Maria hissed between clenched teeth as Ian wrung the energy of Beginning out of her for what felt like the millionth time. Her fingers popped off the crystallized Beginning deposit.

“Sorry,” he whispered. She could feel the tension in his muscles against her back.

“It is what it is,” Maria replied softly. “You know I’m anything but fragile. Again.” She clenched the Beginning tightly in her fingers, inviting the shock of blinding white static into her system. Ian siphoned it away almost as quickly as it came. She held on for as long as she could before, in her disorientation, her unfeeling fingers drifted from the Beginning spindles.

They practiced relentlessly, Maria taking the energy into herself and Ian stripping it out. Only when the ethereal energy ebbed did they stop and go their separate ways to cultivate nethereal attuned affinities, Ian focusing on Remorse and Maria on End.

The more they cycled Beginning together, the more convinced Ash became that the boon of rapid advancement didn’t act on a linear scale, but instead compounded. With that knowledge in hand, Ian and Maria raced to achieve the impossible. Ash even suggested at one point that Ian depart and bind more liches, but the necromancer had shut that idea down. I don’t understand why it worked the first time, he’d explained in exasperation. It was my emotion that made it possible. Without using a different technique, I couldn’t replicate that success unless resurrecting someone I cared about.

Maria had felt somewhat vindicated at that moment. She wasn’t just some common construct, easily replicated. Moreover, her resurrection had only been possible because Ian had cared about her. She hadn’t known concretely how Ian felt back on the lightless plane when they worked together to subdue Karanos. The man was tight-lipped when it came to his feelings. They’d built up a rapport after days of working together, but Maria had questioned the depth of his affections.

Their relationship only deepened after she became Ian’s construct; consequently, she held onto doubts that he only loved her because she was beholden to him completely. He didn’t treat her like a slave, but she’d be remiss to forget that a lich’s bond is, ultimately, to a master.

Maria had a vague understanding of Ian’s past and his parents. She knew how children inherited the sins–and more specifically, patterns of behavior–of their fathers. Both of Ian’s parents left much to be desired, the mother and father wielding manipulative emotional abuse as their weapons of choice to control, dominate, and demean. She saw the effects of their violence in Ian’s reticence to engage in political maneuvering and his desire to withdraw and be free of external quibbles.

Whenever night fell and she moved to practice her End affinity alone, her thoughts wandered to topics regarding the future and her relationship with Ian. She tried to remain focused, but it was hard when she effectively trained non-stop every day without breaks.

I know what I’m fighting for, Maria told herself as her eyelids began to drift shut. The future of Selejo–the future of our world. I won’t suffer regrets that I didn’t try hard enough.

The little black orb in charge of her curriculum interrupted her thoughts by repeating the current objective: “Externalization of End. Prerequisites: control over ascendant energy, peak End affinity. Objective: use the chaos of ascendant energy to ink End directly into existence. Step one…”

Ash kept them too exhausted to properly register the passage of time. Every moment was a bone-tired agony, drawn out, but when she tried to remember the past hours, all was cloaked in a haze. In this manner, the days flowed like water.

—

Liches didn’t have a need for sleep, but as Maria’s eyes snapped open, her body jolting to alertness in Ian’s lap, she felt like she’d overslept for a meeting.

“Ian,” she said suddenly, once she realized where they were. He didn’t answer her. In fact, his body felt cold. She gripped his folded legs and squeezed, trying to stimulate the ascendant to action. She whipped around and beheld Ian’s unfocused stare, his cheeks sallow, hair greasy, his body thin.

Ian hasn’t died and refreshed in...a long time. When did this become our new normal? At some point in their pursuit of power with Ash, Ian had given himself over entirely to bettering his practice, living like an ascetic. Looking at him now, she could imagine him sitting with the old monks in the state of Seven, where they allegedly subsisted off of pine needles and sat unmoving, waiting for the approach of death.

“Ash!” Maria called.

