Having studied the issue from multiple perspectives over my long career, I feel the need to challenge the established canon. It is my expert opinion that the crusade was constituted of culture rather than of arms, no matter what the old geezers might tell you. I understand the danger in this interpretation, but the truth always shines through. With the evidence I have collected, there will be no other recourse.

  -Written by an unknown historian, her name lost to time

  I knew she was bluffing. After I come down from the mountain trail, bouncing on my feet and tossing the stone core in the air over and over again, I find Jess exactly where I left her, lying back on the boulder and bathing in sunlight. Despite all her talk about one hour, she makes me wait until nightfall before we start.

  We stack a fire out on the flat plateau, next to the ship, content to stare up at the night sky and watch the stars slowly appear from the expanse. Their twinkling light is always a marvel anytime I actually take the time to look, and the full moon is already high in the sky by the time the night arrives in full. Jess smashes the orange shells of some insect monster we hunted weeks back in a mortar, adding an array of powders and oils until she has a thick and bright paste. She applies the orange to my face, tracing intricate lines with her pointed claw, snapping at me each time I fail to sit fully still for her. The paste runs down my neck in a sloping pattern, forming curls on my shoulders, and coming to intersecting lines near my navel, just a slight distortion where they cross over the jagged scar on my left side.

  I stare into a large saucer filled with water while she repeats the markings on her own face and body, claws moving deftly despite her not even looking to a reflection for assistance. I look wild, my orange hair made frizzy from the heat of the fire and almost matching the lines in color and chaotic pattern. The paint stands out far brighter and more beautifully on Jess’ scales. She sets the bowl aside holding out a hand to me, beckoning me to sit across the fire from her.

  Back in Westgrove, there is not so much ceremony to this. When I watched Halford advance to the second rank, he meditated for a long time as we watched on, eventually manifesting his soul and trapping it in a cage. I like Jess’ way better.

  “Tonight, we shall reflect upon the shards of our greater being for the first time,” she says to me, her words strangely accented, as if she is repeating them by rote. “We shall call out to the veil where it lingers, begging its passage into this world of mortality and pain, and in its light and shape we shall see a reflection of ourselves, of our future and past. Contemplate this, understand it, for the energy in the divine is more you than this mortal shell.”

  I politely decline saying that I have seen my soul already, many times in fact. I nod to Jess. She nods to the box we set near the fire, a bit of irritation in her glance, like I am screwing up some part that she already explained to me. Ignoring that, I slide the box my way, dipping my hand inside and pulling free the soul cage of sparkling crystal from inside. In the light of the flickering flame, the crystal glows a pulsing orange, and it feels right in my hand somehow.

  “My prison,” I say, the only words she told me to say before we began.

  Jess slides the box toward herself, pulling free a soul cage made of feathersteel, one she made herself with what she managed to salvage from the metal I gave to her before we began this expedition. It is a wonderful piece, bands of interlaced chain as thin as a hair all coiling around one another. The runes are not set into the metal as I have seen with all other soul cages but painted on in purple geometry. Flecks of mica in the paint catch the firelight, making the entire thing seem to sparkle.

  “My prison,” Jess says. As one, we stand, each holding our soul cages before us. “When next we come together, it shall be as two different women, but sisters.”

  I nod, turning a second after her, eyes scanning the darkness outside the reach of our fire. The sounds of Jess’ feet padding off into the dark grow quiet as she descends the mountain eastward, toward a clearing she told me of before. I grab two more logs and toss them over the fire before leaving the campsite, the place of my own ascension long since picked and prepared, gravel crunching beneath my naked feet.

  The glade is by far the most serene place I have found on the mountain. A pool of placid water catches the moonlight, burning a pale white as I step from the trees. Opposite the pool from me, a doe and her fawn lap at the water, their ears flicking as I enter the glade. They do not notice me until I reach the cushion I set before the water, my footfalls on the dewy grass far too soft. The mother deer looks up, and for a moment our eyes meet, and then she darts away. I stand upon the cushion, looking over the fawn, something in the eyes of the animal striking a sad chord within my heart. It moves away through the swaying stalks, loping silently into the forest beyond the glade and vanishing.

  My breath hurts when next I take it in, but I force myself down onto the cushion, ignoring the heat rising at the back of my neck. Once again, I have reached the threshold, and once again I will cross over.

