The storm reminded her of a hurricane. There was a swelling in the center, the “eye” that was a veritable cluster of rainbows that spread outwards and dulled as the colored waves stretched into the outer ring where they met the still grey sensory information from beyond his immediate awareness. Still there was an order to it all, the currents beneath ran stable.

If her host’s desire for order was blue, it was a small miracle to her that his mind was not simply a mockery of a cloudless sky for how matter of fact he could be. The best most should have expected from him was a nice artificial sunset for when his meals approached. However, while there was indeed a bit too much azur for her taste, common enough she would think it was the canvas that all other emotions were painted upon, he like any other healthy being had variety.

His mind was a sea and within it were streams and currents of other colors like bands peeled from rainbows. Both above and within that sea rose a storm. The storm was where most of the colors concentrated and met.

The fresh undeveloped thoughts from the rivers of observation were transparent with flecks of color like wind that caught the subtlest hints of diamond dust. However, Alvah’s observations were tinged grey, muddled from years of loss and apathy. It was the impulses erupting from below that gave them color, bursts of dye, ready to to paint the corresponding emotion. A single thought could carry than one emotion at once. Bittersweet memories brought tears of sadness and nostalgia.

When looked at as a whole, it all wove together into changing mosaic of activity. However, just as there was a place he concentrated his attention, like focusing his thoughts through a lense as seen in the “eye”. There was a place where ideas and concepts sank into seeming nothingness.

If the eye was the forefront of his mind, the broken continent was where he and his other half once bordered. By defining a part of himself and removing it, he had to set boundaries and those boundaries remained. The pit where half of him used to be formed a maelstrom and the scars trying to heal around it formed the continent. However, how would a wound heal when it was moving? The maelstrom was always in the farthest part of himself, no matter where she was, it seemed to be on distant horizon.

Or that would forever be the case if she did not call that mindscape her dominion. She once willed the turbulent maelstrom to remain in place and ventured through it. It took the place of the continent at that time.

A fragment of his former divinity lingered in the center of the disturbance. His split had not been clean. Parts of his humanity broke off with the self he left behind but some of what he tried to throw away remained.

What was left was not appetizing, remnants of an extinct dogma, not even an ember but ash. The fresh sentiments that he should have accumulated and felt however sank into the pit to bleed away before they ever came to fruition.

But those emotions did not quietly vanish into oblivion, not anymore. “Below” the mind was a crystalline star, a mental prosthesis of her own design. All the discarded ideals and sentiments spiraled into the star where they were collected in its many facets and channeled back into the deepest currents of the depths where they were eventually most likely fed into the “eye” like jets of heated water climbing out from a volcanic vent.

In older days people had drugs, magics, and devices to regulate a frail heart. That heart being of course the insignificant little organ that sent blood through the body, not the hearts she sought. She simply applied the idea to the mind, a bandage for until the wound in his psyche finally closed. If it ever closed.

Maybe it was more akin to filtration system for siphoning poisoned blood? Her disregard for the sciences was why she could do such a thing. She was in the realm of the mind, not the material. Human logic did not actually need to be true or even make sense, it just needed to feel “right” and it might become accepted. How many maniacs thought they were perfectly sane? How many anceint scholars were proven wrong when a new fact was discovered?

She shaped herself a lair beneath the surface at the nexus of observations where the storm ruled, somewhere between consciousness and the unknown. It was a place of dreams where reality and madness coexisted.

The foundation for her cocoon was a question and answer. The question was “Does that mean I have a soul?” He never his reply instead he let it linger in his mind where it would become another island.

There she could watch his thoughts form above and listen to the mutterings secret even to him below.

Alvah, due to his meditative practices, was capable of being a lucid dreamer and thus was aware of her while she was in that place. He could even interact and influence that part of his mindscape if he concentrated.

Most people were limited influencing the surface. When someone dedicated their every waking thought to a single image, that was all they created, an image. All they did was erect a shell on the outside but the issue with a shell was that such things did not run deep.

While he might have been able to control his conscience thoughts, those shallow ideas that dwelled on the surface like algae and even his dreams, his subconscious deep below was far beyond his control.

She lingered outside her lair. Her crimson hair lengthened and split into an infinitesimally intricate web. The details were so subtle and widespread, it appeared similarly to a drop of dye dissipating into a well.

