After a third night of Odin's absence, I turned my mind to getting out of here. I wasn't sure what Odin's endgame was, but if they wanted me stuck in the plane of insecurity, by default I wanted to get as far away from here as possible.

That wasn't just because of Odin, of course. The mimics were utterly terrifying, too, and although Meloai and Tanryn kept the larger ones out, I kept sitting on chairs only to have them skitter away from underneath me with a tick-tick-tick of clockwork. I had no idea how Tanryn had survived here for twenty years; I was already going insane after a handful of nights.

"The mimics aren't usually this brave," Meloai commented. "I think they like you."

"Eurgh. I got enough of that stuff with those random animals stalking me back in the Peaks. Get off of me." I brushed a gold bar off my leg, and it sprouted tiny claws and clattered off into the distance. Tanryn couldn't quite figure out how to keep the shapeshifting creatures out of the vault once they got below a certain size, but thankfully, the small ones weren't aggressive. "Alright, that's it. We're getting back to realspace, and we're getting back as soon as possible."

"This is why those of inferior breeding cannot govern themselves," Tanryn said. "I've been trapped in the plane of insecurity for twenty years. What do you have that I don't?"

I grinned. "Rifts," I said.

Tanryn raised an eyebrow. "I beg your pardon?"

"All magic is generated by creating microscopic rifts," I explained, "connecting different planes of thoughtspace to realspace. And any Redlander knows that if you cast a spell with enough emotion, you get a permanent rift. That's how we've blown up most of our own cities, after all. I don't know what happens if you cast a spell while you're inside thoughtspace, but..." I wrapped my mind around the thorns of self-hatred that still clung to my soul, and flung them outwards; a moment later, I shrank to the size of a pea. Tanryn shrieked in shock and Meloai gave me a polite little golf-clap of applause as I returned to normal size. "Clearly, magic still works from inside thoughtspace."

"So if you cast a spell using enough insecurity as fuel, you think you can open a rift back into realspace?" Meloai asked.

I nodded. "It's worth a shot, at least."

"And, what, you just so happen to be a witch attuned to insecurity?" Tanryn asked, blushing as she got back to her feet from her fall.

Of course I wasn't. The only emotion I could wield was self-hatred; I didn't have even a hint of an attunement to insecurity.

But I had something better.

I knew how to give myself one.

Outwardly, though, I made no mention of that. As amusing as it would be to see Tanryn bluster in disbelief, I'd learned my lesson from Odin: letting slip that you have the secret to unlocking every school of witchcraft was a Very Bad Idea. "I am," I lied.

Tanryn gave me an irritated look. "Of course you are. Well, if nothing else, it'll be amusing to watch you fail. Get to it, commoner."

I gave her a sloppy salute. "Aye-aye, cap'n."

"I am not a captain. The formal address for a woman of my rank is 'Lady Tanryn,' and you do not salute..." I let Tanryn's words wash over me like rain on a tin roof, grinning stupidly to myself as I thought.

I would need a place to think.

###

There were four steps to achieving attunement: to feel the emotion yourself, to lose the emotion yourself, to cause the emotion in others, and to take the emotion from others.

"So which am I?" Lucet's eyes crinkled. "The riftmaw or the hearth dragon?"

"You're whatever you want to be," I said. "They cannot take this from you."

I had eased the insecurity of others.

Lucet giggled as Iola's elven halo flickered, irritation momentarily tainting his schadenfreude. "Stay away from my girlfriend, you Redlands freak."

"I would, but you've been dumped by so many of them. I can hardly cross the main lawn without tripping over—" I don't know what self-destructive instinct led me to keep talking when the flash of anger in Iola's eyes ignited, but I knew I'd struck a nerve by the way Lucet flinched.

I had inflamed the insecurity of others.

I was hardly listening to the old man's words.

Because I was a witch who used self-hatred.

For me to have an emotional attunement, it meant that I had to have caused that emotion in someone else.

My head swam. Who could it have been? Who had I hurt inadvertently so badly that it made them turn their anger inwards on themself? Who...

I had felt insecurity myself. I held three of the four keys to attunement to insecurity already.

All I needed was to let go of my own insecurities, and I would be free.

The simple ones came first. Though the roving clockwork mimics outside were terrifying, the bunker we were in was secure. There was no need to fear for my physical safety. I felt a burden leave me as my breathing slowed. I was getting closer to attunement. I could feel it.

The harder ones came next. I'd been matching wits against an opponent that wanted nothing more than to steal the secret of attuning new powers, and they had thoroughly outmaneuvered me at every opportunity they had.

But Odin had made one crucial mistake, and that was trying to trap a person who could create their own attunements on the fly. I would adapt, and I would get out of here alive.

Another insecurity faded, and I felt the attunement beginning to form. Like liquid metal unfurling around my soul. But it was tentative, weak, and I knew that if I stressed it, it'd snap like a string.

If I wanted to escape Odin's trap, I had to address the final core of insecurity that had driven me here. A single question that dug beneath my nails and squirmed behind my eyes and drove me wild with desperation.

Had my mother died hating herself because of me?

And as the question consumed my mind and soul, as it sang along every fiber of my being, something resonated back..

The soul fragment I'd absorbed. The echo of my mother's soul that still remembered, somewhere, what it was like to be alive.

And it began to burn.

"Mom?" I whispered.

Deep within my soulspace, where nothing grew but thorns of self-hatred, my mother's memory latched on to my own, dissolving into sound and light as it did, the shard of her soul that I'd collected burning itself up to bring Quianna back, just for the slimmest moment.

And Mom spoke eight words that cracked open my soul.

"I died loving you with all my heart."

Even that much effort was nearly too much for the soul fragment to bear, and I grasped at the air in futility, something hot and bright blurring my gaze as I tried to hold onto a ghost. "Wait! Mom! I—you can't—don't leave me! I... I..." I swallowed. "If it wasn't you... then whoever I hurt..."

"You may never know the fullness of the impact you have on the lives around you," my mother said, fading with each word. "You may never know who you have inadvertently hurt. And that's okay. Because whoever it is? It's long past time that they've healed, and moved on." A memory of a hand brushed against my cheek. "And so should you, Cienne."

"I..." I closed my eyes, feeling as though something heavy and toxic and dark was finally sluicing free from my body, and I bowed my head. "Thank you. Mom."

The burnt-out soul fragment gave no response.

Then I opened my eyes once more, and through them, I saw my soul anew. Swimming alongside the thorns of self-hatred that had once been the only thing I saw within my soul, I sensed liquid-mirror insecurity flowing through my veins. Not much. Not anymore. But enough that I could touch the power of falsehood and bring it to bear from my soul.

I took in a deep, steady breath.

Then I hurled my insecurity against the fabric of space itself, and I tore the world open like an arrow through a heart.