Suddenly the ancient was behind her. He grabbed her shoulders and shoved her away, then waved his hand. As Maria landed lithely on the crystals with her feet staggered, green light suffused Ian’s body, Ash’s vitality potent enough to be visible. Ian’s atrophied muscles regained their definition and his skin lost its pallor.

Ian blinked, then coughed and fell from the center of the geode onto the crystals, landing hard on his knees. He winced and cried out. Maria could see the white vitality of his blood darkening as it smeared the crystals. Ian staggered to his feet, then seemed to remember his faculties and hovered himself a foot above the uneven crystals.

He looked around with a dazed, yet oddly focused expression, reminding Maria of elders on the streets with untreated memory loss. It was as though everything was new, unfamiliar, and potentially dangerous.

Without warning, Ash slapped Ian across the face. The necromancer reacted on instinct to block the move, his arm shooting up in front of his face. Maria recognized the motion–back when they’d traveled with Karanos, she’d drilled Ian on combat maneuvers herself. It felt like those days were an eternity ago.

Blocking the slap seemed to have aroused Ian from his haze. He kept his eyes closed and his posture was subdued as he spoke. “Was it enough?”

“Look at the wristband and see,” Ash said.

Maria looked at it, noting the shift in the bracelet’s hue.

Ian kept his eyes closed. “It’s hard to look. Overwhelming in a way that Death and Remorse are not.”

Ash grunted. “Though I can’t speak from experience, Remorse will overwhelm once you leave this place and have countless thinking minds around you.”

“Perhaps.” Ian sighed. “I don’t need to look at the wristband to know. I suddenly–I just know things that I shouldn’t. See connections that I shouldn’t be able to see. If this is what I experience, you certainly can’t be using your Beginning at all times. Peak Beginning practitioners can’t–they would go insane.”

“Beginning is always active, but there is a method to leveraging its madness, ways to dial it back. You’re nowhere near the point of that being necessary, however. What do you reckon you awakened it as?”

“I shouldn’t have an answer to that question,” Ian began. “But as I think on it, memories I’ve long forgotten bob to the surface, interactions with Beginning practitioners throughout the course of my life. The memories come slowly, and many more feel like they’re just beyond my grasp.” He paused. “Beginning practitioners can be evaluated in terms of speed, accuracy, and concurrency. How quickly, how well, and how many questions can the mind process?”

Ian shook his head. “I think…something around 30%. Higher than Remorse.”

“Your affinity is 27%,” Ash corrected. “Now, open your eyes.” Ash turned to Maria. “If he doesn’t open them in five seconds, help him.”

Maria reached for his face, her hand cupping his cheek. Five seconds passed. She caressed a finger against his right eyelid, then pulled it gently upward, revealing a familiar brown eye. Ian blinked, his eyelashes fluttering against her finger. Grudgingly, he opened the other, staring at her contemplatively.

“Hello,” she said. “Are you well?”

“I think so.” He frowned. “My head feels like it’s going to burst, but I assume that will fade.”

But it didn’t fade–in fact, it only seemed to get worse with the passing hours. Ash had given them leave to exit the rift and make some calls using the transmission artifact, but Ian was in no state to activate it. Soon he was curled up on the ground, a bed of dead leaves cradling his head as a pillow.

“Why is he like this?” Maria asked, trying her best to constrain her accusatory tone.

“How could I know? He’s the youngest ancient possibly ever, and that’s no small achievement. We couldn’t know the ramifications when we set out on this path. But take heart–why would Eternity place us in his path, orchestrating this moment, only for Ian to falter after achieving the impossible?”

Maria didn’t have an answer, but she couldn’t dispel the unease in her chest. She considered calling Crystal or Karanos, but didn’t know what to say. She couldn’t find it in her to rifle through Ian’s void storage to retrieve the artifact.

A day passed. Ash and Maria waited next to Ian. At first Maria was surprised that Ash hadn’t corralled her away to work on her curriculum.

