Dear Human, when the brother dragged me through the other door, I looked back in awe at the shrine. This one glimpse was almost worth everything. The size and beauty were almost enough to elevate my spirit to a level in which petty squabbles between morls and humans just don’t matter.

The brother dumped me unceremoniously in the corner of a waiting room just beyond the stone door. He began to meditate by sitting in another corner and, every few moments, ramming his head into the stone wall, causing his forehead to bleed. Yes, his was not a mind I wanted to Gather.

That, of course, was not an option at the moment. Even for a morl, it’s not easy to kill someone when you’re tied up in the corner. But then again, words are weapons. I called out softly to the brother, saying, “Please, I need water.” He stopped and gave me a look as if proud of the trickle of blood stretching from the middle of his forehead all the way down one side of his nose. Then he went back to his ritual of self-injury.

I tried again, “If you give me water, I’ll give you a Gift.”

Again he stopped and looked at me, eyes glassy, either from the gasses seeping under the shrine chamber door or from his years of ritualistic impact trauma. “So it’s true?” he said. “Morls give magical gifts?”

“I’m surprised you know about that,” I said. “We don’t routinely go around talking about the mechanics of morlish magic with humans.”

“That’s the thing with you morls,” said the brother. “You think you know everything about us. You think you’re the only ones watching, observing, and taking notes. You think you’re the only ones with secret organizations and hidden information networks. That’s why you’re losing the war.”

I felt my stomach wrench and was, as always, glad that no hint of my distress could be detected. Could it be true? I wondered. Or were these merely his own weapons of words? If he spoke the truth, though, I needed to escape even more desperately. I strained quietly against my wrist bonds, feeling the bite of the enchanted rope cutting off my circulation. Perhaps, I could saw through my own skin, tendons, and bones with the rope. I would lose a hand or two, perhaps, but it would be a small price.

Keeping my voice calm, I said, “The war is none of my business. All I need is water.” I saw him peering into the space where I was, not really looking at my eyes, or even the correct vicinity of my head. Still, he seemed to think he could discern something about whether I was telling the truth from the enigmatic shimmering that all humans see when they look upon us. I rolled my eyes.

“And what gift will you give me,” he said, shaking his canteen to refill it and taking a long drink, “if I give you some water?”

“Take your pick,” I said, smiling inwardly. “I could make you a necromancer. Or better yet, in my back pocket you’ll find a deck of cards. About thirty of them have names on them, and most of those correspond to gifts I could give you. Pick one, and I’ll happily tell you which gifts I’d be willing to part with for a drink of water.”

My heart leapt as the monk shuffled over. I told him I was turning over and allowed him to grope around my buttocks area until he located my pocket and the box of cards within. Then I rolled back over to find him bemusedly flipping through them.

“The Sorcerer of Moons,” he said, then flipped to the back, “Torin Thanata. Wasn’t he that ‘Wanted’ necromancer a few years ago? I remember reading about it in the church’s weekly newsletter. Oh, I don’t know, maybe ten years ago? I guess you found him.” He kept flipping, looking carefully at each card and each name. “Fascinating,” he said, every now and then. When he was finished, he said, “I didn’t realize morls kept decks of cards.” He set the box down gently beside me, as if he somehow understood the significance of what he was holding. I decided in that moment that if he had to die, I would try to make it painless. He seemed like a nice human.

“Well,” I said, “see anything you like?”

“So how does it work?” he said. “You just pick some magical gift that someone you’ve Gathered has and then…” He snapped his fingers. “…suddenly I have it too?”

“From your perspective,” I said, “yes. That’s exactly how it works. From my perspective, it’s a bit more complicated, but that’s not really relevant.”

“One thing I’ve always wondered,” said the monk, “is whether you can give the same gift more than once. This is a technical detail that my brothers and I often argue about. There’s some scholarship on both sides.”

“I’m impressed,” I said. “A moment ago, I didn’t think a single human in the South Sea Nations even knew what a gift or a Gathering was. Now you’re telling me you discuss the matter routinely in your remote monastery in the north? And there’s scholarship on the matter? You’ve gotten me very curious about where the leak is in my organization. It sounds like it’s been leaky for a while now.”

