meowcats734

[meowcats734]

(prompt response) "You're right, we are peaceful." He said, slowly standing up and lifting an axe that dwarfed him in size. "For you're only 'peaceful' if you're capable of great violence. Otherwise, the word is 'Harmless'."

We were jumpy in the days after we trapped Iola in the Plane of Elemental Calm. Even with Sansen sacrificing his hope and mental health to scan futures—coming up clean every time—and Meloai staying up all night on watch, I still had nightmares of the bubble-skinned thing Iola had become melting a hole in the fabric of space and doing... well, the nightmares were never clear on what, exactly, but it probably wasn't pleasant, judging by the way I shot awake in a cold sweat. 

Tension in the party was at an all-time high, especially since none of us had, er, talked about what we'd glimpsed in the Plane of Elemental Possibility. Lucet had deliberately made a note of making her sleeping bag as far away from mine as humanly possible, and I took the hint that she didn't want to chat about it now. Or maybe ever. 

So we needed a bit of old-fashioned banter to unwind every now and then, and old-fashioned banter was exactly what we got.

"I say the elves should be the most peaceful species, at least on paper," Meloai grated out as she clambered down the mountain. Our ragtag little adventuring party wasn't at its best right now, but we still had the energy to talk while we climbed. Meloai in particular seemed to have been hurt in the Plane of Elemental Cold, although I... wasn't really sure how mimic biology worked, and neither was she. Still, she managed to keep up a lighthearted expression as we inched down the Silent Peaks.

Lucet scoffed, hammering a rope into a cliff face and casting it down with ease of long practice. A native-born Peaks child probably forgot more than I'd ever know about rock climbing. "An elf? Are you crazy? Right after Iola just tried to light-magic us out of existence, too?"

"I don't think that was traditional light magic," Meloai said. "The last person he used that spell on started bleeding and vomiting, and that was before he became an eldritch abomination."

"See? Does that sound peaceful to you?"

"All I'm saying is that elves are supposed to feel joy. I don't think Iola's a very good example of what elves are normally like. They sound like they'd be... I dunno, better people, on average. Better than Iola, at least."

"Well, that one elf in particular is pretty peaceful now," I said, piping up, "because we violence'd his ass into a place where he won't be hurting anyone."

Meloai and Lucet chuckled, while Sansen merely grunted. The wrinkled old man was the most experienced of the four of us when it came to adventures like this, and I had a feeling he was about to put our banter to shame. "If you want a real answer? I think the Fey are the most peaceful of all the human-derived species. They just live in their forests and grow their crops and bugger off whenever someone threatens them."

"No, see, that's not peaceful." I tested the rope Lucet had nailed down, then started absailing down the sheer cliff face. I had to speak up to be heard over the wind. "That's just passive. I'm pretty sure the fey are, like, mentally incapable of not immediately forgiving anyone they meet. It's part of their biology. Magicology?"

"You're looking for 'mythology'," Meloai absently said.

"Yeah, that." Ugh, I'd even taken a class called Mythology of Magical Beings, way back in what seemed to be an age and a half ago. "Forgiveness is Regrowth and all that. The fey physically cannot do anything but forgive tresspassers in their forests. I don't think that's peaceful so much as helpless."

"So... what, in order to be peaceful, you have to be capable of immense violence, just... choosing to hold back for the time being?" Meloai mused, rubbing her chin. The shapeshifter currently in the form of a young girl grinned. "Because I can do that." Quick as a flash, her left arm morphed into an axe taller than she was—partly because she grew shorter to compensate for the lost mass.

"Well, rifts, by that measure, we're probably the most peaceful adventuring party in the whole of the Silent Peaks!" Lucet chimed in.

I couldn't see Sansen from my position climbing down the cliff face, but I could imagine the gruff grimace in the old man's face. "I don't think that's what peaceful means," he mused, and I could almost imagine him back at home with a cup of brandy, eyes twinkling as he philosophized, instead of running around with three violent teenagers who called themselves an adventuring party. "I think that being peaceful is... something for people who've managed to forget violence. For children whose greatest concern is how they will go to school, or what their friends will think of their new clothes. I think that being peaceful is something that we fight for, not for ourselves, but for the next generation. We die in violence so they can live in peace."

The only sound to follow that was the whistling of the desolate winter winds around the empty Silent Peaks.

Then Meloai hefted her axe. "So, uh, no incredible violence for me, then?"

And just like that, we were back to laughing and chuckling and climbing down the next section of rope. "I just said we'd die in violence," Sansen said, expertly navigating the rocky cliff with the help of the rope.

"Rifts, that is not what you want to hear from the party oracle," I muttered.

"But we die for a purpose." I could hear the smile in Lucet's voice. "I like that. So the most peaceful people in the world... is not the people of today."

"It's the children of tomorrow," Sansen agreed. "That's what we fight for."

Burning with determination, our ragtag adventuring party continued crawling down the side of the Silent Peaks, to whatever death awaited us and whatever peace we would find after.

A.N.

Soulmage is a serial written in response to writing prompts. Stick around for more episodes, or join my Discord to chat about it!

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[meowcats734]

(prompt response) You can see everyone's Deaths following them, arriving to offer their hands right as they die. Today, you saw something new; someone chasing after their Death, who is fleeing at a dead sprint.

"Plane of Insecurity," Sansen snapped, and we jolted into action, clustering into a circle while I gathered the liquid-metal insecurity that shivered in my soulspace. None of us bothered to ask things like how did Iola find out or what if he's just here to talk?

It was Iola. For all I knew, he'd just snapped and randomly decided to murder us. Or maybe his newfound eldritch form let him spy on us from afar. Or Odin wanted to put pressure on us, or the Silent Parliament, or some third faction that I didn't even know about. This clusterfuck of a war was exactly why we needed to get as far away from here as humanly possible, and probably further, since I was willing to bet Iola didn't count as anything remotely human anymore. 

"Knock, knock," sang Iola from the door, and his voice was garbled and fleshy and wow did I not want to find out what kind of bullshit he was going to get us into this time. With a flash of magic, we shifted into the Plane of Elemental Insecurity. Lucet let out a sigh of relief as Iola vanished, replaced by cotton-fake snow on cardboard stone—

"Keep moving," Sansen snapped, sprinting off towards the borders of town. A tiny rift into the Plane of Elemental Possibility blazed over his left eye, trailing behind sparks like a golden comet. 

"But he can't reach us here," Meloai asked, her tone more pleading than assertive as she ran. I wasn't entirely sure how her clockwork body differed from human standard, but she had no trouble speaking during our flat-out sprint.

Behind us, I got the nauseating feeling that space itself squelched. Meloai turned around, abandoning the illusion of humanity to swivel her head a full hundred and eighty degrees, then snapped her head back to normal and pushed forwards, a wordless, shocked horror on her face as she fled.

"Yeah," I panted, "evidence says otherwise."

"Why are you running?" Iola's voice was disconcertingly wet, but it was still unmistakably his voice. Morbid curiosity made me want to turn and look and see the terrible beauty of whatever abomination Iola had become—but I had to stay focused. I had to keep moving. "You wouldn't happen to be depriving a wartime effort of crucial emotional power sources, would you? Because if you were..."

"Close your eyes and follow me," Sansen interrupted, skidding to a halt. "We're plane-shifting again."

"To where?" Meloai asked. "This is the only safe plane out of—wait. Wait, no, you couldn't possibly be—"

Sansen threw both arms out, as if opening a door, and the rift over his eye exploded outwards, tearing a hole into the Plane of Elemental Possibility. Right before the rift swallowed me, I turned around, just to catch a glimpse of what was coming after us.

I really wish I hadn't.

The thing that had once called itself Iola stood in a puddle of... melted space. There was no other way to describe it—it was as if everything around where he'd entered the Plane of Elemental Falsehood had become limp and liquid and dead. I'd once seen a painting of clocks flopped over a desolate landscape like so many pancakes; what Iola had done when he'd clawed his way into this place reminded me of it so intensely I almost thought I was back in Art and Culture 102. 

But I never would be again, if Iola had anything to say about it.

His body bubbled like soup on a stove, bulges of skin forming and snapping and regenerating all along his once-perfect body. Who knew, maybe the Silent Parliament would declare this the new perfect once we were gone. His cruel smile ballooned and shrank like a frog's throat, and the corrupted arm he pointed at us shed bits and pieces of amorphous flesh even as he moved it. And yet, the transformations the Eldritch Initiative had wreaked on his body weren't even the worst part.

Because I was a witch, and I could see what they had done to his soul.

Joy should have been dew. Joy should have been pure, clear water, and it always worried me that Iola's version of the stuff was sickly and tainted. But now, the droplets that jittered through Iola's soul were infested, tiny, jittering swimming-things squirming in the inhuman emotion Iola now felt instead of joy.

In a horrible insight, I realized what those liquid, living orbs were.

They were eggs.

And at Iola's command, they began to hatch.

Thankfully, the rift into the Plane of Elemental Possibility swallowed us before I could see what that spell did. At the last minute, I remembered Sansen's instructions, closing my eyes and holding my breath—

And a cacophony of voices from every possible timeline assaulted my ears.

"Get away from me!" Lucet shrieked/shrieks/will shriek. "You're a monster—can't you see that? Can't you see what they've done to you?"

"I'm very sorry," Odin mused/muses/will muse, "but that's not the bargaining chip you think it is. Aim higher."

"Can I kiss you?" I asked/ask/will ask, my voice uncertain and frail. Lucet replies with a quiet little "m-hm!" and I can hear the smile in her voice—

That last one nearly shocked me into opening my eyes, but—fuck, I couldn't afford to get distracted, and presumably, that was exactly why Sansen had told us to close our eyes. I locked onto Sansen's soul in the chaos, following him towards the rift, and he shouted, "Lucet! Plane shift!"

From Lucet's momentary silence, I could tell she was shocked from what we'd heard as well, but—

"Gotcha," Iola said/says/will say, and his voice is disgustingly pleased as something squishes and I scream—

"Right. Everyone, gather close and hold your breath."

As Lucet prepared the rift, Sansen grabbed my arm and said, "Listen. When I give you the signal, send Lucet and I to the Plane of Calm, then take Meloai and yourself back to realspace."

I creased my brows. "What signal?"

Sansen drew in breath to speak—

Behind us, a hundred futures died screaming as Iola forced his way into the Plane of Elemental Possibility, and even though I was facing away from him, with so much of my concentration on my soulsight, I saw what he did to bore a hole between planes. The oil-droplets that normally comprised passion had turned rancid and rotten, matted with strange algae and molds, and he used that living, inhuman emotion to melt holes through thoughtspace itself. I sensed his soul shift, that infested not-joy rising to the surface, and though his next attack spell moved at the speed of thought, Sansen's futuresight was faster. Lucet's spell ended before his even begun, and we leapt between planes again, landing in the Plane of Elemental Cold.

Immediately, my entire body burned as I came into contact with air that had never known heat or light, and I instinctively flared up with passion, not that it was of much use. I had little passion left in me now, and spread thin over the four of us as it was, it only slowed the inevitable. Still, Sansen directed us to struggle onwards, stumbling over uneven, rock-hard snow, putting a little more distance between us and Iola while the heat leeched from our flesh. In the distance, through my tightly closed eyes, I sensed the soul fragments of skeletal deaths, Demons of Sorrow reaching out to take our hands and slay us with a touch—

And then, right as my lungs were about to give out and suck in a breath of deadly, thin air, Sansen squeezed my arm, and his instructions flashed into my mind. The last of my calm went into sending Sansen and Lucet into the Plane of Elemental Antimagic, while my plentiful sorrow tore a rift for Meloai and I to step back into realspace. As the rift rose around us, I sensed Iola burst into the Plane of Elemental Cold too late, the deaths scattering as Iola gleefully cast a spell—

We landed outside the boundaries of the city in a snowy plains, and it was a testament to the absolute chill of the Plane of Elemental Frost that the snow felt hot to the touch compared to my numbed, frozen skin. I cracked my eyes open—fuck, that hurt—and tried to gather my thoughts.

"What's going on? Why'd you separate us?" Meloai asked.

"I don't know," I muttered, pacing. "It was part of Sansen's plan—"

"If you don't have a plan, then we should keep running," Meloai snapped. She started to slog forwards through the snow. Her joints were seizing up and her metal body sank deeper than mine, so I got one shoulder beneath hers and helped haul her along. 

"The Plane of Calm is pretty safe," I said, thinking aloud, "but, uh, magic doesn't work in there. Even if they had an attunement to calm, they'd be trapped—you can't open a rift from inside the Plane of Elemental Antimagic. You have to coordinate with someone on the other side to open a rift from realspace."

Meloai flicked me on the back of the head. "You dunce—you're the person he sent to the other side! It's a trap for Iola, and Lucet's the bait—if you take them out of thoughtspace from this side, Iola will be stranded in the Plane of Elemental Antimagic!"

That made sense, and would be glorious if it worked, but... "I have no way to tell them where to meet up," I said.

Meloai gave me an incredulous look. "No way to tell... Cienne. Sansen is an oracle. He probably looked into the future and saw where you'd open the rift way back at the beginning."

My eyes shot open, and despite how it stretched and bloodied my cracked, frozen skin, I grinned. My heartbeat began to slow as, finally, I started to accept that maybe, just maybe, we'd done it. "Oh," I simply said, and tore open two person-sized rifts into the Plane of Elemental Antimagic.

And the four of us were reunited in realspace, exhausted, battered, and mentally shaken from our trawl through the planes. I felt like I was about to collapse, Lucet wouldn't meet my gaze, Meloai's movement was jamming up, and Sansen's eye-rift had extinguished, but the four of us were still, somehow, alive.

"He took the bait," Sansen gasped. "He's stuck in the Plane of Calm until someone thinks to dig him out."

"So we're safe," I finished. "For now, at least, we're safe."

Meloai nodded, extending a hand to Sansen and Lucet. With a weary smile, the four of us embraced, huddling together in the snow for a quiet, eternal moment.

And then the four of us began the long, tired slog from the Silent Peaks, wondering if the madness that had overtaken it would yet swallow us whole.

A.N.

Soulmage is a serial written in response to writing prompts. Stick around for more episodes, or join my Discord to chat about it! This prompt was chosen by my Patreons.

