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2.06 Patreon Release
🕑 Added 2024-11-15 15:59:52 +0000 UTCIt’s cold.
That’s weird, because temperature isn’t the kind of thing one normally notices in a dream. Nonetheless, it is undeniably cold here. I can feel it on my skin, in my teeth, and especially from the ache in my hand.
Where is here, anyway? It is not the waters below the ice, nor is it the flat expanse above, nor the beach or great and incomprehensible forest beyond. Instead, I sit upon an outcropping, some vast block of hard and rough material that could be stone, or bone, or perhaps the Spire’s dermis. It’s large enough for me to sit comfortably in the middle without feeling worryingly close to the edge and thus in danger of falling off. The outcropping is somewhat uneven, with high and low points gently rising and falling until the sides slope worryingly downward. Perhaps this is the tip of some great, buried femur, protruding up from the mists shrouding whatever may be below. Always mist in these dreams. It’s cold.
More to the point, I’m not alone. Someone else sits next to me, a man, older by maybe ten or fifteen years, with a salt-worn face and grainy stubble. His skin is darker than my pallor, tanned by the sun and stretched taut over a muscular frame. No bodybuilder physique, rather the practical muscles of a man whose trade is contingent on a functional body. He is whole, unlike me.
I recognize him from the news; this is the pivotal figure around which the whole debacle in the Gulf of Mexico revolved. Noah Holton. Now something like my adoptive sibling, perhaps—being from the same creche of Flame as I, another fragment from when the Heron shattered fate. In theory, there were four of us—but one had turned inferno and been put down by the Vaetna, so now, only three, and only two right here on this strange outcropping surrounded by cold mist.
“You’re Ezzen.”
It is not a question. His voice is as weathered as his face, gravelly. Perhaps he smokes. His accent is of the American South.
“That’s me,” I confirm. “You’re…Noah? Mr. Holton?”
“Just Holton. You’re some kind of magic expert, they tell me. And just a kid. Have any idea where in God’s name we are?”
“Haven’t a clue, sorry.” I scrape a fingernail on the hard surface; it leaves no mark. “But this is a dream.”
“Figured as much. More weird flamebearer shit?”
“I…guess so. Haven’t heard of it, but this isn’t my first. Third, I think.”
With my full recollection available here, I realize I hadn’t dreamt the previous night, when I’d slept with Hina. Odd.
“Huh. Sure isn’t where I went to sleep, that’s for sure.”
“We won’t remember this when we wake up, either. At least, I don’t.”
“Huh. Then what’s the point?”
We fall into silence for a while.
“Where do you think the third guy is?”
“Probably not asleep. It’s morning back home.”
“Oh, right. So, then, why are you asleep?”
“Healing. Ripple fucked me up good, they say.”
“You look whole to me. Who’s ‘they’?”
“What are you, a cop?”
I blink.
“I’m just—trying to look out for you, I guess.”
“Why?”
“Because…” I thought about this. “I should?”
He grunts.
“Thanks. But I’m not telling you anything. I don’t even know if you’re real. You could be somebody from the Peacies trying to trick me into giving up my location, for all I know.”
“I’ve got no love for them,” I object. But he’s right; I have no way of knowing he’s real, either. I change the topic, hoping that if he is indeed real, he can answer this question. “Why did Brianna leave you?”
“Who? Oh, the Vaetna?”
“Yeah.”
“She said she couldn’t take me.”
I sit further up in alarm.
“What does that mean?”
“Beats me.” He says nothing more, looking out into the mist, rubbing his hands together as though to warm them up. It doesn’t work.
“Well—did she say anything else?” That couldn’t be right, but he just shrugs.
“Don’t remember exactly what she said, but yeah, that’s what it came out to. She couldn’t take me to the Spire. Couldn’t even stick around to bail me out. Didn’t give a real reason, I think. I didn’t beg her, either, so she just left.”
“That doesn’t happen.”
“No? ‘Cause that’s what happened.”