“Well, I’ll make you a deal,” said the monk, “you settle this scholarly debate for me, and then if you tell me where your mouth is, I’ll pour some water in.”

“You don’t want a gift?” I said. “Did you see the Queen of Flames? This was, let’s see… one hundred and fifteen years ago. There was a woman who could set fire to things with her mind.”

“I’ll take the knowledge,” said the monk, “not the magic. Do you want water or not?”

Damn. This wasn’t working. Honestly, I’d never met a human who would pass up the chance to be able to set fire to things with their mind. What do you do when you can’t corrupt a human into doing what you want them to do? What levers of manipulation are left?

“Fine,” I rasped. My throat was becoming dryer than Nial’s notebook paper. “Yes, we can give gifts as many times as we wish. The verb we translate as ‘to gift a human with magic’ or ‘to play a card face down’ can also be translated as ‘to copy a card.’”

“That’s a lot of translations,” he said, unscrewing the canteen.

“Language is complicated,” I said. “My mouth is over here. Where the noise is coming from.” I made popping sounds with my lips. The water that trickled in was cold and refreshing. Yes, this monk would not die a painful death if I could avoid it. What a nice guy!

“Satisfied?” said the monk.

“Very,” I said. “Thank you. So… I guess we just wait now? How long does the shrine experience usually take?”

“It depends on the pilgrim,” said the monk. “I’ve seen it take as little as twenty-four hours and as long as a week.”

“Wow,” I said. “So we’ll be here a while.”

“If you don’t mind,” he said, “I need to return to my meditations.” He started to move back to his corner, where the rocks were stained red. Then he stopped and said, “Is it true that you torture the minds you Gather? From what I understand, you have to do that to get them to cooperate.”

I sighed. Under other circumstances morality was one of my favorite topics. Although I didn’t entirely give up on fighting my way free with word weapons, I began to saw through my own wrists with the ropes. The pain was intense, and the thought of having no hands wasn’t appealing, but what choice did I have? I gritted my teeth as warm blood began to flow from the rope cuts.

“I’ve never had to explain this to a non-Gathered human before…” I said. “But what I usually tell my newly Gathered, during orientation, is, ‘Welcome to the afterlife. You’re lucky to be here.’ Then, I say, ‘This can be heaven or hell. It’s up to you.’”

“But really,” said the monk, pausing before his next head bash, “It’s up to you, right?”

“Of course,” I said. “But I, for one, like my Gathered to know that I have rules. I have a strict sense of morality. I reward the right and I punish the wrong. And I always keep my promises.”

“So you only torture the ones who do the wrong things,” he said.

“Torture is a last resort,” I said, sharply. The rope was deep in my right wrist now. By rotating my wrists, just a few degrees this way then a few degrees that way, I helped it saw even deeper. Then I did it again. It was getting easier now that everything was slick with blood. The hard part was not screaming. “Most minds thank me. It’s eternal life, after all. The greatest gift of all.”

“I can’t help but wonder,” said the monk, “where their souls would have gone if they weren’t Gathered. Is there some other after life? Something you are depriving them of?”

“Morlish philosophers discuss this matter on occasion,” I said. “Your guess is as good as theirs.” I could feel the rope grating against bones in my right wrist now. I’d lost all feeling in my right hand, where the circulation had stopped. The rest of my right arm, though, felt like it was full of wasps or razors. The only way I knew I’d hit bone was that the vibrations the rope made as it scraped against skin changed to the kind you might get if you were rubbing rope on, well, bone.

“Well, that’s nice,” said the monk. “If you don’t mind, I have some self-inflicted torture to endure.” With that, he bashed his head into the wall so hard that he swayed to one side, and I thought he would lose consciousness. But somehow he stayed on his knees and managed to do it again.

Dear Human, I’m sure we can agree on one thing. Some members of your species are very strange.

Having hit bone with the rope should have made the bonds looser, but the enchantment on them caused the bonds to tighten. I wondered if I would die from blood loss before I managed to sever my own hand.

