“Nami, I. . .”

Without a word, her midnight blue washed through the white dress she always wore. Just over her navel, two streams of water coiled out from her and around each other, a vortex forming.

“After a year, you are not allowed to march down here the moment you return and take offense to what has happened in your absence.” Aster commanded in her authoritative voice.

“I didn’t know,” I started, staring at Nami. “You just left,” There were too many things I needed to say. I hated the shame I heard in my voice. I hadn’t done anything wrong. She left, not me. “I waited. I sent you letters,” The silky fabric of the bedsheet I had unknowingly clutched in my hands slipped out of my fingers as they numbed. “I. . . ,” I had done nothing wrong. Why did I feel like I had? “Waited for you.”

The vortex ripped into a whirlpool and a torrent of raging water rushed through the air towards me.

Aster ripped the sheet off of herself. Her feet enshrouded in amaranthine shadows, she kicked her pale legs over the side of the bed and left a swathe of purple gloom painted in the air behind her like ink spilled on a page.

The torrent crashed into the gloom and dissipated into a faint blue cloud.

“Stay out of this Aster.” Nami warned. She was looking at me without meeting my eyes and no matter how hard I tried, she wouldn’t.

“You should have stayed out of all of this. You are the one who left.” Aster shouted, the shadows around her feet creeping up the pale skin of her legs like animate bruises.

“Why didn’t you talk to me? Why did you just leave me wondering?” I asked, feeling like I was staring down a tunnel that blocked everything from my sight but Nami.

“I couldn’t,” She whispered, casting her eyes down. Then they snapped to Aster. “ I didn’t think I had to.”

A second torrent broke from her navel.

Aster swept one leg out in front of herself and sent a rippling arc of her purple gloom stemming up from the floor in a flush. It swelled into a shadowed swathe between the rushing water and where I laid. The torrent split, one current vanished against the shadow and the other ripped underneath it.

It crashed into me before I could so much as raise my hands.

They wouldn’t have been any use to me, even if I had.

Cold water drilled straight into my chest where my tattoos met between my breasts. The unrelenting force pushed me back into the headboard and washed me to the floor like driftwood caught in a tidal wave.

“Nami.” I gasped from where I had settled, both from the cold and the aching in my chest.

Another torrent struck me in my side and the water pressed me into the wall.

“How dare you!” I heard Aster yell. The room grew darker. Between desperate attempts at filling my cold shocked lungs, I looked up. The stars Aster had painted across the ceiling dimmed and trickled into an amaranthine mass.

My body shook as I crawled to my hands and knees, looking back up at Nami. Aster glided across the floor with her gloom, her purple aura enshrouding her up to her chest. With a sweep of her leg, the mass dropped from the ceiling just as Nami spun another torrent towards me.

Trea appeared in the doorway, wide eyes on her pouty face. “Oh shit, they are fighting, fighting.”

The mass ensnared Nami, dropping onto her right shoulder and rippling down her side. Without a second passing, her face flushed as Asters gloom sapped the strength from her. Only then, did she finally meet my eyes.

I saw the girl that brought the feeling back in my hands, that slept with her head under her pillow every night, that walked on the tips of her toes when she got excited, I saw all the things she had been for me and that I had been for her slipping away within her blue eyes.

The last torrent rushed towards me.

I raised my left hand in a fist and waved my fingers from pinky to thumb, unspooling my aura within me. Five wires, each looking like they had been spun from a sunset, fanned out from my fingertips as I cast them. They cut through the torrent and were tangled together by its current.

I opened my hand and split the rushing water into a burst of cold mist. Reeling the threads back, I snapped my wrist and sent them whipping through the air towards the mass of gloom that clutched Nami. I couldn’t stand to see her in pain.

I hadn’t seen Constance come into my room.

My hands numbed.

I couldn’t feel my threads.

I couldn’t throw them off their path.

They struck Constance across her cheek, leaving five lines of blood welling on her tawny skin.

Nobody hit Constance, even by accident, she was off limits when we fought. Fighting happened much more often than any of us would admit, even without matters of the heart being involved.

Trea stormed into the room towards me, carmine aura encasing her fists. “I hoped I would get to do this.”