“It doesn’t. They don’t leave flamebearers out to dry like that. They didn’t, for me. I mean, I didn’t wind up going with them, but three of them showed up for me. That doesn’t make sense.”
“Eh. They didn’t really ‘leave me out to dry’, I guess. Helped clean up the guys I was fighting—scooped out the whole east side of the superstructure. Poor fucker right in front of me was caught at the edge, didn’t get him all the way.”
Guilt seeps through me like poison. That hadn’t been the Vaetna—should I tell him that, admit what I had done? Would that make anything about this better? He’d mentioned he was recovering from ripple exposure—I would feel guiltier if that was our doing. But it could well have been his, or just the ambient residuals from his Flamefall. I can’t risk it.
“Even—even so. They left you there. That doesn’t happen,” I repeat. “There has to be a reason.”
“Probably is. Doesn’t really matter to me.”
“Why not? It’s unprecedented, it means something.” I feel myself growing annoyed at his apathy. “And we’re from the same cluster, so even if you don’t care, I do.”
“Still can’t prove that.”
A fair point. But there has to be a way. I rack my brain, trying to picture glyphs, my ingrained expertise far more slow and sluggish to respond than usual, dampened by the swaddling other-ness of the dream.
“I can prove it somehow,” I promise. “I’ll find a way to remember this, contact you.”
“Cool.”
I frown. He just—doesn’t care? I don’t know what to say in the face of the brick wall of apathy. So I say nothing and stand, to better investigate this strange locale. Even with no prosthetic, this dream lets me walk without pain or difficulty. I move to the edge of the mostly level area of the outcropping, where it begins to slope downward, getting as close as I dare; as I thought, no surge of acrophobia rises to meet me as I peer down into the milky mist. But it is cold. Why does my hand hurt, but not my foot? Perhaps the answer lies somewhere below, beyond my sight.
“Gonna jump?”
“What? No, just looking.”
“Why not?”
I turn to him, befuddled.
“Why would I?”
“Well. Assuming you are real, I’m just thinking…maybe this is some sort of test. Like we won’t wake up until we leave the platform, or something.”
“And your evidence for thinking that?”
He shrugs.
“Guess.”
I turn back toward the fog, trying to glean something, anything. But there are not even swirls of atmospheric motion. It is instead a heavy, impenetrable stillness. It occurs to me that perhaps we are high above that forest beyond the beach, and that somewhere within the fog lays a surface of treetops. That doesn’t answer the question of what we’re actually standing on. I hope it’s not bone; the implications of that would be dire. As I look, I speak.
“My last dreams didn’t have any kind of…test, or whatever. And this isn’t the same place. I did have somebody else there, but it was…just a manifestation of my Flame, somehow. And it was different from you. I think you’re real, but my gut says that we’re supposed to talk to each other. Our Flames, or somebody else, want us to communicate.”
“Huh. Well, kid, from where I’m sitting, the Frozen Flame isn’t our friend. Real bastard, even. I’d think real hard about what I assume it wants.”
“It’s not evil.”
“It runs on pain. I learned that from minute one. How much more evil can it get?” He shifts. “I don’t want to find out. I didn’t sign up for any of this shit. But I can’t even get away from it when I’m sleeping, seems like.”
For me, this has all been a dream come true, albeit a twisted one. But for somebody without my obsessive passion for magic, somebody who was trapped in the middle of a standoff between world powers rather than whisked away to relative safety?
“I don’t blame you,” I concede. “But we ought to make the most of the hand we’re dealt.”
“Speak for yourself. I’m not playing.”
“Meaning what? You—can’t go to the Spire.” The words are ash in my mouth for their implication. He has to have misunderstood somehow. “If that’s what Bri meant. And there’s no other safe haven, not really, other than…the Peacies, or their equivalents. Who you don’t seem keen on.”
“I’m not, nah. I don’t know what I’m going to do yet. But I’m not gonna go to war with them or whatever else the fuckin—what’s the word—VNTs get up to. And especially whatever this shit—” he waves at the mist around us “—is. No thanks. I want out.”
