What I thought of as divination or scrying could be done without any kind of connection, but if so it was trivial to stop with the right wards. I wasn''t clear on how exactly people used blood or hair or whatever, but the point was to have a solid connection to your target. The better the connection, the harder it would be to stop it. I''d linked my own ability to my lutore, which basically meant I was targeting myself using my whole person as a focus; I suspected I''d be able to power through most wards that way, but the tradeoff is that I could only see... me.


    The wild mage had tethered me with a fate thread, or a fate-adjacent one anyway - it had that silvery opalescence. That meant it was permanent, and invisible to anyone but me so far as I knew. It was a really good trick, and I was already planning on stealing it at some point so I could check on Katrin and Errod in an emergency. Hell, if I could learn to make new threads I could tag things and then check on them whenever I wanted. Maybe even make bugs I could plant places. As cool as that was, I didn''t want anyone else doing it to me.


    I was staring into the gap between my Dumines, willing that guide to give me a solution. The issue was that breaking fate threads was not something it would offer. That didn''t mean it was impossible, exactly - my communication with my Dumines was odd, and it was possible I was asking for the wrong thing or just couldn''t do it without getting other abilities first. Could I move it on to something else? Maybe. I had a little potential, but not much - I''d been planning on using it to get mental defenses but had been distracted by everything else going on.


    That was a thought. If I couldn''t sever the thread, could I just prevent it from functioning? Hell, I''d already managed to use it to turn things around and spy on the wild mage. Surely I could block it off. Some fiddling around and prodding led me to a modification on the first abilities I''d bought, the strange binding of the layers that made up my lutore and the comprehension of the fourth-dimensional squiggles under my Dumine interface. That eye-watering pattern was the magic inscribed onto my Dumine, and if the threads attached there too it wasn''t a big change to let me have a greater understanding of those as well. I couldn''t tell if it was going to do what I wanted, and I could see red in the corners of my vision as if the normal rules of the Dumines that I was bypassing would be preventing this purchase. Hmm.


    In the end, the fact that I couldn''t easily un-do it made me set that plan aside for the time being. I could practice whatever had let me use it to see the wild mage, and maybe just manually keep a metaphorical eye on the thread - although that would take dedicated attention in a way I couldn''t keep up all the time. Frustrated, I gave up and called the others into my wagon. They had been concerned about my flailing, but I''d wanted to take some time to process before trying to explain what was going on - especially since I wasn''t sure how much to tell Hugh.


    "Okay, the short version is there''s a... spell, of sorts, that is almost impossible to detect and is allowing a wild mage who wants me dead to spy on me. I turned it around to see her instead, and she held me there somehow and burned herself to punish me because she''s... a bit dramatic, I guess. If I focus on it I can - I think - guarantee she''s not watching us right now, but I don''t know how well I can detect it passively."


    "Before we discuss anything else," Katrin said, "how likely is it that this has some connection to that figment of your imagination that''s been running around in your head? They both seem to want to kill you, and both are - in a sense - spying on you. If they''re the same person, or working together, then that may change how we approach this."


    Hugh''s eyebrows climbed even higher than they had been, but he kept his mouth shut.


    "I''m remaining paranoid about that, but I still think it''s most likely that the person I''ve seen running around in my head is part of my subconscious - I''m sure I''ve seen her before in dreams, and she spoke English, and... I don''t know. It''s still possible it''s the wild mage disguising herself as a figment of my imagination, or some totally separate thing. I guess it would partly depend on how the spell works, and we don''t know that."


    Katrin looked annoyed. "If I could see it being cast maybe I would know, although with wild magic... at any rate, it''s well beyond my ability to tell you details about the spell, if it''s possible at all."


    Hugh looked like he was about to say something, so I waited. It took him a moment to finally decide where to start. "When did she put this spell on you?"


    "Well, in retrospect I think I accidentally used it to spy on her a while back when we fought Telen and the Behemoth," I answered, "because I remember seeing her right outside our window while we were sleeping. So it''s possible she cast it right then so she could keep tabs on us if we got away? For sure no later than that."


