As it turned out, meeting with the a Guild representative to recount the last hour and a bit of our lives was less than fun.

  Even disregarding the fact that I got the joyful experience of reliving the worst pain of my life, we all had to give our reports individually, so we ended up wasting a bunch of time going over all of the same information again and again.

  Admittedly it was a little interesting to hear about what I had missed between getting hit with that decay wave and regrowing my body. Apparently the reason Matthais had been so panicked by the time I was back in action was that he had actually had an escape plan that failed.

  According to Cassie and Neil, he had tried to use a spirit of some kind to make his escape, doing something to it that seemed very painful for the spirit to turn his own body ethereal and trying to flee. Unfortunately for him, by the time he tried to run Jenny had finished calming the Revenant and was able to disrupt him long enough for the spirit to escape from him, which ruined his plans.

  Nevertheless, it was definitely the least interesting part of adventuring that I had experienced so far. Neil seemed pretty used to it, giving his report in clear and concise terms. Cassie decided to embellish far beyond the rest of us, which was obviously caught out. Apparently the Guild representative was used to that kind of thing though, because he didn’t say a thing.

  When it was finally over I was plenty relieved to be making my way back to our room. I was absolutely shattered, since I had skipped sleep last night to design my bug form. The Guild was nice enough to lend me some spare clothes, so I could pass as a regular human again rather than a humanoid person with weird chitin clothing.

  At least, that had been the plan. Unfortunately I was drained in more ways than just the physical, and I was having much more trouble than usual keeping consistent. Something about running on the bare minimum of vitae just made everything harder. I was feeling cold and lethargic, and it felt like my body was less and less under my control.

  I mentioned this to Cassie when she noticed I was struggling and she had an idea for me to try.

  “Why not just be smaller?” She suggested.

  I narrowed my eyes. “And get stepped on while we walk through the city? No thanks.”

  She grinned. “Oh, don’t worry, I’ll carry you. Come on, it’ll be fun!”

  I sighed. I couldn’t make my mind up whether it would be embarrassing or enjoyable, but I had to admit that it probably would work. A smaller body would need far less vitae to function at a baseline level, after all.

  However, I still didn’t want to draw attention to myself. Even if I wasn’t walking under my own power, I needed to see if I couldn’t shift into something that wouldn’t stand out too much. I considered the problem and had a great idea.

  I focused on my body and condensed my body to mimic one that I had recently come into contact with, shifting my bones, muscle and cartilage to accommodate my smaller form. I removed my legs and shifted my arms into smaller, leaner versions of the tentacle design I already used. My eyes shifted to the top of my head and skin softened, becoming springy and elastic.

  Where I had stood now sat a brand new Observer, albeit with a couple of tweaks. Rather than the normal flat colouring I still exhibited the swirling pink and teal skin I had already had. I also decided to use the same eyes I used for my bug form, since Observer eyes were ironically not very good. It seemed like they relied mostly on their magic for sight, and I couldn’t imitate that.

  Nonetheless, I was pretty proud of my work. It hadn’t taken too long at all to do the actual shifting, more just figuring out what went where. With a swinging motion I thrust out a single tentacle and grabbed onto the ground, allowing it to stretch and then relax as it dragged me out of the pile of Guild clothes and along towards Cassie, who was suddenly huge.

  With another swing my other arm looped around and grabbed on at the apex of my momentum, and then the pattern repeated for a few more test walks before I started really getting the rhythm. It wasn’t the most efficient way to move but damn was it satisfying.

  Before I knew it I was engrossed, just spiralling around an increasingly bemused Cassie as she watched me spin my way across the wooden boardwalk. “That’s your idea? Tiny Observer Lia?”

  Her comment took my by surprise, sending me tumbling end-over-end across as I missed the floor entirely with my tentacle and just launched myself by accident. When I came to a rolling stop several feet away I realised that Cassie was straight up laughing at me.

  ‘Rude. You Try It Next Time,’ I wrote to her.

  “Nope. I’ll leave all of the weird moving to you, thanks. Now come on. I’m exhausted, and I know you are too,” she ordered. I couldn’t exactly disagree so I wriggled my way over to her and let her pick me up, placing me on one of her shoulders. Then she reached down to scoop up the loaned clothes.

  It was… weird, feeling her move around with me on her. I knew that I was completely safe, yet all the same my body was telling me I should be about to fall any second. It was strangely exciting, even though I found myself clinging quite desperately to Cassie’s shoulder. Even her small movements were fairly exaggerated with me as small as I was, not to mention the constant sway of the floating city.

  Seeing where she was going with this, I wove a small illusion over me to make it look like I was actually a towel looped over Cassie’s shoulder. I couldn’t quite manage a reflective veil with so much movement, but this would do too so long as I stayed still.

