Orton weighed the pack of cigarettes in his hand, pondering, as he sat cross-legged in a rented room above the discotheque where the monastery should have been. This was definitely a risky proposition.

Digesting the leaf of the kum bum shù had indeed awakened him to the metaphysical underpinnings of his body's spiritual mechanisms -- he could feel it like a glow, spreading outwards and permeating his internal tissues. But he could already tell that it wouldn't be enough. His body was becoming purified, but it wasn't something he could repeat or sustain in the way that a true Rite of Repletion would provide on-demand; there would simply be too much information for his mind to process all at once, and he'd never get a second attempt. His only option was to do something drastic.

Still, it wasn't an easy decision. He'd spent the past six years painstakingly honing and purifying his body with the objective of making its constituent processes more and more visible to his mind, so that he could bring the two of them into the harmony which was required to directly work with one's soul. What he was contemplating now would not only undo all his work, but make it that much more difficult to try again in the future.

Eventually, it was the knowledge of the amulet that swayed him -- if this went poorly, he could always reset and try again. Sighing, he meditated until his mind was focused, drank a few alchemical mixtures to sharpen his perception, and then opened the package.

First, he focused his sight beyond sight upon the cigarettes -- he'd hoped they would be mystical objects, perhaps rolled in the pages of ancient tomes or filled with alchemy-soaked leaves of the divine tree, but no such luck. They were simply ordinary, everyday cigarettes, likely purchased from a bodega a few blocks away from the tenement building. The only thing his divinatory senses were picking up from them were faint probabilistic echoes of lung cancer in the future of whoever smoked them. So much for that.

Next, he turned his perceptions inward, focusing as hard as possible on his own biological processes. Suffused with spiritual solidity, he could sense the multimodal aspects of his physical existence in a manner of distinct abstractions: chakras and meridians overlapped dermatomes and innervating perfusive structures harmoniously in a manner both fractally complex and sublimely simplistic. Which was great and all, but one can't exactly memorize infinite intricacy and whip it out on demand at pub trivia; Orton needed something more concise. Regretfully, he took out one of the cigarettes, lit it, and inhaled with an air of resignation.

At first, nothing happened, other than the standard sting of inhaling burning leaves and the slight contraction of his alveoli. Orton slumped slightly in disappointment -- then abruptly sat bolt upright. With his bodily awareness heightened to its current degree, he could see the corruption of the tar and nicotine spreading throughout his body in the sharpest possible relief; the blackest black against the whitest white of his ultra-pure, eternity-infused biostructures. As the impurity swirled in and through him, patterns and systems made themselves instantly clear to him in a rush of contrast. He perceived his body as an expressed iterative duality, the black of yin and the white of yang each containing each other according to a simple and beautiful pattern created by a yet deeper series of simple steps and rules. The familiar rush of epiphany raced up his spine, electrifying all his multifarious abstractions, and in an instant he broke through to the third tier of spiritual perfection.

The rush of enlightenments and universal truths that flooded through him were, as usual, intense and mindblowing, but this was Orton's fourth time to experience it and he rushed through it with downright unseemly haste. Total harmony with the living world, utter control over his own mental universe, blah blah blah. He unpacked a few imaginary castles full of memorized spellbooks that he'd had stored away in his subconscious, restoring another large portion of his lost power from previous loops while neatly bypassing the tedious "reinventing each technique from first principles" steps he'd had to endure the first two times. Most of the spells and powers that this gained him fell firmly into the "not flashy, but important" category, such as his ability to both seed and track divination anchors and various spells to prevent or reverse physical trauma -- capabilities he'd sorely missed at various points during the previous six years. He couldn't use them all at his current power level, unfortunately; there were quite a few that were still beyond his reach, such as the ability to impose or engage with meta-realms -- not that he needed those at the moment, but they were shockingly powerful when used judiciously. It was very easy, for example, to convince someone that they had experienced something imaginary or were feeling very sleepy if you could convince their subconscious inner self of it in a dreamscape (with minimal power expenditure relative to more brute-force reality alteration spells, to boot). Still, he wasn't going to complain; this was a good year ahead of where he had expected to be at this juncture, and it freed up a lot of opportunities to --

Orton!

He blinked. "Hello?" He didn't see anyone around, but that didn't mean much. Come to think of it, how had he heard anything over the noise from downstairs?

Orton, help!

Oh, crap. That was coming from inside his mind. He concentrated, sending back subvocalizations along a quivering mental thread that hadn't been there a second ago. What? Who contacts me?

Damn it, Orton, don't be a butthead! I need help!

He jumped involuntarily to his feet. Enna. What's going on? How did you contact my mind?

I made my thoughts the same color as yours. Don't ask! There's somebody after me!

He sighed. Well, unless you're in Tibet, I'm not exactly local enough to come save you. Who's chasing you?

He sensed some commotion through the link. It's a guy! He's a mage too, I think. Shit, I don't know. He caught an impression of an explosion and some falling bricks. We were traveling together and then I saw him killing another guy and then he started chasing me!

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

Orton pursed his lips. Well, let's see here...

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Enna dashed around the corner, barely dodging the hurtling ball of crackling black energy as it took a huge chunk out of the opposite wall. As she gasped for breath, a shadowy image vaguely resembling Orton's outline appeared next to her and shrugged apologetically. This is the best I can do for now, it said without sound.

"How is this supposed to help me?!" Enna protested in disbelief. "Can't you teleport me to you, or something?"

Not for another few years, the shadow replied glumly. Where are you right now?

