We took a moment to sit and try to calm down, mostly for Celestine's sake. If she had control of the lungs she would be hyperventilating now.

I've been trying to relinquish control like I usually do, but nothing is changing. I have absolute control over this half of the body and she has absolute control over the other. As an experiment, I lit a small ball of light with magic in the right hand and I managed to calm Celestine down enough to light one with the left hand. Each spell is being powered independently of one another. In this state, we each have full access to our conduits without them intersecting or influencing each other. After that attack on Warran, it felt like her conduit was forced open wider.

Now that I can compare her magic to mine, it seems the reason her conduit was a little wider was due to my conduit intersecting and influencing hers. This is just my interpretation, though. We still don't know enough about magic to know for certain. While her conduit hasn't changed, her control over it has advanced. Her spell is refined and pulsing to let off as much light as possible with the least amount of power, while mine is raw light with little influence.

"How did you learn to pulse the light like that?" I asked with the mouth. Seems like her focus was on the light and it was helping to calm her down more.

She explained, controlling the pulsing of her spell a bit to demonstrate.

I ask.

I ask, dreading if my memories ended up spoiling-

Mother's not going to be happy about that.

She stopped casting her light spell and tried to get up from the chair. But only one leg moved, of course.

I said, dreading this bit.

We stood up. And... it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. We each control one leg, we can move them independently, and we have no trouble coordinating steps. This... seems pretty normal actually.

I said. We walked casually to Celestine's room and changed out of her lounging dress, which was just a simple peach dress that stopped short of her knees, and into a white no-sleeve blouse and teal skirt combination. A wide cloth belt wrapped around her waist. If we've learned anything from Mother, it's how to dress well and still stay cool. Can't just go around wearing sundresses all the time.

So, dressing didn't trouble us at all either. We just worked together to accomplish the goal of dressing the body. One arm did what it needed to while the other did what it needed to. We did a quick spin in front of the mirror on the dresser and something caught my eye. My eye, the one I see out of, to be exact. The right eye's pupil is flashing brightly with static. And the single point of changing light usually present in both eyes was not in the left eye at all.

She cried in my head. I nodded to her in the mirror. I need to put myself in her perspective. While we are split on control of most everything, I have control of the speech and breathing, so this is not ideal for her. It is her body after all.

I put on the straw sun hat and make our way to the front door. Of course Mother found us. She was standing on the foot of the staircase looking up at us standing about halfway down. She had this 'gotcha' look about her with her hands on her hips. "Where did you think you're go-"

"Mother." I said plainly. She knew only I called her Mother. It was an easy way to tell just who was speaking to her, Celestine or Novos.

Her expression changed to one of serious worry now. She had to have noticed the eye. I rarely speak to her, after all.

We make our way down the stairs, I grab Mother's hand with the hand I am in control of and we pull her into the dining room. I don't know how well sound can travel in this hall and I don't want to find out, though I believe Daemon already suspects something after Warran's outburst in this hall the day I attacked him. Mother wants to keep me a secret from him, so I will do my best to help with that.

I pull Mother over and had her sit on a chair so she was head-height with us. "Something of an accident has happened. While we were trying to train control over the body, we lost control and now we each control half. I have the right side and Celestine has the left. I also have the mouth and breathing portion of the body."

Mother slightly nodded, but didn't say anything.

"We need to visit the church to ask them about what they did to Celestine when she was young and was sick before I came along. The last treatment they did, did they cut something?"

She just nodded again.

"Did they tell you any specifics?"

"They just said it was last-ditch treatment recommended by one of the founders of Arture... It was like a miracle though." Mother leaned forward and pulled us into her embrace. She pulled off the sun hat and pressed her face against the top of the head. We lightly returned the hug.

Without leaving the embrace, I continued, "I am not a normal Voyager, Mother. We know this now. We are going to the church. I need to ask them specifics about the treatment and this founder."

"I'll go get ready." Mother said, pulling away from us.

"No, you don't need to. We can go ourselves." I said.

"No." Mother said sternly.

"Mother. You do not need to worry. We can take care of ourselves on a short walk to and from the church."

