“Was I not supposed to be?” Elach asked in confusion.

Struck speechless, Shar shook her head and let her Issi that wasn’t preserving the scorpion dissipate. She dissolved the scorpion into mist and let it swirl around her neck, her scarf carrying a darker red tone than it had before, but spoke not while she did so.

“Hello? Can you hear me?” Elach prodded, stepping up to Shar and waving a hand in front of her face. “Were you going to kill me there?”

“No! No, I wasn’t…” Shar shook herself, then slapped her face with both hands. “I knew you had a sort of resistance to Issi, but I didn’t think you’d be able to withstand my unleashed Issi.”

“Well, I guess you underestimated me. Or overestimated yourself?” Elach shrugged. “Either works, I guess. Did you get what you wanted out of killing the scorpion?”

“I.. I did.” Shar said, slapping her face once more. She nodded with confidence, her eyes boring into Elach’s own, and a thin smile crept across her face. “I found exactly what I was looking for.”

The offshoot of a grove Elach wandered into was exactly like he was expecting. A large clearing with fruit trees boxing it in on all sides, filled to the brim with flowers and bushes and a small stream of liquid that was barely tinted blue running through the middle. And it was occupied.

Bug-people of all shapes and sizes milled about, closely investigating each and every plant and rock for what Elach assumed were the little lights. There didn’t seem to be any fights going on, which was a point against Izzik’s violent actions, and Elach started walking the edge of the grove with as much caution as he could muster. Every fiber of his being was on alert, his Issi at his fingertips for when he needed it, a soft clinking from his wrists a constant reminder of exactly that.

“How are we supposed to draw out Occril without collateral damage?” Shar wondered aloud, no longer bothering to keep her voice low. “All these people would get caught up in the crossfire, and even if you don’t mind their heads on your conscience, I won’t have a part in it.”

Elach turned and made a face at Shar. “How little empathy do you think I have?”

“You did murder a new practitioner just under a week ago. So… very little.” Shar said, trying to keep a straight face. But the problem with not normally having a mouth was that any trace of a smile was blatantly obvious.

“It was self-defence.” Elach protested, the image of the poor boy’s empty eyes having haunted his dreams ever since. One more horrific painting in the art gallery that was his memory. “What about the woman that’s a manifestation of slaughter? You’d think she’d have very little empathy.”

“You’d be surprised. Manifestations see all sides of their Issi, both the ugly and the pristine.” Shar tutted. “I can see the beauty in destruction; of an invading army reduced to nothing but a cooling pile of inanimate flesh, of a stormhoof herd brought low by a single starving ironscale crocodile. But I can see the horrors as well. Which outnumber any beauty there could be by a factor of ten.”

“A village that didn’t succeed in repelling that army.” Shar continued, her tone taking on a somber note. “Of innocents murdered in their homes in the name of a war they held no part in. Of a father who succumbed to his vices, leaving nothing of his family but bloody stains. Slaughter is a terrible, terrible part of nature. It is violence past the point of necessity. But it doesn’t mean my empathy’s dead.”

“There’s the librarian in you.” Elach chuckled. “I already figured it was something like that, since you would probably be too dangerous to keep anywhere near young kids if you were hells-bent on slaughter.”

Shar crossed her arms and lifted her chin triumphantly. Elach laughed and turned his head, surveying all the bugs once more. They were largely ignoring the two non-shadowed newcomers, save for a concerned glance every now and again, but that was quickly followed by a shift to better protect their gathered light. A cautionary motion.

Elach’s foot tapped against a hard lump, just barely enough for his toes to slam into the end of his shoe. He raised an eyebrow and bent down, pushing aside a strange abundance of vibrant purple flowers to see what he’d hit.

“Shit.” He hissed, brushing a clump of roots off of an empty shell. Dimmed eyes stared up at him, frozen in the moment of death, a gaping hole caved in through the chest of the unfortunate bug-person. The still-warm insides had begun attracting small flies that grew fat with bright purple, wobbling through the air with gorged lightblood after their feast. “This is a little too fresh.”

Those concerned glances suddenly took on a more sinister meaning. “It seems like the competition here is cutthroat.” Shar muttered, running a finger along a jagged cut on the dead bug-person’s neck. “I’m going to give them a warning, and if they choose not to heed it, we aren’t taking responsibility for the casualties.”

