Die. Respawn. Repeat.

Chapter 101: Book 2: Symptoms

He-Who-Guards remembered when he first met She-Who-Whispers.

She was stunning, he remembered thinking. The daughter of the then-ruler of Isthanok — as close a thing to a princess as their Great City could have. It wasn't necessarily her beauty that fascinated him, though that was no small part of it. It was her force of personality. She believed in a vision, and she took whatever steps needed to make that vision come to life.

He couldn't have imagined, then, what the Trials would do to her. How the Integrators would take that trait that gave her life and beauty and twist it into something monstrous.

"I want the city to be perfect," she told him. "Look at it. It's a ruin for what we call a Great City. We live in the remnants of what someone else built. One day, these towers will fly again."

To her credit, she'd accomplished exactly that. Many of the once-destroyed shards now once again hung in the skies of Isthanok, beautiful and pristine.

At the time, He-Who-Guards hadn't considered the price that might be paid for her dreams. He'd been enamored with her, really. A little foolish, in hindsight, but... their friendship had been genuine. He was sure of it.

"I am sure you will restore the city," He-Who-Guards said. He fidgeted, an unfamiliar nervousness coursing through the mist of his body . There was a part of him that was drawn to her determination, her willingness to enact change. He wanted to be a part of it.

"You'll help me, won't you?" she asked.

"Of course," he said, bowing his head. "I am here to serve."

"Yes, well..." He-Who-Guards shrugged, feeling a little self-conscious. "It is difficult to get used to the idea."

"Why are you a guard, anyway? You're way too young." She peered at him curiously. "What makes you so special?"

"Nothing," he said. It was a lie. The amount of Firmament he commanded was enormous. The strength he possessed, even at his age, allowed him to create perfect barriers that nothing could penetrate. It was the whole reason he'd chosen his name.

"You're lying to me," She-Who-Whispers accused, her body language emanating petulance. Despite himself, He-Who-Guards grinned.

"Perhaps I am," he said. "If you're lucky, you will get the chance to find out."

He remembered the way she laughed at that, her eyes bright. He didn't need to look at her pendant to understand that she was delighted by his response, though he couldn't fathom why.

He-Who-Guards had gotten used to her eventually. He allowed himself to relax, to become someone he never thought he could be. She-Who-Whispers made him feel normal — and that was a precious thing for someone like him. He'd been born with too much Firmament. His sheer strength was both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because he could do things with his Firmament that no one else could, and a curse because the sheer strength of it eroded his own body and the very structure of his soul. The stuff that kept his Firmament in place.

He never told her, of course. As the days passed, he grew stronger, and the end of his life grew closer. He was shedding Firmament to the point where it was nearly visible — a constant glow to the silvery mist that made up his body.

There came a point where he couldn't hide it any longer.

"Why are you always glowing?" She-Who-Whispers asked. There was a playful lilt to her voice — she was teasing him. "It's not because you're around me, is it?"

He-Who-Guards was glad he was facing away from her, and she could not see the expression on his pendant. "It's, ah... private."

"Are you keeping a secret from me?" she narrowed her eyes at him. "You can't keep a secret from me."

"I think you will find that I can. I have so far," he said dryly. Then he cursed to himself. Evidently, he was quite bad at keeping secrets from She-Who-Whispers.

"Aha!" She-Who-Whispers exclaimed, triumphant. "You are hiding something from me."

"Only for your own sake," he said.

"You know how I feel about things being done 'for my sake'."

He-Who-Guards sighed. "It's just Firmament. No big deal." A small lie. It couldn't hurt that badly, could it?

"Oh." She-Who-Whispers stared at him for a moment. "You're still hiding something."

"Perhaps."

"I want you to be my consort."

That made He-Who-Guards sputter, the abrupt change in topic throwing him for a loop. "W-what?"

"You heard me!" She-Who-Whispers smirked. "I want you to be my consort. So if you've got something to hide, you better tell me now, before my dad announces it to the city."

"Announces it to the—" He-Who-Guards cut himself off. "Why would he announce it to the city?!"

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"I asked him to."

"Why would you..." he sighed. "...Whisper, this isn't going to work. I like you, but I have ten Hestian cycles left in me. Maybe less."

"What."

He-Who-Guards remembered the abrupt change in her voice. It was chilling. She went from bright and warm and playful to something abruptly cold. The utter lack of emotion in her voice made dread coil through his Firmament.

"...I have a condition," He-Who-Guards explained. "My Firmament. It is too strong to stay together. It will all unravel — it is only a matter of time."

Silence.

When he turned around to look for her, she was gone.

He'd thought she abandoned him back then. That the news he'd given her was too much, for whatever reason — that she was choosing to protect her heart. He would have understood if that was what she did.

But no. She'd left to throw herself into work, into finding a cure. He'd never seen her with so many books, speaking to so many specialists and practitioners of Firmament. He'd never seen her try this hard even when it came to rebuilding Isthanok, and that had been her passion for as long as he could remember.

And then came Integration Day.

