Nowhere Stars

"I'll see you soon, okay, Lia?" Dad's eyes are still wet when he finally moves to leave.

"Mhm." I raise a hand in a weak wave.

"I mean it this time. I know how that sounds, but… yeah."

"Alright. You know where to find me, except when you don't. Mornings are better for that."

"I'll check in with you first next time. And about the other stuff… I know how it works. I know I can't ask you to stop. So just do your best to stay safe as you can, yeah?"

"That's the plan," I say. It is now, anyway. I don't think I had a plan for my first month.

"Great. Yeah, I'm sure you know your life better than I do. But if there's anything I can do to help you out, seriously, anything at all, you let me know, okay?"

"If you have any more illegal books of secret lore, I'll take them."

Dad chuckles. "I'll go see what I can rustle up. 'Til then, you take care." And with that, he steps away, letting my door swing shut.

I sigh, sit back down, and flop my head into my desk. I'm not sure if I believe him. I'm not sure if I want him to come back. But I don't think it changes much for me either way, so all I can do is wait and see if he holds himself to it.

And look at his books, of course. I'm exhausted, all peopled out for the next several days, but I might as well do something useful while Aisling digs for information. They're all proper paper books instead of tablets, which is normally how I like them, but in this specific case it would be nice if they had a search function. I look over their titles again, check the front pages for any sort of helpful chapter index that might explain what they're all actually about, and find no such thing. In their absence, I start on Human Mortality Before the Fourth Scourge. Maybe Mom's group knew what I know, and if they didn't, that also tells me… something, probably.

~~~

If Mom's friends knew about death, this book doesn't seem to talk about it. It's all about the physical process of dying – specifically, the ways that process changed after Infezea, the Harbinger who spawned disease into the world around 600 years ago. Unlike everything else I've read about Infezea, the author here consistently refers to it as female. They don't seem interested in explaining why.

But the book's first direct mention of her is underlined in pen. The margins next to it are filled with simple doodles of four nearly-identical tall, gaunt girls dressed in ragged shrouds and black-eyed plague masks. Above them, in neat, straight-lined script, is written "Her?"

Curious, I open one of Mom's journals. Paging through it, practically everything inside is written in strange swirly glyphs that resemble the language of magic more than Clarish or Thalassic, but the handwriting itself does seem to match. I'm glad her secret club was having fun with all this.

But rather than talk about the Harbinger it-or-herself, the book is about the last of the Infezean Scourges, a collective name for the four broad types her creations fell into: viral and bacterial infections, disease-causing parasites, inborn illnesses, and "physiological diseases," which is what they call every other internal way a body can break.

Hearts giving out, neurons breaking down, muscles rotting on disintegrating bones. Bodies are a chain. An anchor. A vessel too small to hold even a human soul. We'll be so much happier once you shed yours.

"I'm reading, shut up," I mutter. "Unless you understand all these charts better than I do." I stab a finger at an incomprehensible plot of medical statistics.

My shadow, making a show of reading over my shoulder, only shrugs. I brush her away and keep reading, mostly ignoring the charts.

The Fourth Scourge never seemed like it fit in with the others. None of the things it apparently caused are diseases, they're just stuff that happens because our bodies are a mess. Did this Harbinger invent sickness and perform some kind of inverted miracle that permanently made all human bodies work worse? The author does point this out and seems to think that yes, that's exactly what happened, but offers no guesses as to how Infezea could do something like that. Instead, most of the book is focused on the question of how people wasted away before a monster created everything we lump into the category of "dying of old age."

~~~

That night, a knock drags me out of slogging through the book.

"Liadain? Can I come in?" Noirin asks through the door.

"Hm? Yes, it's open."

Noirin steps inside and greets me with a smile. "Thanks. I was wondering if I could have another look at your tarot books."

"Go ahead. Take any you like, I've read them all."

"Any recommendations?" she asks.

"After Demystifying? Probably Tarot for Yourself. Less explanation, more about actually reading in the easiest possible context."

"Thank you." Hearing her footsteps so clearly as she shuffles to my small bookshelf feels bizarre, but there they are. "What are you reading, anyway?"

"Illegal books of secret lore. Don't tell anyone. They're really boring, honestly," I say.

