Trenevalt notices the pile of dust first, frowning as he squints down at the mound of lint and trash. I stay perfectly still—this must be what deer feel like when cars are barreling toward them—as if he somehow won’t notice his magical glass flask has teleported rooms.

“My, my,” Trenevalt mutters, rubbing his head. “What is this? Did I…”

Light must have caught in my glass, as his eyes snap abruptly to me. I start to roll away, futile though it may be. The floorboards shake as Trenevalt follows, and in the next moment something warm closes around me, my rolling comes to an abrupt halt, and I’m dizzyingly swept up into the air.

“Stars above,” the wizard mumbles. “What are you doing here? How did you get down? Why, it’s a miracle you didn’t shatter falling off that desk.”

You’re telling me.

Trenevalt tuts to himself. “And this mess you’ve created.” Hey! “Seems like I need to put you in a more secure…” He trails off, his gaze sweeping around the room. It’s not spotless, but all the corners are a little less fuzzy and gray, and all the little bits of flotsam that time collects were now gathered in one place.

“Were you cleaning?” he asks. His features soften. “Already! Why, I had no idea you were so eager.”

Yeah, that’s totally it.

“I do appreciate the enthusiasm—and assistance.” He steps around my trash pile, carrying me back over to his desk and my awaiting stand. “However, that’s more than enough cleaning for today.”

[Command paused,] Echo says. [Sanity Level: 100%]

Tension goes out of me as the Role Command retracts its prickly claws from my mind. Whew. Free from that order, at least.

“It’s dangerous to be exerting yourself in this form,” Trenevalt continues. “There will be plenty of time for that in a more suitable body.” He places me carefully back in my stand and sinks into the chair next to me with a wince. “Can’t come soon enough, I’ll say. Getting too old for this. Too forgetful.” He lifts a beaded bracelet to show me; two of the glass beads are clear, while the rest glow with a faint moonstone light. “Why, I wouldn’t even remember to renew your spell without this to remind me how long it’s been. Learned that lesson the hard way.” He glances back at the hollow homunculus shell.

Um. Excuse me?

Echo, what the fuck is that bracelet for?

[Check,] Echo says. [A bracelet imbued with a simple charm by the wizard Trenevalt. It is designed to indicate the time remaining in a spell of his design.]

A spell? I repeat. Which spell? What does it do?

[Core Bond,] Echo says. [A spell which secures a target energy source to a vessel of the caster’s choosing.]

Echo’s not making it easy for me to follow, but the gist I do understand is sending nervous prickles across my mind.

And I’m the target? I ask.

[The charm is targeting two separate entities, one of which is you.]

The other is probably Noli. So we’re being kept in these bodies by one of Trenevalt’s spells. I feel a brief spark of hope. That means we can break the spell. Or at least stop him from renewing it. If the spell ends, it would send us both back to our own bodies, right? I ask Echo.

[If the energy which is sustaining the Core Bond spell were to expire, the energy stored in both vessels would return to the planar dimension from which they were summoned.]

And by planar dimension, you don’t mean Earth, do you? I’m not optimistic, but one can hope, anyway.

[Between,] Echo says, dashing that briefly held dream to pieces.

If the spell expires, we’ll end up Between again.

But maybe that’s okay. Without whichever spell Trenevalt cast that got us stuck Between in the first place, we should pass right through it, right? Noli would snap back to her body. And I….

I’d move on to the afterlife.

And that’s assuming Noli and I could even complete our journey Between without immediately getting swallowed up by that creature in the dark. I can almost feel it waiting there for us to return.

My hope sinks back into dread as dark as the Between.

I don’t like any of this. There has to be some other outcome I’m not seeing. Something else we could do. Although, that spell limit will be the least of my worries if I don’t figure out how to stop Trenevalt from binding me to that homunculus shell, first. As if one existential threat wasn’t bad enough.

Trenevalt sighs, rubbing at his knuckles, and his sleeves fall over the charmed bracelet, obscuring it once more. Shit, I should have paid more attention to how many of those beads were glowing.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

“Well, you’ll soon help keep me straight, won’t you?” Trenevalt says, smiling sadly.

Damn. I don’t want to, but I kinda feel bad for the guy. I’m still pissed he summoned me here against my will. I’m still humiliated at being forced to carry out his chores, and the frustration stings even worse knowing he has no idea that he’s done any of that. But it’s hard to hate someone you pity. Living your last few years in isolation while your body falls apart and you slowly lose your mind is not a fate I’d wish on many.

I guess feeling betrayed by your own body is something the two of us have in common.

After a time the wizard’s gaze grows distant, and I wonder if he remembers his conversation (such that it was) with me at all. His gaze alights on the basket of mushrooms he’d left in the living room when he’d found me, and with a creaking grunt, he pushes himself to his feet and busies himself with the bushel of fungus in the kitchen.

While he’s gone, I’m left to my own devices, which I wish I could say is rewarding.

Can’t speak. Can’t eat. And at this point I’m pretty sure I can’t sleep, save for the comatose-like state Attunement provides me. I seriously miss my smartphone and computer. I’d do unspeakable things for a streaming service.

