The bird lowered their head into their wing and let out three quick, muffled chirps. It didn’t make sense. How couldn’t they know if they would let Elach bond with something else? Were they unsure if they wanted to get more powerful? Did they think Elach would abandon them the second he got new Issi to play around with? Were they scared that a bond…

Elach unclenched one fist and kneeled down to be at eye level with the bird. “Are you scared that me getting a new bond will change you? Maybe erase you altogether?”

One chirp.

Elach ran two fingers over the bird’s head and down their back. “How about this; whenever I try to bond with something, I’ll consult with you first. If it feels wrong, or if you’re scared that they’ll erase you, like with Resthollow, I won’t accept their Issi. This is your life just as much as it is mine. What you need for what I want, remember? And right now, your needs are more important than my wants.”

The bird made no noise for a long time, not removing their head from under their wing until their feathers ruffled and they looked at Elach with shining eyes. They raised one of their wings towards Elach like a toddler wanting to touch fingertips, a very un-birdlike motion, and chirped once. Elach smiled to himself and chuckled, touching his pointer finger to the bird’s wingtip and shaking it up and down.

“So, what do you want to be called? Flow? Lotus? Something completely different?” Elach asked, and the bird chirped once. “Should have asked them one by one, I guess. Did you like Flow?” The bird chirped once and flapped their wings, hovering in front of Elach’s face with wings beating at absurd speeds that cemented his earlier hummingbird comparison, sang a quick happy tune and flew to one of the top corners of the room. Flow landed on empty air, fluffed up their feathers, and promptly went to sleep.

“Might as well call it a night too.” Elach said as he watched Flow’s slow breathing, slightly jealous of just how quickly they’d managed to fall asleep. “Good night, Flow. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Elach visited Flow three times a day for the next four days. Once when he woke up, once when he ate lunch, and finally right before he went to bed. It was a good excuse to meditate and try to make his headspace and container just that little bit larger, but Elach had no idea if what he was doing actually made a difference. He did feel his container grow in a single day as much as it had in four during his two months in Resthollow, but it could be that it was Flow feeling better and not his meditation that sped up progress. But he enjoyed having a little time alone with his thoughts, even with Flow flying, splashing, and hopping around just happy to be near Elach.

The end of the second day was when he started hearing the snaps. They were quiet at first, causing him muscle spasms and headaches that left him unable to remember just what he’d been doing mere moments ago. But the more he visited Flow, the louder the snaps got and the more violent their side effects were. On the fourth day he started hearing the snaps while he was inside his headspace, muffled clicks that reminded him of when Resthollow glitched right before they were supposed to bond. Outside of his headspace Elach couldn’t go for more than ten minutes without being interrupted by a snap, the holes in his memory almost outpacing the memories themselves and the ache of a cramp, spasm, or headache never fading before the next one came.

Existence was misery. Elach’s journey ground to as near a halt as he would let it, traversing barely ten kilometers a day before collapsing into his headspace for a moment’s reprieve from the torture that was the outside world. He couldn’t live like this. And he had no idea why it was happening. Flow fluttered down to land on his chest as he lay on the ground, breathing heavily with tears in his eyes at the pain that had been and the indescribable relief that came with leaving it behind.

“I can’t go back out there.” Elach whispered with a stitch in his voice. “It’s like my head is deep underwater, the pressure threatening to pop it like a grape while the rest of my body burns to a crisp in a wildfire. How am I supposed to live like this?”

Flow worriedly chirped and hopped off of Elach’s chest to wriggle their way under his arm, trying their best to comfort him from the pain he’d just come from. Elach let out a choked sob he’d been holding in all day, tears streaming down his face as he stared at the nondescript ceiling of his headspace. Was this his punishment for failing to bond Resthollow? Was his body tearing itself apart for its Issi because his headspace didn’t have a container full of Issi to sustain him? Or maybe he’d stumbled into the territory of some malevolent Issi predator, and these pains were to force him to lie down and accept death when it eventually decided he wouldn’t fight back.

Elach went to sleep that night with restless thoughts, a chorus of muffled snaps lulling him to a very late sleep that was anything but restful. And for the first time, Elach slept in his headspace and awoke in the outside world, where everything hurt just a little more and the snaps came with less and less time between them.

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Elach stumbled through the underbrush to where he thought he remembered there was a stream, his supply of water having run out just this morning. Or maybe it had run out sometime last week. He couldn’t even form a single coherent thought without being interrupted by one of the snaps and the ailments that came with it, his memory a complete blank aside from the time he spent in his headspace. Every step he had to remind himself that he needed to drink water to live, and every other step he couldn’t remember how long it had been since he’d had a single drop to drink or bite to eat. He could be a walking emaciated corpse as far as he remembered, since the Elach he saw in his headspace was a snapshot from the last time he could remember anything from the outside world. A clash of razor sharp leaves carried by hurricane level winds and sticky, tar-like black and orange fireballs blew his body to bits, and he kept walking forward one step at a time. His muscles were in a constant state of agony as he was sliced from shoulder to pelvis, his guts spilling from two halves of what used to be Elach and he stumbled over a branch from a tree that had splintered into a thousand pieces.

An errant blue-green vine with diamond thorns severed his head from his shoulders, and Elach watched as his headless body carried on for a few steps before he pushed aside a large black and orange spider web that exploded with the force of a volcanic eruption and blasted chunks of him back thirty feet. He stepped over a large root and came face to face with a rolling inferno that had engulfed most of the forest, stepping into the flames that liquified the skin on his feet and legs with each and every step until he stepped in wet mud a few feet before the river. The trees around it were a verdant green, the croaking of frogs and honking of some kind of water fowl a pleasant background noise to the four huge chunks of fire that thundered into the river. In mere moments all the water had evaporated under the absurd radiant heat of the projectiles, his skin crackling and calcifying from simply being too close.

