Oriz burned with rainbow aura and impatience. The wicker boat bobbed down the stream, bumping into mirrordile corpses, slowly progressing toward the flooded town and the waiting dungeon bosses. She wanted to leap from the boat, charge into the lake, and take out the bosses before her body failed.

She still had the strength, but it would mean abandoning Zoe. Her disciple's long thick hair lay in her lap, untangled with the inherent grace that comes from choosing a body path with Mirror at its core. The sight stabbed Oriz, but she refused to look away.

The choice Zoe made was her own. Without this body, she couldn’t have escaped purgatory. Oriz had not been honest, but she had never led Zoe astray. And Zoe was only stuck with Mirror essence because she foolishly incorporated the dungeon’s bell.

The justifications rose like a great wave and crashed against the cliffs of her guilt. Maybe, one day, they might erode the sickness she felt at what she did.

Maybe.

“Something’s wrong,” Anton frowned down at the [Tome of Bloody Thunder].

His voice cut through Oriz’s musings. She looked down at where his silvery scouting technique hovered above Zoe’s third eye. The silver orb flickered as Zoe’s flesh phased in and out of existence. Oriz concentrated, observed, and felt the outlines of Zoe’s mind in turmoil.

There was something there. She sensed activity, a deep conversation rippled Zoe’s essence. She frowned at the murmuring, but couldn’t make out the words.

“She’s not alone,” she said.

“What does that mean?” Bella asked, her expression radiating distrust of Oriz.

The expression didn’t hurt her feelings, if anything she was happy Zoe had found such a reliable adventuring companion. Oriz’s life would have been very different if she had someone like Bella. With bitterness, she realized she had perpetuated the cycle of abusive mentors that had so shackled her fate.

If she got out of this dungeon, she would make amends, but to do that she must get Zoe out. Even if she died trying.

“It means,” she paused as she probed. “Zoe has picked up a parasite. A void creature.”

The runeblade twitched in Bella’s hand

“Don’t let that blade get too close. I don’t want its mind to disrupt Zoe’s dream state.”

“Is it like the thing that Cassy became? Those who rejected the system?”

Oriz recollected what Zoe told her about her time on the plane and the event in the graveyard.

“Similar. No two of them are the same, and they all find their own ways to crawl out of the void. I think it’s trying to use the surgery to take over her body.”

Bella’s grip tightened audibly.

“How do we kill the parasite?”

Oriz bit her thin lip.

“There’s a chance that I’m wrong. Dream situations are always imprecise. Zoe incorporated a parasitic being while she was in purgatory. I don’t want to make the wrong conclusion. This could be a natural effect of having Moth inside her. For now, we need to trust Zoe. If I try to interrupt, there’s no way I can be as precise as her —”

“You mean you could do the surgery? She doesn’t need to do it?”

“But I can’t feel her soul as well as she can. If I miss a spot of Blackstar energy, even just a speck, it will kill her.”

“You’re burning up with rainbow, but you’re not doing surgery,” Anton said as he flipped a page in the book. “What gives?”

Oriz gritted her teeth.

“I’m completely irradiated,” she said. “There’s nothing for me to cut out. Why don’t you scout ahead?”

Anton glanced up and made eye contact with Bella. An expression passed between them, and Anton stood with a graceful movement as he snapped the book shut.

“I’ll be back.”

He leaped from the boat, giving it a subtle bob, and landed on the belly of a mirrordile. From corpse to corpse, he hopped down the throat of the tunnel with his silvery eyes floating before him like tracking hounds until he vanished around a curve in the rock.

Bella eyed Oriz.

“Don’t try anything.”

Oriz suppressed a snort. She admired Bella’s pluck, even if there was nothing she could do to stop her. But that sword would become monstrous given the opportunity. Was it safer to take this woman out now? Better for Zoe’s future not to have someone rooted to an engine of apocalypse?

She smiled.

“I won’t try anything.”

###

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Questions plagued Zoe as she went through the motions of checking the patient’s — her — vitals. What was this place? Was she inside her mind or was it somewhere like the Smith’s forge? Tables, lights, walls, and even the floor billowed whenever she gazed in their direction. She moved through a room of thought, of projection, only three things were real: her, the body on the table, and Moth in nurse scrubs.

It was strange to see Moth without her mirrored skin. As long as Zoe saw her in the real world — though, who said this wasn't the real world? — Moth’s skin reflected the world. Now, that technique was a part of Zoe. She wanted to ask, the question resting on the edge of her tongue, but she also wanted to keep the companionable silence. For if she asked Moth that dread question, she might get an answer.

But Moth interrupted her indecision with a hand upon her arm. Her eyes crinkled with a smile behind her surgical mask.

“You have a question for me?”

Zoe looked at Moth across the operating table where her mute body lay. She looked into eyes that were her eyes but unburdened by a life of struggle. How can one gaze so easily through eyes unclouded? Zoe wanted to know, and so, despite her fear, she asked.

“Is it really you?”

Moth nodded.

“It’s me.”

“You’re not just a projection? Not just something conjured by my mind so this all makes sense? But then… no matter what you said that wouldn’t matter…”

Moth laughed soft and sweet as she took Zoe’s hands in hers.

