dark below. I've eaten and Oleander has stepped out and I am lying on the sleeping platform staring at the ceiling lichen and I am very tired in a way that is apparently not tired enough to actually sleep.
the amulet is warm. I put my claw over it.
you should sleep, Callisto says.
I say: I know.
something comes through the amulet. music, low and strange, bass that accumulates rather than hits, vocals processed until they've lost their edges.
still here still here still here
(still, still)
the ground don't want me
the sky don't want me
(don't, don't want)
I am in the between
I am in the between
(the be-, the between)
caught on something I can't name
(can't, can't name it)
eleven years the same
eleven years the same
(e-eleven, yeah)
the moon keeps all its dead
(keeps, keeps, keeps)
the moon keeps all its dead
I watched you from up here
(watched, I w-watched)
I saw the thing you buried
(buried, b-buried deep)
still here
(s-still)
can't leave
(can't, can't)
can't leave
not yet
(n-not yet)
something coming through
(through, coming t-through)
hold on
(hold, hold on)
(on)
I say: what is that.
hexd rap, he says. I've had eleven years to develop opinions about it.
I say: I can't sleep to this.
no, he says, after a moment. I suppose not.
the music stops. the canal moves below the window. the ceiling lichen is pale and blue-grey and I count the patches of it and get to eleven and lose count and start again.
I say: what could you do with it. the shadow magic. what could you do that I can't yet.
a pause. long enough that I think he's not going to answer. then:
what couldn't I, he says.
and he tells me.
he tells me about reading darkness the way I read it with the shadowveil, except further, deeper, not just the emotional texture but the memory of a space, the history a shadow carries, the way a room remembers what happened in it. he tells me about moving through shadow the way light moves through water, traveling distances in a step, being somewhere else before the someone watching you registers you've gone. he tells me about the thing he could do with other people's shadows that I'm not going to write down yet because writing it down makes it real and I'm not ready for it to be real.
he talks for a long time. I don't stop him once.
I want the record to show: I am not a person who gets hungry. I have spent thirty years being very careful and very strategic and very deliberate about what I let myself want because wanting things in the archipelago was a liability I could not afford. I filed everything. I noted everything. I decided what I thought about it later, or didn't.
lying in Oleander's room at three in the morning with the canal dark below me and a dead man describing what shadow magic can do I am hungry in a way I don't have a filing system for. it is not a feeling that sends me to the elsewhere. it is in my chest, in my hands, in the place the amulet sits warm against my sternum.
I want to know everything. right now. I want thirty years back. I want the ceiling.
I say: teach me.
he says: that is what we're doing.
I say: faster.
he's quiet for a moment. then something in the amulet shifts, the warmth of it changing quality, and he says:
the shadow isn't separate from you. it isn't a tool you pick up. it's the part of you that already knows where the dark is. stop directing it. let it go where it knows to go.
I close my eye.
I let it go.
the room opens up around me. not visually. something else, something the shadowveil does when I stop managing it, when I stop keeping it to a careful controlled trickle. I can feel the canal below, the slow cold dark of it, the memory of rain in it. I can feel the lichen on the ceiling, the ancient patience of it. I can feel Oleander somewhere in the building, the particular texture of his shadow, homesickness so old it has stopped hurting.
I can feel Callisto. warm and specific and right here, which is not how I expected a ghost to feel.
I say: oh.
he says: yes.
we talk until it's light.
I'm not the killing type.
I want that on record before I walk out there.
the sand is pale and the ring smells of metal and old wood and something I don't have a name for yet, some Irontrees-specific thing, and the opponent across from me is large in a way that recalibrates the space around them. I do the thing my depth perception used to do automatically, assess distance and mass, and I get the distance wrong. my right side gives me nothing. the nothing is loud and shaped like an eye. I adjust. I note: large. I file it under: problem.
the crowd is loud before we've done anything. I am the spectacle. I knew that when I walked out and every head turned, a one-eyed griffin, a griffin at all, something nobody here has seen before. there is money on this. I'm trying not to think about what the money means, what it's for, what comes after.
I'm not the killing type. this is round one. nobody dies in round one.
they come forward. I go sideways.
this is not strategy. my body made a decision without me. I came back already sideways, already not where I'd been standing. that's how I know the dodge was real — the elsewhere doesn't manufacture outcomes. it just removes me from them. whatever happened while I was gone, happened.
they swung and I wasn't there and the crowd made a sound and I thought: oh. interesting.
they came again. full commitment this time, the weight of them behind it, and I tried the shadowveil without deciding to, pressed it outward the way I do in private when I want to know what something is carrying. I got mass and heat and forward momentum and a very clear intention to go through me rather than around me.
