III-3 Reinforce

A soul cannot be damaged. This is simply a colloquial way of describing the pain one feels when their skills are shattered, or when they suffer the effects of Necromancy. The soul itself, after all, is more of a repository—a storage or archive for our own legends and history. It is these legends and histories, these feats of struggle and triumph and defeats, that shape our skills. And what are skills but expressions of who we are, who we strive to be, who we will become, should we continue walking our paths?

Necromancy, then, is reaching that which is lost. It reaches into the defeat. It reaches into the shadow of who we are, the parts where we are insufficient, the moments we fell—all that was and was lost, all that could have been and was never reached. That is why Necromancy is so destructive to the so-called soul: because it is a story breaker, a story defiler, something that withers potential itself.

And that is why all entities drawn back from the brink of death, called risen, are more fallen in actual fact. They are fallen because they are their lowest potential. They are the shadow of who they are, who they could be, and they are the echoes of their darkest thoughts, their ruined memories, their destroyed history. Fallen Legendary Pathbearers often plunge far beneath even Heroic-Tier after their destruction and pseudo-resurrection.

But then, I asked myself if one is capable of falling, if one can be broken so brutally, if a skill, a history, one's own conception of their personal mythology made manifest through the system's magic can be deformed so drastically, then it should also be possible to remake a soul. To remake the components of a soul, to shape history without ever truly performing a requisite deed in the eyes of the system.

And thus, we depart from necromancy—the shadow of what was, the ease of breaking—and we enter animancy, which, if I am correct in my assumptions, is the magic of magic itself.

-Udraal Thann’s Animancy Notes

III-3

Reinforce

Before Shiv even spiked his gravitic field once, Adam surged right past him. There was no warning, no hint, or anything that could have prepared the Deathless for just how fast the Gate Lord reached top speed. Shiv realized immediately that Adam had undergone a major Skill Evolution. Rather than having the fiery Wings of the Starhawk, he now had six inverted pyramids, white-hot and pulsing bright with strange energy.

The wings gave off no force at all. There were no ripples in the air, no shock waves; there wasn't even any sound. It was like Adam was traveling without propulsion. And after a few seconds more, Shiv was certain the Young Lord was moving without propulsion. He was simply accelerating of his own accord, divorced from the world. Shiv wasn't a well-versed student of physics, but even he knew that every action should have a reaction. Well, there was no reaction for Adam, not anymore.

There was also no build-up to him reaching max velocity. One moment, Adam was still; the next, he was shooting ahead and accelerating at a constant, staggering pace. Shiv felt his jaw drop momentarily. This, he didn't see coming at all. And as Uva cast herself into his mind, she tasted his surprise as well.

But the surprise didn't last. A sudden, aberrant feeling of competitiveness overcame Shiv, and he spiked his field again and again, chasing after the new Gate Lord. Uva kept them all connected, but her Reflexes Skill was drastically lesser than both of theirs now. She barely managed a thought while both of them spoke to each other.

"That's a nice Skill Evolution to have there," Shiv said.

"I got it when the bloody stranger tried to drag me into its mouth." Adam spat back a shudder of trauma, and trauma lingered there. 

Shiv's amusement died down. He realized just how much Adam was holding within himself. How much stress, how much terror, how much anguish. Fighting the eldritch entity took a lot out of Adam Arrow, and it was a miracle he was still keeping it together. Such was why Shiv resolved to take Adam's mind off things with a brief, albeit interesting, race.

For a bit, he considered using his Strider of the Unbending Path to instantly reappear right next to Adam and shock the Dimensional Archer. He guessed it was probably four kilometers of distance. Adam was turning into a smaller and smaller dot on the horizon, but between Inertial Overdrive and stopping time, Shiv dismissed that thought. He wasn't going to be cheap. He didn't have it in him to be cheap; Adam deserved better than that. Besides, Shiv wanted to see if he could actually catch up to Adam using his own Heroic-Tier Skill Evolution. There was a reason why he had Inertial Overdrive, after all.

