Remembering how things should be helped to set them straight. The exhaustion-black bags beneath Cienne’s eyes could be slept away; a thin, spicy Silent Peaks soup could help Jiaola’s tense, fake smile relax; a quiet question to Meloai could draw her out of her reclusive apprenticeship.

And my memories of the docks of Knwharfhelm that I’d destroyed in my fury were the very thing that would let me rebuild them.

My soul was all but dry these days, but I still managed to draw liquid drops of joy from the memories of my friends—my strange little family—coming back to life like calmflowers after snow. Holding my memory of the docks in place, I poured joy into it like a mold. And as the happiness flowed from soulspace to thoughtspace to realspace, my joy burst into light, illuminating the shape of the docks that had been.

“Alright, we’re on track,” Crwhevt said, nodding at the illusory blueprint. “We should be able to fill in the last missing columns today. Perk up, people, we’ve got work to do! And Lucet, get rid of the planks; we just need those two columns outlined.”

Maybe a good little witch from the Silent Peaks would have bristled in arrogance at Crwhevt’s rudeness, but I just felt bubbles of relief rise and pop within my soul. After all, I was the reason why Crwhevt’s livelihood and docks were destroyed; when I’d come offering my services as a soulmage to repair them, I’d half-expected to be thrown in jail.

But the local authorities were terrified of a woman who could freeze a coastline into jagged spikes with a thought, and despite how rightly furious Cienne was at me he wasn’t going to let me get locked away, so the Fantasial Court let me serve penance by cleaning up my mess instead.

“Well?” Crwhevt nudged me with the tip of his leather boots. “Are you going to get to work or what?”

And cleaning up my mess meant doing it with my own two hands. Once created, the blueprint illusion required little attention from me to sustain, so I grabbed my toolbox and harness and jumped into the sea.

The salt greeted me, like it always did. Pruning, prickling, purifying my skin, as painful as it was preserving. I opened my eyes, welcoming the burn, and let freedom drift from my soul into my lips. The spell was a simple one, drawing wind from the Plane of Elemental Freedom and setting a flurry of bubbles around my head. One of the many, many perks of being a soulmage.

My swimming skills were like my relationships: I could stay in the sunlight for a short while, but one way or another I’d sink into the depths. Thankfully, that was exactly what I wanted; the wave of frost I’d unleashed upon these docks had apparently ripped the ancient iron nails from where they’d been driven into solid stone, and someone had to replace them. The task was normally hellishly inaccurate, but with the help of my guiding illusions, even I managed to walk along the seabed to my destination.

The other divers were using Knwharfhelm-made riftknives to carve out the stone, but Crwhevt refused to trust me with one, so I had to make do with my own magic. Shame, too; some part of me wanted to know how some Crystal Coast witches had managed to enchant something beyond what I’d seen during my time at the Silent Academy.

Still, any soulmage was more than up to the task of drilling a few holes in the ground. I’d never managed to make a memory of the nails on the ocean floor, but my guiding illusion gave me a good enough picture of where to start. I shaped greasy, solid insecurity into the shape of a nail, and drove it into the ocean floor with an effort of will.

The stone transformed into cardboard wherever the Plane of Elemental Falsehood’s power slipped into realspace, and from there it was nothing but manual labor to lay the planks that would make a new foundation and nail them into the floor. I had almost finished the second plank when—

Pain. I spun in the cold and the dark, knowing this was where I died, and twin lances of light formed in my palms. If I was to fall, I would take one more soldier with me in this cursed storm. I pointed and death screamed from my fingers—

I snapped back to the present as the jellyfish that had stung me froze solid, an arc of ice tracking the arrow of sorrow I’d fired from my soul. I stared at the jellyfish—not a monster like I’d been raised to see in the Silent Peaks’ enemies, not an evil to wield the full might of a soulmage against—and closed my eyes. It didn’t stop me from seeing the jellyfish’s soul fracture as its body died.

I reached out, mud-thick regret swelling from my fingertips, to glue its soul back together—but the body was destroyed, and I had no other vessel to put it in. Returning it to its wrecked self would simply doom it to a slow and painful death, perhaps returning as one of the perennial undead that plagued Knwharfhelm’s outskirts.

Things were simpler when I’d first met Cienne. When I was trapped by someone I felt justified unleashing the fullness of my rage against.

“How dare you make me care about you,” I whispered. To Crwhevt, to the docks I’d wrecked, to the stupid fucking jellyfish that had done nothing wrong but bump into me at the wrong time.

I set down the jellyfish’s soul and willed a bullet of solid gold to rise from my soulspace, angling it towards the jellyfish’s. Accelerating it across the void between souls with a thought, I watched as the primitive proto-soul was obliterated on impact.

A painless death. The best I could give.

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I turned back to the seabed and began laying a new foundation for the work that was to come.

#

Of the four remaining soulmages in Knwharfhelm, only one of us had any idea how to do real-world things like “making a living” and “purchasing a house.” And Jiaola hadn’t done anything but smile and nod ever since his husband died. So Cienne, Meloai, and I played to our strengths. We may not have money, but we could manipulate our souls to tear rifts between planes.

And so the commute from work to home was simple. Walk out from the Knwharfhelm docks, head due south until I hit the gnarl of alleyways just past where Sansen had been laid to rest, and rip open a gateway to the Plane of Elemental Cold.

Knwharfhelm was a surprisingly magically adept city—despite not having soulmages, they regularly harnessed demons, had some mulching colonies in the Plane of Elemental Falsehood, and even had some technologies I’d never seen before, like the riftblades or whatever the hell was up with Zhytln’s basement. So we’d had to get creative to find a plane that was too dangerous for Knwharfhelm to have laid claim to already, but wasn’t dangerous enough that we’d be obliterated trying to live there. The solution we’d settled on was based on a spell I’d once seen Cienne cast unconsciously: sorrow and fury intertwined, creating a pillar of flame around a heart of ice.

