Willow awoke in her bed at 23 Grave street and walked bleary eyed through the door to the dining room. Margaret was cooking and Benny waited impatiently at the table kicking his feet. Willow pulled out a chair.

“Oh dear, that seat’s for Bryan,” Margaret said, and the name brought a twinge of nausea. A memory of blood and essence. A speeding piece of wood.

“Sorry,” Willow said, and pulled the seat beside it. Just as she sat down, Margaret turned around and, with a smile on her face, began to serve breakfast.

It wasn’t food. Animal things writhed on the plates, some with human faces. Some that shrieked and wailed in pain. They hadn’t been cooked, some were even alive. Willow recoiled at the plate sat in front of her, which held the head of an elf, still blinking.

“Not hungry,” Margaret asked innocently, sitting down beside Benny. She cut the tentacle off of some writhing thing and held it out to the boy, who eagerly slurped it up.

“What’s happening,” Willow asked. The air thickened like jelly and she felt trapped in the seat. She tried to rise, but she was stuck.

“Breakfast,” Margaret said. “Bryan will be back any moment, then you both can tell us about your little adventure.”

Blood, screams, ricocheting wood. It came back as images like she’d never seen it before. As someone would have through human eyes. A softly glowing sphere, thirty feet wide, hovering over the dying body of a woman.

“Oh dear, you’re back,” Margaret said, and Willow’s eyes went wide. She turned her head slowly, and Bryan was sitting in the chair beside her. He was pale and his eyes stared into the distance, focused on nothing. His mouth hung open, but he spoke anyway.

“All for you, Willow,” he whispered, and Willow scratched down her cheeks as she tried to scream.

Benny and Margaret joined in, and when she looked they’d been mutilated and crushed.

“My life for you.”

🜛

Willow woke with a start and several items around the bedchamber clattered to the floor. Leopold hardly seemed to notice, and turned over in bed beside her.

She was sweaty and couldn’t seem to get control of her breathing. She nearly tumbled out of bed and rushed to the window, hand on her chest to push away the invisible weight.

The lights outside were like a multicolored sea. All of the magical creatures, just as sentient as any human, waiting on her whim. Waiting to serve. Loyal, to her.

She tore away from the window and gathered a nightrobe before bursting from their bedchamber into the hallway. The insect-lights were low, but at her presence they began to brighten. Finally alone, she caught her breath. Willow leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes.

Bryan.

They snapped open again and she forced herself to walk. Another sleepless night, although it seemed like she needed the sleep less and less. Was she becoming less human like the elf had said? Was it because she’d spent so much time out of her body during the fight? Or was she just traumatized?

She staggered down the hall, one hand trailing the expensive wallpaper. She hadn’t gone far when she heard the slap of flesh on wood ahead. She stopped and listened, and the slap came again.

There was an open door to the right, one she’d never entered before, and she crept up to it and peeked around the corner. Inside was a grand room floored in polished wood, a long table pushed back toward the floor-to-ceiling windows. Sun Geon stood in the center of the room, sweating, then moved faster than she could follow. His arms and legs blurred for a moment and there came the slap again.

He came back into focus and, catching his breath, looked right at her.

“Wraith Willow, have you difficulty sleeping?”

Willow stepped into the room, her own bare feet padding against the polished floor, until she was a few feet away. The smell of sweat permeated the air around him.

“Dreams,” she said. “Do you sleep?” It didn’t seem like such a ridiculous question to ask of someone three hundred years old.

“Few cultivators at my level need it,” Sun Geon said, then wiped his face. “But there’s a secret few know: we’re plagued by dreams too.”

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Willow saw the same look in his eyes that she felt in hers. “You saw the fight?”

“Yes,” Sun Geon said unapologetically. “Your power was unsurpassed. Your enemies fell in droves.”

“I can’t get them out of my head,” Willow said. “I killed… I killed a friend that day too. I didn’t know I’d done it until after.”

Sun Geon looked out of the window at the sea of lights which surrounded the mansion. “In my life I have killed thousands of men,” he said. “Some deserved death, some sought to deal it to me. But most… most were slaughtered on orders. Orders I could not question, that I would not. Orders that named a place, and I would go there and none would be left alive. I blinded myself to my actions then, but I see every face in my dreams.”

“What helps,” Willow asked. “Does anything?”

Sun Geon smiled and nodded. “Training. Would you trade pointers with me?”

“Pointers?”

“A turn of phrase from my homeland. What it means is to fight, but not to the death. Each instructs the other on their failings. In my sect and many others it is the chief method of training from disciple to disciple.”

