The order arrived at dawn, carried by a boy who had not yet learned to be afraid of seals.
He stood in the chapel doorway with his hair still half-asleep and his chest puffed out by duty. The letter looked heavier than he did.
"For you," he told Oren, but his eyes slid to Xion, who was cleaning wax from the candlesticks with the concentration of a man attempting to convince himself this was a real job.
"For us," Oren corrected gently. "The Church never sends a letter to one person when it can worry two."
He broke the seal with his thumb. The wax gave way reluctantly, like a habit. Xion watched the priest's face as the words went in. Oren's features were usually arranged in three modes: amused, tired, or stubbornly kind. Today, something sharp edged between the three.
"Destroyer-Class Lost Souls," Oren said.
The boy's shoulders straightened further. "The big ones?"
"The unreasonable ones," Oren said. "Saltworks district. North viaduct. They want them gone before the night trains start again."
Xion set the candlestick down. "We?"
"You," Oren said, and handed him the letter. "The Church, in its infinite wisdom and finite staff, has seconded you to a partner from Midnight Lore. You will cooperate, coordinate, and refrain from inventing liturgy on site."
"Have they met me?" Xion asked.
"Unfortunately," Oren said, "yes. That's why the letter includes three seals and one apology."
Xion scanned the page. The Church's script was a self-important crawl, but the meaning was clear enough: the saltworks' abandoned channels had become a nest. The Lost Souls haunting it were rated Destroyer-Class—large, hungry, prone to warping laws rather than merely gnawing on individual lives. Left unchecked, they could fray the northern rail lines, twist navigation charms, turn travel timetables into suggestions instead of promises.
"Midnight Lore," he repeated. "The Ordo's nocturnal cousins."
"Professional meddlers," Oren said. "They catalogue the things that the Ordo would rather pretend were metaphors. Alchemists, analysts, archivists. Some of them remember to eat."
"And my partner is...?"
The letter mentioned only a codename and a sigil: a stylized retort over a crescent moon, inked in dark brown that might have been an affectation or dried blood.
"'Field license thirteen,'" Oren read over his shoulder. "The Alchemist."
"Comforting."
"Try not to be threatened," Oren said. "You can always sulk later if she's better at something."
"She will be," Xion said. "That's what partnerships are for."
Oren's mouth twitched. "Good. Then go be useful somewhere that isn't my candle supply. And, Trinity—"
"Yes?"
"Destroyer-Class are weak to magic if you don't overfeed them," Oren said. "You know that. They're also attracted to repetition. If something feels familiar, assume it's trying to lure you into doing it again."
Xion thought of the cemetery. Of his own grave. Of stone instructions carved like homework. He nodded. "I'll keep my creativity on a leash."
"Do that," Oren said. "And come back whole. Or at least interesting."
⸻
The rendezvous point was a quarantine antechamber on the edge of the hospital quarter, a room that smelled of boiled linen, medicinal alcohol, and the faint iron of regret. It existed to keep contagion out and necessary people in. Today, it contained one necessary person.
She looked like she had stepped out of a cautionary illustration in an apothecary handbook.
Wide-brimmed hat pulled low, curls of black hair spilling from under it like rope lit by bad intentions. A weathered leather cloak with high collar and stitched seams, buttoned all the way up, more armor than garment. Black gloves. Beneath the cloak, the shape of a fitted coat and a skirt that didn't quite touch the floor, practical for walking but ceremonial enough to offend no one important.
On her lap, she held a plague mask: pale, beaked, fitted with round lenses rimmed in brass. It looked like a bird that had decided to become an instrument.
On the side table sat a large syringe, glass barrel catching the muttered light, needle capped; beside it, an amber bottle with a wax seal bearing the same sigil from the letter.
She did not look up when Xion entered. She did not fidget. The IV bags hanging on the far wall ticked slow drips into shadow; she out-stillnessed them.
"You're the Alchemist," Xion said, because there was no point pretending this was ambiguous.
She lifted her head. Up close, her face was younger than the outfit suggested, but only in the sense that an old book might have been printed recently. Grey eyes, precise and assessing, with the deep tiredness of someone who had read too many footnotes about things that kill carelessly.
"Midnight Lore," she said. Her voice was quiet but exact, like mortar under a pestle. "Field license thirteen. If you must use a name, 'Alchemist' is fine. Names are receipts."
"Xion Trinity," he replied. "Maryville parish. Currently on loan to whoever phrases their request in the most flattering way."
