Chapter 113 – Continuity Error (1)
(Erynd)
The analyzer started screaming just as Nat said the words "well within tolerance."
Which was an impressive combination of wrong and bad timing even by Tower standards.
The little crystal in my coat went from politely dormant to stabbing bright-blue pulses into my ribs. The side rune Ethan had carved for "signature match" flared hot.
Goldwynn's missing thread.
I stopped mid-lecture about over-layered wards.
Nat faltered.
"What?" he said.
The device pulsed again. Stronger. West-north-west.
"Hold that thought," I said. "And try not to drop your building while I'm gone."
"Viscount—" Ewilyn began.
"Don't touch your core array," I added over my shoulder as I headed for the lift. "If it explodes before I get back I'll be cross, and you won't enjoy the conversation we'll have after we're all ghosts."
The doors slid shut on their offended faces.
***
By the time I reached street level, the analyzer had gone from pulsing to a steady, frantic flicker.
Direction marker: still west-north-west. Intensity: climbing.
I crossed the Tower courtyard at a jog.
The city swallowed me.
Noise. Smell. People.
The analyzer didn't care.
Arrow, arrow, arrow, tugging me through side streets and alleys, out of the clean stone district and into places the capital pretended not to see.
Yggdrasil's smaller marks started appearing in corners: the subtle tree, roots folded around a merchant's sign, our little angular scratch along the lowest branch.
Food lines. Pop-up clinics. Someone in one of our plain-grey robes binding a woman's arm with a low-tier healing charm.
Good.
Problems for later.
The analyzer's arrow swung more sharply left.
I followed.
That was when the smell hit.
Not normal slum-rot. Not "too many people and not enough drainage."
Something deeper. Thicker. The smell of meat that should have stopped moving years ago, kept staggering forward out of sheer stubbornness and bad magic.
It crawled down my throat and sat there.
"Mm," Melody said softly in my head. "That's familiar."
"Don't say that," I thought back. "Ever."
I turned a corner at a run.
There.
A girl.
Bare feet slapping stone. Dress torn and stained. Hair hacked short in clumsy, practical chunks.
At a distance, to anyone else, she looked alive.
My analyzer disagreed.
The little crystal flared, the invisible lattice of readings spiking in ways only I could see. Her aura was a mess: whole sections hollowed out, other parts swollen with foul, sluggish mana. The Goldwynn-thread pulsed through the middle like someone had hammered a glowing nail into a rotten plank.
Three years.
Too long.
She'd kept this body walking far past its sell-by date.
She saw me.
Flinched like she'd been struck.
Then she bolted.
"Of course," I muttered, and followed.
***
Chasing someone who knows they're already dying is a particular kind of unpleasant.
She didn't pace herself.
Didn't dodge like she was worried about her ankles. A living girl would have thought twice before launching herself over a stack of crates at that angle. She didn't. Something in her knee tore; I felt the wrongness in the way her aura lurched.
She kept going anyway.
She cut hard left into a narrower street.
The rot-smell rolled back with her wake, thick enough now that people on the edges of the road gagged and swore.
Ahead, I heard someone say, "Do you smell that?"
Tamara's voice.
Of course.
I came around the same corner in time to see three silhouettes freeze.
Tamara, Lyra, Noelle.
Bags in their hands, dressed for "normal day," eyes blown wide as the smell hit them.
The running girl angled away from them instinctively, wide arc like they were fire.
Smart.
I didn't have time to swear, so I did it internally.
Three more variables I needed not to die today.
The girl's head snapped toward me again.
Our eyes met properly for the first time.
She staggered mid-step.
For a heartbeat, I saw the fear under the rot.
And the recognition.
She knew my mana signature. Not from sight or story. From the way the air bent around me.
She spun away.
Her path lined up with the arrow in my hand.
"Stay," I snapped at the girls as I passed them. I let my gaze hit each of them for a fraction of a second, packing everything I could into it.
Back.
Don't interfere.
I have this.
Then I focused on the girl.
I wasn't going to tackle her.
If I tried, bits of her would come off on me.
I threw the pattern instead.
Containment, not crush.
Force in a direction is simple when you think in vectors. I shaped a hollow cylinder ahead of her—walls of hard, angled pressure, a floor of softened impact, a ceiling in case she decided to jump like an idiot.
