The sorcerer Eames spat at the sorceress and began to move towards her. "It's not a tower, it's The Spire."

Just as he finished speaking, Auden's ethereal fangs appeared around the woman and closed.

The ground under the sorceress's feet became illuminated from her yellow aura and she jumped, a gale wind carrying her into the air.

The fangs snapped closed onto empty air.

The yellow aura rose up the sorceress's muscled calves in a neat line before disappearing into her dress. They reappeared under the straps on her shoulders and fanned out, leaving her body and stretching into the air behind her where they fell like an unraveled curtain. I understood a moment before her working manifested fully what she was doing.

Wings of manifested aura, identical to those of the flurry of birds she had sent towards her enemy in every manner but their size, formed off her back and held her aloft.

"That's hardly fair!" The sorcerer yelled, dashing in a throwing a spinning disk of his own gray aura up at the sky bound sorceress.

She answered in turn by beating her wings down at him. They separated, sending down bolts of her yellow aura in a hyper focused spread of bolts. The sorcerer's projectile was caught by the bolts instantly and sent back to the ground.

Eames bent and placed his hand on the ground before snapping back up and raising a gray wall in front of himself and hunkering down behind it. The bolts showered down around him and stuck into his wall when they struck it.

The sorceress glided to the ground, wingless and as if she weighed no more than a feather, and landed precisely where she had jumped from. "Oh my," She smiled wildly. "It's been too long since I've gotten to do that." She spread her bare feet across the ground and traced a yellow arc in the dirt in front of her with a pointed toe.

Just as the rain of aura ended, Eames dropped his wall and took a step toward his enemy.

The sorceress extended her arc into a full circle around herself and spun into a momentous kick. Violent wind, like the precursor to a storm, erupted from the apex of her kick and battered into the sorcerer. He braced himself and though he managed to keep his footing for a moment, the gust was too strong and he was sent tumbling backwards.

"Oops, sorry! I didn't mean to blow you away like that." The sorceress laughed.

Eames struggled to his feet and did something that I didn't expect. The sorcerer, with a single pointed glance at me, turned tail and ran into the woods.

"Coward." The sorceress muttered before she sprinted after him, a trail of yellow footprints being left in her wake.

Something pulled me away by the wrist of my broken hand.

"Hey, hey, hey! What's the plan here? You called her, right? That's what the whole "Mothers help me" shit was about?" Anna demanded.

I, uhm," I began, realizing that if she hadn't gotten my attention that I wouldn't have looked away. The Sorceress, any amount of dislike I had held for Mr. Bill Argus gone just like her glamor, was fucking astonishing. There was something different about seeing power of that magnitude through my own eyes and not through someone else's memory. "I didn't call for her specifically, but yes."

Anna led me the short distance away from where I had been standing awestruck and over to where Arthur still lay in Ms. Lao's lap in a hurry. My hand had been numb for so long that I was beginning to worry that the broken bones were the least of my worries, but I could feel the warmth of my friend's hands in her gentle hold. With Arthur only avoiding death by the whims of a fickle forest spirit and the potential for Ms. Lao to still lose her grip on her sanity still very much at play, I shouldn't have found as much pleasure in her touch as I did.

I couldn't blame myself too much though, could I? The amount of time I had left with her, with any of them, was rapidly approaching a point with which I could only count it in minutes.

Anna crouched and put her hand on her mothers shoulder. "Ma, we should get him inside, alright?"

"Okay." Ms. Lao answered, not looking up at her daughter. The blue light of the morning made the sick woman look pale and small against the dark shape of the woods behind her. She stood, legs shaking from weariness or the cold, but never looked up from Arthur. "He needs a hospital."

Anna looked at me and I understood. The two of us both went to Arthur and raised him into a sitting position. His eyes were open but struggling to focus.

Anna slapped him. "Wake up. You are too big for us to carry."

