The Cane and his charge walked up to Wander, who met them in the middle. She went up to De. The eyes of the animals followed her.


    De stood across from her, and shivered.


    "S-Shaminkat," he whispered.


    Wander looked at him and then at Fragile. The Sixbraid''s eyes were pressed open. He was not fidgeting. His breaths were shallow.


    "H-he is w-well," De stuttered. "M-my w-worker h-has h-h-him." He coughed.


    "I am surprised you could take him from the Light," Wander said.


    "I h-have his t-touch." De rolled his grip on his weapon. "I c-could t-take him f-from t-the s-sea."


    De waited for a reply which was not forthcoming.


    "D-drop your n-niv," De said. "And h-he w-will keep."


    Wander''s blood was cool. Her grip on her blaith relaxed, and did not release.


    De tilted his head. He lifted his finger. Fragile removed the littlecane from his hoofleather bag and put it to his throat.


    </a> The weapon broke his skin. De watched her. Her brow and mouth remained flat as he began to make his way to a large vein, and her grip on weapon stayed loose. Some muscles in her legs began to tense. She looked at De, and saw instead the dimensions of Fragile''s throat.


    </a> The Cane raised his hand and Fragile''s halted. A thin cone of blood traced down his neck, past a point where they could not see.


    </a> De looked up at her. His eyes fell through his mask, uncovered by the sun. He tilted his head, and Fragile''s hand dropped. He began to walk back towards De''s army.


    </a> "H-how?" De asked.


    </a> "He has touched two," Wander said. "They have both put metal to his neck. If you want to hurt him, you will have to do it with that way."


    </a> De looked at her.


    </a> He stepped back toward his retinue. "T-these can t-take your tithe, firmtipper." His body clicked. "Or w-we m-meet again. T-tonight."


    </a> He turned away and the ranks of howls and tusks and stompers moved on Wander. They let out a roar that started and stopped.


    </a> Wander looked at the animals, and they were all stuck in her many assemblies. She admired their figure. She preferred the sound of them and the difference, which De''s trick had now pressed out of them. There was no mystery in their movement, or difference, and they had all been tied together, and did not know anything. Their word had been risen from them into a new one.


    </a> When the bodies washed around her and surrounded her, she stood still, and moved her body toward their mouths. The wings came down and perched on her and snapped at her face. The howls bit at her armor and the straps that closed it. The tusks thrust at her and shot dents into her torso.


    </a> A stomper twice her size lumbered through the mass. The howls and tusks moved out of its way, and continued with their assault. It threw her down with a paw on her chest and wrapped its jaws around her head. In the darkness, the master''s blades fell.


    </a> A pair of hands wrapped around the stomper''s jaws. A whirling occurred, and she had soon produced a room to conduct her work.


    </a> Over the hours, Wander swept her blaith back and forward. The wings swam down to her and did not rise up again. That brought in the light, which shined black, red, and glared gold as the sun dropped and took on the shades of her department. She found twilight when the labor was complete.


    </a> The fur and carcasses of a thousand dead beasts laid down around the roundseats of the shell. She sat down among the dead, her hesigns shimmering and her armor torn, at the foot of a howl with a stab in its throat.


    </a> She took the howl in her hands, without her gloves. She looked into its eye, which had not closed.


    </a> She bit into its coat. De watched from afar.


    </a> As she ate it up, and ate the sinew, De sat down. He removed the mouthpiece of his mask and set aside. He withdrew his blower from the folds of his robe, clicked his lips, and placed it there. A sweet note rang out across the field and swam among the popping of the meat.


    </a> The song De played was soft and slow. Wander had heard it once before. At that time, he had moaned and screamed through its holes. Now he was nurturing the air. His tune mixed itself between a parallel, floating series that plucked itself raw. She had not heard it from his instrument.


    </a> Fragile''s expression twitched and jolted. His eyebrows loosened and then tensed up again. Water stained his face. Wander looked into De''s eyes as she crushed her teeth through a bone. He looked back at her as he passed his air through this style.


    </a> When she was finished, Wander wiped her mouth and stood. De''s lips separated from the blower. He laid it in the snow and rubbed it with his thumb. She advanced on him.


    </a> De shivered in his robe against the Wild. The intensity of his shaking diminished when it took on the boiling air that Wander, hot with exertion, was creating. Her frame, covered with blood, took up her blaith and the wreckage of her Kathan blade and exited the battlefield. She took up a spot apart from him where sun shone between, and descending.


    </a> De stabbed his walking stick into the frozen ground, cracking it apart. He removed his robe.


