Sorana blinked, her eyes briefly shutting out the all-consuming light. When they opened again, the light had narrowed, resolving into a solid bar that sat before her eyes. She was suddenly aware that she was lying down, her back against a hard floor, the bar of light embedded in a metal ceiling. The floor beneath her shook and rattled, and her awareness expanded to a constant, gentle swaying through the entire room. She carefully started to pull herself to her feet, only for the entire room to lurch to the left, sending her rolling end to end. She finally stopped herself against something hard, the texture reminding her of the crabs the fishermen pedaled from the dockside markets.

She braced herself on the surface her hands had found, lifting herself upright, and face to face with the largest crab she’d ever seen. A shriek escaped her lips as she scrambled back, only to immediately bump into another behind her, forcing her to whirl about. The entire room around her was filled with the figures, their forms not quite right upon closer inspection. They weren’t actually crabs, but something close to it, large flat chitinous things, black instead of red. Instead of having a front and back like they should have, they seemed vaguely octagonal, legs running all along their radius, four holding them off the floor, four tented above their bodies in a sort of rest, eight gleaming jet lumps between each pair of legs seeming to stare like eyes. Sorana fought the urge to scream again as she desperately tried to shuffle herself into the middle of the clear aisle that ran the middle of the chamber.

As she watched, the forms sat perfectly still. Even as the chamber she was in rattled and swayed, they stayed stock still, limbs not even adjusting to manage their balance, causing them to rattle about like loose cutlery in a wagon. She stared at them another moment, then hesitantly reached out a hand and touched one of them. They were cool as stone, and she was suddenly struck by the impression she was in a room of statutes rather than living things.

She let out a shaky sigh and took further stock of the room around her. The walls were metal, incredibly, the walls composed of odd shutters, and longer than it was wide. At each narrow end sat a door with a window of glass purer than any she’d seen. Down one way, she could see another swaying chamber with more of the statues, towards the other, she found herself stared at the baleful eye of the Shaper gazing back at her. Before she could do more than startle, it turned and disappeared from view of the window.

She stood there for a moment, indecisive. In the end it was the simple absence of value that drove her towards the Shaper. He had spoken to her back in the temple, so he wasn’t likely to eat her or anything, and she didn’t feel like more rooms of statues would have anything of value for her. She made her way over to the door, and found the handle for it. She tugged and pulled, but it wasn’t latched like a simple wooden door would have been back home. Before she could struggle further, one of the statues reached out a leg and pressed a latch she had not noticed, causing the door to slide open even as she shrieked again. Seemingly ignoring her scream, the ‘statue’ simply resumed it’s earlier pose, the black ‘eyes’ studding its body seeming no more alive than they had before. All the same, she scurried away from the room full of suddenly gazing figures, quickly shutting the door behind her, and all but scampering through the one after it.

The next room was nothing like the one she’d formerly occupied. Rather than an empty box, this one reminded her of a smithy, both for all the inscrutable forms that littered the walls, but also for the heat that radiated through the room. In here now, she could see the Shaper. His form writhed and darted between various handles and other shapes littered about the room, grasping and twisting them with clear purpose, even if she couldn’t comprehend it.

“E-excuse me--” She began.

“Ah!” His eye flicked her, and he smiled, jagged and wide. “You’re up! Fantastic!” His attention immediately went back to the various mechanisms he manipulated, though he continued to speak. “I hope the Minders didn’t frighten you too much. They’re not made to socialize, you know. Still do their best to be helpful all the same.”

She swallowed, remembering the one that had opened the door for her. “Uhm, yes.”

“Good, good!” His head bobbed along in approval. “I’m sure you’re wondering, well, a lot of things! Could probably make a list!”

“I… Yes.” She glanced around. The room here had windows, and she had the distinct impression that they were moving forward very swiftly, but she couldn’t make out anything actually outside beyond dark shadows slipping past. “A list, yes.”

“Sorry about that,” he said. “This whole thing could probably be done more elegantly. Give you some ancient texts to discover, some ancient murals, slowly reveal the mysteries of the cosmos, all that.” There was suddenly a noisy screech from the space around them, and the Shaper’s movements became more frantic. “Ugh! Sadly we’re all a bit short on time here as it is, so to answer your questions in an unsatisfactory manner--” He turned and faced her for a moment. “You are in a place that does not matter, where there is nothing for you to contribute, solely for the reason of speaking to me.”