"Hey, that hurt." Arthur whined, but the small pain seemed to bring him back just enough that he listened to his sister. With his help, each of his arms thrown over our shoulders, we managed to stand him up. Then, the four of us, no, the three Laos and I, I was not a part of them no matter how bad I wanted to be, started the short walk to the stairs of the ruined boarding house.

We reached the steps and began to struggle to get Arthur's annoyingly long body up them because of the difference in all of our heights. Before we could pass Arthur's lankiness through the open back door, a growl echoed off the house from behind me.

"Autumn. . . turn around." Anna whispered. She had taken her brother under his arms and had walked her half of him up the stairs backwards.

I dropped Arthur's legs and whirred around on the second step of the stairs. Auden, the sorcerers familiar, stood less than a step away from me. His four eyes were alight with his silver power and his terrible fangs were bared. Every part of him seemed oriented to send him up to my throat at the blink of an eye.

"Hey Auden, you are a good boy, right?" I didn't know what else to say. I couldn't fight him. I had nothing left to fight him with. I risked a glance up from him and into the backyard. The sorcerer and sorceress were nowhere to be seen, but rapid flashes of yellow and gray light coming from within the embattled woods told me their struggle had not been settled yet.

Auden, without relaxing himself at all, answered. "I. Am."

Which, from his perspective I supposed was the truth. He held no allegiance or responsibility to me. Capturing me for his master would be exactly what a good boy would do.

Just as the cold weight of all the things I had already felt began to settle onto my soul once again, which all manifested in one manner or another from the core feeling of both loss and what I was losing, a deep hum filled the air like static before a storm. The windows and broken pieces of the house rattled from its reverberations and I could feel the stairs beneath my feet shaking violently.

Another growl rose from Auden's throat and I knew my time was coming to a close.

Just before he pounced and locked his maw around my arm or leg to drag me away, the four eyed wolf became surrounded in a blue energy that was so dark it was almost black. It snapped its head to my right and I followed its gaze.

Just appearing from around the corner of the house, was Sam. Dragging himself forward and cloaked in the same dark blue, half his boney body remained rigid and frozen. Only one of his eye lights were present, alight with the same color as the energy that surrounded the two familiars, the other being nothing but an empty socket.

Auden's silver eyes shone within the dark blues and his silver power began to coat him and push back.

Sam, nearly half way to the stairs despite having to crawl, stopped and the low hum rose in the air. My familiar, spoke. "Elid."

Without warning, the blue energy surrounding Auden collapsed in a violent burst of sound and the four eyed wolf vanished.

Slack jawed, I stared at the spot the familiar had been in only a moment ago. Trying to understand what had just happened, I turned to my still partially petrified familiar. "What did you just do?"

Sam, still dragging himself towards me, remained consistent. "What is your name?"

So much had happened, I had almost forgotten that I had been dragged into a memory just before I had slain the second and hopefully final creature. How many hours ago had that been? And yet, whatever directive Sam was under still compelled him despite the time that had passed. I had reached a point where his questions didn't annoy me. I knew, no matter what I did, I would have to answer them before he could move on. So, I answered them in quick succession while I went and picked him up off the ground.

"How did you do that? Is he dead?" I asked Sam, moving through the then empty doorway. He was heavier since his rebirth, which made sense considering how large he had grown.

In his standard hypnotic basso, he answered. "I sent him away."

I carried him into the boarding house and the door shut behind me suddenly.

Ms. Lao turned both locks and pointed towards the kitchen. "Go sit at the table."

Her commanding tone had returned and without ever really deciding to listen to her, I went and did just as she said.

Head laid down on his own folded arms, Arthur sat at the table. Anna sat on the side opposite her brother and pulled out the chair next to her for me to sit. I did. Just as I sat down and placed Sam's half stiff body on the table, the night caught up with me. My face hurt and I could taste blood in my mouth. Every part of my body ached in ways I had never felt before. The numbness in my hand waned and a throbbing pain came roaring in its place. I was beyond tired, feeling so worn out, so ragged, that nothing seemed real. I looked at Sam and then Arthur, but it felt like it took my mind an extra second to process what I was seeing. Raw, that was the only word that I could find to fit the way I felt. Then, the thoughts came. Flashes of the different horrors and feelings I had been rung through the night before collided in my mind and it was too much. I couldn't take it.

