Nine years of forced abstention from my favorite feast day on the calendar had apparently not robbed me of a child’s fondness for masks and costumes, but only buried it. As the minutes slipped away and the time of the dance grew nearer… admittedly not a whole lot nearer, as it was still fairly early… I started to wish that I had made an earlier start on my outfit and come up with something that would be a proper costume in every sense of the word. A disguise. Something that not just present the semblance of another identity, but conceal my own beneath it.

It would be fun to go with Ian as a swordswoman, but in the eyes of everyone there I would be Mack the demon girl dressed up as a barbarian… but if I had come up with something with a full head covering, or a face mask and a wig or hair glamour, then I could show up as… well…

Someone else.

Someone not me.

It wasn’t that I wasn’t fond of myself… I wasn’t actively ashamed of myself or anything, at that moment… but it could have been a nice chance to go out among a bunch of people, many of them regular humans, and just be part of the crowd. The chance to do that was what I’d really been looking forward to about college, before Puddy outed me.

It wasn’t entirely her fault, though… or perhaps more accurately, she couldn’t claim all the credit. I’d give her all the blame for what she actually had done, but even if she hadn’t, the realities of campus politics regarding Harlowe Hall and the specifics of my condition would have made it difficult for me to keep it a secret. In retrospect, I’d been as naive as Sooni in some ways, such as in not taking the time to make arrangements for my feeding schedule or even properly figuring out what it was before coming to university.

If my nature hadn’t already been common knowledge, how much worse might that have turned out?

No, it would have been impossible for me to keep my heritage invisible while enjoying campus life… but I could imagine stepping back into the hellcloset for one night. Ian had maybe had the right idea in thinking that I needed to get out and let people get to know me as a person, but even that would be a matter of, “Hey, I guess this half-demon isn’t as bad as I assumed a half-demon would be”, not “Hey, I like this person. She’s interesting and fun.”

“Person” implicitly meant “human”, to most humans… an elf or a dwarf or a gnome could be a person to them, but they would be an elven person or a dwarven person or a gnomish person, and if they felt the need to drop some part of the descriptor it was the race they would keep, the modifier to a perceived default. When you moved away from those races to ones that looked less like the internal definition of “person”… ogres, orcs, goblins, and so on… the modifier became more important, and personhood became more distant.

Someone who got to know Semele might think of her as “a creepy girl”, while the same person would probably think of Oru as “a nice goblin” even if they liked her.

I was doing it myself, I realized: my generic “someone” was implicitly human by default.

It was an interesting to think about… especially when viewed in light of the way humanity had traditionally depicted demons. The exact features, not being based at all on reality, varied widely, but they included things such as wings like a gargoyle, horns like a minotaur, facial features like an orc, huge like an ogre, twisted like a troll, or cloven feet like a fawn. Reptilian scales and other such bestial features were also not uncommon.

It was apparently too much for humanity’s collective psyche that their most monstrous adversaries looked exactly like them. That had to be a disguise, a trick, a twisted mockery… and as well it may have been, originally, but it was also the only appearance demons had. All modern diabolists and theologians were in agreement on that score. What you saw was what you got, unless the demon was employing illusionary magic or shapeshifting to play on the popular image that had persisted for centuries.

Bringing that line of thinking back around to costumes, I realized that the fact that I couldn’t come up with anything more than “something with a mask” was a pretty solid indication of how foolish I was being. I had a costume. Ian… and, apparently, Sooni… had done a great job putting it together even at the last minute. Sure, everybody would know who I was, but even if I wasn’t “the demon girl from Harlowe” there was no guarantee I’d be universally beloved.

If I wasn’t “the demon girl” but was still scrawny and clumsy and geeky and kind of absent-minded and shy… well, I’d probably have ended up more or less with the same friends who loved me anyway.

“You’re awfully smiley, all of a sudden,” Ian said. He was sitting opposite me, all alone on his side of the table because Two insisted on being next to me if she couldn’t be across from me, and I really preferred to sit next to Amaranth.

“I was just thinking,” I said. “I guess… about how lucky I am.”

“You were so quiet, I thought for sure you were worried about Steff,” he said, and I felt a burst of guilt.

“Oh, no,” I said. “I mean, yeah, I am… of course… but… I had actually forgotten about her, if you can believe that. I hate to say it…”

“Your thoughts and feelings for yourself don’t disappear just because a dear friend is in trouble,” Amaranth said. “And I really think Steff is going to be fine. Dee has promised to summon emergency services if Steff’s life force weakens, if she has a heart attack or respiratory distress… even though Dee should be able to heal those without a problem…”

“Dee can heal a heart attack?” Ian asked.

“A heart attack isn’t actually a lot of damage,” Amaranth said. “But it doesn’t have to be, considering where it is. Anyway, Dee insists that it’s perfectly safe, but… the potion’s only ever been taken by elves, as far as she knows. I suspect a human heart would have given out under the strain.”

“Um… do you think that maybe we should get emergency services on the case, anyway?” I asked.

“I did,” Amaranth said. “This is the compromise we came up with. Dee’s staying with her the whole time, keeping an eye… and mind… on her condition.”

“I don’t know about you, but I’d feel better if Steff were being watched by professionals,” I said. “Even if they don’t have any more experience with this potion than Dee does, they’ve probably got more experience with, you know, people dying… and stopping it from happening.”

“Dee is a trained priestess, and that includes healing,” Amaranth said. “They don’t have a separate healing profession like we do. For all intents and purposes, she is a trained professional.”

“Yeah, okay,” Ian said. “Except… if elves don’t have heart attacks then what exactly is Dee looking for and what’s she going to do if she spots it?”

“Well…” Amaranth said, growing flustered, and I could tell that she hadn’t thought of this, “I suppose she’ll respond to any physical distress with healing, and that should take care of it. I mean, it’s not like you have to know how the heart fits together or how it works to undo damage to it. You just… pour energy on it.”

“I’d still feel better…” I said.

“Baby, I would, too,” she said. “Honestly, I would… but this could blow up into a huge scandal if it went from a private scare to a public crisis. I mean, Dee would probably be facing consequences from both the surface authorities and from her own people, and Steff’s privacy… well, it would cease to exist. Also, imagine the news report about a sinister potion from the underworld that messes with the gender binary and endangers your children’s lives. Lurid imagery about ‘dark elf’ priestesses emasculating or feminizing humans and surface elves is a sadly well-established theme in propaganda.”

“And in porn,” Ian said. “I mean, I could see there being porn like that.”

“Anyway, the point is that Dee’s not just shielding herself from trouble… actually, since she probably hasn’t broken any laws, the worst consequences might not even fall on her,” Amaranth said. “But moral panics are rarely rational or predictable, and even more rarely moral… I think it’s better if the whole thing stays a private matter between friends.”

“You don’t think people are going to notice there’s something suddenly different about Steff?” Ian asked.

“Well, she drops out of sight for the weekend and comes back changed,” Amaranth said. “Nobody has to know how… if anything, she’ll fit people’s expectations of what it means to be a transgender woman better after the potion’s run its course. She’ll have to explain to her mother, I suppose, but I’ve gathered she’s fairly supportive. I really doubt that any of the teachers will question her about it, though.”

“Um…” Ian said, to my surprise, as it was pretty much what I was thinking.

“What?” Amaranth asked.

“I think Coach Callahan might have a thing or two to say about the new Steff,” he said.

“Yeah,” I agreed, glad to not be the only one who thought so.

“Oh, come on… Coach Callahan likes Steff,” Amaranth said. “They’re practically involved with each other.”

“Yeah, and you don’t think that gives her some interest in sudden bodily rearrangements?” Ian asked. “Callahan likes guys. She likes guys who like guys, because guy plus guy equals more guys. Trust me on this one. I’ve listened to her going through it enough times to have memorized the arithmetic.”

“Steff is a girl,” Two interjected.

“Yeah, okay, I’m not going to argue that,” Ian said. “But Coach would… at least, she would if she cared what Steff or anyone else had to say on the subject. Whatever’s Steff… I don’t, identity… you take away the clothes and it’s a male body. Or at least it was. I’m not sure she’s going to see this change as an improvement.”

I nodded. I didn’t quite agree with how Ian put it, but the essential point he was getting at… that Callahan did not have a very sensitive view of Steff and that she would not likely take Steff’s altered body as an improvement… was true and too important to risk diluting by arguing with his wording.

“Well, that’s not really her call to make,” Amaranth said. “I mean, it would be nice for her if they could continue their arrangement, but if it was based on a fundamental incompatibility of viewpoint, then maybe it’s for the best that Steff provide her with a visual cue for her femininity, before their relationship goes any further.”

“You know… I’m not sure I’m comfortable calling it a relationship,” I said.

“Oh, hush, baby, that’s really not your call,” Amaranth said. “Anyway, Ian, I’m sure, Steff will be devastated if Coach Callahan rejects her, and you’re very sweet to worry…”

“The thing is, I’m not sure emotional consequences are all she’s got to worry about,” Ian said. “I mean, for as much as she’s into gay guys, Coach really, really doesn’t like elves. If she can’t think of Steff as a guy any more…”

“Well, this is all hypothetical,” Amaranth said, though she was worrying away at her lower lip. “We can’t really know how she’ll react.”

“Look, I don’t even know Steff that well… I’m only thinking about this stuff because I know you guys care about her,” he said.

“Well, like I said, you’re very sweet to worry,” Amaranth said. “But you know what?” She sat up very straight and tall beside me, and put on her biggest smile. “I’m going to maintain some perspective. If how people react to the new and improved Steff is the biggest consequence of this, that means she’s fine and everything worked okay. That’s a good thing, right?”

“Yeah, I guess it beats the alternative,” Ian said. “You know what the real question we should be asking is?”

“What?” Amaranth asked.

“What kind of diplomatic repercussions would there be if an ogre prince killed a dark elf princess?” he asked. “Or the other way around. While they were both at a human school.”

Once again, I completely suppressed the urge to correct his terminology. I couldn’t argue with either his premises or the seeming conclusion: it would be very, very bad.

“Well… um… you know, I really don’t think it would come to that, but I’m pretty sure Dee knows how to restrain people in a number of ways without harming them,” Amaranth said.

“Even if she’s distraught herself?” Ian asked. “Or if she thinks that maybe she deserves it?”

“I don’t think this is a very productive line of inquiry!” Amaranth said.

“Sorry,” Ian said. “I’m just trying to, you know, look at this from all the angles.”

“Well, not all angles are helpful angles,” Amaranth said. “Let’s talk about something else.”

And she tried… she made a valiant effort to start a conversation about classes, and about the upcoming festivities, but considering that she got more response on each subject from Two than from either Ian or myself, it was kind of a doomed attempt.

I couldn’t stop thinking about what Ian had said. Viktor against Dee… it would be a horrible fight, predicated by horrible circumstances, with horrible consequences. Slim chance or not, if we weren’t doing everything we could to stop it, we weren’t doing enough.

“I think we should to talk to Dee,” I said into the awkward silence. “We need to convince her to either get in the mirror with a representative from Ceilos who knows how the potion works, or if we need to take Steff into the healing center where they can monitor her, or both.”

“Baby, I tried…” Amaranth said.

“We’ll all go together,” I said.

“I’m worried, too, but I don’t think ganging up on Dee’s the answer,” Amaranth said.

“We won’t be,” I said. “We’ll be helping her fix her mistake… I mean, we’ve all made stupid decisions, but when we do, we help each other out. Dee’s done her share of that.” I looked at Ian, appealing to him for help.

“You know, fuck it,” he said. “I don’t really know Dee, and if I’m honest I don’t even like Steff… but if you want to help your friends, I want to help you. Besides, this is a rockfall waiting to happen and we’re just watching it.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, giving him a half downward-tilted face and a smile. “You don’t have to come, I guess… it’s not your friends.”

“No, but it’s yours,” Ian said. “And if we’re just making sure, you know, experienced professionals get involved, it shouldn’t take all night or anything… you’ll probably have a better time at the Veil dance if you know Steff’s okay.”

“I suppose we all will,” Amaranth said. “Okay. It’s settled, then. We’ll all go over together and talk to Viktor and Dee.”

“Viktor?” I repeated. I hadn’t counted on that.

“Of course,” Amaranth said. “You don’t think he’d be anywhere except by Steff’s side during this?”

Oh, this was going to be fun.

Discuss this story.

“Hi, Cetea… thanks for agreeing to talk with me,” Lucinda said, getting to her feet and holding out her hand.

“No problem,” Cetea said, clasping her palm to Lucinda’s but curling her four sharp-taloned fingers up loosely around the top of Lucinda’s hand instead of gripping firmly. Lucinda observed the awkwardness and made a mental note to check out the hands of future interviewees before trying to shake them.

“Go ahead and have a seat, unless you want to get some food,” Lucinda said. “I’m just getting stuff organized.”

“I’m fine. Do you do shorthand?” Cetea asked, watching the student reporter line up her pens and flip through her notepad.

“Kind of,” Lucinda replied. “I’ve got my own system.”

“Ah,” Cetea said, reaching up to stroke and soothe the snakes. “My cousin’s a steno.”

“Nice,” Lucinda said.

“Can I ask a question?” Cetea said. “I mean, I know you’re interviewing me, but I’m curious about something.”

“Sure,” Lucinda said. “Feel free. An interview’s not a monologue.”

“What’s this for, exactly?”

“Well, I’m a reporter with the Gazetteer…”

“I know, but… I didn’t just win any awards and I’ve kept my noses out of the little scandals,” Cetea said. “So what’s the story?”

“That’s what I want to find out,” Lucinda said. She gave her friendliest smile. “What is your story, Cetea? Who are you? Where do you come from? That kind of thing.”

“Why me, though?” Cetea said.

“Well, I’m going to be honest… I’m gathering material for something I’m not sure I can talk my editor into running. But somebody said something that got me thinking about why I got into journalism in the first place.”

“What was that?”

“Something about it being my job to tell people’s stories,” Lucinda said. “And you know, if the union burned down tomorrow or one of the deans got caught stealing money or something, we’d print it… but on a day to day basis, that’s what we do. But it’s mostly human stories.”

“So this is an affirmative action interview,” Cetea said.

“I wouldn’t have put it that way, but kind of. I just want to get more voices in the public forum. Does that bother you?” Lucinda said.

“Meh. It’s not the worst motive,” Cetea said. “Let’s go for it.”

“Okay, I’m going to be asking you about yourself, and also about your culture, because I don’t think most of our readers are very familiar with gorgons,” Lucinda said. She put a crystal down on the table. “I’m going to be taking notes so I can organize my thoughts, but I’m also going to be making an echo of this for later, just so I can make sure I’ve got everything accurately if I quote you. Is that okay?”

“Sure,” Cetea said, holding out one hand to examine the long fingernails. Her skin was covered in scales that were a very reflective yellow-green… her nails in particular were long and yellow and very shiny, like brass.

“Is that their natural color?” Lucinda asked her, pointing at the claws.

“Is that an interview question?”

“It’s a place to start,” the reporter said.

“Mostly,” Cetea said. “They tend to collect grime, so I clean and polish them regularly… the first time I ran out of nail polish last year and asked my roommate if she had any, it was kind of a learning experience.”

“Your roommate was…?”

“Her name was Willa. She was a golem. She dropped out about a month into the semester. Married someone she met on that crystal ball thing. One of those bigger-type goblins… I don’t remember his name, I only met him once. I thought they were both kind of stupid about it, but I kind of had the impression she only came here to meet someone. She was very single-minded about it.”

“How about you? Why’d you come here?”

“Not to bag a man,” Cetea said. “Or a woman. I wanted an education.”

“What are you studying?”

“Enchantment theory, and music.”

“Music?” Lucinda asked.

“Yeah.”

“You don’t seem… I mean… you know, never mind,” Lucinda said.

“What were you going to say?”

“Something stupid,” Lucinda said. “I don’t know what a bardic student is supposed to look like.”

“Human,” Cetea said.

“Uh… yeah. Sorry,” Lucinda blushed. “Stupid.”

“Eh, you’re trying,” Cetea said. “My uncle… great-uncle… used to crawl around caves with this guy, Lazarus, who taught music here forever ago…”

“Professor Lazar?” Lucinda asked. “The guy they named the music building after?”

“Yeah,” Cetea said. “Him. We called him Lazarus. I have one of his harps. Not here… I had to buy the one I use for classes. It’s waiting for me when I graduate.”

“Oh, wow,” Lucinda said. “Cool for you. So… you came here to study music?”

“I actually came here so I could learn other things along with the music,” Cetea said. “We do have something like a conservatory back home. It’s kind of famous… even elves send their children to learn.”

“Where’s home, for you?”

“Down,” Cetea said.

“In the underworld?”

“Yeah. We weren’t an underground race, originally,” Cetea said. “But the surface got crowded, and we got crowded out. There are some colonies still up top, but they’re very isolated… underground, it’s a bit of a struggle, but we’re not so cut off. We trade with kobolds and dwarves…”

“With both of them?”

“We’re neutral. If they want to trade with each other, they go through us.”

“And elves come down to study music at your school?”

“They come up,” Cetea said.

“Oh… you mean dark elves,” Lucinda said, realizing. “Sorry. I got hung up there for a second.”

“Yeah,” Cetea said. “Seeing pale white elves was kind of a shock when I came here. Not that I saw a lot of elven skin around the colony, but… well… that was an adjustment, too. When I was a hatchling, I thought elves were ghosts… that you could take the cloak off and there wouldn’t be anything there. I learned better, but it’s still weird seeing them with bare heads.”

