The image flickered and shifted, all light fading from it as it turned back into a murky square. Sechen blinked and gingerly retracted her hand, the square hardening into some sort of jagged material before falling to an invisible floor and shattering into jagged pieces. Sechen stepped to the side, her feet brushing away the debris from the memory, and placed her fingers on the next square.

Once more, it began with Revel’s face. Sechen recognized the hills of oilseed that led the way to the Gilded Night in the background, and Revel’s face was once more filled with concern. Her mouth opened wide with every motion, and Sechen could hear her raising her voice even through the silence. It all came back to her a little too quickly; this was the last time she would walk the world piece without Revel’s circlet around her neck. The hurtful words Revel hadn’t meant that way screamed silently in her ears, and Sechen felt her right canine draw blood from her lip. Frustration pointed at her chest like a spear. Hopelessness badly concealed, bleeding into desperation as she turned to cast a glance at the place Sechen knew they were going. And yet, concern burned through all the others.

“She wanted me to excel, but she wanted it to be because of her.” Sechen said flatly. “Of course. She wanted more apprentices. And all she had to show for herself was me, because she wasn’t strong enough to draw them on her own.”

This panel didn’t go black. It shone brighter and brighter until Sechen had to look away, then shattered with a sound like breaking glass. When Sechen turned back, lowering her arms that she’d used to shield her eyes, the debris around her feet was now two-toned. Gold and murky black. Grimacing, she turned her attention to the final panel. She had a bad feeling she knew what the third panel would show her, and it was still fresh enough in her mind that those scars hadn’t even begun to fade.

This panel didn’t start with Revel’s face. It started with the top of her head, sitting on one of the beds in their room at the glacier’s hotel during the argument that started everything off. She didn’t know which point the argument had gotten to; it might have been near the beginning, where she’d given Revel an earful for lying about having found a place for new apprentices, or after Revel had tried to turn it on her for not being good enough to attract new apprentices, or even when Sechen had pointed out that it was entirely Revel’s fault she couldn’t get any new apprentices. Revel looked up at Sechen, and she caught a glimpse of those infuriated eyes that had gone along with the words that had brought along all the insecurities she’d dealt with before she got to the Gilded Night.

“I never needed you in the first place. Don’t confuse my pity for your incompetence.” Sechen whispered as the room crashed in around her, the fuzzy formless blobs of the attackers who had cut off her arm and taken Revel away bursting in at that exact moment. Sechen turned her head as they froze, seeing something she’d missed in the moment. Revel was trying to run away. She’d put Sechen between herself and the three intruders.

“I was never her sister.” Sechen’s voice cracked as she spoke. “I was her apprentice. She was my master. And when her life was in danger, there wasn’t a moment of hesitation.”

She waved away the memory before it was over, and the panel stayed lit. Enough time went by that it should have shattered like the others, but it didn’t. Instead it grew smaller and smaller until it was the size of Sechen’s hand, then folded in on itself until it was the shape of a crystal. In a flash, it turned purple. And another memory came.

The martial Issi practitioner, standing before her and about to end her life. Prisoner stepping in and murdering the man, then starting Sechen on the short path to become the person she was now. She looked into his eyes, and she saw frustration. Concern. But more than anything, she saw herself reflected in them. Prisoner was using her for selfish reasons. That was what he’d said. But everyone was selfish.

Sechen grabbed the crystal and crushed it between her fingers, purple dust falling through them like sand. The master-apprentice system was innately selfish. The apprentices wanted power, and the masters wanted influence. She was never going to be free of selfishness. And even though he wasn’t giving her Issi, he’d given her more power in four weeks than Revel had in years. His plans were laid out for half a decade, and if she lived through that half decade, they’d go on for far longer. She didn’t know how many eternals were left alive, but Prisoner wanted to bring her along for all of their ends. She’d end up at least as powerful as he was now. But was that what she really wanted?

Revel’s face flashed before her eyes. Sechen had no idea what she wanted. But being one of the most powerful people on the world piece couldn’t hurt her options.