"I-"

"And I almost killed Warran once." She was looking into my eye. The eye that was static. I could see it reflected in her green eyes. "We're five you know, we can be outside for a little while. You don't need to worry, okay? We'll stay on the main roads." I smiled.

"I don't want you to go alone..." Mother said, looking down.

"We aren't alone. We have each other, after all."

She nodded. I need to lighten the mood.

"When we get back, Celestine needs to have a talk with you. Mother, I kinda accidentally revealed how babies are made to her." I didn't know the proper word for sex in this language, so the talk needed to happen eventually anyway.

"You what?!" Ah, anger. That's better than moping. "She's too young!"

"It was an accident!" I took a step back, pulling the sun hat from her hand. "My memories got into her dreams somehow, so I don't even know what all she saw."

I took a few steps back. Mother rose to her feet. "Well, we'll be back soon!"

I demanded. We took a few steps back, put the straw sun hat on, and bolted for the front door. Mother moved to grab us, but a well-placed wind gust spell by Celestine tripped her and she fell forward against the wall. We rushed into the main hall, put our sandals on, and rushed out the door into the hot desert sun.

"Sorry, Mother! Love you, be back soon!" I shouted, closing the door and running out the front gate and onto the road. We ran toward the main road and further away from Mother's fury. I don't think she was chasing us, but I didn't want to dally and let her catch up to us either. We will probably get a red ass when we come home for that stunt...

We stopped briefly in the wider main road to catch our breath. I pulled a paper fan out from under the cloth belt and opened it to help dry off the sweat already covering our face. There were a few wooden carts sitting by houses with men working to unload crates of items. It looked like they were filled with jugs of water. We were in the well-to-do area of Arture after all, so this must be how each house is supplied with water then.

We looked around at a few other people walking around, everyone in clothes they probably shouldn't be wearing for this kind of environment. Their sweaty faces proving me right. There was another girl that looked about twelve Earth-years old running toward the center of the city in an outfit similar to ours, blouse and skirt. Seems like it doesn't become fashionable to sweat like a pig in fancy, ill-suited for desert clothes until you're an adult.

We made our way toward the center of the city as well. The tall black-stone church was a significant landmark. It is hard to get lost in this city because that church should be visible from everywhere as long as you're looking for it. That would actually be a good place to set up a guide post. A couple bronze coins for directions and you could make a decent living in the city.

The closer we got to the church, the older some of the buildings got. I can clearly see the mark of time on some of the stone brick houses. Several cracks up walls that have had attempts at repair done to them by filling in the cracks with mortar. One building looked like a puzzle with how many cracks there were on the walls. I suspect the house was either abandoned or the owner just didn't care what the outside of their house looked like. This was supposed to be the richer side of town, so that surprised me. In a world of magic, why haven't they tried using earth magic to repair the stone?

I put the fan in Celestine's hand and she started fanning us from the left now. I kinda like this teamwork we have going. I wouldn't mind staying like this, though there's the whole her not being able to talk problem to worry about. After we figure out what's happened to us, we can worry about that.

As we got closer to the center of town, the crowd started to thicken. People walking around the church going from one place to another. I saw a few more dog-people with leather collars on their necks walking around as well. Furry arms and parts of their head were also covered in hair down their neck. They were wearing the typical clothing of Arture lower-class. The clothes that acted only to protect modesty and left as much bear skin as possible to keep cool. Essentially, the men wore only shorts and the women wore shorts and a bra. One of them even had his mouth open and was panting like a dog. I want to learn more about them, but another time maybe.

We folded the paper fan up and I put it back in the little pocket on the inside of the cloth belt. We also had a few coins in here too for spending money if we needed it. Mother had given us some after we returned home from shopping for supplies to make the chess set many days ago.

We weaved through the crowd and entered the church. A light breeze wafted over us. The church has long since been repaired from the awakening ceremony that ended in disaster. I took the sun hat off our head and we held it in front of us in both hands as he entered. Some of the murals on the walls and ceiling still need to be repainted, but the structure itself is fixed. The windows have had their stained glass replaced. The light crystals are all hanging from the ceiling just like before. A few parishioners were sitting in stone pews praying with their heads down.

