I have time.

Everie swung her sword; the path of her blade a practiced arc of perfected death, as always.

But it’s not so perfect, is it? There were deficiencies in her swing that Everie had always been aware of, but had thought them impossible to fix. The impossibly minute tremblings in her wrist, the way her posture was slightly ajar - by mere millimeters at most - and how her back was still ever-so-stiff.

All mortal foibles; surely, her failings had not been caused by any measure of languor on her part.

But the enemy I’m fighting is not mortal, or anything I’ve confronted before in my previous line of work, is it?

Everie swung her sword.

“Everie!” she heard a voice call out to her. “You ready?”

She exhaled. Without the barest flourish, she sheathed her sword; perfectly still, perfectly quiet. As befit the First Sister.

Except... it wasn’t perfectly quiet, was it?

Banishing the thought, Everie felt a cold - yet approachable - smile twist across her face. Now, she was no longer her brooding, fickle internal self. She was Lady Everie of Medea Manor. The place she now called home.

Except... it wasn't quite home, was it?

----------------------------------------

Anger was an old enemy of Everie’s, but one that she’d thought had been successfully tamed. But with her new troubles, it seemed the beast had licked its wounds and slunk back for another stab at her unguarded flank.

The battle. Vernas’ ghostfire, sweeping across the South-Square of Medea Manor with the ferocity of the dragonflame of not-so-legend. It had enthralled every time Everie’d seen it.

It was representative of what she’d devoted herself to achieve. The pinnacle of strength in this world, as she’d been in her last. The power her uncle had come to wield represented in her eyes stability. Safety. Freedom.

This she thought, darkly. Everie hadn’t forgotten the void. She had not forgotten the cause of her incarnation, when countless beasts of formless night had gazed upon the frailty of her soul with relish. She remembered the clashing of gods and the unraveling of firmament. She remembered the feeling of being small. Insignificant. Inconsequential.

She hated it.

And the girl - Anabellum - had cut it all apart.

Everie had grown... somewhat fond of the girl. Her initial decision to take her ‘under her wing’ had been a spur-of-the-decision action. She could hardly justify her actions as having been born of kindness - Everie was far too lost for such a thing - but there had been a depth of emotional weight to her charitous action that she had come to accept.

Still, she’d tried to distance herself from the girl. Her aloofness was not one born of accident; it was a guise she carefully constructed for herself, such that she would always live. For fundamentally, Everie was a stranger to this world. An usurper, foisted into this new body and destiny by the powers of one of the many beings that had made her feel… inconsequential.

Attaining Daphne had been her first misstep. What right did she have to deceive another innocent soul?

And yet... she’d found herself opening up to the girl. A ten-year-old, of all things. Her, someone who was in truth twice her age - and by all rights should be twice as mature. Her! The First Sister, of all things!

Everie laughed silently, shivering beneath the covers of her all-too-large bed.

And now, with less than half her experience and without a single lick of blood staining her delicate hands, Ana had taken the first step to what Inesorin and all his contemporaries adulated as the long-lost rank of Divinity before her.

Everie was proud of her, of course. Surely, she wasn’t so petty as to be jealous of an actual child, who... perhaps reminded Everie of herself a little too much.

Hells. I’m a real mess, aren’t I?

It was petty, even for her. Especially for her.

All Everie could do was continue trying. She was the First Sister, after all. A survivor. Everie had forged herself into that through nothing but grit and effort and the broken shards of what had remained of her after what she did-

-she clenched her fists, swallowing. “Shit,” she muttered. Looks like even sleep’s abandoned me, huh?

It didn’t take long for Everie to stalk out onto the Manor grounds, scabbard affixed to her hip.

The covert was silent. No one followed her, although Everie was sure the Guard was watching her every step nonetheless. It was for this reason that she abandoned any pretense of caution; for she could hardly assume she would be able to protect herself better than those sworn to protect her.

But that night, none watched her.

----------------------------------------

The thousandth swing was when she finally broke down.

Her sword clattered to the floor, dispersing the early-morning mists where it struck the cobblestones. But even that discordant note was vaporized in comparison to her ragged scream of despair.

“Why-!” she shrieked. “Why! Isn’t! It! Working?”

She swung angrily - a strike devoid of technique - and watched, listlessly, as a blast of pure, unrefined ether rippled through the air. The very action left her drained, the ambient magic around her resisting Everie’s brutish and cretinous attempts to bend it to her will.

