Sechen nodded grimly as Thana sped away, her voice coming through the clearing the next she spoke. Paui jogged to a stop and looked up at where Thana’s voice must have been coming from, chest heaving as she took in breath after breath. She leaned over and planted her hands on her thighs as her borrowed Issi dissipated with the whitestone boundary, sweat dripping off her forehead, the pain of going from an Issi-enhanced body to flesh and blood one Sechen knew all too well. She didn’t seem to be collapsing, but she also didn’t look like she’d be moving any time soon.

A loud sigh proved Sechen wrong as Paui dropped to her knees, throwing her arms out to the side and falling backwards with her legs kicking straight up for a short moment. A rickety laugh echoed out, followed immediately by a dry cough, the utter relief of having finished the trial radiating out from Paui like the embers of a spent fire. Sechen walked through the absence of a table, over the whitestone barrier, and towards the pile of exhaustion that was Paui. She leaned over Paui, a smile growing on her face as she watched the woman’s face light up with recognition.

“I think you kicked the shit outta this trial.” She laughed, offering Paui a hand to help her stand.

Paui coughed the first few times she tried to speak, then turned to the side and cleared her throat. “I sure hope so. How long was I in here for, anyway? A couple of hours?”

Sechen shrugged. “Eh, closer to five. How’re you feeling now?”

“Well, better now.” Paui laughed, taking Sechen’s hand. She pulled hard, bringing Sechen down to the ground with a yell of surprise. “Mind lying here with me for a little bit? Apparently I’ve got five hours of exhaustion to work through.”

“Not like I have anything else to do.”

Sechen reoriented herself so she was lying next to Paui, staring up at the black dome of the Gilded Night that somehow made days in here feel natural. Natural-ish. She explicitly didn’t look over to her left, where Paui’s face was only inches away from hers, a fact that brought on thoughts she’d managed to avoid these past two weeks with a healthy dose of Revel-induced denial. She definitely didn’t have thoughts of Paui’s arms around her, or other less appropriate thoughts that made her face flare up. This was her friend she was fantasizing about.

Then she turned her head, hazarding a glance, and found Paui staring straight up, her arms folded over her stomach as her breaths slowly leveled out. Sechen blinked twice and turned back, mentally kicking herself for those thoughts. This wasn’t the time for those thoughts. Hells, it might never be the time for those thoughts. Just because Paui liked girls, it didn’t mean her feelings were reciprocal. The last thing Paui needed right now was someone she thought was her friend coming on to her.

So when was the right time? Sechen sighed as her thoughts ran rampant, though these were no longer as pleasant. She imagined Paui turning her down, and they’d have to work together for a long while Paui knew Sechen thought of her that way. Would she be flattered, but not attracted? Would she feel disgusted that someone she thought was her friend was looking at her like that all this time? Would she go back over everything they’d done together and question if everything was only done out of a hope that it’d lead to sex? Sechen grimaced, her stomach knotting together as her thoughts grew increasingly negative. What if Paui decided she’d rather be forgotten than work with her? That being changed completely, and maybe forgotten, was better than travelling with someone knowing they looked at you that way?

If Sechen had turned her head at any time during her moment of self-doubt, she would have seen Paui staring at the side of her face. She would have seen her thoughts, her doubts, her lust, echoed in Paui’s eyes. Yet she never turned, the minutes crawling away until the false light above dimmed to early evening.

Down in the city below, at the point where obscurity is at its thickest, hunger rests.

A brief feeling of hunger slid past Hoalt’s cherry red gums, and he laughed. He’d starved himself for this meeting, to make sure he was as pleasant to look at for the morsel who’d offered herself to his endless appetite. She hadn’t voiced a desire to be consumed, but nobody asked the starving wolf for anything without knowing the price. The unchangeable, omni-present price.

Her handler had been quite clear. A single favor in exchange for free reign over the juicy souls above. The too-high ceiling that kept him from what was rightfully his. Where the nametaker lived happily with all his think-less drones, believing that he had a claim to something he wouldn’t fight for. What he wouldn’t face the real Hoalt for.

Hoalt licked his lips and felt his teeth shredding his tongue, his delicious blood running out of his mouth and splattering to the cold stone below. An acolyte shuddered in delight at the sound, a blur of pure black that obscured a plain-looking man with a manic look in his eyes. A look that kept Hoalt from devouring him. The look of kin.

“The handler wanted today.” Hoalt stated. If he was wrong, one of the many acolytes would correct him. He so hoped one of them would correct him. He was so, so hungry. But he couldn’t eat. He was saving himself for the morsel. One whole day without tasting the sweet, rich tang of blood. Of the spices of fear, of lust, of anger. Each morsel died oh so differently.

The man with eyes of kin bent down and ran a hand through Hoalt’s blood, shivering as he did, licking his fingers clean as if it were the greatest treat he’d ever known. He let out a short, satisfied sigh before he spoke. “She’s going to be held up for a long while, packmaster. Nobody can see through the blessed black as you can.”

