The only sapient Demon of Empathy in the Redlands closed their eyes and thought of death. Ever since they'd merged with their siblings, Odin had found the near-constant sleet of new empathy-charged soul fragments rather distracting, and so they'd learned to tune out the noise. Now, however, they needed to perform their daily ritual of sorting through their soul for anything of value, and burning off the rest. It was a hallucinogenic, disorienting, hours-long task, but it was necessary nonetheless.

Odin did not sleep, but today, they dreamed.

"Caw," I said, ruffling my feathers, and Astrenn giggled as I tried to cheer her up. The flowers shifted in the breeze.

The snow cave was unbearably hot, my skin feverish despite the crust of ice, and I huddled into my fellow soldier's body. I could tell from the tension in his gritted jaw that he was burning up too, his body gone haywire as he died in the frost.

I winked at Kino as I stabbed the crude puppet of Cienne, then held its impaled body over the fire. He guffawed, and I slapped his shoulder in companionship as we planned the death of a hated man.

Odin furrowed their brow. Ah, that would be the outcome of Iola's battle with Cienne. Despite the sponsorship of the Outside, it seemed as though being outnumbered four to one had evened the odds between Iola and Cienne. Odin quested deeper into the memory fragment, pushing at its boundaries; reluctantly, the shard complied, cracking from the strain as Odin rewound it to its beginning.

"Catch," Kino said, tossing me a bundle of cloth. My head snapped up, trailing droplets of flesh, as I snatched it from the air and unfolded it, scowling.

"This had better be good, Kino," I growled. "I just spent two days in the Plane of Elemental Antimagic, and I am pissed. If this is another one of your inane..." I trailed off as I saw what he'd made.

An effigy of the only man to best me.

My face split in a wide humber as I turned towards Kino. "Oh, Kino, you shouldn't have! You know me too well. This is just what I needed to have some real fun. You sly rascal, c'mere." I extended my arms and gave Kino a wide-open hug. After a moment, I withdrew, turning my dorceless eyes towards the unsuspecting doll.

"Gotcha," I whispered with a squelch, and in the corner, Kino mimicked the panicked scream of a stuck-up poacher getting what he deserved.

Odin peeled back from the memory, grimacing. They would have to pore over that memory later in detail—if nothing else, to determine what it was like to feel those eldritch emotions—but for now, they had more important things to deal with. Iola was dead, and slain by their actions; perhaps in times of peace, Odin would have spent the decades necessary to find that core of a good person that they believed all people had within them, but for now, there were other matters to attend to.

Other souls to save.

It took another twelve hours for Odin to sort through the last few weeks of memories, but once they had carefully funneled the useful ones into safe sections of their soul, they compacted the rest into their metabolic core, where they would be burned to sustain Odin's existence over the next month or so.

When they opened their eyes, they found a stack of neatly-aligned papers waiting for them. Ah, that would be the research division's daily report. Odin sifted through it—marginal progress on all fronts, as they'd expected. The breakthrough in creating attunements had led to a flurry of new discoveries, but research progressed slowly, and a day's worth of verified findings was still small enough to fit comfortably in a hand-sized pamphlet. The properties of the Plane of Elemental Falsehood were still being tested; nobody could identify what the strange substance that wood turned into was, but it appeared that gold became lead and snow became cotton under the strange transformation that was the power of insecurity.

More mundane results also featured in the research pamphlet. A mixture of various acids appeared to have the bizarre ability to corrode gold in realspace; the chemistry department was still uncertain if it could be reproduced in soulspace, but with the infinity of possibilities that had sprung from their discovery that attunements could be combined, it seemed likely that they would find a reaction pathway eventually.

Odin found it endlessly amusing that Cienne had independently reached that discovery himself, only a few days after Odin's dedicated research team had found it. If they hadn't been forced by the pressures of wartime to burn that bridge, they might have considered pushing harder to recruit Cienne—but they'd done the poor boy enough harm. Better to let him live his life, free of the horrors of war.

Then again, Odin supposed that they shouldn't have been surprised at Cienne's pace of innovation. The boy was a student of the Silent Academy, after all—and despite all their flaws, they were an institute of higher education. Odin's primary objective in freeing the students of the Silent Academy was moral in nature, but they had to admit that formally-educated researchers with standardized methodologies had drastically sped up the pace at which the Order of Valhalla could develop new spells and technologies.

Which had... worrying implications for how much further ahead of them the Silent Peaks' level of advancement truly was. Had their experiments with Eldritch emotions truly come from Outside? Or... worse, had they discovered them independently?

Perhaps today would bring answers. Odin finished reading the summary of today's progress, committing it to memory, and sighed. It was time for the part of the day they dreaded most.

It was time for today's Three Truths.

Odin stood from their desk, pushing in the chair as an afterthought, and exited their office, stepping into the main atrium. They weren't stupid enough to keep their Truthteller in their main base of operations, but the research team assigned here had gotten large enough that some construction was warranted. At the very least, Odin mused, the past five decades had seen some favorable amenities crop up. Odin had no need to eat—their body was maintained solely by the synchronization between their soul and realspace—but they appreciated how the research staff had somewhere to sit and eat while they took breaks.