So far, it seemed Adam's skill was outright superior, but if there was one thing Shiv learned through all his trials and triumphs, it was that there was always more than meets the eye for every skill one gained. There were always advantages, limitations, and prices to pay, and he intended to discover Adam's, along with his own.

Shiv spiked his field a dozen times in quick succession. His speed exploded. The world around him turned into a traveling ball of flame. The Young Lord briefly stopped. Shiv saw Adam turn around, shifting in place while his wings remained unmoving. The pointed ends of each of his vectors determined his position of acceleration. That was another advantage Adam had; he seemed to be able to move his body freely, independent of his wings, meaning he could be going in one direction and not even need to twist his body around entirely to shoot. The wings could reorient him, and he made instant and extreme turns and flight adjustments without suffering any drag either.

Truly, Adam was a frictionless flyer. Reactionless, Shiv thought again. But the difference in their Heroic-Tier skills quickly revealed itself. Where once Adam seemed impossibly fast, the growing gulf between them began to slow, stop, and then shrink. Slowly, Shiv was moving faster. Adam drew closer with every spike he applied to himself. His gravitic field pulled him along, and every single surge of momentum he gained was retained all throughout his journey, and with the frequency of his gravity spikes, his speed soon grew to be exponential.

At first, he crawled closer to Adam, inching toward the Young Lord bit by bit. But with every subsequent pull on his field, his body groaned and suffered. Wounds opened up, his recently mended gash lining his chest bled freely, his soul burns coating the left side of his body screamed at him, but Shiv was too excited and too motivated to stop. His mind skipped briefly as he forgot why he was doing this, but the pain brought him back. His parts within his body were destroyed from the sheer force of Inertial Overdrive. His acceleration drastically outpaced Adam's. He shot forward like a plunging anvil, while Adam went from an arrow in flight to a feather held still by a rushing gale.

Despite this, Shiv realized that Adam was ridiculously fast. Absurdly, compared to most people. It was just that he seemed to have a maximum ceiling to his speed, one that might increase with future Skill Evolutions and levels gained. But the velocity at which he traveled couldn't stack, and that was where Shiv beat him. The Young Lord flew wide, rising high into the air to avoid the massive tsunami of force that followed Shiv in his wake. A surging fist of flame smashed over the ruins of Gate Theborn. Below, the rubble began to melt, and as the force of his dragging acceleration crashed over them, they dissolved to nothing but ash and motes of dust.

"What in the bloody hells was that?" Adam cried.

Shiv could only laugh—laugh as he coughed blood, as his eyes burst, as his vision began to fade. Uva was starting to mutter something inside his mind, doubtlessly calling for him to stop. Or to control his speed. But for a while, just a while, he wanted to go this fast. He wanted to see the difference between them. He couldn't help it. 

He was born to fight. He was born to face down titans. And he was born to spar with Adam Arrow.

But as Shiv continued on, he realized another major advantage Adam had over him. The Young Lord's flight was reactionless, reactionless, reactionless. The word repeated in Shiv's mind three times as he realized Adam was easily capable of halting in place, going from traveling kilometers every second to becoming impossibly still, without any ill effect to his body.

Shiv, meanwhile, was practically being eroded down to his bone. He gritted his teeth and pointed downward, but even the attempt to wrestle the vector of his acceleration proved to be a grand struggle. He was going too fast, much too fast for his gravity field to even contend with, and frankly, his gravity field was the problem. Once he picked the direction that he was going in, the best he could do was make a few small angles of adjustment after extreme speed was achieved. 

Inertial Overdrive was really defined by "overdrive." Eventually, he would get to a point where his strength wasn't enough, where his body was just fragile glass rather than adaptive adamantium.

Right, Shiv thought, that's enough of that. And then he froze time.

His temporal shell flared over him, and he projected his Chronomancy back a full ten seconds, practically halfway across the entire gate. He blinked in place and his armor shuddered just a little. Shiv grinned once more. His Strider of the Unbending Path could arguably be the greater reward of his recent struggles, even as just a Master-Tier skill. Inertial Overdrive might have been heroic, but some skills simply offered an absolute advantage instead of a relative one.

