I explode into motion, fueled by panic and terror. As is our habit, I sleep when most of the rest of the team is awake to ensure that while the longest-range scout is down, we are at our best versus potential ambushes. This time, I had been in a particularly deep and comfortable sleep thanks to Mateo curling around me like a loyal snake-monster cocoon. I think I was even having a nice dream for once, though I don't really remember it.

This all ends in an instant as Alan's soul becomes dust. Body raging and tentacles writhing, I leap over Mateo's flank and burst towards Norah and Bently, furious scream ripping itself from my throat.

"You fucking monsters!" I shriek, tackling Bently in the gut. "You dusted him! You killed him permanently!"

Bently staggers backwards but catches me without falling, grabbing my comparatively tiny wrists and struggling to fight my soul-enhanced strength. Snarling, I wrap tendrils around his core, causing him to immediately drop me in terror. Should I do it? Do I kill him? No, no, what am I thinking? It’s Bently. I can’t… but why would they do this, how could they do this?

"Vita!" Norah shouts, "Vita, stop! He told us to! Look, I'll show you!"

She points in front of the body— oh fuck, he's dust, he's nothing but dust now, my beautiful cake full of swords— and my eyes focus on part of the ground that looks like someone scratched half a conversation with a stick into the dirt.

Hello to you too, Norah.

I am all right, all things considered. Yourself?

Strange, but not as bad as you’d think.

I do, yes.

Just a nice, normal conversation. Alan can’t talk but he can write. There’s no one writing back, Norah and Bently were presumably speaking aloud and waiting politely for the words to be scratched into the dirt. The conversation continues, neat and orderly. It doesn’t take long until it’s about me.

Miss Vita is an odd sort, but a good sort.

In general? Well, animancy is illegal of course.

I don’t think there’s any need to worry about Miss Vita.

My good, loyal Revenants. I know I shouldn't think like that, I know that forcing loyalty on someone is messed up. But I also know that I love it. It's just what I am, I suppose. They are comfortable, they are safe. They are so much easier than normal people.

I’m not sure. It just feels wrong to not use a title, I suppose.

Norah must have asked about the name. “Miss Vita.” Honestly, I don’t even know why so many of them like calling me that.

She saved my life. Should I not be grateful?

Of course you should! You’re welcome!

I suppose that isn’t untrue.

Why would she be messing with my head?

Not on purpose?

The fuck is this shit? Are they purposefully steering the conversation towards my Revenants being mind controlled? I explicitly tried to not let on… ugh. I glance up at Norah with my soul-eye, physical ones still reading. She’s scared. No, mortified. She suspected I’d been mind controlling for a while now and wanted to be wrong. Turns out she wasn’t.

I just want to live. I know the Watcher waits for me, but when I look at her I just want

Cut off, huh? Didn’t even let him finish.

You might be right.

You’re right. How did I not

I love her so much

I’m an abomination.

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck! She twisted him! She… she took him from me! I… okay, maybe I twisted him first. He was religious. I knew that. He probably would have agreed with Norah had he been alive. But he was wrong! Their religion is wrong! And now he’s dust and he won’t ever get to… aagh!

You have to destroy me.

No! When she wakes up I’ll see her face and

Yes. I mean it. Send me to the Watcher. The others too.

Free us.

“Fuck you, Norah!” I hiss. Am I crying?

“Vita, he asked us to do this,” Norah snaps back. “You were messing with his head! Bently and I agreed on this, this is beyond fucked up! They need to move on to the afterlife, you never told us you were—”

“You shattered him you stupid bitch!” I shriek. “Even if your god wasn’t going to eat him anyway there is nothing left. Everything was linked to the bones and you crushed them and now he’s gone forever! He doesn’t get an afterlife anymore!”

Pangs of hostility behind me caused me to tear my gaze off of Norah, rotating my inner eye completely around to stare at Mateo and Netta. The latter has knocked and drawn her bow, face furious as she aims at Norah. Mateo coils towards Bently, power gathering in his soul as his massive body slithers forward, shaking with grief. A split second later, Orville draws his bow as well, aiming towards Mateo. Penelope, who has been napping even though she's not technically supposed to, rouses quickly, blinking twice at the scene and scowling with the sort of bland irritation she might have at an overcooked meal.

"What did I miss?" she grumbles.

"Two of yours killed one of ours," Netta growls, air magic already starting to swirl around her arrow.

"We'll sssee how they like it," Mateo hisses.

