Were you dropped on your head from the top of the dumb fucking mountain? Graywing, you fucking idiot! Moronic, imbecilic, half-brain, weak-willed with a brain murkier than river silt ice.

Ranvir fell through nothing. Or floated. Or swam. Or maybe he did none of those things. Maybe he just sat there. A pocket of air surrounded him, presumably because he hadn’t moved and it didn’t move and distances didn’t exist and… His head was hurting.

His shoulder was hurting too. His arms, feet, eyes, scalp, fingers, knees, leg, wings, back, those damned disintegrating talons. The only thing, strangely, that didn’t hurt was his chest. Though he was feeling a clammy chill settle in. Though was that from the in-between space of the Liminal or blood loss or injury?

He didn’t dare move at risk of dispersing what little air he had access to, and though he could easily find his beacons, he had no space to affect and so could not effectively move.

Graywing, when I get my hands on you… I’ll pluck you. Every feather. I’ll send you running naked as the day you were born, or hatched whatever, throughout every plane and country in existence. All shall know you for stupidity and cowardice…

His tirade lasted some time. Or maybe it didn’t. He had no markers by which to track, no points for which to reference. After Saleema ejected them from Vednar, trapping them inside her pocket-space, she’d used the seals over his spaces to tear them away. Then generated more space to shred them. Their remnant might drift through the Liminal as well. Or not. They would also be standing still.

His head hurt and he felt clumsy.

In the confusion of such an attack, Graywing had allowed her a moment. The singular event she needed to employ a deathblow. She’d torn apart her own space. For Ranvir, such a move would be suicidal, but she was a generator. He knew she had long since created a new space and returned to the fight. Killing everyone while he drifted. Dying half from asphyxiation, half from blood loss, and wholly from spiritual dissolution.

Ranvir blinked. There was something in the distance. Which didn’t make sense. The Liminal didn’t have horizons, there was no space. Except around planes! Could it be Vednar? He had been close to it. Or not, actually.

Growling, he stretched forth his tether-sense. It was an island. Rock and nothing more. No space, no mana, nothing. Except it was moving. Or maybe he was. Though neither should be.

Something played across the rock, flickering and shifting. Light. Ranvir blinked, feeling cold settle across his side. Then light, dappled and strange, shifted across him.

The source was a… gap in the nothing. White and nonsensical. Voices were coming through. He blinked. It sounded like idle chatter. He pressed a hand to his chest. Blood was puddling there. No gravity to pull it— a droplet fell off towards the gap. I’m not imagining it?

The end, he realized. I’m reaching the end of the Liminal. That strange space I’d felt when one of my pocket-spaces drifted. How did I find it so quickly? He wondered back, trying to place it. The island struck the gap. More words.

Then suddenly, he was moving quick. Cold intensified. The light burned with power to blind even Grevor. Then a strange pull.

Blinded and torn forward, Ranvir cried out. Pressure was building inside him, saliva and tears leaking. The voices were louder now, alarmed. There wasn’t anything to breathe, the cold it was biting into him ferociously. Every part of his body was trying to burst apart.

Heat enveloped him, the voices evened out, and sweet breath pressed into his lungs. His body no longer felt as if it was being torn apart anymore than it was previously. Gasping, he sat up.

He was on the island he’d seen. But he was still in the middle of nowhere. Distantly, he could see little lights, but it was otherwise as empty as the Liminal. Except for two… Ranvir hesitated, calling them men. They had the height. More than enough, actually. Both stood at least seven feet tall, with green skin, thick jaws and tusk emerging from their lower lip.

A vast hand enclosed on Ranvir’s shoulder. “You’re in a bad way, Friend. What happened to you?” Around the wrist, he’d wrapped a piece of red cloth looking freshly dipped in blood. The sight sparked a memory. On Belnavir, he’d seen the same. Two men, human in appearance, though their sleeves had been longer.

“Who are you?” he asked, wonder overcoming his injury for a moment.

“We are called Red Arms,” a newcomer said, setting down beyond the two stranger.

The two turned around sharply, then bowed. “Sir.”

His arm was covered up to his shoulder, nor did it seem like cloth. Instead, it was a liquid like substance, though it creased like fabric should. He appeared to be in his late fifties and wore a hat. He was short, especially compared to the strangers. There was a strangely familiar cast to his face.

“Have I seen you before?” Ranvir asked.

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The man smiled, his eyes kindly. Already, Ranvir felt invigorated by his presence. “Briefly, on Belnavir.”

Ranvir nodded. He’d been with the strange man with the overwhelming tether-sense. “Your arm, it’s anima.”

“The sleeve is.” He held out a hand.

Ranvir took it and the man tugged him upright. “You look the worse for wear.”

Ranvir nodded, pressing a hand to his chest, though he could do nothing for the bleeding on the opposite end. Nor the dissolving limbs. It didn’t hurt, but he’d lost most of his fingers. Bare nubs remained wiggling on malformed lumps at the end of his wrist.

“You came to see me?” Ranvir asked.

“I’ve been monitoring you.”

“It’s a little too late now, I fear.”

“Fear often clouds the mind.”

Ranvir shook his head and looked down at the ground. A small puddle of blood. He was tired, his soul was wrung out. The last of the last of the last. He had no more to give or take. “My body and spirit are torn. I have no more left.”

