Iris climbed through the almost perfectly masoned opening, the dust settling on her armour as she stepped into the dead room awash with scarlet. Book pages torn from their bindings fluttered from the ceiling, and a bookcase lay broken before her, snapped down the middle and resting on more shelves of identical make. Caynes’s padding, undoubtedly. An imprint remained in the shape of snapped wood, but he had already fled.

“What did I teach you in Aetherology, Iris? Or have you already forgotten?”

The voice reverberated crystal clear, sounding impossibly close: in earshot but not in sight. She summoned her beast back to her side.

“Aetherology. I don’t subscribe to those lunatics’ stupid belief that making logic of magic is what weakens us Spirits, but it makes one think, doesn’t it?”

She stepped forward, looking for directionality in his voice and finding none. Bookcases broke sightlines and gave superficial cover, but the gas made the world his world—there was no point relying on anything but herself.

“Those who believe equality exists are either stupid or blissfully ignorant of the privilege they hold. The Spirits who say the world is balanced are the former, the humans the latter.”

Iris continued to cycle the gas plume around herself, fanning it outwards and giving herself a wider safe area. She tried to filter out his words as she had done his lectures, but found it impossible. Perhaps it was the voice itself and not the words. Iris hoped that was the case.

“With every generation, we grow weaker, supplementing our own degradation by adopting human society. We water ourselves down to survive. We devolve, Iris. Each time our concepts become more defined, we lose touch with the Aether, we lose our power. Even you are relegated to a mere child.”

Her fist tightened, and her heart lost its rhythm, disrupting the cycle of ventilating gas. ‘Even you’.

“What do you mean?” she muttered, feeling the pins return before restarting the flow. “What does that mean?”

Caynes was silent for a second too long. Her intuition told her that his words were failing him.

She rounded another corner: nothing.

“The Temple shared my beliefs. They knew of the degradation the Spirits were suffering, and they knew of a way it would stop.”

“The Spirit of Spirits.”

“Good, Iris.”

His voice was taking on directionality. Left, if only by a few compass bearings.

“They prayed and prayed, but the Spirit never answered, for it was weakened by something long forgotten, so long that the world thought Spirit de-evolution was natural. It needed Aether to strengthen; Aether it could no longer consume by itself without a conduit. Tell me Iris, you should know this. What consumes Aether but doesn’t use it?”

Iris turned her direction thirty degrees to her right. He was there, somewhere, cowering behind the librarian’s desk, waiting for her to come closer. The heinous things he uttered, he did so all with the common tone of a teacher heading a class. The way he egged her on, the way he complimented her reasoning, it made her sick to her stomach.

“Carbon-based organisms.”

“And which one do you think checked the most boxes of efficiency, abundance and social significance?”

The voice narrowed to a single point, unclouded despite the blood mist.

“Humans,” Iris answered. The hundreds of humans floating motionless above Excala city while the Spirit of Spirits fed on their Aether.

“Where’s Crestana?” Iris demanded, shouting in Caynes’s direction. “What did you do with her?”

“The ritual needed a centrepiece; the Spirit of Spirits required a medium. I think it was symbolic, why the Temple chose her for the role.”

Iris threw forward a razor-sharp edge down the direction his voice originated from, but her attack froze not a few metres from the tips of her fingers; her frozen fingers. Suspended in time; her extremities couldn’t even twitch.

Caynes stood up from behind cover and turned to her, no fear burdening his movements as he rounded the desk and approached one step at a time. Iris looked down, and harsh beams of light blinded her from below; a Sigil she had walked straight into.

“Wesper doubted you were ever the key to changing the world, I always doubted if you were ever needed in the first place. Only Provenance believed, him and the people he managed to…convince.”

Caynes closed the distance between them, staring through her mask and addressing the Spirit inside her. It listened while she struggled with and strained every muscle in her body, praying to everything for one to move. Without her arms, the gas lingered, slowly diffusing into the red with each passing moment. The pain grew, and her skin prepared itself in anticipation.

“I’ll do what you couldn’t, Tetrica. We don’t need you to fix the world.”

Caynes’s face dipped closer, mere inches away from hers and into the layer of gas around her.

Subconscious, reactionary, running on instinct rather than conscious thought. She needed her arms to move the gas, but whether it even was gas….

Iris solidified the matter floating around Caynes’s head, encasing it in a rock-solid cast like hard candy. Caynes reeled instantaneously, severing his concentration and with it, his connection with the spell.

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Iris broke free, dropping to her knees as the strain in every muscle took hold, even her heart and lungs. Her Spirit side had kept her alive like a lifeline while the Sigil had stopped them dead. Caynes knew what she was, otherwise, she would’ve died only a few seconds into his speech.

Another Sigil wrapped itself around Caynes’s mummified head and broke him free; the blue flames erupting once again with newfound contempt.

Iris took advantage of his split-second disorientation; a rough-handed swipe with her arm radiated a knife’s edge forward from her body. The onslaught sliced everything in its path before reaching Caynes’s hand, already encased in a Sigil itself. The knife shattered like a glass mirror, but Iris surged through the pieces and into the fray, her gauntlets already transformed into knives.

Up close, she pressed her advantage, lunging at him with a flurry of fanged punches and blows, ones he managed to dance around, but only barely. He was reading her range and taking it for granted, a fatal flaw.

Her next strike, she extended her claws another inch further, catching him in the side and tearing through his cloak. His body was hard; almost crystalline, but Iris had help. The armour up her arm stiffened into a lever and the joint in her left shoulder moved with a mind of its own, putting behind her slice the uncompromising force of a machine.

Caynes stumbled backwards, his voice box vocalising an agonising cry before falling from his face.

