The plan was simple, because it had to be. We had little to no idea what kind of countermeasures the Silent Peaks would inflict on people who tried to flee their little paradise, so we cheated. Sansen was still wrung out from the last time he'd gone deep into an oracular trance, but he still agreed to put his mind through the wringer of living through the same three days over and over again for our sake.

So Lucet, Sansen, Meloai, and I all gathered in the safe room's ritual circle, holding hands so that Sansen could draw on our hope. Sansen touched the paintings and carved wooden tokens that Jiaola had made for him, laid in a neat circle around him, and even though I couldn't see the hope coruscating through his soulspace, his straightened back and sharp, clear gaze told me he was ready.

Then he set down a wooden pair of glasses and, without touching them, carefully mimed lifting them to his face.

"What's he doing?" Meloai whispered.

I concentrated on my soulsight, slipping for a moment between realspace and soulspace, and in Sansen's soulspace, I saw him lift the memory of the glasses to his face. It was a technique I'd only seen once before, but intuitively, I knew what he was doing.

"He's using the memory of the glasses to channel the spell," I whispered back. "He doesn't need to open a massive rift into the Plane of Elemental Possibility—he just needs to be able to see the future. It's more energy-efficient to make two tiny rifts over his eyes than a larger one further away."

And as I spoke, I felt Sansen tug at our souls, and the future seemed a little less bright as hope drained from my soulspace. But it was worth it. A dizzying rift into another timeline coalesced and stabilized in the form of two swirling lenses, held firm by the memory of a pair of glasses. Sansen's eyes flickered, darting left and right as future after future sang to him. His brow furrowed into a scowl, and his jaw began to twitch.

"That doesn't look good," Lucet muttered.

"We're supposed to stay hopeful," Meloai said.

"You can't just force yourself to feel hope," I grumbled. "Come on, just shush and let Sansen do his thing."

As I spoke, I noticed something begin to... change. Sansen flinched, then started whispering something. Over and over again, he murmured beneath his breath, and I couldn't help but lean in to hear him say:

Sorry. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I'll do better next time. I'll keep them safe. I'm so, so sorry.

"Sansen?" I hesitantly asked. "Are you o—"

Sansen jerked back, swearing, and clutched his head, waving away the memory of the glasses and letting the tiny rifts unravel. Lucet yelped in surprise; Meloai blurred with clockwork precision to keep him from falling. I just waited for Sansen to come back from the trance, and though it was a slow, dazed process, come back he eventually did.

"I kept dying," he finally managed to say, "because our future held something so deadly it killed me just by looking at it." He managed a weak smile. "That... that's new, at least."

Meloai frowned. "Wait. If you looked at a future that kills you if you see it... why aren't you dead?"

Sansen tiredly waved a hand at me, so I took over to explain. "In order to look multiple days into the future, you kind of have to cheat. The amount of hope you'd need to directly look three days into the future is obscene; maybe the Peaks could manage it with a specially-trained battlechoir, but our ragtag little band definitely can't."

"But there's a workaround," Sansen said, pushing himself to his feet and giving Meloai a grateful nod. "If I can look five seconds into the future, I can choose to look into a timeline where my future self is also looking five seconds into the future, and telling me what he sees."

"And you can chain that until you reach the point in the future you want," Meloai said, eyes lighting up.

"Well, the inaccuracies introduced are exponentially compounding with each link in the chain, so I try to make the links as large as possible. But yes, it's a very potent oracular technique. It also provides some insulation from... whatever one of my future selves died looking at."

The four of us traded nervous glances.

"And what would that be?" Meloai finally asked.

Sansen shrugged. "Not a damn clue. But whatever my future self saw through the rift, it must've been horrible. He started vomiting and bleeding and seizing up, and..." He trailed off at our horrified expressions. "What? What is it?"

"Iola," I hissed, and it was more a curse than a name.

###

Class the next day was an awkward, fearful thing. I sat down in Ritual Magic 201, in the same room as the boy who killed us in some timeline that never was, and wondered if firing a frostbolt through his head now would be worth getting mind-wiped if it meant letting Lucet and Meloai and Sansen go free.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

"Now, class," Mr. Ganrey said, "I'd like to share an exciting opportunity with you all. Thanks to an exciting new legislation from the Silent Parliament, there are some new opportunities for those of us on the home front to assist with the war. Thanks to our angelic partners, I'm glad to announce a brand-new way for excited young soldiers to become combat-ready in no time."

Mr. Ganrey stepped to the side, and a rift between planes opened, letting a pale-white agglutination of flesh step into the classroom. Somehow, the Angel of Arrogance reminded me of a half-melted candle.

"Thanks to new advancements in our understanding of human soul fragment absorption," the Angel of Arrogance said, "we have discovered that it is now possible to hybridize a soulspace entity and a realspace creature, resulting in a soul capable of feats of witchcraft hitherto unimagined. Preliminary animal trials and oracular divinations have yielded promising data, and we are now looking for human volunteers."

The Angel of Arrogance went on about the possible benefits of joining the Eldritch Initiative, but I had eyes for only one person. One gleeful elf who'd been raring for a chance to join in on the war since the day it had begun.

Iola's soul twitched with corrupted glee, and I knew I had to stop him from joining the Eldritch Initiative before he killed us all.

###

"Hi, I'm here to inquire about the Eldritch Initiative?" I asked, tentatively sidling into the... distressingly organic clinic in the center of the Silent City. Pulses of power languorously pumped across its skin—its walls, I told myself, buildings have walls—and the amorphous blob of pale white flesh that served as its receptionist.

