Impressions flashed past the Patron of Feathers as her bodily functions began to fail. Her consciousness would snag on portions of the memories before the increasingly common blackouts dragged her down into delirium for an indeterminate amount of time. She saw—

Her hands covered in blood when they assisted in the coup of Malloon. The disappointment she felt when her father was the best in a long list of bad choices to rule the city.

The joy she felt as they began to accumulate other Patrons. Each became an integral part of the family, contributing legitimate accomplishments with her own Skills. And as their numbers expanded, so did the scope of their operations. With power came ambition, and each step forward forced the group to sharpen their blades so they could withstand their growing responsibility.

She saw the training room they developed. She felt her own sweat drying on her skin.

She saw darkness. Days of sparring and toil blurred past.

Most of all, like an ice pick through the heart each time, the Patron of Feathers remembered the look on Fiero’s face, half seen through a crack in the door, as he said. “From now on, wouldn’t it be easier if you were all mine?”

The memories trembled and scattered, blown away by a sudden gale. She sank into the unconscious darkness, tiptoeing between life and death, before she popped back into the memories with a gasp. She saw Fiero, just a manifestation of Wild Energy, floating in that clearing. She felt dread, knowing what was to come.

She could watch, but she couldn’t halt the tragedy.

The Patron of Feathers swam through her small loves, her favorite meals, her fondest memories. All those moments of stunned embarrassment, the lingering moments of personal shame, the trembling admittances of weakness she had to endure. Yet none of them could grant her any succor. The demands of her weakened limbs, the last gasps of her sputtering organs kept pulling her out of the memories and announcing a bleak truth.

She would soon die.

Tears glittered in the Patron of Feather's eyes. Her joints ached. In the end, the only memory that could screen her from the truth was-

Fiero’s sharp eyes, the malicious smile.

“...wouldn’t it be easier if you were all mine.”

She dove into darkness. She emerged dizzy an eternity later. Fiero smiled.

“All mine.”

The Patron of Feathers gasped as something shifted. The memories abruptly faded and left her in the dark room, sitting on the patterns drawn by her father. Around her were the dried and crusted remnants of bile and blood she hadn’t even noticed she had been leaking. She sat hunched forward, partially collapsed in on herself. Yet not a single muscle remained to shift her weight.

No wonder her organs had failed; she had been squeezing them for the last… however long she had been here.

So here, in the quiet… is how I will die. More… peaceful than I expected. The Patron of Feathers could barely manage a small wheeze at the prospect. She looked around at the small room, wishing she wasn’t here alone. More than that, she wished she could have changed the outcome of her life. She wished she hadn’t been so cowardly as to consider no method to change her situation other than running away. And then she wished she hadn’t simply allowed the Patron of the Borrowed to take more and more from those two good people, until—

The door opened, bringing with it blinding light. The Patron of Feathers shivered, realizing that the illumination from the room's mechanisms had gone dark. A figure moved through the blinding revelation and stood by her side. He patted her head, his alabaster feathers glittering. “You have done well, my daughter.”

Then her father’s attention shifted. He knelt and with great care picked up the dagger laying in the middle of the arrangement. Faelmac Westrisser practically burned, even to the Patron’s blurry eyes. After all this time, he had finally accomplished his most dearly-held wish. His research and effort had been vindicated.

Considering she had survived… her father

A tear slid down the Patron of Feather’s cheeks, the sensation overwhelming enough that she lost consciousness and collapsed.

*****

Without any more petty distractions, Randidly focused on his temporal manipulations. He tried not to think about the disappointment of Elhume’s current image. But he couldn’t help but consider the fact that his presence had undercut some of his foe’s growth. Because he could impact the memory positively, he could impact it negatively.

Either way, forcing a Pinnacle event would need to be handled by Randidly.

Perhaps the most important development from the brief spar, besides new insight into how to manifest an image in a stable location, was that the Dungeon edges established by Neveah finally solidified. Randidly could feel the mechanisms of that working clicked together and began to activate. All the aspects he had come to expect from a ‘Dungeon” engaged. The concentration of Aether in the air steadily began to creep upward.

Randidly grinned and flexed his fingers; with a firm boundary at the edge, his manipulations could grow a bit rougher. He used the temporal teeth in the skyisland to grasp and twist the next pulse of time flowing across existence. Tension rapidly built as Randidly held the wave still with the methods he had learned when he attempted to fight directly against time. As he neared his limit, he even had the cheekiness to reach out with the Dread Homunculus’s fingers and strum the flow of time.

He strummed with some extra viciousness, adding some twang to the effect.

Congratulations! Your Skill the Wrathful Calamity Rends (T) has grown to Level 990!

At that very moment the strange of time began to fray from the pressure, his Engraving disengaged. The briefly stifled time snapped back into place, whipping through the existence around the skyisland until it hit the edges of the Dungeon, now at least temporally relevant, and rebounded.

The milky bleed of the sky intensified. White clouds became vast pearly horizons, mountains multiplied and seeped down until they resembled forests, and forests seemed to shiver and march across the ground as though they were ants. The remnant energy discharge from Randidly’s earlier attempts at impossible tasks crackled across the sky, gashing bright hues across the environment that flashed and faded.

