Maria’s cold arms embrace me from behind. What happened?

Limp and drained, I take a moment to collect my thoughts. Since Ash separated us, we’ve been speaking mostly over the lich bond. It wasn’t something consciously decided, but a natural product of broken trust. Ash is like a prison warden, with Maria and I under his constant watch. Speaking over the lich bond is the only method of private communication.

I spoke to Eury, I reply simply. I inhale the taste of the lake and the scent of wet soil. We’re no longer in the rift. It’s the first time since our training started that Ash brought us back to the plane’s surface.

I presumed you contacted him, but you were out of sorts while using the transmission artifact. Did he say or do something unexpected?

I suppress a blush of shame. No, it was nothing like that. I ended up venting to him like a child.

About what?

I click my tongue. Everything–this whole, tangled mess of Achemiss and the Infinity loop and Ash.

She pulls me in tighter. I feel her lips on the back of my head. Do you feel better now? There’s still time to call Germaine if you need someone else to talk to. Who knows when we’ll be given another opportunity?

Y’jeni, Germaine is the last person I want to talk to when I’m raw like this. Knowing that I’m suffering will only make her worry.

Or you could talk to Soolemar, Maria suggests.

It’s fine, I say, cutting off the conversation. It’s your turn. Call Kaiwen or whoever else is important.

She holds me without saying anything or reaching for the transmission artifact. I grab her hands and gently close them around the artifact’s length. We don’t have much time, I remind her. Ash didn’t say how long the break would be. Go.

Still wrapped around me, her body goes limp. I gently lower her to the ground and stand up, stretching. I sense Ash fifty feet away in a copse of trees, the man keeping his distance as a small courtesy.

I wish I could use my Remorse affinity to sense his emotions, but I can’t call the ability forth. It’s like trying to move your legs when your spine is severed. You know how it feels to move–the instinct is right. But there’s a disconnect.

That disconnect is my poor affinity. Ash doesn’t have a potentioreader, but he has another device–a wristband that changes color when I practice. This one’s attuned to Remorse. When I’m in the Remorse attuned nethereal confluence, I’m able to get the color up from its baseline to a burnt orange. Ash says that means my affinity scrapes the 22% mark with the nethereal energy boost.

“You have four years,” he had told me, back when my Remorse affinity blossomed. “Possibly more, but to be safe, four. Four years to stabilize this affinity and unlock a third.”

I’d thought that if I spent years here gaining strength, that wouldn’t be a bad thing. I was planning to do training in dilated planes with Karanos anyway. But...years in this little plane, with only Ash and Maria as company, forced to practice my affinity with minimal breaks?

Ash is suddenly by my side, having crossed the distance between us in a fraction of a second. “What are you thinking about?”

“Time,” I reply honestly, then paralyze my facial muscles. Ash is too good at reading faces–too good at reading me.

“That’s a big subject.”

I don’t reply.

“Do you understand why we must go fast?” Ash asks.

I give him a slight nod. “It’s fast now or slow later.”

“Five years, versus thousands of years,” Ash asserts, “and only that little because you’re unlocking a second affinity, not a third. And only because your teacher knows the trick of using rifts.”

“Am I supposed to keep that as a secret?”

“No, tell whoever you like. Good luck to those who intend to find a rift with nethereal and or ethereal energy. As I explained earlier, they’re hard to come by in Eternity.”

I pause, suddenly realizing something. “But not down in the mortal worlds below. Rifts are stable there. If ascendants wanted to, they could go down and go into the rifts for the affinity confluences...”

If that were true, Achemiss would never advocate for the destruction of our home world, would he? Why would he cut himself off from stable rifts if they’re so useful?

Ash rubs his arms and beady red eyes pop up out of the armor along his biceps, peering at me defiantly. “I can guess where your mind is going, but you’re off base. For people who aren’t in the accelerated advancement period after awakening an affinity, even developing a second affinity takes a long time. This implies that to make use of rifts on mortal worlds, an ascendant would need to come down for an extended period of time.

“Not only would they place themselves at risk of being killed by others,” Ash says lightly, “but they risk dying of old age. They can’t stay in the mortal world forever without Eternity sustaining their body.”

“You couldn’t keep yourself alive indefinitely?” I ask, raising an eyebrow. I find it hard to believe a Life practitioner of his caliber would fail.

“There is, ultimately, always a limit,” he says, expression somber. “Our strength just determines when. Do you think I’d be able to stay alive for millions of years outside of Eternity? Most mortal worlds self-destruct every few hundred or thousand years, and even an ascendant can die in a world bathed in the flames of violence.”

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“What about for a lich, like Maria, though? She’s not even alive.”

He smiles, revealing his fangs. “Nothing ever lasts forever. But you’re missing a key point, Ian. Most ascendants have no desire to master every affinity. They’re content to live out their days as they are, secure in their power. There’s very little they can’t do.” He blinks. “But simply subsisting goes against the will of Eternity.”

I swallow. “Eternity rewards those who dare to do the impossible.”

Ash taps on one of the small eyes jutting from his armor, causing it to squint shut. “Never lose sight of that unless you’re ready to disappear from the cosmos.”

—

“It’s a shame you got Remorse first,” Ash comments. He crouches in front of me. “Time was running out, so any affinity was better than none, but Beginning would have assisted in further efforts to develop other affinities. I also am ill equipped to help you with an affinity I lack.”

“We can’t always get what we want.” Eyes closed, legs crossed in front of me, I try to feel the nethereal energy flows while reading Ash’s emotions. His mental defenses are lowered so I can practice, but reading him is still almost impossible. I’ve asked to practice with Maria, but Ash refuses on the grounds that Maria needs to focus on her own curriculum.