“That might be more than someone here deserves.” Elach said with a grimace. The lightblood had begun leaking through his shoes, and he was feeling much less generous with his judgments than moments ago. “Can you fight Occril with the scorpion in your Issi?”

“Not without your help. Keep an eye and ear open this time; Occril should be far more dangerous than the scorpion was. Bunker down here and wait for my signal. I’ll make it far more obvious this time.” Shar instructed.

“Will do.” Elach said with a small salute, shuffling away from the body. He watched as Shar sauntered over to the middle of the clearing, Issi swelling as she caught the attention of every living thing in the grove.

He tuned her out and tried to get back in the groove of Izzik’s technique. It was far simpler the second time, taking only a few thoughts and a motion like lighting a match on his left palm, a single link of chain appearing between his thumb and forefinger. Shar’s spectacle luckily drew the entire grove’s attention, both fear and rage, with four-fifths of the bug-people running for the exit at the first show of overwhelming potential. The fifth that remained came together and brandished weapons of solid black, luminescent patterns weaving through the shadows as their own techniques sparked into reality.

It was all for nothing. Shar turned lazily and flicked a shard at a mantis, a massive wedge of ruby red bisecting it the moment it made contact with twin pink-etched blades. Shar didn’t bother preserving the mantis’ body, shifting her focus to the twin hornless beetles charging her. Muddy brown shields raised in protection splintered under a wave of liquid Issi, filling the twins with pain and suffering for a moment before they became birthing grounds for spikes of slaughter Issi.

Shar strode over to the corpses and tapped on their shells, turning them to brilliant motes of triangular Issi that glimmered in the minimal light. The spikes were far less brilliant, moving like the tendrils of a vine-based Issi beast to ensnare and subsequently puncture an ant that was pooling their light into a technique. Once it had more holes than intact body parts, Shar retracted the tendrils and let them slither a wide circle around her knees like a mass of writhing snakes.

The whole grisly spectacle took less than thirty seconds. The two remaining butterflies took to the air and began whipping sparkling silver winds between the two of them, gaining speed with every rotation. It didn’t matter. Shar sheared the wings from the leftmost one in a spray of liquid red, the winds petering out before they could do any real damage, and executed the final butterfly with a ring of mist filled with shards. Absolutely brutal efficiency.

Elach laughed incredulously and focused on the now empty grove. Shar had easily completed her half of the plan. Now it was his turn.

Izzik’s technique called out to everything around Elach, whispering promises of light and safety through the medium of his Issi. He felt countless tiny dots of light on the edges of his conscious mind, creeping just out of the range of his technique like a spider avoiding the light of a swinging lantern. They weren’t quite terrified of Izzik’s technique, but there was some sort of instinctual reticence within the myriad lights. But it wasn’t all the same reticence.

The pink dots wanted more than anything to answer Elach’s call, but they didn’t want to be the first colour to venture forth. They were prey, Elach realized, and wouldn’t move without knowing it was safe. The greens were their polar opposite; they didn’t want to come forward whatsoever, but they were slowly inching forward with an insatiable curiosity of the unknown and the desire to be the first to discover it. He somehow knew that if he could call the greens, the pinks would follow.

But that was only two out of an entire rainbow. Yellow, orange, red, purple, blue, black, and white were enigmas to his senses, and all the other colours he could tell were out there somewhere hadn’t shown the slightest interest in his technique. While he wondered why those other colours were so far out of reach, he felt the greens stirring. A single mote meandered from the edge of his mind to the inner reaches, tentatively brushing up against his technique with a touch that reminded Elach of the sharp edges of waxy leaves.

He smiled down at the little light with his eyes still firmly shut, turning up an open palm for it to rest. The green mote settled on his upturned palm with a pulse of comfort and content, shattering the floodgates for the rest of the greens. They spilled into his mind with reckless abandon, clustering over his hand with a weight that only pulled on his thoughts. Elach’s smile widened and he cracked one eye open, looking down to a buzzing swarm of green ten-sided shapes that glowed with a dark emerald light.

It was beyond comforting. He relaxed his shoulders and breathed a sigh of relief, letting Izzik’s technique fall to the unconscious part of his mind that governed things like breathing. It changed as it fell, but not in a way that he could fully describe. It was like the difference between fresh snow falling and a midwinter storm, between the change of seasons and the continuation of one. Comfort in the known, even though it is far worse than the unknown ever was.