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[meowcats734]

(prompt response) “Depressed? Anxious? Unhappy?” The sign shouted at you, “Why not become an amorphous entity and shirk the confines of time and space? Embrace your Eldritch Nature today!”

The plan was simple, because it had to be. We had little to no idea what kind of countermeasures the Silent Peaks would inflict on people who tried to flee their little paradise, so we cheated. Sansen was still wrung out from the last time he'd gone deep into an oracular trance, but he still agreed to put his mind through the wringer of living through the same three days over and over again for our sake.

So Lucet, Sansen, Meloai, and I all gathered in the safe room's ritual circle, holding hands so that Sansen could draw on our hope. Sansen touched the paintings and carved wooden tokens that Jiaola had made for him, laid in a neat circle around him, and even though I couldn't see the hope coruscating through his soulspace, his straightened back and sharp, clear gaze told me he was ready.

Then he set down a wooden pair of glasses and, without touching them, carefully mimed lifting them to his face.

"What's he doing?" Meloai whispered.

I concentrated on my soulsight, slipping for a moment between realspace and soulspace, and in Sansen's soulspace, I saw him lift the memory of the glasses to his face. It was a technique I'd only seen once before, but intuitively, I knew what he was doing.

"He's using the memory of the glasses to channel the spell," I whispered back. "He doesn't need to open a massive rift into the Plane of Elemental Possibility—he just needs to be able to see the future. It's more energy-efficient to make two tiny rifts over his eyes than a larger one further away."

And as I spoke, I felt Sansen tug at our souls, and the future seemed a little less bright as hope drained from my soulspace. But it was worth it. A dizzying rift into another timeline coalesced and stabilized in the form of two swirling lenses, held firm by the memory of a pair of glasses. Sansen's eyes flickered, darting left and right as future after future sang to him. His brow furrowed into a scowl, and his jaw began to twitch.

"That doesn't look good," Lucet muttered. 

"We're supposed to stay hopeful," Meloai said.

"You can't just force yourself to feel hope," I grumbled. "Come on, just shush and let Sansen do his thing."

As I spoke, I noticed something begin to... change. Sansen flinched, then started whispering something. Over and over again, he murmured beneath his breath, and I couldn't help but lean in to hear him say:

Sorry. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I'll do better next time. I'll keep them safe. I'm so, so sorry.

"Sansen?" I hesitantly asked. "Are you o—"

Sansen jerked back, swearing, and clutched his head, waving away the memory of the glasses and letting the tiny rifts unravel. Lucet yelped in surprise; Meloai blurred with clockwork precision to keep him from falling. I just waited for Sansen to come back from the trance, and though it was a slow, dazed process, come back he eventually did.

"I kept dying," he finally managed to say, "because our future held something so deadly it killed me just by looking at it." He managed a weak smile. "That... that's new, at least."

Meloai frowned. "Wait. If you looked at a future that kills you if you see it... why aren't you dead?"

Sansen tiredly waved a hand at me, so I took over to explain. "In order to look multiple days into the future, you kind of have to cheat. The amount of hope you'd need to directly look three days into the future is obscene; maybe the Peaks could manage it with a specially-trained battlechoir, but our ragtag little band definitely can't."

"But there's a workaround," Sansen said, pushing himself to his feet and giving Meloai a grateful nod. "If I can look five seconds into the future, I can choose to look into a timeline where my future self is also looking five seconds into the future, and telling me what he sees."

"And you can chain that until you reach the point in the future you want," Meloai said, eyes lighting up. 

"Well, the inaccuracies introduced are exponentially compounding with each link in the chain, so I try to make the links as large as possible. But yes, it's a very potent oracular technique. It also provides some insulation from... whatever one of my future selves died looking at."

The four of us traded nervous glances.

"And what would that be?" Meloai finally asked.

Sansen shrugged. "Not a damn clue. But whatever my future self saw through the rift, it must've been horrible. He started vomiting and bleeding and seizing up, and..." He trailed off at our horrified expressions. "What? What is it?"

"Iola," I hissed, and it was more a curse than a name.

###

Class the next day was an awkward, fearful thing. I sat down in Ritual Magic 201, in the same room as the boy who killed us in some timeline that never was, and wondered if firing a frostbolt through his head now would be worth getting mind-wiped if it meant letting Lucet and Meloai and Sansen go free.

"Now, class," Mr. Ganrey said, "I'd like to share an exciting opportunity with you all. Thanks to an exciting new legislation from the Silent Parliament, there are some new opportunities for those of us on the home front to assist with the war. Thanks to our angelic partners, I'm glad to announce a brand-new way for excited young soldiers to become combat-ready in no time."

Mr. Ganrey stepped to the side, and a rift between planes opened, letting a pale-white agglutination of flesh step into the classroom. Somehow, the Angel of Arrogance reminded me of a half-melted candle.

"Thanks to new advancements in our understanding of human soul fragment absorption," the Angel of Arrogance said, "we have discovered that it is now possible to hybridize a soulspace entity and a realspace creature, resulting in a soul capable of feats of witchcraft hitherto unimagined. Preliminary animal trials and oracular divinations have yielded promising data, and we are now looking for human volunteers."

The Angel of Arrogance went on about the possible benefits of joining the Eldritch Initiative, but I had eyes for only one person. One gleeful elf who'd been raring for a chance to join in on the war since the day it had begun.

Iola's soul twitched with corrupted glee, and I knew I had to stop him from joining the Eldritch Initiative before he killed us all.

###

"Hi, I'm here to inquire about the Eldritch Initiative?" I asked, tentatively sidling into the... distressingly organic clinic in the center of the Silent City. Pulses of power languorously pumped across its skin—its walls, I told myself, buildings have walls—and the amorphous blob of pale white flesh that served as its receptionist.

"Wonderful, wonderful! We could use every hand, tentacle, and other grasping appendage we can get. May I start by asking how you heard about it?"

"OH THAT WAS ME," the sign from outside shrieked. Its fleshy, bulbous lips looked like they were going to pop, and for a heartbeat, I had an insane urge to take a pin to them. "I SHOUTED AT THEM LIKE YOU TOLD ME TO SHOUT AND FOR SOME REASON INSTEAD OF RUNNING AWAY THIS ONE CAME HERE."

"Er, yeah, I have a... a 'friend' who came here earlier. I was wondering if—"

"Well, hold your horses, thestrals, Bearers of the Apocalypse, or other metaphysical equestrian-equivalents!" I got a distinct impression that the blob at the desk was trying to smile. "You can't leave—"

"What?" I burst out.

"—without hearing about the wide array of possible benefits that the Eldritch Initiative can have for you. Ask your doctor if becoming a demon from outside realspace is right for you," the receptionist finished smoothly, as if I hadn't said anything.

"WHY DO PEOPLE KEEP INTERRUPTING AT THAT PART?" The sign screamed. I still wasn't sure how its locomotion worked, to be honest, but it had managed to find a way to wriggle closer to me while I wasn't looking.

"Use your inside-spacetime voice, A." Ugh, all the soulspace entities around here had such bizarre names. This one was pronounced 'Albin,' too. Like that wasn't going to get confusing. "You see, we here at the Eldritch Initiative don't just offer suppression of undesirable emotions and enhancement of Academic emotions. We actually offer an entirely original broadening of your emotional spectrum!"

Uh... what? "Like... as in... uh... no, honestly, I have no idea what that's like."

"We have a helpful procedure to explain." The receptionist elongated their body—or maybe contracted spacetime—and pulled over a cup of what I hoped was water. "This, here, represents the spectrum of all humanly possible emotions." Then they drank the water, gulping it down, satisfied. "And that represents the scope of the emotions you'll have after your partnership with the Eldritch Initiative. Any questions?"

"Yes," I said slowly. "What... what on Earth does that mean?"

"It doesn't mean anything on Earth! You have to transcend realspace in order to have access to most of these emotions, after all. In addition to normal human feelings such as happiness, relief, awambuk, and ikstuarpok, we offer expanded emotions, normally inaccessible to single sapient minds, such as: Humber. Nage. Dorcelessness. Kindness. Ponnish. Harfam. Loric..."

The receptionist just kept going, and I found my vision swimming. I tried to stand, but the receptionist's droning voice and the pulsating heat of the room blended together, and I found myself tipping over—

"Andric. Varination. Kyne."

"UH. HEY. THE HUMAN DOESN'T SEEM SO GOOD."

"Trantiveness. Teluge." The receptionist paused. "Oh, dear. Was that too much for—"

And I blacked out, squelching on the tongue of the building's mouth.

###

"I'm scared," I admitted. "No, scratch that—I'm fucking terrified."

"They wouldn't let me stop him," Lucet admitted. She'd tried after I'd—somewhat embarrassingly—fainted with fear as the receptionist rattled off the monstrosities that Iola would have access to now that he'd gone from human to elf to eldritch fusion. "Maybe... maybe we can't leave. Maybe we just have to hunker down and try to survive."

"Yeah, and maybe the Silent Peaks are going to stop mind-wiping us, harvesting our emotions for war, and getting increasingly close to letting Iola murder us on principle," Meloai said.

Nobody really had anything to say in response to that.

"Iola's got it out for me," I admitted, "and it's pretty fucking clear that the administration no longer cares if their golden boy decides to do some vigilante justice on the troublemaking Redlander. I'm done for if I stay."

"Being a Fell witch isn't much more popular around here, either," Lucet said. "And... I don't want to think about what Iola would do if he got his hands on me again."

"According to your school's terminology, I'm technically a demon," Meloai added. "Iola's going to, ah, 'disassemble' me if I don't get out of here as quickly as possible."

"People have been giving Jiaola and I a blind eye ever since the Redlanders became the city's newest punching bag," Sansen said, "but I'm no fool. I've seen this before. Once they've ran out of newcomers to hate, they'll fall back on old prejudices. It's certain death if I stay; at least there's a chance if we make a break for it while we still can."

"I can take us through the Plane of Elemental Falsehood," I said. Of the planes I had access to, it was the only one that was remotely close to being safe for us to traverse. "Unless Iola's got an attunement to insecurity, he shouldn't be able to follow us there."

Meloai grimaced. "We'll have to deal with the mimics if we route through Falsehood."

"We'd already get our asses killed dealing with Iola Classic. I don't want to try our luck against Iola, Eldritch Edition. We can handle mimics."

"I'll scan the future to see how true that is," Sansen said, wearily getting to his feet. I grimaced—it was obvious that seeing his death over and over was taking a toll on the old man—but we had no choice. If we were to flee the Silent Peaks, we needed every edge we could get.

"You've packed everything you need?" I asked Lucet. I was pretty sure Meloai didn't have any belongings, anyway. 

Lucet nodded and was about to speak when Sansen, pale-faced, burst up from the safe room, swearing under his breath. That... that was not what you wanted to see from an oracle.

"He knows," Sansen said, panting for breath. "He's already coming. Iola's already here."

A.N.

Soulmage is a serial written in response to writing prompts. Stick around for more episodes, or join my Discord to chat about it!

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[meowcats734]

(prompt response) "But...this place is my home!" He stopped pacing around and stared at me in annoyance, "You've died 349 times in this place...and yet still you call this place 'home'?"

"I'm sorry, I've done what three hundred and forty-nine times?" I asked, blanching.

Sansen grimaced. "Sorry. The oracular trance... I've seen you die here, three hundred and forty-nine times. In three hundred and forty-eight futures that never were."

"Wait." I set down my cup of slurry. "How did I die three hundred and forty-nine times if you only looked into three hundred and forty-eight futures?"

"Necromancer in one of them," Sansen idly said, waving a hand. "Look, the point is this. Remember the Battle of Silentfell?"

I shuddered. "How could I not? I still have nightmares about Odin and his forces tromping up and down the streets and blowing up everything in sight."

"Yeah. Well. I was an oracle trying to keep the people I love safe. I'm not trying to diminish your traumas or anything, but... you only lived through that battle in real time, once. I died through it more times than you can count."

"But you can count them," I murmured.

Sansen closed his eyes. "Every single one," he agreed.

Put that way... I could totally see why Sansen had hidden his oracular abilities when the draft for the war came. If the poor old man had gone through hell and back just to survive one battle, I shuddered to think what those freaks in the Silent Parliament would do if they got their hands on him for the course of an entire war.

And I could see why Sansen wanted to leave the city.

"This place..." I hesitated, then continued. "It's the closest thing I have to a home. Ever since Sorrowfell was destroyed for the last time."

Sansen tilted his head, and for some reason the old man looked curiously puppyish.

"But..." Memories flashed behind my eyes as I stared around the old, solid wooden house. Here was where I'd hidden in the saferoom with Sansen as Odin's forces entered the mountain. There was the church where I'd been shoved out of the teleportation circle and stranded in the middle of a warzone. "It's getting worse," I finally said. "The only thing that makes this home is my friends and family."

Sansen gave me a tired smile. "You can take those with you," he said.

"I can take them with me," I agreed.

He stood and held out a hand. "I'll be packing. Three days from today."

I raised an eyebrow. "That an oracle's prediction?"

"It's your uncle's promise."

I smiled and took his hand, and the old man hauled me to my feet.

Then I left the house that Sansen and his husband had built with their own two hands, to gather my friends and tell them to flee.

A.N.

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[meowcats734]

(prompt response) You're the villain that the Chosen One is meant to defeat. Once they arrive, you notice they're just a teenager who barely knows how to swing a sword. Angered by your opponents sending children to do all their dirty work, you decide to help the teen get revenge.

The Silent Parliament may have been ruthless, but they weren't stupid. They knew that Odin was turning their populace against them, and they remembered that Odin's opening move in the war was contacting possible sympathizers through the vehicle of dreams. So they'd taken countermeasures. While I was gone, they'd erected obelisks at the barriers of the city, and although I couldn't make heads or tails of how they worked, it was clear what the end result was. The few times that Odin did try to show up in people's dreams, the reports were that they were fuzzy and incomprehensible, their attempts to reach out to anyone in the Silent Peaks stymied.

But all that changed after our classmate went crazy and tried to blow us off the side of the mountain.

