Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Though rare, and not often able to maintain themselves for more than a few weeks, ghosts are now known scientific phenomena, if still difficult to study and understand. With advancements in the study of magic, due to its connection to the soul, research on ghosts has also marched onwards.

Ghosts are discrete entities, in that they exist in one place and not the other. And yet, they have no mass. Since such creatures have volume and no mass, they require a medium through which to interact with the physical plane. Though not thoroughly tested due to the limited amount of times ghosts remain in the living world, there are recorded consistencies in how they continue to interact with this plane.

They require a physical vessel of some sort. Ghosts are souls and minds without bodies, therefore must use a vessel that was not born to them. These vessels also must resemble, in the vaguest of terms, the type of body they had when alive. Upright, with two legs and two arms for humans, for example. Wings of some sort for birds, et cetera. Statues, dolls, or even corpses in the cases of particularly violent ghosts, are all viable vessels. There are no recorded observations of ghosts in living vessels- likely due to the living mind and soul being stronger than the dead’s, and unable to be removed or destroyed by them.”

-Professor Rhodes, An Introduction To Ghosts and How They Touch Our World

--

Shadows of his own creation doming the area below his minions’ (ill-made, but effective) trap, contract unfurled before a new victim’s eyes, the Snatcher thoroughly enjoyed the feeling of looming over the new contractor. It never got old! He wondered, idly rolling up the illegibly-signed contract, how much menial labor he could squeeze out of this one before eating their soul. Maybe the minions would have requests…

“Now, lemme just grab that real quick-” Snatcher said, drawing her soul out as if fishing with a net made of static, tucking it away into the shadow-plane he used as storage; living souls were always such a pain to keep stable while their body and mind were off doing his dirty work, but his depthless pockets served as a decent enough anchor to keep them from drifting off. All emotion and no conscious thought, yeesh, it was like babysitting scared bushcats-

The soul in his claws bucked.

And then he was near-blinded, thrashing rage and gnawing panic from the soul lashing across his mind like ice-needles, unknotting the blackbriar and shadow that made up his form. Holding himself and his vessel together and keeping his grip on the soul was like holding back a blizzard in his bare hands. And it hurt.

Flung out of his body like a hapless fisherman from a lightning-struck dinghy, Snatcher clawed for a suitable vessel, a statue, a burlap sack, anything would do, so long as he wasn’t stuck as a drifting ghost with less power than a spring breeze-

There.

A sturdy body, right within reach, easy enough to slip in and seize control of-

Snatcher realized his mistake when he inhaled through borrowed lungs, looking up through shared eyes to see his body. Which now had a new occupant.

The cheerful backglow of pink where there used to be wildfire-yellow did nothing to diminish the presence of the creature in front of him, tail whipping against tree trunks and hackles raised like honey-locust thorns. It snarled at him, teeth bristling like a hundred night-stained needles.

Snatcher ran.

Except wait, no, he didn’t run, who-

He tried to put on the brakes, or ease his breathing, or turn his head back, but he couldn’t. Surely he hadn’t forgotten how to move a living body! It’d only been what, a couple centuries?

‘Shoot, how do these things work again…’

He tripped. Or rather, the body tripped, because he certainly wasn’t calling the shots-

“What the peck? Who are you?!” Spilled from his vessel’s mouth, and oh, no. No way. The connections lit up in his mind like morning dew on a spider’s web, because if the contractor’s soul was in his body, and the vessel he hopped into was alive, without a soul of its own bound to body and mind...

A sensation like claws raking through his feathers and scraping his mind, and the hatted alien scowled at him despite there being a much more concerning threat wreaking havoc behind them. “You! Then this is your fault, you dumb windsock!”

‘My fault! It’s your soul flailing around in my body we’re running from!’

“And whose fault is that- oh peck!” A sharp turn, and the alien skidded on wet forest leaves, right as thorn-sharp claws closed around them, and oh, killed a second time, by a contractor in his body, now that’s just pathetic-

The world tilted, spun like he was getting pummeled at the bottom of the waterfall-

They landed in a pile of soft… pillows?

Facedown in an ocean of fluffy things, the hatted child groaned. “Ugh, ow, warping is not supposed to take that much energy…”

Now if only Snatcher could see where they’d- apparently- teleported, and maybe start figuring out how to pry his soul out of this not-so-empty body and get back to his own. Unfortunately, he couldn’t even twitch an eyelid, let alone start troubleshooting.

And then there was the weird mental brush of something touching his stronger thoughts, like the shadow of a thunderstorm spitting seed-sparks.

He poked it.

It jumped like a swamp-viper that’d been prodded awake from a sun-warmed nap, and Snatcher realized, belatedly, what it was.

Her mind. Her soul was down in Subcon still, but unlike ghosts, living people’s natural state of being was an equilibrium of mind, body, and soul, each strung together by remembered motions and sense-of-self. With no natural soul, it was trying to maintain that equilibrium by stitching mismatched pieces of a self together. Which wouldn’t work anyways, because a ghost was a mind and a soul as one entity, without a body to bind them.

The alien girl rolled over on her side, sitting up and scowling at nothing. “Ugh, is that why I’m getting your weird mental backwash? Because your thoughts are almost as loud as that stupid laugh.”

‘It’s not like I want your gross fleshy nose in my business! Just be grateful you’re only getting projected thoughts, or I’d give you something to really be upset about!’

She stilled. “... This isn’t permanent, is it?” And despite his attempts to weave a partition between them, he still felt the errant smoke-swirl of fear.

‘No, thankfully for my sanity. It might take some effort to tie down your feral excuse for a soul long enough to kick it out of my body, but it’s just one soul, with none of my magic.’ An unfurling sensation, like tattered parchment rolling on the floor. ‘So, let’s make an honest deal, hm? My soul back in my body, your soul back in yours, and we never see each other again. You even get to live, because I’m a fair businessman, thank you!’

The kid- Hat Kid? That was the impression of a nickname he felt in her head, he was sure- stood, stretched, and reached for the telescope-looking thing that hummed with energy. And then froze, eyes narrowing.

“Actually, there’s something else I need. I know for a fact there’s Time Pieces that fell into your forest, and I need all of them,” she said aloud, abandoning the telescope and trotting through the light-lined tunnel and out to the rest of… wherever they were.

‘What’s a Time Piece?’ Snatcher wondered, because if all she wanted were a few lost items, then sure, whatever, it would be a bit of a pain to take a detour, but not as painful as being stuck as a prisoner in someone else’s body with their brain as an obnoxious neighbor. ‘It better not take long for you to fetch whatever you dropped in my forest like some kind of litterer.’

Best to let her focus on the scathing tone, rather than how much he wanted out of this mess. There were a lot of reasons ghosts didn’t take already-living vessels, after all.

An image and a concept, impressed into his mind like a memory. Hourglass-shaped, glowy, filled with unparalleled energy. Time captured in a physical vessel, of all things.

Oh. There was no way by Subcon’s burnt bark that he was letting those out of his possession. ‘Sorry, kiddo, but those are mine! It would be irresponsible of me to hand that kind of power to children!’ he crowed.

She froze at the opened door to the bridge of her ship. Tilted her head. Shrugged. Trotted across the carpet to the control chair.

“Okay then, I guess I’ll just keep gathering them in other places while my soul pecks up your forest.”

‘Wh-. Wait, no, where are you going-’ Snatcher sputtered, and then stopped as a soaring window and even more soaring view swamped Hat Kid’s vision.

… Space. They were in space, Earth a fuzzy-edged sphere in the middle of a vast star-sprawl.

He didn’t get much time to take in the sights, though, as Hat Kid found whatever she was looking for on Earth’s surface, and made her way through a downward-sloping tunnel. For some inscrutable reason, she completely ignored the smoking engine and broken pipes, instead scurrying up some ladders and bringing a telescope to her eye, similar to the one that was in her room. And despite the paper-layered partition between their selves, Snatcher still caught the impressions of alien information- not memories, or projected thoughts, but unhidden facts of life, and common knowledge. Like how the telescope-apparatus was for pinpoint warping.

At least the absorbed knowledge was, well, alien enough for him to know it wasn’t his. Messing around with time for something as mundane as ship fuel, of all things, yeesh. It’s a miracle the entirety of the Tempus system hadn’t collapsed from the irritated strike of Time after prodding it a bit too much.

Hat Kid made good on her threat, and with a whirl of folded space and spun gravity, she and her surprise passenger landed at the top of a soaring mountain, clouds churning above and below.

Eh, whatever. She might think she had the advantage in this… business negotiation, but as irritating as being stuck in a disgustingly fragile mortal body was, he was even less concerned about the thing they left at the forest. Magic was attached to the soul, and his soul was here, for better or for worse. The alien-infested shadow couldn’t access his fire, or his shadow-pockets, or the forest’s roots. That was all with him, still, though it was useless without full control of a vessel.

And he’d know if the foreign soul actually hurt the forest, sure as if it tore his own skin. He could wait the hat-brat out- she was alive! She had all the time in the world to lose, after all. Snatcher was getting out of this with both his proper body and a bundle of enchanted items that would be unfathomably powerful in the right hands.

For now, though, he was stuck behind the eyes of an alien child, radiating displeasure and attempting to ignore the muted-but-still-strange sensations of stone on callused fingers as she hauled herself up the mountain, or the feeling of handling something with actual heft, even if it was just as light as an umbrella.

‘Why can’t you just take the deal,’ Snatcher grumbled. ‘You even get to live to tell the tale, which is more than even the good contractors get, and-’ His trail of thought stuttered to a halt, spitting startled sparks like flint on steel. ‘What is that thing!?’

Twitching and staticky and seemingly occupying more space than it actually was, the red-garbed thing by one of the mountaintop statues looked like the laws of physics tied themselves into a knot and gave the resulting tangle a life of its own.

“Oh, you mean the Badge Seller?” Hat Kid said innocently, far too calm even considering her lack of soul.

At the sound of its name, the thing’s masked face jerkily creaked to stare at them.

‘Kid, I don’t care what is considered normal on your planet, that thing is freaky.’

“Hey, don’t be mean! They’re super nice,” she huffed. “And what can you say about something being weird? You’re dead!”

‘Ouch, low blow, kid.’ Snatcher projected insincerely.

As Hat Kid fearlessly approached the ‘Badge Seller’, it stooped down to better meet their eyes, and despite being hidden behind layers of flesh and blood and bone, Snatcher felt seen.

“Hello, young one. I was waiting with a new badge for you, but I was not expecting another visitor.”

Snatcher coiled up and tensed, hanging at the back of the kid’s mind and pulling closed a curtain of alien memories he’d accidentally assimilated. Ordinarily he’d gladly fire-blast this out-of-place creature off the side of the mountain, but like most actions without control of the body, blowing stuff up was an unavailable option.

Hat Kid made grabby hands at the prospect of a new badge. “Ooh, gimme. Same price?” she asked, already pulling her hat off her head and digging through it for money.

“Of course, valued customer,” it said, with the hint of a sarcastic smirk in its voice. Or maybe it was just a particularly glitchy inflection.

Hat Kid tipped her hat over, and the resulting cascade of pons just… vanished into Badge Seller’s proffered hand. What the heck.

It placed the badge in her outstretched hand, and the girl pinned it on her hat before flipping it back onto her head. “Neat! So, uh, what does it do?”

As if glitching from one frame to the next, the Badge Seller’s hand was suddenly pointing to the long line of flags, extending up into clouds crackling with faint traces of storm-glow. “Goats may climb the mountains with ease, but little alien children would need other means to reach their sanctuary. The Hookshot Badge will carry you there, young one.”

Hat Kid followed the creature’s finger to the string of banners, and Snatcher felt her lips curl up into a smile, impressions of flying and wind-gusts whipping through his feathers (or her hair? The memories felt similar).

The image of her body going splat at the bottom of the canyon and killing them both for real was entirely of his own making.

‘Hey, kid, maybe we should find a better way up- URK-’ Snatcher’s mental voice tripped on itself like a man with a foot caught in a water-wheel- suddenly, violently, and with much sputtering involved.

Stormclouds parted before them like falling water, and the child’s amazement swelled so high even Snatcher could feel it.

< It’s beautiful! >

While, in his humble opinion, Snatcher thought his nice and gloomy forest was more pleasant, he privately admitted there was something almost pretty about wind-scoured spires bristling from below the clouds, with rainbow banners spiderwebbing across the gulfs and moss-furred buildings perched atop them.

He’d probably feel different if he wasn't in a body made of meat, though. The sun tended to wash him out.

While Hat Kid scurried about the village like an insect over a dragon’s spines, Snatcher actually began to pay attention to how the body moved. Signal from the brain, down the nerves, to the muscle, to movement, and if he could just grab at that thread of motion, maybe-

His attempt at controlling the body was cut off before it even began, snatched by the strange itching sensation that he somehow felt, and not through the body- that alcohol-tang prickled across Snatcher, the disembodied spirit, leaving Hat Kid alone.

Hat Kid was trotting to the right, towards a group of chatting hooded creatures. The prickling feeling dragged at him from the left, where a bed of violet flowers grew.

Snatcher yanked all their attention towards the left. Hat Kid’s body kept going right.

They tripped, and the bleating chatter from the hooded villagers stopped abruptly.

For perhaps the first time since occupying the same body, Snatcher and Hat Kid were in perfect sync as they groaned against the gravel grinding into her cheek. Embarrassing.

< Nice job making us eat shit, Snatcher. >

‘Shut it, you were already bonking into stuff before I was stuck with you. I take no responsibility.’

“Um, Miss? Are you okay?” Side of her face still plastered on the stone, Hat Kid glanced up at the worried silhouette blocking the sun.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,” she grunted, pushing herself to her feet and brushing grit off her tunic.

The nomad glanced at her curiously, horned head tilted to the side. Snatcher was familiar with the strange goatling creatures, though only to the extent of what their souls tasted like. They always were irritatingly perceptive.

“Are you sure you’re alright, though?” the nomad prodded. “You seem a bit… ill, is all.”

Hat Kid waved them off. “Pfft, no, I’m just- uh. Height sickness! Yeah.”

‘Very convincing, from someone who literally dropped from space. Super believable.’

Blithely, she ignored him, though not without a faint huff, like a dispersing dustball smacking him in the face.

“Well, if you say so… But just in case, if there’s a curse of some kind clinging to you, you came to the right place!” The nomad beamed, clearly not believing her in the slightest about ‘height sickness’. “The filter-flowers here keep the air and the magic clean! Stick around them for a little bit and your illnesses will be cleared up in no time!”

“Thanks for the tip!” Hat Kid exclaimed, though her eyes were already elsewhere, only half-listening to the nomad. Sparkling in the distance to her- and thus Snatcher’s- eyes, a beacon of cycling temporal energy sparked, nestled inside a heat-scoured mountain.

Their first destination, apparently.

Hat Kid found the zipline-ride to a melting mountain spire fun, because of course she did. For his part, Snatcher ignored her bouncing around the stony slopes, preoccupied with counting the leverage they had on each other- he wanted to get out of this with an actual gain, after all.

His position... wasn’t that great, he admitted to himself. With jurisdiction over the body, Hat Kid could do pretty much whatever she wanted, bar accessing the Time Pieces Snatcher had pocketed. If only it was so easy as just tripping themselves into falling off a cliff and Snatcher freeing himself of her lifeless corpse, but no, of course not, because he’d hastily grabbed for a living vessel instead of something sensible like a stone statue or one of the plush Subconite bodies. Instead he had a vested interest in keeping her alive and an unwanted surprise tour of Alpine Skyline to deal with.

< Heh, you’re sulking. > A passing thought, flitting across the smoke-cloud of his emotions.

Ugh. That was just another issue to add to the ‘ghost in a body that still had its mind’ pile. Keeping conscious thought from the other mind he was sharing skull-space with wasn’t too hard, but emotions bled through them both like watery ink on paper; the context behind such sentiments could be obscured, but the feelings themselves were obvious.

‘Yeah, and you’re nervous about just a little bit of lava,’ he countered, looking up at the lopsided layers of molten stone. A volcano wasn’t exactly as cozy as his nice eternal wildfire at home, but it was still pleasant enough for a being who had deep-fire for a core, rather than a heart.

Hat Kid straightened, marching up to the wobbling pillars and hopping onto one without looking down at the magma- a rebuttal to his accusation. < I’m not! > she lied, apprehension rising like silt from a disturbed riverbank. < It’s just, ah, it feels way less hot than it should? Toasty, not, y’know, burning. >

Just before he was about to mock her wimpy heat tolerance, Snatcher paused. She was right- the scent of hot rock did not sear lungs, and the watery shimmer of superheated air above lava was uncomfortable, but not burning.

‘... Huh. magic is connected to the soul,’ he muttered, words blurred by the remembered magic-shapes and heart-motions that were the closest thing to ‘seeing’ magical signatures anyone could get. ‘Even if the soul and body are mismatched.’

< Fire magic, huh? > Hat Kid mused, peeking over the lip of a stone pillar into popping lava, bubbles releasing sun-hot cinders that billowed around her face like an open oven, rather than searing burnt streaks into her skin. < That’s kinda cool, actually, > she reflected, catching one in her hands.

Idly, she bounced it between her palms; it wasn’t hot enough to sear her fingertips, but it was still pretty hot.

If this was the kind of stuff she poked without thinking, they were both going to die before she gave up and left the Time Pieces to him. ‘Hey, put that thing down! How- how stupid can you be, to just grab something hot like that? What are you, eight?’

“Twelve, actually,” she said aloud, as if that was any better. “And I’m not stupid! I can feel your magic kinda hanging out in the back, even though it’s really pecking weird. I knew the ambient fire magic would protect me.”

< Probably… > Echoed across their shared space, unbidden.

‘Feh, whatever. I don’t care what death-taunting nonsense you get into, so long as it’s when I’m not in here with you!’ And wouldn’t that be a relief. She’d already been scooping up an ingrained understanding of fire magic from him; stars knew what else she’d get imprinted on her. He certainly didn’t want any literally-alien ideas stamped onto him, like some kind of rude houseguest trailing in mud.

Though she wasn’t going to bake alive anytime soon, Hat Kid was still wary of the lava in a way that spoke of more than just instinct- rapid heartbeat, a fine tremble in her hands, breathing purposely controlled and far too even to be a natural reaction.

She didn’t let it affect her gymnastics, at least, and the moment she touched the Time Piece and warped them back to her ship, her shoulders loosening with the breath of relief she released.

The power of the Time Piece in their hands was magnetizing- attracting and repelling both. The feeling faded after Hat Kid carelessly tossed it into her ship’s vault, though the stash of sandglasses still pulsed in the back of their minds, calling out to the weird sixth sense Tempeans seemed to possess.

Hat Kid trudged up the ramp; tired, soot-stained, and gut-achingly hungry, which were not feelings Snatcher missed from his life at all. She tumbled through the swinging doors, marched up to the fridge, and opened it. Eyed her dinner options, which consisted of leftovers, leftovers, and more leftovers.

She stuck her head into the fridge, the cool wires of the rack pressing into her cheek.

< Ooooh, that feels good after the Lava Cake. >

‘Ugh, c’mon, just grab something and stuff it down your throat. This sucks just as much for me as it does for you, y’know,’ he said. Hat Kid remained unmoved, so Snatcher jerked their eyes open to stare at the boxed leftovers.

Hah! So he could move something! Only when she was tired and distracted (or maybe just feeling lazy) enough, but still, he would count it as a victory. ‘Say, you got any bacon in this box of yours?’

Chapter Text

Being soulless wasn’t… actually as terrible as Hattie thought it would be. Not like anyone at home had managed to lose a soul and survive to tell the tale anyways, but still.

