We bound through the ship like an excited puppy, making a beeline for the exit. Well, most of us does: we had to leave our core back in the control room. But we take small bits of glass with us, pieces that don’t have air pockets. They act as bones within our form and can be rearranged as claws or teeth as we see fit. We like it when we’re able to merge the two magics. Even the part of us that doesn’t want to admit it—we feel more whole when we’re able to make void and glass work together.

As we’ve done several times before, when we reach the cargo bay, we dive out the window and into the ocean. The sea immediately assaults our senses—cold and briney—sensations that summon a keen sense of nostalgia in half of us. Smell, taste… senses that have been locked away for so many months now. It stirs a strange, uncomfortable ache in our mind, which we quickly squash. We came out here to feel powerful and good, not whiny and pathetic!

The water passes through our void in a strange, viscous sensation, yet we have no difficulty maneuvering the dark, empty waters. Attuned void, like all Attuned magic, is propelled by instinct and intention. Simply wishing to be in another place moves us in that direction.

As we make a few laps around the Prismatic, keeping a keen eye out for the telltale shifting currents of nearby prey, we can start to feel the limit of our range. Although the many level ups we’ve gained while on the underwater mission has increased the range of our Attuned magics, it still doesn’t feel like nearly enough freedom. We’re bound to our core by a radius of a little over one hundred feet, now. That might seem like a lot, but it feels like a short leash.

Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Maybe it’s good we can’t range too far.

Ridiculous! How are we supposed to hunt this way?

The goal isn’t to hunt: it’s to protect the Prismatic.

That’s the same thing. And we’d be more efficient at it if we could go farther. Expand and guard our territory.

That will only happen if we level up.

Which we get from fighting!

And practicing spells.

We chew on this thought. It doesn’t seem as fun as fighting. There is no sense of victory in doing spells. And they seem so restrictive—nothing like the instinctive way we can shape and move our void. But if it makes us more powerful…

Yes! We will practice spells. But which ones?

Any of them are good to practice and level up. But if we want to build up our body—become stronger, more durable—we need more material to work with. The newly acquired Elemental Dowsing spell could be a good place to start.

For once, we’re all in agreement, equally curious to try the spell and learn what it can do. Getting stronger is something both of us want. Building our body into a more ideal form is something both of us want. On these things, at least, we are in sync.

We try to activate the spell in just a small range at first—but nothing happens. Right. We’ve always struggled to activate spells when we’re like this. Like there’s interference. It’s interesting, because simply controlling the Attuned glass and void still comes easily. And there have been times when we were able to perform a spell while the predator was in control—like when we teleported our core through the ocean via a Displace spell the predator intuited from the tempo squids. But the predator hadn’t known it was a spell called Displace; it had just acted on instinct. Is that the trick? When we are separate, we rely on a concrete magic system to perform spells—concrete, similar to our mortal mind.

But like this, an entity of abstraction, concrete ideas begin to crumble. Is that how we must operate in this form? By embracing the turmoil?

We try again with the Dowsing spell. Without trying to separate our minds, without trying to reach for Echo or the System, without trying to force concrete rules into the chaos that is this form. Instead, we cast our mind out, imagining what we want, willing it to be: searching for void or glass that we can join with.

[...ell activated…]

And to our surprise, we feel something. We can feel our awareness expand—and a strength in us faintly ebbing away. Is that the Dowsing spell we can feel? And mana being extinguished? For a moment we want to pull our mind back, search for Echo and our interface to check—but we can confirm later. For now, we’re too excited to explore the function of this spell.

We focus the Elemental Dowsing spell downward, searching for the seafloor. If we’re going to find glass we can Attune anywhere, it’s down there. But there’s nothing in that direction to sense. Are we too high up? Is the range of our spell too small? We plunge downward, continuing our search.

And then…

Ah! Like sparks of light in the dark. Tiny, miniscule flickers of something at the edge of our range. Are those grains of glass? Specks of void? We don’t know, but we’re eager to find out. We swim toward them, picking up speed as we eagerly close in on our treasure.

And then a painful pressure snaps through us. We reel back in surprise and hurt, a tension like a taught spring pulling us back toward the Prismatic.

It’s the range of our void. We can’t move any further away from our core—the distance aches in us like a sprained limb. We’re at the limit of our range.

Agh! So close, too. The speckles of light are only a dozen feet away. Maybe if we just stretched a little farther—

Ahhh! The pressure again spikes into sudden pain, and we recoil. No, this is a limitation we can’t test. What if trying to pull away from our core actually works, and the connection snaps? It might kill us. It might send us back Between.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Can’t risk it. Sulking, we drift back toward the Prismatic. We were so close to finding something, too! If only we were a little bit deeper.

The thought gives us pause. Maybe we can move a little deeper. Zyneth has been working on the controls of the ship. What if…

No! Bad idea. This is a bad idea. Given our track record, we’d end up nose-diving the sub into the ocean floor.

But we don’t have to mess with the controls. With our void outside the ship, maybe a little nudge is all it needs.

We still don’t think this is a good idea. Zyneth would tell us, “Kanin/Predator, this is not a very good idea.”

That’s never stopped us before.

Okay—yes—fair point. But maybe it should! We could start today. Turn over a new leaf. We don’t have to give into the impulse of every bad idea we have!

…But we will. Because we’re very, very curious.

…

…

…Dammit.