And god, I miss feeling like I’m accomplishing anything. I miss acting. I spent years honing my skills and body for that one purpose—and I was damn good at it! The only thing I was ever really good at. And now, no one will ever get to see my show. They’ll never see me.

Somehow, that makes me feel even more alone.

I spend my time watching Trenevalt shuffle about his depressingly mundane day. I count motes of dust as they drift past the window. Check, I tell Echo, bored to metaphorical tears.

[Name: Kanin]

[Species: N/A]

[Class: None]

[Level: 1]

[HP: 10/10]

[Mana: 10/10]

[Void: 24%]

[Role: Homunculus]

Finally! All healed up. I guess if nothing else, I can use my HP and Mana as a way to gauge the passage of time. Though I see my Bonus HP stat is gone again, now that I don’t have any of my Attuned glass out. My level is still 1. Geez, what’s it gunna take to level up around here?

And that Void stat… That definitely seems higher than last time. Ominous.

Echo, you mentioned I have affinities for glass and void, I say.

[Affirmative.]

Does this Void stat have something to do with that?

[Affirmative.]

You know, my favorite thing about Echo is how explicit and illuminating her replies always are.

How? I press. What does it mean?

[The Void stat increases with the rate at which you access the void.]

I’m not accessing any void, I object.

Echo remains silent. Great, I feel so informed. Well, there’s not much I can do about it without Echo’s input; I guess I’ll just have to pay better attention to my stats and start Checking myself more often going forward.

The afternoon stretches on uneventfully, until a flash of movement finally catches my eye. Noli peeks out from around a corner, waving a tentacle in my direction. She waits there a little longer, probably seeing if Trenevalt is around, but he retired to his workshop an hour ago.

I bring my glass out of my inventory as she approaches. I suppose I could use it to climb off the stand once more, but I don’t really see much point. Noli’s still the only one with any versatility between the two of us. She’s capable of doing far more about our situation than me—if I can communicate that to her.

When Noli finally makes it up to the desk, I watch her closely. And I mean, really watch her.

“Hey, Kanin!” she signs. “Some day, huh? I nearly got eaten by a bird. It’s crazy out there. I think we might be in the Firestone Mountains. Or it could be the Stonefire Mountains. Or maybe…” She continues to ramble on about geography that means nothing to me.

But this time, I don’t just let the translations wash over me as she talks. I pay attention to each movement, follow every wave of her limbs. It doesn’t really mean anything to me—even with Google Translate working in the back of my head—and it’s even harder to find a pattern now that I’m paying attention. But I don’t have to understand each movement. Not yet, at least. I just need to find something I can copy.

There. Noli crosses her arms in an X shape, and just as she’s continuing on to another word, I use two of my glass limbs to recreate the shape.

Noli stops mid-sentence. “Hm?” she asks. “Are you trying to say something?”

She didn’t catch it then. But at the end of her sentence there’s a lifting motion, almost like a shrug, and I break my X to try to copy the gesture.

This time she reaches out to tap one of my limbs. “What’s this? Are you copying me?”

There it is again—the pseudo-shrug. Is that her sign-language equivalent of a question mark? I tap one of my limbs twice in a “Yes.”

“Oh. Oh!” Noli’s signs light up with excited animation. “You can sign? That’s amazing!”

I hurriedly tap out a “No.” Not yet, at least.

“You’re… trying to sign?” she guesses.

“Yes,” I tap. Then I add the shrug.

Noli laughs. “No, like this.” She nudges my glass around. It looks the same to me, but she appears satisfied.

“You’re a strange one, Kanin,” Noli signs. “You can understand my signs, right?”

“Yes,” I tap.

She cocks her head. “But you don’t know how to sign?”

“No,” I tap.

She shakes her head. “Stranger and stranger yet. But you won’t be able to make much with just those four sticks. I’m surprised you can even understand much from these things!” She wiggles two of her bronze tentacles. “Fingers and faces do a lot of the heavy lifting, you know.”

I’d figured as much. If I want to be able to communicate effectively, I’ll be needing more glass. Not that I have much of a vocabulary to articulate that at the moment.

“Here, hold them out,” Noli signs.

I levitate my four glass rods before me, and she begins to nudge them around in the air.

“Not much to work with, but this one is pretty close to ‘What?’” She uses another two limbs to move the glass while keeping them in the same orientation. “Good. Now you try.”

I move the glass back into the position she’d just shown me and wait for her approval.

“No!” Noli cries. “You can’t just keep it there. It’s the movement, see? The movement is part of it. Honestly, you’ve been watching me talk all this time and you haven’t figured that out…”

Noli shows me a handful of other signs my four pieces of glass are barely capable of approximating, and I’ll be lucky if I can remember half of them. But in spite of everything, I find myself having fun.

It’s hard. Noli is an encouraging yet terribly impatient teacher, at once showering me with encouragement while also nitpicking every shape and motion I make. Yet the handful of signs I pick up fill me with so much pride, it feels like nailing a scene on the first go. I learned this. No help from magic voices or mana. Just me and my own brain, learning new things. I feel an urge to smile.

Fate sure is throwing everything it can my way, but maybe I’ll find some way to make it through. Maybe I’ll find ways to cope.

Just maybe, I got this.