Divination generally required some physical connection. Some hair, some blood, a stick broken off the tree you're scrying on. Something. And that connection weakened over time, so for example if you used someone's hair it would only last so long and if they shaved their head it might stop working right away. A lot of it depended on how you'd built up your Dumine. For myself, I'd been doing it the cheap and easy way by using divination with my whole body as the link - it limited what I could look at, but it was the simplest and cheapest connection possible and it would never wear out as long as I was alive. The wild mage, meanwhile, was using fate magic which was ridiculously expensive but had one thing in common with my method - it would be good until I was dead.

Errod was watching over our bodies as Katrin, Hugh, and myself discussed what to do about it. Hugh had been hesitant to enter my mind, mainly because he was worried about being less aware of his actual surroundings, but once he agreed he immediately insisted on seeing Earth so our meeting was taking place at Dobbins' Lookout on South Mountain with Phoenix spreading off into the distance. It was a much gentler introduction than the observation deck of the Empire State Building.

"Before we discuss anything else," Katrin said, "how likely is it that this has some connection to that figment of your imagination that's been running around in your head? They both seem to want to kill you, and both are - in a sense - spying on you. If they're the same person, or working together, then this may not be a safe place to talk either."

"I'm remaining paranoid about that, but... well first of all, if this place isn't safe nowhere is so it doesn't really matter. On top of that, I still think it's most likely that the person I've seen running around in here is part of my subconscious - I've seen her before in dreams, and she spoke English, and... I don't know. It's still possible it's the wild mage disguising herself as a figment of my imagination, or some totally separate thing. I guess it would partly depend on how the spell works, and we don't know that."

Katrin looked frustrated. "Sorry about that. If I could see it being cast maybe I would know, but from just what's left on the fate thread... it's well beyond my ability, if it's possible at all."

We'd given Hugh just the most basic run-down as soon as we'd arrived - 'Calliope can see threads of fate attached to things, they can be used with magic, a wild magic sorcerer seems to be using this to spy on us, yes we've fought her before, no we don't know what her deal is, we know about this thing because we can make it work both ways but it seems like she has better control over it'. He'd listened and asked a few very straightforward questions, taking it in stride. Now he was staring thoughtfully at Phoenix.

"When did she put this spell on you?" he asked, without turning around.

"Well in retrospect I think I accidentally used it to spy on her a while back when we fought Telen and the Behemoth. She was right outside our window, while we were sleeping. So it's possible she cast it right then so she could keep tabs on us if we got away? For sure no later than that."

Katrin shook her head. "Earlier. They were just arriving, and one of the only things we know about spellcasting with fate is that it's not easy. She couldn't have just run up and cast that sort of thing through the window at you on the fly."

"Right, true. So then... not while we were traveling, but we stayed at the Necropolis for a bit. I don't think that's likely at all. Before that... not during the attack at Theramas obviously, but maybe while they scouted out the location? While we were in the apartment? I would think Hammersmith -"

"Lord Protector Hammersmith," Hugh corrected.

"- Lord Hammerpants would have had some sort of shit in place that would have alerted her to that kind of big magic targeting us. She doesn't strike me as the type to think a few bodyguards will do the trick. But it had to be then, because before that I was traveling with Hugh and you guys and before that I'd just arrived and was up in the mountains nearly dying every time I ate anything."

Hugh shrugged. "It could have been part of the spell that brought you here, yes?"

I looked at Katrin and raised an eyebrow, but she only shrugged. "I don't know. It seems like that would be... needlessly complicated, wouldn't it? Bring you into this world but also link to you with fate magic to spy on you? I feel like those would be two different spells."

"Okay, wait, you're on to something there. Why would she want to spy on me at all? She's attacked us, right? And when she did, she certainly seemed to be planning on killing me. She held off when there were kids in the way, but I don't think that was for my benefit. But if we're saying that this fucking spell is super tricky and probably needed all sorts of mana or multiple casters or whatever, then... why not just kill me when she cast it? Like, there are a thousand ways to just murder someone with magic, right?"

Hugh tapped his nose ring in what was obviously some common gesture. I'd seen some people in Erathik do it, and whatever the specific meaning it seemed to be positive.