Fun fact, in morlish, the verbs ‘to take a risk’ and ‘to play a card face up’ come from the same root word. And in this case, I was going to need to do both. I will now describe to you the very risky thing I did, and it will serve as a good introduction to the mechanics of morlish magic. I chose to play Madam Ulana Bela here (the Crone of Swords if you were to find her in my deck) because her wrists were half the diameter of mine and as brittle as the bones of a bird. But also, and this is very important, I played her because she is over 80 years old and is the weakest and frailest card I could play. This is important.

For a morl, playing a card is a simple matter of thinking about doing it. I thought about Madam Bela lying there, wrists bound, in my place. And then she was there, and I was not. It was a dizzying sensation that I have felt only a handful of other times in my life. I cannot stress to you how dangerous playing a card is: they are in play until they die or until they voluntarily choose to return.

Now several things happened at once. For one thing, Madam Bela began screaming. I don’t blame her. The pain was excruciating. The enchanted bonds, already tight, constricted further and snapped a wrist, causing her screams to intensify.

From the perspective of the monk in the other corner, the only evidence indicating I had departed and Madam Bela had arrived was the sound. The shimmers take a moment to fade after we’ve played a card, plus her body was covered in shimmering morl sweat and blood. He looked suspiciously in the direction of Madam Bela’s screams.

When she paused to catch her breath, he said, “What’s going on over there? Is this some kind of morlish trick?”

“Help,” she begged. “I’m not Father Ori. Please, let me go.”

If you want to imagine this from my perspective, you can imagine that I was hovering near Madam Bela’s body like a ghost, able to do only two things 1) perceive the scene, and 2) speak silently to Madam Bela. That’s all we are when we play a card face up, disembodied and waiting. Suddenly that card exists in our place, and all we can do is hope they do the right thing. Oh, and you can remind them of what you’ll do to them if they don’t. Remember, I told her. Wrongness is punished and rightness rewarded.

The monk got to his feet and walked over to where she lay. He squinted down into what his mind perceived only as shimmers: Madam Bela’s body drenched in the blood and sweat of a morl. “Are you some kind of ventriloquist?” he asked.

“No,” she said through deep gasps of pain. “I’m Ulana Bela.” Deep breath. “I was on the pilgrimage to the shrine when Father Ori Gathered me. Please, my wrists…”

“Are you telling me he played you? Just now?” said the monk.

Ah, I thought, the monks truly are well-informed when it comes to morlish magic. This made it all the more important that I succeed in my mission.

“My wrist is broken,” she said. “Please. It hurts.”

She was losing blood fast, I could see. The monk, however, could not, as is often the case. Morlish blood and bones are as difficult for human eyes to perceive as the rest of us. You really have to know what you’re looking for.

“How do I know I can trust you?” he said. “How do I know you’re not just making your voice sound different?”

She took a deep breath and tried to say something, but her wrinkled lips (which I could see quite clearly, of course) weren’t quite strong enough to form the words she wanted. So she was forced to let the breath out and try again. This was going quite well, actually. Although I couldn’t see beneath her, I was pretty sure that her right hand must be very nearly severed. If I could get her out of play, I felt confident that I could saw through the remaining scrap of flesh that still attached wrist to arm, freeing my hands from their bonds. Remember, I told her, The pain will end the moment you return.

She began to cough, frail chest jerking. For a moment, I thought she was going to choke on her own tongue.

Remember, I told her, using my stern voice. (All of my Gathered know my stern voice quite well.) If you die, you return anyway. So why delay the inevitable?

“Because I hate you,” she wheezed, through a grin of pain.

I should not have played her, I realized. Yes, her wrists were weak, but her spirit was still strong. I should have played one who had been Gathered long ago, one who better understood right and wrong. I love you, I said. But after this, I will have to punish you.

Dear Human, if you wish to understand my state of mind at that moment, please imagine how a parent might feel when a young child does the wrong thing. Can you really blame the child? No, we can only blame ourselves.

