I was braced for the ceiling when the ceiling stopped being the point.
The weight went first. Then the cold went, along with the entire concept of the room, and I was standing in a white that went out in every direction like paper before the drawing. Standing. On legs that had finished business a breath ago.
I checked my chest. The slab and the blood were gone. So was the socket where the core had been, which was strange, because the absence of an absence is its own sensation, and I didn’t have it.
[ You can stop doing that, ]
[ Nothing here is missing. Yet. ]
The same small blue frame from under the rubble hung at a conversational height. Out here in all the white, it looked even more like a clerical error.
“Where am I?”
[ Between. Think of it as the landing between two floors. You’ve said yes, he’s said yes, and now there’s paperwork. There’s always paperwork, sweetheart. You of all people should approve. ]
“Don’t call me sweetheart.”
[ Noted, ]
“And who or what are you?”
[ Management. The household spirit. The one holding the clipboard. Pick whichever makes you feel better about the lease you just signed. ]
“He,” I said. “You said he’s said yes. Who?”
“That would be me.”
I turned around, and there was a boy.
Fifteen, maybe. Silver-haired, with warm brown skin against all that white like the room had been built to frame him.
He was dressed like a formal portrait that had studied casual clothing and missed.
He stood as though the white were his and I were the one visiting, and he was looking at me as I’d looked at floor ninety-one in Tower of Genesis.
“So you’re the vessel.”
His voice arrived without touching the air, the words simply present, slightly amused about it.
“You are shorter than your memories imply.”
“My memories?”
“I have seen them. All of them, I’m told, though how would I check?”
He circled me once, unhurried, an inspection.
“Your kebab shop years. The nine. Kilnsey, and the four minutes you are still proud of.”
The white went very quiet.
“In my world, a man carrying that much cold would have been taken to somebody who could burn it out of him. It would have cost his family a great fortune and they would have paid for it, and he would have been walking by spring.”
He said it as though the whole business were a parking regulation.
“You people wrote it on a form and sent him home. I have so many questions about the form.”
“And you are?”
“Azazel.”
The name arrived like it expected its own weather.
“The rest of the titles won’t fit in your filing system.”
“You’ve seen mine.” I looked at the blue frame. “What have I seen of his?”
[ His are his. ]
The tone of it changed for those three words, from concierge to filing cabinet, and then changed back. I marked it as I’d marked the Gemini tiles.
“That’s the door closing.”
[ It’s the door on the offer. ]
A pause.
[ He is a guest in my house and you are a guest in my house, and a good host doesn’t read one guest’s letters to the other. ]
“It is endlessly smug.” The boy examined his nails. “It has also never lied to me, which I find worse.”
We took the terms standing up, because there was nothing to sit on and the white declined to provide.
[ The merge is underway. It cannot be paused and it should not be rushed. One body at the end of it, both voices intact. You’ll share as bad flatmates share, which is to say completely and with complaint. ]
“And the price?” I kept my eyes on the frame. “You appeared to a dying man with one button that mattered, and arranged a body-share between strangers. You answer half of what you’re asked, warmly. In my experience, that’s what expensive looks like.”
[ Good, ]
[ Keep that. You’ll need it out there. ]
“The price.”
[ The price is that I get an Avatar. Congratulations, it’s you. ]
“Meaning what?”
[ Meaning, ]
[ that I finally have someone to talk to at parties. ]
“You see.” The boy directed this at me with the weariness of long tenancy. “Smug. I did tell you.”
Looking between the two of them, the clerk and the tenant, the arrangement stated itself plainly. I had signed a lease with terms in a language I didn’t read, witnessed by a landlord I didn’t trust, because the alternative had been the rubble.
I’d have signed again.
The white kept its own time, and the frame kept a bar.
[ MERGE: 4% ]
It hung in the distance like weather. Under it, we worked.
He taught me to hold his mana called Umbra, which was nothing like holding mine had been. Mine had run grey and thin through frosted pipes. His arrived like the sea arrives, and the first month I did nothing but learn not to drown in my own hands.
This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.
The armchair he’d eventually bullied the white into providing became his stand.
“Again. You grip it. It is not a sword, it is a tide. Stand in it properly or it will take your footing. Then I will laugh, and then we will go again.”