She stared at him a moment. “That’s it? You can’t just--”

Any further protest was cut off by a sharp rap against her forehead with a strange length of metal that was suddenly in his grasp. “Just did.” He turned back to the mechanisms of the room, that length of metal set to twisting some sort of spiraled fastener. “Now, let’s--”

She punched him in the eye. Interestingly, was more like punching a rock than an actual thing of flesh and blood. He recoiled all the same. “Ow! What was that for?!”

“For this!” She thrust her finger at her forehead, certain she was going to get a lump there now. “You don’t just smack a girl on the head!”

“That’s patently untrue at this point,” he said, shooting her a glare. So she punched him again. “Ow! Dammit!”

She had to wring her hand out this time, suppressing a hiss. “How can that possibly hurt? It’s like punching stone!”

“It hurts because it’s supposed to hurt!” He snarled, amorphous limbs rubbing over his eye. “Those are the rules.”

“The rules?!” She stared at him, struggling to comprehend. “Your eye hurts because of a rule?”

“Of course!” He waved the length of metal at her. “As a mortal who lives with them daily, you clearly don’t give it any thought, but its rules that give your life meaning. You don’t have to think about them, because they’re always there. If it rains, you get wet, if you step off a ledge, you fall. You naturally have those rules. I have to pick mine.”

“So your eye hurts just because you… decide it does?” She felt a headache coming on.

“Yes! Otherwise what’s the point?” He waved a transient limb at her. “Look at this right now! We’re engaging, interacting, because you hit me in the eye and it hurt! If it hadn’t hurt, I’d have ignored you, you’d probably choose to ignore me, and we’d all go wandering off our own ways as if we weren’t even here!” He paused for a moment. “Okay, perhaps a slight exaggeration but I hope you see the point. It’s like games. You can change the pieces, the players, the setting, but so long as you follow the rules, it’s still the same game.”

“I…” In a strange way, his words made sense. “You’re really just pretending it hurts if I hit you?”

“With all my heart.” His eye flicked down to gaze into his empty ‘chest.’ “Metaphorically.”

“I…” She rubbed her head now, slumping back against the door she’d come through. This was madness. “Why did you want to speak to me?”

“To get to know you,” he said, turning back to the machinery around them. “Though your fists have been more enlightening than your words.”

She shot his back a look. “My patience is a little thin at this point.”

“Didn’t see you punching Wreave,” he groused.

“She was straight with me,” She said. “Also she’s scarier.”

The Shaper snorted. “She is at that. At least that’s how she presents herself.”

“Oh?” She raised her eyebrow.

“Oh? Oh.” The Shaper shook his head. “No, I mean I’m actually scarier if I try to be. She’s absolutely as scary as she looks. Probably scarier. I’m just miles ahead if I try.”

“Really?” Her eyebrow climbed higher.

He turned to look at her, and for a moment all the levity was gone. “I am the Shaper. I made the place we stand, I made the temple in which we stood, and I made you as you exist now. And no, I am not going to explain that last statement, it goes deep enough into existentialism that we’ll be here all day. Suffice it to say, so far as the scope of your existence will ever go: what I will is as I will it to be.” He shrugged, grandeur gone in a flash. “But that’s no fun, so I will that I must sit here and have a chat with you and bonk you with wrenches rather than simply solving everything.”

Despite his words, Sorana suddenly felt far less comfortable with punching him. “That… makes sense?”

“Good!” He nodded, and was back to work. “So, tell me about yourself. Don’t bother with details like ‘I come from a long line of bakers.’ That’s all circumstantial, and Wreave told me it all already.”

“Oh, well--” She registered his words. “Wreave knows my parents are bakers? How?”

The Shaper shrugged. “Don’t ask me. Maybe she smelled flour on your clothes, maybe you talk in your sleep. Those eyes of hers aren’t for show: she’s observant. Painfully so.”

Sorana was silent a moment. The fact that Wreave knew even that much about her was unsettling. She could understand studying her in the forest, but if she’d figured out even that much about her life before then? How much did she know?

“I wouldn’t worry too much about it,” the Shaper said, interrupting her thoughts. “She’s… fundamentally beneficent, to put it one way.”

“She’s what?” Sorana asked.

