Thakur stared at the adept across from him in the room adjoining her garden at the top of the Rose Tower. “Khunawal-” he began.

The adept snapped her wrist as though to dismiss the man. “Khunawal.” She said. “A fine surgeon, even a capable cultivator, but not adept material. It takes a single mindedness to become an adept that he lacks, though he tells himself, and perhaps even others, that it will only be one more step on his journey.”

Thakur stared at her. “I don’t understand.”

One of her hands began to tap rhythmically on the side of her chair as she studied him, then continued as she spoke. “I am no adept.” She told him. “You should know that. I have power, but what power I have comes from my butterflies and what they leave for me.” She stood and went to the edge of her garden. Thakur jerked to rise and follow her but she waved a hand at him to remain seated.

“There is no Rose icon. Roses are living things. They have their own spirits, their own breath, if you will, that animates them without any need of an icon.” She combed through her roses as she spoke, peering into each blood red blossom before moving on. “According to what I have read, these, this physical world, is nothing, in truth. The simple minded break down stones and say that the world is made up of indivisible particles that cling together or fly apart according to rules no one has ever set down, but such inventors do not ask the right question to come to true and useful conclusions about the nature of reality.”

She found a rose that she liked and pulled a slim pair of scissors from a pocket that she used to snip it from its stem then trim the remnant branch of thorns. “These roses may be made up of particles, but particles did not make this rose, any more than they make a stone. They are reflections only, a mirage we can touch and feel and taste.” She looked at the blossom in her hand as she finished trimming the hedge. “They are representations of the rules which truly make the world. Icons, so to speak, of forces that lay beyond the physical realm.”

She stroked the petals as she lost herself in thought then turned unnerving black eyes to regard him. “Not all seers describe it in the same fashion. Some compare the physical world to limp cloth or soft clay for which the icon is like a mold, shaping it the same way a stamp would shape it, or a figure over which the cloth is draped. Other authors claim that the cloth itself has no existence except in our mind which can only interpret the spiritual realities.” She carried the blossom to him and offered it to him. “But all agree,” she said, “that there is something more to reality than what the eyes alone can see, or mathematics explain.”

He took the rose and looked at it, nonplussed then offered it back to her.

Pinprick stars swam in her eyes as she leaned towards him. “Look deeper.” She whispered.

He did, and was about to look away again when he thought he caught something deep within the shadows of the petals. Something dark and liquid and impossible. When he peered closer there seemed to be a void that opened up between the petals of the flower, one that went on and on, as though, through the petals of the rose, he looked down into a deep ocean or an endless abyss, one in which distant lights shone like pinprick stars.

Eventually the adept took the rose from him, and Thakur realized his hands were shaking. When he looked up at her eyes, he had to flinch away from the distance he now saw hidden in the black holes that occupied the space her eyes should have.

“My power is not like an adept’s power.” She told him. She went around the couch with the blossom still in her fingers. “Spiritual parasites, like my butterflies, feed on the spirit. Most consume their hosts entirely. Draw out the life and leave nothing but a husk behind. I have seen it twice before, my parasites though, are unique. They give back for what they take, as they did with this rose. They drank from its breath, and what they left behind...” She stopped at the edge of the basin of water and lifted the blossom to her nose, then inhaled deeply from the flower’s center, as though she intended to drink the void that lived in the center. She let out a long slow breath as she finished and dropped the rose into the water making it slosh while the ripples that danced upon it fled. “Sweet sweet life,” she said, “and only my soul lost in the bargain.”

She smiled at him, teeth brilliantly white beneath the twinned holes of her eyes.

“Am I, losing my soul then?” Thakur asked. “Is my wife?”

“No.” She replied. She looked down at the rose bobbing in the bowl. “No. I suspect a parasite like that would save you, if it could survive even a taste of what your spirit has become. Your, malady, comes back to the Icons.”

She gazed at the flower for a moment as the water settled and invisible creatures returned to disturb it with their half seen reflections.

He shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

She shook herself and looked at him as she returned to the present. “Icons are what make the world as it is.” She told him. “Natural icons, the sorts that animate roses and make the worlds turn around the core, such icons are complex things, more so than any cultivator could grasp, but there are other icons that are within man’s reach, designed by man even. Our divine power, and, if the tales are true, the power the first adept used to build the bottom and keep the beasts of the beyond at bay. They are the laws we enforce on the world, laws like table-ness, or the properties of venom. Human beings are said to make such impositions on the world subconsciously at all times, adding to the laws that make the world. An adept simply makes that process more, explicit.”

Thakur felt his hand press against the fire burning within his ribs as he saw where she was going.

“Icons make our world.” she said, turning her eyes back to the flower drifting in the bowl. “By knowing them, intimately, an adept remakes himself in the image of the thing he knows best.”

“Poison doesn’t kill.” Thakur whispered. “It corrupts.” He felt, or at least imagined, the fire in his chest swell at the spoken words.

Black eyes turned to regard him but Thakur barely saw the woman in front of him anymore. Instead he saw a lifetime in service to the eighth pit, learning all the ways a cup of water could kill a man.

“I suspect that the icon is not yet strong in you.” The woman across from him said. “If you were a cultivator there would be more breath for the icon to do its work through. As you are though, you have only the little breath you were born with and it is taking its time to change your flesh.”

“But,” Thakur’s brought both hands to his head as he shook it. “Are you saying I’m, killing myself?” He looked up at her.

“Your spirit at least.” The Rose Adept replied.

Hope felt like an electric shock as Thakur realized the flaw in her theory. “But Mayanna,” he said, “she doesn’t know a thing about my work.”

The adept, who was not an adept, waved her hand dismissively. “You love your wife I presume? Make love to her that is?”

He spluttered and she gave him a joyless smile.

“Sex is not a physical act.” She said. “Not mostly at least. A new life is the result, after all, or the intended one. That cannot occur without some mingling of breath, spirit quickening in the womb, giving life, shaping the physical. So, I have read at least. Two become one, become three, spiritually as well as physically. I assume that you have been intimate with your wife since you touched your icon?”

Thakur felt a new pain at his chest and looked down to find his hand clutched around a knot of shirt cloth. He released it slowly, smoothed it down, stared at the spot on his chest as he let his hand drop to the head of his cane balanced between his legs.

“I have not seen her.” The adept said. “But I suspect I know what I will find. A bit of breath, mingling, corrupting.”

He looked up at her. “What do we have to do?”

“Do?” The Rose Adept raised her eyebrows. “I’ve told you that your spirit is killing you. I cannot cure you of your soul.”

Thakur wanted to rise and throw something at her. To scream that it wasn’t true, but he felt the pain swell inside of him as he breathed, he could feel it burning him in ways that no physical poison should. Thakur fumbled with his cane instead.

“I must,” he said, “I must…” He tried to rise but the ache in his bones was suddenly too much and he fell forward on knees that wouldn’t hold him. When he caught himself on the low table between the couches the bowl at its center wobbled and dripped water around its edges while small wingbeats fled from its edge. He knelt and felt as though all strength had left him.

The Rose Adept stood and walked around the table to offer him her hand. He made no move to take it.

“I told you that I was not an adept.” She said. “But, I may have some suggestions.”

Thakur looked up to meet her eyes but there was nothing for him to meet. Just an empty void staring back at him. He took her hand anyways and was pulled to his feet. She helped him back to his seat and he collapsed bonelessly into it.

She perched on the end of a couch near his and gazed into the water as it began to ripple once more.

“You have come during an interesting time.” She told him. “Did you know that?”

Thakur held his head and voiced no answer to her questioning look.

“Well,” she said, “I have not, revealed myself, to anyone, in a very very long time.”

“Forgive me if I do not thank you.” Thakur spat.

She ignored the venom in his tone and continued to stare into her bowl. “I will.” She replied. “It costs me little to tell my secrets to a dead man.”

