Anna summoned a chair for herself, sat and crossed her legs. She had thinking to do, and she'd do it better sitting down and enjoying the spectacle. It felt good to finally release all that power she'd dragged around. It had been glorious, but the toll wasn't something she wanted to make a habit of.

At that moment, she didn't envy Tallah, not if Anna's state was in any way a reflection of the pyromancer's. If she, a ghost, somehow felt bone-tired and wrung out, she didn't dare touch on the rich tapestry of hurts and aches that permeated the flesh in which they all resided. In the excitement, she'd had only the barest time to adjust Tallah's endocrines. Most of that witch's resilience had relied on grit and stubborn determination, not on blood assistance.

Anna would see about the damage Tallah had inflicted on herself later, when they were all recovered.

In the first moment of quiet in two days' time, her mind was aflame. She'd gotten a taste of the sort of power she could wield and the results she could achieve once she paired with an intellect like Bianca's, and now the possibilities of what could be accomplished swirled in her ambition like ink in water. It was intoxicating in a way she hadn't experienced since the very first days of her Sanctum.

She had promised godhood to Tallah. Now, she knew she could make good on her boasts, if only she could figure a solution to their most pressing problem: the soul trap latched onto Tallah's soul. Which was why she'd come here to think, at the edges of what was definitely the best spectacle available in her old friend's dour mindscape.

It was quite the amazing display. When Christina had described it to her, she had thought the whole thing sinister at best, and sad in its entirety. Now that she saw it with her own eyes, she had to admit it was impossible to look away.

No wonder Bianca got into such a huff if Anna or Christina eavesdropped on her toils. Not only was she making an utter fool of herself, but she was doing it with such great focus that the petite woman hadn't even noticed Anna's intrusion.

The whole scene was surreal. Bianca stood, naked as the day she were born, in the middle of a great atrium filled with faceless ghosts that all jeered and mocked in a cacophony that Anna suspected was just noise shaped into a semblance of language. If she tried to pick out any one strand or voice, it would invariably only result in gibberish.

Bianca held the tip of an inverted pyramid on her shoulders. It was built of glass cubes, each of them filled with images of sad humans going about sad little lives, filled with morose faces and scenes designed to tug at the heartstrings of anyone with a pulse. Children starving in harsh winters. Soldiers suffering of poor food and even poorer gear. A thousand projects always demanding funding and never receiving it.

The whole construct of little boxes scraped against the white ceiling of the room with a noise like porcelain shattering, and was always on the brink of collapse. No box stood in the same position for long, as they all slid against one another and made ready to tumble. Bianca was focused intently on maintaining an impossible balance.

And here I thought Tallah was the most damaged out of all of us. Anna would've whistled in appreciation, but that would likely get lost in the jeers and boos of the ghostly crowd. I've never been happier to not have accepted the empress's invitation to serve in her Court.

Anna felt a twinge of pity for her tight-arsed old colleague. Sure, they'd grown closer in recent days, but the gulf of so many seasons that lay between them would not be filled quite so soon. Still, watching this, she couldn't help a growing, grudging admiration for her one-time tormentor. Bianca shouldered a kind of guilt that was alien to Anna, one born of a sense of duty so profound and misguided that it should have been inhuman.

What else lay in Bianca's distant past to have led to this?

What lay in all their pasts to have led them down the roads they'd taken?

Those were thoughts to ponder on, but not just then. She scooted her chair sideways, to better peer at the whole chaos amid the hustling ghosts, trying to gain a better understanding of the effect they were all so keen on keeping in check. With the little she understood of soul magic, and the absurdity of what she witnessed in its application, Anna almost forgot why she'd even plunged these depths.

"Why are you here?!"

Anna jumped at the sound of Bianca's furious voice blanketing the crowd. She hadn't noticed the manipulator's gaze settling on her through the crowd, like the spotlight of a play. A rumble like anger rolled across the atrium, and all the ghosts turned in stare at her.

"Get out!" Bianca's face was an odd mix of unwavering focus, profound embarrassment, and a guarded hurt in a war of which to take precedence.

