"It feels like I'm back in therapy," I said to myself, "except stranger and probably worse. This is dumb."

I nodded. "Yeah, obviously I agree. But we thought it would be a good idea, so we're doing it."

I'd tweaked the threads until there was a disconnect between my minds, but we were pretty much still on the same page. "We should boot mecha-Callie back up. It was easier to split off from her."

Across the room, I frowned down at mecha-Callie, who was laying on the floor catatonic. "The brain drain is rough, though. You remember how foggy we got, keeping her cut off made sense."

It might have made sense, but I felt bad about it. She'd shown back up the night before, but had mostly reverted to being a normal oydirme. I didn't really want to synch back up if it was going to fill me with memories of existential dread over losing my identity and higher thought as I floated through Ematse between people's domains. On the other hand, she was a resource I wasn't using and also it felt fucked up to just leave her laying there. "Are we a bad person?"

I looked up at me, and sighed. "Right, the thing we're supposed to be talking about. Okay. Well, I've spent my time with us being semi-detached reviewing a bunch of memories, and I think it's all Connie's fault."

Not surprisingly, I'd had the same thought. "Yeah. I trusted Katrin and Errod more before, I don't think I would have lied to them and kept stuff from them. When Errod called me out for being more... ruthless... and mentioned the thing in Xeyul, and I remembered it from Connie's point of view and defended handing over that guy as a gift to the Sahrger? That didn't feel great. But also, that was us. We're Connie."

"Yes," I said, "but it doesn't have to be about that. Connie got... less good... when she killed the human Callie. Right? And there was that time, when we were about to fight the Behemoth outside Sentortzi, where we clamped down on the connection with her and felt our emotions go dull. Hell, that's why we've put off trying to switch her connection over to our own threads and turn it off. She's got something we don't. So we just need to find it, and get it."

I stood up and started pacing. "Yeah, but she's also a psycho. Though... well, I guess it's two things. A fundamental connection to emotions and empathy, which I'm probably imperfectly stealing from her, and then the... trauma and behavioral patterns and shit. You're thinking about that strange thing with our soul, right?"

I nodded and took my arm, dragging me into a memory of us in a little crypt in the Necropolis. "Yes. And I think we've felt it before."

In the memory I was hugging Katrin, whispering something to her. Yeah. This was when we'd been getting ready to start moving again and I'd been too casual about Aestrid dying. I'd actually been sad about that, in the moment, but while I'd slept it had sort of just... faded away. I'd had some nightmares, and I could still logically say it was a sad thing that had happened, but there just wasn't any real emotion to it. And I'd tried to fake it, and Katrin had noticed, and... well. But at the end there, when she'd said it was okay, there had been that same thing. That warm spark.

The memory around us shifted, and we were in Bill's house. Anything I wasn't looking at seemed to shift in the corner of my vision, walls and clothing morphing like an AI hallucination. "I love you, kiddo," Bill said, ruffling my hair. There was a time I would have killed him for that, but it didn't seem like I minded.

"I love you too," I said. Just a mechanical rote response, and I could hear how hollow it was.

He smiled. "No you don't, not today."

I saw my shoulders tense up, the beginnings of fight or flight. This was it, the moment it was all going to go wrong. The other shoe was going to drop. Instead, he put one hand on my shoulder and used the other to tilt my head up to look at him. "If you don't mean it that day, you don't have to say it. Maybe you'll mean it tomorrow, maybe you won't, and it doesn't matter. I'm saying it because I mean it, and I'll mean it whether or not you have those emotions that day - or ever. It's not conditional, or transactional. It's... been really nice, having you here."

"You're just saying that because you haven't found out about the cockfighting ring I'm running out of the garage."

Bill looked at me, very serious. "Do you expect me to believe you're cleaning up all the blood and feathers from something like that? I can't get you to stop leaving peanut butter-covered spoons on the counter. Just to be safe, please don't participate in animal cruelty. Or human trafficking, or, I don't know, cooking meth."

"You never let me do anything fun," I replied, and then pulled away and started to walk out of the room. I stopped at the doorway, and when I turned around it was clear my eyes were a little watery. "Bill? You too," I said, and hurried away.

