It was extremely cold, yet also comfortable and refreshing. All around Felitïa, hazy images flittered and moved about, many vanishing to be replaced by others. One showed snow-covered mountains. Another was just the face of a young Feodor Belone. He had a hint of a smile just before he vanished.
Another was of an incredibly tall Isyar, taller than even the tallest humans. His hands were on his hips as he gazed down sternly.
No. He wasn’t immensely tall. It was the viewer who was small, just a young child. Was the giant one of Plavistalorik’s parents perhaps?
The Isyar vanished and an image of Felitïa appeared in its place. It was just her face sneering, but there was something off about it. Perhaps it was the general haziness of all the images in this place, but her eyes looked too large, and her face too long. Felitïa didn’t spend a lot of time staring at herself in mirrors, but she felt she knew her own face well enough to know this one wasn’t completely right.
But these were Plavistalorik’s memories, and memory could be a fickle thing. Plavistalorik spent most of her time not looking at people, so it made sense her memory of Felitïa was imperfect.
But why the sneer? Had she ever sneered at Plavistalorik?
So this was Plavistalorik’s mind. It was nothing like Felitïa’s own mind, though she supposed that was to be expected. Now she was here, Felitïa had no idea what to do. The only other times she’d been in someone else’s head were times she had touched Elderaan’s mind through magic, and that time on Scovese when she’d entered Maneshka’s mind. Though on that occasion, it was more accurate to describe it as both their minds entwining together. They had also been making love, so now was nothing at all like that.
Felitïa tried to move. The images around her moved about faster as if she was moving between them, so it seemed to work. A group of Isyar children playing shot past. Then an Isyar child with thin grey eyes. Both her hands were linked with the hands of the viewer—Plavistalorik presumably—and they were spinning in a circle. A sense of joy came through.
Then the image vanished, and a searing shot of sadness passed through Felitïa.
So she could still sense emotions in here. But were these memories of emotions, or ones Plavistalorik was experiencing right now?
There was so much she didn’t understand about what she was doing right now.
She should let Zandrue know…
Oh gods.
She couldn’t see out her actual eyes. She couldn’t feel the floor beneath her, or hear whatever Zandrue and Nin-Akna were up to.
When she was in the Room in her head, she had no trouble operating in the real world at the same time. She had assumed it would be the same here. Gods, that had been a foolish assumption. She had never done anything like this before, and she had only managed it by squeezing through a tiny hole in those damn grey walls. They were presumably stopping her from staying in control of her own body.
What state was she in? Would she even notice if something happened to her?
Dear gods, she had no idea how to get back either. Her body was helpless. Anyone could just…
No. She had to stay calm. Panic would do no good.
You don’t belong here, Will-Breaker.
Felitïa looked around for a source of the voice, but there were only the constantly moving and changing images. You didn’t belong inside my head. I’m just returning the favour.
You couldn’t hold me off in your own head without help. Do you really think you can do so here, where I rule?
Yes. I think it’ll be a lot easier. She hoped she sounded confident and in control because she wasn’t sure she felt it.
There was a hint of fear in the cold though, and that was a good sign. Now she just had to figure out what to do.
In her own head, she always thought of herself as being in various locations—in the Room, or more recently, the memory triggers. Was it the same for Plavistalorik? If she searched, could she find Plavistalorik’s “presence”? Or was Plavistalorik literally everywhere here?
There was only one way to find out.
She started moving through the images, but didn’t get far before she hit...a barrier? There was nothing she could see, but something blocked her way.
She changed directions, but something blocked that way too. She tried backwards, up, down. Could she do other, impossible directions like she could in her own mind? She tried, and this time, on contact with the barrier, pain jolted through her, and she rebounded in the opposite direction, right into one of the floating memories.
The hazy surroundings vanished, as did all the other memories. She was in a room with walls of ice and no ceiling. A table with its surface only a couple feet off the floor dominated the centre of the room, and a grey, vine-like plant grew from the table’s centre.
An Isyar with thin grey eyes sat on a stool beside the table. Felitïa wasn’t sure, but she got the feeling this was the same young Isyar she had seen spinning around with Plavistalorik in the other memory. She was older here—late teens now—but she had the same basic countenance.
“My diare says when I’m finished my elispt, I have to go on a mission for the Pundritta. He said it might take years, decades even.” The speaker was Plavistalorik and as she spoke, her gaze lowered to the ice floor. The words were in Isyarian, but somehow, Felitïa understood them. Perhaps because Plavistalorik understood them and this was Plavistalorik’s memory.
“I know,” the other Isyar said. “My diare told me yours was going to tell you that.”
“You could talk to your diare. He’s the Pundir. He could override my diare. Please, I don’t want to leave you.”