And she wasn’t entirely soulless, at least on technicality. It just… wasn’t her soul, was all. Snatcher was obnoxious, and greedy, and kinda cranky about all their feelings bleeding all over each other, but at least their stalemate was a relatively understanding one, in a way. Even if he wasn’t as sneaky as he thought he was.

Snatcher was adult-sneaky, which meant Hattie had to watch out for what he didn’t say. Like how he didn’t verbalize that the sensation of being so wholly trapped grated on him like shattered ice, or like how he said pinning down the her-soul-in-his-body would be easy, but neglected to mention how hard it would be to actually swap the souls.

Like how he didn’t say why being in a living vessel was actually a bad thing for ghosts; though he tried to keep the reason why away from her, she still caught the eddies of that gravity-well of a thought.

For a guy who was already dead, Snatcher was pretty scared of dying again.

Which was almost insulting, in a way. She was very good at not dying, thank you very much! Sure, if she died, it’d spell a permanent end to her weird brain-neighbor, but it’s not like she’d let herself get killed just to be rid of him. How dumb did he think she was?

… Pretty dumb, actually, if he thought she’d let him keep the Time Pieces for fixing the mess he got them into.

The past few days of Time Piece gathering had gotten them both to… settle, in a way. Each clearly thought they could out-stall the other, and as emotions and impressions and words washed between them like tides, they were habituated to each other, somewhat. Like the time Hattie’s whole family had visited for her parents’ send-off to the moon-base; a gentle background chatter and unfiltered thoughts. Like the time his elder sister, the heir, had pulled him aside during the old Queen’s banquet, knowing he was deeply uncomfortable, and yanked him away from the ever-prying royal court to sit in comfortable silence in the gardens.

Hattie shook her head, shooing away the foreign half-thought like an errant dust-bunny. The Snatcher-brain-backwash was… not unpleasant, at least not right now, but still strange. He was at least able to keep the denser memories shoved down out of her range. Which boded well, since it meant the memories that weighed on her like an overcharged gravity field were safely tucked away from him.

And even without the living, shadowy tendrils curling around her mind, she didn’t want to think of the moon-base. Ever.

Alpine Skyline was nice, in that way. Nothing like that polar-lit moon in the Outer Reaches. Still made her wonder who, or what, built a birdcage that big. Especially since most of the birds on Earth were people.

As she scaled the gigantic windmill, Snatcher lazily unfurled his awareness from the back of her mind, like a bushcat stretching out and clawing at her. ‘Hey, kid, don't fleshbags need to, I dunno, sleep? Or are aliens somehow exempt?’

< Of course we need to! Your planet’s day cycles are just weirdly short. >

‘Hey, you’ve done some really odd stuff. I still can’t believe you ate the fork along with the food,’ Snatcher ribbed at her.

< Says the guy who eats meat. And oh, yeah, souls, > she countered, bracing herself before grabbing the windmill-hidden Time Piece. < Seriously, I cannot believe you asked me if I had ‘bacon’ in the fridge. Who even eats that? >

‘Not you, apparently. You’re literally venomous enough to poison a well, how was I supposed to know you’re some kind of bizarre vegetarian species?’ A brief pause, and an echoed reflection of silver bending between their jaws. ‘Is metal even vegetarian?’

Snatcher’s line of inquiry cut off as Hattie warped them back up to the ship, Time Piece in hand. ‘Ugh, don’t do that without a warning! It gives me a headache, which means it gives you one too, idiot!’ he snapped, his intangible presence squeezing tighter around her brain.

Or maybe that was the headache- he wasn’t lying about warping straining her a lot more since she lost her soul. She was pretty sure warping wasn’t really magic, but magic in general was connected to the soul, rather than the body. There was a reason she hadn’t been able to spin yarn or craft any new hats since losing her soul.

She didn’t bother offering a retort, instead trudging up the tunnel to her room and flopping facedown on the bed. The windmill climb was long.

< Just… be quiet, I’ll sleep it off. Unless you want me to give us a worse headache? >

Surprisingly, he actually acquiesced, and was silent as she burrowed under the covers and smacked the bedside light switch off. He’d chilled out quite a lot in a few days- strange, for someone who was such a jerk, but maybe the threat of a worse headache for someone who hadn’t felt such pain in centuries was enough. Or maybe they were absorbing more from each other than she thought, including a less volatile equilibrium- a side-effect of having the feelings of a soulless person as emotional background-buzz, she supposed.

Snatcher curled around their brain like a serpentine smoke cloud, she slept.

--

In their dreams, they floated, as if the very earth rejected their weight. Soaring spires of obsidian, of ice, of bony claws erupted from the moon-pale ground, spearing chromed buildings that oozed into lava. Desolate. Empty, the aftermath of a volcanic wrath.

Then the bodies washed across their path.

Wood-carved masks burning away to expose eyeless, noseless corpses, shiny and burnt flesh melting like the world around them. Frozen statues, like heat-blown glass instead of ice, trapping the dead inside, whose faces he remembered but did not recognize, and whose memories held warmth for her.

And it was silent, but for the faint rumbling on the horizon.

They looked out.

This was a dream, they both knew. But the view that captured them was a memory, not a dream, despite the nightmarishly impossible scene.

Like a pair of incongruent storms in a smooth sky, the two Beings clashed, slow as grinding glaciers and too fast for the eye to follow, phasing in and out of what-should-be and what-is. Forces of nature dueling, uncaring of the feeble mortal lives crushed beneath the weight of their skirmish.

They both knew, in the way one knew what death smelled like, what these creatures were. And how dangerous they were.

Hattie, in the gliding, agonizingly slow way of the dreaming, scrambled through melted streets and to the ship-docks, hope for an undamaged spaceship the only thing keeping her afloat above the breath-eating terror of it all. As she crested the rise of the tall platform, the metal creaked and groaned and threw Hattie to her knees, the Beings inching closer and rattling the ships in their docks.

Hattie looked up from her tumble just as the invading Being crashed into the moon-Being. Shuddered, like continents colliding, a thousand aurora-arms whipping at its territorial rival. The ground boiled beneath their clash, stone melting into lava and rippling across the surface to consume the moon-base’s remains.

Hattie scrambled across the metal grate to un-dock her family’s ship, and transferred all the Time Pieces from the dock’s fuel tank into her own ship’s stores. Refusing to look back, she carelessly unhooked the fuel tube and threw herself into the ship, pelting across the bridge to the control chair.

The air shook, and the moon’s native Being- the one that had always slumbered beneath their feet- loomed in the ship’s window, miles away yet unspeakably huge.

Blade-mist feathers, each spanning the length of a Tempus city-state; rows of mountain-teeth dipping above and below her line of sight. Uncountable legs braced the Being to the ground, feet and hooves and claws and fins churning like a swarm.

The ship screamed when she launched it, pulled in by the sucking backdraft, and Hattie blindly reached for the ‘warp’ lever, too panicked and too rushed to set a destination.

Glass shattered, and the warfront-moon vanished from sight.

Frostbite-black fingers trailing down his face, then to his neck-

Ceaseless water-drops dripping from the ceiling, flooding the cellar drop by drop-

They couldn’t breathe, heat sucking the oxygen from their breath and chain-borne weight crushing their lungs-

--

A strangled gasp, and they thrashed awake, blankets tangling as they backed up and banged into the headboard.

Dark, can’t see, why couldn’t she see, even in the forest’s moonless depths she was never blind, not since the cellar door closed behind her-

Called by their synchronized, half-wild need for light, Hattie’s hand lit with a ball of sun-laced blue fire, casting the dark room in a washed-out glow and stark shadows.

There was nothing in the room save the bed, the pillow-pile, and the desk. No unknowable creatures prying their way into the world to wage war on each other and destroy her home. No dead water covering the floor.

Hattie let her hitched breathing even out, and slumped, cradling the magic flame in her hands, resting across her lap. She concentrated on the flickering fire, letting the patternless flares refocus her, keep her mind from wandering into the distorted memories that her sleeping mind patched into a nightmare. The pulsing heartbeat in her hands was familiar, and comfortable, despite its foreignness.

It was foreign to her, at least, Hattie realized. Snatcher had latched onto the little fire as a point of focus as well, and he was where the familiarity with the exercise came from.

Consciousness pressed right up against hers, Snatcher felt unsteady; spiky and confused but solid, far more rooted than she’d felt. She leaned into it, warm and surprisingly soft, like black snake-wool.

She then felt nearly squashed as Snatcher reoriented himself, the smoke-presence curling around their shared mind like an eel in its den, waiting for the threat to appear so he could kill it dead. Curiously, he didn’t make a grab for the motor controls, and the flames in her hand continued to burn.

There was no true threat- only remembered ones.

‘Kid, where- what the heck was that!’

Still caught between the grogginess of poor sleep and shaking adrenaline, Hattie answered aloud “That was home. Or, uh, the research base my parents worked in. One of the… things they were studying got out. I don’t know how many other people survived.”

Mom and Dad didn’t.

The ache of their loss was still raw. Like salt and ice on a bleeding wound. She curled in tighter, head resting on her knees and fire dimming as she blocked the rest of the world out. “Tempus should’ve known it was too dangerous to capture and study. But they sent us anyway, and didn’t send a rescue when a moon-spirit and a grounded star-Being destroyed the entire base in a territory fight.”

Snatcher had at least assimilated some knowledge of the Beings from her- it saved her the need to explain the living forms of locations, or phenomena; the creatures that lived to perpetuate their own existence and the boundaries of their selves; that were huge, and near-impossible to pin down, and had no concept of ‘collateral damage’.

The Tempus Council may as well have asked the moon-base to hold on to a black hole. Beings were sapient, but did not have the capacity to love, or hate. They simply were.

Thousands killed, and the things that slew them couldn’t even care.

Silence, and something like… understanding. This kind of circumstance wasn’t unfamiliar to both of them- lava-floods and unburied family mirroring ice-sheened trees and dead subjects.

‘... I think I get it, kid.’

Curious, and desperate to focus on anything else, Hattie uncurled herself and leaned back against the headboard. “Hey, Snatcher, I’ve been wondering. You had family once too, right?”

The impression of raised hackles, and the sound of a choked snarl. ‘How do you- no, of course. It’s the stupid memories.’

“Hey, it’s not like I can reach in and rummage around your mind. Some things just kinda… show up.” She tilted her head, thinking of a few glimpses of memory she’d caught from him, shadow-lit and old. “I know the answer anyway. It’s not like you sprung up from under a mushroom one day.”

… Although she wouldn’t have been surprised if that was the case. “Tell me about them. Please?”

‘No.’ Absolutely no hesitation.

“That’s not a very good way to honor their memory,” Hattie said, and slapped a palm over her mouth (the one without fire in it) as if to stop more impulsive words from escaping. Snatcher was an ass- to other people more often than her, since they felt each other’s surface emotions- but there were some lines that were best left uncrossed.

The magic in her hand shrieked upwards in a pillar of fire, matched by the flash-paper seething from Snatcher. He shoved her mind away from his, and the fire went out, not even a wisp of smoke left.

Tense silence. ‘You aren’t exactly doing a swell job of that yourself, kiddo. If you’re so concerned with honoring your family’s memory, where are those memories, huh?’

Hattie flinched at the venomous tone, but shot back “It’s been less than a year! You’ve had centuries, you peck-neck!”

The rebound of both their emotions from their respective outbursts rattled them, echoes of the other’s feelings flowing around them, but once they’d settled, Snatcher inched closer to the gossamer-curtain between their minds. ‘I… okay. Let’s make a deal-’ and oh, that was never a good thing to hear from him… ‘-Tell me something about your family, and I’ll tell you something about mine. And then you sleep again, because being this tired feels like crap.’

“Can’t take a little bit of sleep deprivation? Weenie,” Hattie teased, but took the deal for what it was- olive branches extended to each other. Not pity, because she didn’t think there was any creature in the world he would deign to feel sorry for, but something more like understanding. A strange sympathy made up of mirror-distorted past experiences and projected emotions.

‘Well? Are you gonna say something or not, because I’ve got better things to do than wait on you.’

< No you don’t, > Hattie projected on reflex. Ignored the affronted scrunch of shadows in her mind, and gathered her thoughts.

“Mom and Dad were always pretty busy- we were reassigned to the moon’s research base when I was just old enough to be in school- but Dad always took time at the end of the day to teach me magic.” She drew on the magic of the soul- it wasn’t the cool, curling softness of fiber magic she was used to; instead it was the flex of fire, warm and bright and ever-shifting. The fire came just as easily to her as the yarn did, before. “Just klostimancy though- how to spin magic into yarn, how to combine the patterns to make clothing with magic effects, that kinda stuff. He didn’t let me learn any Time magic yet, though,” she said, wistful. And quickly slapped his wandering claws away from thoughts of using a Time Piece for illicit purposes. “Time magic is something we can all do, but it’s not really worth the very dangerous consequences unless you have a seriously powerful way to filter it- like the starglass in Time Pieces.”

A mental tickle, like an owl’s ear-tufts pricking up in interest. ‘So, magic, hm?’

“What, do you not have much of that here?” It was rather odd, since no matter where she went on Earth, there wasn’t much in the way of magic at all; the Mafia Boss had lightning magic, and the cat-burglars in Alpine used minor light magic to obscure themselves, but beyond that she hadn’t seen much. Well, not much that was alive. Ghosts were weird, and it was even weirder that there were so many on a magic-poor planet.

‘You’ve used my fire, of course we have magic here, idiot,’ Snatcher snorted. ‘Elemental magic, mostly, and alchemy is more common in some areas. Haven’t seen anything that enchants objects like the hat-making does, though.’

“Yeah, okay, but Time isn’t actually magic, it’s a dimension, so I’m still right.” Hattie crossed her arms and huffed. “I know what you’re doing, by the way! Fess up, it’s your turn.”

‘Ugh, fine. Parents died before I did, their spirits didn’t stick around. Older sister skipped town with some guy named Larsen before the ice storm, probably the smartest thing she’d ever done. Pretty sure I had some cousins in different clans, but who knows what happened to them.’ A sifting of shadows, almost like a shrug. ‘They’d be dead by now anyways.’

Though stark, and pared down to facts, Snatcher couldn’t hide from her the emotions each statement was tagged with. Absence from his father, interspersed with the feeling of his back hitting the dirt arena from his mother. A casual sense of curiosity about the cousins, long-forgotten what-could-have-beens. A sense of protected-and-protector towards his sister, sleeping on the floor of her room when they were both still children, nearly drowning each other in the swamp but laughing afterwards because it was all in good fun, after all.

“Eh, good enough, I suppose.” Hattie shrugged. And let out a jaw-cracking yawn. Talking to someone for long enough gentled the post-nightmare jitters into something more resembling drowsiness.

Hattie leaned around and shoved aside her hat on the bedside table to check the clock- it’d only been seven hours since she’d fallen asleep the first time. “I think we should get back to sleep soon, really.” She tugged the blankets over her head, until there was nothing but a tuft of bed-mussed brown hair peeking out from the top. “G’night, Snatcher.”

And maybe it was her imagination, but whispered in the back of her mind, Hattie thought she heard an ash-whisper of ‘Good night, kid.’

--

“So uhhhh I’m not supposed to be talking about this BUT my uncle got back from his off-planet research trip and holy shit.

Okay some backstory, my uncle is an extradimensional biologist and I’m in college for the same thing so it’s not like I’m talking out of my ass about some of this stuff. He was one of the people pulled in for a government science project- real serious stuff, y’know how hush-hush they can get about this.

ANYWAY, so if you live on the Tempus homeworld instead of the colonies, you probably heard about how the moon-base went kaboom a few months ago. Freak accident with the Time Pieces or whatever. Tragic, but it’s happened before.

Except that isn’t what happened. Uncle was one of the survivors who managed to fly out in time (they kept all the survivors anonymous, thankfully for me), and he just got cleared to return home and I got him to spill.

They were on that moon to study Beings. They managed to capture and hold one. Which like, in and of itself is absolutely wild, it’s like saying ‘oh I caught a hurricane in a bottle’. See, thing is, Beings are like… personifications of places or even aspects of reality. The ones that are locations are weaker, but that isn’t saying much when we’re working on a scale like this. Turns out taking the Being they captured down to the moon-base was a bad idea, because that moon had a personification, and that Being woke up when they poked the captured one too hard. And Beings are super territorial.

I’m gonna quote one of Uncle’s super old textbooks, but no matter how old it is it’s still right. “Beings are not people. They are a many-willed locality, an aspect of reality, or an actualized idea. They do not act to help, or to hurt, or to understand. They act to perpetuate their own existence, or act just because they can.” So as soon as the two Beings felt each other? They started going to town, just shredding one another.

I don’t have a way to post it, but as my uncle was telling me all this, he pulled up a video from his ship’s dashcam, and I think just seeing parts of those things through the smoke was one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever seen, and I wasn’t even there.

The Tempus Council messed up big time with this, guys. I’m scared that if they keep poking Beings too hard, they’ll attract the attention of Beings that are aspects from reality, and not just small things like a nebula or a planet or whatever. And if we poke Time too hard, and it decides to poke back, then we won’t have Time Pieces anymore, and we’re screwed.”

-Personal blog post of a Clockwork University student. This is the last post on the blog.

Chapter Text

“While we have evolved to hold Time magic in our souls, and use it, such power is not without consequence- it’s one of the reasons we have Time Pieces, after all. To stretch or squash the fourth dimension- that is, to speed up, or slow, or even stop time- is simple to do, once you know how to.

Which is why it’s important to avoid doing so, without the proper training or equipment.

When you slow or speed up time, you slow parts of yourself as well. And when you stop time? Those things stop too. Your breathing, your heartbeat, your vision because light can’t reach your eyes- those are all forfeit in the time-frozen limbo. The Being of Time has to keep us humble somehow.”

-Blog entry from a Tempus citizen, aimed at alien system-neighbors who share the same internet

--

In the moon-shadowed depths of Subcon Forest, a creature hunted.

Not for prey, but for magic- magic that sang to its spirit, like calling to like. Time magic. Magic that the creature knew belonged in its safekeeping, with a certainty that could shake the seas and stars.

One time-glass-sand had been recovered. Ripped from the plank-splintered maw of some wooden construct- a weak thing, barely any challenge, but a thief of what-was-its nonetheless. The remains of the construct- which even to the nerveless sensory gaps in the creature’s face smelled like sewage- were scattered around the stone plaza, interspersed with swatches of violet burlap- the remains of the little stuffed creatures that hadn’t escaped the fight in time.

The time-glass-sand still smelled like a toilet though, even after being extracted from the construct’s remains. Gross.

The night-sharp claws that once belonged to the Snatcher were deceptively gentle, holding the retrieved time-glass-sand; the alien soul inhabiting the body mindful of the object’s value, even without the conscious thought of the mind.

And there was a second such object still unretrieved, pinging at the creature from the north. With one time-glass-sand tucked carefully away in the creature’s shadow-down, it slithered across a rubbled bridge and into air that bit with cold.

The frigid wind that curled, perversely loving, around the creature’s black feathers and pink-glowing eyes made its hackles raise on end and its eyes narrow.

The snow-lit manor it approached was not a place of safety.

It was a place of white-glass-pain known but not remembered, frost-wounded instincts that screamed of the threat just over the frozen lake. Of the spark of temporal energy hidden in that same place, by that same dangerous presence- the spark that belonged to the creature.

Urged by need and by fear both, the Tempus-born alien soul slithered across the ice, and into the Queen’s territory.

It approached from the rear, feeling the pull of the time-glass-sand and the push of the woman who haunted this body’s memories. The cellar proved a comfortable entry point to allow the creature inside, while staying farther away from the Queen’s influence. The cold water plastered its feathers to its sides, revealing the bristling thorns hidden under the fluff.

The blood-rusted chains bolted to stone walls were given a wide berth, echoes of ice-burnt scars on the neck and a crushing, invisible weight on the chest that suffocated the creature, despite its lack of lungs.