“What else was an adjustment for you, coming to a human… predominantly human university?”

“Well, everything,” Cetea said. “There were girls who’d never seen a toilet before coming here. I mean, I hadn’t, but I read a lot…though really, that kind of thing doesn’t make it into a lot of your stories. Anyway, though, it’s not just the human stuff. I spent most of my time in Harlowe the first year, and there are so many different cultures on the floor, it’s hard not to tread on anybody. I think I did okay, if only because I’m personally used to dealing with different cultures, but I’m not sure who’s being served by having a separate dorm.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not like we’re any less strange to each other than we are to humans, and learning how to get along with goblins and gargoyles is nifty but it doesn’t help much in a ‘predominantly human’ university,” Cetea said. “It would be more useful if we were learning how to deal with humans, and vice-versa.”

“But you came back to Harlowe for your second year,” Lucinda said.

Cetea shrugged.

“If it wasn’t here, and we all had to mix, I think things would be better,” she said. “But it is, and I’m not going to be the one who slips outside her place.”

“Has anyone in particular made you feel that way?” Lucinda asked.

Cetea raised a shiny hand up to her mouth and covered it. The snakes’ mouths all opened and they hissed, not quite in unison. It was creepy to Lucinda, how much it sounded like laughter.

“I’m sorry,” Cetea said. “That question… ‘anyone in particular’. I got that a lot, when I tried to talk to my advisor about how I felt last year. It’s not anyone in particular. It’s everything in general. The lizardfolk get treated as beasts, because that’s what humans do with ‘humanoids’ that look like animals that aren’t monkeys.”

“What race looks like monkeys?” Lucinda asked.

“Oh… um… no one. I was being hypothetical there,” Cetea said. “Anyway, they’re beasts but I’m a monster… and when you’re a monster, everybody’s afraid of you, until the moment they think you’re weak and they decide to be brave.”

“So, there were moments when you were afraid of what a human student might do to you?”

“There were moments when I was afraid of what a hundred human students might do after what I did to one who tried to do something to me,” Cetea said. “Which is sad, because really, I’ve got the perfect non-fatal self-defense device right up here.” She pointed to her reflective eyes. “But because I have it and they don’t, people are afraid of it.”

“In fairness, don’t you see how having poison snakes for hair might be legitimately intimidating?” Lucinda asked.

“First of all, I don’t have snakes for hair,” she said. “I’m reptilian. Did you ever see a reptile with hair?”

“I saw a bearded dragon once,” Lucinda said.

“Funny,” Cetea said. “But I mean, the snakes aren’t there instead of anything. I’m not ‘supposed’ to have hair to begin with. That’s a mammal thing. Isn’t that where the word ‘mammal’ comes from?” She mimed like she was fluffing up a big poofy hairdo. “Because you have mammaries?”

“Um… that’s not what mammaries are,” Lucinda said.

“Really? What are they?”

“Breasts.”

“Every animal has a breast, though,” Cetea said.

“Breasts,” Lucinda said. “As in, boobies.” At Cetea’s blank stare, she cupped hers briefly. “These.”

“Oh, really? I thought those were just the cuppy things you wore,” Cetea said.

“Um, no,” Lucinda said. “Those are for support, since they don’t have a lot of, you know, structure. Didn’t you ever notice, with your roommate…?”

“Willa moved out and I never got another one last year,” Cetea said. “I have a roommate this year, but I don’t see much of her. I just thought… well, the goblin girls don’t wear them, and they don’t have anything there.”

“Well, goblins don’t have mammaries,” Lucinda said.

“Aren’t they mammals? They have hair.”

“I don’t know what they are,” Lucinda admitted. “I thought they were reptiles, because they don’t have… you know.”

“Huh,” Cetea said. “Anyway…”

“Poisonous snakes,” Lucinda said.

“Yeah, well, the way I see it… if I have a dozen mouths full of poison fangs, or a flaming catapult in my pocket, or whatever, that should make it more reassuring to people that I’ve got a way of disabling an attacker without hurting them.”

“Speaking as somebody who honestly does find you a little intimidating, I can say that it’s hard to think about somebody turning to stone as being painless or non-fatal,” Lucinda said.

“Human magic can cure a lot worse than that these days, though,” Cetea said. “And anyway, it wears off in about a week on its own. That’s something else that was an adjustment, though… training myself not to open my eyes when I’m startled.”

“Your eyes are closed?” Lucinda asked.

“Veiled,” Cetea said. “Lidded. It’s not the same thing that you have. I can see out, but you can’t see in. We walk around like that most of the time, but if something threatens us… poof.”

“So what color are your eyes under there?”

“Dunno,” Cetea said. “Nobody’s ever got a good look at them.”

“Not even your family?”

“We’re not immune to each others’ gazes,” Cetea said. “They’d be able to throw it off in a few hours, though.”

“What about you, in a mirror?”

Cetea shuddered and all her snakes reared. Lucinda jumped back in her chair.

“Sorry,” Cetea said. “Mirrors… that’s another adjustment. Great big mirrors in the bathrooms. We have horror stories about mirrors… like a bride who gets stuck in front of one for a hundred years, until the dust on it’s thick enough that she can’t see her eyes in it any more.”

“If that really happened, couldn’t she just close her eyes or look away as soon as she, uh, thawed?”

“It would be too late… how long does seeing something take you?” Cetea said. “That’s why in the bad old days, the other races had stories about how horrible we looked. None of them got a good look at our faces because as soon as they saw it, poof.”

“If you don’t mind me saying, I think gorgons are kind of pretty,” Lucinda said. “With your shiny scales, and everything.”

“Thank you,” Cetea said. “If you don’t mind me asking, what races do you think are ugly?”

“Uh… um…”

“Rhetorical question,” Cetea said. “There really aren’t any races I’ve found that really match my aesthetic ideals, but that’s because a good crown is one of the first things we look for.”

“Crown… of snakes?” Lucinda asked, and Cetea nodded. “So… male gorgons have them, too?”

“Yeah,” Cetea said. “I’ve heard all the stories, that males don’t have snakes, or that they’re the ugly ones, or that we don’t have males… I honestly don’t know where they came from. Our men look exactly like our women, just like every other race… well, I guess the mammary thing is different, if that’s not just clothes.”

“I actually think more races have differences between men and women,” Lucinda said. “Which might be where the confusion came from.”

“Really?” Cetea said. “Well, I guess there are a lot of mammal races… but, goblins and kobolds are the same.”

“Except in the, you know, privates,” Lucinda said.

“The what?”

“The, uh, genitalia,” Lucinda clarified. “Men have different ones than women.”

“But they still look the same, don’t they?”

“I haven’t actually looked at any goblins,” Lucinda said. “But I think they’re normal.”

“What’s ‘normal’?”

“I mean, like ours,” Lucinda said. “Mammalian, I mean.”

“No offense, but I’m not sure I want to know what that means,” Cetea said, shaking her head. The snakes’ heads moved in the opposite direction. “That would be weird to me. Different… stuff… for men and women. I can’t wrap my head around it.”

“So, you’ve been going here more than a year now and you never realized that?”

“I didn’t spend a lot of time peeking in the boys’ bathroom,” Cetea said.

“Not to be indelicate, but did you never notice that men look different in tight jeans than women do?”

“I didn’t spend a lot of time staring at mammal crotches,” Cetea said. “But when I did notice it, I just figured they were aroused a lot of the time. I had no idea a lump like that was normal.”

“Well, see, we’re learning things about each others’ races,” Lucinda said. “Um, if I can ask a question about your crown?”

“Wreath,” Cetea said. “Men have crowns, women have wreaths.”

“But they’re exactly the same?”

“Crowns are male, wreaths are female.”

“Noted,” Lucinda said. “I’m not sure how to word this, but… can you see with them? I mean, it looked like they saw me first and then you did.”

“No, I only have two eyes that are mine,” Lucinda said. “But they ‘tell’ me things, and they respond to my thoughts.”

“So you don’t control them?”

“No,” Cetea said. “They knew I was looking for you, and they looked for you… but some days they get sulky, or they want attention. The worst is when they started fighting each other. I don’t know if they don’t realize that their blood is mine and they’re just making all of us sick when they bite each other, or if they don’t care.”

“They’re not intelligent, then?”

“They’re snakes.”

“So, if somebody tried to touch them…”

“They’d probably get bit,” Cetea said. “They bite me sometimes.”

“How long would they be, if they stretched all the way out?”

“About two feet long… but they really can’t just stretch out like that without something to support them. They’re halfway coiled most of the time.”

“Do you… uh… do you feed them?”

“They don’t need to eat separate from me, but if I don’t want my hands getting bit on the way to my mouth, I do,” she said. “They hunt rodents and lizards while I sleep. At home, I mean, they did.”

“Did they catch many from your bed?”

“Oh, we don’t sleep in beds,” Cetea said. “We all bed down in the kitchen, around the stove.”

“Do you wash them?”

“When I can,” she said. “They hate showers, so I don’t bother. I can’t really scrub them, or oil them up like I do the rest of my scales… that’s why they’re so dull compared to me.”

“Is it weird having a dozen living creatures sticking out of your skull?”

“Is it weird not having any?” Cetea asked. “I can understand how hard it can be to understand what it’s like, but I can’t really imagine what it’s like not to.”

“This might be getting into morbid territory, and please tell me if I’m touching on something taboo, but… if they’re alive, can they die? And what would happen?”

“Oh, they can be killed… older people often have lost a few to accidents or fights,” Cetea said. “They won’t die of natural causes because they’re not going to get any sicker from anything than I am, and they can heal from just about anything as long as I’m alive.”

“Could… forgive me, but my imagination… could they stay alive if you were dead?”

“Maybe for a while,” she said. “But I don’t think so. We share blood.”

“Sorry… I don’t mean to focus on your hair, er, your wreath,” Lucinda said. “Just tell me if anything I ask is bothering you.”

“It’s not bothering me,” Cetea said, smiling wryly. “But for reference, I think the closest equivalent would be you giving an interview all about your, uh, breasts.”

“Oh, well, let’s go to another subject,” Lucinda said. “Your uncle… your great-uncle… knew Professor Lazar?”

“They traveled together, a little. Cetus… my great-uncle… showed him the way around our neck of the underworld.”

“Is he the one who taught your people music?”

“Cetus?”

“Lazar.”

“Why would we need to be taught?” Cetea asked, and some of her snakes looked angry. “We already had the conservatory at that point… he was actually there to learn from us.”

“Oh! Sorry,” Lucinda said. “I didn’t mean to imply… I don’t think of reptilians as being musical. That’s probably stupid.”

“I don’t know any race that doesn’t have music,” Cetea said. “There was an ogre in one of my performance classes last year. He was pretty good, when he remembered to show up. Every race is musical. It’s the universal language.”

“By that token, what did Professor Lazar have to learn from you?”

“Our songs, I’d imagine,” Cetea said. “And the ones in our library. We had songs from all the races we traded with… dwarves, elves, kobolds…”

“Kobolds?”

“You’re doing it again,” Cetea said. “It was a cultural exchange. He had songs from all over the surface.”

“So, really, you were teaching each other, your ancestors and him,” Lucinda said.

“If this story comes out and it’s about how the brave Professor Lazar descended into darkness and taught the gorgons how to sing, I’m going to throw up,” Cetea said. “In front of you. And when I throw up, it’s a chain reaction.”

“I’m just thinking about the best angle to involve the average human reader in the story,” Lucinda said. “A cultural exchange is good.”

“Yeah, whatever,” Cetea said. “Anyway, he made four or five harps while he was down with us, and he left one with my great-uncle when he left.”

“As a sign of friendship?”

“As payment for a vase he broke,” Cetea said.

“Ah,” Lucinda said. “So, are your whole family musicians?”

“If they were, I’d probably never get the harp,” Cetea said. “My father is… I guess it would translate as ‘chef’, but there’s less cooking. We cook some things with heat, but our cuisine is more about presentation than anything else. Our mouths don’t chew well, so we keep portions small to avoid having to stretch out our jaws to swallow, and every meal includes a plate of amuse-gueules.”

“What’s that?”

“Distractions for them,” Cetea said. She pointed up at her wreath. “We have to make sure what they’re eating looks as good as or better than what we’re eating, or there are going to be bites. We’re each a little resistant to our own snakes’ venom, and those of close family, but it still doesn’t feel great.”

“Does anybody ever… muzzle or restrain them?”

“No, and I can’t imagine anybody doing that,” Cetea said.

“So, your father prepares food,” Lucinda said. “Is that a professional thing? I mean, does he do that for the family or…”

“I guess you’d call it professional,” Cetea said. “We’re communalists, it’s what he does for the colony. There’s usually a waiting list for his tables.”

“And your mother?”

“She teaches. Literature and storytelling.”

“Any siblings?”

“I have a sister, but she’s too young to have a path. I have a brother a few years younger than me,” Cetea said. “Nobody expects much from him, because he has feralia.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a condition where the snakes aren’t properly… connected? They act wildly all the time, they bite each other and the baby and anybody else that gets near. They have to be defanged, which… well, it’s pretty horrific for a child, but it beats the alternatives.”

“I’m sorry,” Lucinda said. “If you don’t want to talk about…”

“It’s okay,” Cetea said. “They still manage to cause a lot of trouble, even without fangs. He doesn’t get any feeling from them, so he never knows if they hurt themselves, and because they don’t send him signals he has a hard time getting around. He’s got to keep looking around and behind himself, stay away from walls, and stay out of narrow corridors.”

“I can see where some of that would be a problem, but nor… uh, I mean, other races can get around okay without a crown or wreath of snakes looking out for them,” Lucinda said.

“Well, maybe things are different for you,” Cetea said. “I probably couldn’t explain it properly to somebody who doesn’t understand what it’s like to have functional snakes.”

“To turn back to your experience here,” Lucinda said, “would you mind giving me some examples of what you were talking about, the problem of being viewed as a ‘monster’ among humans?”

“Well, if you want me to pull out the story about how I got lynched or the time I was chased out of town, I can’t help you,” Cetea said. “But you said earlier that I intimidated you.”

“Yeah, but… I’m here, sitting down and talking to you,” Lucinda said, sounding hurt.

“Sure, because you decided to do an interview with the ‘unknown voices’,” Cetea said. “Chances are you’re talking to me because I intimidate you. You didn’t pick a little goblin or a fluffy faun or something safe and ‘sexy’ like a mermaid, you went straight to the gorgon girl so you could make a point.”

“That’s not fair,” Lucinda said.

“I’m sorry, is this story about you?” Cetea said. “You asked a question. Let me finish answering. You’re intimidated by me. I understand that’s not anything personal, but that doesn’t change the fact that you are… and you’re not alone. People on the surface are intimidated by me, in general. I know this. Imagine how that affects me when I have a chance to decide whether to approach someone or not. Imagine how it affects others when they have a choice to approach me or not. Is it impossible for me to make friends with humans because I’m a gorgon? No, it’s not. Can I point to any one friend I lost when they suddenly realized I was a gorgon? No, I can’t. But knowing how you feel when you look at me, can you honestly say it’s hard to imagine that I have a harder time making friends than you do?”

“I suppose it really isn’t,” Lucinda said. “But… honestly, it feels kind of racist saying that.”

“Right,” Cetea said. “One human I met last year made a big deal about how she’s skinblind, as she put it. ‘I don’t see humans or gorgons or elves, I just see people.’ That’s a wonderful disorder for a human to have, but I can’t not be aware that I’m a gorgon surrounded by humans, and I’d rather have other people think about what that means than pretend it doesn’t matter.”

“Okay,” Lucinda said, scribbling on her notepad. “Um… I think that’s enough to work up a basic piece. I’ll probably quote you directly on that last, if you don’t mind, it was really good. Can I a-mail you if I have any follow-up questions?”

“Sure,” Cetea said. “I’d ask when this is going to go out, but you told me you don’t think it will.”

“Oh, I’m going to do something with it,” Lucinda said. “If it’s not in the Gazetteer, I’ll put it somewhere. I’ll cross that bridge when I get there, though. Thank you so much, Cetea,” she said, standing up. She started to hold out her hand, then raised it gave a little wave, which Cetea returned.

“You’re welcome,” Cetea said. “And just so you know we cover our eyes.”

“What?”

“When we’re greeting someone respectfully,” she said, lifting her hand and very slowly and putting it across her eyes, careful not to disturb the writhing snakes.

“Oh,” Lucinda said. “Do I do that back?”

“After I uncover mine,” Cetea said, doing so. One of the snake heads lunged for her hand and she pulled it out of the way. “That’s about the minimum polite time. You leave them covered longer when you’re greeting an important person, but they return the same.”

“Would it be an insult if they didn’t?”

“It would make them look foolish and petty, more than anything else.”

“This is good,” Lucinda said. “I know what my first question is going to be in my next interview.”

Discuss this story.

“Steff!” Amaranth said. “Are you okay? What happened to your jacket?”

“What?” Steff said. She lifted her arm listlessly and looked at the shredded sleeve. “Oh… I don’t know?”

I had a pretty good idea. It wasn’t torn, but cut, over and over again in different directions. Which meant probably she hadn’t made it back to the necromancy building before she’d had the urge to do something bigger than scratch her palms with the vampiric knife.

“You did put it back, right?” I asked her.