"My. Look at you go." Noirin grins, then mimes zipping her lips shut, turning a key to her mouth, and throwing it out the window. "And is everything else, ah, as well as it can be?"

"You mean Dad?" I ask.

"Mm. I don't know your relationship, but you'll understand if I'm concerned that this is the first time I've seen him around here."

"It's not like that. I don't think he showed up because he wants magic or Keeper-daughter clout or something. He just… didn't want to watch me die and maybe now he doesn't have to?"

"Well." Noirin makes a face like she swallowed something mildly yucky. "That's quite different, then."

Wait, why am I standing up for him? Is that what I'm doing? It still doesn't sound great, but… I don't know. To my surprise, it really doesn't feel like a problem that he's here. He's trying, at least, and I've done worse than he ever has to me.

"I know, he's terrible at his job. But I think I'll be fine."

Noirin shrugs, her smile slowly returning. "If you're sure. Give him my regards next time he comes around, would you? I think they'll sound better coming from you."

~~~

Over the next days, I skip through several more plots of data on mostly-similar lifespans around the world, skimming to their conclusion: apparently, the average life expectancy right before the Scourges was 27 years longer. Seems like a really specific number to claim confidently about something that happened six centuries ago, but I suppose they did still have the Sea back then, even if it wasn't so commonplace. Anyway, the book says that before Infezea, ordinary humans lived for between 100 and 125 years, suffering almost no signs of physical aging past their peak. What happened then, if not any of the things that kill us now?

That's when they contracted "the Fading." Or felt it coming on and killed themselves.

At some point late in life, people's minds, their souls, started to break down. Slowly, sometimes over the last decade of their lives, they'd forget who they were, what they were doing, what and who they cared about. They'd start seeing things that weren't there, believing things that weren't possible, losing their thoughts and senses until the world was nothing but chaos and noise. ("See C2-21 re: screaming," a note in the margins reads.)

And then they died. If the Fading didn't get them killed or drive them to suicide, they'd finally fall comatose, trapped in their shells until they starved or someone killed them. There was no known cause or cure, no successful cases of healing or staving off the condition with magic. Keepers who hoped to end it with a miracle were told by their Messengers that if it could be done, they didn't know how. It still exists today ("Cases, see C2-27/28,") but no one lasts long enough to see the worst of it anymore.

I catch myself chewing nervously on the skin of my cheek. Do Keepers get this? Vyuji promised there'd be some way for me to live forever. The book never says anything about it, but there's Keepers older than 125, right? Iona isn't quite there, but Sofia is 300-something… she's died and returned who knows how many times in that span, though. Could that insulate her from it?

"PD, Keepers don't have lifespans, do we? Who's the oldest living Keeper other than Sofia the Deathless?" I ask. My voice is a little shaky. A few seconds later, a text bubble pops up on my phone: No known Keeper has ever died of age-based infirmity! Lenya Selgisel, the Last and Longest Day, is currently 182 years and 35 days old.

I heave out a sigh. "Right. Thanks."

My phone answers with a happy little bloop and a blink of its squiggly eye.

That's a really pointed name for the second-oldest Keeper alive. Did their title change at some point? What happened to them when it did? Doesn't really matter, this is good news. I've never heard of them, but anyone who's been around that long probably has more important things to do than manage their public presence. What's important is that this is a problem for some future me who can afford to work on making everyone immortal forever to worry about.

Still, this entire idea raises a question the book doesn't talk about at all. Dead humans return to the sea, whatever that means. Once they're there, Vyuji, who can't lie, says they suffer forever in some kind of soul-hospice "until a better way presents itself." What's the point of that, and what does forever mean, if human souls pass an expiration date where they rot away until there's nothing left of them but a tiny, miserable kernel of barely-consciousness?

Past that point, the book ends with… some kind of story? In a restricted medical textbook? I have no idea what to make of it – there's no title or introduction. Mom actually wrote "?????" over the opening, so I suppose we'd have at least this in common. It's a story about a family, four siblings and their father, living their idyllic little lives on a farm in a dreamwarded village. It's full of sappy little anecdotes about how much they loved each other, how hard their saintly father worked to raise them all well, and how happy they were together, none of which seem like they have to do with anything.

Only Mom's notes keep me reading. The margins are filled with her increasingly vicious comments on the story's bland prose, emotion so heavy-handed it could bash your skull in, and complete lack of anything that looks like a narrative or a point – once the kids have grown up, nothing seems to change for them or anyone in their community, but still it carries on with boring scenes from their comfy lives.

Until, after what might as well have been 125 years of that, the eldest daughter wakes her father up and he recoils from her in terror. That episode passes, but it's the start of a final long, drawn-out sequence where he loses all concept of who his children are, who he is, and how to live. He spends his last days mumbling about a voice no one else can hear, asking over and over why "I've heard it so many times but I still can't say it," until the eldest tearfully smothers him with a pillow.

And then, mad with grief, she bursts out of her skin like a popping boil and becomes a Harbinger. She immediately subsumes her siblings, using their shared pain to make them into facets of herself, splinters her village's dreamwards, and the four-in-one spill out into the world, carrying disease and decay with them. To spare humanity the despair of watching the Fading destroy everyone we loved, they blessed us with "kinder forms of mortality."

Here, Mom's notes break down into a barely-legible rant, ending in what looks like a long list of all the most horrible diseases she could think of.

I still don't get it. There's no explanation, no sign that this is anything more than a bad story the author made up. The only thing about it that marks it as coming from a spooky forbidden book is that it's more open about the idea of people directly becoming Harbingers than anything else I've read, but after everything I've seen, that isn't at all new to me.

But it does leave me thinking about something else: what does this Harbinger who invented disease say about me and my power? The books all say she's dead, but I still don't know if that means anything at all. Does what's left of her live in whoever ate her, or whatever ate them and whoever ate it and so on and so on since this happened centuries before even Sofia and they can't still be around? Or in the sea, or in me, some ghostly parasite still passing itself on through my magic, or everyone else suffering from her gifts? Or all of those at once?

Ugh. It doesn't matter. I mean, it probably does, but not in a way I can do anything with right now. This didn't help at all. I stuff the book into a desk drawer, think for a bit about where to hide the rest, then realize that I don't really care. Keeper prerogative, I can read whatever I want.