Such was all she could summon, as the energy stubbornly refused to take shape no matter what she did. She’d read practically every text on the subject in the Library, had listened to Daphne ramble on the subject for countless hours, had spent nary a minute not circulating her ether, looking for something, anything-

What is it that I’m doing wrong?

She sagged down, slowly picking her sword back up.

Paths.

The word flashed in her mind, and an ember of anger crackled within her before she managed to douse it.

Is that really it? She wondered, bitterly. Am I just lacking resolve?

Resolve to live?

She exhaled.

It wasn’t impossible. After all, that was supposedly how Ana had awakened her innate magic. Her Path. Vernas had called her the Pathfinder - her title, for discovering her way.

And then there was the fact that the Crying Demon had done something to her soul that had fundamentally warped its composition. It was without a doubt something special - an arcane magic which Everie dared not to tell anyone about, in fear of the Sereph hearing her.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

But... does any of that matter? At the end of the day, there was only herself and her failure. The creatures of the unknown, however they influenced her, were not things she could defeat. Not as of yet.

Slowly, she stalked her way back to the Manor. Maybe it really is just my age. Younger people are supposed to have less control over their ether anyway, and I’ve never heard of anyone else awakening on their first birthday.

Maybe that’s all it is.

Maybe-

She froze.

Then, so far to the peripheries of her vision that she almost dismissed her initial observation, something twitched.

It looked like mist. A black tendril of smog, slithering on the ground...

…leading into the darkness of the multicolored foliage that comprised Medean covert. The place Everie hadn’t dared to enter; not since the Mudwraith attack, and not since she’d been reminded so glaringly of her fragility.

In retrospect, had she been acting rationally, Everie would have ignored the thing completely. Reckless though she had always been, even as a Sister, danger was always something she had avoided. Regardless of her present instability, she was fundamentally still a survivor - and even the greatest of men could fall without understanding the concept of caution.

It was, after all, the very first thing Selena had taught her - to stay alive, no matter the cost. And perhaps it was the only thing Everie had excelled at.

Oh-thirty-four and oh-forty-seven, meanwhile, had learned from their eldest Sister to weave. To play. To paint. To read poetry. To do all the things that children, Everie had learned, were supposed to do.

Thus, she had deemed childhood as weakness. As distraction. And eventually, after she’d buried the bones of her sisters in the Graveyard together with Selena, she’d thought - nestled within her hatred of the cult for their deaths, and the cruelty of the world she’d resided in, and the gods that had abandoned it - that in the end, it had been those very same distractions that had killed her Sisters.

Now, even Selena was gone. Now, Everie was all that remained. The one who remains. She was a survivor. And she hated it.

It was that hatred that cost her.

So she followed the tendril. She threw caution to the wind, because Everie couldn’t care less about surviving. Not now. Not anymore. She strayed from the path, stumbling into the darkness of the forest without aim.

No, she thought, blearily. I never possessed such a guiding force in the first place.

The revelation - the Insight - should have been what jolted her from her stupor. It was at that moment that Everie felt something awaken in her; but it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t nearly enough. Her magic was so obviously there, but it still resisted her control with stubbornness.

She wanted it. She hungered for it.

Brambles tickled her bare legs. Vines slithered around her legs as she walked, stonefaced, through the forest. As she walked past a rosebush, tiny thorns drew a dozen thin lines of blood across the naked flesh of her gangly arms.

She refused to flinch.

The darkness welcomed her, and Everie let its caresses comfort her. Shadow embraced her, and Everie felt a sensation of homeliness wash over her.

The darkness had, after all, been her second home for almost twenty years. Everie had spent her entire early years in dank caves and catacombs; then, as a Sister, she had learned to walk in the shadows, killing political figures and slaughtering the enemies of the cult indiscriminately.

Many feared the darkness. But to oh-one, it was a place of refuge.

A place of pathless empty.

Blood trickled down her forearms. Beads of crimson entangled her fingers, before drip-drip-dripping onto the lower fabrics of her disgustingly fine dress - much of which was now torn, caught on brambles and foliage of the like.

She smelled iron. She tasted it. Another familiar sensation; it was something Everie knew intimately. She had wrung whole ingots of such before from the lifeblood of her enemies.

Everie drank it all in, closing her eyes.

