They were in a forest at midday.

Harlan wondered where they could be, at this time of night there shouldn’t be anywhere east or west where the sun was so high up.

“He is inside. All of the materials are prepared, you simply need to set them up.”

There was a lone tower which stood on the hillside, char and glass indicated that this was the sight of a great battle some time ago.

A nearby mountain was missing its tip and as they crested the hill to reach that lone tower he saw a crater that was now a lake.

Inside Harlan saw the man, then the woman, then another man.

No matter which form he shifted into, Harlan could feel the oppressive sadness emanating from him.

“You will, no, you, you, you. Yes, you are the one, finally.”

His voice was not in an even tone, sometimes younger, sometimes older, masculine, feminine, there was no pattern, it just shifted with each word.

“I will begin setting up the spell.”

“Ah, yes I, no, I have, I want to, I made it, right? When is this? You, how long has it been?”

Coronach answered the man.

“It has been 7 days since we last met, have you been here the entire time?”

“I might’ve… no I thought… I was here. Where else could I be?”

The man was clearly unwell, Harlan felt many minds inside of the man like a hundred candles around a bonfire.

His case reminded Harlan of the orcs, both void and radiant.

They came about from the mixing of souls, both wanted to be the one that connected to the mind, this incongruity caused their minds to be broken.

The term used for it when it happened in a person, generally with a twin absorbed in the womb, was multimind.

The effects were devastating if both souls had the power to fight one another, sometimes it manifested as sleepwalking as a different person, sometimes they could live two entirely separate lives without the other realizing it at first.

Yet with the orcs it was a goblin soul forcibly put inside of a human soul, they had no compatibility and so they thrashed against one another yet neither could be expelled as they were a single soul still.

He suspected that the same thing was happening with this man.

There was somebody else who came by to mourn him while he was still alive, he calmed slightly when he arrived but it didn’t last long before he had to be restrained by Coronach to prevent him from hurting anybody, including himself.

“Boy, man, monster, thing, why are you here? No, you came for, you will help her, right? Adina?”

Harlan stopped his work.

“How did you know her name?”

“You told me.”

“I haven’t talked to you at all yet.”

“But you would, you have, it is the same thing.”

He stood up from the pile of bricks he was on and Coronach stood between them.

“He is unwell, he cannot tell what has happened from what will happen.”

“I worked for her once, she gave me what I needed, I saw it all, I just needed to save them, then it was enough. It was never enough, I just needed a little more. Power power power. I crushed them all for them, I GAVE THEM EVERYTHING.”

He became formless, no eyes, no nose, no hair, his body appeared neither distinctly male or female.

The man sat limply on the pile of bricks and made no sounds.

Harlan went back to his work, carving the runes and the other symbols, whose purpose was unknown but hurt to look at, spreading dust and painting with liquids he would rather not think about.

After another few hours the man woke up again, his mind was stable and so was his form, a moment of lucidity in his waking nightmare.

“You must be Harlan, you came here to put me out of my misery, right?”

“Yes to both.”

“You want more than what she will give you, you want to know how I worked for her, where we are right now, you want a lot of things. The killer, the lover, both sides of a man who will never be whole, who refuses to be. A man who is not himself cannot have friends, just parts of him can. When those pieces fight, who will win? I’ve lost my fight before I fought it.”

“Are these things you’ve already spoken with me about?”

“Some, some are just things I gathered from the answers I can’t see. I could give you the answers you wanted, but then she would be mad, and I wouldn’t get a good death. I just want it to be over.”

Harlan just kept working, he wasn’t sure if he should take anything he said seriously at all.

He knew what other versions of him would do, those questions and those answers might not make any sense for the Harlan that was standing in front of the man now.

“You are curious, you want what I have, to be somebody else. The mind, the body, the soul, all part of one machine that turns good men into evil men when powered by love. No, you want to be something else, you want to throw away your form until you throw away the man under the skin.”

“You seem very upset and I don’t want to ask something of you.”

