Training with Hugh had made me really good at fighting with humans, but I wasn't really sure about giant tentacle-handed bear things. Sige seemed uncertain too, but he nodded at me and charged. I flung a knife at the thing's eye but missed by a fraction of an inch - the knife's enchantment triggered but rather that digging in it just made the blade skitter along its skull before vanishing into the undergrowth.

The next one went right into the center of the mass of tentacles that made up its right paw, but it was impossible to tell how much damage I'd actually done. In the meantime, Sige had somehow rolled under all the swiping appendages and scrambled onto the thing's back in preparation for his signature move - yanking it involuntarily onto another plane.

He probably wasn't used to fighting monsters that were so flexible.

He was ripped off of the beast, wrapped in clawed tentacles that dug into his skin as he was slammed violently into the ground. Yeah, wrestling skills weren't going to be great against this thing. I also wasn't certain how useful my knives would be, since it looked like it might already be dead - the skin on its face was sagging and its eyes were clouded, plus the cut I'd made was just oozing a little bit of very dark blood.

I'd thought right away that it looked like a zombie, but I hadn't considered what it would mean if that really was what was going on. Removing the head seemed like the best bet in either case, but Errod hadn't had time to recover from being chucked into the woods and neither Sige nor I had anything that could do that kind of damage.

I flicked on threadsight, in case I could see its spirit or some tether connecting it to a master somewhere. Instead, I saw a chaotic mass of rainbow squiggles threaded all through it. What the fuck? I'd have to worry about it later - for now, it just told me that it was unlikely anyone was puppeting this thing.

I threw some more knives at it, further damaging the tentacle cluster that held Sige, and it turned to face me. Hurling Sige away, it charged. Well, shit. My ghost attacks caused more pain and confusion than actual damage, and I wasn't sure how much this monstrosity cared about pain or confusion. Even if it worked, would it work fast enough?

I turned and ran. Stalling and distracting it while I waited for Errod to slice this thing in half was for sure the right call. It crashed through trees behind me, and I quickly realized that I was at a huge disadvantage; I'd thought that my smaller size would let me go between trees that the monster had to go around, but they must have had shallow roots because the swiping tentacles were just knocking them over. Worse, while it did have to slow down to get past the trees, I was going even slower in the underbrush now that I was off the game trail.

I doubled back, and as I ducked under a fallen tree I sent my ghost on in another direction. The zombie octo-bear turned to move after the only visible target, and I ran behind it instead. I had to dismiss my ghost quickly since I had trouble maintaining it further than about twenty feet away, but by then I had a head start and was able to sprint along the path of destruction with much less getting in my way.

When I got back to where I'd started, there was still no sign of Sige and Errod so I continued up towards the tower instead. I wasn't sure what good high ground would do against this thing, and it's not like a collapsing tower would be a safe place to shelter, but I didn't have a lot of ideas and it was the clearest path. In fact, after a moment I could see signs that it had been an actual road at some point in the past. Plants were growing to cover it, but the wheel ruts hadn't yet faded away.

When I reached the building, I saw that it was in even worse shape than I'd thought. The walls of the tower looked like they were unzipping as the cracks widened, and I was sure that at any moment the whole thing could flop outward in long strips like a banana peel. Hmm. I'd been watching the bear-thing's progress with divination so I didn't have to turn around, and it was still very close. I spun and threw one more knife, this one miraculously going right up its nostril, and then waited while the monster reared back in anger. So probably it could still feel pain, at least somewhat.

Once it dropped back down and started to charge, I ran into the tower through the open doorway - the door itself was laying to the side on some bushes. I'd had the idea that I could quickly run upstairs and somehow shove or lever the wall above it off and onto the thing's head, but I knew that even if I'd been lucky enough to find intact stairs it was unlikely that I could successfully push the wall out.

Instead, I just bolted through the structure towards the back, where I knew the wall had already collapsed. Jumping over piles of debris, I ran down a hallway and past some rooms that appeared to be full of old barrels. Quickly I reached the gaping hole at the back, and ran into one last problem - the drop.