Anna gave her a little wave of her hand. "I needed a place to think," she said, trying to sound contrite. "I figured keeping you some company would do us both some good."

"Get out!" Bianca nearly dropped the whole construct, shifting the weight on her shoulders in just such a way that it looked to loom over Anna, ready to fall at a moment's notice. "You're the last person I want in here."

Anna watched impassively the threatening display. Bianca would no more drop her load than Tallah would drop her grievances against the empress. That was just the kind of righteous beasts both of them were

"It's dreadful out there." Anna feigned distress, one hand playing with a strand of her white hair. "Christina's muttering something about broken limitations and blooming soul strands, whatever those are. I've had to completely shut down Tallah's adrenaline gland, lest she blew her heart out. And listening through her ears just leads to a lot of people asking a lot of sad questions. I'd much rather be in here with you." She gave Bianca her most sincere and honey-sweet smile. "Let me stay. Pretty please?"

"If you bat your eyes lashes at me, I will skin you alive," Bianca retorted, still glaring daggers. Her mood had softened though.

Trust worked in funny way. Anna wasn't immune to that softening of the tone, and more than a little surprised at her own feelings of joy that Bianca wasn't outright kicking her out. She knew it was possible to be evicted quite easily by the one doing the work. She'd done it to Christina once, just to see if she could.

Anna raised a hand and pushed one of the glass cubes back into position as it threatened to fall on her head, and take a huge chunk of the load with it. "It's a good thing I have no lashes then. I can only take this joke so far without feeling as ridiculous as all this." She gestured vaguely at the entire scene. "Bianca, my sweet little bleeding heart, you have issues."

"Get bent," the sweet little bleeding heart replied in the coldest tone of voice Anna had ever heard from her. "What do you really want?"

Anna leaned back in her chair and stretched, allowing herself the simple pleasure of her spine extending and cracking. The feeling was so satisfying that she'd even kept several spines in her Sanctum just for this one purpose.

Why am I here? She had been so taken in by the sight, that it took her several heartbeats to come back around to her initial point. She had been curious of what Bianca was shown by the soul trap. If Christina had some deep shame of hers with regards to her beast, and Anna herself was vexed by the weakness of her fleshy form, Bianca was just… odd.

If she were honest, what she wanted and needed was a captive audience to talk at. Christina made for a terrible audience as she tended to ask too many questions and provide an exasperating amount of suggestions.

Anna sighed and tucked her abused strand of hair behind a ear. "I want to kill Tallah," she said.

"Get in line." Bianca shifted and the entire overladen pyramid tinkled. "I believe that if everyone that wants her dead would form a line to each stab her once, your turn would come sometime next winter."

"Droll." Anna scrunched her nose. "I didn't mean it figuratively, Bianca. I believe we should start thinking of killing Tallah." She gestured with an open palm among the ghosts, at the chore of keeping the soul trap fed and engaged. "This isn't healthy for us, and it's an issue we should be dealing with rather than… whatever this is."

Bianca grunted with her efforts, but her interest was piqued. "And what would you expect to gain from the attempt? Without Tallah's soul, we'd all be shaken loose."

Anna closed her eyes, already feeling frustrated with the subject. There was a lot she didn't understand about the whole ordeal, and she was determined to get to the bottom of it. While Tallah carried this affliction in her soul, they were all severely handicapped and vastly weakened. This whole affair had the air of a stopgap solution that had become the de facto state, one that needed to change.

Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

"Christina, can you get in here?" she called out, feeling they needed all three heads for a proper conversation. Thinking wouldn't be enough if she cut out the one with the most knowledge.

Bianca growled. "Can't you do this somewhere else entirely? I do not appreciate your presence here." There was no bite to the words, rather just an annoyance that Anna found slightly puzzling.

"We've seen you naked before," Christina said as she materialised next to Anna, manifesting her own padded chair to drop into. "You're not interesting to either of us."