"Mortal," Sam growled at Anna. "Comfort her, I am unable to."

Silent tears rolled down my cheeks because I was too tired to cry. The sound of Anna's chair screeching against the wooden floor of the kitchen filled my ears and then I felt her wrap an arm around me. I refused to close my eyes, despite wanting nothing more than to do that very thing, for fear of slipping into The Well. My friend didn't speak to me. Which, I was grateful for because I would have been unable to answer.

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I heard Ms. Lao's voice and it sounded distant and watery. "How is she?"

A hand touched the shoulder that wasn't buried into Anna and I looked up to see the stern woman looking down at me. I tried to blink the tears away but was unable to do so fully. "A little breakfast and you will feel better."

Without another word, I watched Ms. Lao turned away from me and performed one of the most impressive feats of small magic that I had ever seen. Within a matter of what seemed like minutes, a veritable feast had been spread over the table. At some point she had moved Sam off the table and placed him on the ground, where the skeletal cat had begun stretching his way into full mobility again. Arthur had raised his head as soon as the first plate of what I would later learn were referred to as pancakes and began to devour them three at a time. The man who had been gored through the stomach just a few hours before seemed to have no issue filling his gut. Eggs, round sausages, thin potatoes that had been shredded like cheese, the pancakes, and pitchers of milk and orange juice had all been laid on the table faster than I could have buttered a piece of bread by the woman who I knew to be fatally ill. She sat beside her son and passed plates and utensils to her daughter.

Handing me a clean white cloth, she gave me a little smile. "Dry your face and eat."

After a moment, I did as she said.

I wiped my face with the cloth silently, finding myself unable to say thank you. Just before I took a bite of the thin potatoes, three sharp knocks came from the back door and everyone in the kitchen turned to look at it.

Did she beat him? I wondered, terrified of who was outside the door if she hadn't.

"Keep eating." Ms. Lao stood and left the kitchen.

Arthur was the only one that listened to his mother, barely taking enough time to breath between bites.

A moment later, Ms. Lao returned. The sorceress, with her messy blond hair and revealing dress, followed behind her barefoot.

I looked up at her and had the strange feeling that I was underwater or in a dream.

"Autumn Aubrey. . ." The sorceress began.

Ms. Lao held up a hand and glared at the wild looking woman. "Breakfast first. She has been through enough for now."

Her words were firm and unyielding, but I knew she didn't have the knowledge necessary to understand who she had just interrupted. The sorceress had answered my call for the Mothers and had evidently defeated a sorcerer in open combat without even dirtying her dress. If the sorceress willed it, no one in the kitchen would even know they were being killed.

In what would have shocked me to core if I hadn't been too exhausted to feel, the sorceress nodded at Ms. Lao in agreement and sat in the chair at the head of the table. "Yes, of course. Breakfast first."

Somewhere between when the meal had begun formally and the point with which it seemed like everyone but me was solely focused on their respective plates, I lost my appetite.

The food was good and in truth was one of the better meals I had ever had, but after the flood of overwhelm that had washed away everything but my pain and weariness, I just wasn't that hungry. Perhaps after my other needs, a shower, my hand, the month of sleep I felt like I needed, were met I would want something to eat.

I snuck glances at the unnamed sorceress whenever I thought she wouldn't notice. The woman who would take me back to what amounted to a prison, the woman that I had called for, wasn't what I had pictured. Allowing herself to be commanded by a mortal and answering in turn by sitting down politely and sharing a meal wasn't exactly the fierce response I had anticipated when I thought about being discovered or revealing myself to the Mothers.

Did you reveal yourself to her, really? A thought came. Unless most of the mortal world was just sorceresses and sorcerers living under the mask of glamors, I had a point. If I had a stone for every time a mortal turned out to be someone in a magical disguise, I'd have two. Which isn't a lot but its strange that it happened twice.