The next minute or so was spent watching her container, feeling the Issi coming off of it in tendrils that grasped aimlessly for the empty space around it. One brushed against Sechen’s ethereal form, a burst of Issi sparking in her container for the briefest moment before rushing away through her pathways. She reached out without thinking and grabbed one of the tendrils, connecting it to one of the rings that surrounded her container. A rush of Issi poured through her, and a halo popped into being around her right wrist. It felt like when she cracked her knuckles for her haloes, but she somehow knew she couldn’t give these to anyone else. These were for her alone, and they had their own Issi stores outside of her container.

“I wonder…” Sechen mused, her voice coming out distorted as if she’d spoken underwater. She pressed her hand against her container one last time, feeling at the size of it and coming away with the understanding that it had become smaller. Yet it was still at the largest it could be inside of this place. The rings must have branched off with their own Issi stores, taking some of her container’s Issi for their own. She came to the rough estimate that she’d lost maybe a third of her container, and after appraising each of her rings, found that each ring held around a quarter of the amount her newly shrunken container could hold. It felt like she could hold just a little bit more Issi than before, but it wasn’t enough to make an impact. Honestly, it might end up being a detriment in the long run.

Cracking open one eye, Sechen looked over at Paui. She still had both eyes firmly shut, a look of concentration screwed onto her face as her arms shook ever so slightly by her sides. Sechen grunted as she lowered herself into a cross-legged sit, her muscles feeling used but not quite sore, and waited for Paui to finish. It didn’t take long.

With a shudder, Paui collapsed to her knees. She gasped for breath, sweat now trickling down from her brow to splatter on the ground between her knees. “Damn it. Not again. Damn it. Damn it!”

She pounded the ground with one fist, wincing in pain as her knuckles smashed against the solid surface.

“Didn’t go well?” Sechen asked, hoping her words didn’t come off as sarcastic. Paui didn’t react badly, which was a relief.

“That’s an understatement. My container just doesn’t want to cooperate.” Paui said, running a hand through her short hair in frustration. “I need to write this down.”

“Throw it here.” Sechen said, gesturing for Paui to pass her notebook. “You can say everything out loud and I’ll write it down.”

“No, I can do that myself.” Paui said quickly, holding her notebook defensively to her chest. “But maybe you can still help me make sense of this?”

“Alright.” Sechen retracted her offered hand. “Go ahead.”

“I’ll skip the uninteresting parts, but my biggest problem is that I’m leaking Issi. A lot of Issi.” Paui said as her pen scratched against paper. “It doesn’t feel like I’m losing anything while I’m out here, but while I’m in there it’s like more of my Issi is outside of my container than inside of it. And nothing I do makes it stop leaking.”

Sechen raised an eyebrow. She hadn’t noticed her container leaking at all. And, looking back, she’d never noticed it leaking before, either. “Just so I can visualize this a little bit better, what does your container look like?”

“Like everyone’s container. A sphere coloured to match my Issi.” Paui said, her tone indicating how obvious that answer should have been. “Why? Does your container look different?”

“Oh yeah.” Sechen chuckled. “It used to look like a gold ball, but now it’s a column surrounded by three haloes. The second I stopped trying to be Revel, it changed completely.”

“Prisoner did say that his container didn’t look like mine either.” Paui mused, jotting down something on the far right side of her page. “Maybe I can do something with that. It takes a lot of work keeping my container in the right shape, and keeping my headspace from crashing down on it at the same time is almost too much to bear.”

“Is that why you ducked out like that?” Sechen asked. “Because you couldn’t hold your headspace back any longer?”

“Mmhm.” Paui murmured.

“Do you think that’s part of all this? Because your guilt over that one kid you kicked out is screwing with your Issi? If your headspace signifies the weight of your thoughts, and your Issi leaking out through your container is because you don’t believe you’re worthy to have a bond with Runfree, then wouldn’t that explain pretty much everything?”

Paui looked up with a start, staring at Sechen as if she’d grown another head. “How would you know?”

“I don’t.” Sechen shrugged. “Just throwing things out and seeing if they stick. Prisoner wouldn’t have you doing this if it wasn’t going to help you, so I’m trying to relate your problems to what’s happening to your inner world. You think I was close?”

“I’ve been looking at this like it was all something I had to fix with my own hands.” Paui sighed. “Was that the completely wrong way to go with this? Was this just a way for me to diagnose what’s wrong with my Issi, and I have to go fix it some other way? It makes a whole lot more sense than what I’ve been trying, and none of that stuff has worked, so why not?”