After the meeting, Ana felt numb. She’d gone with Tellak to practice her shaping and had done well, managing to coat her whole arm in a protective shell of mana that resisted a knife’s edge very well. A notification had even told her that she’d learned the Skill — Shaping had its own little category, Magic, in her Skills list — and Tellak and Touanne had congratulated her. They’d started working on masking her emotions, too, which was very different and yet very similar to her shield, involving exercises to create a simple mana construct that canceled out whatever ripples she created unconsciously. Then she’d gone home, which by now meant Messy’s apartment.

  After she’d undressed and curled up in Messy’s arms, Messy had asked her, “Angel, are you okay?”

  Ana had answered honestly: “No, I’m not.” Messy deserved that. Then she’d snuggled in closer, pulled Messy’s arm tighter around herself, and said, “But I will be. This helps.”

  Messy had accepted that, kissed the top of her head, and pretended to sleep until Ana drifted off herself.

  She’d woken perhaps four hours later. It was all she needed. She’d practically attacked Messy, kissing her with a hunger that she’d never felt before, as though the calm and comfort that had been stolen from her could somehow be found in the elfin woman’s skin and lips. Then she’d cried softly for a while, apologizing over and over while Messy stroked her hair and told her that it was okay, and would have actually been very pleasant if not for the tears.

  “I wish I could want you the way that you deserve,” Ana whispered between sniffles.

  “It’s all right, Angel,” Messy said, and Ana believed her. She had to believe her. “Enough people have wanted me for my body. I love knowing that you want me for everything else.”

  With most of the morning free, they had breakfast and then went directly to Tellak and Touanne, only stopping to tell master Renvi that Messy had militia business to deal with. He gave her the day off with his blessing.

  Ana knew something was wrong even before they opened the door to Touanne’s shop. The door was unlocked, and when she opened it the sounds of screaming and banging that Ana’s high Perception had picked up even in the street became a cacophony of noise.

  Below it all, Ana heard the sound of sniffling. “Back here,” Touanne’s voice, strained and rough, said in response to the bell above the door jingling.

  Ana and Messy rushed to the door which led from the front room to the rest of the building. They stopped in the doorway. Touanne sat on the floor across from the locked room where they kept Jancia, her legs pulled up to her chest and her face buried in her knees. Tellak knelt next to her, holding her awkwardly and clearly not sure what to do.

  The cause of the noise and Touanne’s distress was no mystery. Jancia’s door rattled and shook, with occasional loud whams as the woman on the other side bashed, kicked, or threw herself against it, all the while keeping up a hoarse, half hysterical torrent of abuse.

  “Let me out! Let me out, you fucking cunts! I’ll kill you! Let me go! I’m going to the Waystone! Do you hear me? I’ll tear your fucking eyes out! Let! Me! Go!”

  And so on, and so forth. Not the sort of things you’d want to hear from a friend that you’re trying to help.

  “She’s pretty bad this morning,” Tellak said lamely, too preoccupied with trying to comfort Touanne to show anything like the steady face she usually wore. “She usually tires herself out more quickly than this.”

  Ana and Messy stood silent, watching the two women on the floor as the screaming and banging continued. “Is she like this every morning?” Ana finally asked.

  “Like I said, this is worse than normal. But recently she’s been waking up furious most days, yes. Today she just happens to be so bad that even I can’t go in there, and Touanne…”

  “I have to do the least harm,” Touanne mumbled, then turned her tear-streaked face up, looking from Ana and Messy to Tellak and back. “I want so badly to let her out, but I can’t. Right? The least harm?”

  “Yeah, Mistress Touanne,” Messy said kindly. “Letting her out now would end up with her and maybe a bunch of other people badly hurt.”

  Touanne pressed her forehead back into her knees. “Right.”

  Ana watched Touanne slowly retreat into herself and took a decision. “Messy,” she said. “Open the front door. Tellak, stay here. I imagine Jancia’s going to need you when she calms down.”

  With that, she walked up, crouched, and picked Touanne up in a princess carry. With Ana’s Strength it was easy, and Touanne didn’t resist or protest. Instead, she wordlessly put her arms around Ana’s neck, and moved her face from her own knees to Ana’s shoulder.