    </a> He was nude beneath the smoky veils that he stayed behind. The Freeman''s flesh, exposed to the naked eye, posed a mottled, shifting hue, which mixed and disposed of individual shades of green, grey, and yellow. Chunks of iron had developed in deposits that encrusted his arms, chest, and stomach. Hanging from his arms, from his legs, and from his upper back, where they collected heavily, was an assortment of half-bodies. The beginning of hands and faces protruded from it, pushing out, no longer restrained by the lumps of cloth. On his abdomen, the crown of a head emerged, trailing strands of Goalish hair. They were thick and black.


    </a> He raised his hand up to his mask, and his face showed in.


    </a> His appearance had been opened in many ways. Loops of skin lacked joins to the muscle and were buffeted by the wind, exposing his naked gums and jaw. Chinbones stretched out and formed a track around his neck. A hive of decay in the cartilage exposed his nostrils. The skin on his cheeks drooped such that his eye sockets were exposed, and their spheres were fully visible.


    </a> De wrapped his fingers around his weapon and lifted it out, brandishing it at his side. It twitched and jittered as he continued to do.


    "I h-had f-forgotten," De said. "The n-newest-t tip-pper. Onn''s last daughter." His throat and head stilled, and they growled this out.


    </a>


    </a> "Y-you place me so l-low?"


    De''s teeth bit together and the muscular ribbons beside it creased. "You should have w-w-waited," he said. "I am-m old."


    </a> "I''m glad I didn''t."


    </a> "And I-I – I am g-glad."


    </a> His cane jolted out to the side and he held out his other hand. "The Otiseran wants your tithe, firmtipper. Bring it out."


    </a> Wander went forward. Her blaith rose up and thrust itself into De''s sternum.


    </a> The Cane was unmoved. He reached in a hand around the metal and closed it. She took back half of the weapon, and she flew until she landed among the dead. She crashed into a clump of howl bodies and rolled.


    The Cane extracted the sign-written blade from his chest and let it drop to the ground. He hunted toward her.


    Wander stood up and looked at the ruin of her blaith. The residue in the signs sputtered and dripped away, falling to the ground, mixing with the blood of a fallen stomper, and dissolving.


    She turned her eye to the approaching Cane. She took the ruin of the Kathan blade in her free hand, the blaith in her burned one, and jumped into him.


    -


    As their clamor started, the Bell''s rope ceased to move around Wander''s waist. It became regular again. The air did not tingle, for there was nothing in it. She was no longer touchable.


    She approached the other, her peer, who sat as the silence that was De.


    "Show yourself in, stranger," the Bell said.


    De''s place washed toward her. His shape was small and many-pointed. She watched him shaft and plunge through the light on his approach, producing thin appenda that she could not contain the tips of.


    She swirled and folded toward him, and regarded his senses.


    "What is your name?" Bell asked. "On our last visit, there was no exchange."


    "Name?" said her peer. "A name is for a speaker, feurkun-Bell, and his friends."


    "What is this I see in you?"


    "Gifts. I create ones. I will create you, feurkun-Bell."


    "If you wish to do it," she said, "you should do it soon, before my path is walked once more."


    "I have your ways," the creator of ones insisted. "Do not mistake my shape, feurkun-Bell. There is a wrong in you that can be dispensed. What it needs is your ear."


    "Where does she sit at the end of it?"


    She gave his gaze to The Joyous One.


    "The firmtipper is your limit," he said. "There are other suns."


    "But there are none so bright," she said. "Or none so me."


    The creator of ones moved closer.


    "Then take up your blade, walks-smiles," he said. "And bring in its murder to me."


    He moved into her, and it was very quick. The Bell was pierced and cut apart.


    </a> Her parts bounded around and cried out, before sticking back together again. The creator twisted, and cut her more.


    -


    Below, the strangers hit at their respective metal resounding, but they broke apart and paused as the world became enveloped by shifting experience. The Cane jumped as the ground turned to a mixture of gelatins, solids, and waters. They looked up at the sky as it thundered without clouds, and the stars all vanished.


    </a> The duelists ate into each other. Their metal was hungry. It cleft apart and could have eaten too. They consumed each bash the other wrought. They circled around and hit in, and became a creature that devoured them both.


    </a> Wander sought the Cane. She snapped and slashed at him with her stumped weapons. Both began to split and chip, producing brilliant shine in the ear and eye as they met his cudgel. Chunks of them splintered and stuck in De''s skin, and when he saw it, he cried. It was a hoarse wail that came out from his throat, which was opened, and which she could see his body work. He blew back against her and retrieved the pieces of himself, grit his teeth and shook.


