According to Witch Aimes, I was "completely incapable" of grasping "even the fundamental conceptual framework needed" to cast the empathy spell she'd wielded. Add onto that the fact that I didn't even have an attunement for empathy—and unless I went out of my way to somehow make someone else stop feeling empathy, I wouldn't anytime soon—and using the spell to contact Odin myself was out of the question.

Fortunately, and to my surprise, Witch Aimes offered to do it free of charge.

"It's basic witchcraft," Witch Aimes explained. "Break your opponent's emotions, and you break their ability to fight. He struck first through messages in dreams? Well, two can play at that game. Show them that the people of the Silent City haven't given up. Haunt their every moment with our defiance. And when we bring the physical war to them, if we play our cards right, we'll have an edge."

I silently wondered if an inhuman entity like Odin even played by the same rules as us when it came to witchcraft, but knowledge on demons like that was strictly forbidden for first-years.

Which was why I needed to contact Odin in the first place, not that I could let Aimes know.

So when she pressed something from her soul onto mine and I felt a presence loom in the back of my mind, I simply said, "You failed to keep your promise, Dealmaker."

Witch Aimes smirked. "That's right, isn't it? We managed to keep plenty of the students they wanted to kidnap out of their damn paws. Alright, who's next?"

Witch Aimes was powerful, intelligent, and strong. She had principles she'd stick to until she died, and I had firsthand experience of her ability to match wits and spells with the strongest foes I knew.

But she was a witch of arrogance above all else.

And for all its strengths, the power of arrogance drew from a reality ever so slightly out of touch with the one everyone else lived in.

###

Odin took my invitation to speak, materializing in my dreams that very same day. Their expression was deliberately smooth and respectful as they appeared in the strange, dark-thorned plane Odin had once called my soulspace.

"Cienne," Odin said. "My forces can escort you to safety from the Academy if you—"

"Not what I'm interested in," I said, and it was true. Say what you would about Odin, but they hadn't been the one to stand between me and impending death. "I need information."

Odin paused, amusement flitting across their face. "So you call me here by insulting my honor, refuse me when I try to make amends, then demand knowledge for no compensation?"

"Who said anything about no compensation?" I said.

Odin raised an eyebrow. "Will you join my forces if I give you what you want?"

"Do you have a fragment of my mother's soul?" I countered.

A predatory light glinted in their eye. "What are you willing to trade for that information?"

"Are we going to keep answering questions with questions, or is one of us going to take the first gesture of goodwill?"

"Why would I need to earn your goodwill?"

"Because you invaded my home, and your soldiers nearly killed my friends?"

Odin folded their arms. "I never claimed to ensure the safety of your friends."

I snorted. "For a Demon of Empathy, you really aren't good at the stuff."

"I use empathy, much like your own witches. Are you surprised that I have none of it to spare for irrelevant people?"

"All people are relevant," I idly said. "It's part of how witchcraft attunements are formed, after all."

Odin froze.

"That's what I'm willing to offer," I said, lowering my voice. "One fourth of the secret to how attunements are created, in return for the complete set of your knowledge on collecting soul fragments of the dead."

Of course, knowing only one of the four attunement conditions would do Odin no good. But unspoken in the air hung the challenge: could they manipulate me into trading the others for something I wanted even more dearly?

Odin's expression marshaled itself, and they came to a decision, "Yes," they said, "I accept these terms."

I gave them a solemn nod. I wasn't surprised they weren't worried about me lying; if a Demon of Empathy was anything like a skilled witch, they'd be able to see if I intended to deceive them. "Very well. The first of the four attunement conditions is feeling the emotion yourself."

Odin gave no indication of whether they knew that already, but I suspected they'd likely had educated guesses along those lines, if nothing else. It didn't matter, though—I was confident that they were confident that they'd pry the rest out of me eventually.

"The emotion you desire an attunement to?" Odin asked.

I nodded.

"Is there a time limit? An intensity limit? Can it be medically induced?"

"I don't know," I said, and it was the truth. "But I know that if you have all four pieces, you can easily experiment to find out."

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Odin nodded. "I suppose your answer is satisfactory, then. I shall honor the agreement in the spirit in which it was made." They rubbed their chin, considering something, then said, "If you are seeking soul fragments, then you already know that on death, the memories that make up a soul are released to the manifolds of thoughtspace which match their emotional vectors."

I frowned. "The... general outlines of that, yes. What, exactly, is a manifold of thoughtspace?"

Odin sighed. "I suppose what I say next will make no sense without a background in theory. Allow me to explain."

Without any apparent exertion, Odin willed my soulspace to shift. Suddenly, a diagram hung in the air, showing three horizontal rectangles hovering in a vertical stack.

"Imagine your world as a sheet of paper," Odin tapped the bottom rectangle. "The place your body inhabits is commonly known as realspace, the plane of form."

I nodded. "With you so far," I said.

"When you access witchcraft, you gain the ability to see souls, and a glimpse of the emotions contained within." Odin tapped the top rectangle. "This phenomenon, known as soulsight, allows you to peer into the plane of memory. Soulspace."

"Where we are now," I said.

"But in between," Odin said, tapping the middle rectangle, "is where—among other things—the souls of the dead are scattered to. Thoughtspace. The plane of power."

The... what? "I've never heard of..." I paused. No, the Angel of Arrogance—Albin was apparently their name—had mentioned thoughtspace once, hadn't they? "Why is thoughtspace the plane of power?"

Odin tilted their head, perhaps considering whether it was worth currying the goodwill by answering my question, then said, "Do you know how emotions create magical effects?"

