“I’m not…” Elach took a step back, looking down at his hands as panic threatened to overtake him. “I’m not a tyrant. I’m not taking anything from anybody. I-I’m a good person.”

Y’talla’s eyes shone with pride, her smile striking directly at Elach’s heart. She was… enjoying this. “No, you are taking. What you aren’t doing is demanding. Heck, you aren’t even asking. Those blades are throwing their Issi at you, and you still don’t get it.”

“Don’t get what?” Elach asked worriedly. His hands were stained with black, the lines reaching towards his chains as he tried to scrub himself clean. He couldn’t be a tyrant. He just couldn’t be.

Flow landed on Elach’s shoulder, then nuzzled into where his neck met his collarbone. They sang of a great warrior who took the hopes and dreams of everyone on their shoulders, falling enemy after enemy with the immense power they had been afforded. But the warrior couldn’t do everything alone, and he fell under the crushing weight of expectation.

Y’talla began singing along, a breathy ethereal voice that sang in a language Elach knew no longer existed. The warrior shed his armor and his cloak, lessening the impossible weight as two comrades joined his fight. He’d given them the strength to exist from his vast well of Issi, and his power didn’t lessen. It grew. The two comrades grew alongside the warrior, and the warrior drew from their strength to add more to the legion.

No more voices joined in, but Elach felt the blades attempting to add their chittering noise to the song. A promise that they would aid the warrior whenever he brought them enough significance to manifest, and in turn, they would give the warrior their everything. It was no longer quite as symbolic, but Elach understood nevertheless.

A tyrant could consume a potential living city, or it could nurture it into being. That was Vault; the true manifestation of the Gilded Night, shown falsely as the daughter of the Tyrant. There was a good chance Hoalt himself didn’t realize what he’d done, and as Elach looked down to Y’talla, he realized that he hadn’t realized what he’d done either.

“You’re the manifestation of a primal spring.” He whispered. Y’talla was bouncing on her feet in elation, excitedly squealing as she gripped him tightly in a hug. “But… which spring? This one, or the one back near my home?”

“Both.” Y’talla said, her words muffled by Elach’s shirt and chest. “There are only ever three springs on the world piece, and if one is destroyed, it regenerates wherever it thinks is safe enough. So that’s me; the spring that kept getting killed before it could make, well, me.”

“So we were putting you back together as much as the spring.” Elach said with a nod, gripping Y’talla tightly as her happy tears soaked his shirt. Flow leaned down and gently ran their beak through Y’talla’s hair, making coo-ing noises as they did. “Well, we’re here for you now. We’ll make sure the real primal spring stays safe.”

Y’talla shook her head. “It’s already dying. I already died. This… this is the real primal spring now. We just have to coax my Issi here with more temptations like the blades. Roxu will help a whole lot, and the wisplings growing up will make a huge difference, but it’s all up to you, Elach. It’s all up to the tyrant of the primal spring.”

----------------------------------------

“So I’m a tyrant.”

Shar coughed up the water she was drinking down from the tree Elach was standing under. “Did you wait for me to take a drink to say that?” She asked between sputtering coughs.

“Maybe.” Elach shrugged. “Is that what you didn’t want Roxu saying last night?”

“Maybe.” Shar said, dropping down next to Elach with barely any impact. She gazed at him with worry, gently pressing her fingers to one of his arms with obvious concern. “Are you alright? I know you have a problem with tyrants taking what isn’t theirs to take, and finding out that you’re starting to become one must be taking a toll on your mind.”

Elach looked up at the sky and blew out a long breath. “I’m surprisingly fine.” He admitted. “Maybe I won’t be in a little bit, but for now, I’m not taking anything from Y’talla or Flow that they aren’t openly giving me. And what I took from Lighthome I don’t regret at all. Those people were already dead, and Nevvi’s wispling is safe in my headspace.”

Shar didn’t seem convinced, but she nodded anyway. “If you ever need to talk to someone who isn’t a part of all that,” She gestured at Elach, “I’m here for you. And I’ve been thinking… maybe we shouldn’t go our separate ways after we bring Prisoner to Hoalt.”

Elach blinked in surprise then narrowed his eyes, turning to give Shar his full attention. Her face under her eyes was a shade lighter than usual, and she was nervously tapping her foot on the ground with her arms crossed. “You want me to stay here?”

“Well, that’s one possibility, but I could also go with you.” Shar offered, reaching up to brush a strand of mist over her shoulder. Elach hadn’t realized it while it was happening, but her scarf had slowly morphed into a combination of scarf and hair. Almost as if Shar was trying to look her best for him. “If Prisoner doesn’t mind me tagging along, of course.” She quickly added. “I spent so much time on that floor that I didn’t really get to have a life of my own, and I want to keep travelling with you. I like being with you.”

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The sounds of the forest were suddenly a little quieter as Elach focused in on Shar. She looked about as bashful as he expected she could, and he was having a difficult time taking her proposal as anything but romantic in nature.

“Before we do anything, tell me if I’m misinterpreting anything. You, one of Hoalt’s elite, want to come with me, one of nobody’s elite. And from the way you’re blushing and fidgeting, it doesn’t seem like you just want to be friends.” He said, and Shar’s blush only deepened. “Now, you’re a beautiful manifestation, and I’m, well, me. So you understand why I might be a little suspicious about your offer.”