I went around them.
the shadow came with me. not the careful managed trickle I've been keeping in a box. something looser. something that had opinions about the direction I was moving and helped, which I was not expecting, which is why I took the first hit. I was paying attention to the wrong thing and their elbow found my left shoulder and I went down.
crowd loud.
I got up. I'm good at getting up. thirty years of practice.
the second hit I saw coming and didn't move fast enough because my right side told me I had more room than I did. I'm learning. this is what learning feels like, it feels like taking hits while the crowd watches and I hear Callisto's voice from last night, stop directing it, let it go where it knows to go, and I think: now would be a good time for that.
I let it go.
the shadow moves before I do. finds the gap around the mass of them the way it found the canal in Oleander's room, the way it found the lichen on the ceiling, already knowing where the dark is, already there. I follow it.
the third hit goes somewhere I'm not anymore and I put the magic into the gap and they go down.
the crowd is very loud.
I stand in the center of the sand and my shoulder aches and my depth perception is a work in progress and something in my chest is still hungry from last night and I think:
I'm not the killing type.
that wasn't killing.
that was finding the gap.
I went to the corridor. Callisto said:
that was appalling.
I said: I know.
let me help or don't. decide now.
I said: let me do round two first.
he said: why.
I said: because I want to know if I can.
he didn't say anything. the amulet was warm. I took it as something.
I said I wanted to do round two alone and I meant it and I am standing in the corridor outside the ring regretting it.
not changing my mind. just regretting it. there's a difference.
the opponent watched round one. I know this because everyone watched round one, I am the spectacle, but this one watched it differently. I can tell by the way they're standing across the sand from me, weight back, patient, giving me nothing. they've already decided not to come to me. they're going to wait until I show them the gap and then they're going to close it. they know what I did in round one.
I know they know because the shadowveil tells me. I press it outward and get caution, calculation, the particular texture of someone who has done their homework. no fear. just readiness. I file this under: problem, different kind than last time.
Callisto is quiet. I said I wanted to do this alone and he is, infuriatingly, respecting that.
I wait. they wait. the crowd gets restless.
I think about last night. I think about lying in Oleander's room and the canal dark below and Callisto saying: traveling distances in a step. being somewhere else before the someone watching you registers you've gone. I think about how I said faster and he said that is what we're doing and I think about how hungry I was lying there in the dark wanting the ceiling.
I think: now would be a good time for a ceiling.
I find a shadow. there's one at the far edge of the ring, the upper tier casting it, dark and specific and patient. I press the shadowveil into it and feel it the way I felt the canal last night, the memory of it, the depth. I think: there. I think: I want to be there.
I step.
something happens that I don't have a word for yet. not movement. not flying. more like the space between here and there collapsed, like it decided the distance was optional, and then I'm standing in the shadow at the edge of the ring and my opponent is still watching the place I was standing a moment ago.
the crowd goes very quiet.
my opponent turns.
I'm already moving.
one hit. clean. the gap was in the half-second it took them to find me, the half-second of recalibration, and I put everything into it and they went down and it was over before the crowd found its voice again.
I stood in the new shadow and I was shaking and it was not fear.
I don't know what it was. I'm noting it. I'm filing it under: figure this out. I'm going to figure this out.
Callisto said nothing when I came back to the corridor. the amulet was warm. then he said:
you improvised.
I said: you told me it was possible.
I told you it was possible for me, he said. at the height of my power. after years of practice.
I said: it worked.
he was quiet for a moment.
yes, he said. it did.
I noted: he sounded like someone who had just revised an estimate upward and wasn't sure how he felt about it. I filed it. I went to find out about round three.
I went into round three alone. that was still the plan. Callisto was in the amulet and the amulet was warm and I was not asking for help and he was not offering it and that was an agreement we had.
the opponent was quick. quicker than the first two, quicker than I was ready for, and my depth perception is still a theory I'm testing and they found the gap in it almost immediately, the gap where my right side gives me nothing, and I took a hit I didn't see coming and then another and I was on one knee and thinking: this is fine. I'm going to find a shadow. I'm going to step.