It left faint claw-marks in the moth-eaten carpet that covered the stairs, a wet trail dragging after it as the creature slithered into the hallway.

It swept its head from side to side, ear-tufts pricked and baleful eyes washing the walls in magenta, scanning the manor for the time-glass-sand that called to it. Straight ahead, there was nothing. But to the left, down the hall…

The faint shuff of feathers on carpet was enough to disturb the manor’s resident; the house, silent as a moonless midnight, echoed.

“Who dares enter my home!”

The creature recoiled, mane bristling, as the shadowed queen stalked out of her den to confront the intruder.

Vanessa, it knew. Knew, but did not remember. Traitor. Thief. Once of life, a young man choking on air in the cellar. Once of time-glass-sand, the magic that belonged to the creature.

Threateningly, the queen raised an ice-dark hand, diamond dust trailing after it.

The untethered soul was all instinct, and emotion, and reaction. It did not abide by threats. It ended them.

The creature lunged at Vanessa, fangs leading-

And speared itself on the ice-pikes that erupted from the floor.

The creature writhed like a needle-pinned worm, the supernaturally-cold spikes tearing into it like the teeth of some great arctic beast.

Queen Vanessa shuffled closer, and the glass-red glint of her eyes widened behind stringy hair. “You! You are that beast who destroyed the bridge! Stole my beloved from his room!”

She loomed over the creature, her feet inches from where it desperately clawed at her, leaving splintered gouges in the old wood. She froze its arms to the ground in a sheath of ice, and the creature froze with it, still as a light-stunned owl.

The creature’s feathers tugged painfully as Vanessa lifted it by its ruff to face her. “Tell me, monster. Where did you take my prince?”

The sensations of freezing fingers on its ruff, of cold pinning its arms, cracked lines of terror through the creature’s mind; while it did not remember, it still knew, with searing certainty, that Vanessa had killed this way. And would do so again.

:Sparks-bristling numbcold chains and bloodied wrists, notagain no, no, NO!:

A sound like a thousand mirrors shattering leagues away, and the world froze. Not in ice, but in time.

The creature heaved itself off the cold spears and ripped its arms from their icy cuffs, leaving gaping rents in its shadow-body that allowed a glimpse of the pink-light of an alien soul. Propping itself up on shaking hands, it looked up at the queen.

Snowflakes, suspended in the air, not even glittering in the candlelight. A lightning bolt outside the window, permanently scrawled into the sky. And Vanessa, frozen in time, so still even her eyes could not move.

But she could still see the creature.

Slowly, the creature rose to its full height, a line of honey-locust thorns down its spine flaring like hackles.

Such raw, instinctual use of Time magic was dangerous to the caster. Enough to kill them. But the body that once belonged to Snatcher had no lungs to draw breath, and no heart to pump blood, and no physical eyes to perceive light; made of tangled briar and shadow, sewn together by spark-stitches and plasma rather than flesh.

Slow as unravelling yarn, Hat Kid’s soul coiled- a viper about to strike.

And swift as the cutting winds of a spring storm, the creature struck, claws hooking in a throat and pulling.

The time-magic broke, and wet red shreds stained the hallway’s wrinkled rug. Queen Vanessa’s reign was no more.

And as the creature exited the accursed manor, it did not care for the blood-drops it left steaming in snow, or the dark smear its hands left on the time-glass-sand.

Chapter Text

“Day 15,

The goats are still kind of concerned about me passing out from altitude sickness and falling off a cliff or something, but are starting to get I’m not going anywhere anytime soon. I mean, it makes sense that they would be, since most of the ‘pilgrims’ who come up this far are from the lowlands. But Fairview City is shoved right up against the foot of Alpine Skyline, so I’m used to the thin air. They trade with us a lot, but they aren’t really great at distinguishing humans from different geographical backgrounds, including locals of their own area.

Regardless, even with our parallel history, there’s so much we don’t know about their home. Some things even they don’t know- Fairview City has census records going pretty far back, even to the names of Subcon immigrants from the mass exodus from the west several centuries ago (now that’s something I’d love to research, but the University board never approves research grants that include travel to Subcon’s remains). Even the founding of the city wasn’t that long ago, only about four hundred years or so.

Alpine? Their oral history goes back millenia, but none of them know where the Twilight Bell came from. It predates them- literally, all their tales of the first goats to settle there mention a guiding moon that never faded, even in daytime. It’s a bit hard to parse since their language has so many translations and specific terms for astronomical events, both natural and metaphorical, but after a lot of stumbling conversations with a few Twilight Stewards, they finally managed to get across to me that the ‘never-fading moon’ was a metaphor, and that the Twilight Bell was what guided them to the Skyline.

The Bell looks a lot like a sapient-made structure to me, but the goats didn’t build it, and even as far back to the dawn of civilization they have oral records of it always being there. So the question remains: who did build it? Or what?”

-Journal entry of historian Brigid Larsen.

--

Tracing the auroras that shimmered like streaks of dawn, Zebu squinted from her stone-carved home, wondering if her eyes had deceived her or if there really was… something hurtling down the Twilight-colored banners, instead of balancing across like a sane goat.

Whoever they were, they weren’t very good at it. At the end of the line they crashed into a stacked hay bale, a flurry of alfalfa exploding into the air and drifting off in the breeze.

Zebu pulled her cowl over her horns and hopped down, sure-footed and confident that the rock-chips would hold her weight, as they had the thousand other times she used this path. The demolished bale rustled as she approached, revealing a hay-veiled human who sputtered in a vain attempt to spit out the dry grass they’d accidentally eaten.

A human? Here?

Humans almost never came up this far. There was a human settlement tucked between the feet of the mountains, but they rarely ventured this high- the air was too heavy for them, and the sheer spires too steep.

Now up on their own two feet and brushing hay from their clothes, the strange human was muttering to themself, a tremendous scowl on their face as they glared up at the faraway Bell. They sneezed, the short spray of fire accompanying the action revealing them to be a fire-mage of some description.

“Are you lost?” Zebu interrupted whatever internal dialogue they were having.

The human startled, releasing a strangely echoey squawk of surprise. “Gah! Where did- who are you?”

Zebu squinted at them, tilting her head as if perhaps a different angle would reveal their sun-shadowed secrets. There was something strange about this human. It wasn’t unknown that some especially cursed humans would make a pilgrimage up the mountain to let the filter-flowers leech away the dark magic clinging to them, but Zebu got the feeling that if this human was there for the filter-flowers, they would’ve stopped by a patch of them already. The flower patches were much easier to get to than the Twilight Bell.

“I’m a Twilight Steward. My name’s Zebu,” she elected to say.

The human’s eyes lit up- almost literally, like the flash of a cat-thief's eyes against a torch. “Ooh, then you must know how to get up to the thing on top of the mountain!” they said, gesturing to the rising spikes that supported the Twilight Bell.

Skeptically, Zebu took in their lack of hooves, or wings, or anything else that would allow them to climb the sheer quartz walls. “Are you sure you can even make it up there? There’s no lines for you to, uh, do that thing with.” And you crashed doing that anyways.

They eyeballed the cliffsides. “Nah, I’ll figure something out,” they declared, unintimidated.

Dubiously, Zebu turned away and shrugged. “If you say so. I’ll believe you if you can keep up!”

Zebu wasn’t exactly counting on the human falling- she did look back frequently during the hike to the Bell- but she wouldn’t have been surprised if she had to help them out somehow. But, to her surprise, the human seemed to be doing just fine, skittering up walls like a gecko dipped in glue and leaping across great gaps that spanned at least five meters.

Okay, maybe this ‘tourist’ wasn’t a human. No human Zebu had ever heard of could move like that.

Zebu soon landed at the Twilight Belfry, grudgingly impressed by the maybe-human’s agility. They seemed… unsure, looking up at the gargantuan structure up close. Understandable, really- even without the starlight suspended under its skirt, the Twilight Bell was a presence few could look away from. Like a living thing, one built with the space between seconds as bricks and the scope of galaxies as welding.

And nearly blending in with the Bell’s ambiance, an old acquaintance waited.

The Badge Seller twitched to look down at Zebu, inscrutable but ever-friendly. “Ah, Miss Zebu. This is a place of reunions, it seems.” Their gaze glitched to the side, where the not-human was… seemingly fighting with themself, every shuffling step forward accompanied by a stiff backpedal. “I do hope our mutual friends have not been causing too much of a ruckus?”

Zebu looked at the acquaintance in question. They had their umbrella out, clutched in both hands, and they glared at their white knuckles as if they could force their fingers to unclench.

“... I don’t think so. Not beyond the usual tourist stuff.” Though most pilgrims- who Zebu called tourists anyways- never travelled the banner-lines like that.

“Mm, good. I’m quite surprised you agreed to guide them all the way up here. You’ve made your opinions on the, ah, ‘tourists’ getting themselves killed very clear.”

Zebu shrugged. “It’s not like it’s dangerous to just look at the Twilight Bell. So long as they only plan… to…” She stilled, then whirled around, hood cast from atop her head in her haste.

The definitely-not-a-human was hanging from the clapper by their umbrella. They swung, the resulting bell-ring thrumming through Zebu’s mind, down her hooves and into the stone.

The moon-bright Bell rang once more on the not-human’s backswing, overpowering Zebu’s panicked shriek of “No! Get off that! It’ll tear you apart!”

The not-human looked back at her, looking sheepish despite the dire warning, and the last of the Bell’s peals twisted inwards, sound inexplicably made visible to the mortal eye as the not-human swinging from the clapper vanished.

Arms limp to her sides, Zebu stared at the impossible structure.

Nobody who entered the Twilight Bell ever returned.

She nearly jumped when a hand rested on her shoulder, cold and fog-fuzzy.

“They will be fine, young one. They did not enter his realm alone, after all.” Gently, the Badge Seller steered her away, to face one of the rustling purple filter-flowers. “Besides. I do believe we will soon have more pressing matters to deal with.”

--

Snatcher and Hattie fell from the half-dawn light of the Twilight Bell’s underside, lighter than leaves on the wind and landing heavily enough on the belfry to crack bones, if she were human.

Disoriented and distinctly nauseous, Snatcher gazed up the Bell’s skirt, and only when Hattie moved them away from the Bell’s shadow did he realize what was wrong.

He could see Hattie, tugged along behind her like a child’s wheelie-toy.

Or like a shadow.

“Ugh, kiddo, I told you this place was a bad idea.” he complained, surprised when his words came out as, well, words, instead of the projected thoughts-and-images he was usually stuck with.

And they surprised Hattie too, as she jerked, nearly tripping over her own two feet to stare behind her. A double-vision flashed across Snatcher’s mind like an overlay- Hattie’s umbrella gripped in a fisted hand, looking behind herself to see her too-long shadow grinning as though looking for a throat to rip out. A shadow with a familiar fanged visage and spiky mane.

Testing, Snatcher twitched a claw. There was none of the usual resistance from Hattie, and the hands of the shadow behind her curled outwards.

Relishing the wind-rippling feeling of freedom, Snatcher peeled the shadow- himself- off of the ground, rising up to the bell to get out of this freaky place-

Something snapped taught behind him, and he was yanked back down to ground level.

Scowling, he stooped over to scrutinize whatever had caught him. There, right where his tail-tip met Hattie’s now-shadowless feet, was a tether to her mind and body- not one he could see, but knew was there nonetheless.

Hattie stepped back experimentally, and Snatcher was towed along like a windbound kite. “I don’t think we’re getting out of this that easily, Snatcher,” she said. Wobbled.

And ran to vomit over the side of the belfry.

The roiling nausea hit Snatcher a moment later, despite the lack of stomach. Though he was outside her body now, it seemed they were still bound by the equilibrium of mind, body, and soul.

Snatcher winced as she retched, the clenching echoes of gut pain pushing him to curl over, mirroring the girl’s own position. He remembered being stuck next to a bucket with a particularly severe bout of swamp-fever when he was a child, but surely it wasn’t this unpleasant.

He didn’t have anything to ease the misery of either of them- at least any actual remedies like his sister had given him when he was younger, though he was fairly sure that it was just whiskey from under her bed- but there were faint fog-thoughts and memories, pushed to the forefront of his mind.

Carefully, as if he was reaching towards a coiled rattlesnake, Snatcher pressed a hand onto Hattie’s hunched back, claws sheathed safely away. Doing his best to remember what Apolonia had taught him, he knuckled at the pressure-point on her back, just beside her spine.

Hattie sniffed, wetly, and sat back, prushing bile off on her sleeve. “That’s not gonna work, y’know. My nervous system isn't the same as a human’s.”

Snatcher drew back his hand, crossing his arms and huffing. “Well excuse me for trying, it’s not like this is any fun for me either-”

“Thanks, though. For trying,” Hattie said honestly. Tilted her heat up to look at him. “Your sister seems cool. Way cooler than you, for sure.”

Not even bothering to question how she knew about that- dang mind-sharing- Snatcher scoffed. “Oh, please, I am the coolest guy you are ever going to meet.” Drifting closer, he scrutinized her as she dug into her hat-storage for a water bottle. “Seriously though, kid, what’s wrong with you. I can feel something is wrong, and if you get us killed by the plague I’m going to make your afterlife miserable.”

Hattie sloshed around a gulp of the water, spitting it out over the edge and stuffing the half-empty bottle back into her hat. “It’s not the plague, old man. It’s radiation. I think. This place is really weird, so I could be wrong.”

“Why are you so casual about radiation poisoning,” Snatcher despaired.

“I’ll be fine, it’ll filter out eventually.” Hattie groaned, getting to her feet as creakily as any stiff-jointed elder. “I need to get the Time Piece; we’re already in here, so there’s no point in turning back empty-handed.”

Snatcher turned away at that, scanning the neverending event horizon, comet-carved pillars and soaring sideways walls clambering for his attention. A storm-green haze further hid the distance from view- impossibly clear and yet too thick to see past. Burning eyes narrowed, he looked deeper into the mist. Strangely, if he squinted, he could see his own reflection in the shimmering fog.

Something about this realm stirred the feathers along his spine, drove him to unsheathe his claws.

Slowly, he bobbed his head, scoping and weaving in an attempt to catch any noises in this soundless place. His mist-reflection bobbed in tandem, faint stars sparkling in its beard and horns curving like cloud-shadowed moons.

Wait-

The star-specked reflection stretched up, and out, and forward-

Snatcher coiled, slapped his hand into the ground, talons sinking into air-stone like clay, and the ground erupted in a pillar of kaleidoscopic fire.

--

The moment Hattie felt the tug of moving fire magic, followed swiftly by the eruption of blinding plasma, she whirled to the source, umbrella whipped out and poised to strike.

There was something in here with them- a fog-stalker that walked the event horizon, whose very presence marked the endless pillars as belonging to it. Isolated territory, that would have to be scrapped over with claws and fangs and fire, lest this creature of Twilight steal territory that was hers, forest and plush subjects and soul-laden hunting grounds-

As if shooing away cobwebs, Hattie shook her head to clear it of Snatcher’s mental static. Heart hammering, she ducked under his braced arms to peek ahead, wondering what had him so on edge, so intently sure that the creature in here was a thief and a competitor.

The first step of an un-charred, massive hoof out of the mist should have shaken the stones, but was perfectly silent, gliding across the belfry like water over a blade.

Black feathers obscured her view as Snatcher crouched lower, his snarl ripping through the air like a wildfire.

Hattie planted her palms onto the deceptively downy feathers of the ghost stooped above her and shoved, because she needed to see this!

What she saw was… a goat. Or at least, it was goat-shaped. It was incongruous, shifting as if it was part of the realm; and though Hattie met the goat’s eyes easily, she got the feeling that if they were in the overworld-plane, then she’d have to crane her neck up at the towering presence to see its face.

Unconcerned with Snatcher’s growling in the same way a mountain was unconcerned with a storm, the goat stopped before getting too close, horned head cocked to the side.

< How strange, for a kin-who-hunts to willingly trespass upon me, > The Twilight Goat- the title felt right, like slotting together watch-gears- rumbled, silent voice thrumming through her mind. Almost like Snatcher’s, but… blockier, less natural, with none of the accompanied emotions and images. < Do you truly intend to fight me for this territory, Little Kin? You would gain no true influence through it, and I have no desire to fight you for your forest. >

Well, if he was talking, it meant he wasn’t smiting them off the stone into the endless void below. Hattie grabbed a fistful of black feathers and yanked, cutting off Snatcher’s posturing with a startled hiss. His retaliatory glare was harsh, bared fangs bringing to mind the stone-cut teeth of dragons, but Hattie remained in place, fearless. At least, she didn’t fear Snatcher. The Twilight Goat, though benevolent, still held the high ground here.

“Heeeeey Mister Goat. Ignore my friend, he’s just cranky- full of hot air, y’know?” Hattie tried to smile, but it probably looked more like an awkward grimace. She would have preferred to whack any enemies into a pile of pons and then be on her way, but every hair on her neck and instinct in her hind-brain was screaming at her not to.

And now that implacable gaze was looking at her, and she was unable to resist the urge to press into the shadow-feathers at her side. < Do not presume that I would not see a threat display for what it is, moon-child. > A ripple of nebula across his shaggy fur, like a shrug. < But I am far more understanding than most among our kin. A young hunter, insecure in his territory, is not a threat to me and my realm. >

“Not a threat?” Snatcher nearly squawked, offended.

Twilight Goat regarded him levelly. < Any other of our kin, hunters or not, would have attempted to slay you the moment you dared overstep their territory-boundary. But I remember being mortal, as you no doubt do as well, young as you are. > A contemplative pause as the goat leaned in further, each of the stars in his pelt uncomfortably resembling eyes as he scrutinized them. < And even then, I find myself more tolerant of your presence than expected. You, Young Hunter, are fortunate to find a kin-bond with a creature who knows of our kind- she smells of Time’s realm, of the people who enchanted it with reverence and creativity. >

Swift as lightning, Hattie understood, and so did Snatcher. “You’re a Being,” she breathed.

< Is that what your people call us? Fascinating, > The Twilight Goat mused. < Wherever you hail from must be somewhere even my stars do not touch, little moon-child. Perhaps your species’ connection to one of the Beginnings is what allows you to host a ‘Being’, as you call us, and remain stable. >

Curling and crashing like foaming lava, the realization struck both Hattie and Snatcher, accompanied by faint horror at a flickering memory of warring beasts on the moon-base.

< But regardless of the questions I would love to ask you- flesh-folk are so very fascinating- I would request something of you, first. > The Twilight Goat went on, blithely unaware of the shock at his previous revelation roiling between the two. < I would prefer that Time’s eyes not focus on my realm, so on your way out, do please take this sandglass out with you. > One split-second to the next, and in his paw was a Time Piece, floating gently and warping the Twilight Bellscape into something dark and even more unknowable. < In exchange, remember that this is a place of shifting boundaries, and the phases between what-will-be and what-has-been. I would also appreciate visitors that don’t get strung apart by their atoms! > He guffawed.

Hattie reached for the offered Time Piece robotically, hugging it to her chest and feeling overwhelmed by the Twilight Goat’s very presence. Snatcher, feeling similarly distressed by the other creature (other Being), coiled his body into a black knot around them.

“Let’s get out of here, kid,” he said lowly. “I’m sick of this guy’s constellated mug.”

They could agree on that, at least. Hattie thought the Twilight Goat was amenable and pleasant, sure, but he operated on a profoundly different scale. That feeling of being made small discomfited her, and it made Snatcher uneasy too. Neither of them liked feeling vulnerable.

Hattie gazed up at the clapper, umbrella in hand, and realized there was a slight roadblock.

“Um. Mister Goat? Is there actually a safe way out of here?” she requested, emphasizing the word ‘safe’, because what was just a tickle to the Twilight Goat would be far more devastating to a person made of flesh and blood.