The end result was that when I stepped through the rift to the Plane of Elemental Cold, a wall of Elemental Heat surrounded the small wooden cabin we’d assembled with Jiaola’s help, creating a sphere of livable space. We’d had to import our own air from the Plane of Freedom, since the frigid temperatures did some weird things to the atmosphere here, but I’d suffered through worse. Honestly, the thin air, barely livable temperatures, and handmade wooden cabin almost reminded me of living in the Silent Peaks.

Jiaola was sitting on the porch and looking out into the endless storms of the plane we’d carved a home from. Despite the molten, agonized glow of his soul, he still gave me a gentle smile when I walked towards him.

“How’re you feeling?” he asked. He always did.

“We’re soulmages, Jiaola. You can see that I’m frustrated just as easily as I can see that you’re grieving.”

Jiaola shrugged, that incongruous, solemn smile still plastered on his face. “I meant physically. Have you been vomiting again?”

I scowled. “I know I’m sick. I’ll fix it, okay?”

“Please, Lucet. Talk to Zhytln. She helped Cienne recover, and—” Jiaola’s outstretched hand made me reflexively flinch, but I was a soulmage. Master of memories and emotions. I would not give in to that vague, nebulous terror I felt at someone smiling in situations when no sane person would.

Jiaola must have seen the crystal-shards of sorrow I’d reflexively called to my fingertips, because he withdrew back into his seat, a little geyser of tar-black frustration fountaining in his soul.

“Thank you for the offer,” I woodenly repeated. “But time is precious, and I’ve taken up enough of yours.”

Glass rained down on the molten core of Jiaola’s soul, but he didn’t stop me as I opened the door to our cabin in the storm.

The furnishings were simple. Jiaola hadn’t been able to cast any magic ever since Sansen’s death, but he could still work a saw and a hammer with the expertise of a lifetime spent honing a craft. And so lovingly-polished wood with a sprinkling of Cienne’s spells was the theme of our house. Permanent, tiny rifts into the Plane of Elemental Radiance sat in painstakingly carved candleholders; a sphere of shimmering heat sat in the chimneyless fireplace, on which a pot of stew was merrily boiling.

And Cienne was sitting in front of the flames, his back to me. Even without looking at the merrily-splashing oceans in his soul, I could tell by the slack in his shoulders, the way he didn’t spin around when my feet creaked on the wood floor, even the plump and hale tone to his skin that he was everything I couldn’t be, everything I’d fought for.

He was happy. At peace. Despite everything that he’d been through, Cienne had found rest.

“Hey,” I muttered.

Cienne turned around, and though he didn’t beam like the sun or light up the room with his mere presence, his simple, relaxed expression was a greater beacon of joy than any elf or Angel I’d ever seen. “Dinner’s almost ready,” he said. “You want some?”

I hesitated. “I don’t think I’ll be able to keep it down.”

And I cursed myself for the way his soul-oceans turned red, the splashing-creatures dying and spilling their guts on the sand. “It’s getting worse, isn’t it. The cancer.”

“...yeah.” I started to sit down by the fire, but my legs itched when I wasn’t in motion.

“You still don’t trust her. Zhytln, that is.” Cienne’s expression darkened, and I glanced away, abashed.

“I… I know she’s helped you. You found peace. And I’m sorry that I tried to keep you from that. It’s… precious, what you have now. I just… can’t take it for myself.”

Cienne glanced at me, opened his mouth to speak, then let out a bitter laugh instead. Old, withered thorns crept throughout the shores of his soul. “Well, I’m not going to force a path to treatment onto you. I sure would be an asshole if I did that.”

“I hear you.” I stood up and started pacing, a half-dozen shadows following me from the myriad lights on the wall. “I was serious about what I said. If you want me gone, I understand. I—”

“Are you kidding?” Cienne grabbed my ankle with surprising strength, and it was a reminder that despite how soft and relaxed and happy he’d finally become, he’d been with me through the roughest shit the world had thrown at me. That he’d moved on from. That I couldn’t. “I’m not trying to send you away, Lucet.”

“I tried to hurt you, Cienne. I am the riftmaw.”

“Yeah. You were a real dipshit.” I nearly choked on air, turning to see Cienne’s expression turn serious. “But just because you were a dipshit doesn’t mean you’re a monster to be slain. You’re… trying your best. I’ve been there. Really.”

And I thought I could feel those familiar thorns writhing through his soul and digging into my ankle.

Cienne wasn’t smiling. He shouldn’t have been. He just kept a hold of my leg, stopping my frenetic pacing, keeping me anchored like a balloon to a string.

“...I don’t suppose you’d… hug me?” I asked.

Cienne hesitated, then shook his head, withdrawing his hand. “Not… yet.”

I nodded. Good. So there was a limit to how easily he could forgive.

“But I mean it, Lucet. You fucked up, big time. That doesn’t mean I’m going to throw you away. No matter what happens, even if the world ends, I’ll always be there for you.”

“...Was that supposed to be reassuring?” I shook my head, pre-empting him. “When the world ends, take care of yourself. You deserve it.”

I know Cienne could have stopped me. Thrown up a wall of searing heat or a rift to a distant and empty plane in order to force his idea of treatment onto me.

But he was better than that. Safer. Content.

“Dinner’s ready soon,” he said as I left. “There’s enough for everyone.”

I opened the door to my room and stopped, hesitating on the threshold.

“I’ll try to eat,” I promised.

Then I stepped into my room and shut the door, resting my forehead against the hand-polished wood.