The memory disintegrated, leaving us somehow back out in the hotel hallway. "I think... I think I've been trying to remember that one for a while. Huh. And yeah, there was that same feeling - that warm thing in my chest, as corny as that is."

"Extremely corny," I agreed, "but it's clearly also a real thing. It's like our soul is broken, and every now and then it tries to start up. Although... probably people on Earth don't even have minds or souls, so it's not like you should need them. Right?"

"Yeah. Well, there's those avatar spirit things you can bind to that make you... grow wings or horns or whatever. And they change how you think. So the soul is probably like that, it's not the only source of emotions and shit, but it can take the place of - or enhance, or something - the natural brain chemistry stuff."

"Of course we already have two souls, and that hasn't helped. But Jeort said the demigod in a tube would know about Granch, so maybe he'll know about other spirit stuff. Speaking of..."

We went to use divination on our body so we could see if Katrin and Errod were ready yet, and something interesting happened. I'd made sure my two minds were de-synched so I could talk to myself in a more productive way, but we both had the same level of control over the Dumines and we both reached for them at the same time. There was this brief moment of tug-of-war, and it reminded me of the feeling the first time I'd had a Dumine lock on and had to feel my way around it. We both let go at the same time, and both looked at each other with the same thought.

I was going to have to do that again until I was better at it. Would it help, if Tindelus got to me? Probably not. But there was a chance, and I was maybe the only person in the world that could practice fighting for control of my Dumine. It was worth a shot. Katrin and Errod did look like they were ready, so I prepared to synch back up with myself. "Okay, you made that list of things we did that were arguably shitty?"

"Yup. And you made a list of non-shitty things we can do?"

"Yup. Starting with breakfast."

We opened up the threads fully again and blinked at each other for a moment as our thoughts and memories fully merged. It happened smoothly, seamlessly, and once again I was just me. I really wanted to find some more minds, somehow - it was so much better than mecha-Callie. I dropped my ghost back into my body so I was combat-ready, and stood up. "Okay guys, I had a talk with myself and I'm going to be less shitty going forward. You've been super nice and patient and understanding with me, and you invited me into your family, and I was... not great. Because of Connie stuff. So this is me, officially saying I'm going to be better. And sometimes I'll be faking it, but just... faking it is also important. Sometimes I have to fake it until it's real, you know?"

They didn't look like they loved that last part, but it really was for the best. It was about building habits - I'd been a better person over the years through deliberate effort, and I'd made it a habit so that I wouldn't slip up. And it had, mostly, worked. But Connie had given up on that, and I'd absorbed those bad habits along with my memories from that time. Errod tried to hand me my share of the rations, and I waved it away. "Nah, I ate while you were sleeping."

Katrin looked skeptical, which was fair - I was absolutely lying to them. But I'd gone hungry a lot of times growing up, and now I was also able to selectively shut off physical feedback from my body. It was a no-brainer. You can go without food for a long time if you need to, but Katrin and Errod probably wouldn't be in top form if they felt hungry. Not giving anyone a chance to argue, I took the ration bars from him and handed half back, and half to Katrin. "Come on, I want to get going. I noticed some of my rashes are heading towards being actual sores, and I'd like to get this show on the road."

I could tell Katrin was going to try and make me take the rations back later - she'd been the one taking inventory, so she probably knew how much we were all supposed to have - but it didn't matter. This was the last of it, and if I needed to actually force the issue I could argue my case. Either way we'd all be hungry soon enough. We slowly climbed out of our hidey-hole, with me using divination to scout ahead. The coast was clear, and we knew - roughly - where we were headed; there were labs at the base of each tower, and while we didn't have a good map we knew where some were and knew others were or weren't near to the Crossroads.

We'd narrowed it down to two locations, and it was likely we'd know if we were at the right one as soon as we arrived since there were, probably, signs posted around. The trip across the city was tense, and we all knew there were only two possible outcomes - we'd avoid Tindelus entirely, or we'd get swarmed and taken over. Sure, it was possible we'd run into a single suborned guard... but if we were right about it being a hive mind, it wouldn't be one for long. Progress was slow, with us sticking to alleyways and sometimes rooftops if it looked like that would be the least visible option. The one source of stress relief was the beauty of the city; even with it being abandoned and showing signs of battle, the architecture was incredible.