This enkindles an unfamiliar emotion in me, one that sweeps away the sympathy. I glower.
“That’s not a choice we get to make.”
He shrugs again.
“It’s the choice I’m making. You gonna jump or what?”
“Why would I…?”
“No other way off this rock. You’re the type who needs answers, and they’re not up here, I can tell you that much.”
I glance down again; still no dizziness or primal terror, because there’s no sense of distance for the fall. A perfect chance to face my fear—assuming this is indeed just a dream, a normal one where I can’t get hurt. But there’s no guarantee of that, not in whatever strange Flame-derived non-space this is. So instead, I turn back to him, surveying the empty expanse around us.
“Not up here, no. But that doesn’t mean I need to jump to find out.”
I squeeze my eyes shut and pull the rip-cord dangling off my soul, tearing the stitches where it meets my Flame. It and I both tremble at the lance of agony, and my hand ignites. The cold does not dissipate, nor the ache, but instead coexists with the searing heat of fire, tongues of Flame in the same milk-white as the mist around us, because in my gut I know that they are one and the same. I raise my hand, reaching out to the edge, telling them to meet and merge, that my shard of the Flame may connect to whatever greater whole composes this ephemeral realm. I might not have access to glyphcraft, but I still have this most basic magic, the basis, its fundamental form.
My hand takes great effort to move toward the edges of the fog, as though I am pushing it through a viscous fluid. It grows denser the further I reach, until I am straining with my entire body for a single extra centimeter. I am close; it will give, with just a little more, and I will make contact. But before I can break through the barrier, stretch the elastic goop to its limit and shear it apart, I hear Holton move behind me.
“Stop,” he whispers, voice grave. “Something is here.”
“A bit—ngh—late for that, I think.” At this point, it would be as much effort to extract my arm, douse the Flame, as it would be to see it through. “What kind of something?”
“I don’t know! Something’s moving out there! Big, white, like a…tooth, or a fin. Cut through the mist. They got fucked up space whales in here?”
“Let’s not find out.”
I push through, and the dream tears.
—
Tap tap tap tap…
I awoke to the sound of rain. A retina-blast of light from my phone shattered the predawn veil of darkness as I confirmed the time—5:47, a truly ungodly hour, a time during which no sane person should be up. I squeezed my eyes tighter shut and rolled over in bed, hoping the pitter-patter of the rain outside would lull me back to oblivion. I’d just been having an interesting dream, though I couldn’t recall the details and had the sense that it had reached some kind of conclusion. I wanted to get back to it and see what else my subconscious could spin up while I rested a few hours more.
Tap tap tap tap…
If the Radiances wanted me up early to prepare for Saturday or paperwork or something else time-sensitive, well, they could just text me or knock on the door or something. Until then, I was going back to sleep. I might miss breakfast, but that was fine if it meant I could avoid another unpleasant run-in with Yuuka.
Tap tap tap tap…
Just as I had snuggled further into my blanket and hooked my arm under the pillow, my hopes of returning to dream-land were sabotaged by the human brain’s propensity for pattern recognition; I realized that the sound of the rain contained an oddly rhythmic component. Of course, there was the generally random white noise of countless raindrops, but there was also a distinct sequence of tapping noises, four at a time.
Taptaptaptap. Taptaptaptap.
Curiosity got the better of me. I peeled one eye open, turned my head, craned my neck—
There was a silhouette on my balcony, visible only as a dark void, a humanoid shape where the lights of the skyscrapers beyond weren’t, half-obscured in the misty condensation.
Adrenaline flooded my system as I parsed the figure. I bolted upright and scrambled to disentangle myself from the blankets. With my prosthetic foot still on the nightstand, I was limited in how far I could move, but I managed to roll off the edge of the bed and land behind it in a crouch, then half-knelt, half-stood to direct the speartip over the top of the bed like a Roman soldier hiding behind a barricade. Emphatically not Heung-like, in hindsight.