  “You alright up there?” She asked once I was settled

  ‘Yep. This Is Actually Kind Of Fun.’

  “I’m glad. Just don’t fall off, okay? If you end up in the sea it’ll take forever to find you,” she joked.

  ‘Yes, Ma’am.’ I answered.

  With that Cassie started walking through the early afternoon streets, which were actually less busy than in the morning. Most of the various fishermen were actually out on the sea now, and not too many other people were just out and about right now, at least not on the floating portion of the city.

  We started seeing more people as we hit solid ground, floating wood turning to cobbled stone. It was really strange seeing people that looked so huge, given that my whole body had about the same mass as my head did before.

  We didn’t really talk as Cassie brought us both back to our room, since she would have looked utterly mad holding a conversation with no one. This meant that I had more time to think than I really would have liked, since the more I began to think the more nervous I got.

  It was pretty obvious that Cassie and I were in a weird place right now. I didn’t quite know how to act around her after the kiss, and even though she acted fine I knew her well enough to see where she was playing it up to compensate for her own discomfort.

  The closer we got to our room the more certain I became that the ‘talk’ that Cassie insisted we have was coming up soon, which only increased my anxiety. On the one hand – or tentacle right now – I did agree with her. It had only been a couple of hours at most and I was already tired of the subtle tension that we were shrouded in.

  At the same time, however, I was entirely out of my depth with this situation. I wouldn’t exactly proclaim myself a relationship guru in any scenario, romantic or otherwise. This situation being so important only made me more worried, too. I knew how I felt about Cassie, how intense some of my feelings for her were.

  What if we weren’t on the same level, though? If she didn’t feel as intensely for me as I did for her, could I live with that? Or perhaps it was too risky to enter any kind of relationship right now. I mean, neither of us had done this before to my knowledge, and we were in a pretty weird situation what with the adventuring and the Revenant.

  On the other hand, could I handle that? I mean, I had been coping well so far with my feelings because it didn’t really change much. We had already been close and I could live with that, especially because I hadn’t really known anything else. But if I got a taste and then messed up somehow, having to go back to how we were, I wasn’t sure if I could deal with that.

  The only thing I was certain of was that I couldn’t afford to lose Cassie, no matter the cost. No matter my own feelings, she was just about all I had besides my mother, and definitely the closest person to me. I cared for her enough that I would be willing to live as friends if we could remain together, no matter how much other possibilities might tempt me.

  As Cassie entered the Warg’s Fang, I considered the possibility that I was overthinking things again. I was rather prone to it, after all. I mean, Cassie had made it pretty clear that she had some sort of feelings for me too, so maybe I could work with that.

  I couldn’t stop wondering about all of the worst outcomes though. It was just like when I thought she was leaving all over again, only this time there were good things that I was overlooking by focusing on the bad stuff. I just couldn’t get my head out of the worst case scenarios.

  By the time Cassie made it to our room and dramatically slammed the door I was spiralling out of control, considering escape options for every time Cassie rejected me or broke my heart or left. I only realised that we were in the room when I was jarred from my thoughts by the sound of the door shutting.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  I timidly crawled off her and onto the floor, feeling hesitant to touch the inevitable topic with images of every worst timeline squirming in my mind. I couldn’t bring myself to write with my illusions, so I just sat silently as I waited for Cassie to speak, my tentacles wrapped awkwardly around my bulbous squid body.

  She sighed as she sat down by the window, clearly exhausted. “So. We should really talk.”

  I blinked slowly as I thought about what to say, but she kept going. “Now if I know you, and I think that I do, you’re wondering exactly how this is going to go wrong, right? You think I’ll be too intense, or you’ll mess up somehow, or maybe we just won’t be compatible.”

  I wrapped myself tighter in my tentacles, torn between a strange sense of dread that I was known so intimately and a feeling of pure joy that it was her that knew me so well. She understood me.

  She smiled, although it was a surprisingly grim thing. “I know what it’s like. I’ve been there, after all.” She paused for a moment before continuing a little more hesitantly than before.

  “Listen, I’m going to tell you some things about myself that I hope will clear up a lot of those niggling doubts, alright? You’ll know a lot of this already, but some of it you don’t, so I need you to listen for a bit. Can you do that for me?”

  I had a feeling that this was going to be a lot, so I held my tongue, choosing to simply nod gently to her.

  Cassie’s smile was small and wry as she turned from the window to look back at me. “Thank you,” she said, sighing softly as she began to speak.

  --------------------------------------

  Cassie

  Not long after she turned thirteen, Cassandra Vaughn’s father died.