  I know no fancy tricks of meditation; such things are made for those that do not recover as quickly as I do. Merely, I attempt to repeat what I saw my brother do, closing my eyes before the water and trying to reach out, to touch that piece of my soul that has been travelling to me for months now. Then I am there, floating in a voidscape punctuated by an infinite number of wan lights floating in the distance and sitting in the glade both.

  Two things float before me. To my left is a simple shape of dull silver, twelve sides slowly revolving, more than half taken up by runes dedicated to the magic I have stored in the soul index. To my right, the huge manifestation that I know to be my soul. The concentric geometries, the largest faceted with too many sides to count, the smallest most center one with less than five. Two runes are burned into the surface of one of the center shapes, one bearing the symbol for cold and the other fire. Further out, on a spinning geometry of more sides shines the symbol for growth. Occasionally, as all the shapes turn in chaotic resonance, the symbols overlap with each other, and a beam of power attempts to manifest in the space between, a sound like a pure note ringing through the dark. How many hours have I spent staring at the spinning shapes, trying to puzzle out the mystery of my own soul.

  I lose track of time, staring at the beautiful geometry, my mind lost in my own puzzlement. Then I feel a connection, something reaching out of the vastness of my soul, a hollowness in my gut, a slight tug inward, and I know its destination to be this. Somehow, I know how to pull on that connection. An enormity of weight, a stubborn inertia tears at my guts, both tickling and yanking on my innards, but I do not let go. Flashes of cold and hot crash over me in waves. I become aware of my body out in the glade, sitting and holding the soul cage out in the air before me, sweat dripping from my skin. A ringing sound like an echoing bell resounds and the points of light littering the void seem almost to shimmer. I want to laugh, I want to cry, feeling like my body is trying to turn itself inside out as I haul on a weight far greater than myself, and then it is gone, the void made black.

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  I open my eyes, my left clouded by my own sweat, staring at the bundle of crystal held out in my hands. The orange light of dawn colors the sky on the opposite end of the pool, setting the soul cage in my hand alight with fire. Between the gaps in the bindings of crystal loops, I see it, that shifting bundle of shapes made so small within the cage. My hands move on their own, some instinct older than my race ordering my motions, bringing the soul cage to my breasts. It passes into me as if I were made of rippling water, nestling into the right cavity of my chest like a second heart. A lance of pain forces a gasp, and I double forward, my skin glowing with an eerie light. Then the world vanishes, everything made white in one glorious moment, and the pain banishes all thought.

  When next I realize I am alive, I stare down at a slender hand dipped into the water before me. I stare down into my reflection, knowing that it is me as soon as I set eyes on the girl there. No, she is clearly a woman. Her features are thin and serious, one eye slitted like a serpent's, the other an orb of black with a red iris, staring back up from above high cheek bones, looking as if she is taking me in and dismissing me all at once. Any trace of orange paint is gone from her, likely worn away by hours of sweat. She must be in her early twenties, far older than my mere seventeen years. She is a beauty, no doubt about it, but she wears it in a cold way. Hair, red and possessing a slight wave falls around her, melts off her shoulders like bloody fire, no longer the orange that people like to call red, but a genuine crimson.

  I touch my face, finding my hand transformed as well, the calluses and dirt I have built up over the last months vanished, the skin smooth and without any sign of a blemish. No sign that those hands have ever done anything other than dress myself is in evidence, and the springy skin feels like silk against my fingertips, but there is a strength in it that makes me almost believe it could stop a blade. I try to smile, finding my reflection in the water copying me, and feel myself almost enchanted by myself. I know that I will spend too long staring at myself if I give into that vain desire. There will be plenty of time later for that.

  Standing, I find myself a bit at a loss for balance. The simple trousers and a wrap of bandages around my chest that I came down to the water with drape me in an odd way. Before, there had been some bulk to me, long hours working in the orchard only refined by the integration of the essentia, but my body has slimmed in reaching the second rank. I find for the first time a part of the transformation that I do not like so much, looking at my arms, finding any sign of muscle slight and dense. At the same time, I must have gained a few more inches in height, the main root of the tightness of my trousers, while the bandages around my chest have only grown tighter if anything. No matter, that is why I bought a few sets in all sorts of sizes before leaving Grim.

  I bound back the way I came, my new legs learning the new steps, the new length of my stride, more quickly than should be natural. A giggle escapes me as I run through the twilight dawn, seeing as well as if it were midday and not knowing if that is owed to the light in the sky or the new strength of my eyes. Stepping into the light of the camp, the sight in front of me stops me short.