It frustrated me that I not only had absolutely no idea what the Silent Parliament was doing to keep Odin's dreams out, I hadn't the faintest clue what Odin had done to counteract that. Trying to catch any true information about the war through the waves of confusion and propaganda was like chasing my shadow around a dying fire.

But it was undeniable that after Odin played their hand and turned the Silent Academy's mind-wiped soldiers against them, the dream-wards on the outskirts of town were no longer effective.

So when I went to sleep next, something touched my soul, and I was no longer Cienne, witch of six magics, a student of the Silent Academy who was just trying to survive the war.

I was Odin, Demon of Empathy, and I had come to expose the Silent Peaks for their hypocrisy and lies.

###

"Prepare to meet your end, foul demon!" The slim, wobbly-kneed teenager tried to swing her blade at me. Unimpressed, I simply took a single, surefooted step back, navigating the corpse-strewn, muddy battlefield with ease. Nobody had taken the time to teach the poor girl the importance of a good pair of boots, and her pitiful slog through the mud would take ages to catch up with me.

"I have a name, you know," I said mildly.

"The only name you deserve is barbarian, you monster!" The girl shrieked as she charged at me. One of my soldiers appeared, brandishing a ball of fire, but I shook my head. This was the fourth would-be hero the Silent Parliament had thrown at me, and I'd given all of the first three a nice pat on the back, a reassuring pep talk, and in one case taken in a runaway who had no stomach for the churn of endless violence that made up an active battlefront.

I may have been a demon, but I was a Demon of Empathy. On occasion, I let others into my heart—which was more than I could say for my enemies.

"I recommend you stop following me," I said, taking another calm step back.

"Never!" The girl snapped. "They said you would try to sway me from my path with your wicked words of deceit!"

"Actually, I'm just trying to point out that you've been following me into enemy lines for the past two minutes." The girl froze as she looked around and realized that the black-and-white emblem of the Silent Parliament was nowhere to be found. "On the plus side," I mused, "it's not exactly as if you can get any more surrounded than you already are."

"Then I shall go down in a blaze of glory!" The girl leapt at me, blade crackling with heat, and I raised an eyebrow. This one knew some magic, evidently. Nevertheless, it was fruitless; she'd misjudged her leap and landed in a sprawl on the floor.

I sighed, walking towards her—ostensibly to give her a hand, but this was the fourth time I'd played out this pattern, and my enemies would be predicting me. I kept my eyes on the sky, watching for the telltale flash of—

There.

Quick as a flash, I slashed one hand through the air, tearing open a rift between here and the Plane of Elemental Darkness. A fraction of a heartbeat later, an eerily silent column of holy light struck the ground around us, crisping the mud into brick and setting the corpses aflame—but beneath the shelter of the rift of darkness, the girl and I were kept safe.

"That was an artillery strike," I gently explained, "ordered by your army's commanding officer on your position, in the hopes of taking me out while I gave a fallen child a hand. Scorn me all you like, but do yourself a favor."

The girl's eyes were wide and shellshocked as they met mine.

"As long as you continue working for the Silent Parliament? Don't think of yourself as the hero."

I stood, leaving the shocked girl staring at the destruction her own commander had wrought—the destruction that I had protected her from—and went to exit the battlefield.

But before I could return to my warcamp, the girl croaked, "Wait."

I stopped, then turned, raising an eyebrow. "What is it?"

"I..." The girl swallowed. "This can't be right. They wouldn't just... they wouldn't just throw me away..."

"But they have." My gaze was not unkind as I knelt by her side. "Would you like to see how?"

The girl got to her feet, sword abandoned in the mud, and mutely nodded.

Then I closed my eyes—trusting her not to strike me—and reached into my soulspace, delicately carving away a portion of my memories. The memories of the first three heroes who had come to stop me, who I had spared, and who had been quietly vanished by their superiors without a trace.

The first one, of course, didn't believe me. Neither did the second, even when I presented him with the memories of his predecessors. The third simply broke down when I showed him the names and faces of the previous "heroes" who had challenged me.

But the fourth?

The fourth grew angry.

"This... this isn't right." The girl clenched her fists. "The Silent Parliament—they can't get away with this."

"They have so far," I gently said. "And they will, if nobody stops them."

The girl trembled with fury. "You told me that I could not call myself a hero, so long as I worked for the Silent Parliament."

Slowly, I nodded.

"Then let me call myself a hero." She held on to the fragment of my soul that I had gifted her. "Let me show everyone what happened here, so that another child like me is never tricked onto this battlefield again."

A quiet, fierce grin spread across my face, and I squeezed the girl's arm.

"I will remember you," I said. "My name is Odin, and I am the greatest Demon of Empathy to walk this world."

"My name is Haionn," she said, "and I am a hero."

Then Haionn strode to her own side of the battlefield, wielding memory and truth where once she held a blade.

###

"I don't buy it," I said the next morning.

Lucet, Meloai, and Tanryn were the only ones in earshot, but Lucet still reflexively looked around with her soulsight. We were alone in the strange vault that Lord Tanryn had built to keep his daughter safe from the last war the Silent Peaks had waged. I found it ironic that we were using it to the same end.

"What don't you buy?" Meloai asked.

"The dream," I said. "The Silent Peaks are fucking awful, but for all their evils..." 

“I left a child in a warzone,” Witch Aimes snarled, getting to her feet. “A helpless, imbecilic child who it is my job to re-educate and protect from the Redlands. To protect from monsters like you, in body and idea.”

"They don't use child soldiers," I said. "And they protect their young."

"I mean, how would we know if they did?" Lucet asked. "What are we going to do, ask around if anyone had any missing children as of late? The watch would wipe our memories of the last week just to be safe if they thought we were questioning them."

"That might very well be Odin's aim," Meloai pointed out. "The watch's stockpiles of liberosis are already running low; they don't have enough resources to keep everyone safely mind-wiped. Having them waste resources on debunking an unfalsifiable accusation might be the sole goal of their broadcast."

"Well, hang on." Tanryn hopped into the conversation. "I don't know about this Odin fellow—"

The three of us chuckled. It was sometimes... endearing, how out of touch with current events Tanryn was.

"—but you said they sent you all a soul fragment, right? If it's a memory, it has to have some grain of truth to it, even if it's carefully chosen."

I shook my head. "Odin can do nonsense with soul fragments that I didn't even know was possible. Case in point: none of us have any idea how they sent the exact same soul fragment to the entire city, simultaneously. I wouldn't put it past them to be able to just... completely fake a memory. And some parts of it have to be fake. I've seen Odin fight personally, and if they had the power to casually open rifts of that size, I'm certain they would have used it against Witch Aimes. I don't know if it's, like, an intimidation tactic, or a tutorial on how to counter light magic, but it's definitely not real."

"So we're left with two competing sources of obviously false news," Lucet summed up. "Well, I suppose that's better than one."

"Not strictly true," Meloai pointed out. "I could add as many sources of obviously fake news as you want, and the situation wouldn't improve." At our blank looks, she elaborated. "As some examples of unhelpful false reports: bees are fish, snow is hot, and Iola is a good person."

I couldn't help but giggle at that. Meloai's sense of humor took some getting used to, but... I was glad we had her, during these times. I could use a smile every now and then. "Odin's lies are a little more subtle than 'bees are fish', but I take your point. We shouldn't take *anything—*either from the broadcasts or the dreams—at face value."

"So then... what do we trust?" Lucet asked. She folded her knees inwards, hugging her legs as if she was a giant egg. Tanryn gave her a scandalized look for putting her shoes on one of House Tanryn's precious chairs, but Lucet didn't even notice. "I mean, for all we know, we've already lost the war and Odin's about to kill us all. Or we won yesterday, and the only reason the Silent Academy is still showing those broadcasts is to fuel some completely unrelated conflict. And I hate that. I hate that so much."

I bit my lip, thinking. "Well," I slowly said. "The last time I didn't trust the Academy's narrative on things..." I almost laughed from how much simpler those times were, when all I had to worry about was what counted as Academic and what counted as Fell magic. "I asked someone who had been there personally."

Meloai and Tanryn gave me confused looks, but Lucet straightened up. "I thought you said Jiaola hadn't come back yet."

"He hasn't," I agreed, "but there's one person with oracular powers and a highly motivated interest in knowing what happened to him."

I stood, stretching my back, and prepared to open a rift back to realspace.

"I think it's time I paid Uncle Sansen a visit," I finished, and tore open a gate back into the Silent Peaks.

A.N.

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[meowcats734]

(prompt response) You're God, reborn as a baby without memories. You grew up as atheist, but you're now remembering.

The hijacked broadcast was the first of Odin's strikes on the home front, but it was far from the last. Odin never sent soldiers or demons or witches, but their moves were devastating nonetheless.

The first sign that something was wrong was how the school curriculum stuttered. One day, we were learning about how the Redlanders were barbaric savages and possibly even slavers; the next, Mr. Ganrey was reluctantly telling us that, actually, Redlanders weren't culturally homogeneous and there was no evidence that the majority of Redlander civilization owned slaves. In Ritual Magic 201, we'd be learning how to incite joy and passion to help empower the front line, then hastily drop that lesson in favor of studying theory of magic instead. 

The penny dropped when a member of the Silent Parliament was tried for treason and consorting with the enemy. I wasn't sure what Odin had offered her to get her to try and change the home front policy away from militarization, and I didn't need to.

They were the Dealmaker, after all. Whatever the woman's price was, I was sure Odin had matched it.

But that was just Odin's opening move. The second broadcast they hijiacked was short—it had to be, before the censors could cut them off—and was released right after the Silent Parliament declared victory over the traitor in their ranks. And with four words, Odin threw the home front of the Silent Peaks into chaos.

"Now find the rest," Odin said, a hard, cruel glint in their eyes.

###

If being the Redlander boy who spoke out in defense of history was unpopular before, it was downright lethal nowadays. The Silent Parliament and the city watch were tearing themselves apart trying to stop civilians from conducting witch hunts in the streets while hurriedly conducting witch hunts of their own, and the fact that everyone was a witch didn't help matters at all. Everyone with the faintest attunement to anything was constantly scanning everyone else's emotions in hope of catching a traitor—and it didn't help matters that the constant suspicion and fear was wrecking the battlechoirs' ability to cast their grand works of passion and joy. Anyone who went around endangering the limited supply of happiness and drive that we still possessed was regarded with suspicion at the very least, and outright violence at the worst.

Which meant, of course, that fucking Iola was more important than ever.

I was pretty sure he'd taken the rejection from the army personally, because he'd taken it upon himself to uproot every traitor he could find—and because he was Iola, that more or less meant doing his utmost to make life for Lucet and I as miserable as he possibly could. At the very least, he seemed to leave Meloai out of it, and Freio had silently moved away from us once he realized that staying too close was an easy way to become the target of Iola's ire.

So it was just Lucet and I in the House of Warp and Weft, after Iola had badgered Mr. Ganrey into assigning us cleanup duty now that Albin was off at the war.

"One of these days, something more powerful's going to come through this damn rift, and we're all going to regret sending Albin to the front lines," Lucet grumbled. The amorphous blob of shifting flesh we were currently trying to kill sent a weak ripple in space our way, but we weren't helpless ourselves. I dissolved the attack with a field of calm while Lucet fired a frostbolt into the pulsating mass; it squelched in displeasure and turned to flee.

"Oh no you don't," I snapped at the minor Demon of Arrogance as it squished towards the nearest door. I hurled a bead of silvery insecurity at the door, and the power of insecurity washed over it, transforming it into a solid facade. The transformation would revert with time, but it did what it had to, rendering the door impassable for the time it took for us to catch up with the Demon of Arrogance. I followed up Lucet's frostbolt with a blast of heat, and the Demon of Arrogance shriveled and died, leaving behind a floating soul fragment and its corpse.

"Rifts, Cienne. How many new attunements do you have?"

I hesitated. Even with my closest friends, I was still anxious about letting slip the fact that I held the secret of attunement. Thankfully, the mystery surrounding attunements meant that it wasn't even that out of the ordinary to randomly pick up a couple overnight; people had assumed I'd simply gotten lucky with whatever forces governed witchcraft. "Five," I said. "Calm, sorrow, passion, joy, and insecurity."

Lucet whistled. "Damn. You're on your way to becoming a bloody terrifying witch."

I laughed awkwardly. "I mean, a spearmaster who trains one move a thousand times will beat a soldier who trains a thousand moves once, right? Iola could probably cook me from the inside out, if he wanted." 

"Not before you gave him a frostbolt to the face," Lucet said. Her expression turned rueful. "Seems like you became the riftmaw before I stopped being the hearth dragon."

I bit my lip guiltily. I... I wanted to tell her, I really did, but... Odin already terrified me enough. They'd wrapped me around their finger, got me to spill my heart out to them, and then fucking abandoned me like yesterday's trash. For all I knew, they were listening to us as we spoke. Instead, I said, "Hey. You're getting damn good with your frost magic. Someone tries to hurt you, you can freeze their face off."

Lucet gave me a savage grin. "Yeah. I'd like to see Iola walk that off. Now come on." She picked up the Demon of Arrogance's corpse, grimacing as it squelched. "We've got three more to go before we fill our quota."

Lucet and I talked and laughed and bantered as we patrolled the House of Warp and Weft, and for three blissful hours, we could fool ourselves into thinking we were ready for anything life could throw at us.

Then the second phase of Odin's counterattacks came.

###

"I AM GOD!" Our newest classmate hurled a gale-force burst of wind at Mr. Ganrey, sending him flying backwards into the pavement with a crunch, and Lucet swore as the mind-wiped Redlands soldier turned towards where the three of us were hiding. I fired a frostbolt off, but I wasn't feeling sad so much as fucking terrified right now, and it was so weak that I don't think the ex-soldier even noticed. "BOW BEFORE ME!"

"Who would've thought that trying to mind-wipe and re-educate enemy soldiers would backfire?" I muttered to myself. 

"I suspected it would," Meloai helpfully added. "Although we didn't know Odin could slip soul fragments past mind-wipes before."

"I think something went wrong with this soul fragment's reintegration," Lucet said. "Why would Odin want a raving madman who thinks he's God? Wouldn't covert agents be a better choice?"

