“Chancellor, we aren’t retreating, we’re merely performing retrograde action.”

-Dread Empress Sinistra II “the Coy”, shortly before her death

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The mountain of fur took a step towards Laurence. I focused my attention on her. The world started to spin. The gentle moonlight stung my eyes. I had spent so long without the sense of sight that I was struggling to handle the ability to see.

Laurence wasn’t moving. There was something wrong with her, but I didn’t have enough time to try healing her immediately in a fight this fast. I reached out with my mind towards the ground beneath Laurence and seized it, then sent it hurtling hundreds of feet in the air. The moment I could take a look at her, I’d see what I could do.

I tried to blink the spots out of my eyes. They didn’t disappear. This wasn’t working for me. I needed to be able to operate well enough to fight. I focused on all the light within the area and willed it to change. The world became varying shades of grey and white. That was fine. It was easier for me to handle.

Yvette finished an incantation from beside me, and lightning leaped out of her fingertips, striking the smaller Ratlings in the distance. There was an understated bang as it arced from one Ratling to the next, then the singe of sizzling fur.

I winced from the noise.

Sound. Sound next.

“Eater was our eldest, the first of the five, brought forth from an age long past,” the giant Ratling sang.

I whimpered. The music might have been harmonious, but it still assaulted my senses. They were completely overloaded. It was scary how my capacity to manage human senses had deteriorated in such a short amount of time.

I muffled the area.

That was better.

“Can you stop changing things it’s making my magic go completely wild I can’t account for all the changes you’re making ma!” Yvette whispered.

She shook one of her hands at me. It was dirty, and the fingernails were cracked.

The Horned Lord’s massive frame pivoted as it turned its attention to us. Now that I knew what its Dream was, I couldn’t allow it to die. Unfortunately, it couldn’t be awake either. That complicated everything. I’d start with simpler ideas, before trying to modify the plan I had made to kill it. It swung a massive tree trunk of a limb our way.

My daughter shrieked.

I didn’t even think. Suddenly, the two of us were standing somewhere else. It wasn’t teleportation. Well, it was, but it also wasn’t. I’d just done what I’d been doing for the past week. I’d defined everywhere within myself as one point, then… changed the colour of the point. It seemed that spending time dead had been good for something after all.

Disoriented, I tried to take a step to my right. I wasn’t facing the right way. I staggered and ate a mouthful of salty ground. The feeling of cool air against my naked skin was starting to sting as well. This was so frustrating. I was being bombarded with so much information that was no longer familiar to me. I had thought that it would be as easy as stepping back into a body. It seemed like I would need time to adjust instead. This wasn’t a good time to find that out.

I focused and my sense of touch became muted.

There. Everything felt fine now.

Learning to be human again was going to be a challenge. A challenge that I didn’t have time for in the middle of combat.

I climbed to my feet once more and turned unconsciously towards where I could feel the Horned Lord. My limbs were shaky and hard to use. My presence shifted to account for the rapid repositioning I had done. It felt like I was swimming in a sea of myself.

The thump, thump of the ground from the distance followed by the colossal shape approaching marked the next round of the fight. I took a moment to reach out with my mind and turn all the smaller Ratlings into smoke. I needed to simplify, to make the situation easy enough to follow that I didn’t need to worry about added complications.

Should I just flatten the plain? I could make everything uniform. That would help me to cope.

No, think human.

“He sated his Hunger, not knowing the cost, not knowing the doom that he courted,” the words echoed out in my mind from the distance.

I cut my way through the threads of story that started to wind their way around us.

My daughter started to mutter under her breath again. Was there a way I could put it to sleep indirectly? I could try to fill an area with an… essence of lethargy. Unfortunately, I had no idea what that would be like and would cost me to do. I was sure there were modern drugs that could achieve what I wanted. Could I pull that off without paying any cost? No. I didn’t know exactly how to make any of them.

I created a persistent vacuum centred around the creature. This was dangerous, but it was the best I could think of. If it worked, it was just as likely to kill the Horned Lord as put it to sleep.

The Horned Lord closed in once more. Its movements were unbalanced, as if it wasn’t used to walking around without the assistance of a tail.

I seized both of us, focused on the island where Laurence was, and the world shifted. The world blurred, then we were on a floating platform hundreds of feet in the air.