“Sure,” Willow said, shaking the dream away. She walked a few feet and cinched the sash about her waist. She stood straight-backed while Sun Geon fell into a martial pose.

“When do we begin?”

“Now,” he said, and disappeared. Adrenaline choked Willow and something screamed in her head that he was behind her to her right, in her blind spot. But that was impossible!

She grabbed at the spot with psychokinesis and felt something evade her grasp. It flitted into the air, jumping a full twenty feet to arc over her, and a hundred arms exploded into the ether around her. He wouldn’t get so close again.

When he landed he went for a frontal assault. She countered with an ethereal arm, aware of the terrible damage even a single limb could inflict, but he batted it away as if it were nothing. Willow sneered and dove in with a dozen others.

He was so fast and slippery. Every hand closed on air, or was touched by a flash of his fist or foot and disrupted by a blast of essence. He was coming, he was getting closer, although she was slowing him down.

She grabbed herself and threw, hurtling across the room. Hands at the other side caught her, driving the air from her lungs, but by the time she reoriented he had crossed the distance, a fist held an inch from her heart.

“An impressive dodge, Wraith Willow,” Sun Geon said, then stepped back and bowed. Willow, surprised that it had ended so quickly, stumbled into a returning bow.

“Now, if I may make some suggestions.”

🜛

They sparred until the sun crept over the mountains, which gave their bouts a new dimension: shadow, and its illusions. Willow threw psychokinetic punches and attempted to pluck Sun Geon from the air, but the cultivator always seemed to see them coming even though they were invisible. She wondered if he possessed an innate sense similar to her own ability to see essence.

She learned to dodge—to move her body when faced with absolute terror by her own physical will and psychokinesis as well. She stopped freezing up mid-attack and started laying down multiple layers of attacks coming from different directions, like her father had taught her so long ago on the chessboard.

At some point Leopold had shown up, but he hung back watching. Annabelle arrived as they traded blows high in the air, Willow’s body held aloft by psychokinesis while Sun Geon attempted to ricochet himself into a position to land a pulled blow.

He succeeded. His shin stopped an inch from her face, and she lowered her body to the ground. Her physical body was still her most vulnerable target. She understood now why Andrew had wanted her to become an essence shadow.

Sun Geon drifted down on a current of essence he rode like a leaf on the wind. She still didn’t know how he did it—his explanations were less than satisfactory. Something about years of focus, about kindling the spark within his belly, about cultivating and meditating and something about pills and cycling, although not the cycling that she’d been taught. Through all of that he’d gained the ability not only to manipulate essence through physical movement alone, but also some amount of control of the ambient essence outside his body as well.

What was clear was that they were practicing two entirely different arts, and Willow was only able to keep up because of what had been done to her. A single mage would never be able to fire off a spell before Sun Geon got to them, although a dozen or more might be able to ensnare the cultivator if they worked together.

They bowed to each other, both sweating profusely, and Sun Geon finally turned to regard the others.

“Leopold, Annabelle, I see you have awoken. Was your sleep restful?”

“Sure,” Leopold said, then locked eyes with Willow. “Can I have a word?”

In the hallway she saw concern on his face. “Are you sure this is such a good idea,” he asked. “I saw him nearly kill you a dozen times in there.”

“We were training,” Willow said, finally coming down from the adrenaline rush. She’d felt something similar in her battles with the warbeasts, but they were always tinged with sorrow and regret. There was nothing sorrowful about this, and it served to erase the visions of Bryan’s body which plagued her.

“He was testing you,” Leopold pleaded. “He knows now he could end you at any moment. And you know it too. Where does that leave you? Leave us? We’ve summoned a wolf, and we didn’t even know.”

“He would be a wolf whether or not he showed me,” Willow said. “At least now I know where my limits are. Before…”

Leopold sighed and pulled her close. He knew: before, she’d been hailed as the greatest achievement in warbeast development. A dozen city-states and the Celestial Empire had born witness to her birth. She’d ripped through half a dozen guards like they were nothing and had slaughtered two deans of the Arcanum. Before this morning she might have thought there was no limit to her destructive powers. To know there was a limit, to know there was something else in this void of violence, was comforting.

“You’re going to have to find somewhere else to practice,” he said, and leaned back to look into the room. Willow did too and noticed for the first time how the polished wooden floor had been cracked and splintered from the force of their spar. The walls had craters from missed punches and a chandelier laid on top of the long table which was now cracked in two.

Willow hadn’t even noticed.

“Oh. Shit.”