    </a> De took in her as well. It did not matter how much she hit him. His flesh was voracious, and grew firm when she thundered into it, excited by her slicing ministry. The dull of her fists made him still. He broke his cane and took in what she gave back to it. The star would not move, had nothing that would move, or he could not retrieve as much. Wander saw this, and hit him further.


    </a> The Star and Cane broke apart as the sun fell below the horizon and the sky bloomed. De jittered and jumped wildly at rest. Wander looked at him with a wide gaze and her arms open.


    </a> "This is Harmony, firmtipper," De whispered. "There is no family here."


    </a> When Wander hit De, she heard the peal of a Bell chime. Her knives put a weathering to the shells that protected him. De''s eye turned and shook as he saw them come apart and he lunged forward, and there was no more line between them.


    </a> The ground fought in their fighting. The air cut itself and rebounded. The ground was thrown onto other parts by the plunge of their hips and feet. The moisture on their fists and skin met. As she fought Wander tore apart herself. Her body rebelled against the levers of the project.


    -


    De was thrown into a wall: a sturdy, half-formed one inside the shell. She solved through it with her fists.


    </a> They were carried back by their play through the ruins, towards the Larun order-stone. Wander''s Kathan blade rang out like a bell when his club struck it. When he could strike what stood past it, there was no sound.


    </a> He punched her with the flat of his weapon, into a path between the roundseats. De wiped his eyes free of fluid. They explored her face as she rose and resumed.


    </a> "You seem a law," he said. "My fifty-fourth face. The men that did not scream, would scream in fear of it. You do not give out anything. I will take it from you, firmtipper."


    </a> Wander struck back at him, striking him in the chest. He raised up his hand as she threw out hers again, shivering. He could have raised it faster, and she punctured him with the Kathan blade. She twisted the handle, and De did not let out any cry or flinch from it.


    </a> "I have little that you lack," she said.


    </a> His teeth bit together and his cheeks creased. He gripped her hand.


    </a> "I lack the scream," he said. "The lack is me. The noise was taken from my I."


    </a> He took out the Kathan blade and wrestled with her.


    </a> "My I," De said, "is a Freeman."


    </a> "My I," De said, "is a coin."


    </a> He threw her off, and roared out a shriek. Her blood burned and a hand lunged into him.


    </a> -


    </a> The Bell screamed and raged around her assailant. He punctured and divided her. He produced holes and drove them apart, through her, whirling her around. She was scattered into pieces. He waited and he watched as they jumped into one another again. They coiled around his face, and he snapped them away.


    </a> The Bell''s concerns assembled themselves, and all of them were joined by the problem. She could grasp no blade. Her creator grasped many. When she pushed against it, she was shorn apart.


    </a> The creator of ones was silent, and he became still, seeing her hold on to herself, and crying out by the cuts that her plan led her to.


    </a> She moved herself around, and tried to create a pierce, but it only tugged soft the sense of the creator. He spoke, and his word became filled with light and humor.


    </a> "You hardly have a hand for what you are!" he cried. "You have a nature, woman. It cannot be changed."


    </a> He moved again, and pinned her with his knives, and not enough to break her apart. She squirmed and worked toward it, that she might be free.


    </a> "If there is a cut in my nature," she screamed, "you will find it, brightplague."


    </a> The creator''s shape wiggled and rippled with a jolt at the word. "I have seen the aberration," he said. "That is not your true way. You are wasting your potentials."


    </a> "My potentials!" The Bell cried. "Shall I now hear of smiles from you, cuts-apart?!"


    </a> "The cutting is creation," the creator said. "The cutting is a way to your concerns."


    </a> It traced its edge along the rough seams in her composition. "Inside the ties you seek- there I am! I am always. To reject me, impossible. My work, and its figures, the principle. The power that rises up and prices this priceless firmament. Yours is second to it. But even in that rank, a heavenly system can await you."


    </a> The Bell sparkled. "Heavenly?"


    </a> The pressure on her lifted slightly.


    </a> "Let me show you the paths I can offer your Firstpoint," said The Creator. "Take ten of these breathers'' turns. Our shape shall form the whole of this space we inhabit. The fibre of the ground shall fit to our step! Be brave, and receive the ecstasy of your post. Look up at me."


    </a> The Bell did.


    </a> "Answer me, now," The Creator said. "Little Bell."


    </a> The Bell sparkled again. Parts of her drifted out from underneath him.


    </a> They wrapped around his point, and between themselves, crushed it.


