Days Ten through Thirteen
On Day Ten, I brought Evernight pages describing monsters I had created. The creations were mine. I had memories from another life, memories inherited from Evelyn's body when I awakened, memories Evelyn had deliberately shared since then, and conclusions built from all three. Only some of those things belonged entirely to me. I placed several pages beside the candle.
On those pages were old characters I had reconstructed from memory, settings from games I had worked on, fragments of stories, and creatures that would have looked absurd in Backlund and perhaps not particularly impressive in the spirit world. The pages covered only a small portion of what I could still remember, but they were things I knew had begun with me rather than Evelyn or this world. The candlelight reached across the nearest sheet without illuminating all of it.
'You're giving a goddess your writing.' Evelyn's voice reached me through our shared mind as she watched through my eyes. Her attention moved between the pages and the shrine with an amusement that was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. I had already spent too long deciding which pieces were sufficiently mine to bring here, and I was not interested in reopening the question.
"Showing," I corrected her aloud, sitting before the shrine. The difference seemed important to me even if it did not impress Evelyn. I adjusted one of the pages where it had begun curling toward the candle, then rested my hands in my lap. "My Lady, these are mine." The sentence sounded possessive. I left it that way as I did not know how to rephrase it.
"They are not prophecy. They contain no ritual. They are things I made before I came here." I touched one page. "There were worlds I wanted that did not exist, so I made approximations." A slight smile curved my lips. Some of the creatures on the pages had once existed only to make a particular story more interesting, while others had survived far longer in my imagination than the stories that created them.
"Monsters were often easier." The candle shortened. "They rarely called hunger compassion." Vale surfaced in my mind before I could prevent it. I sighed. The comparison had not been intentional, but once it appeared I could not separate his justifications from the creatures I had written to be frightening precisely because they believed possession and protection were the same thing.
Sleep came so suddenly that I had no time to notice it arriving. There was no slow heaviness behind my eyes and no moment where the shrine blurred into darkness. The room simply disappeared. A crimson moon hung over a dark, quiet space. Evernight sat several paces away with my pages in Her hands.
I knew Her without being told. Her features would not settle into anything I could later describe with confidence. My attention slid from Her face toward the pages, the folds of Her dark dress, the quiet line of Her hands. The crimson light remained soft enough that the paper in Her grasp should have been difficult to read, though I doubted something so ordinary mattered to Her. Nothing else moved.
Evernight read while I waited. That was difficult for me. I wanted to explain everything: why one character had been written badly at first, why a city worked a certain way, which creature had started as a joke, and which story had been abandoned because I could not make the ending behave. I said none of it. The silence made me increasingly conscious of every missing explanation, but Evernight never looked as though She required one. Eventually, She stopped at a description of a maternal monster that protected people by enclosing them within itself without erasing their minds.
"Did you believe such a being could exist?" Evernight asked. Her attention remained on the page. Her expression gave me no indication of whether She found the creature interesting, foolish, familiar, or something else entirely.
"When I wrote it?" I asked, needing the distinction before answering.
"Yes." Evernight waited. Her single word made it clear that She was asking about the person I had been when I wrote the story rather than the person sitting before Her now.
"No," I answered. I had never believed it existed. That had not made the idea useless.
"Why write it?" Evernight asked.
I thought about that. There were more complicated answers available, particularly now, after everything I had learned about this world, but they would have belonged to the person I had become rather than the person who originally created it.
"Because I wanted a personification," I answered. The dream ended before I could decide whether that answer required elaboration.
I woke in the chair. The candle had burned low. One of the pages lay turned over. Evelyn was already present. My neck ached faintly from the angle at which I had fallen asleep, and the ordinary walls of the room seemed unusually solid after the dream.
'She read them.' Evelyn's satisfaction was immediate enough that I suspected she had been waiting for me to wake.
'Yes.' I looked at the overturned page. I could not remember whether I had left it that way.
'You didn't explain half the references.' There was far too much amusement behind the observation. The exact problem had been bothering me throughout most of the dream.