“Huh? Oh, yeah… of course I did,” Steff said. I honestly couldn’t tell if she was lying or not, because she was saying everything in the same tiny, tired voice. “Definitely.”

“Where have you been?” Amaranth asked. “We’ve all been worried sick over you.”

“Oh, that must be what it was,” Hazel said. “I’m a champion worrier.”

“I’m fine,” Steff said. “I just sort of… lost track of time. I’m not too late to kiss the birthday girl, am I?”

“It isn’t my birthday,” Two said. “I wasn’t born. But you aren’t too late to kiss me. There isn’t a time limit on that.”

Steff stared at her, confused. It seemed like Two had just thrown too much at her for her to handle at one time.

This looked really bad to me. Whatever Steff had done with the knife, it wasn’t in her hands anymore, so it clearly wasn’t a case of simple fascination distracting her. Even taking into account the emotional whirlwind that Steff had been going through, it seemed like there had to be more going on.

It hit me that if the knife was in fact evil and not just sketchy-looking and with a questionable enchantment on it, it would likely extract a cost from the wielder or the victim for the use of its mystical powers.

“Go to her, hon,” Amaranth said, nudging Steff towards an expectant and increasingly alarmed-looking Two who didn’t understand why she was hesitating to give their ritualized greeting.

Finally, Steff went over to her, tripping a bit on the leg of a chair, and with a little prompting from Two, she did the required hug and double-kiss.

“Happy, um, party,” Steff said.

“Happy party to you, too!” Two said.

Amaranth looked at me, worrying her lower lip between her teeth. I just nodded. Steff flaking out a bit wasn’t so weird, but I couldn’t remember ever seeing Steff stumble like that, even a little bit.

“Dude, what the hell has Steff been quaffing?” Celia asked.

“She has… issues,” Amaranth said.

“No kidding.

“But she’s getting help for them,” Amaranth added.

“She should get more.”

“Hey, she didn’t spend a couple days petrified,” I said.

“What I do with my downtime is my business,” Celia said.

“You’re going to pretend that you did that on purpose?” I asked.

“It’s so damn boring here,” she said. “Why not be a rock if nothing else is going on?”

“You could always take part in activities with the rest of us,” Amaranth said. “We do appreciate your company, you know.”

“What? Watch TV? Play dress-up with the ear brigade? Fuck everything that moves? Play with little stone dolls?” Celia said.

“Well, what did you do for fun where you came from?”

“I hiked,” she said. “Explored the canyons. Collected rocks.”

“You could go hiking around here,” Amaranth said. “There are some trails in the forest.”

Celia shuddered visibly.

“What?” I asked.

“There wasn’t that much green stuff around where I come from,” she said. “Anyway, it’s too damn cold to be outside for long now.”

“No kidding,” I said. “I’m not looking forward to the snow. When I applied here, I was thinking since it was kind of in the middle of everything, from north to south, that it wouldn’t be too cold in the winter but it also wouldn’t be too intolerant about stuff… turns out it just means I get both cold and intolerance.”

“Oh, well, I can’t speak about the south and tolerance, but I can tell you the autumn has been much more mild so far than it would have been further north,” Amaranth said. “Actually, I’m surprised at how fast it’s been passing me by… the fall’s always been my ‘busy season’ back home. I mean, the time of year when there’s a lot of extra stuff going on. I do most of my regular work in the spring and the summer, then fall was festival season, and then winter was the closest thing I had to downtime. There was the solstice observance, but other than that… well, cold always bothered the humans a lot more than it did me, and with my field hibernating I always had energy to spare. As much as I love my work, I always looked forward to winter.”

“Not me,” I said. “Only thing I ever liked about winter was Khersentide and, of course, the break from school… and I only had a few Khersens I can really remember before I ended up with my grandmother.” I felt a flush of irritation at the memories that were being stirred. “Anyway, what are we going to do about Steff?”

“Well… I don’t know what we can do, except keep an eye on her and be here for her. She’s already seeing a mental healer, isn’t she?” Amaranth said. “I… um… I don’t think we need to try to do their job for them, you know? I think it’s just possible that we could make things worse. Anyway, don’t you think it’s kind of a good sign? I mean, obviously she must have had a pretty strong impulse for hurting herself, but she didn’t give vent to it until she found something that could do it without lasting harm.”

“Apparent lasting harm,” I said.

“Yeah, uh, I’m not really clear on what you mammals do or don’t have going on in the sensory department, but it seems pretty damn apparent to me,” Celia said. “The elf thing smells about half-dead.”

“Uh, that’s probably because she’s been in the necromancy department,” I said. “Some of the stuff she does is pretty… hands on.”

“Yeah, among other things,” Celia said. “I don’t mean she smells like dead bodies. She’s always got that taste swirling around her. I mean she’s got the scent of somebody who is half-dead on her. Not sick. Not hurt. Death. It’s got a flavor of its own.”

“So, there’s nothing wrong with her but she’s almost dead anyway?” I asked.

“No, there’s something wrong with her and she’s half-dead,” Celia said.

I looked over at Steff, who was very visibly leaning on Two for support as she showed her the deck of cards. A little movement caught the corner of my eye and I saw Iona, drifting over towards them with a casual look on most of her face that did nothing to hide the hungry gleam in her eyes. I seriously doubted it was the buttercream frosting that was drawing her in like that.

Whatever Celia’s tongue could pick up, so could Iona’s nose.

“We should get over there,” I said, hurrying towards the table before Amaranth had started her response.

“Good idea,” she said. “I feel weird, standing here and talking about her.”

“Look at what Steff made for me, Mack,” Two said, holding up one of the cards. “It’s okay to look at them,” she added. “They’re only orders if you’re reading them for one.”

“Nice,” I said, looking at a card that said “draw on the back of your hand”, and had a picture of a slim hand with neat little fingernails and an elaborate pattern of vines and leaves drawn on it. Steff’s elven heritage wasn’t as easy to leave behind as she liked to pretend, it seemed.

“They are just silly little doodles,” Two said. “But I think they are very good silly little doodles.”

“I think you’re right,” Amaranth said.

Iona had sidled up alongside Steff, on the other side from Two. Two turned towards her.

“You look hungry,” she said. “Would you like a piece of cake?”

“I could just kill a piece of cake,” Iona replied, her eyes locked on Steff, who didn’t seem to notice.

“Oh, you don’t have to kill it,” Two said, holding out a plate with a piece of cake on it, which Iona ignored. “It was never alive. Only the wheat and the sugar ever were.”

“So, Steff, have you talked to Viktor?” I asked. “He was looking for you, you know.”

“He was?” Steff said. “Oh, shit… I hope he’s not mad.”

“I think he’ll just be glad that you’re okay,” Amaranth said. “We got worried when you didn’t show, that’s all.”

“Sorry,” Steff said. “I just… I got wrapped up in stuff.”

“Have you ever met Steff’s boyfriend, Iona?” I asked. “I mean, you guys are the same year and all.”

“Don’t think so,” Iona said, still looking at Steff. “What’s he like?”

“He’s pretty much the last person on campus you’d want to have pissed at you,” I said.

“That a fact?” Iona said, leaning in towards Steff like she was being pulled.

Apparently, my aim with subtle hints was about as good as my aim with thrown daggers, because Steff burst into tears.

“Shit, Mack, I didn’t mean to get everybody worried,” she said. “I was just… I was having…”

“I didn’t mean you,” I said quickly, but it was too late. Steff turned and collapsed against Two, who hugged her tightly without understanding or reservation, her face as blank and neutral a mask as it ever had been. She tried vainly to put the plate with the cake on it down without releasing Steff from the clench. Amaranth took it and put it on the table.

“Oh, you’re all worked up,” Iona said, putting her hand on Steff’s shoulder and tugging her away. “You know what you need? Fresh air. A little walk around campus.”

“You aren’t supposed to go out after dark without a reason,” Two said.

“Oh, we’ll be fine,” Iona said.

I tried to figure out what to say to get Iona to back off without starting a panic… at this point, I was more concerned with that than with preserving her secret for its own sake. I’d kept my mouth shut about what the mermaids had done in their own lands, but if Iona couldn’t keep her predatory nature in check she wasn’t going to be my top priority.

Feejee intervened before I could, though. She put her hand on Iona’s arm and pulled her away from Steff.

“Come on, Io,” she said. She gave me an apologetic look and a “can you believe this?” eye roll. “Maybe we should take that walk.”

“Wow,” Steff said, sniffling and drying her eyes. “First Feejee and you, then Iona takes after me… I wouldn’t have expected the merms to be so hot to trot.”

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “I think we’re going to have to have a talk about that.” I looked at Two. “Possibly all of us.”

“I’ll be looking forward to that,” Ian said, drifting in a little closer.

The rest of the human guests were kind of watching us with half-concealed interest. I wondered what it looked it like through their eyes. From Hazel’s nausea to the conversation about her possible pregnancy through this, it had to be strange being on the edge of so much drama and not understanding it.

Either that or they were just staring at the weird Harlowe kids and I was badly overestimating how interesting our little lives were.

“Hey, come on, isn’t this a party?” Hazel said again. “The fishfolks may have floated off early, but there’s still plenty of food and I’m waiting for a challenger on the darts.”

With a little more cajoling on her part, things settled down and people started eating and talking and playing again. I hung close to Steff, but she seemed to be doing alright. She wasn’t getting any weaker or more out of it or anything, and half-dead was still half-alive. People probably came back from worse.

It was only as the party wore on that I realized the mermaids weren’t the only ones who’d left. Honey and Dee had both slipped out at some point. I asked Amaranth and Ian if they’d seen either of them leaving, but of course, they hadn’t.

Thinking back, it seemed like I hadn’t seen Dee since Steff stumbled in. The two facts didn’t have to be related, necessarily, but considering Dee’s harsh judgment on Steff’s behavior, it wasn’t impossible to think that the animosity she’d once felt towards Steff might have been rekindled a little.

In any event, the party could hardly be said to have come off without a hitch, but there was cake and there was good food and Two was happy. It hadn’t been an unmitigated disaster. Nobody had ended up in the healing center. Nobody had got arrested. There hadn’t been any screaming arguments. The metaphorical glass could hardly be said to be full, but I wasn’t about to complain.

I supposed that was what I’d have to call a “pretty good night”.

And, as I listened to Hazel explaining about sleepover parties to Two, I realized it had nowhere to go but up.

After I knocked on Amaranth’s door, I heard a rather loud sniffle, and then the sound of something heavy being shifted around, and then her bare feet slapping angrily against the tile floor. She finally opened the door. Her eyes were a little bit puffy and red, but not as much as mine would have been after crying all day. She looked down at me with a look on her face that I couldn’t quantify.

Cold anger?

Hard sadness?

Hurt defiance?

It went without saying that she was breathtaking.

“Come to yell at me some more?” she asked. The catch in her voice betrayed the strength in her face.

“I didn’t yell at you,” I said. Impressively, I managed to say this without yelling. “Can I… can I please come in?”

“Why not,” she said sulkily, stomping away. I followed meekly behind her.

“Your robe is, um, still showing,” I said, pointing to the corner of the bed. Amaranth went bright pink and shoved it back under the mattress. Like many people do when they try to do something angry, she put more force than thought into this… rather than lifting the corner of the mattress first and then just sort of tucking the robe beneath it, she did her best to shove and stuff the robe out of sight without moving the mattress. It sort of worked… sort of.

“So, what do you want?” she asked when she’d finished. It sounded like she was daring me to say one more word about her forbidden garment.

“I… um… you remember that suitcase I gave you?” I asked. In the time it had taken her to push the robe mostly out of sight, I’d come up with something that almost resembled a plan.

“Yeah,” she said, and her voice had become more sad than angry. “I suppose you… you must want it back.”

“I just… I kind of need it,” I said. “For something.”

“Oh, right,” she said. She was getting herself mad again. “You don’t have to say anything more. You obviously can’t trust the science girl with your stuff… she might do weird experiments on it.”

She turned herself all the way around, pushing the case at me as she came back around to face me. It was the fastest and sloppiest she’d ever done her “producing an object from thin air” thing, but of course, I still hadn’t actually seen the case appearing.

“It’s all there,” she said, as I took it from her. “Whatever’s in there, I mean. I didn’t even open it up.”

I turned and set the case down on her bed.

“Good,” I said, unhooking the latches. “Because if you still thought I hated science even after you’d seen this, then I don’t know what I would do.”

“Seen what?” she asked

“This is Buzz Saber,” I said, pulling out the first of my Mecknight figures. Buzz wore a tight suit of leather armor, and with his chainsaw slung over his back, there was nothing obviously fantasy about him. I paused just a moment, until it seemed like Amaranth was about to question why I’d just put a little plastic man on her bed, and then I pulled out another toy. “This is his motorcycle.”

I touched the figure of Buzz lightly on the top of its head, and it came to life, leaping on the bike and drawing the chainsaw. Vehicle and weapon both roared to life with tiny little motor noises, and he rode around on top of her bed spread, brandishing the whirring instrument. Entranced, Amaranth leaned in and touched her finger to the edge of the blade.

“It’s an illusion,” I said, as Amaranth looked down at her fingertip in disappointment. “The edge doesn’t actually move like that.” I pulled out some of the other knights and set them up. “These are Flash Bolt, and Piston, and Gearhead, and this is… um, Annie… she doesn’t really have a code name, for some reason. They use their mechanized motorbikes and chemical propelled weapons to, you know… fight evil and stuff.”

“Why… why are you showing me this?” she asked.

“So you’ll know that I couldn’t hate you for liking science… because I love it,” I said. “I just… I have a hard time believing in it.”

“And that’s why you think anybody who does is stupid,” she said, turning away from the spectacle of the enaction figures.

“No!” I said.

“I heard what you said,” she said, a sliver of despondence in her voice. “And I know you hate lying… so… so… it must have been the truth.”

“Please, Amaranth,” I said. “I’m not lying now. I… I lost my temper, that’s all.”

“That doesn’t mean you weren’t telling the truth,” she said.

“Amaranth, I used to spend so much time, alone in my room or down… well, by myself, imagining–fantasizing, really–that I lived in a world where there weren’t things like demons, and you could solve any problem by building a machine or figuring out a formula, or whatever,” I said. “When I… well, when I’d go back into what I thought of as ‘the real world’, you know, high school, and now college, I always had to tell myself that those things weren’t real. The only way I was ever going to have control of my life was to learn magic and make a lot of money as an enchanter, which meant keeping my head level and my feet on the ground.”

“So, now you have to shout down anybody who tries to say otherwise,” Amaranth said. “I remember. Push or be pushed, right? If somebody tells you that science is real, you have to bludgeon them until they admit they’re wrong, or it means you’re wrong…”

“Amaranth, you’re right… I’m really not good at seeing a middle ground,” I said. “But… it comes from years of having to convince myself that science only works in stories. In a way, I was really shouting at myself.”

She shook her head.

“I’m sorry,” she said, blinking away tears. “What you’re saying makes sense… but… I watched you let Puddy manhandle you and throw you into the table without a word of complaint, and then… and then…”

“…and then I have no problem telling the Mechan circle exactly how I feel about them,” I said. “Okay, look, that was me being stupid. Puddy’s… well, I thought of her as my friend. The Mechans were a bunch of strangers. If I’d been thinking of them in terms of… well, in terms of you… okay, I’m not saying this right.” I could see in her face that I was losing her, that she was maybe seconds away from bursting into tears and then probably telling me to get out. I got desperate. “I’m sorry I yelled, Amaranth, and I’m sorry I called anybody stupid, because you’re the least stupid person I know… and I love you, and… and…”… and I said a bunch of things that were anything but words.

“You what?” Amaranth asked, leaning in close. Her curiosity, at least, seemed to have forestalled the tears.

I tried again.

“I don’t know what I would be, if I can’t be yours,” I said, forcing each word out individually.

“I… I don’t even know what to say to that. I mean, you have just given me the shittiest day of my life,” she said, turning away from me. “I have never been so angry… I have never been so sad… I have never been so afraid as I was when I thought you would hate me forever.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I… I felt the same way.”

“You thought I could hate?” Amaranth asked me, horrified.

“I thought if you could hate anybody, it would be me,” I said quickly.

She slapped me.

Hard.

“I love you,” she said. “I could hate you least of all.”

“It’s just… it’s a lot easier for me to accept being hated than being loved,” I told her.

“That’s sad,” she said, her voice very flat.

“I know,” I said.

She sighed, and then didn’t say anything for a while.

“I don’t really have a lot of possessions,” she said, in the same flat tone of voice. It reminded me of Two. She sort of hugged herself as she turned and walked away across the room. “I like to think I take good care of the ones I do have. It was only for like a day, but I think you’d agree I took good care of the suitcase you gave me.”

“Yeah,” I said, not sure where she was going.

“So, if you really are mine, I expect you to start taking a lot better care of yourself than you have been,” she said, whirling around. There was an almost angry glint in her eyes, and her voice was becoming more alive as she spoke, and full of a steely resolve I wasn’t used to hearing. “First thing Monday, you are going to quit that stupid non-fighting class and sign up for mixed melee. The same class Steff’s in, if you can, so I will know that you’re actually going, and that you’re paying attention. If you can’t get into that one, then you will sign up for any mixed melee, small blades, or serious unarmed combat class you can get into. You are going to learn how to protect yourself, whether you want to or not.”

“Okay, okay,” I said.

“Not ‘okay’,” she said. “‘Yes, ma’am.’”

