“Fuck, fuck, fuck, shit, fuck.” Hekate cursed. She understood why Caeden had shoved her out of the Forge. If he had sustained anywhere near the kind of damage that Erik had, he must be worried about how it would influence his domain. And from what he’d said, his soul damage was much worse. Bad enough to affect him even through his seemingly invincible state inside the Forge.

She understood, but that didn’t mean she was happy about it. After all, she was in the middle of fixing Erik, and it wasn’t going well. Whatever Caeden had done removed the bit of soulstuff that was bound and determined to rip Erik apart, but in doing so, he’d injured Erik’s soul as well.

So far, she’d managed to hold it together. Part of that was due to the constant activity of Erik’s Healing shroud. The body and the soul were reflections of each other, and damage to one was damage to the other. That also meant what healed one could positively influence the other. It wasn’t a perfect reflection, so the Healing shroud couldn’t just solve the problem in Hekate’s stead, but it added a level of stability that was welcome.

Back in the Forge, under normal circumstances, Hekate was confident in fixing Erik’s soul, even with the damage he’d sustained. But now she was back in the Starry Sea, in the founder’s base, in the middle of a battle. Not ideal healing conditions.

With what focus she could spare, Hekate pulled on her familiar bond. Dave showed up immediately. He’d been waiting for her signal after all. She could practically feel him taking in the situation, including her current patient.

“Well, it looks like everything went to shit pretty quick. Where’s Caeden?” Dave asked after he’d gotten his bearings.

“In the Forge. He got hit with something similar to Erik. He’s handling it himself.” Hekate’s words were clipped and short.

“Well alright then. That’s going to make this annoying for a while. I’ll need-”

“Use all of it. I’m using Soul right now anyway. Necromancy is all you.” Hekate cut him off, opening up their connection and giving him access to all her reserves of Necromantic Mana. She even tied him into the supply her shroud was producing. Basically, for as long as she held this connection in place, she was giving Dave her shroud. Or, the Necromancy splinter of it.

“Alright, I’ll get to work.” Dave rolled his shoulder and cracked his knuckles, then started chanting out summoning spells in rapid succession. High level ones, as the shrouded Ethermen would ignore anything below high-tier undead. “I won’t be able to stop them, but I can stall them out and give Lily and Asherta some breathing room.”

Hekate hardly had the time to notice, but she had seen the situation her friends were in. Both of her teammates were still trying to interfere with whatever the founder was trying to do. She’d only been in the Forge for a moment in Starry Sea time, so he still hadn’t managed to cross the workshop. It was a little silly, watching a man running at a normal human pace trying to outrun two shrouded.

But the Ethermen were making that possible. In fact, the founder had actually managed to gain ground on them, with Lily and Asherta stalling out in the face of so many shrouded Ethermen. They weren’t losing, not by any means. But they also couldn’t casually push past their opponents without reprisal.

Whatever the founder was trying to do, Hekate didn’t want to find out. If Dave and an army of undead could take the pressure off her teammates, they could handle the rest. And if she could just manage to get Erik’s condition under control, she could join in and start helping.

But those thoughts vanished as several portions of repairs Hekate had done collapsed inside Erik, and she had to devote all her attention to keeping his soul from devolving into incoherent wisps rather than a definitive soul. It was so frustrating! She had no idea what was going wrong.

This was more in-depths repairs than she’d ever had to do. And Erik’s soul wasn’t exactly cooperating. No soul took on foreign influence easily, but Erik’s soul was violently reacting to her presence. Hekate hypothesized that the reaction was down to two factors. One, Eriks’s soul was damaged, and it was lashing out like a wounded animal, unable to distinguish friend from foe. Second, Erik’s soul had undergone experiments at the founder’s hand. Hekate wondered if that had allowed his soul to form some sort of resistance to outside influence.

Rather than focus on the why, though, Hekate forced all her attention onto what was actually happening in Erik’s soul. Because what she was doing so far obviously wasn’t working. She’d been, without thinking much about it, using her memory of how Erik’s soul was before as a template to rebuild it.

That wasn’t working like it should. The soul would normally actively work with her, trying to return to it’s previous, healthy state. But all her repairs collapsed not long after she made them, as if Erik’s soul was rejecting the template she was building. That…didn’t make sense. From all of her experience, what she was doing right now should work. It had been working, to a lesser extent, before Caeden removed that foreign bit from Erik’s soul.

Oh

Hekate wanted to smack herself. Erik’s soul wasn’t going to return to its previous state! Both the founder and Caeden had removed parts of it. The founder had taken something called ‘causality waves’ , whatever that was, and Caeden had removed the founder’s influence. Erik’s soul was missing parts, things that Hekate couldn’t very well replace.

She’d been building a template, but it was full of holes, so the template kept collapsing. And Erik’s soul was fighting her so hard because what she was doing prevented it from moving forward. Erik’s soul needed to progress, instead of returning back to the way it had been.

Unfortunately, Hekate had no idea how to make that happen. But, Erik’s soul likely did. It had been trying to form a new shape for itself the whole time, and she’d been getting in its way. Quickly, Hekate tore down all the scaffolding she’d built, and simply watched Erik’s soul as it tried to fix itself.