"The spell must do something other than spying, yes? A way to spy remotely that lasts seemingly forever is valuable, but she would not have tried to kill you unless this was discovered. Better to keep you there as an asset, especially since she would have known Lord Protector Hammersmith still wanted your assistance."

"What else would it do, that she doesn't need it to do anymore? Maybe it really was just for spying, and when I tapped into it back in Zistarne she decided I knew about it. I mean I probably should have figured it out or at least questioned my sudden divination more, and she can't be watching us all the time so she could have missed the parts where we talked about not knowing what that was. Or she heard, and thought it was deliberate misinformation. So maybe she thought the jig was up and it was time to kill me. Though... I mean she did seem like she was going to kill me in that first fight too. Fuck. I don't know. There's too much going on. Hugh, you're the actual adult here. Tell me what to do."

Hugh smiled, still mostly looking out at the city. "You won't like the answer, Calliope Smith. What you should do is lock yourself in the wagon and stay there, yes? We would not tell you where we are going, and therefore this woman would not know either. If your vision of her was through her eyes, then the reverse should be true which means so long as you cannot see outside the wagon she is powerless. Is our safety worth your boredom?"

And I wanted to say no. That sounded fucking awful, and it would be for at least a week - maybe longer. How would I go to the bathroom - would I need to be led out with my eyes shut? And the wagons were so small! But he'd worded it that way on purpose, the old bastard. If I said no, I'd be acknowledging that I valued my own comfort over the lives of my friends.

"Of course I can stay in the wagon," I said, internally screaming, "but that's short term. What we really need is to break the connection somehow or... is there some sort of anti-scrying thing I can get? Like a magic amulet or some shit?"

Hugh scrunched up his face. "Magic is not my area of expertise, sadly. There are runes that can prevent divination, but would they work when this connection leads directly to you? I am not certain. If it can be done, it would require someone with more experience writing out runes than anyone here has unless there is more you have not told me."

"No, we're pretty basic on that front. No complex formulas, just... light and heat, basically."

He nodded. "Then we can do nothing until we reach a city, at which point we are best served by arranging teleportation to Theramas. There is one other option, of course, but it is hard to plan for."

"What's that?"

"It is simple, yes? We lure the wild mage in and we kill her."

I'd been confined to the wagon for four days, although thankfully going into my memory palace gave me the illusion of freedom. Still, laying in place too long would be bad for my health and so I had to exercise which wasn't easy in that teeny space.

"Okay," I said from my spot on Katrin's bunk, "no spilling the water this time."

My body sat up on its bed, swiveled, and reached out to grab the wooden mug full of water on the counter - my aim was off a bit, but it sort of rolled into my palm and I closed my fingers around it successfully. I could feel it, just barely, a phantom sensation against my imaginary skin. Now to stand up and do my little routine.

The first few times I'd tried walking my body around while meditating it was a disaster, because there was a disconnect between my mental perspective and the orientation of my actual body. I banged into things, tripped, and even punched myself at one point. I could do it by meditating really shallowly, but that kept me from doing much in the memory palace and I certainly couldn't have the divination working in any useful way. The goal was to be able to control myself smoothly in third person like I was playing a video game, so that I could keep my divination up all the time.

Not literally all the time of course, since it did use mana, but if I stayed close to my body and didn't - for example - peek through a nearby wall then I could keep it up for a long time. And at the moment I couldn't peek through the wall anyway since it would defeat the whole purpose of keeping me locked in the wagon. Hugh had even hung up a blanket outside the door so that Katrin could come and go without accidentally giving me a peek, though just to be paranoid she also always knocked so I would close my eyes. I wondered, sometimes, where we were going but my knowledge of geography was still pretty sparse despite some tutoring from Errod and anyway Hugh would be taking us along an odd route and to an unexpected city to guarantee we wouldn't be ambushed by the wild mage. So much for going back to Sentortzi.

I watched, feeling disconnected from my body, as it did some stretches without spilling any water. I was getting pretty good, and when I could eventually get the hell out of the wagon I was even thinking of trying to spar with Errod while using divination. It would be like a real life fighting game. It should also be good for party tricks, since it meant I could do things with my eyes closed. Eventually I decided I had successfully prevented myself from getting bed sores and directed my body back to the bed to lay down once more.

"Okay. Enough cramped wagon time. Holodeck, end program."

