We were set for shelter thanks to the Redlands' forgiving climate, and Mairel's ghost combined with my foraging skills meant we were good for food and water. I wasn't exactly sure what the limitations of the ghost were, but Sansen assured me that the soulspace entity from the Plane of Nostalgia was limited in what it could do—mostly, bringing memories from its past to life, spending them one by one.

I felt a little sad taking advantage of the ghost of Sansen's old crush like that, but it was clear from experimentation that the clump of soul fragments that made up Mairel's ghost wasn't sentient, and was perfectly happy to help us in any way it could. If we could have a slightly higher chance of not dying before we found Jiaola and got the hell away from this nightmare war, I'd gladly sacrifice a hundred ghosts and memories to save one living person.

"So how come it's not sentient, but people like Odin and I am?" Meloai asked. I had no idea how her clockwork body repaired itself, but she seemed to have recovered from her flight through the Plane of Elemental Cold, because she could walk longer than any of us—and for the entire day, too. She offered to shapeshift into a horse and give us all a ride, but... something about that just felt sleazy, and it was pretty clear that she had no idea how to control a horse's body anyway, so we all walked for now until we could think up a faster method of transport.

"I think it has something to do with the number of memories that happened to agglutinate at that point in soulspace," Sansen said. "Or maybe the diversity of memories? I could tell that Mairel's ghost was... well, Mairel's. There weren't any elements from other people's minds, as far as I can tell."

"Hey, yeah. And that creepy little mimic I, er, threw into the void way back when—the only soul fragment that came out of that was my mother's. And it sure as hell wasn't sentient."

"That reminds me—what were you doing in the Plane of Elemental Falsehood in the first place?" Lucet asked, tilting her head towards me.

"Odin was fucking with me," I said. It was the safe response. Liquid metal flushed through my soul, but I ignored it. "So, wait, Meloai, when we're feeding you the soul fragments from the animals we hunt, is that making you... smarter, or something?"

Meloai giggled awkwardly. "Sort of? But not in the way you think! I have to, uh, consume a certain amount of memories per day. In theory, I could survive indefinitely by consuming my memories as quickly as I produced them—that's how most soulspace entities just sort of keep existing—but then I wouldn't get to form new memories with you guys, having a good time and learning about the world. So... I consume other things' memories, instead." She paused, frowning. "It's not very efficient, though. I need to eat the right... kind... of memories. Ones charged with insecurity."

"Huh." Lucet turned to Sansen. "Hey, speaking of which, do you have any idea where memories that get eaten by soulspace entities... go? Our old teacher sort of stonewalled us on the topic."

Sansen shrugged. "Too theoretical for my tastes. Wouldn't they just get destroyed?"

"Soul fragments can't get destroyed, only transformed," Meloai said.

"According to the Academy," I added.

"Okay, yeah, but if there's one place where we'd expect a little less propaganda, it'd be the realm of science, no? It's an empirically observed fact, and we ran some experiments to confirm it."

"Yes, true, cool—counterpoint: the Academy harvested our fucking emotions to power their war machine. I'm not trusting anything that came out of that 'education' that I can't verify with my own two hands."

"Hey, uh, guys?" Lucet said. "I hate to interrupt, but... are you three seeing this?"

Sansen muttered something about poor old eyes, but Meloai and I stopped in our banter, turning to face the end of the dirt road we'd been following for the past week.

The village was utterly and clearly ruined, even from this distance. The sky was scribbled over with slashes of darkness, and there wasn't a building taller than an outhouse left standing.

"What is it?" Sansen asked, squinting at the horizon.

Nobody wanted to say "probably a massacre," but I was a Redlander. I was used to it. "Probably a massacre," I said, and my voice was surprisingly calm. It was only the third village I'd seen this way, but it already felt... familiar. Like slipping into an old torture rack, made comfortable from years of use. "It's a standard Redlands tactic. There's some valuable piece of land that everyone wants—a particularly fertile field, a really good aquifer, whatever—but nobody's able to hold it for long. So someone who knows they can't have it decides nobody else can, either, and tears open rifts until the place is uninhabitable. Then they move on to go fight over some other piece of land and forget about it until a year or two have passed and the rifts have mostly closed over. And the next batch of villagers settle in, name the place after the rifts that killed the last group of poor bastards to live there, and hope they have a decade or so before the cycle repeats itself all over again."

"Fuck," Lucet murmured. "I'm sorry, Cienne."

I shook my head. "It's... it's just the way things are. Come on. These rifts don't look as bad as they could be—let's check for survivors."

"What kind of rifts are we walking into?" Sansen absently asked.

"Darkness," I said. "If we encounter a shadow, we should probably just run. Demons of Fear can be fucking terrifying, and I don't... there's nothing here to be happy about. I can't use joy right now."

"Let me see," Sansen said, and two lenses of possibility swirled into existence around his eyes. He shook his head. "Very unlikely for there to be demons in the near future. Best bet is that the forces that clashed here—and let's be real, this was the Silent Peaks against the Order of Valhalla—already dealt with them, one way or another."

"Then let's get going."

