My mind is suddenly assailed by a flood of rough images. The colors are slightly oversaturated, the flame of Maria’s lantern too richly orange, and the arrows...

The arrows...

I close my eyes and shake my head. The images continue to stream into my head like messy snapshots, some oriented slightly wrong. It feels like I’m watching a recording with a low framerate and poor footage, but the imperfections fall away as I concentrate, my mind somehow compensating for the messiness and producing a rather clear image.

I see the world in colors of heat, interposed on the physical in a way similar to how I see vitality. A somewhat accurate descriptor would be to say that mundane vision and heat vision are each painted on transparent slides of glass, but instead of seeing them laid atop one another, Maria and I see both slides simultaneously, neither form of vision obscuring the other. It only highlights how incredible Crystal’s power is–she shares not just what Maria sees with her physical eyes, but what she perceives with her affinities.

And finally, on another metaphorical glass slide, are two arrows: One in a shade of bright violet leads to me, while another in turquoise leads to Crystal.

“Huh. I always thought my arrow was gold–at least that’s what Eury told me.”

“So you can see,” Maria murmurs. “The color of your arrow isn’t absolute–every End practitioner sees things differently. Though I must say, gold is considered a rather splendid color for a fate arrow. Violet, on the other hand, may represent complex and uncertain relationships. But don’t misunderstand: color isn’t a science.”

Violet does sound accurate, then. “Aside from the arrows, should I be noticing anything else?”

I sense her shaking her head from behind me. “No, I stopped my array temporarily. I’ll start it again–you should see it come into being.”

Perhaps I’ll finally be able to better understand the relationship between End affinity arrows and the arrows I see in souls.

Suddenly a bright red arrow erupts from my–Maria’s–chest. It shoots into the ground at the center of the inscribed pentacle. Red–the same color as the arrow–fills the pentacle like colored water, flowing in and revealing intricate scripts and swirls. Arrows surface like shark fins along the outer circle of the pentacle, angling themselves to the left. Then they extend out and widen, multiplying into flat plaits of arrows, and then those braids come together to form a massive cord of fate.

The cord twists in on itself like a cloth being wrung out.

Twist. It shrinks, the End arrows compressing.

Schwip. It shrinks down again.

The cord soon has the width of a hand, its girth reduced by at least a factor of one thousand.

Next the cord slithers toward me like a snake. When it reaches the violet arrow between myself and Maria, it coils around it and twists a final time. The red becomes violet, losing its original coloration. In return, the arrow binding us becomes thicker, like the red rope, but more ornate, like a fancily knotted fisherman’s rope, or jeweler’s expensive gold chain.

The violet chain shakes and quivers, elongating. Through Maria’s perspective I see the arrow sinking deeper through my chest, nestling between my ribs. It begins to take root, the tip splintering off and forming small knobby tendrils that work their way through my ethereal body.

“This is where I get stuck,” she says. “I get this far, but I suspect that my arrows are unable to get a hold of your soul.”

I cock my head to the side “What are you expecting to happen to deem this successful?”

“Think of the violet arrow as a poisonous viper. It needs to sink its metaphorical venom into the soul. I hoped that fate would be able to touch the connection between your soul projection and your true soul, counting as indirect contact, but by your lack of reaction, no such luck.”

“Tell me about your array’s ‘venom,’” I murmur.

“I think of it as injecting the seed of an idea: a desire for non-existence, to revert back to a blank slate of before.”

“To revert back to a disembodied soul.”

Maria blinks. “So that’s the name for them. Yes, whatever they are when they have no host, no memories, no self. You helped me understand that the soul is structured.”

“I did?”

“Of course,” she replies. “I felt how my soul wound itself from the outside in. It had these...layers, rings, like a coiled spiral of time, winding inward. When you saw my memories, my soul gently uncoiled itself like a closed hand, and when you left, the hand snapped back shut. I don’t fully understand this image–it might be entirely metaphorical, singular only to myself–but it’s the basis of my array. If a soul has structure, then I can attack that structure. As a serpent’s venom necrotizes flesh, my array’s venom will apply a nasty affliction, a sense of otherness.”

“Can you elaborate?”

“Like an itch that can’t be scratched, like a cancer that slowly takes over your body, or a parasite that eats you from the inside out. The idea will be an infestation that grows only worse with time, until the soul has no other choice but to seek oblivion, a clean end.”

Maria’s way of thinking is alien to me. “You speak as though souls have a conscious will.”

“Don’t they?” Her fingers lightly hug my shoulders, no longer as warm as before.

Usually no, but I can think of one very solid exception: Soolemar’s old compatriots in their ancient school, their souls still visiting when called. Woeshiv.

“...I suppose they do. What you’re describing does sound promising, but as you observed, nothing is happening to me. I think we must be missing something small.”

“Is there any way for you to affect your own soul? We might be skipping a few steps here by going straight to my End array.”

I see what she’s saying. If I can find a way to affect my true soul through the projected soul in my body, we’ll have a clearer path forward. “I tried briefly to affect my own soul in the beginning, when Crimson Teeth first told us about how souls work in Eternity. I didn’t experiment much, but I can do so now.”

Crystal severs our shared sight, my vision returning to normal. An intense vertigo comes over me and I lean forward, holding my arms over my knees. Maria walks off and continues to make refinements to the pentacle while I regain my faculties.

How do you handle seeing everybody’s perspectives all the time? I ask Crystal.

“I have seen through the eyes of others for a very long time. It is something you can acclimate to.”

Perhaps eventually, though there’s no time to get used to the sensation now.

While sitting, I close my eyes and focus inward. Ascending didn’t change the fact that my ethereal body is a tattered drape, pieces of it strewn throughout my body while still maintaining a connection to my soul. Eternity is apparently unable to heal the soul damage that Soolemar considered a side effect of using the Infinity Loop.