I reached for the shadow.
it wasn't there. the ring was bright, upper lights, no angles, nowhere for the dark to pool. I pressed the shadowveil outward looking for anything and got nothing useful and the opponent was already moving again and I thought:
okay.
then the drawer slid open.
I want to be precise about this because I'm going to be thinking about it for a long time. it wasn't the elsewhere, I know that feeling, I've been going to the elsewhere my whole life. this was different. this was something sliding into the space beside me, not displacing me, just. present. the way you become aware of someone standing next to you before you've looked at them.
my hands did something I didn't decide.
I came back four seconds later already winning. the opponent on one knee. the crowd making a sound I didn't recognize at first because it wasn't what they were making after round one or round two. I stood in the center of the sand and I thought: why is everyone looking at me like that.
then I looked down.
my stripes were blue.
not my color, not the grey-black I've been my whole life, blue, the particular blue of the amulet when it glows in the dark, cold and specific and not mine. I watched them for a moment. I lifted a claw and looked at it. blue. I looked at the crowd. they looked back.
the drawer slid closed.
the stripes started fading. slow, a few minutes, blue bleeding back into grey while I stood there and watched it happen and the crowd watched me watch it.
I went to the corridor.
I said: you were in my body.
he said: briefly.
I said: you were in my body.
he said: yes.
I said: my stripes went blue.
he said: yes. I should have mentioned that.
I said: you should have mentioned that.
he said: it's a Nocthaari Pantharis thing. the color shift happens when the magic is running at full capacity. I didn't think it would be visible through your griffin markings.
I said: it was very visible.
he said: yes. I noticed.
I needed to be alone and he is in the amulet which is around my neck so that is not a thing I can do.
he called it collaboration. I'm writing that word down. I'm going to look at it and decide what I think.
what I think right now is: it doesn't count if I wasn't fully there.
I'm noting that I think this.
I'm noting that my hands knew exactly what they were doing.
I'm filing it.
I'm going back in.
I'm not writing about round four.
I wrote that and I'm looking at it and it is the least convincing thing I've put in my notes and I've written some unconvincing things in my notes. I wrote I'm not terrified in the prologue and believed it for approximately four minutes. I wrote I don't remember their face twenty minutes ago and that lasted less than one sentence.
I'm not writing about round four.
here is what I'm writing about instead. I'm writing about the corridor. the maintenance corridor behind the ring that smells of metal and old oil and where I have been sitting on the floor for longer than I should be sitting on the floor because round five is in forty minutes and I should be eating something or at least standing up and I am not doing either of those things.
I'm sitting on the floor thinking about whether I'm evil.
I want to approach this carefully because I've spent thirty years being called monstrous and I know what it feels like to be named a thing you're not, I know the specific shape of that injustice, and I don't want to do the opposite thing and refuse to name myself a thing I am. so. carefully.
I made it fast. that part I stand by. that was kind, or the closest thing to kind the situation had available. I looked at someone who was terrified and decided the least I could do was make it fast and I did and I stand by that.
I liked having the upper hand.
I'm writing it down. I liked it. not the ending of it. the having of it. the moment mid-fight when the gap opened and the shadow moved and I was there before they could close it and I had the upper hand and something in my chest felt like
I don't have a word for it. I've been trying to find the word for twenty minutes on this corridor floor and I don't have it. not satisfaction exactly. not pleasure. something more like. recognition. like: oh. this is something I'm good at. like the first time I flew far enough to find the outer islands and the wind grabbed onto me and I thought oh. this is what I'm for.
I made it fast because it was kind.
I also made it fast because I didn't want to feel the recognition any longer than necessary.
I can't separate those two things. I've been trying and they won't separate. they're the same decision with two different reasons attached and I don't know which reason was real and I don't know if that question has an answer and I don't know what it means about me that I can't answer it.
Callisto is quiet. he's been quiet since the corridor, since I sat down, which is unusual enough that I put my claw on the amulet to check and it's warm, he's there, he's just. not talking.
I say: am I evil.
he says: no.
I say: that was fast.
he says: you made it fast because it was kind. that's not evil.
I say: I also made it fast because I didn't want to keep feeling the thing I was feeling.
he's quiet for a moment.
I know, he says. that's not evil either.
I say: what is it then.
he says: it's being good at something you were never allowed to be good at. it's thirty years of carrying something with no outlet and then having an outlet. it's complicated and it doesn't make you monstrous.
