“What the - you were a sword? But how? That’s not-”

Serenity ignored Jacob’s babbling. There would be time to deal with him later. Rissa mattered. She was lying on the floor, not moving. It wasn’t like Jacob; Serenity could see her breathing. There wasn’t anything obvious wrong, so Serenity triggered his Essence Sight.

With that, it was obvious: when the spell cracked, small pieces of it splintered off. Several were embedded in Rissa’s arms and upper body.

Serenity still wasn’t a healer, but he knew enough to know that pieces of foreign hostile magic were not something to leave in an injury. These weren’t an active spell, so they’d dissipate on their own, but you wouldn’t want them to be in you when that happened.

Serenity coated his hands in Essence again and set to picking them out of Rissa. Her breathing eased, then she turned to face him. “That was terrifying. There was nothing. That’s all there was.”

“It was pieces of the curse. We must have damaged the part that handles the mental blindness, so when you were hit with bits of it, that’s what you got. It wouldn’t have lasted that long.” Serenity didn’t mention the possibility of aftereffects; he’d removed all of the large shards he could find. There was one more thing he wanted to do. “May I try something?”

“Sure, what?”

“I just want to make sure I got everything.” Serenity closed his eyes - not that it mattered since he was using Eyeless Sight anyway - and concentrated on forming a sticky shell of Essence around Rissa. It wasn’t proper spellcasting in any way; it was horribly expensive for what it did and would only work in a few specific circumstances.

This was one of those circumstances. Serenity knew he needed to work with his Essence magic more; it would be a long time before he was as good with it as he was with Mana-based magic, especially since it seemed to have a significant bias towards permanence, but in order to get good he had to get started.

The sticky shell closed over Rissa; Serenity could feel a number of tiny slivers stick to the shell. He pulled it away, just like using tape to clean a surface. “There we go, it’s done.” Serenity condensed the shell smaller, then used it to contain the larger pieces he’d removed by hand. “Now what do I do with this?”

It looked like a small glass ball with a center of shiny shards to Essence Sight, but it wasn’t visible at all to Eyeless Sight. Serenity wasn’t sure if it would be visible to normal sight or not.

“With what?” Denise’s question answered that question, at least.

“Spell residue.” Serenity would have to hang onto it until the spell dissipated. He knew how to reabsorb unaspected mana, and expected that unaspected essence was similar, but this stuff was far too likely to be contaminated by something he didn’t want. “Unless… do you have salt, rosemary, and rue?”

“Salt and rosemary, yeah, but I don’t think I know anything that calls for rue.” Jacob answered this time. It seemed like he’d calmed down.

Oh. He was sitting on the bed being hugged into submission by Denise. Yeah, that was a pretty good reason to have calmed down. Serenity knew that when Rissa did the same thing to him it worked. Eventually, at least.

“It’s not for cooking; I don’t think you’d want to cook rue. I can probably use some bay leaves; the point is something sharp and noticeable. We may need to steam them a bit; they need to be nice and smelly.” Serenity didn’t use casting components most of the time, but there was a reason the option existed, especially for rituals. For this, he was an inexperienced mage, and having the correct aromatics would help. Rue would be better, but bay should work.

Jacob started to move, but Denise didn’t let him. “Explanations first. What just happened? I saw Rissa with a weird knife, then there was a bang and you woke up.”

“I wasn’t sleeping! I was … I was … I was sitting at the table?” Jacob turned his head to look at Serenity. “And I seem to remember that you didn’t have wings. Only you do now. I thought that was a special effect, but you keep moving them. It sorta looks like watching a bird move, only you’re not a bird.”

“They’re real,” Serenity said. He was watching Jacob closely. It sounded like they’d damaged something important to the curse, but he knew they hadn’t broken it. A quick shift to Essence Sight made it obvious; there was an entire patch missing from the part of the spell over Jacob’s head and cracks in other places, but it had shrunk down to fit him. It wouldn’t be safe to try the same thing again.

Why couldn’t it ever be easy?

“Why did I think that was LEDs? That doesn’t even make sense.” Jacob must be commenting on Serenity’s eyes again.

Serenity knew he could have answered the question and led up to it gently, but he decided to be blunt. It was his normal preference and it didn’t seem like being delicate would help anyway. “You’re under a curse. We’ve cracked it, but we need to figure out how to remove it completely. Some curses can heal. The one you’ve been under prevented you from recognizing anything outside the normal. It seems like that’s gone for now.”

Jacob looked at Serenity. “But that can’t be true. If it were-”

Serenity walked over towards Jacob and extended one of his wings forward. He had a significant range of motion, but there was still only so far forward his wingtips could reach.

Jacob reached out and touched the wing. “It’s … it’s warm.”

Serenity smiled. “Well, I am warmblooded. I should hope my wing would be warm.”

Jacob ran his hand over the feathers again. Serenity had to control his reflex to stop himself from snatching it away. He didn’t really trust Jacob enough to let him that close to his wing.