"Bloody hell if I know. Odin's been running circles around the Silent Parliament this whole time. I wouldn't underestimate them," I said. The self-proclaimed god rose on a column of wind, turning towards us with a snarl, and I swore. "Get behind me," I said, breathing out a misty veil of calm.

It came just in time, and even with my newfound attunement, it was really quite hard to stay calm while a madman was trying to huff and puff and blow me off the side of the mountain. Even with the shroud of calm struggling to enervate the torrential winds, I could barely breathe, and my skin felt like it was being pulled off of my cheeks. So for once in my lifetime, I was grateful to see Iola amongst the cowering classmates as he stood and pointed at the student, those sickly dewdrops of joy accelerating to impossible speeds as a beam of invisible light struck the mind-wiped soldier in the head.

For a minute, the poor soldier didn't even notice—but he was already a dead man walking. Less than a minute after the spell was cast, he wobbled in the air and vomited, seizing up before falling to the ground. Reddened, weeping sores marked where the beam of deadly, invisible light had passed through his skull.

Lucet and I traded glances as Iola gave the rest of the class a satisfied, self-congratulatory grin.

"He's going to be fucking insufferable after this, isn't he?" Lucet asked rhetorically. 

And just like that, the first week of the war had passed.

A.N.

This prompt was written by my Patreons!

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[meowcats734]

(prompt response) Demons gain power from the fear they inflict upon others. The more people are afraid of a certain demon, the stronger they will become. For this reason, Kingdoms employ, not Knights and Warriors, but Bards and Minstrels to combat the Demons.

The war was broadcast, because it had to be. The magic of the battlechoirs was fueled by emotion, after all, and every viewer at home was a potential power source. When the battlechoirs hurled grand fireballs at the enemy ramparts, it was our passion they drew on to feed the flames; when they called down great sunbeams to blind and burn soldiers, it was our joy they converted into sunshine.

And when the battlechoirs summoned walls of repulsive force to crush entire villages and shove the broken corpses aside, it was our nationalism they stole to fuel their war machine.

I felt vaguely sick at how my fellow classmates whooped and cheered on the battle being broadcast in the matrix of light spells in the center of the auditorium. As if the battle was a sports match, and the dark red mud was an aesthetic choice. Even poor Freio in the corner was confusedly smiling, simply from the sheer inertia of the crowd.

At first, the Order of Valhalla had fielded foot soldiers and witches against the forces of the Silent Peaks, but after the first battle resulted in a resounding victory for "us"—or, at least, the side that got to broadcast their version of the war to me and my classmates—the Order of Valhalla switched tactics. They had numbers and logistics, but the Silent Peaks had a vast edge in spellcraft, and the Order of Valhalla hadn't expected the seven-meter-wide fireballs fueled by the rage of an entire city.

So the Order of Valhalla began summoning demons. On screen, the Demon of Fear manifested as a vast, many-tendriled darkness, spearing soldiers with rays of absolute void that made whatever they touched just... fall apart. The view quickly panned away from the carnage, but it was too late. The image of a bard's insides being sprayed into the wind like a farmer sowing seeds had already been burned into my head.

Mr. Ganrey looked at the private, smaller broadcast he was receiving straight from the battlechoir's conductor, and said, "Alright, class, our brave battlechoirs on the front lines need us to supply them with joy. Remember that we will win this battle. That the Order of Valhalla will be crushed beneath our boot. Their children will be re-educated into a more civilized culture, and their war-leaders will be executed for their crimes against the Silent Peaks."

The majority of my classmates whooped in joy, but to my left, Lucet grimaced. "He wants us to be happy about that?" she whispered.

"There's no evidence to support the idea that the culture of the Silent Peaks is any more or less 'civilized' than that of the Redlands," Meloai added from my right. The three of us were a minority, though, and not a very vocal one at that. I grimaced as, through my soulsight, I saw the little dewdrops of joy on my classmates' souls condense and flow together, being siphoned into great magical channels all the way to the battlefront.

Mere minutes later, the battlechoir sang a triumphant chord, and a column of light so bright it left the grasses as nothing more than smoking ash struck the Demon of Fear. My classmates cheered as the feed zoomed in on the ruined, dissolving body of the Demon of Fear—

And revealed something much, much worse standing in its remnants.

The entity didn't have the same looming, formless menace as the Demon of Fear. They were large for a person, but still roughly human-sized, even with the faintly glowing runic armor they wore. They bore no weapon, and had no army to back them up, but a shiver went down my spine regardless.

For there stood a Demon of Empathy, and it was the first time since the war begun that they had taken to the field.

Odin wasted no time, looking straight at the projection as if they could see right into our souls. "Peoples of the Silent Peaks," they began. "Your government is lying to you. They are manipulating your emotions in order to continue the war crimes they commit on the active front. Exit your city's boundaries and sleep. I will inform you of more in your dreams. The Silent Peaks is—"

I heard someone on the other end snap, "Cut the feed."

Moments later, the image dissolved into smoke and light.

Silence reigned in the classroom.

Then Mr. Ganrey cleared his throat. "Now, class. Let's... forget that last part happened, shall we?"

And here came the part I hated the most.

My classmates' eyes glazed over as a spell struck them all at once, and I felt Mr. Ganrey's magic assaulting my mind. But I had come prepared, and with a calm, misty breath, I shrouded my soul in antimagic, dulling the weak forgetfulness spell. If Mr. Ganrey noticed, he didn't say anything. Around me, Lucet and Meloai came back to life, and my classmates began eagerly discussing how we'd totally annihilated the enemy and how we were guaranteed victory within months.

"Cienne?" Lucet asked from my side. "Are you okay? You look like you've seen a ghost."

"I'm fine," I managed to choke out. "Just... give me a minute."

I sprinted out of the classroom. Down the hall, to the left, through the door, and fumble at the lock.

I barely made it to the outhouse before I threw up with fear.

A.N.

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[meowcats734]

(prompt response) Instead of jail time, crime is punished by the erasure of memories. Depending on severity, the criminal may lose days, weeks, or even decades. No matter how long a span of time, the lost memories always include the entirety of the crime itself.

Even though the Silent Academy did its best to keep us away from the war, it still showed up in every aspect of our lives. It echoed in Jiaola's absence whenever I swung by Sansen's place for tea. It rang in every word as Mr. Ganrey gave the lectures that Witch Aimes was supposed to teach. 

And barely a week into the campaign, it showed up in the middle of our classroom, in the form of a brand-new student.

"Howdy," said the teenager in a fifty-year-old's body. He looked painfully awkward at the head of class, introducing himself as a brand new student when he could have passed for a tenured teacher. "I'm Freio, most of the time. Sometimes I go by Jan, and I'll tell you when that is. I'm, uh, I'm a second chancer. If you couldn't already tell."

Iola raised a perfect hand, then before our substitute teacher could call on him, said, "How'd you manage to fuck up so badly you lost thirty years of your memory?"

Freio winced. "I, uh... truth is, I don't rightfully know. They didn't tell me, and I didn't ask. The way I see it, I went to bed thirty years ago as a teenager, woke up in the modern day." Insecurity roiled around him like a blanket. "I... I'm just glad to have a second chance. I guess. Better'n nothing."

"Alright, class, let's settle down. Freio, find yourself a seat," Mr. Ganrey said. 

"We should offer him a place to sit," Lucet whispered from my left.

Meloai, overhearing, said, "Hey, Freio! Want to sit with us?"

Lucet winced, and I sighed. I loved Meloai and Lucet, but Meloai's straightforwardness didn't mesh well with Lucet's shy nature. Meloai had successfully caught Freio's attention, but she'd turned the heads of everyone in the class as well.

"Uh..." Freio looked torn between wanting to jump down a deep hole and wanting to just close his eyes and pretend everything was just a bad dream. I sympathized. "I... okay. If you say so."

Iola turned to watch the old man's body stumble across the classroom desks, the teenager's soul piloting it still confused about why he was half a foot taller than he was used to. His body scrunched up to fit into the wooden school desk, and a few classmates giggled at how ridiculous he looked, knees half-raised to his chest. The humiliated expression on his face burned me to see, and I wished I could do something more for him.

"Now, class," Mr. Ganrey began. "In light of the recent war against the Redlands aggressors, I think that it's pertinent to cover the history of these barbaric savages..."

Ah, that sounded like a perfect time to draw away some attention from the poor second-chancer. Abruptly, I raised my hand. I'd gone with a more confrontational approach in history classes before, but that had gotten me nowhere, so I tried a more diplomatic tone when I spoke up.

"Mr. Ganrey?" I asked. "Your characterization of Redlanders as aggressive savages... doesn't the recent work by Anenne show that Redland culture is no more intrinsically aggressive than any other?"

The class tittered and oohed, shifting their attention from Freio to me, and even though my cheeks burned from the stares, the relief on Freio's face as he was no longer in the spotlight was evident. He flashed me a grateful smile as Mr. Ganrey cleared his throat and began his counterargument.

"Well, I must say you're rather well-read, but consider this: would the Redlanders invade us without provocation if they really were a developed and cultured people? As Chentrenne once wrote..."

###

The classes blurred by, and although Freio stuck out like a sore thumb in each of them, Lucet, Meloai, and I took turns deflecting attention from the school's newest second-chancer. Since the war had begun in earnest, more and more of the second-chancers had been showing up, and it was my hope that eventually, either people would get used to them or the Silent Parliament would stop churning them out.

Regardless of what the future held, however, the four of us were content to spend the present eating lunch in a quiet nook. Freio was still somewhat stunned by what was, from his perspective, a leap thirty years into the future—but Meloai had already gotten him to laugh a few times, and Lucet had bonded with him by sheer virtue of being able to hold a comfortable silence.

Of course, nothing lasted forever, and the momentary respite we'd found in our shady little corner was no exception. Iola and his new cronies—all men who'd been rejected from the war draft for being too young, and felt like they had something to prove because of it—sauntered up to us in a vaguely predatory triangle, fanning out to block the only exit.

"Well, well, well. If it isn't the freak squad," Iola drawled. He pointed at us one at a time. "Redlands-fucker. Soulless girl. My ex-toy. And of course, the enemy soldier." Me, Meloai, Lucet, and Freio respectively. Lovely.

"What do you mean, enemy?" Freio whispered.

I winced. Meloai shook her head. "You don't want to know this one, Freio," she warned.

Iola tsked. "Ah-ah-ah! You're not the one in control here, soulless girl. Whaddya think? Wanna know who you used to be, freak?" Despite Freio's body being nearly a head taller, he backed down, intimidated, as Iola grabbed him by the shirt.

"Don't touch him," I snapped, starting forwards, but Iola just kept speaking.

"You used to be an enemy soldier," Iola crooned. "You were a prisoner of war. And the powers that be decided it was more trouble ransoming you than wiping your memory to when you were nothing more than an impressionable child and re-educating you into their very own killing machine, so that they could fire you right back at the enemy they'd stolen you from."

"Iola, that's enough!" I snapped, and shoved him backwards.

With an ooh of anticipation, Iola's new cronies stepped back, giving Iola space as his face twisted into a jitterbugging, lopsided, manic grin. Meloai stepped forwards, flexing a fist that went tick-tick-tick, but Iola said, "Kino? Lantenne? If that thing lays a hand on me, disassemble it."

I held out a hand as Iola's goons stepped forwards. The Cienne of two weeks ago would have simply gotten beaten into a pulp, but I was done with letting people strongarm and manipulate me. "I wouldn't do that if I were you," I warned. Freio snapped back to his senses as Lucet grimly got between him and the staredown, salt-crystals of sorrow precipitating around her soul like bracers.

Iola scoffed, and through my enhanced soulsight, I saw him ready the same bizarre, mutated light spell that had cooked that poor vole from the inside out. Simultaneously, oil-drops of passion streaked into Kino and Lantenne's palms. "You know, I'm not sure why I was ever mad about getting booted from the army," Iola said. "If I want to kill a Redlander, I've got a domestic supply of them right here."

In response, I simply took a deep breath in, one of my new attunements flaring to life as I gathered misty calm behind my nostrils.

Then I exhaled, and my steady, rolling calmness spread out across the tiny alleyway, eating at and weakening every spell present. 

Lucet shot me a startled glance as the icetouch she was preparing was disrupted, and from Meloai's sudden stiffness, I gathered that I'd accidentally weakened the magic that animated her body, too. Uh, oops. Just because I had a half-dozen attunements now didn't mean I was proficient in their use. I'd used up my reserves of calm, too, and now I was jittery and nervous. Plus, Iola had the raw power of an elf; I was pretty sure my little calm spell had barely shaken his magical abilities. Man, I really needed to get better at casting spells; if I couldn't even shoo away Iola, I'd have no chance if—when—Odin returned to wrench the secrets of attunement out of my head.

I had scared the fuck out of Kino and Lantenne, though, who had suddenly found themselves holding fistfuls of nothing as their spells fizzled out. That was good enough for now. They took an uneasy step back, and Iola must not have liked the odds of pissing off all three of us without any backup, because he shot me a glare and stepped back, drawing the feverish, corrupted joy back into the core of his soul.

"Piss off," I said. 

Iola just grinned wider. "Fine. Enjoy hanging out with a mind-wiped enemy soldier. I look forward to him snapping and killing you all."

Then he spun around and left, laughing to himself as if he'd told the best joke that anyone had ever heard, leaving us alone with a stunned, horrified Freio.

Hesitantly, the three of us moved closer to Freio. The shock on his face had morphed into something bleak and empty.

"Is that true?" Freio asked. "Am I... am I really just... a prisoner of war?"

"It is," said an elderly voice from behind us.

The four of us spun to see Mr. Ganrey stumping towards Freio, and his clouded eyes seemed sharp as a tack for once.

Freio balled his fists. "How can you... how can you do this to me? To us? How can you get away with this?"

"Like this," he said, and tapped Freio on the forehead once.

And just like that, the last three minutes were wiped from his memory.

"We're at war, kids." Mr. Ganrey gave us all a warning look. "Sacrifices must be made. Don't forget it."

The substitute teacher walked away, leaving three faces grim and one face confused in our shady little corner of the Silent Academy.

A.N.

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[meowcats734]

(prompt response) The ritual would be much easier to complete if his "friends" weren't cooking with the sacrificial knife and rare spices...