~~~

Sleeping hasn't gotten any easier. Finding a way out from the fear that I'll never wake up again one day does nothing for the constant pain, or for all the horrifying things racing through my mind. I'm constantly waking in the night from awful dreams that make no sense, but feel like the most important things in the world while they're happening.

Not tonight, though. Tonight is just dark. A slow, lingering descent through that miserable place where you can't sleep but you still aren't really there, eyes wrenched shut while I struggle to shut everything out for long enough to fade into yet another nightmare that never comes.

And when it does finally come, there's nothing familiar about it. I sink from the darkness beneath my covers into a heavy shroud of senseless nothing that falls over me, wraps around me.

Suffocating. Strangling.

Not like clinging smog but cold hands around my throat, squeezing, squeezing–

It's okay. It's only a dream. And it's better this way, isn't it?

…What was that?

Without all this gross skin twisting you into shapes you never asked for.

That's not her. Is it?

Here, the only pain is in your mind, and minds can change! Soon the weight will lift, and you'll be free to climb out of yourself and fly somewhere better!

No. These aren't my thoughts or the other me's or any of my Harbingers or… the other dreams I have. This voice-without-a-voice feels like something else trying to sneak ideas into my head, only without really knowing how I think. It's clumsy.

<never sleep again,> a cold needle in my ear whispers like a curse.

My eyes shoot open in a featureless black just as dark as before. Did I open them at all? Do I even have eyes? I try to sit up or twitch a finger or breathe but none of it works. Nothing changes except a tightening in the force pressing down on the body I no longer seem to have.

But I'm still here. And as long as I exist, my magic is with me. I open my soul, draw forth the gnawing nothing in my veins, and pour it out into wherever-I-am. Emerald shadows seethe into the shapeless void, parting it like the first rays of dark light cast by a cancerous green Sun.

And as my power cuts through it, the darkness around me yelps in shock. The formlessness around me contracts into a vague outline of… something, a shape draped in so many layers of misty cloth that the only sign of a body underneath is the white mask serving as its face.