  At first, I mistake the woman sitting on a cushion by the fire, stabbing the embers with a long stick, for a stranger. How could I not? Jess has changed more than I could have imagined.

  A woman that the darkness makes seem almost human sits at the fire. The hard cast of her scales has been worn smooth, the triangle pattern standing out across her like a print on red skin. Her face has become softer as well but still angular, almost like an elf's, and her mouth boasts a set of lips that I might almost call pouty. The woman has hair now, a lizardkin with hair, a loose crop of black ringing her head in a boyish fashion. She notices me standing on the edge of the camp, her eyebrows raising as she looks me over, actual eyebrows with dark and thin hair. She smiles, finally revealing the sharp teeth that I have seen her flash my way a hundred times before.

  “You did it, sister,” she says, tossing the stick aside and standing. Then, I notice the rest of her has changed as well, the taut skin that still vaguely resembles scales pulled smooth across her stomach and showing off rows of powerful muscle. She also has…there are…Jess now has breasts, there is no other way to say it. Given that, and the usual lack of clothing she is prone to wear, I find myself blushing madly as she wraps me in a hug.

  “I did,” I say, searching for words. “You did too, though it seems you changed far more than I did.”

  She holds me at arms-length, looking me up and down before glancing down at herself. “It would seem that I was further from the creator’s ideal. Tonight, I have grown closer to Sadissa, might this body come to bring light to her vision.”

  “Closer to the creator?” Arabella had said something about theology getting wrapped up in the transformations that magicians underwent when advancing between ranks.

  “Of course.” Jess gestures to her near nakedness. “Do I not strike a resemblance closer to Sadissa now than I ever did before?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I say.

  Her fanged mouth hangs open for a moment before she shrugs and nods. “I suppose that is fair. There are depictions that I need to show to you then. I admit, I only have seen representations of Parfillio, nothing of his wife, the ideal for your women.” Her eyes roam over me once more. “I can only assume that she is quite tall.” She brings her hands up, hands that noticeably do not end in claws, and cups her breasts, looking between the two of us. “I assume that hers are quite large as well, considering what happened to yours. Are larger better?”

  “Are…what?” I step back from her, not exactly certain if this is not all some strange hallucination.

  “When I watched you softskins before, the men seem to find the larger ones more attractive.” She sighs, looking down at herself. “I cannot imagine these as being anything other than a hinderance. Sure, they help to feed and nurture strong young, but how do you not get them chopped off in the middle of a battle.”

  It is impossible to do anything but stare at her.

  She studies me for a moment longer. “Ah, yes. My aunt said that things may become like this. ‘You won’t be so excited to take the second form of our people when in mixed company.’ Now I see what she means. My nakedness did not distress you before, but now I suppose that it may.”

  “No,” I say, waving my hand. “It isn’t that you are naked. It’s just…I suppose I had gotten used to it in a different way.”

  “Not to worry,” Jess squeezes my shoulder, and I notice for the first time that she is nearly a head shorter than me now. “I have prepared for the discomfort of humans beforehand.”

  Before I can say anything, she skips to a basket near the fire and retrieves a huge garment. Jess pulls over herself what looks to be a night shirt, the hem hanging down all the way past her knees, blue linen with darker blue vertical stripes. She holds her hands wide, looking like she just threw on a tent. “See, you should be comfortable now.”

  “Yes,” I lie. “Thank you for the consideration.”

  “We are sisters now,” Jess says. “Looking after one another will be our bond. Now, I don’t know about you, but I could really eat.” She crouches near a wicker basket and begins to pull parcels of paper-bound meat from inside. “I think that it is finally about time to start eating that wolf creature, the one from the rocks.”

  I stare at her as the pale light of the sun’s first rays begin to reach down toward the mountain. I find myself fiddling with my fingers, enjoying the sensation of touching my own skin. Jess begins to hum as she prepares breakfast, and I find myself dropping in beside her, matching her tune in a voice deeper than the one I remember having. As the meat sizzles in the pan, the smell of a delicious meal wafting off the cast iron, the sun fully peaks from behind the far mountain range, and the strangest, most important night of my life, comes to a close.

  Everything else aside, Jess is right about at least one thing, I can’t help but feel bound to her. The next chapter of my life opens, and I find my feet already running down the path.

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