“Llewyn.”

  “What about Llewyn?”

  Ike pointed at himself.

  Wisp furrowed her brows, only to raise them and widen her eyes in the next minute. “Ohhh. Yikes. No thanks, dude.”

  “I agree, but…”

  “You destroyed him, didn’t you? Wouldn’t you have absorbed him then?” she asked.

  Ike shrugged. “Maybe? He’s a puppet, and it’s not like I shattered his core. It’s very possible he just… retreated, somehow. However Brightbriar puts souls into puppets, there’s surely also a way for the souls to escape the puppets, right? And maybe even move around from puppet to puppet.”

  “So that green-haired bastard probably isn’t dead,” Wisp muttered. A second later, she snapped her fingers and pointed at Ike.

  “What?”

  “Your dad! We figured it out. Your dad’s Brightbriar!”

  “Is he?” Ike asked. Even as he did, he felt the answer from the Prince and the King. Brightbriar was their father. He always had been, and always would be. Even with Rosamund, whom Ike hadn’t absorbed, he’d positioned himself as her father. If Ike didn’t know his father, then his father was Brightbriar: so spoke every part of him.

  It made a cold kind of sense. Why would Brightbriar be obsessed with some random kid? But if he was Brightbriar’s son, of course he was obsessed. Ordinary parents were obsessed with their children, let alone a homicidal puppet-building maniac. All those times he’d let Ike go, all those times he’d looked the other way—all because Ike was his son.

  “Who’s a human, so you figured out nothing,” Ike returned, deadpan, as he remembered why Wisp was bringing this up at all. It still hadn’t resolved the aether issue Wisp was so fond of bringing up.

  “Oh, sure he is, sure he is. You think ol’ puppet-fucker hasn’t puppetized himself by now?”

  Ike opened his mouth, then shut it. He wrinkled his nose. “Yuck.”

  “I’m just saying. You’re half-puppet, Ikey-boy.”

  “How the hell would that work? Explain that to me. How does a puppet inseminate a woman?” Ike asked, crossing his arms.

  Wisp spread her hands. “That’s for you to figure out. I only have yellow-ichored spiders in my history. True, biological, no-blooded spiders. I don’t need to figure out how a puppet got it on with a human lady and knocked her up. That’s what we call your problem.”

  “Gods,” Ike muttered, rubbing the bridge of his nose. Somehow, after all the earth-shattering revelations he’d just handled, Wisp somehow brought up a yet more groundshaking truth, one he was less prepared to handle than the rest of them. How the hell was I made? If Brightbriar really was a puppet, and hell, why wouldn’t he be, when he could make puppets so powerful that they were virtually immortal, then how on earth had he had a child?

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  Wisp grinned, happy to have caused a problem. “He’s a puppet-fucker and a puppet-fucker and a puppet-fu—”

  “We get the idea, thanks, Wisp,” Ike interrupted her. He dusted off his hands. “Come on. We know Brightbriar’s in the area, and if he set this up, then I bet he set something to alert him when it collapses.” Who knew if he’d try to stop Ike from absorbing his pieces or not, but Ike didn’t want to hang around and find out. “Let’s clear out before daddy dearest shows up.”

  Wisp made a puking face. “Hearing you call him daddy is a big yuck from me.”

  “Yeah? Now you know how I feel. Mag, anyone on the horizon?”

  Mag, who’d been perched on a stone petal overhead blissfully out of earshot—perhaps intentionally—looked up when Ike shouted to him. “Not yet.”

  “Let’s hit the road. There’s another ruined region that way,” Ike pointed off to the horizon. It was a long ways off, but he had no better ideas. The only other thing that came to mind was going to meet Scar in the central city in his region… but this seemed more important. Not to mention, it felt like an easy way to power up and grow his Rank. If he could absorb a few more fragments as powerful as the Prince and the King, Rank 4 wouldn’t be a dream. “Dunno if it’s got any me in it, but I say we go find out.”

  “You got it, boss.”

  The three of them set off toward the horizon. Out over the deadlands, through lands where rock was the only thing to break the monotonous flat horizon. In the far distance, mountains yet again broke the monotony, marking the edge of this flat, bowl-like region. His home region was split with mountains, with several ranges separating the various cities, so it was strange to see such a vast valley. Looking at it, he felt like he understood why the King had been able to defend his lands, and why the Prince had failed… would have failed, if he’d tried. The King’s lands were dense with mountains, so hilly and mountainous that the desert at the edge of his region stood out as flat land. Here, he stood in a plains that spread off to seemingly infinity, a vast region of flat land with little change in elevation. If an invading force got past the mountains, there was little in the geography to assist in defending the lands until they retreated to the mountains on the far side of the region. It was a less-than-ideal place to hold, and he couldn’t help but wonder if Brightbriar had deliberately put one of his more weak-willed ‘children’ in charge of such a place.

  Of course, that only brought up more questions, like: why were he and all Brightbriar’s children all shards of one greater being? Were they all copies of Brightbriar’s original son, whoever he was, split into a thousand pieces as the years marched on? Why not just give up, if his son was really so irredeemable in Brightbriar’s eyes, that whether his son held a region or fell over in a rebellion, he was still seen as a failure?

  Is this all some sick attempt to craft the perfect child? Ike wondered, looking at his hands. If that were the case, though, Brightbriar had been shockingly out of his life. He’d never met the man. His first skill had fallen to him by luck, not by…

  Wait. His first skill had come to him when Brightbriar had held a birthday party for Rosamund. He’d been one of the lucky few to escape with an intact skill, and not just that, but a Unique skill. Was that all part of Brightbriar’s master plan? Some kind of mysterious hands-off approach to parenting?

  Ike chuckled under his breath. If that was the case, then he had more than a few bones to pick with Brightbriar, for letting him languish under his abusive uncle for so long, when he could have been lying in the lap of luxury.

  The Prince’s memories welled up, and Ike immediately sighed. Right. Brightbriar had tried that, once, and it hadn’t worked out well. Was his horrible childhood, then, some last ditch fuck-it-I-don’t-care attempt to create a different type of child?

  That actually tracks, Ike realized, frowning a little. After all, Brightbriar was raising Rosamund at the same time. Maybe he really was a shot in the dark, a ‘throw it and let’s see where it falls’ child, while Rosamund was his serious attempt to raise the perfect child. If he’d tried everything else, and nothing had worked, why not try the complete random approach?

  Hopefully there’s not too many other shot-in-the-dark kids out there, Ike thought to himself, snorting. He’d have a seriously hard time collecting all the fragments if that were the case.

  The road ground on. The three of them crossed the land at speed, running along at a good fraction of their top speed. The next region approached.

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