Elach leaned forward, slightly confused at Y’talla’s outburst but still wanting to know more.

“How powerful is Sentence compared to someone like Glasrime? Or the living cities, or the tyrants?”

“Don’t even try comparing them. Sentence is close to the strength of an eternal. And not one of the weak ones.” Y’talla said, seemingly surprising herself with her words. “That Prisoner guy is closer to Glasrime and the others.”

“They were that powerful?” Elach asked incredulously. “How come I didn’t even feel it?”

“Because you didn’t have any Issi at that point.” Y’talla reminded him. “Just Flow’s initial bond, and even though that was enough to start pulling you to this side, it wasn’t enough for you to start sensing Issi.”

“That… makes perfect sense.” Elach reluctantly admitted, feeling Y’talla’s bizarre Issi lazily buzzing around his system like a swarm of smoked bees. “I think your Issi’s starting to work its way into my system. Not my container, though. It feels really weird.”

“Like a technique going backwards? From your pathways back into your container?” Y’talla asked excitedly.

“I don’t know what that means, but sure.” Elach flexed his fingers, feeling the Issi saturating him slowly being drawn into whatever his pathways were. “I think I’ve got enough to try and do… something.”

“If you can pull two of these pieces together, it should do something. This place doesn’t like being torn apart. It wants to be whole again.” Y’talla said confidently, standing up and offering Elach a hand. “I think whatever happened is starting to go away. My brain feels alone again.”

Elach accepted the hand, cool and slick like a stone, and let Y’talla help pull him to his feet. “Tell me if you feel it coming on again. I’ve got so many questions.”

“Okay! But I don’t think it’s happening again. Not sure why, but it feels like that part of my brain’s gone somewhere else. Still in your headspace, but not here. And not with Flow in the main place either. One of those other doors, maybe?” Y’talla nodded. “Yeah, that feels right.”

“Alright, find the next door, and maybe you get another bout of talkativeness.” Elach reached out and tried to anchor his chains to the nearest piece of debris, but his anchors didn’t feel right anymore. As if Y’talla mentioning that he didn’t use them had made them redundant. Instead, he simply envisioned the chains cemented inside of the chunk of floating earth. An intangible outline stretched between the shackle around his wrist and the debris, waiting to be filled with Issi and be made real. Elach let it dissipate and repeated it multiple times, getting a better feel for the formation timing until he could do it with barely any delay between thought and manifestation. He’d bring it down to nothing eventually, but that was good enough for now.

“Maybe we should stand back?” Y’talla suggested as Elach pushed Issi into his chains, feeling his container drop by a good thirty percent. Far more than normal. “You know, just in case.”

“Not much to stand back on.” Elach said, taking four steps back and finding himself at the end of the chunk of debris. He offered a hand to Y’talla. “Here. If I accidentally destroy this chunk, I’ll pull us to another.”

“I trust you.” Y’talla said, but clutched Elach’s hand like her life depended on it.

Elach smiled and focused his Issi on the chains wrapped around his other hand, pulling hard and watching as the other piece of debris sped towards his face at breakneck speed. “Right.” He said as he hung from his chain, Y’talla wrapped around his other arm as she whimpered in terror. “My Issi doesn’t work like that.”

“Please put us back down.” She whispered, scrambling up Elach’s left arm like a squirrel. She was absurdly light. “You can’t do it. Okay. You don’t have to prove it any more”

“Believe it or not, that wasn’t on purpose.” Elach set his sights back on the debris he’d pulled them from and set a chain right above it. Another quick pull, and they were back on solid ground. “So I can’t move anything but myself, and anchoring to something instead of a random point in space takes way more Issi. There’s gotta be a reason for that.”

“I don’t know anymore.” Y’talla said as she tentatively put a toe down on the ground, then quickly followed with the rest of her body. “I feel so dumb now.”

“Maybe it’s because I’m doing something wrong? Like, my perception’s all off or something.” Elach mused. “My anchors got built into my chains, so I can do everything in one motion instead of two separate ones. Maybe something changed about my pulls too.”

“I feel like I should have something to tell you that would help, but I don’t. This is so frustrating.” Y’talla grumbled. “It’s like I ran out of mind Issi, but I’m not a mind Issi manifestation.”

“What kind of manifestation are you?” Elach asked, half paying attention as he tried to do something else with his chains. They wouldn’t wrap all around the piece of debris, and he still couldn’t make them appear out of nowhere like he’d done in his last fight. “Do you know that?”

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

“Primal.” Y’talla said confidently. “I don’t know what primal Issi is, but I’m made of it. And nothing else.”

“As in primal spring? Like, raw Issi?”

“Untapped potential.” Y’talla agreed. “Whatever Issi is before it becomes… Issi. Kind of like the… opposite? Of transcendent Issi? No, that isn’t right.” Elach heard Y’talla shake her head and start pacing around in circles. “If transcendent Issi takes a natural Issi and turns it into something amazing, then primal Issi is like taking something amazing and turning it into Issi. No, that’s not right either.”