We swim back up to the Prismatic, relief flowing through us as the pressure of our range limit vanishes back into obscurity. Instead of heading back into the ship, however, we settle on top of it. We press down a little, testing our strength, and our void flattens out over the surface like a pancake. That won’t do. We try again, gathering ourself back together, and try to focus on staying in one, solid clump of void, pressing down on the hull.

A dozen pieces of our glass clink against the Prismatic, and we use these points to focus our void on, providing structure to our form. We try again, pressing down, clinging to our glass anchors. Then, we push harder.

It’s hard to tell if we’re doing anything. The water moves around us as it always does. Always a current, even when we’re not heading anywhere, but if we’re moving down, it’s not fast enough to notice. Probably a good thing: if we could feel our descent, it would be too fast. After a few minutes of pushing on the sub, we stop, then swim back beneath the Prismatic once more, using Elemental Dowsing to see if the distance has changed.

And it has! We still can’t reach the ocean floor, but it’s closer. Excited by the progress, we swim back up to the Prismatic and try again.

It takes several attempts of carefully nudging the sub toward the floor before we can finally reach the bottom. See? Look, patience and restraint: concepts both halves of us are learning to put into practice. We’re giddy with excitement when we finally swim down to the sand.

The pinpricks of light are pieces of glass, we think. Small specks the size of the surrounding sand itself. What makes something sand instead of glass? Is it just heat? We aren’t sure. Maybe we can take some back to the ship and play around with it.

We run our void through the sand, like fingers dragging through the beach, and the sensation summons abrupt memories within us. We’ll never be human again. We’ll forever be locked out of so many sensations and experiences—except like this. Except when we’re living as some kind of monster. Is this really what our life will become?

We growl within our mind, digging claws of void into the sand and squishing the material in our grasp. What’s wrong with being a monster? We’re powerful. And we’ll only get stronger. What’s so appealing about being squishy and organic and vulnerable?

We’re vulnerable whether or not we’re squishy and organic. Our core is so fragile.

Then we’ll make that stronger, too!

We sift through the sand, plucking out pieces of glass that stand out to us because of the Dowsing spell. It’s only then we realize we can’t Attune them here—they need to touch our core to be Attuned. We’ll have to bring them back to the ship. And just as we’re thinking this, the lights in the sand vanish as the Dowsing spell ends. Our mana is extinguished.

Irritation ripples through us, but it’s only a minor inconvenience. Even this small handful will be useful to us. And there’s more glass in the surrounding sand: we can pick it out later when we have more mana.

Scooping up a pile of sand and holding it within our void, we glide carefully back to the ship. Too fast, and our void moves around the sand, spilling it back into the water. Too slow, and… well, there’s no drawback to moving slow. We’re just impatient.

When we reach the window leading back into the Prismatic, we experience a strange pulling sensation as the spelled window repels the water in our void and sand. But it’s not enough pressure to stop us, and with another push, we spill back into the ship—and the sand goes spilling across the deck. Oops. We’ll clean that up later.

In the meantime, we flow through the ship and back to our body, rejoining void and glass once more as we nestle protectively around our core. Motion in this body, walking on two legs instead of flowing between whatever form is most convenient, is more restrictive—less adaptable. But it’s also more cohesive, and the glass bones make us feel powerful. We grab all the broken bits of glass that we still haven’t had enough mana to reattached to the body, and take those with us, too.

As we relocate back to the storage room, void and glass alike float along with us, like moons caught in an orbit. We could tuck all of the void beneath our clothes if we wanted to, but there’s so much now that it’s a tight fit, and the shadows still manage to spill from every opening in our coat. Besides, we don’t see why we need to hide the void, anyway. We should be proud of this power, not try to stifle it.

We settle before our pile of sand. In the light, we can now see it’s a colorful mix. There’s white bits of coral and black bits of volcanic rock; pink and blue pieces of shells, and many more yellow and green specks we don’t recognize. We wouldn’t be able to tell the glass from the rest if it weren’t for our magic. But sure enough, with a bit of mental prodding, now that a few points of our mana have recovered, we can begin to single them out.

We remove our core from our chest and settle it atop the pile of sand. Without our coat or a pouch to cover our core, we enter a now-familiar state of double-vision, looking up at our body from the perspective of the core, while simultaneously looking through our glass and void back down at the little glass vial that houses our soul. Bits of glass sparkle as they lazily float around our body, while blobs of void separate and rejoin like the contents of a lava lamp. No, we don’t look like a monster: we look like something far more alien.

The specks of glass are so tiny, they only take seconds to Attune. We have to go digging through the sand and pull out the pieces one by one, which takes a while, but we’re steadily amassing a small, new store of granular glass at my disposal. We’ve never worked with bits so small before. In a cluster, it’s almost easier to treat them like a fluid—like our void—than separate pieces of solid material. What can we do with this? What applications might it have?

Time slips away from us as we work, and with no change in lighting to indicate the passage of time, we bristle with a start when we hear a noise within the ship.

“Ah, here you are,” Zyneth says, ducking under the bulkhead and into the room. “Couldn’t find you on the main deck, and I assume there’s a good reason for—” He stops mid-word as he catches sight of us.

Alarm and shame course through us. We hadn’t wanted Zyneth to see us like this, and we’re already pulling away, fighting for mental space, even as another half of us disappointedly resist. No! It’s not time, yet. We don’t have to separate. We were having fun!

As we continue our mental struggle, Zyneth’s surprised gaze falls from us to the floor, where his brow quickly pinches in confusion. “Kanin… did you spend your watch building a sand castle?”

We look at our little pile of sand with our core perched on top like a decorative seashell.

Our void puddles to the floor in mortification.