“And so it comes to me at last.” The voice arrived before the rest of it. The fire pits shifted and formed, with dramatic timing, into The Rage demon: bigger than man-sized, a pillar of flame and grievance, with flailing arms and a dripping head of magma.
“I’ve been watching through so many eyes. Yours will do nicely. You shall be mine. Body and soul.”
“You assume I have a soul,” she said. The Rage demon made a sound that could have been laughter or a sputter of combustion.
“If I lose,” she added, holding her staff ahead of her as if it were a shield, “the templars cut you down.”
“They are welcome to try.” He paused, evaluating her, then sloughed toward Mouse. “So. This creature is your offering, Mouse? Another plaything? Is this all?”
This was unsurprising.
Mouse’s voice, when it came, had a quality she hadn’t heard from him before — not the managed helpfulness, nor the urgency, the unnecessary devotion to time. He spoke, improbably, with actual feeling, which she felt in the air as the either genuine or the most sophisticated layer of the manipulation yet.
“I’m not offering you anything,” he said. “I don’t have to help you anymore.”
“Aww.” The Rage demon’s fire shifted in what might have been a face, a fond expression. “After all those wonderful meals we shared. Now suddenly the mouse has changed the rules?” But its tone was mocking. “How disappointing.”
“I’m not a mouse now.” Bear-Mouse, the always and forever rat, built his own rage behind her. “And soon I won’t have to hide. I don’t need to bargain with you anymore.”
“We shall see,” the Rage demon said.
The wisps jittered around it, their wrong light orbiting the larger wrongness. Smaller resentments around the central one. (She was developing a taxonomy of Fade phenomena. She had no regrets about this coping strategy.)
Mouse, the bear that Mouse was wearing, in an ongoing negotiation with its own mass and all the layers underneath, moved forward without being asked. He placed himself between her and the Rage demon with the heaviness he’d complained about. Rat or no, he now functioned as exactly the thing she needed him to be. She watched him absorb the first strike and thought, involuntarily: I didn’t expect that from you.
She dispatched the first wisp. Arcane bolt, disruption, a shriek at a frequency that rattled her molars. The second required more. Either it had learned from watching, or it simply moved differently by chance. Its bolt caught her shoulder and locked her muscles, the price of brief inattention. Her rock armor stuttered and reformed. Wisp two evaporated.
She moved toward the lyrium vein as Mouse rallied again toward the demon. Her mana was low enough to feel the pressure. The lyrium vein ran its fixed line through the ground, a plunge of blue into the yellow. Not too close–
The chorus had been soft since her Harrowing dose. This was louder. Overwhelming, the source of the sound settled into her skeleton. The vein harmonized with something inside. Time slowed.
She closed her eyes, thinking clearly. The Fade coiled around her, and brightened.
The wisp that materialized at her shoulder was not hostile ones. It was calm in the way the lyrium was calm — fixed, self-possessed, producing its light without agenda. It didn’t fight. It hovered loosely around her shoulders.
The Rage demon had finished with Mouse. He turned, finally, recognizing the greater threat or simply exhausted by the bear’s dogged refusal to stop existing. It came toward her.
Here is what she understood academically about lightning against a fire demon, in the half-second before she cast it: not ideal. Fire demons run hot. She knew this. She cast it anyway, because her mana reserves were newly full and the wisp at her shoulder was doing something encouraging: I wonder if—
The bolt hit. The Rage demon staggered. Not catastrophically. But it had been shocked, more metaphorically than literally. It rearranged itself around the surprise. She did it again.
Mouse hit it from behind while it was still deciding what to make of the second bolt, which was not elegant and did not need to be. She cast again, and again. The Rage demon popped and charred, finally consuming itself, its opinions evaporating without the emotion to sustain it.
Then the arena was quiet.
The wisp settled closer at her shoulder. Cold, steady light. This is mine now.
“You did it.” Mouse’s voice, from the bear-form, vibed in frequencies that hadn’t been available to him an hour ago. “You actually did it.”
She waited. Her conjured armor ground dully in the damp air.
“When you came,” he continued, the helpful guide folding itself away neatly, unpacking something else. “I hoped. Maybe. But I never really thought any of you were worthy.”
Lyrium ran its fixed lines through the floor, softly singing its beautiful note. The only honest thing in the arena.
“The ones before me,” she said. “What were their names?”
“They weren’t as promising,” he said. “It was a long time ago. I don’t — I can’t remember. I don’t even remember my own name.”
“Anything to survive,” she said. “Like an animal.”
“I am what the Fade has made me. Am I to blame for that? Deciding to exist or not — that’s not a fair choice. I had no hope.” The script found its last footing. “You’ve shown me other possibilities. There may be a way out. A foothold. You only need to let me in.”
The urgency, the scarcity, the contempt for the Tranquil and their inaccessibility to him, the irritation whenever she slowed down to consider anything. Worst of all: a series of previous apprentices who had been less suspicious, less patient, or both.
She had been right from almost the beginning. She had been patient about it, let him follow her, let him talk because every conversation was data. She had not accused him before she was certain.
“Were you ever an apprentice?” The wisp at her shoulder burned cold and steady, her only ally an arena full of hostility, fire, and the particular exhaustion of being right when she’d have preferred to be wrong.
“What? Yes. Of course. I—Isn’t that enough? It should be enough. For you.” It was reaching for something it wasn’t sure it could get, which was her belief. The one thing she had been carefully not giving him.
“Maybe they are right about you,” Mouse said. The last play, the final redirect. The bear-form began to change. One idea replaced by a truer one, the smallest possible thing expanding into its true shape, the Fade doing what the Fade does: showing you, eventually, the thing you were looking at all along.
They? She didn’t get a chance to ask.
“Simple killing is a warrior’s job. The real dangers of the Fade are preconceptions. Careless trust. Pride. Keep your wits about you,” Mouse said, voice dropping into deepness. His performance finally setting down its props. “True tests never end.”
But suddenly, she was very far away. The arena dimmed to darkness.
“Are you all right? Say something, please…”