The wagon flickered out of existence, and I was in an empty hotel room. Huh, I hadn't thought that would actually work. I took a moment to gauge my mana - at maybe a fifth of my maximum which would last for a long time if I didn't do anything fancy - and then headed out into the hotel to poke around. There were a lot of memories I wanted to use divination on, but it took forever to get to full mana while in the wagon and then I would need to spend hours just sitting in the real world to recover which sounded boring as hell. So instead I was just making a list for later, jotting them down in a notepad as I explored my mind.

I hadn't seen the scar-faced me for a while, in fact not since she yelled at me and stormed off. Part of me wondered if that was evidence that she was an avatar of the wild mage, but there were certainly other possibilities - soon after the last time I'd seen her I invited Katrin into my mind, and it was possible that had somehow reset things; after all, the first time she'd shown up actually in the memory palace had been when I tried to bring Katrin and Errod in. Maybe there'd been some kind of... glitch in the guest list... and when I did it again without issue she had been wiped out.

In any case, I was close to being able to lock her out for good if she was some external force - in the meantime all I could do was keep an eye out. I wandered into Universal Servicing Systems where I had lived for so long, and sat at the reception desk to read the Paradox of Fate for a while. It felt like I was really there, fourteen or fifteen years old and living on my own in an abandoned office, pawning the office equipment and scrounging in desk drawers for coins I could put in the vending machine. And then it happened again, for just a second all the desks were scattered and flipped over like a hurricane had passed through and there was a perfectly circular hole in one wall. I'd seen that glitch once before, but it had been right before I found that a year's worth of memories were missing and I'd been new to poking around in my brain so I hadn't worried about it much. But... well, that didn't look great. Was it a memory? A dream? Whatever it was, I didn't seem to have more than that split second glimpse.

Too many loose ends, not enough resolutions. I tried to get back into reading, but now I was all distracted. I wanted to do something, anything that might actually let me figure out what was going on. But I was stuck hiding in a fucking wagon, being taken to protective custody with Hammershit. There was really only one thing I could do, which would be to spy on the wild mage. She'd burned the shit out of me last time but only by actually burning herself, and so in a way that was a win for me. Plus the pain had faded pretty quickly, and the terror of the situation would be lessened by me knowing that at the worst I'd be kicked out as soon as I ran out of mana. And anyway, if I didn't try it how would I learn to resist it? Hell, maybe I could even learn to tell when she was spying on us if I played around some, or I could learn to be sneaky so she wouldn't be able to detect me. Either way.

I knew that Katrin would be annoyed if she found out, and I would have to tell her eventually - especially if I learned something. But I suspected Hugh would be okay with it, since I was gathering intel and only really risking some discomfort probably. Boredom shouldn't be the driving factor for big decisions, I know, but once I had started thinking about it I genuinely started to think it was a good idea. So I took a deep breath and went in.

She was in a town I didn't recognize, and people were giving her strange looks. I could see bits of her green hair blowing into view as the wind caught it, but otherwise all I saw of her was the edges of the eye holes on the mask. Unlike my divination trick that I used on my own body, I seemed to be stuck viewing the world from her perspective so unless she looked in a mirror or something I wasn't going to see her clearly. On my list of things to use divination on was some time she was nearby so I could look under the mask, but the thought of getting a better view of Connie's death made me feel sick so I would need to do either the attack at Theramas or that brief encounter when we dropped off Elba.

Elba... wait.

I broke the connection successfully, immediately dropping into the real world. How had I not thought about it? How had I missed it? What had Mossbloom, the Sahrger that had taken Elba's place, said? "My family could teach you things you could never learn here. Magical secrets. Rituals of binding. Ways to scry across worlds. Paths to the places of power, where the ancient rune-stones still stand." I'd seen huge stones covered in runes, in that moment I came to this world. Rituals of binding? Scrying across worlds? The Sahrger must have had something to do with bringing me here and with the connection the wild mage was using - presumably she wasn't a Sahrger herself, since she had kept Mossbloom from escaping, but that could have been some sort of misdirection.

I hammered on the door and called for Katrin, who came in a moment later being careful to keep the blanket blocking my view. She asked if everything was okay, but I just gestured that I needed her to join me in the memory palace. Once we were in, I tried to lay out my logic. Katrin listened and then was very quiet for a moment before her face went pale.

"Callie. We need to be careful. That other version of you, that's the wild mage. She's in your mind."

