> “‘Then I am sure, Duff van Asch, that you will be a fine standard bearer for Rita’s legacy.’”

“What have you done?”

I stared at Beatrice and once again, a memory from ages past bubbled up to the surface of my subconscious and popped into being.

“Wouldn’t that mean that there was magic in people too?” I had asked Steve over grog all those months ago.

“Hmm. Probably. But the amount that could be pulled from a person is not worth the price of admission.”

“No one will miss them,” said Beatrice with an empty smile. “I can assure you of that.”

“How many?” asked Hugo, his hands suddenly shaking.

“A dozen here. A dozen there. I don’t keep an exact tally. It was getting harder and harder to track down suitable candidates without drawing attention to myself.”

“I’ll bet it was,” said Hugo. “But there’s a reason that the Treaty of Verdun banned the-”

“Do you know what happened two towns over last year? The mayor’s brother was out drinking with his buddies and got into a scrape with the man dating his ex-wife. Punches were thrown. It should have been just another barroom brawl. Except the next night, the second guy comes back from a midnight grocery run to find a raging inferno where his house had been.”

“I didn’t think arson had been upgraded to a capital crime by the unmasked vigilante council,” I said.

“Oh, it hasn’t,” said Beatrice. “And I wouldn’t have bothered if the asshole had succeeded in sending a message like he planned. But as it turned out, the place wasn’t empty. Because that morning, after hearing what had happened at the bar, his ex had fled to that very house, thinking she’d be safe there. Now, the charges didn’t stick, and no one cared that three kids have to grow up without a mother. But I found out the truth and set things right.”

A sharp pain erupted in the back of my head and my vision became spotty, and when I blinked my eyes open again, I was standing over a man strapped to a raised platform, a weird metal contraption impaled in his chest. There was a sock taped into his mouth and he was-

I blinked, and I was in the woods shoveling dirt into a freshly dug hole, sweat glistening on my brow, a smug look on my face. There were several burlap sacks in the pit I had created, and as I covered them up, I wondered whether the next time would-

I opened my eyes wide and was back in the drab living room, clutching my head and watching Beatrice do the same.

“Hmm, didn’t think that link still existed,” said Beatrice. “What a stupid experiment, in retrospect. Not sure what I was thinking there.”

“Where … what happened to…?” I asked, confused about what I had accidentally pulled from Beatrice’s memory.

The other two ignored me. Hugo’s hands and face were now beet red, but Beatrice remained oddly calm, as if she was completely detached from reality.

“So you set things right by making his kids orphans instead, is that it?” Hugo asked. “And siphoning off the minuscule amount of prima materia inside of him as a reward for doing so?”

“Precisely,” said Beatrice. “I’m not a monster. If I was, this whole experiment would be a lot easier.”

“I’m done,” said Hugo. “This … this is beyond the pale. I can’t … you’ll have to find that stupid book on your own.”

Without another word, Hugo strode toward the rickety front door, pushed it open, and didn’t look back as it slammed against the frame.

“He seems nice,” said Beatrice.

“Where is the rest?” I asked, the scattered images of Beatrice’s unspeakable acts still randomly playing in my head. “I only saw the before and the after.”

“They’re forgotten, but not gone,” she said, again her voice nearly robotic.

“What does that mean? What happened to you? You’re … it’s like you’re here, but not here.”

“An excellent question,” said Beatrice. “What happened was you tricked me into finding that gold token, which I dutifully threw into the fountain. Then all hell broke loose, and I did the only sensible thing: I ran. But before I could even pack a bag, I came home that night to divorce papers and my son’s pleading eyes.”

“And you decided that kidnapping was the answer?”

Beatrice pushed herself slowly to her feet and walked into the kitchen, and I followed. She rummaged through the refrigerator, which looked liked it had maybe hours to spare before it broke down forever, and pulled out a plain aluminum can. Opening it generated an uncanny hiss far different from the one that greeted you when drinking a soda, and she downed the contents in a single gulp.

“Not sure what you’re talking about,” she said, and I swear I saw a blueish sheen around the outside of her pupils that quickly vanished just as fast as her posture and poise seemed to improve. Whether it was her improved vitality serum, the blue prima materia she had stolen, or something much worse, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

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“You took … forget it, it doesn’t matter.”

“That’s right, your betrayal doesn’t matter. The Guild coming after me, it doesn’t matter. What matters is my work here.”

“They’re not,” I said. “Coming after you. Dalia, the Guild, they have bigger things to worry about than you at the moment. That’s why I’m here.”

“For a blank book?”

“I could lie to you and say yes, but I think you know it’s not really blank,” I said.

“Well, that’s nice of you, Jen. Or Jade. Or whoever you say you are.”

“What’s that’s supposed to mean?” I said. “You know who I am. What we’ve gone through.”

“Ah, but that’s the thing,” said Beatrice. “I don’t anymore. Come. Let me show you something.”

She beckoned me into her tiny bedroom, and I watched as she fiddled with the wall before finally pulling one of the panels free and tossing it on the floor. I looked over her shoulder to see a small nook had been cut into the sheetrock, and resting inside was a mason jar. A mason jar filled with silver rings.

“What is this?” I asked. “Please don’t tell me those are yours.”