The man shook his head. “It feels that way, but that’s your body and spirit talking to you, through you even. But you mind is the most important part of the equation. It is not a triumvirate of equals, but lessers to greaters, you understand. Your mind commands and the rest obeys.”

Ranvir shook his head, but looked up. The man had turned, looking into the void. The little lights, faint and uncaring. “I don’t understand.”

“Breathe. Think. What do you need?”

“I need my soul to recover and my body to heal, but I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

Ranvir shrugged. “It’s not possible,” he said, knowing it was wrong.

“Is it not?”

“I cannot do what Saleema has. I don’t know how.”

“How would you guess?”

Ranvir shook his head. “I’m too tired.”

“Okay.”

Ranvir hung for a moment. “Okay?”

The man shrugged. “Self-governing and sufficiency are extremely important, especially as strength rises. If you say you can’t, then that’s it. It starts and stops with you.”

“That’s how your organization runs?”

“Not mine, but yes. If you are self-sufficient, you may handle tasks on your own. You get more freedom. But should you prove unequal to the task, you get put on easier, simpler duties where the ability to decide matters less.”

“Are you trying to recruit me?”

“You’re not that interesting, besides you’re infected.”

Ranvir shivered, thinking about which part of him the… Red Arm considered infected. Loce or Latresekt’s spawn. Probably wasn’t Graywing, since the man had been on the Belnavir of his own volition.

There was something else about the man, familiar outside of having seen him before. Right on the tip of his tongue.

“What is so different about the woman, Saleema?”

Ranvir stared at the man in profile, eyes narrowing. “Her spirit is greater than it should be, bigger than mine. Despite it being torn to pieces, she persists. Despite her body being torn to pieces, she persists.”

“Where does that come from?”

Ranvir shrugged. “Her Fundament, presumably that’s where she coalesces. But it would need to be strong. Powerful beyond…” he flailed weakly, looking for the right— “words.”

“How does a Fundament grow strong?”

“Trials. Training. Concept.”

“What is a strong Concept?”

Ranvir shook his head. “One that’s incredibly tightly bound to you. Shaped over years or decades. Esmund and Sansir did something to theirs, but I don’t know the effect it would have… A perfect Concept, one to which you already fit.”

“And so what would be your first step to become like Saleema?”

“Wait another decade.”

“And if you couldn’t? Say you had… fifteen minutes?”

Ranvir swallowed. Fifteen minutes… “I’d have to find my Perfect Concept, but I don’t know how or where to begin.”

“Where would you look?”

“In my soul. But it is tearing apart now. Like a tornado is actively going through it.” He’d attempted sanctuary within his spirit when he’d first drifted, but there’d been no peace. It felt as if the winds could’ve torn him apart, killed him even faster.

The man turned around, standing next to Ranvir, but turned the other way. He narrowed his eyes as he looked at something. “That sounds traumatic.”

Ranvir snorted. “You don’t know the half of it.” He turned to follow the man’s gaze. The space wasn’t as empty as he’d thought it was. Distantly, a nebulous cloud hung. Colorful and foggy, it hung as if it had just stopped spinning around some blindingly bright element.

Curious, Ranvir reached out with his tether-sense— he staggered to his knee. The space around them. “How?” he gasped. Looking up. It was old. Beyond numbers. Beyond reckoning. Tens of thousands of years old. Hundreds of thousands. Perhaps even a million. And it was all bonded together by anima. “A million? Is it really a million years old?” his knees were too weak to support.

The two strangers snorted and laughed, but a look from the man quieted them down. “A little more than that.”

“Things cannot be that old.” He turned his attention back to the disk.

“Son,” the man said, placing a hand on Ranvir’s shoulder. Warmth seemed to spread through him into his bones. Calming and easing. “You have no idea what’s possible.”

“And that,” Ranvir said, nodding to the disk. “What is that?”

“A galaxy. Spinning endlessly through the universe.”

Ranvir licked his lips. Something was coming together, he could feel suddenly. “Spinning. Around that white thing, the eye?”

“Eye is a good enough word for it, and aye, it’s turning around it.”

“Like a hurricane.” Ranvir said, feeling his voice grow distant as his spirit echoed with sudden clarity. Winds rushing and pushing, fighting him when he’d first attained a Persistence as a Concept. The slight winds created by his tether-space, the gush of wind from Amanaris, and the winds of Graywing’s enclosure. When his soul had injured, both this and the first time. Storm winds as if to ravage him, tear him down fully.

The seed that would become Loce, coming from a simple elemental of sand but becoming a storm locust. Ranvir staggered as he felt his Fundament reacting. The Concept imbued within, forever altered. But not broken.

Space, when shown to sizes that he could not reckon, had become a storm. Amanaris mana shifted and changed slightly.

Amanaris

***

Sand Mana has become Sandstorm Mana.

“How old is it?”

“Close enough to your surroundings that it doesn’t matter.”

“It’s still spinning?”

“Yes.”

Forever turning, twisting on and on. Sand, Storm, and Space it was all the same. One. A hurricane endless. An Eternal Storm.

Ranvir's Fundament shifted. Accommodating the new form. Turning softly at the center of his spirit. “I need a forge.” He gasped, falling to his knees. His stumpy arms didn’t hurt when they caught him, sloughing sand onto the island.

“Then go find one.”