    Katrin shook her head. "Earlier. They were just arriving, and one of the only things we know about spellcasting with..." She paused and looked at Hugh, then at me. I shrugged and she continued. "With fate magic... is that it''s not easy. She couldn''t have just run up and cast that sort of thing through the window at you on the fly."


    "Right, true. So then... not while we were traveling, but we stayed at the Necropolis for a bit. I don''t think that''s likely at all. Before that... not during the attack at Theramas obviously, but maybe while they scouted out the location? While we were in the apartment? I would think Hammersmith -"


    "Lord Protector Hammersmith," Hugh corrected.


    "- Lord Hammerpants would have had some sort of shit in place that would have alerted her to that kind of big magic targeting us. She doesn''t strike me as the type to think a few bodyguards will do the trick. But it had to be then, because before that I was traveling with Hugh and you guys and before that I''d just arrived and was up in the mountains nearly dying every time I ate anything."


    Hugh shrugged. "Could it have been part of the spell that brought you here?"


    I looked at Katrin and raised an eyebrow, and she frowned as she tried to think about it. "I don''t know. It seems like that would be... needlessly complicated, wouldn''t it? Bring you into this... continent... but also link to you with fate magic to spy on you? I feel like those would be two different spells."


    "Okay, wait, you''re on to something there. Why would she want to spy on me at all? She''s attacked us, right? And when she did, she certainly seemed to be planning on killing me. She held off when there were kids in the way, but I don''t think that was for my benefit. But if we''re saying that this fucking spell is super tricky and probably needed all sorts of mana or multiple casters or whatever, then... why not just kill me when she cast it? Like, there are a thousand ways to just murder someone with magic, right?"


    Hugh tapped his nose ring in what was obviously some common gesture. I''d seen some people in Erathik do it, and whatever the specific meaning it seemed to be positive. "The spell must do something other than spying, yes? A way to spy remotely that lasts seemingly forever is valuable, but she would not have tried to kill you unless this was discovered. Better to keep you there as an asset, especially since she would have known Lord Protector Hammersmith still wanted your assistance."


    "What else would it do, that she doesn''t need it to do anymore? Maybe it really was just for spying, and when I tapped into it back in Zistarne she decided I knew about it. I mean I probably should have figured it out, or at least questioned my sudden divination more, and she can''t be watching us all the time so she could have missed the parts where we talked about not knowing what that was. Or she heard, and thought it was deliberate misinformation. So maybe she thought the jig was up and it was time to kill me. Though... I mean, she did seem like she was going to kill me in that first fight too. Fuck. I don''t know. There''s too much going on. Hugh, you''re the actual adult here. Tell me what to do."


    Hugh smiled as he looked around the wagon. "You won''t like the answer, Calliope Smith. What you should do is lock yourself in here, yes? We would not tell you where we are going, and therefore this woman would not know either. If your vision of her was through her eyes, then the reverse should be true which means so long as you cannot see outside the wagon she is powerless. Is our safety worth your boredom?"


    And I wanted to say no. That sounded fucking awful, and it would be for at least a week - maybe longer. How would I go to the bathroom - would I need to be led out with my eyes shut? And the wagons were so small! But he''d worded it that way on purpose, the old bastard. If I said no, I''d be acknowledging that I valued my own comfort over the lives of my friends. This was the same conversation I''d had with Errod, about handing myself to Hammersmith.


    "Of course I can stay in the wagon," I said, internally screaming.


    He nodded. "Then I will work on getting us safely to a city, at which point we are best served by arranging teleportation to Lord Protector Hammersmith. There is one other option, of course, but it is hard to plan for."


    "What''s that?"


    "It is simple, yes? We lure the wild mage in and we kill her."


    And so began several days of torment. It wasn''t actually as bad as I''d feared; I was in my own wagon that I loved, and I could feel us moving which helped somehow. On top of that, being able to go into my memory palace meant I at least had the illusion of freedom - although it was bad for me to just lay in one place all day which meant I had to frequently get up and stretch. It was a bit of a challenge to exercise in that tiny space, but I''d managed to turn it into a game.


