Dani stops. Everything that is him bleeds out through his skin in prismatic colours, each of which whispers in a different tone. Reds are passionate. Blacks scared. Blues mournful, greens joyous, oranges sick… and a mess of everything else that smears together to form Dani as a person. It bleeds and bleeds and bleeds until his actual body is colourless and thin like tissue paper soaked in rubbing alcohol.

Jumble cries for him. Her claws scrape down the shield as she quietly apologizes to thin air–because Dani isn't in there anymore. All the magic and colour pools at the bottom of the shield, crackling and fizzling against the system's power… and stays there. Locked inside thanks to a power that's a little too strong for Jumble to break through.

"What did you do to him?" Clutter asks warily. "He's all… see-through."

"What did I do?" Jumble shakes her head and laughs humorlessly. "I did what I had to do. If he got to use that Class… the system would've won. It would've taken him away, regrouped with its army, and I would've lost my only… my only…"

She gnashes her teeth as she struggles to get the words out. I kneel at her side and wrap my arm around her, feeling her short breaths and stifled sobs pounding against her frame from the inside. This… is the kind of dismay I would've expected from her seeing Euro die. Definitely not Dani.

"I know he was a bastard, but he was your bastard," I quietly say with as much reassurance I can muster for the bastard. "Must be hard unmaking someone like that."

Jumble laughs again and vigorously shakes her head. "Dani? Y-you think I'd waste all these tears for that murderous traitor? No. No, no, no… absolutely none of these are for him. They're all for what he made me do to save the rest of us. What he made me do to get the coin sitting uselessly in that colourful puddle."

What he made her do? I discreetly glance over at Clutter to see if he knows what she's talking about. All he can offer is a shrug. So I look to Pearl… who is stunned silent. With a look of sympathetic dismay so deep that it almost looks like she's feeling Jumble's emotions at the same time she is.

An awful possibility twists at my gut. "Jumble, what did you have to do?"

A soft, staticky crackling hits the edge of my awareness. It rockets through faster than almost anything I've ever seen, seeps in through the crack in the ceiling, and rains down on Jumble in a sort of morose rainbow. I slowly pull my arm away and back off, the sensation in my gut quickly spreading all the way to the tips of my ears and the back of my throat. But… it's only one so far. Maybe it's the only one that's going to appear.

"It isn't," Pearl raises her hands to her eyes and grips her face. "Because that's not how magic like this works; not unless you have thousands of hours and hundreds of people working on complex failsafes. Instead, you just do the simplest thing possible and never even consider how horrible things might end up going."

I swallow around nothing as images of the book pop into my head. Overlapping colours, all written at the exact same time on the same pages. If one of them dies, their colour just stops. But if you pull the pages out of the book… you rip out all of the colours at the same time.

Another crackling pool of magical essence slurps through the ceiling and rains down on Jumble. My Class Card finally buzzes, as do Clutter's and Jumble's. I don't have to look at it to know what question is being asked. Because Jumble just ripped the pages out to make sure one colour couldn't keep being written.

Killing all of her constructs in the process.

Her Class Card bubbles. She summons it and waves a hand over it. A slough of coloured magic pours free, seeps into her feet, and disappears in a heartbeat. Everything that is her heaves in sadness–yet, in that sadness, she feels far more powerful than a moment ago. Jumble clutches her clawed hand against the seemingly impenetrable shield.

It shatters with a horrid screech. The last remaining construct fluid seeps into her feet, and the near-invisible outline of Dani finally blinks out of existence. Completing the absolute end of Jumble's party to leave only her behind–all the power she'd put into them now hers alone to wield.

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I almost open my mouth to ask if there was another way, but stop myself as I think better of it. Obviously there was a better way. Obviously she didn't try for it because we're about to lose a lot of people to the horizonguard finishing the quest. Saying that shit to her right now would be like plunging a rusty salt-coated needle into a fresh knife wound.

When I finally do manage to open my mouth, something pathetic and unhelpful dribbles out. "All of them?"

