It’s not easy to tell someone that something they’re worried about, genuinely and deeply worried about, is just never going to change. Not easy to hear it, either, I know that much, so I’m sympathetic, if unbending.

We’re much better for having had it out in the open. It wasn’t even much of an argument; Amber isn’t about to stop trying to keep me safe, but I’m not about to let her go into battle on her own, and she’s not about to put a knife in my knee to stop me from having her back. So we argue, but we know where the other person’s coming from, and the argument is as much us grappling with having someone we care about this much.

Amber, I come to understand at least partially, found it almost impossible to stand back, towards the end. The shell had never done anything to her perception - why would it, when all she expected was to see the truth, when all she wanted was to get to dance with me? I promise her, when she says that, that next time she will be, as long as she can handle leading - and she’d been torn between a fierce, sympathetic joy and a growing anger that Zidanya would soon betray me. It had been obvious to her, obvious in that social way that I was so bad at and because of her interactions with the amalgam Ranger.

She’d chosen not to intervene, not because she trusted me but because if she had, it would have been an act of distrust in me.

At that point, without really knowing why, I start crying. She comforts me as best she can; I reciprocate, and we spend some time afterwards talking again with more vulnerability in how we bare our hearts to each other, bare bodies pressed up against each other.

We still haven’t gotten the System’s notification that we defeated the Gatekeeper yet, nor is there a door. I don’t mind; I’m drifting, head pillowed by her breasts and ankles wrapped around one of her thighs, curled up on her chest and hugging her with arms and legs alike. It’s a new experience for me in a few ways, mostly that she’s this much taller than I am - I’m barely median height if I were a grounder, but I’m taller than almost any woman in the Fleets - but also that we’re talking.

We’re making concrete tactical commitments - learn to communicate with gestures, teach Amber about my Motes and orbs and runes, train with her about physical combat, have a way to indicate that I know I’m being maliciously seduced, that kind of thing - when the ambient mana finishes being pulled out of the realm. The jump-glyph discorporates somewhat explosively, as glyphs go; it’s loud, it’s hissy, it spits mana in about a ten-meter radius. We’re about four times that distance, inasmuch as I can judge based on the irregular patterns that make up the ground, and we’re fine, better than we were before since I manage to pull a few points of mana into myself from the cloud before it dissipates.

There’s a pylon.

Neither of us was watching when the pylon showed up, or formed, or whatever. We’re both watching now, her with her eyes and me through my Visor. It looks - so far as I can tell, which is pretty far with the Visor - identical to the previous one I saw, glyphwork so intricate and dense I can’t tell where one glyph ends and another begins, or where one rune bleeds into another. Possibly the entire pylon, five conical feet of faceted, gleaming crystal in a housing of a bluish-grey metal neither of us can identify holding it two feet off the ground, is one enormous rune, complex beyond the shadow of my understanding’s vision.

We get dressed. She’s at first trying to keep an eye on everything at the same time, but I don’t bother; if the realm itself wants to kill us at this point, that’ll be that. I’m down to one mana somehow and Amber’s nearly out herself, and neither of us is of a mind suitable for fighting. We drift, instead, towards the one point of reference other than each other in this expanse, and talk practicality. There’s apparently a tradition in Cadoran dungeons, and less commonly in Temples, of having a final encounter; one that needs to be completed before the pylon can be activated is most common, but sometimes it’s while the pylon is active. She tells me about one that locks the activator in with the crystal until it’s cleared and one that summons waves of beasts of some sort or another, and they keep coming, stronger and stronger until either everyone is dead or the activator is done communing, and can rejoin the party, stronger and fresher, in triumph; I laugh at that, at the sheer drama and personalized trauma of it depending, and tell her there’s no point in worrying about it.

After all, there’s only the two of us. If she can’t handle it, she can’t, but as I remind her, I have complete faith in her abilities.

That seems to help, and also doesn’t, and then we’re dressed and ready and there.

Just in case, before I slip my hands into the handles, I try to summon up my Status. Mental invocation, pushing for it, gives me a sense of pushing against a wall; saying it out loud does nothing other than make me feel like an idiot, and that’s about it, since we don’t have writing implements and paper, and even if we did I don’t fancy the idea of trying to let the Status flow through my quill, whatever Amber says about how it would suit my personality. At least she’s having enough fun to smirk at me.

