I fought through the disorientation, adrenaline, and some sort of manic rush pushing me forward. One mind was in my memory palace shifting the passage of time so it could watch the battle via divination and see everything that was going on. Having my minds move at different speeds meant restricting the transfer of direct thoughts to basically nothing, otherwise I'd be tripping over myself as about six seconds of information hit me every one second that passed, so I'd worked something else out; freed of the need to directly control my body, it was altering my perception through the tether and making the unimportant things fade into the background in black and white. My enemies were outlined in red, allies in green, and the exits in yellow.

The craziest thing was how little mana it all used - the bracers were even making the shifting of time in Ematse cost less, which didn't make sense. I hadn't demonstrated that for Talia, had she just... anticipated it somehow? And why had she gone so far overboard in general? Not that I was complaining. The mana Katrin had shoved into me - from Errod, unless I'd misunderstood - wasn't enough to get me to full but it was a surprising amount considering I'd assumed Errod had shitty mana levels. It wasn't quite enough to make a fate thread, but I could do some short term regular threads and beef up my ghost.

Katrin had shattered the bolt of the door the same way she'd broken their chains - I'd have to find out what the limitations of that spell were later, it seemed amazing - and we had run out to find three guards, someone that I presumed was a full knight, and the Master of Chains herself. The squire with Gilra's armor bolted as soon as we came out. "Surrender, and we will grant you a swift death," Gilra said, but I'd decided a long time ago I was going to go screaming, kicking, and probably biting.

There was a brief pause as they seemed to be actually giving us the chance to surrender and be executed. Not that they were lounging around, everyone was clearly also prepared to fight. In a way it made sense, since we were the ones in a hurry - reinforcements would be on the way. "They'll be blocking the exits," I said in English, "though for what it's worth I think most of them are in Brinkmar and some are presumably just off doing other shit. I only know where the teleportation room is, and there's a chance Empire forces are coming in from there."

Errod gave a curt nod. "I know a way out, follow me."

"Great. See the one still snapping on armor? When she takes her hand off her sword, it's yours."

I'd noticed tiny threads reaching from the hooked swords to their wielders, and as Gilra took her hand off the hilt of her sword to place another plate of armor on I slapped a thread of my own between it and Errod. He reached his hand out, and the blade flew to him - much to the shock of the others, who were so surprised that they reacted a little too slowly to Katrin as she sent a concussive blast through them. One of the guards fell over, and another was suddenly reeling from a blow to his knee that Errod delivered, following up with a yank that caused the fishhook to wrench the man onto the ground. The remaining one tried to swing at me as I charged, but thanks to Hugh's relentless training I was able to duck around the blow and shove my hand against his chest - my ghost continued on, grabbing his heart.

I couldn't make my hand fully solid and kill him instantly, but even being just slightly substantive while inside him made the man shudder and go to one knee - I used that moment of pain and disorientation to drop Helma's shitty little knife and pull the much more serious dagger from the guard's side sheath and plunge it into his eye slit. The red outline around him vanished, and the one around the guard that had been knocked down by Katrin flashed to get my attention - trusting the other half of my mind I focused my attention there.

Errod had leapt over the guard he'd pulled down and gone to directly engaging the knight, whose blade was crackling with black lightning. Katrin was mostly playing defense, creating shields that only lasted for the split second they were needed - Errod clearly was counting on this, because I saw him forego blocking or dodging attacks that would have killed him so he could get a hit in. The trust on display was absolute. As I lunged towards the guard my mind had directed me at, I saw why - some sort of wrist-mounted dart launcher thing was leveled at Katrin. I threw the dagger despite it not really being weighted for that, and it slammed hilt first into the man's hand as he tried to fire, sending the bolt wide.

I landed on him, undignified and feral, shoving my ghostly head all the way into his and screaming at the top of my... well, not lungs. The question of how ghosts made sound was an interesting one, but not important enough to worry about. All that mattered was the effect it had on the guard, which was an immediate seizure. Again, I pulled his dagger and found a gap to shove it through. Two down. Errod was keeping both the knight and Gilra busy, and there was a howl next to me as the remaining guard fell down again from Katrin using that rope spell in a new way - before she'd had it going directly from her to her target, but now she had created it to wind its way through the metal loop in the ceiling that held the lantern - the guard was hauled all the way up and dangled like a pinata.

I ran forward and managed to slide past the knight, but when I tried to shove a hand through his armor it stopped dead and I felt a horrible numb feeling spread through my ghost as a chunk of mana fled me. Well, shit. Of course spirit-proof armor would be a thing. As I tried to dodge his elbows and find a spot that my dagger would be able to get into, Errod deflected a swing with his blade and then whipped it upwards so that the hook caught the chin of the knight's helmet and yanked it askew - he then pulled sharply and the man stumbled a step forwards, right as Errod reversed and thrust the sword forward. His neck guard failed him, and he went limp.