Celestine lifted her hand off the hat and used it to pull some loose hair out of the face and behind her ear. After she was done, she held the hat and I did the same with my hand. All the while, we were looking around for familiar faces. A few blue acolytes were near the front of the half-circle church cleaning. To our left was a closed door to the lower floor. Further in, there were more doors to our right to offices I remembered being open the last time I was here, all closed. I don't know what I was really expecting when I decided to come here. Open arms and a hug? It's a rather quiet place when a service isn't happening.

We quietly walked to one of the empty pews and sat. We looked around and toward the various people in black robes with their colored galaxies. I never bothered to commit their faces to memory. Well, that's not true. There were a few I bothered to remember. Like Charcoal Man, the beautiful older blonde woman, and the head priest were the three that stuck out in my memory. If yoga pants woman is here, I don't recognize her in her proper robes.

We sat for roughly ten minutes just admiring the work done to fix the church. If not for the missing chunks of artwork, you wouldn't even recognize if anything had been damaged. This is the kind of work I thought earth magic could produce. Not even a crack in the ceiling.

A door opened behind us. We turned to watch the head priest leaving an office. He had a book and some folders under his arm. He locked the office behind him and slipped the key under the collar of his robe where it hung as a necklace. He looked around and his eyes met ours. He gave us a smile between the hairs that made up his white beard and walked over to the pew we sat on. We slid further away from the end so he could sit with us.

"Hello little Celestine. Been a while since I've seen you visit. If we didn't get the occasional visit from your mother, I would have thought you skipped town on us." He said softly with a chuckle while sitting down beside us. "While I have you here, I wanted to get your opinion on the new portraits for the ceiling murals. Since we needed to repaint the inside of the church, I decided to go all out and ordered portraits straight from Sirius. These here are interpretations approved by the largest church in Sirius, you see." He said pulling a folder out of his stack and opening it up.

Within were highly detailed artistic renderings of humans in various poses to match with the constellations they were represented by. Each picture had one central figure surrounded by smaller figures, which I assume represent the minor gods that serve under the main god represented. There was one male figure holding a ball of white light with many others underneath him holding smaller lights all backdropped by sky blue. The next one was a beautiful woman tending a field of greens while her helpers were caring for babies on vine hammocks. A man with a dog in another portrait holding down an animal that looked like a deer. Behind him were other men cooking on a campfire. The next one was a skeletal figure carefully sifting through bones and flesh, this one was rather morbid actually. There were other skeletal figures around him tending to graves. A woman was visible in the next one with large muscles hefting huge blocks of rock on her shoulders. Others nearby either helping her or carrying rocks of their own. A man on fire in the next one, but with a very bored-looking face about him. Trees and people around him were also on fire, but were very content about the whole ordeal. This is fine. The last one was a circular portrait of a large man with a black beard and starry eyes looking forward in a backdrop of stars. All seven portraits were a bit morbid and beautiful all in one. None of the images seemed to go together. They stand on their own as different representations of the seven major gods. Of which, I don't quite remember the names I gave them over a year ago. If the religion isn't limited to this city, maybe there's something more to it.

"I was about to go hire painters to recreate these up above in the ceiling. The six surrounding %$#&$## in the middle. Do you think that would look nice?" He said, pointing up. We looked up and saw what was left of the scarred old paintings. What was formerly black with just the typical white stars connected by imaginary lines and outlines to make the six constellations with a white galaxy in the center.

"We think they would look lovely. Though... the bony one could use some artistic liberty." We looked back down at the portraits and then back up at the ceiling, "might lose some detail with how high up it is. They could also be painted and hung like regular paintings between the office doors? That way they could be enjoyed from a distance and also the detail can be seen closer up."

He took out a small notebook and made some notes with a bonechar pencil. "I take it I'm talking to Novos?"

"We're both here. That's actually the reason we came today. We're having a bit of a problem and I wanted to speak with whoever was in charge of Celestine's treatments before I came along."

"The illness? You had a name for it I think... Anyway, that would be Jorald. He took special interest in your case and recommended the last treatment himself." He said, closing the notebook he had. "What problem are you having?"

"To put it simply, we want to know what secrets you're keeping from us and what has been done to us."