She hit it at full speed.
The field flexed.
Momentum bled sideways, harmlessly, into the surrounding pattern.
She crumpled to her knees rather than splattering.
Better.
The smell inside the bubble intensified, trapped now, thick and greasy and wrong.
I layered a second shell around the first—sound-dampening inward, mana-dampening outward. No stray bursts, no screaming. The people in line at the Yggdrasil door a dozen meters away kept shuffling forward, blissfully unaware.
Tamara muttered something that sounded like "magic jar" under her breath.
I ignored her and stepped inside the inner ring.
***
Up close, the three years showed.
Her hands were the worst at a glance.
The skin at the fingertips had gone almost black, not like bruises but like fruit left too long in the sun. Cracks ran along the joints, and when she flexed them I saw the faintest glimpse of yellow beneath.
One ankle was swollen and wrong; the ligaments there had clearly torn multiple times and been held together by whatever shoddy necromantic stitching she could manage.
Her face… had been pretty once, I thought.
Now the skin sat too tight across her cheekbones, an unnatural tautness. Fine fissures at the corners of her mouth and eyes made small spiderwebs when she moved.
One of her eyes was bloodshot to the point that the white was more red than anything. The other tracked me with a frantic sharpness that felt too large for the socket.
Her aura was worse than the flesh.
Rotten mana crawled along the rune-scars under her skin, eating away at structure. The Goldwynn-channel in the middle pulsed with each heartbeat, sending a thin trickle of… her… down a path I'd mapped from a Tower bed.
She tried to scramble back as I approached.
Her heel skidded in something dark. She almost fell, caught herself on one hand.
The skin on her palm slipped half a finger-width over the bone before settling again.
She froze.
Looked at her own hand.
Then at me.
"Don't—" she rasped. "Don't come closer."
Her voice sounded like she hadn't used it for anything but screaming in a long time. Raw and dry and full of ash.
"I already did," I said calmly. "Running away time's over."
Her gaze jumped, jittering between my face, my coat, the edge of the containment, Tamara and the others outside.
Her breath came fast and shallow.
Not because the lungs needed the air.
Because the mind needed the illusion of control.
"Tower?" she managed. "You're… Tower?"
"No," I said. "They're upset about that. I'm the idiot they call when they break something important."
She flinched.
"The Tower," she whispered. "They—if they see me—"
"Burn first, ask questions never," I said. "Yes. You're not wrong."
Her shoulders shook.
I wasn't sure if it was laughter or panic.
Probably both.
"I didn't mean for this," she said. "I didn't— I just wanted—"
Words tangled.
She pressed her cracked mouth shut, as if afraid more would fall out than just sound.
I crouched, careful to keep just outside arm's reach.
Up close, I could see the thin smears of chalk still under her nails. Old, old dust, caught in little cracks. Some part of her still drew diagrams when the hands weren't falling apart.
"You built a bridge," I said quietly. "Between you and you. Point here, point there. You walked across. You got stuck halfway. That's the short version, yes?"
Her stare sharpened.
"How—" she started.
"I read your notes," I said. "The tower kept them. Very scholarly. Terrible safety procedures."
She swallowed.
Or tried to.
Her throat worked wrong, a hitch in the movement like something not sliding properly.
"Is she…" Her voice cracked. "Is she still…?"
"In a bed," I said. "Breathing. Not waking. They've been calling it a coma for three years."
She shut her eyes.
Her whole face twisted.
For a moment, the rot didn't matter.
She just looked like a girl who'd suddenly been told a ghost story was real.
"I thought she was gone," she whispered. "I thought we— I thought I—"
Her hands flew to her head, fingers digging into greasy hair, dirt and dried something flaking off where she grabbed too hard.
"Don't take it from me," she said. "Please. I— If she's alive, if you— I can't—"
"Stop," I said.
Not harsh.
Firm.
She froze like the word itself had weight.
"I'm not taking anything from you," I said. "Let's be very clear on this part. If I intended to end you, you'd already be paste on the flagstones."
Her breath hitched.
She glanced at the containment walls.
"You caught me," she said, voice small. "You burned me in a circle. That's what they do to things like me."
"This isn't a burning circle," I said. "This is a 'don't accidentally poison the food line' circle."
I held up the analyzer.
