The fight was not going well.

Usually if Ratface and Halmir fought, she couldn’t touch him. The ability to change his shape and blink around made him difficult for her to catch even if she had quicker hands.

The glamour was having no such trouble. It caught Halmir each time and he was left to duck out of the way before it could do too much damage. The first time it had struck him he’d looked at it with surprise but at this point only grim determination was left on his face.

It wasn’t that her body had suddenly become stronger under the glamour’s control. It was embarrassing, but it simply used her body better. It moved with a natural grace and economy of movements Ratface wasn’t sure she’d ever achieve. It could read mana as well. She was sure that’s how it knew where he was going to blink to.

It was only because the glamour was ‘playing’ that the fight was still going. It was just backhanding him or leaving small cuts with the knife. Not to say those weren’t dangerous. Ratface could feel the force in the strikes and the cuts were beginning to rack up. It was smiling but Ratface could feel the rising boredom in her mind. It’d wrap this up soon.

Halmir appeared before it once more. When it tried to backhand him this time, he caught the arm with two of his. It smiled and stabbed towards him. He slipped away from the attack. His hands were bleeding, and he left a smear of his blood over her hands.

It was killing him. Moment by moment he was being cut down and it was her hands that were doing it. She could feel where his blood was left smeared over them. Ratface paused. The pollen had been wiped away from the blood.

Halmir stood panting just out of reach. He was a mess; she doubted he had too many runs against it left. The glamour tilted her head, tapping the knife idly on her hand as it did so.

“So, what’s the plan here?” it asked, “Bore me to death?”

“It should be crystal clear what my plan is. I just have to hold you still.”

Ratface kept her emotions calm. Had the glamour heard the hidden instruction? She couldn’t feel anything from it to suggest it had. Instead, an intense joy and smugness was radiating from it.

“Do you know why you’re going to lose?” It asked. It circled around him as it talked. “Our win conditions are just too different. You want to stop this body sure, but you don’t want to hurt her, do you? I bet if I leaned into an attack your claws would suddenly go elsewhere. Me? I’ll enjoy killing you.” It paused, switching its grip on the knife for something more deadly. “You might stand a chance against a weaker opponent. Which brings me to your second problem.”

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“What’s that?” asked Halmir. He tensed as the glamour got ready to strike. Ratface readied herself in her mind as well.

“I’m just better than you,” said the glamour.

It rushed towards him. It was the first time it had gone on the attack, and it was stabbing down at Halmir before the blink of an eye had passed. He raised his hands and Ratface struck.

She put all her will into this one movement. All she needed to do was grab it for a second. Her hand reached out and sailed past the crystal. The glamour wasn’t stupid, it only needed to tell the hand not to grab the crystal.

The order travelled down to Ratface’s arm, which suited her fine, seems she wasn’t trying to grab that. Her hand wrapped around her other wrist holding the knife, holding it in place. She’d known she wouldn’t win a contest of will and she’d been betting that Halmir did too. Him telling her about the crystal wasn’t to tell her what to grab. He’d been telling her what his target was.

His hands went straight for the crystal, trusting her to hold the arm back. The glamour tried to bring the knife down, but Ratface held her will strong. She may not be able to beat it in a contest of wills, but with the glamours instructions split she could at least hold the arm. After than it became a question of strength. It was even split because it was Ratface’s body. She held the arm firm.

Halmir grabbed the crystal, his blood smearing all over it. He shoved it into Ratface, tripping her in the process. They slammed into the ground with the crystal trapped between them.

Halmir’s blood ran from his hand to the crystal, onto Ratface. His magic blood.

It was a gamble. He couldn’t put the inscriptions Suncat had needed to make this happen the first time. What he did have was the fact that it had been Ratface and him connected by the ritual. The echo of that connection was still tying them together. He pushed onto that lingering connection.

The three of them were pulled into the dreamlike world. They stood in Ratface’s village, the huts and path along it in vivid details rather than smoke for once.

“Four of us,” said a frazzled voice. Next to Ratface stood the elf girl. She looked harried, weakened. Her form was literally falling apart at the seams. The edges of it struggled to hold itself together.

On the other side of the village, the other glamour was lying on the ground. It lay before the only part of the memory that was still fuzzy. Ratface knew her mother was there, and she was furious. This deep into the memory it was all the glamour could do to stop her seeing the full memory and her emotions slammed back into her. She wanted to weep for what she had loss. To curl into a ball and lose herself to misery. The thought she hadn’t been able to grieve, like a knife that had slid deeper and deeper with every day.

But there wasn’t time for that right now, so she hung onto that fury and promised herself that she’d take it out on the thing before them.

The glamour stood up and the fury and grief were replaced by shock.

Its features were delicate, beautiful even. It had the same perfection as any elf she’d seen.

Yet it wasn’t an elf that stood before her, not a human, not even a rat noble.

It was a goblin.