You can save her.

I sink ever deeper in a sea of nothing-that-hurts.

You can save everyone you care about.

Sleep is quiet, persistent agony.

All it would cost is everyone you don’t.

If I sleep at all, that is. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between dreams and the insistent whispers flooding my soul.

<that is all it is to live. to stumble through a nightmare, begging your own mind to release you into the waking world, only to realize that you were never asleep at all.>

Memories crash down like the weight of the ocean. Dreams of paralysis, of drowning in nothing at all, of being torn apart layer by layer and left exposed to the frozen wind between the stars.

When the echoes in my head fade, I’m sitting in a black field of black flowers beneath a sunless sky, in which clouds composed entirely of tiny stars shimmer and shift. At my feet, the dark grass gives way to a thin shore of obsidian sand before a vast ink-black sea. Its surface is still, partially frozen over into thin, cracking sheets of ice that reflect the stars like window-glass. Far away, seeming to float on the water’s surface, there’s a single ring-shaped structure, its spiny, porous walls like white coral gleaming in the faint starlight.

And a living shadow rests by my side, peering at me with two star-speckled violet irises like ring nebulae.

Yulasri, she called herself, though not in the way Harbingers scream their truths into the world. Her soul is silenced, as hidden as the face behind her umbral veil – if she has a face at all.

I wonder if that’s an act of mercy.

I’ve seen her before. Heard her before. Felt what she can do. I just… haven’t thought about her at all since then, and I have no idea why. All I know is that here, in my own head, I’m helpless as I’ve ever been.

The shadow shakes her head. Her tangled hair drifts in a messy fan behind her, floating as if it’s underwater. <rest easy. i have already seen inside your shell.>

I wince, doing my best to shove those memories away. No matter what she says, just trying to talk to her feels like asking the Sun why it rips our souls out through our eyes. But the world around us is silent, still, tranquil, and she only waits and watches.

Whatever she’s come back for, this won’t end until she’s done it.

“Then why are you here?”

<to commiserate.>

Yulasri gestures with her eyes out at the black sea. I can’t tell what she’s pointing me to, at first. There’s only ice and darkness and that strange coral-carved building.

But in time, shapes and splotches of dull color come into view. Human shapes. Preserved corpses, far too many to count, half-frozen into the surface of the sea.

I can’t retch. My stomach doesn’t churn. I feel like I should, but that’s something bodies do, and in this place, there’s only me. All I feel is a familiar heavy, creeping dread when I recognize Shona among them – her body is faceup near the shore, frozen in a rictus of agony, her Keeper outfit dark and waterlogged.

The weight grows and grows as my eyes pan over the dead, a spectacle too awful to look away from. Mide is among them, too. And Aisling, and Niavh, and Noirin, and Dad and Grainne and Mom and everyone I’ve ever known, and even once I’ve ran out of faces I could possibly recognize, I can’t help but imagine every single icy corpse as someone precious to me and gone forever.

<i have lost more dear ones than you have met. the pain never dulls. not ever. certainly not for those of us who know what becomes of them.>

Cold certainty stabs into me, confirming what I already knew.

No, the dead-but-suffering souls trapped inside me have nothing to do with me or my power. For beings like them – and like Shona, I can only imagine, and certainly like me, judging by the way my own power keeps screaming at me that my body and my life are mere inconveniences – death is just something worse than even I could’ve imagined.

“It’s not just me, is it? It’s part of magic. Some aspect of having power and needing to eat souls to grow.”

Yulasri’s eyes flicker, seeming to blink rapidly, but only for a fraction of a second before they stabilize. <you stare in horror at reflections on the surface of the sea, blind to the depths of the abyss. if you dove in, it would swallow you whole.>

I stare back at her, uncomprehending and hating myself for it. It’s one thing to be told you’re a stupid child who doesn’t understand anything, and another entirely when you know the person saying it is right. This whole idea is a nightmare I stumbled into by accident right before bed. I have no idea how it really works or why it’s this way.