I hate this, she thought, wearily. Is this really all I am?

Do I really have no purpose greater than this?

She didn’t know each story she’d ended intimately. Hells, Everie thought, shivering, I barely remember some of them at all. After thirty-four and forty-seven, she’d thrown herself into her work, rocketing up the ranks of the Sisterhood straight into the upper echelons. It was then, barely pubescent, that Everie had gained her reputation as a specter of death - the sickle of the cult, if Selena had been its scythe.

How ironic, she thought, that both had eventually been swung against their master.

Thirty-four. Forty-seven. Selena. All three were dead. Gone. Little more than mist, probably having been burned so thoroughly in the energies of the Soul Confluence that they were completely new people, with neither the sins nor the memories of their previous selves bound to them.

All three, in their dying moments, had been so obviously more alive than Everie had been. And she knew it. She’d always known it.

She’d never strayed from the path in the first place, because Everie had never been on such a path at all. Her whole life had been a cycle of senseless murder. Everie had rejected the hand to life Selena had proffered, and had paid dearly for it. She was-

-pathetic, she thought, closing her eyes.

Seconds passed. The foliage rustled, the covert drawing breath in a weighty sigh.

Still, Everie kept moving forward, putting one foot after the other. Her motions felt stiff, but they faded into just that - motions. The dullness of repetition ebbed at the corners of her mind, helping her forget. Eventually, even her ruminations ceased; the thoughts that had plagued her settling, although still present, into a quiet sense of equilibrium.

At the very least, she was in denial no longer. It wasn’t the world that was at fault, although its cruelty had taken much from her.

It was her.

And it had always been her.

Everie just hadn’t realized it.

Still, even the emotion of nothingness came to end, in due course. Soon, her Inner-Eye - which Everie had been intentionally ignoring, if not suppressing - flickered. The ambient ether around her, so close and so pure, trembled with an ungodly weight.

Her fingers twitched.

“Now what?”

It took her a second to realize she’d spoken out loud. That brief respite from oblivion jarred her, as the very air around her distorted-

-and she opened her eyes.

Everie blinked.

It was a spring. A massive one. The waters were crystal-clear, and the body itself was probably large enough to accommodate the entirety of the Manor Guard at once with a comfortable distance between each member.

Tiny, orb-shaped lights - skittering pink and purple - caressed the very fringes of the grove. And immediately, Everie knew this place was special. There was a history behind it. There was-

-her core cried out. Everie let out a sharp gasp of pain. “What-”

Her spine jolted like electricity had touched it. A maelstrom of black erupted around her, swamping the entire clearing in a storm of liquid night.

It’s the same thing the tendril was made out of, she thought.

Her cognizance of the fact was enough to snap her out of whatever trance she’d fallen into - and for all the emotions she’d suppressed in the past hour to come flooding back into her. An intense sense of foreboding washed over her. Her instinct for survival, however suppressed, seemed to stir, only to be brought back low by the intense pressure that soon washed over her.

Everie turned-

-and then everything went black.

Except she was still awake. She couldn’t see, though. Yet, there was something there.

Something powerful.

What Everie sensed next should not have frightened her. Her life had been marred by horrors; and from evil men to evil gods, to wicked beasts and malevolent daemons - Everie had seen it all. She’d felt fear before; and this should not have scared her.

Should not have scared her.

It was a little girl. Brown-haired. Her face was delicate, and gloriously pale - almost stark in contrast to the shadows wrapped around her. She had hazel eyes and a fragile, button nose. She wore a plain white dress that was only slightly darker textured than her closely juxtaposed bare skin.

Beyond just the fact that Everie still had her eyes closed, there was just something unnatural about the sight. Yet, there was that feeling of familiarity, emanating from the little girl-monster-demon; this thing, which now walked towards her with eyes so empty, dressed in a dress that clearly did not fit her...

...yes, she would have thought, had she still been conscious, Everie did know this feeling. She knew it well. She knew this sight intimately, because Everie knew that very same expression intimately. She’d both seen it and worn it before.

The girl was in front of her. How, or when, Everie didn’t know.

Not that what she thought or perceived mattered now, anyway. There was nothing she could do. She could only watch from within herself, her eyes still closed, paralyzed, as the plain slip of a girl raised both her hands - each now holding a needle-thin knife-

-and stabbed them into her soul.