    "Okay," I said from my spot on Katrin''s bunk, "no spilling the water this time."


    My body sat up on its bed, swiveled, and reached out to grab the wooden mug full of water on the counter - my aim was off a bit, but it sort of rolled into my palm and I closed my fingers around it successfully. I could feel it, just barely, a phantom sensation against my imaginary skin. Now to stand up and do my little routine.


    The first few times I''d tried walking my body around while meditating it was a disaster, because there was a disconnect between my mental perspective and the orientation of my actual body. I banged into things, tripped, and even punched myself at one point. I could do it by meditating really shallowly, but that prevented me from having divination going in any useful way. The goal was to be able to control myself smoothly in third person like I was playing a video game, so that I could keep my divination up all the time - or at least until I ran out of mana.


    If I stayed close to my body and didn''t - for example - peek through a nearby wall then I could keep it up for a long time, and at the moment I couldn''t peek through the wall anyway since it would defeat the whole purpose of keeping me locked in the wagon. Hugh had even hung up a blanket outside the door so that Katrin could come and go without accidentally giving me a peek, though just to be paranoid she also always knocked so I would close my eyes. I wondered, sometimes, where we were going - but my knowledge of geography was still pretty sparse despite some tutoring from Errod, and anyway Hugh would be taking us along an odd route and to an unexpected city to guarantee we wouldn''t be ambushed by the wild mage. So much for going back to Sentortzi.


    The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.


    I watched, feeling disconnected from my body, as it did some stretches without spilling any water. I was getting pretty good, and when I could eventually get the hell out of the wagon I was even thinking of trying to spar with Errod while using divination. It would be like a real life fighting game. It should also be good for party tricks, since it meant I could do things with my eyes closed. Eventually I decided I had successfully prevented myself from getting bed sores and directed my body back to the bed to lay down once more.


    "Okay. Enough cramped wagon time. Holodeck, end program."


    The wagon flickered out of existence, and I was in an empty hotel room. Huh, I hadn''t thought that would actually work. I took a moment to gauge my mana - at maybe a fifth of my maximum which would last for a long time if I didn''t do anything fancy - and then headed out into the hotel to poke around. I was still chipping away at some memories with Divination, like digging a tunnel through a mountain. Sooner or later I''d find something that had been obscured by the foggy or overwritten memories. If it didn''t take so much mana to do, or take so long to recover my mana in the wagon, I would have been done already.


    I hadn''t seen the scar-faced me for a while, in fact not since she yelled at me and stormed off. I couldn''t decide if that was evidence for or against her being an avatar of the wild mage, but in any case I was still working on figuring out how to build mental defenses in a way that would also apply to someone that was tethered to my lutore.


    I wandered into Universal Servicing Systems where I had lived for so long, and sat at the reception desk to read the Paradox of Fate for a while. It felt like I was really there, fourteen or fifteen years old and living on my own in an abandoned office, pawning the office equipment and scrounging in desk drawers for coins I could put in the vending machine. And then it happened again - for just a second all the desks were scattered and flipped over like a hurricane had passed through and there was a perfectly circular hole in one wall. I''d seen that glitch once before, but it had been right before I found that a year''s worth of memories were missing and I''d been new to poking around in my brain so I hadn''t worried about it much. But... well, that didn''t look great. Was it a memory? A dream? Whatever it was, I didn''t seem to have more than that split second glimpse.


    Too many loose ends, not enough resolutions. I tried to get back into reading, but now I was all distracted. I wanted to do something, anything that might actually let me figure out what was going on, but I was stuck hiding in a fucking wagon while I was taken to protective custody with Hammershit. There was really only one thing I could do, which would be to spy on the wild mage. She''d burned the shit out of me last time but only by actually burning herself, and so in a way that was a win for me, right? Plus the pain had faded pretty quickly, and the terror of the situation would be lessened by me knowing that at the worst I''d be kicked out as soon as I ran out of mana. And anyway, if I didn''t try it how would I learn to resist it? I''d been trying to improve my understanding and control over that thread, but there was just so little feedback.


