Without consciously thinking about it, I sit down on the floor. My mind is an empty buzz, incapable of comprehending the totality of what I just heard. The Church wants me to eat people. The Church wants me to eat people. The Church wants me to eat people.

"I… I can't," I whisper. "I can't do that."

Jelisaveta makes a sympathetic face, squatting down to join me on the floor.

"Yeah, I didn't think you'd like the news very much," she admits, sighing. "Which is why I figured I should tell you now. Give you some time to think and decide. It's a big ask."

That's a painful understatement. The Church was the entire basis of August's morality system, which is of course the entire reason I have a morality system. My empathy, my humanity, my adherence to right and wrong… it's fundamentally and inseparably rooted to the truth that eating people is wrong, no matter what. It doesn't matter how good it feels, it doesn't matter if I think it's going to help a friend, it doesn't matter if I'm getting beaten half to death, it's wrong. Full stop. I have to believe that. Or… or else I'll…

"I can't," I tell her again. She has to understand that.

"Well, I'm pretty sure you can," Jelisaveta counters patiently. "The question you're struggling with is whether you should. And that's a much trickier topic."

"No," I disagree. "No, it's not. It's a sin. It's wrong. You can't… you can't give me a good reason to eat people. I can't believe there is one. Please."

Jelisaveta's eyes open a little wider.

"Oh," she says. "Oh, I see. I'm sorry, Lark."

She scoots forward, moving to a cross-legged position and getting as close to me as she can without touching. Her smile is so sympathetic, so understanding, that I burst into tears. I hate this. I hate myself. This can't be my fate, can it? But it makes too much sense. Why are the Templars helping me? Why did the Watcher make me like this? Why do I have to suffer? The questions I ask myself every day have answers, now. I eat souls so that I can slay immortals. That is my purpose.

But I can't.

The tears stream down my face as Jelisaveta sits with me in relative silence. Just the two of us, sitting in some unused closet in the barracks. My body doesn't normally use much water, so crying this much can make me noticeably thirsty. I should probably try to stop, but in the end I lose track of time long before I run out of tears. I'm probably missing class. Jelisaveta doesn't seem to mind, though, just waiting patiently for my sobbing to slow down.

"What's it like?" she asks when it finally does. "I've read a lot about you, Lark. What you've done, how your body works. But what's it like, being you?"

"I don't really know how to answer that," I choke out. "I don't know what it's like to be you. Humans are weird. So good, but so weird."

"You think we're good?" Jelisaveta asks, sounding surprised. "We're not really that good."

"You don't feel constant urges to eat each other," I bite out.

"Yeah, but some of us do it anyway," Jelisaveta shrugs. "Think about that. Sure, we have our instincts, but most of us aren't a nonstop mess of primal needs for violence. We'll hurt each other out of anger and stuff, but by and large when we slaughter each other, we're lucid during it. I'd argue that you have it worse than us, and yet you're still doing better."

I shake my head.

"I've heard about that, but I've literally never seen two humans try to kill each other," I counter. "And there are a ton of you. You're all over the place. There's no way the vast majority of you have killed any number of humans other than zero. Your problems are outliers. It's not comparable. You don't want to kill each other."

"You pretty clearly don't want to kill people," Jelisaveta says.

I shake my head again, holding back a second bout of tears.

"That's what you don't get," I say slowly, barely holding myself back from screaming at her. "None of you seem to get it. I do want to eat you. I want to kill and eat every last one of you, and I want it so badly that it hurts."

As usual, the fear and disgust I expect to see on Jelisaveta's face never comes. She just looks… calculating. Far calmer than anyone should be in a room with someone that swallowed their arm half a tenday ago.

"Could you elaborate on that?" she asks.

Elaborate? She wants to know more?