Grimly, the four of us marched towards the ruined village, three of us keeping a lookout in space, one of us keeping a lookout in time. Nobody detected any threats, but I was still jumpy for the entire journey.

Meloai and Lucet seemed like they had a pretty good coverage of realspace, so I closed my eyes and looked into soulspace. The cluster of memories that made up Meloai was beginning to grow into visibility, although it was still small in comparison to the souls of the three humans in the party. Aside from us, though, there weren't many lifeforms in the village, and those that were seemed to mostly be dumb animals. I could tell from the emotions—mostly monotone, tiny drops of joy or crystals of sorrow...

...except, wait, I'd nearly overlooked it, since its soul was so small, but there was a more complex soul. It had the simple emotions like sorrow and fear, yes, but there were glass shards of shame and sticky black thorns of self-hatred, and those were emotions I uniquely associated with what it meant to be human.

"Hold on," I said, eyes still closed. "I think I found something. A sapient soul, this way." I pointed towards where the soul would have corresponded to in realspace. Nobody questioned me—with my nine attunements, I had by far the broadest range of emotions I could see with my soulsight, and even though it didn't make me a master witch by any means, it gave me an edge in situations like this.

Even as the four of us inched closer to the broken rubble that I'd sensed the soul in, in my soulsight I felt the soul breaking apart. Fuck, the only person who could tell us what had happened here was already dying. "Quickly," I said, kneeling down to excavate the rubble.

Meloai pushed me aside without even thinking and hefted, clockwork tick-tick-ticking as strength a dozen times more than I could possibly output lifted a massive wooden beam off the ground.

At what she saw beneath, Meloai froze—not in the living, breathing way a human might, but in the perfect form of a statue that reminded me of her home in endless halls of oil and clockwork.

The girl who'd been crushed beneath the falling beam was undeniably dead. Nobody could survive watering the grass like that.

But the soul I had sensed stirred, and I knelt down, lifting up the girl's hand to reveal... a crow. Jet-black, beautiful, bloodied, and broken. But still alive, for now.

"Can you—" Lucet began.

"I never attuned forgiveness," I said, and it was disgusting how level my voice was. "It's not an emotion for me."

"Fuck," Lucet whispered. "And there aren't any other sapient souls in the village?"

"Not that I can sense," I said. Calm, sorrow, passion, insecurity, joy, fear, spite, guilt, self-hatred—even with the nine fields of magic I could now touch, I couldn't even save a fucking crow.

Well. At the very least, my oldest attunement was in perfect working order.

The crow shifted in my hands, letting out a faint wheeze. For a moment, I could have sworn it was trying to tell me something.

And then, in a flash of insight, I realized that it still could.

"You two. Choose an emotion," I said, "and I'll open up a rift. Meloai, you just do what you do."

Lucet blinked, uncomprehending, but Meloai got it immediately. "What?" Lucet asked.

"We've got exactly one witness to what happened here," I explained, "and their memories are about to be scattered throughout thoughtspace. Maybe if we're lucky, we can catch them as they go."

"Worth a shot," Sansen said. "I'll take care of my own rift, thank you."

"I'm... comfortable with the Plane of Sorrow," Lucet said. "You just focus on yourself."

I nodded, oil welling up from my soul as I let my passion swell. The dying crow almost seemed to nod at me as three witches and one demon prepared to dive into the crow's memories.

Then the crow's soul shattered, and I slashed my way between realities to try and catch a shard before it was lost forever.

And I was no longer Cienne, the helpless little boy who was still hopelessly in over his head.

I was the crow. I liked shiny things and eating clams. I disliked fire and pointy knives. I was the crow. I was the crow—

###

Astrenn needed the Shiny. Even though my feathers were singed, even when the Angry Thing swiped at me with its claws, Astrenn needed the Shiny. And so I would get the Shiny. It didn't matter how long it took, it didn't matter how distracting the village was (ooh! Is that tinsel? I love tinsel. No. No, focus. Astrenn needed the Shiny.) The Angry Thing was dumb, and even though it was strong and magical, I was clever-clever, fast-fast. I would win eventually.

The first thing to do was to get to a friendly nest. Right now, we were near the nest of the Large Baker—who used the Angry Things for cook-fires and shooed away me from the Delicious Breads. If the Large Baker came out on the street to investigate, Astrenn would never get the Shiny. So I flew to a nearby bin of Smelly Rotten Mush and tipped it over with a wingflap.

I knew this much about the Angry Things: they had a powerful sense of smell. And so as soon as the Smelly Rotten Mush poured out onto the street (to the dismay of the Large Baker), the Angry Thing awkwardly flapped away, the Shiny in its claws. I grabbed a small pebble (and a tinsel, for later), and shot into the sky, my feather-silent wings swift where the clunky, impossible weight of the Angry Thing farted along on inelegant wind magic.

"Caw," I said, and released the stone.

The Angry Thing must have been stupid, because it didn't even try to dodge the stone that thunked on its head. Unfortunately, the Angry Thing was a big ball of scales (shiny? No, not Shiny. Focus. Astrenn needed the Shiny) and probably wasn't even hurt by the rock. Which was no fair. Even the hard-hard-hard clams from the market got split open by a high-heavy-dropped rock. But at the very least, the Angry Thing dropped the Shiny, letting it twinkle to the ground like a wish upon a star.