  “Where are you taking her?” Tellak said as Ana turned toward the front door. She wasn’t protesting either, just asking.

  “Anywhere she can’t hear the screaming. The square, I guess.”

  Tellak nodded once, and Ana carried Touanne out of the shop, with Messy in tow.

  “Is this any better?” Ana asked as she set Touanne down at the foot of the Waystone. “I know the Waystone is part of this whole mess but—”

  “It’s fine. Thank you,” Touanne said, sniffling and wiping her eyes.

  “How’s your work with the book going?”

  Touanne brightened a fraction, clearly grateful for the distraction. “Oh! I was hoping to tell you today, and here you are! I made a breakthrough, of sorts, after you left last night. About the crystals. They’re mana constructs! Can you believe that? Solid, self-sustaining, self-propagating mana constructs with multiple effects! That’s how it could affect the Waystone, too. They’re not of flesh, or mineral, or anything like that; they’re pure mana! When Jancia brought the crystals growing in her into contact with the Waystone it simply triggered one of the functions of the construct: disrupt the Waystone. Whoever designed the ritual to create them must have been an absolute genius; if their purpose wasn’t so horrid I’d have loved to meet them.”

  “Okay, that’s interesting. What does that mean for us?”

  “That it might be easier to fix than I’d feared. I was looking into reversing the entire implantation ritual, but now I think it might be possible to dismantle the crystals themselves. Any mana construct can be dismantled if you’re careful enough. I just need to figure out which thread to pull on to unravel the whole thing, and then design a ritual to do that safely.”

  “What about protecting against infection?”

  Touanne’s face fell for a moment, then turned thoughtful. “Perhaps in time, but I doubt I’d be able to do anything in the time we have. It would need to be… no. Not realistically.“

  “All right. Do you have what you need for the ritual?”

  “It’s hard to say for certain until it’s designed, but most likely. The design will be the hard part. I’ll have to go entirely on theory, since I can’t test it on Jancia. If I do it wrong, and the constructs collapse instead of being dismantled in a controlled way, it would be— you heard what happened when I removed a crystal surgically, yes?”

  “I heard.”

  Touanne shuddered. “The crystals have invaded her mana channels. If they’re not dismantled properly, removing them will leave gaping holes in the ethereal body, and then the physical body can’t hold mana. It just bleeds away, the body fails, and the soul flees. So we must be careful.”

  Ana nodded, silently adding “Acquire guinea pigs” to the things they needed to do outside the palisade. They’d have to be careful, indeed.

  As they sat, thunder rolled across a cloudless sky. People stopped to look up in confusion, and Touanne whispered, “Oh, that’s not good.”

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  “Why?” Ana whispered back, as confused as anyone.

  “We’ve never had thunder here before, as far as I know. It could be a sign of the splinter becoming unstable.”

  “She’s right,” Messy said. “Never had thunder or lightning for as long as I’ve been here.”

  “Anything we can do about it?” Ana asked.

  Touanne shook her head. “At the moment? No.”

  “In that case,” Messy said, gently patting Touanne on the shoulder before rising, “I’m going to check on Jancia and Tellak.”

  Messy returned to say that Jancia had calmed down, was very sorry, and that Tellak was comforting her. Once they were all back at the shop Ana practiced masking, while Tellak took care of her friend, and Messy did what she could to help Touanne in the lab until it was time for the morning’s training.

  The large-scale exercise, with around fifty people clashing all at once in the training yard, went surprisingly well. There was some level of chaos, of course, but that was only to be expected. None of them had ever done anything similar.

  “Spears, for sure,” Messy said to Ana as they took a break to switch sides. Messy, who'd been one of the unarmed and frenzied attackers, would now be on the defending side. “We need spears, and lots of them. See those guys over there?” She pointed to two men and two women who were smiling and laughing together nearby.

  “Those four stood shoulder to shoulder, all with staves, and trying to get at them was a nightmare. I’d say that anyone who doesn't have a strong Perk or Ability-related reason to use something else should have a spear, if possible.”

