“Wasn’t Elach supposed to be here by now?” Sechen sighed, resting her hands as she planted her elbows on her knees.

“It’s eight twenty five-ish, so he’s about two hours late.” Metea/Irric said. “So yes, he definity was supposed to be here by now.”

“And, remind me again, why are we sitting here waiting? It’s obvious he ran off. It’s what I’d’ve done in his place.”

“Rainshear said he’d be at the cafe, so he’ll be at the cafe.” Metea/Irric said confidently. “But… if he isn’t…” She paused, fiddling with a small pendant half-scoured with glowing grey symbols. “We don’t go looking for him. He isn’t a part of this; not like you, Rainshear, and me.”

Sechen stared down at the anchoring presence of the pendant, shaped like two elongated pyramids placed with their widest sides touching. There was a core inside that thrummed with Issi, and as Metea/Irric twisted the sides apart Sechen felt her mind clear. Rainshear’s technique wasn’t gone, but it was pushed away for a short time.

Metea/Irric shook her head and shot Sechen an apologetic smile. “It gets harder and harder to remember to use this every time. I think I’m close to forgetting about it completely.”

A core of lucent grey hissed out Issi like a broken faucet, most of the hastily scratched symbols popping and sizzling under the onslaught of a greater power. Sechen basked in the presence for a moment before feeling sure Rainshear’s control was far enough away that the woman couldn’t listen in, sighing in frustration at the measures Metea/Irric had to take to deal with Rainshear’s domineering paranoia.

“Take a moment with your thoughts.” Metea/Irric said softly. “I have to go back there, but you don’t. You can find Elach and get him to take you with him.”

“He’s resisting Rainshear.” Sechen stated in disbelief. “I overheard Hugil saying he had some absurdly strong mental defences, but Rainshear? Didn’t she manage to subdue Glasrime once?”

Metea/Irric laughed bitterly, pressing her finger to the top of the pendant until a drop of clear liquid flowed down one facet. “That’s the story she tells, but I have no idea if it's true or not. Maybe that’s what she says to keep me from trying to break her hold on me. Well, she won’t have to tell stories for much longer.”

The conversation stilled at that revelation from Metea/Irric. Sechen had known Rainshear was slowly breaking down Metea/Irric into a wholly subservient apprentice, but six months ago Metea/Irric had been confident that she could eventually break Rainshear’s hold. Two years ago, Metea/Irric had created the pendant and voiced her fears to Sechen for the first time. Revel had dismissed it as hearsay, since Rainshear had protected her for almost a decade at that point, but then Sechen had felt the insidious technique evaporating around her ruined headspace when they got far enough from the glacier.

Then Revel had turned, her eyes perfectly clear, and had completely dismissed all of Sechen’s fears. The master knew best, and she was nothing but an apprentice. One that should be grateful for everything Revel had given her. She’d looked down at her feet, seeing sunken eyes reflected at her in a fresh puddle. They were the same ones she used to see every time she looked in the mirror, and every day she was terrified she’d awake to see those old eyes staring back at her once more.

“Sechen? You still there?” Metea/Irric asked. “Are you sure you’re doing alright?”

Sechen shook her head. The memories were starting to gain way. “I’m here, I’m here. Just… memories, you know?”

“Let’s move, then.” Metea/Irric said as she stood up, offering a hand to Sechen that she took with a nod of thanks. She pressed the pendant back together, the glowing grey diminished to darkness. “We can go back to our place. Maybe Elach will show up eventually, then we can grill him for answers.”

Metea/Irric laid a glass of water in front of Sechen and a platter of meats, cheeses, and roasted vegetables on the table before sitting down herself. Sechen grabbed a round of thinly sliced meat and wrapped it around three small blocks of cheese, popping it in her mouth as Metea/Irric dipped one of the vegetables in some kind of sauce.

“Any progress with your infusions?” Sechen asked with a mouth full of food.