From my vantage point, I could see that there had in fact been a landslide - the stream we'd crossed earlier was a large pond here, and over time the water must have eroded the bank on this side. I could see stone blocks from the collapsed wall down in the water, along with more barrels and a lot of that gross multicolored slime I'd seen downstream. Maybe something had rotted in the barrels, but for all I knew that kind of growth was normal here.

I heard a crash behind me as the bear forced its way inside, and decided I was out of time. Going right to the edge of the hole, I very carefully shimmied out and was able to just barely hold on to the uneven stonework until I'd reached solid ground. The second I stepped away from the tower I saw it sway, and had to sprint into the trees to make sure I was far enough from anywhere the walls might land.

The sound of the tower collapsing almost entirely covered the unnatural howling from the bear, but not quite.

The cloud of dust didn't linger, thankfully, and as I wandered back over I saw Sige and Errod frantically pulling at the stones. Were they trying to dig the bear out? They didn't hear me as I approached, and I stood there watching them for a moment before my curiosity finally got the better of me. "What the fuck are you guys doing?"

They stopped, looking shocked, and then Sige collapsed in relief as Errod crushed me in a hug. Oh. Oh, right. They must have seen me go into the tower. "Sorry, I went out the back. Figured I'd let the zombie bear squid kill itself. Man, I appreciate the worry, but I'm not going to just hang out in a place that looks that unstable. I had a plan. You can trust - Sige watch out!"

A tentacle was already wrapping around him, as the bear shoved up out of the wreckage. Sige braced himself against a block and pulled the tentacle tight, then lifted a hand - there was a glint of light off of the edge of his pinky finger as he swiped down, and the tentacle was sliced nearly all the way through.

I wasn't sure when Sige had strapped blades to the sides of his hands, but it was pretty fucking cool. A cutting karate-chop was arguably not as good as just having a knife, but for someone like Sige who liked to keep his hands free I could see the appeal and it had a lot of style. He followed up by picking up a large stone block and clobbering the thing over its head as it emerged, but even as its head dented inwards a blast of lightning shot out of its mouth.

I'd somehow forgotten that just a few minutes ago I'd seen lightning crackling over its teeth. I fell backwards, twitching and partially numb, but thankfully it had missed Errod entirely and he swung the Sword of Density so hard that it shattered the masonry apart as it cleaved the bear's head and shoulders in half.

The body was still twitching - as were Sige and I - but the fight was clearly over. The lightning didn't seem to have done any serious damage to me, but Sige made me take a small healing potion anyway. We all just sat for a moment, keeping an eye on the tentacles until they finally ceased moving completely.

Part of the tower was still standing, though even that was largely inaccessible at the moment. "There were a bunch of barrels in there," I said, "but I didn't see cages or anything. I don't think it was someone experimenting on animals. I can search through it if you give me a minute."

I used divination to go back to what the tower had looked like prior to the collapse, and started searching around. There was paperwork and what looked like some ledgers, but they were completely ruined from being exposed to the elements; the doors and windows had clearly given out at least a year or so ago, not to mention the holes in the walls, and with rain blowing inside there was a lot of mold.

The barrels were wood on the outside, but some were covered in metal on the inside. For reinforcement? To make them water-tight? As some sort of curing assistance? Hell, it was possible that it was alchemical metal that was supposed to keep the contents cold. Many of the barrels I checked were empty, but as I neared the back of the tower I found whole rooms where they were filled.

Each one was a little different, but none had food or water like I was expecting. One seemed to be filled with some kind of sand, one with a bunch of little cubes, one with solid concrete. There were repeats, and I noticed after a bit that they had information painted onto the sides. A date, with the most recent being from five years ago, a code of some sort, and a string of symbols that I didn't recognize.

There were other things, various tools and personal items, but I wasn't sure if any of it was important. It for sure didn't look like an active lab, or anywhere that anyone was keeping animals. The only thing that looked really interesting was a large device that had a series of concentric rings and some sort of track extending from them. Mounted to the track was a bracket, which looked like it could probably hold one of the barrels. Huh.

