If I want nothing, then I am nothing.

I wanted peace, and found it impossible. Then I wanted to hurt those who hurt me, and it made me feel nothing.

In old books, there are people who talk about the joy of clearing one’s mind of desire. Letting go.

I think they are fools.

But they are fools who understood something fundamental: that you will become them, whether you want to or not.

(And you will not want to)

I wanted a home, and it burned. I wanted a family, and it broke. I wanted to be someone that could be relied upon, someone that could do something good – and now my mind is… fragmenting, leaving me unsure. I wanted, though I did not acknowledge I wanted it, power. And power drove me mad, is driving me to madness.

I wanted to know. Truth. Not things that are true, but the fundamental kind. And what did it give me?

It led me into this war. I have told myself a dozen times there is nothing I could have done, that the war came to me, but the truth is that I could have run. I could have gone north, or east, long before the Invictans came. Now it is too late, but I could have fled. I could have found a new life. Or died in the wilderness, it doesn’t matter, better by starvation than by a sword through my ribs.

But I am here, and that is who I am. I still want peace, and I still want to hurt those who hurt me. I still want home, and family, and to be relied upon, and to do good. And I still want truth.

And what we want defines us, as much as what we do.

Hilda

As the world went wrong

Hilda stood back to back with Lucian for a moment when they met at the edge of the storm. But his hands were loose on the hafts of his knieves and his feet ready to dance a tarantella into the arms of the Emperor. Around them the air was hot and thick, difficult to walk through. Hilda sensed the soldier coming before he even thought of taking his swing, and she moved past him, shoving him to one knee. Lucian whirled and his knife found its mark. Hilda kept moving, her steps careful and quick at the same time. The Gift was strong, coursing through her blood and her mind, and she knew exactly where she needed to step, exactly where the strikes would come from. Nothing and no one could touch her.

Until they could. A hand grasped her neck from behind and she gasped, stumbling forward, hands grasping desperately, roiling the Aether around her. Her glaive nearly fell from her fingers, and then she let it go herself, and in her hand was a sword, its grip backwards, materializing through the elbow of the arm that held her. Its grip went slack. She pulled free, coughing and sputtering, picking up her glaive again.

When she turned around, she saw what her sense already told her, as the earth changed around her. A tall, broad man with eyes full of mist and Desert stepped toward her. She ran him through and he kept coming, dripping, walking further along the shaft of her glaive. He smiled. “Do you see, do you see…” When his feet slapped down into the dirt – already growing muddy with the wetness of blood, a slurry that made Hilda’s head swim and brought bile to her throat – they left prints of sand and dust and shattered glass. He held her by the shoulders. He did not know what she was.

The contact was enough. She smiled a sad smile, and Banished him.

And she stood on sheer glass, the sound of crackling and breaking all around her, and there was mist and wind in her hair and someone else’s tears in her eyes. All around, the pieces of broken ancient edifices, buildings old and new, steel that stretched up to the sky until it twisted suddenly to the side, or disappeared into fractals of ice and iron.

On the glass earth in front of her sat a huddled man, dark brown hair tangled up in waves from the back of his head and tied up in a single ponytail that remained unruly in spite of the tie holding it. He wore a simple buttoned shirt with a vest over it, his arms were wrapped around his knees, and he kept his eyes away from Hilda as she approached and knelt by him.

“Don’t touch me,” he said. “You’re not real.”

“You’re the one they call the Aetheric Angel.” Hilda smiled. “I think if anyone here is not real, it’s you.”

“That’s not what you’re supposed to call me,” Ofer whispered, his breath shuddering through his lips. “I don’t want you to call me that.”

“Are you actually here?” she asked, putting a hand on his shoulder.

“Of course not,” he said. “I don’t exist. I stopped existing a long time ago.”

Chuckling darkly, Zoe Bari walked out of the mist, towering over Hilda and Ofer. Her eyes were yellow vertical slits. “He’s not real, I’m not real… maybe you should take a look at yourself, Hilda. Look in the mirror!” She pointed down at the ground. Hilda glanced down, and saw her reflection staring back at her from the glassy earth. Her eyes leaked blood up at her, and when the blood broke the surface, the glass shattered, cutting at her face.

