"Bad news," Sansen said.

I cracked an eye open—I hadn't quite managed to slip into a nap, but I was close enough to be cranky about the interruption. "You're not going to do the whole 'good news, bad news, which do you want to hear first' routine?"

"I'm an oracle. I've lived through this twice already. It's purely performative on my part." From behind him, Lucet giggled. I got up and erected a brief bubble of darkness, put on my binder, and then terminated the spell of fear. Being a novice witch in eleven different schools still didn't put me on par with a real witch like Sansen, but we'd all been trying to hone any skill that could help us survive, and that included casting spells and improving our techniques whenever possible.

Plus, I liked having privacy when I changed.

"So what's the bad news?" I asked.

"Well, we think we found out why there's a whole bunch of Demons of Fear hanging out in the sky," Sansen said. "We've done some observation, and there've been some aerial clashes between Demons of Fear and Angels of Arrogance. Odds are, we're not the first people to think of using soulspace entities for reconnaissance, and what we've been seeing is the Order and the Peaks brawling for control over surveillance from above."

"Yeah, I didn't think we were military geniuses either. But wait, if you observed the conflict directly..."

Sansen grinned. "Yeah, Lucet and Meloai managed to train the Demon of Joy while you were asleep, and I can look into a future where we kill it for its memories and gather all the information it would have held without having to actually kill it every time we want to know what it saw."

I exhaled, a weight lifting from my soul. "We needed a win," I said.

Lucet turned away from our little scout—a butterfly of light that fluttered towards a flower Meloai held—and gave me a gentle smile. "We did, didn't we?"

"Speaking of wins and losses," Sansen said, "the Order of Valhalla and the Peaks fought to a standstill at a nearby lake. We... there wasn't any sign of Jiaola, but if we can get closer and dig through the memory fragments..."

"You want to rummage around in an active battlefield?" I asked.

"Both sides retreated, and if we move fast, they might still be regrouping by the time we get there. Plus, there's another factor at play. From what the butterfly—"

"I'm naming him Misiel," Meloai interrupted.

"From what Misiel saw," Sansen corrected himself, "the aftermath of the battle looked... extensive. Someone tore open a massive rift into the Plane of Elemental Cold, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were more rifts hidden beneath that massive cloud of mist."

"So we think we're safe, because the battlefield's too deadly for either army to want to enter," I summarized.

"We don't have to go into the heart of that mess," Sansen said. "We just have to get in far enough that we can find a couple soul fragments, and get out. With a competent oracle, two combat witches, and a mimic, we should at the very least be able to run from any major soulspace entities before they kill us."

"Great, thanks, very reassuring." I rubbed my forehead. "What do you all think?"

"None of us would've made it out of the Silent Peaks without Sansen," Lucet said, squeezing my arm. "And... I never met Jiaola, but... he's your friend, Cienne. This is the clearest shot at finding him that we've had so far. I say we take it."

"Family's hard to come by," Meloai added, giving me a reassuring nod. "I'm not looking forward to finding out what kinds of things are going to crawl out of those rifts, but... it's worth the risk."

I swallowed heavily, feeling a familiar constriction in my throat, and some sticky, sharp part of my soul wished I'd never asked.

Lucet and Meloai were willing to throw their lives on the line for someone they'd never even met.

But I? I was scared. I was a fucking coward. I was a horrible person. They would be better off if I just disappeared one day and never came back.

I took in a deep breath, letting the familiar voices wash over me.

Then I forced my way past it, the way I'd painstakingly learned how, and said, "Alright. Let's do this."

###

The cloud cover got thicker and thicker as we approached what was left of Feardust Lake. I'd never actually been to this part of the Redlands—for most of my childhood, the area was considered uninhabitable thanks to the last clash between the Redlands and the Peaks—but it didn't seem all that different from any other section of the plains I called home. Endless waves of flowing grass? Check. Majestic open sky that felt like it could swallow you whole? Check. Rifts into other dimensions that spewed monsters and elemental destruction? You betcha.