I couldn't go up the tower very far with divination, but the second floor was within reach - or what was left of it. Still no cages or anything, but there were desks. One had some legible documents left behind, with some sort of ledger. There were names and payments, what city they were from, and then some codes that looked like they probably corresponded to the ones on the barrels. If I could find that desk in the wreckage I could show it to Sige and see what he thought.

I could also just bring him into my memory palace, but I'd have to be careful about what I let him see. So far has he knew I didn't have Perception, and while I could pass a lot of things off as either my memory or something that I'd 'seen' by sending a spirit through it that wouldn't fly for my full divination. I could probably tell him I got a look at that device in passing, though.

Back in the real world, I started climbing around in the rubble trying to find the desk while I described the doohicky I'd seen. That turned out to be in one of the non-collapsed areas, although that was a double-edged sword; the room was still intact, but could collapse at any time and bring down what remained of the floor above. It seemed safer just to bring Sige into the memory palace for that one, and while he was doing that I could keep my body looking for the desk. He'd never been in before, and I didn't really want to show any of the Earth stuff so I just jumped to a live view before pulling him in.

"Whoa, nice. I can tell you've been practicing, I did this once before with someone and it felt way more... dreamy. This is fucking solid."

"I'm mapping the area with my ghost," I lied, "so we can just make the walls disappear and look in there without worrying about it falling on us. Here we go."

The device was revealed, and for good measure I dropped it and the two of us into my favorite courtyard in Erathik. Sige was even more impressed than before, and I couldn't help adding on by summoning an appetizer platter and some drinks.

"I could fucking get used to this," he said, "and - fuck, even the taste is right. Well, maybe it's a little off - I'm probably tasting it how it is for you, but that's close enough. Shit, this is nice. Okay, let me look at this fucking thing. Huh. It's... this might be a portal. Could be our fucking culprit right here. These rails, though..."

"Yeah, it looks like the big barrels I found could slot in here. Are they shipping barrels of stuff somewhere across planes?"

He nodded thoughtfully. "Could be. Yeah, maybe. But... wait, shit. This is the whole thing?"

"Yeah, why?"

"No mana capacitor. See? One would go right here. Otherwise... well, someone could manually power it, but that's not happening right now. Hell, even if there'd been a fucking capacitor this place has been abandoned for a few years at least probably. Portals are hungry fuckers, it would have drained that thing dry. So why are there monsters here now? And they still don't seem like regular monsters, they're all fucked up. It's the kind of shit you'd see on Calnon, where... oh. Fuck."

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I slowed time just for myself, so I could try and figure things out before Sige told me. I wanted to feel smart. Calnon was where I'd pretended to be from, it was another continent that had been largely abandoned after thousands of years of wizards fighting with inefficient wild magic made the whole place a radioactive wasteland. Mana that still had some fragments of intent tied to it continued to wreak havoc, and Hugh had told me that the Coastal Alliance - a cluster of city-states along the ocean this continent shared with Calnon - was constantly busy dealing with tainted monsters from there.

Well then.

So wait, was this a portal to Calnon? No. That wouldn't make sense. And then a memory surfaced, one I remembered from two points of view. I was sitting on the roof of our little apartment in Theramas, the two of me talking about what happened with Ulren and why I - Connie - was dying. We were talking about aligned mana and how destructive it could be, and I said... "That slag, the shit left over when an alchemist fucks up? Sometimes they just seal it in a barrel and throw it into this one plane that's basically an entropic void. It's the only way to dispose of it". I didn't remember anymore where I'd learned that - my memories of being Connie were pretty fragmented still - but that didn't matter. This all made sense.

I summoned some copies of the barrels and let time catch up, and Sige popped them open. "I don't fucking know," he said, "this all looks pretty inert."

"It might just be that it's a reproduction. I didn't get a great look in person, this might not be accurate and even if it is magic stuff doesn't work right - or at all sometimes - when it's here rather than the real world."