You won’t be able to focus with him like this, Ash had explained, unbidden. So stay with him. I won’t force you to leave.

After another day with Ian delirious and unresponsive, they decided to kill the necromancer and reset his body. “He’s already advanced as much as is reasonable,” Ash said. “He’ll keep the gains for the affinities he awakened.”

Ash let Maria do the honors. She killed him cleanly, severing his neck from his shoulders by creating a small tear in the veil. She could have incinerated him, but that felt too much like a cremation for her tastes. He’s not dead.

When Ian reappeared in the same catatonic state, Ash said words that tore Maria’s heart in half: “You know, it’s possible I might have broken him.” The delivery was casual, as though Ash were discussing the weather.

Maria blinked, her mouth agog. Before letting incipient anger consume her, she took a calming breath. Her anger was such that literal steam from her elementalism left her nostrils. He’s doing this on purpose, she reasoned. He knows exactly how to push my buttons. That he’s pushing them now means he wants to direct my behavior.

“You know how to fix him, then,” Maria postulated, her fists clenched.

Ash shrugged, then grinned. Maria wanted to slap the expression off his face. “There is usually more than one answer to any problem. Rather than sitting around twiddling your thumbs, why not try to use your gifts to save your man from oblivion?”

Maria felt like screaming, but a life at court gave her the skills to compartmentalize. Screaming wouldn’t solve her problems.

Why would learning a third affinity cause a young ascendant to break? Maria’s mind raced to think of a reason. The soul, she realized. There’s only one thing that remains static through deaths in Eternity–the soul. The more she considered, the more convinced she became. The soul was tied to affinity and the mind. It was defined by memory, and the weight of existence pressed upon it, shaping its tight, coiled structure within a person.

She only knew that because Ian had explained it to her. Understanding the anatomy of souls was critical to comprehending how corruption manifested itself upon them.

And a soul, lengthening with its longevity, coiling ever tightly inward...might it become unstable if set off kilter? A cup filled to the brim would remain upright in a breeze, while one filled only to the quarter mark might topple.

Maria didn’t know the answers to her many questions. More importantly, she had no idea how she was supposed to look into Ian’s soul. That was his domain as a necromancer–she had no such gift.

As she leaned over Ian, lost in thought, Ash cleared his throat. “You’ve been doing an awful lot of thinking. Let me spare you some of that effort–I’d suggest you try using End.”

Like Death, End affinity had the ability to influence the ethereal body, but it wasn’t the same. Maria still didn’t understand. She was so tired, so exhausted from everything. Her mind wasn’t working as well as it should.

Ash clicked his tongue. “If you want Ian to do something, make him. You have oaths, methods of applying compulsions upon those at your mercy.”

Maria bowed her head to him, thankful for the clearly-worded suggestion. She couldn’t deal with ambiguity and puzzles, not now.

An oath began to take form, draped over Ian like a gossamer spider web. Maria wrote it in carbonized ash, then anointed it with her practice. As her ascendant energy manifested, the array turned a burnished gold color and floated an inch. It began to slowly rotate before slamming down on Ian from all directions, folding to contour his body.

Maria took a special stylus from her storage and pricked Ian on the arm. When she withdrew it, a thread of blood trailed behind it in the air like a red bead of saliva. She made broad strokes over the existing array, emphasizing a hexagram otherwise obscured by all the other writings.

Ian’s blood steadily seeped into the array, dying the gold sanguine red.

It was a blood oath–fundamentally, one of the simplest and most barbaric of oaths in that it forced the bleeding party to perform actions without their consent. Observers back home wouldn’t recognize it for a blood oath, however–it was far more complicated than the generic blood oath employed by most. This one had a very tricky purpose, and Maria wouldn’t leave any detail to chance.

“Simple, yet exquisite,” Ash nodded approvingly.

Before she could properly appreciate the compliment, Maria’s spirit left her body and she found herself in darkness.