“Karanos, we need to talk about accelerating our plans. It’s time to go after Achemiss.”

“You’ve been back for thirty minutes,” the ascendant says, frowning. “You have two new affinities but they aren’t very good, and you’re tethered to that dagger. I’m not going to send you to die when another year of solidifying your foundation will significantly increase your chance of victory.”

“I don’t need more time,” I protest. “I’m not going to win through power alone. Achemiss has too many years on me, too many powerful artifacts at his disposal. My victory will come through deception and surprise.”

Karanos narrows his eyes but doesn’t interrupt. Kuin is also in the room and appears contemplative. I thought Karanos and Kuin didn’t get along, but Karanos apparently trusts the man enough to bring him into our discussion.

“He’s right,” Kuin says. “You’re being too conservative, Karanos.”

Karanos gives the man a sidelong look, as though half-accusing him of taking my side just to be annoying. “Achemiss won’t increase his power substantially in the next few years. Ian most definitely will–his speed of advancement is unnatural. While he may not overpower Achemiss in the end, he will have a greater margin for error if he’s closer to Achemiss in combat capability.”

I exhale sharply. “It still won’t make a difference.” My gaze is harsh. “I care about more than Achemiss–I have a world to save. Call me reckless, I don’t care, but the clock is ticking, and I’m tired of training.”

Maria stands next to me, offering silent support. I understand Karanos’s caution. He needs an ascendant from Achemiss’s home world to serve as an assassin. Finding such an individual in the boundless planes of Eternity is extremely unlikely. He has you, but if you fail, not only will Karanos lose his assassin, but Achemiss’s plans may come to fruition before Karanos can find another suitable candidate. Our world may fall, sooner rather than later, and then Achemiss’s immortality will be assured.

I know Karanos only has one shot, I mentally reply. But the stakes are greater for us. I’m wagering my life, and the lives of everyone on our world.

“Ian is right, Karanos,” Crystal says. “Too easily do ascendants fall into the trap of excessive caution. You have unlimited time–what is one more year? One more century?”

Karanos sighs. “You too, minnow?”

“You forget how young Ian is,” Crystal continues. “You need to let him go and do what must be done.”

Karanos clenches his fist, but finally nods “You’re all sure this is what you want to do? Ian won’t be acting alone. To succeed, it will take all of us.”

Maria smiles and crosses her arms, while Crystal rubs her head against my hips.

Kuin laughs in amusement, his fangs flashing. “The real question is whether you’re ready to commit. You’re the only one putting up a fuss.”

Karanos rolls his eyes. “Well, it’s not like I’ve been idle.”

Kuin raises an eyebrow. “You mean, we.”

“We,” Karanos agrees, inclining his head toward Kuin. “We didn’t expect Ian to come back as an ancient, but we spent the last month developing strategies to assassinate Achemiss. They’re all irrelevant now, obviously.”

I give him a mock apologetic expression. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to become so powerful…”

He scoffs. “It’s fine–it was more useful as an exercise than anything else. We always knew that we’d have to adjust them.”

Kuin smiles, his eyes glinting deviously. “What I will say is that you becoming an ancient gives us significantly more options.”

I place a hand on Maria’s shoulder and smile back.

“They do not even know half of what you and Maria can do,” Crystal notes.

Yep, I reply.

“Like you being able to use Maria’s End affinity and some of her fire elementalism when she’s transformed.”

Sounds like you have some interesting ideas of your own, I mentally reply.

“A few,” the fish says. “We shall see whose ideas are better, in the end.”

—

The plan we eventually decide on is complicated, but theoretically straightforward.

While I was gone, Kuin tried to track down information about Achemiss’s location, falling back on his connections as acting head of Voidkeep. However, the location of Achemiss’s lair was unknown to the information brokers in Kuin’s network.