"Flattery isn't efficient," she said, and finally set the mask aside. "The Church request mentioned you. Negation wielder. Ascent irregular. Pathological hinge."
He blinked. "Pathological?"
"They meant it as praise," she added. "Mostly."
"That's worse," he said.
"Agreed." She rose in one smooth motion. The cloak settled around her like a closing book.
Under it, he saw the outline of bandoleers along her torso—lines of glass vials in loops, labeled in tight shorthand: symbols for elements, saints, abstract concepts, moon phases. A small leather satchel hung at her hip, its flap stitched shut with copper wire that hissed faintly against the air.
She noticed him noticing, and did not seem offended. "You're armed," she said, glance flicking to the sword strapped across his back. "Will Breaker. Negation ego-sword, meta-reactive edge, temperament: sardonic. Known side effect: encourages stupid bravery."
"I prefer the term creative," Will Breaker said in his head, amused.
"I am also armed," the Alchemist continued, ignoring the invisible commentary. "Do not touch any of my vials without my express permission. Do not breathe deeply if I tell you not to. And if I say run, you run, even if your metaphysical dignity protests."
"Understood," Xion said. "Any rules for you?"
She considered. "If I begin reciting formulae backward, hit me hard enough to disrupt the pattern but not hard enough to break my jaw. I will have more to say later."
"Comforting," he said. "Any other cheerful pre-mission remarks?"
"Yes," she said. "Lost Souls are weak against magic. You know this?"
"Yes. Oren reminded me. Our magic is the portion of supernatural energy that can either purify or warp the physical and non-physical laws holding the world together."
"Good," she said. "And the problem?"
"If we overload a spell," Xion said, "we feed them. They adapt to the behavior of the magic instead of fracturing under it. Too much power at once, and we turn them from ghosts into new laws."
"Exactly." She picked up the plague mask with delicate precision. Up close, Xion could see etched runes along the underside of the beak—filters, purifiers, small circulation sigils. Functional superstition. "Lost Souls are stupid. Destroyer-Class are stupid and big. They warp regions instead of rooms. The Church wants the saltworks viaduct functional by tonight. We are going to encourage these particular souls to disassemble."
"Encourage gently?" Xion asked.
She thought about it. "Efficiently."
Her hand brushed a small brass lever on the wall near the door. A sigil above it flickered, then turned green—quarantine charm suspended.
"Shall we?" she asked.
Xion nodded. "Lead the way, Alchemist who refuses receipts."
She did not respond to that, but he thought her shoulders settled into a slightly less guarded shape as she opened the door.
⸻
Maryville's northern viaduct was where the city remembered it was built on a salt plain that had decided to become concrete for a while. The viaduct itself was an elevated road, its arches striding over old brine channels that cut the ground into rectangles like pages in a ledger.
Below, the abandoned saltworks sprawled: long sheds with roofs caved in, rusted rails for small carts, stone basins that had once held brine and now held only debris and occasional adventurous weeds. The air tasted like old tears and iron filings.
As they approached, the world began to misbehave in small ways.
Xion's boot landed on a perfectly solid plank and slid half a foot as if the wood had been greased. A gull rose from a broken beam, flapped twice, and then hung in the air, wings beating against a delay that wasn't wind. Sound carried oddly: the distant clamor of the market square came in short bursts, chopped into syllables, while the drip of water in the brine basins seemed to echo too long, like a storyteller who didn't know when to stop.
"Here we go," the Alchemist murmured.
"Law-warping?" Xion asked.
"Friction, momentum, acoustics," she replied, gaze scanning. "Low-grade spooling along the edges. The nest is ahead."
He touched his mana channels, the pseudo-nervous web of bright tension threaded through his body. They were not physical, but they were real; they hummed when he paid attention, like plucked strings. Mana: his spiritual energy, produced and held by that inner web, linked directly to mind and soul. In his case, it tended to run hot and stubborn, colored by whatever stubborn kindness and petty pettiness his soul had grown.
He inhaled, letting breath drop into the channels, following the pathways down spine, into ribs, out to fingertips. The flows tugged to the right—toward a deeper pocket of wrongness.
"Three knots," he said. "There, there, and there." He pointed: one at the junction of two broken rails, one beneath a collapsed roof, one where three basins met.
"Three maws," the Alchemist confirmed. "Interlinked locus. Destroyer-Class usually like trios. If one overfeeds, the energy bleeds to the others. If one collapses, the others scramble to inherit its function."
"Noisy family," Xion said.