The monk must have decided that all the ruckus deserved a closer look. Kneeling beside the shimmers, he must have finally seen her face, for he gasped. He touched the old lady’s sharp shoulder and ran his hand down her stick of an arm. He felt her ribs, protruding through the cloth of the morlish tunic I had been wearing. He touched her scraggly hair, matted with blood that had pooled beneath her. When he pulled his hands back, he could not see them, for they were covered in morlish blood.

“Untie me,” she begged. “Please. There’s a knife in his boot.”

The monk found the knife, a traditional morlish “bone blade” constructed from remains of youngling morls who have volunteered to donate their bodies. They are sharper than human knives and much lighter. Usually, the metal part (from the hilt down) is visible. But this one was, like everything now, covered in my blood. It slipped out of the monk’s hands as he tried to wield it against the ropes. He had to grope the stone floor to find it again.

The old lady was fading. I was quite certain I had severed my radial artery before I played the Crone of Swords, so there was no real hope for her. The issue, though, was that if she didn’t voluntarily leave play, she would expire and would exit play involuntarily. This, of course, would cause me to reenter play with a severed radial artery, one less hand, and very little blood, a condition that could prove fatal.

This wasn’t where I wanted my story to end. Yet the Crone of Swords seemed to think this was a time to make a last stand against the morls, by sacrificing herself to kill me. I needed to change tactics.

I’ll make you a deal, I said. Return, and when the war is over, I’ll trade you to a youngling morl of your choosing. Pick anyone in the Morl Nation. Maybe a youngling who has yet to Gather? You could be the sole voice in her head, her imaginary friend. You could teach her. She might even play you every now and then if you ask her nicely.

The Crone of Swords looked up at me, up at the ceiling of the cave. With great effort, she spent her last breath on the words, “It’s over, Father Ori.” When she finished the exhale, she did not inhale. And suddenly, I was the one inhaling there on the floor. Excruciating pain. The rope cut all the way through the ragged tendon holding my right hand to my wrist. Vertigo of looking up at the ceiling. The Crone’s laughter in my head. There were black swirls at the edge of my vision.

The monk seemed to sense that something had changed. Maybe he heard the shift in rhythm of breath. As he squinted into the shimmers, I darted out with my good hand and struck the knife out of his hand. He scrambled to retrieve it and slipped on pooled blood, falling atop me with crushing weight. I bit off his ear, which found its way near my mouth.

Strangely enough, the pain made him start laughing, even as he sprang to his feet, holding his gushing head and looking for the invisible knife. Now, of course, he was mine. He couldn’t see the knife and I could. He couldn’t distinguish my body mass from the blood everywhere. It was all shimmers to him. So I merely rolled over sluggishly, found the knife with my left hand. Then, when he stumbled into the vicinity, not realizing I had moved. I sliced through the tendon in his heel.

He fell, still laughing, giddy about the pain. Such a weird sect of monks. Just for good measure, and to make sure he wouldn’t be walking anywhere soon, I stabbed him in the thigh of his uninjured leg. Yes, he laughed at this too, but his laughter was growing weak as he too lost blood.

“Okay,” I said, cradling the stump of my right hand against my left shoulder, trying to slow the bleeding. “Look, I don’t want to kill you. There’s no room in my deck for someone who can’t be punished when they need to be punished.”

The monk just kept on laughing. It was like he had entered another state of mind, one trained by years of beatings and pain.

I cut a strip of cloth from my tunic, awkwardly with my left hand. Then I used my left hand and my teeth to tie a poor tourniquet around the stump of my right hand. This gave the monk time to quiet down.

I tried again. “I don’t want you to die,” I said. “But you’re losing a lot of blood. Maybe we can make a deal?”

The monk just chuckled. “What makes you think I care if I live or die?”

Ugh, I remember thinking. Why did I have to be dealing with the most unreasonable humans at a time like this? First, the Crone tries to sacrifice herself, now this monk wants to do the same. This is exactly the reason we try to keep the mechanics of morlish magic quiet. Humans sometimes get it into their heads that being Gathered is a bad thing, and then they fight (and die!) to prevent it from happening to others. Perhaps, Dear Human, you feel the same way. That’s okay. That’s one reason we’ve released this Third Edition: to help humans like you understand the nuances of their relationship with the morls, and the dysfunctions that can arise when both sides misunderstand the priorities of the other.