“So you rely on techniques and devices.” Hoalt mused. He shifted a massive paw, throwing the kin into a wall. His bones cracked and he shuddered, blood and Issi leaking out with the spurs as his skin shifted like a liquid to accommodate. “Tell them ten minutes, then they bring in whoever they have. I’ll devour any morsels who lie to me.”

The kin nodded after a moment of reshaping, their shoulders a little too far apart and their legs not the same length any more. When their head came back up, it didn’t come as far, now hunched over like some sort of freak. Hoalt growled in disgust, throwing the kin against another wall with a swipe of his paw. “Correct yourself, not-morsel. You are kin now. Act like it.”

“Yes, packmaster.” The kin croaked, his Issi overtaking his entire form. When it left, Hoalt saw his kin once more. Excellent. “I’ll tell them they have ten minutes.”

Hoalt made a noise in the back of his throat that felt like a growl, both of a wolf and a stomach. Fitting for him, as he was both.

Sechen grimaced and looked away as Paui fumbled through yet another leg of the force Issi trial. Thana assured her that Paui wasn’t doing too horribly in comparison to the regular hopefuls, but that was comparing a grown woman to kids. Teenagers. And with every shaky motion, every improvised attack that came out a little too late, Paui slowed.

Compared to her performance the previous day, she was obviously lacking. She had a mosaic of cuts and bruises from the harsh trial, a simple ordeal where she was instructed to blast away at anything that came at her while taking down targets that popped up inside the barrier. Paui’s accuracy was beyond awful, her blasts coming out with an immense shockwave that petered out not a foot from her body. It took her more time to focus a ten-foot long blast than it did to run thirty feet and physically destroy a target, and defending against any of the telegraphed attacks was solely reliant on luck. If the attack came from the same direction she was already building up a blast in, or if she caught it the instant it started forming, she came away unharmed. Otherwise she ended up with a new bruise or scrape to add to her ever growing mosaic.

“This is painful to watch.” Thana stated, flinching away without changing her expression as Paui took a clay disk marked with silvery green Issi to the shoulder. “I sincerely regret adding the stipulation that she could not dodge or use non-Issi methods to break the projectiles.”

“You added that part? Did you want to see Paui get clobbered for a couple of hours?” Sechen asked, shaking her head bewilderedly. “What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking that she would progress in her mastery of Issi. She excelled in the fluidity trial and surpassed excelling in the fast trial, so I expected that she would continue the pattern.” Thana stated. “If she performed worse with the Issi type that she’d had for years than one she had very little experience with, wouldn’t you say it stands to be that the same outcome would be expected for this force trial?”

“She had a little yellow Issi in her blue Issi trial, and a little blue Issi in her yellow Issi trial. There wasn’t a drop of green in any of either of them, and now she doesn’t have anything helping her with this.” Sechen gestured at Paui, her Issi a solid silvery green; not a hint of yellow or blue shone through. “I think she’s got some sort of contamination between speed and fluidity Issi, but nothing for force. You think that’s gonna screw her over?”

Thana shook her head. “No. It will most likely remove force Issi from her selections, but it won’t affect the results she attained in fast and fluidity. It could make the final trial a dash more challenging, but that trial is designed to be completed in one of three ways. Unless she cannot see the fast or fluidity paths, she won’t have to touch the path designed for force Issi.”

Paui charged through a wall of manifested Issi bricks with a shield of force Issi dampening the blow, tiny shards of Issi stabbing into the clearing before being quickly whisked away by the whitestone barrier. She grimaced and dropped to the ground to take a blow on her shin, biting back a yelp of pain when the attack sent her spiraling back a few feet. It had been hard to watch since the beginning, but this was just painful.

“How long until you can call it?” Sechen asked.

“There are two more arenas she will have to endure after this one. I cannot alter the commands I already put in place, in which I set the ‘arenas cleared’ requirement to six, to ensure that her trial is fair and just.” Thana said.

Sechen shook her head. “Yuck. Is there any way she can get out of this quicker?” She asked, averting her gaze before a particularly powerful-looking blast of Issi slammed into Paui.

A pained scream turned to frustration, and Thana watched Paui for a few moments before responding. If the woman showed any real emotion, Sechen wouldn’t be anywhere near as worried as she was.

“She can fail.” Thana whispered, her hands clasped behind her back. “She has already passed the minimum of one arena cleared to not be dismissed from the trials, so she could fail.”

“But we both know she isn’t going to do that.”

“Yes, we do.”

“Well, I guess you’re going to have to run her down into the healing basement like you did for me when she’s done.” Sechen forced a chuckle, but her heart wasn’t in it. “I really don’t want to watch any more of this, but Paui would probably kill me if I left. Even if she didn’t want me here on day one.”