The goat clapped his hands together in realization. < Oh! I forgot, yes, you will need a path to the overworld that shall not pain you so much as arriving here did- you really were quite lucky you came here together, or we never would’ve been able to speak! > The Twilight Goat chuckled, pleasantly, as if he hadn’t just casually implied they would have died if they came here alone and in different bodies. < I can send you back, of course. Take care! >

Like touching a reflection, Hattie felt her home dimension fade into being- stone-scented wind and chirping birds on Alpine Skyline, dizzying in their intensity compared to the inconceivably-silent Twilight Bell.

As the world wavered and spun, the Twilight Goat shouted after them < And be careful of the weather in there! It’s a bit stormier than usual! >

That’s weird, Hattie thought. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky when we rang the Bell.

Time Piece in one hand and Snatcher’s neck-ruff in the other, they returned to the mountains.

Chapter Text

“Day 8,

Alpine Skyline has a particularly significant native plant that is integrated into their lifestyle- the filter-flower. Large, purple, really pointy, move around even when there’s no wind, that kind of stuff. I’m no botanist or trained mage, but the magic around these plants is powerful enough for even the most magically-blind people to sense.

But beyond what they look like, what they do is even more interesting. As their name indicates, they ‘filter’ the air- but not of particulates or pollution, but of magic. They evolved to consume ambient magic, particularly the more chaotic varieties of natural magic- though they certainly will consume manmade magic! I lit a fire in my hand to guide myself back to my lodgings at night, and I could feel the flowers tugging at the energy. It does line up with what the Capra told me about the filter-flowers preferring to consume the less-stable magic sources- inborn magic like the aforementioned fire is heavily reliant on emotion, and isn’t something that can be learned such as alchemy. (Just to test, I activated a few runes next to a filter-flower patch. They weren’t interested).

Their primary significance is the native Capra using them to remove curses, or mana-borne illnesses, or even the occasional geas. The flowers are particularly effective against shadow, storm, and dark magic- again with the more chaotic magical elements, though they are limited in how much they can consume of other elements, such as fire and stone magic.

Funny story, on the first day they actually guided me right to a filter-flower patch! They thought I was a pilgrim who came up to cleanse myself of dark influence. Ha! Maybe it was the extra dark roast I’ve been chugging that made them think that.”

-Journal entry of historian Brigid Larsen.

—

Hattie was nearly blown off the belfry by a black gale before she even touched the ground in the overworld.

Fingers digging into the crystalline carvings of the Twilight mountain, Hattie halted their skidding tumble, and looked up.

Stormy weather, indeed.

Scrawls of violet lightning lit up the sky, casting a stark light onto overgrown black thorns and dark debris-clouds. Three points in the distance, like black holes, radiated a corona of invisible not-light that Hattie knew, from Snatcher’s senses, to be magic.

Clinging to a stone pillar, Hattie could only watch, captivated, as the churning darkness rose into fluffy anvils, tiny vortices playfully brushing the edge of mountaintops.

Tempus, despite its name, never had storms this intense.

‘Snap out of it, kid!’ Needle-teeth dug into the base of her skull, and Hattie blinked away the stunned fog. And yelped, when a lighting bolt crashed a bit too close for comfort.

< Brace yourself! I’m warping us out of here! > She projected, knowing that warping without her soul was still rough on both of them.

Hattie reached out to her ship’s beacon, twisting aside the space between her and her home-

Space straightened like an untwisting chain, and her already-faint space-folding abilities were moving away from her, energy siphoning off to one of the storm’s three centers.

< Oh, shit, > she thought, succinctly, and ignored Snatcher’s offended admonishment of ‘Hey, language!’

Whatever was causing this storm was eating the energy she used to warp, and there wasn’t a way to get out of its range without taking a very long walk off a short bridge. If there was a way to somehow keep it from eating her attempts to warp…

‘Hey! What did I say! Run, you idiot!’

Hattie startled, realizing Snatcher was right, and pelted across the Twilight Belfry to attach herself to the green ziplines.

The wind fought her like a live thing, stinging her skin and ripping through her hair like thorns as she clung close to the walls, making her way down to the main zipline to Goat Village.

A feeling of pressure, like something touching her back.

And Hattie was yanked to the side by the back of her cape, the storming vista vanishing from her line of sight and replaced by torchlit stone.

She whirled around, fire summoned to her hands, to face her attacker.

It wasn’t an attacker, though, and their hooded face eyed the fire licking along her arms warily.

“I cannot,” Zebu enunciated carefully, tone rising with every word. “Believe that you survived!” She shouted.

‘Yeesh, no need to sound so thrilled about us not dying.’ Snatcher whispered from the back of their mind, sarcastic.

Ignoring him, Hattie shook the fire out of her hands. “Zebu? Is that… normal?”

“Wh- No, of course it isn’t normal! It’s been like this for almost a day!” Zebu cried, flinging her hands aside to show the howling storm outside the open door.

“A day?” Hattie questioned, in pure disbelief. They hadn’t even been in the Twilight Bell for an hour!

“Yes, a day, but I didn’t expect you to come back at all, since nobody else who rang the bell has!” Zebu said, exasperated. Which Hattie couldn’t blame her for. Being holed up inside a mountain-carved house to wait out the tempest for that long seemed… stressful, at the very least.

“Wait-” Hattie cut off her previous thoughts of the Twilight Bell’s apparent death toll. “-Do you know what caused this, at least? I can’t warp home because something in this storm is dragging at me.”

Zebu looked at her quizzically. “Warp? You mean magic?”

Not technically, but still. “Yeah, sure, that’s close enough. Point is, it’s eating the energy I use to get back up to my ship.”

Zebu sucked in a breath. “The filter-flowers. I don’t know what has enough power to do that, but- something must have clogged them, so all their stored malignant magic erupted!” Frantically, she yanked open a hanging tapestry, revealing a bookcase carved into the rock, and began to haphazardly dig through the shelved tomes.

She stilled, one hand still on an unopened book. “Actually… how powerful is your fire, human?”

“Not a human.” Hattie muttered under her breath, then felt around for the fire-pulse that was Snatcher’s magic. “I… haven’t used it much? So I don’t actually know.” She much preferred fighting physically, with her umbrella.

“Fire’s inherent destructive and purifying properties might be what we need, though,” Zebu said, ponderous. “How strong can you make the fire? Because if you’re anything like the last fire-mage that was up here, you’d be about as useful as a candle.”

Like rising smoke, Hattie felt out the not-quite memories attached to the heat-core. A swath of ever-burning forest, lava beneath Subcon’s crust moving sluggishly, blasts of dragonfire stripping away ice to bare stone and ashes.

“Uh… I’m not sure about that either, actually,” she said apologetically.

Zebu scrutinized Hattie, and her eyes slid askance to look at the whipping winds outside their shelter. “... Well, what do you say about finding out how strong it can get?”

“I don’t have a choice if I want to get out of here, do I?”

“Probably not, no.”

Hattie squared her shoulders, flipping on her Sprint Hat and tightening the band so it wouldn’t fly off her head. ‘Is this like… normal for you? Being stuck unless you do some arbitrarily dangerous mission?’

Hattie rolled her eyes. < It’s not like what you were planning to have me do would’ve been any better. >

‘Okay, sure, but I didn’t- hey! How did you know that? Have you been snooping!?’

Snickering to herself- in all fairness, she hadn’t gone purposefully snooping, because some of his long-buried lingering memories felt scary- Hattie mentally tallied up another score for herself against Snatcher, and leapt into the storm.

Dodging and weaving and flinging herself from one hookshot-anchor to the next, Hattie realized her problem when they reached the first engorged filter-flower.

“Um, Snatcher, how do I use the fire?”

‘Wh- you have magic! You should know how!’

“Thread magic, you dumb noodle! Elemental magic is completely different!” Hattie cried, opening up her umbrella to block the wave of dark pollen that swept over their perch.

‘You’re asking this now?!’

“Ugh! You’re no help at all!” Hattie growled, and shoved her hands out in front of her, attempting to push the heat in their shared soul outward, to manifest as flames.

What puffed out of her hands was a cheerful cloud of directionless fire, washing in all directions and barely scorching the leaf-tips of the filter-flower.

‘Wow. Impressive.’ Snatcher drawled. There was a sensation like bushcat paws batting at her mind. ‘Hand over the wheel to me, kiddo. I’ll show you how it’s really done!’

“How stupid do you think I-” Hattie yelped and dove aside as a head-sized spore-ball landed where she just was and exploded.

‘It’s either be stupid or dead, so pick one already!’

Hattie had exactly three seconds to deliberate before another thorny projectile nearly took her head off < Fine! You’re still an ass, though! >

This time, when Snatcher grabbed for control of the body, his grip didn't slide off.

In her body, Snatcher stumbled, and tripped, and in general moved in an indescribably ungainly way when scrambling back to the filter-flower. Probably the effects of, well, not having legs for a few centuries.

And it was odd, residing as a passenger in her own body. She could still feel things, dimly, but they were faded, sanded down. Like when her parents had taken her up to the ship and let her tiny hands grip the controls; as they rested their own hands over hers, gently guiding them into not crashing the ship on a passing moon. The feeling of moving her body, but none of the actual authority.

Snatcher smirked at the giant flower, and pointed their hands towards the flower, palms facing down and thumbs touching. He hooked their fingers into claws, sinking jagged blades of magic and unseen heat into the stone, surrounding the now-writhing flower with heat-glowing granite.

He swept their arms apart, like splitting a curtain, and the ground erupted into a roaring pillar or fire- not the just tame blue that Hattie could summon, but woven through with pink and white and yellow.

Not even ashes remained of the filter-flower.

“Yes, we’re back in business!” he crowed, throwing raised fists into the air in triumph. Paused, scrunching up Hattie’s face into a scowl. “Oh, ugh, I sound like a little girl.”

< Yeah, because it’s my body, dummy! >

“Not now it isn’t!” Snatcher smirked, flexing their fingers and marvelling at their- to him- strangely stiff movement and blunted tips.

And then their body stiffened as Hattie punted him out of control, nearly falling on her face as she readjusted to moving her legs and arms again. Snatcher hissed and puffed out his presence in their mind, dejected.

“You didn’t seriously think that was going to work, did you?” Hattie questioned aloud, because her voice sounded just fine, thank you!

‘It was worth experimenting with, even if we couldn’t leave with this dang flower-storm,’ Snatcher grumped.

Hattie rolled her eyes at his transparent attempts to cover up the fact that he had no plan beyond grabbing control of the body after incinerating the flowers, and running. They still had two more to go anyway; the first of which they approached rapidly, now that she’d gotten the hang of leaning into the winds and swinging from the hovering flower stems, and diving away from comet-tailed pollen balls exploding above her head-

Tree-thick thorns exploded out of the ground around her, and Hattie shoved Snatcher to the forefront of their movements.

An undignified yelp and feeble attempt at a snarl through humanoid vocal chords, and Snatcher blasted the thorns away in an expanding fire-sphere.

“Warn a guy next time!” he lashed, whipping spinning disks of fire through hooked thorns and tracing lines of sparks though green stems.

< You’re the one who can set things on fire with their brain! >

This particular filter-flower was destroyed with far more impunity than the last one.

The last filter-flower crumpled without fuss, an almost-audible wheeze puffing out dark pollen before it finally withered and died.

Hattie grasped back for control, sitting heavily on the ash-scoured stone. And sneezed.

< Blegh, I think I swallowed some of that gross crap. >

‘I wouldn’t be surprised, considering you feel the need to shout when you hit things.’

Hattie crossed her arms and scowled at the clearing smoke that hazed the horizon, outlines of far-off mountains blazing back to life under the sun.

Under that blessed sunlight, something in the smoldering remains of the filter-flower patch glinted.

Hattie scrambled to it on her hands and knees, almost not believing her eyes when she unearthed the Time Piece and dusted the ash off, uncaring of the embers that harmlessly brushed her fingers.

‘Great!’ Snatcher piped up, falsely cheery. ‘Now let’s get out of this thrice-cursed place! It’s way too bright out here for someone like me.’

“Yeah, whatever, Mister Gloomy-guts, I’m going.” Hattie waved him off, bracing herself for the inevitable headache as she warped home. Alpine Skyline had been lovely, if… intense, in numerous ways. She still felt off-kilter from the conversation with the Twilight Goat ringing through her memories like the Bell he resided in.

After the white sparks finished flashing across her vision when she warped them to her room, Hattie didn’t even bother to secure the Time Piece inside the vault, instead flopping facefirst into her pillow-pile.

It was kinda fun, at least. If she discounted the radiation poisoning. And nearly getting her head taken off by a briar-ball. And still dealing with the scratchy-throat feeling from inhaling the pollen.

… Maybe only a few parts of this particular trip were fun, actually. Like meeting Zebu, and the Twilight Goat.

‘I’ll never understand how meeting that bedazzled beast is counted as a positive for you, kid,’ Snatcher groused.

< Oh please, you definitely had some fun. Don’t think I didn’t hear you cackling maniacally while setting things on fire. >

‘So? Maybe someday you’ll learn to enjoy your enemy’s demise. Won’t that be hilarious, seeing the shame on their faces because they got their butts whooped by a little girl!’

The implication that he would be around to see it, that he would continue to interact with her on a voluntary basis, escaped him.

Chapter Text

“Today marks the day the memorial (pictured below) for the lost lives from ChronoMoon-5’s destruction is revealed. The moon now renamed ↸ᒷᔑℸ ̣ ⍑, this is the second time such a misfortune has plagued our fair empire, 300 years since the disaster of ᖋᕊᖋリ↸ᒍリᒷ↸, which was rendered uninhabitable by a tragic accident experimenting with pinpoint and sustainable time acceleration.

↸ᒷᔑℸ ̣ ⍑ was rendered to its base, primal state- a simple molten core of iron and magma, as the Time Pieces destabilized. Due to the suddenness of the event, 3,905 Empire-accredited scientists and their families perished. Twelve people survived, and refrained to comment on the memorial.

The Tempus Council, and we, the citizenry, share these survivors’ grief. But do not fear the march of time, as the advancement of Tempus’s science is advancement for civilization.

[A picture of a smoothed and stabilized block of chronoton, 3,905 names projected onto them with frozen light from a Time Piece on a pedestal. One of the names is oddly smudged, marked as ‘Harriet [indecipherable], XX21-XX33’.]”

-Article in the Spire Newsletter, dated to 4 months after the Beings’ conflict.

--

The infected filter-flower spores didn’t make Hattie lose her marbles, not like the larger goats.

They did, however, make her sick.

Laying around like a dying fish and feeling miserable certainly left Snatcher as close to alone with his thoughts that he could possibly get.

It was not a state of being he appreciated.

And there it was. Being. Beings, rather, and what they did, and him existing as one. Foolishly, he’d thought that the oddities that kept him distinct from other ghosts was just a result of his own magical power, or the rage he tended to like a dying fire until his last breath. That his hunger was sated by souls only because they fueled the flames at his core. That his vessel constructed from corporeal shadow and writhing blackthorn appeared as inhuman only because of his desperation as he gathered it to himself, hanging in that cold cellar and choking on his own fog-cold breath. That the nerve-filament roots of Subcon Forest carried his will only because his unbound mana was powerful enough to command mindless trees and vines.

The nature of Beings, absorbed from Hattie’s nightmares and memories and half-remembered textbooks, and his own habits and actions, stretching over centuries, fit together like interlocking fangs. What a fool he was.

Unbidden, heat-hazed images of clashing monsters flicked through his mind, borne on the wings of a remembered nightmare.

Was that what he would someday become, hundreds, thousands, millions of years down the line? Something only concerned with what belonged to it, and feeding itself, and nothing else?

… Looking back on the past three hundred years, perhaps he was already becoming like those astral predators that destroyed Hattie’s home. The thought disturbed him deeply. He was a hunter, one who slew prey and invaders only. He wasn’t indiscriminate- a mass murderer. He wasn’t like her.

… No. He refused to be like Vanessa. He refused to be like those Beings with star-spun fur and cloud-claws that rent and tore the earth and the lives it held apart.

Snatcher prided himself in his presence of mind, kept solid and real and in cold-water clarity even centuries after his death. Even the Twilight Goat, peaceable as a Being could be, seemed distant and unmoored to Snatcher. If his options were a slow transformation into things like the Twilight Goat, or the creatures that destroyed the Tempus moon-base… he didn’t like either of those options.

Beings are solitary, whispered an impression from Hattie’s half-unconscious mind, drifting knowledge flitting between their mental boundaries.

… That’s right. Beings were solitary. Like the Twilight Goat, who lived alone and did not step foot on the overworld despite his ability to, despite his fascination with the Capra residing on the mountains. Like the moon-Being who would tear a war-zone into its realm, rather than coexist with others.

Like Snatcher wasn’t, surrounding himself with his subjects and tying them all together with a tangle of owed-and-owed-to. Tearing apart those early looters who had dared to strike at plush bodies. Bringing back his kills to the plaza, watching as the Subconites took their pick of whatever colorful fabrics or strange electronic baubles Snatcher’s victims had on their person. Fishing a few of the more foolish ones out of the well when they inevitably got stuck playing in it.

The only reason he wasn’t like the Beings in their shared nightmares was because he cared. It had stained and warped like ink on fabric, but Snatcher still felt that remnant of his time as the Prince- and even further back, to his time as the Subcon Margravate’s youngest heir.

A Subconite Clan Head was responsible for their people. Down to the last.

‘I’m sure Mother is thrilled even beyond the grave that she managed to drill those lessons so deep into my skull, even death wouldn’t erase them,’ Snatcher thought wryly. His sister was a more adept warrior than him, always, but she’d been far more flippant about their future subjects. Even as an adult, she chose to run off with Sir Larsen the hedge knight rather than be chained by duty to people she didn’t truly know.

It had saved her life, at least.

A thunderous sneeze from Hattie cut off Snatcher’s bittersweet memories of his sister. ‘Yeesh, kid, you’re fit to wake the dead like that!’

< Absolutely hilarious. I’m dying with laughter over here. > Hattie grumped silently, throat still scratchy from her bout with magic pollen-illness.

‘Ha! See, my jokes are funny!’

When nothing but silence answered him, Snatcher prodded at her. ‘Uh, kid, that wasn’t an invitation to actually die on me.’

Somehow, Hattie managed to sink herself even further into the pillows. < Be quiet, you chatterbox. You’re not helping. >

‘Hey, I’m not exactly having the time of my afterlife over here either. Fevers are for living people to deal with- I should be past this kind of nonsense!’

Hattie jolted, mind racing despite the mental sick-muck that dragged at her thoughts. < Wait, no, hang on a minute. We need to make the fever worse! >

‘Okay, yeah, no, you’ve definitely lost it.’

< No, you don’t get it! Fevers are the body trying to burn out the sickness- the germs can’t survive the heat. But since we have the heat-resistance from your soul, we can cook out the illness without, y’know, cooking us. >

Snatcher turned that reasoning over carefully. ‘Huh. That… might actually work.’

< Good. Now get to it! > Hattie commanded, playfully imperious, and shoved control at Snatcher.

“Eurgh.” He groaned aloud, rolling out of the pillow pile and flopping onto the floor, feeling suddenly very sorry for himself as the full force of the sickness hit him. “You just wanted to fob off all this nastiness onto me, didn’t you?”

The echo of a shrug. < Eh, kinda. I really do think burning it out is a good idea, though. I have things to do! I can’t be some kind of layabout all day! >

“Yeah, things to do like bothering me.” Snatcher rolled eyes that did not belong to him. “Now, shhh, this is delicate.”

And it was, because even if they could walk into a fire and remain unscorched, letting the internal heat seep from soul outwards to flesh required concentration.