Metea/Irric waggled her hand in a sort-of motion, finishing her mouthful before replying. “I’m about as far as I can get with the ingredients and accelerants I can get here. I can’t go anywhere near the black market for obvious reasons, and everything that comes from the upper docks gets cherry-picked before it makes its way down here.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Once I run through everything I can, I’m going to leave this place.” Metea/Irric said, though uncertainty tinted her words. “Rainshear barely needs me anymore since she bonded with Kari and Josrea, and Uldrek has pretty much taken over my job at this point. I haven’t actually seen any of the people we’re supposedly protecting in months, and I’m pretty sure that’s what Rainshear is pushing for.”

Sechen frowned. “She’s trying to edge you out?”

“That, or she wants me for something other than combat. Maybe a live-in maid, or an indentured servant.” Metea/Irric sighed, reaching under the table for the dim grey pendant. She produced a stylus and a bottle of shining grey liquid out of nowhere and continued the arduous process of etching the pendant. “If I give her the benefit of the doubt, I’d say she wants me to find my own way. I was sort of hoping Elach would stay for a while, we’d become real friends, and then I could convince him to let me go with him to… well, wherever he’s going.”

“And what, you didn’t even think about travelling with Revel and me?” Sechen said with mock outrage to conceal the little bit of hurt she felt at Metea/Irric choosing Elach over her. “Were we not good enough for you?”

“Honestly? What you and Revel are doing isn’t for me. I don’t need to bond with anyone, so there’s no reason for me to travel around the cities with you while you look for potential new recruits.”

“But the cities could have more ingredients for your infusions.”

“Or I could get kidnapped and sold piece by piece as some kind of herbal medicine garbage.” Metea/Irric retorted. “People like us don’t survive being weak on our own, Sechen. If Revel doesn’t come back, your adventures will end. You’ll have to live like the rest of the wisp-touched people in this forsaken glacier; under constant monitoring and a heavy curtain of uselessness.”

“Geez, I was just trying to make a suggestion.” Sechen muttered. “You didn’t have to get real with me like that.”

“Sechen. You’ve been bonded to Revel for years now. You just created your first manifestation last night, and that was with Revel intervening to save your life. I know you’re scared of what might happen if you fully embrace Revel’s Issi, but eventually Revel will have other apprentices. She won’t be there every waking moment to protect you.”

Sechen forced her lips into a thin smile. Scared was definitely what she was, but embracing Revel’s Issi was not at all the focus of that fear. Cruel laughter echoed out from her headspace, making it much harder to hold her fake smile.

“I’m not about to go from one protection job to another.” Metea/Irric continued. “If I go with you and Revel, it’ll be for your sake. Not mine. And call me selfish, but I want to do something for me this time.”

“I…” Sechen started, but her words failed her. Deep down, she knew Metea/Irric was right. That she hadn’t tried even once to truly get stronger, but her reasons were hers and hers alone. Metea/Irric couldn’t know them, because Sechen had never spoken about them with anyone. Anyone other than Revel.

She would share her reasons someday. Someday, but not today.

“You can stay here tonight.” Metea/Irric eventually said, filling a plate from the platter on the table before she moved to the loft’s ladder. “I’ll be up in the loft working on my infusions if you need me. And Sechen?”

“Yeah?” Sechen said, only half listening at this point.

“You should check your headspace. Your manifestation probably knocked some things around, and maybe even changed what your focus did to the place.”

The fake smile came back. “Yeah.”

Metea/Irric paused at the base of the ladder for a second, staring at Sechen before shaking her head and climbing up with one hand supporting her food. Sechen had a fleeting thought of tripping Metea/Irric up to make her fall, and blinked at just how much it didn’t feel like she was thinking it. Almost like it was someone else’s anger coming through her.

Sechen finished the rest of her meal in silence, placing the platter that still held around a third of the total food it started with inside of the fridge and brushing her hand over the Issi inscription that kept the temperature inside cold, refilling the relatively small reserves with the last of her own Issi. She flopped down in a chair just outside of the kitchen, bringing her legs up so she was in something that resembled the fetal position and closed her eyes. She tried to focus on the ruins that made up her headspace, the specter of unease as always making the leap from real world to inner world as difficult as possible.

She felt the veil wash over her like walking through a waterfall of oil and blood, shaking her head to get the intangible filth out of her hair as she opened her eyes to see the ruined majesty of her headspace. Metea/Irric was right, Sechen thought, as she looked at the new veins of tarnished gold that ran through the destroyed walls of whatever her headspace had been before it fell to ruin.

