Chapter 21 From the Book of Purifications. Chapter 2, Sister of Ashen, Catalyst of the Nameless.
The mighty warrior. Sister of the faith and protector of the equation. She who defied the filthy Swillborn prophecy and sealed the purification of the spiral.
In the falling ash, she defeated countless Swillborn Tuskari, who bested our own. She held the fortress. She guarded the new constant within. And when Noc’Thule called upon her, she dropped her defenses and was rendered null, so the new constant might endure and unleash holy salvation upon the worlds!
The village where she lay slain was razed to white ash in The First Purification. It remained sanctified for an age, until the Panther Tansarath delivered a ripened truth: Truth born from chaos, no matter how deeply buried, remains chaos, and must be purified before it ever surfaces.
Where our Sister fell, a tree grew from her dust and rose mighty across centuries. Upon it, Tansarath built Her winter perch, where She lived and died Her thousand-year death. But the roots became entangled with the new world, in which her cub was charged to shield from unearned truths. Within this world, constellations revealed themselves.
Thus was our Sister’s equation unbalanced, and what is unbalanced cannot hold.
She was drawn, unripened, from Tansarath’s ash, returned to the perch in the great rebalance—licked clean by the Panther before Her final death, as if our Sister were counted among Her cubs.
For a new Variable had entered the ashen hollow—wild, unpredictable, unstoppable—a herald of chaos imperiling existence itself.
And so our Sister, drawn from the Panther’s keeping and the ashes of her own past, rose again not as a constant, but a Variable to balance the new chaos of an unbalanced world.
For the Equation permits no lonely Variable. They must find balance in each other—or be nullified together, and with them all hope of salvation.
Chapter 22, After The Final Time I Died
The final time I died… it might otherwise have gone unnoticed. Likely I’d have missed my cue entirely. Dying had become more punctuation than ending.
Every time, I got dragged back to the exact same moment, in the exact same patch of grass. Same light. Same smell. Same angle of the cult-kid’s axe coming down. For someone who killed me that often, he never improved his form. I’d died so many times I couldn’t tell one ending from the next.
Fighting Tephra was becoming emotionally unbearable. Each time I killed her it hurt me worse than her staff to the groin. The more we fought, the deeper I fell for her. Her beauty was the hook. But her strength, her resolve, and the way she fiercely protected Sara and Jon… Grutzon was his full name… like they were more than family to her. The way she looked at me kept softening. It must have been the way I looked at her. That is all I can think.
So I started only taking the axe. It was the only break I could get. I couldn’t face her again. I kept begging whatever deity wasn’t listening to me to change something. Anything. I should have been more careful how I scripted my wish.
I died. Again. Well, eventually.
But it was my final, and least favorite, death… so far. I died and was dropped back into a sequence of events I’d only lived through once before.
Which meant.
Yes.
I finally had a chance to rewrite our death scenes.
It was about time I found something useful to do with this ridiculous death-curse of mine.
Because instead of the familiar blade splitting my skull, the Field bucked, like it did that one other time. And nothing good came from that.
Boots. Hooves. Metal. Shouts.
Wrong cues. The sounds hit before my eyes even opened. When they did, everything was wrong. Same set, different scene.
Cultists in brown-red robes marked with the Swillborn sigil popped into existence around me like game pieces snapping onto a board. Massive pig-men followed, their bodies arriving with violent solidity, not the soft, flickering souls that blinked in and back out. These things were the shape of Jon, but honed, hard, and bred for violence. Their tusks tattooed and filed to deadly points, or capped with silver. Their eyes were hungry.
Quite the contrast to Jon, I’d say. Soft belly, gardening tools, warm heart. His overall… disposition.
They tripped over each other in their waves of sudden arrival, recovered, and headed south toward the center of the Hollow. A solid, stinking battering ram made of muscle, grunts, and pig-shit. Villagers tried to fight with tools and kitchen knives. They didn’t stand a chance.
Somehow, my weird black sword was already in my hand. I had grown fond of the odd prop.
And then the chapel door flew open.
Out burst Sara, nineteen and focused, with a leather bag bouncing against her ribs, a slate tablet sticking out and chalk gripped tightly. Three cats wove around her boots: orange Pip, gray Moth, and tiny black Tansi. Alert and taking stock of the scene.
Jon lumbered out behind her, squealing her name in panic, garden hoe raised like he’d garden them to death.
Sara scanned the chaos. She saw everything, decided instantly, and found me. There was no recognition, just assessment.