Again, she felt like slapping herself. Almost immediately, a clear pattern emerged. What she’d taken for random flailing was a deliberate attempt to reform itself. Now, Hekate started following along behind Erik’s soul. Whenever it managed to pull together a portion of itself, she’d reinforce the shape it had made, making the pattern and form more stable.

Finally, a critical threshold appeared. Once Erik’s soul passed a certain level of stability, Hekate’s help became almost meaningless. The soul was managing to heal on its own, and at a surprising rate.

“You always were a resilient one.” Hekate sighed, sitting back from where she’d been crouched over Erik for several minutes. “Of course your soul takes after you.”

Finally, Hekate turned her attention to the battle. A lot had changed in the meantime. Dave’s forces of high-tier undead had worked together, stalling out and harassing the Ethermen enough that Lily and Asherta closed the gap with the founder. However, it seemed they’d been a hair too slow. He reached the far side of the room where the suppression field and ether engine were and raised an energy barrier.

The founder was in the process of doing…something…with the suppression field and Asherta was doing her best to drown the shield in Mithril. So far, it wasn’t working. Hekate supposed it was her turn to step in. If she and Dave worked together, they could clear up some of the Ethermen. Currently, Lily was stopping any of them from bothering Asherta as she worked, but Hekate didn’t doubt that she could help Asherta cut through the shield faster if she was freed up from doing that.

“This is gonna be so annoying.” Hekate sighed, getting up and grabbing Dark Debt. She had so much work to do. Glancing around, it was obvious that the Ethermen weren’t paying any attention to anyone not fighting. With that in mind she could leave Erik here without worrying.

And one last thing. She looked over to the cage holding her gramps. Necroflame rolled across her fingers. She wasn’t about to leave him in there.

{}

Erik slowly returned to consciousness, feeling…odd. Not wrong, but different in a way he couldn’t put his finger on. He was having trouble remembering where he was, or how he got here. Or what was going. He wasn’t worried about it though, which felt…strange.

This feeling…it was like someone had constantly been ringing a bell in his ear his whole life, and now they’d stopped. It was strangely disorienting, to have that sound suddenly gone. But he could also hear much more clearly without the interference.

It felt like that, but for his whole body, every sense, every cell. Even his shrouds somehow felt easier to handle. And Erik couldn’t even begin to imagine why. Instead of worrying about it, he just relaxed in the silence for a long moment, enjoying the freeing sense of peace.

That was, until his mind started to catch up to him, and he could actually hear his surroundings. And he could hear the battle happening nearby. That got him to start focusing more. Where was he again? It didn’t take long for the answers to start coming back to him. The founder, the island, the plan to sneak in close by pretending to lose.

The fact that the founder had experimented on him, caused his bad luck. The pain he’d felt when the founder snapped his fingers. It all came back quickly. Yet Erik still didn’t feel any urgency, any pressure to act. It was strange.

Despite that, he opened his eyes, flexing his toes in a familiar way and getting to his feet in a single, smooth motion. Why did everything feel so easy? He could see the battle now. Asherta trying to break down another energy barrier. Lily working with Dave to let Asherta focus, while Cat stood off to the side next to her grandfather, forming portals and summoning more undead to deal with the frankly stupid number of Ethermen present. Some were shrouded, but a decent number were the ones they’d faced back on Baserock.

And he felt…not what he expected to. He still felt light, like if he took a step, he wouldn’t move forward, but instead fly off into the air. That sense of weightlessness was attached to every one of his thoughts, leaving them empty of motivation.

But he wasn’t about to let it get his friends hurt. So he reached out, black chains forming and rapidly binding dozens, hundreds of Ethermen as fast as he could think.

Was this ever this easy? Erik couldn’t help his thinking, drifting into that weightlessness. Every time he acted he felt like he should be encountering some kind of resistance, but it just wasn’t there.

Am I in danger? The thought suddenly occurred to him. Was he under some kind of mental attack? He reached for his defensive sense…

Erik was stunned. His defensive sense was off. As in, not active at all. That had never happened, not even once, since he was born. His defensive sense had been running literally every moment of his entire life, as far as he knew. And now, it was off.

Panicking, he flicked it back on. Only to nearly collapse under the deluge of information it started to feed back to him. It became obvious in moments that his shrouds had shut down his defensive sense to protect his mind. But Erik was stubborn, and he brute forced the issue, adjusting to the information. And what he found stunned him.

Everything was so crisp and clear, the detail was almost eye-wateringly intense. But that was what drew his attention first. His whole life, Erik had felt a constant sense of threat from the world itself, a sort of directionless, sourceless pervasive danger that never stopped. Now, it was gone.

And it all clicked. Everything was so crisp, and Erik felt so light, because he wasn’t fighting the whole universe to stay alive anymore. He could breath, basically for the first time in his life, without worrying about choking on the air. Everything felt…Easy.

His bad luck was gone.

A smile crept across Erik’s face, until it took over completely.

“Oh, you all are so fucked!”