"I wouldn't say that," Anna said, and relished the horrified disgust that radiated off Bianca. "Oh, don't be like that. I'm only teasing."

"Anna wants to kill Tallah," Bianca said, as if to deflect the conversation. "I remember we wanted to try that too, once. I can't remember right now why we've decided against it."

"Oh, that. Yes, we did try it. It didn't end well," Christina said as she leaned back. "I remember we almost got torn apart by forces we didn't quite control."

Anna studied the ghost. Were the lines of her face… changing? Each day, Christina began resembling Tallah's harsher features. The set of her eyes and crook of her mouth. There was even a red sheen in Christina's hair, though that might just have been the odd light radiating off Bianca's little boxes of sadness.

"I can have her heart stopped for just enough that this silliness runs its course," Anna protested. "Then I can revive her entirely. I can build it within her to do it without any intervention from any of us, were we to be incapacitated. I daresay she might not even have any brain damage if we set everything right."

Christina shook her head. "We're inextricably linked to her vitality. If she falls, we all fall and the binds that hold us together would shatter. It's why it's so bloody hard to keep her moving if she passes out. I've taken you've come to the conclusion that we must break the trap?"

Anna nodded and Christina gave her the smile of a teacher proud of her student. "I knew you would, sooner or later. Unfortunately, it won't be easy to manage, as you're clearly starting to figure. Don't waste time thinking of the healer."

Anna blinked in surprise. She was just thinking of that. The alternative to having Tallah die, for the trap to run its course, was to kill the healer. And that one was such a ball of anger and self-destructive, gleeful and stubborn stupidity, that Anna was growing certain Silestra was actually suicidal. Or, if not that, at least well on her way to a complete mental breakdown. If that one wanted to live, she was doing her absolute best to achieve the opposite.

"It galls me how it handicaps us," Anna said, sighing deep and long. The ghost were all still glaring at them, bright white eyes forming a forest with Bianca's toils in its centre. "If it's you in here, Christina, Tallah doesn't have access to your strength. If myself or Bianca do this silly work, we lose access to our most powerful channelling. I see no better alternative than to get rid of the root of our issues. Don't you agree?"

"If only it were that easy." Christina raised two fingers. "Firstly, we can't kill our host. It'd doom us. Secondly, this thing in here has been active for so long that it's taken quite a few chunks out of Tallah. If we leave it finish the work, the Tallah inside the trap… would not be Tallah. Do you understand me?"

"I take it she'd come out psychotic?" Anna asked.

"At the very least. Let's say we got her into her gem, and the hen would sew her back up into this body. What would wake then would have equal chance of being our old friend, a shell of her, or all her worst bits amplified." Christina shuddered in revulsion. "As fun as that might be, I can't say I'd look forward to the kind of destruction a markedly less sane Tallah could visit upon the world."

Much as Anna hated to admit, she agreed with Christina. Tallah was spectacular even in her barely sane, barely restrained manner. If she slipped the leash of whatever sanity still gripped her, Tallah could just as well abandon her mission, and that would become a waste of everyone's time, deaths, and plans.

She lapsed into silence as Bianca continued to struggle with her work.

"How come we're sane?" she asked, and got back a snort of derision from the atrium's ghosts. It seemed the whole place was a part of Bianca's psyche.

"Because it was quick for us," Christina said, without looking over. She was tapping an index finger against her lips. "When it's all done quick, there's little chance of fragmentation. The empress did not design her traps for quick work, so Tallah's was already running rampant by the time she got help from me. She was hurt deeply by the time she found me at Hoarfrost, large parts of her psyche and memories swallowed whole."

A shudder crossed the imagined atrium and Bianca's load twinkled. Anna wrinkled her nose at the sudden interruption and sent her senses questing out.

"They're trying to wake her," she said "Fools. She needs to rest."

"Speaking of," Bianca said. "Have you seen the boy fight? If we could bottle whatever it is that keeps him going, we'd have that healing goddess kissing our feet."

Anna had commented with Bianca on the boy's state during the last moments of the assault. How that scrawny creature kept upright and fighting was surely a medical wonder that she was extremely interested in unravelling. Too bad Tallah refused to let her dissect the wretch.