"End-stage trauma pattern," she said, as if that explained everything. "We'll treat them as shared organs. Shut down functions in sequence, not in a single blow."
She knelt on a relatively intact slab of concrete, unrolled a canvas bundle, and began setting up.
Xion watched, fascinated despite himself. The work was precise and almost ritualistic: chalk circle, but not a circle—segments, each labeled with a glyph; a copper censer loaded with a blend of herbs and mineral powders; a small array of vials sorted by color and consistency.
"Mana channels," she said conversationally as she drew, "are how everything cheats at the rules. Yours are... unusual."
"In what way?" he asked.
"Resilient. Flexible. A little too willing to re-route under stress instead of break." She flicked him a quick look. "That tends to happen to people who refuse to pick one path."
"Trinity problem," he said.
"Yes," she said. "Also useful. The Lost Souls' channels are externalized. They treat the environment's mana webs as extensions of their own. We'll collapse their borrowings and leave their core patterns exposed. Then we nudge."
"With magic," he said. "Gently."
"With magic," she agreed. "Precisely. Think laundress, not comet. You don't throw the clothes into the sun to get them clean. You soak them. Scrub specific stains. Rinse in the correct direction."
"Tilda would be proud," Xion said automatically.
She paused. "Who?"
"Laundress," he said. "Teaches knots that save doorways. And metaphors."
"Ah," the Alchemist said. "We like her already."
She finished the array: nine points linked by straight lines, a kind of angular flower stretched over the cracked concrete. Each point held a small ceramic bead inscribed with a word.
"What's that one?" Xion asked, pointing.
"Friction," she said. Another: "Memory." Another: "Yield." Not surrender—the mechanical kind.
"Ready?" she asked.
"As I'll ever be," he said.
"Good. Stay close. And do not draw Will Breaker unless you absolutely must. Like all blades, she'll want to solve the problem by making another one."
"Rude," the sword said in his head. He ignored her.
The Alchemist placed a pinch of powdered incense into the censer, struck a spark, and began to chant.
It wasn't a church hymn. It wasn't entirely not one, either. The cadence was similar—call and response—but the words were older, less interested in God and more in the small agreements between elements.
The smoke curled upward, then outward, then sideways. It didn't rise; it sought.
As it drifted over the first knot of wrongness, the world reacted.
The broken rails ahead of them rippled. The air thickened. Something invisible but heavy turned its attention toward them with the curiosity of a predator that had never seen two-legged nerves before.
The knot of wrongness became visible: a shimmering distortion, mouth-like, chewing on the lines of mana threading through the saltworks. The Lost Soul wasn't a ghost in the story sense. It was more like a disease in the laws—an emptiness wearing the shape of appetite.
"First function," the Alchemist murmured. "They've eaten friction. That's why your boots slipped. We give it back."
She uncorked a vial of liquid the color of midsummer noon and poured three drops into the censer.
The smoke changed. It thickened, turned from pale gray to a faint gold, and settled over the shimmering maw like a veil. Wherever it touched, the distortion dimpled, slowed. The concrete beneath it stopped trying to act like ice.
"Your turn," she said. "Don't cut. Pin."
Xion stepped forward.
He didn't reach for the sword. Instead, he dipped his awareness into his mana channels again, found the flows that connected his ankles to his ribs to his shoulders, and coaxed them into a new pattern.
Elemental Dragon Dance: a style he'd been building from scraps—broken battlefield forms, instinct, miasma behavior, the way dragons were described in myths.
"First Form," he breathed. "Ember Step."
He took one step into the veil.
Where his boot landed, he let a thread of negation seep from his sole into the ground—not enough to erase, just enough to say no to the wrongness. The Lost Soul's stolen friction recoiled from the contact, unable to find purchase. He stepped again, again, drawing a rough spiral around the maw.
From above, it might have looked like a dragon coiling, tail chasing head.
Inside the spiral, the Lost Soul's influence kinked. The shimmer faltered; the rails laid there remembered how iron was supposed to sound when stressed.
The maw shuddered, as if confused. That was good. Confused things made mistakes.
"Second function," the Alchemist said, eyes half-closed, hands moving in fast, precise shapes over the chalk array. "They're stretching moments. Lateness law, gifted by our dear Calendar Court. We cut their credit."
She reached to another vial, this one dusk-colored, and let a single drop fall onto the chalk bead labeled MEMORY.
The bead flared dull red, then sank back. The lines between points pulsed once, like a heartbeat.
