"Plane of Insecurity," Sansen snapped, and we jolted into action, clustering into a circle while I gathered the liquid-metal insecurity that shivered in my soulspace. None of us bothered to ask things like how did Iola find out or what if he's just here to talk?

It was Iola. For all I knew, he'd just snapped and randomly decided to murder us. Or maybe his newfound eldritch form let him spy on us from afar. Or Odin wanted to put pressure on us, or the Silent Parliament, or some third faction that I didn't even know about. This clusterfuck of a war was exactly why we needed to get as far away from here as humanly possible, and probably further, since I was willing to bet Iola didn't count as anything remotely human anymore.

"Knock, knock," sang Iola from the door, and his voice was garbled and fleshy and wow did I not want to find out what kind of bullshit he was going to get us into this time. With a flash of magic, we shifted into the Plane of Elemental Insecurity. Lucet let out a sigh of relief as Iola vanished, replaced by cotton-fake snow on cardboard stone—

"Keep moving," Sansen snapped, sprinting off towards the borders of town. A tiny rift into the Plane of Elemental Possibility blazed over his left eye, trailing behind sparks like a golden comet.

"But he can't reach us here," Meloai asked, her tone more pleading than assertive as she ran. I wasn't entirely sure how her clockwork body differed from human standard, but she had no trouble speaking during our flat-out sprint.

Behind us, I got the nauseating feeling that space itself squelched. Meloai turned around, abandoning the illusion of humanity to swivel her head a full hundred and eighty degrees, then snapped her head back to normal and pushed forwards, a wordless, shocked horror on her face as she fled.

"Yeah," I panted, "evidence says otherwise."

"Why are you running?" Iola's voice was disconcertingly wet, but it was still unmistakably his voice. Morbid curiosity made me want to turn and look and see the terrible beauty of whatever abomination Iola had become—but I had to stay focused. I had to keep moving. "You wouldn't happen to be depriving a wartime effort of crucial emotional power sources, would you? Because if you were..."

"Close your eyes and follow me," Sansen interrupted, skidding to a halt. "We're plane-shifting again."

"To where?" Meloai asked. "This is the only safe plane out of—wait. Wait, no, you couldn't possibly be—"

Sansen threw both arms out, as if opening a door, and the rift over his eye exploded outwards, tearing a hole into the Plane of Elemental Possibility. Right before the rift swallowed me, I turned around, just to catch a glimpse of what was coming after us.

I really wish I hadn't.

The thing that had once called itself Iola stood in a puddle of... melted space. There was no other way to describe it—it was as if everything around where he'd entered the Plane of Elemental Falsehood had become limp and liquid and dead. I'd once seen a painting of clocks flopped over a desolate landscape like so many pancakes; what Iola had done when he'd clawed his way into this place reminded me of it so intensely I almost thought I was back in Art and Culture 102.

But I never would be again, if Iola had anything to say about it.

His body bubbled like soup on a stove, bulges of skin forming and snapping and regenerating all along his once-perfect body. Who knew, maybe the Silent Parliament would declare this the new perfect once we were gone. His cruel smile ballooned and shrank like a frog's throat, and the corrupted arm he pointed at us shed bits and pieces of amorphous flesh even as he moved it. And yet, the transformations the Eldritch Initiative had wreaked on his body weren't even the worst part.

Because I was a witch, and I could see what they had done to his soul.

Joy should have been dew. Joy should have been pure, clear water, and it always worried me that Iola's version of the stuff was sickly and tainted. But now, the droplets that jittered through Iola's soul were infested, tiny, jittering swimming-things squirming in the inhuman emotion Iola now felt instead of joy.

In a horrible insight, I realized what those liquid, living orbs were.

They were eggs.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

And at Iola's command, they began to hatch.

Thankfully, the rift into the Plane of Elemental Possibility swallowed us before I could see what that spell did. At the last minute, I remembered Sansen's instructions, closing my eyes and holding my breath—

And a cacophony of voices from every possible timeline assaulted my ears.

"Get away from me!" Lucet shrieked/shrieks/will shriek. "You're a monster—can't you see that? Can't you see what they've done to you?"

"I'm very sorry," Odin mused/muses/will muse, "but that's not the bargaining chip you think it is. Aim higher."

"Can I kiss you?" I asked/ask/will ask, my voice uncertain and frail. Lucet replies with a quiet little "m-hm!" and I can hear the smile in her voice—

That last one nearly shocked me into opening my eyes, but—fuck, I couldn't afford to get distracted, and presumably, that was exactly why Sansen had told us to close our eyes. I locked onto Sansen's soul in the chaos, following him towards the rift, and he shouted, "Lucet! Plane shift!"

