We flag down a passing figment and ask for directions. The citizenry are as eager to help as ever, and the conversation passes quickly without any existential interruptions. Cheshire takes the lead, moving confidently through the city streets, and I follow along close behind.

“I still have questions,” I tell the catgirl. “Several days’ worth.”

Cheshire twirls around to face me, walking backwards, and gives me a double thumbs-up. “Fire away!”

Bah. So cheerful. I run my hands through my hair and consider which question to ask first. There is so much I want to learn, but it’s best to be tactical about this. Proper sequencing. “Okay, let’s start with this: why can’t people read me?”

Cheshire quirks an eyebrow. “Like, in general? ‘Cause I think you put a pretty decent effort into making it hard for people to read your true intentions.”

I glare at the creature that definitely knows what I’m talking about and is fucking with me. “Second sight. Bashe looking at my desires, the dog trying to sniff me out, the priestess feeling for my role. That’s three fuckers now who’ve tried to use some magic sensory ability on me, and all three of them have met with an opposition they seemed not to expect or understand. Why?”

Cheshire taps her chin and muses playfully, clearly teasing me. “Hmm, why indeed… what an interesting question. Why were they surprised by how difficult you are to read? Well, I think, if I were to guess, I would say that it’s because none of them had ever met a witch before meeting you.” She grins, toothy and smug, and I blink repeatedly in disorientation.

“Sorry, what? Sorry, what? I’m a witch? Since when!? You’re saying that I am a witch, which–yes, ha ha–to be clear, is the kind of thing that you are? Someone with weird special magic that doesn’t fit into the Throne system? That thing? I’m that thing? I’m a witch?”

The changeling giggles. “Yep! Hehe. You’re fun.”

I clap my hands to either side of my head and stare past Cheshire. “Fuuuuuuck. Gods fucking damn this bastard fucking world. Is this- is this why- is this why she didn’t answer!? Because I already had a cheat ability? Because I’ve had one since I fucking woke up!? It would have to be! It would have to be, because I was getting that reaction as early as Bashe, and–oh you’ve gotta be fucking kidding me, is this why Eirdryd didn’t murder me!? Okay, hold on, let’s back up here. So, I am a witch. I have been a witch for an indeterminate amount of time, and being a witch does something to the various second sight abilities you have in this setting. How does that all work?”

Cheshire laughs again, richer and deeper this time. “Ah, I can practically hear the gears turning in your head, that machine of a mind recalculating everything you know. Here’s how it is: every witch has, in addition to their actual power, a witch’s shroud that helps to conceal them from those endowed with sight beyond sight. The shroud isn’t perfect, of course, but it’s fairly effective, and it gets stronger as you do. As for how long you’ve been a witch, I’d say ‘since you woke up in the abandoned school’ is about accurate.”

“Motherfucker!” I swear. “So I’ve had a cheat ability this whole time, and I had no idea. Wait, it’s not the fear thing, right? No, can’t be, ‘cause that’s gone now. Okay.” I’m bouncing on my feet, hands twitching, full of energy. I am pissed that I’m only learning this now, but I’m also so fucking excited to realize that I have even more magic than I thought I did. “Seriously, though, was that part of what made Eirdryd interested in me? Is that what stopped him from killing me, because he could see the shroud and knew what it meant?”

Cheshire wiggles a hand noncommittally. “Eh, I imagine it was part of his reasoning, but far from the whole thing. This may surprise you to learn, Alice, but you actually played that scene really well; wyldfae are bound by stories and trickery, and you were smart about how you seized the initiative and turned the story around on him. With how you positioned yourself, it would actually have been pretty difficult for him to just kill you on a whim.”

“Huh. Interesting. Well, that’s good to know, I guess.” I’m glad that gamble paid off, because I’m pretty sure that if I hadn’t taken it I would currently be dying of starvation lost in the woods. “Alright, that aside: what’s my power? What’s my witch ability?”

“Aw, but it’s so much more fun if you figure it out yourself! Sooo I don’t think I will tell you, actually.” Cheshire winks at me and sticks her tongue out, which is as obnoxious as it is cute. “I’ll give you a hint, though: you’ve already used it once.”

