The snap of the Priest's fingers cracked through the cavern like a fault line finding its break.
And then everything moved at once.
The shockwave rolled out – not loud, not physical, a pressure that passed through her the way sound passed through water. Sharp. Total. A jolt of pulsating pain arcing through the mind before the body had time to register it, arriving and departing in the same instant, leaving nothing behind except the faint sense that something had been touched that hadn't been touched before.
Sera's hands were already moving before the sensation cleared.
The blue interface detonated beneath her vision:
A truth is walking towards you.
10…
The formation didn't stop to read it. Couldn't – the robed figures were already in motion, the heads that had lifted simultaneously now attached to bodies surging forward with the particular wrongness of things that had been still for too long and were now correcting for it. Not slow. Not fast. Wrong. Something being animated from the outside rather than driven from within – jerky at the joints, overcorrecting, the staffs and swords and implements coming up from prayer into hostility.
"Formation – hold the line!" Rena's voice cut across the cavern. "Guides cycle, don't stop cycling – espers, engage!"
The first wave of robed figures hit.
Sera moved.
Guide work in combat was its own particular discipline – not the careful attentive work of a session room, not the measured increments of pollution-pulling over fifteen minutes. This was fast and approximate and continuous, her hands finding esper arms and necks and backs as they rotated through her position, the mana cycling running on a different track from the part of her brain reading the room, cataloguing threats, avoiding swings, deciding where to be in the next three seconds.
9…
She pulled a fistful of pollution from Yoru's left arm as he pivoted past – dark and dense, the residue of whatever the shockwave had left in his channels – returned clean mana in the same motion and released him. He didn't acknowledge the contact. No time.
The robed figure nearest her was holding a staff. It moved in the overcorrecting way – too much weight forward, the staff raised in a configuration she didn't have a modern name for. A black-haired esper intercepted it before it reached her. She didn't watch the outcome. She was already moving to the next rotation.
8…
The counter sat beneath everything else like a second heartbeat. The raid force wasn't ignoring it – she could see it in the way eyes occasionally flicked to certain corners, the half-second of distraction before combat instinct dragged them back. Eight seconds felt like enough time. Eight seconds felt like nothing. The Priest had given them a statement they couldn't parse and a number they couldn't stop and the robed figures didn't care about either.
A truth is walking towards you.
She had heard the Priest speak. She had understood every word. And still the interface's rendering of the first hand's function landed in her like a cold stone dropped into still water – not the splash. Just the weight of it, settling.
A truth.
Walking.
Toward her specifically? Part of her wondered. Or toward all of them. Here she was, with a monster, same as she. It's eyes tracking her steadily with a veiled serenity.
7…
A robed figure with a sword broke through the formation's left flank. Arlen's ice lance caught it at the shoulder joint – the arm separating cleanly, the figure continuing forward two steps before the legs processed the damage and stopped. It didn't fall. It stood there with one arm and regarded the space where the other had been with the sunken sockets that weren't eyes anymore.
She noted this as she ran past.
6…
Something was happening to her left.
Another robed figure standing still in the middle of the chaos – not moving. Just standing. The implement it held raised. Not a weapon. A flute. Its deteriorated fingers positioned on the instrument with the muscle memory of something that had played it ten thousand times before the muscle dried to husk.
It blew.
The sound was wrong in the way everything in this room was wrong – screechy and old and feathered, arriving through the ears and bypassing them simultaneously. She felt it in her back teeth. In her sternum. In the place behind her eyes where the Priest's address had landed and was still sitting undisturbed.
Three espers on her right staggered.
5…
"Sound type," Arlen's voice bellowed, instructive and commanding. "Disorientation. Guides – anyone with sound-sensitive espers, prioritize cycling. Don't let the pollution accumulate–"
Sera was already moving toward the nearest staggered esper. Her hands found his bare arm. She pulled. The pollution was different from standard combat residue – textured differently. She cleared it. Returned clean mana. The esper steadied.
4…
The beast was quiet.
This was the wrong thing. During the approach, during the Priest's address, it had pressed and paced and pushed against the window with increasing urgency. Now – with the chaos of combat running through the room, with robed figures breaking against the formation and the instruments playing wrong notes and the counter ticking beneath everyone's vision – the beast was quiet.