He flung open a door, then hurried down the staircase, looking for anything that might tell him where She-Who-Whispers was. She loved her schedules and her timetables — she was never missing. Not when she had something planned. For her to be more than an hour late was unheard of, and in combination with the news that thousands of Hestians had simply vanished...

He hoped against hope that she wasn't one of them — but when he threw open the doors to her room and saw the perfectly spherical chunk taken out of it, felt the remnants of foreign Firmament contaminating everything nearby, he knew.

Whisper was gone.

The worst part was that part of him had almost felt relieved. Not that she was gone, but that she would no longer be throwing herself into the pointless task of saving him. With any luck, he would be gone by the time she returned, and she would be able to put her energy back into the one thing she truly wanted to do.

Things hadn't worked out that way, of course.

Really, he should have known better than to underestimate her.

She-Who-Whispers came back changed.

He-Who-Guards knew it from the first moment he saw her — there was something in her eyes that was cold. He'd only caught a glimpse of that coldness once before, when she'd first learned that his death was inevitable, but now she seemed to wear it like armor rather than hide it within.

Her gaze warmed again when she looked at him, though only slightly. "He-Who-Guards," she greeted. The formalization of his name made his Firmament stir uncomfortably. "I have found a cure for your condition."

He didn't know then how much of a fool he would be to trust her.

His biggest mistake, he supposed, wasn't necessarily that he trusted her. He didn't regret trusting people he cared about — trust was something he had chosen to never regret. He gave his trust when it was earned, and if that trust was ever broken, he didn't blame himself for choosing to trust. It was on the other party for breaking it.

Whisper had certainly broken his trust. Whatever happened to her during her Trial had turned her into someone that was only a mockery of who she had been. He saw everything she used to be magnified to the point of absurdity. Mild perfectionism became an obsessive need for control; where she once respected the thoughts and ideas of others, she now only listened to herself.

He hadn't managed to learn much about what her Trial had been about. From the few details she'd told him, she had to rule over a kingdom of others. He couldn't tell if she'd been put in charge of it, or if she'd worked her way into being in charge, somehow. The subjects she commanded were apparently tied to her will, and constantly under siege from outside forces. Unless she controlled everything perfectly, she would lose and die, and start over with a different kingdom.

He could imagine how that might have changed her. He just couldn't have imagined it would change her this much.

"You'll be fine," she told him. Her voice was clipped, her focus on a bunch of diagrams and models floating in front of her. Scattered around her were mechanical parts, the technology several steps ahead of anything he'd seen in any of the Great Cities so far, let alone Isthanok. "The procedure might hurt a little, but you will be perfect afterward."

He didn't like the way she said 'perfect'. "I would prefer not to go through with this, Whisper."

She turned around to look at him. She seemed to consider his request for a moment — but then she shook her head sharply. "I can't have you dying," she told him. "I still need you to protect this city."

There was a lot hidden in those words. 'I still need you.' He-Who-Guards glimpsed something genuine in that. But she'd followed it up immediately with 'to protect this city', and the dispassionate ruthlessness with which she'd returned had immediately taken over once more.

It was the same way he'd seen it when she first returned. She wore it like armor.

In truth, that made him wish he had done more to fight the Integrators. He had tried, when Hestians had first been taken, but there was nothing he could do — not only because they were stronger than he was, but because he had no means of getting to them. Their announcements came through their Interface, temporarily attaching to them just long enough to drop a message in their vision and then disconnecting once more, before they could learn anything more about it.

Whisper reached out, clipped something to him—

And then his world was fire and pain.

His memories were fragmented, after that. His body was different. He-Who-Guards became metal instead of mist. His Firmament was supported by Whisper's, and his mind was supported by technology. A cognitive prosthetic, Whisper had called it.

Sometimes it whispered in him, like it was alive. Like it, too, was struggling against all of this.

He remembered being ordered to do things he would normally have refused to do. He remembered putting down rebellions before they began, as the first whispers began to race across the streets. He remembered a hundred different bodies marching through the streets, each commanded to keep the peace, no matter the cost.

He remembered struggling against it. Once or twice, She-Who-Whispers tried to loosen her control of him — to see if he would obey her orders willingly. He would always pretend to, at first; he saw no other option. But the moment he got the opportunity, he tried to slip free of the leash.

Eventually, she'd stopped giving him those opportunities at all. Only very rarely did she ever allow him on missions outside of Isthanok, now; only when there were anomalies that were significant enough to pique her interest, or when she needed him to put on a show of force.

And then came the Fracture. Then came Ethan. He remembered the Trialgoer with startling clarity. The nature of his Firmament kept him from being erased whenever time was rewound, though he would never willingly share those details with Whisper. She had access only to what the technology attached to him recorded, and those were as vulnerable to temporal rewinding as almost everything else.

It was funny. In many ways, Ethan reminded him of who Whisper had been before the Trials.

He hoped the Trials wouldn't break him the same way. But there was a fire in Ethan he'd never seen in Whisper.

Maybe with Ethan, things could be different.

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