Shar nodded a little too vigorously. “You’re worried I’m using you to get to Prisoner.”

“I am.” Elach confirmed.

“Well, I can’t give you anything but my word right now, but I’ll show you that your worries are unfounded. And, um, well, yes.” Shar mumbled while blushing furiously. “I don’t want to just be friends. If you’re, um, interested. In me. Like that.”

“Honestly, I never even thought about it.” Elach admitted. But now that he was thinking about it, he had been attracted to at least something in Shar. He enjoyed just being around her, and she was extremely easy to talk to. Hells, his annoyance at not being trusted stemmed from a desire to get closer to her.

“Now that you are thinking of it though?” Shar asked hopefully.

“I think we should deal with Lighthome before I tell you that.” Elach chuckled, rubbing the back of his head as he felt his face growing hot. “I do like you, Shar, I’m just not sure if being more than friends is what I’m looking for.”

“That’s completely understandable.” Shar said with a nod. “I just wanted to put the option out there so you know how I feel. I don’t have many friends, and especially not ones that I wouldn’t get the least bit tired of after continuous weeks of being together.”

Elach thought about bringing up the secrets she was still keeping from him, but kept his mouth shut. Shar had been slowly sprinkling answers as she saw fit, and Elach was surprised to realize he was okay with that. He would tell Shar about Flow’s true nature eventually if she stayed with him, and he figured she was thinking the exact same thing about her own secrets. It would be more than hypocritical to bring it up now.

“You’re sure you want to be with a budding tyrant like me?” Elach sarcastically asked.

That brought Shar more pause than he’d expected. Eventually, though, she slowly nodded. “I’m a wisp manifestation; we’re pretty much ageless from the beginning, so there’s no real worry about me dying of old age while you turn immortal. And tyrants aren’t something intrinsically wrong, just… selfish. They don’t take life, just the potential of life. And I’ve taken enough lives that I’m not going to whine over a life that hasn’t even started yet.”

Another nod, this time with determination. “Hoalt started off terrible, but now grants sanctuary to people on this side of the veil that they can’t get anywhere else. They don’t all have to be warriors, or assassins, or even wield Issi. He might be a tyrant, but he’s also a kind and generous ruler. Maybe I can help you get to the ‘kind and generous’ part without all the atrocities that led Hoalt to it.”

“I don’t plan on committing any atrocities.” Elach said indignantly. “I’m not like Hoalt.”

“Destroying Lighthome isn’t an atrocity? Because that seems like an atrocity to me.” Shar teased, tossing Elach her water bottle. “But I’ll take some of the blame for this one, as will Roxu and Y’talla. Flow’s the only innocent one, and even then they’re willingly turning a blind eye.”

Elach pulled the water bottle into his headspace and gestured for Shar to take the lead. The mood shifted to deadly sharp and serious as she stepped out of the forest, carrying the remaining wisplings in a lantern Elach had already reinforced. Elach hoped what had happened yesterday was already forgotten among Lighthome, or that it had been overshadowed by Ghravv’s spawn’s reappearance.

Shar looked around in confusion at the guard post, now completely shrouded in sticky shadows. A cloud of vicious shards appeared around her hand as she sliced down through them, revealing a grisly scene that had dried out long ago.

“That’s not good.” She muttered, signaling for Elach to join her. “The spider isn’t just dead; it’s completely dismembered. Who would take the time to pluck each eye and leg from the creature?” Her hands traced over the spider, then paused when her finger hit a single piece of raised chitin. “No, that’s not right. This was a punishment.”

She stood and vaulted over the spider’s corpse, scanning the small post with one hand on her hip and the other pressed to where her mouth would be. “We’ve killed enough bugs to know that lightblood is a quickly evaporating liquid. But absolutely nothing around here has any sort of stains or water damage. Combine that with a single puncture wound, and I suspect that this spider was drained of its lightblood before they were dismembered.”

Elach stayed outside the guard post, his Issi senses reaching out to make sure they weren’t about to be ambushed. He agreed with Shar’s general idea, but as he watched the sticky shadows start to knit back together, he couldn’t explain how the two acts fit together.

“Why would someone drain all of the spider’s light, then dismember it, and then board this post up with sticky shadows?” He mused, ripping a handful of the shadows from the ceiling and throwing them to the ground. “Maybe a disgruntled bug found the spider here and took revenge on its corpse. But then that doesn’t explain the shadows, does it?”

Shar stood and brushed off her knees, kicking a blackened metal lever to start the entryway’s rumbling exposure. “I’d guess that they dismembered it to stop what happened to Occril from happening here. The shadows could be trying to knit the spider back together, but something’s preventing them from taking hold. Or we could be overthinking this completely, and it was just attacked and brutalized.”

Elach stepped to the side for Shar to jump out of the guard post, then walked in silence up to the revealing maw of the darkened tunnel. It was pitch-black this time, not the slightest bit of luminance escaping from the depths. Something had changed.

He raised an eyebrow at Shar and received a shake of her head in response. Even if Lighthome had changed, the plan hadn’t.