Not settled. Not pushed back.
Listening.
For what? She couldn't take time to examine. She had four seconds and a formation to cycle.
3…
Hibiscus appeared at her shoulder – moving through the combat rotation with efficient precision, hands already extended toward the next esper in the cycle. They worked in parallel without speaking. The channel between them ran clean and professional. The same work it had always been.
Sera grabbed her shoulder, yanking her out of the way of an oncoming spear.
2…
A robed figure holding a lyre played now. Longer this time – skillfully dodging espers as it continued its paralyzing ditty. The sound found the gaps in the formation's defensive positioning and settled into them.
Her back teeth rattled.
Her sternum tightened.
The place behind her eyes.
1…
She looked up at the Priest on its dais.
It hadn't moved. The unfurled right palm still extended, still patient. The iridescent light still pouring from the cracked lids. Still watching her with a peaceful equanimity and waiting to see what she would do.
A truth is walking towards you.
0.
Nothing happened.
The combat continued. The formation held. The robed musicians played and the attacking ones pressed and Arlen was calling something from the front and Hibiscus was three steps to her left and Sera's hands were still moving through the cycle–
Screaming erupted around her.
Blackness climbed from the corners of her vision and consumed her.
✦ ♡ ✦
The darkness lasted longer than three seconds.
She knew this because she counted – a habit from the chains, from the dungeon, from every time she had lost a sense and needed to know when it would come back.
One.
Two.
Three.
The black didn't lift.
Four. Five.
Wrong. Something was wrong. The screaming around her had faded. The sounds of the fight – the impact of weapons against mummified bodies, the crack of ice, the rage of fire, Rena's voice cutting commands – had faded. The black wasn't lifting. The black was–
It peeled away into light and color in a disorienting flash.
She was moving.
Not in the cavern. Somewhere else entirely.
Her body felt strange. Wrong-shaped. The weight distribution off, the center of gravity sitting differently than she was used to, her gait covering ground in long strides that wasn't hers. She looked down at her hands and they were – present, functional, but wrong. Longer fingers. Different calluses. She was wearing something she would never have chosen – gilded fabric catching the light of a midday sun. Formal, refined wear – the kind of clothing worn to occasions she hadn't been invited to. The collar sat high and stiff against a neck that was not quite her neck. She noted, with growing surprise, that this was clothing from her home world. The style, the curves, and arcs of the fabric and designs…familiar.
Ratiora.
She didn't understand what was happening.
Her body was moving anyway. Forward. With an excited urgency of someone that knew where they were going even if she didn't – a pull toward the far end of the space she was in, a courtyard, the bright sky above, the stone underfoot worn smooth and old, the air carrying something floral and sweet and entirely unlike anywhere she had been before.
A figure in the distance.
She saw it because her body had decided to look – her attention going there automatically, the way a compass found north.
A girl. Robed in a dark blue fabric with a cape, gilded in silver.
Standing at the far end of the courtyard with her back to her, the robe heavy and simple against the warm light of the sun. Shimmering white hair in one long braid tied at the end with a blue velvet bow.
Her feet were already moving faster.
She didn't know why. She didn't examine why. The body she was in knew this girl – she could feel it as a pressure in the chest, in the throat, in the particular urgency of the stride – and the knowing predated anything she could consciously access.
The girl turned.
She looked across the courtyard – directly at Sera, directly at the body Sera was inhabiting – and her face broke open into something warm and unguarded and entirely without armor. She lifted a hand. Called out across the distance between them with the ease of someone saying a name they had said ten thousand times before.
"Vaelenyr," the girl called out cheerily.
Sera went rigid in the body that wasn't hers.
The name landed in her the way the Priest's address had landed – through the ears and past them, arriving somewhere deeper than hearing. She didn't know it. She had never heard it. And yet the body she was borrowing responded before she could stop it – the chest tightening, the warmth arriving unbidden, the particular physiological response of someone who had heard the most familiar sound in the world.
The girl was looking at her.