“Yes, ma’am,” I mumbled, more than a little sheepishly.

“If attacked, you will defend yourself,” she said. “You will not allow yourself to be… to be victimized, or molested.” The steely edge in her voice lost some of its sharpness here, as she still had problems with this concept. “If you can’t stand up for yourself, remember that you belong to me, and stand up for that instead. Most importantly, if anybody’s giving you problems, you will tell me. It’s not for you to decide if it’s worth bothering me about or if I can do anything about it… as your owner, that’s my responsibility.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“Don’t mumble when you say that,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, more firmly, though I blushed furiously.

“Unless you’re ashamed of being mine,” she said.

“No!” I blurted out quickly and forcefully, then blushed harder, and said, “I mean, no, ma’am,” without being told.

Amaranth made a throaty little purr before she proceeded.

“You will not yell at anybody, or lose your temper in public, or threaten anybody with violence,” she said. “Any violation of these rules will result in immediate disciplinary action, regardless of context or setting.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, my blush intensifying as images of me being punished in public flashed behind my eyes.

“In my absence, you will obey Steff,” she said. “If an order from either of us is too far past your comfort level, you are ordered to say, clearly and distinctly, that this is the case.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“Good,” she said. She took a deep breath and let it out, then gave a little giggle. I think she’d surprised herself.

She’d sure as hell surprised me.

“Now, you’re not off the hook for your behavior last night,” she said. “Or for letting me spend the whole day thinking you hated me. If you want to be mine, you’re going to have to be ready to pay for that, to work it off. Are you?”

I took a deep breath and considered. She was giving me an out. I could tell her no, and… well… maybe now that I’d explained how I felt about science, and I’d made the effort and apologized, we could still be friends. There just wouldn’t be this thing between us, with the punishments and the “yes ma’ams” and the weird, almost sexual stuff that kept happening… things would just go back to normal.

Certainly, more normal than they would be if I said yes.

I closed my eyes, and braced myself for my answer… not quite sure exactly what it would be.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good,” she said. “Sit here,” she said, patting the head of her bed. I did, and then heard her gathering up the Mecknights and setting them back in the case. They deactivated when held in the hand. She came back to stand between me and her dresser, picking up a black felt-tipped pen.

“Hold still,” she said with a wry smile. With one hand beneath my chin to tilt my head up towards her, she began to mark across my forehead.

“Semi-permanent marker,” she said as she wrote. “Unless you’re an accomplished breaker or can shell out the silver for spelled solvent, only the eraser on the other end of this particular marker will remove the ink.” She stepped back to look at her handiwork. “If you are very, very, very good, I will remove it before the dance tomorrow.”

She stepped to one side, so I could see myself in the mirror above her dresser. The writing appeared backwards, of course, but the big block letters weren’t difficult to read. Amaranth had written, very clearly and distinctly, the words “NYMPH’S TOY” across my forehead.

I pictured myself going through the day tomorrow with that emblazoned on my head. It went without saying that staying in my room all day wasn’t an option.

“Now, have you showered today?” she asked.

“I… well, I kind of woke up late, and I didn’t really have… um, I mean, no, ma’am,” I said. I remembered Barley inviting me along for “recreational showering”, and wondered if Amaranth was leading up to something like that. I didn’t know if I was ready for something like that… especially not with communal bathrooms. Considering that a couple of my floor mates had already demonstrated unease at using the showers when I was around, it was pretty embarrassing to think about one of the other girls coming in and finding me in a position that was somewhat sexually intimate. Okay, did I say embarrassing? It was close to terrifying.

Okay, it was kind of exciting.

But it wasn’t what she had in mind.

“You will shower every morning, and, unless you’re physically exhausted, every night before you go to bed,” she said. “What I said about taking care of yourself applies to your appearance and cleanliness as much as anything else, and besides of which, we want to be careful about germs.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, deciding that now was not the time to ask what the hell she was talking about with the “germs” thing.

“Do I even need to ask if you’ve got any cleaner clothes?”

“No, ma’am,” I said, dropping my head. The previous night’s misadventure meant I was now down to a grand total of two t-shirts, both of which had been worn more than once in the past week.

“We really need to expand your wardrobe,” she said. “Tomorrow, Steff and I are going to take you clothes shopping… we’ll pick something out for you to wear on your little date, too.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“Now, you’re going to shower before we go to dinner, and while you do that, I’m going to run and borrow a skirt and some things from Steff. You’ve got bigger hips and thighs, so it might come up a little short on you, but I’m not going to let people see you walking around in dirty clothes all the time.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, blushing so hard I was surprised I didn’t burst into flame. Me, in a skirt… all exposed to the world? And a skirt that had regularly been worn by another girl… with parts of it in regularly close proximity to her… to her body? I wasn’t sure why, but that somehow made it seem… dirtier. That was the only word I could think of, but somehow it just avoided being the sort of dirtiness that made me feel like I needed to scrub my skin for hours.

I wondered if Amaranth was going to borrow some of Steff’s underwear, too.

“Now then, there’s just one more thing before you go shower,” she said. “Take off your clothes.”

“What… I…” I stammered, with a glance towards the still-open door.

“Take. Them. Off.“

I gulped and hastened to obey, my “Yes, ma’am,” being somewhat swallowed up by my shirt as I stripped it off. My eyes were squeezed tightly shut when I finished, as if they were observing the old “If I can’t see them, they can’t see me!” rule. I certainly didn’t have anything to do with it. I stood there in the slightly chilly room, waiting for Amaranth’s next command to come, but it never did… instead she yanked me over to the bed, sat down a little ways back from its edge, laid me out across her lap, and proceeded to spank my bare behind within an inch of my life.

I cried out in shock and in genuine pain at the strength and enthusiasm of the punishment she laid on me, as savage as the impromptu caning Steff had given me, but with all of her skill and natural instincts brought to bear upon me, as well.

Tears streamed down my face. As the burst of perverse pleasure swelled up within me, I bit my lip to try to keep in what I knew would be a monstrously out of place gasping cry of exultation. Though my lip bled from the effort, I couldn’t hold it in when it finally came… came with the intensity and swiftness of a thunderbolt.

As if to punish me further for having somehow, somewhat enjoyed myself, Amaranth did not stop when I’d achieved that odd sense of release/relief… at least not the first time.

She kept going, now sometimes alternating a swat with a fast but strangely gentle stroke of the back of her fingers, up from just below the bottom of… of my pussy… to the base of my spine. This was both soothing and exciting, and made more exciting from the fact that there was no outward pattern I could discern as to when she would do it.

Despite not being the least bit painful, or more than a little humiliating (though I did cringe and gasp a little bit every time her nails accidentally brushed part of my most intimate place, or dragged on the the only almost equally dirty part of my ass), this motion served only to heighten the semblance of pleasure which grew and burst up within me a total of three times before Amaranth herself was spent. She sprawled backwards, her legs dangling over the side of the bed and her head against the wall, and we both lay there panting and gasping like we’d run a marathon.

Dimly, I wondered if what I had felt was anything like what an orgasm felt like… but I pushed that thought away.

That was sex.

This had been punishment, and I deserved it… every ounce… every inch… every drop of it.

It was Amaranth who finally broke the silence.

“I love you, Mack,” she said, in her normal voice, though with a hint of fatigue. “Differently than I love anybody else.”

“I love you, too,” I said.

She sat up, and pushed my legs away, so that I slid off her and stood up.

“Go… go shower,” she said. She was still short of breath. I started to reach for my clothes, but she stopped me with a gentle touch and the playful admonition, “I thought I told you not to wear dirty clothes.”

“But… yes, ma’am,” I said. “Um… can I have a towel?”

“I’ll bring you one when your outfit for the evening is ready,” she said. She giggled. “I mean, it would be pretty embarrassing for you to get out of the shower and have nothing to wear, wouldn’t it?”

“But… yes, ma’am,” I said.

“Well, get going,” she said, giving me a push–via the bottom, of course–towards the door. At least her room was pretty near the end… once I was inside the bathroom, my state would be more-or-less socially acceptable, and once in the shower, completely so…

…minus the black label on my forehead, but I could keep my face to the wall if anybody came in, and happened to need a shower so early in the evening.

Amaranth stuck her head out the door as I was almost there.

“Don’t forget to get your soap and shampoo and stuff,” she said brightly. “There’s no point in showering without them, is there?”

Mutely, meekly, and above all happily, I obeyed, walking past doors… some of which were open, though I didn’t dare stop to glance inside and see if anybody could see me. I kept my eyes fixed straight ahead… or rather, straight down at the floor… but even so, I was happy.

It wasn’t that parading myself nude–naked–down the hall wasn’t humiliating, because it was downright mortifying. I fully expected to drop dead any moment… or at least bump into Sooni and her flock of cat girls… or be told off by the R.A., Kiersta… or be expelled or fined or arrested for public indecency; in other words, locked up for being so dirty, so filthy, so very downright nasty as I was.

But it was for her.

And so it was okay.

My ass stung like hell, my eyes kept wanting to well up with tears that had to be of shame, and I was sure that everybody on the floor who wasn’t watching would soon have heard the story and know what a total freak I was… but I was Amaranth’s once again.

I belonged.

I was in love.

It wasn’t the same thing as being normal, by a long shot, but it was still kind of nice.

Two got back to the fifth floor just as I was reaching my own door, after Friday’s classes were done. I waited–braced myself, more like–for her to give her customary greeting. It was so stupid… a rote greeting, just another order for her to follow. It didn’t increase her autonomy or broaden her horizons. It required no thought on her own part. Why did Amaranth insist on making her say it?

She walked right past me with barely a flicker of her eyes to let me know she’d seen me, and headed towards the lounge.

“Hi, Two!” I called after her, just before she reached the door. She turned–rather abruptly–to face me, and said, “Hi, Mack!” in a somewhat cheery fashion, right as she collided with the door frame and rebounded, tumbling to the floor.

“Two!” I cried, running and stooping down beside her. “Are you okay?”

“I’m unhurt,” she said.

“Why didn’t you look where you were going?” I asked, aghast.

“I am supposed to respond to people who greet me, and to look at people as I speak to them,” Two explained.

“Aren’t you supposed to look after yourself?” I asked. I couldn’t imagine a golem with her low level of general functionality surviving without an ingrained directive to preserve herself from harm.

“Yes,” she said, nodding gravely. She quickly added, “But I am not physically injured, so I was still within my orders.”

“That’s not the point,” I said. “How exactly do you prioritize conflicting orders?”

“As I am told to,” she said.

“Well, you shouldn’t let… I mean, do not let any common courtesy instructions put you in physical danger,” I said. “Even as mild as walking into a door or wall.”

“Okay,” she said.

“I mean, what if you’d been by the stairs?” I asked. “Never mind… just… um… did Amaranth give you those instructions?”

“…yes,” she said, after a moment of what seemed like very painful hesitation. I remembered that she had said Amaranth was nice, and figured that she was afraid to get her in trouble.

“If I told you to take any command Amaranth gave you and interpret it as if she had said it the way I would, would you be able to do that?” I asked.

Two visibly mulled this over in her head… I watched her kind of roll her eyes from left to right before she nodded and said, “Yes.”

“Okay,” I said. “Do that, then.”

“Okay,” she said.

“And if you’re not sure how I would word it, follow Amaranth’s instructions until you see me when she’s not around, and then ask for clarification,” I added.

“Okay,” she said.

“That is, assuming she’s ever around me again,” I said dispiritedly, as reality caught up to me.

“Okay,” Two said.

“Wait, no, disregard that last part,” I said, realizing Two had accepted it as a condition for the last order. “It wasn’t an instruction, it was just… me being stupid.”

“Please clarify,” Two said. “Do you mean for that amendment to be contingent upon accepting that you are stupid?”

I snorted. It was such a silly question, even for her.

“Oh, come on, Two,” I said dismissively. “There was nothing in that statement that would make it conditional.”

“Sorry, I made a mistake,” she said. She got to her feet and held up her book bag. “I am supposed to do my homework at the first available opportunity,” she said in an almost apologetic tone, then turned and went into the lounge.

It wasn’t until I was back in my own room that I realized she’d been trying to tell me she didn’t think I was stupid, without stepping outside the bounds of her established orders. Considering how upset she’d been with herself the last time she let an unsolicited personal opinion out, I’d probably done the worst thing possible by basically laughing it off. I stepped back into the hall, meaning to explain myself to her or reassure her that it was alright for her to slip in her own opinions every now and then, but something about the sight of her through the lounge’s glass wall… sitting quietly, absolutely absorbed in her homework while eating a pudding cup… told me that it wasn’t necessary.

If Two had ever needed reassuring, this was not the time.

Still…

“Um, sorry to interrupt,” I said, knocking on the open door so as not to startle her as I came in. “But, did Amaranth tell you not to say hi to me any more?”

She looked up from her textbook.

“Yes, but, after that, she told me to respond to greetings in kind,” in what I was coming to realize was her defensive but-I-really-didn’t-disobey tone. Where most people’s “defensiveness” had at least a little bit of belligerence to it, Two’s was pure verbal cringe.

“That’s okay,” I said. “Did she tell you why?”

“No,” Two said.

“Okay,” I said, and started to turn away, then realized I could have phrased the question a bit more broadly. “Do you know why?”

“Yes,” Two said.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because Steff asked her,” Two said, a little hesitantly.

This answer surprised me so much that I almost managed to choke, despite not having anything in my throat.

“Steff… asked her to tell you not to say hi to me?” I asked, hoping that I’d misunderstood. I thought Steff’s feelings towards me had been pretty clear in history class, but maybe I’d underestimated the level to which I’d pissed her off.

“No,” Two said. I waited for her to expand on this, but she just looked at me for several seconds, and when I didn’t say anything else, she dropped her gaze back to her homework.

“Two, what did Steff ask Amaranth?” I asked her.

“He asked her why she told me not to greet you any more,” Two said.

It took me a moment to realize she was talking about Steff. Why did it seem like so many people were confused about Steff’s sex? Okay, so in fairness, I hadn’t been sure the first time I’d seen her… but I’d figured it out pretty quickly.

Then again, it kind of made sense for Two to be a little sketchy on this matter… her ability to make fine judgments was a little bit rougher than most people’s. If she had “grown up” around humans, then the general androgyny of elves might confuse her. Maybe she’d even mistaken a boy with elven blood for a girl at some point in the past, and been corrected… depending on how that correction was worded, it might have caused her to err on the side of masculinity when judging elven gender.

It did make a kind of sense, when I thought about it.

“Two, you do know that Steff is a girl, don’t you?” I asked.

“No,” Two said, quite emphatically.

“Um… no, you don’t know, or no, she isn’t?” I asked.

Two thought about this briefly.

“I was answering the question you put to me, but both would be true,” she said. “I do not know that Steff is a girl because he isn’t.”

“Two… Steff is a girl,” I said, trying not to sound like I was lecturing a preschooler on the fact that the sky was blue.

She blinked at me a couple of times, and then said, “Okay. She asked Amaranth why she told me to not to greet you any more.”

“And what did Amaranth tell her?” I asked.

Two’s eyes kind of darted to the left, and then she said, “Her reason.”

“Which is?”

“The thing that motivated her to take that course of action,” Two said.

“Two, do you… not want… to answer me?” I asked her.

“I want to answer any question put to me as truthfully as I can,” she said, the familiar note of desperate panic edging into her voice.

Okay, wrong track.

“Did Amaranth threaten you?” I asked, knowing that this was ridiculous… impossible.

To my immense relief, Two shook her head wildly and said, “No!” with as much firmness as I’d ever heard her use.

I tried to think of variations on the question, but then I decided to cut straight through to the point.

“What exactly did Amaranth say when Steff asked her about her reason?” I asked.

“‘Mack doesn’t like it, anyway… who am I to inflict an unwanted presence on her?’,” Two quoted, visibly cringing the entire time. She clapped her hand over her mouth as soon as she’d finished, her big eyes looking up at me as if in anticipation of a physical blow.

“Was she… did she sound angry when she said this?” I asked.

“No,” Two said gravely. “She… she was… she was crying.”

“Thank you,” I said, a little quietly. I don’t know if my gratitude actually meant anything to Two, but it had probably cost her something to add the unasked-for detail.

“You’re welcome,” Two said automatically.

I stood there and thought for a minute. I figured that if I was going to catch Amaranth and talk to her, this would be the time… after dinner, she’d probably head straight for work. It would be… awkward… for me to go knocking on doors. Then, what if she wasn’t in Harlowe tonight? It would almost be worse if I found her. Would she even stop what she was doing to talk to me?

Searching for Amaranth after dinner would be like looking for a needle in a haystack, if the needle was naked and the haystack was gross and embarrassing.

I could always just wait for her outside the dining hall, but if she wanted to avoid me all she had to do was walk past me and go in. Or, what if she made a scene? Or Steff was there and she decided to be less than helpful? I mean, she was very clearly on Amaranth’s side. I’d save the dining hall for Plan B… the best thing to do would be to find her and try to talk to her before dinner.

Great, so… I had a plan. All the details worked out. All the ducks in a row. Every wrinkle ironed and every kink… uh, actually, it was probably best not to think about kinks. The point was, I knew exactly what I had to do and how I had to do it.

Except, you know, for the tiny niggling detail of what I would actually say to her when I found her.

Details, details.

“Um, do you, by any chance, know where Amaranth is?” I asked Two. I figured she probably wouldn’t, but it couldn’t hurt to ask.

