Celestine demanded.

I was ignoring her while we leaned on the dresser to take a closer look at our eyes. The craziness of yesterday didn't give me the opportunity to fully appreciate just how odd this looks. The left eye is perfectly normal. Brown iris surrounding a black pupil, contracted slightly because of the morning sun. The right eye is the problem. Brown iris surrounding the static that is ever present on the skin of my dream-self. Constant shifts of colors from all extremes flashing in and out of existence while surrounded in the normal brown eye. Even from a distance, the pupil's colors blend together into a gray-brown color that isn't natural.

"We won't be able to hide this from anyone." I mused out loud. Keeping this a secret from Sullivan and Daemon was going to be annoying. We could buy an eye patch, but then I wouldn't be able to see at all then. Part of our unconscious coordination is the ability to see. It becomes difficult to move with one eye closed. Not impossible, but we get clumsy.

Celestine was still trying to force this sibling relationship between us. She hasn't shut up about it since my little greeting when we woke up.

I said while we started to change out of our nightgown. A simple sleeveless shirt and shorts later and we were walking to the elf's office. It was still early morning, but we could smell the scent of breakfast being made downstairs. Now that I thought on it, why exactly did Mom need to hire a chef? Surely she could cook for the five of us. Maybe she just wanted an excuse to spend Daemon's money.

We entered the other wing of the house and knocked on Warran's door. After a pause, we knocked again and waited some more. After nothing happened, we opened the door to peek inside. The room was much cleaner than the last time we visited. The papers he had strewn about weren't on the floor anymore. But his desk was piled high with them. Maybe that's his organizing method, throw everything on the floor and slowly sort through it when you need it. A tall basket was in the corner full of wadded up papers and shreds. The elf himself was snoring on the desk using his arms as pillows. Normally something like this would be bad for someone's back, but I guess that doesn't matter when you have the power to immediately repair any spinal misalignment with magic.

We entered the room and found a chair in front of the desk to sit down on. We leaned forward and picked up a loose paper on the desk to see what all the mess was about. The paper was very nice, almost like Earth copy paper. The writing on the paper, though, was nothing like we've seen before. Not even the writing in the journal in the church matched anything like this. It bore an odd resemblance to Arabic mixed with some Gaelic script, but consisted of none of the characters of either. I studied the page for a bit to try to commit the letters to memory before the page was forcibly pulled out of my hand by Lefty, who then put the page back where I took it.

I sighed and rubbed the bridge of our nose, fighting a headache. She's not going to stop with this is she...

We look back up to the elf and he was already awake and looking at us. I jumped a bit at the sudden change. When was he such a light sleeper? Celestine struggled to get him to wake up when she came in here to show him that she could light a crystal the last time.

He studied us for a bit. I could see his golden eyes moving back and forth between ours. He pulled a book from one of his piles and flipped it open and to another page. Then he looked at us again, then back at the book as if comparing us to the contents of the book. He closed it and looked back to us. "Sylvianna did say something about the Voyager in Celestine splitting the body. I thought it made no sense at all before. But now that I see you, it's odd. Every book I received from Hope says Voyagers are just people reincarnated with two conduits and odd eyes, both eyes. Would you mind filling me in?"

"I suppose it goes without saying that the Celestine you have interacted with for the last several weeks is nothing more than a normal child." I started.

"After I was attacked, I had figured you to be a very good actor. I was terrified when I saw your eyes then. I thought I would actually die if that attack continued. I haven't been that close to death in a looong time."

"I'll give you the short version. One of the founders of Arture was a Voyager. She used the isolationist nature of the city to impose the binding practice on children. This binding has the added effect of doing... something to Voyagers when they appear under it. Then when the effects showed, the church was instructed to perform a... brain treatment. That's not the right word, I don't know how best to translate it. They cut open the head and severed a connection in the brain. It allowed two distinct personalities to develop in the same body. While I, the Voyager, remained dormant, Celestine's personality was left to develop. When I let myself be known, the church released the binding."

"So it was after the treatment that they knew they had a Voyager on their hands? I'm guessing the instructions from the founder left that bit out?"

We nodded. "It was all for the twisted curiosity of someone long dead." I spat out those last words with malice.

"You humans can be so brutal with your researching sometimes, you know? I would have never thought to develop a whole city so far from civilization just for the off-chance to catch a Voyager in an experiment. Part of me wants to congratulate this founder for succeeding even in death." He chuckled.

I balled my hand into a fist.

He must have read my expression. "Ah, sorry. Continue?"

I released my anger. "I don't very much appreciate being part of someone's experiment."