<your language is ill-suited to conceptualize such things.> Yulasri handles the word language the way she might a slimy piece of trash, holding it at a distance between two fingers. <let alone convey them. you are grasping at ideas you lack the words to even think. but still you grasp. there is dignity in that, i suppose.>

“Then say it in yours! You know I understand it, so If you’re here to talk about this, say it so I can understand!”

She picks a single onyx flower, stares at it for a moment, then releases it to drift into the sea on an unfelt breeze. <it is not my wish to smash you into a thousand eggshell splinters.>

“What does that even-”

I freeze. The answer to my own question bubbles up from my mind.

Drown yourself in my light and I will show you everything, the Sun spoke to me just last week.

Maybe there are things no one should know. Things we can’t understand and stay ourselves.

“Nevermind. I think I get it. Um, say what you can without… doing that thing. Please.”

A thin, joyless outline of a smile crawls across Yulasri’s shadowed face, a faintly-curved crescent of amethyst light. <you do see into the shallows, then. i will tell you this: your fear, if it is a thing you fear, is correct. i have no need to show you what you can already sense. this sepulchre is only a sketch of the truth, and a rather idyllic one. but your view of it all is woefully incomplete.> Her bitter expression dissolves back into darkness, leaving only her wide, unblinking eyes. <how lucky the dead would be, if only there were any of them! there is no world beyond for the dead. no silent respite of oblivion. only transformation, twisting and tearing and torment without end. always. forever. for everyone and everything.>

“What?” I choke out, the word dry as sand in my mouth.

That strange smile blinks into being for another instant, but there’s a jaggedness to it, like a child’s imperfectly drawn outline of the original shape. <you described it well enough, given your limitations. only one false impression led you astray. you think through the scope of your own experiences, and the true scale of all this escapes you.>

“That can’t be,” I croak.

Yulasri’s starlit eyes narrow, giving the impression of a mouthless scowl. <if you understood the language of the stars, you would know what an absurd thing it is to accuse me of being a liar. listen to my echoes, really listen, and you will know that all i have said is true.>

I know that. The way Harbingers speak isn’t just speech. It’s opening their soul up and exposing a part of themselves to me. Hearing it is enough to be certain that whatever they say is the absolute truth as they see it – they couldn’t spew lies any more than I could tear my ribcage open and pluck an apple from the tree I have growing where my heart should be. But they’re Harbingers. That doesn’t mean what they believe is real. They’ve told me things that couldn’t be real, no matter how abstractly I think about them.

…Haven’t they? The more I rack my mind, the less certain I am.

So if what she’s saying is true, or some kind of true, what would that mean? Is everyone a Harbinger eats still inside them? What about everyone who was inside a Harbinger I ate? Could I reach Mr. Enfield through Yurfaln, or pluck him out of it and bring him back to life the way I’m hoping to do with Shona?

I try to reach out for my victims, to feel them and search for any traces of their victims, but I don’t know how to target or talk to or interact with them, and their voices are quiet here. Like they’re hiding in the corners of my soul to escape Yulasri’s notice. I don’t know how to check for little tortured people layered deep in the nesting doll of my soul, but… I do know souls can be absorbed and still exist. It could happen to normal people’s souls, too. It’s not nearly as ridiculous a thought as I desperately need it to be.

“And, and everyone who lives an ordinary life and dies an ordinary death? What happens to them? Where do they go?”

<there are no such souls,> Yulasri says, coldly and with absolute confidence. <the nature of this world is repulsively abnormal artifice to begin with.>

I can’t get lost in imagining what that might mean. Not now.

I dig my fingers into the grass, clutching stray blades tightly enough to rip them out. “Then what are we even supposed to say about any of this? Everything is terrible and it always will be? Is that all?”