Astrenn would get the Shiny. Astrenn had to get the Shiny.

I dove down, folding my wings tight and close to my body like how I'd seen the swooping-fast-kill-above birds do, and snatched the Shiny out of the air. The Angry Thing dove after me, but it had fallen into my trap.

For these fields of amber grain were the nests of the Old Farmer, and they appreciated me for my ability to hunt-find-eat mice more than the Angry Things that set their barns and crops on fire.

The Angry Thing dove after me, heat lighting up in its maw as I settled on the ground, and I knew the Angry Thing thought it had victory in its stupid little claws.

But then, like a thunderbolt, a broom head slapped the Angry Thing out of the sky as the Old Farmer scolded it.

"Back, you silly little dragon! I won't have you burning the barn down today!" The Old Farmer had skin like wrinkle-walnuts, and he was unamused by the Angry Thing's presence in his nest. Another two broom slaps swept the defeated Angry Thing away, and the Old Farmer gave me a piercing look.

"Say... you're my daughter's friend, aren't you?" The Old Farmer chuckled to himself. "You clever little thing. Well, go on. She's waiting for you where we buried... oh, why am I bothering? You can't understand me; you're just a crow. Astrenn! Your crow's here to visit!"

I flapped towards the barn, where Astrenn was waiting. The little girl who'd once taken me in, feeding me, and keeping me warm when the nights grew cold. Astrenn had saved my life when she was a hatchling, and I would do anything for Astrenn in return.

Astrenn needed the Shiny. And finally, I had delivered.

Astrenn looked up from the small lump of freshly-turned earth, the small, carved rock that stood where a mother should have been. Her cheeks glistened with sparkling droplets of water, but for once, I only wanted to wipe these shinies away.

"There you are, you silly lump of feathers." Astrenn sniffled and held out her arm; I hopped on and nuzzled her cheek. "What've you got for me today?"

I said, "Caw," and relinquished my treasures. A single gold coin for Astrenn, and a bit of tinsel for me.

Astrenn giggled. "You crazy crow—where'd you get this? Mother would have fed you plump for days. Come on—we can still send her off, if we hurry."

Astrenn pocketed the Shiny and hurried into the market, exchanging the Shiny for some smaller sparkles and a bouquet of fresh flowers.

Then Astrenn and I returned to Astrenn's mother's grave, placing the flowers in the center. After a moment of thought, I delicately balanced my tinsel on top, and Astrenn closed her eyes that shone like stars.

"She would have loved you, you pretty little girl."

"Caw," I said, perhaps agreeing, perhaps simply being there for my friend.

And Astrenn and I knelt there in mourning, until the sun bled red and the greatest shinies of all twinkled in the night sky above.

###

Time flickered, stepped, and jumped, and I was back in my body. Back in realspace. Back in the ruined, darksky village.

Back by the corpse of a girl named Astrenn who loved to feed crows.

"It was them," Lucet whispered by my side. "The Order and the Peaks. They fought here."

"Yeah." The words came out of my mouth. "I get that."

My friends gave me odd looks, but I couldn't hear what they said next over the sudden rush of my heartbeat in my ears. Worried, Lucet stood to put a hand on my shoulder, but as if I was in a dream, I walked forwards and my friends fell away.

"You guys keep looking," I managed to say. "I'll be right back."

"Cienne, where are you—" Lucet started to say, before someone cut her off. Probably Sansen. I loved Meloai, but... it would be Sansen who stopped her.

I stepped into the middle of a blackened, ruined field. Now that I knew what to look for, it was obvious that this was where the Peaks had called down one of their devastating strikes of pure light. The crops here had been burnt to ash, but that was okay. The bodies, the blood, the ruins—they would just make more fertile soil, more desirable targets for the next time war came to this horrible, beautiful place that I called home.

This coming spring harvest we'll do it again

From the first bitter dawn to the pitiful end.

My heart thumped to the mournful tune of the Redlands Anthem, and I clenched my fists and my jaw and my soul and my everything, everything was dense and hot and furious—

So lift up a glass for the heroes who fell

And the bastards that got them, we'll see them in—

I let loose a wordless, bloody, guttural shriek, and a torrent of fury and sorrow and self-hatred screamed out with it, heat that warped the air as much as my tears, frost that numbed my flesh as deep as my soul, and I was falling, shrinking, fading into nothingness as the storm of ice and fire that was my love and loss reached so high it nearly split the sky in two.

When it was over, I was curled up in a patch of melting frost, surrounded by ruined, incinerated earth. My soul was empty. I was empty. I was so, so weak, and if a gust of wind so much as touched me, I would blow away into dust.

From behind me, I heard the frost crunch as someone stepped up to me, waited, then laid down by my side. Reaching out to loop one arm around my chest, holding me tight and close.

I closed my eyes and let Lucet hold me, the anthem of the Redlands echoing in my ears as my soul went quiet and still, falling asleep in a cradle of frost and flame.