“If you know who I am then you should give up trying to fight me,” Iris said, putting on a brave face and bringing her beast to her side.

Pieces fell from Caynes’s shirt; black ashen bone like burnt firewood splintered into dust against the hard floor. Caynes looked up, facing her; facing her Spirit, and spoke through the Aether.

“Give up?” he said, his words teetering on the edge of laughing or crying. “Like you did? Like you gave up because you didn’t want to hurt your friend’s feelings?”

The words struck Iris deeply, somewhere she had never even imagined existed. The place beyond the final door in her Mind Palace; somewhere not even she had managed to venture.

“I see now, what Provenance meant. Maybe you can burn the world."

A Sigil lit up on Iris’s chest, giving her little time to react, let alone retaliate. She braced herself, the action subconsciously reinforcing her armour tenfold below the Sigil. The impact of the disintegration carried weight, and she was blown backwards. Bookshelves flew past her before her beast—and subsequently the wall—caught her. It softened the impact, but not enough to keep the air from escaping her lungs.

Her first gasp, but already more lines painted her body and the wall behind her. Iris brought her fists up, materialising two walls between her and the Sigil’s projection. She felt the blast as a hole was blown cleanly through the first wall, her cue to push the second forward directly at Caynes—something to distract him while she ducked into cover.

She leapt behind a bookcase, pressing herself against the spines of the hardcovers as she heard her second wall shatter as well. She caught the matter before it returned to her and transformed it into gas. Doubtful the trick would work a second time, she could at least use it to whittle down Caynes’s working room.

The bookshelf across the aisle from her burst into a flurry of paper and wood splinters; an unlucky guess, but her cover was next to go.

Iris twisted her wrists together, shielding herself with a dome as the bookshelf blew apart. Residual pieces of the Sigil that shone through the cracks exploded across her barrier like firecrackers. She segmented her dome into pieces, sharpened the edges and launched them across the room, peppering the entire direction like a sawn-off shotgun.

Whatever bookshelves remained standing were torn to pieces; whatever already broken was reduced to mulch. Iris stood from the carnage, assessing for noise; a rustle to suggest he was still standing.

Another Sigil lit the ground beneath her feet and swept the solid ground from under her. She fell through a circular opening—a repeat of her rooftop battle.

She whipped a jet stream of purple that solidified upon sticking to the far wall, pulling her out of harm’s way as the wall behind her disintegrated. She landed behind an array of desks, glancing at a dark figure across the room she assumed to be her enemy.

A defensive barrier, two more for good measure before she unleashed a flurry of sharp edges, each turning into gas once she felt them impact with something she couldn’t see. Each attack doubled as a probe, creating a game of trial and error until one of her knives or the gas cloud they produced caught onto something.

And they did; something rigid and skeletal. She tightened the gas into a solid around the object and sent her beast after it.

“We used to have Gods.”

The air seemed to freeze again. Iris looked around for another Sigil but couldn’t find one. Even if one was stopping her movements, she could feel her beast frozen in mid-air along with her. The walls dissolved; the prison around Caynes dissolved. Iris, or at least one part of her, was listening.

“We used to have Gods that watched over us, now their unworthy successors don’t dare leave old Spirit country. This happened while you were asleep, while you left the world to rot.”

Iris felt a calm wash over her; her own consciousness took a step back as something else stepped forward, overriding her own thoughts and claiming…reclaiming her own body.

“You. Know. Nothing.”

The library unravelled. Reality traded places with a fake imitation: cardboard cutouts masquerading as borders of sensation. More literal borders in a sense, for no light passed through its cracks, no sound through its wood.

Simple borders, suffocating borders. Irritating carpet, sickening light, stained plaster with no human presence to justify its existence. Caynes stood in its centre; Iris was nothing but a bystander.

Caynes showed more bravery than Iris did; standing his ground despite the disfigured battlefield. Advantages hadn’t swapped sides; both parties were simply at the mercy of something greater.

A Sigil painted Iris’s body; catching her and her surroundings in one indelicate assault. He clenched his fist and Iris prepared for the worst, but what shattered instead was the Sigil itself.

“You. Know. Me. But. Attack. Still.”

Iris’s body took a step forward, the armour clinking like chainmail as a thousand borrowed voices spoke in unison between laboured exhales.

“Imbecile.”

Thin twine stretched from the tips of her fingers, elbows and knees. Tens of delicate strings with no obvious puppeteer put in question her Spirit’s autonomy. But what controlled an absolute power, Iris couldn't fathom.

Another Sigil flashed across her face, Caynes taking another split-second to zero in on her head, but her gauntlet grabbed it—the entity that was still only light—and tore it from her face.

He lit one underneath him, hoping to escape through the floor, but the hollow plywood proved tougher than steel. Not even a scratch as though clawing it with his bare hands was a better option.

“They. Told. You. No?”

Iris felt the all too familiar terror set into her system as the pit in her stomach rose and sunk at the same time.

“Symptom. Not. Cause.”

The weight of her armour’s footsteps toppled Caynes’s stature and shattered his assuredness in his existence. She could watch him, manufactured and genuine terror tearing him to his core piece by piece.

“You. Haven’t. Suffered. Ideas. Idealist. Imbecile.”

“Suffered?” Caynes choked. “I’ve seen the world, I’ve scoured our knowledge, I—”

“Your. Kind. Scholars. Nothing. Else.”

Iris’s feet stopped.

“Books. Wrong. Books. Lie. World. Does. Not.”

Caynes dryly chuckled. “If books lie, then how do I know what you are? And if the world doesn’t…what say you of our chances, Spirit of Destruction?”

Iris closed her eyes as hard as she could as the beast surged past her and took Caynes by the leg, sinking its jaws into him. She opened her eyes, and he was gone.