“Of course they are,” said Beatrice, picking up the jar and shaking it. From what I could see, there must have been dozens and dozens inside. Were they singular moments that she had excised or had she gone deeper, removing entire years of her life? And how did she even have the knowledge and raw materials to accomplish such a task? But instead of those questions, the only thing I blurted out was a single word.

“Why?”

“That is the wrong question. The correct inquiry is why I didn’t think of this sooner? What I’d managed in the past decade pales in comparison to what I’ve accomplished in the past three months. I guess, in a roundabout way, I should be thanking you, for setting me on this path.”

“What path?” I asked. “The path that led you to become a cold-blooded psychopath? You sound barely human. How much of your past did you dump into this jar?”

“Not enough,” she said. “Because you know what I felt when you showed up? Both times? Anger. And I can’t afford to be angry.”

“Well, if being angry prevented you from siphoning off whatever was in that tree, then I’m glad to have caused it!”

“You’re starting to bore me,” said Beatrice. “And I have so much work to do, now that I tapped out nearly all my power. So if it’s the book you want, I’m afraid you’ll just have to be on your way.”

“Because where you hid it is one of those rings in there and you don’t know which?”

“If only it were that simple,” she said. “I knew this day would come, so I took precautions, although I didn’t think you would be the one to show up here.”

“I didn’t have a choice!” I said, but my plea fell on deaf ears, as she walked out of the room, leaving me alone with her memories. I picked up the jar and resisted the urge to smash it against the floor, as if that would somehow force the memories back into her head.

I found Beatrice in the kitchen a few minutes later, standing over the stovetop, stirring what appeared to be hot water in a pot with a wooden spoon.

“You know, it’s customary to add the ingredients first,” I offered.

“I’m not cooking anything,” said Beatrice. “It helps me think in my current state.”

“As opposed to what other state?”

She turned around suddenly and stared directly into my eyes, and before I could react, I was falling into a deep abyss that thankfully ended a few seconds later. I looked around in a mild panic before realizing where I was.

“So you actually did it. I thought maybe there was a chance you were faking this whole thing,” I said, turning a full circle to see that the expanse that had once held a galaxy’s worth of bright memories was now dark. No, that wasn’t the right word. It was empty.

“I’ve been here once before. Do you still remember?” I asked. “When we were in the lighthouse, when I needed to reach you. I forced my way in through our link and I found you. There.”

I pointed off into the distance and was surprised to find the dim light of that awful memory present in the night sky of Beatrice’s mind.

“Yes, it’s still there,” she said. Beatrice materialized a few paces away, looking the same as she did in the real world. Except the outline of her visage was fuzzy, and it blinked in and out like a TV trying to pick up a signal, a proper representation of the incomplete person I saw before me.

“Figured that would be the first thing you would want to forget.”

“I thought so too,” said Beatrice. “Was saving it for last. I would have been a clean slate, with nothing standing in my way except the limits of my ambition. But I realized something right as I was about to put pen to paper. I couldn’t forget that little girl. Couldn’t toss her away.”

“Beatrice, I’m…”

“You’re what? Sorry for what you did? For not telling me you had a gold token this whole time?”

“Don’t you think that would have been the first thing I would have mentioned if I had known?” I said.

“So I’m supposed to believe that you spent years, even before you found out about the Quests, with the long-lost Guild token around your neck?”

Anger infected her voice, and Beatrice’s figure became clearer, as if the remnants of her emotional core were trying to reboot her being. She realized it too and tried to steady herself, but that had the opposite effect.

“Yes, because it’s the truth!” I pleaded.

“I only know one truth,” said Beatrice. “That nothing will stand in my way again. Not the Guild, not you, not even the tallest fucking tree on this planet.”

Lightning cracked across the black sky, illuminating Beatrice’s empty inner world and causing me to shield my “eyes” from its unyielding brightness.

“What … is that?” asked Beatrice, and I realized she had not theatrically summoned the bolt to intimidate me.

“Dunno,” I said with a chuckle, “but if I had to guess, it’s something trying to stand in your way.”

Beatrice pushed me out of her mind just as quickly as she had pulled me into it, and I collapsed backward onto the kitchen floor, my head pounding. The entire house was shaking, dishes were falling out of the cabinets, and the refrigerator door had come free from its hinges, revealing shelves full of unmarked aluminum cans. But I couldn’t focus on yet another fridge stocked with mysterious alchemy, as there was the very real possibility that whatever or whoever was causing this chaos was intent on burying us alive in the rubble of the little shack. I ran toward the front door, only to nearly collide with a retreating Beatrice.

“This way!” she cried, directing me into her room. The jar was still in the nook where I had returned it and somehow in one piece. That wasn’t the item she had sought to retrieve, however, as Beatrice was instead frantically searching through a chest of drawers next to her bed. After dumping piles of matching blue overalls onto the floor, she pulled free a familiar looking key and darted into the kitchen. I joined her there a few moments later to see that the key that had once been a mottled doorknob was already inserted into a lock on the back door, and when Beatrice yanked it open, I was face to face again with a vervorium portal.

“Follow me,” she said and was about to step into the darkness when she saw the hesitation on my face.

“It could be Hugo. Let me go out and talk to him, before it’s too late,” I said, but she just shook her head and stepped through.

I considered my options, all of them terrible, and after making one more circuit through the house, decided the only choice was to follow Beatrice into the unknown yet again.