She pulled her glaive back into ready guard as she walked past the space where an Aether-Touched had just been, and surveyed the field. “Lucian!” Hilda shouted. “Where are the other Hunters?”

“Over there,” Lucian said, pointed to the trees nearby. “Taking cover. We should do the same!”

“The guns aren’t pointed anywhere near us,” Hilda said. “I’ll tell you when we need to move.”

“If you’re wrong, we’ll be ripped to shreds!”

“I’m in my element.” Hilda smiled, feeling a burning behind her eyes, trying not to imagine her own eyes as yellow slits. “And you are too. Dancers in the chaos. Do you doubt me?”

“Never,” Lucian sighed, and tossed a knife into the heart of an Invictan soldier, knocking her off of her vehicle, against which a rifle-spear was mounted. The vehicle, its motor just becoming audible over the din of war, continued accelerating toward them. Hilda did not need to be warned, and stepped to the side, knowing before Lucian did how he would turn the situation to his advantage. Always he danced through it. He leapt up, onto the vehicle, and made a circle, cutting deep treads in the earth. Hilda reached out for Lucian’s hand, and he took it, and instead of climbing aboard, Hilda took to the air, tossed into the space between bullet-paths, her trajectory perfect, timed. The bullets whizzed past her, cutting the air around her, the mere pressure of it slicing thin cuts in the surface of her skin. Five human beings died at her sides as she flew through the edge of the fray. Invictan soldiers screamed and turned tail, their weapons and training geared to urban warfare, their practiced courage abandoning them exactly when they needed it.

Hilda stretched her arm out ahead of her as she approached the Valer with the horned flesh mask of five holes, that sobbed green tears. The Emperor’s influence had broken his mind so quickly, and now he could do nothing but raise his blade like a fencer, hoping to impale the approaching Reaper, hoping he would be caught by the Reaper, hoping his pain would not be long but striking out to kill her anyway because that was what he had to do, what he was supposed to do, what he was built to do. The Aether called him to defend himself from the Reaper, but that did not stop him from whispering a hushed “thank you” when the falcon came down from above, talons into the mask’s highest holes, and the fencer’s stance broke, and Hilda’s hand closed gently around the back of his head, and then she dove through the space where he’d been onto the

Ground made of glass, and she skidded to a stop. Stumbling as she raised up to stand again, she looked out over the misty landscape. An old house of wood and brick stood before her, a rickety set of stairs going up its porch. She ascended the steps, and the door opened. Ofer Shvets sat down on the top step next to her. She leaned against the opposite railing, looking down at him warily.

“I know what you’re thinking.”

“That’s because you’re not real,” Hilda snapped. “You’re an echo. This is all inside my head. I’m losing my mind.”

“That’s one way of looking at it,” Ofer said, though something in his tone told Hilda he did not think so. He stared off into the distance, at something unseen in the distance. “Do you want to know how I ended up in this whole mess?”

“I already know,” Hilda said. “I have your memories, whether I want them or not.”

“But you haven’t gotten them all ordered,” Plato whispered from under the stairs. Hilda nearly jumped in fright, and glanced over the railing. Plato Arap lay there, looking up at her through his spectacles, his hands folded over his chest. Three crossbow bolts stuck out of him. “Too many memories, all mixed up, no way to separate what’s you from what’s everyone else… how do you think the Aether-Touched got to be the way that they are?” He smiled. “I did not become what I became until the Sun of Gaurlante touched my lips and pulled me up on strings.”

“Ignore him,” Ofer muttered angrily. “I know his type. Smug bastards who’ll smile as they twist the knife in you. Tell you you’re the one hurting them.”

