“Well, that was something.” Elach chuckled sheepishly.

The area beyond the door was something he hadn’t been expecting; a large, open clearing with a spring in the exact middle. He recognized it instantly, but there were quite a few differences from the primal spring he knew. The Issi bubbling off the spring was a thick, multicoloured fog that shifted to a more solid colour whenever it brushed over anything, turning into Issi for whatever it was that it ran over. The Issi around trees were a mixture of deep browns and verdant greens, rocks were a dark grey and matte black, and the people in black robes were a mixture of blood red, bone-white, and pink shot through with scars of black. And as Elach stepped through the threshold, he got a taste as to why practitioners never went into the gardens.

The Issi fled from where he stood, leaving a huge gap in the fog the primal spring was exuding. And with it fled each and every wisp that had been in the area, chasing the retreating Issi of the spring with a single-minded determination that only a mindless creature could fathom. Elach reflexively reached for his own Issi, and he felt it at the ready without any kind of holdups. So the fact that practitioners drove away the wisps in the gardens was true, but Elach had always kind of assumed the Issi from the spring did something to someone’s ability to use their own Issi. Dampened their powers, or maybe prevented them from being used altogether.

Elach took another step forward, and all eyes turned to him. The Issi beasts and cloaked invaders didn’t so much as pause their battle, but now they continued without looking at each other. It was like walking through the middle of a rehearsal for a play, everyone turning to look at the distraction without missing a beat for their performance. An invader went down under the claws of an Issi beast and were set on by wisps before they even hit the ground, glossy red hearts latching onto their wounds and sending tendrils into opened veins. They didn’t scream, which Elach had to try and recall if any of the invaders had screamed when he was fighting them, and a few memories vividly proved that they had, indeed, audibly suffered as they died.

“Is this what would’ve happened if Resthollow didn’t intervene?” Elach wondered, pausing for a moment to watch the carnage around him. “But there aren’t any people without cloaks here. Did they not have to invade during the solstice? Or did they already kill everyone else?”

The ground became swampy under Elach’s feet, and he grunted in annoyance as he lifted his shoe out of the muck with a squelching wet pop. He didn’t remember the ground being anything like this, and he especially didn’t remember all the invaders being so disorganized. They’d made a large ring around the spring itself, plugged Kayvee and some of the kids into an Issi device that mimicked the abilities of a lightning practitioner, and holed up here waiting for who knows what. But the fights here were scattered and far more brutal than Elach remembered, with Issi beasts being slaughtered by the dozen and some invaders catching wisps in cages that looked like they were made of burlap sacks and thick, yellow cord. And then it happened.

The primal spring shuddered once, twice, three times, then everything went still. It was as if everything had decided to hold their collective breaths at the same time, heads snapped to looking at the primal spring instead of Elach. He watched in slow motion as every single mote of Issi was consumed by the spring, feeling a yawning emptiness that he hadn’t felt since he bonded with Flow. And he bore witness to the end of a spring.

Existence detonated in a jumble of colours and sounds that Elach couldn’t begin to describe that left him blind and deaf to the world. He was slammed backwards and pushed into the muck, sensations like thousands of knives skimming over his skin but not quite cutting him overwhelming his mind as the detonation blew through. Then it was over. And everything had gone, leaving him lying in a bone-dry mold of his back half. He lay like that until his vision started coming back, white spots dancing about on his eyes, and the ringing in his ears became an unnerving quiet. There was nothing left to make a sound.

Elach stared up at an utterly empty sky, a pure black unused canvas in which it seemed even the sun and moons had been erased. It had been daytime only moments ago, so either he’d been out for hours or the sun itself had gotten caught up in the explosion. He smacked his dry lips together, feeling them bounce off each other like two salted sausages, and pushed himself up into a sitting position against the hard and parched ground.

He was sitting on a fifty meter by fifty meter perfect square of dirt, scoured free of any plant life and any water evaporated away. But that wasn’t the worst of it. No, the worst part was that this little square was floating in the void with other debris around it like icebergs in a lake. But unlike icebergs, this debris wasn’t limited to one axis of existence. There was debris under him, above him, and all around him, chunks of dead earth that connected to nothing and went nowhere. And the door back to his headspace was nowhere to be found.

“Well, what in the hells am I supposed to do now?” Elach exasperatedly said, gesturing out into the jumbled beyond with frustration. “I’m pretty sure that whatever that blast was should have killed me, since it destroyed everything else, but here I am. All alone....”

He sat bolt upright in a panic. He was alone. “Flow! Where are you!?”