From Lucet's momentary silence, I could tell she was shocked from what we'd heard as well, but—

"Gotcha," Iola said/says/will say, and his voice is disgustingly pleased as something squishes and I scream—

"Right. Everyone, gather close and hold your breath."

As Lucet prepared the rift, Sansen grabbed my arm and said, "Listen. When I give you the signal, send Lucet and I to the Plane of Calm, then take Meloai and yourself back to realspace."

I creased my brows. "What signal?"

Sansen drew in breath to speak—

Behind us, a hundred futures died screaming as Iola forced his way into the Plane of Elemental Possibility, and even though I was facing away from him, with so much of my concentration on my soulsight, I saw what he did to bore a hole between planes. The oil-droplets that normally comprised passion had turned rancid and rotten, matted with strange algae and molds, and he used that living, inhuman emotion to melt holes through thoughtspace itself. I sensed his soul shift, that infested not-joy rising to the surface, and though his next attack spell moved at the speed of thought, Sansen's futuresight was faster. Lucet's spell ended before his even begun, and we leapt between planes again, landing in the Plane of Elemental Cold.

Immediately, my entire body burned as I came into contact with air that had never known heat or light, and I instinctively flared up with passion, not that it was of much use. I had little passion left in me now, and spread thin over the four of us as it was, it only slowed the inevitable. Still, Sansen directed us to struggle onwards, stumbling over uneven, rock-hard snow, putting a little more distance between us and Iola while the heat leeched from our flesh. In the distance, through my tightly closed eyes, I sensed the soul fragments of skeletal deaths, Demons of Sorrow reaching out to take our hands and slay us with a touch—

And then, right as my lungs were about to give out and suck in a breath of deadly, thin air, Sansen squeezed my arm, and his instructions flashed into my mind. The last of my calm went into sending Sansen and Lucet into the Plane of Elemental Antimagic, while my plentiful sorrow tore a rift for Meloai and I to step back into realspace. As the rift rose around us, I sensed Iola burst into the Plane of Elemental Cold too late, the deaths scattering as Iola gleefully cast a spell—

We landed outside the boundaries of the city in a snowy plains, and it was a testament to the absolute chill of the Plane of Elemental Frost that the snow felt hot to the touch compared to my numbed, frozen skin. I cracked my eyes open—fuck, that hurt—and tried to gather my thoughts.

"What's going on? Why'd you separate us?" Meloai asked.

"I don't know," I muttered, pacing. "It was part of Sansen's plan—"

"If you don't have a plan, then we should keep running," Meloai snapped. She started to slog forwards through the snow. Her joints were seizing up and her metal body sank deeper than mine, so I got one shoulder beneath hers and helped haul her along.

"The Plane of Calm is pretty safe," I said, thinking aloud, "but, uh, magic doesn't work in there. Even if they had an attunement to calm, they'd be trapped—you can't open a rift from inside the Plane of Elemental Antimagic. You have to coordinate with someone on the other side to open a rift from realspace."

Meloai flicked me on the back of the head. "You dunce—you're the person he sent to the other side! It's a trap for Iola, and Lucet's the bait—if you take them out of thoughtspace from this side, Iola will be stranded in the Plane of Elemental Antimagic!"

That made sense, and would be glorious if it worked, but... "I have no way to tell them where to meet up," I said.

Meloai gave me an incredulous look. "No way to tell... Cienne. Sansen is an oracle. He probably looked into the future and saw where you'd open the rift way back at the beginning."

My eyes shot open, and despite how it stretched and bloodied my cracked, frozen skin, I grinned. My heartbeat began to slow as, finally, I started to accept that maybe, just maybe, we'd done it. "Oh," I simply said, and tore open two person-sized rifts into the Plane of Elemental Antimagic.

And the four of us were reunited in realspace, exhausted, battered, and mentally shaken from our trawl through the planes. I felt like I was about to collapse, Lucet wouldn't meet my gaze, Meloai's movement was jamming up, and Sansen's eye-rift had extinguished, but the four of us were still, somehow, alive.

"He took the bait," Sansen gasped. "He's stuck in the Plane of Calm until someone thinks to dig him out."

"So we're safe," I finished. "For now, at least, we're safe."

Meloai nodded, extending a hand to Sansen and Lucet. With a weary smile, the four of us embraced, huddling together in the snow for a quiet, eternal moment.

And then the four of us began the long, tired slog from the Silent Peaks, wondering if the madness that had overtaken it would yet swallow us whole.