I had time to kill before sunset, but I sure as hell wasn't venturing back into the city. The trapped soulspace entity was busy trying to find a way out of the Redlands memory I'd summoned around it, but it only took a moderate amount of focus to keep it contained. It tried to manifest another memory over mine—one of open, sunny skies—but this close to the center of my soul, it had no chance of overriding my will. Now that it wasn't messing around with my memories of the present as they were forming, it was a lot easier to spot whatever changes it was trying to make as they happened.

About half an hour passed of the entity scrabbling around the plains I'd manifested into a prison before, abruptly, it... stopped. I sat up from where I was lying on the hill, confused, and I could have sworn the entity scowled at me.

Then it vanished, as if it had never been there.

I swore, getting to my feet, and called forth my magic, passion blazing in one hand, hope over my left eye. I still couldn't manage to process the dizzying variety of futures that Sansen could at once, but a cursory scan into my future revealed no obvious threats—just me, standing on the same hill. Wait, no, my future self was looking at something behind him—

I turned around, but nothing was there. It took me a heart-pounding to realize that I'd just gotten startled by my own future self. Which had probably caused what was now my past self to have been startled in the first place. Great, I'd inadvertently caused a time loop. Still, that didn't tell me where that slippery little soulspace entity had gone off to.

I considered dismissing the Redlands memory, wondered if the soulspace entity had turned invisible to trick me into removing the memory, then decided that there was a simple way to find out: I dropped a memory of the Silent Peaks on top of my memory of the Redlands. Something in my mind strained as the two memories slammed into each other, but when the oddly laminar dust settled, there were no telltale signs of a fleeing soulspace entity. Cautiously, I stopped concentrating on both memories, letting them vanish.

They vanished, as if they had never been there. In exactly the same way as the soulspace entity.

...Huh. I wasn't quite sure what to make of that. I spent the next couple hours rifling through my memories and thinking un-hopeful thoughts, but nothing seemed out of place. I mean, it was always theoretically possible that the soulspace entity had wormed so deep into my mind that I couldn't distinguish its manipulations from reality, but if that was the case I was fucked anyway and might as well give up.

So when Lucet and Meloai crested the rolling hills of the Crystal Coast, they found me lying on my back and watching the sunset, trying to shake off the lingering anxiety I had about where the hell that slippery little soulspace entity had squirreled off to.

They noticed my anxiety, of course. They had more attunements than I could count at this point; if they had their soulsight open even a crack, they'd see the fear bleeding from my soul from a mile away. I heard Lucet's urgent footsteps from behind me, saw her form a bow of memory and nock an arrow of sorrow, but I shook my head.

"So here's the good news: at the very least, the fucked-up shit in this city doesn't deal in physical violence," I said.

Lucet and Meloai glanced at each other. Lucet cautiously lowered her bow and asked, "Are you talking about the living memories?"

"Huh?" I sat up, curiosity spinning outwards from my soul. "I'm... maybe? Little semi-sentient things that hop into your soul when you absorb a memory? Try to rewrite your thoughts as you have them? Mysteriously vanish when you drag them out into the light?"

"I, er, didn't know about the mysteriously vanishing part," Lucet admitted. "I may have burned mine to death."

"I ate mine," Meloai said. "I don't think its source soul liked that."

That was disturbing on a number of levels, but I supposed I'd tried to drop a mountain on the damn pest, so I couldn't really blame them for overreacting. Besides, there was something more urgent than debating the ethicality of Meloai's dietary habits. "What do you mean, its source soul?"

"Well, whatever those things were, they weren't the same kind of soulspace entity as me," Meloai explained. "Like, I have a body in realspace, and my soul is covered in salt and quartz and dew and all the soulspace forms of emotions. Whatever this thing is, it doesn't have a physical body, and its soul wasn't made of emotions. It was just made of..."

"Memory." I frowned. "Just like... just like Odin's projections, when they spoke to me in my dreams. Whenever they visited me in my soul, my emotions would show up in soulspace, but theirs never would."

"Right, right! And I think I know how Odin did that." Meloai started pacing, oil of passion cascading as she spoke. "You know how when you focus on a memory, it shows up in your soulspace?"

If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

"Literally just did that to flush out that entity," I said.

"Okay, okay. And you can manifest a memory outside your soul, right?"

Lucet held out a hand, and her memory of a bow coalesced in my soulsight. "Sure, that's one of my favorite spells."

Meloai beamed. "So what if you manifested a memory inside someone else's soul?"

I stared at Meloai, mind racing. Lucet gave me a mischeivous smile.

Then distinctly, from inside my soul, I heard a memory shaped like Lucet whisper, "Boo."

I yelped in shock; Lucet and Meloai burst out in giggles. I glared at them, then remembered my hand pushing Lucet's memory out of my soul. "How long were you planning on pranking me like that?"

"The entire walk back," Lucet cheerfully said.

