Vish took a last deep breath as the wyvern hurtled towards him, its talons ready to snatch the mind-mapper from the surface of the raft. Perhaps it had a mind to drop him against the far bank, as it had the others, or maybe it was planning to mix things up with a nice chomp of its fang-strewn, stone beak. This was one curiosity Vish was not intent on indulging.

The mind-mapper poured everything into his mental awareness, ready for a reckless charge. There was normally some precision and delicacy to gently maneuvering a soul to the back of its being, making ‘space’ for another to enter. He had spent whole evenings with particularly grounded personalities, detaching them from their fleshy surrounds, making them malleable to his ministrations. On this occasion, he lacked the luxury of time. It would be a contest of brute force - his well against the beast’s. It was not a contest he could afford to lose, and not something he would get another attempt at.

Fortunately, most creatures don’t tend to expect a sarcastic, apathetic, demi-hedonist to miraculously appear entangled with their psyche.

When their eyes locked, Vish made the jump.

It felt like he had been slapped 180 degrees. His soul did a metaphysical pirouette, and latched onto the wyvern like a rider jumping onto the back of a galloping horse.

The beast screamed the mental equivalent of whatever ‘what the fuck’ was in wyvern, and then promptly fainted (that is, it the did whatever the mental equivalent of fainting was).

Vish found himself at the helm of a giant bird-lizard careening full speed towards himself, poised to rend and butcher his frail, be-robed body.

‘No, no, no, no,’ Vish screamed internally.

He tested his essence along the creature’s outstretched wings and found that they responded to him, albeit sluggishly.

‘Yes, yes, yes, yes!’

Flying being one of those skills that doesn’t tend to come naturally to lazy mercenaries who think of the sky primarily as the oppressive backdrop for that most hated object - the sun - Vish found himself a tad lacking when it came to aerobatic finesse. Through panic, rather than design, Vish pulled his new body to the side, dipping his left wing and raising his right to avoid decapitating his now empty shell. The jump happened so quickly that Vish’s body hadn’t even had a chance to slump to the deck before the wyvern was on top of it, very nearly making all of his efforts for naught. Still, he had done just enough to prevent the impact, though his talons passed so close to his soulless vessel that he almost scalped himself.

‘I’m a gods’ certified natural!’ Vish thought to himself, as his new trajectory took him straight towards the surface of the river.

‘Ah,’ was all he completed of the next thought as his pointed beak broke the surface tension and sent miniscule bubbles effervescing around his eyes.

As Vish-Wyvern twisted, his left wing clipped the raft, dragging it with him as he descended into the murky waters. The raft tilted at a near right angle before it splashed down again with a tremendous smack, but not before it had deposited its load into the choppy waters of the Malin. This was including, but not limited to, a cursing mage, a crying alchemist, a laughing redhead, and a limp, comatose, Vish.

Vish had little enough time to worry about other Vish, seeing as he was a bit busy sinking. It turned out the wyvern had been justified in its fear of the water; the thick hair around the creature’s throat quickly became saturated, weighing his neck down like an anchor. What’s more, now that some of the excitement was over, and a good deal of the creature’s adrenaline was leaking away, Vish became very aware of just how much pain this thing was in. The wyvern’s wounds had not been superficial - cuts, slashes and punctures screamed out their existence like a class of children taking roll call, each one begging to be the center of attention. This creature was dying, Vish knew instinctively, and now its pain was his pain.

In a matter of heartbeats, the pain transitioned from burning to dull. At first Vish wanted to believe that the water’s cool embrace was alleviating some of the agony. He had to remind himself that the embrace he was feeling was something much more sinister. The temptation to curl in on himself and focus all of his dwindling efforts on pushing out the remaining pain was terrifyingly alluring, and he wondered absently how the wyvern had, for so long, resisted doing just that. It took everything he had to remind himself that he could still live, if only he could concentrate for a fraction longer.

Time dragged as he considered all this, and his vision started to blur. It was only when he attempted to move again that a gasp of bubbles reminded him that he was also on the verge of drowning – a threat that had seemed so distant when compared with the demands of his more immediate suffering. It was at this point that Vish lost all awareness of the wyvern’s sense of self, the creature entirely resigned to death. At the moment the creature faded, Vish fancied he felt another essence withdraw from the body, something as foreign as himself, although more an urge than a soul.

Vish pondered the phenomenon of experiencing another creature’s death for approximately zero seconds. There were slightly more pressing matters.

‘Fuck, bollocks, balls, shit! Where am I? I mean, where am ‘I’? Where’s my body? Why am I bothering to make that distinction! I know what I mean! Okay, Vish. I gotta be cool, relax…’

Vish twisted as much as the wyvern’s punished body would allow. Try as he might, he could not see beyond his own wings, spread out over him like a funeral shroud.

‘You know, I bet all those Guides who were so down on the concept of time had never been in danger of drowning,’ Vish thought.

A movement out of the corner of Vish’s eye drew his attention, and gave him an idea. Not a good one, but an idea.