<it is. so few of you notice what is right in front of you. but no, that is not all.> Yulasri glances back out at the sea. She watches as a sheet of ice silently cracks, sending the bodies splayed across and through it bobbing off into the distance.

<i can end their pain. if it is your wish for them, i will grant your captives the peace the world denies them.>

I’ve barely processed her words when the voices emerge from their hiding places, speaking all at once in a chaotic storm of sentiment. Fear and shock slowly resolve into three distinct impressions: Seryana’s dull apathy, Aulunla’s sharp, spiteful insistence that I have no right to wish anything for it, and from Yurfaln, still the loudest and clearest of the crowd…

<no no no please NO you CAN’T she CAN’T>

“How?” I ask in a barely-voiced whisper. “Why?”

Yulasri bows her head and puts a hand to her chest. <loss. grief. keenly-felt absences. these things shape me, as the struggle to live in unlivable conditions shapes you. i have searched and searched for an exit to this labyrinth, as you do for a way to persist inside it forever, and when i could not find one, i tore it open myself. a cold and gentle absence at the bottom of everything, for those who can bear this no longer.> She makes a single sweeping gesture over the colorless field and the star-clouded sky and the corpse-ridden ocean. <it is a small thing. hardly a solution. but it is the closest thing to a true escape i know of, for now.> There’s a sense of quiet triumph in her voice, as if she’d accomplished something too beautiful to truly express.

What she's describing is nothing more than the fate I always believed was waiting for me and everyone else. If I take her at her word, she's claiming to have invented death.If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

Her eyes flit between the frozen corpses on the water. I wonder what she sees there, somehow certain that we aren’t looking at the same thing. Where I see the faces of everyone I’ve ever known, she must be staring out at her own tortured wasteland of lost friends.

How choked with corpses is her ocean? How much pain has she carried, for how long, to bring her to the point of celebrating my greatest fear?

<I won’t go never not ever this is WHERE I BELONG,> Yurfaln babbles desperately. I don’t know how to answer it. I don’t know what I’d say if I did.

“And what would that mean for… us?”

<those you carry with you would vanish from all but memory. i cannot erase them entirely – something nobody ever knew was there cannot be lost. as for you? you would be less than you are now, i suspect. but more yourself.>

“Less how? I need to be less myself to live.”

<that depends on you. on precisely how much they have changed you.>

“Right,” I mutter. Not a good sign.

I don’t want to carry these monsters around forever. It’s not even just for my own comfort. I don’t want Yurfaln or Irakkia or Seryana free to follow their whims, but I don’t want their conscious remains to be ripped apart and tortured forever. Nothing deserves that. It’s horrible beyond comprehension that this is the way things work.

Still… despite everything they are, everything they did, the idea that they could’ve lived for nothing, died for nothing, and been thrown into the void for nothing feels too sad. I know Aulunla deserves better. I’d give it better, if there was any way I could. It didn’t do anything I wouldn’t do, if I had to kill to save my life.

“No,” I finally say. “Thank you, I think. But I don’t think I can do that to them. Not while there might be… I don’t know. Something else for them. somewhere.”

My Harbingers pull back into the edges of my awareness, save for Yurfaln. I feel its gratitude like a warm meal in my stomach, if that meal was still alive and squirming happily. Please stop that, I think at it, to no avail. Maybe I’m lying to myself. Maybe I wouldn’t give this a moment’s thought if I didn’t need their stolen power to keep myself alive.

<i expected as much,> Yulasri says with only a small tinge of disappointment. <search as long as you must, then. perhaps another time.>

Another time? I can only think of one other nightmare like this, but… how often has this happened? How many more times will she rip my world apart, then vanish from even my thoughts?

I know what she could do to me at any second. Carrying on a conversation with her, doing anything more than answering when she speaks and hoping for her to leave, feels like plunging my hand into a frozen fire, just on the distant hope that my ruined fingers will curl around some precious secret.

But what’s a little more pain?

“Um. If you really just wanted to talk… why? Why me? Who are you?” I ask.