Gilra hopped back a step, and suddenly the whole world seemed to twist as up and down reversed. Katrin slammed into the ceiling with a crunch, but Errod and I managed to flip and catch ourselves without injury - if Hugh ever found out his "advanced falling" lessons had immediately come in so handy he would be insufferable. Before I could figure out what to do next gravity reverted - except at double strength. This time I only managed to keep from getting injured, not to stay standing - so I gave up and sent my ghost out to deal with her. There was still an open section of armor, and my ghost didn't give a shit about gravity.

She jumped back, constantly turning her armored side to face me. When I finally got around her side and was about to strike, she changed gravity to make everyone fly down the hallway and as my body hurtled away it hit the limit of how far my ghost could reach and yanked the spectral part of me with it. The extra range she had on us now was extremely bad news - I couldn't imagine how we were going to get to her. Errod was on his feet immediately, but Katrin was laying very, very still. The last guard was also not moving thankfully, which was probably why Gilra hadn't immediately started fucking with gravity; I'd been told that it wasn't a great ability for precision attacks, and we had caught them a little off guard with the initial charge thanks to the way we stole her sword.

We needed a ranged attack. I grabbed Katrin, and she mumbled unintelligibly. Another knight rounded the corner, one with extra-fancy armor. That couldn't be good. "Katrin, can you get up?"

She looked in my direction, but not really at me - her eyes weren't focusing right. Fuck. A flash of red got my attention as the image of a chain appeared between our two opponents. Yeah, that'll do it. "Give me your mana, Katrin. I'll get you out of here."

However bad her concussion was, she understood me and I felt a massive surge of mana flow into me as Katrin's eyes rolled back in her head. I spun up a fate thread, and bound Gilra and the new knight together with everything cranked wide open. All thought, all perception, everything. Errod must have seen them waver, because he charged instantly - the knight saw him coming but when he tried to swing it was at the wrong spot, and as Errod's sword came at him like a meteor Gilra tried to block instead. Gravity flickered around us, but wasn't doing anything useful - I was up and hurrying right behind Errod, and this time when I got to Gilra she did a way worse job at keeping her armor between us. A crushing weight hit me, but it got the other knight too which caused Gilra to stagger and drop the effect as the pain transferred through the link I'd made.

Finally I got my opening, and launched my ghost right into her side. She screamed, the other knight dropped his sword, and Errod slammed him across the chest, dropping him. Both were groaning and disoriented, feeling each other's pain and unable to figure out which limbs belonged to them. Errod turned and ran back to his sister, and I quickly did the grim work of making sure neither Gilra or the knight would be getting back up. The hallway was suddenly silent other than my panting. Holy shit, that had both gone better than expected and really badly. We needed armor, and I needed everyone else to have less of it. The knife I'd grabbed had done well for itself, but if I was going to to be stabbing through slits in helmets and tiny gaps in armor I was in trouble - I might be the luckiest girl on the planet, but if there was one thing The Paradox of Fate had been clear on it was that a lot of people with very big destinies found themselves beheaded before completing them.

Errod arrived back quickly, supporting Katrin as she stumbled drunkenly - his brow furrowed as he looked down at the corpses, but he just continued past me down the hall. We reached the lobby right as the door to the artificer's area flew open, and the old man burst out holding what looked vaguely like a hacksaw in one hand and a mallet in the other. "There are intruders in the... oh. Oh, shit." He reversed course and tried to pull the door shut, but we pushed past him and Errod disarmed the man while I re-locked the door.

"This will work," Errod said, "before the Knights of the Storm moved in this was a kitchen for prisoners of the Order of Wings."

"An order of wings would be great right now," I said, wishing once again that this world had buffalo sauce.

The old artificer sputtered. "What - how would you - the Order of Wings was destroyed long before we came here, this place was abandoned for a hundred years!"

Errod sighed. "I read about it in a book," he said unconvincingly, "but right now I need you to give me anything you have that can heal my sister. If you help me, we'll do our best to get out of here with minimal bloodshed." For some reason he looked right at me for that last part.

"This isn't where they put the healing items," the man said, "this is where they put the things too dangerous to use - if I knew something was just a healing device, I'd clear it and it would be taken elsewhere."

I stepped forward and sliced his wrist open. "Whoops! Where are your healing items for when one of those dangerous items goes off in your face?"