Y’talla grumbled to herself for a long while as Elach fumbled his way through trying to do something he had absolutely no idea how to. His chains always connected to his shackles, and they connected at one end to existence itself. Connecting to anything real took five times more Issi than if he connected to nothing for some reason, and it returned as much Issi back to him as if he’d connected to nothing. He had to be missing something here.

“Do you know how Issi is made, Elach?”

Elach turned his head and raised an eyebrow. “No?”

“I was hoping you knew.” Y’talla sighed. “Maybe that would help me figure out what I am.”

“Sorry. We didn’t really learn anything about Issi where I grew up. Maybe someone from the other side would be able to tell you, but I’m not that person.” Elach grunted as he tried to pull without moving, but he still rocketed up to the end point of his chain. “Damn it.”

“You were from the other side, weren’t you? What was it like? Could you still feel things? Or was everything all muted and colourless?” Y’talla asked innocently. “Is that why you didn’t push me away? Because you don’t know how to distrust someone?”

“I don’t… what?” Elach laughed. “I don’t trust everyone I meet.”

“That’s not what I said.”

“It’s not like I trusted everyone I met. I… Brynn… Prisoner… Revel…” Elach shut his mouth and looked down at his hands. “Sechen. Sentence. Hugil. Arvay. Metea/Irric. Rainshear. Even those people at the hotel. I… trusted them. No. I treated them the same way I did everyone else in my life. I know what trust is. But I’ve never used it.”

“What do you mean?” Y’talla asked, concern growing as Elach started shaking.

“I grew up living a lie. I know what things are, but I’ve never done them. Never used them. Rainshear betrayed us, and left us for dead, and I don’t feel a thing. I died so many times before I got to Prisoner’s glade. And I didn’t even get angry at those people fighting.” Elach laughed, a quick set of humourless barks that made Y’talla jump. “What’s wrong with me? I didn’t even question it when you appeared out of thin air and started talking to me. In my own freakin’ head. Just a day after I found out I’m slowly getting pulled to the same cell Prisoner’s being kept in. I can hate, I can love, hells, I can do anything. But I don’t even consider any of it.”

Elach tilted his head, staring directly into Y’talla with unblinking eyes. She shivered and stepped back, sparing glances over her shoulder to make sure she wasn’t going to fall. “Elach? Are you okay?”

“No, I don’t think I am. I think I’m broken.” Elach snapped his fingers, a pop of Issi coming off of them like he’d crushed a beetle. “But the worst kind of broken; one where you can’t find out what’s breaking you. I lived on the other side for… so long. My family’s there. My friends… well, my one friend is there. And now here I am, inside somewhere that’s apparently still my headspace, talking to something that has the same name as a dead ‘god’ and introspecting over stuff I never had to deal with over there.”

Elach was sure he heard Y’talla try to get a word in there, but it was like a dam had burst and all the worries he didn’t know he had were spilling out. “I bonded to something that’s as powerful as an eternal. I crossed the veil and learned things that made looking back at my life feel like watching a tragedy play out over and over again, but nobody ever found anything wrong with it. Now you come along, tell me I’m missing some seriously important parts to being a person with their own thoughts, motivations, and goals, and all I can think is what else am I missing? I’ve loved, but have I ever been in love? I’ve hated, but has that hate ever lasted longer than the moment the eternals needed it to? Can I even make my own connections now, or is that piece of me completely broken thanks to twenty two years of living under the eternals overwhelming and invisible power?”

“You’re scaring me.” Y’talla whispered.

“I’m scaring you?!” Elach laughed, this time a mad and uncontrolled frenzy that left him wheezing and clutching his stomach with one arm. “I’m freaking terrified over here! Flow’s the only real companion I have, and now I’m starting to think that’s only because they’ve drilled into my brain and forced out a little niche for themselves!”

“Do I even want to kill the eternals?!” Elach yelled, and the space around him shook like a leaf. “They’re the reason I’m in this mess, but the amount of hatred I can call up for them is about the same as a mosquito that bit me! How in the hells is that enough hatred for the beings that literally ruined my damn life?!”

“Elach.” Y’talla’s voice was quaking with fear, her body following suit. “What did you do?”

Elach tore his gaze from her and swiveled his head around, finding a mass of chains raging in the air around him. They came from one tear in reality and ended in another, moving so quickly that he could barely make out the amber-black links that marked them as his own. And they were not the tiny, weak things he manifested to pull himself to. These were giant, even off in the distance, tearing through debris and leaving ruin in their wake. He looked inwards in a panic, assuming he’d ravaged his container to do this, but he felt a different kind of emptiness. One he couldn’t quite place. “The transcendent Issi.”

“Stop it! Please!” Y’talla pleaded, grabbing onto Elach’s arm and shaking him. “Don’t hurt this place!”

Elach felt his blood run cold, images of the cultists that attacked Kayvee and the kids flashing through his mind for an indiscernible reason. The chains shattered into Issi, raining down through the void like countless shards of shimmering glass. His connection to Sentence shifted along with it, leaving a gaping hole in his container that was swiftly filled with… something else. His Issi was his own. Somehow. He looked down at Y’talla, tears running down her face, relief and recognition sharing a place in her eyes.

“I’m sorry.”