Carefully, like feeling the waves of heat-shimmer over coals, Snatcher incrementally pushed the fire magic out from his soul, warming their body further. In the background, he felt Hattie mark down each degree with her familiar-yet-foreign number-language. Snaking shimmers of steam wafted off them as the increasing heat from their body evaporated the fever-sweat-

< Stop! > Hattie interrupted, and Snatcher froze. Carefully pulled the heat back into his soul, magic condensing at their core once more.

‘I cannot believe that worked.’ A pause, and reshuffling of mental coils. ‘... Did it work? Because it still feels pretty gross over here.’

< Yes, it worked, just gimme a little bit to cool down. >

And after a while, the cloying, fuzzy-sick feeling began to lift, to the relief of both of them. Snatcher wasn’t an expert on thauma-botany, but he had the sneaking suspicion that the filter-flower pollen would have remained in Hattie’s system until it ‘purified’ her of shadowed influences. And Snatcher had no intention of losing to a pollen-puff.

Still flopped ungainly against one of the pillows, Snatcher scowled when Hattie mentally prodded him, a questing finger dragging through feathers. < Hey. Get up and get us some water. >

Contrary, Snatcher replied ‘No. I am not encouraging your layabout behavior.’

A slow crawl of a grin- a cheeky thing that immediately put Snatcher on edge. < I’ll teach the Subconites what a union is. >

The film-reel of thoughts featuring his minions producing a contract for him to sign shocked Snatcher upright, blunt human-shaped fingers digging into the carpet. “You wouldn’t dare,” he hissed.

Insufferably smug silence. She would dare, and she’d have the time of her life doing so.

‘You exist just to make me suffer.’ Snatcher thought, plaintive and purposefully overly-dramatic. He pushed himself onto unsteady feet, looking longingly at the Subcon warp telescope; though he was beginning to understand that maybe fighting to keep the Time Pieces wasn’t a good idea anyway.

“How do you even know what a union is?” Snatcher grumbled aloud. “I’m pretty sure they don’t have it in your screwed-up space empire.”

< Actually, I lifted it from you. So it’s your fault, technically! > She punctuated her retort with the familiar motions of spitting a raspberry, like when she would taunt the Mafia goons.

“I hate you. So much.” Snatcher lied, plodding through the galaxy-patterned tunnel and out to the bridge. “You’re the one who signed the contract-” He stopped. Stared.

There was a little girl in the ship, sun-bright eyes wide in shock at the interruption. In the sack repurposed from her hood: a pile of Time Pieces, obviously pilfered from the wide-open vault.

Silence. The sense of stillness, like the avalanches from Vanessa’s home territory, moments before the first snowdrift let go-

Mustache Girl bolted.

“Hey! Those are mine!” Snatcher and Hattie shrieked in unison, launching themselves at the fleeing girl.

Hattie wrested full control from him, socked feet sliding on the carpet as Mustache Girl leapt over her head and hit the ground running.

At the ship’s window, Mustache Girl skidded to a stop, nearly ramming into the glass and dropping her precious cargo. For a split second, her eyes met theirs, an unfathomable sense of determination flashing within.

And then Mustache Girl took a handful of Time Pieces and smashed them into the ground.

Like moonlight’s reflection on water, the world shattered. Stuttered, flashed as if split by lightning crashing down with all the mercy of a falling sword.

Stinging sand-grit, and the impossible sound of the world’s strings, plucked.

Snatcher and Hattie saw no more, after that.

--

Hattie woke up face-down on her ship’s bridge, scratchy carpet digging into her cheek. Slowly, she sat up, swivelling her head around the bridge.

Mu was gone. And so were the Time Pieces.

And so, it seemed, was Snatcher, if the odd void behind her eyes and deafening silence were any indication.

< Snatcher? > Hattie projected hesitantly. Where he usually kept himself tucked in their shared brain-space, the shadows seemed oddly faint, and unanimated. She pushed past the partition between their minds to touch it, and it popped like a soap bubble, memories tangling like yarn snarled on brambles.

A hand held in hers, cold yet loving-

:Worn training weapon in his hands, grin on his face as he play-sparred with the other children in the moon-base research facility-:

The smell of flowers and sensation of getting noogied by a friendly fist, bright red hair and a brighter smile-

:Drawing fluff through an hourglass-shaped spindle, threading magic and intent into yarn and showing the result to Dad, grinning proudly-:

Raptor-yellow eyes, a mirror of Luka’s own, blinking at her from across the darkened hallway while Apolonia motioned her to be quiet as she sneaked out to visit the squire Cato Larsen-

:Softness, a kind of warmth that he’d never experienced with his own family, and the yawning gulf of grief that called to him at Mom and Dad’s absence-:

Eyelid-tugging exhaustion, quill pen fumbling in her fingers and spilled ink lit by faint candlelight-

The world came roaring back with Snatcher’s consciousness, directionless and wordless.

The resulting shriek petered off into a rumbling growl, the presence in her mind spiked into needle-point night-barbs and raised hackles.

Reflexively, Hattie puffed herself out by flaring her cape, and hissed as best she was able to with her humanoid vocal chords, because this was her territory, he was here on her hospitality-!

She then realized she probably looked ridiculous, with no spines to flare or feathers to raise. And that responding to Snatcher’s snarling the way he would was probably a sign that they’d been less successful in staying completely separate than she thought.

“Ugh, okay. Lesson learned- don’t poke the old memories,” Hattie grumbled, voice still a little scratchy from her poor attempt at a hiss like Snatcher’s.

‘You- what- don’t touch those!’ Snatcher sputtered, indignant and genuinely angry. Uh-oh.

‘“Uh-oh” is right, brat! Those are private, and mine, and not something I want you to see especially, and-’ Snatcher railed on, managing to loom despite only being a soul in the back of her mind. Hattie puffed herself up again, mentally preparing her ammunition for the now-routine arguing-

Snatcher stopped. Stiffly, he folded up all the sharp edges and dark nettle-stings that he’d wrapped around his soul. Sighed.

‘Just… don't do it again.’

Hattie deflated, still confused by the lack of expected confrontation. To Hattie, most of her arguments with Snatcher felt almost like sparring; and from what she knew of his life with his family before he died, Snatcher definitely knew his way around the sparring mat as well- both Subcon nobility and Tempae citizenry were taught and expected to know how to fight from young ages, it seemed. Sure, sometimes spars got out of hand and turned into real fights, but Hattie was used to giving just as good as she got.

< Trust me, I won’t anytime soon. > Hattie said, shivering away some of the moon-cold memories that she’d brushed against. She didn’t see much, but she was glad for it, despite her curiosity. Snatcher himself was a lot less scary than the memories he carried.

‘I, uh, sorry- wait!’ Snatcher cut himself off, embarrassment tingeing his soul. Oh, so he was capable of apologizing, look at that. Or at least trying to. ‘What happened to the blonde one?!’

That’s right! Mu was here, and she took the Time Pieces, and-!

Hattie scrambled upright and drunkenly stumbled to the viewport, plastering her cheek to the window. Deceptively peaceful, floating along its usual orbit-

Lava. Earth was covered in lava, same as the planet she’d seen pictures of in her history classes, ᖋᕊᖋリ↸ᒍリᒷ↸- the planet that destabilized so completely from errant Time Piece usage that it was still just a floating ball of lava, even seven millenia afterward.

Oh. Oh, this was bad.

‘My forest!’ Snatcher screeched, and though she couldn’t see it, Hattie knew where the lowland marsh was, under all that lava.

Despairingly, she slumped to her knees, forehead pressed against cold glass. That was it, then. Maybe she could bring the ship through the atmosphere close enough to pick survivors off the mountaintops, but otherwise, there was nothing she could do.

Or was there?

Hattie jerked her head up, face smushed against the glass once more as she eyeballed the magma-shifting landscape. There were Time Pieces down there that she could sense- a lot of them, clustered in one place where a black dot of a building rose above an orange sea. She wouldn’t be surprised if Mu was there, since she was the one who stole them in the first place.

Theoretically, Hattie could fix this. Maybe. But with how restricting the rules were about people using Time Pieces, especially uncertified civilians…

Well. She had to either make her peace with leaving these people to their fate, or never going home.

‘You’re up to something,’ Snatcher said. A statement, rather than a question. ‘And you think you can fix this. Spill.’

Almost giddy with beginnings of adrenaline, Hattie bounced up and dashed to the attic elevator. < With how many Time Pieces Mu stole? I can use them to fix this! > Jogging in place as the elevator rose, Hattie gesticulated wildly. < Earth’s destabilization was really recent, and happened because of Time Pieces, yeah? Since it was caused by them, I can use the same Time Pieces to reverse the entire thing! Everything goes back to normal, everyone lives again! >

‘Frankly, I’d like nothing more for my forest to not be covered in miles of lava. But I’m sensing a ‘but’ there, kiddo.’

Hattie’s face fell. < Well, uh. I’m not sure how much you’ve seen, but Tempus is really, really strict about using Time Pieces like that, especially if you’re a civilian. And using them to do what I’m planning at all is, um, discouraged. Enough that they might come for me if they figured out where I am, and ‘set the world back to rights’. Which would reverse the process of fixing Earth. >

Snatcher spat derisively. ‘Pah! I’d like to see them try. It’s always so convenient, when your food comes to you.’ Accompanying the declaration was a sense of circling, smoke spreading like splayed feathers, coiling around memories of hundreds of little burlap creatures, and the forest’s core she felt miles below, and around her.

Hattie pushed aside old boxes, sending them toppling to the ground without a care, revealing the old warp-telescope. She had a plan, and she wasn’t alone.

She looked through the telescope, and aimed for the lava-black castle floating in a red sea.

Chapter Text

“True aristocratic classes, with real power, are a rare thing now, but not too long ago, they were the norm.

The Subcon Margravate is one such example, though there was a drastic shift from pre-annexation Subcon to a single-ruler system, like the kingdom they owed vassalage to, Omnoc. But before Omnoc’s annexation war, Subcon was ruled by multiple clans, with each clan ruled by a Clan Head- often warlords of great repute from their house.

Though they presented a united front against outsiders- as the costly war Omnoc waged has shown- Subconite clans followed a philosophy of “sharpening one’s blade against your neighbor”. Skirmishes were common, but fatalities were low in such conflicts, due to the stringent rules in place when battling other Clans. Fatalities were far more likely to occur in honor duels between nobility- when both personal and house honor were on the line.

Subconite Clan Heads held a myriad of duties, both to their house and to their full territory. A Clan Head was expected to be a deadly warrior, who cultivated their chunk of forest into a place that was hostile to intruders and providing for its residents. A rather unique obligation was the expectation that parentless children would live and train under the Clan Head’s roof, to be provided for until they were of age. In the words of Cassius Pryce, “A good Head hoards his wards like fine blades, treasured and deadly, who will one day bring their clan honor in combat.”

The tipping of this balance of houses and clans, with the assignment of one sovereign margrave amongst the other clans, made Subcon resent Omnoc all the more. The skyrocketing tensions, and the uncertainty of one queen with no heirs to inherit the Omnoc throne, were at their peak when Subcon fell and Omnoc split. It is theorized, from what little evidence and testimonies we have, that the fall of Subcon and death of Omnoc’s dynasty were caused by in-fighting of some kind- family politics were the country’s politics, and the Omnoc royal family was known for their powerful natural ice magic, the traces of which are still seen in the permanently-frozen border between Omnoc and Old Subcon.”

-History lecture from Dr. Brigid Larsen, Fairview University.

--

The first thing Hattie saw was a rainbow of reds and yellows, churning below the metal grate she landed on. The second thing she saw was a palatial fortress, embellished in mustaches and standing tall as the only non-melting building for leagues.

The third thing she saw was… a line. Sentients of all shapes and ages curled out the massive doors and down the stairs, through the courtyard and down the long path Hattie stood on. And someone at the end of the line was very familiar.

“Cookie!” Hattie called out, waving cheerfully at the panting cat.

“Wh- lil’ lady, did you get yanked up here too?” Cookie asked, gently fussing over Hattie’s lopsided hat and rumpled cape while Hattie preened under the attention. Cooking Cat was the best, like her aunties back at Tempus who kept their home warm and their arms open. “If you have any idea who runs this kitchen, let me know? Though, it’s anyone’s guess who would set up a court in the middle of a volcano.”

Oh, Hattie realized. She doesn’t know the entire world is like this.

Plastering a grin on her face and giving the cat a thumbs-up, Hattie jogged up the line, the courthouse looming higher with every step. When she reached the courtyard-

‘Hey! She took my minions!’ Snatcher shrieked in offense, drawing Hattie’s eyes to a nearby purple-sewn Subconite, wilting twigs poking from between their seams and red bandanna tied around their hood.

And while Snatcher had three hundred years of memories to draw from, the event that came to Hattie’s mind involved gleeful giggles, a chase, and a white burlap sack.

“You!” Hattie shouted, jabbing an accusatory finger at the Subconite that lured her into the trap in Subcon Forest.

Weed- which was what they called themselves, despite the signature on their contract reading ‘Ash’- jumped and whipped around to face her, incredulous. “Me?”

Their glowing spiral-face spun, as if in contemplation, before brightening like a light-panel. “Oh! You’re the newest contractor! I thought Boss already ate your soul though…” They clamped their stubby arms over where their mouth would be. “Oh, wait, I wasn’t supposed to tell you that…”

Hattie snorted, folding a hand over her head and adopting a naive falsetto. “Oh no, who ever would have guessed the evil lawyer ghost with a stupid laugh was going to eat my soul!”

‘My laugh is menacing, and- stop rolling your eyes! The disrespect from kids these days, yeesh.’ Snatcher piped up, half-serious.

“I guess when you put it that way…” Weed sighed, admitting defeat.

Hattie hummed to herself, preparing to move further down the line. “Don’t get yourself roasted, m’kay? Otherwise Snatcher will get upset.”

“Oh, sure kid.” Weed said, absentmindedly waving. And then paused, calling after her swiftly-retreating figure. “Wait! What do you mean- where did you meet the boss!?”

‘You’re just going to leave my poor, innocent minion out to dry like that? That’s cold, kiddo. That’s real cold.’ Snatcher said, lightly mocking.

< It’s not like they’ll remember anything anyways, once I fix this. Reversing this means reversing it. All the way. >

And she hadn’t made her peace with never going home. Not yet. But she would, eventually, because the alternative was letting another planet fall to lifelessness.

She wasn’t sure if her parents would be proud of her or not for blatantly breaking so many regulations to help people.

She hoped they would be.

--

In Mu’s defense, most of the lava had been an accident.

Trying to direct all that energy, to shape and spin it like molten glass- it had been like trying to reign in a comet. Errant thoughts skimming across the Time Pieces' shattered vibrations had been made real, the river of creative power washing Mu further downstream before she could correct the mistakes and distractions.

So what was intended to be a courthouse in the middle of an active caldera off the coast of her island, turned out to actually be a courthouse in the middle of a planet-spanning ocean of lava.

She was a natural fire-mage, if a weak one- not strong enough to drive off the invaders, she was just a child, but one who still felt that aching responsibility to her people- and even she could admit the amount of molten rock was a bit excessive.

Well, that could be a problem for Future Mu to fix. With all the reality-bending powers the Time Pieces gave her, it should be easy for her to make everything better for the good guys, right?

She was beginning to wonder where the good guys were, though, since pretty much everyone who arrived at her seat of power was, in some way, an asshole. ‘Not as much of a jerk as I could have been’ was not the stellar defense some of the Mafia goons seemed to think it was.

Mu rolled her eyes at the Mafia Goon’s pathetic pleading. Cowards, the lot of them, because bad guys were always cowards, punching down and tormenting those weaker than them.

“I’m so touched by your restraint.” Mu said, rolling her eyes. Snapped her fingers, tweaking the strings of the world, and dropped the goon through the floor. “Bad guy! Next!”

The next candidate to step into her courtroom was frighteningly familiar- she had been the last thing Mu saw before strumming the strings of the world.

Hat Kid (“Call me Hattie!”) of Tempus strode into Mu’s domain, hand hovering over her umbrella handle and eyes narrowed at the pile of Time Pieces Mu perched on.

Something about Hattie seemed… different, from that day on the Mafia Boss’s stage. A smoke-spark, flickering out the corner of Mu’s eye like air over coals.

Even in the stifling backdrop of lava-heat, something in Hattie’s soul burned.

Though Hattie’s refusal to help, her selfishness, still stung, the other girl hadn’t actually done anything to actively stop Mu, the spaceship heist notwithstanding. And the amount of bad guys Hattie had been smacking around tipped the scales in her favor more. Yeah, that worked. So Hattie could go free.

“I mean, you haven’t really done much to stop me-” And we were friends, once. “-So you’re a good guy, I guess.”

Hattie just stood there, a lone spire against a storm-surge. Unlike the hurricane, though, Mu was far more generous. “Go on, you get to live.” Take it. Take the offering and go.

Hattie responded by throwing a fireball at her.

Contemptuously, Mu shunted it off to the side, like a cinder falling into the extinguishing sea. “Seriously? I was willing to forgive you!” Mu cried, and the pile of Time Pieces trembled. “But of course we couldn’t have that, you- you rotten, selfish jerk! Save the planet from bad guys? Pfft, am I right?”

“You have got to be pecking joking!” Hattie barked, smoke blowing from her breath. “Save the planet? What planet?! It’s all under lava, and that includes all the people!” Exasperated, she threw up her hands, fingers trailing azure sparks. “And at the rate you’re going, there won’t be anyone left, let alone so-called ‘good guys’!”

Mu swallowed, and looked Hattie in the eye. “This… this is only temporary! I’m going to figure it out, and then everything will be fine, and justice will be served!”

Hattie jabbed her umbrella at Mu accusingly. “So you don’t know how to fix this!” She softened, ever so slightly. “But I do. Give me back the Time Pieces, Mu.”

Mu couldn’t help but entertain the thought, fleeting as a gull on the wind. But she only entertained it. “And let things just go back to the way they were? No.” She leapt off the throne and faced Hattie, the Time Pieces’ power thrumming through her bones like a silent tsunami. “I was wrong. You are a bad guy. And I’ll show you how this justice system deals with bad guys!”

The first blow took Hattie by surprise.

The second didn’t, the alien dancing away from every blow like sunlight on waves. Increasingly frustrated, Mu lobbed Time Pieces at Hattie, hoping the tiny fallout of shattered time was enough to catch her off guard.

It wasn’t enough, so Mu decided to do this the old-fashioned way, winding back her fist and launching herself through the air-

Right into an umbrella, swung at her gut like a home-run bat. And even with all the power she held, it still hurt.

Mu skidded back, looking up at Hattie, and noticed they’d attracted an audience.

They wanted her to get lost.

Never.

Mu cracked the world in half, a fine hairline along reality.

It was like clutching a hurricane- one of the big ones that pushed the storm-surge all the way up to her island’s mountains, splintered entire dock-towns to kindling, whose winds roared like something alive and angry. And Mu had to keep all of it inside her.

In the depthless, dimensionless void where the universe floated, Time twitched.

--

Careening wildly through the barely-stable pocket Mu had managed to hollow out in this disaster, Hattie figured that if Time hadn’t noticed someone tugging on its temporal whiskers yet, it certainly did now. It was a damned miracle this cracked-open half-dimension hadn’t literally torn them apart by their atoms.

When her umbrella skidded off a sky-brittle shield, she passed off control to Snatcher. < Heads up, you’re on explosives duty! >

He dipped her hand into his pocket-dimension, yanked out colorful glass bottles, drifted back for Hattie to throw them with her better aim, and wove back into her nerves, gesturing and setting half the arena alight with potion-fueled fire- all as seamless as wind-smoothed sand dunes.

Funny, how well they worked together when their lives were actually on the line.