I blinked. "Um. What? They... they just do. Happiness creates light, sorrow creates cold, arrogance—"

"Yes, yes, yes," Odin said, waving their hand, "but do you know how they create magic?"

I shook my head.

"Then observe." Odin pointed at the top rectangle—soulspace—and said, "Typically, emotions reside in the soul. But when a witch uses magic, they push emotions from their soul into the physical world around them—in other words, their emotions transition from soulspace to realspace." Odin drew a vertical line from the top rectangle to the bottom one, pausing where it hit the middle rectangle. Where emotion met thoughtspace. "But in between the soul and the body is the mind, and in between soulspace and realspace is thoughtspace. When an emotion is emitted from the soul, it tears a hole between the three planes, allowing energies to pass through."

A hole between planes that allowed energies to pass through. My eyes widened. "Rifts," I whispered.

"Correct," Odin said. "All magic relies on creating microscopic rifts into thoughtspace, allowing a fraction of the energies within to enter our world as a spell. Happiness opens a gate to a plane of endless radiance; sorrow opens a gate to a plane of absolute cold; arrogance opens a gate to a plane of spatial distortions. So if you wish to enter thoughtspace to search for fragments of souls..."

"...I have to go through the rifts," I finished, a chill running down my spine.

###

"That's..." Witch Aimes paused, frowning. Thinking. She opened her mouth, closed it again, then grudgingly said, "That... just... might... work."

I blinked. "Really?"

She gave me a searching look. "Were you surprised? Yes, in theory, if you could expose enough sentient minds to the other side of a rift, you could catch the memories that went through that region of thoughtspace. I'm just... suspicious... that you knew that."

I shrugged. "I did some independent research. Having such an initiative might help with the war."

Witch Aimes raised an eyebrow. "Oh?"

"Demons have vast reserves of knowledge from the influx of memories of the dead," I said. "If we could set up a way to intercept those memories before they reached Odin, we'd be cutting them off in the long term from a source of potentially invaluable intelligence."

Witch Aimes drummed her fingers. "You'd need a massive number of sapient minds to devote to the effort, though. And they'd have to be intelligent enough to communicate in some fashion, if you wanted to make use of all those memories yourself."

That was true, and I hadn't really thought of that. It wasn't like we had the manpower to spare on giving some precocious first-year thousands of test subjects during wartime. "I don't suppose you have a couple hundred trained monkeys lying around?" I tried, shrugging.

Witch Aimes' eyes gleamed. "Well, now that you mention it..."

###

"Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116," wrote the monkey.

"You called?" spoke the abomination of flesh from behind me.

"It was a joke," I groused, throwing my hands in the air. "One. Stupid. Joke."

The quivering entity reached out with one spindly arm and gave me a tentative pat. I slapped its hand that barely remembered how to be made of flesh off my shoulder. Albin didn't bother me anymore; I'd seen far worse than them in the past few weeks. Besides, Albin was nice enough. Kept the house in order, occasionally broke the fabric of space, and gave me privacy when I needed it.

It said something that an entity from beyond the rifts was the best roommate I'd ever had.

"Fhqwhgadshgnsdhjsdbkhsdabkfabkveybvf," the next paper read.

"That can't possibly have any meaning," Albin observed.

"Yeah, I think it's been too long," I agreed. I ran a hand through my hair. After the preliminary results from Albin came in, the Academy had actually gotten me a grant and a deadline to show results by, and I wasn't going to turn my nose up at an opportunity to get some cash. So even if this whole damn experiment had started out as a joke, I was going to do it right. "Want to do another exposure?"

"Rift's ready," Albin said. "You've got the mortal?"

"His name's Jim," I decided on the spot, "and he's going to come back just fine from today's exposure. Just like all the other times."

I picked up the docile monkey with one arm—the Academy's trainers really were miracle workers—and walked downstairs, to the rift in spacetime that sat in my rental house's basement. It took a while, since the hallway kept folding in on itself and I nearly fell down an infinitely recursive hole, but that kind of thing was par for the course when a hole in reality was lying around.

"No entities on the other side of the rift," Albin decided, poking their sensory-blob through the wound in the world. "We're good to go."

"Good luck, Jim," I said, patting the monkey on the back. I tied a rope to his waist and picked him up.

Then I tossed him out of reality.

I'd gone on the other side of the rift myself, as a curiosity—as rifts went, this one was fairly safe to go through if you had a guide who knew what they were doing, and my teacher had apparently spent quite a bit of time there herself. The strange thoughtspace that powered spatial magic was a drifting whirlwind of spatial eddies and distant memories, sluicing through the void like half-remembered dreams. Usually, those eldritch secrets were nothing more than random noise, only remembered in subconscious bursts or with extreme luck.

But if you had enough subconsciousnesses to expose to the rifts, and enough time, maybe you could extract something of use.

I reeled the monkey back in; Jim seemed no worse for the wear after his time on the other side of the rifts. He joined the other trained monkeys in the basement, and I walked past the noise of stolen memories being printed by the yard.

I reached Jim's station and stopped, reading out the newest haul from his latest exposure.

"dQw4w9WgXcQ," the monkey wrote.

I sighed. "More meaningless garbage," I said.

"Well," Albin hazarded, "we are grabbing completely random memories from thoughtspace. Maybe it means something to someone else."

"Maybe," I muttered, rubbing my eyes. "I'm going to sleep. Wake me up if the monkeys start telling us about... I dunno, buried treasure or something."

I slogged upstairs, realized I was walking up the infinite staircase again, and backtracked until I returned to normal physical space. My room had somehow shown up behind me—stupid spatial rift—and I slumped inside and fell asleep.

Damn monkeys. Sure was a shame that none of that gibberish had any meaning.