"None of us can control the circumstances of our births. What matters is what we do from then on." Warran gave a bit of sage advice before continuing. "Sylvianna said you were practicing switching control of the body and something went wrong?"

"Yesterday we had nothing to do and we started feeling out the level of control within the body we had. Celestine is the one with the smaller conduit, so if we could figure out how we can switch control of the body fast enough, we can better protect ourselves. Or at least that was the idea. Something sorta... broke. Now I, the Voyager, have control of the right half of the body, and speech, while Celestine has the left, and lacks the ability to speak. We visited the church yesterday to confirm my suspicions on the reason for this. Now we need to know how to get things back to the way they used to be."

"Is there any reason you need to go back? By all rights, the second personality shouldn't exist. The Voyager in the body IS Celestine. This might just be the body's way of trying to revert back to its intended state."

"Too much has changed. If the treatment had never happened, then you would have a point. But we are two in one now."

"I could repair the damage in the brain. There's always that option." Warran dropped a bombshell on me.

"I-I have no idea what could happen then! Our personalities could easily merge or I could end up overpowering Celestine in that case. I don't want that! I just want things to go back to the way they were! No more of this! I don't want to be like this!" I shouted at first, then my voice got quiet and ended in a soft squeak.

"Calm down, girl. I was just entertaining the idea. I can't actually repair brain damage anyway. The brain is too delicate for my conduit to deal with." He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to us.

My vision had gotten cloudy in my outburst. I brought my hand to our cheek and felt the wetness of tears. Why was I crying? The left hand accepted the handkerchief and wiped the tears out of our eyes. Celestine stayed quiet.

"So why did you come to me if you weren't thinking about me fixing your 'treatment'?"

"The word for opening up someone and physically manipulating under their skin for healing, what is it?"

"#$^%$#?" He asked.

"Does that word best describe opening up the head and cutting something in the brain?"

"I guess?"

Then that word must be surgery or some equivalent.

"We didn't come to have the results of our surgery reversed. I actually had an interesting conversation with one of the acolytes there and I entertained the idea that we might be able to go back to the way we were, or at least give Celestine the ability to talk, if we learned some sort of mind magic. He said that's something the Eldwen religious leaders use to deal with heretics?"

It was Warran's turn to sigh now. He had closed his eyes and brought his right hand up and behind his long ear. It twitched lightly like he was itching behind it while thinking. "It's so strange to be outside Eldwen again. Something that could get you killed for saying out loud is so easily common knowledge here. I'm glad I left before the $%^$&^*#^@$#^ could get to me." He spoke that very quietly, but we heard it.

He opened his eyes and coughed. "Celestine, if you ever visit Eldwen in the future, and I hope you do not, you must never mention mind magic. Mind magic is a subset of the identification school of magic. The name of the school itself isn't exactly right either. It's more like information manipulation. It's one of the least understood of the rare schools of magic. Anyway, why do you think this would help you anyway?"

"Before we were able to more or less inhabit the body and intermingle despite the physical separation. I believe some sort of unconscious mind magic might have been the reason for our state. Even now we can still communicate in the brain despite no actual physical connection in the higher brain. If we were to learn-"

"Like I said," he interrupted, "it's the least understood of the rare schools. Even the $%^$&^*#^@$#^ turn their heretic victims into nothing more than driveling retards after they are done siphoning them for information. That is not the path for fixing... whatever it is you think might have happened. Even if it was, you don't have the affinity for identification magic. Your affinities are enchanting and some unknown god-level school."

"What exactly are god-level schools? You never mentioned those."

"This will be your lesson for the day. God-level schools of magic are incredibly rare schools that are usually only seen in Voyagers or a species's #@%$#&@. Though there are some cases where people have been born with one without being a Voyager. There are only two schools known. The others have been lost. Temporal, which is time manipulation. And gravitational manipulation. Temporal allows a person to affect an object or person's local time perception for a short time. Someone more versed can even halt their local time and pass forward in time while never moving or aging. There's actually a Voyager in Hope doing that right now. Crazy fool. He was apparently born four hundred years ago and he travels forward in leaps of anywhere from thirty to sixty years. Gravity manipulation is a higher form of spacial manipulation that allows the mage to control the pull of gravity. A single mage with this affinity can flatten any monster flat without breaking a sweat. We only know about this one because of reports made during the Elven-Demon wars. I won't go into detail on that, though. Too gruesome."

"Now, you supposedly have a god-level affinity since the church couldn't identify it. Since it couldn't be identified, we can be safe to say it isn't temporal. So it could be gravitational manipulation or something else."

"Why could it not be temporal if it wasn't identified?"