The newer additions had a sort of art deco feel, although often with garish colors like the crystal palace. The older structures, meanwhile, were more fluid and organic with almost no straight lines anywhere. They also were more muted, though not without color - the stone was usually gray, but with a blue or green tint to it. The age of some of the buildings was staggering - if I understood correctly, they were from before the reign of the Clockmaker and therefore might be three thousand years old or older. I wasn't much of a history buff, but I couldn't think of anything on Earth that compared. The great pyramids were older, I was pretty sure, but they weren't in great shape nor were they in almost continuous use.

Time as a whole was strange here - magic meant some materials lasted way longer, and ensured others could be perfectly repaired. On Earth, if you had a stone structure in use for thousands of years the floor would get worn away from people walking on it - I'd seen pictures of old stone stairs where you could see that the flow of people over time had eroded them like river rocks. But here? Someone like Mila could slap some new stone on every so often, and keep it just like new forever. Hell, with Transmutation they could even make more stone that perfectly matched what was already there.

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That being said, the average person didn't live all that much longer than on Earth. There were a lot more people over a hundred, and some people were basically immortal, but it still meant there were limits to how far back most people knew anything; everyone knew the Clockmaker, but the kingdoms that came right after his empire's collapse were all forgotten. Most people, as on Earth, didn't really know - or give a shit about - anything more than maybe two hundred years ago. And then, randomly, there were these important figures or places or traditions from thousands of years back.

Brinkmar was already fading into myth for most people, but Katrin and Errod's great grandfather had lived here. And then there were these buildings, lovingly maintained until relatively recently, from a culture the Clockmaker had wiped out ages ago - their original purpose forgotten, their designers and builders all long dead. I'd spent most of my life in places where something was notably old if it had been around for more than a hundred years; I'd seen things a bit older when I still lived in New Jersey, but even taking that into consideration the oldest structure I'd seen in person was... I pictured a castle on a hill for a moment, with snow falling around me? But no - I'd never been to a castle, and was probably picturing a movie. The oldest I'd really seen was most likely some of the buildings in Philly, so maybe three hundred years old at most.

My reverie was interrupted by movement up ahead. I signaled for the others to stop, and continued to peek around the corner with divination. Further down the street I saw some Erathi soldiers being restrained by a mixed group, and one of the captors had a strange cord... oh. It was the same thing that had been attached to the Duminere we'd found. I'd kept it, but then left it - along with my phone and a few other things - in a safe deposit box in Erathik. They were using it to connect one of them to the struggling Eratri soldiers, who then... stopped struggling. Well, shit.

"They have a way to take other people over," I whispered, though we were far enough away it didn't seem likely any of them would hear me even if I spoke normally. "It's not as good as what Tindelus can do directly, but it means they can turn captives without having to drag them back. That also means they can spread this thing along the prime plane, in multiple locations. Shit. How common are those cord things, the ones that attach to the Duminere? Cyne made it sound like they weren't common, but I think he also said some people could make them. And hell, since this place is littered with the Clockmaker's old shit there could be a whole crate full of them."

Errod looked like he wanted to go on the offensive, so I held a hand out. "We're not close enough to catch them by surprise, and there's too many of them, and it's not like killing a handful of them will help anyone anyway. We need an actual solution, not to go stab a couple of them just so we can get taken over ourselves."

He looked miserable, but nodded. We just camped there for a bit, and when the group finally left they thankfully headed in another direction. On principle I gave it another ten minutes, and then we made our way over and checked for anything they'd left behind. There were a few items, but none of them were food which was pretty much all we cared about at this point. Another hour of walking got us to where we were heading, and sure enough there was a sign telling us we'd arrived at the Ethereal Engineering lab.

I had flashbacks to some of the abandoned buildings I'd explored as we entered the lobby. Things were broken, runic devices had clearly been pulled from the walls and a window had been shattered. If there had been graffiti and old beer bottles it would have been really nostalgic. It was hard to say how old any of the damage was, since the curse had rendered the whole plane so lifeless, but even without vines majestically covering everything I was pretty sure some of the damage was from the civil war before Brinkmar was evacuated - if for no other reason than the fact that someone had cleared some of it.

