Elach sat in the middle of a circle of black chalk and burnt embers, taking in the smell of the materials as he tried to compress his Issi for the umpteenth time that hour. Now that Sentence was unconfident in his own teachings he was more willing to abandon those that showed no promise, so Elach and Flow had burned through his first set of options in twenty minutes. Sentence then moved on to the items he’d brought with him, stating that they helped the characters with their own progress in the tales and that Elach should try the technique that he’d been the closest to success with while surrounded or holding each and every one of them.

“Any change?” Sentence asked as Elach stretched, Flow ruffling their feathers in his lap.

“It was smokier in my mind. Like there was a haze between Flow, my Issi, and me.” Elach said, relaying what he’d just felt to Sentence. “Other than that, nothing new. A little more annoying to try and make it work, but it didn’t help or hurt the process.”

Sentence turned his attention to Flow and raised an eyebrow. They sang him an elaborate song with a few squacks and caws thrown in for emphasis, and Sentence just nodded along as if he understood them perfectly.

“The haze proved difficult for you to navigate.” Sentence reiterated. “Then we will remove this from the pool of possibilities. Do you have anything else to add?”

Flow and Sentence continued their, from Elach’s point of view, extremely one-sided conversation, and he dipped down into his container to try and get one last look at his Issi through the smoke from the charcoal chalk. He stared at the mass of seemingly empty space as Flow’s song sounded clearly through the link they shared, their chatter making it difficult to focus on what he wanted to do.

And yet, through the smoke, Elach felt his Issi resonating with Flow’s song whenever they hit a high note. He felt the Issi outside of him grow more and more supple with each and every note, almost begging him to absorb it and take its power for his own. And then a sad, empty note pierced the veil of smoke, and Elach felt his Issi ripple in sympathy. It remembered being pointless, weak and void of meaning until Elach unraveled the ribbon around it and filled himself with its emptiness. But at that moment, he saw what his Issi used to be. There was something dripping out of that hole he had tried to contain, to stifle, to prevent from overwhelming his entire being. But he’d combined that with the ribbon that had sealed it when he ripped the hole open, taking that emptiness at the center and making it his own.

“Spaces between spaces.” Elach muttered. “Flow, do you remember the first song you sang after you hatched? The really sad one when we talked about Resthollow?”

Flow cocked their head, locking eyes with Elach at his question. They tentatively let out a low whistle he took as questioning confirmation, and he searched for the words to explain what he’d just felt.

“That sad note cut right through everything and hit me right in the Issi.” Elach said, motioning at his gut. “Just one of them sent a reverberation through my container that was like one of the ripples, only bigger and more powerful.”

“And you said you would be able to hold onto five ripples. Is that regardless of size?” Sentence asked.

“I don’t know. Not yet.” Elach said. “And just the low notes didn’t feel fully right. I think it needs to be the whole song.”

Flow chirped and hopped up to Elach to perch on his shoulder. They shuffled around for a moment to find their footing, then closed their eyes. Elach felt their presence settle on his Issi like a weight growing more and more comfortable, closing his own eyes to better visualize what was going on.

Flow began singing the same dirge they’d sung when they first met after their bond. An immeasurable sadness flowed out of them along with the notes, for an unfathomably cruel world cutting lives and loves terrifyingly short. Then came the terror and pain, of watching everything you once knew and cared for being wiped out in an instant, changed to something close enough to what it used to be to seem like a cruel mockery of what you once had. The fear washed away to terrifying apathy, floating through existence without any direction or higher goals than surviving. In those notes, Elach realized he knew so little about Flow; this wasn’t some theoretical dirge of love, life, and the inevitable loss under the eternals. This was Flow. Their entire being, their story, and the terror that wracked their very being that Elach would fall and they would return to the first chapter once more.

Elach opened his eyes when he felt tears running down his cheeks, seeing Sentence looking at Flow and himself with a curious yet hopeful light in his eyes. Elach’s Issi shook like a beaten puppy in the dark corner of a ruined barn, starving wolves closing in to take a life to extend their own. He felt Flow's notes resonate across the surface in shockingly cold waves, Flow’s previous life experiences brought together in a dirge that spurred even the emptiness in his container to shimmer and shake in traumatic sympathy.

