I didn’t want to check. It was one thing to dig through a monster’s corpse to find its core buried somewhere deep inside, but this was a person. I hadn’t seen Nia’s core from the glances I’d shot at the massive wound on her back, so I’d assumed that Endra had used it to come through to this world. But what if she hadn’t?

“I’m not sure.” I admitted, looking deeper in Nia’s wound for anything that looked like a core. I put the gorier details out of my mind, noting that Nia’s insides looked far more plant-like than human, but I didn’t know any plants that had bones. Or… whatever those hard masses were in Nia’s body.

{Cores take the place of hearts, so that’s where it would be if Endra didn’t take it.} I messaged Jun. I needed to be more careful with my assumptions, and assuming that the cores-for-hearts fact was common knowledge could give Okeria some thoughts I didn’t want him thinking. {Do your people even have hearts?}

{Don’t ask anyone else that. It’s pretty demeaning, even if you didn’t mean it that way. Makes us sound like monsters.} Jun sent, then gestured to get my attention. She pointed at a spot just beneath her throat where my ribcage would’ve started. {Our ‘heart’ is at the base of our necks. So unless Endra went back in and covered up the wound she made, Nia’s still got her core. Is… gods, I can’t believe I’m about to type this… okay. Can I check if her core’s gone?}

Why was Jun asking me for permission? I had no right to ownership of Nia’s body, not now, not ever. But as I looked down at her, I saw someone who thought differently. Her eyes shone with grim curiosity, and her lips were set in a frown that showed blatant discomfort at what she was asking. But for some reason she seemed to think that I could give her permission for… this.

//NAMES ARE INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT FOR THE STAURA; SO MUCH SO THAT FAMILIES HAVE GONE CENTURIES WITHOUT CREATING ONE FOR THEMSELVES.

//PERSEPHONIA WAS ONE OF THE NAMELESS.

//SHE CREATED A NAME FOR HERSELF, AND BECAME ONE OF VERY FEW WHO ARE MIRROR-NAMED.

//WITH HER PASSING THE NAME SHOULD DIE WITH HER.

‘Should’. That one word threw a wrench into everything, even as I tried to make sense of what the hell ‘mirror-named’ meant. I switched my active conversation from Jun to The End to hopefully get a few answers.

{What does it mean to be ‘mirror named’? And why wouldn’t Nia’s name die with her?} I asked.

{Where did you hear that?} Jun answered, informing me that I hadn’t switched over who I was conversing with. {Probably The End, right, nevermind. ‘Mirror-named’ is the fancy term for people who have the same first and last name like Nia, and since Nia never had any kids of her own, her name ends with her. Since she was a mirror-name.}

I sighed and scratched at the metal covering my neck. Why did being ‘mirror-named’ mean that Nia’s name would die out? She had to have parents, maybe a sibling or some aunts, uncles, or cousins. But… Okeria wasn’t named Okeria Okeria. Harvester and Scalovers had first names that I hadn’t bothered to remember, but I knew they weren’t the same as their last. And Jun’s last name, Keratily… wait. Maybe that was the key.

{Your grandma’s name is Keratily Keratily. Is that the same reason Nia had two of the same name?}

Jun nodded.

{And is the name Keratily, well, ‘retired’ in your family?}

Another nod. And Keratily Keratily seemed ancient; could she be the origin of the name ‘Keratily’? Like how sports teams retired jersey numbers for their star players, but more? “Are mirror-names the start of a family on Jun’s home planet?” I muttered, looking down at Nia’s body with somehow more respect than I’d had a moment ago.

“Not technically the start, but the start of a named family.” Jun said, cutting into my thoughts and theories with a solid answer. “Families don’t have names until someone does something worth remembering, and then they can pass that name down to their kids. It doesn’t go backwards or sideways, so Nia’s the first and last of her name.”

Something dropped to the ground behind me, and I swiveled around to see Okeria’s armored form hovering in a tiny electrical field. Another one of his ‘cameras’. “Persephonia can pass on her name ta someone who she thinks is worthy of it. Don’t know why that might be,” He said with an obvious gesture at me, “but it could be the case. If she left an inheritance, the name will be in there along with everything else. But that’s just me theorizing, and certainly not something I know Persephonia would do from the last conversation I had with her a few days ago. Certainly not. I’ll leave ya ta your conversation, mister ‘definitely-not-Persephonia’s-chosen-heir’ and miss Keratily.”

Jun and I stared blankly at the silver cube as it collapsed and hovered into the air before shimmering and disappearing. “I think he was getting sick of us dancing around the point.” Jun said, trying to follow the barely visible shimmer of the cube’s camouflage with her eyes. “Or maybe he didn’t want us to waste Nia’s last gifts.”

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“The second one!” Okeria called out, but when I snapped my head to where his voice had come from, the camera-cube wasn’t visible.

“I knew he was spying on us.” I said, then bent down further over Nia’s body. “Do you think you can get the core out without desecrating Nia’s body any worse than it is?”

Jun studied Nia’s body for a moment before answering. “Maybe. I… no. Probably not, but I don’t think we want to leave it in there any longer than we have to. Just in case the core starts to rot with the rest of her.”