Moments before filling my lungs to yell for backup, I looked at my balcony again and assessed the figure more carefully. During those few seconds of panic, my eyes had begun to adjust to the darkness, and I realized who this was. I caught the shine of rain-soaked hair matted down over shoulders, the silhouette of slender legs. And of course, when the light caught her face just right, an unmistakably brilliant blue shone from my girlfriend’s eyes. Perhaps obvious in hindsight. Hina glinted a toothy grin and waved enthusiastically at me. Her other palm was pressed against the glass; the rhythmic tapping sound had been her galloping her fingernails on the door.
My face turned hot as I realized how my maneuver across the bed must have looked. I averted my eyes from hers—always so difficult to look away from that beautiful sapphire—and hurriedly banished my spear. I knew rationally that I had probably done the right thing, but I couldn’t stop my body from repurposing the adrenal energy of my erroneous fight-or-flight response toward embarrassment. On the balcony, Hina seemed to giggle, shoulders shaking in mirth—or perhaps shivering from the cold, but that didn’t seem like her. While I tried to keep myself from cringing at my reaction, she pointed at the door handle and tilted her head, a wordless request for permission. She was drenched, so I did the decent thing and hurriedly waved assent. The open door brought the dull, distant roar of the rain into immediate clarity, making me flinch and move to cover my ears.
As Hina stepped in, closing the door behind her to re-establish the barrier between cozy interior and unpleasant outdoors, I had to wonder—
“Why the balcony?”
“It’s pretty nice out there!”
I gaped at her, glanced out the window to confirm we were seeing the same rainstorm, then back at her, soaked head to toe. She was already on the move, wringing out her hair with her hands.
“Mind if I dry off?”
If it were any other person, I would have insisted that she make full use of my towels. But because it was Hina, I instead had a terrible premonition that she was about to do something distinctly dog-like.
“I just built that,” I declared, pointing at my PC, hoping to head off the spattering. “Please don’t ruin it.”
“What? Wasn’t gonna. I mean, that sounds fun…” For a terrifying moment, she seemed to be genuinely considering it, ultramarine eyes scanning across my belongings, “But I’m not gonna ruin your room. You think I’d do that?”
“Uh…I guess not? In any case—” I pointed at the bathroom, relieved by the sanity, “Yeah, use what you need.”
“Oh, I was just gonna, uh, blow-dry. With magic. Can I?” In response to my suspicious look, she clarified, “Won’t make a mess, I promise! And I’ll be so warm after.” She batted her eyes at me, probably trying to look alluring—a little too wet-dog at that moment to pull it off, but the message was received.
“Uh, sure.”
“Yay!”
Then there was heat.
—
I woke up again as dawn began to break. This time, the puppygirl equivalent of a heating pad was entangled with me, radiating wonderful warmth across everywhere our bodies touched and our limbs wrapped around one another’s. My hazy return to consciousness brought a dim wonder to the post-coital embrace—before my brain came slightly more online and I remembered that nothing sexual had happened. She’d just stripped her most-soaked outer layers, blow-dried herself, and hopped into bed with me, and I’d fallen right back asleep in short order.
Now, shifting and readjusting slightly against her smaller form, I very much didn’t want to get up, even less so than before. I just wanted to stay here with her in my arms and be warm and safe forever. And I did feel safe, paradoxically—Hina was being very lovey, all snuggles.
“Making up for lost time,” she explained. “Sorry I was out last night.”
“Mm.” Her hair still smelled a bit rainy; tricky to identify, not wet-dog, more like earthy notes layered over the aroma of her shampoo. I felt unimaginably spoiled to have my face pressed into her mane like this. “Find anything?”
“No,” she muttered dejectedly into my chest while her hand idly ran up and down my flank. “I went to run some tests with a friend in Kyoto. Oh! You probably know them, maybe, they’re on the forums. On there, they’re…Gorogorosan?”
I blinked, pulling away from her slightly, enough to look down at her. In hindsight, it wasn’t surprising at all that she knew one of Japan’s premier experts in ripple propagation, but I hadn’t made the connection myself.