    </a> -


    A yowling red thunderbolt cracked across the shell, from the ground to the sky and back down again, and remained there, glowing down. Fragile''s gaze - fixed where it had last been ordered, on the clouds of dust spilling up from the roundseats - twitched again. He blinked.


    The fissure that had threaded itself up to the stars emitted raining showers of luminous golden drops. They marked the fields that Wander plowed with De.


    The warrior sheathed her weapons and brought down her fists on his side and jaw. He stumbled backward, so she hit him again in the chest and the chest. She pulled him close, and bit off his cheek with her teeth. She threw him into the order-stone and swallowed.


    </a> De''s body cracked over the monolith and splashed into the snow. Brown fluid stained it and the rock. He did not move or make noise.


    </a> Wander watched the streaks of light play over him. Another bolt cracked across the sky that was white. Snow fell from it, as the air continued to rage and heat. As it did so, she moved on him.


    </a> Around her step, the snow melted within a large radius, stretching high in to the air, such that the precipitate became rain many metres up. The air waved, the ground steamed, and her eyelids drooped. She removed the ruined blaith from her belt and pricked her finger with it. Its signs were silent and quiet. Her arm fell, and she trudged forward. Her eyes focused on his neck.


    </a> The Freeman''s body twitched. She stopped.


    </a> It recoiled. The eyes and mouth De was marked with opened; tugging muscles underneath hugged them toward plans of expression and alignment that conflicted and changed, and the faces they made swirled between possibilities. They began to look and speak.


    </a> "How I price you, Otiser; how I praise you! For what is it you want? Please, speak to me!"


    </a> "What''s happening? Is this design? This feeling, a great trial. Prodda sees me first."


    </a> "The fight is on! The firmtipper must fall. She must, at our hands. Where are my hands? Where is my niv?"


    </a> Their hands and legs began to move. They returned him to a standing posture and turned him.


    </a> When they had done this, De was absent. A younger man had taken his place. His head had a face, formed with Fragile''s skin color. Black hair grew out from his skull. His eyes were fully white. There was no green in them.


    </a> "I will say it," the man said. "Your law is high. I do not know that it is high enough."The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.


    </a> Wander unsheathed her Kathan blade.


    </a> The man lifted his arm. The material of his weapon had sealed onto his skin. It had become a dark, heavy skewer melted into his wrist, and the cheek of his palm. He splayed all of his fingers, on his hand, his chest, and more curling over his shoulder, reaching out from around his back. The parts of his body loosened and unfolded, and gained new definition. They fell out from his rear and center, reached toward and above her, and unfurled themselves.


    </a> "The higher law can break another," The Cane said. "We can find a freedom there."


    </a> He looked at her. "Show it to me, Dry Man."


    </a> The faces chittered. "Fight the firmtipper!" "Fight her." "Do only what is right."


    </a> His fingers wrapped around the shaft and started forward. "Show me a higher law."


    </a> -


    </a> The Bell bit again upon her foe.


    </a> The creator of ones screamed and stabbed into her vise. Her feeling loosened, but he did scream from her new experiment, and kept doing it.


    </a> "Feurkun," he said. "Shamin leavings."


    He drove his point through her. She resumed again, and was growing dry of screams, but she did not like it. She saw less well, and less particular.


    He forced himself against her and she wrenched his tip back and forward. She fell on him and came apart by it, rejoined into a bash.


    </a> The creator squealed and scrambled to get a push on her. Once he did, he howled, and splintered her into many pieces. He threw them out, and kept up his work, making her smaller and smaller.


    </a> A group of her pulled itself together, and he slammed into it.


    </a> "You see this a smiling work," the creator roared. "I was your Joyous One''s last hope. Your faithless, know-nothing coin destroyer. Her last. Let it be said. Have you even seen what it''s like? The silence?"


    </a> Her parts reared and crawled around him, and he beat them back together.


    </a> "We are alone!"


    </a> He struck her into a small space. "I have taken the only path. The same that you would have taken. The one you could have taken, feurkun Chamark. That little spark we murdered burned the words into you. Must I really scream them for you to hear?


    </a> WE HAVE NO RULERS. WE HAVE NO RULES. WE HAVE NO GOAL.


    </a> He struck her at last, and she was shot apart at speed. She reached for herself, what was left, in the dim, and the creator reached for it too.


    </a> -


    </a> The foreigner fought back. Wander moved, and he kicked her, in the chest, back and waist. Her posture shook with each blow. They found paths inside that had not been travelled.


    </a> The Cane''s hands leaned down to pick at her. She swept up her blade and cut them as they approached. Four fell, trailing brown liquid, and eight moved to take their place.


