Kirra Strand stared at us, flanked by two of her Firestorm teammates.

"What are you two low level knobfolds doing here?" Kirra growled. "Pretty sure that Fern assigned you to watch the Eastern edge of the labyrinth by the entrance."

"Pfff. Fern?" Candace waved the raptor girl off. "She ain't the boss of us."

"Yura and Pire," one of the raptors smirked. "Canoodling in the bushes while you're supposed to be patrolling. How utterly predictable."

"Canoodling? What is this, the 1950s?" Candace-Yura scoffed.

"We were just... strategizing," I said.

"Horizontal strategizing?" Another raptor snickered. "Come on, get back to your post. I don't want to fail this class 'cus you two can't resist pawing at each other."

"Ye," Kirra agreed. "If those delvers get past our defenses because you two couldn't keep it in your fur for five minutes, Fern will have all of our tails for lunch."

"We weren't just fooling around," I said quickly, stepping forward. "We were making out 'cus we were... celebrating our victory!"

"Victory? What victory?" Katherine asked, emerging from behind the other raptors.

"Oh, nothing much," Candace-Yura said with exaggerated nonchalance. "Ke ke ke."

"What are you knobs hiding?" One of the raptors demanded.

"Yeah. Where'd you get those bags?" Katherine demanded. "Those look like… delver equipment that was hanging in the gym."

"We just captured two delvers from Team Foster!" I declared, pulling my extradimensional backpack off myself and slowly unzipping it. "The human and the husky! Good eye, bird. That's their bags with all of their delvin' shit! They're knocked out inside! Behold!"

I unzipped the bag even more, turning it so Kirra could peer inside.

Inside, visible through the small opening, was my unconscious human body and Nessy. The husky heard me through the opening in the bag and clearly understood my game. She was pretending to be unconscious, her tongue cutely lolling off to one side.

Kirra's eyes widened. "Slayer's Sword," she breathed. "No friggin' way! You actually got them."

I zipped the bag closed quickly pulling it back on. "Yep. Two down, three to go. We were heading to Professor Fern to claim our A-grade and MVP status."

"How in the Abyss did you two idiots manage to capture Foster and the Bard dog?" one of the raptors demanded.

"Skillz, baby," Candace purred, slinging an arm around my shoulders. "Pure, unadulterated talent. Right, Pire?"

"Damn right babe," I high fived her. "Skeeels. The dumb-ass human and the husky thought they were being all clever and sneaky. They basically got their Binder fox to make them invisible and split up their team. Their invisibility doesn't work against wolf noses though."

I tapped my large nose.

"Ahh sheet." Kirra looked jealous. "Damn it, you guys got lucky."

"The level three human was real easy—no combat skills to speak of," I boasted with a laugh. "The dog put up more of a fight, knocked me down hard so I can barely walk straight now. Luckily, Yura here has a mean right hook that brought down that dumb husky."

"Damn right." Candace flexed her muscles with a canine grin. "What can I say? I'm just that good."

Katherine narrowed her eyes at us, looking skeptical but clearly impressed with us capturing two delvers. "And you two are just... bringing them to Fern?"

"Hell yeah we are," I nodded enthusiastically. "First come, first serve, baby! You snooze, you lose. We're not sharing our glory with anyone. Me and my packmate bae captured em fair n' square."

"Besides," Candace added, "those other three losers from Foster's team are absolutely tracking us right now with their sniffers, trying to rescue their packmates."

"What do you mean?" Kirra, feathers flaring up with sudden alertness.

"Like I said before," I lowered my voice conspiratorially, "their silver fox Binder is good at invisibility spells. They're using stealth tactics. But they def' can't hide from a superior snout like yours, Kirra!"

Kirra beamed at the praise.

"Here's a tip," Candace purred. "They'll absolutely be following the scent of our trail, trying to get their Alpha back. So if you want to catch the rest of Team Foster knobs, just hang around here and use yo raptor senses. Listen for breathing, sniff things, watch for disturbances in the undergrowth. Pretend that you don't see them and then BAM! Right to the noggin when they don't expect you!" She punched her left palm with her right fist.

I nodded sagely. "Yeah, we'd stay and help, but..." I patted my bag. "We gotta get these two to Fern and get our A's. I got tackled pretty bad, so I'm more of a sad impediment at this point than anything, but you guys are still fresh."

"Fair enough," Katherine said, her tone becoming more authoritative as she addressed her team. "You heard them. Spread out, keep your senses sharp. We'll catch them for sho'!"

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"Good luck!" Candace chirped, already tugging me down the path leading deeper into the maze.

As we rounded the corner and moved out of earshot, she leaned in close. "Not bad, wolf-tato. Not bad at all."

"Thanks," I whispered back. "That should keep them occupied for a while. Are you… feeling okay?"

"Peachy," she fired back, entwining her hand around my elbow. "Just… looked into the Astral too deep… again. Sorry."

"You can use your Astral gazing skill as a wolf?" I leaned in closer to her to whisper the question.

"A skill is inside of a soul," she whispered back. "And our souls are inside of these wolf noggins now."

"And where are… their souls?"

"Bound to our bodies, duh," Candace clarified. "Which I put to sleep."

"This is all sorts of weird," I commented.

"Welcome to my life," she shrugged. "Also, I just learned that it's actually way easier to see shit in the Astral when I'm not in my own brain meat."