There’s something I’ve wondered for a while, but haven’t been willing to ask. In my frustration it tumbles from my mouth. “Is it possible you don’t have strong emotions?”

For the first time today, I sense something from Ash in response to those words. The sensation is most similar to my sense of smell, almost like I can smell or taste people’s exuded emotions. That’s obviously not how skilled Remorse practitioners operate–there’s no way they can smell people’s thoughts or experiences. Moreover, the way Crystal describes skimming minds is acutely visual in nature. This all suggests that what I’m sensing is more primitive, formless. Still, I’ll take what I can get for now.

“Did you feel something just now?” he asks, a smile playing at the corners of his lips.

I open my eyes. “It’s like when you smell something you’ve encountered before, but can’t put a name to it. Your emotion felt familiar but I don’t know what it was, and it was gone in an instant.”

Ash snorts. “Most emotions don’t have specific names. Ask people how they feel and most of the time, they’re just fine. Perhaps they’re tired, or frustrated, or hopeful. But almost never are they just one thing.” He pauses. “Perhaps for the sake of your training, I should try to exude certain emotions more concretely.”

Having a Remorse affinity makes my own emotions more tangible, harder to ignore. I recognize my own intense apprehension. But what if emotions are more than just hard to ignore? What if I can grab onto that apprehension and send it away?

What if I can thrust it upon Ash?

Before I can test the idea, Ash’s form begins to ripple before my eyes, like there’s a haze of heat around him. He’s crouching less than two feet away and the temperature is constant, so I don’t think he’s using his Sun affinity.

Then the waves of heat reach me and I almost gasp. I feel rage like I’ve never felt before. The rage is at once within and without me. It’s dominating my own emotions, making me angry, and also acting upon me. Every memory of Mother’s verbal abuse rushes to the forefront of my mind. It’s a visceral, debilitating assault that catches me off guard. Memories I’d thought I’d suppressed of the darkest of times–those first few years in Father’s absence, when Mother drowned in brokenness–circle like sharks, biting into my psyche.

“Stop,” I call out hoarsely. The assault is comparable to when Cayeun Suncloud toyed with my memories and emotions during the celebration of mirrors. But Suncloud isn’t here, and Ash doesn’t have a Remorse affinity, so why am I so affected?

A dark suspicion enters my mind. What if Remorse is a double-edged sword, and I can be as affected by what I sense as others are affected by me?

I feel sick as I think about being a Remorse practitioner on a battlefield. To stay sane during the Ho’ostar Peninsula war, I hardened my emotions, justifying violence to myself. But even then, I often couldn’t bring myself to kill people in the cold blood, sending armies of constructs to do it for me.

But what if you can’t ignore the emotions of the terrified and the damned, those who lay in the throes of death? In that case, there’s no quarter for denial. You’ll know exactly what you’re doing. You’ll be able to smell people’s fear and taste their despair.

Ash’s rage increases in intensity, then abruptly dissipates. Relief buoys over my body, seeping into the air.

“So, what do you think?” Ash asks innocently.

I stare at him in confusion. “What?”

“I conducted an experiment,” he explains, smiling, “to test your hypothesis that I lack strong emotions. What’s your verdict?”

My verdict, really?

“Where did that come from?” I ask, sidestepping his question. “All that anger. It had to have come from somewhere.”

“Not so,” he says. “I’m not a Remorse practitioner, but I have a general understanding of how the practice works. Do you think Remorse practitioners genuinely feel everything they force on others? No. They construct emotions like artists painting portraits and landscapes, or actors subsuming the identity of myriad characters. You can try to make your metaphorical emotional paintings subtle, realistic–lifelike. Or, you can make them fantastical and bizarre, impressionistic. But the emotion doesn’t have to be real. It just has to feel real. Do you understand?”

The fear from before stews with the anger of the present, forming tight coils of emotion around me. Rather than almost smelling them, like before, I feel them as a static charge across my skin. I wonder if it’s the nethereal confluence that’s giving them a physical sensation. “What’s your point, that Remorse practitioners should take acting classes?”

“Don’t be facetious,” Ash says. “From the way you’re looking at me, I think you have enough organic emotion to play with. Let’s see how much you can make me feel.”

The static shifts. I see the faintest outline of red anger and frustration arcing through the air, crackling soundlessly around Ash, though not touching him. It flashes in and out of existence, grounding itself on my body, surging back and forth, looking for an outlet.

Ash often states the importance of visualization techniques. Though his methods are dubious, I can’t ignore his advice.

I’m the source of the storm, I think, envisioning myself as a black storm cloud crackling with electricity. The red-tinged arcs grow in intensity, becoming more tangible. But I feel the energy also taint my psyche as it passes through, causing my muscles to tense and nostrils to flare. The lightning soon flows in time with my breath–out, it expels the rage around Ash, still not touching him. In, it pulls a fraction of that rage back in, forming a feedback loop that compounds my emotions.

This isn’t sustainable. If I keep cycling the emotional energy, it’s going to overwhelm me.

When I next exhale, I direct the charges to enter Ash. It’s easier than I expect–they obey my intentions. Ash grunts, stiffens, then blinks rapidly. I feel an odd elation in my chest, along with a cold hollowness, like I’ve spent a limited resource that needs to be replenished.

“That...” Ash trails off. He coughs once. “That was rather potent. You wound me.” His last words are flippant, but that doesn’t dampen the mix of shock and elation that surrounds me. This is the first time he’s praised my efforts at developing this affinity.

“How did that feel?” I ask.

“Not great,” he replies. “But you’re going to do it again.”

Ash is harder to hate when he puts himself through the wringer on my behalf, and I find myself relishing the prospect of paying some of the abuse forward. I grin at him. “Alright. No take backs.”

His eyes glint and he laughs uproariously. “No remorse.”