He felt a weak connection in his mind, but it was a world piece away. And through it he felt Flow’s fear and worry, but no pain. That was good. He tried to project that he was alright, and Flow’s fear seemed to die down a little, but it was quickly overtaken by worry. Elach figured he must have been putting out the same signals on his end, but he took solace in the fact that Flow was healthy enough to be worried. His heart beat just a little slower as he looked out over the vast expanse of debris, the field of shattered ground lazily meandering around the void without a care in the world. Elach tried to judge the distance between him and the next closest piece of debris, but at the pace it was moving it would take upwards of an hour to get close enough.

“Right. Issi.” Elach laughed tensely, raising a hand and visualizing his anchor on top of a piece of debris that looked big enough to support ten of him. He felt his Issi emptying as it formed, then a chain appeared wrapped multiple times around his palm connecting him to it. It was still tiny, and felt weak enough that he couldn’t actually bind anything with it, and there was a tiny voice in the back of his head that screamed it wouldn’t support his weight when he tried to pull himself over. He ignored it, since his Issi didn’t work that way, but it didn’t go away.

Elach pulled himself to the piece of debris, the chain winding up and around his arm as he went. It was a slightly different feeling than when he’d pulled himself to his regular anchors, as if he actually had to put in just a little effort to get to where he was going instead of the world sliding under him until he came to the right place. He shook his arm and let the chain dissolve into Issi, but it didn’t dissipate into the world around him. This time it was sucked back into his container, leaving him with a technique that cost about half as much as if he hadn’t used the chains at all.

“So it’s harder to do, but it costs less Issi.” Elach said to himself. “Wonder when I’ll be able to do all that stuff I did under the existential bleed again.”

The background hum of some greater power answered him, and Elach sighed as he readied another anchor. Something in the back of his mind was telling him to keep moving, and the fact that he was in his own head right now made him listen. He looked back at the largest piece of debris in the field, the one he’d come from, and turned away with resolve. He would meet up with Flow and then find the door out of here. If the blast didn’t kill him, the door must have survived.

Elach fell into a rhythm of pulling, anchoring, and recovering in ten minute intervals, taking in the ambient Issi of the broken world and forcing it into his body so he could work on purifying it. It wasn’t an easy task; the ambient Issi seemed to be a medley of countless other types, and picking it apart to get the useful bits was like going through a pile of autumn leaves and picking out only the tastiest ones: impossible to do without taking a few very unpleasant licks and bites. But he eventually fell into a pattern, throwing away the Issi that would be more of a hassle than it was worth and gleaning what he could from the rest. Elach silently thanked Sentence for making him go through all those different Issi types as he coughed out a miasma of brightly coloured mist, a hum dying in his throat as he turned to look at his next target.

That continued for a few good hours, then a few alright hours, and then a single strained half hour of some of the worst Issi pains Elach had ever felt. It was like his container was as raw as his throat felt, dry and cracking from all the humming he had to do to take in the Issi of this realm. His chains came out slower and felt more brittle, his anchors manifesting closer and closer to him until he expected his range was halved from where he’d started. And the worst part was the exhaustion from having nothing to eat or drink, and nowhere to stop and take a real rest. He’d gone away from the bigger pieces hours ago, and now he was standing on what would have been a large rock back on solid ground.

Standing might have been too grand a word for what Elach was doing. It was closer to clinging for dear life to the side of a rained-on cliff, grip slowly weakening as the waters of exhaustion washed over him, waiting for the inevitable fall that crept up on him by the second. He took in a pained breath that was all he could take in thanks to his throat being shredded from the constant Issi intake, and looked around in a tired panic for anything big enough to lie down on. He needed to rest.

The biggest piece of debris he could find was shaped like a rather large tree trunk, long and cylindrical, connecting two perfectly round spheres of dirt on either end. It was on the edge of what he felt he could anchor to, and he quarreled with the risk for a moment before his exhaustion won out. He focused his gaze on the center of the trunk and a blurry anchor came into view, the Issi coming out of his container like the last dregs squeezed out of a soft canteen. And then the chains came into existence, and his container screamed in defiance of being so emptied. He felt himself grow weaker as his Issi left him, and he almost lost the courage to pull himself. Almost.

The tree trunk came rushing up to him in a blur of brown and the darkest greens, but the chains shattered before he came to a comfortable stop. Elach had a split second to wonder what was going to happen before he slammed stomach first into the trunk, what little wind that was left in him leaving in one huge vision-darkening impact. He scrambled against the wood to try and get a hold on it, his fingernails clicking and scraping against the rock-like bark but finding no purchase. He could feel the ridges in the wood, but his body just wouldn’t listen to him. Or maybe it was, and the few milliseconds of exhausted delay prevented any of his commands from doing what he needed them to. His ribs stung, his lungs burned, his head swam, and his fingernails tore into a bloody mess as the rock-bark ripped them to shreds. And then he was falling, the tree shrinking smaller and smaller until it was nothing but a pinprick of a memory as he plummeted into the void below.

“No.” Elach croaked, grasping at his container with a plea to find strength he knew he didn’t have. “I refuse to die again.”