Without really meaning to speak, I muttered. "How did you find me?"

The sorceress looked at Mr. Lao and then at me. "You called for help, How could I not?"

I followed her logic. "What happened to Eames?"

She raised an eyebrow at me. "The sorcerer?"

"Yes." I answered, meeting her eyes and then looking back down at my half cleaned plate.

A memory, one that I was fairly certain was mine, played in my head whenever I looked at her. My mother had been holding me in her lap. It couldn't have been long after I had stolen The Well because everything was out of focus and blurry. A woman I didn't know had been there. When she had entered the room, where she had come from, or who she was, I didn't know. She had made my mother cry, I remembered that. I remembered crying myself, because somehow I knew that whatever the woman had told my mother had been bad and I had been the cause of it.

Whenever I met the sorceress' eyes, I instantly felt like that little girl sitting on her mother's lap and crying because she knew she had done wrong.

"Gone," The sorceress said bluntly. She glanced at the Lao's, starting with Anna and ending with Ms. Lao. "Can we agree that the meal is over? I am certainly full."

"We can. Who are you?" Ms. Lao answered, earning the full attention of the sorceress.

"My name is Ulet. I have answered Autumn Aubrey's call for help in the place of the nine Mothers. I have come to return her to Zenithcidel." Ulet answered.

I was grateful I had cried my eyes dry not long before. It was impossible to break down further than I already had without literally falling to pieces.

Ms. Lao opened her mouth to respond but then closed it without speaking. Which made sense after all the sick woman had witnessed that night. Anna had some idea of what Zenithcidel was, about aura and The Well, and the truth of wider reality. She had told me that she had attempted a brief explanation but Ms. Lao hadn't understood.

Ulet continued. "There is an unusual energy emanating from your son," She spoke, her voice clear and fluid. Calm. "I do not know what the sorcerer did to him. I would inspect him before we depart if you will allow it."

Arthur let out a snore from within his folded arms. He had returned to the position before he had even finished chewing his last bite of breakfast.

The sorcerer? Ulet didn't know about the spirit. I had only called for help after the black nailed creatures had burned into thin air. When she had arrived, still wearing the glamor of Mr. Bill Argus, all she had seen was Eames and his familiar. Could she sense that I had awakened the color of my soul or that I had opened a second channel the way she could sense the spirit within Arthur?

Spiraling down that vortex of questions and realizations, a much more important question came to mind and I was powerless to stop myself from asking it. "You've been here the whole time. I find it terribly odd that there were two sorceresses in disguises that just so happened to stumble upon the same boarding house. Why didn't you take me back as soon as you arrived?"

Something brushed against my hand, and I peeked down to see Anna's fingers intertwine with my own beneath the table. She pulsed her fingers twice and I responded in turn.

"It is not odd at all. I did not stumble upon this place, I was led to it." Ulet answered.

"By who?" I questioned.

"Your familiar," She said, nodding down to Sam who was shaking the last stiff spot out of his boney tail. "I spotted him the moment his paws landed on mortal soil and tracked him to your location."

"Impossible." Sam interjected, his voice full of disbelief.

"As for why I did not apprehend you upon our first meeting, I could not be sure it was you until I saw you without your glamor. For a maiden with no training, you were able to cast doubt into my mind with your working." She pushed her chair back from the table and crossed her muscular legs, sending the hem of her short dress perilously high up her thighs. Despite having fought on dew damp and disturbed ground or chasing her enemy through dense woods without shoes, her feet were clean and unmarked.

That's the difference. I realized, remembering the state my own feet had been left in after my first walk in the woods behind the boarding house. A smirk turned the corner of my mouth up just a bit. The only thing holding me back from being just as strong as Ulet was learning how to keep my feet clean.

I would have laughed if I could have summoned the strength for it.

Ulet yawned and ran her hands through her wild blonde hair. "Shall I look at him?"