I shuffled my soul around, hiding my true emotions behind an external of moldy disappointment. "You know... fighting off that living memory was a really awful experience. It's kind of in bad taste to prank someone with lookoutwhatsbehindyou?" I projected a memory of a riftmaw directly into Lucet's soul—I couldn't get all the fiddly bits right, but it was realistic enough that Lucet burst out laughing before slapping it away with a block of solid arrogance. The riftmaw acted exactly like it would have if a real riftmaw had gotten hit by a chunk of gold the size of a house, and went flying out of her soul before disappearing as I dismissed it.

"Okay, okay, but seriously." A bit of the levity cooled off from Lucet's face. "Someone in this city—or maybe multiple someones—are projecting their own memories into other people's souls and modifying their memories. Which we actually haven't figured out how to do, incidentally."

"Eh, it'd be a little terrifying if modifying other peoples' memories was so easy that you could pick it up just by knowing it's possible," I said. "But yeah, it's creepy. I guess we know what parts of town to stay away from, hm?"

Lucet did a double-take. "What? No, now we know whose butts we have to kick so that they knock it off!"

I hesitated. "I... I mean, didn't we, uh, already do that? We won, Lucet. We got away from the war."

"Yeah, and we were damned good at it." Lucet gave me a confused look. "Cienne, the only reason we were able to fight off the living memories so easily is because we're powerful witches with, like, fifty attunements each. The common people of Knwharfhelm? The person who tried to infect us with a living memory was a kid, Cienne."

"Her name was Svette," I found myself muttering. "The kid who infected me."

"Exactly. They're... they're people who need help. And... you're really, really good at protecting people from bullies, Cienne." Lucet bit her lip, transparent insecurity coating her soul.

Bitter flowers of rue bloomed along my soul, and I whispered, "And look what happened when we did. Iola's last spell... for all we know, it's killed us already."

"Even if it has—why does it matter? That just means we've gotta take this new asshole down, before it's too late for us." Lucet flexed her hands impotently. "Every day that Iola claimed me as his without giving me a chance to fight back—that's how he was killing me. And now there's some freaky-ass telepath trying to fuck over an entire city's worth of kids, and you... what, just want to move to a better part of town and pretend we never saw them?"

"No! No, I just think... Lucet, you're not going to help anyone if you start vomiting your stomach out thanks to Iola's last gift. We can't do anything about Zhytln without making sure that we're okay fir—"

"You have a name?" Lucet's soul sparkled with excitement.

"Lucet, that's not the point." I threw my hands in the air in frustration. "This isn't the Redlands. It—if someone's causing trouble, we can call the authorities. It doesn't have to be us."

"Call the authorities? How'd that work out for you in the Peaks, hm? How much worse do you think it's going to go in a city in the grip of a fucking mind-manipulator?" The passion coruscating over Lucet's soul darkened, Lucet giving me a betrayed look. "I can't believe I'm even arguing about this with you! You—you're the reason why any of us ever made it out of the Silent Peaks in the first place."

"And I'm just trying to make sure we don't run headfirst back into the Silent Peaks, or something even worse," I snapped. "I'm just trying to be reasonable, and to look out for you, and—"

I stopped, seeing Lucet's expression shift from furious to shocked to... sympathetic. As her eyes focused on something not of this world.

I turned my soulsight inwards, tracking where she had to be looking.

My soul was trembling, bleeding fear from a hundred gaping wounds.

I sagged, the defensiveness and anger draining from my frame. "And I'm afraid," I whispered. "After all the lives whose ends I absorbed... I'm just... so, so afraid that the next one will be you."

Meloai, who'd been watching our argument with shock, tentatively reached out, putting one hand on my shoulder. I leaned into her touch, and before I knew it, Lucet was there two, and the three of us fell into a warm, safe embrace.

"You said that it didn't even matter, if you were already dead. That all it meant was that you had less time to take on Zhytln," I whispered into Lucet's shoulder. "But it matters to me, Lucet. You matter to me, so, so much."

"I know," Lucet murmured back. "And you do as well. But... you know what it's like, to be under some awful tyrant's thrall. I can't... I can't just see that happening and ignore it."

"And I'm not asking you to," I said. "Just... be careful. Wait a little, first. Let us fix all the shit Iola's done to us first."

At that, Lucet drew back from the hug, a bittersweet smile playing on her lips.

"Don't you understand, Cienne? This is how I fix what Iola's taken from me."

I swallowed, nodded, and withdrew. I opened my mouth to speak, but Lucet put a finger to my lips.

"I won't do anything reckless, I promise. But... I'm not going to let a bully like Zhytln keep fucking with people's heads. Not when I can fight back."

She smiled at me, but my soul was frail with glass as I failed to meet her eyes.

"You... you're a better person than I am, Lucet," I finally muttered.

She tapped the bottom of my chin, startling me into looking up, and squeezed my shoulder.

"I had a good teacher," she said.