“She is probably in her room,” she said. “She told Steff, who is a girl, that she didn’t feel like working and would probably just go to bed after her classes were done.”

It struck me that Two had been quite a bit more forthcoming in telling me where I might find Amaranth and why than she had been in telling me what Amaranth had said. I almost asked her if she wanted me to talk to Amaranth, but stopped myself. I just said “thanks,” and received another “you’re welcome.”

It was also very significant–and worrying–that Amaranth didn’t feel like working. She talked about sex as though it was her life… which I guess it sort of was… but anyway, it was hard for me to imagine something upsetting her so badly that she didn’t want to have sex.

Of course, the fact that I was the thing that had upset her so badly wasn’t that pleasant to face, either… but it wasn’t exactly difficult to believe.

I realized in that moment that if I left her alone, Amaranth might be better off. She’d probably rebound from whatever kind of a funk she was in… she would get better, and go back to smiling at everybody (except maybe me) and having lots of sex, and she would go on loving everybody (except maybe me)… and I’d… well…

On the one hand, there’d never be another spanking, or a public humiliation, or being pulled onto Amaranth’s lap or talked about like I was a pet or a toy, or being made to lie naked beside her for an entire night… I’d never have to face the specter of actual sex with her, which I’m sure she would have expected at some point… and that alone would have to be a huge relief.

On the other hand… well, there wasn’t really anything on the other hand, except the question: was the first hand the good hand, or the bad one?

“Two, what would you do if you were me?” I asked, if only because I couldn’t think of anything else.

“Cry all the time,” she said without hesitation.

I looked at her, indignantly, and then I laughed. I had to. It would have been the perfect witty insult, coming from anybody else… but Two didn’t have any way of coping with bad things in her life, except to cry.

I wasn’t a golem, though. I did have choices. When bad things happened, I could try to do something about them… at least, to a greater extent than Two could.

“What do you think I should do?” I asked, fully realizing that it was an even more absurd question to put to Two than the last one had been.

“I think you should do what you want,” Two said.

“Yeah, but what do I want?” I murmured to myself.

“Amaranth,” Two said, as if it was self-evident. “To be with her. To be hers.”

“Why do you think that?” I asked her.

“It’s self-evident,” she said. Well, ask a stupid question…

“Right,” I said. “I should probably go talk to her, then, shouldn’t I?”

“Probably,” Two agreed.

“Okay,” I said. “Bye, Two, and wish me luck.”

“Bye, Mack, and good luck,” she said as I turned to go. “And… thank you.”

She almost shouted the last part, not in an enthusiastic way, but in the way that sometimes happens when you’re forcing yourself to spit out something you’re almost incapable of saying.

“Um, you’re welcome,” I said, a little uncertainly. I turned back to regard her, and saw what I thought of as her oh-now-I’ve-done-it look on her face, as if she was afraid she’d exceeded her orders and was about to be called on it. “What for?”

“You talked to me,” she said, in an almost painful tone.

“Yeah, but I’ve talked to you before,” I said, confused. “I talk to you every day, Two.”

“Oh,” Two said. “You’re right. Never mind. I’ve made a mistake.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, quite honestly.

“That’s my fault,” she said. “I was mistaken.”

“Um, okay,” I said, deciding to drop the subject rather than cause her any further distress. “I’m going to go talk to Amaranth. Goodbye, Two.”

“Goodbye, Mack.”

 I’d expected to break down crying at some point, if not during the unnecessarily long walk back to the dorm, then certainly during the dark and lonely part of the night. I’d definitely expected some kind of fucked-up nightmares involving the faces of the ghouls, or the sight of their bodies ripping apart in my hands, or of the look of most profound anguish Amaranth had given me, or some combination of that.

Instead, once I’d showered off the ghoul gunk, I went to bed and just sort of… laid there. Normally I can’t get my mind to shut up, but it didn’t seem to know what to say, even after sleep eventually claimed me.

It was a good thing that general thaumatology was my first class the next day, or else I probably wouldn’t have even got out of bed. The course syllabus had mentioned that Friday was quiz day, and the quizzes formed the bulk of our grades. I reminded myself that the entire purpose of going to college was going to college. My other problems… social, emotional, or whatever… were just sidelines, and I couldn’t let them distract me from my education. I told myself that, over and over again.

It didn’t really work, except to the extent that it got me dressed and out the door.

Professor Goldman informed us that he used to start every quiz by posing the question, “If a quiz leaves you feeling quizzical, then what do you feel after a test?” until the department head asked him to stop, and thus, we would never hear him say such a thing.

The quiz probably wouldn’t have taken me more than ten or fifteen minutes, under normal circumstances. It covered what we’d gone over in lecture on Monday and Wednesday, and the assigned reading… which I’d known just by looking at the chapter titles wasn’t anything I actually needed to read.

What are the three main components of intentionalism within thaumatology? That was easy: caster’s intent, creator’s intent, and formal intent. The more common names for theurgy and thaumaturgy? Also easy: divine and arcane magic. It was all incredibly basic stuff. This was probably why Goldman’s lecture seemed to be so popular… one quiz a week meant that any one you totally blew would be balanced out by the dead easy ones at the start of the term.

It was dead easy. It really was. I just couldn’t focus on it. Lying alone in my room, I’d been numb… static. I’d broken that stasis by getting up. Amaranth hated me. Being an evil, dangerous monster on the inside apparently didn’t make me a good enough fighter to even competently protect my friends. Amaranth hated me. Of course, I didn’t really have any friends. Amaranth hated me. Not any more. Amaranth hated me. If I’d ever really had any.

Amaranth hated me.

It took me most of the period to get through the simple little quiz, not because I couldn’t find the answers but because I’d find myself staring into space for five minutes at a time while these thoughts chased themselves and me around the inside of my head. I wasn’t the last person to turn in my paper and leave the lecture hall. Ordinarily, this might have made me shake my head and wonder what the hell the others had been doing when this exact same stuff was covered in high school…

Now, I figured that probably they’d been busy talking to their friends… or stealing glances from their lovers.

I’d skipped breakfast and there was no question of going to lunch. Even if I’d wanted or needed to, I couldn’t afford it, and didn’t have anybody who’d shell out the fifty copper for me because Amaranth hated me… and anyway, nothing would underscore just how completely I’d fucked up quite like sitting alone in a crowded room. Amaranth would certainly be there, sitting with Steff and Two… and probably others, who’d come join the group now that I wasn’t there.

It suddenly struck me how pretty those three were… how well they went together. I tried to imagine how the four of us together would have looked, to somebody else’s eyes: Amaranth, with her golden, honey-like hair and generous nymphly curves… Steff, with her shining platinum hair and her exotic elven looks… and Two, with her wispy blonde hair and sad, waifish beauty.

And then, me.

Two, sitting there and quietly eating her pudding, fit in better with the little group than I ever had, or ever could.

So, yeah… lunch was out of the question.

I also skipped my WP class, again. I’d finally had a chance to actually use my knife and had completely blown it. I figured if I messed around with it any more, I’d probably find a way to stab myself without even taking the knife out of its sheath.

I might have skipped elven history, too, but I was already on Professor Ariadne’s shit list (if a haughtily beautiful true elf could have something so crude) and there was no chance she wouldn’t notice my absence. I tried not to look at Steff when I entered the room, and instead made a beeline for the empty seat farthest from her.

“I was beginning to formulate the impression that you did not care for me,” Delia Daella said as I sat down beside her. I visibly started at the sound, as I’d been so focused on who I wasn’t sitting by. “I see by your reaction that this impression was not in error.”

“I’m… I’m sorry,” I said. “I like you okay… I’ve just got a lot of stuff on my mind.”

“Yes, I know,” she said. “It is rather loud. I hope you do not intend to keep thinking throughout the entire class.”

“You can hear my thoughts?” I asked, surprised. I knew she was taking a minor in the subtle arts, but… well… there were few disciplines where a single week of classes would yield that kind of results.

“Not as thoughts, but as a distracting jumble of noise. Women of my line are naturally gifted in that area,” she said. “I am taking classes to learn better control. Why are you not sitting by your racist friend? There’s an empty seat by her, which I assumed she was saving for you.”

“Steff isn’t racist,” I said defensively, though in fairness, Steff had been a little dismissive towards the dark elf viewpoint. “She just… well, she’s…”

I trailed off, trying to figure out what I was trying to say. I realized I didn’t know anything about Steff’s background or her upbringing. Had she been raised in any part by elves?

“Your language doesn’t have enough pronouns,” Delia Daella said, and then Professor Ariadne swept into the room, beginning her recitation the moment she’d entered the door. I didn’t dare ask Delia Daella what she had meant by that. The sentence didn’t make sense no matter how I tried to parse it… but then, there were other times when she’d phrased things a bit oddly. Probably, her command of Pax Magisteria wasn’t as good as she thought it was. I couldn’t fault her. I mean, I didn’t speak any Elvish.

It was only about a quarter of the way through the class when Steff started whispering to me.

“Y’know,” her voice said, “a whole hell of a lot of people here would have happily taken the fact that you stomped past me without a glance as a sign that you’re a mean, hateful bitch and they were better off without your company.”

I didn’t know why she was telling me this, because of course, there was absolutely no way I could respond. I had to do my best to look like I wasn’t even hearing her.

“I mean, given that you yelled at my friends and insulted my beliefs… and then threw a knife at my head,” she went on, a bit later, “you can probably see why I might be inclined to seize any excuse to get madder at you.”

I gave a little shake of my head. I needed to focus on Ariadne’s recitation of long-ago wars. In the event that she ever gave a test… or real homework… I wanted to be able to reverse the instructor’s negative opinion of me.

“Amy spent the whole night crying,” Steff said. Was she trying to make me feel shitty? Probably. Like she said, she had plenty of reason to hate me. “She thinks you hate her… she doesn’t see how you could hate science so much and not hate her for believing in it.”

Oh, did I ever want to respond to that! Hate Amaranth? How could I? How could anyone? For that matter, I didn’t hate science… I loved it. I just, you know, made sure I had my head on straight about it. That was trivial, though… the main thing was how could Amaranth think I hated her?

Of course, I thought, it could just be that, as she believed in loving everyone, she had a hard time dealing with her hatred for me without imagining I hated her back.

“Maybe there really is nothing you can do to fix this, but I really don’t want to have to spend the whole year dividing my time between the two of you,” Steff said. I knew it went without saying that she’d pick Amaranth’s company over mine… she didn’t have to say it. I got the message. “But you’re going to have to be the one who tries, because Amy doesn’t have a clue how to deal with this. She doesn’t have a lot of experience with negative emotions, if you haven’t noticed.”

“Ms. Blaise,” Professor Ariadne said rather sharply. Her voice sounded so much like it was coming from right in front of me that I involuntarily looked up… and jumped, banging my knee on the underside of the desk, when I saw that she was. “Perhaps you would like to share your interpretation of the last stanza?”

“I… uh…” I said, feeling the heat and color rise in my cheeks. “I… didn’t really hear it,” I admitted.

“Of course you didn’t… you were quite clearly listening to something else. Market report? Afternoon soap opera? Skirmish match? If this were one of your high schools, I would demand you turn over whatever device it is you were using,” she said. “However, this is not high school. You are here by choice, and in fact, have paid for the privilege of being here. Moreover, elven history in particular is not a required subject for any major or focus of study, which means that not one person is here entirely against their will. In short, if my subject doesn’t interest you… there’s no reason for you to be here.”

I wanted to say either “But I am interested!” or “I actually love elven history!” or “I do want to be here!”… but as usual, when my brain came up with two or more things to say at the same time, nothing intelligible came out.

“Excuse me, Professor,” Delia Daella said. “I believe another student was whispering and distracting her.”

“Oh?” Ariadne said, arching an eyebrow. “Is this true, Ms. Blaise?”

I wanted to yell “No!”…but, unsurprisingly… “I… I really was just listening to something.” was as close to a lie as I could muster, to shield Steff from the professor’s ire. “I’ll pay better attention from now on,” I said, trying to end the uncomfortable attention.

“Yes, well… please see that you do,” she said. “And remember that you can still drop classes without penalty.”

With that admonition, she went back into her story. Steff left me alone for the rest of the class, but I still wasn’t able to focus on the whirling narrative. Amaranth’s crying face kept appearing in front of me.

The worst part of a crying nymph is that they never stop being a nymph. If you ever watch a pretty woman really break down and cry, it isn’t pretty. It had been like this when Two had cried… it’s the difference between TV tears and real tears. A nymph doesn’t stop being devastatingly beautiful no matter what she does, though… which makes the rather uncommon sight of one bawling her eyes out simply more devastating.

Steff made a beeline for me after class was dismissed–once more with the command to think given in lieu of homework–but I headed away through the knot of people, and she didn’t bother to catch up. I couldn’t face her. I hadn’t been able to see her face as she’d whispered to me from across the room, but in my mind I knew it held a look of purest accusation. I’d made Amaranth cry, as she’d never cried before.

Of course Steff wanted me to try to make it up to her, but she’d as good as said herself that she didn’t think it could be done.

I was inclined to agree.

I did have to try, though.

Ghouls… wicked mockeries of living things… were approaching Amaranth in two packs, each numbering more than a dozen. I was frozen… unable to move… but at my side, Steff seemed to be immune to the paralysis I was feeling. She strode down the hill–to say she charged would not be an accurate description of her graceful stride–and headed purposefully towards the knot of undead who approached the cowering nymph from behind.

Her knives were out. She didn’t go for any vital spots, because of course, ghouls didn’t have any… the blood and bile which clogged the byways of their putrid, rotting bodies did not serve any purpose, and neither did the ruined organs which pooled in their distended bellies.

A ghoul’s body did one thing: it hungered.

This fact allowed a ghoul to ignore blows that would have removed a man from the field of battle. Stabbing it in the gut would provoke next to no reaction. An arrow into its eye wouldn’t even diminish the thing’s ability to sense the world around it.

If the magic that sustained them were more sophisticated or more powerful, they’d be unstoppable killing machines… but like most corporeal undead, ghouls were essentially an enchanted object, an inanimate corpse bound up with a bit of necromantic magic. Just like the spells which made a TV set work would dissolve if it suffered enough physical damage, so would the ghouls turn inert if their shells were sufficiently broken.

Steff, with both her formal training in necromancy and her mechanical view of life, knew all this… and she used that knowledge to great advantage, slashing rather than stabbing. She ducked low to hamstring a ghoul as she moved past it, then opened up another’s abdomen from ribcage to navel with one slash. She added another cut crosswise beneath it with her other knife… leaping back as its blackened, shriveled guts spilled outward.

It teetered and then fell atop the mess.

Of course, I’m describing all this after the fact, which gives me some room for a more descriptive analysis of the scene as it unfolded. At the time, what went through my head was less articulate, less focused, and more like the mental, emotional, and spiritual equivalent of peeing your pants.

Steff’s whisper came in my ear, as if she were still standing beside me.

“Move.“

Her tone was a fair imitation of Amaranth’s command voice, and that was enough to jar me to action. Move I did, charging down the hill. My right hand groped for the knife at my side, and I realized I should have been wearing it on my left hip. I nearly tripped again, trying to focus on getting it out and keeping my eye on the group of ghouls to the right, the ones in front of Amaranth.

As I came nearer, I drew back my hand, over my head, the handle of the knife held with ease and confidence in my fingers.

I positioned my body and my arm to be on a line with one of the hideous monsters who were, as of yet, still more interested in the pretty shrieking cringing thing and the whirling spinning slashing thing than they were in me. I visualized the knife spinning end-over-end through the air, and embedding itself in the soft, rotted skull of the thing.

I brought my hand down and forward, with the supernatural strength my damned bloodline gave me.

Uttering a savage battle cry that didn’t sound anything like the scream of a crackly-voiced pubescent boy, I released the knife…

…then watched first in slightly embarrassed horror as the wildly spinning projectile veered way to the left… then in sheer terror as it became apparent just how close it would come to the darting and dancing figure of Steff.

Time seemed to slow and the world seemed to shrink until it consisted of just two things: my knife and Steff’s head. She seemed to sense its approach somehow, and turned either to see it coming or to avoid its flight. The hilt ended up glancing off her temple, and she staggered backwards, treading on a ghoul’s foot in the process.

“Fucking ow!” she yelled, shaking her head as though to clear away stars as a ghoul lunged in low, its arms open as if to sweep her up in a loving hug. I couldn’t see how she would avoid it, but then she leaped into its eager embrace, only to cross her knives beneath its chin and close them like a pair of scissors, beheading it. The thing tumbled backwards.

“Sorry!” I said.

It sounded lame, but there wasn’t time for a better apology… or for me to retrieve my weapon. Amaranth had reacted to Steff’s arrival by spinning around and backing away from the commotion behind her… towards the group of ghouls I’d attempted to engage. She was about to stumble back right into their midst, and there was nothing I could do to them that would either take them all out of commission or grab all of their attention at once, not when better prey was so close.

I launched myself forward, but not at the ghouls. I barreled into Amaranth, knocking her away with a bone-jarring body block. This put me about where she had been, and in the clutches of one of the ghouls

Ghouls fought by the crudest methods imaginable. Alone or in small numbers, they could be only scavengers… going so far as to dig up long-buried and much-decayed corpses for their food, if they couldn’t find the weak, the wounded, or the freshly dead. Larger groups could press themselves upon the quick and hale, dragging them down through sheer numbers. It wasn’t a pretty death, as ghouls had few natural weapons and very little intelligence… they would pull a person apart slowly, with barely more than human strength, or else grind their still-living flesh with teeth no sharper than they would have been in life.