Aster swept her back foot forward and then her front foot to her side, sending rippling gloom towards Trea and tightening the mass around Nami.

A tendril of water burst through the gloom over Nami’s navel and snaked its way around Aster's pale throat before she could realize it had happened.

I did nothing.

With my hands fully numb, I could do nothing but watch my threads lay useless on the floor.

“Enough.” Constance said, one hand covering the cuts I had marred her cheek with.

The room shook.

Curls of living wood burst from the floor and ceiling. A root, thicker than my body, wrapped over my back and burrowed its end into the floor. It pulled me down until my stomach was pressed flat into the cold water beneath me. Breaking through the gloom around her, wood circled up Aster's pale legs and rooted her to the ground. Catching her in her stride, Trea’s wrists were caught and she was lifted off the ground. The mass ensnaring Nami was displaced by a series of roots coiling around her middle.

Constance alone stood free, speaking through heavy breaths. “Enough. That's enough, from all of you.”

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Trea, her legs flailing wildly, tried to turn herself around to face Constance and shouted. “Let me go. She hit you!”

“Keep your voice down, do you wish to wake her,” Constance insisted. “I will release each of you, individually, and each of you will return to your own rooms.”

I heard what she was saying, it made sense considering she had needed to bind us all, but I couldn’t go along with it.

I needed to talk to Nami.

“Trea, you first.” Constance began

All of the lights, including what bled through the doorway from the common room, died out.

“I can’t see!” Trea shouted from the ceiling.

“None of us can,” Constance sighed. “We woke her up.”

Tarnished light from no source painted the room a dull gray that did not cast any shadows.

Standing between Nami and Aster, where no one had been a moment before, Grey yawned. She was a head shorter than both and her white hair concealed all of her face but her mouth and slight chin.

Constance, with her hands on her hips and her eyes cast to the ground, spoke. “I’m sorry, Grey. I tried to keep them quiet.”

“Lady Nami. You are needed.” Grey said, her voice utterly devoid of interest in the battle she had appeared in the middle of.

“For what?” I blurted, unable to keep myself from speaking out of turn.

“A new sun. The sorceress sent to prevent it has failed. Your water should have no trouble.”

“What does she mean, a new sun?” Trea snapped.

“If it continues to gain mass. It will kill us all. The gate has been prepared.” Grey said, no emotion or urgency in her voice. We called it her nothing voice, because other than the words she said, it held nothing.

“Let me go, Constance.” Nami said.

Grey yawned again and the wood crumbled to dust from around us. My wires left five sunset colored lines of dust across the floor. The coil of water around Aster’s neck turned to dark blue glitter on her bare shoulders. What remained of Aster’s amaranthine mass fell into a purple mound at Nami’s feet. Trea fell to the floor and landed on her ass before her carmine aura streamed down onto her dark hair.

Without another word, Nami turned and left my room.

I tried to stand, slipped, and then got to my feet and ran after her. Through my door, I watched her take the stairs that lay between Grey’s room and the empty one next to it. I would run her down and make her talk to me. Before I could chase after her, a hand caught me by my wrist.

“Let her go.” Grey said in her nothing voice, holding me back.

I stopped, despite how much it hurt.

Feeling like I was being torn in half from the inside. I watched her disappear up the stairs in the shadowless light.

It had been a year, an entire year, since Nami had been called away and I was watching her leave again after what could not have been more than a quarter hour.

Grey turned her head up to me. “You are naked. Did you know that?”

Before I could answer her, my vision flickered. The numbness in my hands spread up my arms and through my body.

Then, I fell.

“What is your name?”

I sat up in the pool, my feet touching its smooth marble bottom and the water coming up to my chest. “Nami, shit,” I pushed my dripping hair back from my face. “I know I’m Autumn. Autumn Aubrey.”

“Who is Autumn Aubrey?”

“I need a pen. I don’t want to forget,” Sam started to repeat his question but I gave him his damn answer before his low voice could settle at the end of his who. “A Maiden of Zenithcidel, daughter of Idensyn Aubrey, thief and possessor of The Well and debtor to The Nine Mothers.”