Next to him, Devick ceased manifesting her image to observe. She rubbed her arms and looked out at the shifting vista, clearly nervous. “What happens now?”

“We see how this world ends,” Randidly said, cryptically but truthfully. It was a testament to Devick’s already developed insanity that she looked at him and nodded, as though this was the most mundane answer.

Still, Randidly already left that issue behind and raced ahead to meet the others. He was on the third of his impossible attempt. With the brief clash against Elhume, he had pushed the First Tree Suffers Fealty over Skill Level 1000 for his twenty-ninth Mille. As he observed the shifting temporal waves, Randidly flexed his fingers. Should I worry that this thirtieth Mille… references a Calamity? Perhaps my speaking of the ‘end of the world’ is a bit too on the nose.

A new temporal wave passed through their position. The Engraving in the Skyisland engaged. It wound that unstoppable force tighter and tighter, holding it in position for several seconds. The sky darkened and turned blotchy as night and day flickered past, one after the other, a spear of darkness chasing a spear of light across the sky through all eternity. When the tension seemed to reach the point that even Randidly’s reinforced Engraving began to groan, he reached out with those long fingers and twisted the temporal wave. The teeth disengaged. The rebound blasted outward, hurling the surrounding space even further into the future.

Congratulations! Your Skill the Wrathful Calamity Rends (T) has grown to Level 991!

Congratulations! Your Skill the Wrathful Calamity Rends (T) has grown to Level 992!

The Dread Homunculus could even wound a timeline, it seemed.

Randidly breathed in and then breathed out. Nether flowed in complex patterns through his body. Compared to the other attempts he had made on the impossible today, this one was almost calming. Most of the heavy lifting was done by the Engraving he had built. Especially now that Yggdrasil lingered in this area, drawing energy from deep within the ground, Randidly barely felt any strain at all. Messing with time like this felt close to a vacation.

“Of course, I sincerely doubt it will be this easy forever,” Randidly remarked. His Fateset twitched and flared, seemingly annoyed that he would say such an unlucky thing. But Randidly just flashed his teeth and continued to work. His Fateset didn’t truly think independently of him, it was just a matter of perspective. And he didn’t mind his more suspicious side rearing its head like this, in a harmless manner.

Grab, twisted, hold, strum, release. Another blast of accelerated time dyed the sky a soft golden color before the flow of night and day ripped new channels through the color.

Congratulations! Your Skill the Wrathful Calamity Rends (T) has grown to Level 994!

With the task in front of him requiring so little, most of Randidly’s attention flowed through to his emotional sea. He sank into its depths, feeling the churning currents of power lurking beneath the surface. Most of the sea had been completely emptied in the first impossible task, smashing against the flow of time, but now that it had recovered the deepest portions had burrowed into even deeper trenches. A horrifying whirlwind of emotions shredded in the deepest corner of that sea, creating a growing whirlpool of irresistible force.

Randidly reached out a mental finger and ran it along the churning edge of the vortex. The depth of determination he found there made him smile.

His attention flicked back to the surface. Below, he could feel reverberations blasting out from the confrontation between Aether and Nether: clearly, Deganawidah had lost his temper with the Cult of the Savior. But unless they tried to ascend and stop Randidly, he would leave them be. He focused on the process.

Activate Engraving, strum time, release and watch the colors ripple.

Congratulations! Your Skill the Wrathful Calamity Rends (T) has grown to Level 995!

Again and again, Randidly repeated these movements, carefully honing the small gestures to eliminate any wasted energy. Grasp, hold, strum, release.

Grasp, hold, strum, release.

Congratulations! Your Skill the Wrathful Calamity Rends (T) has grown to Level 996!

Momentum began to build up in the accelerated time bouncing off the remnants of previous waves that still lingered. The bleeding of colors grew more stark and overwhelming. Randidly observed with narrowed eyes, adjusting his methodology to create more of these rebounding effects. Very clearly, they would thrust him even faster toward the future.

Congratulations! Your Skill Motif of Unimagined Tolls (GD) has grown to Level 1099!

Congratulations! Your Skill the Wrathful Calamity Rends (T) has grown to Level 997!

While time whirled forward inside the Upper Sonora, Randidly peered through the gaps and saw the core of history that they followed. Honestly if this hadn’t been a constructed memory, Randidly suspected this brute force method wouldn’t have worked nearly as well. His Acute Nether Nose allowed him to peer down the ‘track’ they followed, witnessing just a fraction of the glorious Pinnacle even at the end. As he considered the area in front of him…

Randidly clicked his tongue. “Of course, it’s this again.”

Already, he could see how even the beginning descent of a Pinnacle event would tear through the essence of the memory and leave him with nothing but charred scraps of Aether. So he would need to perform some renovations, so he could afford to host such a prestigious guest.

Alright, let’s see if we can add a bit of extra strain on top. Randidly’s eyes twinkled. One-half of him continued the temporal process, grasp, hold, strum, release. The rest of his attention went to his fingers, which burned with Mana.

For the second time today, he began to Engrave.

He wrote into existence the foundations of a Miracle, his Fateset singing as it worked.