The rift itself was hidden beneath the shroud of condensation and frost it had generated, but even from this distance, it was obvious that it was one hell of a thing. I'd be surprised if I lived to see it fade. The signature tactic of Fell witches—sowing sorrow on the battlefield and reaping it all at once to tear massive rifts in the sky—had survived for centuries, and judging by how far away the Silent Peaks had made their camp from the enormous rift, the Peaks had learned to respect it.

"Was this... a victory for the Order?" Meloai asked.

I shrugged. "No clue. If you want to go up to their camps and ask, I'm sure both sides will have their version of the story where they won."

"Hey," Lucet said, frowning. "Do you guys... Cienne. Do you... is something... wrong with sorrow right now?"

I tensed, looking at Sansen, but he shook his head—nothing imminently threatening. "From a scale of elf-Iola to eldritch-Iola, how wrong are we talking here?"

"I'm... just try casting a spell with sorrow," Lucet said. "A... a small one. Small as you can make it."

"Uh. Okay." Salt-crystal sorrow grew in abundance along the inner edge of my soul; I willed a fraction of it to chip off, then tossed it from my soul into realspace—

The frostbolt skittered a good foot before stopping, leaving a trail of swirling condensation in its path.

Even Sansen seemed surprised as the four of us stared at it.

"That is not what that spell was supposed to do," I finally said, just as Sansen's expression returned to normal. Oh, was that what had caused Sansen to be surprised? Gah, stupid oracles, reacting to my sentences before they're spoken.

"Huh." Lucet's soul stirred. "So if I try to cast a normal frostbolt, then—"

"NO!" Sansen grabbed her arm, startling Lucet, and she yelped, spinning around. "No. Just... no. We all die if you try to use a full-powered frost spell."

A chill went down my spine. "I... I don't suppose any of you have ever tried using magic near a rift this large before?"

I got three shaken heads in response.

"Maybe... maybe we should stay away from frost magic, for now. Until we're away from that ridiculously-sized rift," I said.

Lucet flinched, and I kicked myself—there was probably a way to say that that didn't render Lucet useless for the time being. But before I could open my mouth, she put on a smile and said, "Yeah. It's alright. Just until after."

Then she turned and strode towards the city-sized rift in the distance.

Dammit. Dammit, dammit, dammit. I felt those familiar thorny vines grow around my throat, but I forged through it. Now was not the time to let my emotions get the better of me.

The consequences of what would happen if I did loomed large on the horizon, a sorrow so deep and vast it had torn two armies apart.

###

"Found one," Meloai shouted. There was thunder periodically crashing from somewhere deeper in the wrecked grasslands, and the constant crash of hail wasn't helping the noise problem either.

"What plane?" Lucet asked.

"No clue. But he died recently—the body's still warm."

I shuddered. "Eurgh. I know your interaction with humanity has been limited to Lady Tanryn for the first two decades of your life, but for future reference, humans generally don't like poking other humans' corpses."

"I... I know. I'm sorry. I just... thought I could help." Meloai's crestfallen expression made me want to fucking stab myself, but... I could keep the voices at bay for just a little longer. Until we got to a place where I felt absolutely safe sharing the secret of attunement with Lucet and Meloai and Sansen, and then I'd be redundant and they wouldn't need me anymore and I could just fall into a dream and vanish—

"Shame," Sansen said. "It's a memory of shame."

Oh, great. "Does opening a rift into the Plane of Elemental Transparency kill us all?"

Sansen shook his head. "Not in the immediate future."

Well, 'not killing myself in the immediate future' was good enough. I'd take it. I drew glass shards of shame from my soul and cut the skin of reality, my skin momentarily shining like glass as I reached between worlds—

And I was no longer the husk of self-hatred that I'd grown into over the weeks since we'd fled the Peaks. Or worse, that I'd always been.

I was Fein, soldier under the Silent Peaks, and I had a promise to keep.

###

I could ignore the pounding hail, I could tune out the screams of dying soldiers, I could ignore the distant flashes of artillery bombardments so long as that burning compulsion stayed at the front of my mind.

I had a promise to keep, and nothing would stand in my way until it was fulfilled.