The handles are weird. They’ve always been weird, since that first time at the locked door right where I somehow crash-landed; if there hadn’t been exactingly detailed imagery of how to activate it, I… well, I’d have figured it out eventually, probably pretty quickly, but it definitely would have taken some guessing. I didn’t, still don’t, understand the point. Why the twist, why the pull? A palm or even just eye contact should be enough.

I twist the handles and pull, eyes fixed on the crystal pane that faces me. It’s like something coming slowly into focus, from being so out of focus you can’t even tell there’s something there. It’s not exactly that, mind; I looked damn closely and carefully at that lying geode, and there definitely was not a sea of out-of-focus numbers and letters inside it, blurry or not.

It’s incoherent. A mess of symbols and graphics and icons, almost none of it recognizable, much less familiar. There isn’t anything like an alphabet, and that’s new; the first pylon I came across was a lot less confusing, with something very obviously alphabet-like and numbers it barely took me minutes to identify as, well, numbers.

That first pylon had qualified me for the Omniglot Trait, which seemed unfair. It was only about as hard as solving any other substitution cipher in my head, at least for the numbers, and the basic structure of the information being displayed had a certain logic to it that constrained the alphabet to a substantial degree. Besides, there were pictures! Admittedly, not pictures that directly translated to the lettering, but the imagery was related, and so frankly giving me Omniglot on the basis that I’d deciphered that enough to select a Class and my first round of Skills was… generous.

This pylon doesn’t have any such generosity. The mess I’m looking at is completely indecipherable. Many of what I might guess to be letters are components of other letters elsewhere, or maybe letters flow into each other without any indication as to where they do so and whether that means they’re new letters or chains of letters or diphthongs. Worse, there are symbols that are symbols I’ve seen before, elsewhere in the Temple and even from my own life beforehand, and the combination of the passive part of my Interface Skill and Omniglot is telling me firmly that they don’t mean the things I expect them to mean, but rather that they…

… that they aren’t meaningful at all.

I’m laughing as I sit down. It’s been maybe half an hour, staring at the incomprehensible swamp, and I’m such an idiot sometimes.

“Zidanya!” My voice betrays my cheer, because my voice betrays my everything, always. “You got me good. I’ve never been so sniped. None of them are even interactable! I should have popped the active on Interface ages ago, just to fuck with you.”

“Magelord James.” Amber whirls around, Zidanya smirks, and then -

“Starless void!”

- Amber’s fist goes most of the way through Zidanya’s chest, angled enough down that the latter bounces some decimeters off of the ground. It’s a wretched crunching, cracking sound, and Amber’s hissing in pain is the only sound for a moment afterwards.

“Mikha bless, Mikha bless that stings.” I feel the ripple of her magic, what is presumably the last of her magic repairing her hand. “Oh, come on, I know it’s just a projection. You don’t have to take a fall just to humor me.”

“It’s not a projection, it’s an extension!” I’m still gaping when there’s a tearing twist in the micro-reality we’re in, and Zidanya sits up, unharmed. “It hurt like a motherfucker, you shallow-rooted -”

“I don’t like to hear people who I like arguing with the intent to hurt each other,” I say, almost at the top of my voice. It’s not a small voice; it sort of echoes, here in this small yet infinite place. “I get worried that they’re not being fair or kind to each other.”

It works, hilariously enough. I’ve always had the probably-bad habit of resorting to the creche-training I’d picked up when people started arguing, and almost all the time, people got righteously pissed at me about it, what with it implying that they were acting like toddlers. Mind you, it works great on toddlers, in my experience; I’ve never had a problem getting them to behave without trying to kill each other or themselves, whether with fists, words, dares, or climbing haphazardly-piled heaps of materials up for reclamation. Hopefully toddlers here are like toddlers at home, as that way I won’t have to relearn new habits.

I’m not too worried, either way. Amber is just looking flatly at Zidanya, whose glower seems almost rote. An improvement over a moment ago, when Zidanya was probably about to insult Amber on the basis of her being … what she was.

“I forgive you,” Amber says suddenly.

That gives the other woman pause. “... what for?” There’s suspicion in her voice, and I’m surprised too, and just sort of listening.