He uncapped his canteen and dipped it into the river, focusing on the single directive he’d given himself that morning; survive. The same thing he told himself every morning. And every lunch, and before bed every night. Once his canteen was filled Elach raised his bloody stumps that used to be his lower arms to his face as diamond roots burst free from the riverbank, cutting off his view of the river as he twisted the cap back on and reached for the second of three canteens he needed to fill. He took a long drink from the second canteen and then submerged it back into the river, the sound of roaring flames and crashing wood encompassing his entire existence as he pulled the canteen out of the river and twisted on the cap before reaching for the third canteen.

Night fell in what felt like an instant, and Elach took the opportunity to end his day. He lay down on the wet dirt of the riverbed and closed his eyes to the sight of something piercing through his stomach in a spray of bile and blood, and within an instant he was in his headspace. His safe space. The space where he could think permanent thoughts that didn’t hurt. Where his muscles didn’t feel like they were ripping themselves apart with every waking second. He didn’t even bother moving, his memory a complete blank since the last time he’d come back into his headspace. Had it been half a day? Two days? A week? Flow couldn’t answer anything pertaining to the outside world, so he was left wondering as the most minute traces of muscle pain and a headache dwelled in the back of his consciousness. Flow nestled into their now normal sleeping position with a few chirps and peeps, ruffling their feathers against Elach’s bare arm as they snuggled into his elbow. Elach blinked twice, wondering if the rest of his life was going to be torture like this. Did the him on the outside lock him out, and was now living his own life without Issi?

Shuddering at the thought, Elach moved Flow in a little closer and closed his eyes. If this was all he’d have for the rest of his life, he had to find some way to make it better. It was that or drown himself in the fountain. But maybe he couldn’t even die in here, and he’d reappear in his headspace just after the life had bled from him as his lungs burned with every imitation breath that only brought on the inevitable.

Elach stopped feeling at some point. Not in his headspace, but in the outside world where he’d at least been conscious in the moment before it was ripped from him to make room for the next single frame of agony that was the slideshow of his life. Now his days were one long stretch of white noise, where he was aware that he existed but had no idea to what end. And he had no idea that anything had changed. He still turned up in his headspace, hoping without any kind of assurance that he’d stuck to the three times a day routine. This was his twenty-first visit since his memories of the outside world had vanished completely, and the pains had finally found him in his personal sanctuary. His head throbbed right behind his eyes and his muscles felt like he’d overexerted them, not too awful except for the fact that this was exactly how it’d started in the outside world. And the snaps had grown far louder than he’d ever heard, crashing against his headspace like a rockslide trying to knock down a stone cottage. He was crumbling down to nothing.

Elach dipped his hand in the water, it’s level having dropped low enough that it no longer spilled over into the abyss. Flow hopped around him on the ground since miniature cracks had started appearing in the space around them, little slivers of his collapsing reality that cut like knives and were as immovable as the mountains. The wound on Flow’s chest still bled red-gold, the bird growing weaker by the visit until they would meet their inevitable end. Elach prayed that his mind was the first to go, so Flow could extract themselves from him as their bond was fractured. Was that even how bonds worked? Elach realized that he knew next to nothing about bonds as a whole, even though his entire life had revolved around them. Resthollow had spoken about conditions, but then they’d simply handed over their Issi. Had he been about to sign a contract he’d never read when Flow and his container rejected Resthollow? Had they saved him from a life of servitude only for him to die a slow, worthless death trapped inside a small portion of his own mind? And was that why Kayvee had left without saying goodbye? Had Resthollow ordered him out of the city, and Kayvee was obligated to comply?

A tear rolled down Elach’s cheek, and he rubbed it away with the side of his hand. It came back stained in blood that was slick like oil. Whatever had happened to him to make his blood like that had managed to cross the veil between his headspace and the real world. Just like the pain and snaps had. Then it was true. He was coming undone. It was almost a relief knowing that the end was in sight, even if there was going to be unimaginable pain in the in-between. Like when he’d broken his arm during one of the festivals, and had to work for five straight days before he could go to the surgeon. It had gotten horribly infected since his bone had pierced through his skin, and he’d fallen on it multiple times, and he’d had to fight off an Issi beast that had put it’s entire weight down on his arm, but the relief he felt when the surgeon cut into him without anesthetic and used their Issi to slowly heal him over the course of a week and a half?

Elach fell to his knees and retched, expunging whatever bile and acid was left in his stomach. What in the hells was that memory? He’d barely reacted when it happened. Sure, he’d screamed in pain and cried his eyes raw, but he’d fought through everything just to get some more teenagers their wisps. And nobody, not Kayvee, not his parents, and especially not himself, had seen anything wrong with it. And now just remembering it had triggered such a violent reaction. What was going on? Why did it feel like he was watching someone else go through that awful experience, feeling everything in sympathy instead of in first person? If he focused on just the days his arm was broken, they were like almost any of his other festival days except for a blazing pain that he’d acted like wasn’t even there.

“Something’s wrong with me.” Elach groaned as his bile fell into the void. “Somebody. Anybody. Please.” He begged, hugging his stomach as droplets of blood joined his bile on their journey to nowhere. “It hurts to remember...”