  “Yeah?” Ana thought about it. She’d thought about giving people spears if they could get a large part of the population to join them, but that was mostly from a resource and ease of use angle. Large formations of spear- or pikemen had been the basic building block of an army for millennia, all over the world, she knew that much, but she hadn’t really considered that spears would be that much more effective. Didn’t the Romans switch to swords and start winning all over the place? “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah. With a proper, sharp spearhead we’d probably need some kind of crossguard to really keep the crazies back, though.”

  “All right,” Ana said. “Let’s try it.”

  Stepping up in front of the guardhouse wall, Ana raised her voice. “Listen up! Listen! Thank you. We’re trying something, all right? Anyone who doesn't have a very high Skill level with a specific type of melee weapon, or an Ability that’s restricted to certain weapons, get inside and grab a staff! We’re doing spears. Also, new rule: attackers, if you get knocked down, go to the end of the field and attack again! Defenders, if you go down, you’re still dead.”

  There was some confused muttering about that. Not about the new rules, but about the spears. The weapons weren't very popular, since they were considered less effective against demons, which needed their heads cut off or caved in to kill them. Still, enough people hopped to follow Ana’s orders that the rest went with the flow.

  The results spoke for themselves. When the next round started, three quarters of the defenders had practice spears or staves, and the attackers found it significantly harder to get any paint on the defenders. Even with the attackers being allowed to “respawn” over and over, it took more than twice as long before the first defender was pulled off her feet. Not everyone was happy about the choice of weapons, but nobody could deny that they were effective in the exercise.

  They switched the teams again. They tried with the defenders outnumbered three to two. The defenders still had a significant advantage, even when the goal was to not get touched at all. From there Ana kept raising the number of attackers, and it was only when the attackers had a two to one advantage that things started falling apart quickly. Of course, the exercises were carried out with no ranged attacks, and no magic of any kind. Adding in those, who could tell?

  And then they were done. The students were panting and talking excitedly, and Ana had half an hour to gather herself and prepare mentally for the meeting that they’d called at noon.

  “You’ll be fine, Angel.” Messy pressed Ana’s hand between her own and gave her a confident smile.

  “All right,” Ana said, squeezing back, doing her best to borrow Messy’s confidence. Then she stepped up on the plinth in front of the Waystone.

  She looked out across the crowd. While she couldn’t recognize nearly every face, as far as she could tell the whole militia had gathered for this. Besides them there were some others who’d stopped to listen when they saw the crowd gathering, and the food vendors who’d set up as normal and glanced her way in between tending to their cooking. There were a lot of people out there, all waiting for her to speak.

  The knot in her gut pulled tighter, and she looked back at Messy, who nodded to her with absolute faith.

  Ana’s entire childhood had taught her that attention was bad. Attention meant that you were about to get bullied, screamed at, mugged, beaten, or worse. She hated attention. Part of what she’d liked about her job was that the attention was always on the client. She wasn’t even supposed to be intimidating. That was what the other, obvious, usually male bodyguard had been for, standing a little to the side and showing everyone that there was someone protecting whoever the client was. Ana had been the orbiter or the fawning girlfriend: harmless, invisible, and right next to the client. All eyes on anyone but her.

  Now she stood in front of — what, almost two hundred people? They’d had a slew of additional volunteers once Mamtass declared his support, and he stood with a crowd of anxious people, obviously not combat Classers. And they were all expecting her to say something big, something wise and important. To give them hope.

  “All eyes on me,” she sighed and turned her back on the crowd. She looked up at the Waystone, the axis around which this whole place rotated, the visible representation of a very real and very present goddess, and she said, “You’d better fucking appreciate this.”

  She put her palm flat on the smooth, black stone. It was hot from the sunlight, and she could feel the currents of mana flowing into it, so much slower than they were supposed to be according to what everyone had told her. Touanne said that it was slowly getting better, but it was still, for all intents and purposes, broken. It wasn’t stabilizing the splinter anymore. It didn’t allow anything in or out. It couldn’t save them.

  Only you, all of you, can do that. And I do appreciate you, Ana. All of you. It's not only your own lives you’re saving if you succeed.

  It was a mix of words and feelings, like a foreign thought in her own head, and the closest to a spoken message the Wayfarer had given her without pulling her into that space between moments. And it helped, if only a little. It reminded her to focus on the big picture.

  There were a lot of lives at stake here. That had to be worth some discomfort.