“... do you want the short list, or the long one, Taveda?” Amber shrugs, and starts ticking off with her fingers. “Took my Magelord dancing, didn’t let me cut in, danced with him as I cannot, with a skill I lack. Those count three. Did a good enough job trying to kill him that I was worried, four. Broke my hand with your sternum, I think, five.”

“That’s -”

Amber keeps talking, cutting off her splutters. “Kept my lord and me waiting around, without the grace to grant us a bed. Watched, I would wager, with hungry eyes.” She grins, and I get the feeling she’s enjoying the moment. “I’d say pranking the man, but he didn’t mind.”

“He is an easier man to lead along wandering paths than some, and more gracious in having been led than most.” I get the impression Zidanya is going for coy-and-poised. She’s definitely not verbally acknowledging the bit about her maybe having watched, and I don’t even know how I feel about that. Conflicted, I suppose.

“Aye.”

I roll my eyes at myself and my indecision as I approach the pylon again; I can let the two of them figure out how they feel about what happened, and take my cues from them. The pylon’s still active, and I can read it effortlessly now, but there’s not a whole lot to see. Three quarters of the sections are a mix of grayed-out, blank, crossed out, gibberish, or stamped over with INVALID and YOU KILLED ME. I’m not quite blind enough to mistake this as anything other than the fault of the damn ghost I’d killed and the curse it’s left me with; even for me, it’s on the less-than-subtle end of the inference spectrum.

Nothing to do about it. It’s the last quarter of the screen that I’m staring at, and eventually I realize they’re quiet behind me, and Amber’s arm is around my waist.

“If you can’t, Adam, I’ll understand.”

“Will you really?”

Amber’s pause is answer enough. My mouth is open to say something when she speaks before I can, surprising me. “No. I won’t. But I’ll accept it, my lord, and when we die, we will die together, striving against the dark, and I will count myself as privileged to have known you.”

“No chance of us making it out without a larger party, huh.” The silence is heavy on my shoulders, and I feel a thickness in my throat. I don’t know what to do, and then a hand reaches past me.

“Thousand and One save us from maudlin idiots.” Zidanya reaches past my shoulder, and I startle in surprise; I’d somehow forgotten she was there, hadn’t meant to be so vulnerable in front of her. I’m having trouble with the fact that apparently she’d been watching, listening all the time that Amber and I had been talking, and I don’t do anything as she puts her hand on the pylon.

The interface shifts. A thousand numbers blur, a vast rapid motion like each of them is a book with the pages being flipped. The letters are worse, twisting and dancing around each other and themselves, and I have to close my eyes and focus on not throwing up what little is in my stomach, mostly from the buffet tables at the party.

When I open my eyes again, the pylon has settled. There are five options, just five lines of plain and unstyled text strewn vertically across the interface, and I feel a wild, spinning feeling in my stomach as I read them.

Create Reca - Spirit-Witch / Shallow-Rooted / Second-Tier / Curse Specialist / Skilled

Create Reca - Temple’s Choice / Tracks Level Until Up To Fourth Tier / Expert

Bind Spirit - Zidanya / Imprint / Tracks Level Until Eighth Tier / Druid-Ranger / Godlike

Bind Spirit - Mathilda / Imprint / Tracks Level Until Fifth Tier / Fighter-Shaman / Grandmaster

Bind Spirit - Johannes / Imprint / Tracks Level Until Fifth Tier / Shaman-Wizard / Grandmaster

Light in the darkness. I swear in my head, reflexively. I’m staring at her, and she just looks at me levelly. There’s a lot of complexity in her expression, and I can’t interpret a single thing about it. “Well?”

“Amber?”

“My lord.” Her voice is soft. “Why are you even asking?”

“Amber.” My social panic is showing in my voice, and I hate it, but my heart is hammering in my ears and all I can remember is the way Amber had said that she could never dance with me like that, and the ways in which this could hurt her, hurt us. Skilled I’ve seen before, fourth-tier and above Journeyman; Expert might be a tier above that. I don’t know even how to evaluate what Grandmaster and Godlike mean, and I can’t -

“Yes. Do it! Before she changes her mind. Before we lose the -”

Whatever she was about to say, I don’t hear, because my will and my hand reach out, and the connection between the two of us, a connection I hadn’t even realized was there, now has a third.

Welcome to the party, Zidanya, I think to myself, or maybe say out loud, and then I pass out from the pain.