'I noticed.' I began collecting the pages, more carefully than necessary. Being forced to watch someone read something without explaining the context had proved far worse than I would have expected.
'That must have hurt.'
'It was... annoying.' I stacked the final sheet with the others. There were stronger words available. I chose not to give Evelyn the satisfaction.
Evelyn laughed. The sound existed only within our shared mind, but it followed me while I moved the pages away from the dying candle. I did not attempt to defend myself. She would only have found that funnier.
The next day I avoided the shrine until evening. Not because the dream had frightened me in the ordinary sense. It had been too direct. There was something uniquely alarming about placing a piece of myself before a being so far above me and having Her simply read it without taking the rest.
That last part remained with me throughout the day. Evernight could have asked about the references I omitted, the people behind them, the memories connected to the pages, or whatever else She wished. She had not. The restraint was easier to notice after Vale because I had spent too much time thinking about people who treated access as permission.
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I sat before the unlit candle. Evening had left the room dim enough that I could barely distinguish the darker cloth of the shrine from the wall behind it. I did not light the wick. What I wanted to say did not seem to require ceremony.
"Thank You." Nothing answered. I remained there for another minute. Then I left. Whatever had happened in the dream, gratitude was the only conclusion I felt comfortable making from it.
On Day Twelve, I asked Evelyn for permission. Not afterward. Before. That mattered more after Vale. The distinction seemed small until I imagined doing it in reverse, telling Evernight first and then explaining to Evelyn why I had believed it acceptable.
'I want to tell Her about you.' Evelyn did not recoil from me. Her attention sharpened. I could feel her focus narrowing away from the room and toward the conversation itself. This concerned something more intimate than the memories I had chosen to place beside the candle.
'Why now?'
'Because I keep talking about consent while hiding the person whose consent matters most.' She considered that. I did not try to fill the silence. The answer had been true before I spoke it and remained true while she examined it.
'How much?'
'That you remain conscious. That you know you're dead. That I am the one controlling the body. Nothing else without permission.' I had already decided on those limits before asking. If they were not acceptable, I would say nothing. There was no reason Evernight needed more simply because I wanted to be honest about Evelyn's existence.
'Will She hear me?'
'I don't know.' There was no useful reassurance I could offer beyond that. Anything stronger would have been pretending I understood what a goddess could perceive.
'Can She enter here?' The question carried fear. Not anger. Evelyn's attention drew inward slightly, as though the act itself might reinforce the boundary she was asking about.
'I don't know that either,' I admitted.
'Tell Her I do not want that,' Evelyn replied.
'I will.' The promise required no thought. Whatever honesty I wanted with Evernight did not include sacrificing the little privacy Evelyn possessed inside her own former body.
'Then you may tell Her,' Evelyn said. I waited. Evelyn did not add conditions or qualify the permission after giving it. I had expected something more complicated.
'That's all?' I asked.
'What else would there be?' Evelyn's confusion seemed genuine.
'I expected more negotiation,' I admitted.
'You asked first,' Evelyn replied. The answer was simple. It did not absolve every other choice I had made for us. It was still better than deciding first and explaining afterward.
That evening I lit the candle. The shrine looked exactly as it had the previous night, but knowing what I intended to say made the room feel less ordinary. Evelyn remained present without speaking. I could feel her attention beneath mine as I watched the flame establish itself.
"My Lady, there is another person involved in every prayer I make." The flame lengthened. "The original Evelyn remains conscious within this body." I kept my hands open in my lap. The gesture was unnecessary, but folding them suddenly felt too close to hiding something.
"She knows she died. I told her on the first night we were able to speak clearly." I did not recount the entire conversation. Evernight had not asked. The memory belonged to both of us anyway.
"She cannot control the body. I can. She sees and hears through it when she attends to our senses. She can withdraw inward. She remembers things I do not. She keeps things from me when she wishes." The candle burned steadily. "She gave me permission to tell You that much." I looked toward the emblem.
"She does not consent to You entering her thoughts." The room went very still. I felt nothing touch the private interior where Evelyn remained. No pressure. No searching attention. No divine curiosity pushing against a boundary simply because it could.