No – the girl was looking at him. At whoever this body belonged to. Calling his name across a courtyard in a voice full of easy warmth and the girl's face was–
White hair. Blue eyes. The youthful countenance of someone who had not yet had certain things happen to them. The nose. The jaw. The set of the mouth. The architecture of it – the specific geometry of those features arranged in that configuration–
It was her face.
Her face.
Not the face she wore now – not the black hair and the red eyes and the struggling years on Earth and or the long, tormenting years before that of chains and training and a constant shackling of the thing she had become. A version that predated all of that. Young. Unguarded. Standing in a warm courtyard wearing a simple robe and calling out a prince's name like it was the easiest thing in the world.
She was looking at herself.
She was inside the body of someone who had deeply loved this version of her – could tell from the way his heart thumped noisily and how the heat coursed in excited, rolling waves through his body. And that girl, whoever she was, was smiling at her– him, with an expression she had never worn on Earth, had never worn since the chains, had never worn since she woke up without her memories. Someone else entirely.
Open.
Unguarded.
Beloved.
What– Sera thought.
The black snapped back.
✦ ♡ ✦
The marble temple came back all at once.
Sound first – the chanting arriving before her vision did, a low collective sound rising from the robed figures standing over the crumpled formation, their sunken sockets aimed upward, their deteriorated mouths open. Not sounds of attack. Not the clash of weapons.
It was laughter.
Or the shape laughter made when it had been stored in a desiccated body for longer than laughter was meant to be stored – rhythmic, staccato, rising and falling in the cadence of a mournful soliloquy. They were laughing in prayer.
Then her vision reformed.
Sera was on her knees.
Her hands were around her head – she didn't know when they had come up, couldn't account for the motion, they were simply there, pressed against her temples with the forceful clench of someone bracing against something internal. The stone floor was cold under her knees.
"I'm sorry."
She heard it before she realized she was saying it. Her own voice, coming out between unsteady, haphazard breaths, lower than she intended, the words arriving without her authorizing them.
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
She didn't know why.
The apology was just there – already in her mouth, already on its way out, her body doing something her mind hadn't caught up to yet. She pressed her hands harder against her temples as if that would stop it. It didn't stop it. The words kept coming between the pants, each one smaller than the last, like something leaking from a crack she hadn't known was there.
"I'msorry.I'msorry.I'msorry"
For what? She tried to locate the source of it – tried to find the thing the apology was aimed at.
She had killed someone.
The thought arrived without context. Just the shape of it, true and certain, the way facts arrived when the body knew them before the mind had caught up. She had killed someone. She was fairly sure of that. She had killed someone and she knew who but she also didn't know who and the not-knowing sat in her chest like a chain on her vessel. Had always been there. She just hadn't been able to feel it until now. Why did she care now?
Had she eaten them?
The question arrived alongside the first one, equally real, equally without context. She didn't know if there was a difference. Killing and eating – were those the same thing, for what she was? Had she consumed the person she had killed? Had the killing been the consuming or had the consuming been the killing or were they one motion she couldn't separate because she had no memory of doing it, no memory of the before and after, just the vague and terrible shape of something that had happened and left no trace she could access?
"I'm sorry," she said again, apologies tumbling out of her mouth before her breath could catch up. Voice cascading out in hitched gasps.
She didn't know if she was apologizing for killing him or for eating him or for the forgetting – for having consumed something so completely that she couldn't even grieve it correctly. She was sorry and she didn't know what she was sorry about and she was losing the details of the memory already – the calluses on the longer fingers, the weight of the gilded collar, the warmth of the courtyard – and she was sorry for that too, for the forgetting, for doing it again, for always doing it.
What had he looked like? What had he looked like? WHAT HAD HE LOOKED LIKE?
She knew his name.
"Vaelenyr," the sound tumbled out, small and pitiful.
In her own voice. Easy. Like she had said it before, ten thousand times.
But this was the first time.
The white-haired girl's face was still behind her eyes – open and unguarded and beloved – and Sera was on her knees on the cold marble floor of a dead thing's sanctum apologizing to someone she couldn't remember killing because of a memory that wasn't hers and the raid force was broken open all at once around her.
Somehow, something had granted a memory.