I pulled myself out of the pool, bringing the salted water out with me and splashing it to the stone floor. It echoed off the walls, drowning out Sam’s third question. Nami, Ola Gresha, Aster. . . I repeated the names in my mind and snatched one of the plush towels off the stack. Pressing the water off my body, drying my hair with my aura the way my mother had taught me, and throwing my towel in the general direction of the one my mother had used earlier, I repeated again. Nami, Ola, Aster. . . Fuck, what were the rest?

“What were you doing?” Sam’s voice echoed, he had stood fully and his blue eyes had narrowed.

“Calm down, cat,” I sighed, trying to untangle my dress from the mess I had thrown it into without allowing my frustration to cause me to tear it into pieces. “Viewing memories from The Well so it may be extracted from me and returned to The Mothers.”

Obsessive directive satisfied, Sam stated. “You are leaving.”

I slipped my dress over my head but the straps were crossed and I nearly choked myself trying to get it off. “I will only be gone for a moment, I need a pen.”

“Why?” Sam rumbled.

“Names. I do not want to forget them.”

Nami, Ola Gresha, Aster. . . Constance!

“Speak their names. I shall not forget.” Sam stated.

“You might not forget but,” My dress still resisted me. “How can it be this tangled? It’s not that fucking big,” I dropped it onto a wet spot on the floor and snatched it back up before any of the water could soak into it. “If you decide you don’t want to tell them back to me, I might as well have forgotten them.”

“I will not keep them from you.” Sam stated.

A knock came from outside the pink marble door. “It’s Arthur.”

What had the guard called him? Ugi?

“Hold on.” I called back. He had already gotten a look up my dress and that had been one time too many.

“If you’re busy I can,”

“Hold on,” I said, finally managing to cast out whatever malicious entity had possessed my simple white dress. I pulled it over my head while I listed the names to my familiar. “Nami, Ola, uhm. Oster. No, Aster! And, uhm, . . . Constance! Fuck, there were more. I don’t remember.”

I stormed over to the door of the well house and cracked it open. Despite its size and that it was made entirely of pink marble, it took no effort to pull it open. “Hello, Arthur.”

The tall man, wearing the same lightweight tunic and pants he had been wearing that morning, had walked almost out of sight of the door. He turned back and waved when I called his name.

Why is he dirty? There were dirt stains on his knees and the back of his pants. Who else was there? I asked, my frustration and Arthur’s interruption already making the memory slip from my mind.

“I didn’t mean to bother you. Well, I did mean to bother you but I didn’t know you would be this busy. I’ll just talk to you before dinner.” The tall man said, wearing most of his wide smile and rubbing the back of his head.

He had gotten bigger. The clothes he had been provided after our arrival in Erosette had not fit him nearly as tight just a couple of months ago. I had told him I would talk to him after he had kept me from being a broken heap that morning, but I needed to focus. I couldn’t let myself forget the names I had just learned.

“I will seek you out and find you myself.” I said, smiling back at him.

I closed the door as soon as I knew my putting him off had been accepted.

“Sam. Tell me what I said.” I commanded my familiar.

The blue tortoise shell cat sat on the stone bench staring back at me with his blue eyes, unblinking. With none of my inflection or tone, he repeated my words back to me in his monotone baritone. “Nami, Ola, uhm. Oster. No, Aster. And, uhm, . . . Constance. Fuck, there were more. I don’t remember.”

“Again.” I stopped repeating the names I had told him in my mind and tried to stumble back across the others.

“Nami, Ola, uhm. Oster. No, Aster. And, uhm, . . . Constance. Fuck, there were more. I don’t remember.” Sam repeated.

“And. . . ,” I trailed off, hoping for something to rise out of nothing. “I have to go back.”

“These names are important?” Sam asked, watching me pull the dress off that had taken a heroic effort to pull on not five minutes prior.

“You said fuck,” I slipped my feet back into the pool, the water it had lost from my swift exit having been inexplicably refilled. “I’m proud of you.”

Sam growled. “Do not leave me in ignorance, child. Why are these names important?”

I dropped into the warm water and stretched my arms above my head before leaning back. “They are important, because they are the names of The Mothers.