"Calliope!" Errod yelled, looking horrified, but the old man scrambled over to a cabinet and pulled out a potion while sobbing with panic. I grabbed his wrist and looked into the drawer - there were plenty more, so I released him and let him drink it while I gathered up the rest. Errod was still scowling at me, even though I'd just saved his sister. Whatever.

Katrin drank the potion with a little help and a little dribbling, and it must have been a good one because her eyes regained their focus. Errod ran to the back of the room and started shoving at one of the shelves, so I helped him out and we got it pulled a little bit away from the wall. While Errod examined the stonework, I started rummaging around for anything that looked valuable - mainly in the utility sense, but I wasn't going to skip grabbing shiny trinkets as long as we were there. In for a penny, in for a pound.

Katrin found a stash of mana capacitors, draining them to recharge herself - she gave me some of the excess, but it wasn't nearly enough to let me make another fate thread. I wasn't having as much luck, since not only was most of the loot locked in caged shelves but half of it really did look dangerous - they were sparking, or shaking, or felt funny to even look at. Hell, one of them I was certain tried to whisper something at me. As fascinating as all that was, it meant that even the seemingly inert ones probably had something deeply wrong with them.

Just as I was about to give up, I saw a familiar chest in the corner - it had been in the wagon. "Hey! Did those assholes steal all our shit out of the wagons?"

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"I... don't know, we... we were so sure you'd be entering Brinkmar from here, and we thought we could... oh, it all seems so stupid now, but we wanted to be there for you and we didn't know the man that attacked you and Errod in Sentortzi was one of the Knights of the Storm."

The chest turned out to contain some of the magic items from the wagons - most of the stuff that hadn't been nailed down. As happy as I was to see my stupid fishbowl diving helmet, the real prize was our armor. Katrin and I pulled our jackets on and she ran to Errod with his entropic chain mail shirt and shielding brooch. There was some boring stuff in there - the thing that made water, the heater, stuff like that - and on principle I shoved those in a sack I emptied out too, but then at the bottom I got a surprise.

"Wait, my knives? I thought... I was sure those were all lost in the fight, along with my hover boots."

"They were," Errod said as he pulled on his chain mail, "but you mentioned you'd found the same set for sale in Sentortzi the first time we were there so before we left we bought you replacements."

My chest suddenly felt a little tight for some reason. "Oh. I... yeah, thanks."

A second later Errod went back to work, and almost immediately I heard masonry falling. "Got it! Come on, we can leave through here."

"What are we doing about the old dude? I tried locking him in a cage, but he busted out. And we can't just leave him here, he'll open the door for the others that are... probably already searching the halls out there right now."

"No." Errod's voice was firm. "I'll tie him up."

As he did that, I went to examine what he'd uncovered and found... an ancient dumbwaiter. The little elevator thing had rotted, and crumbled away as I poked at it, but the shaft went up into the darkness. Errod returned and headed up - it was a tight fit, but if anything that helped him brace himself so he wouldn't slide down. As Katrin was climbing in I heard a thumping at the door, and we all did our best to speed up. It wasn't a climb you could do quickly, and by the time there was enough room for me to start wiggling into the shaft the door flew open and knights started swarming into the room. One pointed at me where I was perched, sitting at the bottom of the shaft waiting for Katrin to move further up as I awkwardly balanced my bags on my head.

As they all rushed towards the shelves, I planted a foot on the one that had been covering the sealed dumbwaiter and heaved - it tipped forward, rocked back, and as it tipped forward again I gave it another push. The whole thing started to fall, caught on another shelf, and everything began to domino. Rack after rack of dangerous magical items smashed down, electricity arcing through the air and something ripping free to shoot across the room like a cannonball. As I started climbing, the sounds of crashing and screaming echoed up after me.

There was a delay at the top of the shaft as Errod tried to break another sealed wall, this time with his arms unable to move more than a few inches and his sword pinned down at his side. I realized, too late, that Katrin should have gone up first so she could throw magic at it or something, and I should have been second to make it easier to spy on the other side before we popped out. There was no way we could go back down and re-arrange now; there was already a very fire-like flickering coming from down there. The mind in my memory palace did try to look through with divination, and could barely reach up through the floor before I hit the limit of my range - thankfully it was a pantry of some sort, with nobody waiting there for us.

"Anything I do to blow it open could kill you," Katrin said, "and maybe the rest of us since we're in a closed space."

