"So, uh, what brings you to Sunburst?" Solan asked. Eurenne weaved around his legs as he walked; I had no idea how Solan kept his balance without tripping over the chunky orange cat.

"If you knew the truth, you'd run the other way."

The kid blinked, and I found myself glad that his two friends had stayed behind. "Uh... how old did you say you were, again?"

"I didn't, but I'm... what's the date?" I asked.

Solan scratched his head. "Gold of Hope, I think."

"Sixteen, then."

He chuckled nervously. "So you're just a kid like me, yeah? C'mon, you won't scare me away."

I very easily could have—a simple exercise of will, and the torrent of fear within me would drown his soul in blood. The fucked-up fact that such a thing had even crossed my mind was itself a compelling argument to scare this poor sucker away. But, selfishly, I needed shelter and I needed his hope, so I just said, "I'll be out of your hair tomorrow, okay? You don't have to worry about me."

"Okay, Lucet? I'm not just making small talk." Solan maintained that amiable amble that let Eurenne dawdle alongside him, but I sensed the hissing-metal suspicion rising to the surface of his soul once more. "This isn't just a game to me, you know. There's a war on, and... if something nasty is chasing after you, I need to know."

Solan tensed as I stopped walking, but all I did was let out the stillborn child of a laugh and a curse. "Yeah. Okay. Guess I never thought about it from your perspective, huh? Mysterious half-dead girl crawls out of a battlefield, you're going to want to make sure whatever did this to her isn't following. No, he's... the nasty that was chasing me was killed by a better man than me." I spread my arms. "Good enough for you?"

Eurenne bonked her head against my ankles, whiskers brushing against me as she furiously purred, and Solan chuckled. "Okay. Fair enough. C'mon, let me introduce you to Pops."

The rough awning in front of one of the larger buildings in town was a relief from the pounding sun; Eurenne had fur and Solan was dark-skinned, but I had been born and raised in the Silent Peaks, and if I hadn't been more worried about my skin sloughing from my body I would have been swearing my teeth off at the sunburn.

"Rifts, Solan, you dragged in another stray?" My eyes took a moment to adjust to the gloom. The man who'd spoken—Pops, presumably—set down the block of ice he'd been carving on a nearby table. I'd expected some kind of tavern, but perhaps this town was too small; glancing around the room, this just looked like someone's home. Padded chairs, a bookshelf with everything but books, and an empty dining table completed the image of a self-made house.

"Hey, you took in the first guy, and she says she'll only be here for a day," Solan protested.

"Sure, but he paid his way. Unless you're another baby witch, by any chance?" Pops asked, turning towards me.

A little more than a baby witch, but—wait, did he say another? "This other, uh, stray... would you happen to know anything about them?"

Emotions were my sword and shield, but I'd never learned to control my facial expression. Most of the people I'd had to hurt could read souls. Still, the lack of skill bit me here; Solan took a nervous step away from me while Pops pushed himself to his feet.

It was all made moot as the door to the second story burst open and a familiar face looked down at me.

It took me a second to realize why he was familiar—I'd last seen him months ago, before I'd even met Cienne, and I never had been the most social student of the Silent Academy. Still, I'd ran into most of my classmates at some point.

And I remembered the ones who'd been taken by Odin during the Battle of Silentfell.

"Arzen?" I blurted out.

Pops turned to my former classmate, frowning. "Who the hell is Arzen?"

The flickering embers in Arzen's soul guttered out unnaturally fast as he wove hope into a spell, and I swore. Futuresight was invaluable and difficult to counter; before I could reach out to Solan to restock my own stores of hope, Arzen recovered, eyes flicking between Pops and me.

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Whatever future he'd seen, he evidently wasn't a fan. Heck, I didn't need futuresight to put the dots together: he'd obviously been posing as someone unaffiliated with the war when he was anything but, and I was about to blow his cover.

So he'd blow me up instead.

"Get down!" I shouted, leaping between Pops and Arzen.

Only he didn't strike, instead looking at me quizzically. "Lucet? Lucet, it's me. I know we didn't talk much, but—I didn't come here to hurt anyone, I promise."

"Yeah? Tell me this: how'd you escape Odin?"

"Okay, now, why don't we all just settle down?" Pops said, standing stiffly at the mention of Odin. His soul was angular and glittering with determination. "Solan, get out of here."

Solan darted for the door, and Arzen held out a hand. His soul flashed with steel, and gravity tilted, Solan shouting helplessly as he fell towards the ceiling. "Please, don't raise the alarm. If you'd just let me explain—"

Absolutely not. Odin had wrecked the Silent Academy with nothing but a few well-placed words; I wasn't trusting any disciple of theirs to have the floor. I wished I could dispel the magic on Solan, but calm was a resource I unfortunately lacked. So I did the next-best thing.