Her attention hitched on that thought.

"The boy's named Vergil, right?" she asked, trying to grab hold of an idea that was just then running through her mind.

"Or so we've been told, yes," Bianca answered.

Christina was just looking at her, eyes unfocused. Her mind was spinning too.

"I keep demanding we dissect him," Anna said, slowly, turning the idea over.

"Yes, you do," Christina said.

"Maybe we should really do that." Anna allowed herself a grin. "Yes, that might actually be useful for our issue."

"You're thinking of the dwarf," Christina noted, a hint of satisfaction in her voice. "And of whatever else is in that boy. Aren't you?"

"Exactly that," Anna said and rose from her chair.

The pyramid of sadness threatened to topple down on her, Bianca having taken a step in their direction. She was sweating—an affection that was as silly as the entire chore to begin with—and looking angry.

"The two of you have better start explaining, or I will give us all quite a shock the moment I drop this," she warned. "What did you figure? And did you need to be in here for it?"

"I'll leave it to you," Christina said, a hint of a smile in her voice.

Anna stretched again and smiled as she took a few steps down the stairs, walking among the ghosts, not letting any of them touch her. For all she knew, none of the apparitions were even substantial enough to register as any form of touch, but they might just disturb Bianca. And she had enough of a disturbance in mind to not risk more.

The whole room shivered and, by how Bianca's gaze settled squarely on her, Anna knew Christina had returned to the surface of Tallah's mindscape, already putting things in motion. If Tallah woke, they would have a lot of problems on their hands, and the sudden realisation they shared could get lost in the hustle. She trusted Christina to make the case to Tallah better than she could.

Which meant, she had a moment where she could just speak to Bianca.

Up close, she noticed the ghost's knees trembling under the load. It's what made the whole racket.

"Why are you coming here?" Bianca looked horror-stricken just then, quite different from the way she's relaxed when Anna had helped her just a few days earlier.

"You're the empath. You tell me." Anna grinned and showed her needle teeth. "We've figured we may get some answers from the boy and his unique relationship with the ghostly dwarf. We think there's more going on there than we believe, and we should learn what we can before the fool gets himself killed."

"You couldn't have said so from up there?" Bianca took a shuddering step back, clearly in distress for the proximity. There was nowhere to go.

And I'm made a fool again. We're both such fools... Anna sauntered up to her friend and wrapped an arm around her naked midriff. Christina figured me out while I was still walking down here.

"Don't squirm. I won't bite," Anna said as she pressed her naked side against Bianca's. She pushed her shoulder against hers and, for a heartbeat, the whole structure tinkled and shivered above. Then the weight settled on both their shoulders. It was all at once light, and crushing, and Anna understood just that little bit more about Bianca.

"Care for a little company?" she asked as she tightened her grip on Bianca's middle. "I can go, if you want me to."

For her part, Bianca looked sickened. Then the lines of her face eased and smoothed as she removed a hand from supporting the load, to wrap around Anna. She let out a soft sigh of pleasure as Anna offered again her barriers and protections, sinking them both into anaesthesia bliss. It wasn't hard to know what Bianca's pains were, and to Anna they were easily dealt with.

There was fear outside Tallah. Uncertainty. The elation of survival and the sinking despair of understanding how many had died in the Cauldron. Tallah wasn't immune to it. She'd shouldered the guilt of the choices and pushed herself on, taking one step after another just to keep moving.

Anna and Christina were cruel women, driven by cold ambition, with the moral compass of their own desires, like starving feral cats.

Bianca was not the same as them, much as she tried. Anna had felt her shuddering when the choices had been made. But Bianca had put herself aside and worked to do what was necessary. And, now, here, she was simply doing more of the same, an endless self-recrimination for crimes she had committed, for which she was her own worst judge.

Well, they'd fought together and they'd controlled a hundred blood dolls together. An army of daemons had bled before them.

They may as well shoulder one more task together.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.