"I… I don't know what to say, Captain," I tell her, but it proves to be false. Once the words start coming out, they don't slow down. "I don't forget things like humans do. When… when I think about a memory, it's like I'm there again. Every feeling, every emotion, every sound, every thought, every urge, it's all back. I live through the worst parts of my life over and over again, and each time it's new, a different part of the experience coming into focus. When I look at you I'm remembering the feeling of sawing through your bone, the taste of your blood, the ecstasy of having something to eat that isn't just another awful rat. You have no idea how incredible you all taste. That's why I hunted you. Why I still want to hunt you. I wish I could go back to before I knew right from wrong. I'm not made for this, Captain. My whole body is starving all the time. I don't think there's any limit to how much I can eat, and eating is the only thing that makes me not feel completely awful all the time, but I can't do it anymore because I'll just get worse and worse and I don't want my body to change but I can't stop myself from changing if I eat anything that doesn't make me feel horrible. There's nothing I can do. Everything makes some part of me feel horrible. I'm trapped. I can't even die."

Captain Jelisaveta raises a hand at that, indicating she'd like to ask me something. I pull the words back, silencing myself so she can speak.

"Do you want to die?" she asks softly.

"Yes," I confirm immediately. "I've tried to kill myself, but I always end up surviving and going into frenzy instead. It doesn't work. I almost threw myself off the edge, but I was afraid I'd just end up as some other island's problem. I'm just a coward."

Captain Jelisaveta nods slowly, staring at me with a quiet look of concern. Once she's gathered her thoughts, she quietly starts to speak.

"My talent gives me exceptionally sensitive senses," she explains slowly. "I can make out any number of noises from absurdly far away. I can read something a mile away if there's nothing blocking my vision. I can smell… well, I'm always smelling far too much. It's often quite overwhelming. And when I was younger, when I first got my talent, I couldn't handle it at all."

I don't understand why she's telling me any of this, but something about the intensity of her look makes me focus on her anyway.

"It was agonizing. So much information was entering my head all the time that I couldn't even think. My parents had to take me to see a biomancer because I tried to claw my own eyes out with nothing but my fingernails. I had to be restrained, or I'd try to kill myself. I wanted to kill myself. My life was nothing but agony for years before I forced myself to deal with what my body had become. I had to come to terms with the fact that I'd never be the person I wanted to be again. I had to adapt, embrace myself, and move on. And it was awful."

I find myself leaning forward a little. I… I had no idea other people felt this way. I guess that's silly of me, in retrospect. But if a human wanted to die, it should be pretty easy for them to accomplish that, right? No, wait. I'm being stupid. It would be as easy as jumping off the edge, and I couldn't bring myself to do that.

"I don't want to die anymore," Captain Jelisaveta continues. "Sometimes I think about it, but it's not a very strong thought. Oh, I guess I should ask, since your memories work differently. Do you know what I mean by a 'strong' thought? Does that happen to you? Where you'll consider something for a moment but it might not feel as tempting as it does otherwise, or it feels extra difficult to resist? Even if it's the same thought?"

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

"I… yeah," I admit, nodding. "Some times are worse than others. Harder."

"Exactly," Captain Jelisaveta nods. "Lark, I wanted to die because I was in constant pain. My whole world was wrong, and I had no hope that it would ever be right again. If you told me back then that I would be… maybe not great, but okay? If you told me I'd end up where I am now? Well, if I could have even understood you I certainly wouldn't have believed you. But… I am here. I figured myself out. Things got better. And, well, I guess the important thing is that my problems didn't go away. They never got any smaller. But I got better at dealing with them, so… here I am now."

Oh. I see.

"You're trying to draw parallels between our experiences," I summarize. "You're trying to tell me that things will get better for me, like they did for you."

"I'm trying to tell you that I don't understand what it's like to be a vrothizo, but I do understand what it's like to wish for oblivion," she corrects. "I understand what it feels like to be stuck in a nightmare you can't wake up from. I understand what it's like to feel as though there's nothing and no one that can make your life worthwhile, that any joy you grasp even for a moment will get inevitably washed away by an unrelenting depression. I know what it's like to not care about any of that, because you can't care about anything. And I know what it's like to care so much, you just want it all to end so you don't have to care about anything ever again."