I say: you've been watching me for eleven years through my necklace. you're not unbiased.
he says: no. but I'm right.
I sit with that. the corridor smells of metal and old oil. the crowd-noise comes through the walls in waves.
I say: okay.
I get up off the floor.
then later, after the bracket, after the accounting, after Oleander and the airship and the food built from wrong assumptions, I am lying in the dark again and the canal is moving below the window and I am staring at the ceiling lichen and the thing I accepted in the corridor is coming apart in my hands.
you're not evil, he said.
and I said okay because I had thirty minutes before round five and I needed something to stand on.
but here is the thing I didn't say in the corridor. here is the thing I'm saying now at whatever hour this is with the ceiling lichen faint above me and nobody to perform okayness for.
he killed people.
not in a bracket. not in a ring with a format and a prize purse and a crowd who paid to watch. his mage friends killed him first, yes, but before that, in the years before that, Callisto was the most powerful shadow mage in the hemisphere and he was not careful with it and he was not kind with it and there are things he told me last night at three in the morning that I have not finished thinking about.
I asked a murderer if I was evil and he said no.
I note: he said it immediately. no hesitation. like he'd already decided.
I note: that might mean he was certain.
I note: it might mean he has a different definition of evil than I do.
I note: I don't know which one it is.
I note: I accepted it anyway.
I file it.
I lie in the dark for a long time.
the amulet is warm. he doesn't say anything. I don't ask him to.
eventually I sleep.
I know before we start.
the shadowveil reads them the moment I walk out and what I get is fear. not nerves, not the cautious calculation of round two's opponent, not the forward momentum of round one. fear. old and specific and already decided, the kind that has been sitting in someone's chest since before they walked onto the sand. they are standing across from me and they are terrified and they have been terrified and they came out here anyway because the money matters to them the way the money matters to me and now they are looking at a one-eyed griffin whose stripes went blue in round three and they are
they are so afraid.
I note it. I file it. I walk to the center of the sand.
I'm not the killing type.
the fight starts. they're not bad. I want the record to show that, they're not bad, they've clearly trained and they have technique and under different circumstances they might have been a problem. they come at me with everything they have and what they have is considerable and also I can feel through the shadowveil the whole time that they are terrified and doing it anyway which is not the same as brave, which is something I recognize, which I am filing.
I find the gap. of course I find the gap. I've been finding gaps my whole life and I've had three rounds of practice now and the shadow moves before I do and the gap opens and I'm there before they can close it and then I have the upper hand and they know it and I feel the moment they know it through the shadowveil like a light going out.
they don't stop fighting. I want the record to show that too. they keep going even knowing, which takes something I don't have a word for.
I could wait. I could let it go on, let them exhaust themselves, drag it out the way I felt round one being dragged out, the crowd getting everything they paid for. I could do that.
I look at them through the one eye I have left and the shadowveil reads: still afraid. still decided. still here anyway.
I make it fast.
one hit. the gap was right there and I put everything into it and it was over and I stood in the center of the sand and the crowd was loud and I thought:
I'm not the killing type.
I don't know if that's still true.
I know I made it fast. I know it was faster than it had to be. I know that was a decision I made and I know why I made it and I'm not writing why I made it here because writing it makes it real and I'm not ready for it to be real.
I don't remember their face.
[I remember their face.]
[I'm putting it away.]
this one is different from the moment we start.
I know it through the shadowveil before anything happens. I press it outward the way I do now, automatically, the habit of three rounds, and what I get is focus. clean and specific and pointed directly at me. they are here to win. they believe they can win. they are looking at me the way I have started looking at opponents and I think: oh. this is what I look like from the outside.
I note: I don't know how I feel about that.
they come fast. faster than round one's opponent, more committed than round two's, nothing like round four's. they come fast and they come smart and the gap closes before I find it and I take a hit I didn't see coming and then another and I think: Callisto
and then I don't.
I said I wanted round two alone and I meant it. I didn't say anything about round five. I could ask. the amulet is warm, he's there, the drawer is right there and I could
I don't.
I find my own gap.
it takes longer than it should. they're good, genuinely good, and every time I think I have the angle they close it and I have to find another and the crowd is loud and my shoulder still aches from round one and my depth perception is still a theory and I am fully present for all of it. no drawer. no elsewhere. just this. just the sand and the shadow and the opponent who is very good and intends to win.