The sky was painted in a perpetual sunset, visible thanks to the fact that the roof had collapsed and now lay strewn about below Sechen’s feet, only a single support column still reaching to the sky in unwitting futility. Other than the new golden accents, the only non-ruined part of Sechen’s headspace was a set of two concentric rings that hovered where a chandelier should have been, spinning slowly yet constantly just out of Sechen’s reach. But there was something different about the rings; they’d added a third, tiny ring at the center of their open space, and they’d tarnished from gleaming gold like Revel’s to match Sechen’s. She raised her hand to look at the golden tubes that had sunk into her skin, one for each knuckle save for her pinky and thumb. Three tubes, three rings.

Sechen leaned against a fairly intact wall and stared up at the sunset, unsure what she could do with these new discoveries. It felt like this place was very slowly becoming her own, yet it still felt like the haunted ruins of an old castle to her. A place that, though she might own it, had history far beyond anything she could fathom. A stranger in her own mind.

“You do realize I’m still here, right?” Sechen’s disembodied voice spoke from nowhere, yet everywhere at once, and Sechen slammed her eyes shut. “Pretending I’m gone isn’t going to change anything.”

This was all her imagination. A specter of the past brought on by the ambient Issi in her headspace. It can’t hurt her. She can’t hurt her.

“You still haven’t outgrown these ruined halls. A shame, really. I could really do with a change of scenery. Maybe a nice park, or a babbling brook. But you can’t bring yourself past this, can you?” Sechen’s voice complained, and Sechen sank down the wall until she was sitting on a pile of crumbled stone and dust. She covered her ears with her hands, and murmured something like a prayer to try and keep the voice out.

It didn’t work. “So you did what you did, and for what? To squander all this potential over your own pointless fears? Pathetic. You don’t deserve this place. Your Issi. Your life. My life.” Sechen said with growing malice, and though nothing inside the ruins had changed Sechen shivered as if the temperature had plummeted.

“You’re not real.” Sechen whimpered, and her voice cackled in response.

“Of course I’m not, dear. You made sure of that. But you won’t let yourself believe that, will you? You’ll cower in fear of possibilities and let everything good in your life come and go without so much as a parting glance. So, here I am, here you are, tormenting you because you want to be tormented. Thinking that torment is all you deserve. And for what? Because you…”

Sechen scraped herself out of her headspace, clawing through the waterfall of blood and oil as she ran terrified from the thing that pervaded everything in her headspace. There was a reason she left that place alone. And this experience served as a harsh reminder that any positives her headspace might be able to give her just couldn’t hold a candle to the stress and horrible memories that came with being inside her own mind.

“You alright?” Rainshear asked, halfway visible as she came up the stairway.

“Yeah. I’m fine.” Sechen said, wiping at her forehead and feeling her hand come away sweaty. “Did you find Revel?”

Rainshear motioned at a folder she held under her arm. “Got a few leads to go on. Metea/Irric up in the loft?”

“She is.”

“Alright. You can sleep in my room tonight. Holler whenever Elach gets back.” Rainshear said, disappearing in a puff of mist and reappearing at the top of the ladder. “And Sechen?”

“Yeah?”

“No matter what happens with Revel, it’s not safe for you here anymore. Not for any wisp manifestation or anyone bonded to one. You’re going to leave as soon as the trials are over.”

“Okay.” Sechen nodded dumbly.

“I’ll explain in the morning. I might be wrong about what’s going down, but I’m ninety five percent sure I’m not.” Rainshear muttered to herself, looking away from Sechen and off into the distance. “Metea/Irric, listen up. We’ve got a few things we need to discuss.”

Sechen sank down into her chair as Rainshear and Metea/Irric talked quietly, yet angrily, in the background, none of their words making it far enough for Sechen to make them out. And she didn’t care to try. Something big was about to go down, or was already going down, and there was a chance she’d have to abandon Revel. She looked inwards, trying to decide if she could ever bring herself to do that.

She was both relieved and terrified when she couldn’t imagine going on living without Revel. For better or worse, she owed Revel for everything she had. So maybe dying to rescue her was the best way to repay a priceless debt.