With each blow, the world seemed to tremble, like the footsteps of a far-off mountain-beast, and the panic of what that could mean lent Hattie and Snatcher more speed, more magic, more desperation, enough to finally wind Mu just enough, overbalance her-

Hattie lunged, pulling fire and shadow and glass-sharp Time Piece shards in her wake.

Mustache Girl skidded across the floor, limp and concussion-addled, as the world faded back into the silk-red throne room, shimmering like a mirage about to shatter.

Ignoring the prone girl, Hattie scrambled to the Time Pieces, now coalescing and bunching into a single point, like a star about to collapse into a black hole-

She grabbed at the bundle, and even though it rejected her touch like opposing magnets, she held on.

< Hold on to your hat! I’m about to commit a temporal felony! >

‘Wh- kid! There’s something here-!’

Hattie rerouted the magic in the Time Piece cluster, instinct guiding her more than experience, and smashed it on the ground.

The world shattered like frozen steam.

--

Hattie floated in a sea-dark void, not seeing or smelling or hearing or tasting, but knowing.

She was speck, colliding against the impossibly huge atmosphere of something bigger than her. Bigger than anything. Perhaps anyone else would have called it a god, but only the foolish or the ignorant worshiped a Being as a god, even one so powerful as Time.

Hattie brushed against a phosphorescent filament- a single hair on a dragon’s mane, singed by Mu’s reckless Time Piece usage.

Time looked at her, even a sliver of its attention overwhelming.

Hattie could do nothing but meet the black-hole gaze, inscrutable and utterly inhuman, until it turned away from her- either satisfied by what it saw, or not deeming her worth the trouble.

The light-crushing pressure vanished, and Hattie jerked awake to see clear, smokeless sky, gulls circling cheerfully and the faint stench of raw fish wafting in the breeze.

Mafia Town?

Hattie wheezed, cackling wildly in relief. Everything was fine! The world felt right, balanced the same way it was before Mu pecked it up. “We could’ve died! Holy shit Snatcher, we saw Time and didn’t end up splattered on the borders of reality!”

‘Insane! You and all your crazy alien people are insane!’ Snatcher’s voice faded in, railing against her hysterical laughter. ‘That’s what you touch every time you use a Time Piece? You can have the damned things then, because I have no plans of getting in a territory spat with that nightmare of a Being!’

Giggles fading, Hattie couldn't help but snort into her sleeve. Snatcher might be an overconfident jerk, but even the biggest ego in the world didn’t look at Time as something they could fight head-on. Even so, it was a damned miracle Time hadn’t smited them just for looking upon it.

Hattie sat up abruptly, realization striking her swift as lightning. She and Snatcher weren’t the only ones to see Time.

Not a few yards from her, rust-red slumped over the cobblestones, shadowed by the plaza’s broken fountain.

Hattie swayed drunkenly upright, legs unsteady as a land-locked sailor’s, and shuffled towards Mu. The other girl was light, tossed over Hattie’s shoulder like an ash-dusted sack of potatoes.

‘I sure hope you’re planning on disposing the body, unless you forgot she tried to kill us?’

< Eh, so have a lot of people. She’s not special. > Besides, they were friends. Even if it wasn’t for very long. < That includes you, by the way. >

‘I did not.’ Snatcher scoffed, offended.

Hattie rolled her eyes, scooting under the boarded-up door and setting Mu across from the long-extinguished fire, where a Mafia goon had once lazed. < I’m not stupid, Snatcher. You eat souls, and you took mine. >

‘... I hope you know I don’t plan on killing you anymore.’

< Yeah, I know. > Hattie grinned. Softie. For a given value of ‘soft’. Though she was grateful she didn’t have to pry his feelings out of him, or articulate her own thoughts, or put words onto the cobbled-together and odd attachment they’d both made.

Not like she would have to, eventually, when Mu woke up.

The sun soon touched the skyline, and Hattie re-lit the campfire between them, the light reflecting at them from the glass windows and throwing fire-shadows across Mu’s dirtied hood, which did nothing to alleviate how strange Mu felt to Hattie’s senses. Unsettling. Unstable. Like invisible hairline cracks in a spaceship’s viewport, or a ghost-wind off the Subcon Swamp. Or like a sticker, peeled from its sheet and replaced in the same spot, just imperfectly.

None of the comparisons Hattie thought of felt right.

Breaking time like that, raking glass shards across the temporal strings until they frayed- that had consequences, no matter how much power Hattie threw behind making things right.

Orange sunbeams grazed across Mu’s closed eyes, and she scrunched her face up. Lifted herself upright, squinting at the fire and crossing her legs.

And jumped, when her eyes met Hattie’s, and visibly shoved down all her emotions in favor of crossing her arms and scoffing. “What are you doing here? You won. Go on. Scram. Leave me alone.”

Hattie squinted at Mu, and ignored her nervous shuffling at the scrutiny. Mu still definitely felt… glitchy, to her senses. Like a spiked wavelength. Or almost like the Badge Seller, actually. Just… less visible to the naked eye. A sensation, rather than a visual. “Nah. I don’t think I will.”

Mu scowled in response. “Seriously? We fought. I wasn’t strong enough. Go back to your mothership, or whatever; clearly we aren’t on the same side.” And under her breath, quiet enough that she probably didn't expect Hattie to hear, she muttered “And you even chose the Mafia over me.”

“Pfft, those losers?” Hattie scoffed dramatically, waving her off. “I didn’t choose the mafia over you. I chose the world- which was, y’know. Covered in lava.” She then leveled Mu with a stare like a drawn blade, serious and deadly. “And stopped you from sticking your fingers into Time’s eyes. That would’ve pecked up a lot more than just Earth.”

Quizzically, one of Mu’s singed eyebrows raised, and the tension leaked from her body. “Eyes? Time doesn’t even have eyes?” A glazed, far-off look- a mind struggling to comprehend what it had seen-felt-smelled-touched-knew. “Or does it…”

“Eh, maybe?” Hattie replied, unsure, and jolted when Mu lurched toward her, still sitting, her hands slapping down on either side of the campfire.

“What was that thing?” Mu babbled. “It was- it- it was like looking at the sky on the ocean, big enough to wrap around you- but then it touched me, and then everything went, went wobbly and cracked and just nothing!” Mu gesticulated wildly, campfire-flames following her frantic movements. “Is that the thing that controls time? It’s- it’s…” She trailed off, unable to find the words.

Hattie could relate. Seeing Time was literally the nightmare scenario for any Tempae, but at least she knew what it was. “It doesn’t really control time? It is time. But yeah, that’s what I didn’t want you to piss off by messing with the Time Pieces so much.”

Mu held her head in her hands and groaned. “Oh, by sea and sky. I could have died, what the peck.”

Hattie scooted around the campfire, giving Mu a few consolidatory back pats. “There, there.”

Mulishly, Mu glared from between her fingers. “Don’t patronize me.”

Oops. Maybe she was a little too condescending. “Hey, I’m not patronizing you,” she lied. “I just- look, it touched you? If you’re still feeling it, it’s not going away.” Subconsciously, Mu reached up to press her fingers into her temple. Hattie noticed. “Is it a headache of some kind?”

“Well, yeah. Like a pressure that won’t go away,” Mu admitted. “And everything feels… disjointed. Like everything is set in layers of paper.”

Hattie hummed, contemplating, hopefully buying enough time to figure out what exactly was going on. Time was definitely looking at mortals now, and wanted people to know about it, but why was Mu not smited out of existence? < A little silent from the peanut gallery back there. Any thoughts? >

Snatcher wove forward. ‘She… I don't know how to put it. Almost smells weird? Like finding a territory marker so big you can’t actually see it all.’ Shivering, like leaves in the winter wind. ‘She smells like Time, a little bit.’

< Nobody’s been touched by Time before. Well, unless you count the people who’ve been obliterated for poking it too much. >

‘So we’re in completely unknown territory in dealing with that… thing. Spectacular.’ Snatcher drawled.

< Well, at least I think I know a way to fix it. >

“I think what’s happening is… y’know the strings? I think yours are vibrating on the wrong wavelength, so your presence in the fourth dimension is kinda… garbled?” Hattie said aloud. “Like, uh. You ever met the Badge Seller? Glitchy dude who sells trinkets?”

Mu’s brow scrunched up. “I never did have enough pons for what they sold,” she muttered. A worried look crossed her face. “Am I going to end up like that?”

“I don’t know. But I think I know a way to stabilize it a bit.” Hattie said, taking off her hat, setting it top-down on the gritty concrete, and pulling out a single Time Piece.

Despite the chaos the objects caused her, Mu still held a look of undisguised want on her face before she reigned it in, stubbornly setting her brow. “... What’s the catch?”

Hattie shrugged. “Nothing, really. Just don’t try and kill me again and we’ll call it even.”

Mu looked at her like she was a few grains short of an hourglass. “You’re so weird.” she said, shivering involuntarily as part of her cape glitched. “...Tell me how this works.”

Ignoring the ‘eep!’ from Mu, Hattie grabbed at the other girl’s hand and pressed it against the Time Piece. “You can use this to keep yourself stable. Time magic can be dangerous- I’m pretty sure you know this already- but anyone with magic can learn how to use it safely.” Faint spirals of time magic, deceptively slow, glowed like new lightning-glass as Mu felt how Hattie directed the Time Piece.

It was a short demonstration, only enough for Mu to keep herself stable, but Hattie already felt the unsettling atmosphere around Mu shift and align back with the rest of the world.

“You can also use that to warp up to the ship, if you still want to be friends after all this,” Hattie pointed out.

Hugging the Time Piece to her chest, Mu looked up at her, confused. “I thought you were leaving? Going home was what you said you needed these for, back when we were working together.”

Sheepishly, Hattie rubbed the back of her neck. “Oh, uh, that’s not happening anymore. I’m kind of a felon in the eyes of Tempus law now?” She hopped to her feet, shrugging helplessly at Mu’s dumbfounded look. “So you can drop by just whenever? I have things to do though, so bye!”

Hattie waved enthusiastically, almost missing Mu’s confused return wave, and warped back to the ship.

‘Ugh, ow! I thought you agreed to warn me before doing that!’

< Sorry, sorry! > Hattie projected, busying herself with sorting through badges on the bridge floor. < But I had an idea when I was talking about strings with Mu! I think I know how to swap our souls back! >

The impression of Snatcher’s confused head-bobbing halted abruptly. ‘Okay, hit me with it, kid.’

< So we’ll need a way to restrain it, first… >

Chapter Text

[A series of images arranged on a photoset, titled ‘Signs of the Subcon Border’]

[A stone-block sign, rusted at the edges, reading “The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.” carved in blocky letters. It’s obviously the oldest of them]

[Wooden sign staked into the ground, with “This is not a place of honor. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. There is nothing of value here.” splashed on it in red]

[A laminated poster is stapled over what used to be a different sign. It has a cartoonishly-drawn outhouse on it, labelled “Toilet of Doom”. It’s extremely out of place, and looks like it was drawn by a child]

“Old Subcon is a dangerous location, and entrance is strictly prohibited by every territory that borders it- but that doesn’t stop people from doing things at the border. Some of these signs were put up by the local agencies, some by regular people who just get a kick out of it. But there is consistency in that there are no details given- even the remote cameras sent into the forest never see anything before getting destroyed, and no surveyors have ever returned.

-modern photography blogger @lostfocus.”

--

Landing in Subcon Forest felt like landing home.

Home tinged with memories that weren’t hers, and populated by people that weren’t hers, but still familiar and comfortable.

There wasn’t a soul in sight. Particularly the one they were looking for.

‘Check the plaza or my tree first. That’s where I spent most of my time, maybe it’ll be drawn to more familiar places.’

Hattie hummed her assent, and picked her way in the direction of the tree without being told where to go, dry leaves crackling beneath her feet.

Hattie let her mind wander, knowing her feet would take her to the heart-tree. There was an eerie beauty to Subcon- its sky-piercing trees embedded with a millennia of memories, whorls of warped bark, and clawmarks. Huge ones.

Without thinking, Hattie shuffled closer to the massive trunk, tracing her fingertips over the three-taloned clawmarks scored vertically into the tree, each gouge longer than she was tall.

She removed her hand from the tree, but the faint memory of bark splintering under her clawtips remained.

Crack.

Hattie froze.

< Snatcher? Is there anything genuinely dangerous to us in this forest? >

‘Pfft, nothing in here could touch us, except, y’know. My body. And maybe-’ An almost-imperceptible shushing sound, like thorns scraping on granite. ‘-Oh. Oh no.’

Two points of baleful light, comet-red.

Hattie didn’t even have time to scream before it was upon her, stone fingers knapped to points and dimpling her throat as it pinned her to the tree.

The statue brought its face closer to her, so deeply shadowed by a cowl that only its glowing eyes could be seen.

“You.” It hissed, voice like a landslide’s far-off rumble. “What did you do to him?”

Frantic, Snatcher clawed at her nerves. ‘Give me the body, give me the body, give me the body!’ he chanted.

“Camellia! Cam, stop, it’s me!” Snatcher wheezed with Hattie’s voice, strained.

Camellia’s grip tightened, blood beading from Hattie’s neck. ”I don’t know who you are, and I don’t care. You were the last one here who saw Snatcher, what did you do to him?”

“I’m here,” he squeaked with their remaining breath. “Luka! I’m Luka!”

The Florist dropped them like a stone. “That name- how-”

Snatcher hacked out a choking breath, and wiped away the blood on her sleeve. “Ugh. Would it kill you to be a bit more gentle, Cam? Mortal bodies are so dang squishy.”

When Snatcher brought their head up to meet the Florist’s eyes, Hattie got the first good look at the woman that wasn’t tinged in adrenaline.

Her stone body was moss-patched and smooth, with faint scuff-marks showing its age and a hooded cloak draped over her shoulders- brown for memory and endurance, and blue-stitched patterns for loyalty. Beneath the cowl, there was no head- only shadows, and red lantern-eyes suspended in nothingness.

“Wait, how-?” Camellia started.

“Ugh. Don’t make me say it, it’s embarrassing,” Snatcher said plaintively.

< Tell her or I will, you big baby. >

“Yeah, yeah, whatever.” He muttered under his breath, before addressing Camellia. “Look, when I took her soul, it was… a lot stronger than I expected. It stole my body and ran off with it, so now I’m stuck in the kid’s body.”

Camellia hummed, rocking from side to side- a habit carried over from when she was alive. “That… would make sense. You- or rather your body- blasted a few minions back into Dwellers, but for the most part it’s just been lurking at the plaza.” Hattie caught the impression of a frown in the hooded shadows. “It also smashed that outhouse you hid the magic hourglass in, if that makes a difference.”

< You stuffed my Time Piece into a toilet?! > Hattie shrieked, outraged. A toilet! She didn’t care how death changed somebody, that was disgusting!

‘Shut up! It’s not like anyone’s used it for centuries!’

“Look,” Snatcher continued, pointedly ignoring the exaggerated ‘blech’-ing sounds Hattie projected. “We know how to swap the souls, but we need to be able to pin my body down. Which won’t be easy, because you know how much energy I put into making it.”

< Wait! I have an idea! > Hattie poked at him. < She said it smashed the toilet with a Time Piece in it, right? I bet we could lure it into a trap with one! >

A trap… now, he knew how to make those. Most of them were just for menacing appeal, but they were salt-solid, enough that even powerful mages who wandered into his domain would be well and truly trapped.

‘Oh now this, this I can work with.’

“Say, Cam, I think I have an idea of how to corner this thing…”

--

Crouched in the bushes next to a large ring of purple-shaded blackthorn, without Camellia to divide Snatcher’s attention, Hattie spoke up.

< So. She’s the red-haired friend? >

‘Saw that much, huh?’ Snatcher growled. ‘Yes, that’s her. She was killed by the same thing as me, so she stuck around.’

Which was oversimplifying it by a lot, Hattie felt. But she didn’t pry, at least not now. The faint blood-taste of Snatcher’s death was enough to let Hattie know he died painfully, and not getting pulled into those memories was a blessing. Even the most muted of those half-known memories were not something she wanted to touch.

Something rumbled in the distance, the trees shaking in sympathy to it. Hattie tensed, and drifted back for Snatcher to take the lead.

Camellia careened out of the brush, Time Piece held aloft in one hand as she skipped along surprisingly fast for something made of stone. She stopped inside the thorn-circle, spinning on a heel to wave her arms at the shaking bushes she erupted from. “Hey, coal-for-brains! Get your dumb alien ass over here!”

An ear-piercing shree, and the soul exploded into the clearing.

Its disarrayed feathers were puffed up every-which-way, tail lashing and crooked thorn-teeth bared. Cold pink light seeped from narrowed eye sockets and gaping rents in its body.

Hattie looked at bloodless wounds, and felt chilled. She knew how carefully Snatcher knit his body from shadow and feather and thorn. What could have actually hurt it like that?

Then it lunged, and Hattie had no time to wonder.

Camellia dove out of the way, and as soon as her stone feet left the perimeter, Snatcher commanded magic-soaked thorns to move.

The creature shrieked its offense to the heavens as it thrashed, thick vines lashing it to the ground like a netted rift-whale. Cool soil pushed beneath Hattie’s fingernails as Snatcher dug their fingers into the ground and willed the thorns to tangle further, pinning the creature’s tail and arms against its trunk.

Once it was sufficiently restrained, or at least enough where it couldn't lash out and kill them all, Snatcher crept closer to the strange creature. As he approached the head, it stilled, magenta soul-glow dimming, and keened- a pathetic sound, like a kicked bird.

< This feels really weird, not gonna lie. >

‘You’re telling me, kid.’

Without realizing, Hattie moved her hand forth to touch the soft down of its head.

The creature’s backglow flared, and it lunged for her with fangs bared, neck extending like a fishing heron’s.

Hattie squeaked and backpedaled, tripping and landing on her rear in the scattered leaves and upturned soil. “Okay, no, I am not dealing with this. Snatcher, do you have any of that blue stuff in your hatspace?”

‘Why do you have to call my shadow-storage ‘hatspace’, anyways? I don’t even have a hat.’ Snatcher grumbled, but still warped the shadows above Hattie’s outstretched palm to drop a blue potion into her hand.

She uncorked the bottle and hefted it, giving the creature with her soul a considering look.

Upended the bottle, covering the creature in blue goop.

Even feral as it was, the creature still had the wherewithal to look offended, face scrunching up and potion-damp feathers flaring out further.

Hattie wound up her umbrella over her shoulder, and swung with all of her considerable strength.

The soul-creature’s head snapped to the side with a rather disconcerting thud, body going slack.

‘How did that even work?’ Snatcher asked, incredulous. ‘I made that vessel from shadow-thorns and other such things. It shouldn’t be possible to knock it out!’

“Maybe it’s made of a bunch of different things you pulled together, but it’s your body, now.” Hattie said, swinging her umbrella to rest on her shoulder. “Beings are a lot more changeable than… pretty much any living thing in the universe, but it’s still a biological body. So it can be knocked out.”

Or killed. But she didn’t need to vocalize that particular thought. He’d already seen two Beings rip each other into dead star-shreds in her memories. Mortality was no longer a past weakness, for him.

< Though you’re probably gonna want to re-align some things once you get your body back. I felt something crack in there when I hit it. >

‘Your restraint is greatly appreciated.’ His tone dripped sarcasm.

Rustling leaves, and a voice echoed from behind them. “Oof, that’s gonna hurt later.” Camellia said, stepping out of her shelter to squint at the limp tangle of bramble-shadow. And then squinted at them, lantern-eyes narrowing. “So. Am I talking to Luka, or the kid?”

“I have a name, you know.” Hattie scowled, crossing her arms. “It’s Hattie, and yes, you are talking to me.”

