We find Ash meditating in the Beginning geode, hovering perfectly in the center of the crystals. When we get close enough to converse, he somersaults out of the enclosure, coming to a stop on the patchy grass, sprawling on his back. His black, chitinous armor makes a peculiar mewling sound, and multiple insect legs appear at the edges of his armor and claw at the ground, reminding me of a cat kneading its claws into a blanket.

“Hello, Ash.”

“I’ve been giving the problem at hand some thought,” he says. “Becoming an ancient has injured your soul, but the mechanism isn’t clear to me. It’s an intriguing problem.”

“That’s not why I’m here,” I state, pointing to the fiery circlet. “I want your help discerning the purpose of this artifact.”

“You can figure it out yourself with Beginning.”

“I’ve already tried, to no avail.”

He chuckles. “Not within the Beginning confluence, you haven’t. It’s still day, so the ethereal floes are active. Go inside the confluence point.”

My patience wanes. “The confluence will increase my affinity by only a few percentages. I don’t think it’ll matter. The least you can do is inspect this artifact.”

He raises an eyebrow, evidently unimpressed by my argument.

You need to tie it back to training, Maria suggests. He thinks you’re taking a shortcut. The easy path.

Fine. “The crown might allow me to train faster,” I explain. “The cloak lets me use Maria’s fire elementalism in a limited capacity, while the bracers allow me to manifest an End avatar.”

That immediately captures Ash’s attention. “Show me.”

I jump off the ground and the cloak activates, rocketing me into the air. I wrestle the flaming cape wings to the sides and they slow my fall to the grass. He doesn’t seem too impressed, probably because he’s seen flying artifacts and even made some of his own.

But when I activate the bracers and my End avatar manifests, he shuffles from foot to foot in excitement and grins. “Try to break this oath.” He flicks his fingers and a complex inscription appears in the air and remains floating. It solidifies to looks like a translucent square tile the size of a pizza box.

“What does it do?”

“Doesn’t matter. Break it.”

I test the tile by putting my hand through it, confirming that it’s not physically present.

Maria, can you handle this?

If I were in my own body right now, I wouldn’t need to make any physical gestures to attack an oath this close. I’m going to ask you to make a thrusting motion toward it.

With my hips?

Hilarious, she says dryly. Jab with your hand toward the tile’s center, then make a circle around it.

I see the End avatar following my movements as I step toward Ash’s oath and strike with my right hand. The first time I wave my hand around the tile, nothing happens.

“That was without Maria helping,” I explain. The second time, the oath tile crumbles as my hand moves clockwise around it. When the circle is complete, the tile bursts into dust and dissipates. “And that was with Maria.”

“So she has to help you willingly?” Ash asks.

“I think so.”

“She’d be more effective acting on her own, rather than as a pair of bracers,” Ash comments. “But that’s only in a frontal confrontation. This artifact has a remarkable capacity for deception.”

“In what way?” I ask.

“You’re now an ancient,” Ash points out. “But unless someone tests your affinities and verifies you have no talent for Sun and End, you could trick them into believing you’ve acquired five affinities.” He frowns. “That’s one more affinity than me.”

“I don’t think that bluff would hold up to inspection.” I can vaguely sense the affinities of others with my decemancy. Anyone with a similar ability would be able to see I don’t actually have Sun or End. “I don’t even have red ascendant energy–how could I already be an ancient with five affinities when that supposedly takes many thousands of years?”

Ash waves his hand dismissively. “It takes longer than that, but I digress. You’re too rooted in the now. Think of the future, when you do have red ascendant energy. There is another side to this deception, one more relevant to you now. The ability to use End affinity to break oaths is not to be underestimated. Someone like Achemiss who knows you don’t have an End affinity–and who does not possess one himself–may try to place you under an pre-written oath if you meet him to conduct business.”

“I thought ascendants didn’t care much for oaths, since dying is an easy way to break them.”

“Dying is also rather obvious,” Ash says, his expression humorous. “If you died, Achemiss would be able to activate defensive artifacts. And if Maria tried to break any oaths, he’d be ready for it. He would be able to sense and feel her affinities with his practice, so she wouldn’t be able to surprise him. But you, he wouldn’t suspect, and all you need is a moment to activate the return beacon.”

What Ash says makes sense, but– “I was told that ascendants deal in the currency of integrity. Would using these methods against Achemiss cause problems for me down the line?”

Ash laughs, his fangs glistening in the daylight. “Only if he survives, and that implies you failed and are already dead.”

Ouch, Maria transmits.

“But take it from me, integrity is overrated,” Ash adds. “Without it, I’ve done just fine. Get enough power and people don’t care what you’ve done, only what you can do for them. Make yourself too useful to be ignored, too powerful to cross, and you’ll do just fine.”

“Why is that better than living inconspicuously and avoiding attention altogether?”

He laughs. “Then people will never visit!” Eyes erupt all over his armor like pustules, blinking out of sync. He shrugs. “Some people live that way, but Eternity doesn’t like it. Trouble finds them inevitably. In contrast, trouble tends to avoid me.” He gives me a crooked grin. “Happens when you get a reputation for scaring people.”

I rub at the bridge of my nose. “Going back to my original question–can you help me figure out this crown artifact?”

Ash suddenly appears in front of me, his eyes glued to the flaming circlet. He waves his hand through it and frowns as the fire flickers and bends. He steps back and gives me an appraising look. “I think we need to find you some souls.”