Yvette yelped and released her spell prematurely. The petrified trees around us on the flying island started to return to life.

“Whassa prolem?” It seemed that talking was also going to take some acclimatization. I focused, then enunciated each word properly.

“What’s the problem?” At least, that’s what I thought I said. I wasn’t entirely sure, considering I had muted sounds.

I tripped and fell.

I hate this.

Grimacing, I flew my way over to Laurence. I may as well just use my mind if my legs were currently beyond me.

She had forced herself up onto her knees using her arm muscles alone, and had the point of her blade dug into the ground beside her.

Time to see if I could heal her, while I waited to find out if my first idea for dealing with the Horned Lord worked at all.

“Broken spine, kid. Can’t move my legs,” she spat out through gritted teeth.

Really? Her spine was broken, and she was trying to drag herself back into the fight.

I already knew that I couldn’t just heal her the way I would heal myself. Her domain prevented it.

That didn’t mean I couldn’t use magic.

If I didn’t have my Name, I would never have risked using magic to heal someone without training first. This was the first time I was going to try properly casting a spell. But with it? This was what I was supposed to be doing. I was meant to be healing people, making the world a brighter place.

I reached out and started to sing to the world under my breath.

Moving my lips was hard. Talking normally was something that I was no longer used to.

My singing wasn’t very good.

It didn’t matter. The angels guided my efforts. What they did made me feel nervous. They sent a sense of commiseration, along with a deep feeling of empathy.

All of Laurence’s smaller wounds were healed over. The break did not fix.

“Shrouded came second, forged in the silence, by then Eater’s die was already cast.” The Tumult spoke.

I severed the thread of narrative that came with it.

“Why isn’t it mending?” I asked.

My muscles kept clenching involuntarily.

Being able to heal almost anything short of death had been something I had quickly become accustomed to. It was something that had always made me feel helpless in the past, and I didn’t like the idea of there being something aside from death beyond my ability to heal now. I thought of myself as fulfilling the same Role as a priest, even if I wasn’t one.

“It doesn’t surprise me.” Laurence’s wrinkled face was bleak. “Heroes and villains rarely scar. Our injuries are never permanent, unless they are dire or meaningful. Seems I’m buggered.”

“Are you serious?”

The idea was stupid and arbitrary. It fit for stories, but I still didn’t like it at all. I was certain that my abilities weren’t limited by that restriction, but they also couldn’t work on the Saint.

“Absolutely. If it's part of my story, then I’m stuck with it.”

I felt my heart break for her just a little.

At least my emotions still work.

Her Dream was to be the sword that ended all evil. It was impossible, and on some level she probably knew that. She knew that there would always be some evil out there that she couldn’t kill. She wanted to one day go out in a blaze of glory, leaving the world a better place in her passing.

It was a belief that would have been incompatible with my own in a kinder world.

This was a world where there were plenty of evils that I was happy to let her kill.

“We’ll find a way for you to keep fighting,” I told her.

I could see her story branch off from where we were. There were two main paths it followed. I could break her dream. I could tell her that she should live out the rest of her life unable to fight. She would become bitter and angry. Not at me, but at herself for her perceived failure. With time her Name would fade and then one day I would be able to heal her again.

But it wouldn’t matter.

Her Name would already be gone, and she would be miserable for the rest of her days.

“I don-”

“Laurence. Have faith. We’ll find a way.” I cut in.

That wasn’t what I would do. I could find a way for her to keep on fighting on the other path. She would die in battle somewhere, doing what she believed to be right. She was old. With time, age would have claimed her regardless of what I did. I didn’t see anything wrong with helping her die on her own terms. It would mean finding an enemy for her that wouldn’t cause more problems when dead than alive, but… there were many of those in Calernia. I doubted I’d even have to look hard to find one.

Gods Above, she could die fighting legions of the dead near Keter if she wanted to. I’d make the other choice if she was younger. Unfortunately, I doubted I was able to change her mind given her life experiences.

I’d give her that one last fight instead.

It would make my own life more complicated, but that was okay. I hadn’t been planning an easy life to begin with.

Laurence started to try and drag herself towards the edge of the island again.

This is utterly ridiculous.

I started to reshape the island. I made sure to be subtle about it, although she would probably notice anyhow. This wasn’t a fight that I was willing to let her throw her life away in.