Jacob turned to look at Denise, right next to him. Serenity couldn’t see his face, but the horror in his voice told the story. “Then everything you said was true, and I … I yelled at you about needing to grow up and abandon fantasies, didn’t I? Why are you still with me? I’ve been a horrible person.”

Serenity could see Denise’s face; she seemed puzzled. “No, you didn’t. Your neighbor yelled that at me while I was getting the mail yesterday. How did you even hear that?” Denise shook her head. “You’ve been a bit distant, but mostly you’ve been locking up. It’s obvious you were in trouble; how could I abandon you when you couldn’t ask for help?”

“It’s so clear, clearer than-” Jacob stopped. “I can’t trust my memories now?”

Serenity had a sinking suspicion that the curse had used whatever it could to achieve its goal. It probably wasn’t why Jacob’s telepathy had activated, but once it was active, the curse could use it against him. “What do you hear right now?”

“Me? My hearing’s nothing special. Some people arguing, neighbors downstairs are having sex. No one’s in the apartment behind me other than a dog; she’s whining. The walls are pretty thin.” Jacob listed it all off without stopping to think.

Serenity could hear a couple of voices, but it wasn’t even loud enough to be sure it was argument. Jacob couldn’t have heard all that with his ears.

Jacob continued while he stared at Denise. “Denise, you’re muttering, but your mouth’s not moving. How are you doing that?”

Serenity’s Mind Affinity was poor by his standards; not bad for a starting mage, but not nearly good enough to hold its own against the beings the Final Reaper fought without appropriate spell support. Still, it should be good enough for a simple modified shield. “You’re not hearing Rissa, are you?”

“Hm? No, she’s not saying anything. Why would I hear her?”

From Rissa’s expression, she had things she wanted to say, but was keeping them to herself. That was proof enough; her shielding was good enough to keep Jacob out.

Serenity built the shielding spell quickly. It was one he’d cast often, but not usually on someone else. For this, he could use something simpler, instead of the layered approach he’d settled on as the Final Reaper; he couldn’t afford that type of mana drain anyway.

Serenity applied his Mind Affinity and was relieved when it slipped into place as expected. He wasn’t a Mind mage - he’d never wanted to be one - so his skill with the Affinity was worse than it probably should have been. Shielding spells were among the few he’d practiced, but even that was long in the past.

Or maybe future. There weren’t tenses for time travel in English, and Serenity had no desire to invent them.

Now, how to explain it to Jacob. “You’re picking up … let’s call it supernatural noise right now. We’ll go into more detail and try to get you some training in how to use your abilities, but for now I’m going to give you some earplugs. Is that okay?”

It wasn’t a great analogy, but it was as close as Serenity could come up with on the fly.

“Supernatural noise? Mm, well, supernaturally bad maybe…” Jacob seemed distracted for a moment, before he focused on Serenity. “Earplugs. Yeah, that’d be great.”

Serenity nodded. At the last moment, he added a twist where the inside of the shield would let him know if it felt the same odd Essence-spell as had wrapped around Jacob earlier, then set the shield well outside the current range of the spell.

Jacob relaxed. “Wow. That was a lot of noise. I had no idea.”

“You need to learn to shield yourself, but that takes time.” Rissa stepped forward. “You’re fortunate Serenity can do that, I had to learn on my own.” There was a smile in Rissa’s voice as she said that.

Rissa ran a hand over Serenity's shoulder under his wing. “This is great, it’s more than I thought we’d get done on the first day. What’s next?”

“We need to chip away at the spell more. I suggest finishing that before you start much training. I can’t hold the shield forever but I can hold it a few hours tonight, let Jacob get some real rest. Tomorrow we’ll need to work on the curse more; I think that’ll mean pushing Jacob to see more impossible things. For tonight, I suggest dinner.” Serenity looked down at the ball of tainted Essence. He could handle that after dinner.

“When you say impossible things … do you mean cast spells on Jacob, or…?” Denise looked concerned.

Serenity lifted his wings, then lowered them sharply. He doubted she’d be able to see a normal shrug. “I thought we’d do a dungeon. That’ll take us through a ley line at the least; we can see if that matters for Jacob. One way or another, we need to either have him break it from the inside now that it’s cracked or it needs to loosen up a bit so I can get at it. Both of those mean we need to expose him to things that stress the curse.”

“Dungeon? Those are real too?” Jacob bit his lip.

“You were taught to fight by your Dad, weren’t you?” Serenity couldn’t see Russ not teaching his children. He hadn’t noticed at the time, but Rissa was better with her spear than someone who spent as little time in combat training as she did had any right to be. She must have used something similar before.

“Yeah.” Jacob didn’t sound reassured.

“You’ll be fine. I know how to shepherd newbies through a dungeon. I promise.”

Denise started laughing. That was probably fair; he knew he’d helped her through at least one of her Dungeon Trials.