With a choked cough, the figure stretches an extension of itself across the floor like a long shadow, then darts away from the cold mist flooding from me like octopus ink. It flattens and compacts its entire body into that limb, and slithers away beneath the door. The mask is still glaring at me when it slips through the crack, and when it vanishes, the shadow it left through remains – until it reaches back, severs itself from its source with the outline of a clawed finger, and begins to writhe and burn away in inner green fire, rotting away within a second.

Panic surging through my nerves, I roll over and throw myself out of my bed, wheeze at the lingering pain in my neck, and tap enough life to pick myself up. Compressing my death-mist into a shroud around myself, I race out after the masked monster. It's already gone and the dimly-lit halls are empty, until the corridor closest to the main room. There, another monster waits – a statue of a twisted, too-long person, skin of white stone dressed in a cloak of liquid darkness. At the sight of me wreathed in death-fog, it turns and scurries away on all fours.

Away. Into the big room full of sleeping patients. A shudder surges through me that has nothing to do with my worthless body. I tighten my grip on my conjured cane, steel myself for whatever's happening here, and follow.

The masked creatures wait at the far end of the room, blocking the way to the elevator. A tall woman between them – dark-haired, weary-eyed, well-dressed in an office blazer and slacks, and utterly, bizarrely normal except for the faint but familiar stench of corruption around her – greets me with a polite nod.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

Through the corners of my eyes, I scan the hall. No one at the front desk. A few of the patients scattered around the room are still sleeping in their usual spots, but most, and all of the nurses, are frozen in their seats, petrified with fear.

Noirin sits in the crowd around the central couches, as trapped as everyone else but alert, glancing furtively around the room. Her eyes widen as I make contact with them, but she says and does nothing.

"You must be Liadain," the tall woman says. She speaks softly, but it's easy to hear through the room's horrified silence.

"Tell me what you're doing here before I kill you all," I say in a strained whisper.

The woman squints, raises her hands, and makes a few quick gestures. They look like sign language, which means nothing to me. Without taking my eyes off her, I shake my head just enough for her to see it.

"Stay there," she orders the masked things.

They share a look, narrowing the eyes of their mask-faces. The shapeless shadow-creature scowls.

"We can still do it. We just need to call him," it says with the voice of a perfectly human girl.

"He can do anything," the living statue agrees, speaking in a strange, slow murmur that carries perfectly through the room.

"If you want to expose him here, I can't stop you," the woman says. "I don't believe anyone's alerted yet. But I hope you're certain that any further complications wouldn't place him in danger in the middle of the city."

Who's him? Their Harbinger? I can't feel anything outside of them. Whatever, I'll kill him too.

The masks don't say anything, but don't follow when she strides toward me, hands up as if in surrender. Instead, they step back and start talking amongst themselves, quietly enough that I can't hear them.

"Could you please put that away? I only want to talk. Your voice doesn't carry well," she says.

After a moment, I call a free card and drain my mist into it, pointedly keeping it between my fingers, and motion for her to come closer. "Okay. Talk."

"Thank you." The woman lowers her hands. "I'm Dalha. But since I don't expect my name will mean anything to you, we're here on behalf of our friend Isobel. You consumed a Harbinger named Aulunla, and she would very much like it back. We'd like to bargain for whatever part of it remains in you."

That's where I knew their stench from.

A burst of hatred squirms through my gut like a live meal as she speaks Aulunla's name. No more not-knowing between us, it doesn't say. I know it. I know Isobel and what she wanted and what I sentenced her to by stealing it from her. You understand but you DO NOT CARE.

Do I? After Isobel sent her new Harbinger's cult to my home?

Maybe I did. Maybe I would have. But somehow, when I look around at the faces of all the people she's terrorizing because I'm here, I can't bring myself to care anymore.

"You're calling for a truce because trying to strangle me didn't work? Seriously? If you wanted to sit down and talk, you could've knocked on the door!"

"Strangle you." Dalha maintains a flat, mild expression, but her eyes flick toward the masks.

"I shouldn't have needed to! You said she was asleep!" Shapeless yells.

"I also said that if we did it this way, there would be unforeseen complications. Either she had some kind of alarm or… did her Messenger warn her?" She glances back at me, clearly not buying her own explanations at all.

I just stare at her. I don't know why someone trying to strangle me wouldn't be enough to wake me up, and more importantly, why are they fighting over this here, in front of me and everyone? Is this some plot to lower my guard or are the cultists trying to kill me just idiots?

