The fog continued to swirl around Kyrylo’s feet as he felt his body settle in this new world. The previously cocky Felix across from him could blend right into it with how pale he was. He was gasping at the air, his eyes darting from one aged building to the next. Not one was recognizable, all of them plucked straight from a historical district in Europe. Some even had signs and writing on them, made up of letters and shapes Kyrylo had never seen before.

“So you don’t know what this is either?” Kyrylo poked at Felix to try and get a response and the young man shook himself back into the moment.

“I already told you I don’t know. I don’t know any of this. I just want to train a recruit and kill spirits, like is that so much?” Felix tossed up his hands and stomped away, slamming a fist against a nearby wall.

“Hey I didn’t ask for this,” Kyrylo shot back. The tension from before was shooting back up, never quite abating; it had only been temporarily settled by the shock and terror of drifting down into another realm. But now what did he have to lose? “I wanted a normal life, that’s all I ever wanted. I want to just go to school and have a girlfriend and get a normal ass job where I just do regular things. This is very much not that.”

Kyrylo spun around to abandon Felix, ready to toss it all away. Except he walked into a wall of fog, cast in the eerie green light from the flames in the lamps above. And in that light he could see a faint figure, the outline of himself reflected back.

Except it wasn’t him. As he looked at it longer he could make it out a little better. Long, spindly, slender, with arms that ended in claws. Hunched, the figure stared back at him with two burning eyes of blackness. A spirit.

Not just a spirit, it was the spirit. The one hovering around Isabelle, the one he had tackled without thinking…the one he had fused with.

He gasped and stepped back and saw the reflected figure do the same. Then they both drew closer together. He tried to reach out but this time the being didn’t reciprocate, its arm still at its side.

“You’re…in me?” Kyrylo felt each syllable bounce between his teeth and tumble out of his mouth as he tried to comprehend what was going on. He hadn’t felt different since the incident, hadn’t shown any symptoms or changes or really anything. But he had been in his own realm, in a place without spirits. Now he was one.

Felix shouted and his sword suddenly flashed through the fog, cutting straight through the spirit-reflection and sending the embankment swirling into harmless water vapour.

“Keep your shit up,” Felix said, twirling the metal rod they called a sword. It was a strange, almost mechanical thing; thick, blocky pieces of metal surrounding a thin blade that barely poked out on one side, just enough to say hello and supposedly cut through ethereal entities. Kyrylo assumed there was some sort of generator within the blade’s housing that created a field or did something special to make it effective against stuff of another realm.

“We’re in their territory still,” Felix continued, “remember? You’re just gawking at them like it’s a zoo.”

Kyrylo bit into his cheek to hold back from unloading. The possibilities sitting within his head outweighed all his prior disputes. While the threat of death from a crime had compelled him, fusing with a spirit was unrealistic. Impossible. It just couldn’t be something he could process.

Then again, he couldn’t have imagined peering through glimmers in space to pass into the spirit realm. Anything was possible.

“Hello?” Felix snapped his fingers in front of Kyrylo’s eyes. “Pay attention, get out your weapon.”

“I don’t have one,” Kyrylo cut back, gesturing at his side. “You have to hand it to me normally.” He pointed at the second sword on Felix’s side. “And that wasn’t a…” That would have been a lie. It was a spirit, just somehow inside of Kyrylo yet also a reflection. And it could be seen by Felix, so it wasn’t entirely in his head.

All of these concepts were stacking up, compressing his brain and slowing down his thoughts. As soon as he started to unravel one he encounter another that only added more layers of complexity. And yet he didn’t know what this actually did to him or for him, other than having a new experience whenever he checked a mirror.

“Excuse me.”

Kyrylo and Felix froze, staring at each other. Neither of them had said those words. They could barely see each other, let alone the deeper streets surrounding them, but they both tried to peer past the other into the mists.

A figure emerged beside them, almost apparating from within the dense clouds. They were shorter than both of them, a stocky thing with broad shoulders and a deep chest. Short, brown fur ran down muscular arms, ending in very humanoid hands and fingers. Their legs were like tigs by comparison underneath, giving off a flipped trapezoid in appearance. And their head was similarly human, as the fur ended around their neck, except for the right antler proudly jutting out from their skull, missing its partner as it branched through the air. Under their left eye was a contrasting swirl of purple lines, nearly identical in form to the antler above but headed to their nose instead. While it gave off the appearance of a tattoo it was impossible to tell with a spirit what was or wasn’t just a part of them.

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The whole thing was wrapped up in a tight, crisp button-up shirt, pressed against their chest by a pair of suspenders holding up black pants. It dawned on Kyrylo that someone dressed so well would likely be the type of spirit polite enough to interject earlier. He couldn’t stop himself from answering, as if that was something he had ever done before.

“Yes?”

The spirit pointed back over its shoulder with its thumb. Kyrylo did his best to make out the shape of one of the buildings, the one they had been the closest to before. “Could you keep it down? You’re ruining the ambience for the customers.” The being shook its head and sighed then stepped back into the fog. Kyrylo heard a door open, listening for it this time, wood scraping against the stone. Then it slammed shut.

“That was the wall I punched,” Felix said, running his hands through the stubble on his head. “Did a spirit just tell me off?” His hand slid down to his cheek, tugging half his face down with it.