"Hang on," I said. "So if you're in another person, that's... beneficial for your Astral Sight somehow?"

"I can see more shit, yes," she nodded. "'Cus my soul don't fit as well into 'dis bod'. I've only been outside of myself once before and spent the entire time drunk-making out with Ads, not Astral gazing at your tree branches."

"Hey, um, so that stuff you were saying before the raptors showed up," I pressed. "About the Folding Forest, the Omnid dimensional gate, the Heart of Topaz... Were those actual Astral visions then?"

Candace's wolf face scrunched up. "Ye. But, it's like... hearing fragments of a conversation through a wall. I catch bits and pieces, but the context is missing. Sometimes it's snippets of things that haven't happened yet, or maybe happened in a different version of reality."

"So you can see the future?" I asked.

"And the past. Sometimes both at once, like a Möbius loop." Her voice took on that distant quality again. "It's... unnerving. Like watching a movie play forward and backward simultaneously while someone keeps changing the script."

"And you see me as... a tree?"

"An Astral tree, yep. With branches that reach everywhere, across realities. I don't know what it means exactly, but I know it's important. More important than most things I've seen."

I mulled this over as we carefully made our way deeper into the maze. "And what did you mean about… 'Her' being 'cleaved in twain'?"

"Oh. That. You're going to think that I'm completely insane," she let out.

"Try me," I said.

"I'm her," she said.

"What?" I stared at the fox in the body of a wolf.

"I… am dancing around you endlessly because I'm her," she repeated.

"Whom?"

"Her."

I rubbed my wolf snout with my elongated fingers. "I don't understand."

"Slayer, you thikk knob," Candace growled. "I'm…"

She trailed off, frustration visible on her wolf face. She looked around frantically until her eyes landed on a fallen pine tree branch nearby. She snatched it up, holding it out in front of me.

"This," she said, gripping the branch. "Is… Her. The original her."

She suddenly snapped the branch in half with a sharp crack and held up the two pieces separately.

"Nessy," she said, wiggling one half. "Kristi," she added, waving the other half.

I blinked at her, trying to make sense of her strange demonstration. Before I could ask what she meant, she combined the two branches together and snapped both of them, producing four pieces.

"Nessy. Candace. Kristi. Addie," she said, presenting four branches to me one by one.

"What?" I felt utterly bewildered. "What are you trying to say? That you're…? Come on, that's absurd. The four of you are completely different prads with different personalities!"

"I did tell you that it was insane," she shrugged, dropping all four branches back onto the ground.

"Okay but why?" I demanded.

"You tell me, why!" she suddenly growled, eyes flashing silver. "Why is there one of you and four of me?"

"I dunno. Maybe because I mathematically converge into a single point of me and you divide?" I tried to get into her crazy mode of thought with my own wild guess.

"I divide?" She laughed with an angry undertone. "You think that I divide? What, on my own, like a cell? Or maybe… I'm like a worm someone keeps chopping up?" She growled.

"Come on," I huffed. "I'm not… chopping you."

"I think that you are chopping me and you should consider stopping that," she said. "Because we're going to run out of bed space. Poor Addie had to sleep on the floor!"

I opened and closed my mouth. "What?"

She suddenly grabbed and shook me, frothing at the mouth again, eyes burning bright silver. "Stop dividing me! STOP IT!"

"I'm not dividing you!" I protested, trying to break free from her femme wolf grip. "You're not making any damn sense! I'm not dividing anyone!"

"You are! Every time! Every cycle!" She panted, radiant silver fractals dancing in her wolf eyes. "The blade, the wish, the crystal tree, the Leviathan! I keep getting split apart! Stop cutting me up into different versions of myself, you jerk!"

"Ca... Yura, I think you're having some kind of... episode. Maybe it's withdrawal?" I stammered out.

"It's not withdrawal!" she hissed. "I get it all now! I see it clearly! Every time we reach the end, you make a wish and reset everything. Then I come back in pieces! Abyss! There's going to be eight of me next time isn't there? How's that going to work out?"

She clawed at her wolf face, twitching. "They don't make beds for that many prads! That's more than there are days of the week. We're going to kill each other and then kill you! Why are you a tree?" She shook me, frothing even more at the mouth.

I didn't know what to say to her mad declarations.

"Where the fuck does it stop?! Eight, sixteen, thirty two, sixty four… n'th hearts all wanting the same thing but never getting it because you keep slicing up my soul! Why are you the tree? Why am I the one who gets divided? Am I not enough for you?! Is that it?!"

Wolf claws dug deeper into my shoulder pads, her eyes wild with something beyond mere anger or confusion—a primal desperation, abyssal madness that seemed to come from somewhere far beyond rational thought.

"Candace, please," I whispered, trying to reason with her, "you're not making any sense. There's no soul chopping, no time loops, no division—"

"THERE IS!" she howled, the sound echoing through the maze. "The loops, the resets, the fragments! I see it all! I SEE US!"

Her breathing came in ragged gasps, her entire body trembling. "Topaz doesn't create these visions, it just makes them bearable! Without it, everything's too awful, too horrible!"

I glanced around nervously, worried that her outburst would attract attention from the 'monsters' patrolling the maze.

I needed to calm her down before she blew our cover completely.

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