"It doesn't matter. It didn't work. Now please be quiet while I try to salvage this," Dalha says, still facing me.

The shapeless one spreads two half-real limbs as if to shrug, then returns to her conversation with the statue. They look like they're barely paying attention to the scene, just… chatting.

Dalha puts a hand to her temple and sighs. "Liadain, you're right. We could have knocked. I recognize how ridiculous it is to try and take the peaceful route now, and it won't and shouldn't mean anything to you that I was outvoted on this. Or that I came to keep things as painless as possible when their plan went wrong."

"Why isn't Isobel asking me this, anyway? Aulunla'd be happy to see her."

Deep in my soul, Aulunla writhes and seethes uselessly, too dead to do anything but remind me how much it hates me.

"That's what we're hoping to arrange, yes. Isobel didn't offer to join this group, and I didn't ask. Truthfully, I don't think she trusted herself around you. None of us want this place to become a warzone."

I fling my free hand in a circle, gesturing out at the packed hospital living room. "Then why are you doing this here?"

"This is the only place you've been, and we're on an uncertain clock. For the same reason, it may be best if we skip ahead to what we have to offer: a Harbinger at large in the city recently killed a friend of yours, and one of ours. Do you want it dead? We do, and whatever my friends say about Keepers, I don't think we should do it alone."

Dead. Do you even know what that means?

"It 'took' them. If it 'took' your friend like it did mine, worming around the city eating people whole, what makes you think there's anything left to get back?" There's something left of them, Aisling said the fungal Harbinger was keeping things it ate in its Wound, but she also said we had no reason to think we could pull them right out in any shape we'd want.

"And what makes you think I could tear Aulunla out and give you its chewed-up guts even if I wanted to?" I probe.

"Well, could you? I've been told it's at least theoretically possible," Dalha says.

"I have no idea. You're really not giving me a good reason to try."

"I'm giving you all the reasons I can. Your friend's soul, a share of the Harbinger large enough to reimburse you for Aulunla and then some, a chance to make something better than this endless brawl between all Keepers and all Harbingers. You know it doesn't have to be that way. We aren't just hunting it to save our friend. We want to show the world that we don't have to be their enemy. I'd have expected you to understand that, given what we've heard of your history."

"Fine," I say. "I've done worse than choke someone and made up. If this is really so important to you, if you want to give me any reason to trust you or care about your uncertain clock, give me any time tomorrow and any place but here or in your Wound or something ridiculous. We can talk then."

Dalha takes a long, steady inhale and exhale through her nose. "I was afraid you'd say that. Our timetable aside, we took the initiative like this for a reason. You and yours are hunting us. Also given your history, we can't trust that you wouldn't call for backup and set a trap as soon as we left. "

"Then you aren't trying to come to terms. You're the same as your friends back there, you just put a human face on it. So no deal. Go away. Or don't," I say, raising my tainted card.

"See, Dalha? Keepers are so selfish!" a fourth voice says from nowhere.

Dalha flinches and backs away, turning to race across the room as my wreath of infection bursts out from its prison.

"They'll never listen, no matter how much better things would be if they did. They're all crazy. It's too bad, but this is why we did all the other stuff first."

All the other stuff. Of course strangling me wasn't enough. Of course they had other plans beyond hoping I'd consent to let their Harbinger rip mine out of me. I whirl around in search of the source, feeling it before I see it in the form of a dizzying spike of their monster's aura.

Behind the abandoned front desk, a half-real spectral arm sinks through the ceiling and opens a hand, releasing from its long, twig-thin fingers… a boy? Just a spindly boy with messy light hair, dressed in a big white hoodie, hiking pants covered in pockets, and a smiling white mask.

"Anyway. We've already tried talking, so let's get right to the point! Could our new friends please stand up? Or, ah, raise your hand, sorry, Sabina," he says with a broad wave.

Scattered across the room, five patients stand, some straining out of their chairs more than others. Sabina, a wheelchair-bound and especially frail old woman I recognize as one of Noirin's friends, only lifts a hand to her shoulder.