The shimmer at the second junction—beneath the collapsed roof—twitched. The echo of dripping water stuttered, then resumed in proper rhythm. The air around them snapped into a cleaner tempo.
The second maw became visible: not a mouth, but a curtain rippling in a wind that wasn't there, threads stretching and contracting.
"River Veil?" Xion suggested.
"Appropriate," she said. "But mind the banks."
He moved again.
"Second Form," he said. "River Veil."
He didn't think of it as casting a spell. That would have gone wrong quickly. Instead, he re-routed his internal mana flows, letting them push outward through his palms in a thin sheet. Not raw force, but ordered imbalance—a difference in potential that the environment itself rushed to correct.
The sheet of not-quite-water spread between the two maws like glass. Where it passed through the second distortion, the stretched moments compressed, snapped back to their intended length. The maw writhed, trying to elongate time again, but the Veil held, enforcing consistency.
"Good," the Alchemist murmured. "You've done this before."
"Today?" he asked.
The word sat wrong in his mouth for no good reason. He ignored it.
"Third function," she continued, voice tightening. "Sound. They're trying to turn language into bait."
Indeed, as the smoke spread to the third knot, faint whispers rose around them—snatches of voices saying his name, Oren's, Luminous's, Mara's childhood complaints. Words designed to pull attention into echo, then chew on it.
"Not nice," Xion muttered.
"They never are," the Alchemist said. She uncorked a third vial, this one a faint blue that made his eyes ache. "Confluence Lattice."
She poured a few drops onto the bead labeled YIELD. The chalk lines flared again, this time in interlocking patterns, tying the three maws together in a net they had not consented to.
The whispers tangled. The third distortion revealed itself: a series of concentric rings, vibrating, trying to hum the entire saltworks into a new key.
"Third Form," Xion said. "Gale Spiral."
He inhaled. Exhaled. Stepped.
The Spiral relied on torsion. He let his mana channels coil—ankles to knees to hips to spine—then snapped the stored twist loose in a controlled release, letting it spin out along his arms as a vortex of ordered air and negation.
Again, not a cut. A twist.
The Spiral intersected the vibrating rings and redirected their oscillation inward. The Lost Soul's attempt to turn all nearby sound into a hymn to its existence collapsed; it began to hear itself instead.
It didn't like that.
The three maws convulsed, their once-coordinated distortions clashing. For a moment Xion saw something at their shared core: a darker shape, sword-long, all edges and grief. A remnant of intent from whatever had given rise to this Destroyer in the first place. Rage, despair, stubborn refusal to dissolve.
The Alchemist's hands slowed. Her chanting shifted key.
"Careful," Xion said softly. "If you overload—"
"I know," she snapped, but the edge wasn't for him. It was for the thing in front of them.
She reached for a fourth vial.
This one had no label.
Its wax seal bore a sigil Xion did not recognize: not Church, not Ordo, not Midnight Lore. Older. Sharper. It made his mana channels twitch just to look at it.
She rolled her sleeve up a fraction, pressed the needlehead to a vein, and drove the contents in without hesitation.
"Is that strictly necessary?" Xion asked.
"Yes," she said. "No." A beat. "It's efficient."
Her pupils dilated, then contracted to pinpoints. For a moment, her mana flared around her like a diagram drawn in light—intricate, layered, more pathways than any sane person should be able to keep track of.
When she spoke next, the word was not in the common tongue.
It was a name.
Not hers.
The air bucked.
The Lost Soul's core writhed as if someone had called it by a childhood nickname in a courtroom.
"Top one in the northern hemisphere," Xion said under his breath, impressed and annoyed.
"Don't say things like that," she replied through clenched teeth, voice doubled by whatever presence she'd invoked. "It keeps donors hopeful."
The core-shape faltered. The three maws, linked through the Confluence Lattice, stuttered. The distortions snapped inward, then outward, then broke.
The Destroyer-Class Lost Soul came apart like a poorly stitched shirt under sudden stress. The warped laws recoiled; friction returned fully, time resumed its usual poor manners, sound stopped trying to be a trap and went back to being rude.
The maws faded.
The saltworks sagged.
Xion let the Spiral wind down, forced his mana channels back to a calmer pattern. The Alchemist leaned against the nearest pillar for three breaths, then straightened, composure snapping back into place like a mask.
"There," she said. "Destroyer-Class cluster, dissolved. No overload, no adaptation. Saltworks viable again. We should check the brine pits for residual snags, but the core is gone."
"Efficient," Xion said, trying not to show how impressed he was.
