The final weeks pass slowly. I feel like I’m trudging through a swamp, or back in the loop, spinning my wheels. I’m tired of the grind. I want to leave this plane and never return. I want to see Crystal, Sah, Karanos, and visit friends like Messeras and little Jimmy, and maybe even taste of Cayeun Suncloud’s insane hospitality.

But then I think of Germaine, of Euryphel, of Soolemar, of the princes and guardians of the former SPU. I think of the Vindradoons in Gnoste, of my extended family in Feather, and my hometown of Jupiter. I think of Academia Hector and my cheering classmates... and finally, I think of Selejo, a place to which I have complicated ties, but one that means everything to Maria.

Ash considers my world small and ephemeral. He and Karanos only see it as a means to kill Achemiss. As members of the white faction, they’d rather the world produce ascendants slowly but steadily for years to come, rather than succumbing to soul corruption, but ultimately they’re not going to let the less-than-ideal fate of my world bother them.

In many ways, the more time I spend in Eternity, the more I sympathize with Ari. She wasn’t cold and impassive. She didn’t come to deliver judgment upon me and ignore the soul corruption infecting my world. She was angry. More specifically, she cared enough to be angry.

I obviously disagree with how she decided to act–triggering a natural disaster level calamity that would level Selejo and send shockwaves to ravage the surrounding areas–but I get it. I can see why Karanos chose her to be his protege, and why he eventually developed a complicated relationship with her. To old, burnt-out, jaded ascendants, Ari must have shone like a bright, boundless star.

Eternity challenged her spirit, but never broke her.

Achemiss did.

I always thought that Achemiss was just an opportunist and that Ari’s death was random. I see now that orchestrating the killing of a random ascendant wouldn’t have been worth Achemiss’s time. Ari was a coldly calculated murder designed to rile up the white faction. A more important question is whether it was a targeted attack on Karanos.

I’ve been using my Beginning affinity to better understand the motivations behind Achemiss’s actions, but my conclusions are as limited as my knowledge. I’ll need to get more concrete information from Karanos when I return.

I get up from the ground and yawn, motioning for Maria to continue our spar. We’ve been fighting in the air space above the Sun confluence canyon, floating down periodically to the rocky plateaus to recharge our mental batteries. Maria dives into a deep stretch, reminding me of a limber feline, her spine supple as her hands press firmly against the ground. As I reach for her hand, intending to interrupt her stretch before we fly skyward, Ash speaks.

“Both of your new affinities are above 50%, Ian,” he says, his serious tone demanding our attention. “You can remain conscious without the dagger’s metamorphoses for twenty-eight hours, wielding the power of an ancient.” He turns his focus on Maria and smiles. “You’ve also done well for yourself.”

She smiles stiffly. Ash must know she doesn’t like him.

“And when you combine your strength, even ascendants with red energy should have cause to feel threatened.” Ash’s next statement is long-coming, but it still hits me in the chest, filling me with apprehension. “With that being said, I’m not going to keep you both here forever–you’re ready to return.”

—

Crystal was bored. Extremely bored. She hadn’t even thought it was possible to be so bored until Ian and Maria left, leaving her in Voidkeep with Karanos, Sah, and a small number of faction ascendants who currently called Voidkeep their home.

The plane looked artificial, like someone had ripped a chunk of rock from reality and deposited it in the void, then covered it in a globe that stood in for an atmosphere. None of the other ascendants seemed to know for sure when she asked, which brought up another problem–she had to ask. The ascendants who stuck around Voidkeep possessed at least adequate mental defenses. They kept Crystal out of their thoughts, forcing her to make do with incoherent scraps of surface thoughts.

Sure, she could still read Sah’s mind, but there wasn’t much going on in there. The frost dragon mostly slept. He reminded her of the many other creatures she shared her home plane with for who knows how long. Time passed quickly back before she fully understood the allure of other sentient minds.

Before she realized what it was to be lonely.

Karanos sometimes entertained her, but he was often holed up with Kuin discussing who knows what. Once Karanos returned from a “discussion” after setting half of Voidkeep’s citadel on fire. The fire was aesthetic more than anything else–it’s not like the keep was flammable–but the flames had still been hot enough that Crystal felt them from the plane’s welcome hangar.

She spent most of her days there, waiting for someone to come by rift and open up a way for her to go to the city on the other side: Abyssinia. There were plenty of people there, mortals who knew precious little about ascendants. Crystal had found their minds open books when she’d briefly traveled through Abyssinia while accompanying Ian for the final round of the pageant.

Karanos had brought her to Abyssinia a few times, but he refused to let her stay there alone. She was a freakish anomaly to the natives, he said. She required active concealment by his Light affinity, he said. And when she claimed that she could just treat an excursion as a training exercise in doctoring memories, Karanos just shook his head and left.

As Crystal lamented how even Sah’s dreams about flying in the void were boring, Karanos appeared beside her. She hadn’t felt him coming, which made sense given his ability to move faster than she could perceive.

“Hello,” she transmitted, perking up.

Karanos gave her a half-smile, his eyes crinkling. “Minnow. You may be in for a treat, today.”

Her round, fishy eyes seemed to grow even wider, if that were possible. Her curiosity ran up against Karanos’s iron defenses. “What?”