Ms. Lao rubbed her palm against one of her eyes. "Why?"

Ulet raised her eyebrow. "It is unusual for mortals to radiate energy. That is reason enough."

"No," Ms. Lao waved her hands in front of herself. "Apprehend? Tracked? Why are you returning her anywhere?"

"She is a fugitive? A criminal? A thief? An escapee?" Ulet responded as if it was shocking that the mortal woman in front of her was not well versed in the criminal underbelly of Zenithcidel.

Ms. Lao's face pinched into a grimace and she closed her eyes.

Anna pulsed her fingers in mine again. "But she called for you. She is turning herself in, doesn't that mean anything?"

I looked at my friend, knowing it would probably be the last time I saw her. I was too exhausted to go through the mental processes of recognizing how much I owed her and how much risk I had introduced to her life. After it all, she was still trying to help me. If there were better people than Anna, Then I and none of the other women's memories I had lived through had met them.

"No, It does not," Ulet answered and stood. "She called for the Mothers out of self preservation. That is hardly a redeeming reason."

The sorceress Aura sprang to life at her feet as she stepped back from the table. Lines, like those that had stretched up her back and out into wings when she had been facing Eames, extended out from her and ran in two clockwise arcs before they met and formed a circle.

Sam bounded from the ground and up to the table, where he did not anticipate his claws to clink against the white plates atop it. Faster than I could see him land, he jumped again and wound up on the counter by the sink.

"If you could all be silent for a moment, this is very delicate working and requires a great deal of my strength." Ulet warned, eyeing my skeletal familiar.

"She doesn't want to go." Ann said angrily.

"That is unfortunate but irrelevant." Ulet answered.

The circle around her rose into perfectly symmetrical lines of yellow power from the ground, reaching up past her body and meeting above her head.

It's a cage, I realized. for me.

"I want to go with her." Anna continued.

"That is unfortunate but irrelevant." Ulet repeated, strain evident on her face.

Anna let go of my hand and all my tired eyes could see was one of the dirty plates spinning through the air and shattering against the wall in a high pitched break.

The symmetrical lines fell back the way they had come and the circle around Ulet's clean feet vanished.

Anna, eyes wide in disbelief at her own actions, was holding her breath.

Ulet's face spread into the wild smile she had worn moments before she had outmatched a full fledged sorcerer. "You should not have done that, you silly little girl. It seems that I will be the one to teach you why mortals should not mettle in a sorceresses affairs."

"Ms. Ulet! You will not threaten my daughter." Ms. Lao snapped.

Arthur snored in agreement.

Ulet glared at me and seethed. "You don't know enough to even understand this, but using power like that has a cost. I can not simply start over and act like nothing happened. I can not simply shrug off the desire I have to pull each of your fingernails out of their beds one by one. I must return you to Zenithcidel and all of you would do well to remember what I am capable of before you continue to disrupt me!"

Arthur snored in defiance.

A positively wicked fire burned in Anna's eyes. I knew, just by seeing it, that as soon as my captor began to construct my cage again, that another plate would go sailing through the air.

From some part of the house above the kitchen, a heavy thud echoed down the stairs.

All of us except Arthur turned our eyes to the ceiling.

Another thud came from the top of the stairs.

"Av." Ulet sighed.

A large bird swooped into the kitchen and landed directly on the sorceress's tangled blonde hair like it was a nest. It folded its wings and revealed that it was no larger than a finch or sparrow. Its wings however were the size of an eagles or a hawks. With a head that looked like it had been shaped by someone pinching their thumb and forefinger together and pulling upward, it let out a confused series of chirps and notes.

Ulet's face ran pale. "Are you sure?"

The bird, who must be Av and her familiar, chirped in response.

Ulet refocused on me. "The situation has changed. If your friend interferes with me again, I will kill her."

"What?" I asked.

"Because of the breakfast and the throwing of plates, an entire council of sorcerers are on their way here as we speak." Ulet growled.

Arthur snored.