"Welcome to Ritual Magic 201," Mr. Ganrey said, tapping his cane on the floor as he walked down the rows of chairs. He was old, arthritic, and practically blind, and had probably been disqualified from fighting in the war for at least one of those reasons, but at least he could still help by training up the next generation of soldiers to throw into the grinder. Whoopee.

Still, despite my misgivings about the Silent Academy's less-than-noble intentions, I couldn't help but be excited for today's class. School was a lot less lonely with Lucet and Meloai to hang out with, and RM201 was a lab class; we didn't get to choose our partners for ourselves, but the class only had twenty or so people in it. Odds were we'd be spending quite a bit of time with each other.

Plus, this was the first course I'd taken at the Silent Academy that went beyond theory and into practice. I'd spent the past few weeks grabbing every attunement I could get my grubby little hands on, and I was itching to try them out.

No more helpless running and hiding from every threat. No more getting outmatched at every turn. This Cienne was growing claws, and the next time the world tried to bite me in the ass, I was going to swipe back.

"In light of recent events," Mr. Ganrey said, as if he was referring to a sports match and not a war, "we've decided to rearrange the curriculum a little. Topics such as realspace-anchored soul manipulation and memory-aided spell foci were deemed too theoretical in a time when we need immediate results, and as such, the first half of this course will focus on the creation and empowerment of friendly soulspace entities. In other words, the focus of today's lesson will be the summoning and binding of demons, angels, and other extraplanar creatures."

Meloai raised a hand, but Mr. Ganrey didn't see, despite looking straight at her. I grimaced. Mr. Ganrey's mundane eyesight was nearly gone, so he relied on his soulsight—but even though Meloai's soul fragment was beginning to grow in complexity, it was still tiny in comparison to a born human soul. I wouldn't be surprised if Meloai was entirely invisible to the poor teacher. 

"Please disperse to your assigned seats," Mr. Ganrey continued. In the corner, Iola and two of his new friends snickered as Meloai patiently kept her hand in the air.

"Just ask the question," Lucet whispered.

"Hm? Oh, okay. Mr. Ganrey?" she asked.

"Raise your hand first, Meloai," Mr. Ganrey said. More laughter from Iola's corner.

"I am," Meloai said, unperturbed.

Mr. Ganrey paused, adjusted his glasses, and cleared his throat. "Mm. Ah. Yes. Well. Your question, then, young lady?"

"I'm a soulspace entity myself—is what we're doing today going to be hazardous to me?"

"What planar domain?" Mr. Ganrey asked, absent-mindedly.

"Insecurity," Meloai said.

Mr. Ganrey shook his head. "The projection of the vectors of happiness and insecurity onto each other is present, but small. Don't assimilate any soul fragments you sense, but you should be otherwise fine. Alright, class, hop to it."

To my disgust, my assigned lab seat was next to Iola. Ugh, the man was worse than Odin. At least they'd left me alone after they'd stranded me in the Plane of Elemental Falsehood. I still had no idea what that was all about.

Iola waggled his eyebrows at me as I approached the lab desk, which held a utilitarian kitchen knife, a small, caged vole, and a bundle of sweet-smelling joyweed.

"If it isn't my favorite Redlander," Iola drawled, his elven halo pulsing in time with his words. "How're you enjoying my sloppy seconds? She's terrible in bed, isn't she?"

"I wouldn't know. Unlike you, I have a modicum of respect for other human beings. How're you enjoying the draft? Still begging to be let onto the front lines?" I shot back. The corners of Iola's eyes twitched as I brought up the draft—he'd been all too eager to go out and start killing people until the Academy told him that they weren't sending barely-trained students out to war. 

"The goal of today's class will be to create, empower, and summon a minor Demon of Happiness," Mr. Ganrey interrupted. "As you should have learned from Elemental Theory, demons, like all soulspace entities, are comprised of the memories of the dead."

"Wonder what kind of demon would pop up if I used this on you," Iola mused, tapping the knife on the desk.

"Dunno," I said. "What do elves summon when they die?"

"Over the centuries," Mr. Ganrey continued, "this has resulted in many a cult or nation deliberately inducing certain emotionally-charged memories in human subjects, then slaying them in order to form or feed demons of their desired emotion. Demons of Fear were a particularly notable historical example. However, memories are not a uniquely human notion, and in the modern day, human sacrifices are not needed to create such entities. We will be creating such an entity by training non-sentient animals to associate certain memories with joy, then sacrificing the animals and feeding the resulting, joy-charged soul shards to the entity that coalesces as a result." 

Huh. Made sense. To my left, Meloai raised her hand again—this time, Lucet raised her hand as well, so that Mr. Ganrey would see. "Yes, Lucet?" Mr. Ganrey asked.

"Actually, that was me, sir," Meloai said. "I have a question. By the first law of thaumatology, souls cannot be destroyed."

"Only changed in form," Mr. Ganrey agreed.

"So when we feed these soul fragments to a soulspace entity... or when, in general, a soulspace entity consumes a soul fragment... what happens?"

"An excellent observation," Mr. Ganrey said, "but one that is outside the scope of this class." Meloai pouted as Mr. Ganrey walked down through the aisles. "Now, in order to form the associated memories, we will have to perform some mundane classical conditioning upon the test subjects..."

The lab began, the small class of twenty laboring to form an association in the voles' tiny minds between the ringing of a bell and a sensation of sudden joy. To my surprise, Iola was a natural when it came to associating reward with a stimulus. Or punishment, for that matter, not that that was part of the lab—he just seemed to delight in watching the vole flinch whenever he snapped his fingers after the third time he'd struck the poor creature while doing so.

My budding attunements gave me greater insight into the soulspace of the vole, so I could tell when the vole's soul bloomed with dewdrops of joy at the ring of a bell, even when no herbs were supplied to follow it up with. Not wanting to let Iola have the dubious honor of sacrificing the vole—knowing him, he'd drag it out just to watch the poor thing suffer—I slit its throat with the sacrificial blade, killing it instantly.

The rest of the class was still catching up to Iola's freakishly good conditioning abilities, which left me some time to wait. I was going to ask if we were supposed to get started on a second vole when Iola picked up the corpse of the sacrifice and... started... cooking it.

Through my newfound suite of attunements, I could see the outlines of the spell he was using. Though joy normally manifested as dewdrops in soulsight, Iola's was something... different. Feverish, sickly, somehow. He pumped it into the vole, the dewdrops accelerating to terrifying speeds as they neared its body, and the vole's body started smoking. Was he... was he cooking the vole with light? Was that even possible?

"What... what are you doing?" I asked, faintly nauseated.

"Hmm?" Iola started skinning the vole with the sacrificial knife. "I'm hungry. Want some?"

"No!" I shuddered, turning away as he rolled up the joyweed into a rough lump and ignited it with a focused beam of light, then tried to smoke it. I was pretty sure he miserably failed by the spluttering that ensued, but I didn't want to know. 

"You should all be done with your voles by now," Mr. Ganrey said. "Fanwyn, you killed yours too early. Iola, take that out of your mouth."

Iola took the magically-cooked vole out of his mouth, scowling, as Mr. Ganrey stepped into the center of the room. A small metal box stood on a dais.

"None of you, with the possible exception of Iola, are capable of opening a sustained rift into the Plane of Elemental Radiance," Mr. Ganrey said. "As such, I will perform this part myself."

The dewdrops that Mr. Ganrey used weren't the strange, sickly, endless torrent of joy that flowed through Iola's soul. But they were far, far more controlled. I watched as the tiny droplets of joy were, somehow, compressed, becoming dense, almost-solid specks before being flung into the metal box.

There was no sound when the rift opened. But the beams of pure, unceasing light that slipped through the cracks at the corners were painfully bright to look at, and I instinctively turned away.

Mr. Ganrey rang a bell—the same bell that we had used to train the voles—and waited for one heartbeat, two. The terrible light from within the box began to fade.

Then he opened the box's door.

A small, chittering vole made of pure light was sniffing around in the center of the box. When Mr. Ganrey rang the bell, its head perked up, and it scampered onto Mr. Ganrey's arm to reach it.

Moments later, the period bell rang, and the Demon of Joy scampered away in search of another, larger bell to follow. Mr. Ganrey tried to grab at it, but the nimble little creature effortlessly avoided his grasp. He rubbed his forehead, grumbling to himself, before regaining his composure.

"That concludes today's lab section on demon summoning," Mr. Ganrey finished. "Be back here the same time tomorrow." He paused, sighed, and added one last thing.

"Oh. And five points extra credit to anyone who can track down that damn demon. We'll need it for tomorrow's class."

A.N.

This prompt was written by my Patreons!

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[meowcats734]

[Soulmage] Book 1 Epilogue

The gold-plated mimic watched Tanryn sulk as she turned the pages of a worn fantasy novel. The mimic had no concept of sulking or novels, of course, but the entity piloting it did. Though the mimic had no eyes—they stood out somewhat obviously on what was supposed to be a gold bar—it watched through soulsight as Tanryn's eyes drooped closed, the whirlwind of emotions from her friends' departure settling into a deep, slow slumber.

Then it was time.

The mimic stood up, sprouting delicate clockwork legs, and began scuttling across the wall.

The slowstone that the walls were forged from was all but impervious to physical damage, which was how the late Lord Tanryn's vaults had survived the Plane of Elemental Falsehood's attempts to synchronize with realspace over the decades. As such, the mimic couldn't just tunnel through the walls like it had done to the rest of the surrounding area, but there was a reason why the mimic had been coerced into shedding most of its body mass. With a tick-tick-tick of impossible clockwork and bones that had never known biology, the gold-plated mimic flattened itself to the thickness of a hair, slipping underneath the crack between solid oak and slowstone, then reconstituting itself on the other side of the door. 

Curious mimics, powered by soul fragments of varying strength, turned towards the tiny golden creature as it rebuilt its body, hungry to tear out and consume the soul shard that kept the mimic alive. But the matrix of magic and memory that someone had wrapped around its soul activated, and all at once, the curiosity in every mimic within a ten-foot radius dropped to zero, the ambling predators returning to their eternal patrol of the oil-stained halls. Satisfied that it was in no physical danger, the golden mimic dug through the flimsy plastic walls, crawling into its painstakingly-dug network of tunnels.

The spiraling, web-like tunnel network wove in and out of twisted halls and slippery staircases until it breached the surface, the gold-plated mimic shaking itself free of cotton-ball snow beneath an angry lamplight sky. Orienting itself by the painted stars on the ceiling of reality, the golden mimic dug back down into the cardboard stone and began tunneling. It was mostly safe to travel out in the open; the reflection of the Silent Peaks into the Plane of Elemental Falsehood had few inherent hazards, other than the mimics. 

Still, the golden mimic had a critical mission, and it would harbor no needless risks.

Twenty-eight hours of tireless digging later, the golden mimic's soul fragment was ragged and fading. It would need to feed soon, if it wanted to survive. Thankfully, as it dug out of the ground and reached a tiny, stable rift, a kindly, waiting face had a fresh meal waiting in the palm of their hand.

"I thank you for your service, little one," Odin murmured, teasing the soul fragment into the golden mimic's body. The golden mimic waved one leg in gratitude.

Then, as it had been taught to do, it unfolded like a flower, exposing its soul to Odin.

Soulspace entities were, in theory, capable of sustaining themselves indefinitely by consuming the new memories they produced, but Odin had strictly forbidden the golden mimic from burning any of its new memories for fuel. The fruit of the golden mimic's patience was plucked all at once, Odin scraping the fresh memories off the surface of the mimic's soul and absorbing them. They closed their eyes as their ancient mind effortlessly assimilated the soul fragments, sifting through them until they found the data they needed.

One of the reasons attunement was so easy to come by yet so tricky to research was because it was impossible to predict when an attunement would occur. Odin had watched the souls of growing witches for their entire lives, waiting for an attunement to form, but there was only so much time they could spend in each day, and the data points they gathered were few and far between. Even when the Order of Valhalla took root, and their resources skyrocketed, it was still nearly impossible to glean anything useful from the fistful of lucky coincidences that had led to Odin observing an attunement being formed in real time.

Unless you had someone who knew exactly how attunements were formed, and deliberately went through the steps to create one.

Odin watched through the golden mimic's eyes as the gallium insecurity in Cienne's body swelled and boiled—then, as his mother's soul fragment burned away, how that insecurity was drained from his soul by lances of diamond catharsis. How Cienne stood, attunement fresh in his mind, and used what was left of his insecurity as a needle to pierce the bubble Odin had trapped him in.

Odin stopped the memory, rewound it to the beginning, and replayed it.

"How counterintuitive," Odin murmured. "In order to gain attunement to an emotion, you must first rid yourself of it to the greatest degree you can."

Then their eyes snapped open. The humble office they used instead of a throne room was warded with the strongest spells they knew, but they'd made some exceptions for spells routing through the Plane of Empathy. Concentrating on the endless ocean of empathy-thread that roiled in their soul, they sent out a message to the team they'd sent across thoughtspace to track down and capture Cienne.

"Cienne clawed his way out of the box," Odin sent to the hunt-and-capture team. "Plan A was a success. No need to capture the child."

After a heartbeat's delay, Odin sensed the other end of the empathic link jiggle in acknowledgement. The witch of empathy Odin had sent with the team was nowhere near as skilled as Odin, but instantaneous transdimensional communication still did wonders for logistics. 

Odin steepled their fingers in thought. Through another rift, a crow poked her head into Odin's office—the Silent City's forces must have been on the move already, sweeping into the Redlands to uproot their organization and unmake everything they had tried to accomplish.

Somewhere in Odin's soul, a tiny, anticipatory flame sparked.

"Then let the games begin," murmured Odin, and a hundred empathic links flared to life at once.

A.N.

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[meowcats734]

(prompt response) Superheroes lie about their powers to protect themselves; some speedsters are actually just able to teleport, and some people with super-strength can just cancel gravity to make things lighter. You're trying to come up with a plausible lie for your powers.

After a third night of Odin's absence, I turned my mind to getting out of here. I wasn't sure what Odin's endgame was, but if they wanted me stuck in the plane of insecurity, by default I wanted to get as far away from here as possible.