We followed the swept path, and eventually came across the remains of a Halenvar camp - there were bedrolls, a sort of makeshift kitchen, and a lot of empty crates. Still no food, or really anything worth taking, which implied they'd either abandoned this spot at some point, or some other group had come through and taken everything. We hurried through to the deeper labs, whose doors were all propped open with furniture; they had been raided and stripped for parts, and it was clear there wouldn't be anything of value. I found myself feeling annoyed, as if I had been entitled to be the one to loot this place. The plus side was that anyone who came through after us would probably just turn right around unless they knew about the demigod.

And speaking of the demigod, we found him no problem - he was at the end of the trail of propped-open doors. The glass tube was about four feet across, and stretched from floor to ceiling - maybe ten feet high. I could, just faintly, see runes etched around the top and bottom foot of the glass, and presumably there were more inside the metal caps. Chairs had been set up facing it, clearly not the original furniture of the room, and there were signs that people had eaten here.

The demigod himself was a little terrifying. He was floating in the air, the human side of his face grinning madly at us while the other half - a twisted mass of what looked like coral, or mushrooms maybe - curled and undulated. One arm looked mostly like that of a normal human, while another was segmented chitin ending in a scorpion or lobster claw. Another set of arms were just below these and looked only half-formed, with one ending in a kind of paw, and then below that were little nubs as if even more arms were straining to sprout. His legs bent the wrong way and were covered in fur, but they ended in strange multi-finned flippers - and there were three of them, equally spaced.

I managed to not react to his appearance, and just gave him a smile. "Betokat, I presume?"

A pair of eyes opened where his nipples should have been, and he giggled. "Yes, wonderful! A ghost and a husk, working together? No tether, different faces... no, a false face, a stolen identity. And the synchronization! The tether must be there, don't tell me! No! I will answer my own question here... obscured externally to prevent interference? Routed cleverly through another plane? I would see that, yes, so it must be... ah! Fate!"

He spun in a circle, giggling again. "You've tethered yourself with fate magic, of course! Have they approached you yet? Come to speak to you of the rules, the restrictions, the benefits of membership?"

"That depends, who are you talking about?"

"The other demigods! If you don't qualify yet you must be well on your way. You'll need a sponsor, of course, preferably more than one. Someone to speak on your behalf. I could guide you, ensure you pass the threshold, give you advice about your calling."

Huh. "And what if I didn't want to join, like the Clockmaker?"

He scowled. "That was a disaster. He argued that his abilities were external, just resources, and therefore did not count. That, because he could give anyone his tools and clearance and they could do the same, he did not meet the requirements. A transparent attempt to avoid the restrictions that come with being part of that rare class. Still, they allowed it. Voted and everything. And to his credit, and his eventual dismay, he did keep himself mostly human."

Katrin stepped forward eagerly. "Do you know what happened to him?"

Betokat gave her a look like she was something he'd found stuck to the bottom of a dumpster. "You're boring. This is your only question. No, I don't know precisely what happened to the Clockmaker. I simply suspect that if he had embraced his power, truly taken it into himself and given up on his mortal goals, he would still be around. He could have even kept this place, as the accord allows demigods to rule over domains on whatever planes they occupy. He'd have needed to give his Empire on the prime plane away to avoid being devoured by the Hunter, however, and that was a price he could never pay. He craved control too much."

Errod raised an eyebrow. "I'd ask how many questions I get, but I'm afraid that would count as one."

"Hah! You... have a shocking number of collapsed lutores in your glove. The Swordsman, I believe? An old artifact, very powerful. Skilled craftsmanship. But, ultimately, a tool that uses you as much as you use it. Not a path towards true greatness. You may have two questions. But you! Ah, yes. You, with the fate magic and ghost and... something else. Your body, too easily controlled even when the ghost is peeking around. Another mind, perhaps? Fascinating. Promising. You, I will talk with until you annoy me."

"Oh no, Callie," Errod said, "sounds like you only get one question."