The words sank into him like a spike and she looked at him as he pressed thumb and forefinger into his temples and tried to keep from falling to pieces. “But, if I have learned anything, it is that there is always a use for an adept, and I have learned to, save, what I can use.”

Black eyes met bloodshot silver ones across the narrow space between them.

“Do you understand?” She asked.

“If you want something from me, tell me how we can survive.”

She looked away again, back to her butterflies. “I am no adept,” she repeated, “so understand that everything I say comes from my study of the subject rather than direct experience, but, there may be a way for you to, prolong your death, if you are willing to do the work.”

He could feel himself glaring at her as she looked for his reaction. “I don’t want to die.” He told her.

She nodded and stood, gesturing for him to follow. “The icon is like a stamp.” She said and paused at a door along one wall while he got to shaky feet and followed her. “We have discussed this.” She pushed the door open as he reached her and led him down narrow hallways cramped with books. Familiars shaped like candle flames fluttered on clips in the wall and cast warm illumination over the spines, some of them remarkably aged and tattered. “In experience and history, adepts have been regarded as supernaturally powerful people, capable, even, of building the Bottom and levitating the worlds between it and the core. A divine act, if well beyond the capabilities of any adept I have known, and I have known many.”

She opened another door and led him into a second room of the house, this one lit by orange daylight streaming through window panes that filled one wall and gave Thakur a dizzying view of the city far far below. Bookshelves lined the other walls. There were more couches arranged in the open spaces as in the adjoining room, although no bowl of rippling water or tinkling windchimes. She went to one of the shelves while he stood in the middle of the room and watched her.

“Fundamentally, an adept’s powers are as bound by the icons they touch as the world is bound by the icons that give it order.” She touched the books as she went through them, as though reading their titles more by feel than by the letters on the spines facing them. She pulled a few out to look at the cover, but always continued her search.

“Typically there are three ways an Icon empowers its adept, usually listed as Touch, Manifestation, and Transformation.” She slid a book down and looked at it for a moment, then cracked it open and licked her finger to flip through the pages. “If you think of the icon as a stamp, touch would be pressing the stamp into an object, pressing your spirit into it so that it obeys the laws of your icon. Manifestation is when you press the stamp into your own breath to the point that your breath manifests as your icon, sometimes also called a projection. Transformation is the empowerment that is killing you. When you press the stamp into your own soul, and become the icon’s, avatar, or embodiment, it changes you.”

She found what she was looking for and closed the book then stepped over to him and offered it to Thakur. “This book can tell you more about the process.” She said. “It is one of the best I have ever found on the subject, though, like me, its author only spoke with adepts, and never touched an icon himself.”

Thakur took the book and held it without really seeing it. “What am I supposed to do with this?” He asked.

“This author,” she tapped the book before turning to walk away towards the windows, “claims that every adept does all three of these subconsciously at all times, some to a greater or lesser degree.” She crossed her arms and looked out the window at the city. “If that is true, then you have three problems you have to deal with. Your flesh, what your breath has managed to touch and change on a spiritual level, will be turning to venom within you. Your breath’s connection to the icon will grow with time, trapped within you, its manifestation will slowly accelerate whatever it has already done to your flesh until you pass a point where your body no longer knows its own laws and succumbs entirely to the laws of your icon. Finally, the stronger your connection grows to the icon, the more it will change you, change your goals, your points of view, your character, until you embody the will, or the intention, of the icon you’ve awakened in your spirit. You will become your power, instead of becoming empowered by it.”

Neither spoke for a moment as she looked out the window and he looked at the book.

“I’m not…” Thakur began, then clenched his hands around the book. “I won’t be, poison.”

“You will.” She said. “But not, I expect, before the other aspects of your power kill you.” she looked at him. “I have seen it before.”

Thakur’s hands clenched around the book. “You said you would help us.”

“I will help you.” She said. “But there are not many adepts in this city of merchants, so when I have helped you, you will help me.”