"Because the temporal Voyager exists, the human gods should be able to tell any identifier the affinity. Once he dies, only those who have ever identified someone with temporal affinity will be able to correctly identify it on someone else. It's difficult to explain. The gods do not tell us what we don't know. So once everyone who knows of something dies, that something can no longer be identified perfectly until it is studied again. The best way to combat this is to keep records and accounts of the affinity, but the Voyager is very tight-lipped about his past life and anything to do with his affinity."

I paused after his explanation before continuing, "I don't understand..."

"It's best not to worry about it too much. I stopped trying to make sense of how identification magic works a long time ago." He waved his hand around dismissively. "So, do you have a name so I can distinguish you from Celestine?"

"Novos. I gave myself the name Novos."

"Hah, that sounds like some archmage's name. Was there anything else you needed?"

"Yes, do you have any idea how we might be able to hide the eye? We don't want Daemon or Sullivan to know about me and the eye is a dead giveaway."

"That I might be able to help with." He picked up another book and started looking through it.

"You haven't been sharing your interest with Voyagers with Daemon, have you?" I asked.

"I listened to your mother, girl. I am not stupid enough to get on her bad side. And no one is rude enough to enter my room unannounced but you, so they wouldn't have seen these books."

"You're always asleep when we need to visit you!"

"You knock too softly then. The door is heavy wood so you need to open it slightly and ask to come in." He sifted through the book until he got to the part he was looking for. His eyes moved back and forth to read the page. "Says here a young Voyager was able to blend in and hide from people who could identify the odd color of their eyes by making the light coming from their eyes travel slower than normal. Or that's just a partial translation from what their journal said. Here, see if this makes any sense to you."

He held the book out in front of us so I could see the text. It was plainly English. The text read 'I figured out how to make the red in my pupils disappear and turn black like a normal person's. So I can at least blend in now without scaring people. Unintended discovery, but a discovery nonetheless. Increasing the wavelength didn't quite create infrared light, though. My research into heat vision will continue!'

My hand slapped my face. "{Oh gods why are Voyagers so fucking stupid?}" I said in English aloud.

"I take it you can read it?" He asked.

"Please tell me this Voyager is dead." I said turning our head to look up at the ceiling.

"Yeah, he was found with most of his lungs, throat, and mouth coated in ice." Warran turned the book around and started flipping through it some more. "No one knows what exactly he was trying to do."

I fucking know. The idiot was trying to be Superman. At least this post-atomic bomb Voyager didn't experiment with nukes. He just wanted to be a superhero... That's so... childish.

I looked back forward. "Warran, Voyagers that did detail their previous lives, did they ever say anything about remembering multiple past lives? For example, remembering dying and being reborn many times before finally being born as a Voyager in this world?" Need to confirm that story that Celestine read.

"Something like that would definitely be one of the highlights in most of these books I have here. No. The Voyagers that went into detail of their time before being reborn never mentioned anything about living before their last life." He paused. "Have you lived more than one life?"

If that is the case, the Superman Voyager might have died as a child. That makes more sense now.

"If it is an effect of this binding and surgery experiment or not, I can't say. But I do have memories of many past lives. They are all sort of merged together, though. So I can't differentiate common memories because they blur together, but I can remember things like arithmetic and {elementary scientific} facts because those don't change and they are more commonly known by my later lives."

"Do you mind if I ask-"

"Yes. I do mind." I interrupted him before he asked me to go into detail. "Sorry, maybe some other time. We still have this problem to deal with right now." I said, pointing to both our eyes back and forth.

"Oh right. We got off topic. There you have your solution for the eye. The only thing I can say that might help with bringing the mind back to what it used to be is to meditate. Exploring your self might help you two to understand this... situation you find yourselves in. It might also help to visit the church and pray to your gods. You humans are lucky to have some benevolent gods. Our god, [email protected]#^%@#, is too meddlesome if you ask me."

"Our?"

"My, elven god. [email protected]#^%@#, god of justice." He almost spat that last word out. Something tells me Warran isn't too fond of his god.

"Ah." I won't step any further onto that minefield.

"$&%$^@##$, your god of death and decay, is the one that usually deals with Voyagers. So praying to him might give you some sort of insight or guidance."

Well that was the god that had to be forced to accept my unbinding during the awaking ritual, so I doubt he will very much like me now. All this talk of gods is starting to get annoying, though. I don't even know for sure if they're real or if everything is just made up like Earth gods. I guess in a world of magic, there's even more of a reason to believe in the gods, but there has to be something else to this.

"Is it fine if we hold off on magic training until we resolve this?" I asked.