    </a> The Cane''s legs struck at her without stopping. Her body bent and rolled with each one, and she could swing cuts at them, but he moved away from her with the consistency of gusted water. His shaft folded at the speed which delivered it. It shot across her cheek and she was blown into the dirt.


    </a> "Where is the Dry Man?" he said. "Only she can show The Cane this law, Wander. A body cannot tell a name."


    </a> She stood up. "I''m not a teller," she said.


    </a> "You are," he said. "But your tell may be softer than mine."


    </a> She swung her blaith at him. He blundered away the remainder of the metal; its shape disintegrated, flinging the last cutlet of sign-covered blade out into the snow, cracking it open at the hilt. He lowered his cane too, and she struck him one more time with the Kathan blade. She stabbed and cut and chopped at his throat, too quickly for one to see.


    </a> Two of The Cane''s arms reached over and clamped over the cuts put on his neck. His foot lashed forward and a roundseat beside the order-stone exploded.


    </a> His bleeding stanched as he walked over to where she lay.


    </a> Wander''s body was generating no more heat, and her body''s hesigns had become dark. She could see The Cane approaching as a blur, but he was not moving fast. She placed up a leg and brought her body with it, and sent a fist into his head. She received it back, and it could not be moved.


    </a> She exploded against the ground again, cracking the dirt. The force of her descent produced thunder.


    </a> "I cannot see the Dry Man," The Cane said. She did not stand up.


    </a> The Cane raised his weapon. "I will go looking."


    </a> Wander''s body cracked apart and swelled. Her eyes flooded with black fluid that increased with each strike to her head, and his body left them. Soon everything was clouded and dark.


    </a> He stopped striking her when she stopped moving, and lowered his cane again.


    </a> "I had not forgotten you," he said.


    </a> The Cane placed his stick into the ground and leaned on it and wailed. The bodies hanging around and beneath him wailed as well, writhing and clinging to him and each other. They stopped all at once.


    "I tried to forget," The Cane said. "I tried to forget until the cold came for me. That one so new could be so wrong. That one so new could pierce right so true. That one so new could see so little."


    He shut his eyes. "It was the first day I saw a beast in breathers. And I could not. My eye is for your type. My eye is for adoring. What was told sheared, and cut up the law. The break is in your flesh."


    The Cane breathed heavily. "The Firstpoint has ordered me to attack." His hands plucked at Wander''s cheeks and eyelids. "To put my niv through you," he continued, "would manage well the hurt of it. I can take your breath, too, with my hold. I can perform any way you prefer. Yours is a high price. You will receive my favors."


    An incomplete noise left Wander''s throat. He turned his ear towards her.


    Hurt is my favor, said The Dry Man.


    The Cane leaned back. "Never have I met one who broke so well," he said. "Even the Star you shot apart, firmtipper. He was a higher kind. A Firstpoint to us both. But he did not know how to break himself as well as you. His foundations were low, and was he. With this, his height could play no part. Not to a firm as high."


    The Cane looked at Wander''s wounds, which had been laid bare by the melee. They entered his eye as a piece unseen, a new shape that he did not know how to pronounce. Her weapons had broke and the feeling was good. It was covered with cuts and signs, as he was, and he had strength embedded in his bones that he saw grown whole in hers. His eye found he could pronounce it well.


    His arm broke out from its place and twisted overhead. It pointed the shaft at her chest.


    "And your firm is high," he said. "But it is not above the sky."


    -


    The Bell did not move, and could not feel herself anymore.


    She had been cut into dust. Each point of her hiked and flew a distance to the other, but as they grew smaller and smaller, the distance grew larger and larger. There was a new feeling emerging, and it was not one she had chosen, and it was not a kind of nothing. It was a pull before her, and she could not move as it began to tug.


    The creator of ones approached the largest part of her that remained. He pressed down on her lightly, and she put out no noise.


    For a moment his word scattered and did not rise high. It gathered together after that, and loomed. "I have found no blade."


    She did not speak to him anymore. He pierced her once, and she flinched.


    "My tells are fine, feurkun nothing," the creator said. "They give me a way to something wrong."


    He pierced her again. "They give me a way to things impossible."


    She began to come apart.


    "All of these will share in them," the creator said. "These breathing unders. I offer you calm with this."


    He arrayed many blades over her and began to dig.


    "Ten turns or twenty," he continued. "Only what is right will enter my eye. So get out from it – feurkun Chamark."


    He pushed darkness into The Bell''s thoughts, and they grew more empty.


    This work made room, and it was filled: by a sun, and its great invading voice.


    -


    "Eldbrother!"


