Within a small house hidden within the Gilded Night’s upper level, a woman who wished nothing but the worst for everyone but her listened to the pleas and mutterings of those beneath her.

Brynn tapped her finger next to the small white communication device she’d been given for her reports to Glasrime. Though it wasn’t their stunning visage that took up the crystal; no, it was one of the Lavassil apprentices Glasrime had insisted join them. She couldn’t fathom why Glasrime thought she needed the help, but they always knew best.

Their face scrunched up in annoyance as Brynn kept them waiting at the end of their report. She didn’t give their appearance a second thought, just as she’d already forgotten their name. They weren’t important or infuriating enough to occupy a permanent space in her mind. Another voice caused them to turn their head, pinch their nose with one hand, close their eyes and sigh in frustration. Brynn gave a vitriolic smile.

“We would greatly appreciate your input, squadron commander Brynn Glasrime.” The apprentice growled. Not the tone she would have preferred, but it would do. For now.

“It appears that Lavassil’s aid, like their apprentices, was underwhelming to say the least.” Brynn said flatly, as if she were stating a fact. Because she was. The apprentice’s face took on a white tinge of rage, though everything appeared white through the communicator. Before they could say anything, she continued. “Your construct has fallen. Your practitioners moronically cleared the twentieth floor without a single consideration that what just befell us could have happened. Luckily, our apprentices are still active in that floor grouping, and will continue to be until further notice. If they too fall, the blood is on your hands.”

“That doesn’t…” The practitioner trembled with barely constrained rage. Brynn tilted her head to the side innocently.

“That doesn’t what?” Brynn waggled a finger and shook her head. “Tsk tsk. Finish your sentence like a civilized practitioner.”

“We need to do something!” The practitioner almost screamed, a vein throbbing on their forehead in time with their rapid heartbeat. “I just gave you a whole damn report, and that’s all you have to say? People are dying! Our constructs are disappearing! This whole thing’s gone to shit, and you don’t give a fuck!”

“Language.” Brynn scolded, a knife-like smile splitting her lips. “What is there to say? Your efforts were worthless. Your very presence is unnecessary, just like your patron. But fear not; we will step in and shape up all of your failures. Cleanse this pillar of the filth that would prevent Glasrime’s glorious future, after which the Gilded Night will feel the glacier’s wrath for harboring these monsters.”

Brynn tapped the communicator before the Lavassil apprentice could get in another word. Maybe they would explode from the rage they felt and save her the trouble of dealing with them again. She sighed and leaned on her elbow, images of Prisoner destroying her hired killer flashing before her eyes. She’d gotten reports of him between floor thirty and forty, but she couldn’t think of anyone else who could have taken care of one of the Lavassil constructs. Though it hurt her to admit, they were truly fearsome pieces of Issi craftsmanship. She swiped across her communicator until she reached a different frequency. As long as there was the chance that Prisoner, or someone like him, was present in the eleven to twenty band, she had to warn her fellows.

And that wasn’t even considering the fresh intel that Elach had resurfaced after disappearing a few days ago. Her fellow practitioners were sandwiched between the monster that was Prisoner, and the unknown that was Elach. Yet Prisoner was, in turn, stuck between her and her fellows.

Brynn straightened as a new face appeared on the communicator, surprise explicitly written on it from the sudden contact. She smiled as comfortingly as she could, delivering the orders that would end with bloodshed on both sides.

“Dmanmn.” Elach muttered through a mouthful of teeth, raising his hands to the needle and grabbing on tight. His technique kept it frozen in place, the Issi unable to latch onto his hands, and he tried to get a better read on this thing’s Issi. Maybe get a hint on how he could permanently end it.

