"Do you ever rest?"

"Ones like us do not need it."

Muriel cracked open her eyes to a sundered sky.

A discordant sky, halfway between the cherry-orange of a rising dawn and the star-strung purple-black of a twilight dusk. Grey, wispy clouds pooled and spun, drawn along the path of an invisible whirlpool, rising and vanishing somewhere beyond her sight. Towers lay broken around her, crumbling ruins reaching for the sky as the world slowly died. People were around her, shattered and empty, strewn about without a care for the dead. There were a couple who still lived, choking and gasping for breath amongst the settling ashes— too broken to do anything but stare and at their coming fate.

They’d failed last time, and the time before that, and the time before that one, and when everything had come to a head, they’d failed again all the same. The only difference was that this had been her final chance.

Now, her fellows had deemed her interferences a bore, and thrown her to the ground. Left her to rot and die in a world they all killed.

What a terrible fate, Muriel thought, drawing a ragged, choked breath of silt and ground bone. To confine the last travelers to a mockery of their world. To indiscriminately trap everyone here with me, to leave us all in the ashes with nothing but a crumbling world at our fingertips.

The deep, swirling pool of clouds slowed, and a pair of soft footsteps made her twist her head, despite the swimming pain.

Has Wormwood come to mock me? Or maybe it’s Raguel?

But it was neither the heavy-handed Wormwood nor the austere Raguel that kneeled above her. Rather, it was Dumah, kind, soft, stillness-of-death Dumah, who had come to her in her final moments. A crooked smile found a way to her face.

“Come to gloat, have you?”

“No,” Dumah replied, sounding solemn. “I have come to pay my dues.”

Despite the aching exhaustion, Muriel’s smile grew sharper, brilliant, unmarred teeth on display. “A second chance then,” she drawled, “how lucky I must be.”

“Your very last chance— you are damaged, Muriel, almost irreparably so.”

“Hasn’t stopped me before.”

Dumah picked her up, laying her to sit up against a nearby stone. Muriel coughed, violent pain ripping through her chest, before raising her head to meet their eyes. “So?”

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“So,” they responded. “You will be resting here until that day.”

“What?” Muriel croaked, confused. Her vision began darkening.

“Rest,” Dumah gently commanded, laying a hand against her eyes. “It will prove invaluable.”

[][][]

Pages crinkled in the background, blowing on an unseen wind, forgotten among the crackling of a fireplace hearth. A girl sat in an armchair, propped messily in a chair, steadily asleep in the safest place she knew.

Dumah would feel bad for the girl if they weren’t currently stalking around her library like a crook. Well, less stalking and more just walking around. Their footsteps made no noise, and in all honesty, soundlessly floating around would’ve been a better choice, but it was the form that counted, they knew.

“There yet?” a voice whispers.

“Yes,” Dumah gently responds, carefully moving around to the armchair's front. A nettling of worry grew in their chest. “And you are certain about this?”

“Yes.”

“Usually, you would go for prettier–”

“Yes,” the voice responded, exasperated, “yes, I’m certain. I’m far past that point now.”

The worry only grew. Selecting this girl was highly out of character for Muriel, she’d normally go for… prettier vessels. Dumah never understood the subjectiveness of beauty, as it wasn’t in their domain– though that wasn’t to say that the girl currently scrunched up in the armchair wasn’t.

Dumah knew she had eyes poets would call striking or icy, and features that didn’t exactly clash with one another– they fit together fairly well by her society’s metric, but...

They just... were all physical qualities, the same as a tree’s olden frame, what draw did they or any other slightly different quality have compared to something that didn’t fade with time? Muriel had described it as some kind of innate sense, an inherent draw that lured others into their social sphere, but from what Dumah could see, the girl before them had nothing of the sort.

The girl was simply that. An average girl with black hair and cold eyes. She had no friends, no allies, nothing to her name other than a fortune and her above-average talent with magic. Compared to the other Contractors, the girl didn’t have much merit. Muriel choosing her, beyond anything, was illogical.

“And… you are certain, Muriel?” Dumah asked again.

“I know how you feel– Don’t,” Muriel responded, voice sounding like a sigh. “The others had it a long time coming.”

“There are bet—”

“Don’t,” she quietly snapped. “I’ve been thinking for a long, long time. If you have a problem with my choice, you can stop helping me if you’d like.”

“You know I can’t do that.”

“If it helps, you could just consider this part of your debt.”

Dumah remained silent, contemplating the response. “It doesn’t.”

“Well, regardless, thanks for your help. I won’t hold it against you if you decide you want to remove me later down the line.”

“You know I don’t participate.”

“Right– right,” Muriel murmured, more to herself, “you win regardless.”

The girl did not wake until later in the morning when the two had gone, not a mote of dust having been disturbed.