"Thank you, thank you all! I know that might still be a lot of work for now. We'll fix that up real soon. Unless, well… hey, Ill Wind! We have an offer for you. Sorcha and I…" he pauses, waving back at Shapeless, "…have been in and out over the last few nights. Reading the room, seeing who might be open to what we're offering. These are some new friends of ours and our god's. Of course, they can still be your friends too – forever! We'll be able to fix them as soon as things are all figured out! So come home with us, just for a little while, and help us make this work for everyone."

Another long-fingered phantom limb rises from the floor at his side and rips the air open with a single clawed digit, tearing a chunk of the world away like ripped cloth to expose a tunnel of darkness lined with white stone. No, with twisted, tangled, still-moving people made of white stone.

"But we aren't quite ready yet. We can't help them unless you'll help us. So if you don't, I'm afraid they'll all die in very short order," the boy says.

My mouth goes dry. There are a few gasps of shock scattered around the room, but of the standing patients, only one man's expression shifts uncomfortably.

"What? You get me or you'll eat them?" I ask.

"Err, huh? No, no, no," he holds up his hands and waves them about in denial. "Where'd that come from? You of all people should know why they'll die, right? It doesn't take any scary plague powers to see that they don't have much left."

"So Aulunla. Or killing that fungus monster. You think those'll give you the power to save them."

"Exactly! You get it!" he exclaims as he snaps his finger into a point at me.

"And what do you want them for?"

His mask seems to roll its eyes."You'll understand if I don't spill everything about our grand plan before we come to terms. But I can tell you it's not all that different from what you and your friends want out of this. Anyway, I can only allow so much stalling for time, so that's about where we are! What happens next is up to you, Ill Wind."

"No. It's not," Noirin says firmly.

His smile widens. "No? I don't think you have a say, unless you'd like to join us too."

"I'm not talking to you!" Noirin snaps.

"Wow," the masked boy huffs. His mask's eyes narrow, but that crescent smile stays just the same. "You know what, sure. Go off, I guess!"

Shivering slightly, Noirin turns back to meet my eyes. "Liadain, you… don't owe us or anyone your life. It's yours." Her voice wavers, then quickly recovers its strength. "No one here wants you to die for us. And anything they do or don't do, you're not to blame for that. They are. So you know what to do in a crisis, don't you? Protect yourself. Help who you can once your own mask is on." She nods slowly, forcing a smile.

My mouth hangs open. I don't know what to say to her. I can't think of anything that would help her, or any way that I could explain what it means to hear that, now of all times. In everything I've lived through, no one but her has ever told me in anything but the blandest, most obvious terms that it was okay to care about myself.

Thinking back, the last time I heard anything about this was when a depressed patient came to me for a reading, spent the entire time venting about what a burden she was to her family, then told me it would be better if, for the sake of everyone left in my life, I stopped eating and got it all over with. She died two days later, so it would've felt pointless to tell anyone and paint this dead woman as a monster who'd go around saying things like that to a child. It's not like I cared what she had to say.

She was kind of right, though, wasn't she? Before I was a Keeper, I was only ever dead weight. A waste, a void a few stupid people poured effort into – effort, but never love – knowing I could be gone any day.

But I'm not gone. And as long as I'm here, it doesn't matter if I have nothing to offer. If I were somehow in this circumstance without being a Keeper, I know Noirin well enough to know she'd say the exact same thing. It doesn't even matter if by carrying on, merely by protecting myself, I make the world worse. My life is mine. It's one thing I'll always, always have, and I will never owe it to anyone.

So, since there's nothing else I can do and nothing else I can give her back, all I do for Noirin is return a smile beneath my mask. The best one I can manage, knowing no one will ever see it. She flashes me a conspiratorial wink back.

"Okay," I say, shifting my attention to the masked boy. "So. You're threatening me with a few people who are about to die anyway? Who agreed to this? Because they did. There's not enough Harbinger in there to have hollowed them out, and if there were, they'd be gone anyway. That's a stupid plan."

There's a few aghast faces in the crowd, but not as many as I expected. Sorry, everyone. I don't think I'll ever be the sort of Keeper you would've hoped for.

The boy chuckles to himself. "You aren't a very good liar, are you? I see the you behind that mask. You want everyone to live, always. Even the ones you kill. I respect that. I don't want anyone to get hurt over this. But I have specific people I need to look out for first. I'm sure you get it."

"Yes. And I'm one of those specific people for me. So if you're really that set on grabbing me, and you really aren't going to start taking hostages, let's do this outside."