The hem of Camellia’s hood fluttered in irritation. “Look, kid, I don’t know who you are, but there are things that go into running this joint that you don’t-”

“Is this about Vanessa?” Hattie interrupted.

Camellia froze, and Snatcher scraped against her mind like a blade on ice. ‘Kid, I need to talk to her, this is not something to mess around with.’

< Yeesh, calm down, dude. I know how scary the old lady is. > And wasn’t that the truth. Memories of the old queen hadn’t crept into Hattie’s mind often, but when they did, even the faint silk-thread recollections were filmed over with old, frost-rimed fear. Blonde hair, the creak of steel, the smell of bleach, and cold. Always cold.

So, yeah, Hattie hardly knew anything about the ice-queen. But she knew enough to fear her.

When Hattie drifted to the back of her mind, Snatcher shook out their hands to get used to the feeling again. “Did that thrice-damned homebody actually leave her cave? Because if she did, that’s a problem we need to address now.”

Something about his tone must have indicated Snatcher was the one speaking, because his friend had no problem answering. “She didn’t, is the thing. It’s been completely silent over there for a week- I haven’t been able to guard the bridge as often since I’ve been corralling the kids.” Camellia jerked a thumb over her shoulder- north, towards the eternal winter. “Past the border, it’s still a frozen hellscape, but the blizzard over the manor just… vanished. Weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Snatcher snorted. “Think she might’ve done one good thing in her life and finally keeled over and died?”

“Oh, if only.” Bemused, Camellia shrugged. “It’s a change, though, so I thought you’d like to know.”

“I’ll poke around in a little bit. When I’m not, y’know, this.” Snatcher gestured to their body.

< I’m going to tie your tail into a knot. >

‘Try me, midget.’

“How are you going to make the swap, anyway?” Camellia prodded. “Ghosts and vessels are, well…”

Hattie shoved Snatcher aside. “He’s being cranky because he doesn’t like the guy we’re going to see, but we’re heading to Alpine Skyline!”

Skeptical, Camellia turned her head to face the Snatcher-body. “... And you’re planning on dragging that all the way up there?”

Hattie shrugged. “Eh, kinda? But it will only stay knocked out for so long, so gotta go, bye!” She waved at a now-confused Florist, placed her hand on the creature, and let the shower of white sparks obscure her vision.

Blinking away the warp-shine, Hattie stepped away from the creature on the bridge, pointing to it imperiously. “You. Stay. I’ll be right back.”

As she jogged down to the engine room, Hattie decided to address something on her mind. < Say, I know you’ll give the Time Pieces back- which I’m happy about- but. Um. Since I can’t go home, I’ll probably stay around Earth, and well… Can I hang around the forest sometimes? >

A faint sense of reluctant warmth, and the futilely-hidden thought-images of flocks of masked people, of a mantle of protection passed down, from sister to brother to sister. ‘Eh, yeah, you can hang out, I guess. What’s one more brat among hundreds?’

She’d call him emotionally constipated, but she really wasn’t much better, Hattie knew. She just hid it a different way- as she was now, deliberately pushing the yawning gulf of loneliness to the side, so that perhaps the certainty of never seeing Tempus again would fade in time.

But she didn’t want to verbalize this, nor did she need to- like skimming algae off the water, Hattie knew Snatcher could catch the surface feelings. < Sweet. I’m going to revolutionize how the minions think about pranks. >

‘I regret giving you entry already.’ Snatcher said, falsely horrified. With a bit of a playful edge to it, however- he and the Subconites did share a love for a good scare.

Ideas for potential pranks already springing to mind, she shooed them aside for more serious matters. And as she folded up the engine room telescope and hauled it back to the creature, Hattie wondered, in the unreachable, wordless depths of her mind, if this was what it would have been like, to have an older brother.

--

Zebu’s day started just peacefully enough for her to wonder if the world was about to yank the rug from under her hooves.

The Alpines had recovered, for the most part, after the strange not-human girl burned the overloaded filter-flowers. The flower population would take far more time to regrow, but after careful examination by the gardeners, they determined they were no longer in danger of such a storm again.

After helping with the cleanup, Zebu was pretty grateful she’d holed up in her home near the Twilight Bell, surrounded by the dense magical energy rippling outwards from it. Some of the other Capra that inhaled the filter-flower pollen were still recovering.

There were still repairs to be made, though, which brought Zebu here, to the Twilight Belfry. The rope-line had been snapped after the alien used it as a zipline, so Zebu tucked her braids into her hood and continued the painstaking process of re-weaving the flags into the rope. Each flag was unique- mountain-silk constellation lines and fog-gold stars embroidered into each one, spelling the path of the sphere of the world.

From her precarious perch atop the rope-line, Zebu blinked as something fell from the sky and landed, surprisingly softly, on the belfry.

The flags could wait.

The clop of Zebu’s hooves on crystalline stone made the intruder jump, and Zebu couldn’t suppress a sigh.

“You again, really?” Zebu asked plaintively, the not-a-human in front of her looking sheepish, and utterly failing to hide the massive, thorn-wrapped thing behind her.

“Um. Hi?” The girl waved, having enough presence of mind to at least appear embarrassed.

Zebu crept closer, curious about what strange thing the hat-girl brought with her.

Trapped within the vines was a beast. Long, with trailing feathers, black as a night-chilled sky. Even from this distance, the beast’s forelegs poked out of the vines, with claws long as Zebu was tall.

There was rust on the tips of those claws, blood-black and old. Even if every hair on the back of her neck wasn’t already standing on end, Zebu knew this creature was a killer.

“Uh, so. What do you have there?”

“Oh, this?” Hatted-Not-Human said, unconvincingly casual. “That’s my body. Don’t worry about it.”

‘Don’t worry about it’, she says, dragging in something that looks like a monster straight from the legends. “Just- Y’know what? I don’t want to know. So long as it’s your hide on the line and not mine, because I do not want to get near that thing.”

The not-human looked perplexed, of all things. “What? I mean, it’s not that scary. Feels fine to me.”

Zebu looked at her, wondering if the not-human was just blind to the natural instincts that kept every creature alert in the presence of a hunter, of a killer. Threw her paws up in exasperation. “Whatever. You’ve already proved to be ridiculously sturdy, so you can mess around inside the Twilight Bell, I guess.”

“Oh, sweet, thanks!” The not-human grinned, cheered. “I mean, I wasn’t going to ask for permission anyways, but it’s nice to have your approval!”

Zebu fiercely resisted the urge to place her head in her paws and groan. The not-human dragged the creature behind her like it was a felled Yule tree, using her umbrella-hookshot to yank on the clapper and vanish the two of them into the Twilight.

I am never, ever complaining about Bell Stewardship being boring ever again.

--

The jade-mist realm of Twilight was just the same as it was when they left, and yet wholly different.

Standing on a starglass belfry, Snatcher manifesting from her living shadow, Hattie eyed the tied-up body still unconscious beside them. Tilted her head towards the endless Twilight fog. She didn’t know how, but she knew they were being watched, by a thousandfold eyes she couldn’t see.

She cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted “Hey! Mister Goat! We’re back!”

False light shone through vaulted arches, and he was there. < So you are, moon-child, Young Hunter. > He tilted his head, fur waving like water. < Oh? And it seems there is another moon-child and little hunter here, as well. >

“Thanks for letting us use your Bell for this- I finally figured out what you meant when you jabbered about states of being, before we left.” Hattie beamed, proud of herself. Twilight Goat probably hadn’t meant to be purposefully obfuscating, but things that were obvious to a Being detached to the world would not be so clear to a mortal child, or to her companion.

< Mm, of course. I appreciate the company, though I do think the one who shares a kin-bond with you isn’t as happy to see me! > The Twilight Goat guffawed, finding Snatcher’s puffed-up growling amusing, of all things.

Hattie grabbed at a clawed hand and tugged Snatcher down from where he arched his back and snarled at the other Being. < Hey, c’mon, we have better things to do than antagonize this poor guy. >

‘Feh, whatever.’ Snatcher sulked, but drifted above her as she approached the soul-creature.

Hesitantly, Hattie inched her hand forward to touch the fuzzy head. There was a distant sense of familiarity and connection, like silk threads reaching for charged glass.

The pink soul seeped through, touching Hattie’s palm. < Now! >

It was like tearing a swamp-leech from her skin. It hurt. But as Snatcher dove back into his own vessel, Hattie’s soul fit back into her body and mind like painted puzzle pieces, finally aligned. As flashes of her soul’s memories whirled in place in her mind, Hattie felt empty, for a moment; negative space where there used to be strangely soft ivy-trails of shadow curling in her blood and in her mind.

And then that loneliness faded, replaced with understanding of what, exactly, her soul had been up to without her.

“Holy shit.” Hattie whispered aloud, staring at her nubby, clawless hands- uncannily mirrored by Snatcher, sitting up and doing the same. “We- I killed her. Holy shit.”

Not guilt, or horror, just- surprise. The near-animalistic drive to tear into enemies with teeth and claws didn’t disturb her, not really, not after sharing headspace with a heavily-armed predator for weeks.

Off to the side, Snatcher curled his bloodstained claws into his palms. “... Good. That’s- that’s good.” He sighed, a shaky thing, and straightened, pulling his talons through his feathery mane and sloughing the trap-vines from himself.

He scowled, ear-tufts flattened in irritation. “Ugh, this is going to take forever to wash off.” He poked along the holes torn by icicle-spikes, faintly glowing yellow through the thin weave of feathers and vines he patched them with. And shook himself like a dog, from his head down to the tip of his tail, splattering Hattie with blue potion-goop.

“Hey!” Hattie shrieked, offended. Snatcher just squinted his eyes to slits, blowing a raspberry at her with a flicker of fire instead of a tongue.

She returned it with a very rude Tempus gesture of her own, and he scrunched up his face like a bushcat’s. He was always so weird about swearing, even in her head.

< Oh? Are you more settled now, Little Kins? > The Twilight Goat hummed, and Snatcher’s head swivelled a full one-eighty degrees to glare at him.

“Yeah, we’re done here. Let’s go, kid.” Snatcher said brusquely, plucking Hattie from the back of her cape like a scruffed bushkitten.

“Aw, c’mon, I wanted to pick his brains,” she whined, but her heart wasn’t in it- she was tired, too, and wanted to collapse in her pillow fort and sleep for ten cycles, now that her mind was quiet.

Snatcher settled her on his shoulder, and she gripped his feathery mane as they rose up beneath the Bell’s skirt.

The Twilight Bell rang like struck crystal, like singing stone, and they were home.

Chapter Text

“The meaning behind Old Subconite traditional cloaks:

I’m tired of seeing a bunch of knockoff cheaply made ‘genuine Subconite mantles’ so I’m gonna clear something up real quick: unless you’re buying from someone who knows what they’re doing, what you have looks pretty but means absolutely nothing. Source: me and my family are Subcon diaspora.

The patterns and colors have meaning, and specific purposes, for one. Overlapping maze-patterns to weave long-lasting luck and to confuse malevolent horizon-spirits are usually at the bottom and edge hems. Embroidery on the hood and body of a cloak varies by Clan region, and carries slightly different, unique flavors of protection and growth. Clan Pryce, my clan, favors fire-thorn patterns, among others.

Colors have specific meaning too, you can’t just attribute your own understanding of color symbolism to it- there’s significance in choosing colors for your family member. Granny always recited the meaning word-for-word to me when she was making mantles for my little siblings. Blue for loyalty, and claws pointed outward. Brown for the memory and endurance, the ever-still earth. White, for the swift of mind, swift of wind, and swift of tongue. Black for secrecy and freedom, for the shadow that belongs to no one. Green, for change and growth and eternity. Red for resolve and the successful hunt. Purple, for the guardians’ cycles- life into death into day into night into calm into storm. Yellow, the color of high-fires, for ferocity and death.

Mantles have to be made with a specific person in mind, otherwise they do nothing. Usually a parent makes their child their mantle, or an older sibling or cousin if neither are available. The child is responsible for re-sizing and hemming their own cloak as they grow older.

Anyway, rant over. I have a history essay to cry over, later dudes.

-Chirper thread from user @hagsfriend, condensed and grammar-corrected for easier reading. It’s dated to 15 years before First Contact. The profile picture is of a young blonde woman in a colorful sweater.”

--

Even months after the disaster with the Time Pieces, Mu still never quite got used to her new state of being.

Some parts were the same- for instance, she still punted loafing Mafia goons off the docks when she could sneak up on them. Which was a lot easier, now, since if she concentrated hard enough she could stop the sound of her footsteps and her breathing from traveling through the air molecules.

But it still wasn’t enough. Everything was back to how it was, with everyone not already fled from the island too overwhelmed by the sheer number of Mafia- far too many for one little mage-girl to drive out, not without a multitude of Time Pieces to use.

Mu brushed her fingers over the single Time Piece in her pouch and shivered. She never, ever wanted to mess with Time Pieces recklessly again. Not after seeing-smelling-touching that… thing.

Hattie had invited Mu up to her ship once, to explain what exactly that thing was. About how lucky they all were that Time hadn’t decided to string their atoms across the known universe for their trespassing. About how viciously territorial Beings were, and how they knew nothing of the meaning of ‘collateral damage’.

Maybe, in the far future, Mu would be able to remember seeing Time without wanting to claw her heart out of her chest.

She shook herself out of that train of thought. No, she had to focus on more… present things. The Mafia buffoons didn’t remember anything of her courthouse thanks to- quoting Hat Kid -“time bullshit”, but they were still a nuisance at best. She was back at square one, with no dimension-warping shortcuts this time.

Well, maybe not back to square one, per se- with Hattie’s help, she did manage to kill the Boss. Shame it didn’t totally stick, though.

“Greetings, young one.”

Mu startled so hard she glitched two feet off the ground, landing with a dusty thud in a beach sand-dune.

“We are due a conversation, I believe,” The Badge Seller said, wholly unrepentant of scaring the daylights out of her. “Your friend thinks I can help you.”

Instantly, Mu was on her guard, popping to her feet and tensing. “Were you spying on us!?”

She couldn’t read their expression, but she got the feeling they might be a bit exasperated at her paranoia. “No, child. She told me.”

Oh. “It’s not like you ever helped me before. I’ve seen you loitering around, and you’ve never done anything to stop the Mafia,” She grumbled.

Badge Seller’s gesture might have been a shrug, but it also might have been a particularly severe glitch. “It made little difference to me. Sentients come, sentients live, and sentients pay. They are so very impermanent. But I… owe the Tempus child a favor.” They leaned on their obviously-unneeded cane. “You may accept my help, or you may not.”

Mu didn’t get this far by being picky. She’d take whatever help she could get, whether an alliance or a weapon. “What kind of help are you talking about?”

“Mm. Training, and advice. Your circumstances are different than mine- Time actively touched you, whereas I? I simply am an explorer.” They flattened their palm out, facedown. Literally- it spread like spilling ink rather than an outstretched hand. “But the effects are similar enough to work with. It is what some would call a poison, but all medicines began as poisons.”

She pulled the implications together like tightening stitches. Disproportionate strength and weakness at random, complete silence or sound carrying at inopportune times, flash-stepping either away from enemies or into walls… “You mean I can control this? How?”

“Think of it not as a power you direct, but a coordinate you move around.” Badge Seller tilted their palm from side to side. “Your position on the axis of the fourth dimension changes, when these things happen. You first must understand you are manipulating the when of yourself, not the what. Mindset is the foremost part of controlling your new state of being.”

Slowly, Mu grinned. If it was just a matter of mindset and a little practice, well, she could work with that. Easily. “Tell me everything.”

--

Snatcher sat in his chair, in his tree, in his forest, and stitched. One month after he returned to his own body, and one month since the kid ingratiated herself to the forest, he finally admitted defeat and picked up his needles from their bookshelf and hunted for the corresponding colored threads. She wasn’t leaving anytime soon, from the forest or from his unspoken guardianship.

(The greatest warriors of Old Subcon, before the annexation, were forsaken children sheltered by the Clan Heads- sheltered and cared for and raised as wards of the House, in the hopes that the clan would be worthy of the blade and magic of children who survived that which destroyed their previous clan.)

Snatcher hadn’t created a Subconite cloak since- well, not since he was human and foolish and blind, working with Vanessa to prepare for a child that would never happen. Usually it was the duty of a parent, or an older sibling if neither parent was alive, to create a child’s mantle, to stitch in protections and shields against the unseen.

Hattie had none of those, and all of them were foreigners anyway, so Snatcher would have to do.

Deciding on the colors was easy, at the very least. Yellow fabric, the color of fire, for ferocity and death. Red stitching, for the successful hunt and unbreakable resolve.

“Hey, Cam?” He called to his friend where she sat at the rim of his tree, knapping her stone fingers into even sharper points. “This isn’t lopsided, is it?”

Camellia’s red eyes squinted, and her hood moved as if she were tilting her head. “You do realize I have no idea what you just said, right?”

Snatcher groaned, kneading where the bridge of his nose used to be, mentally shuffling around his words and re-adjusting what functioned as vocal chords. Sometimes he still caught himself thinking and speaking in Tempae, which he honestly should’ve expected after living in a vessel that thought primarily in the Tempus alien language. Apparently the magic hat picked up the linguistic slack when Hattie talked to Terran natives.

“Gah, I can’t believe that’s still happening,” he complained. “Whatever. I’ll be done with this soon, let me know if the kid barges in.”

“Sure, sure, but I won’t be able to stop her,” Cam snorted. “Because for the record? I’ve been watching her, and that is the damn scariest kid you ever could’ve adopted into the clan.”

Which wasn’t an inaccurate statement, alien super strength notwithstanding. She used an umbrella, for the spirits’ sake. Give her a real weapon and a decade to grow up, and Hattie would never have to worry about losing a fight again.

Uncharacteristically quiet, Snatcher returned to his work, old memories of a living Subcon and a living young man surfacing in his mind. Sepia-sweet memories, pricked with the little pains that were proof of life. Red dots, clumsy fingers as his sister, far more hopeless at traditional embroidery than him, nonetheless tried to show him a seam-shortcut. Old, old memories, memories of humanity that surfaced with every stitch he pulled on the new mantle.

Red fire-thorns licking up the edges of the yellow hood. Blocky geometric patterns on the bottom hem, a thread-maze for malevolent spirits to get lost in. The crest of Clan Pryce sewn on the inside in everdeep violet thread- the same place and pattern that was on Apolonia’s mantle, wherever she took it, and on the mantle that once belonged to a man named Luka, tucked away beneath the floorboards of the heart-tree.

In the days onwards, he worked, lazily keeping a half-eye on the kid as she mapped out the forest and fixed the Time Rifts that still twitched and traveled around Subcon like perpetual ball-lightning.

Such a familiar sight Hattie was now in Subcon, that he didn’t even notice her stepping over his threshold as he pulled the last stitch. At this time, Camellia was out scouting the ever-retreating border of ice- a vital task, since if the perpetual blizzard and eternal glacier-wall sustained by Vanessa’s hate finally melted, it meant the Omnoc remnants would venture further south, into his territory. And that just would not do- he was a predator, yes, but even the greatest of hunters could be overwhelmed by sheer numbers.

“Whatcha got there?” Hattie said, right by his head.

“Gah,” Snatcher managed, nearly stabbing himself with a still-threaded needle. “Did nobody teach you to knock?”

“Yes, they did.” Hattie said primly, and didn’t bother to justify herself. Well, he was almost done anyways.

“Eh, whatever, I was about to send a minion to fetch you anyways.” He said, tying off the last knot on a fire-thorn pattern. Casually, he tossed the finished product at her head. “Here, you’re gonna need this- you’re the only resident who doesn’t have one.” Though the minions kept theirs hidden in their stuffing for safekeeping, for the most part.