Yulasri only shrugs noncommittally, a bizarrely childish, human gesture coming from… whatever she is. She doesn’t feel the way Harbingers do. She doesn’t feel like anything.

<why not? this world makes all of our dreams into delusions. all desperate, hopeless dreamers are my kin. but here, so few of you listen. so few third-angels so much as try to understand. you listen, so i speak.>

“…Okay.” That follows. I can’t imagine I’m special enough to be the only… third-angel? The only person with dreams worth invading. “I’m really trying. To figure all of this out. But I can’t understand what you’re trying to say if it all just disappears when I wake up. So if that’s something you do, some power you control… please don’t.”

That thin, hollow smile flashes back into being, but only for an instant. <i am only a phantasm. a thing more felt than heard and recalled. this is only a dream, but what a dream means lingers well after dawn chases it away. nothing you need will escape you.>

“Is it a dream? I mean, yes, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t real. You aren’t some tarot character I’m talking to myself through,” I push.

Yulasri answers with a curious tilt of her head.

“Right. Sorry, it’s just… I wasn’t really thinking about this last time.” I suppress a fresh shudder. “But I think I’ve seen you somewhere else. Or someone saw something like you and wrote it into our stories.” I summon a deck of my cards, close at hand in my sleep just the way it always is, pluck out the Undreaming, and pass it to her. She takes it in two spectral fingers and stares down at it.

<what is this?> she asks. The eerie, ethereal distance in her voice has vanished, sharpened to an icicle point.

“Um,” I gulp.

<what is this?> she hisses again. The light of a hundred stars dying at once flares in her eyes, then is swiftly smothered.

This was wrong. This was a mistake. I shouldn’t have said anything.

Maybe all of us have things we shouldn’t know.

But I’m certain she won’t just let this go, and there’s no point in lying to something that could turn me inside-out on a whim.

“She’s from a myth. I think it’s a myth. Claiasya’s daughter. All the pain in the world broke her, and her nightmares about it started becoming monsters, or turning people into them,” I mumble.

A silence as deep and heavy as sinking into the deepest ocean trench.

And then Yulasri… laughs. She squeezes her arms around herself, leaving the card to flutter to the ground as her silhouette tightens and she bursts into a manic giggling fit. Her whispering voice resounds endlessly, echoes layering upon echoes until the world is enveloped in the soft white noise of a thousand black butterfly wingbeats.

“It’s… it’s just a weird old story you reminded me of! I don’t think it’s true, so-”