Perhaps it’s because the soul damage isn’t actually harmful. The damage weakened my soul, leaving it more susceptible to attacks, but also increased its offensive capabilities, allowing me to defeat someone like Ari. Why fix what isn’t broken?

I sense the soul within my ethereal body, but as before, when I try to manipulate it directly, the soul becomes untouchable. It almost reminds me of when I first started as a necromancer and didn’t know how to touch souls without them flying away. Only after Soolemar taught me a method to make my hand appear dead was I able to manipulate them.

It’s almost like my own soul doesn’t recognize me. Maybe it really doesn’t. This body, me...it’s not the one I left behind in the amber, no matter how realistic it is.

When dealing with real, true souls, like Maria’s, ownership over the soul doesn’t matter: I can touch Maria’s soul without any issues. Perhaps the projected soul operates with different rules that prevent anyone but the original body from manipulating it.

Even if that’s true, how does knowing that help? The goal is to find some way of manipulating my soul, whether that’s through indirect methods, as Maria pursued, or other means.

I continue to mull over the problem in silence.

“You have been thinking for a while,” Crystal comments. “Why not take a break to refresh?”

I groan and stretch my arms. Probably a good idea.

As I hover myself over the plane, I let my mind wander and go on autopilot. I wonder what this plane used to look like before its destruction. Floria said that relocating the plane to Eternity ruined it, leaving it unrecognizable, and I wonder if she was exaggerating.

Soon I find myself flying over the city of souls. The gothic buildings loom above quiet stone-paved streets. In the darkness, souls swirl like lanterns, each an orb pricked by different colored dye. Did the people whom these souls belonged to die before the ascendants moved the world to Eternity, or during the relocation?

A soul nearly runs into my hand before bobbing backward, repelled by my flesh. On reflex, I reach out and grab it, pinching it between my fingers. I hold it up to my eyes, studying it. The soul is clear with a bright green swirl of ink.

Staring at the soul gives me an idea. I push the soul toward my chest, forcing it inside. It becomes stuck in my ethereal body. Though I can no longer see it with my eyes, I can sense its integrity beginning to fail, the soul’s walls breaking down.

My eyes widen. Oops. I try to pull the soul away to save it from falling apart. In the process, I drag the soul past the center of my ethereal body...and my own projected soul.

I sense the projection shift in response to the intruder.

Oh.

My concern for the disembodied soul’s longevity disappears, overshadowed by the fervor of a new discovery. I coat strands of my ethereal body in the disembodied soul’s membrane. A strand of the coated ethereal body touches the soul projection and actually forces it to move to the side.

I’m under no illusions that I directly pushed my soul; rather, my soul’s projection reacted to the presence of the foreign soul, moving away on its own volition. The real question is: How can I use this discovery to empower Maria’s End array to deploy a payload into the soul?

Maybe it’s time to go back and give things another try.

—

It’s been several hours since I’ve returned. Maria and I have been experimenting continuously, trying new refinements, convinced that a small change may hold the key to success.

Crystal once again allows me to see through Maria’s eyes. We’re on the pentacle, Maria behind me with her hands on my shoulders like before. The End array forms around me, a sanguine mandela centered on my hips. I wait until it’s complete; Maria’s red arrow forms into a thick cord and compresses down as it merges with my violet fate arrow.

A disembodied soul is in my off hand. I drag it over and pinch a section, pulling it like taffy and pushing the stringy protrusion into my chest, where my ethereal body can take over. I direct the disembodied soul’s offshoot toward the snake-like violet arrow...and wrap it around the arrow’s head like a cap.

“Now.”

Maria grunts. The violet arrow launches forward like a harpoon, stabbing into my soul. At first I don’t feel anything. The seconds pass and Maria and I both wait in nervous anticipation, our hearts thrumming like wingbeats.

Not another failure...

Just when Maria motions to end the array, I feel a twinge in my soul.

“Stop!” I bellow. “I sense something.”

Maria flinches and nods. “What do you feel exactly?”

Describing the discomfort is difficult. “It’s almost like...an uneasiness in my soul. It’s rotating for seemingly no reason–it’s normally stationary.”

The seconds tick on and the soul begins to rotate faster, swiveling madly, as though trying to get away from Maria’s serpentine End arrow.

A piece of my ethereal body begins to tear from the soul’s movement. I can tell that if this continues, I might not like the consequences.

“Okay, stop,” I command.

The violet End arrow freezes, then snaps away before disappearing. But even though the array is deactivated, my soul continues to spin.

Lovely.

“Kill yourself,” Crystal suggests; I sense worry in her tone.

Just a bit longer, I tell her. We need to know whether this can hurt Karanos or not.

“Dunai, the experiment’s over,” Maria says, voice raised in alarm. “Open your eyes.”

“Just a bit more,” I reply, trying not to let myself be distracted.

“You...” Maria clenches her jaw, then looks toward Crystal. “Fine.”

I was worried that she’d try and force me to stop, but in the end she recognizes the need to take risks. Like Eury, when I practiced killing and reviving myself in the rift.

Parts of my soul begin to anneal, peeling up like birch bark.

A little longer...

I sense cracks beginning to form over its surface like tectonic plates.

But none of this would be enough to harm Karanos.

Finally...I sense my soul beginning to wobble, collapsing in on itself. I realize that I’ve let things go too far.

How do I stop? I wonder, suddenly overcome with horror. I don’t know how to stop.

“Kill yourself!” Crystal repeats, mental voice filled with urgency. I sense the fish scraping at the ground in agitation with her claws.

Ah, right. Smiling stupidly, my body feeling sluggish, I crush both my heart and then my brain.

Everything turns black.