“Is my plan working?” I turned to Yvette.

She moved to the edge of the floating island and looked off.

“Suffocation isn’t doing anything to it but that doesn’t surprise me if something like this could be killed that easily then it would no longer be alive do you have a better idea because we need to try something else-” Yvette’s voice cut off as she shrieked.

A projectile smashed into the bottom of our floating island.

“The Song called out to me in the fields of starvation, it crooned while I contorted.”

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

I broke the effect of the Tumult’s performance while seizing my momentum. Yvette nearly fell off the edge. Her hair pulled upwards as she did so. At a glance, it looked filthy. That would need to be cleaned later. My mom would come back to haunt me from the grave if I had a daughter with hair that looked like that. I caught her with a thought. Laurence remained unmoved, her grip held firmly around the blade dug into the ground.

“Careful, kids!”

It took a few heartbeats for me to stabilize the island again.

Flicker.

The world swirled.

I redefined myself once more, and materialised at the edge of the island. Taking a moment to assess our situation, I looked down below. I would have preferred to just walk to the edge, but that wasn’t an option right now. It would probably end with me falling flat on my face.

Maybe I should have just flown over? I was so used to moving myself by changing the demarcations of space after doing it for a week that considering alternatives felt off to me.

The Horned Lord was below us and was in the process of uprooting another petrified tree. That was one way to attack us without appropriate reach.

I briefly glimpsed what looked like rotating panes of glass in the distance.

It seemed like we had found the destination for my dreams as well.

“I’m taking us down.”

The hard part of this would be keeping the Horned Lord alive without upsetting Laurence. I knew that I couldn’t convince her to spare it, despite how much more harm killing it would do. Even just a glance at her Dream was enough to convince me that she was too stuck in her current philosophy without me deliberately shattering her Dream. It was frustrating, but it was what I had to work with.

That meant finding some way to make her think that it was dealt with.

I was fairly confident that I had a way to achieve that.

I had put together a plan to remove the Horned Lord as a problem. It was an idea that could easily be adjusted to be non-lethal. There were a few fallbacks if my first attempt didn’t work as well. It was time to see if my efforts paid off.

The hard part would be the preparation.

I needed it to try and suppress us before I chose to act. I couldn’t risk relying on Persevere until afterwards, and even then, only two spectres at most.

“Why we should be safe up here you just need to keep moving the island we can keep attacking it until something works and then it will die.”

“We all crash if it uses its Sin again. Better for us to fight it on the ground and not risk dying to the fall.”

Flicker.

We were somewhere else again.

My head was pounding. Not from exhaustion, but from sheer information overload. Humans weren’t meant to do things like this. They weren’t meant to arbitrarily respecify the properties of their own body. It was taking its toll on me.

I rested my hand on Yvette’s right shoulder to stabilize myself. It was likely that I would fall without proper support.

“‘Twas a century ‘fore the birth of the land of death when Snatcher finally arrived."

A fossilized tree came hurtling towards us. I made it vanish from existence with a thought.

“Try to slow it down,” I ordered.

“I don’t think that will work, ma,” Yvette muttered.

That didn’t stop her from changing her focus. Brighter symbols started to trace themselves into the air.

I focused, then made the ground between us and the Horned Lord slick. It started to sprint towards us at a breakneck pace. The distance disappeared in moments.

Flicker.

I threw up.

Should I remove my capacity to feel nauseous? No, better not. Human. Think human.

I purged the vomit from my mouth and looked around. Moving like this was disorienting, and I wasn’t entirely sure where we were.

We had landed in the middle of a dense field of grass. The Horned Lord was already in pursuit. I started to propel Laurence’s island towards the edge of my range. I could have tried fleeing on it, but I doubted that the Horned Lord would allow us to escape.

What else could I do to make this easier for me?

Smells, I could remove those. I’d acclimatize to them again later. This grass could also go. It was visually distracting.

I removed friction from the area the Horned Lord was in. It slipped, fell, then started to slide towards us. This wasn’t acceptable. Direction? Yes, that would work.

Flicker.

We were back in the salt plains with petrified trees.

Yvette released another spell. Purple lights started to dance in the surrounding air. She howled in frustration.

“Stop stop stop just stop ma I can’t follow what you’re doing nobody can every one of my spells gets messed up this isn’t normal just think about Laurence and I before you kill us all by accident please!”