The second month, he stopped letting me hold it still.
“You keep making a wall of it. That is the paladin in you and I am going to have to take it out with tongs. Umbra is not a wall. It is not anything until you tell it what to be, and then it is that until you get bored.”
He put his cup down and held up one hand, and a second hand grew out of the air beside it, black and violet and entirely his, flexing its fingers to prove the point.
Then a third, and a fourth, arranged around him with the patience of somebody who had done this since before I was born.
“Hands, when I want hands. There is no rule that says two.”
The fourth one picked up his cup and drank from it, which I understood was for my benefit and enjoyed anyway.
It took me eleven days to grow anything at all. What I managed was a thumb.
“Congratulations. You have invented the least useful part of a hand.”
After that, it came faster. A rope from the wrist that held weight. A flat shape I could stand on for four seconds before it thought better of it.
The blasts were easier, because a blast is only Umbra with nowhere to go, and I had spent a lifetime learning to commit to a line.
“Good. That one you did not have to be taught, which is either a compliment or a diagnosis.”
The one thing I could not make was a shield.
I tried it perhaps thirty times, and every time the shape came out thin and went to nothing the moment anything touched it.
“Because it does not want to sit between things. It wants to take hold of something and drag it somewhere it did not agree to go. You will have to find another answer to the question your old order taught you to ask. I would start soon.”
He was fifteen and he taught like somebody’s grandfather. I left the contradiction where it was. I’d watched the frame’s tone change once, and I was learning this house’s rule as I’d learned all the others.
[ MERGE: 31% ]
Somewhere in the second stretch, he found the bedsheet. The white had provided bedding by then, since we’d both insisted on sleeping out of stubbornness rather than need, and he came to training one day with a sheet knotted at his throat like a cape.
“It restores a certain dignity,” he said, daring me.
“It’s a bedsheet.”
“It is a cloak of office.”
“You look like a colander advert.”
“You have no idea what a colander is for either. I have seen your kitchen.”
The cape stayed. In the interest of honesty, it did restore a certain dignity, and I have never once admitted that out loud until now.
There was also the kettle.
It sat by his armchair, ceramic and patient. The one time I reached for it, he was between me and it with a speed I never saw him spend on anything else.
“Mine. You may not touch it.”
“Do you know what it’s for?”
“Do you?” Sudden interest, caught and put away. “Irrelevant. It is mine.”
[ MERGE: 41% ]
He started me on the wrists, and kept me there for what the white was calling a summer.
Nothing above the wrists and nothing below them, over and over, until I stopped asking when we were moving on and started being annoyed on the days we didn’t.
“Why there?” I asked once, somewhere in the middle of it.
“Because it is where everything begins.” He said it without any hesitation at all, and then something crossed his face and went again before I could read it. “I do not know why I know that. I have known it since I could hold anything. Ask me a different question.”
I asked a different question.
“Somebody taught me to hold a sword. I could not tell you their name, and I have stopped finding that interesting. What I did with it afterwards was mine. Nobody else has ever had this much Umbra to be wrong with.”
That was the first I heard of it having a name.
“Shadow Sword. Ten forms, and I built every one of them, and you are getting three.”
“Three?”
“Three, because three is what this body will hold without coming apart, and because I would like the two of us to remain on speaking terms with your ribs.”
The first one took four months.
Shadow Sword, First Form: Eclipse.
The cut came up from underneath instead of down, and the Umbra dragged the edge round so the line bent through the guard rather than into it.
What came off the blade was a crescent. Black in the middle and violet at the thin ends, and it went outward and kept going until it found the wall of a room that had no walls.
The first hundred times, nothing came off the blade at all. The hundred after that, something came off and went wide, and once it came back and I had to stand very still while it passed.
“Draw in. Throw out. You are doing both at once, and the sword cannot hear you over the argument.”
The second one took longer and hurt more.
Shadow Sword, Second Form: Nightfall.
Overhead, two hands, the whole weight of it coming down. The Umbra pulled from above, and the blade arrived carrying four times what it weighed.
I broke the floor of a room that did not have a floor. The white repaired it without comment, which I chose to read as disapproval.
The third one I did not get until the last stretch.
