Elach wobbled into Rainshear’s cafe well past midnight, surprised to find the door unlocked and a note on the lowering pole letting him know that there was food in the fridge if he wanted it. He’d chased a lead on Gilt for the entire night, only to end up in a sticky situation involving a few people he expected were cultists and a bar full of angry patrons. Flow had retreated into his headspace when the first glass was flung, and the night had ended with the cultists handcuffed and subdued with Issi while he snuck out the back of the bar thanks to a bartender that knew Rainshear.

“Eternals, I smell disgusting.” Elach muttered as he brought down the staircase as quietly as he could, trying not to disturb whoever might be sleeping above. “At least I got something out of this shitshow.”

“And what, may I ask, did you get?” Rainshear asked, effortlessly pulling Elach up into her home.

“A lead on Gilt, and by extension, Revel.” Elach said with a tired smile. “It’s one single group wrangling them all up, and much to my surprise it wasn’t Promised Tomorrows. They’re just a buyer.”

“Let me guess; Pinnacle?” Rainshear said.

Elach’s eyes widened, then narrowed in suspicion. “How’d you know that?”

“Elach, I have eyes and ears all over this forsaken glacier.” Rainshear snickered. “But you did find part of the issue. And please tell me you weren’t trying to take the fight to them. Alone. We don’t need them getting scared off before we have a chance to b… strike at them.”

“No, I was otherwise occupied.” Elach muttered. “But what do you mean part of the issue? Is Pinnacle working with another group?”

“Far more than one group, Elach. Almost everyone in Glasrime’s inner circle has brought on a group like Pinnacle or Promised Tomorrows to… how do I put it… acquire the prime materials for their newest and most powerful proteges.” Rainshear said with a longing sigh. “It isn’t safe here for wisp manifestations or anyone bonded to one of them anymore. There’s no way Glasrime doesn’t know what their inner circle’s doing, which makes me think they’re paying tribute to keep all this under wraps.”

“Do you mean they’re giving some of the wisps they capture to Glasrime?”

“You said it, not me.” Rainshear said as she pulled a mostly-eaten platter out of the fridge. “Have you eaten yet?”

Elach’s stomach rumbled at the sight of food, and he patted it for emphasis. “Nope.”

“Then come eat your fill and get a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow’s going to be one massively unpleasant day for all of us.” Rainshear said ominously, letting the platter clatter to the table, and Elach kept up a placid smile.

Elach signaled to Flow and reached out a proverbial rope that Flow eagerly took, appearing on the back of a chair and looking at the food with a barely suppressed hunger. Elach tapped a finger to the side of his neck, pushing Issi to his brain as Rainshear’s calming Issi came knocking. He didn’t want her to know he’d found a sort of countermeasure to her insidious technique, and he especially didn’t want her to know who he’d beaten the details out of.

He would have felt worse for the bartender if he hadn’t caught a glance at the back room, and all the far-too-exotic meats it contained. Especially when the bar was supposedly vegan.

“You can show your thanks tomorrow.” Rainshear said as she opened the door to what Elach thought was Metea/Irric’s room and shot a wary glance back at him. Had she already noticed? “Oh, and try not to make too much noise. Sechen is trying to sleep, and Metea/Irric’s focused on her tinkering right now. Go straight to bed.”

That last word came out as an order, and Elach felt the pressure from her technique double. He smiled with what he hoped was an empty expression and nodded, waiting until Rainshear had closed the door behind her and the weight of her technique diminished to let his face fall. Flow quietly peeped in frustration as they tried as hard as they could to quietly peck apart a nut in its shell, giving up and moving to some of the sliced meats instead.

“Let me get that for you.” Elach offered.

He grabbed the nut and tried to pry it apart at the seams, but it stayed tightly shut no matter how hard he pulled. Flow tweeted knowingly and went back to a slice of dark red hued meat as Elach placed the nut back on the tray, pushing it alongside its brethren to one corner to never be consumed. Until someone stronger than him came along for a midnight snack, that was.