“Oh, yeah. So you were testing ripple?”
“Mhm. Trying to figure it out. What they did, where they went. But we didn’t really find anything. Sorry.”
“For what?”
“Not solving it!” She wiggled unhappily.
“‘S fine,” I murmured, letting my eyes slide back shut. “You really don’t have to go that far. How far away is Kyoto, again?”
“Mmmm…two-fifty miles? Sum’n’ like that. Sorry, yeah, I know I’m getting wound up about this, I just don’t want there to be something out there that can hurt you. Any of you,” she added hastily, squirming again. “I think it’s just nerves about the Peacies. I’d rather they just showed up so I can tear ‘em apart and we can be done with this. But that won’t be for a bit, says Yuuka.”
I grimaced a bit at the mention of her abrasive teammate.
“You…talked to her? I seem to recall you saying you were going to…enact violence.”
“Yeah. Took a few swings at her, but she’s always so slippery. Got my point across, though, I think.”
“That being?”
“Stay away from my cutie.” She injected a spine-tickling growl into the words. I shivered at the goosebumps that raced across my arms, heady with the surreality of our intimacy. She ran her hand down my arm possessively, approvingly, and dug her claws into the rough scar tissue. I winced, heart pounding. “Or at least, IDK, treat you with basic respect. That’d be good too.”
“Thanks,” I squeaked out. “Mmf. Ow.”
“Hm? Oh.” The claws retreated and she rubbed the stinging depressions contritely. “Sorry?”
Something giddy and vulnerable took control of me, urged on by the protectiveness on full display. She wouldn’t let anybody else hurt me—but cocooned here together, I was happy to let her do so.
“I didn’t say stop.”
—
Half an hour of ragged-edged gasping and delirious giggles and nibbling kisses later, Hina finally had to get up for work. My collection of hickeys had grown and my hand stung in all sorts of interesting ways, the result of clawing and gnawing and kneading. She seemed positively fixated on my flame-touched limb, seeming to prefer when I touched her with it over my other hand—and touch her I did, all the more reason for me to curse the tyranny of the clock and her presumably important responsibilities when she had to disentangle from me. Then again, an eyeful of mostly naked Hina was a lovely note to end on.
Some time later, I dragged myself out of bed as well and spent the morning enjoying my new PC setup. There was more work to be done, customizing and tuning increasingly miniscule settings, but mostly, I just relaxed with the chatroom on one monitor and YouTube on another, catching up properly on the few days I’d been out of the news cycle. It was good to be back. There were new glyphcraft papers, updates on the Vaetna—nothing pertaining to Bri at a glance—and continuing ripple effects of the non-magical sort from the Thunder Horse Inferno. And beyond my little bubble of awareness, the world kept turning as well, random new politics that I had little time for and banished from my feed as soon as they appeared.
The great invisible algorithms of the modern internet seemed to have picked up that I was now in Japan, and I chuckled dryly as I saw that my interest in magical studies had been correlated with my location and resulted in a slew of Todai videos dotted across my recommended page. I had a degree of academic interest in those, scrubbing through, looking for things to fill in the gaps in my understanding of what they did all day. The through-line across all five of them was that they did a lot of brand collaborations, but I was still a bit hazy on the day-to-day.
As it happened, though, I wound up getting mezzanine seats to exactly that subject in person. My hunger reached a tipping point and overcame inertia to send me creeping out of my room to the top of the stairs, intending to raid the kitchen for snacks and possibly a full meal if something in the fridge struck my fancy. I didn’t make it that far—I stopped short of the top of the stairs as I overheard a pair of raised voices, British and Australian. Fortunate, perhaps, that they were having this conversation—argument, really—in English.
“So you decided without me that I wasn’t going?”
“I’d have assumed you would be fine with it.”
“I would have been, if we’d decided this when it had first come up! But I’ve planned my whole day around it now, so I’m going.”
“This is a serious event, not an excuse for you to hang out with Amane all day.”