“She means well in the end,” he said. “Admittedly, if ‘in the end’ you save eleven babies by throwing ten off a cliff…” He let the statement hang.

“That’s… not very comforting,” she said, hand rubbing her arm absently.

“You probably shouldn’t be too comfortable around her,” he said, before pausing a moment. “Or maybe you should be. Frankly, I don’t see you outplaying her. Whatever designs she has for you, I doubt you’ve got the ability to affect them.”

“That’s less comforting,” she said, shooting him a flat look.

“It’s true though,” he said. After a moment, he sighed. “Look, I don’t mean to alarm you. She does mean well, for everyone at heart. Some more than others, yes, but everyone if she can manage it. Sure, she’d kill ten folks to save eleven, but if she could save those eleven while only killing three, she’ll do that instead. She wants what’s best. She’s just… savagely pragmatic.”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“Why are you telling me all this?” Sorana asked. “Aren’t you working with her?”

“I’m doing her a favor,” he said. “We don’t typically work together, not truly. We don’t see eye to eye on enough. Our respective number of eyes not withstanding.” Glancing back, he saw the obvious question on her face and sighed. “I don’t believe in ‘using’ people. It offends me on principle. People are not soldiers, not bakers, not rocks and clay to be beaten into a convenient forms. They are people and should be people. That is the paradox of society, the promise that you can be more yourself if you agree to be less so.” He made a show of spitting though nothing actually came out. “Disgusting. A horrible amalgam of biology and circumstance, yet a necessary, or at least preferential, one for many.” He glanced back at her, and abruptly gave a self-conscious cough. “Sorry, I tend to rant on the matter. To get to my point, Wreave does not share my passionate loathing for the impositions of society. I would recoil at ‘making’ you do something that may go against your nature, and she would not.”

Sorana remembered what he’d said. “That was why you asked if I wanted to be here.”

He pointed at her with a limb and nodded. “Exactly! That was the condition of my assistance to Wreave, she needed to find someone who would be her agent naturally, go along with her plans of their own volition rather than with their family at knifepoint.”

Sorana turned that over in her mind a moment. “But then why am I here? Why do you have to talk to me? You already asked the question.”

“Oh, I knew you’re going along with her, for one reason or another,” he said. “But doesn’t help me help you. Like I said, I agreed to help Wreave with her scheme provided she found a willing participant. However, I still need to figure out what form my help will take in regards to you.”

“Me?” She blinked. “I’m just going to play the part of the hero, right? Bring back the attuner.” She reflected. “Or, whatever you made that’s supposed to pass for it.”

“Excuse me,” he sniffed. “Mine is better. That idiot trinket is a glorified genetic mixing pot. Mine is a true pottery wheel of the flesh.” He preened for a moment before continuing. “But yes, point is, I have to figure out how to attune you.”

“Wait, what?!” She nearly jumped at the assertion. “I-I can’t, I mean, its--” It was a holy relic! A thing shrouded in mystery and a lost age. She couldn’t just use it.

“Why not? You found it.” He shrugged. “Besides, how else are you going to avoid being just some lucky baker’s daughter? You need something to mark you apart.”

She found her legs carrying her back and forth in the cramped space, rapidly grappling with the implications. Even in Ivoth, the wildkin lived apart, a different cut, a cut above. Greater, stronger, even the lowest and meanest nothing short of beautiful. She couldn’t just be one. “I mean, I just, I don’t--”

The Shaper rolled his eye. “Well are you happy as you are now?”

The question stilled her feet. He was right. Wasn’t the whole reason she’d gone into the forest to be something more than a baker’s daughter? Just another middling face on the street? Even now, she knew she hardly had a face for statues. Who would ever commemorate Sorana, the lucky baker’s daughter. “What…” She swallowed. “Would I be like… a wolf girl?” She’d known an especially cute one on her street, with fox-red hair and ears all the boys wanted to play with, (especially as they’d gotten older, she reflected with a tinge of bitterness.)

The Shaper retched. “What did I just say? My attuner is not some crude mold for a mix and match slurry. No, you shall be a custom work! A masterpiece. Something truly unique.” He paused for a moment, then sighed. “Though I will use existing breeds as a guideline, as you can’t realistically be too phenomenal. To start with anyway.”

“Wait, what do you mean, ‘to start with?’” She asked.

