The midnight revelation was the first major lead we had on Jiaola's location, but it was still just that: midnight. Meloai didn't need to sleep, but Lucet had been practicing cold spells relentlessly, and Sansen was an old man who'd hiked through a supernatural blizzard while maintaining a permanent spell of futuresight. As much as I wanted to burst into the storm and save Jiaola myself, we were in no shape to go haring off into the wilderness just yet.

But I sure as hell couldn't sleep, so I decided to try and bleed off my nervous energy by honing my magic. I wasn't going to be able to mess with my friends' emotions for the sake of getting more attunements while they were sleeping, and besides, I'd run through pretty much every attunement that I thought I could get myself without being a massive dick to the people I cared about most. Giving Lucet a friendly prank-scare or sparking a little joy in Meloai's eyes was one thing—intentionally betraying Sansen's trust or snuffing out someone's sense of wonder was a step beyond what I felt I was willing to do in order to touch one more school of magic. And those were the tamer of the attunements I could try to grab for myself. I'd already picked all the low-hanging fruits when it came to attunement.

That being said, although my obsession with piling up attunements had paid off already with saving Mertri's soul, it was far from the only way that I could improve myself. Every spell I practiced, every memory I summoned into my soulspace, every demon I created and trained was another tool in my arsenal for the next time Iola or Mr. Ganrey or Odin showed up to ruin everyone's day.

And besides... there was a very real possibility that I could do some good for the fallen while I trained my magic. So I told Meloai to keep an eye out and quietly slipped into the storm.

The blizzard had buried the once-fertile plains, swallowing everything from the tiniest of gnats to the light of day itself. Somehow, it almost felt fitting that even the sun would fade before the apocalyptic hailstorm. After all, what went better together than the cold and the dark?

Well. Necromancers and the dead, for one. Idly, I wondered if in some other life I would've answered something cutesy and trite like "peanut butter and jelly," or "puppies and cuddles," or "governments and corruption." Perhaps that other version of me wouldn't be shivering in sub-zero weather, a repulsion spell keeping the hail from caving in my skull, scouring the fields of the dead for souls that I could still knit back together.

Or perhaps that other version of me would have died long ago. Who knew. Not me, for sure; I wasn't an oracle. Maybe I'd ask Sansen to look into some alternate futures for the fun of it, when we were safely away from the center of a battlefield and everyone we loved was safe.

The blizzard may have been blinding to the mundane eye, but my soulsight had grown by leaps and bounds in the past few weeks, and I could see the constant puffs of death drifting up from the ground. There was where a family of mice starved to death, their sparkling souls shattering like raindrops on earth. Then was when a soldier had frozen, succumbing to the supernatural frost, a few glittering motes of fading souldust marking where he'd passed.

I stepped up to the body, closing their eyes with one hand. I wasn't here for the bodies, although I guessed that if there was anyone left to claim the fallen soldier as kin, I would happily reunite the two. As in, I'd bring the claimant to their slain family, not send them to the afterlife together. Man, people had held weird prejudices against necromancers for so long that even my subconscious felt the need to clarify. But the point was, the bodies of the dead weren't why I'd come out here.

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I'd come here for the souls.

It was a feat of concentration maintaining the spell keeping the hail away while I worked another piece of magic: I had to simultaneously manage the bile of disgust pouring into the repulsion spell while digging out a shard of sorrow from my soul, slicing open a tiny rift between planes. The emotions I used to fuel my magic were rarely pleasant, and this was no exception.

But it would be worth it.

A sliver of the dead soldier's soul slipped from thoughtspace to realspace, and I concentrated, drawing it closer to me with the memory of a pair of tweezers. The sliver was barely enough to contain more than a moment of the soldier's life, but as the soul shard melded with my mind, a flash of memory shot through me—

"Leave me behind," I gasped, falling to the ground. "Get to the camp. It'll be faster without a wounded soldier weighing you down."

—and I swallowed heavily, taking in a deep, quavering breath.

Other necromancers might have tried to raise an army with the raw corpses left behind. But I was the greatest necromancer still alive beneath this unceasing storm.

I wasn't here to enslave the bodies of the dead.

I was here to remember their stories.

The greatest necromancers always were historians, after all. Any two-bit thug could raise a freshly-fallen corpse, but if you wanted to summon an army of souls bound to skeletons, there was no better way than unearthing a hidden mass grave from a war two centuries ago. I was a historian, too. Trying to catch the sparks of souls before they faded into thoughtspace.

I stood, narrowing my eyes, and plucked the memory back out from my soul. It was an art that I was still getting used to—anyone who would have taught me further soul manipulation was either as in the dark as I was, a mortal enemy, or dead—but with the help of a tweezer of soulstuff, I held the memory so that it barely skimmed the surface of my soul, still as fresh and perfect as the moment I'd absorbed it. The tracks the soldier's companions had left shone bright in my memory, even if they'd long since been swallowed by the snow, and I followed them like a dog on a hunt. Not that there were any living dogs within a hundred miles.

"Getting warmer," I muttered to myself. "Warmer... warmer... hot."

The memory ended abruptly, but it was enough of a lead that I could pick up the finer details. I was no tracker, but one of the soldier's companions must have been a fairly competent mage of freedom—now that I knew what to look for, I could see the telltale signs from here on out of where the path had been blown free of snow. I reached the end of the trail, hope rising. Maybe... maybe, for once in this fucking endless torment of chronicling the dead, I could actually save someone for once. I would dearly love nothing more than my power over death being utterly, completely useless.

"Warmer," I said, pacing towards what I dimly recognized as a snow cave—

And stopped dead.

Because my soulsight pierced all barriers as mundane as physical objects, and I could see very, very clearly that there were no living souls in the shelter.

Just the leftover fragments of shattered souls.

Despite my layers of thick mountain clothing, I suddenly felt very, very cold.

I trudged forwards, blowing aside the front wall of the shelter with a swipe of my hand and a pulse of disgust, to confirm with my eyes what my soul already knew. Two more soldiers laid dead, embracing each other beneath the snow.

Once more, I pressed against the skin of reality and made a single, incisive cut. The soul fragment that came through was disjointed, a mangled whisper, but still I made sense of the broken memory, disentangling it into a single sentence:

We died warm.

I fell still, standing beside the two frozen bodies, and some cold, calculating part of me wondered if a distant observer would be able to tell which of us were the dead and which of us were the living.

Then, mutely, I turned around to return to my shelter. It was time to put today's expedition to an end.

I was getting colder, after all.