The crystal still pulsed in time with the thread in her core.
"This is the part you should be worried about," I added. "You're bleeding. Slowly, constantly. Every time your heart beats, a little more of you goes down that line instead of staying here."
Her gaze dropped to the device.
She stared like it was a knife.
"We know," she said.
The "we" slipped out without conscious permission.
Fear made people honest.
"We can feel it," she went on, words stumbling. "Some days we wake up and there's less. Like… like we miscounted hours, like something happened while we weren't looking. We fix what we can. We patch. We write it down so we don't forget. But it—it keeps—"
"Going," I finished.
She nodded once, jerky.
"I can't stop it," she said. "I tried cutting it. Tried blocking. It hurts. It breaks things. And—and every time I touch it, I feel her."
"Her," I repeated.
"The girl in the bed," she whispered, not looking at me. "The one you think is the real one."
There it was.
I could hear the shape of that thought, all sharp edges.
"I think she is a person," I said. "And I think you are a person. Stop putting 'real' in front of everything like there's only one ticket being handed out."
She laughed once, ugly, breath rattling.
"That's… easy for you to say," she said. "You're not… this."
Her hand twitched again, and I saw more skin slide over bone.
Her eyes squeezed shut.
"I'm disgusting," she said. The word came out cracked. "I'm… wrong. People get sick when I'm close too long. Kids cry. Dogs won't come near. I can feel the rot chewing on whatever we are. I don't know how much time is left before there's nothing but hunger."
The last word came out as a rasp.
"You came toward Yggdrasil territory," I said. "Not away."
She flinched.
"I thought…" She swallowed. "We thought… maybe you had… answers. Or… or at least wards. We can hide in cults. They don't ask questions. They like broken things. But they're… awful. They hurt people. I tried to run."
Tried.
The word hung there.
She looked at her hands again.
"I don't want to hurt anyone," she whispered. "I just… didn't want to vanish alone in a hole. I wanted… somewhere. Before…"
She trailed off.
Rot sunk its fingers a little deeper into the lines around her mouth.
"Before you forget you were ever a who instead of a what," I said.
Her eyes flew open.
She stared at me like I'd peeled her skull.
"How do you know that," she breathed.
"Because I've poked body and mana long enough to recognize the shape of a fear," I said. "You're not unique. Just… farther along than most."
She gave a breathy, panicked almost-laugh.
"Congratulations to me," she said. "I win the prize."
"Yes," I said. "And the prize is: I can help you."
She went still.
"Help," she echoed.
"Yes," I said. "Help. Stabilize. Patch the leaks. And, while I'm at it, use your end of the bridge to wake the girl in the bed."
Her whole body flinched.
"No," she said immediately. "No. You can't— If you open it more, it'll tear. She'll fall in. Or I will. Or—"
"You're thinking in 'all or nothing,'" I said. "Stop. It's a bad habit. This isn't a jar. It's a road. Roads can be widened. Side paths can be built."
Her breath sped up again.
"You make it sound easy," she said. "It's not easy. I tried for three years. I tried everything I could reach."
"You tried alone," I said. "With half a library, cult pamphlets, and whatever terrible ideas the Tower didn't burn fast enough. That you got this far is… troubling, for the record. But we can do better than 'one desperate girl in a basement.'"
"We," she said again, automatically.
Then she realized it and flinched.
"I," she corrected. "I. I'm not… we. She's… she's there. I'm here."
"Both can be true," I said shrugging. "Look. Here are the options as I see them."
I ticked them off on my fingers.
"One: you keep running until you fall apart in some ditch. Maybe you take a few people with you when the rot finally wins. The Tower eventually notices, panics, and overcorrects so hard they outlaw anything that even smells like interface research for the next century."
She winced.
"Two: I kill you here," I continued. "Quickly. Cleanly. The channel collapses when your body does. The girl in the bed stays asleep forever. Less collateral. More guilt."
Her fingers dug into the stone.
"Three," I said. "You let me contain you properly. You come under my wards. You let me study what you actually built instead of just guessing from chalk stains. Together, we open the bridge in a controlled way, enough to send back what needs to go back and keep what deserves to stay. If it works, she wakes. You stabilize. If it fails…"
"We both die," she whispered.
"Yes," I said. "But you were going to anyway. I'm offering a chance at something else on the way there."