Suddenly Shiv was slower, his body wasn't so damaged, and he detonated his inertial sheath with a thought. The blast wave was still intense; the fireball cleaved out, and he flattened it into the form of an envelope. As he struck his hands together, creating a counter-shock wave against the displaced force rushing up behind him, it flattened and cleaved downward, spearing a full kilometer deep into the already ruined earth. A glistening lip of glass and melted obsidian shone from far below. For a moment, it seemed that one of Gate Theborn's molten rivers had returned, but ultimately, the gleam faded as the heat dissipated.

A second later, Shiv forgot what he just did again, why he gained a Gravitic Wrestler level.

Gravitic Wrestler 140 > 141

Finally, Uva responded, finishing her thought. "Shiv, what just… It felt like I lost an entire section of my time. Did you freeze time? Did you use your Chronomancy again?" She sounded annoyed, but also fascinated, slightly excited.

"Yeah," Shiv said. His thoughts felt loose and hard to track. "I just had a little race with Adam."

Adam was still flinching, looking around, trying to find where the wall of force and flame coming right at him went. He stared at Shiv, and the Deathless laughed—laughed as the Young Lord hovered above, cursing at him. Shiv shook his head. He got a little carried away then, and then he noticed his own mind was still reeling. His own impulses were all over the place. His mood shot high, swooped low, and he groaned. 

Shit… I’m still broken… The brain damage inflicted on him was still lingering. He wasn't completely well, even after everything Uva did.

And to cement that understanding, she began to stitch away at him again. "Composer, I don't know how you're coherent right now," she breathed.

"I just… I…" And Shiv thought back to his torture, how the things clawed at his very skills, how the entities the Recollector poured into him tore his mind asunder over and over again, deformed his body, mutated him as they tried to mold him into a desired vessel for their eldritch designs. He went insane several times then. He went insane, but eventually, he always came back…

Then, just then, a voice whispered from within, Rose's voice. Even I… even I come back, she muttered. A slight bit of coherence had returned to her. Previously, Shiv tuned out her constant screaming, her gibbering insanity. Even I am dragged back to full restoration. God's ascendance, what kind of thing am I trapped within?

Shiv ignored her dehumanizing remark. On some level, he got it, and on another, he was used to being treated as a thing by the people of Blackedge, and she was, more than anyone else, a citizen of Blackedge. Even if she'd been dead for well over eighteen years.

"Did you forget that we’re looking for Valor and Can Hu!" Adam cried, his frustration boiling to near anger, and Shiv suddenly realized that he was the one who jolted them into action a mere few seconds ago.

Right, Shiv thought, and then he noticed the glowing crevice beneath him again. When did that get made—

Uva pulled at his focus. Shiv shuddered.

"Just follow my voice, and follow Adam," she spoke. "I will keep you focused. Parts of your attention will be drifting as I continue my mending. I moved your broken mind back together in haste. Some parts should not be together. You healed wrong. I need to tear at some of your mind. Be ready for a bit of… oddness."

"And what about… what about you?" Shiv asked. "What about your wounds?"

"My wounds I can fix in time," she said dismissively, but he could still feel a cold dread lining the undercurrents of her consciousness. He knew her; they'd been intimate on a level deeper than most could imagine, and the chill that gnawed at her was of a different sort altogether than her normal, cool demeanor.

Shiv's attention jumped several times more, and twice Uva had to center him before he started another race with Adam, briefly forgetting where he was. But it took very little time for the Young Lord to spot where Valor, Can Hu, and the owl were left. Adam touched down over a dense mound of half-melted rubble. Shiv slammed deep into the earth, approximately 300 meters away from Adam to avoid any friendly fire. Debris still spiked everywhere, and the lightest discharge that followed was still devastating enough to leave a shallow crater on the pockmarked land. 

From on high, the bottom of Gate Theborn looked like it had been pounded by siege spells and artillery for well over a full year. That was how it seemed to Shiv, and that was the way Uva felt as well.

Shiv crossed the remaining distance without feeding his sheath any more force. Controlling it was still hard. It was a hungry layer of membrane. Practically every bit of kinetic energy he applied on himself was drawn at least somewhat into the sheath. It wanted him to go fast. It wanted to explode. And it had an effect on his mood as well.