She nods solemnly and lets her hands fall to the ground. "Ward, Euro, Rina, Dani. Their story is over. Now… it's just the author on her own again."

"Just you?" I ask almost entirely on reflex. "What are we, invisible?"

Jumble blinks, then looks over her shoulder. Her eyes take in me and Clutter–and Pearl, somehow–as if seeing us for the first time. She stifles an inappropriate laugh, then starts to laugh-sob in equal measure. I'm in the middle of wondering if that's a good thing or a bad thing when she springs up and wraps her arms around me, nuzzling a tear-soaked face into my neck as she squeezes me tight.

"Thank you," she whispers. "Just… don't be like everyone else I've ever loved. Please."

I forcibly chuckle and pat her on the head. "Don't plan on it any time soon."

She nods into my neck, then looks up at Clutter over my shoulder. "You, too. Just because you're not the one getting hugged it doesn't mean you're any less important to me."

"No, I know I'm not," Clutter chuckles awkwardly. "But… um… we don't have time for this, right? Sorry if that sounds insensitive."

Jumble shakes her head and lets go, rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand as she walks away. "You're right. Okay, both of you–do not touch that coin. I know it feels like a Worth coin, but it's so much more insidious than that. The system used it a long time ago to bait one of my… actually, my only friend then… into using it."

"Bait?" I ask.

"Yeah, bait. Er-hem!" Jumble clears her throat, then bends down and carefully picks up the coin using the pages of her book like tongs. Her now completely empty book. "Okay, so, very short explanation; this coin is the Master-Servant coin. When someone finds it, they can mark themselves as the master, and then whoever uses it is duty-bound to obey everything they say. Yes, it is a Worth Class, but right now you'd probably be forced into doing the horizonguard's bidding if you used it."

I raise an eyebrow at the innocuous coin. "Why does it have bird motifs?"

"Does that mean two people can use the same coin?" Clutter chimes in before Jumble can answer. "How does that work? Does it mean the horizonguard can have two Classes if he uses that one?"

Jumble snaps her book closed, sealing the coin inside. "If either of you ever get the chance to ask the system, be my guest; I only know this second-hand thanks to my skill. Now that we actually have the coin, there's a good chance we'll be able to find someone to study it. Like Clutter said, though, we don't have time. Did anyone look through the telescope since we broke the ceiling?"

I shake my head.

Clutter darts for the telescope. He presses his eye to the lens, which is aimed directly at the hole in the sky. A soft gasp escapes his lips, and when he pulls back, there's a ring of sparkling grey magic around his eye like a monocle.

"Oh, wow, that's weird," he murmurs as he moves his hand in and out of his field of view. "Can any of you tell if this magic is safe for me to have on my face?"

"It's safe," Pearl assures me.

"Pearl says we're good," I echo to everyone else. "What can you see, Clutter?"

He points up towards the hole. "A path."

"What kind of a path?" Jumble asks, but puts her eye to the lens without waiting for an answer. "Oh, that kind of path. I probably should've seen this coming. Your turn, Shelby."

She steps aside, her own monocle of magic resting pleasantly on her face. I fiddle with an earring to sate the urge to claw at my neck as I step up, lean down, and gently press my eye to the viewpiece. At first, it looks just like what I can see from my other eye; a hole, a lot of localized mist billowing in the sky, and nothing much else. Then my awareness flashes with magic, and everything changes.

A long, grey staircase appears out of nowhere, extending far into the sky and ending exactly at the mouth of the hole. Each of the steps is strangely deep and made of dozens of individual squares of stone; a dozen feet wide, and another dozen feet deep. There are some scratches on said squares, too, almost like… letters. Paindne letters.

I squint to try and get a better look. With a flash of Pearl-tinted inspiration, I can suddenly read every single name etched in and the dates listed right above them. Because these aren't any simple stones. They're tombstones. Stacked so many high and long that they stretch into the sky without any effort at all.

"The tombstones are leading us right to the hole in the sky," I mutter. "Does that mean the actual tombs have been in that huge hole the entire time?"

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