“So you also didn’t know they could talk?” Kyrylo’s eyes were all over the place, trying to suddenly take in the city around them as he realized the whole thing could be packed with spirits, all just out of view, wandering through the fog, sitting behind a door, watching through a window. Anything was possible now.

“No, they can talk. They like try to manipulate you and stuff sometimes, some of them are arrogant before you kill them, it’s just not often you’re engaging them that long so it’s pretty rare. But…” Felix trailed off and shook his head, then he slapped himself in the face. He stared at his hand for a moment after, then in the direction the spirit had left, the disbelief practically etched into his features. “I mean they’ve never told me to do something…normal. Why didn’t it try to kill us?”

“They just live here then?” Kyrylo added. “Like live live? They build cities and are customers of things and are not just specters in a different dimension haunting people?”

“Yes?” Felix gave him a shrug back but he was unable to play mister cool. His own confusion, evident in his expressions, gave away the game. This was all new to both of them.

They both stood there. Kyrylo felt the dampness of the fog pressing into his clothes as it continued to roll past them. He kept trying to process but his mind ran into a rut and refused to get out, fixated on a single detail, on only one possible answer, refusing to explore any other concept until it got the answer it desired.

“So we’re going in, right?” Felix’s words hit Kyrylo’s brain perfectly. It seemed he was just as hung up on the curiosity of knowing what the hell was happening inside the brick walls.

Kyrylo gave a shrug as response and the pair strutted forth, reaching a faded yellow door, flecked with chips in the paint and scratches in the wood, laced with ribbons of metal crisscrossing to reinforce it in age. There was a piece of him tugging at his compulsion, reminding him that there was a little device with an emergency recall, that they weren’t supposed to be here, that he didn’t even know if it was actually possible to leave again.

None of it mattered. He was going to cross through, bitter that normalcy continued to get further behind him and yet unable to stop himself from getting the answer. The door opened.

It wasn’t very bright inside, lit mainly by candles suspended from the ceiling in glass orbs. Kyrylo had been expecting to be blinded compared to the relative darkness outside so he was taken back by the dim experience within.

It was also small, with two round tables at standing height and a bar with no stools running along the wall to his right. The antler spirit was behind it, pulling down different bottles from off shelves and inspecting them, rubbing them with a towel and placing them carefully back on their perch. There was only one other…thing in the space, covered in a cloak and eyeing them from under a dark hood, a single red orb that snapped to their movements.

“Oh?” The apparent bartender turned to the sound of their entrance. Felix yanked the door closed behind them, leaving them two on two for whenever the inevitable fight broke out. Kyrylo was certain it had to end that way, sooner or later. “Why are the hooligans here?”

“We wanted to see the ambiance,” Felix replied, instantly. His gaze was fixated on the spirit, jaw clenched. His hand hovered over the weapon at his side. “Since you talked about it like it mattered.”

Kyrylo looked back and forth between the bartender and Felix, waiting for some sort of explosion to break the tension. Someone was about to kick through a wall and a brawl would ensue, it was the only way it could go at this point.

“Fair enough.” The spirit nodded towards the remaining empty table. “It’s all standing room so wherever you feel comfortable.”

Felix didn’t move. Kyrylo resisted a deep urge to chew on his fingernails, swatting away the buzzing in his head. That was an old habit his mom had buried in him years ago. But it was soon overpowered by an even greater urge; curiosity.

“Why aren’t you killing us?” The words burst out of Kyrylo’s mouth and yet didn’t affect anything, with Felix still prepped for combat and the bartender absently wiping away at the bottle in their hands. “Why aren’t…I mean…sorry this is just a lot to…we’re like people, you know that, right? And you haunt us and things and then…” He pointed at the sword clipped to Felix’s waist. “This stuff? How are we not all fighting right now?”

There was a gurgle from the cloaked figure. It shook a little and then lifted a glass up from under the table and tipped it under the hood, the one glowing eye finally moving off them to wander around the bottles on the wall.

“Not that kind of place,” was the answer from the antler-spirit. “And I’m not that kind of creature. Neither is she.” A little nod. Like this was all a completely normal exchange that happened with regularity. “You don’t have any money though, do you? Don’t know why I’m chatting up non-customers.”

Kyrylo decided to give in, sliding up to the free table. Felix didn’t budge. It seemed if anything suddenly changed he would be ready. But there was something strangely reassuring about how the bartender was pushing this all away. Almost like this was some type of…new normal? And the idea of that, even if just a misguided flicker for a second, was worth pursuing.

“This place has a name or something?” he asked, ignoring the statue of Felix in the doorway.

“Oleg’s. Because I’m Oleg, the guy who owns it.” The antler-spirit, Oleg, seemed rather proud of this fact, his chest swelling a bit. Kyrylo thought back to his stature outside and wondered how he was even able to see him so well over the bar, guessing there was some platform behind it so that Oleg could be tall enough to see and serve over the bar.

“Cool, cool.” Kyrylo drummed his fingers along the table, glancing up into the candles above and checking around the rest of the space as he put together more thoughts. “So anyways, we need some help figuring out what happens when a human and a spirit fuse. Do you know anything?”