Shiv did his best to focus. It was hard with his broken mind. More than a few times, he had to pop himself. Then he lost track of his thoughts again and just started doing it for fun. And the last time, he popped himself right beside Adam, making the Young Lord stagger.

"Stop that!" Adam hissed, barely regaining his balance. "We need to get Can Hu and Valor out!"

Uva tugged on Shiv's mind again, and a brief, tranquil moment of absolute focus followed. Right, Can Hu, Valor, they remained cemented in his mind. And with that, a flood of other memories followed as well: Valor broken and unmoving, Can Hu unresponsive. Uva then had to seal away the part of him that was hurtling towards a berserker rage.

Godsdamned Recollector, Shiv thought. When I eventually get to the stranger's dimension—and I will find my way there. If not tomorrow, then a thousand years, a million years. I'm going to rip the entire dimension apart.

Adam pawed at the rubble, grunting as his Skybearer’s Strength allowed him to pitch chunks of rubble the size of his body as if they were rocks. He grunted with the effort. Shiv sniffed and simply swept everything beneath him away with a casual swipe of a hand. Adam staggered back as a wave of force tore across the land. Shiv reached deeper, slamming his gravitic field over the mound, and he pulled. He dug down until he felt something that didn’t crack as easily as stone or obsidian. That's how he separated the teleportation anchor from the rest of the debris. With a casual tug, he tore it out from the ground, and it exploded upward, sending obsidian, concrete, glass, and more flying everywhere.

Shiv's stomach dropped, and he felt it drop two more times as both Uva and Adam feared the worst. The teleportation anchor crumpled into a small and deformed ball. Shiv gritted his teeth as Adam prepared to cast a Necromancy spell. He said that he wanted to shear away an edge to cut an opening so they could see within and carefully extract. 

Shiv stopped listening then. Just enough anger leaked into his focus that he acted with casual, contemptuous ease. He tore the teleportation anchor open. His recent levels and his rage made the action easy. Ridiculously so. Compared to the Jealousy's teleportation anchor, the one they used as an operating base within Gate Theborn was also practically tiny. 

As such, it was like opening an aluminum can.

The teleportation anchor split in half. Shiv threw away the topmost section, chucking it far without even a second thought. Adam's jaw dropped. He took a step back. Uva muttered something about how that was absolutely absurd. A swell of excited warmth followed her comment.

"What?" Shiv said, staring at Adam's stunned reaction.

The Young Lord just narrowed his eyes as his mouth moved. "That’s just bloody monstrous. A person's not supposed to have that kind of strength."

Shiv let out a breath as he looked inside. He prepared himself for the worst, but then he saw an opening. An opening that he remembered seeing several times over the course of the past few days. It looked like a portal within the teleportation anchor had been opened. Then he realized it wasn't a portal. It was a smaller dimension, a Category 1 dimension. Right, Shiv remembered. Can Hu got a Master-Tier item from the Dragon Knight quest as well. The Garden of Bountiful Alloy.

A frame of metal became the archway holding a new portal, and it sat at the center of the crumpled teleportation anchor, surrounded by a cube of dense alloy to stop it from being crushed. Through the portal, Shiv saw two gleaming green eyes stare back at him. A smile curved on his face immediately.

"Can Hu!" Shiv cried, his heart accelerating, joy catching fire in his veins..

"Pathbearer Shiv," Can Hu replied, and though they were an automaton, he could hear relief and triumph and satisfaction in Can Hu's echoing tones as well.

Uva untangled herself from him, but left more than a few strands inside his mind as she continued mending him. Adam slipped past Shiv and squeezed into the mangled remains of the teleportation anchor. He sprinted into the small dimension of growing alloy, and his sun shone bright. The azure dawn splashed over Can Hu and over the scattered and still broken form of Valor.

Shiv's initial joy evaporated. Valor was still broken, unmoving. A hardened dread cemented inside Shiv. He couldn't imagine a world where Valor could die, yet the possibility gnawed at him. He didn't think Valor could die. He couldn't imagine it. But even so, while Can Hu was standing, supported by a column of stone and several pieces of metal that held his body as if an armor stand, Valor lay unmoving on the ground, lifeless, soulless even.