‘Okaay, time for some creative maneuvering.’

Vish didn’t have a breath to take, but he still did his best to draw his presence into one place. He grabbed a hold of his sense of self like a bundle of unravelling twine and made ready to abandon ship. He wouldn’t be able to make a mental push of the magnitude he had when assaulting the wyvern, but he wagered it would be enough.

With a last effort to detach himself from the tendrils of the creature’s pain, Vish balled up, and sprang from the now empty husk of the wyvern.

For the purposes of inter-body travel, the fact they were underwater made very little difference when all was said and done. Still, Vish fancied that he was being jostled and rolled by the currents and flow of the river. It was disorienting feeling, jumping bodies, and he found himself very glad that his stomach did not follow him on this journey.

‘Gods, is that what I’ve been doing to people? That is way worse than I remember. I mean, better them than me, but perhaps I owe Figo a pint or two. Maybe. If I live. If I live and still feel like it. Anyway, we’re not in the clear yet. Now, let’s see, what do we have here?’

Vish’s new body was casually drifting through the water like a lone cloud on a sunny day. He didn’t feel any pain, which was an enormous plus, but he did feel weird. He was in a body that was reflexively producing oxygen, through some biological sorcery that Vish couldn’t even begin to understand. He decided not to reflect on that matter too much, on the off chance he upset this body’s natural rhythm and somehow screw up breathing.

Apart from the irregular make-up of the new body, it was a surprisingly serene experience. Whilst the wyvern had been alarmed by his invasion, and other souls before had pushed back against his attacks, the guppy he now inhabited apparently didn’t really give a shit. Vish slipped into the guppy’s body like a traveller into a tavern on a quiet winter’s morning. The ‘innkeep’ gave him little more than a cursory glance and a jaded nod.

‘Don’t mind me, little guy, I’ll be out of here in no time. I’m just hitching a ride,’ Vish thought for his own benefit, a little unnerved by the silence in this skull.

Regrettably, the view from the guppy was little better than the view from the wyvern. Vish could see the hulk of the dead monster he’d just vacated, and could make out rough squares of opaque darkness wavering on the surface, which he assumed to be the rafts, but little else. He made a few attempts to swim, but flapping his fins like arms did little to propel the tiny fish, and he could only poorly mimic the wiggling motion he often saw fish make as they cut through the water.

It was some consolation that he was no longer drowning, Vish admitted as he summersaulted awkwardly at the mercy of his own ineptitude, but he was painfully aware that his actual body probably wasn’t doing a hell of a lot to keep itself alive.

Salvation appeared in the form of a carp, gracefully meandering through the water near one of the rafts. Its scales shimmered in the light cast from above, making it look positively angelic. Vish kept an eye on it as he bobbed around aimlessly, said a quick farewell to his piscine mount, and jumped again.

Once again, his soul darted intangibly across the ‘space’, that wasn’t really measurable in such away, and planted itself on his fourth host in as many minutes.

There was nothing.

To say all was black would have been inaccurate; you need eyes to process such things as light, colour, size, shape. Here, there was just nothing. There were no smells, no sounds, no tastes – all these things he hadn’t even considered as Guppy Vish, but certainly noticed the absence of now.

Vish had overshot. He’d pushed forward and found, not the occupied space of a living, breathing being, but instead the void. He didn’t know exactly what had gone wrong, but he knew that he was the only one here.

‘… shit,’ seemed like the best way to summarise his predicament.

Here lay doom.

As the elders had cautioned, Vish’s soul had become lost. He was without a worldly foothold, and thus adrift in the aether. His soul was renegade, and not even another mind-mapper could pluck him from this nothingness.

It was an ignoble end.

He found himself remarkably calm. Perhaps it was because he had been certain of his death from the moment the wyvern set its eyes on him, or perhaps it was just because he lacked the nerves and hormones to properly feel anything. Either way, he was at peace. The only thing that really worried him was how he would cope with an eternity of utter boredom.

He took the opportunity to do some thinking.

Vish wondered about the nature of his abilities in a way that hadn’t really interested him throughout his youthful training. What he could do was awesome, and that had always been that. He kind of lost interest in anything outside of this fact. The guessing at the why and the how had been the pleasure of the Guides, and those mind-mappers with sticks up their arses, not him. Still, now he wondered a little about what kept his soul intact, and why, even now, adrift, he felt strangely whole.

He had always assumed that souls stayed intact when they moved because all the blueprints for life were already there. Just now he had inhabited some entirely alien bodies, but they were still bodies, with all of the mechanics to support a soul and allow them control over it. Why he could attach a soul to inanimate objects was a bit more of a mystery, and he briefly (really briefly) wondered if he had been reckless to do just that in the past. He’d never had trouble, though, identifying a soul and retrieving it from a plant, a tree, even a wall, or a pillow.