It wasn’t something I particularly had to fear… unless a ghoul’s teeth also counted as a magical weapon, which I doubted. I knew they ranked very low in the orders of undead. They were somewhat above zombies and other completely mindless creations, but below the truly self-aware and self-willed abominations.

As the ghoul wrapped its arms around me, I strained my own arms up and outwards like a TV hero breaking free of a coil of rope. The ghoul’s arms, which were cold, clammy, disturbingly soft, and wet, did not snap as such cinematic bonds would have, but at least they weren’t able to match my own strength. I forced the restraining arms apart, and when I had some room to move in, I ducked back, and then grabbed it by the wrists.

It tried to press forward, gnashing its teeth and snapping its jaw, but I was ready to bring my other weapon into play. Pushing past my ingrained reluctance, I ignited both my hands. Not a lot, but I figured as a walking corpse, the ghoul would go up like an oil-soaked rag, and then I could push it back into its fellows (or wouldn’t have to, as they were coming forward, and crowding into my opponent as they sought the shortest route to me.)

Unfortunately, the thing remained stubbornly unablaze, though the flesh in direct contact with my flaming hands was giving off a smell most safely described as “interesting.”

“Ghouls aren’t like zombies,” Steff’s voice told me. “They’re preserved in a state of putrefaction, they never really dry out.”

“I noticed,” I said tersely under my breath, unsure of whether she’d hear me. I rocked back on my heels a bit, then forward, giving the grappling ghoul a bit of a shove. My hope in doing this was that it’d bowl over its companions and then I could dispatch them in some quick and cunning fashion as they tried to pick themselves up. Sadly, I didn’t have that great a grip to begin with, and trying to push somebody around by the forearms is not the easiest thing to do… it just kind of stumbled backwards into another ghoul, and then was pushed forward again.

“C’mon, I thought you could take care of yourself,” Steff chided me with another whisper.

I took a deep breath… which I deeply regretted, given my proximity to a bunch of permanently rotting corpses… then, as the ghouls surged forward, I shifted one leg back, pivoted my waist, cocked back my arm, and then laid into the nearest one with a single punch that had everything I had to give.

A quavering sound that was half insuppressible whimper and half suppressed scream escaped my lips when, instead of sending a broken body flying away, my mighty blow resulted in me being up my elbow in ghoul gut gunk.

It felt… well, I now had a very real, very tangible feeling that could only help my attempts to imagine what the dirtiness and nastiness inherent in the female body should feel like. Worse, the wretched thing didn’t appear to notice that it was impaled on me, and continued squelchily forward, while other arms grabbed me from the side. The awful face of the impaled ghoul pressed in against me, and it was the face of my fright mask as it had appeared in my dreams… its sick and strangely hot breath filling my nostrils as it clicked and clacked its teeth, uselessly seeking purchase against my impervious skin.

Other mouths closed on other flesh, and the ghouls in back pushed against the one I’d punched, sending the whole mass of us to the ground.

“Get over it, you pussy,” Steff said, her voice finding me even in the midst of that pile of writhing, biting awfulness. “If you haven’t noticed, you punched through a monster.”

Maybe I could try to salvage one scrap of dignity by pretending that her chiding voice and affirmation of my supernatural strength goaded me to reach deep down inside me to find an inner core of badassness, but the simple truth was that the rising tide of panic and terror at being buried beneath a mass of squishily wet corpses which tore at my clothes and dragged their teeth ineffectually against any bare skin they could find had to overwhelm me sooner or later. My shirt was quickly ripped into pieces. There was nothing personal or prurient about it… clothing meant only two things: it was a handhold, and it was something that could get in the way.

When I felt dead fingers playing tug-of-war with my bra, that was when my body had to act. There was nothing so horrible, so terrifying, so debilitatingly disgusting that it couldn’t be made worse by being naked and exposed. My free hand shot up, and I sat up, thrusting both of my arms apart, parting the mass of bodies like I was opening a curtain.

The one who’d been stuck on my arm was torn nearly in two, and fell still. The rest picked themselves up and began to lurch towards me.

I was now aware of a rattling, gurgling noise from the backs of their throats. I don’t know if they’d been making it all along, but somehow, it seemed like an angry noise. I realized that I could press forward and continue to fight with the surge of emotion I’d had… or I could hesitate, and lose all will to fight the things the first time a wrist or mouth or pair of arms closed around me.

It wasn’t a conscious thought inside my head… that was still occupied with a chorus of “oh shit, oh shit”, which now harmonized with a group of singers going “ew, ew, ew”, and was overlaid with vague but stern voices condemning me for giving in to violence, for letting myself get dirty, and for losing my shirt. It was more like an instinctual insight, a moment of clarity in which I realized that what was happening to me wasn’t just something happening to me… it was a choice set before me, between succumbing or fighting.

At that moment, Amaranth gave another terrified cry behind me. Probably she’d been doing it the whole time, actually, but it was in my moment of clarity that I heard it.

I chose to fight.

I didn’t try many more wild, mule-kick punches… I did aim one punch at the head of one of the things, with better but hardly more pleasant results. That was one down, anyway. For the rest, I adopted tactics midway between their own and Steff’s… I kept moving in and out of the mass of milling monsters, in order to avoid being swamped and dragged down again, but I grabbed arms and necks.

I rended, I tore, I snapped, I broke… the ghouls’ bones were spongy and soft, which helped in some ways and hindered in some. I doubted I could pull a human’s arm clean from its socket as easily as I did a ghoul’s… at least, I hoped it was so, but I knew that a living leg wouldn’t bend as much as a ghoul’s did before breaking. I was spattered with dark, gunky, putrid fluid from the veins of my victims… opponents, I mean. I didn’t think about it. I didn’t let myself think about it. The last ghoul stopped moving when, with my foot on its groin (oh, I so didn’t let myself think about that), I wrenched its leg off and threw it aside.

I spun around to find the next thing to hurt, and saw Steff severing both arms of the last ghoul standing on her side clean off at the shoulders. It staggered forward, and then fell, moving no more.

Amaranth was down on the ground between us, curled up like an egg, her arms over her head. I couldn’t fault her–even if I’d wanted to–for not having jumped at the chance to live her dream of being torn apart by hideous monsters… I’d hardly measured up to my own expectations during my first such encounter. I took a shaky step towards her, but Steff was already at her side, extending a gentle hand. I imagine she whispered something that was for Amaranth’s ears only, because her body’s quaking noticeably lessened and she looked up at her. She let Steff help her to her feet, and accepted her glasses from the half-elf’s hands.

“Amaranth,” I said, my voice doing the opposite of Steff’s trick by sounding very, very far away despite coming from so close to my ears. I took another step towards her.

She turned at the sound of my voice, but the look on her face…

I wanted to believe that the look was because I was half-naked and covered in grave filth. In that moment, I honestly would have been happy to believe she was horrified because she’d witnessed the savage fury with which I’d dispatched the living corpses. I would have been thrilled to believe that this was why she was looking at me as though I was a horrible monster.

She had a way of quickly composing her face after it had inadvertently expressed some negative, un-nymph-like emotion, but this time she only half-managed it. Turning back to Steff, she said, “Let’s go home.”

Steff gave me a look that was… well, I don’t know if it was pity, contempt, or confusion, then offered Amaranth her arm and headed back up the slope in the direction of the campus proper and of Harlowe Hall, or maybe of the Mechan circle, which after all would still be engaged in their bizarre lunar study.

I didn’t watch them go. It took me a long time to find my knife… specifically, long enough that I could be fairly sure that they’d made it at least as far as the hill where the circle had met.

Then, setting off around the base of the hill, I started my own unnecessarily long walk back to the residence hall I called home.

There was a lot of shouting and other activity going on around me, but I was deaf and numb to it, even though I‘m sure a lot of the shouting was directed at me.

Amaranth believed in science. That seemed impossible. I’d yelled and effectively called her stupid. That seemed equally impossible. She’d thrown her glasses at me and ran off into the night, crying her eyes out. At me. Because of me. That seemed… That was beyond impossible.

It was world shattering.

My mind was racing in circles, except each circle branched out and spawned new, even less productive circles. I was remembering Amaranth telling me that I only had two volumes, that I needed to find a middle ground, that I needed to learn to disagree with somebody without bludgeoning them or letting them walk all over me… and through it all, I heard myself yelling, calling her stupid. Not the Mechans… or possibly, not the rest of the Mechans… just her.

I’d lost my temper.

I’d yelled and screamed at a bunch of people I didn’t know.

I’d called Amaranth stupid.

I’d driven her away.

So many of the friends I’d thought I’d made in that short time had ended up turning on me, somehow… had they really, or I had driven them to it? I mean, didn’t I know there was something bad inside me? Hadn’t I tried to warn Amaranth of that very thing?

My first realization of having fallen to the ground was when I felt a hand grab hold of my hair and pull me more or less to my feet, in a bent-forward sort of way, and drag me over to the table. I might have cried out… but then, I think I already was.

Then, my jeans and panties were down around my ankles, and that brought me back into the moment a bit… the repeated sharp blows Steff gave me on my ass and the back of my thighs with the branch she’d found earlier brought me the rest of the way. Where Amaranth used a natural rhythm, building and teasing and tensing and withholding and withdrawing and building again, Steff was savage about it… beating the bad thoughts back inside me, driving the images and endless replays away.

The familiar sensation grew within me, but not as a steady swelling of pressure… each time the branch lashed me, the feeling… well, jumped, as if it had itself been hit… and seemed to give off a smaller explosive echo of itself. It never actually broke and washed over me, though, and when one last cry of pain pushed away the last of the anguish, Steff stopped and I laid there panting, hanging onto the table.

“Better?” she asked, quietly, but with an edge to her voice.

“Better,” I gasped. I forced my breathing to slow, then picked myself up. I turned, and wished I hadn’t… because of course, the entire Mechan circle was still there, and they were staring… and I’d just turned and shown them… I quickly turned back around, and pulled my jeans back up. “Where’s… where’s Amaranth?”

“She’s there,” Steff said, pointing roughly in the direction that Amaranth had run. “Just crested the next hill over… that big one, see? Or maybe you don’t… I forget sometimes I’ve got my father’s eyes… and now she’s gone. Athletic girl, isn’t she? I could catch her, but I don’t know if she’d stop for me… if she’d come back with me.”

“Fat chance she’d come back for me,” I said, looking away. “She’ll probably never want to see me again, after I… I…”

I was on the verge of breaking down again, when Steff slapped me with her free hand.

“We don’t have time to go through this again,” she said, holding the stick up and then tossing it aside. “Nymphs don’t always remember they’re supposed to leave footprints and stuff, so if she gets completely out of sight and earshot, we’re out of luck. I could go by myself, but if I have to hobble her and carry her back… well, as if a shrieking nymph wasn’t enough of a monster magnet, picture a lone half-elf carrying a shrieking and wounded nymph. Are you a good runner?”

“Um…” I said, not sure how to answer. I didn’t think of myself as the athletic sort, but I did have certain advantages over the average couch potato… even if I didn’t like to think about them.

“Well, I’m sure you’ll keep up,” Steff said.

“Do you require any assistance from the circle?” Prevailingwind asked her.

Steff shook her head.

“You guys work on the chart,” she said. “No sense wasting this opportunity.”

“I don’t know if…” I started, but Steff stifled me with her finger, the way that she and Amaranth did.

“I’m going,” she said. “Come along, or go home. Your choice.”

I took a deep breath. I still felt shaky, and unsure of anything… except that I’d fucked things up with Amaranth, permanently.

“I’ll come if you tell me to,” I said.

Steff’s eyes narrowed.

“You don’t deserve to have it that easy,” she said, and then she turned and was off.

I almost didn’t see just how fast she was running at first, because when she ran, she moved with a slightly rougher variation of the fluidly flowing grace that full elves moved with. I had to hurry to keep up with her, which made the places where my ass and legs should have had welts scream with pain.

“But the odds are she’d still calm down and come back, right?” I huffed once I had caught up, about halfway down the hill. “I mean, if she doesn’t run into something.”

“The thing that worries me is that without her glasses, she might not even know she’s not heading back towards the university proper,” Steff said.

“Does she even really need them?” I asked, thinking of the heavy, clunky impractical eyewear she favored. “I mean, a nymph’s body is supposed to be ideal, isn’t it?”

“Ideals can be subjective,” Steff said. “I’d imagine a half-blind girl would be some guys’ idea of heaven, wouldn’t you? Anyway, I don’t know how much her glasses would even help her if she ran into trouble… the moon’s pretty bright, but her eyes are basically human. They can’t see in the dark like we can.”

“I can’t see in the dark,” I said.

Steff shot me an incredulous sideways look.

“What? I can’t!” I said.

“You’re making your way pretty confidently now,” she said.

“Well, there’s a full moon,” I said.

“The way I understand it, from nights out with humans, a full moon pretty much gives them enough light to see big, light-colored things,” Steff said. “Once you get away from magically lit areas, they’ve got to take it pretty slow, keep their eyes to the ground.”

“Well, I don’t expect you’d get the full picture just from watching other people,” I said. It was clear as day (pardon the expression) that Steff didn’t know what she was talking about. I could make out the lay of the land almost as far away… or maybe even as far away… as I could have during the day, but it was noticeably much darker. The tall weeds, the trees which dotted the hills, the fallen limbs, the stray rocks, the small holes which might have been animals’ dens… it was like a heavy shadow had dropped over all of them.

“So, if the moon wasn’t out, you’d be limping and groping around behind me?” Steff asked.

“Yeah, I probably would be,” I said, though I honestly hadn’t taken a lot of walks out of doors on moonless nights, but I did have other experiences with lack of light I could draw on. “Like, I used to always… well, when I would find myself in a dark basement, I couldn’t see anything. I could just sort of make out where the walls and things were… I could barely see my own hand in front of my face.”

“This basement have windows?” Steff asked. “Some kind of a nightlight? Even a crack under the door?”

“No!” I said. I’d never really consciously thought about it before. “I mean, obviously, there was some light, somewhere in there, because, you know, you’re right… people can’t see in total darkness.”

“As much as I hate to say it, you remind me of some people in my circle,” Steff said. “Humans can’t see anything in total darkness, Mack… but you’re not human.”

In that moment, I could have hated Steff… aside from turning around and abandoning Amaranth, I only had two choices for getting away from her: fall behind, or get ahead.

If I tried the first one, she might just slow down so I could catch up again, and Amaranth could end up… well, I told myself that she was immortal, and that the worst thing that could happen was she’d end up back in her little farming valley, five days’ journey away.

But, a part of me feared… no, a part of me knew that if she went home now, I’d never see her again. It wasn’t rational. It probably wasn’t even true.

I still knew it, though.

I pushed myself further, lengthened my stride until I wasn’t just running, I was pushing off with every foot step. I don’t know if I would have looked like I was running, bounding, or flying. I just know it jarred the hell out of me, every time one of my feet came down. It was hell on my ankles and calves, especially on the unevenly sloping ground. I knew I wasn’t doing myself any real damage, though, and I had to be leaving Steff in my dust as I raced up the side of the next hill.

“I knew you could run faster,” she said, trotting easily right along beside me. I chanced a look at her… though she was breathing a bit harder, she didn’t appear to have to have lengthened or quickened her stride. That one brief look cost me, as my foot came down wrong. It was like I kicked the hillside in front of me while running full-out. My leg felt like it accordioned, and then I tumbled backwards, biting my tongue.

Steff turned while in motion, alarm on her face. She somehow managed to skid to a stop, backwards, without losing her balance and, came and knelt by me.

“Oh shit, are you okay?” she asked.

“Of course I am,” I said, though of course I felt fucked up several times over, and when I put my hand to my mouth, it came back bloody.

“It’s nothing,” I said. “I bit my tongue.” She stared at me. “Haven’t you ever bit your tongue before?” I asked.

“I thought you were, you know, invulnerable,” she said. “To non-magical weapons.” Her eyes widened appreciably, and she gave me a wide grin. “You… you’ve got magic teeth!”

“It’s nothing,” I said again, more firmly. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“No, but that’s so awesome!” she said. “Do you have fangs?”

I opened my mouth.

“Do you see fangs?” I demanded. Well, it didn’t come out quite like that, with my mouth wide open, but she got the idea.

“No,” she said. She sounded disappointed. “How about your cla… your nails? Are they magic, too?”

“I think they’re just nails,” I said, clenching my fists to protect them from scrutiny. Of course, I’d always kept my nails clipped and filed so short it would have been hard to cut anything with them, myself included.

“Oh,” she said, disappointment filling her voice and face. “Hey… open your mouth again like that?”

I did, wondering for a moment if her keen elven eyesight had noticed something I hadn’t. Did I have fangs? Maybe tiny and underdeveloped ones… or ones that were just growing in. She just stared. Nervous, I strained my mouth open even farther, hoping she’d get a better look and just tell me what was wrong… and then a little more… and then, really straining, still a little more.

Steff finally gave a low whistle, and… probably less than five seconds later… I realized why she was gaping at me. My jaw flew shut. I wanted very badly to murder her with my eyes, but they insisted on venting their wrath down the front of my shirt.

“I know you’re pretty much into the whole, you know, pussy thing at this point,” she said, which did nothing to diminish my blush, “but I really hope you’ll consider…”

Amaranth’s scream… high, terrified, and infinitely prolonged… killed the rest of the sentence.

