"So you're attuned to hope now, too?" Sansen asked.

I shook my head. "I'm... not sure," I lied.

In truth, I knew for certain that I wasn't attuned to hope. I never did manage to make someone lose hope, apparently; I suppose I'd simply frustrated and overshadowed Lucet, but she'd slowly lost hope on her own during her long, self-punishing practice sessions. And I didn't really think that forcing one of my closest friends to lose hope just so that our party could have a second, much less experienced oracle was worth the cost. Plus, the fact that I normally couldn't see that familiar fire in people's souls gave me a pretty good indication that I wasn't attuned to hope.

But I couldn't just say that aloud. Not unless I was sure Odin wasn't listening.

Sansen frowned. "How can you be... unsure of whether or not you have an attunement?"

"I'm just... well, does it matter? You're a hundred times the oracle I could ever be." I sighed. I shouldn't have mentioned that I'd used magic to rekindle hope in Lucet's soul at all, really.

Because I had manipulated hope without having an attunement to it.

And the implications were terrifying.

It had made a certain kind of sense, in my head. Determination was quartz; passion was oil; quartz made sparks when struck together; oil became fire when in contact with sparks. If I couldn't touch hope on my own, well, I had all the ingredients to build hope myself. And it had worked. I'd combined determination and passion to make hope.

But when I had, something had rotated in my soul. Like... two tinted lenses slotting over each other, making a new color. And through that compound lens, I had beheld the fires of hope. And as far as I could tell, just as two overlaid lenses could function as one, "rotating" my two attunements in just the right way functioned exactly the same as a normal attunement to hope.

And there was no reason to think that hope was the only emotion that could be created like this, as a combination of others I held.

But that wasn't the scary part. Not in the slightest. What terrified me was that I had stumbled upon this purely by accident and the fact that I had some attunements to non-Academic emotions. By sheer bad luck, the emotions the Academy liked to use had mostly inert forms in soulspace. Arrogance was gold, which would be a hell of a thing to turn into another substance; passion was oil, but since gold and salt didn't really make sparks, there would be no way to set it aflame; happiness was water, which would happily mix with anything that wasn't gold or oil, and sorrow was salt, which could make... salty water. Not exactly the most inspiring of combinations. Near as I could tell from my time at the Academy, sorrow was mostly disdained as an emotion anyway, due to its association with the Redlands. I wasn't actually sure why it was considered an Academic emotions, but my best guess was a historical precedent that was too entrenched to upturn.

All of that was irrelevant, though. Through their own stupid rules about Academic and Fell magic, the Academy had hamstrung themselves. Odin, however, would not be so limited—and if they finished getting their hands on the secrets of attunement, I shuddered to think of the levels of power they'd achieve when they inevitably discovered attunement combinations afterwards.

Which meant that there would still be no sharing of my secrets until we were behind a firmly warded room, the likes of which were unlikely to be found in the middle of a frozen wasteland. Unfortunate, since there were a hundred and one reasons why I would have dearly loved to give my friends a couple dozen attunements of their own.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"Well, if you figure out whether or not you've got an attunement to hope, let me know," Sansen said soberly. "There are plenty of tricks to futuresight that I can teach you. Speaking of which..." Sansen stared at something only he could see, the rift over his left eye letting him glimpse the Plane of Elemental Possibility. "We're here."

The area looked like nothing more than another strip of frozen plains, but none of us doubted him. If Sansen said we'd arrived at Jiaola's last known location, then we had.

"Judging by the fact that you're not sprinting towards your husband with open arms," I said, "I guess there's a complication?"

Sansen grimaced. "You could say that. I'm... I don't want anyone to jump to conclusions, but I'm looking at the future, and all my future selves are dead. Bleeding from skin burns and vomiting."

Meloai halted mid-stride, Lucet's face went carefully blank, and I swore. "No. No. Even if he already got out of the Plane of Elemental Antimagic, why the hell would he be all the way out—"

"Why else?" Lucet asked woodenly. "He's after the only girl to dump him instead of the other way around, and the only boy to spit in his eye time after time without getting beaten to a pulp as a result. He knows how his victims think, and going after the one person he knows we care about and was missing from our escape attempt is... in line with what I know of him. He probably even got his superiors' blessing; for all they know, he's just valiantly charging into an unstable battlefield to save a missing soldier. Because he's their golden elf, and he can do no wrong. No matter how many times you tell them otherwise."

The only sound after Lucet finished speaking was the rain of mournful frost. I shifted my posture minutely, studying Lucet's expression, but... she wouldn't want any physical comfort right now.

"We'll get him," I whispered.

"How?" Sansen asked. "My futuresight gets blacked out around Iola thanks to that deadly light he likes to fling around, and if it kills anyone who even looks at it, he doesn't need to find Jiaola to kill him. He just needs to flood the area with the stuff, and..." Sansen closed his eyes.

Ah, fuck. That wasn't even the 'him' or 'get' I'd meant, but it was as valid a perspective as Lucet's. I rotated my attunements, sliding determination over passion to create hope, and confirmed what I'd feared: Sansen was running low on hope. That was the natural consequence of using futuresight for so long, though; even an old and experienced oracle like Sansen would struggle to keep up hope over these long, grueling months.

"I still have that offer," Lucet suddenly said.

I frowned, turning towards her. "What offer?"

"Odin... Odin offered to kill Iola for me." Lucet hesitated, then added, "And... they never stopped offering. Every night, they show up in my dreams, making the same offer, over and over again."

"Whoa, wait, what?" I turned from her to Sansen. "Weren't they doing the same thing with Sansen?"

"From what you've described, I don't think the iterations of Odin communicating with the two of you are actually Odin themself," Meloai quietly observed. "Repeating the exact same sequence of actions over and over until something hits you hard enough to shock you out of it? That's not how a sapient being works. That's... that's how a newborn soulspace entity does."

"We already knew Odin can do things with souls that none of us can even dream of," I added. "Or, er, in this case, that we specifically can and are forced to dream of. But... yeah, sending soulspace entities to offer deals sounds like something Odin would do."

"But we don't have to make a deal with Odin at all," Sansen pointed out. "They're... anything they offer, they'll do either way."

"Maybe, but Odin never offered any kind of timeframe," Lucet said. "And Iola is... dangerous. I wouldn't blame Odin if they wanted to wait until their position was stronger to try and take him out. I certainly wouldn't be surprised if Odin waited longer than we had left."

I grimaced. "Sansen, do you know how long we have until Iola... arrives?"

Sansen shivered. "Hours. Not days."

"We barely managed to escape from him the last time we fought," Meloai pointed out, "and that was with the help of a trick Iola will almost certainly have adapted to."

"Could we find Jiaola before Iola arrives?" Lucet asked. "Just... leave? Never have to confront him at all?"

Sansen's weary eye scanned dying, wintry futures, and he shook his head. "Not in any timeline I can see. But... if we just turn around now, we—"

"No," I said. "Nobody's getting left behind." Lucet looked away, and the thorns in my soul knew how she felt. "I don't blame you for bringing it up. It's... a natural response. But I have one last thing I want to try. Lucet?" I asked.

She looked at me, expression empty of anything, anything at all. "Cienne," she said.

"I have something that Odin desperately wants. If you tell them I'm willing to talk..." I took in a deep, steadying breath. "Then I think I can salvage something from this mess."