--- FORA ---

I neatly tied the top of the small sack together, binding the explosives into a cohesive whole. Beside me, Netun was placing the finished packs into a new dimensional storage I’d made, where they wouldn’t be jostled against each other or even shift in position until someone took them out.

I glanced up as a communication stone started vibrating, pausing as I saw the familiar contraption that would record what was being said instead of allowing it to be played out loud.

Why was he sending another message the very next day?

I frowned at it with worry for far too long. I didn’t want to talk to Hivren until I could say that I’d gotten vengeance… but… Sparks I hadn’t even gotten a chance yet to listen to the one from yesterday.

Hesitantly, I stopped assembling bombs and waited for it to stop vibrating. Netun watched with curiosity, but he didn’t seem inclined to say anything about the break. It was several minutes before the vibrations stopped, which was concerning on its own. As such, the moment it was done I disconnected it from the recording crystal before immediately playing the two recordings, back to back.

“Fora—” Hivren cut off for a second before trying again. “I’ve… started to make these regular I think. Maybe it’s because you like things that are predictable, constant. You like to know how something will be before it even starts.”

He sighed. “I think at this point I’ve convinced myself that you either lost the crystal or you’ve died. So maybe this regular message is for myself. You’d be sixteen by now, almost seventeen, it isn’t fair that you always die so young, there are joys in life you can only find later on. But… the oldest you’ve gotten is twenty eight.

“In the end, I just hope that you always remember who you are, and that people care.”

Click.

“Fora!” His voice sounded excited almost, if it wasn’t for the worry and anxiety that filled the rest of the space up. “Fora, I felt something today, something that changes everything.” He paused, gathering his thoughts.

“If you remember my uncle Harrel, you’ll remember how he always went on adventures to far off lands and after treasures. You’ll remember how he was sort of involved romantically with Aymiae, though they were always very weird about each other.”

I blinked at that information, feeling more than a little guilty about having not thought about my old friend’s romantic life before. She’d always just… felt like that angry little kid to me.

“About fourteen or fifteen years ago, before you came back, my uncle Harrel went missing, no one could find him and those who looked always came back a bit… odd. It always reminded me of that memory spell your old dragon master had on him, the more they found out, and the longer they looked, the more they forgot.

“And so I know I’ll forget this, and I know that that’s the worst thing that can happen, because you need to know it. So I hope you’re listening.

“No one can remember Aymiae either. I don’t know why I can remember, I don’t know why you can, but almost anyone who knew her well has had her scrubbed from their memory. For the last fifteen years I always found this strange since my mother and sister don’t remember her, but I figured they were trying to grieve, or they were trying to give her memory the respect it deserves.

“But then this morning, I realized that I had a huge gap in my memory, me and… Kureia visited the capital a number of years before I believe the forgetting happened, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t remember why. The entire trip as well as most of the events surrounding it are gone from my memory.

“All I know was that Harrel was there.

“And so was Aymiae.

“This was after the fire, Aymi was supposed to be dead. And yet she wasn’t.” He sighed, “I don’t know if I’m going insane, I could be, but there’s something big I’m missing, and the more that I think about it, the more energy and thought that I put into my mental enhancements, the more I’m certain that Aymi is somehow in the middle of it.”

“I hope you can make more use of this than I can.”

Click.

“Aymiae?” Netun asked, frowning in thought. “The fire? She was there when you died?”

I nodded numbly, staring at the crystal, “We grew up together, we were kind of like sisters in some ways.”

“And I was there… looking for Turste…”

“Yes, you said that already.”

Netun gave me a blank look for a long moment. He paused, frowning, “Sorry, what were we talking about?”

I felt my blood run cold.

Netun had told me from the start that he had huge gaps in his memory, nearly ten entire years. And here he was, forgetting again once Aymi was brought up. I remembered what Netun had told me not so long ago, that Turste could remember things the rest of the world couldn't. “Netun, can you take me to Turste?”

He nodded, still frowning, “We were in the middle of looking for justice though, shouldn’t we keep hunting the Mis-born Dragon?”

I shook my head, “They’ll still be there when we get back.”

Netun paused, “What about your clone?”

Right, they might move her around a bunch, I should record her current location and see where they took her… but I also remembered how much harder things got if I let a clone run around unsupervised for more than a month. Would I be gone for a month? I wasn’t sure where Turste was so I doubted I could teleport there or even make portals.

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I needed to record her location, and then I could cut off the Geneseri and retrieve the memories.

Right. Right…

My mind was whirring though, spinning about like a wild blade, Aymi might be alive. It was hard to focus on anything else with that distinct possibility lingering there. That was… that was amazing if so, she’d be sixty at this point…

Barely able to form coherent thoughts, I prepared to enter my between space in search of that tracking stone.

I blinked at the spatial runes as a piece of paper fell in front of me. Picking it up, I examined the writing with a worried frown, half expecting it to be the Mis-born Dragon ready to attack after somehow finding my new base.

This is your friendly reminder not to take spatial distortions into the between (Unlike you, I do have bees ready for deployment at all times.)