“But I am right,” Plato whispered. “You are a plague. You have always been a plague. Your very existence leads my people astray. That is why we kill you. We kill you because it is what’s necessary -”

“To make my life possible,” Zoe grated. “Shut up, you fanatical bastard. Looks at our lives now. You know I never wanted to join the army? Your Emperor made me. Stole my research and gave me a choice between that and death. Well, I managed to tack a few extra years onto my life by being his gun, but… well. Watched that crazy bastard Fatih run enough people through and laugh doing it. It got to me in the end, didn’t it?” She snorted, gestured toward Hilda. “It got to you, too.”

Ofer groaned and slammed his hands against his knees. “Do you want to know what I was going to say, or not?”

Hilda nodded quickly, shutting the door before Zoe could step outside to join her.

“My parents,” Ofer went on. “They were commissioners in one of the alchemical societies of the last age. They made secrets for velt tzukunft, they kept them hidden, and then my sister and I discovered what they were doing. Studying things beyond human comprehension, and making sure nobody would misuse them. Under their noses, my sister and I were already doing the same thing, and we were gaining a following – you’d be surprised how many people, people who like to think they possess special knowledge, will dip their toes into incredible mysteries they can’t touch, knowing no one will believe them if they try to spread that knowledge. But we did try to spread that knowledge. And so, things got worse. The Aether War. The breaking of the very world. All of it. We never set out to do it, but that doesn’t change what we did.”

Ofer let out a slow sigh, as the mist came in to sweep around him and the cold night air filled Hilda’s lungs. “We get what we pay for, even when we don’t recognize the currency that passes between our fingers.”

As soon as she hit the dirt, mud and filth splashing all around her, Hilda was off and running again. Her mind flooded with endless clarity, the coursing surety of the Reaper’s Gift, cutting through mist and obscurity and turning the battlefield to a tangled web of chains as far as the mind could comprehend. One of the chains wrapped round her wrist and dragged her to the side, just as Lucian tried to reach out to her. She ducked between lines in the air where bullets would be, dove under the future arc of a swinging axe, held back her glaive from striking when she realized the wounded soldier under her was not Invictan but a Kivv militiaman. Instead she parted the weave of the Veil and gave him a healing hypo in the hopes that he would not be trampled to death. “Get to safety before you use it,” she hissed before rushing onward along the outskirts of the fray toward the next Aether-Touched.

Somewhere near her, a missile fired from inside the city walls landed and exploded. Hilda would have flinched, cringed and stumbled away had she lacked the benefit of the Reaper’s Gift, but she saw that her chain did not end here, and she followed it, stepping out of the way of danger again and again. She knew, too, that if she had cringed for an instant, she would die. Though the fray was all confusion where the Invictans had expected to charge the walls, in a battle where most of the attacking soldiers were outfitted for house-to-house urban warfare, still a bullet was a bullet.

Somewhere in the fray she lost her hat. It fell toward the ground, and detecting a lull in the onslaught, seeing that it was safe, Hilda snatched it back out of the air and pushed it down on her head as she took one final step toward the woman lying on the ground, branches and roots growing out of the great glowing amber sprouting smiling bullet hole in her stomach. She smiled as Hilda placed a finger across her eyes.

The body became shatterglass, and the shards became the ground, and Hilda shut her eyes for a half second and leaned back against the soft cold hard. “Why are you here again?” she whispered, and Ofer sat down next to her.

“Because you want me to be,” Ofer whispered back. “I’m not real. I died long before you were born.”

“Then why are you talking to me?”

“Because you think I should.” He smiled and shrugged. “You’re reconstructing an idea of what I would have acted like based on the memories you’ve inherited, and you’re talking to that. If you’d like to stop, I’m sure the good doctor can help you with that. As it is, though, I quite enjoy these chats.”

Hilda smiled. “But if you’re not real, how can you enjoy talking to me?”

“Because you think I would,” Ofer replied, grinning. “A bit egotistical, maybe, but I think – you think I think – that you’re entitled to a little egotism. Especially after everything you’ve had to endure out there.” He gestured to his left, and Hilda turned her head to look. Beyond the mists to her side lay the real world – an overhead view of the whole Wanderer’s Vale, caught in the depths of winter.