She gave him a quick, sideways look. "You kept the negation tight. No unnecessary erasures. That's unusual."
"Only because you don't know me well enough," he said. "I'm capable of plenty of unnecessary erasures."
"Save them for paperwork," she said.
They walked the saltworks in a slow circuit.
Without the maws, the place felt... normal was too generous, but less wrong. The cracked basins were just cracked basins. The rails were just rust. A gull landed, squawked, lifted off again, aggrieved in an ordinary way.
Xion tied a small rope he'd brought around a beam near the old intake gate and set a chair-knot in it out of habit.
"What's that for?" she asked.
"Workers," he said. "Tomorrow someone will lean on this and not know why it makes them less tired. That's enough."
"Midnight Lore approves of low-level interventions," she said. "They create better data."
"Everything's data to you," he observed.
"Everything is pattern," she corrected. "Data are just patterns that know they're being watched."
He snorted. "You and the Ordo would get along."
"We already do," she said. "Until we don't."
At the edge of the saltworks, near where the viaduct's shadow fell, she paused. "There is a secondary nest," she said. "East brine pits. Smaller. I can handle it alone."
"We can handle it," he said.
"I read your file," she said. "You have other obligations. Bells, tables, necromantically active headstones."
"You read my grave?" he asked.
"I read the Ordo's notes about your grave," she said. "They are unnerved. That amuses me."
He couldn't help but smile. "All the more reason to keep me alive and underemployed."
Something tugged in his chest then, a small, familiar lurch.
He had felt it enough times now to recognize the onset.
The Curse of Suffering.
"Wait," he said.
The world hesitated.
Frame by frame, the saltworks flickered: gull in mid-flap, dust in mid-fall, the Alchemist's cloak in mid-sway.
"Ah," he muttered. "Again."
He had half a heartbeat of bitter humor—at least we cleared the nest this time—before everything snapped.
⸻
He was back in the quarantine antechamber.
Boiled linen. Medicinal alcohol. Iron.
The IV bags ticked as if they'd never stopped. The amber bottle sat unopened. The syringe lay where it had been before. The plague mask rested in the Alchemist's lap. Her head was bowed, the brim of her hat shading her eyes.
Deja vu didn't quite cover it. This wasn't a feeling. It was an architectural feature of his life.
The Curse of Suffering didn't just yank him back in time. It yanked him back to a checkpoint—a moment the world had declared a save point. Usually, it chose times of stress or choice. Occasionally, it chose times of maximum embarrassment.
This time, it had chosen right before the mission.
"Lost Souls, Destroyer-Class, saltworks," she said, as if on cue, lifting her head. "Midnight Lore, Field license thirteen. If you must use a name—"
"Alchemist," Xion finished with her. "Names are receipts."
She paused.
Her eyes narrowed a fraction, as if she were watching a familiar pattern appear in a new place.
"You've been briefed already?" she asked.
"Call it a hunch," he said lightly.
And here was the tricky part.
Talking about the Curse never helped. The universe did not enjoy being accused of reruns. But ignoring it wasted the one advantage it gave him: he remembered. No one else did, unless they had their own metaphysical problems, which he sincerely hoped she did not.
He considered blurting everything: We just did this; there are three maws; your unnamed vial is dangerous; if you overuse it you'll burn your channels. Practical. Efficient.
Also, reckless.
He had learned the hard way that telling people their near-future made them behave like actors trying to match a script. They squinted at events, overcorrected, stepped in holes they would've danced around naturally.
Better to use the knowledge sideways.
"Before we head out," he said, "may I see your kit?"
She blinked. "Why?"
"So I know what not to touch," he said. "And what to admire from a respectful distance."
Suspicion lingered, but professionalism won. She opened the canvas bundle on the table.
It was the same array he'd seen an hour ago, and also not. This version was neat, ordered, unused. He pointed to the vials he recognized.
"Noon," he said. "For friction. Dusk. For mercy. Blue for—sound?"
"Resonance attenuation," she said slowly. "Not strictly sound. Closer to narrative damping."
"And this one?" He touched—not physically, just with a glance—the unlabeled vial with the old sigil.
"Field-level permission," she said. "Emergency use only."
"Define 'emergency,'" he said.
"Situation where not using it will cost more lives than using it," she said, reciting.
"And side effects?" he asked.
"My mana channels complain for a day," she said. "Dreams get loud. Nothing permanent. We have tested it."
"We?" he asked.
"Lore," she said. "And one very patient demiurge."
"Of course," he muttered. "Look, if I ask you not to use it unless absolutely necessary, will that offend professional pride?"