“Fine,” I said, crawling to the backpack that the monk had left in the corner where he had been “praying.” There in the pack was one of the magic rice cooking pots that gets hot on its own when there’s water in it. There was also one of those canteens that refill themselves when you shake them. Perfect. The gifts of making apparatus like these were given to humankind over five hundred years ago. ‘Cards played face down.’ And here they were, saving my life today: I filled the pot with water from the canteen, and set it on the floor. The water was boiling within seconds. I didn’t care, though, and dumped the water on the ground. I screamed as I touched the bottom of the pot to the ragged stump of my right wrist. Then, I did it again, and again. I couldn’t quite make myself laugh at the pain, but I did grow quite numb to it, as I destroyed nerves and cauterized arteries. I bandaged the wound as best I could with strips of cloth I found in the monk’s pack; it made sense that monks like these carry lots of bandages. There was also some kind of liquid antiseptic, which I poured liberally over the bandages. I heard a scream and realized it had come from my own mouth. Yes, blood loss really messes with your sense of reality. This is something our races share.

When I looked up, the monk was lying with his eyes closed against the far wall. Damn, had I killed him after all? But no, his eyes opened and looked at me with bare slits. “If I bleed out,” he said. “I guess we’ll be seeing a lot of each other.”

It crossed my mind once again that these monks wanted to be Gathered. I tossed him his backpack as I staggered to the big stone door. “There are more bandages in there. I only used what I needed. Patch yourself up and we won’t have to worry about it.” I had planned for that to be my dramatic exit line, but when I tried to open the door, it didn’t budge. “Um, yes, how do these doors work?”

“Kill me,” he said. “And I’ll tell you.”

Damn. He did want to be Gathered. This was a disturbing piece of intelligence, and I desperately needed to communicate it to my fellow operatives. They, like myself, were waging a war under the assumption that we had managed to keep the mechanics of morlish magic a secret throughout the centuries. But if this well-informed outpost in the north was full of monks who were practically training to jump into the minds of morls upon death, then there was no telling what other preparations the humans had been making.

The irony was, if I could get through the door, I could do it. The shrine would allow me to communicate across great distances. I poked and prodded at the door, its hinges, and the strange glowing crystals set into the wall around it. But no mechanism for entering the shrine revealed itself. The whole time, I felt like I was moving in slow motion, as if underwater.

“Ready when you are,” the monk said. “Want me to give you a hint?”

“Yes,” I said, sagging against the door. I could feel the heat from the shrine radiating through it. If I wasn’t already in excruciating pain, the stones might have been too hot to touch.

“Those doors were built by a race of gods,” said the monk. “The creators of our races.”

“How is that a hint?” I asked.

“The creators knew that morls and men would be locked in an eternal struggle,” said the monk, as if he was reciting from a textbook. But then, he looked me (almost) in the eye and say, very seriously, “Or as your people call it, ‘the Game.’”

I held his gaze until his eyes were forced to slide off of me, the way human eyes do. Speaking of the Game, I was dying to ask my colleagues how we had screwed it up so badly. Had some rogue morl centuries ago started giving out forbidden gifts, like the gift of prophecy? There are reasons certain things are banned! The human magical ecosystem was a delicate garden that needed to be carefully maintained. Play too many of the wrong cards face down, and bam a few centuries later, anything can happen!

The monk went on, “But the creators built certain unbreakable rules into the Game. The fact that morls cannot be seen, for example. Or the fact that morls Gather humans, not the other way around. And so on.”

“Yes yes yes,” I said, impatiently. “Obviously, I know about those rules. You’re the one who isn’t supposed to.”

The monk smirked. What an asshole. Maybe I should Gather him. And spend a century or two figuring out how to torture him.

“The hint,” he said, “is that the creators made certain places that morls cannot enter unless escorted by humans. These are places of power. Places like the shrine. Places like the city in the desert.”

