"Tell me about this Isei," Eluvie said. "With the highest rank in this place, she must be an incredible person."

  It was a bold request, but with the thawing atmosphere around them, there would be no better time to ask it.

  "She is," Yira said somberly.

  Maso scoffed. "Incredible?" He said. "She is unrivaled. She passed her first trial at the age of five. Five! At that age, I couldn't eat without soiling my clothes."

  Yira shot a meaningful look at Maso, but he returned a defiant look. "What?" He said. "Is there any reason not to tell her?"

  "She is a stranger," Yira said. "Important matters shouldn't be shared so freely."

  Maso looked incredulous. "We're sharing our opinions, not secrets. Anyway," he turned to Eluvie. "There hasn't been anyone like her in a thousand years. We all spend decades agonizing over our next trial. She treats them like vacations: one this week, one next week. She returned from her trial for Isei, just having surpassed her mentor, and the next day announced that she would be trying for Rauw."

  "What is chasing her?" Eluvie asked.

  Maso burst into laughter. "That is what I said! I mean, she's clearly capable. She clears trials in half the time it takes everyone else, but she should take an actual break now and then. Trials might be easy for her, but they can't be as easy as she makes it seem."

  He sounded as if he was speaking directly to Eluvie there, though he gave no visual indication of that.

  "Why would she bother?" Eluvie asked. "If she already outranks everyone, what is the point?"

  Yira still looked miffed at the direction of the conversation, but she supplied an answer.

  "She is actually doing a good thing," Yira said. "The elders don't tell us, but we know there are important things that can only be done at higher ranks, important things are getting neglected. The sky, for example, it doesn't maintain itself. The other worlds -" she paused nervously, "your world is horrible, but some worlds are literally falling apart. Higher ranks come with more power, the power to fix larger problems. Everyone is so terrified of the trials that after a certain rank, no one wants to advance anymore. But if they don't we might be fine for now, but the decline of those worlds can reach us. Isei has a good heart. She cares about the people of other worlds. She goes through terrible trials for them. She is brave, selfless, and has an unfathomable understanding of the creator. If even half of us were like her, we could create a thousand Sanctuaries, instead of cowering in this one."

  The woman they were describing bore no resemblance to Eluvie. Eluvie didn't even want to be like her.

  "So, you think she will pass the trial?"

  Both Illrum fell silent.

  "She's failing," Eluvie guessed.

  Maso shook his head solemnly. "No one can say. No one knows the actual success conditions for a trial until it is over."

  He said that, but it was clear from their expression that the situation was dire.

  "It'll be fine as long as she doesn't kill anyone," Maso said, earning a glare from Yira; a glare he promptly ignored. "I know that for each trial, you need to meet the requirements for the coming rank without violating the requirements for your current rank. And being unable to forgive your enemies clearly violates the requirements for Isei."

  "We should go inside," Yira said. "We've seen enough."

  While they guided her back to her room, Eluvie steered the conversation to the topic of food. Yira treated even that topic as if it were a national secret, but she seemed less anxious about it.

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  Yira and Maso proved to be worse captors than Mirab’s guards. When they returned to their quarters, Eluvie requested something mild to drink and then expressed the intention to sleep.

  She truly did sleep, knowing how complacent that made the guards. And it worked. She woke hours later and found Yira and Maso, not asleep, but lying on the floor, engrossed in their own conversation. Escaping them proved nerve-wracking, but comically easy. She split off a tiny piece of herself, converted it to a wisp of smoke, and steered it out through a hole in the ceiling. With the strength she had accumulated from their strange light, controlling both portions of her body proved easy and she was able to confirm that her escape had gone unnoticed.

  Outside, the world seemed frozen in the moment between twilight and dark. The weak light lent the evening an ethereal quality while lamps dotting the landscape provided just enough light to navigate by. Eluvie soared higher until she was certain that even Illrum eyes could not see her, then she proceeded toward the house that held her enemies.

  She knew exactly where they were. The tour, ostensibly born out of boredom, had actually been a survey mission. The guards and rulers had been housed together in a roofless building on the opposite side of the settlement.

  The journey was long, but not long enough for all the thoughts rattling about in her mind. When she reached her destination, she was not ready. But she was ready. She moved as quickly. When you’ve made a decision, hesitation can only presage defeat.

  Once arriving at her destination, she found the best situation she could hope for. The house was still roofless, and the prisoners were still unconscious.

  Who says that heaven gives no gifts?

  There were guards. Two stood watch in the air, two stood watch on the ground, and two were in the room with their eyes fixed on the prisoners.

  But, clearly, they had never before guarded anything more important than a locked door. They were so poorly positioned that she almost wondered if they were decoys.

  The two in the air were laughably easy to evade. They possessed blind spots as wide as a town. And neither seemed to be watching for an invisible wisp of air.

  The two guarding from the ground were similarly easy to avoid. Eluvie watched long enough to confirm that they never looked up, then found a route that would avoid them without drawing suspicion from those above.

  The two in the room were the real challenge. She hovered above the room for a while, wondering what to do. Unlike the other guards, these had their eyes on the prize. They would notice anything odd happening to their charges.

  The answer came to Eluvie, blessedly, with only a moment’s thought. It did not matter if they could see her. What mattered was that they would not stop her.

  She split herself again, then let both portions grow until they were as large as she needed. Then, she descended into the room and formed a box just as Maso had done. Inside the box was her other half, still in smoke form, and the captives. Before the guards could react, she had solidified the box into a steel structure, transformed into human form, and created a knife for herself.

  The guards attacked the box, but Eluvie poured most of her strength into reinforcing it. It held. It would eventually fall, but she needed less than a minute. One of the guards continued to pound on the box, his fists delivering enough force to crumble normal walls, while the other launched a sort of mental attack against Eluvie.

  Her head pounded, and she felt a strong invitation to put down the knife. She called up a mental image of Mirab’s face, and the mental pressure eased.

  The bodies lay defenseless before her. Her captors, unconscious and helpless as babies. Helpless as she had been in their hands. As long as she acted, she would never have to suffer at their hands again. She would never shiver with fear, cry out from nightmares, never return to the tub, never have her wings dug out, never hear a sound in the darkness and be unable to see it.

  As long as she could have that, she would want nothing else.

  Naturally, one should take the path with the least regrets.

  She began with Mirab.

  She bent over and made one slash across the woman’s throat, all her grief in the one movement.

  But the slash failed. The knife disintegrated in her hands an instant before the cut began, so that Eluvie finished the movement holding nothing but air.

  Suddenly, she could no longer feel the box she had made. The pressure of the guards’ thoughts on her mind was gone. She could not feel the body she had left behind in her quarters. She only felt weak, small, and cold.

  With the box gone, all six guards rushed at her and pulled her away from Mirab. She tried to struggle, but their grips might well have been made of steel.

  She glanced down at herself, searching her mind and body for an explanation. Even her clothes had disintegrated.

  She recalled Maso’s reply to her question about the consequences of failure.

  Worse than death, indeed.

  She was no longer an Illrum, and her enemies were still alive.