“Come with me,” she said. It was not a request.
She ran. Jon thundered after her. I followed. They didn’t know me yet, not in this cycle, but I knew them, and they were all I had.
TANSARATH
We cut southeast through twisting alleys and market stalls. Smoke began to rise from the northeast, heavy and metallic, mingling with burning wood. Something massive was burning behind us, but everything ahead was movement, noise, and stink.
Somewhere in the shouting: “Goreborn pushing forward, a Tuskari leading them.” I didn’t know the names, but I knew instantly which one was the elite.
Screams, high and sharp. The grunt-snort of Goreborn charging. The sound of intense flame distant but roaring closer.
We rounded a corner.
A round stone hut, half bunker and half shrine, currently a de facto fortress, stood beneath the thickening smoke as ash began floating down like large snowflakes. Its doorway smashed wide. Sister Tephra stood alone defending it, staff spinning in precise, devastating arcs. Every strike broke bone, disabled a limb, or opened a throat. She left no openings.
Two separate factions crashed against the hut: Swillborn in red-brown, and Noc’Thule in black-silver, roaring, “For the Nameless Empress, Servant to Noc’Thule!” Their voices rose in near-unison.
The whole area had become chaos, and the ring around the doorway was its furious center. Screams cut the air, steel met bone, and Goreborn bodies piled where the two factions slammed together. Neither side gave ground. Both fought with what bordered on madness. Every one of them trying to claw a path through to the same doorway. For them, whatever was inside that hut was worth killing for, and everyone out there knew their motivation.
The smoke thickened, and the ash fell, spreading through the chaos until the edges of the scene blurred and the lighting slowly faded into a coppery tint. It was gorgeous, by the way. You’d have loved it, except for the war bit.
Inside the hut, behind Tephra, I saw something I wouldn’t have believed possible: a young female minotaur. She was protecting a small boy, light skin and dark hair, pulling him deeper into the shadows. He clutched something dark. As soon as I saw him, a vibration rattled the Collar I carried, the one I’d taken from a high priest in another life. Whatever he held, it was tied to mine.
Sara froze when she saw the boy. Her face hardened. Her motivation shifted, painfully clear: she needed to reach him. But the doorway was a wall of bodies. No path. No time.
“We’re not getting through that,” I said.
She was already kneeling.
Sara dropped her leather bag and pulled out her slate. Chalk scratched before the tablet even settled onto her knees. With her free hand, she wiped some fresh ash off the tablet, then thumbed open a wooden box of colored stones she’d stuffed in the bag.
“Stay close,” she told us, quick and low. “I’ve calculated this, but it is the first time I’ve applied it. I’ll try not to lose anyone.”
“Do not stand between me and the hut.”
Jon hovered behind her, hoe raised. Pip planted himself just off the slate. Moth climbed to her shoulder. Tansi paced, tail twitching, flicking ash back into the air. She was reacting to something I couldn’t see.
Sara drew spirals and symbols that looked like math had learned to pray. She dipped two fingers into a pile of Goreborn shit and dragged a brown spiral over the chalk one, binding the marks together somehow.
Then behind us came a low, rolling snarl, deep and feline, the sort that only a big cat can make. Branches snapped. A wet gurgle. Then a Tuskari’s body dropped from the hedge, his throat quite neatly, and very recently, removed. Tansi trotted forward through the falling ash, tiny paws neat, tail straight up like she had other business to attend to.
Sara’s jaw tightened, but her chalk never slowed.
She placed stones with fast, precise motions, adjusting each by hairs. Pip pawed one slightly out of alignment.
“Good,” she whispered. …To the cat… “Thank you.”
When the pattern settled, the air began to hum, through my teeth, through my sword, through the Collar resonating against my chest. The battle at the hut appeared to waver, stuttering and bending, as if deciding whether to snap or keep going.
“Ready,” Sara said.
Ready for what? The big reveal, apparently. I’d just have to improvise my way through it.
Moth’s claws hooked gently into her shoulder. Jon braced himself in front of her, garden hoe held tight. In his eyes there was no denying it. To protect Sara, he was ready to till…
I raised my sword.
Sara breathed, “Now.”
The world flickered.
A two-second gap opened beneath us, a hidden step in time. We moved forward and landed ahead of ourselves. Our afterimages, pale echoes, remained behind, still caught in the positions we had occupied an instant before.
Then time snapped back into alignment.