That wasn't just because of Odin, of course. The mimics were utterly terrifying, too, and although Meloai and Tanryn kept the larger ones out, I kept sitting on chairs only to have them skitter away from underneath me with a tick-tick-tick of clockwork. I had no idea how Tanryn had survived here for twenty years; I was already going insane after a handful of nights.

"The mimics aren't usually this brave," Meloai commented. "I think they like you."

"Eurgh. I got enough of that stuff with those random animals stalking me back in the Peaks. Get off of me." I brushed a gold bar off my leg, and it sprouted tiny claws and clattered off into the distance. Tanryn couldn't quite figure out how to keep the shapeshifting creatures out of the vault once they got below a certain size, but thankfully, the small ones weren't aggressive. "Alright, that's it. We're getting back to realspace, and we're getting back as soon as possible."

"This is why those of inferior breeding cannot govern themselves," Tanryn said. "I've been trapped in the plane of insecurity for twenty years. What do you have that I don't?"

I grinned. "Rifts," I said.

Tanryn raised an eyebrow. "I beg your pardon?"

"All magic is generated by creating microscopic rifts," I explained, "connecting different planes of thoughtspace to realspace. And any Redlander knows that if you cast a spell with enough emotion, you get a permanent rift. That's how we've blown up most of our own cities, after all. I don't know what happens if you cast a spell while you're inside thoughtspace, but..." I wrapped my mind around the thorns of self-hatred that still clung to my soul, and flung them outwards; a moment later, I shrank to the size of a pea. Tanryn shrieked in shock and Meloai gave me a polite little golf-clap of applause as I returned to normal size. "Clearly, magic still works from inside thoughtspace."

"So if you cast a spell using enough insecurity as fuel, you think you can open a rift back into realspace?" Meloai asked.

I nodded. "It's worth a shot, at least."

"And, what, you just so happen to be a witch attuned to insecurity?" Tanryn asked, blushing as she got back to her feet from her fall.

Of course I wasn't. The only emotion I could wield was self-hatred; I didn't have even a hint of an attunement to insecurity.

But I had something better.

I knew how to give myself one.

Outwardly, though, I made no mention of that. As amusing as it would be to see Tanryn bluster in disbelief, I'd learned my lesson from Odin: letting slip that you have the secret to unlocking every school of witchcraft was a Very Bad Idea. "I am," I lied.

Tanryn gave me an irritated look. "Of course you are. Well, if nothing else, it'll be amusing to watch you fail. Get to it, commoner."

I gave her a sloppy salute. "Aye-aye, cap'n."

"I am not a captain. The formal address for a woman of my rank is 'Lady Tanryn,' and you do not salute..." I let Tanryn's words wash over me like rain on a tin roof, grinning stupidly to myself as I thought.

I would need a place to think.

###

There were four steps to achieving attunement: to feel the emotion yourself, to lose the emotion yourself, to cause the emotion in others, and to take the emotion from others.

"So which am I?" Lucet's eyes crinkled. "The riftmaw or the hearth dragon?"

"You're whatever you want to be," I said. "They cannot take this from you."

I had eased the insecurity of others.

Lucet giggled as Iola's elven halo flickered, irritation momentarily tainting his schadenfreude. "Stay away from my girlfriend, you Redlands freak."

"I would, but you've been dumped by so many of them. I can hardly cross the main lawn without tripping over—" I don't know what self-destructive instinct led me to keep talking when the flash of anger in Iola's eyes ignited, but I knew I'd struck a nerve by the way Lucet flinched.

I had inflamed the insecurity of others.

I was hardly listening to the old man's words.

Because I was a witch who used self-hatred.

For me to have an emotional attunement, it meant that I had to have caused that emotion in someone else.

My head swam. Who could it have been? Who had I hurt inadvertently so badly that it made them turn their anger inwards on themself? Who...

I had felt insecurity myself. I held three of the four keys to attunement to insecurity already.

All I needed was to let go of my own insecurities, and I would be free.

The simple ones came first. Though the roving clockwork mimics outside were terrifying, the bunker we were in was secure. There was no need to fear for my physical safety. I felt a burden leave me as my breathing slowed. I was getting closer to attunement. I could feel it.

The harder ones came next. I'd been matching wits against an opponent that wanted nothing more than to steal the secret of attuning new powers, and they had thoroughly outmaneuvered me at every opportunity they had.

But Odin had made one crucial mistake, and that was trying to trap a person who could create their own attunements on the fly. I would adapt, and I would get out of here alive.

Another insecurity faded, and I felt the attunement beginning to form. Like liquid metal unfurling around my soul. But it was tentative, weak, and I knew that if I stressed it, it'd snap like a string.

If I wanted to escape Odin's trap, I had to address the final core of insecurity that had driven me here. A single question that dug beneath my nails and squirmed behind my eyes and drove me wild with desperation.

Had my mother died hating herself because of me?

And as the question consumed my mind and soul, as it sang along every fiber of my being, something resonated back..

The soul fragment I'd absorbed. The echo of my mother's soul that still remembered, somewhere, what it was like to be alive.

And it began to burn.

"Mom?" I whispered.

Deep within my soulspace, where nothing grew but thorns of self-hatred, my mother's memory latched on to my own, dissolving into sound and light as it did, the shard of her soul that I'd collected burning itself up to bring Quianna back, just for the slimmest moment.

And Mom spoke eight words that cracked open my soul.

"I died loving you with all my heart."

Even that much effort was nearly too much for the soul fragment to bear, and I grasped at the air in futility, something hot and bright blurring my gaze as I tried to hold onto a ghost. "Wait! Mom! I—you can't—don't leave me! I... I..." I swallowed. "If it wasn't you... then whoever I hurt..."

"You may never know the fullness of the impact you have on the lives around you," my mother said, fading with each word. "You may never know who you have inadvertently hurt. And that's okay. Because whoever it is? It's long past time that they've healed, and moved on." A memory of a hand brushed against my cheek. "And so should you, Cienne."

"I..." I closed my eyes, feeling as though something heavy and toxic and dark was finally sluicing free from my body, and I bowed my head. "Thank you. Mom."

The burnt-out soul fragment gave no response.

Then I opened my eyes once more, and through them, I saw my soul anew. Swimming alongside the thorns of self-hatred that had once been the only thing I saw within my soul, I sensed liquid-mirror insecurity flowing through my veins. Not much. Not anymore. But enough that I could touch the power of falsehood and bring it to bear from my soul.

I took in a deep, steady breath.

Then I hurled my insecurity against the fabric of space itself, and I tore the world open like an arrow through a heart.

A.N.

Soulmage is a serial written in response to writing prompts. Stick around for more episodes, or join my Discord to chat about it!

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[meowcats734]

(prompt response) You're a wealthy estate owner who hid away your riches in an abandoned cave, so to avoid paying the kingdom's new taxes. A ragtag group of adventurers have found it and now think they've uncovered long-lost treasure.

Meloai disarmed the spike trap with a single thrust of her clockwork arm. Normal human flesh would have been shredded to bits by the saferoom's defenses, but Meloai was a mimic that had learned to be human—she was made of tougher stuff. Of the two of us, she was certainly the more qualified in our little ragtag adventuring party.

"And you said there're rations in this cave?" I asked. I'd been wandering around this damn dungeon for nearly two days without food or water now, and it was hard to think about something that wasn't where I'd get my next drink of water. The only liquid down here was the strangely omnipresent oil that covered the walls and floor, and even though I'd considered trying it in desperation, Meloai had warned me that it wasn't safe for human consumption.

"Oh, yeah. Rations for days. All kinds of stuff, too. Gold bars, statues, paintings—"

I spluttered. "Gold bars?"

Meloai gave me a frown. "Yeah. So what? I've been stuck in this dungeon since the day I was born, and I'll be here until I die. There isn't exactly any use for human currency down here."

...Right. Meloai was a person like any other, but her experiences weren't the same as mine. Still, I had hopes of getting out of this damn dungeon some day, and doing so with a backpack full of loot sounded good. Or maybe just a small sock full of loot; presumably, gold was as heavy as any other metal, and even though I had a Redlander's stocky frame, I wouldn't be able to lug a whole backpack of the stuff around. "Fair enough," I said.

I winced as Meloai forcibly reset the spike trap with a squeal of metal—those arms of hers were terrifyingly strong when she wanted them to be. She beckoned me through a hole in the wall that looked... more recent than the rest of the dungeon, and I ducked inside. A sturdy door made of wood—real wood, not whatever bizarre material most of the dungeon's fake doors were made of—blocked my path.

"Alright. Home sweet home. Should be more than enough rations for two, at least for now," she said.

I blinked. "For two? Meloai, you don't eat."

She winked. "I don't, but my sister does."

And then she opened the door.

The cave was definitely artificial, made of solid bricks inlaid with currents of invisible power that somehow reminded me of a living soul. And yes, crates of gold bullion were stacked to the left, and yes, a massive marble statue of some naked woman that looked very expensive was on the right, and yes, there was a gloriously tall wall stocked to the brim with dried rations and clean water.

But what took me aback the most was the living, human girl in the center of the room. Not a mimic—I could see her soul—but another, biological human being. Incongruously, she was somehow garbed in opulent, sparkling-clean purple robes.

"What..." I stared around the cave as Meloai grinned. "What... is this place?"

"Dunno!" Meloai cheerfully chirped. "But this is Tanryn, and this is my treasure room!"

"My father's treasure room," Tanryn snapped. "And my title is Lady Tanryn, thank you very much."

"Oh, you." Meloai waved a hand at Tanryn, and she sighed, rubbing her forehead. Huh. Huh. I looked back and forth between the mimic who had learned to be human and the human who lived amongst mimics. I had wondered how Meloai had taught herself human behaviors; I guess it made sense that she'd simply had a living companion to talk to over all these years. "Anyway, I hope you don't mind if I break out some of the rations? We've got a guest for the first time in... uh, two decades, so... feels like a reasonable occasion."

"My father appointed me here to safeguard the treasures of House Tanryn, and I will not allow some commoner to—"

"Wait, did you say House Tanryn?" I asked.

Lady Tanryn turned to me, one eyebrow upraised. "I did indeed invoke our noble name. Presumably, you've heard of us?"

"Yeah, you're the house whose head got executed for tax evasion twenty years back," I said. There was probably a more diplomatic way to phrase that, but I was starving and dying of thirst and this 'Lady' Tanryn was trying to prevent me from getting to her ceiling-high mountain of food. I was in no mood to be polite. "No wonder they couldn't find his riches—he had them squirreled away in some cave in another damn dimension."

The last living Tanryn spluttered with indignation. "Why, you—how dare you slander House Tanryn with these lies! Meloai!"

"Hm?"

"Execute him!"

"No, he's cool. Here, have a snack." Meloai walked past Tanryn; the lady tried to stop her, but pitting her muscles against the clockwork of the mimic was like shoving against an oncoming avalanche. Meloai handed me a water flask and a container of jerky, which I greedily tore into.

"Those are the treasures of House Tanryn! Put that back right now!"

I swallowed and said, "Dude. House Tanryn's been dead for longer than I've been alive, and I've been wandering around down here for days without food or water. It is impossible to overstate how little I care about your demands right now."

"But—I—but—" Tanryn's rage swelled up to a crescendo, and I prepared myself for the inevitable eruption.

What I didn't expect was for her to deflate.

"He said he wouldn't leave me here," she finally whispered.

Meloai winced, and to be honest, I wouldn't have cared less about what Tanryn's sob story was, but... Meloai clearly cared about the girl, for all her bluster and anger. So I swallowed my jerky and said, "Well, he clearly did."

Lady Tanryn shot me a glare. "Thank you, peasant. I can see that. I just... can't see... why."

I tilted my head. "Wait. Did he... did he not tell you?"

Lady Tanryn frowned. "Tell me what? You can't possibly expect me to believe that a commoner would be able to glean the inner workings of a noble's mind."

"I can in this case, because I took a history class on the damn thing. The Silent Crusade was twenty years back, and the tax on the nobles was... sending a firstborn child to war." From the expression on Lady Tanryn's face, I could tell that this was news to her. Great. I was no good at comforting people who were abrasive assholes, but as one of those abrasive assholes myself, I figured I'd give it a shot. I sat down next to her and said, "Your father didn't send you here to get rid of you. He kept you here, with all his greatest treasures, to keep you safe."

Lady Tanryn closed her eyes.

Then she opened them, expression set in stone.

"Then I gather that I am the last living heir to House Tanryn?"

"That I know of," I cautiously said.

"Then as the lady of this house, I have done you a grave disservice in my hospitality." She stood aside from the shelf of food and water. "Though I will preserve the treasures of House Tanryn, as I have been commanded to by my father, you are welcome to resupply yourself on your journey, adventurer."

I gave her a surprised look, but didn't look the gift horse in the mouth, popping open a second water flask and slowly rehydrating my parched body. Tanryn and Meloai traded glances before breaking off into conversation, and I sat down, waiting for my body to recover from the stress of the past few days.

Then I chuckled to myself, looking around the room. Tanryn and Meloai turned to me.

"What is it now, commoner?" Tanryn asked.

I snorted. "Nothing. Nothing. Just..." I gestured around the room, at the bullion and the statues, and how small they were in comparison to the massive, redundant tower of supplies, all to feed Tanryn in her long isolation. "Seems like your father was true to tradition when designing his little hoard."

Tanryn raised an eyebrow. "Oh?"

"Yeah. The real treasure was the friends we made along the way."

Tanryn's exasperated sigh and Meloai's giggling laughter filled the room, and for the first time since Odin had tricked me into the plane of falsehood, I felt like I was almost at home.

A.N.

Soulmage is a serial written in response to writing prompts. Stick around for more episodes, or join my Discord to chat about it!

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[meowcats734]

thanks to the october that happened recently i decided to try writing my first horror story here we go:

just watched into the spiderverse for the first time. in 480p

#i normally write longer things than this

[meowcats734]

[Soulmage] A mimic, seeking to improve its hunting ability, starts hiding among humans studying them to the point where it can pull off a perfect human disguise. However, it soon finds that life as a human is much better than life as a mimic pretending to be furniture.

I expected Odin to show up the next time I fell asleep. Perhaps to taunt me, perhaps to manipulate me further, perhaps to go for the kill and offer a deal I would be forced to refuse.