She ignores me, choking on her own breathless voice until it sounds like she must be in pain. The whole world bends, swirling into a chaotic mess around her. Howling wind rushes from everywhere to nowhere, its scream merging with Yulasri’s agonized laugh. Her body twists itself up, spiraling into an endlessly dark hole in everything, and the night around her spins and swirls until reality is nothing but a storm circling a drain–

~~~

I wake up soaked in frigid sweat. Too-familiar empty pain wracks my body, and even tucked beneath my covers, it’s so desperately cold. I feel like a living corpse, without so much as body heat to push back against the cold numbness. I probably am.

It feels like I might as well not have slept at all, too. I guess it would be strange if I weren’t having nightmares after last night. Already, I’m not sure what they’re about – and there is some small mercy in that, probably – but I can imagine easily enough.

Wriggling and squirming and failing even to properly stretch, I shove Pearl away from her place clutched to my chest. It’s probably not comfy there anymore. Ugh. Maybe I’ll give her a bath later.

I linger in my bed there for a while longer, trying to gather up the energy to do anything else, until a small, cold hand on my shoulder interrupts my fitful not-rest.

“Liadain,” Vyuji says. When I roll over, she’s seated on my nightstand, looking down at me with a softer expression than I’ve ever seen on her.

“Blrgh. Morning,” I say. “Did you know?”

“About what? I check in on my children sometimes, but I can’t read your thoughts. I have heard about your… friend?” she says uncertainly. I nod. “Yes. I know how little this is worth, but I am sorry. Sometimes it’s unavoidable, but most of us consider every lost Keeper at least something of a failure on our parts.”

“Okay. Thanks.” Maybe she doesn’t watch quite that closely, then. I always wonder how much attention she’s paying to me, in the stretches between when I usually call for her. “That isn’t what I was asking, though. I guess I’m not sure why I thought you’d know what I meant.”

Vyuji’s face relaxes into its usual placid, too-calm look. “In that case, what was?”

“Last night… ngh!” Some half-remembered nightmare stabs into me like a cold knife in my brain. Vyuji’s dark eyes widen, settling as I shake off the momentary pain. “Last night, I did a tarot reading with my power for the first time. It showed me a lot of things I really didn’t like about myself. And the world. Like that the Harbingers we eat are still there. Still aware, in some form. Still in pain, maybe… probably. I think it’s the same for Shona. And… I’m not sure what it would be like if you don’t get eaten, but maybe it’s the same for everyone who dies, too.”

Nothing shows on Vyuji’s face, but I read into her unnatural stillness all the same. I can’t tell if she’s surprised or simply taking as long as I’ll give her to decide what to say.

“Yes. I’m afraid I did know that,” she says slowly. “The knowing makes every loss hurt us that much more. As for your friend’s situation, it is possible that some great work of magic – Emergence, to wit – could resurrect Shona, if she were retrieved from her killer. I must urge… maybe not restraint, but certainly caution, if you plan to pursue that Harbinger.”

“I might. I think I might even be able to do it myself. Um, bring her back if I reach her, not run off and fight the Harbinger alone.” That gets an odd reaction from her, a proud smile beneath eyes narrowed uncertainly. “But not right away. I can’t do anything like I am now. Anyway, it’s not just about her. I don’t want the Harbingers suffering forever, either. I don’t want that for anyone.”

“Ah.” Vyuji nods once. “I understand. I don’t feel or fear for them the way I do for you, but there is no justice in that fate.”

“I don’t want to shrug and say ‘well, that’s awful, but it is how it is’ either! Why is it like this? How do I make it stop?”

Vyuji’s gaze shifts, rising to stare out at the sky through my window. “I genuinely don’t know. It takes a very particular type of perception to notice it, much less interact with the dead, but it’s been this way for at least as long as I can remember. Which, I will tell you, is a very long time.”

There’s a hardness in her eyes when she meets mine again. For a moment, they look less like dark, shiny dolphin’s eyes and more like a thin sheen of water passing over black stone.

“So, what do you propose? You know what Harbingers would make of the world, left to do as they please. How many of them do you think present dilemmas more complex than whether you or they can survive? My duty is to my children, and I don’t consider it useful to paralyze you with the fear that you might encounter one of those few. Even if you did, your survival is more important to me.”

“Fine, just… I should’ve known. If it weren’t for those weird senses, I could’ve just pushed on and on and never had any idea that there was a problem I’d want to do something about at all.”

“Would knowing from your first day have changed your mind?” she asks.

“I don’t know!” I cry, blinking away cold tears.

Yes you do, my own voice whispers.

Fair enough. I won’t get anywhere by lying about myself.

“Probably not,” I admit. “I still don’t want to die. But it’s not just the Harbingers, either. What about everyone else? What happens to all the people right here who’ll be dead soon? What’s it mean to ‘return to the sea?’ Do you know that?”

There’s another telling, expressionless pause before Vyuji sighs, her shoulders sagging.

“Liadain, I will never lie to you, nor to any of my children. I cannot and would not if I could. If I withhold anything from you, it’s because I don’t yet believe sharing it is in your best interests. So all I can do is ask that you believe me now: there are things we cannot share freely with the world. We’ve tried. We’ve seen what happens when we do. What do you think would change if every human knew what we were discussing now? Knew that there was absolutely nothing they could do about it? I’m sure you can imagine, and I hope you keep whatever you’ve imagined in mind when I ask you not to spread this information too freely.”

“Truth is the furthest thing from an unquestionable good,” she says, and lapses back into stone-faced silence.

I’m sure she’s right. I really don’t think the answer is that anyone who knew about this would become a Keeper to escape it.

“If I agree, will you answer my question? Or is that not in my best interests?” I press.

“It’s not for me to say, at least not entirely. I had no part in my siblings’ answer to this problem. I can tell you that they do their best to minimize pain for those in their care. If it helps, think of it as a place like this hospice, for souls who can no longer be comforted in any other way.

It really, really doesn’t. “Forever,” I say.

“Or until a better way presents itself. So, if you consider something about this sorry state of things intolerable, search for a way to change it.” Vyuji hops down from the nightstand and leans against my bed, bringing her face to my level. “This is not the conversation I was expecting to have, when I came here. I wish I could offer you more. I wish I could encourage you more fully. I can’t promise that such a thing is possible, or that any solutions you find would be at all desirable. But your power is your own, and it’s your right to do what you feel you must with it.”

“Then I will. I don’t know what I’ll do yet. But I will.”

“I’ll look forward to it. But please, do find a way to care for yourself first,” she says, and vanishes without fanfare.