  It was a shock to the community, a supposedly healthy man passing away in the night. That was what the neighbours heard, anyway. Mother wouldn’t have it any other way.

  Cass knew the truth, of course. She had been the one to find him, laid out as he was in the main room of their house, knife by his side. She knew what had happened, what he had done. She just didn’t know why.

  She felt… numb, in a way. She should have seen this coming, really. He had been a good liar for such an honest man, but there was no hiding the pain he was in.

  Her father had been ill. Incredibly so. She knew this too, although neither of her parents knew that she did. She had heard the hushed conversations and visits by the clergy. The sobbing of her father and deafening silence of her mother.

  What Cassie didn’t understand was why Mother decided to hide the sickness from the town. She had always denied it, but Cass knew that she valued the aesthetic of a family as much as its members, so she played along. Still, she couldn't help but be baffled by her mother's priorities.

  It had hurt her Dad though, to keep up the pretence of vigour the way he had. She heard the wheezing coughs, saw the shaking hands. She even saw the quickly cleaned blades and hurriedly explained cuts on her father’s arms, although he was better at hiding those. This was to say that she didn’t blame him for leaving her, no matter how much she wanted too.

  That didn’t soothe the pain, though. No matter how much she modelled herself after her mother in many ways, it was her Dad that was her closest confidante. The only one that she told everything, that she trusted implicitly. Now she was alone, and she didn’t really know how to handle it.

  Of course, she knew she wasn’t alone. She could go to her mother for most of her problems, just so long as she was willing to endure the admonishments and hypocrisy that walked hand-in-hand with the Vaughn matriarch. Of course, there were some things that she couldn’t know, too. The kind of thing that would shatter Mother’s plans for her future, which would bring a reckoning she wasn’t ready for.

  There was a knock on her door, gentle but insistent. Mother. She rolled off her bed and got to her feet, meandering to the door and opening it. She really wasn’t in the mood to deal with her mother, but she knew what happened if she didn’t, so she would answer it anyway.

  When she opened the door she saw that Mother had company, in the form of both Julie and her own mother. They lived right on the edge of town, so they tended to travel together.

  She did have Julie as well. Her one friend, the one that actually bothered to stick with her after being examined by her parents. It was sweet, in a way, how oblivious her friend could be at times. Cass was sure she didn’t even realise the interrogation she had been put through when they had first met. She probably thought that was just how Cass’ parents were. She may have even been right.

  Julie was an odd one, though. She moved through the world like it didn’t even see her, and what was stranger was that she was often right. It fascinated Cass to some extent, but it didn’t exactly breed trust. She was interesting and fun, but they didn’t really know each other that well. She probably wasn’t the one to confide in either.

  She could guess what they were here for, so she steeled herself for a round of meaningless platitudes.

  “Look who’s here, Cassandra! Your friend and her mother have come to pay their respects. Be nice now.” Her mother was using the voice she did when they had company, the happy, jovial home-maker who adored her daughter and loved her home town. “Why don’t you show Julie here to your room while I talk with her mother?”

  Cass just nodded and wandered away from the door again to sit on her bed once more, the tacit invitation obvious. Julie didn’t take it though. Of course she didn’t. Julie always seemed to think on a parallel line of thought to everyone else. Her master said there was something odd about her, but assured her that the girl wasn’t dangerous.

  “Come in,” she said finally. Her friend entered her room and sat calmly on the floor, looking up at her with those big eyes that always seemed to look through whatever they saw.

  “I heard about your dad,” Julie finally said. “Sorry. Do you have any cards?”

  That was it. No little anecdote about what Dad had done for her, no condescending pat on the shoulder or sad smile. Just a brief sorry and then moving on. It was strangely refreshing, somehow.

  Cass couldn’t stop herself from letting out a choked laugh. It was completely inappropriate, of course, but who cared? Mother wasn’t here anymore, she could act however she wanted.

  Julie appeared concerned, tilting her head a little as she examined Cass. “Did I say something wrong?”

  Cass waved a hand. “Nope! You’re fine. I don’t have any cards, sorry.”

  Julie seemed both relieved and disappointed at the same time. She absently fiddled with her hair as she thought about what to ask next. “Do you have any sticks?”

  Confused, Cass responded earnestly. “Not in here. I’m sure we can find some outside though. Why?”

  Julie looked at her like she had just asked if humans needed to eat. “For sword-fighting, obviously. I started learning recently, it’s really fun!”

  You know what? Sure.

  “Alright, come on then,” Cass remarked as she stood up. She was strangely excited to hit something with sticks. “I think I know a place where we can get some really good ones.”

  --------------------------------------

  Age fourteen saw Cass feeling lost again.