"Yes," she said. "But that doesn't mean I won't listen."
"Fair enough," he said. "Just... trust me when I say we can probably handle this Destroyer-Class without invoking old favors."
She studied him for a long breath. "You're very confident for a man whose file includes the word 'chaotic' nine times."
"I have excellent taste in teamwork," he said. "I've seen what you can do."
"Have you," she said, and there was more in the words than curiosity.
"Hypothetically," he amended. "Alchemists with field license thirteen don't tend to be mediocre."
"Flattery is inefficient," she reminded him.
"It also works," he said. "Sometimes."
Her mouth twitched, just once. "Very well. We'll try your laundress approach. Sequential, subtle. No comets. If we get pinned, I reserve the right to escalate."
"Deal," he said.
They stepped out.
⸻
The second time through the saltworks, he walked like a man crossing a street he knew had a hidden pothole.
He knew where the rails would try to slip his boots; he adjusted before they did. He knew the gull would hang in the air; he watched it with a kind of grim affection. He knew where the wrongness knots waited.
"Three maws," he said out loud as they crossed under the viaduct. "One eating friction, one stretching time, one playing games with sound. Shared core. We can tie them together and choke the core without letting them adapt."
The Alchemist stopped. "How do you know the distribution?" she asked.
"Pattern recognition," he said, a little too fast. "The way the dust falls, the way the echoes—"
"Don't lie," she said, and he found he liked her more for it.
He sighed. "Fine. I've seen this configuration before. Not exactly here. Similar enough."
"In a dream?" she asked.
"In a life," he said.
There was a dangerous curiosity in her eyes now. "Time-loop phenomenon?"
"Something like that," he said carefully. "I call it the Curse. It prefers checkpoints. It's exhausting. Occasionally useful. I remember the mistakes. No one else does."
"Side effects?" she asked.
"Emotional erosion. Chronic déjà vu. Poor impulse control."
"Those last two may be baseline for you," she said.
"Cruel," he said. "Accurate."
She considered. "Very well. Veil-loop phenomena are above my pay grade. I will simply adjust my priors. Tell me what went wrong."
"Nothing catastrophic," he said. "We cleared the nest. You used the unlabeled vial. It worked. But your channels flared enough that if the Destroyer had been slightly more complicated, it could have anchored on that and used you as a conduit."
"That would have been... inconvenient," she said.
"For you," he said. "For the city. For me, mostly paperwork."
"And the Curse dragged you back here," she said. "Meaning it disapproved."
"Or considered the risk unresolved," he said. "I don't pretend to understand its criteria. I just know it rarely gives me a second run on things it thinks are minor."
"Interesting," she murmured. "Very interesting."
"Please don't turn me into a paper," he said.
"Too late," she said. "You were probably a paper before you were a person."
He grimaced. "That explains a lot."
She set up the chalk array again. This time, her hand lingered over the unlabeled vial, then moved past it.
"We'll do this your way," she said. "Laundress, not comet."
"Good choice," he said. "Tilda would be proud."
"Introduce me sometime," she said. "I have questions about detergent."
They worked.
The noon vial went into the censer first—friction returning as the golden smoke settled. Ember Step around the first maw, negation pinned in tidy points rather than wild strokes. The Destroyer's attempt to steal friction met resistance sooner, destabilizing without provoking panic.
"Mana is responding more linearly," the Alchemist observed. "Your channels are... unusually cooperative with mine."
"Compliment?" he asked.
"Observation," she said. "Don't make it weird."
The dusk vial—her mercy—went into the lattice early, reinforcing the yield bead before the time-stretching maw could fully develop. He threw River Veil not at the distortion directly, but across the gap between the first and second maws, forcing them to share constraints they hadn't planned for.
The whispers from the third knot started earlier this time, trying to bait him with different names—Luminous, Eline, Sareen's exasperated voice. He knew the trick now; he treated them as badly tuned instruments and tuned them out.
"Gale Spiral," he said. "But shallow. We don't need to reach the core yet."
The Alchemist nodded. Together, they manipulated the distortions like a pair of very hardhearted physicians depriving an infection of oxygen.
When the core finally bared itself—blade-shape, grief, that unfinished intent—it did so at a fraction of the size as before.
"Now?" she asked, eyeing the unlabeled vial.
"Now," he said, "we do something petty."
He let his mana channels swirl in a pattern he'd been hesitant to try the first time. Will Breaker hummed approval on his back.
"Fourth Form," he said softly. "Ashen Lull."
