The wall burst into an explosion of roots and wet dirt as Occril slammed into it, a lattice of chains stretching a tunnel from the point he’d been to the crater he now resided in. Y’talla said something Elach didn’t hear as his feet carried him towards the bug-man, glancing up and around at the passageway that radiated with his own Issi. Occril struggled with a mess of chains wrapped around him that Elach must have put there at some point, four endpoints anchored into the dirt wall through small wounds in existence itself.

Bending down, Elach ran a finger over one of Occril’s wounds. It felt solid to the touch, but from the way it dripped violet, he knew it had to be a liquid of some sort. “I know you’re in there somewhere, Occril. We’re going to end your suffering as soon as we can. I promise you that.”

An anchor burst and a hand coated in violet blades reached for Elach’s throat, but he wasn’t there anymore. He shook his head sadly from the end of the latticework as it crumbled down into Issi, breathing in the remnants of whatever technique that had been to reclaim what little Issi was left.

“Don’t ignore me next time.” Y’talla huffed. “Is using a focus for the first time really that exciting?”

Elach blinked and stared dumbly at Y’talla. A few things slowly fell into place, but the holes they tried to fill weren’t the right size, so all it raised were further questions. “I’ve used my focus before. When I chained things together. That was what Prisoner’s coin let me do.”

“That’s only a base function of your Issi.” Shar coughed, opening her mouth to let a black sludge trickle out. “Locking things in place, pulling yourself, and making chains. Those are the base functions of your Issi. And location Issi itself allows movement of things in and out of your headspace that usually need a much higher level of Issi master than what you have.”

Flow’s objection to the conversation came in the form of an ear-piercing shriek, bringing all eyes and ears to them in an instant. They gestured at Occril, who was in the process of shrugging off the last existential anchor, letting out a battle cry that sent a shock of Issi through Elach that made his muscles tingle with unbridled energy.

“Right you are.” Elach agreed, narrowing his eyes and readying another one of the techniques that had managed to move Occril. “Occril comes first.”

“Y’talla, Flow, you two stand back.” Shar ordered, wiping her chin with one hand while a saw toothed blade of shards collected in her other. “Whatever infested Occril is far stronger in him than it was in the scorpion. Killing him could let loose something far deadlier.”

Elach grimaced in agreement. “Hopefully that doesn’t happen.”

“Hopefully so.” Shar agreed, stepping forward with her mist thick and deadly. “Can you tangle Occril in chains without pushing him away? Not the immobilizing technique, but conjuring physical chains to restrict his movements?”

“Easily. And maybe I can anchor them to the ground so he can’t move.” Elach said “No promises, though, so be ready for that part to fail.”

“I don’t need you to anchor him. Just make it so he can’t fly away like last time.” Shar twirled her sword between two hands before raising it like a bat, thick mist billowing out to completely conceal her.

A harsh whisper came from Occril, an undertone of temptation sliding through all of Elach’s defenses undeterred. But he noticed it. His Issi raged through his pathways and tore the whisper asunder, shooting a glance at Shar to ensure she hadn’t fallen to whatever Occril’s dark-spawn invader had just tried to do. The whisper hadn’t managed to make it through to her mind, as the shredded field of Issi dying in her mist proved, and she nodded readiness to Elach.

“Go.”

That single word sparked Elach’s technique to life, chains of Issi appearing around Occril with a thought. Transcendent power buzzed at the edges of his awareness, prepared to be unleashed, four brilliant coins spinning on the map in his headspace powered by his thoughts alone. Elach ordered them to fall, but it didn’t quite do so. It needed something else.

Elach breathed in slowly and watched the coins as they slowed, the transcendent Issi pooling away from them to allow him a better view. And what he saw had to be a new development, because it wasn’t there when he’d looked over the coins before.

On one side, there was his symbol. Twin diamonds, representing Flow and Y’talla, and the five claw marks he’d dug into his headspace what now felt like so long ago. The diamonds looked to be made of the same material as his chains, the claw marks filled in with crystallized existential bleed. Two of the three dots were filled in the colours of Flow’s nectars, but the third was empty. A small indent where a circular gem should have lain.

He studied the symbol for an instant, and felt his own container stirring in response. If the coin fell that side up, Elach had a feeling it would only affect something he tried on himself. Which left the other side as his option. Which was… the exact same as he remembered. The exact same coin Prisoner had given him. A coin to pay any toll.

A toll paid in transcendent Issi. Elach mentally slammed the coins all blank-side up, feeling all of the remaining transcendent Issi he had left splash up on impact. Four stakes of crystallized bleed materialized near four ends of his chains, each driving themselves through a link and into the ground with a spider web of rainbow-coloured cracks. Occril tried to surge forward, straining against the stakes with all of his might.

