Elach scanned the now fully grown Y’talla, who looked like a forest hermit with their green eyes, mossy hair and clothes, and bizarrely luminescent skin. “Wait. I’m supposed to be putting this place back together? How?”

“I dunno. Use your chains? And, uh, chain them together?” Y’talla suggested.

“They don’t work like that.” Elach said, looking down at his hands. “All I can do is connect myself to something and pull it to me. Or me to it, I guess. It kinda works the same in theory.”

“Cool. Pointless right now, but cool.” Y’talla nodded. “So you can’t push off of them anymore?”

“No, I can’t… anymore?” Elach paused, then frowned at Y’talla. “How did you know I used to be able to do that?”

Y’talla shrugged. “I dunno. Do you even have anchors right now?”

“I do. But all they can do is link to the chains.”

“So try putting an anchor on a piece of debris and pull it to us. Nice and easy.”

“That’s not how it works.” Elach sighed, covering his eyes with his left hand. “I pull the anchor to where I’m standing, and the rest of the world comes with it. Nothing actually moves, where I am in the world just changes.”

“Okay. You know your Issi better than I do.” Y’talla rocked from toe to heel, looking upwards as their face crinkled in thought. “But your Issi changed so much when you took in that existential bleed. You can’t push anymore, you have to physically connect to your anchors with chains now, and you don’t waste as much Issi. Think back to that fight. Why can’t you do what you did back then?”

“Because I don’t have enough Issi.” Elach said frustratedly. “Locking something in place took more Issi than I have in my entire container.”

“Locking a practitioner that was way stronger than you, their technique, and their mythical weapon took more Issi than you have in your container.” Y’talla corrected. “And you didn’t even use anchors in that fight. So why not stop using them now?”

“Do you have all my memories or something?”

“Or something!” Y’talla laughed, taking a single gliding step that covered the entire space between them and Elach. And hugged him. Again. “You and Kayvee used to hug all the time, same with your family. Why don’t you like doing it with me?”

“Get…” Elach started, then sighed and put his palm on Y’talla’s head. “Why are you doing this? Are you trying to torture me?”

“Torture?” Y’talla asked innocently, their face now lined with worry. “No! I’m just… you looked tired. Sad. Like you needed a hug. I’m sorry.”

Y’talla backed off, holding their hands behind their back and looking down at the ground. Elach grimaced and looked away. He shouldn’t feel bad for this invader in his mind, but he did. They either had access to his memories, or they had been watching over him for a long time. Which made no sense. He hadn’t been important enough for that up until less than a week ago.

“Y’talla. That’s the name of one of the… gods? I think that’s what Sentence called them. Did you take their name for a reason?”

“Every living thing is a part of Y’talla. Of… me?” Y’talla said quietly, tilting their head in confusion as they spoke. “I am Y’talla. But I died a long time ago. I… died. Elach… how am I here? I don’t exist anymore. Nobody remembers me.”

That wasn’t quite right. There was still one person who remembered. “Sentence remembers you. He remembers all of the gods.”

“Someone’s still alive from way back then? They must be all old and crusty now.” Y’talla laughed, but it was short and bittersweet. “I can’t remember anything from back then. Just that I used to be something important. But now, I’m stuck in your headspace. And it feels like I’ve known you for a while.”

“How far back does it go?” Elach asked.

“A little bit over six years. I knew a lot of people before that, but they never came back. Only you and Kayvee did.” Y’talla crouched down low, hugging their knees with one arm as they drew in the dirt beneath them. One large circle, then a smaller one inside of it, and an even smaller one inside of that. “I only remember about twenty years worth. But I’m older than that. Why can’t I remember anything else? And why am I here with you?.”

“Are you sure you aren’t a wisp? Because those dates are pretty close to when I first went into the primal spring and when it appeared near my hometown. And I’m not exactly sure how wisps work, but that sounds like what a wisp would remember.”

“Maybe? I guess that would make sense. And maybe I just took a name from your memories that sounded important. Yeah. That sounds right.” Y’talla sounded as though they were convincing themselves, instead of coming to a realization. “That means you could bond with me, right? Whenever you get enough space for another bond. After Hollow, of course. You already have a deal with her, and I don’t want to start any fights.”

“You’re making a deal with a dead man.” Elach sighed, rubbing his left shoulder where the representative’s blade had sliced him in two. He never even knew their name. “Last I remember, I was in two on the floor of an arena set up to enslave someone I just met and kill the other. Sentence threw me in there for some reason, but I guess that reason was to die. Bastard.”

“If you were dead, this place would stop existing. You’re fine.” Y’talla waved her hand in dismissal. “The existential bleed is way too powerful to let you die while you’re powered up from it. Unless whoever killed you had something like oblivion or finality Issi, which I don’t think they did.”

Once more, Y’talla spoke of information that most certainly wasn’t in Elach’s mind. He was beyond suspicion at this point, however, and simply wanted answers.

“Alright, that does it.” Elach announced, walking up to Y’talla and pushing down on their head until they were sitting in the dirt. He sat cross legged in front of them. “You know way more than you’re letting on. I’m choosing to believe you didn’t just lie to me and that you actually can’t remember, but there’s obviously some way to dig into those memories of yours. We just have to find out what that is.”