Vish considered the matter and concluded that the Guides had probably been on to something when they claimed that the aether infused all physical things. Maybe that was all it took. Maybe wherever the aether was rooted there was a place for a soul to latch. That was about the only reason he could think of when he imagined how it was that he had brought back souls with all of their faculties despite having implanted them on objects that, by all doctors’ accounts, could not sustain life. Perhaps the living and the being were two separate things. Maybe one didn’t need the other as much as previously thought.

‘Huh, this is probably how necromancers get started,’ Vish thought.

Souls lost to the aether were lost to the aether; he’d always believed that. The sages surmised that they were broken down. They were not destroyed, but they were taken apart in such a way that the essence of a being was dismantled entirely. Sure, there were folk tales about resurrection, a skill sadly not in Vish’s repertoire, but even this was considered the reassembling of an essence, using physical remnants to draw back components of a lost soul. There wasn’t a theorist alive who believed a soul could maintain its complete awareness without some kind of physical connection. This begged the question, why was Vish still so gods damned internally chatty?

This line of questioning led him to a realization; he was attached to something.

No sooner had he thought it than Vish became aware of it.

He wasn’t aware of it in any way he could identify. He still couldn’t see for shit, and he certainly couldn’t feel, but he was awoken to his solidity in a place. He knew he had dimensions, he knew he had mass. He knew that there was a point where his soul ended and a place in the world where his soul had presence.

‘Oh cool, I still exist,’ Vish thought, ‘…Now what?’

Mind-mapper lore dictated that to send a mind from one place to another the catalyst, i.e. the mapper, had to have sight of both the soul being moved, and its destination. Vish had never really questioned this, he just knew that it worked. What if they had been wrong, though? Or what if this rule only existed as a precaution? His kind were nothing if not cautious… present company excluded.

In the end, it didn’t matter. There was doing to be done, and that was infinitely more fun than thinking. That is, unless that doing was work, of course.

So, Vish did all that remained to him. He gathered himself once more and went, ‘Fuck it’.

As best as he could, without knowing up from down, Vish picked a point and jumped to it.

His sense opened like a hooker’s legs.

He was back in the river and he was in something that, mercifully, had eyes, a mouth, protrusions that might have been limbs, all the fun stuff. It was another fish, he realised, although this was still a pretty thrilling upgrade.

If the direction of his gaze was anything to go by, he’d spent the last however long attached to the bottom of one of the rafts. This meant that Vish was probably the first mind-mapper to ever be imprinted on two fish, a wyvern and a lump of wood, all in one day. He made a mental note to boast about that if he ever got a tongue that could form words again.

That was when he spotted his body.

Vish’s body was being hauled from the water, its dead weight being hoisted by a figure on one of the rafts. Once out of the water, he would lose sight of himself, and may never be able to find a way back.

Now, Vish was pretty pleased to be imprinted on the fish, it has to be said. Being any living thing again was great, but if there was a chance to be Vish again then he was going to take it.

With a lot more practice than he had started the day with, Vish took aim, and bolted from his new fishy friend. He prayed to the gods he didn’t miss again.

Lydia almost dropped the mind-mapper when the previously floating corpse suddenly started coughing river water into her face. Luckily, she had just enough presence of mind to deposit Vish onto the raft before letting go. With surprising deftness for someone with one-arm, Lydia flipped Vish onto his front and slap-patted his back until it looked like he had ejected the majority of the water he’d taken in. When he looked like he was no longer on the verge of dying, she helped him into a kneeling position.

Still spluttering a little, Vish brought both hands to his face, flipped them a few times to verify they were his, and then shouted, “Yeeesss! In your face, mum!”

Lydia blinked at the mind-mapper, “Excuse me?”

“What?”

“You just said-”

“No I didn’t.”

Lydia shrugged and offered Vish some water, which he recoiled from, making a sound like a hissing cat.

“Suit yourself,” the warrior said, draining half the contents herself, “Glad you made it.”

“Oh, are your now?” Vish said with a wiggle of his eyebrows.

“You want me to put you back in there?”

“I think I’m good.”

Vish looked around the raft and spotted some pleasingly familiar faces. Figo was running supplies to the sick and traumatized. Bling was bundled up in a fresh cloak, her teeth chattering, but a smile on her lips. Violet was hugging her knees as Archimedes put a blanket over her. Less pleasingly, Thomas was also in one piece, wringing out his robe over the edge of the raft.

Another familiar face was making its way towards him.

“Vish? Vish, are you alright?” Gabriel said, leaning down next to his long-time comrade.

“Alright? I’m a fricking legend! Did you see me take out that wyvern? I even flew for a bit! Then I body hopped a couple of million times, and now I’m back, world! I am back!”

Gabriel nodded along enthusiastically, “Yes, Vish, I saw. I saw it all. It was truly remarkable. However, more importantly,” Gabriel looked deathly serious, “did you just say, ‘In your face, mum’?”

“No.”

“Oh, but you did, Vish. You did, and I heard it,” Gabriel said with a patronising pat and a shit-eating grin.

Vish rubbed his face and flicked the excess water from his fingers, “Lydia, I think I’ll take you up on that offer after all; you can put me back in the river now.”