“That’s not what I mean. I was going to get some field advocacy work done!”
“Ah. For your research?”
“Yeah!” Yuuka sounded annoyed, as though this shouldn’t need explaining. “I was talking to Inoue-sensei and told him I was going, and he said I could count attendance instead of going to lecture next week because of the whole environmental focus of the fundraising. I was just going to take some pictures with the FOEI people there, y’know, we do that stuff all the time—”
“And were you going to tell me about this? Or PR?”
“Tch. Probably!”
“Probably isn’t enough, Yuuka,” Alice chided. “We’ve been over this. If you want to do a marketing campaign, collab, whatever, you have to run it by us first. And how were you going to juggle that with keeping an eye on Ezzen?”
“You’re sending Ai instead! Why does he have to be my problem? Now there’ll be three of us to keep an eye on the monsterfu—on him.” There was no contrition in the self-correction, but her resigned tone at least suggested that Amane had gotten through to her, even if Hina’s message perhaps hadn’t stuck. “Don’t know why you even fuckin’ bother—”
“Language. Can’t believe you got this vulgar after two years down there—”
“Piss off, it’s part of my brand. There’s a reason my merch sales are the highest—”
“Two reasons.” Alice retorted with uncharacteristic venom in her voice. I could picture her tail lashing angrily. “And they’re both attached to your chest.”
The bickering collapsed into very angry-sounding Japanese. I’d been crouching, a reflexive but pointless attempt to be stealthy as I eavesdropped from out of view up above them—now I sat down more carefully to relieve the stress on my foot, waiting to see if they’d return to English. I didn’t like to pry, but…I was already learning a lot. Yuuka was some kind of environmental sciences major, for one. For two, her relationship with Alice was a little…incendiary, not unlike a rebellious teen and her mother. Weren’t they only two years separated?
“Listen, Alice. Point is, cunt’s a problem.”
“He’s a victim. Like Amane! It’s almost the same situation.”
“He’s a guy, and he’s balls-deep in that thing. I thought after all the shit with Jason you’d be done letting her bring her chew toys back here!”
“Yuuka,” Alice’s voice went gentler. “Have they caused you any actual problems? I think you’re projecting some of your own experiences onto him; he’s been nothing but pleasant and polite. Help me understand where the problem is so we can solve it together. You’re a smart girl, you know—”
“Ugh. Sonna ni yaru na yo. Fine, here’s a reason: Having two of those things here is fucking terrible for Amane. Ai wants him to help with the hosougu for some fucking reason, but with how much red Hina’s gonna make because of him, it just winds up giving Amane a bunch more flare-ups.”
“Is that foresight, or an assumption?”
“I pinged for something this morning! They’re biting each other or some shit.”
I blushed—then my stomach lurched. Had we contributed to some “bad weather” for Amane in our selfish, giddy exchanges of passion?
“And yet Amane has been fine,” Alice retorted, and I sighed in relief. Yuuka’s silence was damning—her foresight was imperfect, it seemed. Alice sighed. “Amane wants him here too. She told you that this morning, so just…I’m not even asking you to get along with him. Avoid him, if you have to, just…right now, you’re being a bigger problem than he is.”
“Right now? You know what’s not right now, Alice? Three weeks from now, when the PCTF will start making offers to take him off our hands. Which we’ll refuse, of course, and then they’ll stop asking and start moving assets up from Okinawa. He is a mess waiting to happen. That’s foresight, and I’m not wrong.”
“Alright,” Alice allowed. “Thank you for the heads-up, it’s good to have some precision on that. Add it to the chart sometime today, please. I’ll inform Hikanome that you’ll also be attending on Saturday. Be nice to Ezzen, please.”
“Fine.” I heard furniture shift, a chair being pushed back. “Don’t know how you can be so calm about it, Ally. He’s going to fuck us all over just by being here. That’s my professional opinion.”
Comments
AstraAllie
Thanks for the chapter!💕
Akashic Archivist
Thanks for the chapter!