“Wrong weather,” Hilda breathed, slowly pushing herself up.

“Well, it’s your hallucination. Don’t blame me.”

“So I am insane.”

“Everyone’s insane, Hilda.” Ofer chuckled. “Just not all in the same way. I think the real difference is whether it stops you from doing what you want to do. Or what you need to do. If there’s a difference.” He shrugged. “Do you remember when we died?”

“I remember.”

“I’m not sure any of that was real either. Maybe my memories aren’t real. But you’re the one with enough information to piece it together, at least a little.” He reached down and poked her forehead, and the glass around her became grass, and she was kneeling instead of laying down, and the battle raged around her again while his voice echoed quietly inside her skull: “I can’t find any answers for myself anymore, but you can.”

Outside her skull, half the Invictan army was screaming, and the other half was turning tail and running.

Soldiers – Valer and Invictan alike – stumbled and glanced about and struck the air as though they were surrounded by manifestations of their worst nightmares. Hilda avoided being caught in the chaotic multidirectional fire by the Reaper’s Gift alone – she stepped between the places where the bullets would be, danced quietly in the center of the violence. She knew little, what with all the screams and the chaos around her, but she knew where she needed to walk, and she knew that she would survive this hour, and Lucian, and Kamila, and that was enough.

When the Emperor died, Hilda did not hear him screaming. She only felt the shape of the air change, the chaos of the minds of everyone around her recede, as the illusory worlds of nightmares all of them had been forced to live in receded.

Hilda turned as the army began to flee, as the Valers and the Wypsies celebrated the routing of their enemies, and saw her sister atop a small hill of the dead, stumbling forward with her hand on a sword’s hilt. And a man stood across from her, a Solist priest in a Gaurl battlecoat, with fire in his hands. He snarled at Kamila. Hilda began to move towards them, but stopped when she realized – before either Kamila or Zhiren must have – what was about to happen.

So she let the body fall and slipped between the fleeing Invictans, back toward the city, knowing the battle was done. When a soldier, panicking to see a Reaper while he tried to escape, jabbed at Hilda with his bayonet, she reshaped the air and turned it aside. He attempted to bring his gunbarrel back up, to fire, and she knocked the weapon out of his hands. He stared at her for a couple of seconds longer before being set stumbling when another soldier barreled into him, and then he turned and ran, leaving Hilda to walk – briskly but steady – back toward the city walls.

Sometime after, in the courtyard in front of the Reaper Monastery, she and Lucian found each other. He stood stoic at first, but when she smiled and said that she was glad to see him alive, he relented and leaned in, and she threw her arms over his neck. “I’m sorry everything had to go wrong,” Hilda muttered into his cheek.

“It didn’t have to, but it did, and we’re still alive now,” Lucian said. “That makes us luckier than a lot of people.” He shrugged, the motion almost lifting Hilda off her feet. “I never knew how to do the right thing, and I think that made me angry at you. I think it made us both angry. I thought you had the clarity I lacked, and you thought I had the clarity you lacked. It… well, maybe we weren’t both what the other needed, not the way we thought.”

Hilda made a sound half between a laugh and a cry. Her muscles were numb enough that she couldn’t tell the difference. “I’ve never known what I wanted to do,” she whispered. “Not really. Not even now. But I know I don’t want to stay standing still forever. And I don’t want to be surrounded by stinking corpses anymore.”

Lucian chuckled, not because he found the situation funny but simply because there was nothing else he could have done.

“Your sister’s fine, by the way,” he said.

“I know. But I’m talking to you right now.”

“You know, I really think you should –“

“Tomorrow,” Hilda said, letting go of Lucian’s neck and taking him by the arm, leading him inside.

Sometime later, Hilda stepped out of the shower and walked, half-asleep, to the edge of the bed. She sat down, eyes fixed on the window to the north while her hand wandered upward to find Lucian’s, and their fingers interlocked. “I’m really sorry,” she said.

“For what this time?” Lucian’s voice was groggy, but he blinked himself more thoroughly awake at the sound of Hilda’s voice.