An axe slammed into Jon’s afterimage. A blade swept through Sara’s ghost-throat. A Tuskari charged straight at me, its sharpened tusk goring my afterimage instead, the momentum carrying through a cultist’s chest behind it. The beast staggered, confused by the kill that wasn’t, and the one that was.
Even Tephra’s staff passed straight through our fading echoes, timed so perfectly it looked like she took us down.
Weapons carved through shadows instead of flesh.
And we ran, alive, through the opening Sara had created.
Tephra held her ground. Bodies crowded the space around her, a layer of ash beginning to cover them. The living started to choke on the smoke, but the attackers never slowed. She held her ground.
She was magnificent. A legend fit for the stars that this sky would never have.
“Tephra, the Warrior Nun Lady.” I suppose I could be there too… Amnesio, the lovesick puppy. No no, that’s a stupid name.
Metallic smoke found its way inside and started to thicken. The boy’s nonstop screams turned rough, and his nose began bleeding heavily. We all found ourselves close to the floor.
Through the haze, the minotaur clung to her space in the shadows, starting to choke on the fumes. She held the screaming child tight in one massive arm. And, gods, she was pregnant. If her anatomy was like ours, she looked ready to pop.
But from some other disaster, I could only assume, my Collar popped. It jolted hard, the pulse slipping, skipping, then snapping back into rhythm.
At that exact moment, the boy went still, expression wiped clean. Then a new scream tore out of him, raw, frightened in a way that didn’t match the room.
The minotaur’s eyes flicked from me, to Sara, to Jon, to Tephra, calculating, protective, cornered. The boy’s blood was all over her. Her other hand held a blade raised and ready. One clean hand motion and she’d take our heads off. I had no doubt she would.
Through the door, Tephra’s shadow danced against the thickening air. I’ll be damned if she wasn’t holding her breath. Ash was collecting in drifts. Some Goreborn and cultists were starting to collapse choking on the smoke.
Sara, clutching her tablet and stones, yelled, “Ready!” as loud as she could, which wasn’t loud enough. I turned my head briefly to acknowledge her.
When I looked back, Tephra was gone.
Chapter 23, The Legend of Tansarath, the Black Panther
From The Stitched Sky: An Assembly of Celestial Testimonies. Read by author, Ilra Wint.
We have no stars in our sky, but the travelers who pass through Gratch Hollow tell tales of stars and the stories of legends they carry. The Swine, Porculon and Oinx, uncover truths and turn them toward the light.
Yet some truths are too sharp for innocent hands. Some wonders are too heavy for a playful mind to lift.
And so Tansarath, the black panther, stalks close to the warm ground in the summer months, guarding the world from truths too wild to be released.
When winter claims the world, she vanishes to a hidden perch above the dark, and her emerald eye watches the slow strengthening of knowledge in the hearts of mortals. Her gaze follows ideas the way a predator follows sound and smell, patient enough to wait for meaning.
Tansarath guards these truths from corruption, whether it comes through hunger, malice, haste, or curiosity. She takes truths not yet ripe and swallows them whole. Deep in her body they ferment into understanding, maturing with the pace of an era—protected from a world that would break them, and keeping that world safe from what it is not yet able to bear. When a truth has grown resilient enough to survive revelation, she releases it back into the world—only when a civilization can endure its consequence.
In daylight, when the swine sleep in the cool mud beneath the hot sun, Tansarath becomes the sole guardian of truth. She hunts for those not yet ripe—unready to become wisdom, still soft enough to bend. With silent precision, she lifts them from Oinx’s quiet embrace and swallows them whole.
When night returns and the swine awaken, she prowls, warding off intruders, thieves, and liars. Porculon digs without fear. Oinx plays without danger. They never stop to wonder why their work remains untouched.
The panther watches, testing every truth against the strength of the world. Only when an age becomes ready to bear what she has nurtured does she give birth beneath the stars. Her litter has as many cubs as there are truths she has carried—each born bearing one burden into the world. And among them, always, one more: the final cub who takes the emerald eye and the waiting hunger. That one becomes Tansarath in her turn.
And when the cubs are gone and the ripened truths walk free into the world, the elder Tansarath lingers at the perch, watching what she has released. Then, when her watch is no longer required, she descends.
She folds herself upon the land and begins a death that lasts a thousand years. She is alive. She is dying. She decays as slowly as the stones around her erode to dust, all the while protecting the truths she still carries—those not yet ripe, still fermenting in her body. When at last she returns to the soil, those truths sink with her. Porculon roots them out again. Oinx lifts them into light.
