“We are born without a thought in our heads. From there we venture forth, discovering wonders as grand as our own toes and as simple as the infinite majesty of creation and all the worlds within it. Though we strive ever on, learning from all of the experiences which befall us, we nevertheless will fall short of a complete understanding of the world around us and our place with in it. This should be a cause for celebration and rejoicing though, for what is adventure if not venturing into the unknown and what are we without adventure?”

– Xindir Harshek Doxle of the First Flame at the funeral for Xalea Greensdale, his first Pact Bond

It wasn’t that I was facing my mirror image that froze me in place. It wasn’t that the girl in front of me had a trio of friends with her and all of them were radiating a light from which the Clockwork Cosmos recoiled. It wasn’t even the heartbreakingly familiar twist of her smile. It was how she smelled.

Despite the oil and gas and ground metal stench that filled the air of the Clockwork Cosmos, her scent came through with the blinding clarity of a lightning bolt.

“Trina?” I wasn’t able to do more than whisper the word and the crashing and turning of the world of gears and pistons swallowed it up as it tumbled from my lips.

But she heard it.

She heard me.

Except that wasn’t possible

Trina was dead.

She was gone and she’d been gone for my whole life and she was never coming back because she couldn’t come back because if she could come back then why hadn’t she come back already and she hadn’t come back because I’d failed.

I’d failed and I’d failed and I’d failed. Everything I’d tried had failed, and I shouldn’t be here, and if I wasn’t here then she wouldn’t be…

“Hey,” my sister said. “We’re gonna be okay.”

And that undid me.

I was newborn in a world where I was an anathema.

I was orphaned, parents and family torn apart in front of my eyes.

I was hiding, pretending to be a small little fuzzy thing I’d caught only the tiniest glimpse of. I didn’t have a right to wear its shape, and holding onto just one form was so, so hard. My skin was suffocating me, and my innards had no idea what to be.

I had no idea what to be.

I wanted to change, to lash out, to melt, to go home, to join my family.

I don’t remember being picked up by Trina’s father, but I can recall the gentle kindness he showed to a lost and terrified wolf pup.

I don’t remember being carried back to the Riverbond estate, but I can recall the smells from the kitchen and how they hit my nose, the one thing I’d gotten right, like the blessing of all the angels on high.

I don’t remember the space in the kennel that had been cleared for me, but I do remember my sister finding me.

“I want that one,” she’d said.

“But that’s not a normal puppy honey. That one’s a wild beast who’s going to need a lot of training,” he’d said.

“She’s mine,” she’s said. “I’m her big sister!”

And then she was. It had been strange being picked up by someone not terrible larger than me. I’d fought against it. I’d tried to scratch her. I’d tried to bite her. Not because I knew what I was doing but because I had claws and teeth and I didn’t know what else to do with them.

“Hey,” she’d said. “We’re gonna be okay.”

And she’d been right.

I’m not sure how long I clung to her then, and I definitely had no idea how long I clung to her in the Clockwork Cosmos. Probably too long, but I couldn’t help myself.

She wasn’t the same.

Her body wasn’t entirely solid, and it wasn’t flesh and blood, but it was hers and that was all that mattered.

“How?” I finally asked once I’d cried out an ocean or two of tears.

“That’s a long story,” Trina said. “And we don’t have a lot of light left.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“No! You’ve got nothing to be sorry about,” she said. “But we should leave here while there’s still time.”

“Right, right!” I said, wiping the last tears from my eyes. “I tried to open a rift though. It’s too tough here.”

“It’s because you’re trying to bring  the dead back to life,” Trina said. “You should be able to get yourself across no problem.”

“The dead?” I asked, completely forgetting for a moment about the two soul prison gems I was carrying.

“We can take them off your hands and get them to a better place than this,” Trina said because turning to address the clockwork sky and adding “No offense!”

None taken, the Clockwork Cosmos said as it pressed in on the ever diminishing light Trina and her friends were radiating.

“I don’t…” I started to say and struggled to decide how to finish. There were innumerable things I didn’t understand and an endless number of questions I needed to ask. After a moment though I collected my thoughts and found only one that really mattered, “Can I go with you?”

She hugged me.

Dammit. That wasn’t playing fair and it wasn’t the answer I wanted.

“We can talk again,” she said. “Your friend Yarrin can find a book in Academy’s restricted section on performing seances and the twins have the right magic to make it happen.”

“But…” I started, again unsure of how to continue.

“I know,” she said, and touched her forehead to mine. “It’s not fair. It never has been. But I am so, so proud of you.”

I didn’t break down.

I was exceptionally proud of that.

I didn’t break down and I handed Hanalee and Roldo’s soul prisons over to her. She took them and placed them in a pouch she was wearing. It was almost easier to wonder where she’d found clothes in the afterlife than it was to process anything else, but even that thought was pushed away so that I could just drink in her presence for the few precious moments we had.

“You’ll be able to get back now. You’ll be safe,” she said.

