A hand grabs our shoulder and jerks us back as warmth floods through us. Zyneth steps around as we fall to the ground—our void swarms to catch us—a hand pressed to our chest even as he extends another toward Gillow, lightning flashing from his fingers. It flashes through us, too, stinging our void, bits of the essence hissing into black fog at the contact, but our glass is unharmed.

There’s a glowing scrap of paper between his hand and our core. We grab his arm, ready to sink our claws into his flesh, ready to tear the limb off for daring to lay a finger on our anchor—but the pain is abating. He’s not attacking us, he’s reinforcing.

Gillow cries out as the electricity jolts through their water and back into them. They stumble away, their ice crashing to the ground like shattered pottery. They clutch at one of their arms, which now hangs limply after the attack.

“You idiot,” they snarl, backing away. “You’re protecting it?”

Still keeping a hand on me, Zyneth raises his knife, lightning sparking to life across its surface, writhing like a nest of angry snakes. “That’s rich, coming from the person who just tried to kill me.”

“You—it—it doesn’t matter,” Gillow hisses, taking another step back. “That thing isn’t natural. It should be left down here at the bottom of the ocean—and you along with it, if you think it’s your friend.”

“His name is Kanin,” Zyneth snaps.

Gillow barks out a pained laugh. “You sure? I don’t think he’s home right now. Look at it. It’s not even talking.”

Zyneth’s gaze darts back at us for a moment. Our grip on his arm tightens—a warm wetness forms beneath our claws in response. We need to be careful with our anchor, but if he tries anything, we should be able to eviscerate him in seconds.

“No thanks to you,” Zyneth says, turning back to Gillow. “You nearly killed him.”

“Self-preservation,” Gillow says, retreating toward their ship. “If I’d known he had this monster in him before we set out on this trip, I would have killed him back in my shop.”

“He’s not a monster,” Zyneth says.

“No?” Gillow scoffs as their shoulder bumps into the side of their vessel. “You’ve always been soft, Zyneth, but you were never stupid. It’s about to tear your arm off.”

Ah, yes. Blood. That’s what that sensation is. We’d nearly forgotten. These creatures are so strange—so fragile. Yet, he’s not retaliating. Part of us trusts him; we don’t understand why, but it does. We extract our claws from his flesh, and he winces, but doesn’t pull his hand away. Commendable. Strange.

“I’m not a fool,” Zyneth says. “I know the risks. But that is why I must remain beside him. He asked me once to do what needed to be done, should the situation require. I will honor his wish if that day ever arrives. But it is not, I think, today.”

Weariness and distant pain courses through us as a portion of our consciousness fades back into awareness. We’re not dead. Somehow, we’re still alive.

Our minds spill over into one another, confusion mixing with context. Regret stings us. Zyneth’s arm—we didn’t mean to do that. He saved us—again. But we also saved him, didn’t we?

Anger burns in us at the memory. Gillow tried to kill him! And they very nearly killed us.

“Zyneth,” we say, pushing through the mind static. Gently, we remove his hand from our core as we rise to our feet. The glass of our core is still broken, but it’s no longer breaking, reinforced by his magic. Ah, it’s so much easier to move now with all of us in sync. All of us working with one shared objective: Destroy Gillow.

Zyneth looks at us with a mix of tired emotions—worry, relief, fondness—as we touch his arm. “Your arm. Sorry.” But a troubled look returns when we speak next. “We are alright now.”

“You nearly got Kanin killed,” Zyneth says, which is strange. We are Kanin. But we are not. He is speaking to us, but only some of us. It’s troubling to try to understand. “You can’t do that. He’s mortal, and from what I understand of you, that makes you mortal, too. If you lose him, you’ll lose everything.”

Not everything. But losing our soul, losing reality, that’s more than we’re willing to give up. Perhaps he’s right. Sometimes, it is difficult to remember we are so susceptible like this.

Conflicted, then alarmed. Hey, we don’t want to die, either!

Behind Zyneth, something is happening. Gillow reaches a hand behind them as they slowly step back. The ship creaks as it shifts. Zyneth whips around, stabbing his blade in Gillow’s direction and firing off another bolt of lightning. They duck away and as the electricity arcs into their ship. One of the tentacles lifts into the air.

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Inspect.

Nothing happens. We push harder. Inspect, Inspect, Inspect!

[...activated.]

Lines of magic spring into view. Radiating from where Gillow is touching the ship, arcana circuits are lighting up, activating spells in the ship too quickly for us to follow. They don’t have the arcana crystal, but they’re using their own magic. We guess they got their hands on enough attuned water to reactivate the ship. Metal screeches as one of the mechanical tentacles laboriously reaches for us.

Time to move.

We leap away, Zyneth only a heartbeat behind us, as the limb crashes down onto the stone, spraying us with chips of rock. No! We still need the spell circle inscribed here. We can’t let it destroy the pattern.