I let the shadow go where it knows to go.
it finds the gap in the sixth attempt. I've been counting. six attempts, five closed, one that opens and stays open for exactly long enough and I put everything into it and it's enough and they go down.
and I am fully there when it ends.
that's what I need to write clearly. I was there. Callisto's hands were not in my hands. the excuse I used after round three was not available and I did not reach for it and I was fully present and I am fully present now standing in the center of the sand with the crowd loud around me and the shadowveil reading: still. the particular stillness of something that has stopped.
I look at their face.
I'm going to remember their face.
I know it standing there looking at it, I know it the way I know things through the magic, not a thought, just a fact, this face is going to be with me for a long time. they were good. they were the best opponent I've faced and they came here to win and they believed they could and they gave me a real fight and I
I won.
I'm not writing what I felt when I won.
I know what I'm not writing.
I walked off the sand and the crowd was loud and I went to the corridor and I sat down on the floor and Callisto didn't say anything and I didn't ask him to and we sat there together in the quiet for a while.
I said: round six tomorrow.
he said: yes.
I said: ask me before you come in.
he said: I will.
I said: okay.
I didn't look at the thing I'm not writing. I got up.
the face is going to stay with me.
I said yes before I went in.
Callisto asked, he kept his word about asking, and I looked at what was left between me and the prize and the artifact and the deal and I said yes and meant it. the drawer opened and I went somewhere slightly adjacent to myself and let him in.
I want to be clear about what that feels like from the inside. it's not disappearing. it's more like. standing in a room while someone else rearranges the furniture. I'm there. I can see what's happening. I just have no hands in it.
my hands did what they did. the fight went the way it went. I was winning, I know that, I could feel it the way you feel a current going the right direction, and Callisto was in my hands and the gap was open and we were almost at the end of it and then
the shadowveil read something.
not me directing it. not a deliberate press outward. it just. read something. the way it read the canal in Oleander's room without my permission, the way it read the lichen. automatic. a thing it does when something nearby is significant.
the opponent was carrying something.
not on their body. in their shadow. something old and specific and humming at a frequency I felt in my back teeth, the same frequency the amulet hums at, the same cold-pale-blue of the fourth chamber walls. I felt it and I thought
oh.
and then I had my hands back.
I don't know how to describe it more precisely than that. one moment I was adjacent and the next I was present, fully present, Callisto gone so fast I stumbled, and I was standing over the opponent with my claw raised and the killing blow right there and available and I
I pulled back.
the crowd went very quiet.
the opponent looked up at me. their stripes were not blue. mine probably were. we looked at each other for a moment, the two of us, and I thought: you are carrying something connected to the artifact. I don't know how and I don't know why and I almost just killed you while a dead man was in my hands and I need you to still be alive so I can find out what you know.
I stepped back.
I said: yield.
the format doesn't have yield. I know that. I knew it when I said it. the crowd knew it. the opponent knew it. they looked at me for a long moment and then they said, very quietly:
yielded.
I left the sand. I left the prize. I went to the corridor and I sat on the floor and I said:
did you know.
Callisto said: no. I felt it when you did.
I said: what is it. what are they carrying.
he was quiet for a moment. the amulet was warm and then warmer and then he said:
I don't know. but I need you to find out.
I sat on the floor in the corridor that smells of metal and old oil and I thought about round four and the mercy kill and the face I'm going to remember and round five and the thing I won't write and round six and the thing that stopped me and I thought:
I said I'm not the killing type.
I don't know what type I am.
I know what stopped me wasn't kindness this time. it was need. I needed them alive and I stopped and I don't know what that makes me and I'm filing it and I'm getting up and I'm going to find out what they know.
they are not where the hit lands
three inches left
then behind me
then nowhere
without a sound
I press the shadowveil
and get nothing
I press harder
and get nothing
a surface
with no depth
stop trying to predict them
Callisto says
you can't
make them react to you
give them something
they have to respond to
then be where the response goes
I stop throwing
I let the shadow pool
slow
dense
a gravity
something that cannot be
dodged by being
somewhere else
they move toward me
there
the going-quiet came early
I didn't have to wait
I won't say
what happened next
except:
not clean
well-matched
the problem kept presenting new faces
I don't know
if Callisto was in my body at the end
I didn't ask him to be
I didn't feel the drawer
but I also didn't feel
entirely singular
my shadow on the sand
was doing something similar
to