Her throat worked.
"I don't trust you," she said.
"Good," I said. "You shouldn't. But you can verify. You're a mage. You'll see what I'm doing. You don't have to like me to know if I'm lying in a circle."
She gave a weak, half-hysterical little huff.
"I'm scared," she said suddenly, voice breaking. "I— We— I don't know how to do this. I don't know who I am anymore. If you… if you put me next to her, which one is…?"
Her hands lifted, fingers curling in the air like she could grab the question itself.
"I don't… want to disappear," she choked. "Again. I don't want to wake up one day and realize I'm just… scenery in someone else's life."
I let her talk.
Let it spill.
Then, when she'd run out of words and was just shaking, I spoke.
"You're not scenery," I said. "You're a very loud, very troublesome main character in a problem I now consider mine. I am not throwing you away. I don't get anything out of erasing you. I get more out of you alive, thinking, and answering questions."
"You'd use me," she said, tears starting to streak clean paths through the grime at the corners of her eyes.
"Yes," I said simply. "I will absolutely use what you know. I'm not pretending otherwise. But I will use it with you, not over your corpse."
She laughed and sobbed at the same time.
It turned into a cough halfway through.
Dark flecks hit the stone again.
The smell twisted nastier.
"No Tower," she whispered hoarsely. "If I… if I come… No Archmages. No labs. They'll put me in a bottle and call it justice."
"No Tower leash," I agreed. "You come to Yggdrasil. My wards. My rules. If the Tower wants to talk to you, they talk through me."
She stared.
"You can promise that?" she asked.
"Yes," I said. "I run the mess you just ran through. If the Tower want to argue, they can take a number."
Outside, Tamara shifted.
"Is she dangerous?" Lyra called softly.
"Yes," I answered without turning.
Tamara made a noise.
"Then this is just Tuesday," she muttered.
The girl in front of me gave another wet, broken laugh.
"I don't want to die," she whispered. "Not yet. Not like this."
"Then don't," I said. "Say yes."
Her eyes squeezed shut.
Her shoulders hunched.
For a long, long moment, the only sound was her ragged breathing and the faint hum of the containment.
"I'm so tired," she said finally. "It hurts all the time. I thought… maybe if I stayed moving, it would be easier to keep being 'me.' But it just… spreads."
Her head bowed.
"If you lie," she said, without looking up, "if you give me to them, if you decide killing me is easier halfway through… I will take as much of you with me as I can."
"Fair," I said. "Conditions accepted."
She gave a small, helpless nod.
"O-okay," she whispered.
It was barely sound.
"Okay," she said again, stronger, forcing the word out. "I… I'll come. I'll… I'll try. Just… don't let them burn me. Please."
There it was.
Consent.
Fragile, scared, but real.
I shifted the inner layer of the containment with a thought.
The pattern changed from "pin" to "carry"—a frame she could move in, tethered to my mana, not the Tower's.
The rot shivered against the new boundaries.
I tightened them.
"Tamara," I said, lifting my head. "Lyra, Noelle. We're taking her home."
Tamara made a strangled noise.
"Of course we are," she said. "Why wouldn't we add 'haunted science corpse' to the household?"
"Strictly speaking, she's not a corpse," I said.
"Working on it," the girl murmured weakly.
Noelle's eyes were huge and wet.
Lyra's hand hovered near her knife again, then dropped.
"Will she… hurt people?" Noelle asked.
"Not if I can help it," I said. "And not because she wants to."
They looked at each other.
Then they nodded.
I turned back to the girl in the circle.
"What do I call you?" I asked.
She flinched.
"Not… her name," she said quickly. "Not yet. She… she didn't ask for this. She… deserves to choose if she wants it back."
"Fair," I said. "We'll workshop something later. For now, 'you' will do."
Her mouth twitched.
"'You' works," she said.
I got my shoulder under the field's anchor line and shifted the whole construct, letting it move with me like a bubble.
"Let's go," I said.
I stepped forward.
She followed because the cage did.
Behind me, three women fell into step at a cautious distance.
Ahead of me, somewhere in the Tower, a girl in a bed kept breathing.
We had one thread, pulled through two bodies and three years of rot.
Now all we had to do was spin it into something that wouldn't snap.
Simple.
Compared to my love life, anyway.