"Netta, hey, don't..." Orville begs, swallowing nervously. "Don't make me fight you."

"You're being mind controlled!" Norah shouts, drawing and raising her shield. "Can't you see that?"

"I just… he asked us to," Bently whines. "He was in so much pain. He was shaking. I just thought—"

"Everyone shut up and stand down!" I shout.

Mateo halts immediately, but Netta twitches, fighting to keep her bow drawn.

"Down, Netta," I snap again, and with a shutter she releases the tension in her body, pointing her weapon back down to the ground.

"Do you see what I mean?" Norah hisses, gesturing to me.

"Fuck! You!" I fume, turning my eye back her way. "I just saved your life, again, and you’re fucking demonizing me for it! Again! Do you think I asked for this? Do you think I did this on purpose? This is just how my power works!"

"So you knew that your power mind controls people and you just didn't tell us?" Norah asks. "Is that supposed to make me feel better?"

Damnit, I thought it was a good thing that Norah was finally starting to talk with the Revenants and treat them like people, but it was just giving her the chance to figure out how weird being a Revenant makes them! I thought it would be unfair to trap them inside me rather than let them walk around since we’re in the forest anyway and everybody knows about them. Why do I keep getting my ass bitten off whenever I try to do something nice!?

"I'm sorry," Bently squeaks, somehow seeming so tiny despite his massive frame. "Alan was just so scared and Norah was freaking out and Alan begged us, he begged us to—"

"So correct me if I'm mistaken here," Penelope chimes in, stretching and adjusting her armor as she stands, "but you're saying that someone requested an assisted suicide, someone who hadn’t wanted to die mere minutes beforehand, someone that you definitively identified as being mentally compromised... and you said yes?"

Bently tries to shrink even further.

"It's not a fucking suicide, he's already dead!" Norah snaps.

"Oh, shove it five feet up your ass!" Netta barks. "I'm missing an eye and I can see that's bullshit!"

"You can't fucking tell me that Vita isn’t messing with your head," Norah counters. "She literally just forced you to do something. Right in front of all of us."

"Yeah, you're fucking welcome," I growl.

"Of course I know that, I'm not an idiot," Netta spits back, and she probably would have spat more literally if she was still capable. "I just don't see why that means you get to stomp my teammate's bones into powder like a Watcher-damn barbarian! There are reasons for what we do, for the laws we have and the policies we follow. Hunters destroy the undead because the souls are tortured and violent, a danger to everyone. Do I look tortured or violent to you?"

"You just aimed a bow my head!"

“And you just murdered my team leader. What’s your fucking point?”

We're all drowning in shit now, and I don't know how to swim. Part of me just wants to rip the souls out of Norah and Bently and call it even, but I push that part down and bottle it up. What went wrong here? How can I make it right? I don't understand enough about people to know what Norah wants from me, but I have to try something.

"Norah, if you had talked to me about this we could've worked something out," I try.

"Then why didn't you say anything?" she counters.

"Well… I was afraid you'd freak out!" I defend honestly. "Which you did!"

"I freaked out because you didn't tell me! Why the fuck would you expect me to not freak out when I learn my friend has mind control powers!?"

"I don't have 'mind control powers!'" I insist. "That's cognimancy, and I can't do that. It's just that when I bring someone back from the dead, I have to take out a bit of my own soul and put it in them to make them work, so—"

"You've been mutilating your own soul!?" Norah yelps. "Vita we need to get you in to see someone that can help you!"

"You will do no sssuch thing," Mateo warns, slithering closer. "Vita hasss made herssself clear on the matter."

"Siccing the monster you made out of a human on me is not going to change my opinion on how badly you need help," Norah growls, activating her talent in anticipation of an attack.

"I am not siccing anyone!" I insist. "And don't call him a monster! My Revenants are just instinctively loyal, okay? It's not on purpose! I'm trying to figure out how to fix it!"

"You should just be letting the Watcher fix it!" Norah snaps at me.

"What, like you? You didn't leave anything for the Mistwatcher to collect! I saved his soul, but you shattered it!"

"You can't just smack someone hard enough that they don't go to the afterlife, Vita!"

I narrow my eyes, lips twisting into a snarl. She really thinks she knows better than me here, huh?

"You wanna bet?" I ask coldly, walking towards her. "Are you going to let the animancer educate you on how fucking souls work? Or are you going to keep acting like I don't know as much as a random idiot preaching in a fancy hat?"