    I knew that Katrin would be annoyed if she found out, and I would have to tell her eventually - especially if I learned something. But I suspected Hugh would be okay with it, since I was gathering intel and only really risking some discomfort probably. Boredom shouldn''t be the driving factor for big decisions, I know, but once I had started thinking about it I genuinely began to believe it was a good idea. So I took a deep breath and went in.


    She was in a town I didn''t recognize, and people were giving her strange looks. I could see bits of her dark green hair blowing into view as the wind caught it, but otherwise all I saw of her was the edges of the eye holes on the mask. Unlike my divination trick that I used on my own body, I seemed to be stuck viewing the world from her perspective so unless she looked in a mirror or something I wasn''t going to see her clearly. On my list of things to use divination on was some time she was nearby so I could look under the mask, but the thought of getting a better view of Connie''s death made me feel sick so I would need to do either the attack at Theramas or that brief encounter when we dropped off Elba.


    Elba... wait.


    I broke the connection successfully, immediately dropping into the real world. How had I not thought about it? How had I missed it? I hammered on the door and called for Katrin, who came in a moment later being careful to keep the blanket blocking my view.


    "Do you remember what Moss In Bloom, the Sahrger that had taken Elba''s place, said? She said her family could teach us things if we let her go, magic shit. She mentioned rituals of binding, scrying across worlds, and places of magic power where ''ancient rune-stones'' are. But when I came here, in that moment when I was teleported to this world, I saw those huge stones covered in runes."


    Katrin nodded thoughtfully, but I was pacing in excitement - not that I could pace far inside the wagon. "Rituals of binding? Scrying across worlds? The Sahrger must have had something to do with bringing me here and with the connection the wild mage was using - presumably she''s not a Sahrger herself, since she kept Moss In Bloom from escaping, but that could have been some sort of misdirection."


    Katrin''s face went pale. "Callie. We need to be careful. That other version of you, that''s the wild mage. She''s in your mind."


    "I... don''t know about that. She''d have to be changing how she... oh, no. A shape changer. A Klunlesh. Fuck, I remember now! Connie even told me, but then she died and I went catatonic and... mother fucker. I hadn''t seen her yet, I didn''t know she was there, but when Connie went out and confronted Telen there was someone else there that I didn''t see and when she reset time I asked. She said it was a Klunlesh she had killed in the other timeline. Shit. Oh, I''m so stupid. There''s just so much that''s been happening to me and it''s all so crazy that it''s hard to... to index all this shit. Fuck, she mentioned it before when I told her about the wild mage too. We were talking about people in masks and she said it, she said she killed a Klunlesh in a mask."


    Katrin took my hand, looking like she was sick to her stomach. "Callie. When we were talking about how you met Errod, the night you were attacked. You said you were already in a bad mood and had a headache because something reminded you of your mother. Right? I... need you to go to your memories, and look at your house. I know you don''t like revisiting that place but it''s important."


    She looked so serious. I nodded, and and dropped into my memory palace. I could still feel Katrin''s hand in mine, squeezing tightly as if for support - but it wasn''t a big deal. I had bad memories there, sure, but she was acting like this was some Earth-shattering shit. I walked silently through the hotel hallways until I came to a door that felt right, and there I was. Katrin had me go to my mother''s room, and then - strangely hesitant - asked me to describe the doorway.


    I looked at the familiar sight, totally unremarkable for a house from Earth. "Uh. It''s a door, just a regular door like all the others. There''s a light switch next to it - I guess you don''t know what that is - some scuff marks from shoes hitting the door by mistake, my great grandmother''s scissors on the wall over it..."


    "Describe them please?" She asked, sounding almost scared.


    "They''re just some old antique scissors, not even anything fancy. Just some old slightly rusty scissors."


    "Callie... you were right. This is about the Sahrger. But not the Klunlesh."


    Still standing in the memory of my mother''s house, I felt my brow furrow in confusion back in the wagon. "But Connie said -"


    "Connie was wrong. Klunlesh can''t use wild magic. Remember? Only humans can."


    Right, of course. "Okay, well. Maybe there was someone else with Telen? Or there was..."


