Elach sighed and shook his head with a smile, closing his eyes and focusing on his headspace. Getting there took a little more effort than usual since he was bringing in the bottle, but he persevered and found himself standing in front of the fountain within minutes. His headspace had changed. Not drastically, but enough that Elach stopped to gawk for a few seconds. The floor was still empty, but now a hole in the fabric of reality was torn somewhere far below. Issi flowed out of it steady and slow, a trickle that Elach promised himself he would turn into a roar.

The fountain had changed colour, now a marble white with speckles of sapphire and obsidian in the material. The walls still had the markings he’d carved with his fingers, but they’d filled in with the same colours as the fountain’s nectar, and had started to seemingly start fading away. If Elach stared hard enough he swore he could see through them to the other side, but there was nothing on the other side to see. The ceiling had the same properties as well, but it was harder to see if it was fading thanks to the lack of carvings on it.

Flow flew down from their invisible perch and landed on the edge of the fountain, strutting along happily as they presented their own changes to Elach. Flow’s feathers were marble white, just like the fountain, with speckles of obsidian and sapphire dotting their plumage. Their eyes now had a distinct ring of sapphire around a pearl of obsidian, and they sparkled with an intelligence that hadn’t been there in Sentence’s headspace. The tips of their wing feathers were blue, as was their chest, and their tail feathers were a gradient from white to blue. Their beak and feet were obsidian black, with talons that could have been cut from the volcanic glass with how vicious they looked.

“You look good.” Elach commented, and Flow puffed themselves up at the compliment. “And I have something for you. We both have to drink half of this. You in here, and me back out there. It’ll probably be a while before we can see each other again, since Prisoner said that this should put both of us out of commission for at least two weeks, but after that I’ll see if I can get you outside with me. Would you like that?”

Flow chirped happily and flew up to perch on Elach’s shoulder, their talons somehow not digging into him at all. They pecked impatiently at the cap of the bottle when Elach held it up, snapping the lid perfectly in half with a single blow and knocking it out of his hand. Into the fountain it tumbled, the rainbow liquid dispersing quickly among the sweet waters. He thought about yelling at Flow, berating them for wasting the existential bleed, but he had to admit that he’d had the same thought the second he saw the fountain. It was like a siren’s call that he’d resisted, but Flow didn’t even try. And as the waters shifted under the influence of their new addition, Elach watched with wonder and anticipation. He could always gather more bleed later if this went sideways.

The fountain shook under the weight of its new addition, pushing the existential bleed away to one side of it as a divider rose up from the depths. It partitioned off exactly half of the fountain and started spilling water down from above, lowering the level of the fountain on that side so that it no longer spilled into nothing down below. Elach put a hand under the new fixture and yanked it away in surprise; this half of the fountain was unbearably cold. And as he shook his hand the water did not fly away, forming long, thin spines that shot out in all directions, making it look like he’d had a run in with a particularly ornery porcupine. The spines lost their shape within seconds, turning into gooey strands that dripped downward but refused to let go of any of their water.

Elach fished the empty bottle out from the bottom of the fountain, shivering at the intense cold that dissipated the moment his arms were free of the water. The stuff that stuck to him wasn’t cold he realized, and he held out his arms and the bottle in front of him as he watched gooey strands drip down his arms.

“This stuff must become more solid the hotter it gets.” Elach theorized, and Flow chirped in what sounded like agreement. “Think the cold would seriously hurt me if we weren’t in my headspace?”

Flow hopped in place to reorient themselves before dipping a talon into the water, shivering at the cold and cooing in curiosity. They rubbed their leg against the outside of the fountain to get the goo that had started forming off of their talon and sang a song Elach couldn’t make heads or tails of, but it seemed like Flow wasn’t looking for him to pitch in. They were thinking out loud.

“Let me bring some of this stuff to Prisoner before we try anything.” Elach said as he dipped the bottle in the frigid fountain. “I'll bring back another bottle of bleed too. Don’t dunk that one, please.”

Flow threw back their head and whistled indignantly. Elach smiled at the gesture and closed his eyes, focusing on the bottle to try and bring it back out of his headspace. It felt infinitely heavier than when he tried to bring it in, and with each and every tug he felt like he was losing something. When he finally got out, Elach looked down at the bottle to find it empty.

“Back so soon?” Prisoner asked as he hid whatever he was working on. He walked over to Elach and studied him as he walked around him. “What’s wrong? Did flow reject the existential bleed?”

“Not really. Actually, not at all.” Elach said, explaining to Prisoner what had happened. He finished with his attempt to bring some of the gooey water back out with him, and Prisoner nodded excitedly.