"Vita," Norah breathes, "don't make me—"

"Don't make you what?"

I stare her down for a few moments, remembering to use the eyes in my head to make sure she knows it. Then I walk right past her, pull a shard from my body, and stick it into a nearby tree. The web of veins extruded from my shard twist up into each and every branch and down through the deepest root.

"Bodies are just objects," I tell her, projecting my voice so everyone can hear. "They're special only in that when a soul is inside one, the Mistwatcher doesn't reach up to eat it. But I can technically make a zombie out of anything, as long as it isn't already alive in the way that matters. Bend towards me, Dreg."

I order my tree and it obeys, branches creaking and crackling as every single one of them attempts to twist in my direction. My team watches in silence, having finally shut the fuck up.

"Zombies don't use eyes to see, they don't use ears to hear, they don't use noses to smell, and they don't use muscles to move. A tree can't normally move itself, but as you can see this one moves anyway because I gave it a soul, and the structure of that soul is shaped to snake through it, anchor to it, meld with it and become tangible to it and only it. The soul moves the vessel. But the vessel also moves the soul."

I am furious, and I take my time with the lecture just to give myself something to help calm me down. She doesn’t believe souls can break, that souls can become irrecoverable. Norah thinks she did a good thing, rather than dooming a kind man to permanent nonexistence. I can’t fucking believe her. I reach up to a branch, grab it, and break it off.

"Snap," I say. "Oops, this part of the soul is broken now. Disconnected. Gone. Most souls can recover from that. Living souls aren't damaged when the body is damaged because they don't act like this, at least not usually. But in the undead, the soul is tied to each and every bit. So when you smash too much of it..."

I glance up at the tree.

"Bend," I order again.

My Revenants flinch, both of them twisting their bodies a little to fulfill the letter of the order, but the Dreg I made from this tree has no such intelligence. The branches creak as they twist, and soon they start to break. Snapping and shattering, one by one at first, but soon they start to clatter like a waterfall to the forest floor in a horrible cacophony of death. A second of this passes until finally the tension is too much and the strength of the remaining soul is too little. My shard shatters, the tree jerking suddenly back into its prior position, well over half its limbs splintered on the ground. A small price to pay to make my point heard.

No one speaks. No one even moves.

"It breaks," I explain. "You can't put a fucking soul back together like a bunch of puzzle pieces, Norah. Souls can be sturdy. Souls can recover from a lot of damage. But when I say a soul is shattered, what I mean is that the constituent parts left of what it once was have become so small that they no longer hold form. They lose whatever fragments of memory and personhood they used to possess, returning to nothing but raw energy that can be slurped up like the last bits of stew in a bowl. That is why you can smack someone hard enough to deny them the afterlife. That is what you fucking did to Alan. That is why you needed to talk to someone that actually knows what they're doing instead of assuming that that person is you!"

I glower at everyone, Penelope having taken particular interest in my rant while the others just seem shocked and mildly mortified. I let the silence stretch, having already said everything I intend to.

"…Fine, we'll do things your way," Norah manages quietly. "I'm sorry. We just did what he asked us to do what we thought was right. Yeah?"

She glances over to Bently with that, who nods in agreement despite his obvious horror at the entire situation.

"He asked us to free the others too," Norah says slowly, "but I guess you're right that it's not his call. I'll back off."

"You expect usss to just let you get away with it?" Mateo growls. "He wasss my best friend."

"Seconded on that, you overgrown bitch," Netta agrees sharply.

Norah glances at me and I scoff with disgust. Now she wants me to save her with mind control? As Netta and Mateo tense for combat, however, Orville, Norah, and a hesitant Bently do the same. I'm tempted to just let them all fight it out; it's not like my Revenants would lose and the whole thing would officially become not my problem. However, as I glance around I notice behind me that Penelope shakes her head, ever so subtly. Her soul is insisting that no, fighting here would be a terrible idea. I suck on the inside of my lip and think for a second. Yeah, it's not exactly a great look if Penelope and I come back as the only survivors. Could the Templars use that as an excuse to pound through the wall of bureaucracy Penelope and her fiancé set up and start officially investigating me? It's probably not worth the risk.

"Sorry Mateo, Netta, but I do expect you to let her get away with it. Or at least keep her alive. On the condition, of course, that she agrees to not tell anyone when we get back to Skyhope."

"Vita, are you fucking serious?" Norah hisses at me.