Elach didn’t feel so much as a twinge of pain. The stakes didn’t so much as budge. They were anchored to existence itself, and even as Elach felt the coins start to shimmy and shake in their indentations, he knew it would hold for long enough. Shar’s mist had gathered around her shattered sword, filling in the saw-like blade with a quietly swirling edge. He let the chains become weaker, and as if sensing the change, Shar struck.

It wasn’t quick. It wasn’t painless. And it certainly wasn’t clean.

Occril’s ravaged corpse fell in multiple pieces, a splatter of violet coating the dirt from his body all the way to the wall. The liquid shadows of the dark-spawn began flaking away the moment their host died, screaming silent pleas of temptation and isolation as it died.

Shar looked over at Elach with her face shrouded in a cowl of mist, then bent down to seal away Occril’s corpse in her mist. Elach let out a breath and tried to call off the stakes, but they wouldn’t come back to him. The coins were almost jumping in their indentations now, and he got an image of them jumping free and colliding into the single coin he used to move between his headspace and Y’talla’s repaired spring.

The vision faded, and the coins kept jumping with increasing intensity. Soon enough, the stakes would fade. Elach turned to look where he’d last seen the three sets of lights, humming to himself in surprise when he saw them still in place.

Y’talla tilted her head to the side while she stared at the clusters of wisplings. “They’re not running away. Do you have enough Issi to call them here?”

“Give me thirty seconds.” Elach said, closing his eyes and shifting his view to his headspace. He strode over to the fountain, shooting a glance at the single coin laying on the map pedestal, and dunked his head into the amber nectar.

After drinking until no more would slide down his throat, Elach switched back to reality and shook his no longer wet hair. The nectar was already working its wonders, but he hurried it through his pathways to help it along. His modified version of Izzik’s technique came to life with the flip of a link of chain, but this time he put absolutely no insistence in the beacon of Issi. It was a calming wave of power, like a still lake waiting for animals to come drink of it.

It took the greater part of an hour to coax the three remaining colours of wisps to join them. The oranges were the last to come, only drawn from their perches when Shar left the grove to check on something that had prodded at Elach’s Issi senses. Y’talla transferred them just as she had all the others, smiling wide as she welcomed new inhabitants to the un-shattered primal spring.

“Did you finally have your breakthrough?” Elach asked after the last of the wisplings were safely tucked away.

“Huh?” Y’talla turned to him with a confused look. “Oh, right! The meditation thing. Yeah, I had my breakthrough. But it didn’t come with a power-up or any more bouts of weird knowledge, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Elach leaned back against the wall, feeling tendrils of darkspawn wriggling through the dirt. With Occril dead, his senses felt sharper than ever. For better or worse. “What did you break through, then?”

“I found out how I’m going to get stronger. And maybe how to get a few more bouts of knowing.” Y’talla said offhandedly, her eyes fixated on a point far past Elach. “The primal spring isn’t supposed to be empty. It’s supposed to be full of life to eat all the Issi it puts out so it can grow. I found that out the first day I started meditating, and spent the rest of the time trying to find a way to get wisps into your headspace.”

Y’talla gestured at the grove with a dumb smile plastered on her face. “Izzik’s little lights seemed too good to be true, but they were even better than that. We’ve got the stuff of beginnings in our spring, and I can play with them as much as I want to get the coolest, most beautiful, and strongest wisps the world piece has ever seen. All we need is that hollowed tree, and I can get started.”

Elach snapped his fingers to get Y’talla’s attention. “I don’t know how you think I’m going to bring a whole tree into my headspace, dead or not. And before I even try, I want a good explanation for why you need it in the first place.”

“WE need that tree, not just me. It’ll work its way through all the petrified and blasted stuff that we call plant life in the spring, so we don’t have to wait a couple of years for the spring to do that for itself.” Y’talla sighed, as if what she was saying was beyond obvious. “If you want to be able to grow stuff there, or let the wisplings grow into real wisps, we’re either waiting a decade or getting that tree into our spring.”

“The spring near me didn’t take a decade to start attracting wisps.” Elach pointed out.

“Do you know how long the spring was there for before it started calling for wisps?” Y’talla asked, but didn’t give time for Elach to answer. “Eight years. And that was with a whole not-destroyed forest and river to feed off.”

Elach raised an eyebrow. “Another thing you know for some reason?”

Y’talla shook her head. “No, that was from talking with Flow. They lived in the river for a long time before the spring came along, and I asked when it started feeling like there was more Issi in it.”

“Oh. So we’ve got a reliable source for once.” Elach chuckled.

“I’m reliable.” Y’talla pouted. “...Sometimes.” She added under her breath.