Several breaths passed. Then the flame lowered. Evelyn remained quiet long enough that I wondered whether she was waiting for something else to happen. Nothing did.
'Did She answer?'
'Not in words.' I kept my attention on the lowered flame. Whatever the movement meant, I did not want to give it more certainty than I possessed.
'Did She touch anything?'
'No.' That answer I could give without qualification. Nothing foreign had entered the place where Evelyn existed.
A pause followed. The tension I had felt from her eased by a degree.
'Good.'
I agreed. We remained before the shrine for a little longer, but neither of us had anything more to add. The boundary had been stated. More importantly, nothing had crossed it.
On Day Thirteen, I told Evernight about transmigration. Not because I thought She needed the information to identify me. Because I had decided that if I spoke, I would not build a relationship from strategically pleasant lies, not with a goddess at the very least.
There were easier versions of the story I could have told. I could have described myself as taken, chosen, summoned, reborn, or any number of words that pretended to explain an event I did not understand. Vale had made those kinds of assumptions look considerably less harmless. I sat on the floor before the shrine and tried to separate what I knew from what I had merely repeated often enough to believe.
"I came from somewhere else." I looked toward the emblem. "I do not know what mechanism brought me here. I do not know whether someone chose me. I do not know whether it was an accident." That last part had become important to me.
Vale had spent years trusting conclusions built into the first page of a file. I refused to do the same thing with my own death. Whatever had happened between one world and the next, my arrival alone did not tell me who had caused it or whether anyone had intended it at all.
"I remember another world. Another age, perhaps. Electricity. Machines. Cities larger than anything I have seen here. Communication across distances ordinary people in Loen would call impossible." I smiled faintly. None of those things felt fantastical when I remembered using them.
"Video games." The candle did not react. "That would take too long to explain." My smile faded. Games were one of the easier pieces of my old life to describe badly and one of the harder ones to explain properly.
"I don't remember the transition." Darkness deepened around the room. The shrine disappeared. I stood beneath the crimson moon. Evernight waited ahead.
The change no longer startled me as completely as it had the first time, though knowing it was possible did little to make standing beneath that moon ordinary. The surrounding darkness possessed no clear distance. Evernight's presence provided the only stable point ahead of me.
"What did you perceive between worlds?" Evernight asked. The question immediately narrowed the subject away from everything I remembered before arriving.
"Nothing," I answered. I searched anyway, finding the same absence I had always found.
"Did you hear a voice?"
"No," I answered. There had been no warning, invitation, or explanation waiting in the gap between lives. At least none I could remember.
"Receive an offer?"
"No," I replied. The answer came just as easily. Nothing had asked whether I wanted this.
"See a symbol?"
"No," I answered. Three questions had removed three possibilities without giving me anything to replace them with. The emptiness between my last certainty in one world and my first certainty in this one remained unchanged.
"Then why do you believe you were taken?" Evernight asked.
I opened my mouth, then closed it. The answer had felt self-evident until she asked me to support it.
"Because I arrived," I answered.
"That establishes arrival," Evernight replied. Not cause. I understood what she meant immediately. The distinction was obvious once it had been placed in front of me, and irritatingly impossible to argue with.
"I don't know why," I admitted. Evernight remained silent. It was not a comforting answer. It was a clean one. That made it useful.
The crimson moon remained fixed above us while the admission settled. There was no explanation waiting behind it, no replacement theory offered by Evernight, and no reassurance that the uncertainty would eventually become meaningful. For once, I allowed the absence to remain an absence.
"What did you withhold?" Evernight asked before the dream ended. The answer came more easily than anything about my arrival. I knew exactly what I had chosen not to give Her.
"Names," I answered.
"Why?" Evernight asked.
"They belong to people who did not choose this world," I answered. The crimson moon remained above us. Evernight did not ask for them.
When I woke, I leaned my head back against the chair.
The room returned around me in familiar pieces: the candle, the dark cloth, the emblem, the ordinary walls of the manor. Nothing about them provided an answer to what had brought me here. I found that I preferred that to inventing one.