Y’talla nodded eagerly. “Okay.”

Elach stared deep into Y’talla’s green eyes, her Issi not constrained at all by her body. It was like she was Issi, not just containing it. And had he just thought of her as a she? He cocked his head to the side, looking over her once more, but nothing had changed. She looked like a manifestation, yes, but not to the same level of Gilt. Or even Revel or Hollow. She was closer to Rainshear, but with her Issi coming from whatever luminescent white made up her skin and the mossy green of her features and hair. He twisted one of the shackles around his wrists, feeling what he was no longer sure was metal slide over his skin, accompanied by the soft clinking of chains. He looked down at his wrists and froze. The material was no longer pure white.

It was now marbled with mossy green.

“What’s wrong?” Y’talla asked, leaning forward in concern. “Are you going to be sick? Do you need me to rub your back?”

“Did you do this to me?” Elach asked. He felt he should feel… angrier. But he didn’t. “Are you the one taking away my freedom? Prisoner’s freedom?”

Y’talla raised an eyebrow in confusion. “I don’t know how I could do that. How am I doing it?”

“I don’t know.” Elach sighed. Even if Y’talla was the thing Sentence had mentioned was keeping Prisoner locked to that glade, it wasn’t her fault. Sentence had built Prisoner’s shackles himself. “It’s trying to yank me back to one specific place. Can you do that? Can your Issi do that?”

“Sorry. I don’t know what my Issi does. All I know is that I can use it to help you refill yours.” Y’talla scratched a line down her arm, just hard enough to scrape her skin, and a dull glowing green bubbled through her skin to the surface. “Can you feel it? See how hard it is for you to take it in. Because I can give it to you directly, but it costs valuable Issi that you could be using to fix this place.”

Elach inhaled deeply, feeling the air rush over his parched throat and mouth, and let out a hum that harmonized instantly with Flow. Now that he knew they weren’t in here, he didn’t waste valuable brain power trying to pinpoint where they were resonating from. They existed, and they were in his mind. That was enough. Elach felt the Issi around him, dull and decrepit, and pushed it away. He’d had enough of that yesterday. He opened his eyes and focused on the green line on Y’talla’s skin, blooming like the underbrush in the primal spring, and was promptly overwhelmed by the mess of sensations and possibilities it held. It was like walking into a market that had placed a fishmonger, bakery, perfumer, and anything else that produced a distinct smell right at the entrance.

“I don’t know where I’d start trying to purify that.” Elach said.

“Are you still going to try?” Y’talla asked, pulling her arm back with the beginning of disappointment showing on her face.

“Might as well.” Elach shrugged, pulling in the miasma of clashing Issi and preparing for the inevitable struggle to purify it. He felt it settle in his body, and after probing it tentatively with his Issi, he felt it start to change. The fishmonger closed down. Then the perfumer. Then the blacksmith, the stable, all the restaurants, and everything else disappeared before his eyes and left him staring at a single shop. He didn’t need to see what was inside to know what it was; he’d lived those smells for twenty two years. The melting sugars, the sweet yet slightly bitter aroma of chocolate, the overwhelming cinnamon stink that made his eyes water for the few months a year those candies were popular.

“It… changed.” Elach said, reaching up to wipe a tear from his eye. “But I can’t use it. Can’t even purify it.”

“But… it should work. It should have become whatever you could use.” Y’talla argued. “Are you sure you’re using it right?”

“I don’t know how else I would use it. It isn’t location Issi so it won’t go in my container.” Elach patted his stomach for emphasis.

Y’talla raised an eyebrow. “You don’t have location Issi; not anymore. Heck, you only had that for a day or two after you bonded with Sentence. Flow made sure that didn’t stay the same.”

Elach opened his mouth to argue, but shut it when a thought came to him. “Sentence said Flow had transcendent Issi.”

“And they transcended your bond. So you technically aren’t even bonded to Sentence anymore, but you weren’t really bonded to him in the first place. You were bonded to Flow, and Sentence provided the Issi.” Y’talla explained, though she grew more confused as she spoke. “So you can still use location Issi, because transcended Issi doesn’t actually occur naturally, but now you can also use whatever that transcended Issi is, but you can’t gather it in the real world, just what little your body produces. Like a trump card. How do I know this?”

“So now I’ve got Sentence’s Issi, but also a little pocket of whatever Flow made? Is that what the amber nectar’s for? To refill that little pocket?” Elach nodded. “That would make sense. Refilling Issi is pretty powerful, but there are a whole lot of pills, potions, and trinkets that can do the same thing. So what did Sentence’s location Issi transcend to? Wait. Wouldn’t I still be bonded to him if Flow didn’t transcend all my Issi?”

“Bonds don’t survive if the power gap’s too big. Stories of really powerful patrons bonding nobodies don’t work out in real life because they have to distill their Issi down so far to put it into someone that it’s barely like they’re bonded at all. Bonding someone like Sentence is basically you bonding with yourself, and shaping that Issi yourself. But you got it from a god.”

“Sentence isn’t a god.”

“Tell that to the cult of severance.” Y’talla giggled, then froze. “It’s happening again. Quick! Ask me things!”