This one wasn't about cutting or twisting or pinning. It was about remembering and refusing.
He reached into the pattern of the Destroyer, tracing the lines of law it had devoured: certain, weightless, proud. Then he overlaid a memory of a table in the square, of chairs that didn't match, of a woman refusing to tell a story and then telling it anyway to herself.
The magic wasn't complex. Any novice could have done it, if they'd had the right memory. He projected that sense of we're done now into the core.
The Destroyer shuddered.
For a moment, he felt its confusion. It had existed as appetite for so long that the idea of satiation was alien.
"So we teach it," the Alchemist murmured.
She didn't reach for the unlabeled vial. Instead, she took a pinch of plain salt from a pouch, whispered a short charm over it, and tossed it into the fading core.
"Go home," she said.
The salt hit like a period at the end of a long, rambling sentence.
The Destroyer shivered. Then, piece by piece, it dissolved. Not in a violent flare, but in a series of small, grudging surrenders. The warp in friction smoothed. Time's stretch snapped back. The whispers turned into ordinary echo and then into silence.
Xion let out a breath he hadn't known he'd locked in his ribs.
"Better?" he asked.
"Cleaner," she said. She looked mildly irritated. "Your lullaby trick was absurd."
"Absurd works," he said. "Especially on things that think they're solemn."
She gave him a look he could not yet read. "You used... memory."
"Mana channels link mind to soul," he said. "We shove power through them all the time. Sometimes we forget we can shove stories instead."
"Midnight Lore will want that technique documented," she said.
"Tell them it's proprietary," he said. "Charges: one plum and a polite table."
Her mouth betrayed a tiny snort. "Very well."
They did the sweep again.
This time, there was no sense of other shoe waiting to drop. The knot at the intake gate was gone; his chair-knot sat alone on the beam, a promise waiting to be leaned on. He tied it again, more neatly—small improvements, even in loops.
At the edge of the saltworks, the Curse tugged lightly in his chest, then settled, as if satisfied.
"So," the Alchemist said. "Your checkpoint god approves."
"Apparently," he said. "For now."
"Good," she said. "I prefer timelines that don't fold on my head. Now, about that secondary nest—"
"I'm coming with you," he said.
"You don't need to."
"I will sleep better," he said. "And if something goes sideways, it's easier to write one report than two eulogies."
She weighed that, then nodded. "Very well. East brine pits. We go by the upper catwalk. Less warped stone."
They walked.
⸻
The brine pits were shallower, the wrongness minor—a lesser nest, as she'd said. A cluster of Lesser-Class Lost Souls gnawing on temperature norms, making pockets of air too hot or too cold.
"Minor," she said. "We can handle this with bottlework alone."
He watched as she did.
It was a different kind of alchemy than she'd used against the Destroyer. Small vials, low-level charms, precise dosing. A puff of cooled vapor here to even out thermal gradients; a dusting of powdered copper there to re-anchor conductive laws. A small chant to remind water that it boiled at a specific point, not whenever it felt dramatic.
Her mana channels were elegant: not brute-force conduits, but fine branching reeds, designed to carry measured flows. In their own way, as impressive as any brute Ascent.
"Top one in the northern hemisphere," he said again, this time not teasing.
She didn't look up. "That rumor is going to spread, isn't it?"
"Yes," he said. "Sorry."
"Don't be," she said. "Rumors are protective coloration. As long as people think I'm stronger than I am, they bring more resources. That makes me stronger than I am."
"Efficient," he said.
"Exactly," she said.
They finished in under an hour.
On the walk back toward the city proper, the sun was slipping behind the viaduct, casting long bars of shadow across the road.
"Your Curse," she said at last. "How many times?"
"Too many," he said. "Sometimes it triggers on death. Sometimes on smaller catastrophes. Sometimes when I'm about to do something very stupid. Occasionally after I've done the stupid thing, which is rude."
"Is it external?" she asked. "Entity, contract, artifact?"
"Complicated," he said. "But it's tied to my soul. To my... Ascent, if you like. The Cycle of Suffering. Reset, replay, learn, repeat."
"And you remember everything?"
"Not everything," he corrected. "Memories blur. Emotional impact dulls. That's its own kind of suffering. But the broad strokes stick, especially around pain and choice."
"A cruel teaching method," she observed.
"Efficient," he said.
She tilted her head. "You joke about it."
"Sometimes," he said. "The alternative is lying down and letting the Gate eat me in one gulp."