“Oh, well, it’s actually quite interesting,” he said, eye focusing on a fascinating middle distance. “See, most wildkin are descendants of the actual attuned. They are born as they are going to be. But someone actually attuned to life is subject to all the possible enhancements attunement can provide as the connection develops. Now, of course, I’ll be simulating an analogue to avoid arousing suspicion, but--”

As her mind was trying to parse what he was saying, light flooded in through the windows. Outside, they emerged from what had been a tunnel, into a grand expanse of desert. Red garnet sand gleamed like blood in all directions, rolling dunes pierced by great stone towers that seemed to reach all the way into the sky. Certainly high enough that she couldn’t see the tops through the windows. One of the towers burned, and around it swarmed what looked like small birds. Whatever the shaper was saying was lost as she focused her gaze on the shapes, the long tails and leathery wings bringing to mind children’s tales, and limbless veterans stumping down the streets.

“The red tyrants!” She recoiled from the sight, pushing herself to the far wall of the chamber.

“Eh?” The Shaper stopped what he was saying and glanced out the window, before letting out a low mutter. “Ah hells, the kyn are already this far? Oh, this is a mess.”

“How are they here?” She pointed at them, as if the Shaper didn’t know what she was talking about. “We drove them into the sea! They have skulls! I’ve seen the skulls!”

“Uh,” the Shaper stared at her blankly for a moment, before comprehension dawned. “Oh, oooooh, they must have invaded you too. Okay, yeah, I can see how that might be traumatic.” He glanced outside, and gave a smile that could only be called sheepish. “Uh, yeah, there’s a whole continent of them. One of their expeditionary forces must have found you. I suppose you didn’t realize there were more?”

She reeled. The spider wolves she could deal with, hunters had come back with their hides. But the tyrants were a legend, just great skulls carried around on parade, the stories of their legions told to children at night. Armorclad hordes led by dagger-fanged killing machines, creatures smarter than any man and crueler than any beast. Horrors driven into the sea by the houses’ combined might, the only time they’d ever truly stood together. “There are more?” She felt her breaths coming quickly. “We have to tell someone, tell the houses! We--”

Another solid rap on her skull dazed her for a moment, and the Shaper’s glare silenced any rebuke. “Hey. It’s not a problem right now. We’re farther away than you know. Now, I wanted to do a whole production here, but clearly you’re in no state, and I evidently have work to do. So, sorry about this, but we’re gonna cut this short. Rest assured, I already know what form is perfect for you. I’ll take care of it.”

Before she could even gather the wits to ask what that meant, the Shaper hauled off with the wrench, and hit her so hard that, for an instant, she was granted the unique awareness of how it felt to have her skull caved in.

-=-=-=-

Something was very wrong.

Wreave had known deep down to her bones that Sphear would screw this up for her somehow. It was always something with him. Some missed element, some forgotten step, some extra embellishment the whole plan caught on and seized up. Of course, she’d planned for it, as much as one could plan for the unplanned.

The spider wolf she was examining had been neatly bisected in a manner that might have fit a sword, except for the way the bones were quite obviously sliced instead of broken. She picked up a rib that had been sheared clean through in a manner closer to cheese than bone. She placed the piece of bone back into the ribcage it had been cut from, the two faces joining seamlessly. Her fears confirmed, she dropped the bone and immediately started heading back to the temple.

She had prepared for early discovery, but not by a force of such competence. She had seen such corpses before, early in her rumor-mongering, back when the forest had been probed by those with the money to afford so-called Wielders. She’d seen all manner of things during those weeks, keeping a running log of all the peculiar deaths the wildlife suffered. Spider wolves with all their fangs broken, spider wolves cut so cleanly you could reassemble them, spider wolves explosively flash-boiled, and other oddities besides. If she was honest with herself, her little project had likely been the worst disaster to befall the local population in recorded history.

Eggs for omelets.

Even now, more distressed howls echoed through the forest. She’d been careful in her management of the wolves, leaving occupied areas all around her little safe zone to discourage any accidental participants. She’d also stockpiled blood from her own hunting for food. Spider wolves were notoriously fussy about scavenging, their habit of dissolving and drinking their prey meaning they couldn’t exactly eat around the rotten bits. Now, that very blood had proven useful to lure the remaining packs into the path of whatever was headed towards her enclave. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to be diverting them any, just slowing them.