Many of her words tear into me, but I still find myself shaking my head.

"You still think it will get better," I insist.

"I hope it will get better," she says. "I believe you can feel better. And I want you to. I want you to be happy."

"You barely even know me."

"I don't see that as a good reason to think you can't overcome this."

I shake my head again, more furiously this time.

"There's nothing to overcome," I tell her. "Everything that makes me deserve death has already happened. I can't take them back. I ate and killed my own father, Captain. The best man I've ever known. He's the one that taught me to care, and I… I…"

I stop talking, pressing my hands over my eyes to try and stave off more tears.

"I was so small," I whisper. "So stupid. I didn't know anything. But I knew enough. And I still… I still did it. I'll always be a monster, Captain. If I ever had a chance for redemption, I lost it when I killed August."

Just saying his name is enough to make me ache, my body repressing a sudden, clawing need to scream. I barely succeed at that, but once again, despite how much I try to hold them back, the tears start to flow. Nothing like the loud sobs I had before, just silent, chin-shaking streams that leave me struggling to breathe but too exhausted to care. August. I miss August. I miss him so much.

"Do you… would you like a hug?" Captain Jelisaveta asks softly.

"No," I choke out, shaking my head. "No, I hate hugs."

"Oh," she answers. "Yeah. Me too."

I'm not sure why, but something about that makes a laugh fall out of me. Briefly, between the tears, I manage to find that truly silly.

"Why did you even ask?" I wonder.

She shrugs.

"Well, it's not really about me," she answers. "A lotta people I know would want a hug under these circumstances. Physical comfort just… works for a lot of people. And I'm experienced enough at dealing with my issues that it's a really good tradeoff to offer that kind of thing, at least for me."

"You're very kind, Captain," I manage to say between sniffs.

"Well, you're clearly quite kind yourself, Lark," she answers. "If you weren't, you wouldn't care so much about any of this."

"I didn't used to be," I whisper. "I tortured people. Murdered people. That's the whole reason Fulvia wanted to kill me."

"Where did you get the idea that kindness isn't a learned skill?" Captain Jelisaveta asks. "Everyone has to work at it, Lark. It's not invalid just because you used to be terrible at it."

I don't have a response to that. It feels pointless to try to form one. I'm just… empty.

"Tell me about him," Captain Jelisaveta says suddenly.

"What?" I ask. "Who?"

"August," she answers. "You called him your father. Tell me about him."

Immediately, instinctively, I hate the idea. The absolute last thing I want to do is talk about August. Just thinking about him is one of the most painful things in my life. But somehow, again, the words come spilling out. Everything does, just because the question was asked. Things I've never spoken, never shared, all laid at her feet. I told her about my disguise, about my struggles to tell humans apart. I told her about helping him, about being invited home with him, about letting him live without knowing why. I told her about Sharif, about how I misunderstood his relationship with his mother, about how I killed her while her husband watched and thought I was doing my friend a favor. I told her about his toys, his lessons, his kindness, his frailty. I told her about the second time I fought Vita, where I ate him as he held me in his arms and called me family.

"Do you think he'd forgive you, Lark?" Jelisaveta asks quietly.

"I know he did," I respond, my tears having long since dried up. "Vita said he did. She… she revived him, I suppose, after his death. To ask him what he wanted her to do with his soul."

My future Captain's eyes go wide.

"She did? Really?"

"She did," I confirm. "And I guess he said he wanted to be with me. So she fed me what was left of him. She said it would… complete my soul. And that he forgave me."

"Do you know what she meant?" Jelisaveta asks, and I shake my head. "I see. Well… I'm an Inquisitor, so I can look at souls. Vrothizo souls are supposedly very distinct. Like a black void, all-consuming and all-destroying. Infinitely voracious. But yours isn't like that at all, Lark. You have a wonderful soul. It's warm and it's bright and it smells like wood from the forest, dangerous yet beautiful. It looks very, very human."