Reaching deeper inside of himself than he’d expected possible, Elach felt Flow’s fears mirrored in himself. But they weren’t out of concern for the people he’d met; his world extended to two people as of now. Flow and himself. It was selfish, but if killing an eternal spared only those who delivered its end from the rewriting of reality, he couldn’t afford to extend himself any further than the walls of his own headspace. For a moment he stopped trying to compress his Issi and just sat there listening to Flow, feeling their very beings intertwine even deeper than they’d been when they bonded.

“I won’t abandon you.” Elach said, his voice as unwavering as the mountains and his heart full of righteous fire. “And you won’t abandon me. That’s enough.”

Flow’s song didn’t so much as stutter, but it took on a slightly different tone. To an outsider, the sadness, loneliness and terror were still there in the forefront. But to Elach and Flow, there was one key difference. In the in betweens, in the quiet of unsung notes, a second voice sang in silent harmony.

Everything changed. Elach felt his Issi completely disappear, his container scoured clean as something reached into him and ran impossibly sharp claws over each and every molecule of his existence. He bled existence at an alarming rate, feeling himself dissociate from reality by the second. Sentence just sat there with the same curious, hopeful expression as Elach felt himself being picked raw, deep grooves gashed into his very being without so much as a tinge of pain. He looked to his shoulder and saw Flow as a cloud of Issi vaguely shaped like a bird, and he knew right then and there that he could devour them. Steal everything that they were and mold himself to be strong enough to do something about his situation.

He knew he could, and he let the thought go without once entertaining it. Flow’s song echoed in the back of his mind, and the cloud of Issi solidified back into Flow. But it wasn’t quite the same Flow as before; their beak was less like that of a hummingbird and more like that of a crow, their eyes sparkling with intelligence far beyond what they’d had a moment ago. Their feathers had taken on a mixture of their original dark purple, red-gold of the amber nectar, and the black speckled with pearl and sapphire of the space-like nectar. Their talons were long and vicious, yet they nestled into Elach’s shoulder like they were made out of marshmallows. Their voice was stronger and more confident, and Elach could somehow feel his unconscious mind harmonizing with their song that he now understood as well as anything else in his life.

Elach crushed the emptiness inside of his container in a single thought down to a pinprick of nothing, and the transformation ended. His Issi rushed back into him, filling him with something that for once didn’t feel empty. He realized that it wasn’t that his Issi was truly empty; it was that Flow was still partly against his union with Sentence. Not because Sentence was a transient or static Issi type, but because Flow hadn't truly accepted that Sentence was helping him. The Issi that flooded out of the emptiness sang with untold potential, and Prisoner’s words of spaces between spaces melted away. Elach looked over a power that finally felt like his and Flow’s, a gift from Sentence that they’d twisted and shaped into something that was their own. And he felt the other presence, the rattling of chains in the far reaches of his mind that were barely audible. He knew they would grow louder over time, but he had far longer than he’d expected.

Flow’s song continued unabated, and Elach studied his modified Issi. Everything that had been scraped from his existence was now inside of this, the missing ingredient that had been blocking him from feeling this out with only Flow to help. He reached out a hand and made a clawing motion, keeping his first knuckles facing perfectly upwards as he etched a symbol into his Issi. The same symbol he’d carved into the walls of his headspace in the times he still couldn’t remember. In the middle sat two overlapping diamonds with three dots in the center representing Flow and… not him. Something else he felt was missing, yet everything fell into place.

Flow’s song cut off, and Elach shoved all of his willpower into the symbol that blazed in front of him like the midday sun. He fell into a broken memory, half-watching and half feeling himself clawing at the walls of his headspace, Flow zipping and dodging around the cracks in reality to stay by his side no matter what. They’d taken far more wounds than he’d remembered, bathing for a few moments in the amber nectar to heal themselves of the most egregious of them before returning to his side. He latched his symbol onto the Issi inside his container and felt it take hold, the harmonious reverberations of his and Flow’s bond rippling over the Issi and holding it in a cage of sound and will. He clenched the symbol with his mind, feeling the Issi fighting against both Flow and himself for a long moment before the song and stress won out, pulsing with power and crushing the Issi down ever so slightly. A wave of relief washed over him and continued through the bond to Flow.

“I got a little bit compressed.” Elach said, his wary voice betraying none of the exhilaration and excitement he felt. “How far should I go?”

“As far as you can.” Sentence answered excitedly. “Ride this wave as far as it will allow.”

A loud, heroic song that denounced all limits and spoke of the great acts Elach would accomplish gave a different opinion, and Elach felt Flow’s presence settle on the middle of the symbol.

His symbol.