Sansen recoiled and started to speak, Meloai immediately started demanding clarification, but I had eyes for one person only. As I finally, finally got that confession off my chest, I turned to Lucet, whose bowed head made her expression unreadable.

But her soul finished roiling as she looked up and gave me a faint smile. "Called it."

I blinked. "You... what?"

"I knew something wasn't adding up. I'm glad you told me." Lucet tilted her head. "How long?"

I swallowed, awaiting her judgement. "I... I kept it from you guys for months. Ever since the Silent Academy. That old vampire dude that visits Jiaola let it slip one day, and I was just scared of letting it fall into Odin's hands, and then they just told me that they knew already—"

"That tracks," Sansen muttered. "The Grandmaster's old enough to remember the Outer rifts, and from what I've gathered, he grew up in a time before operational security and never bothered to change. Too much political power for the Parliament to just ignore him, either. I bet they never would have let a walking information leak like him into the same room as some random student if they hadn't been pressed so hard by the war."

I only vaguely heard what Sansen said, still focused on Lucet. She brushed my hair out of my eyes and whispered, "I'm not mad."

My throat seized up. "I never said that you were."

"I know." Raising her voice a little, she said, "So... what are the secrets of attunement, if I might ask?"

I sat up, brushing snow off my shoulders. Right, time to get to business. "Well. Two things, I guess. Creating attunement—it takes four things. Feeling, losing, giving, and taking an emotion. And once you have those attunements... you can combine them to make new ones."

"Giving? Taking? What do you mean by that?" Meloai asked, leaning in.

The next few minutes were dedicated to a flurry of questions and answers and clarifications—most of which I couldn't provide, despite having looked myself. No, I didn't know what was so special about those four things. Yes, as far as I could tell, you didn't have to be aware of the process, and it could take as long as you pleased. No, I wasn't hiding any other fundamental secrets of magic up my sleeve.

"What do you mean by 'combining' attunements?" Meloai finally asked.

I hesitated. "It's... hard to describe, but... here. Earlier, I was trying to give Lucet a bit of hope, and... well, I don't have an attunement to hope myself, but I saw quartz and oil in her soul and thought 'I have all the ingredients to make fire myself right here,' so I went ahead and did a caveman." At their confused looks, I clarified: "Hitting rocks together to make fire."

"Wait." Sansen frowned. "But different emotions can't interact with each other."

"Normally," I agreed. "Unless you're attuned to the emotions you want to make interact, and you rotate your attunements into alignment."

"We get it, Cienne, you're very smart," Lucet primly said.

"Wait." Meloai narrowed her eyes. "You said earlier that you could see Iola's soul. The insect eggs and tar and moss that he used to fuel his spells."

I shuddered. "Please don't remind me."

"Sorry," Meloai said. "But if Iola's corrupted emotions are close enough to mundane passion and joy that your attunements can see them... are they close enough that your attunements can burn them?"

Silence fell as the four of us pondered the question.

"I don't have nearly enough mastery of hope to pull that off," I finally said. "Not to mention that... I'm... not all that hopeful right now. If—"

"I am," Sansen suddenly said. "Get me the attunements, and I'll burn that hellscape that Iola calls a soul."

"And with his magic locked down..." Meloai held up a hand, shifting it into a blade. "I can kill him."

We all stared at her for a moment.

"What?" she asked. "Are we trying to keep him alive?"

"No," Lucet said forcefully. "I mean, I don't wish him dead in general, but right now in specific, he's planning on killing us all, and probably Jiaola afterwards. He... he's too dangerous to try to spare, even if I wanted to. And I don't. I don't want him dead, I don't want him alive, I want to be free from him. I just... was surprised to hear you say it like that."

"Then if we're decided?" Sansen stood. "I think we have some attunements to make."

###

Iola's deadliest weapon was his strange, corrupted light magic. There was no point in fighting at all if he just snapped his fingers and consigned us all to die within minutes. So my role in the battle to come would be to provide us with what was hopefully at least a little protection against Iola's signature Instant Death Beam.

Thankfully, Odin themself had demonstrated how to counter light magic in one of their dream-broadcasts, and the answer was blindingly simple, pun intended. Sansen and Lucet had their own roles to play in the upcoming fight, so I had the task of wrapping three shrouds of darkness around us, voids that swallowed all light except for a strip around our eyes. There was no way around that, unfortunately; we couldn't fight Iola if we were blind. Relying on soulsight alone had its limits, after all.

Meloai had declined a shield, to my relief—I'd lessened the mental burden of managing the shrouds significantly by channeling them into the memory of three sets of winter clothes, but constantly remembering their shape was still tricky. I probably couldn't do four at once even if I tried. Besides, there was no way I could match Iola head on, power-for-power; my flimsy shields would last mere seconds under a concentrated onslaught. If the plan didn't work, we'd be dead in an instant.

I didn't have the time to waste on pondering that, though. I just had to hope that our magical protections would be enough.

