Euryphel watched silently as Ian told Clara Belvaire what he planned to do at a high level. He made impossibility sound so simple. Ultimately, he persuaded Clara to accept the procedure–depending on one’s definition of persuade.

Euryphel recognized that the power dynamics in the room were grossly imbalanced. Ian was an ascendant–an elevated lifeform nobody would ever expect to meet one-on-one, especially not a regular like Clara. Returned ascendants were all reclusive and enigmatic, revealing few secrets of Eternity.

Euryphel knew more about Eternity than most non-ascendants, possibly more than anyone else. He had heard Ian describe how it warped people. How it made them worse. He had also learned what kind of person returned to their home world, leaving behind Eternity. People who wanted to die. Maybe not immediately, but eventually.

But one bit of knowledge was universally known: returned ascendants were all extraordinarily powerful.

And what happens when you have extremely powerful people who have deep rooted trauma and a death wish? Euryphel asked himself. Not good things!

It was no surprise that Iastra was the strongest nation on their world. Most ascendants lived within Iastra’s Adder Spire, a mountain range that threatened to scrape the stars with its jagged, winding peaks. Were Eury the sovereign of Iastra, he would have made it his prerogative to either control the ascendants or force them out of his territory. Otherwise, they were a risk–a blade hanging over his head.

Euryphel didn’t kid himself. If he had a random person as strong as Ian living in his backyard, he would want them gone–or dead. Too much could go wrong if an ascendant decided to go on a murderous rampage, even if other ascendants intervened out of a sense of responsibility.

Iastra’s mighty practitioners and ingenious technologies were the inevitable result of such dangerous neighbors.

Euryphel figured Clara knew more than most about ascendants after being in an assembly room with Achemiss’s projection. Even so, she wasn’t familiar with them. She wasn’t immune to their dark charisma. To their undeniable confidence.

Which brought Euryphel back to the question of power dynamics. When an ascendant told you that they would be performing a procedure, you didn’t have an option to say no. Not really.

This situation wasn’t an exception. Clara knew she couldn’t deny the special oath, not after everything she’d learned. Ian was kind enough to humor her and explain what he intended to do, but that’s all it was–a kindness paid upon someone who might endure great pain and serve an important, dangerous role as an inside agent.

“Are you ready for me to begin?” Ian asked. His eyes shined iridescent. In the dim light cast by the lamp in the corner of the room–the overhead lighting was off–his features were even more striking than usual, the shadow of his jaw accentuated, his eyebrows ebony arches beneath the glowing ember crown.

Euryphel thought that Ian looked striking in his Ancient Black get-up–namely his formal armored suit from Cayeun Suncloud and Maria’s full regalia–but he thought that seeing Ian in casual clothes with the crown of embers was… he didn’t even know how to describe it. Perhaps scary, in a good way. Ancient Black’s attire was part of a façade, meant to give off the impression of power. Ian’s current clothes–a gray linen shirt and black jeans–revealed a side of him that lacked embellishment. And combined with the fact that he wasn’t transformed by the Blade of Revelation, his aura of authority seemed more real. More his.

It made Euryphel consider himself and his own path to power over the last ten years. He remembered feeling like an imposter in the beginning, wearing the clothes and hair ornament of a Prime, but lacking the experience and wisdom to rule as his parents had. His high Regret affinity had allowed him to compose a peerless façade of power, one only broken occasionally, like on calls with Maria Sezakuin.

Facades were funny things, Euryphel thought. People grew into them. He had grown into his constructed persona, just as Ian had grown into his. When he met Ian, the man was oddly experienced in some ways and naïve in others. He had been a powerful loose cannon, one without guardrails.

I really should’ve been more terrified about letting him near me, Euryphel mused. And now–

His thoughts were cut off as Clara nodded, cueing Ian to begin procedure. The necromancer suspended Clara in front of him as though setting her on an invisible operating table. The woman was eerily still, frozen by Ian’s practice.

“It’s best for the operation if you stay conscious,” Ian said calmly as he slid a hand under her blouse. “I’ve temporarily removed your ability to feel sensation from below the neck and I’ve frozen all your muscles in place. You don’t need to do anything. You can’t.”

The women’s face pointed toward the ceiling, so she couldn’t see Ian as he worked. All she had was his voice.

“You’re wondering why I’m keeping you awake–and why I said that the experiment will be painful,” Ian said, this time speaking mentally to both of them. “It won’t be pain of the physical body, but pain of the soul. Almost like what you can feel from an oath.”

Ian adopted an expression of intense concentration, his eyes narrowing. Then, he used his other hand to withdraw a few small apples from his void storage, hovering them in the air with his practice. He pinched each of the fruits in what looked like a bizarre pantomime, pulling his hand to the ember crown.

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Euryphel had never seen him activate the crown before. As Ian’s empty fingers reached the crown, one of its embers changed color. He repeated this until each ember assumed vibrant gemstone hues. Suddenly, the entire crown changed. The embers rotated rapidly over Ian’s head, then condensed into one tongue of black flame. Euryphel had never seen a fire so black, not even from the fire elementalist entertainers who specialized in colored flames for yearly celebrations.

And that black flame is still Maria, somehow? It was hard to wrap his mind around the Eldemari’s regalia form.