Do not be dead, Valor. Do you hear me? Do you hear me, system? Shiv snarled at the system. 

Using his mind, Uva comforted him, but it made no difference. If Valor died, if any of them had died during this battle, what the hells would he do? For the first time, Shiv felt himself deflated. His mood swung drastically, and a sudden onrush of crushing despair nearly flooded his mind, and then it broke away as his focus jumped.

"Sorry," Uva said. "It's just, the damage is…"

"You keep working," Shiv thought. "But thanks, Uva. Really. I wouldn't know what I'd be doing without you.”

"Screaming incoherently, like a borderline vegetable, lost to a berserk rage," Uva surmised accurately with a slight hint of deadpan humor.

Shiv nodded. "Yeah, probably that." And then another memory returned to him unbidden. He remembered charging the entity, screaming how he was the chef and it was the food. Shiv cringed. Uva let out a slight huff of laughter, but it was diminished as Adam knelt down and checked Valor.

"Pathbearer Adam," Can Hu grieved. Its voice echoed in imitation of an exhalation. "What is that?" Can Hu directed a small pebble towards Adam's azure sun. "I feel…" Can Hu moved. His damaged body shifted, even with Shiv's cracked armor weighing on him. He let out a slow groan of pain, but he moved of his own accord, strong enough to decide his own actions even after all the damage he sustained. His actions twitched and his body whined with a scream of metal, but he moved.

Shiv's eyes widened, and Uva's mind went still. 

"I am…” Can Hu gasped. “My skills, they are still broken, but my existing skills, the ones that are whole, the levels are climbing. They are…"

"Yeah," Shiv breathed. "Adam here had a run-in with the Stranger, and now…" His mind trailed off. He forgot what he was talking about. "I'll let you tell him later," Shiv said, suddenly feeling extremely mentally exhausted. 

Then Adam's light faded from Shiv's body, faded from everyone but Valor. Shiv groaned as he clutched at his chest. The bleeding intensified immediately. The pain lining the left hemisphere of his entire person flared to a roaring height once more.

Uva groaned. The sheer damage sustained by her mind leaked over into Shiv's, and his thoughts began to skip rapidly as well. He only remembered the following moments in fractured instances, but he saw Adam channeling a spray of azure sunlight over the downed legendary path bearer. For three seconds, Valor was drowned in a resplendent blue glow. Shiv held his breath, and then he let it out multiple times because he kept forgetting where he was and who he was. It didn't help that the psionic backlash inflicted a cascade and caused Uva to forget herself as well. She was constantly blinking. He constantly veered towards berserk, and then she had to undo his anger before something happened.

But finally, Adam sagged forward and Shiv shot into the dimension of bountiful alloy. He caught the Young Lord before he could fall, and Adam muttered a grateful "thanks." And beneath them, a glow returned to Valor's eyes. It started as a flicker and then it faded. Shiv felt his stomach drop once more, but then a burst of sparks ignited again and Valor started twitching into motion. The other pieces of his body, the dagger, the arms, slid into place and Valor shot up, manifesting his Necromancy.

A corrosive blade slashed out just as Shiv's mind lost track of where he was—of who he was. Adam tackled him as his vector wings flared. He moved Shiv out of the room, both of them gliding weightlessly, reactionlessly, avoiding Valor's strike by the distance of a meter.

"Where… where are you? Come, let me show you how a legendary path bearer does!" And then Valor stopped talking. He noticed them, and Adam regarded Valor. "Valor, are you well? Are you?" He let out a rasping laugh and barely held back a rough breath of relief at the end.

Shiv, meanwhile, staggered over to Valor, uncaring about the necromantic blade, and tried to hug the skeleton. He forgot, momentarily, that Valor was currently imprinted by a shroud of necromancy as well.

"No!" Adam screamed. He shot and pinned Shiv against the wall. His acceleration rattled them both. That's how Shiv discovered that force could still be enacted on Adam. His vectors of reactionless acceleration applied mainly to his movement and not his body specifically. How that worked was beyond Shiv's understanding. He would probably have to ask a Dynamancer. And, unfortunately, he forgot to make a note of that too because his temporary amnesia skipped in once more.