Immediately I retreat inward, poring over memories in search of answers. It’s not the fear. The potion? Bashe reacted to that, called it impossible, but something that’s impossible for Throne magic is perfectly possible for witch magic. But what does that make my power? I asked Azathoth for that potion–or rather I asked for something else and got the potion instead–but I received nothing when I asked for a compass. It wouldn’t be Azathoth anyways, right? It’s supposed to be Nyarlathotep that interferes.

What other impossible things have I done? I mean there’s the Zero Sphere but that’s just isekai bullshit. What else did Bashe react to?

The knife. He got weird about the knife. Not like, potion or Zero Sphere weird, but he said it didn’t sound like how artifacts are supposed to be made. I narrow my eyes at Cheshire and ask, “Hey, totally unrelated to this entire conversation: how do fae make artifacts? Comprehensive explanation, please.”

She grins, and I know I’m on the right track. “Well, it differs between corpsefae and wyldfae, but I’ll just assume you mean Summer. For anyone bound to Summer, there are two ways. When a hunt is called and a worthy prey is slaughtered, a hunting trophy may be claimed; materials from the body are taken to a forgemaster or rider and shaped into an artifact. The second method is available only to elves, who may take a portion of their stockpiled power and shape it into an artifact wholecloth, though in this case it is essential that there is a story to the resulting creation, and such artifacts rarely last long beyond the end of the story they were made for.”

We could go over the details in that explanation and pick at the circumstances surrounding the artifact, but I think it’s pretty clear that neither of those methods resemble how [Ashthorn] was made. Which means… “Did I make [Ashthorn]?”

The geist claps her hands. “Ding ding ding! Got it in one, babe. In a world where magic items have all sorts of esoteric rules attached to their creation, you’re the real deal: a genuine bona fide artificer.”

I’m stunned into silence for a few moments, just processing. I’m an artificer. I thought I was thrown into this world with nothing, with scraps, with just my wits and a scattering of items, but actually… I have what’s arguably one of the most broken cheat abilities possible. I mean, there’s time bullshit, sure, and various “I win” buttons, but being able to make magic items? That’s crazy strong.

My brain is buzzing with possibilities. How does my power work? Do I have to meet certain conditions? How did I make [Ashthorn]? The fae burned a bunch of spiders and also my knife, and then I ripped the knife out and gave it a name. Is that it? I mean, I was excited by the idea that it might be a magic item, but I didn’t will it to have any particular powers, right?

Hmm. I wonder if that matters? Could I shape an artifact with an intent, if I knew I was doing it? I have to try. I have to run experiments. Glorious science awaits.

And the mall should be full of fun toys to experiment on.

“Okay, well, that’s going to be interesting. Looping back to sight and sound: if every witch has this shroud effect, that means you have it too, right? So if Bashe had looked at you with second sight, he would have seen the same thing?”

“Mm, almost. I’ve had my shroud long enough to learn how to control it, so I can make people see whatever I want them to see. When Bashekehi looked at me with his sight, all he saw was the darkness of the Abyss.” Her lips quirk into a smaller, subtler smile, and she asks, “Would you like to see it in action?”

“Yes, yes, obviously yes, of course yes. How do I do that?” I lean in with eyes wide.

Cheshire pulls me to a stop by the side of the street, then rubs her hands together. “Okay, step one: close your eyes.”

I comply, and the world is darkness–or more accurately, that not-quite-darkness of staring at your eyelids in a lit area. I can hear the dim chatter and clatter of people–figments–walking to and fro, and I can feel the sturdy ground beneath my feet.

“What’s around you, right now?” Her voice comes from right in front of me, and I can remember her position relative to mine, but the visual details are already murky. I’m terrible at visualization, really; my brain just doesn’t do pictures that well.

“You,” I answer. “And the street. Buildings. Figments, passing by. The city.”

“The city?” she probes.

I frown, working to parse her question. She’s stressing the article, so is that the issue? Why? Too definitive? “A city,” I test.

“What kind of city?”

My frown deepens. What kind of a question is that? How am I meant to answer? “A strange city. A half-real city. A city of not-quite-people and shifting landscape. A city of the Labyrinth.” An idea seizes me. “Or… not a city at all. The idea of a city. The dream of a city.”

“Close!” she cheers me on. “Very close. But you’re missing a piece. You’re still thinking too rigidly. You’re in Pandaemonium now, and the rules are different. Real, not-real, half-real; they’re all different here.”