He sighed. "It's got to be slag. Looks like it's all just different methods of containing it. Mixing it with other stuff, or something. Of course. You wouldn't want to fucking cart around that shit all concentrated. Dump a bunch of cheap metals in there, or sand, or... something that hopefully won't react. There are alchemical metals that are used for shielding mana capacitors, ones that are really resistant to changing. Could be they mixed shit with that, or sealed it in some, or... fuck, I don't know."

I dropped Sige back out of my domain so he could look around the rubble in person. I hadn't found the desk, but near the back I did find some barrels - one was cracked open, and a bunch of metal cubes were scattered around. Most of them were glowing faintly. Errod came over but stopped a little distance away, squinting at the barrel. "I know one of those symbols," he said, "it's an alchemical metal called ortoa. It's used for heating things, some of the devices we talked about for the airship use it."

Sige looked resigned. "Okay, so this shit is for sure slag. Either alchemical metals that were made wrong, or mixed with mana crystals that had an incompatible alignment, or leftover shit that was melted together. Fuck. Look at all these different symbols," he said, pointing to another barrel not far away, "each fucking one has a different set. Some could be from failed potions too, I don't think all these symbols are metals."

Errod was very, very carefully stepping around and trying to look at more of the barrels without getting too close. "That other part, the string of numbers... maybe what it was exposed to, or where it's from, or maybe the method they used to try and contain it for transport? I suppose it doesn't matter. There's so much here, this must be what's making the monsters. It would explain why they're so... random. We shouldn't stay any longer, it's not safe."

Something was bothering me. Something I was missing. I ran through the scenario again - this business is out here, away from everyone since nobody wants to live near this shit, and they're sending slag off to Azaraze. Unlike the device the Hierophants of Oblivion had been fucking with, this would send something there rather than pulling Azaraze in to overlap with this plane. Way safer, so long as you're not stupid enough to load yourself into a barrel. Even I wasn't that dumb. Then, something happened - the portal thingy broke, or the mana battery ran out and they couldn't get a new one, or... who knows. But shipments keep coming for a while, and they just stack barrels in the back of the tower.

Then it's abandoned, and erosion from the river causes a landslide that takes out part of the wall and dumps however-many barrels into the pond. That pond is probably a bog watering hole for local animals, and they all get fucked up. Then, since they're using magic now, they're starving for more mana. The mana wards on the town walls have failed, or were shit to begin with, so they're attracted to all those mana-filled snacks called humans - even moreso since the town has probably drained all the ambient mana out of the countryside.

That... all made perfect sense. The mystery was solved. What was still bugging me?

I switched to divination mode since being close to the slag was making Errod nervous, and began stripping away layers of rubble. This was way better than looking in person - the stonework would re-appear after a moment, but that didn't matter so long as I kept moving. I found the desk no problem, and hurried to the spot to retrieve the ledger. This would probably help whatever authorities had to deal with this, as well as serving as something concrete we could hand over. There was a totally intact door next to me, leading into a closet - funny what survived and what didn't.

The door.

Wait.

I looked across the wreckage, the shattered wooden beams and cracked stone blocks. The broken barrels, spilling out sand and cubes and spheres that flickered or vibrated or turned the stone around them into some reddish muddy substance. And then I looked at the front door. I'd run past it quickly, since I was being chased by a giant monster, but I had noticed it wasn't in the frame. No big shock there, the place was falling apart, but it hadn't just fallen in place. It had been dropped across some plants. Plants that wouldn't have been there, not like that, if the door had been in that spot for long.

Someone had been here recently, and as I looked at the slag around me again I knew who it was. Fuck.

I touched the door next to me, thinking about the weave I'd seen when we entered Heregie. I could do that, couldn't I? I had a little potential, and it was just another trick with Binding and Planar magic - it would be a variation on the other threads I'd been making, not some new unrelated power. I'd already made sure I could make the planar membrane as thin as possible, all I needed was that last tiny push to temporarily bind two planes in one spot. I could open this door to Nusos - easy to enter, easy to leave, allows for fast travel especially if you're alone. If I moved quickly, I could save lives.

Although I knew it wasn't really about that. It was about my pure, white-hot rage.