I turned away as Jun called her helmet and began reaching towards the base of Nia’s mostly destroyed neck. “Don’t consume it if you find it, please. There’s something I want to try first.”

“It’s not mine to consume.” Jun said seriously over the sound of wet squelching and cracking. “She talked about you more than anyone else, which still wasn’t a lot, but you lit something in her that I never saw while she was training us. Like she actually had a purpose, instead of just going through the motions.”

“Skies above, I know I was.” Jun muttered under her breath so quietly that I wasn’t even sure she had said it. A loud crack brought her to absolute silence, then she resumed talking and searching at the same time. “I didn’t think this was going to change anything, you know. But it’s a Keratily’s duty; come to the all-world and do… something.”

I waited for her to elaborate, but all I got was more squelches. “What ‘something’?”

“I didn’t know. And I still don’t know, I guess. But that’s what everyone in my family does; the first kid who has godblood in them gets sent to the all-world. Doesn’t matter if that’s what I wanted or not.” Jun said, then let out a surprised yelp as her entire body convulsed. “I think I found it.”

With one last thunderous crack Jun dug deep into Nia’s body, severing bones and sinew to wrench free a strange black sphere with countless cracks that bled bright orange light. She held it up to the dim light of the hazard to get a better look, and I saw that the black sphere wasn’t one solid mass; it was countless interlocking and overlapping scales like the ones Nia had used to fight. And the orange cracks were where scales had fallen away, leaving small gaps for the inner light to shine through. My first thought was that it looked like a curled-up armadillo with dragon scales, and as Jun held it out for me to take, something else made itself known.

When my fingers met the strangely smooth surface of Nia’s core, I felt beyond full. It was as if I’d just eaten a ten-course meal and my stomach was full to bursting, but more than that. I had to use the bathroom more than I ever had. My mind was racing at a mile a minute trying to take in each and every sensation around me. My muscles tensed and untensed far too many times, like I had a charlie horse in every damn part of my body.

And then it was gone. I blinked in surprise, patting my stomach with my free hand while I checked my armor for any… ‘biological contaminants’. I found absolutely nothing. “Did you feel that too?”

“I did.” Jun confirmed, but her eyes were locked on my hands. “But it doesn’t look like I got it as bad as you did. Look what happened to Nia’s core.”

I blinked and looked down at Nia’s core, only to find that it had unfurled. What was once a perfect sphere was now a mechanical flower with a large divot in the center that bled smoky orange light. As if her core was burning something. The petals curled slightly upwards so that their tips were eventually pointing straight up, the scales that made them up shivering and rippling in perfect waves that almost made the core feel alive.

My mind flinched away as something bashed against the innermost part of my thoughts, but I couldn’t quite make it out. As if a message had failed to make it to my interface. I gently reached towards Nia’s core and placed my fingers inside the divot in the center, feeling them delve into a warm liquid that soaked through my armor as if it were simple cloth. I saw numbers. I saw what I would gain if I consumed this core. I saw potential.

But I also saw what I would lose. If I consumed this core, then there was absolutely no chance that I could do anything more with it. But did I have the luxury of choice while Endra was quite literally just outside the hazard waiting to take my life? I held the core close to my chest, not willing to give up on the potential within it just yet, and tried something else.

//CREATION HAS ACTIVATED: PRESENT MATERIALS FOR //CONSUMPTION OR //CORRUPTION.

I pushed Nia’s core towards the whirlpool that was //NULL without any intent to consume it. I wouldn’t let Nia’s memory die like that. She wouldn’t just become another stone that paved the path of my life. No matter how many nodes I had to sacrifice, I would make something out of this. I would stone Nia’s core in my inventory for decades if that’s how long it took for me to gather enough potential. But I wouldn’t let her most precious gift become fodder for anyone.

//MATERIAL PRESENTED: [ICON OF EXCESS].

//ANALYZING… HUMAN [SEBASTIAN CORMIER] HAS BEEN GRANTED POTENTIAL RIGHTS TO THIS CORE’S FUNCTION BY THE DECEASED [PERSEPHONIA PERSEPHONIA].

//IF [SEBASTIAN CORMIER] ACCEPTS THE NAME [PERSEPHONIA], //NULL WILL CONSUME ALL STORED POTENTIAL AND EMPTY NODES IN EXCHANGE FOR THE TRANSFORMATION OF [ICON OF EXCESS] WITH THE AID OF THE PRESERVER.

//ACCEPT: [Y] OR [N]?

I pressed [Y] before I could talk myself out of it. I owed Nia at least this much, and everything I still had left I’d taken from Inopsy. It only felt right to cleanse myself of all of it. Nia’s core gently shimmered in the air before the orange smoke was drawn into my core in a long, thin string; spiraling in fractal patterns as //NULL transformed it. Before the divot was drained dry the scales of the flower began blowing away like cherry blossoms in the wind, joining the smoke in my core as I watched my potential and empty nodes bottom out.

The last few scales left my hands close to a minute later, and I was left staring at what looked exactly like my core, but completely still. The whirlpool had stopped, and within it I saw cracks beginning to form. I stared at it for what felt like hours as tiny pieces of my core chipped away one by one, and then it finally started to move again. But it wasn’t a liquid any more.

It was countless scales that flowed like water.