“The tentacles. Break them,” we say. If we can slip our void between the seams, we should be able to rip them apart. We elongate the void around our hands into needle-sharp claws.

“We can’t,” Zyneth says. “We need The Prismatic to get home, or we’ll be stranded here!”

We hesitate as another tentacle rears up to attack us. Outside the water, it’s slow, but its weight can cause enough damage as is—both to us and the spell circle. What do we do? We can’t let the circle be destroyed, but we also can’t destroy it. “Gillow.”

“I’ll stop them,” Zyneth says. “You can keep the ship busy?”

Amusement. “Yes.”

The tentacle looms overhead, and this time instead of running, we reach up even as it falls toward us. Reshaping our magic from claws into a Void Whip, we snap the magic out, wrapping around the limb as all its weight slams down on us. We stagger beneath the force. Our void compresses as the limb presses down on us. We push back, and metal on metal grinds through the limb. It stops feet above our head.

Satisfaction crackles through us. There. No destroying anything.

And then the limb lifts back up, pulling us with it. Oh. We should have dispersed the Void Whip. A miscalculation.

The limb snaps us through the air, and we can only hang on as our surroundings become a blur of color. If we let go now, we could be thrown in any direction, and it’s unlikely our glass would survive the fall.

We hope it doesn’t smash us into the ground.

That would probably be the smart thing to do.

Deciding a change of tactics would be wise, we reel ourself in, latching onto the tentacle as we funnel as much void around us as possible, forming a protective bubble. If we can finish the shell in time, it should be able to cushion the blow. Probably. We hope.

There’s shouting below, but even when we use our void as our eyes, we’re moving too erratically to tell what’s going on. There’s a flash of lightning. Daggers of ice. Zyneth and Gillow must be fighting. Other limbs are moving, too, and we brace for impact, expecting to be squished between them. Instead, however, they are sweeping around the ship. One has even reached out of the air bubble and is touching the ocean. What is it doing? It can’t go anywhere without—

Without the arcana crystal. Even as we realize this, circuit lines explode through the Prismatic, lighting up the ship in a dazzling display. They got it back.

They’re planning to leave.

No! They can’t abandon us here. What about Zyneth? He’ll die if he’s left behind. This tentacle we’re latched onto isn’t trying to kill us, it’s trying to keep us out of the fight.

It’s high time to get back into it.

Keeping our orb of void tightly knit around us, we let go of the tentacle and are sent flying through the air. We brace all our glass, cushion our core as much as we can, then slam into the ground, streaking across the coarse stone. Our void splatters away, and our elbow clips the ground, immediately shattering on impact. The shards stay within our void, held in place for now, but we don’t have time to stitch the glass back together. We have to stop Gillow.

Bloodlust overcomes us in a wave we don’t even want to fight: Not stop. Kill.

Water floods over the ground as the ship pulls itself toward the edge of the bubble, metal screeching on stone with the movement. Even that stops after a moment when the water flows beneath the ship, buoying it up and wrapping around the Prismatic. Water crawls up the side of the craft, forming a shimmering layer over its surface. Do we have time to get back into the ship and steal the arcana crystal, shutting down the Prismatic’s power? It begins to drift toward the edge of the bubble.

No. No time.

But we can do something else.

The void unwraps from around us like petals of a flower, which fall away and swirl into the ground we’re kneeling on. Fragments of our broken arm clatter to the ground, but we can’t pay that any mind now. We summon an ancient memory of the circle to our mind, and our void replicates it on the stone, flowing into the grooves, filling in the damaged sections of the circle, completing each spiral and runic figure in inky black lines.

The Prismatic breaches the edge of the water. Only a few moments more and it will be too late.

Echo, we call, forcing our link with her. Echo. For the Location spell, establish foci: Our soul. No. My soul.

There’s a pause as we experience a mental dissonance: We need to be separated enough to work our magic, but still close enough to retain control over our void. We can’t let our control over the circle slip. We wait, tense. We have to time this perfectly.

[Foci Established,] Echo says.

Pushing through the mind static, we activate the Location spell.

A thread of light appears within our soul, vanishing into the air only inches from my body.

Now.

Activate Planar Linkage spell, we tell ourself.

The is the moment of truth. The moment where it can chose to help us, or stop us in our tracks. It must know what we’re planning. That we intend to leave it Between.

Yet, it doesn’t hesitate. Both halves of us are eager to activate this spell.

And maybe that means we shouldn’t.

Echo says, [Planar Linkage Spell Activated.]

All across the base of the stadium, the circle illuminates with the black light of our magic. We pour everything we have into it. All our mana, everything Zyneth gave us, all the bonus mana from the null magic we’ve been storing. As more null arcana drifts around the stadium, like flotsam caught in a hurricane, we grab that, and we add it to the spell circle, too. Void jumps into the air, tracing the lines of the spell. The Prismatic edges closer to the wall of ocean, closer to the edge of the circle—

Then the world splits open, and darkness wraps its familiar weight around us.