Since she was a part of his mind now, her own memories slipped into the flow as well. He was privy of most events she could recall while she passed through the surface. However, her musings were better concealed from him than his were from her.

Her lair had no particular shape. Besides her, there no inhabitants and she could shape the rainbow colored structure like clay. At the moment, it was a cocoon. Nice and cozy but her sanctum was more an expression of herself than him at that point. She kept it small so she could dip a metaphorical toe in the world outside so she did not have to nibble on her home when her hunger grew.

She slipped inside and gazed through the transparent ceiling to the thoughts forming above so she could see the emotions playing out to his actions.

And his actions were clear to her. At the moment, he was giving Itxaro a lesson if one could call it that anymore. With his leg healed so they could keep moving and a child to watch over. It was more akin to a day long conversation while all other matters were performed.

Spellcraft was no certainly no longer the only subject. History and geography proved commonplace though the girl knew enough of medicine for the subject of biology to prove important though the young woman, being one raised in the woods had tricks to teach him regarding survival. He being a noble from a more arid climate, his knowledge of foresting was more hearsay and personal experience but no teachings cemented by custom. He had also been using his magic during such times, a magic he only relearned two of the seven types of spells he could once use.

It seemed appropriate that the only elemental spells of his to not abandon him was fire. Fire cast shadows and was itself the shadow of humanity and life, a bright shadow but a shadow all the same, both the remnants and source of those that spread it.

In a slight deviation from Alvah’s planned curriculum, the subject matter of that day was tied to their meeting. Itxaro wanted to know how and why sacrifices were ever woven into magical practices. As Alvah explained, magic was about will and imagery, the resolve to sacrifice was akin to a marker to prove one had the willpower to perform the task and also reinforced the spell itself as one that already paid a deep for it would be reluctant to see it falter compared to a spell that was cast at no cost.

Desdomena sighed as the storm above showed tints of snow white at the hope a growing pupil might inspire but the grim subject matter clouded his thoughts. He was still growing accustomed to be able to “feel,” but his centuries of expressionless made him capable of concealing that fact. If something troubled him, he simply let it go unexpressed.

He had practiced his facial expressions with Desdomena in their journey’s first days but he minimized that since Itxaro joined their company. He did not want to disturb the young woman’s efforts in caring for a child.

Desdomena stuck her legs out into the unknown and combined them together into a long serpent’s tail. Plants and animals, she did not truly understand them. When she took their full guise, she acted the way they were expected to act. She behaved under the preconceptions and undoubtedly seemed more “real” to the unprepared than a genuine creature.

She grew a preference for lions, snakes, and spiders. The latter’s occasion to devour its own mate resounded well with her own modus operandi. If she had to be a bird, she liked to be a hawk but found herself as an owl when she needed to fly by night.

Maybe she would enjoy the aspects of a mantis if not for the certainty of the conclusion such a guise suggested. It was less fun if her mannerisms were too firmly cemented. Spiders were more diverse and thus had more mysteries surrounding them. Mysteries allowed her to leave little twists without drawing attention or combatting disbelief.

She let her tail sink deep where Alvah’s subconscious self “tickled” her.

The depths below were still hostile to her. He knew what she was and his remaining sense of selfpreservation tried to unravel her. Not that his instincts were misled. They were quite justified.

It comforted her that some part of him still struggled against his fate. Blind adoration was boring. It was predictable. Someone under its influence walked into a trap because they could not see the trap. Those that saw the trap and with trepidation sprung it, showed true faith and trust. It was such things she broke with glee.

The urge to harm was so powerful that it hurt. It hurt so wonderfully bad. But there were too many choices. She just could not decide.

The issue with being a creature of unencumbered morality was that she was not given the pleasure of breaking a taboo. Cultural norms did not apply so she was robbed of the chance to do what would be expressly forbidden. The more taboos one breaks, the better it would feel.

When Alvah felt discomfort or asked her to stop, that gave her a limit to rebel against. He was polite about it, he requested that she abstained from certain actions. It was not as if he could stop her if he told her to. If he phrased it as a demand she would go against it immediately.

But soft words gave her something to consider, to press forward gently against like a veil between her and her destination rather than a meddlesome wall. Him making tiny little requests for her to “play nice” let her know how it felt to delve into the profane and depravity by acknowledging his plea and choosing to or not to violate it.