But the roots became entangled with a new world where constellations revealed themselves.
A world which her cub was charged with shielding from unearned truths.
Thus was our Sister’s equation unbalanced, and what is unbalanced cannot hold.
Chapter 24, From a Higher Place
The air was comfortably warm, even as snow collected smooth across Gratch Hollow—idyllic, like a solstice display meant only to be admired. The chapel stood quiet and whole, its steeple capped in white.
Everything else was missing: houses, roads, people, erased as if they had never existed. Instead, the snowy ground was dotted with colorful cylinders, each one small and shining faintly, as if lit by a moon that wasn’t there. Each seemed placed deliberately, though he couldn’t say why. None of them collected snow.
And there he stood, under the only tree in the hollow.
Sara, looking to be about four years old, ran in tight circles with her arms outstretched, barefoot in the snow. She talked fast, as if there were too much to say.
“Sister Tephra told me you’d be here!”
Tephra…
He froze.
“I’m Sara. Do you want to see my drawings?”
High above, a voice called down, tired and annoyed.
“Sara… come on. Would you please let me out?”
Sara tipped her head back and grinned.
“That’s Sister Tephra,” she said. “I locked her in the treehouse.”
Only moments ago he had watched Goreborn warriors tear Tephra’s limp body apart even as they staggered and choked on air thick with metallic smoke, their silhouettes edged in red-orange flame. The whole battlefield had been choking, loud, final. No one would survive.
“These are my kitties!” Sara said cheerfully.
Three enormous cats moved with her, each taller than a horse. One drifted through the air, gray fur glowing softly as feathered wings carried her in slow circles. Another padded across the snow beside Sara, orange fur streaked with bright colors that shimmered even though there was no wind. The tallest was black as night, her fur edged with green light. Her steps made no sound.
Sara pointed up at the tree, which rose unnaturally high above the hollow. Near the top, a rough wooden platform clung to the branches.
“Come on,” she said, already moving.
He followed.
As he climbed the ladder, he realized Sara was not climbing with him.
When he pulled himself up onto the platform, he watched as Sara climbed off Moth’s back. The winged cat immediately fell backward, circling the tree with barely a flutter of her wings.
Tephra stood there. She carried no weapon, only a copy of Ilra Wint’s A Stitched Sky tucked into the crook of her arm. Her expression was one of contentment, a peacefulness he had never seen in all the times they had been locked in battle.
Sara pointed below.
“Look at my drawing!”
From this height, the scattered cylinders curved together into a single, sweeping spiral. It grew outward from the dark round tower at the center of the hollow, rising from ground to sky. A line of gold cylinders ran through its heart, forming the spine of the spiral. It remained steady and unbroken as it widened. Each turn opened in proportion to the one before it, expanding by a shared rhythm that carried the shape outward, as if the spiral knew exactly how much space it needed next.
Smaller spirals branched off that golden spine. They curled away and looped back, repeating the same motion at different scales. Near the center, the patterns were tight and busy. Farther out, they spread wider and calmer, still filling the entire hollow with design, so that no stretch of ground felt empty or unused.
The colors followed a different set of rules. Woven through the larger structure were great spiral arms of many shades, each flowing outward until it reached the wall. They did not stop so much as end mid-curve, as if the smooth black circular wall were only a boundary for this place, not for the pattern itself.
Behind him, Tephra spoke, calm and even.
“She sees from a higher place. Where the whole pattern comes clear. The rules. The laws. How they connect.”
“Someday she’ll decide which rules to bend. Which to defend.”
“And how to break the laws that govern them.”
He kept his eyes on the spiral.
It was beautiful. And it was exact.
The curves widened and returned with a playful and precise confidence, like a solution in motion, even beyond the space that held it.
He forgot himself, lost in the pattern, his gaze fixed as if it might cease to exist the moment he looked away.
When he finally did turn, Sara was gone. Tephra was gone. Only the three giant cats remained, scaled just enough to fit side by side on the platform. Tansi stepped forward and nudged her nose against his shoulder, gentle and steady.
For a moment longer, they were there. Then they weren’t.
He looked back out over the hollow.
The snow was gone. The pattern was gone. In their place stood blackened, battered stone walls and foundations, jutting up through a thick layer of fine ash. Gratch Hollow lay incinerated within the confined cylindrical wall that enclosed it like a kiln.
