I was lucky enough to be able to feel myself dying. Cancer’s touch had been lighter on me than Sansen, and if I hadn’t known exactly where to look, I likely would’ve missed some of the subtler symptoms. But a soulmage’s memory was not that of a regular human’s: if I trawled through the arid deserts of my soul for long enough, I could retrieve and relive weeks of my slow decline all at once.

The eight memories I held suspended in my soulspace formed a clear trend. Despite how normal it felt nowadays to sleep sixteen hours a day and eat nothing more than a few bites, when I could flick back through days of my life like they were attractions at a street carnival, the pattern became clear.

I would be dead within the month if this kept up.

It was impeccably clear to me how I felt about that: I had not fought my way through a state-sponsored abuser, a blizzard-torn war, and my own arrogance and fear just to collapse from my wounds at the end of the race. The endless, determined, glittering sands of my soul were testament to that. But as much as I wanted to trust the only person in Knwharfhelm who practiced the kind of medicine I’d need to save my life, Zhytln was still a mind-manipulator with incomprehensible goals that I trusted no further than I could throw her. Which wasn’t very far, considering that she somehow effortlessly negated any attempts to fling magic her way.

So I dug deeper. Much as I detested Zhytln, I had studied her strange magics and—with Meloai’s help—developed them into something safe and ethical for my own use. I would never invade the mind of another, but working magic on my own mind was something I could do. I held a memory of Cienne, shimmering in the endless sands, and brought it to life. The living memory burned, bits of its essence rotating out of existence in angles my mind couldn’t track, as I transmitted my command into its very being: search my memories for anything I can recall about cures for cancer.

The memory of Cienne nodded and raced across the deserts of my soul, occasionally flickering and warping as it angled itself through the infinite dimensions of soulspace. Memories were four-dimensional, and I could only perceive three; with the help of another two living memories I summoned, I could grab different perspectives of my soul, hunting down memories faster than I could on my own.

Only marginally faster, unfortunately; when I tried to maintain a fourth living memory, the other three promptly destabilized, giving me a splitting headache. But inevitably, I caught the shape of a winding thread of memory, snaking throughout the planes of my soul, and hauled it to the surface. Where had I remembered glimpsing a cure for cancer? I touched the memory—

snow that swallowed footsteps and screams from your dorm room alike, hearth dragons gamboling beneath an ice-blue moon—

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Home. The last remaining lead was home.

I had grown up in the Silent Peaks; despite or perhaps because of their remote, resource-barren location, they managed to be one of the most magically adept nations in the world. And they’d been the ones to discover or invent the strange light magic that sickened all whose gaze it fell upon—they wouldn’t make a weapon that devastating without understanding how to slow its effects in their own. If anyone else knew how to heal me of the sickness in my bones, it would be the arrogant, sadistic witches who’d brewed it to life in the first place.

My eyes snapped open, the living memories dismissed, and I got to my feet unsteadily. Feathers drifted in my soul, jets of wind helping prop me up.

If I wanted answers on how to live, I’d have to beat them out of the manipulative hellhole I’d fled from so many months ago.

I clenched my fists, and lines of frost danced around the room in tune with my mood.

Finally, a problem a riftmaw could solve.

#

The Whispered Secret held memories in every cup and nail and floorboard. Salt-crusted breakups, glittering like stars; thick, layered funerals that let out puffs of dust when touch; lurking, eight-eyed rivalries that skittered in the dark—if a human soul could host it, the Whispered Secret had it.

I walked in with a bottled soul shard that resembled nothing at all in this shop of souls and secrets, and the bartender fell silent as I slid it across the counter.

The bottle’s soul held something that had been oil, once, although it had long since congealed, strange algal blooms that needed no water to live infesting the eldritch emotion. Zhytln picked it up, turned the label, and stilled.

“Dorcelessness,” Zhytln read out, expression flat. I saw the gears in her head turning as she processed the information. “Where did you find this?”

“The shattered soul of a juvenile monster,” I said.

Zhytln set the bottle down. “Cienne never mentioned you had samples of the Silent Peaks’ creations,” she said.

“He doesn’t know.”

“Why tell me?”

“I’m leaving, soon, to the place where this came from.” I tapped the bottle. “You’re a scientific type. Analytical. Vivisectionist. And I don’t want that anywhere near Cienne or me. But if I can aim you in the direction of a bigger monster, I will.”

Zhytln tilted her head, and I got the feeling someone else would have asked the harder questions. Why I hadn’t told Cienne I’d snatched a piece of Iola’s soul when Cienne had killed him. Why I’d waited until now to tell Cienne I was going back to the place that horror had been birthed. Why I’d come to Zhytln first, instead of someone I cared about and trusted.

The answers were all the same: because Zhytln would never think to ask, and Cienne would never think of anything else.

Zhytln pocketed the bottle warily. “I meant what I said, when we first met. I seek no conflict, with your party or anyone else’s. I will not step into this war of yours.”

The corners of my lips twitched. “No. But it’ll step into your business, eventually. When that day comes, they’ll find someone armed and ready with knowledge of how to fight them.”

“I will keep that in mind,” Zhytln said. “Now, if there’s anything else I can do for you…?”

I pushed the stool back from the bar, about to shake my head, then paused. Chuckled, dark and bitter. “Actually, there is.”

Zhytln raised an eyebrow, and I slapped two coins down on the counter. “Give me a drink, bartender. I have a feeling I’ll need it.”