I couldn’t tell if he was telling the truth or lying. I’d never heard of these rules, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. The Game is complex, is a common morl utterance for a reason. Whenever something unexpected happens, from accidentally stubbing your toe to, well, all the unexpected things that had happened during my mission, we morls will often spread our hands, look to the sky, and said, “The Game is complex.”

I mention this because the next words out of the monk’s mouth caused my jaw to drop and made me into a believer instantly. Even though it was almost a century ago today, I remember every word as I sit preparing this Third Edition. “When I first came to the shrine, I dreamed of this very moment. Me lying here, bleeding. You standing there, shimmering. The door behind you. All of it. Even me telling you all this. I dreamed that too. And I have a message for you, Father Ori. And for you, Sir Mau Dannister. And for you, Madam Ulana Bela. And for you, Torin Thanata. And for you-”

“I get it,” I snapped. “What’s the message?”

He smirked again. “I dreamed you would say that. The message is that if you wish to enter the shrine, I will have to escort you. And I will only do so if you give me my word that you will Gather me and the rest of the pilgrims. All of us. Before we leave the shrine.” Then, somehow, his eyes managed to look directly into mine. It gave me vertigo and chills. This was, perhaps, the first time a human had managed to find the exact location of my eyes within the shimmers. “The Game, as your people are fond of saying, is complex.”

My jaw dropped at this. It, along with the rest of my body, felt like it was made of stone. I could hear the chatter of my Gathered flock in my ears. The cackle of the Crone was the loudest. I shut them all out with a clench of my jaw.

“Deal,” I said, “I give you my word.”

“And that,” said the monk, “is the last thing my dreams ever showed me.” With great effort, he clawed his way to his feet and joined me against the door.

He didn’t press me for proof that I would keep my word. In fact, I never heard him speak another word. He simply put his hand on the door, and it swung inward, allowing a gust of scalding air to lash out at us. Then, he took me by the arm, and we supported each other as we hobbled onto the bridge that soared over the drop toward the molten core of the planet. In the distance, I could see the bodies of the pilgrims strewn about on the stone.

Just past the threshold, dangerously close to the edge of the bridge, the monk stopped. If he wanted to, he probably could have pulled us both off the edge and ended my part in the Game immediately. But he didn’t. Instead, he took my good hand and placed it onto his chest. Instinctively, I clutched at his robes as he leaned backward, almost toppling off the edge. His balance was ever-so-slightly backward, making my weak fingers the only thing keeping him on the stone bridge. For the second time, he looked me right in the eyes, perfectly in the eyes, and gave me an expression that I couldn’t read. Fear? Sadness? Triumph? Anger? Joy? Usually, I can read human faces like books. But this one was inscrutable.

He nodded. He was ready.

Dear Human, you may be wondering if there is some mechanism of morlish magic that I have not told you about, a mandate to keep our promises, perhaps. But I assure you, there is not. I didn’t have to keep my word that I would Gather him and the rest of the pilgrims. But morls rarely break our promises. Remember, unlike humans, we are never alone. We have an audience at all times. If my Gathered were ever to see me break a promise, then what good is my word to them? Naturally, you may be wondering, why do I care? Simple: when moments arise in which I must make a deal with my Gathered, I want them to know that I can be trusted to uphold my end. For example, if the Crone of Swords had returned voluntarily, I would indeed have traded her to a youngling morl of her choosing, as promised.

These days, at the Shadow Guild, one of our teachings is: Honesty makes trust; Trust makes cooperation. The Gathered sometimes don’t cooperate, but when they don’t trust you, they never do. Sometimes is better than never.

As for the matter at hand: Not because I wanted to, but because I promised I would, I allowed the fingers in my left hand to relax. The cloth of the monk’s robes slipped through my fingers. He fell calmly backward, laughing as he left the bridge, laughing as he tumbled toward the center of the planet. It took only moments before the hot air killed him mid-fall, and I began to feel his presence, Gathered into me. And now his laughter was in my head, surprisingly loud. I would have to assign him a card later; no time now.

I ignored the sounds of the other Gathered greeting him and introducing themselves. Calmly, I walked to where the pilgrims lay strewn about like a hand of cards that had been dropped.