“Farona Pyre has been keeping track of Ian and Maria for me with her End affinity, limited though it may be in Eternity,” Karanos explained. “She cannot see their arrows of fate, but she still feels something–a tug, or perhaps a breeze. It’s the slightest shifting of fate.”

Crystal didn’t have the expressive muscles of a mammal and didn’t look particularly excited. Most who saw her either considered her weird or goofy, and her bugged out eyes only enhanced that impression. But her Death energy legs were quivering with her anticipation. Even Sah seemed to realize something was happening and dragged himself up from the corner he’d curled up into, smoke curling from his nostrils.

“They’ll be coming soon,” he said.

And soon it was. Thirty minutes after Karanos arrived, space tore, though on the other side of the room. Ian clawed his way out of the darkness of the void, meaning that he hadn’t come through the standard Abyssinia entrance.

Crystal wasn’t surprised by the near-black hue and ruggedness of Ian’s skin. She’d seen how the dagger artifact transformed the necromancer several times before. She also wasn’t surprised by Maria’s absence since she assumed the lich was following on Ian’s heels, her arrival imminent.

No–what shocked Crystal into a stupor was the mental barrier around Ian’s mind. How had this happened? Even with Cayeun Suncloud working with him directly, Ian’s mental defenses had been unable to keep her out completely. In his time away, the necromancer had apparently found a way.

Crystal’s eyes shined as she bounded forward. “Not you too!” she cried out. “I thought you liked to share your thoughts with me.”

Suddenly the mental barrier dropped and thoughts exploded out for a moment before slowing to a trickle.

“Sorry,” Ian transmitted, though his mental voice sounded different, more forceful. “Habit. One of Ash’s artifacts could do automated mind attacks. I learned to keep my guard up.”

Crystal blinked, sorting through the torrent of information now available to her. It was a lot more than she expected. She’d known that Ash would take Ian and Maria to a dilated plane, but she hadn’t fully digested the ramifications.

Ian hadn’t seen her for years. But Crystal did what she did best and sorted through everything that she’d missed, inserting herself retroactively into Ian’s life.

“Crystal,” Ian murmured, rubbing his knuckles softly against her nose. “You don’t have to absorb everything at once.”

“I want to know what I missed.”

“Then better to read the beginning and end to get an initial understanding,” he replied.

Though slightly miffed, she recognized the wisdom. Ian’s thoughts were like layers of water with different density. His surface thoughts were, unsurprisingly, on the surface, with the older thoughts at the water’s bottom. She’d dove into the metaphorical murk until she found the beginning of Ian’s journey. Jumping to the end–just below the surface–was easier.

She almost didn’t understand what she found.

“Welcome back,” Karanos said, speaking for the first time. He peered into the still-closing tear in the veil. “Where is Maria?”

Crystal inhaled Ian’s thoughts but only grew confused by what she found. Did Ian have a sickness of the soul? She searched for the memories that showed the root of the predicament and came across something even more confounding.

Does Ian have two new affinities?

Ian’s smile faltered slightly. “Maria’s here already.”

He tapped his bracers. The wristguards, crown of six embers, and flaming cloak–all unfamiliar additions to Ian’s attire–disappeared. Having already seen Maria’s metamorphosis in Ian’s memories, Crystal expected her reappearance. Ian drooped as though weakened, but Maria side-stepped behind him and placed her hands upon his shoulders, squeezing. They smiled at one another, then disengaged, Ian standing under his own strength.

Maria gave Karanos a pointed look. “I used to think that you were a taskmaster.” Crystal noticed that the artifact Maria previously used to make herself appear more human was no longer present. Submerging herself deeper into Ian’s memories, she saw that they’d deposited the azure circlet in Ian’s void storage since it fell to the ground whenever Maria used the dagger artifact to transform.

Karanos chuckled. “Has your viewpoint changed?”

Her tone was dry. “A bit.” She nudged Ian on the arm. “How long until the transformation wears off?”

“A few more minutes,” he said, his eyes evading her gaze.

“You didn’t have to end my transformation early,” she chided.

Karanos’s brow furrowed slightly in confusion, but Crystal understood immediately what had happened. Over the final few months of their time training with Ash, Ian and Maria had grown more familiar with the nuances of controlling the dagger’s power. Ascendant energy worked through the dagger to levy an effect on whatever it touched, but Ian found a way to isolate and shift the energy of the transformation, allowing him to take the remaining charge and add it to his own body’s counter. He could do it with random objects too for a short while, turning them into batteries and allowing him to prolong how long he could go without the dagger artifact by a few hours.

That is the change that brought him over the edge, Crystal realized. The real reason why Ash finally agreed that he was self-sufficient and ready to leave. If Ian lost the dagger now, he’d still probably be screwed, but less so than at the outset when he’d fall unconscious after only a few minutes.

Ian stabbed the dagger into the hangar wall and breathed in sharply as his body returned to its normal form. The wall transformed into balloons that began to fly away. He genuinely seemed happy to see all of them. Crystal wondered if Kuin would be mad at the damage.

Karanos flinched, his hands flashing out reflexively. “I see new colors in your eyes,” he said.

“They’re as brown as ever,” Ian retorted.

“There’s a rainbow sheen over them like the skin of a bubble.” Karanos paused. “I know what I see, and what it means.”

“It means that I’m an ancient,” Ian replied simply. As he walked forward on unsteady legs, he laughed. “With my body like this, I certainly feel old.”