“The water just went off again.”

“But the battle’s over, what went wrong with it?”

“I don’t know, but I can’t imagine getting it back up is the highest priority right now. It’s a miracle we still had running water tonight, anyway.”

Lucian laughed. “Small miracles. Exactly the kind we need.” He sat up and put a hand over Hilda’s opposite shoulder. “Well, don’t worry about it. This whole city smells like blood anyway.”

In the morning, when Hilda stepped out into the rain-crisp air, she saw her brother across the road, sitting in his garden. Hilda ran over to meet him. “You’re up early,” she called as she approached.

“I could say the same to you,” Aleks said, standing up. There was a red mark on the side of his face that looked fresh to Hilda, that made her wince in sympathy and a flash of memory – metal gauntlets against her own flesh – when she saw it. Although he was covered in bruises, there was something about that mark. “What are you doing up this early, the day after…?” he trailed off.

“I have something I need to do,” Hilda said simply with a small shrug of her shoulders. “What about you?”

“I can’t sleep. Couldn’t. Just…” He shook his head. “I think I have to let things sit for a while.”

“So you’re tending your flowers.”

“Yeah.” Aleks shrugged. “What of it?”

“Did you at least try to get some sleep?”

“Yes,” Aleks said. “I tried.”

Hilda nodded. “Alright.”

Knowing what Lucian had told her overnight, she kept her eyes on the north – on the tower where Kamila stayed. “Let’s talk later,” Hilda said. “Please. I want you to know that you can talk to me.”

“Of course,” Aleks said. “I will.” But when he looked at Hilda, it was like he was looking through her, at something a hundred miles away.

“Good. I’ll talk to you later.”

She turned.

Aleks called out, “wait.”

She waited.

“Dad’s coming back. Probably today. He’s alive.”

Hilda turned. “He’s alive?”

Aleks nodded. “He’s alive.”

She walked over, stepping over the fence, and hugged Aleks. “Thank you,” she whispered.

“But I didn’t do anything,” Aleks said.

“You did.”

Hilda went to the gate.

The city was still quiet, though the streets thronged with the war’s survivors. They constantly talked quietly to one another, but Hilda heard little of it but a distant, indistinct buzz. Even when she brushed past people, she saw their lips moving, heard the sounds of speech, and couldn’t piece together the words at all. The falcon came down from the sky after a while to rest on her shoulder, whispering in its strange way its surprise that she was awake so early. She told it why, and it grew hushed.

Shattered glass covered the ground, and Hilda strode over it without paying any mind. Her boots were strong and thick. The glass was just glass – normal glass – untouched by Aetheric mists.

Lucian arrived not long after, leaning against the gate. Clearly more tired than even Hilda was. Hilda smiled when he arrived, stepped up on the tips of her toes to kiss him on the cheek, and whispered: “My father is alive. I hear he’s going to be coming back today.”

“That’s wonderful,” Lucian said quietly.

They did not have to wait long before Kamila joined them.

When she stopped in front of the gate, backpack over her shoulder and sword belted to her hip, Kamila’s face grew grim and her eyes downcast. She fidgeted, shifting her feet, as though she was considering turning on her heel and walking away. When Hilda tried to look into Kamila’s eyes, Kamila broke contact – that steel-silver chased away by the questioning gaze of green eyes.

But then Kamila drew in a deep breath, and Hilda did too by sympathetic instinct, and then Kamila shifted the weight of her pack and walked toward the gate. At some point on the walk, Kamila must have realized Hilda was watching her closely. She felt the change. So she walked up, and with one hand she took her hat off, and then she leaned forward to hug Kamila, though her heart felt cold. “I’m glad you made it.”

Kamila stood stock-still. Hilda ended the hug, feeling no warmer than a moment before, and stepped away. Finally, Kamila spoke – her voice sounding almost choked, and hearing it Hidla imagined a weight bearing down on Kamila’s shoulders and chest. “I’m glad you made it, too, Hilda.”