What a dumb fucking way to die. I looked at the opposite side, and the wall was thicker there - it was the pantry side or nothing. Errod was squirming as he tried to rotate without falling, and finally managed to put his back against where the exit should be and shove using his whole body. At first nothing happened, and then something shifted and Errod tumbled through awkwardly and hit his head on the top of the opening. Once he'd pulled his legs out of the way Katrin and I hurried up, and I started dumping everything I could down the shaft. A cask of oil got stuck halfway down, and the thought of them hacking at it from underneath made me wish I could set up a camera to record it.

Belatedly I realized this wasn't the best use of my time, and scryed on the other side of the pantry door. It was clear, for the moment - there was a kitchen, but the ovens were cold and it didn't look like anyone had been using it recently. I gave the all clear and Errod led the way, taking us through hallways like he owned the place. We passed someone at one point, but they weren't a guard or knight and just looked at us in confusion without trying to stop us. "Where are we going?" I asked in English, and Errod paused at an arrow slit to look out.

"Well, the exit that's easiest to get to from here is in the courtyard down there, but it looks like they've blocked it. The teleportation room is, as you said, useless to us. The main entrance will be shut. I know one more way, but... no, that will be guarded as well and it would just get us into more trouble."

"Errod? Listen, at this point I don't give a shit. I didn't think this through well enough. I should have just let them use you as bargaining chips and kept you safe that way, I could have stalled until I could talk to Hammersmith directly and she probably would have made sure you guys went free, at least. I think we're fucked here. Frankly even if we got out, then what? Cool, we're outside, they can fill us with arrows from the walls. I don't know how this ends, I don't see any way we get out of this unless I turn myself over. So that's... that's the new goal. The knights won't let us surrender probably, so get us to the teleportation room and we'll try to get the Empire guys to arrest us."

Errod and Katrin shared a silent look, and they both nodded. "Okay. Follow me."

We hurried down a few more hallways, and finally came to a sort of gallery. We were twenty feet above the main hall, with a similar area on the opposite side, and I couldn't help but notice the built-in quivers full of crossbow bolts. Errod pointed to a half-eaten sandwich and held a finger to his lips. Guards had been here very recently, probably called away to help catch us without realizing we'd be circling back around by using a long-forgotten dumbwaiter. In a movie or video game there would have been some handy banners or something we could climb down, but instead we had to just dangle and then drop fifteen feet - Errod and I went first and I got away with nothing worse than an uncomfortable jolt through my knees as I landed and rolled, and then we both caught Katrin.

At the end of the large hall we entered a series of smaller, twisting passages and Errod looked a little confused. "This part is new," he muttered, "and I'm not sure what's going on with it."

I looked at the walls closely as we went, and finally a little slit running from floor to ceiling caught my eye and I tried using divination to pop through. "There's extra walls that can slide out, this whole thing can be re-arranged. You could probably just remove the exit entirely and with the way it loops around someone could take ages to figure it out."

Something was bothering me. Hadn't someone mentioned a maze? Oh, shit. I flicked threadsight on, and sure enough one of the fate lines was clearly very close and getting closer. I watched it move as we turned, and while I couldn't triangulate it on the fly it couldn't be far. "Errod? Why are you taking me towards Yesrin's Loom?"

"I didn't know I was," he said, "but if we are that's not a good sign. They wouldn't put it right by a way in and out of the keep, no matter how secure. There were stairs ahead, but with all these changes... and I don't think it will be as easy to get through as the wall with the dumbwaiter."

I felt a deep anger building. This wasn't just a coincidence. I was being led along by this fate thread, and while I knew it was just supposed to be small tweaks to probability those could really add up over time. Was it my fault Katrin and Errod had been captured in the first place? It was impossible to trace everything back, each event had a nearly infinite array of other things that led up to it - what would have happened anyway, and what was specifically nudged by fate?

"This fucking fate bullshit. Look, I think they're using Yesrin's Loom like bait and killing anyone that touches it because they think they can get rid of anyone that's fated to destroy the world that way. Or something. It's stupid, and I might be wrong, but... that would explain why this idiotic maze exists. If we go through it and find the loom knights jump out and murder us, and if we try to run they strategically close walls so we get stuck. We should turn around right now - I'm not touching that fucking thing, fate can go screw itself."

"We're so close. If we could get through the floor somehow..."

Katrin shook her head. "Don't look at me. I haven't been able to figure out any transmutation spells, and it's probably warded against them anyway. And I certainly can't just blow a hole through."

I looked through the walls again. "Guys, there's a skinny little access hallway back behind the walls - I don't think we can get back there, but the thinner sections of wall that are made to slide in and out and change the maze are powered by runes and I can see them carved in on metal plates back here. They've got to be controlled from somewhere, right?"