I was heading up the hill before I knew it… before I’d even properly got up. I wasn’t bothering with any pretense of running now. I forgot about trying to act human. The hill was my only concern, as it was standing between me and Amaranth. When my legs came in contact with the ground, they pushed. When my hands did, they pulled and clawed. It needs hardly be mentioned that a human-shaped body is not built for moving on all fours. The knees don’t bend the right way and the legs are the wrong length. My movements would have looked more natural if I had been scrabbling to keep from falling up a much steeper slope, but they somehow carried me up to the top of the hill faster than if I’d been walking upright.

Once I got up and over the hill, I could see down the other side. I could see with sickening clarity the figure of Amaranth, her naked skin shining bright in the moonlight as she recoiled from a mass of grasping hands and clacking jaws, stumbling backwards… towards another group of the same.

When I looked at the things which were moving to surround her, I found myself reminded for the first time in years of my old Veil mask… the worm-and-mildew eaten, rotting, twisted face with its sightless eyes hanging weirdly out of the somehow not-so-sightless seeming sockets.

I found myself once again thinking, wildly, impossibly that it had come alive… or rather, turned real… and that now it had come looking for me, the fickle little girl who’d put so much of her hopes and dreams into it and then abandoned it to the elements.

Only, it had grown a body… a body just as shrunken and twisted and peeling and warped as it was.

And it had brought friends.

Lots of friends.

Steff was beside me in a flash, and she saw what I saw… probably in greater detail and with greater clarity, both for the gift of eyesight from her elven father and for not being thrown into a horrific childhood memory at the sight of the things. She said a single word, her voice full of something that was more awe than fear… but with the fear definitely there.

“Ghouls.”

When I was little, my favorite feast was always Veil.

That was back when I lived with my mom, of course. After I turned nine, and I turned… well… I didn’t really have much do with feast days after that. My grandmother always said that the Feast of Veil was just a load of Arkanite heresy, anyway. That first year, it was awful for me to have to stay inside by myself while all the other kids in the neighborhood put on their masks and costumes and ran wild all over town.

The next year, I’d come to realize how terribly redundant it would have been for me to dress up as a monster.

But, from the time I was five… wait, no, is that right?

Five… six… seven… eight.

I’ve never really thought about it, but there were only ever actually four years where I dressed up for Veil. Shit, was that really all? It has to be, because before that I would have been too young, and after that… when I think about it like that… it’s like, I know I had nine years with my mother, but when you consider that I wasn’t old enough to remember much of anything before I was three, and it’s still kind of sketchy for a couple years after that, then that means I didn’t really have… I didn’t…

I’m sorry, I’m getting sidetracked.

It just seems like it should be more.

That’s all.

Anyway, my first year I was… as I believe every five year old girl in the entire Imperial Republic of Magisteria is required by law to be… a pretty pretty elven princess with a sparkly gown. The year after that, I was a mummer. When I was seven, I caught my first whiff of the real spirit of the holiday and tried to talk my mom into letting me dress up as something really scary. We ended up compromising on a bed sheet ghost.

When I was eight… the last time I ever dressed up for the Feast of Veil… I managed to hold onto my birthday money all the way through to the middle of autumn so I could buy a two silver fright mask from the corner apothecary. I couldn’t afford much else for a costume. So, I wore a gray sweater… my mom wouldn’t let me go out dressed all in black… and black tights, and had a great time.

The next day, I wrapped the mask up carefully inside the sweater and put it away in my chest to use the next year, figuring I could improve the rest of the costume if I didn’t have to buy a new mask. We never had a lot of money, so I figured out a lot about being frugal early on.

Everything changed for me before Veil came around again. When I went to go live with my grandmother, all of my stuff was packed into a cart at once… otherwise I don’t think something like the mask would have made it inside the front door. By the time I got settled in, I’d figured out quite a bit about what sorts of things grandmother would and wouldn’t tolerate in her house… about what she wouldn’t tolerate from me.

She didn’t find the mask the first time she went through my things, but then, she didn’t look too closely at any one thing. I think she was looking for a few things in particular, for signs of some kind. A folded-up sweater inside a chest just didn’t trip any alarms. When she was satisfied… or when she realized she was going to have to be unsatisfied… grandmother announced that she’d make full inspections of my room on a frequent but irregular basis.

The next time she was out of the house, I took the mask out of my chest and… realized I didn’t have anywhere else to put it. A folded-up sweater under my bed or behind the dresser would be checked. Later on, I’d learn that her house had a few little spots where I could stow things, but at that point I was alone in an unfamiliar place. The house was grandmother’s, and hers alone. Her hand had touched everything within it. Her eyes had gone over every inch of it on a daily basis. Her presence lingered everywhere. Even holding the mask in my hands felt like a risk, as long as I was inside the house.

I ran out the door with it, without having made a conscious decision to do so. The enormity of my action hit me a moment later. I’d been sworn never to go outside except in her presence, or with her permission. Having broken my word, I had to make it worthwhile.

My grandmother’s house was on a hill. An ancient-looking stone retaining wall kept her neighbor’s yard from tumbling into hers. In one place there was a gap of several inches beneath it, where the earth had somehow been washed away. I stuck the wrapped-up mask there. I couldn’t think of anything better to do with it… I knew it wasn’t an ideal hiding spot, but I figured I’d come up with a better one later.

The key thing was to get it out of my room before grandmother made her promised full inspection, because there was just no way I was going to let her take it.

That mask was the first real thing that I’d bought with my own money… I mean, not counting candy and drinks and stickers, and other things that you used up and then they were gone. Plus, it represented not one but two serious accomplishments: first, saving my birthday money for months to buy it, and then keeping it put away all year so it would be in good condition. That’s serious willpower, when you’re that age.

So I hid it, in the chink beneath the retaining wall, and then…. well, then I forgot about it.

Maybe that’ll sound stupid… maybe it’ll sound crazy… but maybe you’ll remember what it was like to be nine. I was in a new place, learning a new routine and all sorts of new rules. Then, school started, and of course, it was a new school, and there were all kinds of added security hassles because of what I was… what I’d turned out to have been. It was impossible to forget that, living in my grandmother’s house, but if I’d ever hoped to escape all that at school, I was disillusioned from the first day.

So, I forgot about the two silver fright mask until the first quarter of my fourth grade year was well underway, when the conversation turned towards Veil and what everybody else would be wearing. My first reaction was a stab of disappointment when it hit me that I would be stuck indoors all night, as there was no way my grandmother would take her eyes off me at such a wicked time… which turned to elation when I realized that of course kids would be wearing their costumes to school that day, and I still had my mask.

I ran to get it as soon as the coach dropped me off from school. It was a terrible risk, as I knew my grandmother kept an eye out for me every afternoon, but I figured I could run to the wall, pull the bundle from its hiding place, stuff it into my open book bag, and come inside. If my grandmother asked me what I’d been doing, I could just shrug and say nothing. That was the safest thing to do, because it wouldn’t be lying.

My grandmother had made it very clear to me, from the first day I was there, that I should never lie.

I knew as soon as I had my hands on it, though, that something was wrong. Had I expected the sweater to be pristine and clean as it had been in my trunk all that time? I guess maybe yeah, I did. In my mind, hiding it had made it safe.

But, the simple fact was that I’d left it out there too long, in the cool damp place between stone and earth. Looking back, I’m surprised it hadn’t simply washed out, or been dug out by one of the neighborhood dogs, or simply been spotted by my grandmother and disposed of earlier. If that had happened, I would have felt a pang of loss… or a crushing disappointment… but it still probably would have been better, in the long run.

My first thought, when I opened up the sodden sweatshirt was that the mask had somehow turned real… well, “come alive” was how I thought it, but those words didn’t really apply.

The black velveteen cowl looked like it had been eaten away by some kind of mold or moss. The blue-green paint on what had been a fairly smooth skeletal face had begun to chip and fleck away, exposing discolored patches between the cracked and shrunken squares that stubbornly held on. A puffy, green-white fungus had taken root around one of the sunken cheeks.

The eyes… well, the eyes had always been my least favorite part of the mask to begin with. They’d always looked rubbery and fake, and they had the little crescent shape cut around the top so you could see out of them, which just made the fake bulgy eyeballs hang forward. With most of the paint gone from them, though, and the underlying rubber twisted and misshapen, they looked… well, it wasn’t pretty, even before I saw something moving back behind them, something squirming in the opening which now well and truly resembled sockets.

I shrieked and dropped it. My grandmother came running up beside me in an instant. She must have seen me lingering by the wall, but she still moved remarkably fast. She gasped “Lord Khersis protect us!” when she saw the ugly, twisted, peeling face on the ground, but then she recognized it for what it was.

I braced myself for her reaction, but she didn’t recognize the sweater from my chest, didn’t connect the ghoul mask’s presence in her yard with me, the devil child in her home.

“Just some wicked mockery the neighbor boys have left out in the rain,” she said. “Leave it be, Kenzie… you don’t need to be gettin’ any ideas from this foul thing.”

She lead me back inside and then went out to dispose of the mask. I heard the lid slamming on the garbage can before she came back in, and I started to cry. I was still crying when she came back into the sitting room. For a moment, she had a look on her face that I didn’t very often see, and I thought she was going to say something to comfort me, but then she turned away and went about her housework. I heard her mutter something that might have been “perverse child” under her breath.

When you read a story, and somebody cries, it always tells you what they’re crying for. If this was just a story I was making up, I’d say I was crying because I’d lost my mask, or because I’d been frightened by its appearance, or because I’d lost my chance to participate in a small way in the Feast of Veil… and any one of those things would be true, but none of them would be the whole truth. Saying I was crying about all of them also wouldn’t be quite true.

Sometimes, I think that we don’t have the words to describe our real emotions. Emotions are too complex and abstract, and words are too simple and concrete. Maybe this is why people feel better when they have somebody to talk to… putting your emotions into words forces them to be smaller and simpler for a while… when you have to make them make sense to somebody who isn’t you, a lot of the conflicting parts just sort of fall away.

If you don’t have anybody to talk to, of course, your emotions stay huge and overwhelming.

Anyway, there wasn’t really anything that happened that day which should have been that big a blow to me. I’d lost my mother… my whole world… already. Looking back, as an adult, I can see how somebody telling this as a story might try to make it out that the mask was “one last piece of my old life, now gone forever”… but nine year olds don’t think like that. Nine year olds don’t feel like that.

When you’re nine, each fresh disappointment… each new injustice… is just as big and powerful as the last one. When I think about the first few years I spent with my grandmother, the image that comes back to me the strongest isn’t anything that she said or did, it’s that rotted and peeling mask, staring up at me with bugs coming out from behind its sightless eyes… remembered both as the precious treasure that had turned on me so horribly and the priceless relic I had destroyed through my own carelessness.

Why am I telling you this now?

I’m not really sure.

I guess I just want you to understand the part that happened next, after Amaranth went running away into the night.

In the echoing silence which followed my declaration, Steff whirled and gave Amaranth a furious glare. Amaranth gave a feeble shadow of a nervous giggle, then turned and pushed me away from the group, towards the edge of the area lit by what I now realized were nothing but candles inside glass lanterns.

“I thought you liked sciencey stuff,” she said in a furious whisper. “Isn’t that what you were looking at, the whole time we were in the library?”

“Yeah, it was,” I said. “I like a good bit of fantasy… but I stopped believing in that kind of stuff when I was… well, a long time ago. It’s fun to imagine, but to actually believe…”

“You promised you’d keep an open mind!” Amaranth said.

“But I didn’t, really,” I said, defensively. This didn’t mollify Amaranth.

“Well, then maybe I didn’t really promise you wouldn’t have to strip naked in front of…”

“Amaranth!” Steff said sharply, coming up behind her and actually whacking her on the ass with a small stick. “You can’t do that. If you told Mack she wouldn’t have to do something, you need to stick by it… otherwise, she’ll never be able to trust you.”

“Ooh… I didn’t mean it,” Amaranth said, scuffing the grass with her foot. “But, she promised!”

“I didn’t!” I said.

“See, this is why it’s important to listen to each other,” Steff said. “Especially you,” she said, pointing the stick at Amaranth.

“Why especially me?” Amaranth asked, a little snippily. “She’s mine, isn’t she? She said she wanted to be.”

“That’s why,” Steff said. “If you don’t think she’s listening to you, you can always give her a little poke or something to get her attention. She won’t always be in a position or a mindset where she can do anything to get yours. And you…” Steff said, poking a finger at me. “If you can’t keep an open mind, at least be respectful, okay? Remember that you guys are guests here.”

“I am open-minded!” I said. “But… that doesn’t mean I have to believe something that got disproved hundreds of years ago.”

“Nobody said you have to believe anything,” Steff said. “But if you don’t think you can even listen to other peoples’ beliefs for a little while, you might as well go back to the dorms.”

“If I may intrude on a private moment?” Prevailingwind said, approaching within a respectful distance. “Perhaps I could take some time to explain our activities to your skeptical friend while you watch the others prepare the apparatus for tonight’s activities.”

“Oh, alright,” Amaranth said, and she let herself be directed by Steff–who did so by poking her in the behind with the stick–towards the tripod.

“Not everybody agrees,” Prevailingwind said to me, “but I find it refreshing to have a doubter in our midsts. When left to our own devices, we sometimes fall into the trap of agreeing too readily with one another. A healthy amount of skepticism is not only beneficial, but it’s necessary for our practices.”

“Really,” I said, trying to keep my voice polite. I found the labels of “skeptic” and “Mechan” to be pretty well mutually exclusive.

“Yes… science disposes of nearly as many theories as it proposes. Many people hear the name ‘Mecha’ and think we must be concerned with great big machines, engines of power like you see on TV,” Prevailingwind said. “And, of course, such depictions of science are not without an actual basis, though you’re unlikely to run into somebody with the knowledge and precision necessary to bring about such a… dramatic device.”

“But you believe it’s possible?” I asked.

“Well, given the climate for the last several hundred years, if I had a working mechanical engine of some kind, I’d keep it to myself,” Prevailingwind said. “Wouldn’t you?”

“You know you could get a fifteen hundred gold prize from Randalf the Red if you can demonstrate a non-magical, non-wind-or-waves-driven, non-muscle-powered device capable of transporting a man’s weight five miles over land?”

“I’ve heard that, yes,” Prevailingwind said. “Of course, he puts so many other conditions and caveats on it, it’s no wonder… well, people who have no real understanding of scientific rigor are in no position to dictate the terms of an experiment to those who do. Stage technicians… I’ve never been quite certain whether they do more harm or good. They do much to keep interest in the great trade alive, I’m sure… but they spread so many fallacies and misconceptions. True science isn’t about getting work done… it’s about learning how things happen. Where magic teaches that things happen simply because they happen, science sees an unbroken chain of cause and effect stretching backwards… where each cause is also an effect with its own cause, in an eternal cycle, a wheel of…”

“But, cutting through all that… it sounds like you favor unprovable philosophy more so than results,” I said.

“Our experiments do produce results… only, it often takes a scientific mind to understand them fully,” Prevailingwind said. “This is why, for centuries, we scientists have only published our results among ourselves. Too often in the past, some barbaric fool would demand proof of our theories, only to become enraged when presented with something they could not understand. During the High Reclamation, the Temple of Khersis…”

“Wait,” I said, cutting him off. As a history buff, I was sensitive to people trying to twist historical accounts to serve their purposes. “The High Reclamation was about forcing gnomes, elves, and other supposed ‘undesirables’ out of Ixthia.”

“And ‘other undesirables’ included scientists,” Prevailingwind said. “The Khersians have traditionally been opposed to scientific progress, to orderly inquiries into the subtle interactions…”

“Not that I’m a big fan of the Khersians, but in the early days of the religion, the Universal Temple was actually traditionally more concerned with holding on to its powerbase than on what a bunch of… free thinkers… in the countryside of the provinces thought,” I said, trying to be diplomatic. “I’m not saying that scientists weren’t among their victims, but their main focus was on heretics… people who professed to be Khersian but didn’t recognize the supreme authority of the Universal Temple. Anything from sects which celebrated the feasts on the ‘wrong’ days to clerics who wielded edged weapons were seen as far more of a threat to the Temple’s authority than a couple of…”

“That scientists were persecuted en masse by the Khersians is a widely-known fact,” Prevailingwind said, a little testily. “And as the Khersian Temple spread its faith…”

“So, are you anti-Khersian, or anti-magic?” I asked. “Because plenty of influential wizards were persecuted by the Temple, because their innovations were seen to undermine Khersian dogma in some way, or to diminish the reliance of people on their clerics. That’s why healing and life magic are so underdeveloped, compared to other schools of magic… because the Universal Temple suppressed non-divine healing for so long.”

“I’m not anti-anything… I’m pro-truth. Magic has its place in modern society, but it can’t explain how a smith with no mystical power can transform iron into steel,” Prevailingwind said. “Or the common bumblebee… according to your elemental alchemists, a creature of that size with such a low level of air shouldn’t be able to fly, but it does. Magic can’t explain it… science can.”

“Wow, do you get all your beliefs from new age self-help books?” I asked. “Elemental balance is only a small part of winged flight. Did you sleep through naturalism class? This is like, elementary school stuff.”

“Well, then there’s psionics,” Prevailingwind said.

“You mean the subtle arts,” I said. “If we’re going to start using comic book names for real things, I think I might as well give up.”