Adam, meanwhile, walked closer to Valor, and the legendary path bearer staggered back, hovering in the air though lethargically. His many pieces shivered as if his spirit could barely sustain their weight. "We are alive. We have not been taken as thralls for the outsiders," Valor said, sounding somewhat awestruck. "I thought that would be our certain fate. I thought I would be made a personal vessel for the stranger to use as a puppet to torment me and the rest of us for as long as he could sustain our souls."

He studied Adam, Shiv, and Uva for a moment. Then his eyes fell on Shiv. "Shiv, your clothes…"

"They got burned off," Shiv muttered. "I can't remember how." And then he remembered how. "Oh yeah, I was fighting the Entity and I developed a Heroic-Tier reflexes skill and then I started moving really fast and the world became really hot and…" Shiv rambled on and then stopped as he forgot what he was talking about.

Adam took over talking to Valor instead. "A lot has happened. Valor, are you well?" Adam said. He kept his sun concentrated on the Legendary Pathbearer and beneath Adam's azure glow, 

Valor let out a rasp of relief. "Slightly better now than I was. But the damage, the damage the Outsider did to my form, how could…?" And then he regarded Adam's azure sun. "What is that? What have you gained?"

"That is The Righteous Dawn Prevails," Adam smiled. "I am a Unique Pathbearer now." He grinned brightly.

Shiv looked at Adam. "You're a Unique Pathbearer?" He blinked. "When in the hells did that happen?"

Adam looked at Shiv and shook his head. "Shiv, you have amnesia. You'll remember in a moment."

"I will? Oh, oh, right."

"And Uva," Valor continued. Now he was regarding the Umbral Psychomancer. "Your eyes, those colors. Have you…? No, you can't be. If you've been painted and touched by an Outsider, you…"

"I've reached into the outside," Uva admitted uncomfortably. "And I suppose something came of it. I, too, am a Unique Pathbearer now.”

Valor went silent for a long moment. "Is that all?"

"No," Uva admitted. "I have another skill, another one I gained while still inside the Recollector's mind."

"What tier?" Valor asked, sounding like he didn't want to know the answer. Shiv was confused as to why. Becoming stronger was a good thing. Gaining major Skill Evolutions was awesome. So why did Valor sound terrified?

"Heroic," she admitted, and she sounded shaken as she did. "It was… I don't think it was supposed to happen. I don't think I was supposed to develop a skill."

"What? Why not?" Shiv breathed.

"Because it's not my skill," she said. "I tore it… I tore a piece away from the Recollector while I was inside it. And that piece slid into my Psychomancy and broke off. And then it resided inside of me. It changed inside of me."

"May as well," Adam said. "Was it purified, changed by another force?"

"The Starhawk. He intervened on my behalf."

"The Starhawk," Valor said, sounding more and more lost with every passing second. He looked to Shiv, and Shiv just shrugged. Shiv shrugged doubly, as he forgot he just shrugged.

"Yes," Adam said. "I see. I think… I think a good portion of what happened to us just now was a scheme, a plot on the side of the system. It wanted us to take pieces from the eldritch, the Outsiders. Unique pieces. Pieces that we couldn't possibly develop on our own. Not nearly this fast. And then pieces that would be molded to us, that would be sculpted by us by our own, by our own manner." And Adam shook his head. The stress was too much. He didn't want to deal with this right now. "I'm just glad you're all right."

"We are not all right," Valor said. "We are far from all right." The ominous tone in the Legendary Pathbearer's voice silenced everyone. "Adam, at this pace you are all developing at… For Shiv, I could understand. His nature is aberrant," he said, sounding slightly apologetic.

Shiv just shrugged. "Yeah, but I kinda like it.”

"You’re a freak," Adam muttered. Shiv grinned.

"But for both of you," Valor continued, regarding Adam and Uva. "Adam, you are skilled in many regards, prodigious in some, but…" He trailed off. He regarded Uva. "And you, sister, you are focused. You have great potential, but this… this is beyond even genius."