"Calliope? Calliope, are you okay?" Errod was coming closer, despite his fear of the slag. He was a good guy. He would do this the right way. I... I wanted to kill someone. "Calliope, please talk to me. I see that look on your face, and I want to help, but I don't know what's wrong."

It was way easier to exit Nusos than it was to get in. Could I force my way out of Nusos in Haminshast, through the wards? If I made the threads on the fate layer, could it bypass them? "Sige, you said it was possible to break through the wards in Haminshast. Right?"

Sige shot Errod a look, and I got the distinct impression they were trying to silently plan on how to restrain me for my own good. "Fucking... maybe, but maybe not. They'd have to be shitty wards, and I'd have to push really fucking hard, and some planes are harder than others... what's going on?"

I took a deep breath, and for the first time in ages really tried to look at myself with Threadsight. I was always focused outwards, following threads away from me, and so it was understandable that I'd missed this. All around me the slag was alive with crazy scribbles of impossible colors, just like the bear-thing had been. And there, just over - or seeping into - my heart, was a jagged tangle to match. Yup, just like I'd thought. I was going to fucking kill her.

By the time Errod reached me, I'd already popped into my Dumine and told it what I needed. It provided the pattern immediately, exactly as requested with very little alteration, and I felt my mana drop as I wove all around the doorway. Errod's hand on my shoulder didn't feel hostile, it felt loving and supportive, but I twisted away regardless and threw the door open to a storage room that was much larger than it should have been. The smell of bleach wafted out at me.

Sige took a concerned step towards me, but Errod held an arm out asking him to wait. "Calliope. Help me understand what's happening."

The anger was still there, but looking into my brother's face I felt it crack and let the fear through instead. Tears started to pour down my cheeks as I pulled the necklace I'd bought out and tossed it down among the other bits of slag. "I bought it in Haminshast. She said it was enchantment practice, and... I'm going to rot away like before, like what the time mana did to me."

His shoulders sagged, in sympathy and sadness. "Oh, Calliope. I'm... we can deal with this. Together. But we don't know that it's that bad. Before, that was a highly concentrated exposure to mana that was all aligned the same way - this is... well, we don't know yet. It doesn't look very strong, and it's probably a mix of random effects that are working at cross-purposes. There are ways to treat exposure, even if it does turn out to have done damage. You're going to be fine."

I nodded. "Thank you. You're always... I love you, Errod. I'll see you in Haminshast." I went to step through, and it was like my legs had just stopped working. The oath, that motherfucking oath I'd taken, seized onto me as I attempted to cross into Nusos.

Sige chuckled, but I knew he wasn't laughing at me. It was the kind of laugh you did when someone told you something fucked up, right before you agreed it was awful. "You're not going to be able to go there to murder someone. Not while we're on the fucking job. Come on, a few extra hours aren't going to make the difference. Let's get back to town, report our findings, and then we'll commandeer some mounts to get to Haminshast as fast as fucking possible."

"She could be selling more to people right now, does that change anything? To some kid, maybe."

Errod's fist tightened on his sword. Ah, that got his attention. Sige was nodding slowly, thinking something through. I was tempted to keep trying to convince him, but that was already my best argument. I just let him finish processing, and after a moment he seemed to come to a conclusion. "Okay. Okay. This... yeah, this can count as an emergency. I'll go do the boring shit back at town. Errod, your job is to stab Calliope if she tries to murder the merchant. I'm not fucking joking. It doesn't have to be fucking lethal, hopefully, just... this can't be about murder. Calliope, for whatever it's worth... if you murder her, that's just you being fucking selfish. There's not a lot of crimes they execute you for, but this is sure as hell one of them - this merchant is dead, one way or another, so all you have to do is let go of the need to do it yourself."

I nodded at him, and then stepped into Nusos hand in hand with Errod.

I pulled him into my memory palace and trusted his glove to keep him walking, then slapped up a perfect reproduction of the little tavern next to where I'd bought the charm. "Concentrate on this. This is where we're going to open a door to. Or... okay, right now it's too... I don't know, it's all stone and old and shit. So we're going to go upstairs, because there's going to be stairs, and it'll be like we're coming out of a basement into this place. Okay?"