“The Skein came not long after, and with its birth the truth was finally learned.”

“I’m struggling,” I admitted.

I didn’t like how inhuman I clearly was.

“Stick to doing things that the rest of us can survive I trust you I know it's difficult but you can kill this monster without turning yourself into some kind of monster yourself.”

In spite of the rest of the reprimand, her trust made me feel warm inside.

Do I tell her what I’m planning?

Yes. If there was one person I should trust with this, it would be her.

“Do you trust me?”

The Horned Lord reached the end of the zone of no friction and started to move towards us once again.

“Of course I trust you otherwise I’d have asked to be assigned to someone else or just ran away.”

“I’m not going to kill the Tumult.”

The Horned Lord was the only thing keeping the Chain of Hunger from imploding. Its Dream was to escape from its hunger. It was an exceedingly detailed Dream, one that had been put together over thousands of years.

“Why aren’t you going to kill it look at all the people that are dying because of it-”

Talking with words was too slow. If I wasn’t struggling with my body, I’d default to it, but right now I needed an alternative. Telepathy? No, there’s no guarantee I didn’t mess something up. I started to will the words I wanted to appear as lights in the air. It was faster. An easier method to communicate.

I knew that I’d need to spend time learning what it meant to be a person again after the fight. I knew that this wasn’t a good decision to make. But with the limitations the fight was placing on me… it was the better alternative.

Now I just needed to hope Laurence’s Listen didn’t pick up our discussion from roughly a mile away.

“More people will die if we kill it,” the words appeared. “It controls everything about the Ratlings. Their culture, their migration patterns, what tools they have, everything. It’s the reason they only attack in spring. It’s the reason that the Chain of Hunger doesn’t run out of food. Without the Tumult, they would have no civilization at all.”

The Tumult was able to distract itself from its hunger through a combination of hibernation and music. The spring raids were both its tool to cull the excess Ratlings at the end of each year, and a way for it to try to steal knowledge from the Lycaonese. Books and other tools of civilization were brought back as plunder so that it could try to engineer an escape from its torment using what it learned.

It was still a villain, still monstrous, but it was a monster that had made itself critical to the continuation of a delicate balance until its own problem had been solved.

Yvette’s face was red with anger. “Then why should we let it survive surely if we kill it then the Ratlings would collapse and there would be no more of them it’s a walking disaster that should just die.”

Two large petrified trees flew towards us. I demolished them.

“The Tumult tries to prevent other Horned Lords from forming. It also tries to prevent large scale attacks on Rhenia, sticking to spring raids at worst. It isn’t perfect. Not just because of the spring raids. Every so often the Tumult makes a mistake and then there’s a disaster. I’m not saying the current situation is good, but it’s better than the alternative. The Ratlings would eat the Chain of Hunger to extinction and then send constant raids south if it was dead. It was probably like that before the Tumult was born.”

That wasn’t even considering the worst case scenario. I wasn’t entirely certain what would happen if the essence of hunger was consolidated into a single Ratling. The Tumult’s dreams of it were nightmarish enough that I didn’t want to give that a chance.

That didn’t mean I was happy with just accepting the way things were.

“It sounds like you’re just excusing a monster and letting it get away with atrocities how many more people will die over the years in spring because you don’t kill it now?”

“I’m not. It’s awful, but it buys us some time.”

The gigantic furry form of the Tumult was drawing close once more.

Flicker.

The world twisted.

I suppressed the urge to vomit as I fell to my knees.

This is bad.

There was a constant droning thrum at the back of my head.

“Time until what if you aren’t planning to kill it then what could possibly make this better I don’t see a solution here what do you think Laurence would say?”

I forced myself to my feet. It was hard.

“Time until we can solve the problem permanently. The Ratlings don’t like their hunger. They don’t want it, but they can’t choose to not have it. If you remove it, they all die. We can change that. Their hunger isn’t natural. The Tumult only needs to live until we can find an answer to it.”

What we really needed to do was find out what the source of the hunger was, then find a way to replace it. The Ratlings were not like the other Evils I had seen so far in Calernia. They were not Evil by choice. They were Evil because they had no other choice. That made them more like a natural disaster than a person. A Ratling that tried to be Good was an extinct Ratling.

So I would try to give them a choice.