When Flow finished off their portion of the platter they let out a long, low note; looking at Elach with tired eyes before returning to his headspace. Elach blinked sleepily as he leaned on the table, looking up at the ladder to the loft like it was an insurmountable mountain. With a quiet grunt Elach pushed his chair back and stood, grasped the ladder with one hand and hauled his tired body up one rung at a time. He looked over at the corner where Metea/Irric was sitting behind her desk, obscuring whatever it was she was doing while the quiet sounds of something being ground in a mortar and pestle emanated through the loft.

Elach didn’t want to bother Metea/Irric, but more than that he didn’t want to face her. He figured Sechen still held some distrust towards him, and after taking more than six hours longer than he’d said he would, Elach wouldn’t blame Metea/Irric if Sechen’s feelings had rubbed off onto her. And then there was the simple fact that she was absolutely soaked through with Rainshear’s Issi, in a sort of long-lasting version of the technique she’d used to placate him.

One that was still somewhat placating him, he realized, since he’d come back here instead of trying to find help somewhere else. His countermeasures weren’t fully up to snuff, but he could think clearly now. Elach frowned; at least he thought he was thinking clearly. But he’d also thought he’d been thinking clearly for twenty-two years.

Peeling off his sweat-soaked socks and bloodstained shirt, Elach wiggled under the blanket from the night before and stared up at the ceiling. He was beyond exhausted, but if he fell asleep now, he might wake up completely at Rainshear’s mercy. Maybe his headspace was safe from her invasive technique. He closed his eyes and willed himself into his headspace, a feeling like crashing through a waterfall greeting him in his transformed little space.

His closet-sized floorless room was a thing of the past, and so were the last vestiges of walls around it. Where the walls used to be there was now a constantly shifting collection of the symbol he’d previously etched into the wall, forming an outer barrier that he expected was to tell him just how far he could walk on empty air until it truly became nothing. Flow’s fountain was still the centerpiece of the room, but it was a little bit bigger and a lot more grandiose. The patterns were now obvious from a distance as floral, like a garden had started creeping up the fountain to reach for the nectars found inside.

And that was the majority of the changes. Elach looked around to try and spot anything else out of the ordinary, but aside from the blurry spot a few feet away from Flow’s fountain that he assumed would become his focus there was nothing else. Flow still slept on an invisible ledge, the fountain’s nectar spilled down into nowhere, and his bottles of existential bleed were right there under the fountain. Honestly, Elach was disappointed in the changes. He’d been expecting a more… grandiose transformation. One that would launch him into his path as a practitioner. Not a small upgrade like this was.

But Sentence had told him that all he’d done was bring himself to the point all other practitioners started at, and now he’d grow even slower thanks to Flow mooching half of the Issi he took in to grow stronger. Well, he was always growing that slow, but he hadn’t known that before. Looking at the fountain before him, Elach finally realized just how far behind he was. Flow’s fountain could help him recover his Issi and compress his container, but that was it. Nothing to help him grow noticeably faster. The six year gap had stolen his potential and given him a body with an absurd Issi saturation, but he had no idea what that meant. Sentence would have mentioned it if it were important, and he would have felt something if it were helpful.

Elach paused, and ran a hand down his face. It was wet with Issi. “Shit.” He muttered, throwing off all his clothes and looking around for anything to dry himself. Only then did he notice an almost translucent bubble of water-like Issi caging his headspace in, shaking off as much of the Issi as he could. His thoughts came slightly more into focus with every drop of Issi he shook off, but it wasn’t enough.

“I hate this. Damn the Eternals, I hate this so much.” Elach whispered, his back against a solid mass of symbols that supported his weight. He’d been sitting here for what felt like hours, rocking back and forth while he waited for the Issi to evaporate. And it had been evaporating, albeit glacially slow.

With the evaporation came unhindered thoughts. Everything that Rainshear’s technique had made him gloss over, or dismiss as insignificant, or flat out misrepresent to twist into subservience to her. It was a truly insidious technique, and one that he’d almost broken. Which would have been a huge mistake, as the bartender had laugh-wheezed through a broken nose when he spilled Rainshear’s secrets. Secrets that had been partially kept from Elach from the very technique he’d sought to dispel.