“Oooh, I get one too? Cool.” Hattie admired the cloak, throwing it over her shoulders and swishing it around, hood up and obscuring her features.

Then froze, glimpsing the near-invisible purple thread inside the black lining of the hood, at her eye-level. “This is- this is the Pryce clan crest.”

Of course she knew that. The same way Snatcher knew her family’s names and faces and history. “Yeah, kid, it is. It’s- you don’t have a clan, anymore, and you already fought for Subcon, so it’s my responsibility to handle wardship.” One ear-tuft pricked up, giving a similar impression as a raised eyebrow. “Besides, you kinda grew on me, I guess. Like kudzu.”

Her brow scrunched up, offended. “Are you calling me a pest?” At his carefully bland non-response, she stuck her tongue out. “Jerk! See if I make you a hat now, after insulting me so terribly!”

“What would I even do with a hat?” Snatcher frowned, doing his utmost not to remember how he weirdly felt the unrelenting need to wear headgear after finally getting out of the kid’s brain. “I already have my own storage.”

“You wouldn’t need to do anything with it, because hats are already awesome,” she said confidently. “But, y’know, it still works as a translator- your Tempae accent is still terrible- and it can point you where you need to go if you ever get lost.”

“Pah! As if I’d get lost in my own forest!” Snatcher waved her off.

Soberly, Hattie replied “Yeah, but what if you aren’t in the forest? What if you aren’t on Earth?” Then, mischievously, she grinned. “You need to get out more, you lazy homebody.”

She blew a raspberry at his offended face, and scampered off, calling over her shoulder “Thanks for the mantle, old man!”

“I am not an old man,” Snatcher grumbled, pulling out a book and sinking lower into his squashy chair. “I’m only three hundred and twenty-one. In my prime, really.”

--

Three weeks after her meetings with Badge Seller ended and after constant practice, Mu impatiently tapped her foot at the beach, the sun not even a sliver above the horizon yet.

Then, finally, like a shimmer of air over a still ocean, Mu sensed displaced space behind her. “There you are, Hattie. What took you so long?” She turned around. “You were supposed to be here… an hour ago…”

Towering beside the alien was a monster, long and sinuous and possessing an eerie predator stillness; like a furry sea serpent out of legend, one that shattered fishing boats and ate the souls of drowned sailors.

Contrastingly, it was wearing a mailman’s hat, ear-tufts sticking out comically to the side beneath it.

“I brought some extra help!” Hattie beamed.

“I am here because she extorted me,” The monster translated.

Hattie leaned forward, whispering conspiratorially into a still-frozen Mu’s ear. “He’s lying, just so you know. I bribed him with the hat.”

What the hell.

Mu knew this feeling, down to the very quarks of her self. “Hattie. Why did you bring a Being to my island?”

Hattie backed out of Mu’s personal space, looking confused. “Uh, I already told you when we were talking up in my ship? He’s the guy I was sharing brainspace with for a while.”

Mu did remember Hattie regaling her during one of their ‘sleepovers’- though Mu preferred the term ‘war meetings’- about the evil lawyer who unsuccessfully stole her soul, and how they reluctantly befriended each other after being forced to work together.

Hattie delicately left out the ‘against Mu herself’ part of ‘learning to work together’. It was appreciated, but not unnoticed.

“You told me he was a dead lawyer! Not a Being!” Mu gesticulated wildly towards the monster.

“Oh no. Looks like I’m not wanted here. Guess I’ll just have to go home,” the lawyer in question said flatly, clearly meaning absolutely none of the sentiment his words implied.

Hattie grabbed the hook of a sword-length talon as the monster started to drift off. “Oh, no you don’t, Snatcher. We made a deal.” Still holding onto the Being’s claw like he was an errant balloon in danger of floating away, Hattie gestured between them. “Mu, this is Snatcher, my sword-brother. Snatcher, this is Mu, my ex-friend-ex-enemy-now-friend-again.”

Mu stared at Snatcher, unsure what to really think of him. He stared back. Hattie broke the tension by propping her hands on her hips and puffing her chest out. “So! Operation Mu-fia Boss is a go!”

“Ugh, still with the dumb name,” Mu lamented, even if it was essentially their plan.

Mafia were weird- they grew from the ground like parsnips, and functioned best under one competent leader, so long as their needs for happiness were met. Which she found utterly bizarre, as someone who chafed under the very idea of being beneath such heavy-handed rulership. But Mafia thought of themselves as a collective more than a group of individuals, so Mu supposed it made sense.

And the Mafia’s boss was the strongest of the bunch. The Mafia desired peace, but respected strength, if that strength was wielded responsibly.

Which was the plan, of course. Wielding power constructively, not destructively, would get Mu what she wanted.

The island, open for her people to live freely and without fear, once more taking the fishing fleets out to the ocean and lighting the celebratory bonfires and the smell of wet-wood smoke and preparing for the hurricane season and living. It didn’t matter if the Mafia would still be there- the desperate hunger for the island to be her people’s domain once more left Mu storm-restless and anxiously running her fingers over the staticky glass of her Time Piece.

Mu had plans. Plans for restructuring and delegating and enforcing, this time without killing all of them.

“Let’s do this, then.”

--

Mu strolled into the backstage throne room like she owned the place. Which, if this all went according to plan, she would, soon.

With Hattie scampering around the theater seats and Snatcher… somewhere, Mu was alone to infiltrate the throne room. And it was depressingly easy to do so- the old jar ran a tight ship, but security really fell apart after Mu shoved him into an industrial kitchen blender.

Brazenly walking down the matted red carpet and up the dias, Mu sat on the Mafia Boss’s throne and pulled the velvet rope.

The theater curtains parted, layer by layer, to a sea of stunned faces- Mafia goons, Mafia cooks, and one gleeful alien girl, eyes reflecting the spotlight like a cat’s.

“Oh, good, you’re all here.” Mu pitched her voice to carry. “Well, a lot of you are, anyways. Inform the others below that there’s been a change in leadership.”

Amidst the stunned outrage, one Mafia stood, crooked swirl-glasses reflecting stagelight. “Child think she can be Boss? Little girl push Mafia from docks! Bring aliens to Mafia Town!”

“And you drove off half the island in a show of force! So I’m here, in a show of force,” Mu snarled, standing, cape and unhooded hair twisting like Time-touched glitches. “Who would dare challenge me for the right to the throne!?”

“Mafia would challenge hooded girl!” One cried out, voice echoing in the theater despite his obvious trembling knees- the Mafia with the swirled glasses, who handled administrative duties since their previous boss was… incapacitated.

From his position in the aisle, he leaned forward incrementally- ready to lunge the moment Mu stepped down to meet his challenge.

She didn’t step down from the throne. She simply was there.

Mu grabbed the front of his pinstriped suit and threw, compounding five minutes of force into a single second.

The Goofy Mafia stopped skidding outside the door to the gambling rooms.

Once more Mu tweaked her position on the fourth dimension’s axis, and she flickered back into being atop the throne. “I don’t think you heard me the first time. There’s been a change of leadership.” And this, this was where it all tilted into an all-out brawl or a more peaceable ascension. They’d either follow her, or gather up enough idiocy to try and jump her, all at once. “And I do intend to lead. There will be changes, and you will follow them, but you lot won’t be getting the shit end of the stick.” Even if you deserve it.

A scoff. “Pah, hooded child has nothing for Mafia!”

This was the kind of thing she’d talked about with Hattie. It’d mostly been an argument, at first, but eventually they compromised. Mu still found the Mafia contemptuous and foolish, but they were fools she realized she could use.

“Here’s how it’s going to work.” Ember-motes of Mafia eyes looked to her, pulled by the deliberate, unnerving Time-touched presence she was exuding. “You are all going to follow my orders. Clean up the island. Dispose of your junk properly. Stay away from the lava faucets. And if you even think about harassing a local again, I will know.” She growled. “And in exchange, as your new boss, I will give you a safe plot to plant and harvest new Mafia, terraform more space for you, and teach you how to really fish, the way my people do. Cod is for boring chefs. You can cook with marlin and pink snapper and even shark.”

“Mafia can do that by self!” A single voice echoed from among the silent herd.

This might take a while.

Breathing deliberately even, Mu tensed. And bared her teeth in what could generously be called a smile. If it was a test of strength they wanted, then that’s what the Mafia would get. “You think you can do a better job as boss? Then fight me, and prove it!”

--

Hair falling out of its ties and hood torn at the hem, Mu exited the theater room right into Hattie’s high-five. “That was awesome, Mu! Went exactly to plan! Well, for the most part, I mean, the challengers you tossed out of the room might be cranky for a while-”

“Please make it stop,” Mu said, plaintive, to the Being that shifted from the shadowed corner like a black tide, slithering alongside the comparatively tiny girls.

“It honestly just gets to be background noise, after a while,” Snatcher said frankly. And then poked Hattie with the end of a claw- deceptively delicate, the glass-sharp points not even catching on her red-stitched cape. “Hey, kid. Why’d you even bring me here anyway? I wouldn’t say no to eating some Mafia souls, but I expected more action.”

“Oh, I didn’t bring you here to beat up Mafia- Mu had that covered!” Hattie explained. “I brought you here because you know about law and governing and stuff, and she doesn’t, so I thought you could help her.”

Ear tufts pinned back beneath his hat, Snatcher scowled. “You want to saddle me with a preteen Mafia Boss? Absolutely not.”

Hattie gave him a look. Took off her hat, stuck her arm shoulder-deep into the thing like somebody going noodling. Held up her prize triumphantly, unrolling it to reveal an old-fashioned parchment contract.

“I despise you,” Snatcher said, flopping to his belly dramatically, so his enormous eyes were level with the girls. Mu discreetly scooted away from the yellow-hot glows. “The hat was definitely not worth it.”

Hattie said nothing, waggling the contract insistently.

Snatcher rolled lazily back into his usual upright coil, “Fine. Since I am contract-bound to do so, I will provide you with advice on governing for specific questions you may have.” A moment of thought. “Also, you have to come to me for that. I am not at your beck and call.”

“I don’t think that will be a problem,” Mu said, since she absolutely intended never to take that offer unless there was an active war raging on every volcanic slope. If there was ever more proof needed that Hattie was not fishing from the same ocean as the rest of them, this was it. Claiming a Being as family and poking it with demands? It was like gazing upon a hurricane that lived and raged and could bite and saying ‘I’m adopting that’. Absolutely insane.

She was currently Mu’s best and only friend though, so she’d have to live with it. Somehow.

But Mu had far bigger fish to fry, now. She’d start by finding where her uncle Ozzy went, after leaving the Mafia-infested island to search for new lands…

--

Silent as mist, Camellia crept across the tundra, wet snow crunching beneath her stone weight. The sky was dark, but clear of snow-clouds for the first time in centuries, the magic-fueled blizzard finally ending with the queen’s life.

Slowly, the border of eternal winter was retreating- there had been snowmelt-soaked mud for a mile past the bridge, where before the frost tested at the stone bridge like creeping fingers. Eventually, Camellia and Snatcher would seal that border off for real, once Omnoc realized their cursed southernmost region was no longer uninhabitable.

But for now, Cam shouldered the old brown sack on her shoulder, and walked on, past ice-rotted homes and brown-streaked ice-spikes and chunks of calved glaciers.

The lake was water instead of ice, now, long-dead fish floating on the surface. The manor on the hill was similarly dead, lights extinguished and occupants silent.

This was what Camellia was here for.

There was one last thing to be done, and since her friend had been adamantly avoiding this place still, it was up to Camellia.

After all, she’d only died here- a spear-sized icicle, practically destroyed her head. But what happened to Luka in this manor- well, it was best not to think about it.

She entered through the front, ice-rimed wood doors flung open carelessly and two-fingered bloodstains trailing across them.

Camellia entered, her stone vessel stiff with her anxiety despite the fact that the manor’s mistress was no longer stalking the halls. She stopped, nearly tripping on the rumpled carpet.

Well. The alien kid’s soul certainly left a mess.

The spotty stains of blood-brown led Camellia to the end of the hall, by the queen’s billiards room. The window Vanessa was slumped against was blood-painted, the full moonlight shining through the red smears like grisly stained glass.

The queen herself was glacier-still, stiff and blessedly unresponsive when Camellia dragged the body away from the window by its feet. Though the rest of her seemed untouched, Vanessa’s throat was a mess- congealed blood and exposed flesh and finely-frayed muscle, torn so deep and so far that Camellia could see the pale cracks of a broken spine. Like the queen had been savaged by a wild animal.

At least she wasn’t in pieces. Made Cam’s job much easier.

She dropped her rucksack and rummaged through it, unearthing a box of salt and a glass of lantern-oil, which she dumped on the corpse. She threw the bag over her shoulder, empty, and retrieved the spark-stones from her cloak’s inside pocket.

The queen lit up like a harvest bonfire. She wouldn’t be leaving any vengeful ghosts, and with the body destroyed there wouldn’t be any horizon-spirits running around wearing Vanessa’s corpse and memories.

Camellia scattered the remaining drops of lantern-oil behind her as she left the manor, hoping it would be enough to burn the old thing to the ground. There was nothing else important she felt the need to search for, and Luka’s corpse was no longer here- disintegrated after he first started to change into what he was now.

Camellia returned home, and for the first time in centuries, Queen Vanessa’s home was warm.

--

Hattie lingered outside the heart-tree, out of sight from the entrance. Her latest Time Piece acquisition was stored away in her ship, and the rift was patched up. All that was left was the shimmery pages in her hands, silk-sheened memories flattened into images on paper like a storybook.

Usually the flattened concentrations of the Time Rift subject’s memories were fun, like a little secret the world whispered into her ear. This whisper was far heavier than the rest, weighted with a connection that made it personal.

This was how he died.

Snatcher had kept most of his human life hidden from her, one cold shadow in a sea of darkness. She knew some things, from when her curiosity outweighed her common sense, or when their dreams mingled when they were still sharing the same body, or even when the whirling dissociated memories from her soul’s time possessing Snatcher’s body finally settled.

The visceral reaction her soul had when faced with Vanessa certainly made sense, now, as did the old scars along his arms, where the feathers grew in thinner. Even if the mind didn’t remember, the body certainly did- a purely instinctual response from Snatcher’s vessel, even if the soul inside it wasn’t his own.

Vanessa had hurt him terribly- a death hanging in an old cellar was not a quick one- and from the vague hints and images she caught during their body-sharing adventure, it had been far from the first time Vanessa hurt him.

Hattie wasn’t blind. She knew some people were terrible, and hurt their family or their partners, but that was different from knowing it happened to someone you cared about. She didn’t even know how to handle this kind of thing with a normal brother, let alone a weird-adopted-Being one.

Blegh. It was so much easier to talk about feelings when she didn’t need to actually talk.

She lingered for a while, stuck behind the threshold as if there was an invisible barrier across it.

“Paint a picture, kid, it’ll last longer,” grumbled Snatcher from his chair, and Hattie jumped.

Delicately she stepped into the doorway, storybook clutched to her chest. Best to get this over with. Like ripping off a gross bandage. “So you know the kinda- uh- weird memory imprints in some Time Rifts?”

He peered over the book- borrowed from her spaceship, and looking ridiculously tiny in his claws- “Yeah? We went through one in the Skyline. Trippy place.”

“Well, uh. Here.” Hattie shuffled forward, placing the book on the ottoman. “One of the Time Pieces must have landed on her, or something, but it’s- yeah.” She explained lamely.

Curious, now, Snatcher picked up the book. Flipped through it. And slammed it closed, dropping it back onto the ottoman like it was made of liquid nitrogen. “How- you- of course, if it landed near her somehow-” He dragged fingers down his face, for once looking just as old as his three hundred years.

“If it helps, I already kinda knew some of it? Because of, y’know.” She gestured first from his head, then to hers.

“... I suppose you did,” Snatcher said, looking both pained and oddly ashamed. Then glared at the innocuous storybook, like it would bite him. “At least I know what set her off, this time.”

This time? “Wait, what did you think it was before?” Hattie asked, knowing she was treading on quicksand.

Snatcher snorted. “What it always is. Politics, and borders, and things like that.” Deliberately, he looked away from the closed book. “I did a lot of digging in the personal effects of abandoned or destroyed homes, and found some interesting stuff.”

Moving on from his interpersonal relationships, and on to grumbling governments and shifting borders- a diversion from his personal connection to Vanessa, one Hattie took gladly. “What did you find?”

A pricked ear-tuft, mimicking an arched brow. “Seemed like Mother dearest and more than half the Clan Heads were gunning for secession, once Omnoc had an heir of Subconite heritage born. She, of course, neglected to inform me of her eventual plans, since among those who personally met the queen, she was a known paranoiac. And Mother couldn’t have her remaining heir slip up and blab to the queen, hm?” He sighed. “I just figured Vanessa found out about those plans, and decided everyone connected to the perceived betrayal had to die.”

Hattie nodded decisively. “So she was nutso. Got it.”

Snatcher barked out a scraping laugh. “Hah! Few logs short of a bonfire, for sure.”

Hattie crawled onto the ottoman, carefully avoiding touching the book beside her. “I’m glad she’s gone. And I’m glad you’re here,” She said frankly.

A heavy, awkward pause, before Hattie picked up the little sheaf of secrets committed to not-paper. “Hey. Wanna burn this up?”

“Oh, absolutely.”

--

The fire was probably a lot bigger than it needed to be just to burn a little storybook, but it felt nice anyways.

Gaze distant, Hattie pulled her eyes from the fire, and looked up at the sky- full of once-foreign constellations, now familiar. “I wonder if the rest of my family even knows I’m alive,” she wondered aloud. “It feels almost like I’m tricking them, somehow.” Like my inevitable funeral was just a really bad-taste prank.

Snatcher sighed, chin on the ground, eyes still fixated on the fire. “Yeah, and you made your decision. Live with it.”

Hattie spat a raspberry at him, flopping down onto her back to face the stars fully. “Oh, that's so helpful, thanks.”

“And it’s true,” he retorted. “You seemed pretty dang sure of your decision before launching us to that courthouse, and you’re not the kind of person to have many doubts.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean I don’t wonder.” She turned her head to face him where he was coiled, his fluffy mane just barely within reach, should she decide to touch it. “What about you? I know your sister left before the ice-storm. Did you ever wonder about her?”

“Again with the personal questions,” he complained. And stole her hat in what was certainly retaliation, placing it on his own head. “You already know she ditched Subcon for Fairview City- she told me that much before she left.”

“Yeah, but did you ever wonder about the rest of your family beyond her?”

Did she mourn you, the same way my aunts and uncles and cousins are mourning me and my parents?

Snatcher stilled. Then groaned dramatically, echoing like trees moaning in the wind. “Oh spirits, she always wanted a whole pack of children. Don’t make me think about it, please.”

Hattie grinned mischievously, giving in to temptation and tugging gently on his feathers. “And you never visited for the Long Night bonfire or the Equinox feast? What a terrible uncle you are, for shame!”

“I had bigger concerns at the time than bringing gifts to Apolonia’s potential brood,” Snatcher said wryly. “And it’s far too late for that, anyway. Most sentients don’t live for centuries.”

“Hm. I think you would have been an okay-ish uncle, though. You’re an okay-ish brother, at least.”

“I’m an awesome brother, I’ll have you know!” Snatcher retorted. “The absolute coolest guy you’ll ever meet.”

“I’ve seen you reading obituaries for fun, you weirdo. Sooo not cool at all!” Hattie slung back at him, mood lightened.

But beneath the surface-smoke level of banter, Hattie wondered. About the Tempus council, and if they noticed the blip in the radar as she fixed Earth. About Time, and why it left Mu alive, touched her, even after she trespassed. About a long-dead Subconite woman and her descendants.

Hattie was almost finished gathering the remaining Time Pieces. And she might have some ideas of what to do next.