We sat down at the table, the morning mist still present with a look out the window. We were just about finishing cooking breakfast, and I had retrieved Selly from her bed sandwich. The three of us were at, or on the table, and I went around pouring a thing of tea for each of us.

Selly had to forgo a cup, but I gave her an extra spoon so she could skim some tea like a massive ladle. I suppose if she was going to stay with us, we could buy her a thimble when that was sorted. But right now, she looked like she was still asleep.

Two of her hands were all droopy, but she somehow still managed to yawn and start filling her mouth with a half portion with the speed and voracity that was still unholy.

Averting my eyes from the demonic sprite massacring the meal, my mind turned to the outside and the mist. It was important not only because, at some point, I would need to get rid of it but also because I was going to head out with Anna in a few days, and I would need to somehow stop myself from getting dragged off into the morning fog on our trip. I had to wonder if the summer sun would wipe it away earlier and earlier every day or if it would linger, held in the air by whatever dark power fueled it.

My mind stopped, the wheels spinning in the air for a moment as it changed its direction. My mind is following a path I didn’t think of before.

Was there something to that?

It couldn’t come into the grove, but assuming it could, assuming the grove didn’t repel it, could it come in?

If it used stagnant dark magic, maybe it wasn’t fog at all, it might be, but it probably wasn’t water mana, it was probably some kind of dark magic. Right? Undead and dark magic was shaping up to be the valley’s greatest problem.

If it was something magical, then the fog probably couldn’t get into the grove even if it wanted to because the ridiculously high concentration of energetic mana in here would shred it like a lumber mill. And if it was vulnerable to that, it might be an indicator that the light mana from the sun was the primary cause of its retreating, not the sun burning off the fog, but the mana weakening it, driving it away into whatever dark place it hid during the day, or it stood around until the spell broke down and ‘retreated.’

It might just be a spell of some sort, some kind of automatic ongoing magical torment shtick.

“Anna,” I started asking her while I finished sucking down the last bit of food in my mouth, “is light mana good at disrupting dark magic?”

Anna, unable to read my mind and currently sipping on her tea, her eyes half closed in a kind of tired [Sage] look, didn’t even turn to face me when she answered.

“Light opposes and overpowers dark, so yes, it does. It is kind of in the name,” she told me tiredly and a little grumpy.

She was focused on the tea, sipping it down little by little.

“I mean like, necromancy dark magic, not like moon magic, dark magic. I wish there was a way to say that like a skill, it would be so much easier.”

Turning to Anna, she had the look of someone who wanted to facepalm.

“I hate the stupid wording.” She said sourly, “It is just… eugh. Every time I think about Tenebre, or Tenebra, or whatever. It's too serious, and it makes it sound important, and the butchered imperial wording is just… eugh.”

I didn’t get what she meant by butchered imperial, but I could understand the sentiment.

“It does sound kind of dumb,” I told her sympathetically, “We can always call dark magic like moon magic and dark magic, dark magic.”

She groaned a little.

“I mean… Yes, we can, it makes sense, but I also just hate it. The word for it is butchered from another language, and the real translation was just darkness. I could see it being some teenage angst thing, and it makes me want to die of secondhand embarrassment just thinking about it.”

I looked at her in incomprehension, then as her look of minor embarrassment started to turn to something else, I picked up on what had been left unsaid.

I didn’t tease her about it, I just smiled.

And her look of embarrassment turned into something more awkward.

My smile turned predatory, and she got flustered, but before she could stammer something, I booped her nose.

As cute as Anna was, I was having a brain thing going on, and if I changed what I was focused on, I was going to forget it. So, in an effort to stay on topic, I decided not to tease her about whatever she did as a teenager to make herself so embarrassed and bring her back around to the question at hand.

“Anna, no getting caught up on that right now. Ok? We can go over our teenage angst later and revel in each other's mutual agony. Do you know if light mana messes up dark magic? Because I’ve been thinking about the fog and wondering why it retreats after the sun rises, and all I can think over is because it might be the light ripping up the stagnant dark magic with how energetic it is.”

Anna caught off guard and no doubt expecting me to mess with her, took a few moments blinking tiredly before her eyes opened as the idea filtered into her head. Then, as it got in, I watched her face as she used her brilliant mind to pull it apart and use what she knew to puzzle it out.

Her face took on that faraway look as she took a sip of her tea, the idea bouncing around inside of her head like a chunk of rubber.

I paid attention, barely taking my eyes off of her to make sure I wasn’t going to stab my fork into the side of my mouth accidentally.

It was mostly just ok. We had some spices now, just a few, but none of them went with egg all that well. It was basically salt because I wasn’t about to commit a crime against cuisine and put something like mint on eggs.

Some things were unforgivable.

Focus, damn it… No thinking about mint eggs, focus on Anna, and not just how cute her face is when she thinks.

It did make her look cute, cute and hot.

I didn’t know what to feel about the way that made me feel or what it said about me that I found Anna's maturity exciting, but I let her puzzle out something while I let myself feel weirdly fluttery about almost nothing. Maybe she was right, maybe I liked older women, or maybe it was just Anna, either way, it was strange to think about.