"Wonderful, wonderful! We could use every hand, tentacle, and other grasping appendage we can get. May I start by asking how you heard about it?"

"OH THAT WAS ME," the sign from outside shrieked. Its fleshy, bulbous lips looked like they were going to pop, and for a heartbeat, I had an insane urge to take a pin to them. "I SHOUTED AT THEM LIKE YOU TOLD ME TO SHOUT AND FOR SOME REASON INSTEAD OF RUNNING AWAY THIS ONE CAME HERE."

"Er, yeah, I have a... a 'friend' who came here earlier. I was wondering if—"

"Well, hold your horses, thestrals, Bearers of the Apocalypse, or other metaphysical equestrian-equivalents!" I got a distinct impression that the blob at the desk was trying to smile. "You can't leave—"

"What?" I burst out.

"—without hearing about the wide array of possible benefits that the Eldritch Initiative can have for you. Ask your doctor if becoming a demon from outside realspace is right for you," the receptionist finished smoothly, as if I hadn't said anything.

"WHY DO PEOPLE KEEP INTERRUPTING AT THAT PART?" The sign screamed. I still wasn't sure how its locomotion worked, to be honest, but it had managed to find a way to wriggle closer to me while I wasn't looking.

"Use your inside-spacetime voice, A." Ugh, all the soulspace entities around here had such bizarre names. This one was pronounced 'Albin,' too. Like that wasn't going to get confusing. "You see, we here at the Eldritch Initiative don't just offer suppression of undesirable emotions and enhancement of Academic emotions. We actually offer an entirely original broadening of your emotional spectrum!"

Uh... what? "Like... as in... uh... no, honestly, I have no idea what that's like."

"We have a helpful procedure to explain." The receptionist elongated their body—or maybe contracted spacetime—and pulled over a cup of what I hoped was water. "This, here, represents the spectrum of all humanly possible emotions." Then they drank the water, gulping it down, satisfied. "And that represents the scope of the emotions you'll have after your partnership with the Eldritch Initiative. Any questions?"

"Yes," I said slowly. "What... what on Earth does that mean?"

"It doesn't mean anything on Earth! You have to transcend realspace in order to have access to most of these emotions, after all. In addition to normal human feelings such as happiness, relief, awambuk, and ikstuarpok, we offer expanded emotions, normally inaccessible to single sapient minds, such as: Humber. Nage. Dorcelessness. Kindness. Ponnish. Harfam. Loric..."

The receptionist just kept going, and I found my vision swimming. I tried to stand, but the receptionist's droning voice and the pulsating heat of the room blended together, and I found myself tipping over—

"Andric. Varination. Kyne."

"UH. HEY. THE HUMAN DOESN'T SEEM SO GOOD."

"Trantiveness. Teluge." The receptionist paused. "Oh, dear. Was that too much for—"

And I blacked out, squelching on the tongue of the building's mouth.

###

"I'm scared," I admitted. "No, scratch that—I'm fucking terrified."

"They wouldn't let me stop him," Lucet admitted. She'd tried after I'd—somewhat embarrassingly—fainted with fear as the receptionist rattled off the monstrosities that Iola would have access to now that he'd gone from human to elf to eldritch fusion. "Maybe... maybe we can't leave. Maybe we just have to hunker down and try to survive."

"Yeah, and maybe the Silent Peaks are going to stop mind-wiping us, harvesting our emotions for war, and getting increasingly close to letting Iola murder us on principle," Meloai said.

Nobody really had anything to say in response to that.

"Iola's got it out for me," I admitted, "and it's pretty fucking clear that the administration no longer cares if their golden boy decides to do some vigilante justice on the troublemaking Redlander. I'm done for if I stay."

"Being a Fell witch isn't much more popular around here, either," Lucet said. "And... I don't want to think about what Iola would do if he got his hands on me again."

"According to your school's terminology, I'm technically a demon," Meloai added. "Iola's going to, ah, 'disassemble' me if I don't get out of here as quickly as possible."

"People have been giving Jiaola and I a blind eye ever since the Redlanders became the city's newest punching bag," Sansen said, "but I'm no fool. I've seen this before. Once they've ran out of newcomers to hate, they'll fall back on old prejudices. It's certain death if I stay; at least there's a chance if we make a break for it while we still can."

"I can take us through the Plane of Elemental Falsehood," I said. Of the planes I had access to, it was the only one that was remotely close to being safe for us to traverse. "Unless Iola's got an attunement to insecurity, he shouldn't be able to follow us there."

Meloai grimaced. "We'll have to deal with the mimics if we route through Falsehood."

"We'd already get our asses killed dealing with Iola Classic. I don't want to try our luck against Iola, Eldritch Edition. We can handle mimics."

"I'll scan the future to see how true that is," Sansen said, wearily getting to his feet. I grimaced—it was obvious that seeing his death over and over was taking a toll on the old man—but we had no choice. If we were to flee the Silent Peaks, we needed every edge we could get.

"You've packed everything you need?" I asked Lucet. I was pretty sure Meloai didn't have any belongings, anyway.

Lucet nodded and was about to speak when Sansen, pale-faced, burst up from the safe room, swearing under his breath. That... that was not what you wanted to see from an oracle.

"He knows," Sansen said, panting for breath. "He's already coming. Iola's already here."