"Why would I not be serious? If you go and blab to the church about me, I die. It seems like a pretty serious situation to me."

"You're not going to fucking die!" Norah insists. "The Templars aren't evil maniacs! The church can help you, Vita! You're a victim, they'll understand that!"

"Norah, I am Penelope's slave because Galdra the fucking Annihilator picked me up by the throat while a Templar captain prepared to skewer me through the spine!"

"I can confirm that," Penelope agrees blandly. "After we were nearly killed by the Mistwatcher, the High Templar blamed Vita for causing it and would have executed her on the spot if I hadn't intervened."

"Well we don't have to go to Galdra of all—"

"Norah," I intone dangerously. "Do you agree to keep this secret or not? For that matter, Bently? Orville? Penelope? Are any of you going to get me fucking killed?"

After only a few seconds, Orville shakes his head no and relaxes his body. I figured he would fall in my camp, considering how much he cares for Netta. Bently caves soon after, completely crumpling under the social pressure. I'm confident he'll keep the secret. I of course already know where Penelope stands, I just didn’t want to single her out via exclusion. After nearly half a minute, Norah agrees to not tell anyone as well. We pack up and we start the last leg of the journey back to Skyhope.

The only problem being that Norah was lying.

An hour later, I ask her again if she plans to tell anyone. She says no, still lying. Half an hour after that, I ask again. Lying. When we're almost to the edge of the forest I ask her one final time.

"Watcher’s eyes, Vita, no! I’m not going to tell anyone! Why the fuck do you keep asking?"

"Because I can see your soul, Norah," I sigh. "I told you guys that already. I can tell when you don’t believe what you say."

"Vita, come on, don't give me that shit. I won't sell you out or betray you or whatever you're afraid of!"

I step in front of her, halting our progress through the forest.

"Norah, this is a matter of life and death for me. You know that. I need you to give me an honest answer."

"I did," Norah snaps. "Vita, I'm serious."

"I feel you making justifications," I growl. "You writhe and twist, you feel hard and hollow. You're lying."

"Vita…" she starts.

"Give me an honest answer or I will kill you," I tell her frankly.

Silence. Everyone turns to stare at me. Shock, grim resignation, fear… agreement from Penelope, which is reassuring. Still, I don't want to do this. The last thing I want is to do this. But I will not sit back and let her get me killed, even if it means getting her first. I cannot die. Not when I'm the only hope for Penta, for Angelien, for Lyn, for Rowan, for all the kids, for every human I've picked up and stored inside me. I will not let their souls get crushed to dust by the monster that waits below. So I will not, must not die.

"W-what do you expect me to say?" Norah asks me, stepping back.

I step forward, tendrils coiled and ready.

"Tell me the truth. Change your mind before you say no again, or tell me the honest yes and let me convince you otherwise."

"You just want me to... to stand here and wait for you to convince me that animancy is okay?" she asks incredulously.

"Yes," I say simply. "I don't want to kill you, Norah, but I will not let you kill me."

"Hey, isn't this a little… extreme?" Orville hedges.

"She's making it about me or her," I snap. "What do you expect me to do, fall over and wait to get skewered by Templars?"

"Sh-she could be telling the truth," Bently stammers. "What if you're wrong?"

"I'm. Not. Wrong," I answer through clenched teeth. "I am very, very tired of having to explain that I'm not wrong."

"Vita," Norah pleads, reaching a hand out towards my shoulder, "I promise you, I—"

The moment she touches me her talent activates, solidifying and hardening every joint in my armor. My whole body freezes like a statue as she kneels, bringing my body to the ground. I'm well aware that no amount of straining will allow my limbs to move the hardened shell she has created around me, even with my enhanced strength. As I'm laid carefully on my back, my Revenants burst into action immediately. Yet they're too close to her. She activates her hardening talent on their bodies, something not possible for her with living flesh but apparently easy enough to use on two dead Revenants at once. Her talent is strained to the absolute limit, but even the massive Mateo falls.

"Bently!" Norah orders. "Pull them closer so I can touch them, or I won't be able to keep this up! We're going to get Vita to someone that can help and keep her safe. Okay? No one has to—"

"What did you expect this to accomplish?" I ask, and rip out her soul.

Silence falls along with her body as I stand back up, cracking my neck. I nestle her inside me, carefully inserting her in that special place right next to Angelien and Penta. Norah had been my friend, one of the few I have ever had.

"What?" I snap at my team, refusing to cry. "I warned her."