He held his bonechar pencil to his lips for a bit and tapped his finger against it in thought. "Well, I don't see the harm in it. I take it that's why you're here alone? Sylvianna knows your here, right?"

"Mother knows we're here, yes. She's not thrilled that we are out by ourselves, but we can't stay in her shadow forever."

"Alright then. Come with me. It's good that you're able to leave the house on your own again. Some of your old playmates from your old neighborhood ask about you. If you have time, perhaps you could pay them a visit. Sylvianna's overprotection of you isn't healthy, I say." He slowly stood up and walked carefully out of the pew. I just noticed he didn't seem to have his bone cane anymore. Perhaps he has his good days and bad days. We followed behind him. "Diane was the one who actually performed the treatments since restructuring magic is her affinity, but she's treating someone downstairs right now. If you need to know specifically about the last one, Jorald should be able to fill in all the details. The procedure was translated from Founder Sibylle's instructions on treating the illness you had."

We walked to one of the offices, not the office the head priest came out of, and he knocked on the door. A shuffling of papers could be heard before a "come in." The head priest opened the door and entered. We walked in right behind him.

"Head Priest Hohn, did you need something?" It was Charcoal Man! Celestine grunted in frustration in our head. But I kinda liked the guy myself. His eyes caught ours, "Ah! Celestine! Novos! Welcome!"

"Jorald, they had something to discuss with you. No secrets." The head priest said, eliciting a slight nod from Charcoal Man. "I need to go find some painters for this. Take care, you three." The head priest said before leaving and closing the door behind him. We were left alone in the office with Charcoal Man.

A short pause happened with just us staring at each other before he broke the silence, "please! Sit sit, let's talk. To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit? Can I get you something to drink?"

We moved closer to his wooden desk and sat on a chair in front of it. We placed the sun hat on our lap. "No, thank you. We wanted to discuss the treatment that was used to heal the seizures Celestine suffered the year before I made myself known."

"Ah, so Novos talking huh? Right. No secrets." He lightly clapped his hands together and closed his eyes in thoughts. "There's no easy way to say this. After exhausting all treatment options available to us, we attempted a procedure from a partially translated journal by Founder Sibylle. That's why you're here right? She was a Voyager and her journals were written in the language of her previous world for secrecy. She and her companions helped build Arture roughly three hundred years ago. It's actually a hobby of mine to work on trying to translate her ramblings. Very hard work."

"What exactly is a Voyager?" I asked.

"Simply, a person born with memories of their previous life. Voyagers have only been known to be human and they possess two conduits."

"Okay, then what was the procedure?"

"Straight to the point, alright." He turned around behind him and pulled a book off one of the shelves in the bookcase behind him. He turned back to us and looked through it. He stopped on the page he was looking for. "After you mentioned the word seizure, I went back and put what we did in better context. Essentially, we just matched symptoms and carried out the procedure. Luckily she left some detailed drawings in her journals. Symptoms included body shaking, loss of motor control, difficulty breathing, strange eye movements, among others." He placed the book on the desk to show us. There was a crinkly piece of paper carefully pasted onto new paper with a combination of Latin characters and this language's written characters. But very clearly there was a picture of a human brain and a scalpel drawn showing a line between the hemispheres. "This treatment shows severing the halves of the brain from one another, either partially or fully, can cure these symptoms. Of course, we were only going off this drawing, so we very well could have killed you. For that, I am desperately sorry. This was the last possible treatment option we had left."

While looking at the page, I was able to recognize the language. "This is German..." I said aloud.

"Can you read it?" His eyes lit up.

I picked up the book and looked over the page. The entire journal entry was cut out and covered in, what I assume was, some sort of preservative paste that allowed the page to be read while still allowing it to escape the threat of degradation. I could read it. But I didn't want him to know that.