I led us on, carefully not going towards Yesrin's loom when I could avoid it. When I found a spot where multiple lines of runes converged we followed it, until we'd traced things back to a spot that was blocked by one of the moving sections of wall. I grabbed Katrin's hand and pulled her into the memory palace, showing her the rune sequence on the other side. She studied it for a minute, and then looked at me in confusion.

"The walls here are warded against almost everything - how are you seeing this?"

"I don't know, my mind and soul are connected with fate threads now - or, not exactly fate threads but magic that's on the same layer of reality as fate. And since then I've been bypassing wards, somehow. Anyway, can you... do something?"

"Yes... I think so. I can manually trigger this rune by just shoving a bunch of mana through the wall at it, I think - I have to do it at just the right spot, and I can't guarantee it, but..."

"Stop with all the qualifiers. Just do it, nobody is going to give you shit if it doesn't work."

She dropped out of the memory palace, and I pointed to the spot she'd indicated. She placed a hand on it, concentrated, and a moment later the wall slid aside with a grinding sound. We continued down a narrower passageway until we reached some stairs, and at the bottom a metal door. I looked through and it was a control center - if this had been Earth it would have been where the feeds from the security cameras went to. There were two knights, and a whole wall of those rune pole things, and a table covered in small runes with labels that looked like names of rooms - as I watched, one that had been glowing went dim, and a knight jotted something down in a notebook.

"The alarm in the lobby has been reset," he said, "but still not the one in the impound. Do you think Jain was serious about the whole room exploding?"

"I'm sure he was exaggerating somewhat, but it was probably pretty bad. Here's the weird part - if the prisoners really did break through the wall they'd be in the monster cells, but when I talked to Gerain he said there was no hole on that side."

"Huh. You think there's a space between the walls?"

The other shrugged. "Either that, or they're still on the impound side and probably blasted to pieces.

It sounded like they hadn't realized we were climbing upwards, and had tried to go around to the other side of that wall on the same level. Presumably the chaos caused by me kicking over the shelves had kept them from following us directly. I continued to look around, and saw that there was another door across the room - that probably went where Errod was leading us, which I assumed was the teleportation room. I just wasn't sure how to get into that room with the knights, since the door was locked and warded - it was tempting to just knock, but these guys probably weren't dumb enough to open up for that and I didn't want to alert them to our presence.

We whispered back and forth about it for a minute, but Katrin and Errod didn't have ideas either. My ghost couldn't get through the door, so while I could see the other side via my memory palace I couldn't, for example, try to phase through and open the door from the other side. Katrin's spell that shattered a link on their manacles and the bolt on the interrogation room door was an option, but she wasn't confident it would work on a heavily warded door and, if it failed, they would surely know someone was blasting at the door with spells.

One of the knights stood and stretched, then pulled off his helmet and looked out the other door nervously before digging out what appeared to be some sort of giant joint. I hadn't seen people smoking much on this world, with no regular cigarettes and most drugs being made into food, but there was no way I could mistake what was happening here - this guy was toking up at work. He walked right towards us, presumably planning on smoking in the little side hallway so it didn't stink up the security room. Based on how he'd looked around outside, he probably had a boss that could show up at any minute.

As he opened the door I kicked it into his face, and Errod tackled the other guard before he could touch the rune poles. As I watched Errod shackle and gag them - restraints had been hanging on the wall - I had the thought that I was going to be questioning everything that happened to me from now on. Did fate make that guy decide to fuck around during an emergency? How often was it tweaking things in my favor? And if the Knights of the Storm were right that anyone who touched Yesrin's Loom was destined to destroy the world, did I want fate saving me?

I tucked the drugs into my pocket, because why not, and we dumped the guards back in the hallway we'd come from to make it less likely they'd set off an alarm. I would have rather made extra sure, but Errod was in a mood already. Katrin started poring over the rune poles to try and determine which ones did what, though she didn't seem confident, while Errod and I quietly exited through the other door. The other side turned out to be a hallway filled with arrow slits, and through them I could see the room that was being guarded - there were a handful of knights, a few people in Empire uniforms, and a large metal door. We would be able to burst into the room through what appeared to be a hidden door - hidden from the other side, anyway - and if I immediately surrendered to the Empire I could maybe demand asylum for the others.

"Found it!" Katrin hissed from the security room, "are we ready?"

Errod readied his sword, but before he could reply I grabbed his shoulder. "What are you doing? You should stay here, let me go surrender and talk to them."

"Do it," he called to Katrin, and then he smiled at me. "You're not surrendering. We're going where they can't follow."

The enormous metal door in the next room swung open - much to the shock of the others in the room - revealing a familiar sight. It was the portal to Brinkmar.

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