He grinned. "Just like old times."

"Well, I'll try not to get us attacked by a tentacle monster that wants us to drink its gross warm juice this time."

We weren't attacked this time, maybe because we were lucky and maybe because things could tell we weren't easy pickings anymore. Cyne had said something about using divination-like abilities here being bad, so I just kept my eyes ahead and remained totally confident that we would end up where I wanted. Sure enough we hit stairs quickly, and came up into a building that was architecturally similar to the one I was aiming for. It was some sort of workshop, so I told Errod there would be a kitchen in the back, and then when that worked I told him the kitchen would lead to a dining area.

It seemed to help to string the rooms together like that, in a logical manner. With only a few more gradual changes, we walked into what was clearly the same room - or, almost. It was... an older version of that room, maybe, with the decorations slightly different and some things moved around. It could have been from a year ago, or a decade - but I figured that was as close as we were getting. There was no way we could just drop into a room full of people, but we could leave the same way we'd entered - via a closet.

We stepped into the cramped space, closed ourselves in, and I adjusted the dial on my bracer so it once again showed the symbol for the prime plane. I pushed, concentrated, and... I was sure nothing was happening. I would have felt it, would have sensed as the worlds aligned. I was trying to weave threads through and tie the locations together, but it was like the other side just wasn't there at all. I used divination to look at where I'd been when I had stepped into that room - Cyne had said it was bad to use divination inside Nusos, or... to look through walls in Nusos? Yeah. That was it. I wasn't doing that, in fact the divination was technically happening in Ematse and targeting the prime plane so Nusos wasn't involved at all.

I focused on that, on the way the membrane overlapped with my lutore and where that was happening. It was right here, just a hair's breadth and a universe away. Dumping an unreasonable amount of mana into making a shimmering purple fate thread, I tried again and felt it take hold - I didn't release the fate thread though, since I was worried I'd somehow make the connection permanent. We pushed the door open and I let the thread pull free with relief. Immediately there was a thunderclap as the wards re-asserted themselves and the closet snapped back to its true form behind us, making the handful of customers turn and stare at us.

"Sorry. Knocked over a broom."

We hurried out, and there she was. Young and pretty, with her whole life ahead of her. Just this cute short girl with super-tight curls, smiling and selling trinkets that would give people magical cancer. I stopped, and when Errod turned to look at me I waved him on. "Go. Just go. Arrest her, I don't... I don't want to even look at her. I suddenly... now that we're here, I just want to be home. Wherever that is."

She tried to run. She tried to cry her way out of it, flirt her way out of it, bribe her way out of it. It took a little bit for someone to come that could confirm what it was she was selling, but as soon as they did she just went dead-eyed and slack. She knew her life was over. I watched her get marched away, and couldn't bring up a shred of satisfaction about it. I didn't feel good about her being brought to justice, didn't feel anything at the fact we'd saved her potential future customers, and I didn't even feel that scared about the knot of technicolor lines in my chest. I probably looked as dead inside as she had. Belatedly, I wondered what her name was - I'd never asked.

Errod came over and hugged me, and then dragged me off and made me eat some pastries filled with fruit and some kind of custard. Dim memories of Bill cheering me up tickled at the back of my mind, and the last straw for my emo facade was when Errod nearly choked on one of his pastries and a glob of custard came out of his nose. I laughed for a solid minute, almost choking on my own pastry in the process, and finally felt the tension release for real. The empty feeling was replaced with a different kind of void, one that just felt like I needed a good night's sleep.

"Fuck. Man, I just wanted a simple job."

Errod leaned back in his chair. "I know. I was pretty skeptical the world was going to let you have that, but I did hope."

"You did a good thing today, Sir Errod. You handed that really well, even when she was crying and shit. Seriously, I'm impressed. Anyway. We have a little longer before we can go to the observatory and talk to a god, so I guess we can try one more time. One normal job, with nothing crazy happening."

I realized I was rubbing the spot on my chest where that mess of threads had worked its way into me, just above my Dumine. One normal job. It was worth a try.

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