“Oh the great hero, you have, will, kill me, don’t you want a little more from it? What’s another life? Didn’t, no, won’t you do far worse? Am I worth more than them? ARE MY SINS NOT GOOD ENOUGH.”

The others were waking up, he was destabilizing.

Harlan wondered, was he right? If he learned this faster, he would need to use less subjects in the future.

He looked to Coronach for guidance, but he had no eyes, spoke no words.

He walked to the man and placed his hand on his shoulder, he was flooded with thoughts that were hard to shift through but he was learning something.

Then he was in a dining hall, it had high vaulted ceilings, the table stretched beyond his sight and every seat was filled with faceless people.

It reminded Harlan of a puppet show, they moved like people, but the only sound was silverware and cups being placed on the table and the food and drinks splashing on the floor.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Then a person came to the table and touched the puppet.

It stopped moving and turned into a person.

More and more of them came out of the dark hallways that led into the room until the table as far as Harlan could see was full of people who laughed and screamed and joked and argued.

Harlan woke up to see that it was nighttime.

The man was faceless again.

Harlan scrambled to his feet.

“Am I alright?”

“You are still just Harlan, I was watching what happened, but I couldn’t go inside.”

“Boy, are you still fine to work? If so, continue.”

Harlan moved quickly, wherever this was if it hit night then it was probably time for him to start on classes already and he still had hours of carving and spreading of ritual materials left to go.

The notes said that using magic to form the symbols would degrade them in some way, so instead he was effectively enchanting the stone.

It was strange to him that he just knew how to enchant things now, she didn’t like giving out information normally.

He channeled his own mana from his soul to the tips of his fingers until he was connected to the chisel not unlike how a mana gem filled with a soul connected to an item it was placed in.

Because it was directly from mind to soul to object it allowed effects that didn’t translate into spells to be put on items yet he didn’t understand the how or why.

He looked at one of the sigils he carved earlier and with his mana sense it seemed to have an almost oily sheen as it filled up with mana and waited for him to add his own to make it a complete spell.

“All of my friends got together and realized what I had done, each of them knew another me. They bickered and argued and then one of them called me a monster for the things I had done, that I hid from the others.

I wished I had stopped that first punch.”

The man rambled on in such a manner, changing faces as he talked until eventually he was back to the faceless form and he fell into a trance.

Dawn was coming again and Harlan was dead tired, enchanting was hard, normally spells worked by moving personal mana that commanded the natural mana to form into a bending of reality.

What was happening now instead was directly warping reality without the mana acting as a middleman to make up most of the actual effect.

He was handed a tonic which he drank and Coronach metabolized for him.

Harlan still couldn’t do it himself, the spell just failed when he tried, likely because of it being designed for humans, beastkin all cast a subtly different spell but there wasn’t one made for Fomorians.

Around noon he woke up again.

“The mind is such a powerful thing, that thing commands the soul, keeps it in line. You are so small minded that it is a jailer when you should be the warden of it. I am standing outside of the prison, watching a riot. I tried to save them all, so I saved no one.”

Harlan wondered if the man was truly rambling or if he was saying profound knowledge filtered through madness.

“Can you explain what you mean more clearly? Or are you just not all there.”

“So you can still speak, you’ve been ignoring me.”

“You keep talking but I don’t think I am getting anything from it.”

“Endless hallways, behind each door lies something, you can keep them all in boxes and then pick and choose the doors to open to be your best self.”

“You are talking about transformation magic, right? The Fenrir I met showed me that her soul was a bunch of boxes that she switched out.”

“If you need to put it all in boxes then you have already failed.”

“What exactly are you? I am nearly done now, so I wanted to know, and I wanted to make absolutely sure, you want to die, right?”

“Do you know what a skinwalker is? No, you don’t, you haven’t yet. Did you know that humans don’t metamorphosize like animals? Why do you think they have limited lives? Is a skinwalker a man or a beast? I am buried under what I have done, I am unstable, I am not a skinwalker anymore.

So I designed this spell, my gift to the world, an immortal slayer. You, I have seen, seen so much, become like me, and you will thrive where I have failed. Your sins are your own, mine are of a monster that became a man.”