Not to her – not specifically, not as a gift. The Priest's first hand had reached into every person in this room and opened whatever was oldest and truest and most buried and surfaced it for a few seconds whether they had asked it to or not.
Around her: the raid force in similar, cracked configurations.
Some on their knees, hands pressed to their faces. Some against columns – sliding down them or holding onto them, the stone the only solid thing available. Some simply still, standing with the vacancy of people who had just returned from a long way away and hadn't finished arriving. An esper two rows over had both fists clenched against his chest, knuckles white, his mouth moving around something she couldn't hear – an apology, from the shape of it. Lips forming words aimed at someone who wasn't in the cavern. Someone from before. Someone who might not be alive anymore.
Another esper was crying. Not loudly – the quiet of someone who didn't know they were doing it, the tears arriving before the decision to cry had been made. She heard, from somewhere behind her, a voice she didn't recognize say "mama" in a register that had nothing to do with being an adult in a dungeon. The voice of someone very young and very alone.
The raid force broke open all at once. Each one somewhere else entirely. Each one returned with something they hadn't been carrying before – or something they had been carrying so long they had stopped knowing it was there.
She looked for Rian.
She didn't decide to. Her eyes found him before the thought formed.
He was standing. That was the first thing – standing, not on his knees, which meant whatever the first hand had given him he had absorbed without going down. But his face–
The blood had drained from it. All of it. The colorlessness of someone who has seen something that took the warmth out of them. His eyes were open and staring into a middle distance that wasn't the cavern – not quite here yet, not quite back from wherever the black had taken him, still at the edge of the return. Cold. Still. The burns across his face catching the Priest's iridescent light in a way that made them look starker than they were.
She didn't know what the first hand had given him. She didn't know what was oldest and truest and most buried in a man whose vessel was shackled with a blessing – dark and burning.
She didn't know. She could see the cost of it on his face.
The Priest's second arm – the remaining hand still in mudra position in its lap – began to rise.
Slow. Patient. The same unhurried quality as the first. It had all the time that had ever existed and it knew this.
The left arm extended.
Rotated outward.
The fingers unfurled, one by one.
Pointed in the direction of Sera, once more, in the midst of the raid.
Iridescent light poured steadily from the cracked lids and the Priest looked at her across the length of the cavern and across the fifty or so people broken open between them and it opened its mouth once more and spoke.
What have you eaten, it wailed.
What have you eaten?
A croon. A mournful anguish. Its register already knew the answer and was asking anyway – not for information, for acknowledgment, for punishment. For her to hear the question and judge her own soul.
Sera felt her mouth spew out more apologies. The words pouring out like a tumbling river, her mouth mechanically moving in repetition, but she was somewhere else. Her thoughts were somewhere else.
Pitiful child.
The same address. The same word. But the tenderness was gone from it now – not cruelty in its place, something older than cruelty. Condemnation.
How could you ruin it so, the Priest hissed.
Sera's hands tightened against her temples.
Why had she eaten him? Was it the beast inside her? Was it her? Did it matter?What was it, exactly?Was it an accident?Was it intentional?Did it matter?Why had she not asked her Instructor?Whyhadsheneverbotheredtolearnmore?
Her muttering hitched in her throat.
Because she was afraid.
"RISE!"
Rena's voice cracked across the cavern like a rifle shot – not a command, a detonation.
"On your feet. All of you. NOW!" she roared.
The formation moved. Not clean – not the disciplined response of a raid force in full function – but movement. People staggering to their feet. Hands leaving heads. Eyes refocusing. Their commander's voice snapping them back to their grim reality – to move, to engage, because the alternative was worse.
Sera's hands came down from her temples.
She looked at Rian one more time.
He was moving – the return finishing, the colorlessness still in his face but his body responding to Rena's voice the way it always responded. Automatic competence. He was back. Mostly. The blankness in his eyes still there underneath the function.
She looked away and got up.
Swallowed the apologies that burned at the bottom of her throat.
The Priest's palm was fully extended now. Patient. Attending. It had said what it came to say and was waiting with equanimity.
What have you eaten.
"I don't know," she whispered.
The second hand snapped.