  There were some problems that you couldn’t deal with on your own, she was learning. Often these were problems that originated from other people too, but the sentiment was still there.

  So it was that Cass found herself making her way out to the edge of Vernal once again. The Weaver household had become something of a refuge for her over the last year, as she and Julie grew closer.

  Julie was still an odd one, but Cass found herself thinking of that as more and more of a positive trait these days. She was a strange mix of oblivious and self-conscious that meant that she was an excellent friend to have. She had no issues with personal space because she was more than happy to just leave Cass alone if needed, which she really appreciated.

  Still, she wasn’t making the walk to her friend’s home to see her. Rather, she was going to see her mother, Jenna. Where Julie had accidentally taken up the slack of Cass’ social needs, her mother had somehow ended up as her number one confidante.

  When she reached the small house on the outskirts of town, she knocked rapidly three times. For some reason both Weavers had insisted that she have a knock distinct from their own so that they knew who was coming in. It was a simple system, but she supposed it made sense to be prepared.

  The door opened to reveal Jenna, a short and buxom woman who had clearly decided at some point that she would only ever ‘bustle’, rather than simply move around. She smiled broadly when she opened the door.

  “Hello, dear. Julie’s out hunting again, I’m afraid. She’ll be back before long, I imagine.” Jenna then leaned down and whispered. “Unless you’re here for me?”

  Cass grinned, the older woman’s energy always bringing her mood up a bit. She considered herself a fairly happy person most of the time, but a top-up never hurt.

  “I am here to see you, Miss Weaver,” she replied in a similarly conspiratorial whisper.

  Jenna straightened up and moved into the house. “Well you had best come in then, dear. And for goodness sake girl, call me Jenna. I swear I’ve told you a hundred times.”

  Cass grinned wider as she stepped through the doorway. “Yes, Miss Weaver.”

  The older woman chuckled as she settled down by the fire, a cup of hot tea in her hand. Somehow there was already a second one waiting for Cass. The woman always knew, no matter the occasion. It was mystifying.

  Cass settled down across from her and gently sipped her tea. It was nothing special, just hot water and leaves, but it was strangely soothing to sit in the cosy little house with a hot drink and a fire.

  “So,” Jenna asked. “What is it that has you coming to see an old woman?”

  Cass stilled and Jenna caught on immediately. “Come now, dearie. Take your time, won’t you? No need to rush it all out.”

  Cass shook her head at her own foolishness. “No, I just… Miss Weaver, I need some advice.”

  Jenna raised an eyebrow. “Well now, that doesn’t sound so bad. Why not go to your own mother though? Not that I’m complaining about your company, mind.”

  Cass shook her head. “She wouldn’t understand. She can be very… domineering.”

  “I’ll do what I can, then. Do tell, kiddo.” Jenna hunched forward, attention squarely on Cass.

  She hesitated, wondering how to phrase her question. “Okay. Um, there’s someone that I know. And I like this person, I think. As in, like like, you know? Only, I don’t think they like me back. I don’t really know how to ask, either.”

  Jenna tilted her head, the movement reminiscent of her daughter’s own curious mannerisms. “Really? That is rather a pickle. Who is he, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  Cass hesitated again, bracing herself. “Um. They’re actually a she, Miss Weaver.”

  Somehow, the expected reaction never came. No disappointed sigh, no sharp look or steely gaze. Nothing like she imagined her own mother would react. If anything, it was eerily reminiscent of how her father had reacted when he found out.

  Jenna simply leaned in closer. “Alright, who’s she then?”

  Cass, who had been expecting so much worse, froze. Yet she pulled herself together. She had gotten through the hard part, from many perspectives. Now she just needed to get through the home stretch. “Um. Your daughter, Miss Weaver.”

  Jenna stared at her for a moment before bursting out into laughter. “Oh, really? Well, isn’t that lovely. I have to admit, I had been a little worried about her. No, you’ll do fine there.”

  “Pardon?” Cass asked. This had been far from how she had thought this would go.

  Jenna collected herself and looked at Cass. “Well dearie, I have reason to believe that our Julie has a bit of a thing for you myself, I do.”

  “Really?” Cass asked again. She didn’t dare hope, but she needed to here it first.

  “Oh, yes,” Jenna beamed. “She’s really rather fond of you, you know. Talks about you all time, she does. Gets all sad when you’re busy too. Call it motherly intuition, but I have a feeling about this.”

  “Huh,” Cass wondered. “So what do I do?”

  Jenna’s smile turned a little strained. “Ah. That’s the hard part, I’m afraid. You need to wait a bit, I reckon. Trust me, she needs to figure this sort of thing out for herself.”

  “Oh,” Cass responded. “I can do that.”

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