    Wander''s eyes flicked in the direction of the sound. The Cane switched about, his eyes running up and down. His mouths babbled after the sound.


    They all settled and stilled on a little figure, stood nearby in the dark. The thick flock of his hair showed through the debris. His was shivering, and he was covered with sweat. His teeth were pressed together, and his eyes were wide, drinking in some visual from the flailing hues of the night, and he blinked quickly.


    Fragile rushed over and fell at The Cane''s feet. Fragile clutched at the bodies above it which fell apart in his little hands. He pressed a kiss to The Cane''s abdomen, and the eyes there widened at him. Their hands hovered over the Sixbraid, some of them clenching, Others reached out.


    "Please," Fragile said. He spoke in broken Sprak. "Firstpoint, please. Change tell. Change tell!"


    The Cane looked down at him, his mouth open. The others did the same, and his body became a top of darkness, tongues and teeth.


    Fragile cried. "Remember words your! Can remember words your? Remember? Remember! Remember!" His cry spat forth tears.


    "I can remember."


    "Touch not pain," he said. "But – this touch pain! This touch! Tell wrong! Tell wrong!"


    </a> He wept. "Please, eldbrother." He spoke in Goalish, even though The Cane could not hear it. "You must know what it all means. You have said it. You have said it to me. Please. Please!"


    </a> A boot shoved off Fragile, and he fell back into the mud.


    </a> "You price high your Firstpoint, feurkun," said The Cane. "And I price high my own."


    </a> He brought up his weapon and admired it. Many hands reached out from his arm and clasped its shaft. "The Tells are your way to calm and sun. They are the only feature I regard. My work is for them alone, and it is only there that I find a sun for myself. My Teller gives me peace. You cannot keep her taking from him what he has taken from her. No piece can."


    </a> "My part!" Fragile cried.


    </a> The Cane tilted his head. Fragile crawled back over to him on his hands and knees, soaked with dirt. "M-my part," Fragile whispered. "Me… me…" He wept. He tapped his chest. "She… see me. Give me chain. Safe Firstpoint. Give me fire. Tjeni. Make me free. Man free. Push me away. Cut me. Cut me… not her. Cut me! Cut me!"


    </a> His eyes weighed on Fragile.


    </a> "A strange virchue," he said. "The wit of Partless found you out. Perhaps you do have a preferred way. It would be a delving work. Maybe it could have found a law."


    </a> Fragile''s eyes widened. De turned back to Wander.


    </a> "But a tell-" he said. "It is told. Rest now, feurkun braid. You have a right. Sett will bring you into words."


    </a> He cocked back his arm. "Words that can fly.


    </a> Fragile moved. The Bell screamed. The world flashed wild red, white, and black, and then silver as the bolt shot into her. The sky cracked with fire.


    </a> Fragile shivered. His arms clung around Wander''s neck, and he looked into her eyes. They were very wide.


    </a> There were shallow gasps. "I''m s-sorry," he whispered. "I''m sorry, s-star."


    </a> He fell down. Her eyes moved to follow him.


    </a> The Cane took up his arm, and his weapon went away from Fragile''s back. A red drop flew from it, and without its support, he rolled off of her, into the dirt.


    </a> The Cane poked Fragile with his shaft. He looked at Wander.


    </a> "This was not my meaning," he said.


    </a> He looked back at Fragile. "This is a heavy sun," he said. Two hands wound around his head and covered his eyes. "I had a glimpse of it once, and now it is found out."


    </a> The hands moved away. He hunched and let his arm down. His stick pressed into the dirt. "Take calm from this, firmtipper. The tell is here to give it to us – a place where it can be found. All is for the firm – the firm is for its suns."


    </a> He opened his eyes. His cane moved on her. "Many breath and fall without finding such a prize. There are no parts for it. Take your calm, Dry Man, for you have found one. And you will meet again, in the eye of Sett."


    </a> -


    </a> The Bell felt herself descending, pierced by the creator into grains without fixture.


    </a> The fireworker''s image, the pieces, process and fluid of it, resounded through her eye. As she dispersed, a sun shined itself into the world. There could be no sun, as it was night, but she saw it anyway. The sun was sealed beneath a stone.


    </a> It moved toward her, and she became excited. The sun''s nearness tightened her feeling, and in a different place, she could feel a prod hacking and hitting at it and bellowing Larun words.


    </a> She could not move any closer to the sun, and the rock stopped her up. There came then, the idea of its removal, and she reviewed her experiments.


    </a> She had not found a pierce. But, there was a push of its own type, and it did make a scream as the pierce did. Her post could produce a work from its oppost.