“I think so,” she said ponderously, which helpfully returned my mind from the gutter as her face returned to its normal cute demeanour. “It stands to reason that if the undead body works like other undead, it would be animated by dark magic. If that is the case, it would stand to reason that enough energetic mana could disrupt it. I never thought about it that way… that’s probably why magic is the go-to for ghosts in the first place; a sword has mana in it, but it’s not highly energetic... I would never have thought about that. Good job, apprentice. Was there anything else you were thinking about?” she asked.

I nodded, fork still in my mouth. I seriously doubted that Anna could have put that together, but I accepted the praise and quickly swallowed the egg in my mouth before I answered, “I was thinking it might be a spell, maybe something that’s being triggered from somewhere like a trap or something. Any thoughts on that?”

The idea went into her head, the great gears of her mind churned, and she said much faster and much more certainly, “No, I don’t think it is. If it was a spell, it wouldn’t be able to react on its own. It could have been released by a spell, and a spell for the fog that leads you astray could be workable, but it seems to possess a sentience that would indicate it is not a spell,” she said, getting a bit of egg and slapping it into her mouth.

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On the plus side, the tea was kicking in, and the questions were getting her head spinning up. But with that upside came the downside that for all that I had possibly puzzled out something that could be useful, it wasn’t going to help me right now, and I couldn’t see it helping me on our trip down south either.

I couldn’t sense it from here, held at bay by the grove-like water pounding futilely against the seawall of a dock. So I decided to ask Anna one last thing.

“Anna, can you sense the fog out there? Is there any dark mojo going on? Bad Vibes? Magical shurecanery?” I asked her.

“Chicanery, Ch-cane-ery,” she helpfully corrected me, “And…”

She stuck a second forkful of food in her mouth and let the ideas bounce around her head a moment before she looked up at me dumbly. Fork in her mouth, her face a rictus of embarrassment.

“What is it? Is it bad out there?” I asked her, more than a bit confused at just what she was expressing.

She swallowed down her eggs quickly to reply, “No… No, I just realized that I was an idiot. I’ve never properly checked the fog because I’m an idiot. Hold on, just let me check the fog properly...”

I stared at her. Selly, sleepy and not particularly interested in the conversation at hand, stared at her.

We both stared at Anna. She was my friend, my mentor in magic, and the woman I was courting. A brilliant woman, a beautiful woman, and a woman that I believed the best in.

And she was apparently quite the silly dumbass.

I sighed while she stared around, mouth closed with her tongue in her cheek, staring at sights I both had and hadn’t seen yet.

I imagined the grove and all its splendour, the grass running out to the edge of the dome before being replaced with a wall of fog, water mana held in the air jostled by the phantom wind of magic in the cooler morning air, pockets of dark magic swirling like noxious fumes through it, giving the fog a direction. Dark spindles of vile magical taint crawled through the air, feeding on stagnancy and sowing taint as it did.

For all that, I couldn’t feel far enough, not nearly enough to properly sense any dark thing outside beyond the grove through the walls, I could tell by the way that Anna moved her head that she could see something that was not material but magical.

“It’s spread out like a cloud, but there is a blob where I suppose it is. I think it’s… tethered. I don’t know how to say this, but there’s, like, a band of dark magic back to somewhere… northeast of here… I think it's bound somehow,” she said ponderously, relaying her words as she found them.

“Like a dog on a leash? I’m not sure if that’s better or worse than if it could move. If it could move, that means it was free to do what it wants, wherever it wants to, but it being tied somewhere probably means it’s a… what the word?” I asked her, trying to figure out the word for when something had a place like Annas but nefarious.

“A lair?” She asked.

“Yes, a lair. That sounds like the right word. Just like the other monster, only if it's bound there, it's not going to be half-cooked,” I told her, thinking it over.

What was over that way during my time? There was a waterway that way, it was where I went to get the stuff for Anna. It couldn’t be Moarn itself, there was little in the way of stagnancy, the plants grew too well, and there was no icky feeling. I didn’t see the ground that way properly, but there was a swath of different trees… What? about halfway between here and the heath? With the water, it could be a peat bog or something that might do it.

South and downhill, but not straight to the river…

It clicked into my head as a kind of intrusive memory filtered through my head, daintily landing on my head. It was a proverb of sorts, one anyone old enough not to remember sewers would say right after grumbling about how good we had it.

Water rolled downhill, but so did shit. And the sewers didn’t empty into the river, it was a protected water source. The answer that city planning had come up with was simple: let it drain south into a refuse store that was somehow magicked to filter the detritus out and let the clean water run free.

The magically separated gunk was a common fertilizer. I had been near it enough to remember the oddly scentless carts of disgusting gunk moving around on roads.

“I think,” I said, grimacing at the idea of wandering through a refuse pit, fighting an intangible undead and its minions. “I know where the lair might be. And I don’t think it would be advisable right now to fight it.”

She looked at me, and I turned to catch it. Her question went unsaid, but her look told me she expected an answer. I just shook my head and said, “Sewage,” and that got my point across well enough, Anna grimaced at it.

We stopped eating for a moment. Selly, bless her, didn’t care, either not understanding the conversation or not caring.