— Astral, the god of Spatial Balance

I rolled my eyes at it and belatedly set down my bag, tucking the note into it. The fact that he felt the need to keep tabs on my every move after last time was almost funny in a way. Perhaps enough to let my mind finally focus on something other than Aymi.

--

“Is it just me,” I asked Netun, “Or have the gods gotten more… vocal lately?”

I frowned at the second note, a thank you from Astral for not breaking the space time continuum again… whatever that meant, but there it was again, space time, the two being associated with each other. It was almost like they weren’t actually opposites.

Netun nodded, his eyes still peering forward to the edge of the sandfrost desert. “I’ve started having odd dreams lately, and I don’t even sleep.”

I blinked at him, “How does that even work?”

“It’s impossible for a creature to leave behind dreams, they’re a connection to the between realm that the mind needs to be healthy. I just don’t sleep when they appear, they’re more like… faint hallucinations mixed with powerful emotions for me.”

I thought back to my own dreams, feeling a bit sad that I barely ever remembered them. “Dream magic is a mix of mind and illusion, right?”

Netun nodded slowly, “I think I’ve known a dream mage, but it might’ve been in that decade I lost.” I watched him hopefully for a second before he belatedly shook his head, “Anyways, gods talk to people through their dreams most of the time, so perhaps it’s Justice looking to tell me something.”

I frowned at the note, “I didn’t even know there was a god of spatial balance until he started bothering me…”

“Maybe he’s trying to get you to worship him?”

“Do they even need that?”

“I don’t know, maybe… Gium never seemed to care if people idolize him, just that there is Order, and Alner… Alner just cared about the promises and the consistency.”

I hummed lightly, “And yet the average person still thinks that Gium is the only god.”

“So clearly it matters at least a bit then. Perhaps if other gods get worshiped they gain a presence in this land?”

“Or maybe they get to eat your soul if you die worshiping them…”

Netun gave me an odd look, “...what?”

“Yeah that was a weird thought there.”

He shook his head in bafflement, “You come up with the strangest things…”

I grinned, “Thank you!”

--

Netun pressed his hand against the sand, leaving me to stare awkwardly. I thought I could even see the little streams of a root like structure as it grew from the outstretched limb and into the ground.

He’d told me already that I wouldn’t be able to hear anything they were saying, but I still tried to look for the nearly invisible spores. They had a faint presence to my magesight… maybe… I could simply be tricking myself into seeing something that wasn’t there, but I thought I could see runes similar to the one on Netun.

It would be harder though since the souls themselves weren’t contained in the spores, I was limited to simple magesight instead of having my soulsight to back it up. Which admittedly was still far too easy, I had plenty of practice with finding spells without the caster nearby.

So… yeah I wasn’t sure if there was actually magic contained in the spores, but I thought I saw some twinkling, so there.

He knelt there for quite a while, his antennae vibrating for… some reason. Perhaps they were being used as sensors? There was a limited sense of smell that came with antennae, but you never knew what a shapeshifter could do with them.

I was busy contemplating the ups and downs of trying to increase my own antennae senses, when suddenly Netun’s soul moved. I blinked at it, watching as it went into the ground.

Sparks!!! I hadn’t thought about the implications of that, and by Gium they were big ones. If he could move his soul around, make bodies, grow streams of himself into the land around him and transfer nutrients quickly and effectively? How could someone ever kill something like that? Sure he was the only mushroom with the ability, but he’d implied that that might change.

I watched with wide eyes as his body slumped slightly, it was still breathing and alive, just no longer active. It seemed almost asleep as I watched.

The minutes ticked by.

If he could leave his body with no repercussions, was there a way for me to do that? I already left my body whenever I died with the instinctive aspect of my rebirth affinity, but if it was anything like other affinities there should be other ways to use it. Right?

I frowned at his form for several minutes before finally sitting down myself, the fact that I’d never figured out anything instinctively from my second affinity besides seeing souls had always felt odd to me, in the back of my mind. It was never something pressing since I had plenty to explore with just dimensionalism.

I remembered the blockage between my memories and sense of identity, back when I’d been just Eliax, I remembered what the golden wingless dragon had said when I was in the middle of rebirth, “I can’t do the same thing as last time…”

Had it done something to me?

Had it been trying to stop me from coming back?

I was certain that there wasn’t any more blockage, so that tracked with what it had said. The good thing was that whatever it had done, it hadn’t worked. I was reasonably certain that the golden dragon hadn’t actually been a dragon, but the blatant use of soul magic just made it more certain in my mind. That had… probably been Gium. Which would mean that Gium himself, the god of Order, was definitely after my death.

It was nice to know that the feeling was mutual.

I blinked out of my thoughts as Netun stood up, frowning at the ground as his antennae started vibrating again. Belatedly he glanced at me, “Turste remembers her, he says he saved her life… she’s… she’s like me now.” He looked like he was in awe, apparently having assumed he was the only one.

I felt my mouth open and close several times, “Aymi is a discount vampire too?!”

Netun tilted his head, antennae vibrating, “Turste says she actually does absorb blood.”

“Sparks! That’s awesome!”

“Do you think maybe she’s the originator of those rumors you heard?”

“WHAT? NOOOO COINCIDENCES CAN’T BE THAT BIG.”