    </a> So Bell reached out with her own way, and the rock was touched by it. It shattered, and shifted a warrior. The sun fattened and created the whole world after that time. And it created twos. The weak thing was in it, and he was making fire.


    </a> She looked on his word and the picture of it. She moved back through Fragile''s path.


    </a> She found another two, seated over a table, where the flame was kept. The two of them wrote some words beside it, in a pool of sand.


    </a> PAIR


    </a> PRIOR


    </a> HEART


    </a> They made flames too. They were, like the others, made from a little melting parts, which she had found in every place. And she discovered no exotic method to it.


    </a> For this, she made a new experiment, while the creator tried to crush them into memory. But she did not cut the parts.


    </a> She pulled them together. She made her own sun. Like the one she knew.


    </a> -


    </a> A swirling column of fire and dust rose. The dark retreated, and did the cold.


    </a> The Cane''s eyes opened. They realized that they had shut.


    </a> His bodies had blown through the Larun order-stone, and cracked it apart. He found himself splayed out in the center of the open. He breathed in a wheezing gasp. His legs stood him up, and he steadied himself with his weapon.


    </a> A fire had spread around the entire shell. The columns and seats were being consumed, and a great volume of snow and steam was being thrown up, offering up the foliage which sat underneath. He could not hear his worker.


    </a> The frost meant the fire moved slowly, but it had plenty of fuel and heat to run. In the distance, bells sounded, clanging in from the Wild. He had heard them before.


    </a> The Cane''s mouths let out cries and keens as the flames crawled through the weeds, closing in on them. A bout of smoke rolled down his throat and he let out revulsing coughs.


    </a> His weapon swept out at the fire. He stamped at it with his feet, and his arms reached out to smother it. He smashed and bashed. Great holes were bored in the ground, and he managed to throw a chunk of soil with which to douse it, but the explosion with which he did so was weakening. The whole wrapped around the douse and boiled through.


    </a> He looked toward the destroyed house where he had catapulted his adversary. He felt a scream in his gut as he found its shape, but he saw no movement. No, he saw movement.


    </a> It was shrouded in the swirling tongues, and in the vapor and rolling tide of smoke. A tall figure made of these rose up from off its knees, bringing up its hand from the ground.


    </a> He saw movement.


    </a> The figure unbent itself and turned to face The Cane. The ringing grew louder.


    </a> He saw movement.


    </a> "A beast," he whispered.


    </a> The ringing stopped.


    </a> The fire exploded. It shot out a green and black fury, its features alive with flame, that struck The Cane in the jaw. He screamed and fell backward. His hands wound out and threw at the spirit, and scalded themselves. He recoiled, and fought back. His shaft swung around and flung the beast into a roundseat flowering with heat.


    He looked away. The fired dwelling burst, and his face snapped forward.


    </a> Wander hacked the stakes into his waist and throat. Heat coursed through Cane''s belly. He could see her face, and it did not scream, so he did.


    He rushed forward, his appenda rolling. She punched his jaw. A middle shot from the right, her left to his cheek, and then she whirled around and cracked him over the neck.


    The Cane was shivering. Wander ripped off his club and the arm it was attached to and cannoned it through his chest.


    He was made silent for a moment, and then he erupted from his rapture. A noise like shredding iron ran out from his mouth. He struck the beast and sent her rolling away. She was swallowed by the flames again.


    He gasped in heaving breaths and looked down at the hole in his chest. He gripped the bolt with both hands and ripped it free from his innards, sending brown fluid spilling out of him.


    Her hair and form trailed loops of smoke when she returned. Her fist shot sparks as she cracked him across the face and seared his flesh.


    She struck him then, on the chest and the chest and the face and the chest and the face and the gut and the side and the chin and the eye, which became dislodged by her hit.


    She thrashed him in the chest and he was thrown to the ground. She picked up his cane from where it hand been left, placed down a foot his stomach, and drove it through his heart, into the dirt behind it.


    The nail did not take at first, and made a moderate dent in the soil. She took her fist and brought it down. It went deeper. She hit it again, and it went deeper, so that she needed to get on her knees.


    She hit it again, and it went deeper. She hit it again, and it went deeper. She hit it again.


    </a> Wander left him for a moment.


    She took a long component beam of one the columns that lined the open. She place its tipped in the fire, hiked onto his chest and rammed it into his mouth.


    </a> The Cane and his faces screamed and screamed and shouted and cried and whined and muttered and breathed heavily and breathed softly. The eyes closed. His chest rose and fell.


    </a> The cold in him left, and his face wrinkled. His hair fell out.