Translated, it read, 'Fall 1st, 1220. Split-brain procedure and reason for future Voyager.' Voyager wasn't in German, 'I was born in a little village in the coldest regions of Sirius. I hate that country. I will never return there for as long as I live. The village was isolated enough to have its own culture, to an extent. They would bind newborns with a spacial magic spell that restricted their abilities to perform magic. The spell itself was simple, it allows only magic power to flow within the body and stops them from gathering more power. Essentially useless for anyone without a restructuring affinity. But with me, there was a unique byproduct of this that I attribute to my being a Voyager. From the descriptions by my parents, I would have bouts of seizures. These only started after the binding procedure, so they quickly lifted it from me and that is when I became aware. Knowing the binding procedure could cause seizures to Voyagers, I was able to convince Tanett to let me influence Arture's culture and religion to an extent where the binding procedure can occur here as well. As a Voyager, migrants will be quick to adopt my methodology and the change won't interfere with his plans for the city anyway. The snake people might even see this as a bonus since the binding stifles growth of those under it, keeping the residents weak in their eyes. It works to my ends. Once the city grows to a decent population, all I need to do is wait for a child to come to me with seizures in this closed environment and I can perform the procedure to cure them. Instead of unbinding them, though, I will sever the hemispheres of their brain, a common procedure for the disease on Earth. I have my theories on the reason for the seizures, but I won't know for certain until I have a test subject. After the procedure, if the seizures cease, then I will monitor the child to see if a Voyager still develops. If one does not, no harm should come to the child anyway. If a Voyager isn't born within my lifetime though, I am writing down the procedure in such a way that my replacements can perform it. Even if I die, I want this world to know what could happen. I hope this journal can last until then. Experiments that can last generations are annoying.' After the brief explanation, symptoms of seizures were written in several Earth languages, including something that looks like an archaic script of the language used in Arture. The grammar is terrible, though. But I guess that's three hundred years of language evolution for you. Then there's the drawings of the procedure.

"Sorry, I can't understand it. One of my lives lived in the area of this language, but I lived there too early. I only know the previous version of the language." I lied. "This right here looks like our language, though."

"Ah, you're right. That's an old variant of Siriusian, the general language spoken on Sirius. We were separated from them for a while, though, so our speech somewhat drifted apart. Our specific tongue is called Arturan Siriusian." He said and I translated the language names loosely.

While reading, I had translated everything to Celestine as well, as well as my conclusion.

So... we really are something new. They severed the brain... Without that, and had the magic bind just been removed, I would have woken up and just been reincarnated in this body, no Celestine. I would be Celestine but there would be no Celestine. But because of what they did, somehow Celestine's half of the brain took control. I am not just in Celestine's body.

We are Celestine.

I am the left half of the brain and she is the right half. On Earth, normal split-brain patients cannot communicate with the other half. The right is silent but controls the left half of the body. The left side holds the speech center of the brain and controls the right side. More useless knowledge from my last life coming to use here. Also explains why Celestine is trying to move into the arts. That's a specialty of the right side.

I mused to Celestine.

Celestine answered quickly.

I asked.

"Ahh..." I sighed out loud.

She chimed in.

I answer back with fake sobs.

She wined.

Charcoal Man was just sitting there watching us monologue internally. When we looked back up to him, he had a bright smile on his face. "So you did understand it." Our little back and forth was not instant. We pretty much were just looking down at the book in our hands without our eyes moving.

"Fine, I'll translate it for you!" I declared. "The cause of the seizures was the binding spell. Sibylle set up that whole practice to lure a Voyager into it so you could do this to me!" I shook the book. "And I don't want you to do this to anyone else! Anyone with seizures, first treatment is the removal of the bind. No light show, just do it! The whole culture here was a human experiment! What year did this bitch die on Earth? I need to know now." I flipped through the pages all the way back to the front cover. There with her name and descriptions of her environment in Sirius was a fucking swastika doodle. Fucking damn it, she was a Nazi doctor. This makes sense now. At least she didn't try to cause a genocide after she was reborn, though from these first few pages it sounds like she thought she was on Earth and was planing to complete Hitler's plans where he failed since no one around her spoke German. She mellowed out and cast aside her former, male, self after the realization. There's a note in Arturan that states the original book had several ripped out lost pages at this point.