Ian blinked his eyes and hummed to himself as he added his second hand to Clara’s torso, pressing into her back. For a while, nothing happened. Ian’s hand movements, if there were any, were largely masked by Clara’s shirt. At some point in the experiment, Ian willed another apple forward, though he didn’t touch it with his hands before sending it to the floor in a pile with the other expended apples.

“There are souls in the apples, Eury,” Ian mentally said, as though only now realizing how weird his actions must seem to an outsider.

Euryphel raised an eyebrow, giving Ian an expression that said, You really think I didn’t already figure that out?

Ian just gave him a small smile back.

A few more minutes passed. Then, Ian slid both hands from the woman, revealing fingers pinched together, as though to hold onto a fishing line.

“I bound your soul together with a disembodied soul–which you can think of as a blank slate,” Ian thought. “As I told you before, doing that alone shouldn’t have any adverse effects. The two souls are barely connected. If I walked away now, the natural repulsive force between them would undo the small binding.

“I need to make the connection permanent. That’s the part that might hurt. And that, unfortunately, is what I’m going to start doing now.”

Clara’s entire body was frozen, even her eyes, revealing no emotion. Euryphel wondered what Ian sensed with his Remorse. Did he taste her terror? Or was she calmly resigned to her fate?

The ascendant’s countenance was as emotionless as Clara’s, his hands stretched slightly in front of him, still as glass.

“Do you want me to try and show you what I see?” Ian asked, not looking in Euryphel’s direction.

Euryphel mouthed, “You’re asking me?” and pointed to himself. He didn’t strictly need to be quiet when Clara was in the room, but he thought it a respectful courtesy. Just because he and Ian were powerful didn’t mean they needed to be inconsiderate in such a small, unimportant way. Besides–he knew Ian’s Beginning affinity would make short work of reading lips.

“Of course.”

Eury felt warmth in his chest, then nodded his assent.

He was immediately assaulted by a bizarre, overwhelming rush of sensations. This was a veritable mental assault. Ian was definitely using ascendant energy to bridge the gap of his own ineptitude.

“I know it’s disorienting,” Ian thought, as though anticipating Euryphel’s complaints. “I’m cheating by using ascendant energy. This kind of shortcut sucks for you, but it’s useful.”

Euryphel pressed his fingers to the space between his eyebrows, grimacing, but he didn’t complain. He waited for his mind to adjust to Ian’s shared senses.

Despite the initial disorientation, things quickly came into focus. Through Ian’s eyes, Euryphel saw a round, cyan watery orb–the disembodied soul–connected to the woman’s body, not that it looked much like a body. It was weird–white with vitality and entrenched with what had to be the woman’s soul. It was vibrant orange and bore a strong resemblance to a coral reef.

Euryphel was glad he didn’t see the world like this. He liked to see people as people, not vitality sacks and soul wombs.

Countless small, ultrathin tendrils extended from Ian and caressed the point where the two souls joined, thrumming and coiling around them. They pushed and pulled, twirling the souls together, like braiding a clumsy tapestry.

Then, without warning, the tips of the ethereal tendrils flattened like scalpel heads. The caressing gentleness remained, but instead of kneading the souls together, they sliced delicate spirals off of them. Then more of Ian’s energy tendrils appeared–these with blunted tips–to weave the spirals together.

It looked difficult–the soul strands clung to each other, almost melting into one another before Ian could intervene. But his ethereal energy strands were able to insulate them, allowing him to weave them tightly together.

Euryphel noticed Ian’s weaving becoming faster as he went. Not frantic, but urgent.

It had to be because of Clara. Ian was a masochist­–Euryphel bet that he forced himself to sense the woman’s pain as he worked on her. Giving himself consequences would make him feel better about what he was doing, serving as a twisted form of proof that he wasn’t just callously experimenting on someone who couldn’t resist him.

After minutes of weaving, Ian had a beautiful bi-color tapestry braid bridging the two souls with his ethereal energy serving as connective insulation between them.

Ian took in a deep breath… and his ethereal energy retracted.

The sunset orange of Clara’s soul melted into the tropical blue of the disembodied soul.

Then Ian pulled, tugging the disembodied soul, stretching out its connection. He stared at it for a moment. Then, suddenly, Clara gasped, freed from Ian’s influence. Tears began streaming down her cheeks.

Euryphel still saw through Ian’s eyes. The necromancer squeezed the disembodied soul with his hand, digging his fingers into it. He gazed at it like he was taking in the secrets of the universe.

Soon after, he cut off the sensory sharing. The world became as it was. Less strange–and perhaps a bit less beautiful.

“It’s done,” Ian said softly. “I’ve bound you with a necromantic oath.”

“I don’t feel like I’m bound by a new oath,” Clara said. She wiped at her eyes, her teeth clenched and knuckles white.

She looked like a victim.

“That’s because the oath I gave you is more than an oath. It’s flexible–whatever I need it to be. I can control it through the disembodied soul. I haven’t even defined what it does yet.”

“Then how do you know it works?” Clara asked.

“Because,” Ian answered, “you’re not the first person I’ve tested this on.” He turned to Euryphel. “It’s time to leave. I’ll call you when it’s convenient.”

The transmission artifact cut out, depositing Euryphel back into his real body.

He sat up on his divan, the sun room’s eternally sunny window bathing his face in golden light. He ran a hand through his hair.

I need coffee.