The stars watched me carefully as I trekked along the grassy, rolling hills. It wasn't at all how geography worked, but setting foot on the rough terrain felt like it was getting me one step closer to the mountains I was born in. As if I would climb mounds and steppes and peaks in an ever-increasing line until I could grab the stars themselves and hurl them down from their celestial thrones.

Meloai would have pointed out that even if I had the physical power to interfere with the heavens, I would probably irreparably break the world if I cast the stars from their fixed positions. It felt like there was a lesson in there somewhere, but I'd had enough of education for a lifetime. Not that I had much of one to look forward to, thanks to the sickness swimming through my soul.

I had a plan for dealing with that, but I needed to wait until sunset. Not because there was any significance of sunset to my magic—the only possible influence would be if dusk had any emotional meaning to me, and of the things I cared about, the beauty of the natural world mattered only if it brought happiness and wonder to the people I'd left behind. No, sunset was just a convenient natural timer for the daily routine I'd have to endure.

I'd gotten far away enough from Knwharfhelm that it was unlikely anyone would investigate the noise if I started casting. So I reached into my soul, found the swirling vortex of snow-dusted feathers born of the mortal freedom that came with having but a handful of months to live, and gathered them into a spell. Shaped into a memory of one of Knwharfhelm's sailing-ships, the magic channeled itself into a nearly-solid boat of wind, lifting me off the ground with a deafening howl. So long as I held that memory firm in my mind, I would keep sailing across the skies until that nihilistic freedom drained from my soul.

So I had plenty of time.

Zhytln may have been an unassailable horror lurking beneath Knwharfhelm, but she put a surprising amount of genuine effort into keeping us placated, and unless I went digging into her personal affairs, she had been willing to answer some questions about the nature of magic. Continuing and broadening the education I'd gotten at the hands of the Silent Academy. One of these days I'd find a teacher that wasn't trying to fuck with free will, but until every would-be bully and tyrant dropped dead of spontaneous combustion, I'd steal what insights I could.

And wow, did Zhytln have insights. Magic was emotion, attunement was isomorphism, souls reflected reality and reality reflected souls. I couldn't claim to understand half of it, but by stacking attunements ("composing" them, as Zhytln had said), I could try to pull off a shadow of Zhytln's treatment of Cienne.

Every element of reality had its echo in soulspace. If I could find the analogue of my cancer in my soul, I could rip it from my body to alleviate the symptoms.

The problem with this kind of direct reality manipulation was that being able to even touch the images of realspace that projected into soulspace required attunement—and mortal minds could only obtain attunement to emotions. Terrible, terrible things happened to the body and soul when one reached too far beyond the scope of emotions a human mind could feel. But terrible things were happening to my body and soul anyway, so I was willing to risk it.

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I knew what to look for: Zhytln had identified it in Cienne. Little swimming-hatching things in the slime-seas of my soul, courtesy of Iola's last spell. I couldn't perceive them, not directly, but they were surely somewhere in the span of attunements I'd collected. It would have been simpler to start with water, but I had precious little joy left in me.

So I started with blood. My vision of soulspace snapped into focus, my crawling, trickling fears visible as veins and rivers and ghostly walking circulatory systems. Filtering fear through spite gave me spidery, anxious hemolymph. I tried encasing it in regret, to show me the mud-caked bodies of the infinitesimal parasites infesting me, but the attunement I was trying to craft slipped from my mind, spinning wildly and rotating my vision of soulspace through uncountable flickering shadows. I grasped frantically at one of them, tiny specks burning in the void, but it was no use. I hadn't even come close to the attunement I'd wanted.

Fine. There was another way.

Attunements weren't monolithic. "Blood" was not a rigorously defined category, and it smeared and stained at the edges. I knew the soul-parasites that represented my sickness lived in the mud, wallowed in my regrets and used them as space to breed. I could relate, honestly. And I knew how to staunch that wound, if only for a moment.

I simply had to run out of regrets.

So I whispered a word and cast a spell, and willed the swamps of my soul to run dry. Infected, fetid mud swirled out of existence, the isomorphism inverting as I forced it into realspace. I knew little of the magics of regret, but Cienne had used it once to knit together a dying soul. Corrupted as it was, its effect would be different, unpredictable—which was why I'd flown off before trying this.

There was nobody but me who would be hurt if this spell backfired.

"You're wrong, you know."

My eyes snapped open, and I reflexively cursed and held out a hand to protect myself from the wind before remembering that I was a soulmage now, and I could strike back at problems instead of letting them strike at me. From the depths of my marrow I hewed coal-black exhaustion, and the resulting weight caused the wind to slump and plummet into a downdraft, letting me squint into the diminished headwind.

I tried to speak a question, but even reduced, the howling gale drowned out my words. The voice, therefore, must have been solely in my mind.

Which explained why it sounded like Sansen.

Hello? I thought.

No response. Tentatively, I willed more of the sickly pus in my soul to drain.

"I'm happy for you, Lucet. He'll be a better partner than I could have been."

I was ready for it, this time, and I caught a glimpse of the spell's mechanisms as it unspooled in soulspace. Tendrils of muck expanded and caught in thoughtspace, snagging on soul shards of those who were close to me and dragging them in. The echoes of Kiton—I hadn't thought of her since that day in the graveyard, and I'd never talked about her, even to Cienne—were just that. Echoes. I pushed further, and this time, the floodgates tore open—

"They'll take care of you," I said, ushering my daughter towards the bespectacled witch. My little Lucet took two toddling, uncertain steps forwards, looking up and up and up at me, and I raised my chin in pride. "Do well in school, won't you? And maybe we'll meet agai—"

My focus shattered, the memory unravelling, and with it, the memory of wind and sails I stood on.

The old me, the unsteady, wobbling child, she would have flailed and fell and dashed herself across the hills. But she had died thrice over on the road to where I stood today, and my only regret was that two of those responsible still drew breath.

Black bile spewed forth from my soul, sheer repulsive force propelling me away from the earth, the recoil as vivid and sharp as a riftmaw's bite. Callous, freezing freedom locked back into place around me, and I set my sights on the horizon once more.

It was hard to tell if the feverish strength in my emaciated limbs was from the cancer I'd excised or the regrets I'd left behind. But either way, both would cease to be an issue once I reached the Silent Peaks.