Uva replied, she nodded. "I would not call myself a genius either. I would say I'm more determined, perhaps analytical, but not so insightful. I've seen true insight. I've seen true genius."

"And one could build to that," Valor said in slight repudiation. "One could grow themselves, grow their own potential until they truly hit that point of mastery above mastery. But for me," he tried to gather his words. "I took forty years to reach heroic. Forty years, and I was considered peerless for my time." He looked at all of them. His skull shivered, the crack lining his bones still glistened, but an azure glow kept Valor infused with strength. "Shiv, have you…?"

"Yeah, I got another heroic spell. Yeah, I got another Heroic Skill," Shiv said. He paused. "I also got," he narrowed his eyes, "two Master Skills. One for Stealth, one for Chronomancy."

"Chronomancy?" Valor said.

"Yeah, it just popped in immediately when my kukri broke while we were all pinned by the entity." Shiv glared hard at nothing in particular. "Come to think of it, I think that was the system's plan too. It gave me the skill the moment I was desperate and defenseless. I think it was planning this all along. The kukri, I was attuning to its mana, and after the entity held me in place…"

"Yes, that pushed you over the edge, especially with your death," Valor with a hiss. Then, he paused. "I have seen those truly system favored. I am system-favored. I am system-favored. But this is on another level. What is happening to you all is… I have never seen so much conflict concentrated on three people, just three, in all my years."

Adam shuddered slightly. "Valor, you're scaring me. Please stop."

"I'm scaring you?" Valor hissed. "I'm scared, Adam. My memories are broken. My spirit is scattered. I was just shattered. I came closer to death than I have in the past thousand years." Valor paused. "Perhaps that's an overstatement. But still, do you know what it's like to be shattered after having so much strength? And now, now I don't understand. There are so few things I can honestly say I have no idea about. And this is one of them. I have no idea why you three, you three are so… are so…" And then Valor's burning sockets centered on Shiv. And he had an epiphany. "Oh," Valor breathed. "Oh, I… I think I might have a theory. I think I…" He sagged slightly. "But first, what… what happened to this place?" He looked beyond the Garden of Bountiful Alloy, beyond the portal to the sheer devastation that now defined Gate Theborn.

"I… Yeah, that… that might be my fault," Shiv said. "I got into a pretty nasty fight with the entity." He grinned. "I won."

"You won?" Adam said. "I killed the bloody thing."

"Yeah. After I fought it for an hour."

“I had to jump in its mind,” Uva said, narrowing her eyes at Shiv in annoyance. “I had to put you back together.”

"It spent most of that hour torturing you," Adam snapped.

"Enough," Uva replied, cutting into their conversation like a thrusting dagger. "We should leave. We should get out of this place and find temporary shelter. More." Uva mana strands speared back toward the last surviving district of Gate Theborn. "There are people who need our help. People under the rubble."

Shiv suddenly remembered. A piece of his mind slipped back in, and he hissed as a pain rushed through his consciousness.

"Sorry," Uva winced.

"It's fine," Shiv grunted. "Keep going. I can handle it. I can handle anything," he finished.

Uva stared at him and sighed. A small smile lit her face. "I know.”

"All right. Well…" And as soon as Adam started turning his sun's radiance away from Valor, the Pathbearer crashed down against the ground, lifeless once more.

Everyone stared. Adam blinked, and then he immediately poured his The Righteous Dawn Prevails back into Valor—specifically on Valor. Valor shot back up to life with a cry. "What? What?"

"I think," Adam said, "I think that you might stay broken without help, the help of my sun."

Valor regarded Adam's The Righteous Dawn Prevails, and his body language sagged with defeat and exhaustion. "Let us be away, then, at least temporarily. There is… there is much for us to consider." 

And from behind him, a loud muffled moan came, and Shiv noticed a form bundled in layers of flayed skin. He recalled why the man was bundled and who the man was.

"Oh, yeah," Shiv laughed. "Hey, Uva! I got you an owl."

"I know. You bring me the sweetest gifts," the Umbral Psychomancer said dryly.