~~~

So I sit – mostly alone in my room – and think, and do my best to shove away the pain, until the morning of Shona’s funeral comes.

It was a quieter night than a few of my last ones. I don’t feel any worse than usual – if nothing else, it seems like my health has stabilized in a strange way, settled down on a baseline of the worst possible state I can be in. It doesn’t feel like it’s getting worse or preparing to kill me.

I don’t much want to rely on that being true, but unless I’m going to take my own shadow’s advice and start eating my fill from the nearest untainted souls, I don’t know what else to do.

I don’t know what I’ll do today, either. I’m staring at the wall over my desk, trying to decide, when my phone chimes with another unexpected call.

Aisling again. I pick it up.

“Hey,” she says, weariness clear as ever in her voice.

“Hi.”

“Will you be there today?”

“Will he?” I ask.

“Look, probably, yeah, but Roland seriously isn’t going to start any shit at a funeral. I already asked him and-”

“You what?” I sputter.

“It’s crazy, I know, but most Keepers do communicate about this sort of thing. He did say he wanted to talk, which I do not consider a preposterous ask in your circumstances, but that it could wait if today was not the day. He said it directly to me, and I’m sure you understand what that means.”

“I do, but… when he came after me, when I asked if we could talk to you about the whole thing, he said it didn’t matter if you believe me because there are ways to fool your power.”

Aisling snorts out a bitter laugh. “Yeah, well, Roland’s an asshole. I’m sure you know what it means that I can say that, too. What he meant was that there are linguistic tricks and mental complications that can muddy my results or keep something misleading from pinging as a technical lie, not that there’s some magic way to spoof my detection entirely. If there is, I don’t know about it. As for those, my club and I keep track of them and actively search for more, and he wasn’t using any loopholes we know of… I’m pretty sure. Yeah. I mean, he said it clear as speech can be, at least. Honestly, it sounds like he just wanted you to himself.”

“Maybe.” His reason why Niavh couldn’t be involved didn’t really hold up, either. “But, um, if I go, I’m seriously, seriously going to hold you to that ‘pretty sure.’”

“Fine. Do it. I’ll be there if anything blows up,” Aisling says. “Was that the only concern?”

It’s very much not. I still feel terrible and I can’t see myself being at all okay at a funeral, least of all one where I’m fairly sure the person it’s for is trapped in some fate worse than death. But I really do want to help her, and if there’s any way to do that without making any more of a disaster of my own life, I think I’ll find it with the handful of Keepers who’ve decided, for some reason, not to think the worst of me.

“The only one I might’ve stayed home over. I’ll see you soon.”