We saw three more ruined villages in the next few weeks. Mairel's ghost must have ran out of nostalgia, because he stopped responding to Sansen and opening doors. None of us could know for sure, since none of us had an attunement to nostalgia and I sure as hell wasn't able to make one, but it was one less luxury on our little adventure. We had to fall back on the Redlands foraging I'd been born and raised with.

It was almost worse that Lucet stopped complaining about the food. As if the food was the real problem here.

Although we were doing a pretty good job of getting the fuck away from the Silent Peaks, we were still no closer to reuniting with Jiaola, and our lack of progress was starting to wear on morale. It was disturbing how easy it was to quantify that, with the ten attunements I now held. I could see Lucet's wells of passion dry up, Sansen's flames of hope guttering and dying, Meloai's liquid-metal insecurity practically spilling out of what was undeniably her soul. I almost felt as if I could reach out and measure each value as it rose and fell, plot them on a chart like we did in Elementary Sciences 103. Here was where a soul fragment pointed us towards the Silent Peaks' main army. There was where hope fell as Meloai asked if we were certain we should be going towards the people who had left four towns lifeless ruins in their wake. Then was the last time Sansen had spoken in days.

I wondered when the falling lines would cross. When the fear and sorrow and shame would consume the passion and joy and hope, and we'd finally be forced to leave a good man behind for no other reason than us being fucking cowards.

I'd like to say that it was one of us who pulled through, one last time. That Sansen gave a rousing speech, that Meloai asked a simple and silly question, that Lucet's quiet hugs at night broke through to me, hell, that I was able to dig myself out of the pit of thorns my soul was ensnared in.

But that would have been asking too much. It wasn't any of us who broke us out of our shambling, aimless stalemate, as we chased the trail of an army that was weeks or months cold.

It was Mairel's fucking ghost returning that kicked us back into motion. The old butler was hardly even sapient at that point, and he still did a better job of holding us together. If that didn't say something about how utterly fucked up we were, I didn't know what did.

Sansen was shambling along doing his future-scanning thing when he whirled around like he'd been bitten. The last time that happened, some random fell witch had tried to harvest our souls, so the three of us started looking around for the hammer to drop—but Sansen shook his head.

"Mairel," Sansen managed to say, one eye tracking a dizzying array of futures. "His ghost is back."

"Where?" Meloai looked around. "I don't see him."

We all turned to look at her for a moment.

"...right, invisible. So how do you know if—"

"His soul shatters," Sansen said, "and in a nearby future, you catch one of the fragments."

Of course it would be me. Because I had all the attunements. Because I still was too scared of Big Bad Odin listening in and becoming even scarier than they already were, back when they were making the Peaks chase their own tails without spending a single soldier. "What plane?" I asked, idly wondering what would happen if it was one of the planes I couldn't reach right now. Not due to lack of attunement, but because none of us had a drop left of the right emotions.

"Fear," Sansen said.

Yeah. Yeah, I could do that. I gave Lucet a questioning look, and she nodded, stepping closer to me. I drew the shimmering red blood of fear from her soul and slashed through the world with it, leaving a rift large enough for me to stick my hand through where Sansen pointed for just a heartbeat—

And I was no longer Cienne. Good. I didn't want to be.

I was Mairel's ghost, and this was the story of how I died.

###

I always had loved the stars. Even as a baby, my first words were (while pointing at the North Star) "I want to be up there!" According to my mother, of course; this was seventy years back, when I was still alive and still a child and still too young to remember the precious things that would one day be all I had left.

I never did reach the stars. I lived and died a butler to some minor nobleman—excuse me, his Lordship Tanryn, third of his name—and never even got to kiss that pretty boy who lived down the street.

Mm. That pretty little boy was now a kindly old man. I'd followed him out from the basement where I'd died, where I'd stayed in stasis for decades, and saw the stars for the first time since I'd entered Lord Tanryn's service. And bit by bit, week by week, the little bits of a child that had once wanted to see the stars... remembered.

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I was nothing but a memory now. I had weight only if I believed I did. That child's wish upon a star could at last come true.

It was slow going, at first. Say what you would about haunting the living, but at least it was never boring. At first I could track the crowds of people underneath me, but before long, they faded into nothing but specks. The clouds were pretty from below, and then from above, but staring at the endless sea of fluffy white got a bit repetitive eventually. I'd stayed stuck in a basement for the better part of two decades, though, so it was, at the very least, a nice change of scenery.

