Riz

When I was all finished crying, I pulled myself together like a big boy with a new determination: I was in my lands where I felt strong, and I wasn't playing around when I bragged about being a powerful motherfucker. I mean, that's literally why they had me fuck so many mothers.

Anyway, whatever was messing with my girl was about to meet me.

But first I had to figure out what it was.

I closed Ever's violin case, picked it up, and looked it straight in the eye.

"Okay, Riz—you're a smart man, sort of. So: What. Just. Happened?"

I usually psyched myself up in front of the mirror in my cabin but there was a shortage of those in the wilderness. We were always taught that, officially, ghosts weren't real, but many Celestian still believed they were, even if they'd never seen them for themselves. By their logic, ghosts were just residue, left over energy. They generally existed somewhere in the 'other'—if you remember my lesson with Drei: fire, water, earth, air, and other.

(It's actually aether, heh.)

When the violin case didn't answer my question, I made my way over to one of the caravans. The lettering was faded away, but I caught an O, an N, and an S. Just to set the timeline straight, Ever and I weren't in Amalia when the Vonsinfonies shared their story, so I wasn't aware they traveled with a big troupe. But it didn't take long for me to figure out who the caravan belonged to. The letters on the rotted wagons were faded, but there were enough scattered around to piece it together. It explained why Ever recognized the song, too.

Interesting information, but it told me next to nothing about how to solve our problem.

Okay, so the ghosts were cold. They disappeared. They weren't Anima, Partisan, they weren't even solid. If they'd gone invisible, I would have felt the energy shifts in the air where they drifted, but I didn't. Everything was just still. Everything was just… gone.

I touched on this briefly before, but it's impossible for energy to be destroyed, for anything to vanish—to really vanish. You can't get something from nothing and something can never be nothing. That's why some Celestian believe in ghosts, and it's one of the basic lessons an elementalist learns starting out. Everything leaves behind evidence. A trace. A pulse.

SOMETHING.

I ran my hand through my hair and started thinking to myself: if they weren't destroyed, if they were gone like they'd never existed in the first place, then there were two far-fetched possibilities. I was under the impression either could only be achieved by a Celestian Partisan or an Anima. And even then, by only the best.

The first possibility is they'd teleported. Which, after I'd thought about it for a while, didn't make much sense. This was their fairground, why would they leave? I took a quick run around to be sure they hadn't just moved to another section.

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The second possibility was about looking at the problem differently.

If it wasn't about where they were, then it was about when they were. I looked around the area in a whole new way, but I still had no idea what to do. There were only a few known Partisans who could talk with time, and it really wasn't covered in our lessons. Not to mention, I had no idea ghosts could create temporal rifts.

"TSB…"

Her voice in my head, but nothing had changed around me.

Ever?

No answer, but then again, I wasn't sure I hadn't imagined hearing her voice in the first place. I took a deep breath and paced between the broken wagons for a while. The violin case bounced off the side of my knee every now and again.

Okay, time. How do I reach you?

It was a good question, and not even the most complicated question. Even if I did reach time, how could I be sure I'd be accessing the correct time? Was it a certain period? A week? A day? An hour? Like I said, none of this was ever taught, just stuff I'd thought about over the years. I think that's why there were so many suicides in my former line of work.

Too much time alone with yourself and your wacky thoughts.

Anyway, I started worrying about the rift, but then it hit me: finding the right moment in Vonsinfonie history would be impossible. I had no way to differentiate one day—or even one moment—from the other. But there was something different about the hour, day, week, period that I was looking for, something that set it apart from all the others.

I just had to open up a dialogue with inarguably the most hard to reach and apathetic element and ask it to take me to wherever Ever was.

Yeah, easy enough.

I set the violin case down and sat cross-legged on the ground nearby. After shaking my shoulders out and considering my shitty predicament for the final time, I focused my attention ahead. The wind was the first to answer. The flow gathered and spun in circles. If I was going to get through to aether for this greedy little request, I needed friends.

The cyclone picked up speed around me, but I was untouchable.

The earth answered next, pulsing steadily beneath me, so I pulled the moisture from the ground and formed a liquid barrier around my body. Lastly, the most temperamental of them all, I extracted the heat from the air itself to create the spark. I fed the fire to the wind, and the two spun around, and around, faster, and faster. The ground rumbled wider.

My offerings, now let's see if it was enough.

I took a deep breath. The pain was excruciating, like burning to death from the inside and somehow still drowning at the same time. One massive inhale and the water was mine, though—a coursing tide through my body. The air filled my lungs to capacity, but I was built for this. The pull of the earth thrummed through every limb. I was magnetized, like, I wouldn't even need a compass. Sweat poured down my face while the heat raged through me, painful enough that I had to convince myself it was pleasurable. I was good at that.

And it was around that time I realized I was probably going die. Yeah, I just killed myself.

Goodbye, Riz.

Sorry, Ever.

It was a good run.

But then it all stopped. The drowning, the burning, the awkwardly sensual thrumming.

I waited—was I dead? But nothing changed. I climbed to my feet, admittedly a bit uncertain under the circumstances. Not to mention, something was weird.

Nothing else was moving, nothing except for me.

And nothing except for… it.

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