“Your wisp is more than I thought they were. They brought a gift with them when you two bonded.” Prisoner took the empty bottle from Elach’s hand and tossed it to the side, giving him another one that was filled with existential bleed. “Your fountain is something most practitioners who are on, how should I put it, non-speaking terms with their wisps would kill for. It distills down whatever you put into it into a reproducible form, combining it with your own Issi signature to create an accelerant designed only for you. It might be worthless to someone with infinite funds who could simply export the most powerful accelerants from their sources, but even then they could run into a supply shortage. And you can mix and match accelerants to make yourself one that does exactly what you want with no wasted potential.”

“But you should still drink this first.” Prisoner pressed a finger on the bottle Elach held. “To give your body an idea of what parts of it are useful, and what parts of it can be filtered out. And keep another one on hand until you bond with that other wisp so you'll acclimate to your new normal once you have another Issi type.”

Prisoner loaded Elach up with a total of ten bottles of existential bleed with explicit instructions to drink one whenever there was a drastic change in his Issi. he expected the batch to last Elach at least a century, handing out an open invitation to come back whenever he needed to refill his supply.

“You make it sound like we won’t see each other again for a long time.” Elach said. He didn’t really want to leave. He needed to learn as much as he could from Prisoner and Sentence so that the outside world didn’t chew him up and spit him out the second he tried to do anything out there.

“We won’t.” Prisoner said sadly, handing Elach a coin with an exterior ring of silver and an inner circle of gold. Tiny beads of crystallized existential bleed were set in the outer ring, and the inner ring held the symbol decorating the majority of Prisoner’s tapestries, carpet under his feet, and the tattoo on his shoulder. “That’s a gift from me. A coin that belongs to no currency, so all the value comes from the materials. It’ll make a damn good first focus for a location practitioner like you.”

“Because it’s what you would have used if you could start over?” Elach asked.

“You know it.” Prisoner said, hesitating for a moment before going in for a hug. “Thanks for coming here, Elach. I know you didn’t mean to, or maybe even want to, but I’m happy I met you. It ain’t often I get company, and they usually ain’t as pleasant as you.”

Elach returned the hug without a moment’s hesitation. Prisoner squeezed tighter when Elach hugged back, stepping away after a long moment. “What’s this stuff going to do to me?” Elach asked, gesturing to one of the bottles that now lay on the ground.

“I told you the truth earlier; it’ll put you flat on your back for two weeks. But after the one week mark, thing’ll start changing. Your body dissociates from reality, pulling you through on the invisible currents of existence before depositing you somewhere only the eternals could figure out. That’s why this is goodbye. I’ll see you again, at least for a little bit, but you won’t see me.” Prisoner said, handing Elach back the armfull of glass jars. “Promise you’ll try and find your way back at some point?”

“I promise.” Elach said. “Goodbye, Prisoner.”

“Goodbye, Elach.” Prisoner said as if he was saying farewell to an old friend. Elach nodded and closed his eyes to focus on his headspace.

Drinking the existential bleed was an experience Elach wasn’t looking forward to experiencing again. He couldn’t even fully remember it, just a constant blur of vertigo and splintered memories that randomly blinked into moments of perceived awareness, only for something to come through the void and torture him for what felt like eternity until the bliss that was death took him. Flow was there with him the entire time, a fragment at the corner of his mind that kept him anchored ever so slightly to reality as the absurd and confusing unfolded around him near constantly.

And then it was over, and Elach was hugging Flow so tightly that any regular bird would have popped from his embrace. But Flow was as much a part of Elach now as his container was, and he set them down with aching muscles to a tired peep before Flow conked out in the middle of the floor. Elach slowly rose to his feet at the protest of his entire body, limping over to the fountain to see if Prisoner was right.

It was like looking up at the sky, a black pond with dots of shining white and blue seeming to stretch on forever in the three foot deep fountain. It radiated cold like before, but in a calming sense now. Like a breeze on a summer night. Elach dipped a hand in the water and marveled at the distortion, his hand becoming an outline like his anchors in the darkness. He pulled up a palmful of the liquid and tentatively sipped at it, the freezing cold water sliding down his throat with no resistance and leaving him feeling like he’d taken a deep breath in sub zero weather. This water left no residue when he poured out the rest of it, sliding out of his hand like liquid ice to rejoin its colony. He spoke as much out loud, stirring Flow from their sleep.

Flow peeped sarcastically. “No, I don’t mean water. I mean liquid Ice.” Elach shot back, and Flow ruffled their feathers in a non committal manner before going back to sleep. “Look at me. I’m arguing with a bird. Maybe that stuff did a number on my brain.” Elach muttered, feeling in his pocket for Prisoner’s coin.

It was still there, just as he’d expected it to be. Prisoner had given it to him to use as a focus, but there was a single fatal flaw in that line of thinking; he had no idea how to make a focus. He had Sentence’s ring that was supposed to help him along, but he also had no idea how to make that work. He rubbed the circle of dark iron hoping to trigger some kind of reaction, and he felt a little surge of Issi, but it amounted to nothing.

“Time to find out where this put me.” Elach sighed, closing his eyes to get out of his headspace.