“Let’s do this.”

I don’t think anybody was surprised at my answer. Sure, it was a risk, but it’s exactly the kind of risk that’s on brand for me, exactly the sort of risk I’ve been conditioned to take, and take, and take, for my entire adult life. It’s also a necessary risk, and even Zidanya implicitly agreed with that. Sure, if I manage to pull out some kind of trick to free them from their bonds and bindings, which I entirely intend to do, they’ll be able to progress and one of them could theoretically pick up Soul Magic through some sort of incredibly awkward change of professions, but it would thoroughly cripple whichever of them did it.

Amber even more than Zidanya, for all that Zidanya would be taking a longer road. The God of Growth doesn’t look kindly on backtracking.

Sara wasn’t surprised at my answer either. I think she might have offered it regardless, but I’m not sure; by the way she phrases her unusually delicate request that we not tell anyone about her knowing Soul Magic, I figure that just having it is taboo. For, well, pretty obvious reasons.

“Lily expects us at her appointed hour. I’d be loathe to disappoint her.” Zidanya looks at Sara, then sighs. “Ninety minutes. No more, but it would be a lie to say we had less.”

“[Spellform],” Sara intones, almost casually. I hear the whisper of it, a clock ticking as gears turn. “I will do what I can within that timescale. Sit down in a comfortable position.”

“Amber and I will secure this demesne.” Zidanya pauses in a rare moment of hesitation. “I cannot promise that, should the Lady trespass…”

“I know. It’s okay.” I smile at Zidanya as best I can, through the nervousness and jitters and already-mounting fourth thoughts. I don’t know, and it’s not okay. “You take a jump into the Between, you come out where you come out. If the anchors drop, it’s not the nav’s fault; if Lily comes by and won’t take no for an answer, I don’t want her victory to be over your corpses.” Which is possibly the most ironic and literally inappropriate example that could have come to mind, but there’s no way for her to know that, and it’s still true.

“Adam.” Zidanya glares at me half-heartedly, but then her expression grows serious. “You do Amber a disservice, and myself. Out of my attempt to kill you gently, you built a path for my resurrection; not for gain, but for that which you consider the right choice to make. If Lillit Sheid comes for your soul, there is nothing I will not do to stop her.”

There’s nothing I can possibly say to that, so I just shut up, face red.

I wind up in a sort of aggressive lounge on the couch. There isn’t much of a back to it, but there’s a lot of very soft pillows. I have objective evidence that there’s some kind of self-cleaning enchantment on them, along with the couch itself, so I’m not worried about drooling or whatever else. Could also have used Keyhome, that’s sort of a place that takes self-cleaning to the next level, but with everyone awake we’re not worried about any threats short of Lily, who could absolutely break her way in there; so we’ll keep that in reserve, and that means the couch out here.

“You will need to lower your guard consciously. There are two elements to the outermost layer of the soul; there is that which permits the soul to flow outwards in a controlled fashion, and that which permits the outside to flow inwards in a controlled fashion. When we reach out with our souls to perform acts of magic, we push ourselves through the membrane of the soul, and it is thin and permits deformation; when something attempts entry, it is opposed by the wall of the soul. The wall is the membrane; the membrane is the wall. I will reach out, gently, and you will have to let me in.”

I try to imagine it. It’s maybe something whose behavior depends on which side you’re going from, and there are plenty of those in nature; one-way glass and fabrics, not the cheap fake stuff that serves as scrim that depends on a lighting differential but the real stuff that uses clever optics and fancy physics. But that doesn’t feel right; there’s no resonance there, and trying to imagine it is just giving me a headache, or maybe that’s Sara’s magic.

“You will need to relax your guard deliberately.” I twig almost immediately to the pattern of her voice. The reiteration in slightly different words is lulling, soothing, drawing me into a state of ready expectation where I listen for what the difference is going to be this time rather than trying to achieve an understanding of her words. “I am going to reach out. You will find it difficult to let me in, but we are not in a rush, and you are in a place of safety.”

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

My head hurts a little bit more. There’s a pressure that feels like mana backlash, and I instinctively push some mana through Mote and the headache fades back down as I keep struggling with conceptualizing the wall/membrane.

“You are relaxing your guard. Good.” Sara’s voice is still pure calm, a low almost-chant. It’s hypnotic, and I’m aware that that’s the point, and that doesn’t stop it from working. “This is what you want, and what you need. Hold to that. This is what I want, and what I need. Hold to that.”

I discard visualizations and concepts in a practiced litany of trial and error. The ability to clear my mind and cycle through a wild array of different notions, seeing if they match to the data, is a skill in its own right that I’ve been honing for decades, and while I’m not the greatest at it, it’s not some convoluted matter.

Convoluted.

“I can feel your wall thin and become pliable. You are doing very well. There is no rush, and no reason to slow; everything you are doing is precisely what you should be doing, and precisely what you want and need. The knowledge of this suffuses you; it is in your muscles and your breath, it is in your mind and in the workings of your heart. Every beat of your heart sends languor through your limbs and mind, a slowing, warm enervation that is contentment and vulnerability. This is as it should be; this is as you should be.”

Convoluted. The thought is like molasses flowing. It’s like I’m leaking, like there’s not enough water pressure in the system to make the thoughts flow properly. There’s something that’s so very much like convoluted which is important right now, and I can’t find it, and I can’t find it in me to object to not being able to find it.

“It is precisely this feeling which you must not chase, and must not flee, but simply allow to grow dominant within your body and mind. It is precisely this opening of your soul to the outside which you must permit, which you are permitting. Your desire and need is for this openness, this vulnerable state of complete trust. You both want and need this, which you are holding to, and that is exactly correct. I need this, and you know that, and you need to open yourself to me for that reason as well.”

The truth of that fills me with warmth. Everything she’s saying is true, true in more dimensions than one. I’ve spent so long opening myself up convulsively to anyone who reached out to me, and then having them tear away so soon after, that I’m always afraid I’ll scar. I need this; I need to let her in, and to be still whole afterwards, and know that there are these three people who I can trust with my very soul.

Convulsively. Dimensions.

The wall is convolved with the membrane. That’s the key; they aren’t the same thing at all, they’re just occupying the same space by a trick of magic and something very much amenable to being thought of as higher spatial dimensions.

My hands rise and then fall. My mana flows, circulating through a part of me I can’t see or perceive to my body and mine and then back up-and-out again, or out into the world; it flows through the earpiece and whispers Conjure Visor, and without the flow of mana being diminished in the least the Visor activates.

You will remember all of this.

It’s like a voice in my head, and then again so unlike a voice in my head. It’s like words, letters writing themselves on a page, and again unlike. There is no color to it, no timbre or pitch, but I know it to be Sara.

Each and every word, each and every deed will never leave you. Live a thousand years, and you will know that Sara Evetheri kept faith with you when she could have chosen otherwise. Asked, you will never lie; even if not summoned to testify, you will move Cador from its very path through the Void if need be, but you will never tolerate even the insinuation otherwise.

I accept it. Not accept it; I would scream it to the Void loud enough to be heard universes over if I knew how. I would do anything for her, in this moment, for this moment; my very soul is coaxed open to the gentleness of her touch, and it is an ecstasy I had not known I needed.

She doesn’t write the words into my soul, doesn’t inscribe it into the fundamentals of my very Self. I’m the one who does that, writing words that blaze with a terrible joy into a layer of who I am that she doesn’t touch, doesn’t even come near.

Her touch dances around parts of me I can’t see, not in any metaphor I can imagine, and I can hear the focus and intensity in the non-voice of her communication.

This has been the straightforward portion. The rest of the road will be far more difficult. We begin now.