"…What a pain. Sorry, Isobel," the masked boy sighs. "There's no point now."

"Wait, really? That's enough to back down over?" Statue protests.

"Yeah, Mairtin, it is. We talked about this – if the threat did nothing, there's no use in forsaking people who need us just to stick to it. I'd rather keep everyone with us. So let's go- ngh!"

Suddenly, the boy coughs, doubles over in pain, and starts to scream. A raw, ragged scream, so intense it quivers the air. I falter backwards. He screams and screams and screams, biting down as tiny dark hands push and crawl and claw their way out from his mouth and shadows flicker wildly around the room. Screams and scrambling noises and the high whine of a heart monitor fill the darkness before something else fills my mind.

It's here. It's inside them. It's always been here.

"Stop! STOP IT! I'll do it, I'll find a way, I'LL–" the tangle of alien limbs that was once a boy chokes out. But with a rising unearthly cry, the darkness draws closer around his body and silences him again.

The air sings its name. The hospice reeks of yearning for some unnameable, indescribable, transcendent Something that would make everything okay forever if we could only reach high enough to snatch it out of the void.

<We Will Find It Amongst The Stars>
<Syancauri>

With those words, countless spindly shadow-limbs burst from the boy's body like parasitic worms. A swarm of them races toward me, their fingers burning away to nubs in my barrier, while the others slither out through the room. Some race for the six patient-cultists, close their fists around them, and drag them unceremoniously away through the floor.

And many, many more race through the crowd to wrap themselves around Noirin. She shrieks in fear as they surround her, then in pain as they rear up like serpents. Through her vain, desperate struggle, they shrink to more effectively seize her, pull her upright, and wrap themselves around her head, holding her in place.

I burn life and sprint across the room, carrying my aura with me. It's everything I can do to steer it away from infecting everyone I pass – or almost everyone, by the groans and coughs rising behind me – and bring it down through the limbs around Noirin like a cleaver's edge.

Too late.

Not good enough.

The hands severed from their source simply twist into new shapes and carry on their work.

The fingers around her head reach down to peel her eyelids open, while the clawed fingertips of two more hands move to crawl inside her head like spectral spiders.

Dalha stares out at the scene in pale-faced horror. The shapeless girl squirms around the edges of the room, making for the portal behind the desk. And Statue… Mairtin… he's laughing. Cheering his monster on.

"Claiasya loves her children so very much that she stuffed you into those disgusting brains with their pointless nerves! Hey, hey, have you ever looked inside an eye? It's ridiculous! Everything's all upside-down, and what is it all even for? A soul can puppet a body just fine, as you'll well see!"

I don't know what to do. I don't know what I can do – it's far too close to inside her, I don't have the control I need to kill it without hurting her, I never will, that's not what I am not like this a plague can't choose who it kills or how–

but it doesn't matter. I've already done it. This is already too much. The fingers squirming halfway past Noirin's eyes decay to nothing first. She collapses back into her seat with the ones holding her in place. Then, within seconds, they're gone.

And so is she, limp and ragged and breathing her last shallow breaths.

"Noirin? Noirin! I'm sorry I can't I didn't mean to, wait, just wait, I can get it out…" I babble, scanning her body, hooking into my disease with everything I can, and finding it already wound through her and her own illness and the traces of corruption already seeping through her into a labyrinth-knot of pain.

take it, something familiar says. A toneless voice that feels like I should recognize it anyway.

"I can't. I'm sorry I can't it's too… I just can't." If I pulled at anything, undid any bad stitch on these infected wounds, everything inside her would come spilling out.

take it, the voice insists. take it take it take it tAKE IT.

There's nothing I can do.

There's nothing else I can do.

"I'msorryI'msorryI'msorryI'msorry…"

And I open myself and drink Noirin's soul.