"Soldier!" The black-and-white regalia of my commanding officer stood out like a skeleton in a closet as I dashed through the battlefield. The chaos that led up to the war had been a tumultuous landslide of impossible promises and contradictory demands, but somehow, we still found enough energy to wind up the old war machines. "You're breaking position."

I met the staunch commander's gaze and evenly said, "I have a promise to keep."

The commander's gaze softened as he searched my soul. "...I understand. We're retreating under artillery cover; you'll be surrounded and bombarded by your own forces."

I knew. But some things superseded simple matters like being turned to drifting bits of gas by an artillery strike.

"Where did the Second Battlechoir fall?" I asked.

"By the southern shore of the lake," the commander said, pointing off into the distance. The miasma of mist and hail made it difficult to see, but I'd seen the maps and fought here before. I would find my way.

"It's been a pleasure to serve," I lied, and dashed out into the hellishly cold warzone.

I had a promise to keep, but that promise said nothing about telling the truth. Quite the opposite, in fact.

I was lucky enough not to stumble on any enemy soldiers as I waded through the mire of corpses and ice that marked the Battle of Promiseshard. The distant, disturbingly silent columns of light that marked where artillery strikes were wiping random spots from existence was probably why—nobody was stupid enough to charge through a field under constant bombardment.

Unless they had a promise to keep.

The steady jog was over less than half a mile, but through a muddy, torn-up battlefield, it may as well have been a sprint to the moon and back. Progress was slow, and I nearly got burned to a crisp twice, but it was worth it.

Thirty minutes of painstaking slogging later, I reached the place where the Second Battlechoir had been surrounded and broken.

Broken—but if I was to have any hope of living with myself after this, not destroyed.

I hurried to the ruined encampment, dust and frozen blood slipping beneath my feet, and called out, "Emi? Emi, are you there?"

In response, I heard a weak exhalation, nearly lost in the tumult of the battle, weak as a newborn kitten.

I rushed over to a collapsed wooden barricade and tried heaving the logs aside—but they were simply too heavy. "Emi? Emi, are you under there? Please, I can get you out, just tell me you're—"

"Fein," Emi whispered, and I saw her dark eyes glittering from under the logs. "Its okay."

My stomach dropped. "Wh—of course you're going to be okay. I—I told you you were going to come back from the war just fine, eh? Just... gotta put my back into it..."

"Stop," Emi said, and she reached out through a crack in the slots. "I'm... it's okay. I don't have much time left. Just... spend it with me. Please."

I clenched my fists. "No. No, Emi, don't talk like that. I promised. I promised you that you'd be okay." I felt something deep, deep in my soul begin to ache, as if my very being was tearing itself apart, and I stood. "If—if I can get enough leverage, or—or if I can find some more survivors to help—"

"I can't feel my legs, Fein." Emi coughed, and I hated how wet and red and lethal it was. "Just... be with me until the end, Fein. Can you do that for me?"

I swallowed.

Then I closed my eyes, placed my hand over hers, and I could pretend that the blood was nothing but rain.

"I promise, Emi. I promise."

And I spent the rest of my life letting one promise live so another could die, until the light faded from Emi's eyes.

###

"Cienne. Cienne. Cienne!"

Lucet was shaking me, but I barely felt it. I was just... so damn tired. How many more times would I have to die and die and die again, reliving the memories of better people than I? Hell, even the fucking crow was better at not casually hurting everyone around her.

"I can't," I whispered.

Lucet stilled. "I'm—can you speak up, Cienne? I can't hear you."

I was worthless. All those people who'd died before me, all those glorious souls who outshone the entirety of my being with a fragment of their life, they had died for something. They had gone out with meaning.

Perhaps that was it. If there was one thing I could make myself good for, it was taking that hit, over and over again, until Jiaola was safe and I was no longer needed.

"I didn't see Jiaola," I managed to say, clearing my throat. "Sorry. The memory disoriented me." I plastered a smile on my face and stood up. "Let's... let's find another soul fragment, shall we?" Better people than me traded worried glances, but before they could speak, I left.

I turned my back, trodding deeper into the darkness and the frost, the souls of the fallen dispersing like blood in rain.