  Behind Ana, the crowd had gradually gone as silent as such a number of people could. She turned to face them. All eyes were, indeed, on her.

  She'd thought a lot about what to say. She could do this.

  Her mask of calm came on, and she suppressed her emotions the best she could.

  “Militia members of this outpost.” Her voice came out strong and clear, far more steady than she felt. “Officers, conscripts, and volunteers. Anyone else who may have joined us. Fellow members of the Bluesky Guild. Thank you for coming. My name is Anastasia Cole. I’ve also been called ‘Knife Girl’ or ‘that bitch who keeps making us fight each other.’ You may know me.”

  There was a ripple of good-natured laughter at that. Most of them had trained under her the last few days, after all.

  “You all know the situation we find ourselves in. We’re surrounded by an unexpected enemy, and we can neither escape nor receive help through the Waystone. Most of our most capable fighters are away, and we have not heard from them in far too long. The situation is dire.

  “I’m standing here now to tell you that it's worse than we thought. Captain Falk’s expedition will not return. They have failed, and are trapped in a Delve, while our enemy grows more numerous by the day.”

  She paused to let the worried susurrus those words sparked die away, ignoring the scattered questions that were shouted at her.

  “I am also here to tell you that there’s hope! But only if we’re willing to fight for it. Only if we're willing to go on the offensive. As long as we're willing to risk everything, we may rescue our friends! We may still make it out of this alive!

  “I know this, because the Wayfarer has spoken to me.”

  The wave of noise that followed that declaration, a mix of shock, excitement, and outrage, never quite died out. Ana had to raise her voice to be heard, something that was easy with her inflated Strength and Endurance.

  “Some people have called me the Wayfarer’s Chosen. I don’t know about that, but I have met her, face to face. I have looked her in the eye as she told me that the survivors of the expedition are trapped, and that we will die if we do not take the initiative. She has told me that our enemy’s goal is nothing less than the destruction of this splinter, which will destabilize other splinters as well. For this reason, we must succeed. We must take the fight to our enemy, whoever they are.”

  As Ana spoke, the crowd fell silent. Eyes grew wide, and mouths opened. Except for a few disbelieving whispers from some people to their neighbors, no one spoke.

  Ana didn’t question it. She plowed on. She felt strong now, and confident. She could do this. This was right. What they were planning was right, and it would work, and if she could only communicate that, they would be that much closer to surviving this crisis.

  “The first step in this is to rescue our farmers. Most of the farms lie in ruins, but five still hold out. We, the officers appointed to lead this militia, have already committed ourselves to making sure that no one else dies out there. Tomorrow morning we are sallying forth to destroy or drive off the enemy force surrounding the Servemel farm. By doing so we will prove to ourselves and to our enemy that we will not be cowed. We will not wait meekly for the end to come. We will strike back. We will preserve the lives of our fellow sapients and Guild members.”

  Her voice rose to a crescendo that filled the square and beyond. “Tomorrow morning, I am going out that gate together with ten brave officers. There we will claim our first victory against an enemy that has kept us on the defensive for too long. I invite each and every one of you to join us as we strike back!”

  She took a deep breath, and the fervor left her. “Speak to your group’s officer if you’re interested. Thank you for your attention, and I’ll see groups six through ten in an hour.”

  Ana had expected the crowd to start breaking up when she descended from the plinth, or at least to start talking again. The silence that hung over the square, and the way they all watched her as she approached Messy, who stood with Petra and the others from Kaira’s casuals group, made the fuzz at the back of her neck stand on end. Even her friends, she realized, were simply watching her with awe as she approached.

  “The fuck’s going on, Mess?” she whispered once she got close enough. “Why’s everyone staring?”

  “Angel,” Messy breathed. And the way she said it, she wasn’t just addressing Ana. She was making a statement, and as she spoke she became more and more excited. “Ana… you had wings. From the moment you questioned if you were the Wayfarer’s Chosen, until you stepped down, you had wings! Twelve feet wide, ethereal goddamn wings!”

  Ana turned back and looked at the Waystone. Fucking drama queen, she thought, but there was no anger in it. What was the point in being angry at a goddess trying to help her save all of their lives?

  Despite not being anywhere close to the obelisk, she could swear that she heard the Wayfarer laughing.

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