Something inside me bursts, breaks, rots.

~~~

It feels so much like claiming a Harbinger, drinking up everything it is and was like a book that stays with you forever. Only this book is so much simpler, so easy to follow that it feels like it has a message for me. A place it wants me to start.

I follow its lead to a collage of memories – scenes of Noirin and her family. Living their lives, seeing her into the seventh floor, happy outings giving way to an endless series of arguments in her room.

And me. The reading I did for her when we first met.

Maybe there's a wall that can't be crossed around one thing, but you've still got everything else. If your argument can't be won on either side, and it's not doing anybody any good, maybe you should talk to them about just… accepting that, putting it aside, and doing as much as you can of whatever's always made you happy together.

The fights end shortly after that. Since then, they've… accepted it. Put the issue aside and made the best they could of whatever time she has.

The picture all this paints is easy to read. Noirin's cancer was the kind that may have been treatable, if she was willing to struggle and suffer for a little more life without pain at the end. Her family wanted her to try, she'd rather have spent her last days in relative peace, and they finally agreed to disagree and enjoy their time together… because of me?

I had a good life. I was happy. This is for helping keep my last months happy, it says.

No. No, you idiot, that's not what I said to do. I never ever would've said that. The tears I was straining with everything I have to hold back flood my vision.

Above, something offers me a hand.

My eyes trace the gloved arm back to my shadow, standing above me on the surface of the void-sea of my soul. Shrouded in black feathers, white hair stained dark with inky ichor, face rotting away to expose a blazing green eye socket in a skull the shape of a plague mask.

"What are you? What do you want from me?" I croak.

I'm you. I've only ever been you. So don't be afraid. Let me help you.

<Accept me.>

And I do. There's nothing else I can do.

~~~

"Isn't it sad?" Mairtin cries. "How your glorious protectors would murder you before they let you become a part of something greater… eh?"

My focus narrows around him, and as I feel the new weight of it, I'm sure he must too. With my left hand, acting on some bleak new instinct, I draw three tarot cards from nowhere and spread them through the air, face down.

I've been doing the same thing over and over and over, infecting things too alien to understand with the one sort of pain I know best.

Why did I think that was how it had to work?

Health is scarce and precious, something to be scraped up and stolen and hoarded. Suffering, though? That's what the world is made of. It comes in infinite forms, and when you share it, you only make more of it. I can bleed blight. I can breathe curses. I descend from a nightmare who broke the whole world in too many ways to count. Why should I be limited to spreading my pain?

It wouldn't be enough. Not for them.

One by one, I turn the cards over. This is his fate I'm taking in my hands and crushing, but it's still my reading. The Hermit inverted – withdrawal from your own face. The Three of Cups inverted – losing yourself in a crowd. Death inverted – the moment when it all rots away.

Your bonds will turn to poison. Your love will be a plague. In life and in death, forever and ever and ever, you will be alone. A blight on anyone who would share your misery, just like me. That's my reading for you. My omen.

MY CURSE.

As the last card turns, all three burst into a scintillating storm of emerald and onyx that swirls around me like snow under a sickly moon. They thread themselves together into a mural of a darklit night sky, looming over Mairtin, the stars above twisting themselves to reveal his terrible new fate, and swiftly vanish from sight.

And he doubles over, choking for breath and gasping in agony. Through the pores and cracks in his flesh, tiny invisible tendrils of green reach out through his aura – not seeking me, not yet, but searching for their next host.

Dalha, still pallid and shaking, turns to watch her comrade collapse. Then, after a long silent, still stretch, she slings him over her shoulder, staggers toward the portal, and crawls through with him in tow. The tangle of limbs that was once a boy waits for another moment, then turns and ambles back into its Wound.

I can't help but smile as the aura fades.

And when the portal scars over behind them, I feel… the best I ever have. Whole. Perfect. Like I'll never hurt again. Like even the pain and horror are drowning beneath my new strength, desperately flailing to keep their heads above water, to keep me from forgetting that anything is even wrong.

It takes looking down at her corpse to remind me.

Why?

Why?

You know why. A sliver of sadness creeps into her voice.

And she's right.

I think I always knew it would be this way. I knew that what I take could never really be measured. There are no reservoirs of "health" I can use to fill mine up with sips from people who have so much to spare. All magic cares about is pain. The kind of misery that stains your soul and scars the world's skin. Suffering and sacrifice and ✴✴✴✴✴✴✴ and the weight all those things hold. That's where real power comes from.

There was almost nothing left of Noirin. If there were wells of health, hers would already be empty. But the last breath of someone I care about is worth much, much more than every tiny scrap I've stolen combined.

I can't even scream anymore.

Why am I still smiling?