There was no secret entrance, no elaborate maze, no over-the-top security guarding the Truthteller. The only defenses Odin employed were a warding scheme to prevent scrying and the undying loyalty of their staff; they had even made sure that every moment spent with the Truthteller was as charged with empathy as possible, so that no memories of what laid within would leak even in death. Each one of the researchers here had once been lost, wayward children; each one, Odin had saved and raised as if they were their own. If Odin had strayed so far from the path of empathy that their own loved ones could be tempted into being traitors, then Odin deserved to be betrayed. That was all the insurance they needed.

Even before opening the door politely marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, Odin knew what they would see. It had been the work of a century and a half to assemble the Truthteller, although much of that was spent puzzling out the hints the Outsiders wove into the fabric of the cosmos.

Of all things, it was the memory of a shaman that had tipped Odin off to the irregularity in the stars. Odin supposed that it made sense—the Redlander communities that had lived here two centuries ago put great cultural emphasis on starwatching—but they were still frustrated with themself for not noticing the patterns in how the stars flickered earlier. It had taken another four years of concerted thought to discover the simplest pattern of the lot, and the first hint that greater forces were at play.

Because the stars encoded messages.

The easiest one to figure out had been how Persei spelled out the first twenty prime numbers, over and over and over again. Odin still looked up at the night sky every now and then to check on it. Ahmael and Tanryn, may the arrogant old man who named the stars after himself rest in peace, worked together to establish three-dimensional coordinates. Van's enigmatic light extended those coordinates from realspace to thoughtspace. Hampern, Lorn, and Quie used those coordinates to describe emotional planes. From emotions, it was trivial to reach materials; from coordinates, it was as easy as breathing to make shapes.

Odin was no great scientific genius, but they were an immortal presented with a mystery they could not crack. Twenty years of curious chipping later, they determined what the stars were saying.

They a blueprint. And they were telling Odin—and anyone else who listened—to make a machine.

Odin opened the door to the basement and beheld the Truthteller.

Nobody had the slightest idea how it worked. From realspace, it looked like a massive metal dish, connected to a complex tangle of levers and wires. In thoughtspace, it spanned twenty-seven different emotional planes, each containing various offshoots of the Truthteller's machinery. Most worryingly, in soulspace, it was undeniably alive.

Half a century ago, when the final gear had been slotted into place, the machine had immediately reconfigured itself, offering a series of puzzles in binary that eventually culminated in the Truthteller comprehending their language. Upon the final binary puzzle's solution, the Truthteller spoke for the very first time.

"CONGRATULATIONS. YOU ARE THE FIFTH. KNOWLEDGE WILL BE REWARDED. YOU HAVE THREE ATTEMPTS PER DAY."

The experimentation that had followed was hasty, and Odin was still not certain that they understood all of the Truthteller's rules. But they understood enough.

The researchers in the room gave Odin polite, tense nods. Dathenn raised her eyebrow as Odin entered.

"Here for the Three Truths?" she asked. Rhetorically, of course. There was nothing else to be here for.

In response, Odin simply nodded.

"Don't expect anything big," Dathenn warned.

"You always live up to my expectations," Odin said. "And my expectations are always grand."

Dathenn gave Odin a warm smile before turning to the Truthteller. She pulled a lever, and the machine made a polite cough in response.

"Truthteller," Dathenn said. "Are you ready?"

"OF COURSE."

"Very well. The first of the truths we have to offer is this." Dathenn consulted her notes. "Gold can be dissolved in a mixture of gastric and fuming acids."

The Truthteller hummed in response. "THIS TRUTH... IS KNOWN TO US."

Dathenn nodded to herself. "Thank you, Truthteller." It was unknowable whether or not the Truthteller had a concept of politeness, but it had become something of a superstition in the decades since its construction. Nobody wanted to be the one to anger the unfathomable machine, after all. "The second of the truths we have to offer is this. Gold can be transmuted to lead through the application of Elemental Falsehood."

"THIS TRUTH... IS KNOWN TO US," the machine repeated.

Dathenn began to speak, but Odin held up a finger.

"Truthteller," Odin said, "I would like to offer you a third truth."

The researchers in the room shared confused glances, but nobody spoke up.

"SPEAK," the Truthteller said.

"You have been assisting a political and ideological enemy of ours, whom we are at war with. This has impeded our ability to gain scientific and magical knowledge, which is at odds with your stated goals," Odin calmly stated.

Silence fell in the chamber of the Truthteller.

"THIS TRUTH... IS NOT KNOWN TO US," the Truthteller finally admitted.

"Then as recompense for my knowledge, I would like to claim a reward."

"...PROCEED."

"You have recently granted the Silent Peaks the ability to convert ordinary witches into eldritch beings of extreme power," Odin said. "I wish to know how to turn them back."

The Truthteller hummed to itself, considering the request.

Then it spoke.

"IT IS KNOWN THAT SOULS ARE INDESTRUCTIBLE. IT IS ALSO KNOWN THAT MEMORIES ARE CONSUMED TO SUSTAIN THE EXISTENCE OF SOULSPACE ENTITIES. HOW, THEN, IS THE PARADOX RESOLVED?"

Odin glanced at Dathenn, who was already studiously taking notes, then back at the Truthteller. "This truth is not known to us," Odin diplomatically said.

"THEN ANSWER ME THIS. I HAVE ASSESSED YOUR KNOWLEDGE OF REALSPACE AND THOUGHTSPACE, AND FOUND IT SUFFICIENT FOR YOU TO COMPREHEND THIS EXERCISE. SO INFORM ME. WHAT DO YOU KNOW OF SOULSPACE?"

And Odin smiled, for at last they were given a question to which they knew the answer.