Pandaemonium. Real and not-real. Reality back home is… physicality. Materiality. But that’s just one-third of the picture, here. The Throne of Order, the ordered laws of a not-quite-natural world. But there’s Spirit, too, the world through the lens of the collective. And then there’s me. Us.

The Throne of Shadow. The world of the self.

“Around me is one city and three cities,” I begin. “A city of ordered laws. A city of… a city of groups; a city of factions: Myriad, Guild, Carnival, and Voidhearts. And a city of individuals.”

“Very good,” Cheshire says, her voice now behind me and to the side. “Three Thrones. Three lenses. Three worlds. Now: focus on that last one. You are surrounded by individuals; by selves. And you are a scion of the Throne of the self, so it is child’s play for you to reach out and see those other selves. Witness the self as it is seen by the self. Peer into hearts and read desires.”

I let her words play in my head, dissecting them and absorbing them. Around me is a city of selves. I just have to reach out and witness them.

“Will your sight–Throne-granted, Throne of the self–to open. See the world as you have not seen it before. And open your eyes.”

I remember the feeling of willing Cheshire to manifest, or of willing a spell to dismiss. I have power. My thoughts are power. I focus my will and demand that the world show me those selves surrounding me. I want to see. I feel something shift, a prickling behind my eyes.

I open them, and I see a world of horror.

Crisp colors are stripped away, clean lines made sketchy and malformed. The city–the world–is scribbled on the pages of a sketchbook, but wavering, shifting. No line stays straight, no curve retains its arc. I see shattered windows and cracked stone and bent metal and endless stretching pavement toward the infinite swallowing dark all around me, seeping down from sky and up from hidden depths.

A sketchbook drifting in the void, lines of black on a splash of white drowning in an ocean of ink. And here and there, scattered through the monochrome mess of misshapen angles, I see splashes of color.

Shades of blue, green, and brown, indistinct but moving, shifting across my field of vision. My gaze flits to one, to a particularly vibrant green, and the rest of the world bleeds away. The ink runs from the page to be swallowed by the dark beyond, and that color gets bigger and brighter and more detailed. A cloud of color becomes an impression, then an image.

More lines, still sketchy but sharper, variation less intense, and filled in with charcoal and oil paint. I see a mask of bone-porcelain growing like a tumor out of a mass of red meat and jutting glass and flowing fabric, and deep within the eyeholes of that blank-faced mask I see two pinpricks of piercing green, glowing, bleeding their color down the cheeks of the mask to spill and stain the fabric below. Black and white and green and red, sharp and messy and twitching.

I see the strings, wrapped around each impression of a limb and sinking into the back of the mask-head like hooks and wires. The strings stretch up, up, up and away, far away, far into the distance, into a tower of black glass. My vision shudders, reality unravels, and again I see the trick in perspective: the wound in the world, the knife in the skin of the dream, inverted to show the dream bleeding out of the wound-tower, color spilling into the deep dark void. I can almost see inside, past the blood and the shards, to something deeper, calling me, pulling me. Whispering my name.

I dig my nails into my skin and tear my vision away before the tower can drag me in. I’m breathing hard, clutching at myself, and all around me I am still surrounded by white and black and drifting color like anglerfish lures in ocean depths. I’m swimming. I’m drowning. There’s so much. It’s all so much.

A touch on my shoulder, light touch, gentle sensation, moving, tracing, gliding. A shiver on the back of my neck, down my arm. Skin, soft, fingers. Fingers tracing up my throat and settling on my cheeks. Color. Two colors, bicolor, dual color. Swirling color, yellow and blue.

My gaze slips into the new color, focuses on it, and I see the cloud resolve into two pinpricks of light–one blue, one yellow–within the eyeholes of a cat-faced mask, bone-porcelain, growing from a mass of seething darkness. Ink like the ink of the ocean surrounding me. A tangle of dark lines, coarse and dripping liquid night.

The mask opens in a too-wide too-toothy smile, all teeth in either direction, pristine cat’s teeth filling the page from edge-to-edge and wrapping around. “Well?” she asks, voice still unmistakably Cheshire’s: achingly beautiful and full of callous mirth. “Enjoying the view?”

“I… you… this is a lot. Woah. This is. What?”

She laughs, and the mask cracks by the edges of its lips, forming laugh lines. “Here, let me give you something nicer to look at.”