Surprisingly, information on Achemiss came not from Kuin’s network but from a public announcement. The Hall of Ascension was recruiting Ari’s replacement. I didn’t recognize the name until Karanos pointed out that the Hall of Ascension was where I’d first come to when I ascended, where Holiday–formally known as Ascendant Crimson Teeth–had led me into the amber. The call for recruitment was in reality a competition to see who was most qualified for the role of descendant.

The white and black factions would be competing, along with other organizations who stayed free of the two factions’ enmity. The two factions had sent out calls for recruitment two weeks ago at large cities like Nuremvark with a critical mass of ascendant practitioners. They weren’t interested in weak ascendants–if any could really be considered weak. They were offering incentives to recruit powerful practitioners to their ranks, practitioners that would increase the chances of seeding one of their own within the Hall of Ascension.

The factions had powerful people among their ranks, but winning Ari’s seat when it had been offered up so publicly was a numbers game. Fresh faction recruits could be used to strategically bolster the chances of the most talented proteges by eliminating the competition.

I don’t know what incentives the white faction is offering for recruitment–that’s not relevant to our aims. I do know that the black faction has selected Achemiss to help outfit the most qualified new recruits with artifacts as an incentive.

If I posed as a new recruit, I wouldn’t have to worry about selling my dagger artifact to attract Achemiss’s attention as I originally planned. It would be easier and less frustrating than effectively catfishing the reclusive necromancer with a unique artifact. All I would need to do is infiltrate the black faction under a new identity and get close to Achemiss.

Straightforward, yes, but oh-so complicated. If I mess up and get caught, the black faction could imprison and torture me for who knows how long. They’re the faction that believes in worlds running short and bright, filled with chaos and war rather than peace and stability. I can’t see them being merciful to spies and assassins. I don’t want to think about what Achemiss will do to me if he unmasks me himself.

To infiltrate the black faction, I need to disguise myself. Enough has changed about my capabilities that it shouldn’t be immediately obvious to anyone who hasn’t met me that I’m Ian Dunai–they’ll be looking for a mono-affinity necromancer, not an ancient. But if I’m intending to meet Achemiss, the changes will need to be more dramatic.

They’ll need to be bone-deep.

In Eternity, our bodies aren’t static. When we die, our bodies are refreshed and restored, all damage repaired. That doesn’t mean that we’re frozen in time forever–when we intend for a change to take hold, it becomes permanent. Perhaps it’s imprinted on our souls, I truly have no idea how the mechanism works.

Most ascendants ascend later in life. In Eternity, they find ways to make themselves younger such as hiring ascendant Life practitioners to reverse the effects of aging. These changes are permanent–when those ascendants die, they retain their youth.

If I’m going to infiltrate the black faction, I need to change my appearance permanently, so that when I die I don’t revert back to my normal appearance. In the loop, I went past the point of no return countless times by shaping my flesh, turning myself into monstrosities. I only dared when I knew death brought a sure reversal–outside the loop, I’ve never trusted myself to make permanent changes.

If I want to use my practice to change form indefinitely, while retaining the ability to restore my original appearance, I need to perfectly memorize and remember everything about my original form. Painting a self-portrait is difficult, and that’s only in two dimensions. Try sculpting that. Then try modeling a physiological diagram of the inside. Try envisioning each tiny scaffold, every vessel, every mole and scar…

Most physiological elements aren’t important to get exactly right–it’s inconsequential if a blood vessel is shifted over by a millimeter. But the positioning of some elements, like nerves, is more finicky. If I wanted to make serious, substantive changes to my own body, I would still need to be able to recall extreme detail.

Life practitioners can create artifacts–rings of flesh shift–that allow them to change form, taking on a different pattern. That kind of transformation reminds me more of my dagger than anything else. It’s a sudden, all-encompassing metamorphosis that is perfectly reversible. I suspect it’s only possible through the miracle of ascendant energy, as I never saw such artifacts before coming to Eternity.

Normally rings of flesh shift are hard to come by and extraordinarily expensive, but Voidkeep just happens to have a potent set of them–the ones the proteges used during the second round of the pageant.