“It is me. Really me. I’ve been watching, and I know how you’ve struggled. I’m here to help, as simple as that.”

They squeezed each other’s hands and Zoe felt a pulse echoing hers through the grip. She tried not to think about a cold stone room in a tower in the middle of a swamp in another world where she did something ugly and unspeakable and…

Moth brushed Zoe’s tear away with a finger.

“Don’t cry for me, Zoe. There was a choice, and were it to be placed before me, I could not have chosen differently.”

Zoe looked away as a tear fell and landed on the body on the operating table. She felt it land upon the exposed flesh of her stomach. Burning hot with shame and grief and the friction of reality’s hardship.

“I’m sorry.”

“I know… I’m here to tell you it’s alright. There’s a way forward.”

Zoe looked around at the room of misty dreams. Her posture straightened as the familiarity of the place settled into her mind-muscle connection. If she squinted and ignored the advances to her Insight, this could be any surgery in the world before.

But it wasn’t, and despite the lies Zoe couldn’t make herself see, she saw no way forward.

“We should get to work.”

###

As Zoe turned to examine the surgical tools laid out, the crinkles around Moth’s eyes faded. Her smile twitched behind her mask. She chewed, swallowing the worms that crept crawling up her throat. The bitter taste filled her mouth, but it didn’t change the sweetness of Moth’s voice.

The creature inside Moth twitched and flexed the fibrous strings extended throughout Moth’s astral form. So unfair that its sister, its brother, were born straight into the bodies of mortals, but finding Moth tethered to Zoe had been a unique stroke of fortune.

With this face, with this voice, the creature could easily trick its way into Zoe.

It was glad of the mask conjured by Zoe’s subconscious. Without the covering, it could never have hidden its gleeful smile. Tricking brains was so much fun. They were so stupid! But this dreamlike world was only half-real: no matter the pain, the mind never bled. But soon, so soon the creature could ignore the bitter worms in its mouth, soon, soon, soon, it would know the true flesh.

Everything was going to plan.

###

In the bright light of the surgery, Zoe moved, and directed Moth, with the instinct that comes from a waking dream.

Their hands slid over the body on the table, another Zoe, silent, staring up with pleading eyes. A translucent mask slithered out of the fog and attached itself to the patient’s mouth with an organic intimacy that sent a deeply uncomfortable tremor through Zoe’s body. The opaque, ribbed hose led off into the vaporous surroundings, a vague tank attached to the wall by vague clamps, as a dream of anesthesia pumped in from the depths of Zoe’s mind.

Those desperate, pained eyes became glassy and doll-like. Lifeless. Zoe closed the lids as she examined the flesh as though it were any other. There was a new sense as she saw the essence running through the body. Metal ran through the muscles. Mirror pooled beneath the skin. Sound bounced, scattered, echoing, through the hollow space that was not hollow.

She still didn’t know what to do with the Sound essence dictated by her body path.

“How do I find the spots affected by Blackstar radiation?” Zoe asked.

Moth smiled behind her mask.

“You must look for aberrations in the flesh. This body is ours. What shouldn’t be there?”

Zoe nodded and turned her eyes and hands toward the body on the table. So strange, surreal, to run her hands up and down, probing, examining her body from such an outside perspective. The dark brown skin was soft, the muscles prominent, lips scarred with intimidating white lines. Even in her mind, those scars remained.

She took a stethoscope and placed it against the chest, listening to the steady thump. Was this a real heart beating or was it a projection of her mind? A projection of essence?

The Sound essence within her responded to her thought. Interestingly, she felt it in herself and the body on the table. They were truly linked. The sound rose through her body, coiled, and she released it like mud through her fingertips. It cascaded, bounced, and she gripped it again. Light, resisting her grip, it was not something that should stop, and she released it again. Let it bounce, didn’t control it, but observed. She forgot the stethoscope as she saw inside through the echos of Sound.

And something was off.

She pressed her finger above her jugular, where a tinny echo rebounded. Something pricked her fingertip like a splinter of black glass. No bigger than a grain of rice. As she poked it, a sickly, cloying feeling washed up her fingertip as though an unwanted hug enveloped her.

The Blackstar system.

She pulled her finger away as joy flickered through her. The joy of discovery. The joy of doing what she trained to do. The joy of using new tools. She glanced up at Moth. The joy of reunion.

“I’ve found a corrupted node,” she said.

“You’re amazing,” she said. “But there will be more.

Moth marked it with a circle. The smell of marker filled her nostrils, astringent and real, as Zoe found two more splinters: one between the knuckles of her left hand, and another lodged between her breast and her heart. The last one was deep, but large, the point almost visible like a goosebump on her skin. She estimated the first two were each between a grain of rice and a pea in size, but the one above her heart felt like a playing card. The edges were sharp, and they sliced apart the sound Essence into a confusing tizzy of half-echos and false notes that made her nauseous.

If she wasn’t careful when removing this piece, it might slip and slice through her body, severing the connections between her flesh and her essence. But being careful in surgery was a redundant statement.

“Nurse,” she said with a smile behind her mask. “Pass me a scalpel.”

“Before you cut,” Moth picked out a stainless steel blade from among many. “I have something to share.”

“Oh? What?”

Moth held out the blade, handle first.

“A new technique.”