    "Callie," Katrin said, "why are there iron scissors hanging over your mother''s door?"


    "Like I said, they belonged to my great grandmother."


    Katrin''s voice was quivering. "Callie, I''m so sorry. Iron blades are... used to keep Sahrger out of places."


    My first thought was that it made sense; my mom had always been into fairies, so it wasn''t a shock if that''s what she had meant - although a horseshoe was a little more traditional for over a doorway on Earth. And then, like being slowly dipped into ice water, the meaning of what Katrin was saying began to sink in. Mom had forbidden me from entering her room, and when I tried I... I physically had trouble doing it and got a terrible headache if I forced it.


    "So... no, that doesn''t... things are different on Earth, or... the wild mage did something."


    "The wild mage is seeing through your eyes, Callie. Just like Elba said she did with the..." Katrin stopped, unable to finish the sentence. Just like Elba said she did with the Sahrger that had taken her place. Elba had had a thread too, hadn''t she? What colors had it been?


    "No. Because I... I''m human." A human that could curse people, like the Sahrger. A human that frequently finds herself incapable of feeling empathy, like the Sahrger. What had the children we rescued had in common? Their parents had been blacksmiths. Well, my father was dead and my mother was an accountant but maybe it was harder to see things on Earth. Maybe they just saw my last name.


    Without wanting it to happen, my mother appeared in the memory pinning little eight-year-old me to the wall with those scissors at my neck. "You''re a monster," she said, "and I should slit your throat right now. I shouldn''t have to put up with this! I shouldn''t have to look at you, every day! Every day that... that face! It''s not fair!"


    She had known. She would have done it if the phone hadn''t suddenly rang, that little trick of probability magic I''d done to save my life without being consciously aware of it. The cut had been so shallow, but it had turned red and burned so badly that someone had called CPS and I''d ended up going to a foster home. I''d handled iron plenty of other times, but Katrin had said it when Elba was returned to her family: it required intent.


    The memory of my mother vanished, and I stormed out into the Long Haul Hotel. My heart was racing, and I could feel Katrin squeezing my hand even tighter than before but I just tuned it out. I burst through door after door, flaring divination to get a better look. The little potion shop I''d tried to go in before meeting Errod? An iron knife. The rune crafter shop I tried to go into in Erathik? Iron knife. I''d never actually gone through the door of that foster house Bill found for me the day before he quit, but probably there''d been a horseshoe or something.


    And the people that had known! The monster hunter in Theramas that had come at me with an iron blade? Or the barely disguised look of panic on the face of the Sahrger we''d negotiated with in Xeyul! "You have been far from home," she''d said, "please... excuse my rudeness." Hah. Yeah, what''s the social debt for leaving someone on another planet and never coming back for them? No wonder they''d been in a rush to call things even. Mother had known. The Sahrger had known. The wild mage had of course known - I opened another door and was in those tunnels, with her standing over me. Elba was pleading for my life.


    "She didn''t hurt us. She saved us from the Sahrger. She''s going to help us find our parents."


    The wild mage was clutching her bleeding throat, voice hoarse. "No, child. She lied to you. You''re not free from the Sahrger, can''t you see?"


    If I hadn''t cut her throat like those scissors cut me, would her voice have been clearer? Would I have recognized it as my own? Or... no, not my own. It was never mine. I wasn''t Calliope Smith. I felt a panic attack coming on, and at the same time sensed that thread, as if the panic was drawing on it somehow. Connie had told me that she lost her emotions entirely at some point, and they never came back. Was it when she killed the wild mage? Was everything human about me stolen? Just... siphoned off of some kidnapped child? Connie had said that...


    Oh no. Connie. My made up sister. "Oh, sure, I have a sister. Connie ran away when CPS came for us though, she''s living in the woods in a tree house with the fairies." Even I had known, or some tiny part of me had. I forced myself back into my body, shaking.


    "Katrin, we can''t kill her. I don''t. I can''t... I always imagined going on some adventure, being the main character of a story like Jake Ross, killing monsters and, and... Oh god, I''m the villain. I''ve always been the villain. She just wants to go home."