I roll one of the rings on my finger while surveying the cards spread out before me. The options are overwhelming–each card contains a different transformation that the ring is attuned to. I disqualify the more bestial options since I don’t want it to be apparent that I’m using a ring of flesh shift, and the vast majority of ascendants are humanoid, with most looking like what I consider “normal” humans.

The humanoid options still cause obvious physical changes, though some are more subtle than others.

“I like this one!” Crystal announces, dancing on her feet like an excited dog.

Maria bursts into laughter. “Of course you do.”

I raise my arm to better inspect the fins growing out of my elbows. “Sorry, Crystal. I don’t think being half fish is going to do me any favors.”

I spot Karanos covering his mouth to hide his laughter. Kuin is off doing administrative things, while some of the other ascendants–Farona Pyre and Krath Mandur–have come over to enjoy the show. They don’t have the full details on why Kuin has authorized me to borrow a ring of flesh shift, but they’re smart enough to fill in the blanks.

“You look like a mistake,” Pyre rasps. “What happened to your eyebrows?”

Mandur sighs. “Very few ascendants have aquatic adaptations; you should move along to something less conspicuous.”

I pick up a card with a snowy owl on it. It’s in the humanoid card pile, so it shouldn’t transform me into an owl, but instead provide more subtle changes. Perhaps it’ll give me wings. I shrug as I activate it.

White wings with horizontal black striations fan out to my sides, extending from my shoulders. I cock my head as I sense the way that my bone structure and musculature has moved to accommodate the new limbs.

Maria’s lip curls. “Honestly, this is one of the best so far.”

My audience is uncharacteristically contemplative, the normal criticism absent.

“Ascendants with biological wings are pretty rare, unfortunately,” Karanos says. “Suncloud is one of the only ones. It might draw suspicion.”

I sway on my feet, overcome by sudden weakness. The wings certainly don’t help my balance and I nearly fall over. Thankfully, Maria has been waiting for this moment and dashes forward to support me. She hands me the dagger.

Nodding, I activate it and stab myself, channeling energy into my body. I transform, my skin turning black and rugged. The relief is immediate, though the weakness is only lessened without Maria assuming her artifact form to stabilize me further.

“Oh boy,” Farona Pyre says, giving me a shit-eating grin, her middle-aged appearance making me feel like I’m being sized up by a mom trying to play match-maker. “That’s sharp.”

Eyes wide in mortification, I turn around and look at the mirror we’ve leaned against the samsara obelisk in the main courtyard.

In the mirror is a new man. My body is transformed like before, but the ruggedness is less pronounced, and my features are sharper, more aquiline. I still clearly look like me, but… different. More avian, I suppose, though I’d say I look more hawk-like than owl-like.

The biggest change is to the wings, which look like they’re made from spectral black shadows rather than feathers. They’re beautiful, ethereal, and don’t look biological.

With the ring of flesh shift and the dagger used in concert, I appear like a human with skin the color of night. I still have sharp, talon-like nails, and my skin is a bit thicker than normal, but nobody would mark that as anomalous.

While I focus on my new appearance, Maria pries the dagger from my hands and stabs herself, transforming. While the bracers and flame crown appear as they normally do, the flaming cape appears differently, no longer hanging down my back. Instead, the cloak’s two halves flow from my shoulders and neck, circle the base of my new wings, and then affix themselves their undersides like fiery under plumage.

It further contributes to the sense that the wings are the product of an artifact or ability.

“If I stayed like this, transformed, I’ll have access to my full power as well as Maria’s affinities,” I state.

“Can you maintain that metamorphosis for an extended period of time?” Karanos asks.

“Indefinitely, as long as I have the dagger.”

“The dagger, and the ring,” Mandur mutters. “Two artifacts that will probably attract the attention of the black faction.”

I smile, showing teeth. “Not if I’m a powerful, older ancient.”