It helped that she didn’t let go of my arms. She didn’t want to leave either. I needed to know that.

Sadly, I also knew that she needed to leave. She was growing dimmer by the moment. I had no idea what that meant specifically, the general idea that her protections against the grinding gears around us was diminishing was pretty easy to work out.

“What about you?” I asked. She was supposed to have been safe with me, the idea of parting from her when she might still be in danger was soul searingly intolerable.

“As soon as you’re back, we’ll leave too,” she said.

“You can go first,” I said.

“No! I left you feeling terrible for the last ten years!” she said. “I can at least make sure you get back safe and sound this time, and then we can talk for real later.”

“I…I don’t want to leave you,” I said.

“You didn’t,” she said. “You’ve given me so much more than you can know. But, for now, go! Please! Be safe!”

I hesitated. 

Did I want safety?

Given where I was standing that did not seem like a concern that I’d affixed a high degree of value to.

Was my sister important to me?

No. That was the wrong question.

Did her wishes matter? Did I still respect her for who she was?

Phrased like that, it wasn’t hard to free my soul from the block of ice it had frozen into.

“I will come right back and hunt you down if you don’t answer the seance,” I said.

“I know you will. Just like you know I’ll be there.”

“I love you.”

“Ten years and we’ve never really been apart you know,” she said and pulled me in for another hug. “And we never really will be.”

I blinked at her, not understanding her words but hearing and feeling the truth in them anyways.

“Now go! And no more losing body parts in here!” she said.

“No promises,” I said with a shrug and turned around to find a spot at the edge of the radiant globe we were standing in.

Tearing a rift back to the material realm was just as easy as she’d suggested it would be. I made it look harder than I had to as I dragged myself out of it though, mostly because I didn’t know what kind of audience was waiting for me and I didn’t want people to be entirely aware of how much I’d worked out about making and closing rifts to otherworlds.

Also, collapsing into a (not literally) boneless heap on the ground and responding to the first fourteen questions asked of me with an inarticulate moaning turned out to be about as much as I had the physical and mental energy to manage.

“Well, see now, I told you the matter wasn’t anything to raise a fuss over,” Doxle said.

He arrived sometime after question thirteen and had been, I think, checking me over for signs of life.

“She has, apparently, survived a trip into another world. That is well worth ‘a fuss’,” someone Imperial-Knight-ish sounding said.

“She also shut down whatever the hell that thing was that you unleashed on all of us.” That was Ilyan. He didn’t sound happy. I found that pleasing both because it meant he’d recovered from the hit he’d taken and because being angry at the Imperial Knights seemed like a really good idea to me.

“She is able to hear you,” I said, reconstructing my jaw and tongue into their proper shapes in order to do so.

Even an ‘easy’ passage back through a rift was a bit ‘bone crunchy’ it turned out.

Rolling over onto my side, I glanced around in the direction I could smell Yarrin’s scent coming from. He wasn’t there. Just like Mellina wasn’t there, despite her scent coming from the same location.

That filled me with a strange sort of relief. It couldn’t have been a good thing that they were hiding out, but given that they weren’t visible it meant that it was less likely anyone would be able to mess with them before I got Yarrin to find the forbidden book I needed him to look up.

“Perhaps ‘she’ would care to explain what ‘she’ did then?” the Imperial Knight asked.

“No.” 

That was not the answer I was supposed to give.

“What do you mean no? You refuse me?” The Imperial Knight was able to parse a two letter answer. Good for him.

“Yes,” I said, seeing if he could manage three letters.

He started sputtering and began to reach for me, some form of coercion or other mayhem clearly in mind.

“You will want to consider that action carefully,” Doxle said with the sort of deceptively disinterested weariness which promises peril untold to those who fail to heed the warning offered.

To his credit, the Imperial Knight was able to process that in time and paused his hands a good several feet from me.

“It seems to me that this has been a rather eventful first day of Imperial training,” Doxle said. “Jalaren, did you have more classes planned, or have there been enough lessons taught today?”

“As all of my students have fled, well almost all, it appears I have very little to say on the matter. Perhaps Sir Ulgro disagrees though?”

The Imperial Knight who’d been reaching for me straightened back up and turned to face Jalaren. “The trial we came here for has been concluded. As acting squad commander, I can say our work here is done and we will be departing forthwith.”

He looked like he wanted to add more to that – probably a jibe about how he’d be investigating me further or something like that. I wasn’t under an illusion that a few words from Doxle had resolved the matter. Sir Ulgro was apparently smart enough to know when to retreat which meant he was also smart enough to come after me from a more oblique angle than a head on charge through an Imperial Advisor. 

That added him to the list of secret enemies I had, which seemed to be growing at an impressive pace given that I’d only been in Middlerun for a few days so far.

In hindsight, I probably should have tried to make even more enemies, after all it wasn’t like I was going to leave even one brick standing on top of another once I was done with the place.