"I... don't know about that. She'd have to be changing how she... oh, no. A shape changer. A Klunlesh. Fuck, I remember now! Connie even told me, but then she died and I went catatonic and... mother fucker. I hadn't seen her yet, I didn't know she was there, but when Connie went out and confronted Telen there was someone else there that I didn't see and when she reset time I asked. She said it was a Klunlesh she had killed in the other timeline. Shit. Oh, I'm so stupid. There's just so much that's been happening to me and it's all so crazy that it's hard to... to index all this shit. Fuck, she mentioned it before when I told her about the wild mage too. We were talking about people in masks and she said it, she said she killed a Klunlesh in a mask."

Katrin took my hand, looking like she was sick to her stomach. "Callie. I... need you to take me to your mother's house. I know you don't like revisiting that place but it's important."

She looked so serious. I nodded, and we walked silently through the hotel hallways until I came to a door that felt right, and there we were. Katrin began looking around, in my room and the bathroom and my mother's room. She came back, and it looked like she was about to cry.

"Callie... you were right. This is about the Sahrger. But not the Klunlesh."

"But Connie said -"

"Connie was wrong. Klunlesh can't use wild magic. Remember? Only humans can."

"Oh. Okay, well. Maybe there was someone else with Telen? Or there was..."

"Callie," Katrin said, "why are there iron scissors hanging over your mother's door?"

"They're... they're antiques. Belonged to my great grandmother."

"Callie, I'm so sorry. Iron blades are... used to keep Sahrger out of places."

My first thought was that it made sense, my mom had always been into fairies so it wasn't a shock if that's what she had meant although a horseshoe was a little more traditional for over a doorway on Earth. And then, like being slowly dipped into ice water, the meaning of what Katrin was saying began to sink in. Mom had forbidden me from entering her room, and when I tried I... I physically had trouble doing it and got a terrible headache if I forced it.

"So... no, that doesn't... things are different on Earth, or... the wild mage did something."

"The wild mage is seeing through your eyes, Callie. Just like Elba said she did with the..." Katrin stopped, unable to finish the sentence. Just like Elba said she did with the Sahrger that had taken her place.

"No. Because I... I'm human." A human that could curse people, like the Sahrger. A human that frequently finds herself incapable of feeling empathy, like the Sahrger. What had the children we rescued had in common? Their parents had been blacksmiths. Well my father was dead and my mother was an accountant but maybe it was harder to see things on Earth. Maybe they just saw my last name.

Without wanting it to happen, my mother appeared in the memory pinning little eight-year-old me to the wall with those scissors at my neck. "You're a monster," she said, "and I should slit your throat right now. I shouldn't have to put up with this! I shouldn't have to look at you, every day! Every day that... that face! It's not fair!" She had known. She would have done it if the phone hadn't suddenly rang, that little trick of probability magic I'd done to save my life without being consciously aware of it. The cut had been so shallow, but it had turned red and burned so badly that someone had called CPS and I'd ended up going to a foster home. I'd handled iron plenty of other times, but Katrin had said it when Elba was returned to her family: it required intent.

The memory of my mother vanished, and I stormed out with Katrin following and trying to say something to me. I burst through another door and was in those tunnels where Connie died, with the wild mage standing over me.

Elba was pleading with her to spare me. "She didn't hurt us. She saved us from the Sahrger. She's going to help us find our parents."

The wild mage was clutching her bleeding throat, voice hoarse. "No, child. She lied to you. You're not free from the Sahrger, can't you see?"

If I hadn't cut her throat like those scissors cut me, would her voice have been clearer? Would I have recognized the voice as my own? Or... no, not my own. It was never mine. I wasn't Calliope Smith.

"Katrin?" I said, and felt her hand on my shoulder. "Connie said that she lost her emotions entirely at some point and they never came back. Do you think that was when she killed the wild mage? Do you think everything human about me is stolen? Just... siphoned off of some kidnapped child? Connie said that..."

Oh no. Connie. My made up sister. "Oh, sure, I have a sister. Connie ran away when CPS came for us though, she's living in the woods in a treehouse with the fairies." I had known, or some tiny part of me had.

"Katrin, we can't kill her. We need to break this bond somehow without killing either of us, because she... I think she just wants to go home. Oh god, I'm the villain."