—

Ash volunteers to collect some souls–how, I have no idea–while Maria and I stay behind to train. He comes back a few hours later with seven of them caught in a fine-mesh net.

“Tell me more about how you see souls,” I ask him, intrigued. “My whole life I was told that only necromancers could see and interact with them.”

“Tell me what you already suspect,” Ash implores me.

“Death uses souls as vessels to invest meaning and create artifacts. Life allows practitioners to take meaning from souls and use it, I guess, though I’m not sure how.”

He smiles. “Let me make a demonstration, then. I can’t touch souls like you can, so I have to rely on tools.” He pulls out a black hook seemingly from thin air. It passes through the net and into one of the souls. Normally, souls would bob away from physical implements, so the hook must be a special tool. He pulls the hooked soul out of the net, forcing it through. Afterwards, the soul’s outer surface layer looks choppy, almost like the texture of an oil painting.

“Necromancers make constructs by investing will into them,” Ash says, dropping the net to the ground. “The bread and butter for the profession are disembodied souls. That’s not a requirement–necromancers can make constructs from the souls of the freshly deceased, retaining some of the skills and memories of the departed.

“For Life practitioners, disembodied souls are almost useless. We need souls that still have purpose. Typically, Life practitioners who practice soulcraft grab souls from the living.” He shakes the hook and the soul jiggles. “Seeing that I only have disembodied souls, I’ll do my best to show you what a Life practitioner can do, though the effects will be unsatisfactory.”

He plucks a wildflower with his off hand and cuts its head open with a sharp nail. “Within this flower are seeds–beads of potential. But the seeds are limited in what they can become. With the help of Life affinity, I can change the form of the flower, allowing it to grow into something other than its natural blueprint.”

I can barely see the seeds that Ash refers to, but he pinches the flower and flicks the seeds over the ground. In seconds, they’ve already grown several inches. Before a minute has transpired, six cat-shaped creatures stand before us that are entirely made of plant fiber.

“They can’t reproduce. They’re not real, as you and I are. They are my creations, and unlike your constructs in that they retain their independence.”

“Maria still has her independence,” I say.

Ash just smiles. “But watch as I add a disembodied soul.”

Ash withdraws a pair of transparent pliers, a filament of dark-violet energy crackling throughout its interior. He raises the pliers to the soul and drags it–a watery orb with royal blue coloring its center–off the black hook and over to one of the plant cats. The creature cocks its head in confusion at the tool.

Ash suddenly suffuses the cat with vital energy, the creature glowing green. He then plunges the pliers into the cat’s chest and stimulates the growth of woody fibers around it, sealing the implement inside. The cat stills, then sits up. Its tail flicks back and forth, but all curiosity and intelligence has fled, replaced by vapidness. You can just tell that something crucial has been lost.

“You killed it,” I state, trying to understand what I’ve just witnessed. “You killed it by giving it a soul.”

Ash shakes his head. “I sealed the cat’s template with an empty shell. It’s more real and alive than ever before, but it–and any theoretical progeny–will be stunted by the poor initial quality of the soul I used. You need a strong soul to start an intelligent race that successfully self-replicates.”

“The people of my world’s past considered creating intelligent life the domain of gods,” I mutter. “Back when my world was filled with temples dedicated to powerful practitioners and ascendants, when rulers were also avatars of divinity. None of them created new intelligent life, which was why they weren’t considered true gods, only close to it.”

“And now it seems so simple, doesn’t it?” Ash says.

I chuckle. “If it were simple, then others on my world would have found a way.” Vracoola made intelligent life to inhabit his plane, but his power as a Life practitioner was immense, suffusing the plane with almost limitless vital energy. On that plane, he was genuinely god-like.

Ash smirks. “These pliers are worth far more to me than your dagger.” He waves his hand and the plant creatures self destruct, their bodies erupting with overgrowth. His arm darts down to retrieve the pliers.

“Where did the soul go?” I ask.

“It was consumed,” Ash explains. “It’s also what happens when a corrupted soul enters a body.”

That’s terrible, Maria thinks sullenly.

“Unfortunately for your world, souls are mandatory.” He gives me a quizzical look. “You know why, don’t you?”

“Souls are seeds of chaos. They’re the reason why humans rise above humble beginnings and create civilizations.”

“You don’t really understand what that means,” Ash asserts. “No one has shown you what happens to worlds like yours where souls are corrupted. Ask Karanos when you get back–it’s easier to explain with Light affinity. Or, if you get good enough, use your Remorse affinity to see for yourself through my memories.”

He coughs and gestures to the net filled with souls. “Back to the task at hand. Take your pick of the lot. A necromancer shouldn’t need my tools to touch them.”

I bend down and reach out; my hand passes through the net. The mesh feels like water on my skin. I grab a turquoise soul and hold it in my hand, the thicker nails of my transformed form clutching the soul with ease, then pull it out. The soul resists passing through, but a sharp tug is enough.

“What do I do with it?”

Ash shrugs. “I think it’ll interact with the embers above your head.”

I give him a dubious look. Do you feel anything, Maria? Any hunches?

No. Might as well give his suggestion a try.

I bring the soul to my head, then release it experimentally. In an instant, faster than my perception can follow, one of the embers siphons up the soul.

“Wait, what?” I cry, passing my hand through the greedy ember.

Ash’s grin is manic. “I still have five more.”