Shadow Sword, Third Form: Severing Dusk.
A flat sweep, wide as the arms go, and the edge did not stop where the steel stopped. It carried on out into the air for another two metres and cut what was standing there.
The first clean one I ever threw took the arm off his chair.
He looked at the chair for a while.
“Acceptable.”
“That’s it?”
“I will teach you the rest of the ten forms one day; for now, focus on the basic three.”
[ MERGE: 58% ]
Once, in the long middle, after a session that had gone badly and then very well, he handed me water I didn’t need in a cup the white had invented, and said, in Freya’s exact cadence, “You’re all very welcome.”
I looked at him. He looked back, fifteen and ancient, and let it stand. I didn’t ask him to.
My sword had made the crossing with me.
I found it in the white one day like it had always been there, the same standard-issue blade I’d carried since the demotion, notched from thirteen rooms, cheap when it was new.
The boy picked it up and looked personally insulted.
“This is a peasant’s blade.”
“It’s a C-rank’s blade. It did its job.”
“It went four inches into a Void artisan and she handed it back to you like a dropped glove. It deserves better and so, marginally, do you.”
He set it across his knees.
“Bring it to me every day. This will take months, and it will be the only honest work I have ever done with my hands. You will not mention that to anyone.”
He tempered it in his own mana, an hour at a time, the grey steel drinking dark until it held an edge of colour I had no name for. Watching him work was the only time he ever looked thirty instead of fifteen.
[ MERGE: 92% ]
Near the end, the frame raised the last item of paperwork.
[ The body will need a name. Nathan Vance has a file, and the file says the Zodiac Gate closed on him. Opening it again would draw the attention we are avoiding. So. For the records I will be forging, who walks out? ]
I’d had three years to think about it, or whatever the white called three years.
“Noah.”
The boy’s head came up from the blade.
“Everyone who walked in with me is dead,” I said. “The children too. I came out. There is an old story about the one man left afloat after the water took everything, and nobody in it pretends he was glad about it.”
The boy smiled then, slowly, the first honest smile I’d seen on him, and it did not belong to a fifteen-year-old.
“Then this is Nadir.”
The shape hadn’t changed. Straight and double-edged above a plain crossguard, the same length I’d carried for eleven years without once thinking about it.
Everything else had. The steel had gone matte black the whole way through, and the light that moved along the edge when I turned it wasn’t reflecting off anything in that room.
The grip had run longer, enough for a second hand if I wanted one. It weighed less than it used to and pulled harder, like something in it was already leaning toward a target I hadn’t picked.
He turned the finished sword in the light and offered it to me as she’d offered it back. Hilt first. This time I took it.
“The lowest point of a descent. The place a falling thing stops falling.” He turned it once in the light. “It was made here. So were you. I would rather we both remembered where. Also, I think it sounds properly cool.”
“It sounds like a brand of cleaning agent.”
“It sounds properly cool.”
[ One more line for the file, since we’re forging it from scratch anyway. ]
[ The vessel wasn’t a repair job. It was a rebuild, and rebuilds don’t always keep the wear. Age on the record will read twenty-one. ]
“Twenty-one.” I turned the number over like a coin that had come back in the wrong currency. “I was thirty-one some time ago.”
[ Your mind wasn’t touched. Only the frame carrying it. Call it a decade the frost doesn’t get to keep. ]
“A vessel a full decade younger.” Azazel inspected me as he’d inspected the sword, faintly proprietary. “At least one of your problems has solved itself for free. You’re welcome, incidentally. I did nothing. I simply feel that should be acknowledged more often.”
[ MERGE: 100% ]
[ Before you go. Housekeeping. ]
The bar I had watched for three years unhooked itself from the distance and folded down to nothing.
[ You will want to see your own numbers eventually, and I would rather you did not spend a fortnight glaring at the sky hoping I take the hint. ]
[ Say ‘system window’. Out loud, the first few times, because your mouth is quicker to believe things than the rest of you is. It will open for you and nobody else. ]
“That is the entire arrangement, in one sentence, if you were still looking for it.”
The white took a breath, and so did I, and only one of us finished it.
[ Good morning, Noah, ]
said the last thing I read before the light.
[ Mind the first step. It’s a lawn. ]