Rainshear’s technique, one that she’d dubbed ‘subservient calm’, wasn’t quite mind control. It tweaked the sense of urgency and danger of whoever got caught, steering them away from any revelations that would go against Rainshear. Like, for example, spilling a secret as huge as the fact that Eternals could die. Or showing her an extremely valuable coin and ring. Or readily accepting an offer to stay the night, or shrugging off a breakfast hostage situation.

Or coming back to that house despite all of that.

Elach ran his hands through his hair, and they came back perfectly dry. “Okay. I think that’s dry enough.” He said to a sleeping Flow, using them as an unresponsive audience to bounce his ideas off of. “Just pushing Issi to the places where I felt Rainshear’s Issi wasn’t enough, since it stays in my body as long as it can get there in the first place. So I need to get all the crap that’s already in me out, and stop new stuff from getting in.”

With a deep breath, Elach focused on all the Issi that was running through his body. His own was barely there, a background hum to existence that he’d gotten used to ignoring, but Rainshear’s was a lazy river winding through each and every inch of his body and mind. Elach pressed his own Issi against the inside of his skin, painting a thin layer of Issi to make a barrier against Rainshear’s consistent onslaught.

He knew that much would work, but he had to find a way to keep that barrier in place as Rainshear’s Issi battered his own away. The insidious Issi work was constantly shifting where it hit the hardest, pushing at wherever his Issi stumbled to shove its way through. If he focused every single ounce of his brain to this one task, it was simple enough to shore up every weakness. But the moment he let go and tried to think about anything else, a small leak instantly popped up.

“Just enough Issi to screw everything up.” Elach sighed, letting his arms fall over his lap. “So it is possible to completely block out Rainshear’s Issi, but I can’t do anything else while I’m doing it. Didn’t Hugil say I had bizarrely strong mental defences? Shouldn’t that plus the saturation from so many years guiding the spring make me immune to this mind-altering shit?”

That one thought made Elach pause. What were mental defences, anyway? Sentence hadn’t touched on them at all, except for making Flow wear a ring to hide their transcendence Issi. A secret that could just as easily be gleaned from picking apart Elach’s mind. Sentence had to be confident that that wouldn’t happen, or else he would have forced one of those rings on Elach as well.

Elach fiddled with the ring on his finger, debating with himself if it was worth risking a five-minute visit with Sentence. A dripping sphere of glistening rainbow popped out of the ring, startling him as multiple of the same sentence repeated itself over and over in shimmering iridescent ink.

“Minimum charge not reached; insufficient Issi to initiate headspace link.” He read, frowning at the stipulation Sentence had forgotten to mention. “Countdown until sufficient Issi; 687 hours, 14 minutes, 08 seconds. Almost a whole damn month.” Elach sighed again, twisting the ring and dispersing the words. “There goes that option.”

He felt the last of his thin layer of Issi scraping away by the second, watching the space outside his headspace fill in once more with the sphere of constantly falling water Issi. But his headspace shouldn’t be the one under all of this duress. It was his brain that was misrepresenting signals, shrugging off warning signs and generally being manipulated.

Feeling like he was getting on the right track, Elach pushed his Issi towards his brain. It was slightly uncomfortable, like the beginnings of a headache, but within a minute he’d saturated his grey matter with Issi. And as the Issi circulated through his brain, it began running down his spine. Each and every nerve tingled in turn as his Issi thoroughly coated them, and suddenly he felt no influence from Rainshear’s technique.

Elach chuckled to himself and shook his head. “That’s all it took? I just had to connect my brain to my container? Hells, do I feel stupid.”

Elach let the flow of Issi continue naturally, and Rainshear’s technique began pressing on him from the outside. He hemmed and hawed about scouring clean the stuff that had already gathered in his flesh, but decided against it. If Rainshear took one look at him and saw that he was completely clean of her Issi, she might decide to permanently deal with him.

Looking up at Flow breathing constantly and quietly as they slept, Elach decided he’d seen all that he needed to see and done what he needed to do. Until his focus came into, well, focus, Elach had no real reason to stay in his headspace any longer. But he still needed to do his nightly Issi compression and container expansion, calling Flow’s songs from memory as he slipped back into reality.

“How’s the headspace?”