Rage blasted forth from my soul—at the Silent Academy for producing armies of brainwashed children, at Odin for consuming the Redlands in war, at Arzen for being in league with one or the other, at sheer misfortune for the first town I stopped at having an agent of Odin. And I channeled that torrential blast of oil down a memory of the streets of Knwharfhelm, directing the tidal wave at Arzen with lethal fury.

He drew the helplessness from Solan's soul, chains and shackles becoming force and gravity, and in a single, supernatural leap, dodged my strike to land on the ceiling. "You could've killed me," he said numbly.

"Are you or are you not working with Odin?" I demanded. Before the heat from my spell could expand and kill us all, I ripped the sorrow from Pops' soul as he tried to shield Solan with his body, casting frost into the air to stop the building from burning down.

"I am. But you have to understand, they're trying to save us all."

"What, from the Peaks? I'm not with them anymore, either. Just because they're awful doesn't mean the warmongering demon is any better."

I ran through my spell list, trying to think of something that would scare Arzen off without reducing the house we stood in to rubble. With a flick of my hand, I tore open a pitch-dark rift to the Plane of Fear, trying to swallow Arzen whole, but he moved out of the way before I even finished casting, soul alight with the fires of hope. Right. There'd be no catching him off-guard when he could see the future.

"If you're not with the Peaks, then we don't have a problem. Odin's working towards something bigger, something that affects everyone. Yes, they've hurt—and killed—people, but it's for the best."

Oh, that pissed me off. But that wasn't the emotion I needed right now. I needed to smother the hope he kept blazing in his heart, or he'd have forewarning of my every move. That was alright; I was a bit of an expert on the subject. "You think you know what's best, but you're just as lost as I am," I said, and I felt it filling up inside me, that well of cold and dark. "We're both just... kids, caught up in a conflict between powers that would grind our bones into pebbles to throw at the other side."

"And that justifies trying to kill me?" Arzen snapped. "Just because I work for Odin?"

"No," I whispered. "But I'm afraid it's all I know, now."

Arzen's eyes widened before I even finished my sentence, and gravity twisted as he tried to hurl himself out of the way—but with the lake's worth of anxiety I'd whipped up inside me, there was nowhere to dodge. The explosion of hemolymph was omnidirectional, chilling and blacking out the room, washing over everyone's souls and wiping out Arzen's foresight spell. I funneled my remaining anxiety down a memory of the Silent Academy's long halls, dousing his soul to lock him down. I met his eyes as I tore open a rift behind him, ready to send him hurtling out of this world—

And I saw an expression I had fervently hoped to never see again. A wild, glorious light in his gaze. A faith, an ardor, an absolute certainty that the cause he served was right.

Fanaticism blazed out of Arzen's soul, and it outshone his previous, puny hope like the fires of the sun itself. I blindly hurled another wave of heat at Arzen, but that impossible incandescence wiped out all other emotions around him simply through its absurd, destructive force.

"They showed me the Truthteller, Lucet! The Outer Rifts must not reopen!" Oh, that was good and ominous. What the hell did Zhytln have to do with Odin? "If you won't work with us, then stay out of Odin's way."

I tried to muster a spell, but this close to his solar fanaticism, neither memory nor soul could remain solid. He wove a cone of all-consuming flame, and the spell burned away at time itself—

—and all at once, Arzen was gone. Pops was gone. A woman in a traditional grass robe stood next to Solan, fruitlessly trying to undo the spell anchoring his gravity to some point on the horizon.

Solan startled when he met my eyes, and looking around the room, I got the sense that time had passed which I had missed. The bookshelf was emptied of curios, a waterskin laid half-empty by Solan, and the rifts I'd opened had healed. From his perspective, perhaps I'd just reappeared from thin air.

"So," Solan said, and he didn't even bother hiding the quiver in his voice. "You did try to warn me, didn't you? Whatever was chasing you was still out there."

The woman rose to her feet, interposing herself between Solan and I, but I just sat down wearily. "No," I muttered. "No, this... isn't what I've been gearing up to fight. This... is something else. Something... new."

I tried to get back up, but as the surge of manic energy that always came with lethal danger faded, something in my body simply folded up and refused to work, and I toppled over onto one knee. The woman who had moments earlier been eyeing me as a potential threat swore and reached out for me.

It was too late. Overexerted, underfed, and exhausted, I collapsed. Sleep claimed me before I even hit the floor.