"Midnight Lore has a file on recursive phenomena," she said. "If you want your... condition... documented, we can ensure the Ordo can't monopolize interpretation."
"You're offering to turn me into a paper," he said.
"Into several," she said, deadpan. "Authored jointly. With you as co-author, not subject."
He thought about that. About being pinned to a page, yes, but also about having some narrative control over his own loops, even if only as footnotes.
"Maybe later," he said. "After we've set a few more tables."
"Very well," she said. "The offer stands."
They reached the Chapel district as the first lamps were being lit.
Children ran ahead of the glow, chasing shadows. Somewhere, bells chimed—correctly off by three minutes. The square's rope lines were still up from the festival; the chalk remnants of table placements ghosted the cobbles.
"Will you come?" Xion asked suddenly.
"To what?" she said.
"The next table day," he said. "We set them in the square. One free thing from every stall. One true story from every guest. No receipts."
She looked at him for a long moment, plague mask dangling from one hand like a question mark.
"I do not sit at tables," she said. "I stand behind them. Easier to leave."
"Consider this research," he said. "We're testing whether shared meals reinforce city-scale mana stability."
"That's a lie," she said.
"Yes," he said. "But it's a helpful one."
She exhaled slowly. "If I come," she said, "no one will attempt to remove my hat."
"I will instruct the entire square," he said. "Hats are sacred. Vials are dangerous. The woman in the coat is to be offered bread, not bothered."
"Offer tea instead," she said. "Bread crumbs clog filters."
"Tea," he agreed. "Dusk-colored, preferably."
"Mercy brew," she said. "We might all need it by then."
They parted at the chapel steps. Oren was in the doorway, book under one arm, eyebrows raised.
"You're alive," he said. "And in one piece. This is very inconvenient; I'd prepared a heartfelt homily."
"Save it for a day when I actually die," Xion said, handing him the signed clearance from the Church's seal. "Destroyer-Class cluster neutralized. Saltworks safe. Lost Souls dissolved. No comets employed."
Oren glanced over the parchment. "Alchemist?"
"Efficient," Xion said.
"I like her already," Oren said. "She filled in her part of the report with complete sentences."
"Monster," Xion muttered.
The priest's gaze softened. "How many times?"
"Once," Xion lied, then corrected himself. "Twice. But we're stable now."
Oren nodded. "Good. Go sleep before your Curse decides to return you to this conversation and make me repeat myself."
"Terrifying thought," Xion said.
He climbed the narrow stairs to his small room under the chapel eaves.
The window was cracked open exactly the width a string could slip through. The evening smelled like rain thinking about committing.
He sat on the edge of the bed, hands open on his knees, and took stock.
Petty coins.
He had lost something again; he could feel the lack even if he couldn't yet name it. The precise pleasure of cool water on sunburned skin, maybe. Or the thrill of the first page in a new book. Something small. Something real.
"Worth it?" Will Breaker asked from where she leaned in the corner.
"Today," he said. "We handled it without escalating the wrong way. We kept the saltworks. We kept her channels intact. We kept the city's laws only slightly more annoyed than usual."
"And the Curse?" she asked.
"Remains unimpressed," he said. "But it let me keep this run. That's something."
He lay back, staring at the ceiling beams. They looked back, stubborn and honest.
Sleep came in hesitant waves.
At some point in the dark, he woke to thunder counting its way across the sky. He listened to the seconds between flash and sound—six, seven, five—and hummed a lullaby he did not remember learning.
It was still wrong.
It was less wrong than yesterday.
He accepted that as progress, closed his eyes, and let the storm complain overhead while the city below dreamed of tables, salt, and women who did impossible things with bottles.
In the seam behind maps, the Calendar Court scribbled an irritated note in the Ledger: Trinity cooperates with Midnight Lore. Law drift: tolerable. Petty rituals: irritating. Net effect: city remains annoyingly alive.
The Sundial added a footnote: Small magic, well-aimed, outperforms grand gestures once again.
The Scribe circled small twice.
The Sexton, tired of being last, closed the book and went to sit in a chair no one had invited him to. It held.
The Beast Gate, disappointed at the lack of fresh panic, rolled over and went back to sulking.
And somewhere in the hospital quarter, in a quarantine antechamber that smelled of boiled linen and iron, an Alchemist cleaned the glass of her plague mask, checked the integrity of her vials, and, for the first time in longer than she remembered, marked a small circle on a private calendar three days hence.
She labeled it, very quietly, in cramped script:
field observation: communal table (maryville)
No receipts required.