    The sound of fire howled and snorted with the wind. The boiling water screeched and hissed.


    </a> -


    </a> Wander ran back over to Fragile. She dusted the flames off her tattered clothing and knelt down. She turned him over and found the hole that Cane had made. It was heavy and large. The tissue, tendons and fibres were shattered, but not wholly. The position of the wound was familiar.


    </a> She blinked, and she took a section of his coldover and bound it tight. She turned him back over and took his pulse and listened to his breathing. He hadn''t woken up.


    </a> "Fragile," she said. "Can you hear me?"


    </a> He didn''t say anything.


    </a> She laid him on the ground and opened up the binding. Her eyes bulbed. Her mouth did not open. She elevated his legs and tilted back his head. She fumbled out a bottle of clear liquid from her pouch.


    </a> The Stonehoof and Stronghoof approached her. The Bell wrapped around The Stronghoof''s head. The Stonehoof nudged Fragile''s. The sky split apart and it began to rain.


    </a> Water dropped onto Wander''s fingers and effects. She took a heavy dose of the liquid and smeared it over his wound.


    </a> "Fire," she said, snapping her fingers at The Bell. The Bell shivered, and Wander''s hand was set alight. Her hand sat over his body.


    </a> She thrust her hand into him, and he was hurt. The wounds closed. She stuffed them and rebound both sides tighter, with more fabric. She shook out her hand and wrapped her arms around him, giving out her warmth.


    <hr>


    The rains extinguished most of the fires. A few still kept on, possessing the last ruins of the shell. Wander looked over her opponent''s body, which had not moved since her victory.


    The stake ran through it, pinning him to the soil. It was broken and mottled, with no clear claim to strength. It was scrawled over with faded, sputtering Hesigns, many layered over each other, along with cuts where sections of flesh had been removed, marks older and younger than the signs that had nevertheless found their way onto them at some point. Sprak phrases were etched alongside them. She found a familiarity in it, and she shook. There was a great sinking to its spot.


    She gripped her blade. She felt the prospect of breaking it apart, and as she did it broke up further. Red-brown lines trickled from his wounds onto the ground. He was intact.


    The skin was blistered, risen by swollen bluffs. Bones had snapped and fell out, writhed on the ground, crumbling. He persisted through tears. His breaths heaved and wheezed and came in stumbling bursts. Each swelled ichor from his wounds. He hunched over, and did not shiver anymore. His body gelled instead. Its contours were a chambered liquid.


    The warrior looked at the bumps patching up his skin. She looked at the bones and the shapes they made. She found the word he formed.


    "Freeman," Wander said.


    His head tilted toward her. He had one eye left. It was mostly green, with small flecks of white. "Onn''s daughter."


    "You are my first," she said. "There will be more."


    "I cannot show you roads," De said. "And you cannot take them. But try, if you must."


    "Where is your Firstpoint?" Wander asked.


    "He is in my heart," De said. "He wrote it so."


    "Then I will take it out."


    His teeth bit together and his cheeks creased.


    "Which of you threw my Wiser?"


    His teeth parted. "I," he said.


    "How was it done?"


    "We moved into the mass," he said. "Her friends attacked. I broke them. I broke her. He took the parts he liked."


    "Did she fight?"


    De''s eye blinked. "Yes."


    "How did she feel?"


    "She had no signs," De said. "I do. She was strong. But it was fast."


    "That is not what I meant."


    An earthy paste fell from De''s mouth as his teeth closed.


    "What was her feeling?" Wander asked. "Her way. Her touch.


    De''s fingers touched the soil. His eye closed and his body shivered.


    "Are you in search of something true?" he asked.


    "Yes."


    "Her touch was strong," De said. "You have read the Otiseran. She says that ones in races, run in you. She has run a long time in me."


    "Why?"


    "She granted nothing."


    Wander''s fingers wrapped around her weapon, and she stood by him without moving or speaking.


    "I''m happy for you both," De said. "I hope he keeps his breath. I hope he makes you smile. There is nothing more perfect to the ones that made me."


    He blinked when she failed to respond. His gaze became drawn to the fire. She followed it.


    "Will you give me to the ease?" he asked. "That is the best way for me. I can take my calm from it."


    She extracted the pole from his body. She took The Cane in her arms, and brought him over to the fire, and laid him down inside it. The flames lapped around her hands, arms, and chest. She stepped back when he was inside, wreathed in flame.


    De made no noise as he was surrounded by the flames. It charred his skin and some of it slowed. He opened his mouth and a cloud of frost came out, and looked at the sky.


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