My breath catches. That's… that's what Vita said. A deep and gleaming light, smelling of fresh wood. She was describing August's soul. And now, somehow…

"It's mine," I whisper. "He gave it to me to keep. I didn't digest it."

Jelisaveta raises her eyebrows, but doesn't comment on my words.

"Definitely forgave you, then," she says instead. "So. Do you think he'd want you to forgive yourself? Would he want you to be miserable?"

"He would want me to not hurt anyone," I tell her firmly. "But I can't stop myself from hurting people. I either lose control, or… or I do what the Templars want, and hurt people on purpose. I'm either a monster or a weapon."

"That's not an answer," she says, holding out her newly-grown hand to me, "would he want you to be miserable? What would he tell you if you came to him as a failure? Would he want you to end your life? Or would he want you to pick yourself back up and succeed the next time?"

I know the answer. I hate it, but I know it.

"People are meant to persevere," she tells me. "We are meant to improve. We pick ourselves up when we fall, forgive those who tripped us, and walk forward together. And every step along the way, we reach a hand out to help the others that have fallen. That is, in my heart, the true nature of humanity. And I see it in you, Lark. We are weak, and we fail, and sometimes our failures bring down everyone around us. But if you keep walking forward, keep helping those you meet, we will all reach a better place together."

"But when I fall," I whisper, "I can bring down a lot more people than you can."

"True," Jelisaveta nods. "But you have more arms than I do. You can help a lot more people up."

"And is that what this would be?" I ask. "Will killing Ars and Vita help people?"

"Ars? Certainly," Jelisaveta confirms. "If there's anyone in the world that deserves death, it's Ars. Vita… is a trickier question."

"I don't want to kill Vita," I tell her. "I think… if there's one person in the world that I hate, it's her. But even then, I don't want to kill her."

"Well," Jelisaveta says, "you have until you graduate to decide on that. It likely won't be long after that when we go after her. A necromancer as powerful as she is, even if she's more misguided than evil, isn't something the Church can abide by. If you don't want to assist us… I'd suggest dropping out of the program."

I chuckle humorlessly.

"I… wasn't under the impression that was an option for me," I tell her. "I don't think the Templars are any more keen on having a vrothizo run around the city than they are a necromancer."

"Yeah, well, I'll fight for you," Jelisaveta smirks, thumping her chest with a fist. "Templar service is voluntary, and they're going to remember it. The choice is yours, Lark. You wanna walk out, you can. No questions, no threats, no bullshit. I'll even see if I can get Lady Vesuvius to make you a citizen. So… you should consider your decision without worrying about any of that crap, okay?"

"Okay,” I promise, nodding. I wipe one more errant tear that started to form, but thankfully no others join it. "Hey, um… I guess this'll be a weird question because I already said no before, but…"

I swallow.

"C-can I have a hug after all?"

Jelisaveta raises her eyebrows, but nods firmly.

"Of course, yeah," she agrees, holding her hands out. "Why? I thought you hated hugs."

"I hate them because they remind me of August," I tell her, hesitantly leaning forwards. "But… you kind of already do."

She smiles softly, pulling my torso onto her lap. I curl up on the floor beside her as I feel her arms wrap around me, warm and tempting. Just feeling it causes saliva to pool in my mouth. But right now, there are other feelings that beat stronger. Loss, regret, and pain, sure. But for the first time since his death, I remember his living moments again. Love, compassion, uncertainty. I remember the times I looked forward to tomorrow, and smile.

The pain is not gone. I know that, sometime soon, I will look at my claws and feel the need to rip open my throat with them, to try desperately to leave this world and flee from self-hate. But something, somehow, is a little more hopeful right now. And I resolve to remember this, too.

Idly, seemingly without thought, Jelisaveta starts stroking the top of my head. It makes me tense at first, but unlike Galdra she is careful with my ears, her gentle ministrations scratching delicately at their base, massaging the muscles I use to move them without hurting. More and more, I relax, and soon enough I feel my body vibrating a low hum with every breath I take.

I close my eyes, and I'm not afraid.