Absolutely nothing. Like a wind-up toy that had reached the end of its wind. No hunger, no urge to eat, nothing. The Issi was there, but it was stagnant. Aimless. Waiting to be rewound by the Issi that it was supposed to have devoured in its ultimate attack. Elach’s Issi. He let go and undid his technique, probing out again and finding that nothing had changed. Ten minutes later, the effigy was as motionless as the moment it had fired that final technique. Elach scratched his shoulder and fished around in his mouth for the shards of tooth that had lodged themselves in his gums and cheeks. The effigy was way too powerful to have been set loose for him specifically. Whoever he was chasing left this behind in case someone like Prisoner, or maybe Metea/Irric came around. He just got extremely lucky that he was somehow immune to the hypnotic Issi it expelled.

His hand brushed up against the effigy’s woven straw body as he formulated the start of a plan. All the effigy’s Issi was concentrated in the spine that ran through it, the heart-like mass now taking the shape of the needle. The grain’s energizing Issi was a shadow against the effigy’s own, the effigy’s dark yellow Issi a twisted overbearing shadow of the original. The grains themselves had nothing to do with any of this. They were the material the effigy had grown itself out of, and nothing more. It wasn’t a manifestation at all.

Elach set to work slowly unweaving each and every stalk from the effigy’s core. He took extra care in making sure not to touch any of the effigy’s twisted Issi, gingerly plucking the stalks one by one until he had undone the effigy from its left shoulder to the same side’s hip. Its spine was uncovered, and Elach used the absolute last of his transcendent Issi to attach a chain to it. He felt none of the resistance that would have come with trying to chain a living creature, solidifying his theory as he backed away to hide behind the closest tree. He didn’t want the spine to crush him when he not so surgically extracted it.

Elach threw himself to the ground as the spine splintered the tree he had hidden behind. He covered the back of his head with his hands as slivers of parched wood dug made him into a pincushion for the second time that day, the spine crashing into the ground and leaving a trail of shattered ground and Issi in its wake. He’d expected it to be near impossible to remove it from the effigy, not the slight resistance that it was in reality, which was why it absolutely sailed when he pulled with all the might he could muster. And he hadn’t mustered a lot of might.

It took a dozen seconds for Elach to push himself to his feet, his container now completely empty. He glanced back at the effigy, which had collapsed into a heap of stalks the moment its spine was pulled, a pool of dark yellow Issi trickling out from under it. The shiny insides of the stalks must have been how the effigy was controlling them, and now that its spine was gone, the Issi had nothing commanding it. The ground absorbed the Issi just a hair slower than it was leaking out, gaining a yellow tint that tried to spread in thin veins, but died out before it could reach more than a few feet away from the pile.

Shaking his head, Elach stepped towards the spine that was also bleeding away its dark yellow Issi. He knelt down just outside of where the ground was lapping the Issi up, rubbing his chin in curiosity as the melting Issi revealed something. It was charred black like a burning log, about two thirds as long as the cylinder of Issi, and ridged like a miniature mountain range. He cracked a smile as it melted down to fully reveal the object it was hiding; a spine. It was as long as he was tall, as thick as his thigh, and radiated a completely different Issi than it had moments ago. It felt like the Issi wanted to be something else, but with an undertone of alertness that reminded him of the grains’ Issi. Not the effigy’s own Issi, but the grains themselves.

Elach mumbled a string of sounds that he meant to come out as “This thing has to be worth at least a week’s worth of meals,” waited for the last dregs of the darker Issi to be devoured by the ground, then stepped up to the spine and gingerly put his hand on it. It almost felt like Flow’s transcendent Issi, but without that unfathomable edge when he looked for too long. Transformative Issi, he remembered Sentence calling it. He had a very selfish thought, a greedy thought, then rationalized it down to a risky thought. A thought he would discuss with Y’talla and Flow.

Speaking of which, Elach felt at his bonds and came back with a sort of groggy confusion from the both of them. He sighed in relief and lowered himself until he was sitting cross-legged next to the spine, shot a look over at the pile that was still leaking Issi, and back to the spine. Maybe the grain would end up being worth something after all.