I was trying to calm down when Sansen's head jerked up, eye tracking the futures that only he could see.

Then he set his jaw and said, "Shields up. He's here."

I concentrated, dipping into my soul, and the shrouds of darkness rippled around our bodies. As I reached into my soulsight, I sensed a fifth soul approaching, riddled with spiders' eggs and moldy tar.

Moments later, the man himself appeared from the blizzard, stopping when he saw the four of us.

"Well. If it isn't my dearest of friends," Iola said, taking a step forwards. His skin sloughed and bubbled in his wake, his flesh eternally melting and regrowing like a fountain of chocolate fondue. "My runaway girlfriend, and the boy who thought he could steal her from me."

Lucet flinched as if she'd been slapped, and from behind her cloak of darkness, I could see the fear in her eyes. My throat tightened, and I wanted to snap at Iola, rise in her defense, but...

I knew Lucet. Stepping in to defend her would only take her agency away. And I had faith in her. She was more than capable of protecting herself.

Especially now, with her back against the wall and nothing left to lose.

Iola stalked forwards, crooning at Lucet with a dripping, wet voice. "I'll tell you what, my toy. Come with me willingly, and I'll even let your friends live. You wouldn't want to force them to die protecting you, would you?"

Lucet froze up as Iola stepped closer, right into the center of our formation of four. I swore under my breath and reached into my soul. If Lucet didn't do something soon, we'd have to—

Then Lucet took a deep breath and shoved Iola away.

"Get away from me!" Lucet shrieked. "You're a monster—can't you see that? Can't you see what they've done to you?"

And before Iola could respond, she channeled her sorrow through her outstretched hands, unleashing the full force of her frost magic upon the unsuspecting Iola.

None of us were really sure what was wrong with frost magic. Something about the location turbocharged it, made it unstable, dangerous to use. In ordinary circumstances, we would never take the risk of unloading such a massive frostbeam on the world.

But these were far from ordinary circumstances, and so Lucet vented years of quiet sadnesses in a single, blinding blow.

The air cracked, Lucet stumbling back as the heat was torn from it in an instant, turning from gas to liquid to solid in a fraction of a heartbeat. Focusing my soulsight, I could tell that Iola was still alive, cloaked in a shield of molten space—and, to my horror, he released a pulse of deadly light, spiders' eggs evaporating into nothing as they transitioned from his soul to reality. I poured every ounce of fear I held into our shields—and I had no shortage of the stuff now—in hope that it would be enough. But how could I know? The shields could have worked perfectly, and we would all be fine. Or we would conquer Iola, only to die a week from now in an agonizing death.

I'd take that problem if it meant I'd live another week. So I turned to Sansen, shouting, "Shut down his magic!"

Sansen was already moving, the old oracle's soul rotating as he willed forth the fires of hope itself. He held nothing back, the ethereal, intangible flame burning at Iola's very soul, as torrential as a dragon's breath, until he slumped over, a pained, empty expression in his eyes. Expending that much of his magic at once had a cost—stripping every last drop of hope from his soul—but it was worth it. For the first time, I heard Iola scream in agony as his shields suddenly failed, exposing him to the bitter cold. The tar in his soul burned a brilliant, agonizing white, the spiders' eggs popping like balloons at a summer fair.

Maybe we could do it. Maybe we could slay the unkillable.

I sensed his burning soul shift as he reached for the deadly light that would slay us all—but the fires of hope still raged, consuming his magics before they saw the light of day. I hesitated, questioning whether I should order Meloai into the fray—she may have been a shapeshifter, but even she couldn't shrug off the the absolute cold that was eating Iola alive.

Before I could choose, though, Meloai chose for me, blurring forwards in a flurry of arms-into-claws-into-blades. I heard something shatter in the mist, chunks of frozen flesh flying every which was as Meloai dug into Iola's vulnerable, frozen form. I saw her flesh crack and freeze as the bitter cold slowed her down, but she sacrificed her body with reckless abandon, tearing Iola to shreds until even his regeneration struggled to keep up.

And then she collapsed, panting with pain, her joints ticking and seizing up as the frost overtook them.

But I was already capitalizing on the opportunity, surging forwards past Lucet as she nursed her frostbitten hands, past Sansen as he struggled with his emptied soul, past Meloai as her body tried to knit itself back together, and from my soul I drew the oldest spell I knew.

Black, clinging thorns looped out from my soul, wrapping around Iola's form and striking while he was still stunned, shrinking him from the size of a man to the size of my hand. I lifted my foot to strike—

And he smiled. Even as he died, the madman laughed and spoke six words.

"It's too late," he said. "You're already dead."

Then my boot fell like a divine hammer, and Iola was no more.

I fell to my knees, heedless of the frost biting into my pants, and let out a ragged, pyrrhic breath.

We'd done the impossible. We'd slain a monster. We'd won.

And all that was left was to pay the price.