I'd like to say my reaction to Zhytln walking through our door was swift and decisive. But the four seconds it took for me to process the appearance of the woman who'd tried to invade our minds by proxy felt like a month each, especially when Lucet reacted faster than I.

"Don't move," Lucet snapped, sorrow and fear forming a salted-blood sea of frost and dark, channeled by the memory of a mountain-slope riverbed.

But instead of that enervating attack swallowing the mind manipulator whole... a dam appeared in the river's path. A memory of a dam, as solid in soulspace as the river Lucet was using to control her spell.

Lucet flinched as her spell splashed harmlessly off Zhytln's remembered defense. The mind manipulator held her hands up, revealing them bare of armaments.

Iola hadn't carried a weapon, either.

"Peace, child. Do you think me a fool? I would never start hostilities with a group of unknown power and capabilities."

"I think your introduction to us was trying to hijack our souls with the same bullshit you've infected Knwharfhelm with," Lucet snapped. "What was I supposed to think, when you brushed aside our privacy ward and burst into our—"

"I knocked," Zhytln calmly responded. "Which was more warning than you gave me before trying to drag my location out of a ragtag group of stray children."

Ah. I suppose that explained how she'd found us. It wasn't that none of us had considered the possibility of Zhytln's living memories infecting the kids we'd asked for help—we just didn't think she'd pop up at our door in response. Lucet bristled, and I held up my hands in a calming gesture. "Uh, Lucet? Can we talk for a moment?"

Lucet jerked her head at Zhytln. "In front of her?"

I sighed. "Sansen, can—"

Before I even finished the sentence, Sansen rearranged his soul, lowering the barriers of memory that protected his emotions from outside manipulation. I drew the red ink of boredom from his soul and flooded the area around us with it, slowing down time in a tightly controlled bubble. The world outside turned a faint red tint, Zhytln slowing to a third of her ordinary speed. To her, our words would be an incomprehensible blur.

"Lucet, maybe we shouldn't antagonize the mind-controlling soul-warping mystery witch who may or may not be our only hope of avoiding death by cancer?"

Lucet scowled. "Yeah, yeah, I'm a loose cannon who can't be trusted. I'll sit quietly in the back of the room and keep my mouth shut when—"

"You know that's not what he meant, Lucet," Sansen spoke up. With the boredom rapidly draining from his soul to power the time differential, he looked... more animated than before. "Or did you forget who killed that man?"

Whatever Lucet was about to say died on her lips. Sansen responding to us before we finished speaking tended to have that effect.

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"You wanted to learn if she's even capable of healing the three of us," Lucet finally said. "I'll play along, but if she tries anything funny, I'll kill her."

"Her control over memories terrifies me," Meloai admitted. "I don't know if you noticed, but her memory of that dam was detailed. To an extent far beyond anything we've managed so far. I wouldn't be surprised if she can simply counter any spell we create simply by interfering with its soulspace form."

"Yeah, well, I haven't seen her cast a real spell yet. Let's see her cast counterspell on my fist," Lucet said.

I squeezed Lucet's hand, and she blinked at me, surprised. "Hopefully it doesn't come to that." Sansen's soul had almost run out of boredom—I suppose it was hard to stay bored when Zhytln was right in front of us—so I held up a finger in warning and dropped the spell, the simple bowl I'd conjured in soulspace vanishing to let the bubble of boredom around us splash away.

Zhytln seemed to have noticed our bubble of accelerated time, because while we'd been talking she'd folded her arms, leaning back on a wall to wait. Despite her relaxed posture, though, her soulspace was...

What in the name of the fuck was wrong with her thoughts?

Though I was relatively new to life as a soulmage, I had a fair amount of experience matching souls to thoughts and emotions. My fear manifested as pulsating blood, lit by the dancing fires of flickering hope; in order to hide my emotions from casual inspection and manipulation, I'd wrapped my soul in the memory of a simple wooden hut from the Redlands, providing a measure of defense and privacy.

Zhytln had taken that practice of using memories to manipulate her thoughts and emotions to its limites. Where my soul was quiet save for the gentle crackling of my hopeful flames, Zhytln's soul screeched with a sound like grinding metal. A massive, impossible construct of ticking-things and wires loomed large where her emotions should have been, gears meshing in thin air and pipes twisting in impossible dimensions around a massive metal dish.

And there were memories of people in her soul. Running back and forth around the surreal, screaming machinery, oiling gears and fixing pipes and barely holding the construct together.

Zhytln tilted her head slightly. "It's impolite to stare."

I gathered my thoughts and backed away, glancing at my companions. Judging by the fact that none of them were eyeing Zhytln, they hadn't tried to peer into her soul yet.

Jiaola spoke up from my left. "I feel like we've gotten off on the wrong foot." He held out a hand, determination clinking in his soul. "Why don't we start with what you want from us?"

"A band of five veteran magic users arrived in my town and immediately began disrupting my computing cluster," Zhytln explained. Her... what? "Furthermore, some of you—" she pointedly did not look at Lucet, who was still aiming her bow of salt at Zhytln—"have treated me with nothing but violent rhetoric and hostilities. I wanted to have a civilized discussion and see if we can't reach some kind of agreement."

"I don't know what a computing cluster is, but if you're talking about the emotional manipulation spells you've been casting on the populace, you're damn right we have a problem with that," Lucet snapped.

Zhytln frowned. "What quarrel do you have with me?"

"What quarrel do you have with us?" Lucet demanded back.

Zhytln stared at us, then closed her eyes, rubbing her forehead. "We will never get anywhere if we don't answer each others' questions. I offer this structure: I will give you one truth about my actions, and you will answer one question of mine in kind. Then you will supply one truth about your actions, and I will answer one question of yours to reciprocate. We will iterate this process until our goals are clarified."

The five of us shared confused glances. "You say that like it's standard practice," Meloai noted, "but I've never met any person who's held a conversation like that before."

Zhytln shrugged. "Then you have never met me. Do we have a deal?"

Well. It wasn't like we didn't have questions for Zhytln of our own. "We have a deal," I confirmed.

Zhytln smiled. "Then let me provide you with truth."