“What’s wrong?” Hilda blurted it out without thinking. What wasn’t wrong? Then she looked at Kamila’s backpack. So Lucian had been right. “Why are you carrying that? Are you leaving?”

Kamila nodded. “You want me to leave, right?” The voice was bitter and harsh. But it made Hilda’s heart hurt, because she knew it was honest.

“You know it isn’t like that, Kamila,” Hilda said, wishing that she could make her words true against her own feelings. “I’m worried. I’m just worried. I understand if you want to leave, but –“

“And you want to stay?” Kamila shot back. “You won’t go back to Etyslund, will you?”

“I want to go back,” Hilda said, “but I don’t think I can.” She looked away.

“Well, I have to,” Kamila said, frowning. “How can you not want to go back? It’s home.”

Hilda paused.

Maybe my memories aren’t real

Maybe it didn’t matter.

Be honest with yourself

I have tried, but it hurts.

“I just… don’t feel like it’s right,” Hilda said. “I’m sorry. But we both have to do what’s best for ourselves. And…” she shook her head. “If you want to go to Etyslund, I’ll go with you.”

“I’m not stopping there,” Kamila said. “I’m not going to stop, ever. You should understand that.”

Hilda glanced at the ground. “I don’t understand, but I know that’s how you feel, and I… accept it.” She nodded to herself, as though to make it more true by moving.

They stood, Kamila looking down at her younger sister, Hilda trying to hide her eyes while she held her hat against her chest.

Maybe my memories aren’t real

“I’m sorry,” Kamila said. “For everything I’ve put you through. I know I wasn’t there for you when you needed me. I know I only made things worse for you. I know there were a lot of times when I should have done more to help you, when I could have stepped in to make you safer, and I didn’t do anything.” She put her hands on Hilda’s shoulders, leaned down, and when Hilda looked back up into her sister’s eyes, she saw only a terrible loneliness. “I hope you can forgive me.”

Hilda turned her head so she would not have to look into Kamila’s eyes, and rested herself against Kamila. She tightened her grip on Kamila’s arm, hoping to comfort her a little, or maybe to hold her at bay, she wasn’t sure. “You don’t need my forgiveness,” she whispered, in what she hoped was a gentle voice.

Maybe my memories aren’t real

I can’t find answers for myself anymore

“And… I want to give it, but I can’t. I’m sorry. Things are too… tangled up in my head.”

I’ve never known the right thing to do

“I don’t know what I want.”

Kamila’s hand tightened on Hilda’s back, bringing her back years in the corridors of her own mind. “I do need it,” Kamila whispered, and then let go and stood away.

“You don’t,” Hilda said, still quiet, but immediate and firm, and – to her own dismay – unyielding. “You’re strong. I’m sorry. But you’ve always been stronger than me, Kamila.”

The memory of steel against her cheeks. Her sister shouting, shouting at her, killing her.

Kamila shuddered, made an almost-laugh that became a sob. “I’m sorry,” Hilda said, turning away to hide her shame. “I just don’t want to lie to you. I still care about you. I want you to be happy. But I can’t just…”

“I understand,” Kamila said, nodding. And she shifted the weight of her pack, and went out through the gates.

Hilda watched her go. She saw Kamila stop in front of the party in the distance. She saw them talking briefly, though when the falcon stretched out its wings as though to take off and spy for her, she chastised it. “Do not take this away from her,” she said.

She tried not to cry when she saw them embrace outside the gates.

Hilda saw Kamila in the distance, pulling away from their father. She shouldered past him, but there was no ferocity in the motion. Kamila put one foot in front of the other, limply, as she walked to the south. Hilda’s heart was so heavy it could have fallen into her stomach. “I did this to her,” she whispered to herself, involuntarily, and Lucian wrapped an arm around her and whispered to assure her that she hadn’t done anything wrong, though she would not hear. She’d pushed her out the gates of the city. But she couldn’t bear to lie, not now, not today.

When her father stepped under what remained of the rust gates, the twisted and rotting remnants of a city of empires in a long-dead world, she hugged him and did not let go until they both had no more tears left to give.