We fidgeted with our food, mostly eaten but not finished and didn’t take a bite.

Anna started talking first.

“I think you’re partially correct. About the spell part, that is. I can feel the magic in the tether coming towards us, I think the undead is being… animated, for a lack of better phrasing, using a spell of some kind. It's also… wrong?” she told me as she grimaced and squinted through a wall.

I looked questioningly at her, but she was focused on the wall, so I spoke up and said, “What do you mean by wrong?”

Anna turned to look at me, and I could see her refocus on the here and now, her eyes momentarily dilated wide as she had just come out of a dark room.

“Sorry, let me rephrase, it's sloppy, the binding, the way everything moves… it's like how you cast a spell inefficiently and then get better as you pay attention to it. It’s just even more inefficient. It's like someone brute forcing an effect. All power, no fitness. I don’t think there’s anyone casting it, so it has to be some kind of ongoing spell.” She told me, gesturing with her hands and making a kind of odd expression.

“I don’t know what principals it works on, whatever necromantic mumbo jumbo it uses, but I think that’s helpful,” she continued, pointing at me, “If it's anything like working magic, normally, it has a limited range because the further it gets, the sloppier and weaker the spell will get because there isn’t a person to adjust it. It also means that if we can get in and end the spell, the undead will starve before falling apart.”

I took in her words, processed them and slotted them into a kind of barely fabricated plan. Pieces of information snapped together with the help of what little I knew and gut feeling. I was thinking of how I would measure up to it when the word we entered my mind, and my head stuttered to a stop.

It said something about Anna that she seemed to take to us more than I did and that she had been thinking about it that way the entire time.

And it definitely said something about me that I hadn’t thought about it that way.

It scared me in a very real and visceral way. Not only because she could get hurt or because I somehow had the delusion that I was stronger than Anna beyond maybe how hard I could physically hit someone. It wasn’t because she was dainty, and I wanted to protect her, or even that it would carve me up if she died because I couldn’t trade myself.

It scared me because I knew deep down that I would have to break my promise and get hurt. It hurt because that would hurt her, and I was ok with hurting her feelings like that to make sure she didn’t die.

I had been following my moral compass so far, and I had felt the need not to harm others, not to kill people, and beyond that, I felt the need to not let people die. If I could take their place and get back up, not doing so would weigh on me because I would have killed them through inaction.

And that had been before I had killed. Now, I had a horrible dread at the idea that I had felt nothing when they had died, not because I wanted to feel bad about killing Gremlins, but because I had the creeping nightmare of a feeling that I wouldn’t care if people died either.

And that, more than the idea of killing a person beyond self-defence, more than the phantom of guilt I felt at the idea of letting people callously die when I could help them, made me feel the horrible gnawing pain of fear more like a thousand knives in my gut than queasiness.

I tried not to let the word ‘we’ conjure images of Anna dying, her broken body laying on the ground, and me feeling nothing at it, like it was just Anna-shaped meat, only feeling the absence of her after the fact.

I did my best to choke down the feel, to kill it, but it was already an intangible ghost that would haunt me. I had cried when Skip and Kindly had left, but was that because they were already dead? Was my lack of care because some part of me was callous, and I just felt nothing because the right people had died?

I answered her after that horrible, halting moment. My voice sounded too hollow to my ear, “Will the opposite be true? Will it get stronger the closer we get?” I could see a hint of confusion in Anna's face at the sound of my voice, her face flickering, twitching quickly through several emotions.

She knew I had thought about something, I could feel how tight my face felt, my unsuccessful attempt to hide my emotions registering to Anna as who knows what.

She reached out, placed a hand on my shoulder, and did something that both reassured me and drove the fear further down into my gut.

“I seem to have gotten ahead of myself. That would indeed be the case. I suppose it would be rather hard to fight an undead that can attack from any direction, requires magic to fight, and can mind control you. That is a lot for both of us. We can think about that after we get back from the trip down south, ok?” she told me, pulling me towards her for a hug.

I leaned in, wrapping my arm back around her in return, and soaked in the comfort of being next to the person I had come to care about the most. I let her warmth pull me back to the moment and out of the whirling nightmare of my own mind.

The morning had been a bit bleak but warm, Anna putting forth the effort to get closer to me twice, and the intimacy wasn’t lost on me.

It took a minute, but I eventually got back to the point where when I spoke I didn’t sound like I was currently choking.

“I suppose I should get back to studying to answer your questions? And you still need to show me something cool,” I told her, lightly probing.

It still rang hollow, but I supposed it was just going to be one of those days. Maybe reading about mana and getting even more questions for every answer I found, and my accompanying pique would be able to drag me out of my funk.

I leaned down and gave her a kiss on the cheek.

“Thanks. I needed that… Want to read with me while we wait for the fog to pass?” I asked her.

She turned to stare at me while I could hear Selly make a nearly silent gaging noise.

“I would like that a lot. Just give me a bit; you’re very comfortable, and it would be a shame to leave breakfast uneaten, it’s the most important meal of the day, after all.”

So we finished our breakfast and moved over to reading in the study. And I hoped, silently, that today would be a good day despite the on-and-off start.