“We prefer the more scientific term,” Prevailingwind said. “Nobody has yet been able to explain why a supposedly magical phenomenon provokes no reaction from attempts to detect magic, and is not affected by means that prevent or protect from magic.”

“Uh… that’s why they’re called the subtle arts?” I said, trying to force myself to sound more patient than I felt. “They’re subtle. It’s easy enough to grasp, if you understand the intrinsic magic of things. Magical detection doesn’t actually detect the presence of magic, no matter what the common perception of it might be… it works by responding to disruptions where magic is being used artificially. You also can’t detect a transmutation spell in play when iron becomes steel… or for that matter, when iron rusts… but again, that’s because magical energy isn’t being overtly called into play.”

“Or maybe it isn’t magic at all,” Prevailingwind said.

“Magic is what makes the world work,” I said. “You can’t separate something out and go, ‘this isn’t magic’, no matter how strange it might seem… at best, you’ve just discovered a new kind of magic, or a new permutation of it. Humanity’s only been able to reach our current level of advancement by abandoning the scientific impulses of our ancestors, and realizing that just because we figured out some little quirk of existence doesn’t mean we can make the physical world sit up and beg. Remember the stories about the two tribes of man? The first learned about magic from the elves, and they were able to gather more food and secure themselves against the elements… and the second tribe… well, they died off, didn’t they?”

“Faded into obscurity, more like,” Prevailingwind said. “The stories don’t actually say what happened to them. Some Mechans have some… interesting ideas in that area.”

“Yeah, I once used a chant rune where this chick insisted she was descended from the second tribe,” I said. “I suppose you think she was right?”

“I wouldn’t care to make that assertion without evidence, but all things are possible until disproved,” he said.

“Until disproved?” I asked. “Her claim’s ridiculous on the face of it… if she could prove it, I guess I’d have to accept it, but the burden of proof’s on her. Anyway, the way she talked about magic, I wondered what the hell she was doing chanting away in front of a crystal ball in the first place… I mean, if you could really make electrical energy do all the things it’s supposed to do, in the animations, then why would you even be on the ethernet in the first place?”

“Well, that’s certainly one way of looking at things,” Prevailingwind said, flashing an indulgent smile… which was pretty infuriating. I mean, here I was talking sense in the face of his nonsense, and he was acting like he was doing me some kind of favor by indulging my point of view?

Amaranth seemed to have sensed that I was about to blow my top, because she was suddenly right there, embracing me from behind, which had the effect of both physically holding me back and pushing the back of my head between her breasts.

“Remember, sweetie, if you’re good, you’ll still get a special treat,” she said, which really didn’t do wonders for my sense of being talked to like I was a child… but still distracted me enough that I forgot my retort.

“Ah, it looks like we’re about ready,” Prevailingwind said, walking back towards the group.

Amaranth turned so that we were facing him, and I could see that the Mechans had assembled a device on the tripod. It consisted of three fat cylinders of differing widths, with a little circular projection coming off the lowest and thinnest one. The whole assemblage was tilted at an angle.

“Can you guess what it is?” Prevailingwind asked, seeing me looking at it.

“It looks a bit like a telescope,” I said. “Or at least the fucked-up grandbaby of one.”

Amaranth hissed in my ear, but Prevailingwind chuckled at the description.

“In a way, it is,” he said. “We have made a few… improvements… to the standard sailor’s glass.”

“I guess that explains what we’re doing on a hilltop,” I said. “But wouldn’t it make more sense to do this during the day? I mean, whatever you’re going to be peering at with that monstrosity is going to be pretty hard to see at night, isn’t it?”

“I would quite agree with you,” the chief technician said. “Except the object of our inquiries is only visible at night. We’re drawing the moon, you see… our goal is to produce a map of the lunar landscape of great accuracy.”

“Why?” I asked, thinking that “map” and “landscape” were an odd way to describe a picture of the moon, but not quibbling over word choice.

“To increase our understanding of it, as we seek to understand all things,” he said. “It’s not so ridiculous to think that one day, humans may walk upon it… and if not, the moon is as much a part of our physical world as the grass beneath our feet, even though it’s over two hundred thousand miles away.”

I stared at him. He simply continued to smile back at me. Finally, I couldn’t help it… I burst out laughing.

“Have I said something amusing?” he asked politely.

“You said the moon is two hundred thousand miles away,” I said.

“Yes, and it is,” he said.

“No, it isn’t,” I said. I pointed skyward. “It’s right there.”

There was some annoyingly self-assured chuckling from other members of the group at this, which got under my skin. If it had simply been a group of people laughing at me, I probably would’ve reacted my usual way: by retreating, either within myself or back down the hill… but this was different. I couldn’t be intimidated by a bunch of lunatics who were only amused at my “ignorance” of patent nonsense.

“Look!” I said, breaking away from Amaranth’s arms and pointing insistently at the bright full moon. “It’s right there, you can see it.”

“On that point, I’d fully agree with you,” Prevailingwind said. “Its visibility was never in question.”

“I suppose you think you could climb up a tree and grab it in your hand,” said the girl who’d made the snide comment about Khersians. She was about my height, but quite a deal heavier, with a head of badly tangled red hair.

“Of course not, you idiot,” I said. I heard Amaranth make a gasping noise, but I was past the point of easy restraint. “The moon is affixed to a sphere within the vault of the heavens. No human… no mortal creature… can reach that through any means.”

That just provoked more derisive laughter.

“Okay, but look… if it were that far away, how could we even see it?” I asked Prevailingwind, who at least wasn’t laughing, even if he did have a trace of smugness behind his mask of calm patience. “It would be too far away… it would look so tiny, it would be invisible, wouldn’t it?”

“Not if it were, say… two thousand some miles in diameter,” Prevailingwind said in an almost off-hand manner.

“Two thousand… two thousand miles in diameter?” I asked, unable to keep from laughing myself at the absurdity.

“Now, now, the mathematics of it is pretty simple,” he said. “Once you know the distance, it’s easy enough to calculate the actual diameter from the apparent…”

“And I suppose once you know the diameter, it’s easy enough to figure the distance?” I asked. “No wonder you call this group a circle…”

“Well, we do check the figures against each other, but there are other ways of measuring the distance,” he said. “For instance, I’m sure that you yourself have noticed that the amount by which distant objects seem to move in response to a lateral change in your own position varies by…”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ve actually heard this one before,” I said. “But you can’t expect that a principle you observe down here will hold perfectly true for a heavenly body. It’s a heavenly body. The rules are different!”

“Well, perhaps you’re right,” Prevailingwind said, in that infuriatingly patronizing tone. “But, if they weren’t, then…”

“You honestly, seriously, truly believe the moon is a disc that’s over two thousand miles across and it only looks so small because it’s a couple hundred thousand miles away?” I asked.

“Of course I don’t,” the chief technician said.

“Well, good,” I said.

“It’s a sphere two thousand miles across,” he said.

“A sphere,” I repeated calmly, with what I felt was an impressive amount of restraint. “That’s interesting. Really.”

“You sound skeptical,” he said.

“Well, yeah,” I said. “It’s just… those markings you’re so interested in? If the moon were a sphere, they wouldn’t always be visible… you’d see the moon appear to turn as it went around us.”

Prevailingwind smiled, as if he’d expected me to say that.

“Unless, of course, it actually was itself turning, and at the proper rate to keep that same side facing us,” he said.

“That’s convenient,” I said.

“That’s gravity,” he countered.

“Gravity?” I said. “Everything gravitates towards its level… I know some people theorize that celestial bodies are susceptible to this as well, but if the moon ever had been anywhere besides its proper level, it would’ve long since reached it, wouldn’t it have? I mean, you can see for yourself that it’s not rising away from or falling towards us, so… there you go.”

“Well, our understanding of gravity is a bit different from yours,” the chief technician said. “But to keep it simple, we don’t believe that the moon has a ‘proper level’, as you put it, but that it’s irresistibly attracted to the larger world… however, it’s also moving as it falls… hmm, how best to put this? Imagine you’re falling from the sky, towards an evenly sloping hill. The hill slopes downwards, dropping one foot in elevation for every foot of lateral distance. If you were to descend one foot per second, while simultaneously moving down slope one foot per second, you’d never be able to hit the ground, as long as the slope continued, would you?”

I considered, then shook my head.

“Just so,” Prevailingwind said. “Now, when you consider the curvature of the world…”

“That’s assuming she even knows the world is round,” the red-haired smart ass piped up.

“Of course the world is round,” I said. “The sphere is the first ideal shape. I’m surprised you guys haven’t convinced yourselves the world is flat.”

“Please, both of you… this is supposed to be an intellectual discussion,” Prevailingwind said. “So, considering the curvature of the world, we have an effectively infinite slope for an object circling it, don’t we?”

“Wait… so, your theory is that the falling moon is so high above the world that, as it falls, it keeps missing?” I asked. “And that it does so at such a speed, while rotating at such a speed, that it just happens to always have the same side turned towards us?”

“Well, er… essentially, yes,” Prevailingwind said.

I shook my head in disbelief.

“Haven’t you ever heard of a little principle called ‘Durkon’s hammer’?” I asked.

“Of course,” Prevailingwind said. “As critical thinking is an important part of our methods, we apply it fairly regularly.”

“Why don’t you apply it here?” I asked. “You’re heaping together all kinds of undue assumptions in order to support your ridiculously convoluted pet theory when a much simpler one exists: the moon is a circle affixed to a crystalline sphere in the vault of the heavens.”

“They aren’t assumptions,” Prevailingwind said. “They all proceed from an orderly scientific investigation. I could tell you our terms for the concepts involved, but it would make little sense to a layperson. If you’d like, though, I could walk you through…”

“Fat chance she’ll ever understand it,” the red-haired one said. “She probably doesn’t even know the threefold law.”

“Please, Fluoride,” Prevailingwind said, holding up a hand towards her in a gesture of restraint. “She never will understand if her ignorance is treated with hostility.”

“‘Ignorance’?” I said. “I’ll admit I haven’t heard of this threefold thing, but I don’t think it’s ‘ignorant’ of me not to know every little thing you guys decided to make up.”

“The threefold law’s precise formulation might be a human invention, but what it describes is very real, and far older than mankind,” the chief technician said.

“Enlighten me,” I said. “I’m all ears.”

“It consists of the law of inertia, the law of acceleration, and the law of reciprocal action,” Prevailingwind said. “These three laws govern the motion of all physical objects: an object in motion tends to stay in motion, force is equal to mass times acceleration, and every action begets an equal and opposite reaction.”

I’d actually heard that kind of thing expressed before… in works of fantasy, of course, and sometimes with slightly different wording. It was part common sense… I mean, the middle part basically said that the harder you swung something, the harder it would hit, though some of the ideas they tried to extrapolate from it were pretty loopy… and the rest was pure bullshit.

“An object in motion tends to stay in motion?” I repeated. “Let’s test that, okay?” I bent down and picked up a small rock. “Object in motion,” I said, tossing it a short distance through the air… very lightly, as if it went out of sight, the point would be lost. The rock came to a rest within the lantern-lit area. “Hey, look… it stopped moving.”

“I gave the simplest form of the law, of course,” Prevailingwind said. “In full, it reads ‘unless acted upon by an external force.’ There were, of course, many forces acting upon the rock: gravity, wind resistance, possibly a cross-breeze… and, of course, when it touches the ground, there’s the equal and opposite…”

“Or, khee, I don’t know… maybe it just ran out of impetus?” I said. “Don’t you see? You’ve got to tack on all these additions to your ‘laws’ when they’re disproved, and then you have to start coming up with ‘forces’ which ‘act on’ the rock to explain the simple fact that it stopped moving when your law said it shouldn’t. Durkon’s hammer, people!” I shouted the last part, wheeling around to face the group as a whole. “The simplest explanation, the one which requires the least assumptions, is the most likely. I mean, look all around you. The world is full of shit, and in case you haven’t noticed, most of it isn’t moving. Doesn’t seem very likely, if there’s some ‘scientific law’ making things that start moving keep moving, does it? Newsflash: the natural state of a solid object is to rest… to the extent that something is solid, it only moves when something imparts impetus to it.”

“So, you don’t agree that the air provides resistance which slows a thrown projectile down?” the chief technician asked.

“If it’s blowing the wrong way, yeah, wind can knock something off course or push it back the way it came,” I said. “But you’re saying that if the air wasn’t there, the rock would go on forever?”

“In the absence of any other forces, yes,” the chief technician said. “But, of course, that circumstance will never arise in…”

“Oh, yeah, convenient,” I said. “Well, I say that in the absence of any force, a moving object will… will turn into a flying pink sunflower that spits out gold coins… or burst into flames… or sing the sun-blazoned standard. Ooh, can’t prove me wrong, can you? Because you’ll never find an object that’s free of your ‘external forces.’”

“It’s no use, Chief Technician,” the woman called Fluoride said. “This… barbarian… will never understand. She’s closed her mind.”

She actually intoned the last three words, as if she were making some grave and important pronouncement. That was what really set me off.

“Closed… closed my mind?” I repeated. “I have trained my mind, you stupid bitch! I have learned and I have studied, while you guys apparently sat on your asses playing an elaborate game of Let’s Pretend, acting like you can learn the secrets of the universe by poking at it, acting like everything’s just set up for your convenience and all you have to do is think things through enough and you’ll figure everything out…”

“Hey, settle down there,” said Steff’s voice in my ear. I waved at the sound like I was brushing away a bee, but then I was hit with a burst of inspiration. I turned a bit, to make sure she wasn’t actually standing beside me, then pointed at her.

“Right now, Steff’s whispering in my ear,” I said.

“His name, for your information, is Antibacteria,” interjected “Fluoride”, but I ignored her. I mean, elven features were a bit androgynous, but if the stupid bitch couldn’t tell a girl half-elf from a boy one, who was she to lecture me?

“Whispering… from ten feet away,” I said. “And I can hear her perfectly. Magic can explain that, but it would be pretty hard to do, if sound ‘propagates as a wave’, like they thought back in the dark ages, isn’t it?”

“Well, under ordinary circumstances it does,” one of the Mechans said, “but obviously, those of elven descent have some magic in their voices that allows them to…”

“No, no, it’s still a wave!” another said. “Elves just subconsciously estimate the distance and then modulate their voices so that…”

“You guys can’t even agree on how to explain away the stuff that contradicts your stupid beliefs!” I said. “And you!” I said, rounding on Steff. “How can you even be studying heavy-duty magic like necromancy if you’re a Mechan?”

Steff looked uncomfortable, for only the second time since I’d met her. I wondered how many of her cohorts knew that was her major… and how many of them had a seriously magical discipline as their own major.

“Well,” she said, drawing out the word unnecessarily long, “I think an understanding of the mechanical nature of life can help…”

“The mechanical nature of life?” I repeated incredulously. “As if our bodies are nothing more than a… a motorcycle, or a wind-up toy, or some sort of bullshit like that? As if our… your stomach was just a fuel reservoir and your heart some kind of pump? Or that your eyes are just lenses, like in your fucking telescope. Well,” I said, spewing words in a headlong, full-on raging torrent now, “I don’t have to tell you how stupid that is, not when we have a nymph here who’s also majoring in life magic. Tell them, Amaranth.”

I was turning as I said it, and it wasn’t until I said her name that her face came into focus. It was like a mask, frozen… looking back, that’s my only real defense. There was no emotion on her face for me to react to, no hint to pick up on. I guess that the lack of expression was so very un-Amaranthy that I should have known something was wrong, but there was just too much momentum to my rant at that point.

“You stepped fully formed out of a field,” I prompted her. “You mutilate and heal yourself on at least a weekly basis… you absorb the food you eat without any waste, without any trace that it was even eaten. You’ve probably even met your goddess in person, one of the architects of life, of the world… tell them how stupid it is to believe that man is a machine, that’s there’s a mechanical basis to the universe.” Her face remained blank, impassive… like she was one of those wind-up toys from the science stories, and she’d run down. “Well, go on!” I said, insistently. I mean, she just had to back me up. She was a nymph… she knew this stuff, better than I did. “Don’t just stand there… tell them how stupid it is!”

I’ve used the phrase “burst into tears” before… maybe even, in the course of this story, a bit more often than would be normal. I haven’t really paid that much attention to stuff like that. However, before this point, I’d never seen tears really, truly burst forth, like a dam had just been fireballed apart. It was a bit like watching Two cry for the first time, only there was no prelude, no preamble… one moment, I was looking at that increasingly awful blank mask, and the next… the next, she was crying.

She whipped off her glasses and threw them at me. I made no move to catch or avoid them, and the heavy metal frame bounced off my chest. I was watching her, not them. She turned away from me and flung herself away from the lighted area, across the flattened peak of the hill and down the other side.

“She believes,” I said, numb with shock… both for that realization, and the realization of what I’d just said… not about this group of self-assured lunatics… or about Steff, who I liked but was just plain weird… but about Amaranth, the woman that I… well, I’d told her that I loved her.

The woman I wanted so badly to belong to.

“Oh, yeah, ya think?” Steff said. “Great going, Mack… the circle’s definitely gonna want to induct her now.”

“I should… should I go after her?” I asked. “Or will that just make things worse?”

“If I may say something?” Prevailingwind said.

“Now’s not really the time, Pre,” Steff said.

“It’s just… well, we are rather near to the edge of the protected radius as it is,” he said. “And given that fact, your comely friend… well, she’s chosen a rather poor direction to run in.”