Every opportunity was like a beetle crawling under her skin, tearing at her insides and she had hundreds of those vile little creatures pushing in opposing directions, trying to burst out. Felt as though she might explode like a bag overstuffed with ravenous vermin.

She could do as she pleased. She did what she wanted to do when she felt like it. But what if she wanted everything at once?

She wanted to choke him. She wanted to break every bone in his body one by one. She wanted to slowly drink every drop of his blood. She wanted to press a needle into his every pore. She wanted to bite his tongue off and eat it in front of him. Flay him.

Pull his entrails out. Crack his skull open and claw out his brain. Turn into a thousand spiders and crawl down his throat. Dislocate every vertebra along his spinal cord. Burn and freeze him.

Tear him limb from limb then leave him to starve while she feasted just beyond the reach of his tongue. Blind and deafen him along with other debilitations.

Wounds inflicted through empathy hurt more than a physical one. If she wished to cause him true pain, she need only revive his family and devour them in front of him, which sometimes she did in his dreams. Split blood and broken bones were the least harm she could do. If she truly hated him or vengeance compelled her, then she need only leave his side forever.

But then he would be gone. If she ever decided on a torment, it would be over and she would have ruined her prize. That dread, that empty ache was just awful. The dull boring existence without anyone to toy with that would greet her at the end of her road paved with tears lingered over her like a specter of doom. She would rather just cease to exist.

Their journey’s next destination drew close. “The deadlands. An ominous name,” she commented aloud. Beyond some mountains was a place supposedly stripped of all life but she and Alvah had seen where the manifestation of death itself cast its shadow.

“It had at the very least decades to heal,” Alvah’s voice rang down. It was loud and slow but an undertone betrayed his curiosity and interest if the visual display above did not make that clear.

“What do you expect to find in the deadlands?” she inquired as she laid back.

“If I am correct in where we are, we should hopefully encounter a tower,” he stated. The thoughts were edged with gray, memories of long established facts.

“Is that all you hope to find, a tower?”

“It is difficult to observe cultures and customs when looking from beyond the clouds,” he reminded her. He once looked upon the world below from his abode on the moon the way others gazed upon the moon. He witnessed sights but they were from afar but he had access to hearsay and knew the world in his youth.

The world above her darkened.

“And you would not expect to find survivors in "dead" lands,” she completed for him.

Death was something alien to her. She watched it happen many times but it was not part of her own lifecycle. There were those that pursued pleasure to the border of death.

She envied those souls for that was a sensation she could not gain on her own. She lacked a life to lose. She either existed or did not. She did not get to experience "near death."

Something worth noting was that death was not painful. She had seen it enough times. It was essentially the turning of the final page, simply a conclusion, an end. It was dying that was painful and was something one only experienced while alive.

She would only experience the instant of death. She would vanish, cease to exist, in the most anticlimactic of fashions. And that would be boring, to be there one instant and gone the next the way one might drop dead from an arrow to the heart. There was no drama, death was quiet.

There were barely any reasons to die. It is an inevitable outcome so there was no reason to move towards it. So, the question should be when does life become not worth living or what would a life be worth trading for?

Even if she lacked a substantial body to relish the experience of death, if Alvah spoke true and she has a soul then if the current world grew too predictable, she and him could just plummet into the Abyss. There was no rush though, if death was eternal then there was no need to leap into it, though she hoped there was an endless hell beneath the pretenses of the Underworld. The thought of being punished for all her actions made it seem all the more entertaining to choose to do what others thought to be wrong, it validated her choices.

“We do not have to go there,” she offered. It would be interesting to visit a wasteland but there were other options. His appreciation for agriculture meant he would likely find a more lively locale to be more pleasant.

“We could head north and soon enough reach the ocean,” he assessed before eagerly adding. “But then we would be circumventing potential sights and people.”

“Do we even want to meet new people?” She waved a hand dismissively. “The last ones tried to sacrifice you.”

A soft red reached her eyes. “You had fun rescuing me, did you not?” he almost jested.

The corners of her lips rose gently in answer. That was an unique experience, an aberration rescuing a human from other humans. It would normally be the other way around. However, the price of having to tolerate those fools long enough for the trap to be sprung was quite a steep price.