"I'll give you seven days, tops. Your father will start to get on my case if he doesn't see me training you any later than that. If that happens, we will continue the training, but you are forbidden to use the large conduit."

"That's... reasonable."

"I have some more reading to do now. I've also letters to write to try to prise more information on god-level affinities out of Sirius. The home country of you apes is so difficult to work with sometimes. I only know of temporal and gravity god-level schools because they're common knowledge. Who knows what Sirius has locked up in their libraries."

"We'll leave it to you, then." I said, hopping off the chair and turning to the door. Looking through the crack of the door, that I forgot to shut all the way, was a single blue eye with strands of blond hair above it.

I said to Celestine. I should have been more careful. Sullivan's room is just a little further from Warran's office in this wing. And there's no telling what all he heard or how he interpreted it.

Celestine started.

And I complied. "G-good morning, Bubby. Did you sleep good?"

"Who are you? Where's sis?" Damn he's sharp for his age.

"Can we talk? I'll explain everything!" I said despite Celestine telling me to try to lie to him.

"Muh-muh-Miss Sylvianna!" He turned and started to run away. Shit shit shit, if he makes too much noise then Daemon will know something's wrong!

We started running to him. We bolt out the door and quickly tackle him before he makes it too far from the office. I have to keep a hand over his mouth to keep him quiet. He's actually struggling really hard right now.

"Ow!" I cried as I felt something hard clamp on my hand. He bit me!

"Da-" He tried to yell before we got a hand on his mouth again.

"You don't bite your big sister! Be quiet, you! Or we'll never read to you again!" We had Lefty switch places as the one to hold his mouth shut while I pulled his arms behind him and held them in place with Righty. Our legs were wrapped around his legs to stop him from kicking the floor.

Now that we had him pinned and I couldn't hear anything but Warran closing his door, I leaned down to whisper into his ear. "Bubby, listen to me. I'm a bit sick right now, but everything is okay. I need you to listen and try to understand. If you promise to not yell, I will take my hand off your mouth, okay? You promise?"

He tried to move his head side to side at first. We just kept Lefty over his mouth until he reluctantly nodded. I need him to be completely on board because I can't drag him anywhere, he's too heavy for us to move while keeping him quiet.

"You promise?" I asked again. And he immediately nodded this time. Celestine slowly lifted her hand off his mouth and he opened his mouth.

"DA-" She had his mouth covered again before he could make more noise. He started wriggling more after that. I just barely have him still. If he puts more strength into this, I'll lose grip.

I said. Fake crying, that's like advanced level stuff you use in a relationship to guilt the man to acquiesce. Where did she learn something like that?

Ah, maybe I should have stopped her from reading all those novels.

I sighed in our head. I hate to do this, but there really is no choice is there?

First of all, I need to get into the mood to cry. Right now I'm just angry at my own stupidity.

Actors from Earth used to say the best way to get the tears flowing is to think of a tragic event in your life that could get you to cry, like the death of a loved one. I have lifetimes of tragic events, so there isn't much trouble there. I focus on a more recent memory. It was one of the first memories I recalled in my void world, I committed suicide in that life. I've had a lot of time to think about my past lives and something always kept me from examining this one. It was mostly because of how much I hated myself. How could I do something like that to my mama and papa? I was their only child. All of my problems were so petty. If only I had... if only I had talked to them, we could have gotten through it together. Mama, Papa...

I rested my head on the closest warm thing I could, which was Sullivan's back, and I started crying over that life. All the wasted potential. There was nothing unfortunate in that life that couldn't have been overcome. There was no war or violence that I could remember. There was no pestilence. There was no childhood death. My life had been completely in my control. And I ended it. I want to strangle that girl that I once was. I want to replace her and continue living. Sure I might not have lived long after that, karma seems to have a thing with killing me early, but I might have lived long enough to be a mother at least.

The tragic thought and self-deprecation had brought me to tears without really trying. At some point we lost all grip on Sullivan and we just cried into his back. He was so shocked that he didn't move or say anything. I had to quickly force myself away from reminiscing or I would have gotten hysterical. That memory might be too much for some crocodile tears, but it did the job.

Celestine asked, probably picking up that this isn't theatrics.

"B-B-Bubby, please believe me. J-just let me talk to you..." I said stuttering.

"O-okay, S-Sis." He said in his typical shy voice.

We managed to get to our feet and he guided us, still crying softly, to the library. He closed the door behind us and we sat on the floor.

We sat face to face. His eyes were locked onto our right eye. We had no choice now. If we didn't explain the eye, he would definitely tell Daemon. We could lie, but he distrusts us enough now as it is. We had to let Sullivan in on the secret.