She moved quickly, having skirted the incoming threat to examine its trail from behind. It kept her safe from detection but also meant that she’d have further to double back. That meant she had to move quickly. That meant she couldn’t be as careful as she wished.

She didn’t see the trip thread before she hit it. Her hind eyes caught the silk trap-door opening, and she smoothly ducked down as the first spider wolf lunged out. Spider wolf tactics had evolved into an odd combination of ambush and pursuit that read more like how someone might imagine a spider/wolf hybrid might hunt rather than a direct derivation of spider and wolf hunting tactics. In any event, she whipped the claws of her upper-arms into the spider wolf’s belly as it sailed overhead, gutting it from throat to pelvis in one smooth motion. As the twitching spider wolf splattered to the ground in front of her, she cut sideways to her original path. If the scout’s surprise attack failed, as it had in her case, the rest of the pack would already be setting trap webs directly in front of her for the scout to chase her into. That the scout was too dead to do so made no difference, the pack wouldn’t know that.

Satisfied she had cut far enough aside, she resumed her pace, trying to find the fastest she could go without missing lines. All the while the sounds of battle and carnage ground slowly through the forest. Judging by the change in position, the group didn’t have a firm direction they were going in, likely just the general ambiguity of the maps she’d made. That could buy her some time as they searched, but their course was close enough that such time might only be measured in hours, if not minutes.

She arrived just ahead of them, close enough that she could faintly make out the ringing of steel and the odd shout. Inside her safezone, she took took full strides, talons digging into the earth as she charged forward. It might leave notable tracks for them to find, but at this point it was a matter of damage control, not proper avoidance.

She barreled through the doors, almost jumping the unfamiliar figure inside before recognition clicked home. The figure couldn’t even be said to resemble Sorana in species, and it was only the manner of her body language that gave lie to her identity. Her sallow brown-on-brown coloration had been replaced with a deep and even caramel skin tone and cascading white hair. Slit-pupiled golden eyes stared at Wreave, a match for the gold-edged white of her long, serpentine lower half.

“Can you move like that?” Was all Wreave asked, transitioning her charge into Sorana into a charge past her, arriving at a corner behind the pillars where she had stashed her belongings. She snatched up the two items, a box containing a dynamo and an optical microphone, and a magnetic crossbow. Her belongings secured, she pushed in the eye of a crow that had been engraved next to her hiding place. The Shaper had pointed it out to her when he had built the place.

“Wreave? Uh, yes! I mean it’s strange but I--” she began, Wreave cutting her off as she rushed past her, the building already beginning to emit ominous groans and cracks.

“With me, we have to go now.” Her crossbow ready in her upper arms, and her box clutched by one of the lower, she was outside the door as the first stones began to crash to the floor.

There was someone outside. Wreave had just the briefest impression of their back, clad in gleaming armor of primrose pink that shone in the light of the broken canopy. “Everyone! You have to--”

How she planned to phrase the rest of her sentence would never be known. Wreave moved smoothly, throwing herself to the steps of the collapsing temple, immediately bracing the butt of the magnetic crossbow on the solid stone. With practiced ease, she flicked the power settings to maximum, one of her eye-tendrils moving into position behind the sight. Within the space of a half second, she fired the bolt at full power.

The air cracked with a sonic boom. The girl’s armor didn’t even dent, but Wreave had expected that. The impact flipped her easily end over end, her armor refusing to even ring from the impact, but that had never been Wreave’s design. Much more comforting was the crunch of bone, audible in the strange silence of her armor, as her head and neck were smashed inside her helmet at supersonic speeds. Her body flopped lifelessly as it landed, blood pouring out of her faceplate into a dark pool on the ground.

Wreave grabbed Sorana’s hand with her free limb even as she stood, stepping over the cracked stone step that had absorbed the crossbow’s recoil. “Come,” she said simply, tone of voice overriding the obvious shock on Sorana’s face. Fortunately, the girl was quick on her tail as Wreave led her away from the rapidly collapsing temple. Wreave would have liked to have left the building there for later use in fabricating Sorana’s story, but she had been left without any time to properly prepare the site. There was too much risk of inconsistencies, to much risk of her signs of habitation being found. It was time to cut losses and leave.

She still had plenty to work with.