I closed the book and held it to my forehead, contemplating if I should destroy it. She was a doctor, so the odds of her knowing about nuclear fission is low. Especially around this point in time. If she had died after 1945, which she didn't, then she would know about Nagasaki and Hiroshima. I have to be careful here. This is a Voyager's journal from a time very close to the discovery of the atomic bomb and she lived about three hundred of this world's years ago. She was part of the founders of this city. If there are any Voyagers alive on this world, they are likely from the time of my last life or from the last twenty years. They will know about atomic theory. I hope anyone who tried to use elementalism to nuke something killed themselves and took that knowledge with them to the next life.

There is zero chance that Sibylle wrote anything about atomic theory in here. It should be safe for Charcoal Man to keep translating on his own. After a moment of thought, I sat the book down on the desk. Charcoal Man let out a huge sigh of relief. I lifted our hands off the book and I look at them both change color from white to blush red as blood flowed back into them. We must have been holding that book very tightly.

I took a deep breath and decided to continue to conversation. "Sorry. Just... If you manage to translate that further, don't take what she says as some sort of gospel. She was only human."

"Right." He said, slowly picking the book back up and placing it beside him on the desk, probably wanting to keep it away from me in case I change my mind.

"Our situation is a result of this experiment of hers, but there were too many uncontrolled conditions so it's difficult to tell exactly what led to... this." I waved to our body.

"If you don't want to tell me, then I won't ask." Charcoal Man said briefly.

"Right now, we have a new problem. That's why I asked about the treatment. But I think I might have a solution. Does any kind of magic exist that can influence the mind?"

He leaned back in his chair and thought a bit. "That's a field that is difficult for me to say. Nothing specific in Arture, no. Not unless someone is doing some seriously unethical studying underground. The magic itself is odd to place into a school. The spell we use to put someone to sleep falls under restructuring magic. But those kind of spells cannot influence thoughts, at least as far as I know. You would do better to ask an elf since Eldwen uses some very... mean practices to interrogate heretics of their religion. Don't like that place very much myself. I'm glad we have an ocean between us."

"The elves don't believe in our gods?"

"Noo of course not. Their whole species is monotheistic, they only believe in one god and they use prophets to rule their lands. Elves talking to a god." He scoffed

"What about the awakening ceremony? Weren't the acolytes convening with the gods?" I asked.

"No secrets." He mumbled to himself. "It's not necessarily speaking. The crystals above each acolyte are tuned to the seven gods and through them we interpret their will. Seems $&%$^@##$ was not happy with you for some reason. It's like an emotion that we can feel in relation to who is on the altar. If someone isn't at least seen as neutral by all seven, we stop the awakening and try to figure out why. But $&%$^@##$ backed down before we could end it. The crystals themselves aren't part of the unbinding procedure. The bind is just a simple spacial magic spell. A child young enough can have it applied without trouble, but it's impossible to apply the seal on adults. What the elves claim to do is speak to their god as I am speaking to you now."

"Does the elf god exist?"

"Of... course? Why wouldn't he?"

"If their god exists then why do we not worship him as well? And why do they not worship ours?"

He took a moment to scratch his head. "Oh, I think I understand. The world Voyagers come from only has humans, right? I think Sibylle said that in her journal somewhere. Managed to translate that because she mentions this 'Gott' a lot in the early entries. There would only be a few gods, so human clashed over which religion was truth. Am I right?"

I nodded.

"Here, on this world, the gods pick favorites. The gods we worship are the patron deities of Man and #$^%$&#. The elves have their patron deity. I wonder if we should change how we teach this during services... That bit didn't seem to stick with you."

"Sorry, we just never paid much attention during the services." I said. "Nothing wrong with the preachings..." I tried to reassure.

He looked as us oddly.

"We haven't been to the church in a year!"

"Perhaps that's something that should change, Novos and Celestine..."

"I think that's all we needed. And I will consider your advice." I said, standing up, handing the sun hat to Celestine's hand. She held it to our left side. "We'll visit again if we have more questions?"

"Just give the door a knock when you visit. I'm usually in here. Especially now that I have to think on what we talked about." He pulled out a notebook and began writing on it with bone char.

We showed ourselves out and shut the door behind us. A lot of questions answered, but now I'm afraid of the gods.

I asked, trying to lighten the mood.

She had been sitting patiently while we were talking to Charcoal Man. I hope the taste buds are at least shared.