What I didn't expect was a dreamless, uneasy slumber.

When I woke up, I half-expected to still be in a dream, with Odin waiting to finally spring the trap they'd spent weeks building. But... Experimentally, I waved my hand in front of my face. Unless Odin had somehow fundamentally changed the rules of soulspace, I wasn't in a dream. This was reality.

Odin had thoroughly outmaneuvered me, held me over a barrel in order to extort me, and then... left me entirely alone.

Somehow, the thought terrified me more than if they'd showed up in full demonic form, tempting me with every trick they knew.

My stomach growled, and I grimaced. Odin could wait; if they weren't immediately going to twist my brain into knots, I could at least spend some time trying to find something to eat in this hellhole. But I'd already spent a day wandering the upper reaches of the Plane of Elemental Falsehood, and I'd found nothing but wooden steaks and salads made of solid glue.

So that left me with only one choice.

I had to go deeper.

###

As dungeon names went, "Do Not Enter" was one of the scariest. Oh, sure, it wasn't "Quarznidoth's Tomb" or "Home of a Thousand Pointy, Tentacled Horrors," but there was something primally worrying about the only lettering on the dungeon entrance being "Do Not Enter," scrawled in a fluid that could have been oil or blood or something in between.

But I needed food in my belly, and it wasn't like there were many job opportunities in my nearby area, so into Do Not Enter I went. At least my contrarian side got some kicks out of defying the message.

The halls within were slick with oil, iridescent rainbow sheens glancing off their surface wherever one of the dungeon's strange, sourceless sunbeams struck. I could hear the click-click-clack-ing of one of those clockwork monstrosities that pretended to be human in the distance, and pointedly stayed away.

The only weapon I had was a wooden chair leg, and my only relevant offensive spell was soulsight. In theory, my soulsight would let me sense when anything with a soul got within a couple dozen meters of me... but that didn't exactly help when mimics didn't have souls.

I didn't fancy my odds against one of those demonic mimics in my current state. I was alone on my little adventure, and I needed to prioritize.

Find food, eat the food, live another day. That was my mission. Everything else was irrelevant.

I found it darkly amusing that the inhabitants of the dungeon quite possibly had the same goal as me.

"Hello?" A high-pitched, feminine voice called. Oh, rifts, it was another one of those mimics that could copy voices. The one that had done my mother's voice was creepy enough, but at least I could tell it wasn't human—this one, however, sounded perfectly real. "Is anybody there?"

Nnnnnope. Nope, nope, nope. I wasn't touching that with a ten-foot pole. The last creepy clockwork nasty had nearly gotten me, and that was when I had a convenient ledge to shove it off of; in these cramped hallways, armed with nothing but a stick, a straight-up fight with a mimic was just asking to be turned into dog chow. I hated myself, but I didn't hate myself that much.

But on the other hand...

It could have been a real person. It could have been someone else, lost and hungry and afraid, just like me.

And the part of me that wanted to lie in bed all day and never wake up would get just a little bit stronger if I abandoned someone down here without even trying to look.

"What do we think, gang? All in favor of risking our lives to get eaten by a mimic, say 'aye'," I muttered.

Of course, nobody answered. There was no-one here but me.

"And all in favor of doing nothing, and tiptoeing away to leave someone to die?"

I was alone. Which meant that there was nobody to stop me from doing something monumentally stupid.

Being a solo adventurer was tough.

Cursing the shard of myself that still tried to be a halfway-decent person, I slunk down the oily, dim halls to where I last heard the voice.

"Hellloooooooo?" The voice called out. "Is anyone there?"

I turned the corner and froze.

She looked like a real person, not a mimic. Her pale skin was the pale of flesh, not of cracked ceramic and ebony. Her eyes creased up at the corners instead of swiveling freely in their sockets, and their blue was the blue of a healthy iris, not of too-perfect paint. Her body didn't even tick and ping with metallic sounds like every other mimic I'd met did.

But my soulsight informed me that there was nothing in her heart.

I backed away, but she must have heard the splash of oil, because she turned around. And when she turned, it was relieved and human, not rigid and mechanical. "Oh, thank the rifts! Someone else came through! I thought... I thought that I was alone down here..."

I warily took a step back. "Don't come any closer," I warned, holding my chair leg between us as if it would do anything against a being made of metal.

Her expression flickered—and not in the uncanny shutdown of a mimic entering hunting mode, but... in genuine pain and shock. She complied, though, holding her hands up and taking a step back. "I... I'm sorry. It's just... been so long since I've seen another person."

"Are you?" I asked.

She blinked. "What?"

"A person," I continued.

Emotions flickered across her face—offense, fear, horror, resolution—and slowly, she closed her eyes.

"What... what gave it away?"

I... paused. That... wasn't the response I'd expected from a vicious killing machine. "You... I have soulsight. You don't have a soul." At her hurt expression, some part of me was compelled to say, "...Sorry."

She bitterly laughed. "No. No, don't apologize. I... I should have expected this. Why should I count as a person, anyways? I thought... I thought if I faked it for long enough, I could be... real. Laugh along when adventurers made jokes, instead of dumbly, numbly staring. Cry in pain when I break my leg, instead of idly thinking how inconvenient it was."

"Get out of bed with a smile on your face, instead of lying on the floor, wishing that you'd never wake up," I found myself blurting out.

The mimic turned to me, surprised, and I swallowed heavily.

"I... I know what it's like." I bit my lip, then... well, to hell with it. I was already in the room with the mimic. If she wanted to kill me, she'd have done so already. "Putting on a mask. Waking up every day and pretending to be human. Because you like what they have. Because you want to live in the light with them."

The mimic stared at me, shocked. "Are you another..."

I shook my head. "I'm a human, born and raised. I just... sometimes feel like I don't have a soul, either."

The mimic playing human and the human playing mimic traded long, bone-deep looks for a cautious... considering... vulnerable heartbeat.

Then she reached out to shake my hand.

"Meloai," she said.

"Cienne," I replied, shaking her hand.

"Come on," she said. "It's not safe out here. The other mimics aren't as... much of a person as I am." She shuddered. "I've got a saferoom with human-food and real beds. You'll like it there, I promise."

A faint smile crept across my face. "I believe you, Meloai."

At the use of the name—her name—she smiled back.

Being a solo adventurer was tough.

It was a good thing I'd found a friend.

A.N.

Soulmage is a serial written in response to writing prompts. Stick around for more episodes, or join my Discord to chat about it!

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[meowcats734]

The soul fragment flashed as I touched it, running down my arm like quicksilver and leaping into my heart. I barely had time to recoil in shock before the world blurred and a memory engulfed me—

And suddenly, I was not Cienne, student of the Silent Academy, witch of self-hatred.

I was Quianna, cook for the village of Sorrowfell, and today was the day King Vanwen's army came to visit.

###

"My most sincere apologies, King Vanwen, the deathblossom was from last year's harvest," I said, bowing my head demurely and performing the polite little curtsy all the women of my village were taught to do in the presence of visiting royalty. "I do hope, at least, that the antidote soufflé was to your satisfaction?"

"Deathblossom and bloodwine make as good a pairing as you and my ninth nephew would," King Vanwen chortled. I kept the sudden grimace off of my face—King Vanwen's ninth nephew was a notoriously irritable man who the king had been trying to marry off to an irrelevant commoner as an insult for years. "The dish was fine, woman. It was its executor that was the problem."

The problem was that King Vanwen had parked his army in the tiny village of Sorrowfell and expected the same treatment as he got in his castle in the heart of the Redlands. He'd ordered the traditional Redlands meal of a poison and an antidote: a statement of bravery by the king, that he would undergo such a risk to himself, and of trust in his citizens, that the antidote would keep him in good health. It wasn't as if a tiny, out-of-the-way village had the kind of potent poisons and substances that the Redlands King himself would expect, though. Our deathblossom was so old it had become more like mildly-sleepy-blossom, and I wouldn't be surprise if our bloodwine was actually just dyed juice.

Aloud, however, I simply said: "Your loyal citizens are at your service, my lord."

"Well, at least she's polite. Get me a real meal next time. Alright, lads, stock up," he said, raising his voice to his army. His soldiers cheered as they cut into our grain supplies, which we'd "generously" opened to the king as he passed. I fumed to myself as I turned away, stalking back into the tent that served as the impromptu kitchen. The King had no idea what he was talking about. He wanted poison? I'd show him poison.

Because I was a witch, and King Vanwen had just pissed off the wrong cooking girl.

I tied the tent flap shut, wrapped my apron around my waist, and reached for the magic within me. Pointing my hand at the pot of stew, I tugged at the power within my soul, and a stream of spiteful spiders poured into the brew, becoming drops of acid-green toxin where they met the liquid. I hadn't exercised my powers since I was a much younger, hot-headed girl, but seeing the king's army stomp up and down my home, taking our supplies to fuel yet another territorial feud, filled me with venom that I poured into the cauldron—

"Mommy!" My little boy, Cienne, burst into the tent. He still had the feminine features of his youth, but he'd cut his hair short, and his new boy's robes fit him well. His eyes lit up as he spied the stew. "Ooh! Can I have some of the—"

"No!" Before I even realized I'd consciously moved, Cienne was cradling a slapped hand, giving me a hurt look. "It's... it's not ready yet. I..." I looked at the poisoned stew, then sighed. "I need to add one last ingredient."

I'd made the stew with one part passion and one part spite, but now I closed my eyes and felt for the trickiest school of magic to master, one that I'd barely touched even as my powers grew. Slowly, reluctantly, I dredged one last emotion from my soul.

Forgiveness.

Delicate, newborn vines snaked out from my soul, popping into bright, glowing sparks where they touched the cauldron. The essence of regrowth would counteract the venom, and all who ate of it could leave unharmed.

"Is it ready now?" my son asked, quivering with excitement.

I smiled and ruffled his hair. "Yes, Cienne. Now run along to the dining hall. We're all eating together, after all."

###

"I must compliment you on your cooking," King Vanwen said between heaping bites. "I've never had a meal quite like it. What's the secret?"

I winked at the king, magic still swirling in my soul. "A little bit of kindness," I said.

The king gave me a blank stare, then guffawed. "You villagefolk really are a riot! No, really. Was it salted beef? I bet it was salted beef."

I hummed to myself quietly, content that I'd done the right thing.

###

The memory ended as abruptly as it had began, and I jerked back, snapping back to my body. I was still in the eerie hallways of the plane of falsehoods, still rattled from my near-tumble into the clockworks below.

But now I was certain of it. That memory was my mother's, and I was one step closer to answering the terrible question that pulled me forwards.

Odin was good for their word.

"I got the soul fragment," I said, and my voice echoed in the empty halls. "You can take me back now."

Take me back now... take me back now... take me back now... take me back now...

The only answer was my echo.

I blinked. "Uh. Odin? You there?"

You there? You there? You there? You there?

I scowled. "You promised you'd get me to the soul fragment, so hurry up and—"

Abruptly, my mind caught up to my words, and my stomach dropped.

Odin had promised to get me to the soul fragment.

They'd never promised anything about getting me back.

"Oh, no," I whispered, and the echoes of the clockworks agreed.

A.N.

Soulmage is a serial written in response to writing prompts. Stick around for more episodes, or join my Discord to chat about it!

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[WP] At dinner, you serve the king a glass of wine with poison in it. He sips from it and continues to eat as usual. At the end of the meal, he walks up to you and says. “Next time you make poison, make sure it really works. It was pathetic.” | | Want to submit a writing or a prompt? Read the rules here

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[meowcats734]

Two weeks passed, and I was no closer to finding my mother's soul. The rift in the basement and the repurposed monkeys were pulling in fragments of memory, but... they were drawing at random from every arrogant thought to ever cross the mind of all dead beings in history. It was hardly a surprise that I hadn't found what I was looking for.

Witch Aimes was pleased, though, if her reactions to the weekly project check-ins were anything to speak of. The project was hardly more than a proof-of-concept at this stage, but Witch Aimes claimed it was progressing remarkably quickly for a theoretical witchcraft project run by a first-year.

That was because of the demon in my dreams giving me academic advice, not because of any prodigal talent I possessed, but I didn't see any reason to let Witch Aimes know that. I didn't want to find myself on the wrong end of her memory-spear, after all.

"It's nice to see some actual academic research still going on here," Witch Aimes mused, looking over the reams of data the monkeys had collected. "It's theoretically possible that this data could give us something useful for the war, of course, but we can't just drop everything and focus solely on results over theory. That's robbing tomorrow's progress for today's shortsighted gain."

Any other time, I would have loved to hear Witch Aimes' take on academic integrity—wait, no, I got that backwards. Any other time, I would have tuned out Witch Aimes' take on academic integrity, and this was no exception. "But are we getting anything coherent out of it? Any memories?"

Witch Aimes shrugged. "Sure. Plenty of memories. This pattern—" She tapped on a crude drawing of what looked like a petal, where we'd switched the monkeys to painting. "It's a perfect match for an immature calmflower."

"We got a memory of a flower," I repeated.

"In only two weeks!" Witch Aimes agreed.

I clenched my fists. "What about something that gets me closer to finding my mother?"

Witch Aimes blinked at me. "I... beg your pardon?"

"The whole reason I started this damn project is because I need to know..." Something in me instinctively clamped down, and I held back. "I need to know what was on my mother's mind when she died," I whispered.

A flicker of sympathy darted over Witch Aimes' face. "I'm sorry for your loss," she automatically said. "But the only reason you have funding at all is the potential for weaponizing your research against Odin. As noble a goal as giving you closure might be, I can't convince the Silent Parliament to allocate funds to bringing back an echo of some boy's dead mother when they could be raising an army to prevent the deaths of thousands more."

I closed my eyes. "I understand," I said. "You won't help me."

"We're all helping out to take down Odin," she said. "Now, tell me about the data you collected on day twelve..."

###

"Yes," Odin said. "I can help."

I paused mid-rant, swiveling towards them. I'd gotten better at moving around in soulspace, even if I still had to actively concentrate to do it. "What did you say?"

Odin shrugged. "You want to find a fragment of your mother's soul. I've been spending the past two weeks and considerable resources doing exactly that."

"You found a soul fragment?" I darted forwards, grabbing them by the shoulders. If the ancient demon was bothered by my treatment, they didn't show it.