Plavistalorik’s gaze rose just enough to see the other Isyar shake her head sadly, then dropped to look at the floor again.
“The order came from my diare,” the other Isyar said. “I already asked him to change his mind. He won’t. I’m sorry. He...he doesn’t approve of us.”
Sadness and despair washed over Felitïa, and if she had the capability here, she’d be crying just like Plavistalorik was.
Out!
Felitïa shot back into the cold, hazy realm of flittering images, where she collided with one of those invisible barriers.
You will not defile my memories, Will-Breaker!
Something hit her and she reeled back, only for something else to hit her. Multiple things hit her from above, below, in front, behind, and every direction she could think of. They grabbed at her, tearing at her very essence. One by one, pieces of her separated and flew off in different directions.
Felitïa screamed, getting louder and louder as she got smaller and smaller.
There was so little of her left.
Who was she, anyway?
Why had she never wondered that before? Or maybe she had, back when there was more of her. When was that exactly?
Will-Breaker.
Will-Breaker? What was it? Was it important? What did it even mean to be important?
Will-Breaker.
So strange. So…
What?
Help?
What?
Screaming? Still screaming.
“Felitïa!”
What?
That was…
What was it?
“Felitïa!”
A sound. That was it.
A real sound.
Zandrue?
Who?
Screamed louder.
Pulled.
Pulled more.
A piece.
Piece of what?
Of her.
Came back.
Another.
And another.
Thoughts returned. Or rather...cognisance. That was the word.
The pain was unbelievable. It should have been unbearable. She was literally being torn apart.
But there was the thing. It wasn’t her body being torn apart; it was her consciousness. Was pain even a thing for that? She was feeling something she considered pain, but did she need to be?
She pulled back more pieces, even as Plavistalorik tore others away. She couldn’t be sure she was outpacing Plavistalorik though, and she needed to.
And pain was a distraction, so she stopped the pain.
She wasn’t entirely sure how she managed that. She just determined that it should stop and it did.
The pieces of her came back faster. Without the pain, it was easy to locate them and even easier to draw them back. Pieces were being torn off her less quickly now, too, and more sporadically. Like Plavistalorik was distracted or tired.
Zandrue! Had she heard Zandrue a moment ago? It might have just been a hallucination brought on by the pain, but if she had, that meant she had had some sort of contact with her physical body, at least momentarily. That could be a way back.
But there was no time for that. She had to deal with Plavistalorik while the Isyar was distracted.
She was mostly whole again now. There were still a few pieces remaining to bring back, but she could sense they weren’t far. She could draw them in as she moved.
There were still barriers up, but with a few prods, it became apparent the barriers were mostly just blocking memories. It was possible to slip between them, which was fine. She didn’t care about the memories. All that mattered was getting to...whatever was the core of Plavistalorik.
She slipped around a fleeting image of Anita standing between Nin-Akna and Danel, and then another one of the grey-eyed Isyar as a young child again. She slipped past more memories, deeper and deeper into the cold. It was like a never-ending maze. For all she knew, that was exactly what it was.
Felitïa.
Had she heard that earlier too? Maybe. Or maybe it had just been her vanishing consciousness desperately clinging to some aspect of her identity.
Felitïa.
Yet there it was again.
It wasn’t Plavistalorik. Not unless she was disguising her voice, which was entirely possible.
Felitïa.
It sounded like the voices in her head. The ones that endlessly called her name from…
The Room!
She often though of it as “in her head”, but it was a construct of her mind, and her mind wasn’t in her head anymore. It was here. And that meant, so was the Room.
She unfolded it, the black walls knocking aside the floating memories and driving the haziness and cold away. She could “see” as clearly as she normally could in the Room. Everything was as it always was in her head. The queue of people and blurred figures. The Staff floating above them. There were no grey walls, but everything else was the same.
And Plavistalorik’s presence was there.
What are you doing to my head? Plavistalorik screamed.
Felitïa looked at her sadly. What I have to to survive.
You don’t have the strength.
Really? Felitïa stared at her. Stared into her.
An image began to form: the halls and rooms of the palace, moving quickly by as Plavistalorik ran. There were people there now. Servants ducked out of her way. A guard came into view.
“She’s here!” The guard drew a sword and ran towards Plavistalorik, who ran the other way.
“I want that Isyar dead!” It was Danel’s voice.
Felitïa returned to the Room, which was now flooded with terror and hatred, as Plavistalorik’s defences started to fall away. Felitïa reeled slightly before steadying herself.
Looks to me like you’re the one without the strength remaining.
What do you know? Plavistalorik tried to raise her defences again, but Felitïa swiped them away with the black walls. Despair joined the Isyar’s fear and hatred.
I know you can’t last much longer.