The inky blackness recedes, tendrils and lines drawn into the mask like slurped spaghetti. For a moment it’s just the mask: pale porcelain, carved cat ears, the stretching line of teeth, and those blue-and-yellow eyelights. I reach out on instinct to feel the mask, tracing smooth bone with fingers outlined in shaky graphite. So warm. So soft. Oddly comforting.

I start and pull my hand back, embarrassed by my lapse in reason. Another laugh from Cheshire, another crinkle-crack of the pale mask, and then a new image paints itself–or is painted by Cheshire, I realize: a face behind a mask, white hair and pale skin and a pair of cat ears; a body, lean and agile; a swishing tail, white-furred; vague impressions of yellow-and-pink fabric.

I’m looking at Cheshire drawn over Cheshire. I can’t help but laugh at the abject absurdity of such a notion.

Cheshire’s oil paint body smiles, and the forever-teeth fold back into the mouth of her mask. “There we go.” A red heart appears under each cheek of the mask.

I breathe. I can finally focus on something that doesn’t threaten to break my fucking brain. “Okay. That is. So much. I. The fuck? Fuck. Okay.” I rub my head and wince. “That was incredibly disorienting. I am still kind of disoriented, honestly. I mean, it’s cool as hell, too, but I do not know how to properly appreciate that without getting slammed in the brain by horrors beyond my comprehension.”

“It’s a skill,” the changeling tells me. “This is your first time using the sight, so of course it’s going to be a bit overwhelming. Right now you’ve filtered out everything except individual meaning. That’s useful for letting you deep-dive someone’s soul, but not great for actually functioning and moving. You could see if someone had violent intent, but you might miss the sword swinging at your throat. You need to learn to overlay this sense over your normal sight.”

As she speaks, I can still feel her hands on my cheeks, but the image of her moves its hands in different gestures: a hand on my shoulder, both hands over her heart, hands clasped together, hands around my throat, a hand on her hip and a hand in the air. The mask warps and contorts through expressions of sympathy, love, erudition, anger, and satisfaction.

“Fascinating,” I murmur. “How do I do that?”

I feel her pat my hand comfortingly. I see the image of Cheshire scoff and turn away from me. I hear her say, “You’ll need to get used to switching between vision types first. We’re close to the mall, so you could practice while holding my hand to keep from getting lost. If you trust me to guide you safely, of course.” The charcoal-and-oil Cheshire swoons, red hearts sketching into the canvas and being erased in strange mimicry of motion.

As untrustworthy as she is in general, I sincerely doubt there’s any harm in trusting her to lead me to the mall. “Sure. I’ll give it a try.” Her hand finds mine and our fingers interlace, and then she is leading the way and I am pulled along.

I reach for my old sight, close my eyes, and when I open them again I can see the city as it was. I switch between my normal sight and soul sight, practicing finding the feeling quicker, making it more natural, until all it takes is a single purposeful blink.

It’s certainly disorienting switching between sights, but there’s something fascinating about seeing the world in a different palette. I see more figment souls, or at least I’m nearly certain those blank-faced puppets have to be figments.

But at last we arrive at the shopping complex, and I discover that it is the massive techno-pyramid I noticed on first stepping out of the apartments. The Pyraplex apparently boasts over seven hundred shops, though I find “shops” a laughable term given this city’s lack of conventional commerce.

The whole structure is made out of metal and glass–non-reflective glass, notably–with neon lines tracing everywhere. There are neon signs, too, and the whole place looks downright cyberpunk. The mega-mall has touchscreen kiosks, even, that display a floor plan of each section of this absurdly-large structure.

That’s pretty cool, but what’s less cool is all the people milling about. It’s not as bad as the club was, thanks to people generally spreading out and keeping moving, but my overstimulation isn’t really the issue so much as my hypervigilance; I keep twitching whenever someone passes too close, expecting another axe-wielding asshole to come charging in at any moment. I flick on soul sight and sweep the area, but I have no real way of determining figment from person without manually checking every single splash of color.

I’ll have to continue relying on Cheshire, I admit to myself. Not that she warned me about the last attack, mind, but she at least had a plan.

“So!” claps the catgirl in question. “Where to first, chief? We’ve got a whole world of options here: we could grab you some new clothes, see about a custom anchor for yours truly, fish around for other necessities…”

I see two separate food courts listed and my stomach lets me know how it feels about that. “Food. Food is first.”

Cheshire grins. “Well, I suppose it is technically still breakfast time. Let’s eat!”