The man went faceless again.

It had just passed midnight, it had been a day and a half in total if Harlan had counted right.

“Shadow, I am done. Now what? The notes didn’t say how to turn on the array.”

“That is my job.”

He pulled a large mana gem cut into a perfect cube from his mouth and placed it in a hole in the wall.

“We will watch from a safe distance.”

They were suddenly on the top of the mountain Harlan had seen earlier.

The tower seemed like just a speck from this distance.

Coronach touched another cube that was quantumly linked to the first and the mana was transferred to the array, though he would call it a ritual spell.

The ground trembled as motes of mana were sucked into that place until it was a small multicolored sun.

Harlan thought that would be the end, yet the sun now sat still and got smaller, and smaller, and smaller, until it was small enough that Harlan wouldn’t have been able to see it if not for the moonless night.

Then it exploded.

The shield around them kept them safe, but the mountain had been blown away and the sea behind them washed back and then hit the shore with a massive surge, forming into a tidal wave on the way back out which dwarfed the mountain and stretched along most of the coast that Harlan could see.

For a moment he took in the beauty of it, he had never been at the sea until now.

Eventually the pulses of energy settled down and Coronach brought them closer so he could grab the single crystal that held a great deal of energy.

“What did we just do?”

Harlan felt pins and needles on his skin just from being near the thing, they faded as Coronach took it into his body.

“He was a collection of souls, thousands of them, the first and last of his kind, a skinwalker that lived long enough to be something able to truly empathize with its victims, at that point he was driven insane, each life believing itself to be the original.”

“They better not be inside of that thing. I was promised it would be painless, he shouldn’t suffer anymore.”

“The souls were sundered, they are just a form of raw energy right now. That explosion was their possibility being turned into nothingness. Goodbye.”

Harlan dropped from the sky and into a ball of void leading right back to the academy.

He fell face first into the walking path as students were gathering for lunch.

He had some scratches, but it was a low drop and his bones were strong.

A Maetus student helped him up and dusted him off with a little bit of wind.

“What happened? Are you alright?”

“I am fine, no need to worry. Just got back from some work.”

He was quickly transported to the medical ward by guards and after a full medical examination, both mental and physical, he was cleared to return to the academy.

Mary handled the mind, Sepul the body.

“See, nothing to worry about. I knew she wouldn’t let him be hurt.”

“You don’t know her shadow like I do. If handed a glass of milk his first reaction would be to shatter the glass on the floor just because he thinks it’s funny.”

“I don’t know the gods like you do, so I’ll take your word for it.”

“Great, so since you two are done poking me, can I get something to eat? I had tonics but those barely count as food. I still need to tell everyone I’ve been fine since I’ve been gone for a day and a half with barely any warning.”

“Two and a half days actually.” Lugh said.

“What?”

“When you went inside his mind you woke up the next night, not that night.”

“Great. Amber is going to kill me.”

Then a sudden thought crossed his mind.

“Where is Adina? Is she still here? I was supposed to immigrate her when I got back so they couldn't take her away.”

“She is fine, I flexed my muscles and the king made your words to him clear, so she is in a political limbo waiting for you to come back and confirm that she is changing sides. I think she is going to look very nice in a golden robe.“

“Thank you for your help, I am sorry, if you ever need anything, just ask, though I don’t know what I can do.”

“All you need to do is help people, don’t leave the world worse than when you entered it. Your communicators are everything you said they would be. But I will keep that favor still, no telling what you’ll be like in the future.”

“Thank you again, I really can’t express that enough.”

“You should thank Sepul too. We were the only two archmagi that actually stood up for her when they tried to take her back for a wedding or some other madness in the middle of the night.“

“Sepul, thank you very much, I am glad you helped when I couldn’t be here.”

The man only scoffed, he had asked Mary not to mention him.

He got himself dressed in a robe that wasn’t soaked in two days of sweat and left, it was already time for dinner, they did not want him to leave until they were sure he was ok.