I punched him in the arm, and Betokat laughed. I wasn't sure where to start, and while I hesitated Errod decided to use his questions. "Tindelus is loose, is there anything you can tell us about it, especially how to defeat it?"

"Ah! The ghost in the clockwork, sneaking around and disabling the Empire. The Clockmaker only spoke to me about it once, either because he did not trust me or because it all happened too fast. All of his great works were falling dormant, everyone's Dumines had ceased functioning - the folly of tying your inscription to a piece of jewelry - and he was sure that he had been cursed by hubris, or assassins, or the ghost of Poicelria.

"I think he came to me because it was a spirit, or because he thought it was at the time. This was, at most, one bell after its attack so he had very little information. He was irrational, fraying, letting the panic that lived inside him show through the cracks. He used me as someone to talk at, he didn't really want my advice. He said there was a central controlling force, that there had to be, but he didn't know who it was and he was worried it was him.

"He'd made copies of himself, you know. Another attempt to sidestep being labeled as a demigod. He didn't trust anyone but himself, and even that was a step too far - he betrayed himself, at least once. Maybe more times, if he was right about Tindelus. I'm not sure he was. He'd fucked something up, something big, and he was sure it was related. Some unaccounted-for spirit mucking up the works, something he'd let loose on the world.

"But how to defeat it? I couldn't say, other than two things. It has a true being, otherwise it couldn't have been contained, and if it really is a spirit it can be killed by any of the normal things - overwhelming energy attacks, a substance-infused weapon, being devoured by another spirit. If it's in a host, or a shell, or some other thing you need to get it out first which may be difficult, and it might have some way of obscuring which one holds its true form. Also, I suppose, I can admit that if it were that easy the Clockmaker would have managed it."

We were quiet for a moment while we processed that, with Errod looking extra serious as he tried to come up with the best use for his second question. I decided to just go ahead and ask something for myself. "Hey, speaking of spirits. I've got a colony of Granch, do you know how to get rid of them? Or, I don't know, tame them?"

He perked up, pressing his face against the glass. "Ah, the young prince's creation! What a dutiful student he was. A custom-made vicious oydirme, with the ability to make more of itself - possibly inspired by Tindelus, but mostly based off of a childhood fear of his nemesis. He could have killed the boy, you know, but he said it wouldn't solve his problems. So he went in, searched the brat's mind for old fears and trauma, and forced an oydirme to take its form.

"If you want to defeat them, destroy them, you must face them. You must fight them. Your ghost should have enough substance that you can come out on top of things, unless you allow yourself to be surrounded. If they have a weakness, it is only known to the one whose mind created them. So just go, see if you can fight them. If you succeed, I can teach you to make your own. Craft an army, make special spirits that are tailored to their purpose. Gain true power, and join the ranks of demigods. Go now, or this conversation is over - I have no use for cowards."

Katrin and Errod looked like they wanted to talk me out of it, but honestly this guy was right. I wanted - needed - to get my memories back, and that meant the Granch had to go. And if it meant I learned how to do cool spirit shit, I wasn't about to pass that up either. "Katrin, charge me up. I want to have so much mana my ghost hits like a wrecking ball." She probably didn't know what a wrecking ball was, but she got the idea - she took my hand and a rush of warmth flowed through me.

I dropped into my memory palace, and headed to the spot where I knew the Granch were. Down the hotel hallway, through a hole in the wall, and into a darker concrete hall filled with storage units and dripping pipes and flickering flourescent lights. No point in waiting. No sense in being afraid. I was going to face whatever Jake Ross had been so scared by as a child, and kick its fucking ass.

I felt them stirring, though I couldn't tell how many there were. They knew I was coming for them, could sense my hostility. There were distant sounds of metal clattering as doors rolled up, and the soft shuffling of feet. Finally I saw them, stepping out from side passages. At first they were just silhouettes, these lanky forms covered in fur, eyes glowing yellow. And then they stepped into the light, and the truth was revealed.

"Oh, you've got to be fucking kidding me," I said, "Jake Ross was scared of the Grinch?"

Teeth bared, a dozen green forms charged at me.

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