Idly, some part of me wondered why more ghosts didn't try this at least once in their lives. Unlives. Afterlives. The proper terminology for what laid beyond the veil was not part of my education as a butler. Where was I? Ah, yes. The streaks of darkness were so mesmerizing, the stars that blinked like eyes, the creatures that flitted just beyond where air and light ended so tempting to join—

I jolted out of my trance, finding myself floating in the void between earth and sun, surrounded by dark, drooling, hungry shapes.

Ah. So that was why no ghosts came up here.

Something else had gotten there first.

The things from beyond the stars lashed out at me, strange spiracles and tendrils of void reaching out to strike. I remembered I had weight and dropped like a stone, but the predators between worlds must have expected that—four excellently aimed lances like the tines of a salad fork speared my soul, and I felt the entities from the void eat at the memories that were all I had left. There went the day I first looked up at the stars. That was the name of the boy I never got to kiss. Farewell, proper ordering of the spoons and forks on a well-set table.

Somehow, that last thing made me angriest of all. Take away my childhood dreams, take away my one-time crushes, but I. Was. A. Butler. Eldritch abominations from beyond the void or not, nobody took that from me.

I closed my eyes and remembered that, once upon a time, I had lived inside a mansion.

And the ghostly form of Lord Tanryn's estates crashed into existence around me, swatting the eldritch entities away like a spider beneath a flyswatter.

The memory I had left behind dissipated within moments, more hungry mouths of darkness consuming them, but I held onto myself as I plummeted back to earth. There was one last thing I had to do. One final service to the living I could still provide.

I had to warn them. Had to warn them about the things beyond the stars.

The clouds parted beneath me, the world fading into view. My memories were bleeding from my stricken soul, but I held on to those last moments for just a little longer. The length of a waltz. That was all I needed to hold myself together for. Just the length of a waltz.

The boy whose name I would never know, the boy who'd grown up into a wry old man while I was dead, was walking along a road with three children in a wide, fertile plains. I would slip through the ground and plummet forever if I didn't do something—but the one thing I could do would surely end me for good. Ghosts didn't leave ghosts, after all.

Ah well. I was a butler. It was in my nature to serve.

I remembered the earth, its solidity and form, and I splattered against the ground exactly how a living human who'd fallen from the sky would.

The man who'd once been a boy jumped, looking around, one eye glowing strangely, and I could have sworn he saw me. No matter. I grinned weakly and strained to whisper the last letter I'd ever run delivery for.

"Do not venture beyond the stars."

Then my soul shattered like a poorly-handled chalice, and I faded into the infinite dream of oblivion.

The things between the stars had gotten me. My leg of the journey was over.

It was in the hands of the living now.

###

The soul fragment faded from my awareness, returning me to my body. Lucet and Meloai were waiting for me to snap out of the memory, carefully not giving me impatient glances as if that fooled anyone, while weary old Sansen just stared into the future, knowing he'd seen it all before.

So not only were we stuck in the middle of a warzone, not only was Iola the Unkillable Eldritch Horror probably going to hunt us down and obliterate us, not only was Jiaola a conscript on what was probably the wrong and definitely not the right side of the war, the skies were filled with Demons of Fear that were eating ghosts, and said ghost—who was probably one of the last friendly faces we'd see for quite a while—had just gotten slaughtered in front of my very eyes.

"Ha," I said.

Lucet gave me a worried look. "...Cienne? Are... are you okay?"

"Ha," I repeated, and even though my soul was dry as a bone, I still managed to crack a smile. "Ha, ha, ha."

"Sansen?" Meloai asked. "Is... is he going to have a stroke, or... something?"

Sansen shook his head, but I saw the flicker of hope reignite in his soul as he saw what I did.

"Mairel's ghost decided to fuck off into the stars, because as a child he had a dream about doing that, or something. Screw the why, it doesn't help us find Jiaola. But. While Mairel was up there, before he got eaten by the Demons of Fear that just seem to be hanging out up there—"

"Before he what?" Lucet exclaimed.

I waved a hand. "Not the point. Before he got eaten, he saw something from above. The positions of both armies."

"Okay, but... that information has to be outdated by now. How is that any better than the memory fragments we've been collecting from the villages?" Meloai asked.

I grinned. "Because, my dear friends, until now, we've been wandering from site to site and just hoping that something died at just the right time to give us a glimpse of where the army might have been, weeks ago. But you all were there for Ritual Magic 201. We can make our own soulspace entities, and Mairel just proved that if you can tell gravity to go fuck itself, you make an excellent scout."

Magics I hadn't felt in weeks slowly woke up in Lucet and Meloai's souls, and even though I felt nothing, I still let my eyes twinkle as though I did. "We can find Jiaola," I said, "and best of all? The Silent Academy is the one who showed us how."