“What makes you sure that an answer can be found any time soon if nobody has found one before then it’s probably not possible I think you’re just letting it get away.”

“Yvie,” I spoke the words, instead of sounding them out. It took more effort than I liked. “I know it's unfair to ask you this, but do you trust your mom?”

The glare she gave me was mutinous.

“You promise you’re not just letting it get away and that this is a way to maybe stop the Ratlings properly?”

“I promise. Please don’t tell Laurence.”

“Fine,” she huffed.

Laurence’s island was as far away as I could take it. The Horned Lord was nowhere near it. It was time to lower Laurence down.

The island started to descend.

The Tumult drew close once more. It had stopped throwing projectiles. I suspected that it had figured out that attempting it was futile.

Flicker.

Everything felt… off. I tried to move my right arm and my left arm moved instead. It was as if all of my bodily responses were just wrong. This was worrying. Far more concerning than the worst I had anticipated. I hadn’t thought that I would have become so unfamiliar with my body in such a short time.

This wasn’t working. I wasn’t making the right kinds of progress. I couldn’t afford to keep running this Horned Lord in circles this way. While I could theoretically keep it up until the Tumult died of starvation, I wouldn’t be a person by the end of it.

I needed to force it to use its Sin before I retaliated. What else could I try? I knew what I wanted to do here, but it wouldn’t work if the Horned Lord had an easy counter.

It paused, cocked its head from side to side, and turn turned in the direction that Laurence was in.

Should I reposition myself again?

No, I’d messed myself up enough already.

But it did give me a better idea.

“I’m going to deal with this. Watch over Laurence.”

“What ab-”

I surrounded myself in a protective barrier, then moved Yvette next to Laurence. The Saint had still been trying to drag herself back into the fight. Her dogged determination reminded me of myself in a bad way.

Finally, I redefined my own position according to the Horned Lord. I was at the centre, and it was at the edge of my range. It didn’t matter where it ran, I would always be positioned relative to it.

Then I made the edge of my range frictionless.

Now it would never get to where it wanted to be.

I might not be able to change the Horned Lord, but there was nothing stopping me from changing myself according to it.

The world became a wash of greys as both of us rapidly spun around. I closed my eyes. It was better if I couldn’t see what was going on. The Horned Lord kept trying to escape the prison that I had turned myself into, but found no success.

Merciful heavens, reacclimatizing to my body was going to be a nightmare.

Now that it couldn’t cause any more trouble for me, I had a moment to think.

Did I want to try forcing a draw? Laurence had talked about patterns of three and while that was an option, I felt confident that I could do better.

I’d try to win, but leave the possibility of a draw available as a safety net.

I finally had the Horned Lord alone. There was plenty that I could try that wouldn’t necessarily be safe around the others.

Should I start by trying to force more of the hunger into it? It was cruel, but it would force the Tumult to sing if it wanted to maintain sanity. I needed it to act before I did. I knew that it would have a third Sin, but I was willing to bet that it was a passive one. Something like record, listen, dance or perform. It would almost certainly be something that passively helped with its performance.

I started the process of attempting to do just that.

“Sleep forever more to suppress the curse, or feast on ourselves until the Drakon is revived.” The Tumult spoke, before I progressed any further.

It seemed that my plan had paid off after all.

All the effects I had up vanished at once.

It felt like I was at the bottom of the ocean, with the weight of all the water pressing down from above.

It didn’t matter. Now I just prayed that my scheme paid off.

Hopefully, I don’t need to rely on backup plans.

Two ghosts vanished.

A skin tight bubble appeared around the Tumult. The inside of the bubble had space mapped to its current location.

The outside…

Well.

That mapped to somewhere else that my presence leaked into. A place that I wasn’t fond of, which I had just spent over a week becoming acquainted with.

It wasn’t the first place that I had considered.

The hells had been on the top of the list, but I wasn’t certain if that was a good idea. Knowing stories, a Praesi summoner would bring it back into Creation, and I wasn’t keen on finding out how that ended. Arcadia had been dismissed for similar reasons.

It worked.

For a moment I stood and looked on in shock. I hadn’t expected a plan of mine to succeed without having to rely on contingencies. Considering everything else I had thrown at the Tumult, I was certain that it would survive this.

The Tumult stepped through my portal into nowhere in particular at all.