You know nothing! You don’t even know how to use your powers. You have a block. You barely know how you got here and you certainly don’t know how to get back. Kill me, and you’ll be stuck here, where you’ll soon expire too.
Perhaps you’re right. But I can’t continue to live the way I have the past couple months, slowly losing my mind, and watching a good friend of mine slowly lose hers. I can’t let you continue to harm others, especially the people I love. If that means I have to die too, so be it.
Felitïa grabbed Plavistalorik. The Isyar’s mind made a last-ditch effort to stop her, throwing up more barriers, but the black walls swept them aside with little effort.
Please! I can tell you things. Secrets you need to know if you wish to prevail in the battles ahead.
Felitïa held her still. She did need to know things, and Plavistalorik likely had answers. The thing is, you are more powerful than me. If you have a chance to rest and recuperate, you’ll get away, probably killing me and others in the process. I can’t let that happen.
No! Please!
Felitïa took a deep metaphorical breath and squashed Plavistalorik down into a tiny tube. Could she use this to get back to her own body? Perhaps if there was a connection to her body. Plavistalorik had probably removed it once Felitïa entered her. But perhaps she could recreate it.
She held the tube up to her eye and looked down it. Plavistalorik’s sight, hearing, and other senses flooded over Felitïa.
The Isyar was leaning in a corner of the library, breathing heavily.
Move.
Plavistalorik moved.
To the throne room.
The Isyar moved to the door.
She was being hunted, and probably wouldn’t make it without some defences. Gods, this body was low on power, but the emptiness from what was missing was huge. At full power, she would be well beyond what Felitïa was capable of.
Felitïa collected what energy she could and cast an invisibility spell. She was unused to how this body worked, so it drained a lot of power, but she was confident it worked. She certainly had no problem spreading it over the presences in the Room, which…
Dear gods, the presences in the Room aligned with their positions in the real world. She passed servants and a couple guards, all spaced exactly in the Room as they were in reality. It really was the grey walls throwing her perception off. She needed to figure out how to get rid of those walls.
Plavistalorik reached the audience chamber. Thankfully, the doors were open, and she was able to slip in unnoticed.
Zandrue, Nin-Akna, and Anita knelt beside Felitïa’s body. Zandrue was shaking her. Nearby, Ezmelda stood watching the entrance, and slumped on the steps near the throne was Hedromornasta.
Felitïa kept the invisibility over everyone. She couldn’t have them attack Plavistalorik right now.
Still, she kept Plavistalorik from getting too close. Hopefully, they were close enough already.
With a little expenditure of Plavistalorik’s rapidly diminishing energy, Felitïa probed out, searching for her own body.
There it was. And there were the grey walls. They were easily avoided with magic, but Felitïa paused at them anyway. She couldn’t pass up the chance to analyse them from the outside. Unfortunately, they didn’t appear any different.
However, Plavistalorik had hidden things in these walls, in those tiny holes and imperfections. Could Felitïa do something similar now? Not hide things in them, but affect them somehow? She had never been able to with her own magic, but that magic had come from within her, not without.
But even if it could be done from outside, did Plavistalorik have enough power remaining for it? There was only way to find out.
Please, no. Plavistalorik’s consciousness was weak, barely there, and barely audible.
Felitïa hesitated a moment. Was it right to play around with a person’s mind like this?
The simple answer was no, it wasn’t, and she certainly hoped she never had to do anything like this again. But there was no other choice right now. There was no other way to stop Plavistalorik. Fra-Ichtaca was probably ruling Ninifin from behind the scenes by now, all because Felitïa had refused to take the opportunity to kill her when she had it. She couldn’t make the same mistake again.
It was going to take every last drop of power Plavistalorik had left. It would burn her out completely. Felitïa also added what mental power Plavistalorik had. The Isyar wasn’t telepathic, but she had a well-tuned mind. There was some power there.
Then Felitïa narrowed all that power into a tiny, thin thread which she threaded into one of the holes in the grey wall. It was difficult, and the thread bent several times. However, eventually, it went in. Then she released the tension and let it expand out again. The power bulged against the wall.
And the wall cracked.
As Plavistalorik’s body collapsed, an empty husk on the floor, Felitïa fled through the crack and back into her own head.
With a gasp, Felitïa opened her eyes.
Zandrue, Nin-Akna, and Anita gasped and moved back a bit.
“Felitïa! Thank the gods!” Zandrue said. “You were unresponsive. We were worried you…”
Zandrue’s worries, fears, and relief flooded into Felitïa, along with the emotions of everyone else in the room. And their thoughts. So many thoughts. It was like at the well all those years ago, except not as intense. Perhaps it was because there was only a crack in the grey walls.
Felitïa smiled up at Zandrue. “Zandrue, I think I’m finally in my right mind.”
Then she lost consciousness.