"Technically, I found three," Odin said, "but two of them are located in parts of thoughtspace inimical to human life. You would be incinerated or frozen in the planes of passion or sorrow." That tracked—the planes of elemental heat and cold would... likely be unpleasant places to go searching for memories of a long-dead mother.

"Then..." My stomach dropped. "Where is the third?" I waited for them to demand their price. Waited for them to force me to refuse. Because despite everything they'd done for me, Odin had already wrought death and destruction on a scale I hadn't seen since my childhood, and their reach would only get so much worse if they knew how to create witches on demand.

"It is located in the plane of insecurity," Odin calmly said.

I blinked. "I—what?"

"Also known as the plane of elemental falsehood," Odin helpfully clarified.

"No, that's not what—you're just giving it to me?"

Odin tilted their head. "I don't have the soul fragment on me, if that's what you're asking. The spell I have in mind will piggyback on the resonance between your memories of your mother and—"

"That's not what I'm asking," I snapped. "You're not... you're not demanding..." They weren't demanding the one thing I couldn't give up. They... they weren't asking anything at all.

"Why would I resort to demands? It's an inelegant way of enforcing my will." Odin raised an eyebrow. "I could send you there now, if you so desired. The plane of elemental falsehood is... uncanny, but it is one of the relatively few emotional planes which is perfectly safe for human life for short periods of stay. As long as you don't do anything entirely idiotic, that is."

Something in me still screamed to say no. To refuse the literal deal with a demon.

But I needed to know. I needed to know if she'd died hating herself because of me.

I held out a hand. "Do it," I said, before I could change my mind.

Odin.

Grinned.

They took my hand, and my soulspace dissolved into wakefulness.

###

The nursery rhyme was nameless, as most such rhymes were. It hovered on the edge of childhood memory and half-remembered dream, wavering as it sang through the glossy-sheened halls.

Tick... tock... goes... the clock... and now, what shall we play?

I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and sat up, back aching from lying on the painted wooden bed. Where... where was I?

Tick... tock... goes... the clock... now summer's gone away.

The room was dim and uncannily familiar, a bizarre mirror image of my rental room. I tried opening the door—it felt far too light to be made out of wood—and stepped into the creaking hallway.

"Hello?" I called.

Tick... tock... goes... the clock... I'll bring you back to me...

Though the hallway had more doors than anyone could count, the song was only coming from behind one of them. Instinctively and unerringly, I stepped forwards, trying to open the door—but it was nothing more than cheap paint on a wall, a facade as thin as a wish.

Tick... tock... goes... the clock... and I will set you free...

I knew that voice. I needed that voice. Hearing it on the other side of the wall was like a fishhook driven through my chest, inexorably tugging me forwards. I looked around for a way through, but even if I was the size of an ant, there wasn't the slightest crack in the smooth, oily wall.

But it was only a facade.

I took one step back, two, then hurled myself forwards, slamming through the painted door. It snapped instead of splintered, whatever material it was made of clearly not wood, revealing the... entity... on the other side.

The doll was the size of a human child, its too-wide eyes and cherubic blush contrasting with the distressingly fleshy lips and obscenely realistic teeth. Beneath its shoulders, even the attempts at seeming lifelike ended, a metallic, ticking skeleton of gears and springs whirring away, all powered by a humming, glowing box.

It sang with my mother's voice.

Tick... tock... goes... the clock... now, go to sleep, my child...

Tick... tock... goes... the clock... and let... your dreams... run wild...

"Mom?" I whispered, throat tightening.

The doll's head swiveled towards me, and I screamed.

It stood with uncannily fluid speed and unhinged its jaw and nope nope nope I wasn't staying around to find out what happened next. From what I understood of thoughtspace, my physical body had been moved from realspace to here; if I died, it was lights out for me. I was already sprinting back down the hallway as its distorted singing chased me:

Tick, tock, goes the clock, the song draws to an end.

Tick, tock, goes the clock, forever we'll be friends.

It was catching up. Oh, rifts, it was catching up. The floor quavered beneath my feet as I ran—

Quavered beneath my feet.

This entire place was a facade. Painted doors, paper-thin walls...

...and a floor so thin it shook when I stepped on it.

Desperately, I turned to face the oncoming demon. Its lips—my mother's lips—twisted up into a grin as I stopped—

I stomped as hard as I could on the floor, and the demonic doll fell into an abyss of clockwork and gears.

Somewhere very, very far down, two massive gears ground up the demon with a spark.

I stood there on the teetering edge of the chasm, catching my breath.

And then a wisp of light rose from the void.

Even in death, it still mournfully sang—but now, the brassy, twisted tones of the demon's body had faded, leaving me with the voice of my mother as I knew her when I was still a child.

Tick, tock, goes the clock, and though the time may fly...

Tick, tock, goes the clock, we're family, you and I.

"Mom," I breathed, and it was as much prayer as joy.

The soul fragment twinkled in the air, uncertain.

Then I reached out and let it in.

A.N.

Soulmage is a serial written in response to writing prompts. Stick around for more episodes, or join my Discord to chat about it!

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Writing Prompt #156 — Plastic World

Writing Prompt #156 — Plastic World

Prompt: You woke up in an entirely fake world. It’s an endless doll-house plastic facsimile powered by miles of clockwork gears and levers that go straight down into darkness. You did not get here yourself, and you have no idea how to leave. (more…)

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[meowcats734]

Odin appeared in my soulspace the next time I slept, which I'd expected to happen from the beginning. I'd tricked Odin into trading me invaluable knowledge for what amounted to nothing of use; now all I had to do to to come out ahead was not engage them any further.

The first time they appeared, we simply stood in opposite sides of the black-thorned space that represented my soul. I kept waiting for them to say something, but they simply watched me with a vaguely concerned look.

And they just.

Kept.

Waiting.

The first hour was fine. As a child, I'd done nothing but stare at the skies for hours on end. I would have laid down, but I still couldn't figure out how to move my body in soulspace, and besides, I was pretty sure my soul looked the same no matter what angle you approached it from. So I just had to hover there. Existing.

The second hour, I knew that Odin was trying to bait me into speaking. Why else would they be waiting so patiently? The spiteful part of me even cheered in joy. I was wasting Odin's time—time that could be spent planning another invasion or doing... whatever Odin wanted to do... with the students they'd poached.

All I had to do was nothing.

For three hours.

For four hours.

For eight hours.

I swore that the silence was pulling at my ears by the time my soulspace—thankfully, blissfully, finally—dissolved, signaling my return to wakefulness. I sat up, yawned, stretched, and got ready for another day of running experiments on the monkeys in the basement. A couple witches would be coming by later today—both to clean up after them and to harvest the excess emotions they generated—but other than that, the entire day would be a breeze.

The next day, when I fell asleep, it started all over again.

###

I cracked on the second day. Four hours in. There was only so much absolute, unmoving silence that I could handle, and eight hours a day of the stuff was unbearable. I started humming, at first. The wordless tune to every sea shanty to come out of the Crystal Coast. Then I started singing, looping through the verses of the Redlands Anthem that I knew, and making up a dozen more when I ran out. All that time, the Demon of Empathy simply watched me. Nodding in tune with the music.

That passed the fifth hour.

I started growing desperate by the time I ran out of possible rhymes for "dead." I ran through every dirty tavern song I'd heard growing up, then every dirtier tavern song I wasn't supposed to have heard growing up. I sang a song making fun of Witch Aimes, and a song telling Iola to go jump in a rift, and a song about the snowball fight I'd had with Lucet, and a song about how rifts, I wanted out of here, I wanted anything but to be left alone with my thoughts for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours on end.

Odin simply stood there as I sang. Watching. Waiting.

Listening.

###

"Odin keeps showing up in my soulspace," I said to Witch Aimes.

She grinned. "Perfect."

I blinked. "Wait, what?"

"Wasting their time and attention on an academy student who knows nothing of value is the most stunning success the empathic backtrace program could have had," Witch Aimes said, scribbling something on a paper. It looked like some kind of form relating to the city's military. Word was that the Silent Peaks were gearing up for a counterattack.

"But I—" I started to speak, then hesitated. What would Witch Aimes do if she found out that I'd overheard one of the core secrets of the Silent Academy?

What would she do if she knew I'd already let part of that secret slip?

"Hm?" Witch Aimes asked.

"I... it's really unpleasant," I said. "You—you can sever the link, right?"

Witch Aimes gave me a concerned look. "What's Odin doing to you?"

"They..." I swallowed, then said, "Er. Well, uh, they're not really doing anything to me, per se. Just sort of standing there. But—"

"You want me to give up a tactical advantage that's distracting the leader of a nation we're at war with because Odin is standing there," Witch Aimes said, her expression going flat.

"I—"

"Get out of my office," Witch Aimes said, and a spatial rift deposited me back in my home.

###

On the third day, I finally said, "Hey, uh, isn't it weird how I can speak in soulspace, but not move my body?" I justified it as fishing for information, spying on the enemy, taking something from the monster who'd invaded my home and ordered the deaths of my friends.

It would have been more convincing if my voice hadn't cracked halfway through.

To my surprise, however, Odin immediately answered. "Speech is learned, while movement is instinctual."

"I..." I grimaced. "I have no idea what that means."

"Soulspace is where memories are stored," Odin said, bringing up the triple-plane diagram from earlier. "In order to affect a change in soulspace, you must invoke a memory. Speech is learned, and thus consists of invocations to memories; speech comes naturally to most sapient beings who enter soulspace. Bodily motion, on the other hand, is—with some exceptions for extensive physical training—instinctive, and does not naturally draw from memory. In order to move in soulspace, you must remember movement, not instinctively command it."

Remember movement, not instinctively command it. I tried calling up a memory of sitting in class—

—and abruptly, I was sitting in class, motionless fascimiles of my classmates arrayed around me.

Odin—who'd moved themself to replace Lucet at my side—said, "It's as easy as that."

And after that, the dam shattered.

###

"You know you can tell me anything, right?" The Demon of Empathy sat across from me on a stuffed straw couch. Considering that they were an extradimensional entity, the form they chose was surprisingly human: barrel-chested, broad-shouldered, and even wearing a pair of thin-rimmed glasses that weren't there the last time we'd met.

I sat down on my own couch. It was irritating and ill-fitting, but that just meant it reminded me of home. I was pretty sure Odin had done that on purpose. "I can tell you anything," I countered. "Whether I should is another matter entirely."

The Demon of Empathy leaned forwards, steepling their fingers beneath their chin. "Are you afraid of hurting me?"

Of course a damn Demon of Empathy would see right through me. It was an irrational fear—I'd experienced the Demon of Empathy's power and wisdom firsthand, and to nobody's surprise, even the vilest of the dark thoughts that whispered in my ear were nothing compared to what the ancient entity knew. And yet still I shrugged and said, "I'd hurt anyone else if I talked about it." Even myself, I thought, although I tried not to let it show.

The Demon of Empathy raised a hand, and the scenery around us blurred. I'd gotten better at understanding the strange place that lived in my dreams where the demon and I had our talks. One of its rules, apparently, was that the Demon of Empathy could shift the appearance of our surroundings at a whim. We appeared on top of a clock tower, watching my past self moongaze, lying down next to a girl with dark brown hair that flowed in the wind.

"Other people have confided in you," the Demon of Empathy said. "Does it hurt you when they speak of the dark thoughts that hound them?"

I hesitated. "It... doesn't," I finally said.

"How would you describe how it makes you feel, then?"

I bit my lip. For some reason, it had simply... never occurred to me to even ask that question. "When Lucet told me about what... what her 'boyfriend' was doing to her..." I struggled to find the words. "It felt right. It felt like... like she was lancing a boil. Taking that toxicity out of her heart before its infection reached her marrow."

I was pretty sure that wasn't how infected wounds worked, but if the Demon of Empathy noticed, they didn't say a thing. Instead, they simply asked:

"Then if others giving voice to their inner demons doesn't hurt you, why do you think your inner demons would destroy them?"

From anyone else, I would have snapped at them and clammed up. But the Demon of Empathy knew how to sound genuinely curious instead of challenging, how to set up conversation after conversation so that it was okay for me to be wrong because that meant I could become right, and I whispered, "Because it's just me."

My therapist—and as twisted and darkly amusing as it was that a Demon of Empathy was the closest thing I had to a therapist, that was what they were—simply regarded me with a calm, open gaze, wordlessly asking if I wanted to continue.

"With Lucet, it was someone else hurting her. And we could both hate him for what he'd done. But with me..." I held up a shaking hand, trying to see it as it was now, not as it had been. "It's just me," I repeated. "I'm the only one responsible for what I've done to myself. The voices that whisper in my ear? They're all my voice. Nobody else's. Don't you get it? I am the monster. And if I tell Lucet... won't she hate the monster too?" My voice grew pleading, and the Demon of Empathy opened his arms, and rifts forgive me but I embraced the demon, breaking down in sobs.

"I, too, am a monster," the Demon of Empathy murmured. "I have committed atrocities that would make dark gods jealous, and over my many, many years, I have learned one thing."

The Demon of Empathy pulled back, and their gaze was fierce. "I am the monster, yes. But I am also a therapist, and a leader, and a friend. And if I can be all those at once, you can too."

And something in my mind snapped. I saw the Demon of Empathy for what they were—killer, savior, truth and lie, angel, demon, therapist, spy—and I saw myself in every facet of their being.

If I can be all those at once, you can too.

I sniffled and leaned back, the effort strange even after how much time I'd spent getting used to the dream-plane we met in. I felt its edges begin to fray as I started my return to consciousness.

"Same time tomorrow?" the Demon of Empathy asked.

I nodded mutely, too stunned to do anything else.

"I'll see you then," the demon said, just before the world dissolved.

I awoke in my bed, the echoes of tears clinging dry to my face.

A.N.

Soulmage is a serial written in response to writing prompts. Stick around for more episodes, or join my Discord to chat about it!

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[WP] As an Eldritch Horror, you’ve strived to have effective humans under your command but now other deities, good and bad, are complaining about your method. Apparently, providing therapy for those who can hear you isn’t standard practise for your kind but you are surprisingly good at it. | | Want to submit a writing or a prompt? Read the rules here

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