"Switzerland!" She muttered an invocation at the wall next to her -- it had no effect for now, but it would fall and collapse onto her pursuer if she was lucky. Heaving in another breath, she staggered back into a slow run. Orton's shadow drifted along beside her, like a black splotch in her vision. "Why does it matter?"

Professional interest? Orton's voice echoed in her mind, making her chuckle. This wasn't how she'd hoped to reconnect with him, but he was helping to calm her down a little. Try to get a little more distance.

Enna groaned, but obligingly drew upon her deepest physical reserves; gasping for breath, she turned another two corners, then collapsed against a wall. "E...enough?" she gasped out.

Abruptly, Orton's shadow flared backwards, enveloping her head; she tried to jerk backwards, but couldn't. Don't panic, his voice echoed in her mind. Relax and let me drive for a second.

With a shock that felt like being dunked in ice-cold water, her whole body suddenly flared with power -- her fatigue was wiped away as if she'd just woken up from a two-day nap, and her vision cleared as her body stood up of its own accord. She fought down a wave of panic and forced herself to relax; it wasn't like Orton was going to do anything worse to her than what John would do if he caught her. Probably. She still wasn't entirely sure this whole thing hadn't been some kind of misunderstanding; she'd thrown up a wave of dust out of pure reflex, and John might have interpreted that as an attack and... fuck, things were so messed up. She was dimly aware of her body casting a number of spells in languages she didn't speak; she hoped Orton knew what he was doing.

Abruptly, John came around the corner, brushing off bricks and dust; he flung a spell of some sort at her, but it bounced off a shield that hadn't been surrounding her a moment ago. A burst of profanity came through the link that she couldn't even parse, and then suddenly, without transition, John was covered in spiders.

They were huge, hideous-looking things; as big as tarantulas, but covered with shiny black-and-yellow striped chitin instead of fur, and adorned with skull-like white heads that bore huge fanged mandibles. John flinched, shrieked, and began flailing spastically as she found herself slipping away around another corner; behind her, she heard thumps, crashes, and the fwoof sounds of something being lit on fire. Bemused, she watched as her body deftly trotted down an alley, ducked through two doors and then back through a third, slipped into a storm drain, and then cast some sort of darkness spell that seemed to thicken the air strangely. That'll keep him busy for a minute, said Orton's voice in her mind, but I need to obscure your trail so he can't track you. Just a minute. Her body uttered another few spells, one of which caused a ring of scattered runes to spring up on the stone surrounding her, and then she was abruptly in control of herself once more; Orton's shadow sat down opposite her in the deserted sewer. So, want to tell me what happened?

Enna flapped her hands a bit, frustrated. "Do we have to talk about this right now?"

My body is currently booking a flight here, the shadow responded, and you can't leave here for at least a day. So we can either sit here in silence, or I can leave you alone, or --

"No, don't." Enna squeezed her eyes shut. "Look, I know I probably fucked up by ditching you. I'm sure you're pissed that I ignored you for six years and then made you come save me out of nowhere."

I'm not as annoyed as you probably think, the shadow said placatingly. It's a little inconvenient, but not much. But I really do need to know how you got caught up with that wizard, because it is in fact very important.

Enna laughed. "Sure. Right. What do you want to know? His name's John something... Valentine, that's it. He's an antiquities dealer -- although, I guess that might have been a cover?" She sat down and put the books aside, then wrapped her arms around her knees. "I didn't even know he was a wizard until he killed that guy."

There was a long moment of silence. You are really, really lucky, said Orton's shadow.

"What? Why do you say that?"

Because you survived being in close quarters with the most dangerous wizard on the planet, the shadow replied. That's Gentry. You remember, the guy who worships the devil and plans to crash the moon into the earth and destroy the world?

"Are you serious?" Enna's heart was suddenly pounding again. "Oh my God, you have got to be fucking kidding me."

It's okay. He can't find you here, not while I'm shielding you. The shadow shifted slightly; she got the impression Orton's attention was divided between the conversation and whatever his physical body was doing. If she'd been able to appreciate it, she might have been impressed, but most of her energy was going towards freaking the hell out at the moment. As long as you don't leave the runic circle, he won't even know where you went after you left that alley.

Enna buried her face in her knees. "I don't suppose there's any chance your spiders killed him, huh?"

The spiders were mostly illusory -- at best they might injure him enough to slow him down for a minute or two. I think I heard him light himself on fire -- which really made my day, let me tell you -- but realistically he's just too powerful to be slowed down by something like that. The shadow twitched a little, then put its featureless chin on its fist in a contemplative pose. Knowing he's in antiquities explains a lot about why he's been able to stay ahead of me in all these loops. He must have access to a powerful artifact of his own -- maybe even more than one.

Enna shuddered. "Great. So what do we do now?"

The shadow stood up. I can't maintain this projection much longer, but I'm connected to you now, so I can find you when I land. Just don't leave the circle.

"Listen, I --" Enna stopped abruptly as the shadow disappeared; in the same instant, she felt Orton withdraw from her mind completely. She tried to think at him again, but she could tell she wasn't getting through -- the telepathy had been an act of desperation, and with most of her powers, it seemed to be suddenly unreliable lately. She cursed to herself in French, then opened her grimoire to one of the more difficult diagrams. Now she was going to be bored in a sewer, instead of bored on a train. With significantly worse beverage service, she thought to herself sourly.

On the streets above, Gentry patiently searched for several hours, but he could find no trace of Juliette. He pondered the whole sequence of events, amused; those spiders had really been something! He'd never dreamed there'd been another mage with him on the train. It's a funny old world, he thought to himself as he purchased another train ticket to Tangier via Madrid. Maybe I'll see her again.