Elfric had a poet’s soul.

  He spoke eloquently, not using sophisticated words but plain language, and yet every word seemed carefully chosen. His tale drew us into the past with him, painting a vivid picture of all that he and Cleo had seen in the Badlands. It was almost enough to distract me from what he’d done.

  Almost.

  I won’t reiterate it word for word—I don’t think I could really do it justice—but I will, at least, give you the gist of it.

  * * *

  My mother was a monster.

  That, above all else, was clear. In fact, it seemed to be why Tana picked her to go along with Elfric on this particular quest. But I’m jumping ahead a little—let me go back to the start. The real start, that is. We’re going back to the moment this world was created.

  Our world, and all those like it, was created out of magicks. It took all magicks to create a world. Illusionists drew up the foundations of a world. Sorcerers wielded and shaped the elements. Conjurors formed the creatures, sapient and otherwise, and healers gave them life. Worldbenders and enchanters and diviners turned magicks into the system we all interact with every day. And it took witches to bind it all together.

  There is a lot to unpack there, so let me reassure you: we’d needed a few minutes to process, too. The original world—the Ascended World—had no system at all. I could not even begin to comprehend what that looked like. How did someone know how strong another was? How did they learn new abilities without simply picking them from a list? How did they get anything done at all?

  And that was to say nothing of Witchcraft’s involvement in the creation of a world. At this point, I asked Elfric about it—why have Players seeded hatred of Witchcraft in this world, if such magicks were used to create it?—and he assured me he would get to that.

  Those that we call Players had never built worlds before. Not only did they build thousands of them—of enough variety to suit all of their kind—but they built them quickly. It was inevitable, then, that they made some mistakes. The worlds… weren’t as cohesive as they wanted. And for many years, the Players didn’t understand why this was.

  There was one part of their world-build that they’d made absolutely sure held true. If a Player died in a world, that was the end for them there, and they could never return. Players knew the dangers of toying with the boundary between life and death, and they would not make the same mistake in these new worlds as they had in their old. What Elfric meant by this wasn’t clear, and he never—even after we pressed the matter—explained it any further.

  When Tana eventually gathered her Council of Players, she told them the truth. The reason that these worlds were flawed was because they’d had traitors in their midst. There had been Players who hadn’t learned the lessons of the past, and they’d shaved off some of the world-build magicks to create powers of their own—powers that would let them triumph over death. They manifested in many different ways across the worlds, but in this one, these traitorous powers manifested as artifacts.

  I’d touched the Sisyphus Artifact through my shirt at this point, removing my hand as casually as possible so as to not draw Elfric’s attention. Who knew what he’d do if he learned I had one of these artifacts on my person?

  Tana had seen it as her duty to fix the mistakes of the past. At first, that had meant fixing the worlds they had created. Only later, once they realised that it was an impossible task, would the Council instead seek to create a new, perfect world of their own. But in that time, they were focused on fixing the world, and that was where my mother came in.

  The leader of the Council had located a tear in the world. Its location should have been obvious, really; where else in all of Alterra had so many problems as the Badlands? Creatures there were stronger than anywhere else in the world, and they evolved over time, far quicker than they should have been able. No civilisation had been able to flourish in those lands, and to this day, the Badlands were ruled by warring tribes.

  Tana sent Elfric and my mother there to close this tear. She’d sent Elfric because he had—theoretical, if not practical—knowledge of Witchcraft. And she’d sent my mother because she’d known Cleo would do whatever had to be done to get them there.

  Elfric had used the phrase “without prejudice” to describe what my mother had done over the months he’d travelled with her, and I think that paints a fairly clear picture. The man had seen her slaughter whole tribes—the young, the old, the feeble—rather than let any get away. If any spoke of their presence to another tribe, she said, then even more enemies could rain down upon them.

  When I say before that my mother was a monster, that wasn’t just me extrapolating from what Elfric had told us; he, too, had described her that way. But how could I marry this information up with the encounter we’d had with her? We’d given Cleo the opportunity to kill us all and be rid of us, and yet she’d barely touched us—only demonstrating that she could have killed us if she’d wanted to. And she’d even offered us a place in the Council’s new world. Were those the actions of a monster?

  I will spare you the gory details of everything else that my mother did. My promise to tell you everything only goes so far; including Cleo’s full list of evil deeds wouldn’t paint you any clearer a picture, but would probably make you queasy. Suffice to say, my mother really did whatever she’d had to to get Elfric to the tear in the world—just as Tana had known she would.

  At this point in the story, the eloquent Elfric went quiet, and paled. His words became stilted and clumsy, and he soon explained that his memory of the tear is… lacking, to say the least. It wasn’t that he simply couldn’t remember what he’d seen when he’d stared into the tear, but that his brain wouldn’t let him remember. Even the Players could be touched by such horrors.

  He shifted to explaining the tear in clinical terms. The tear in the world was essentially a gap in its creation, a place where someone could stare into the space between the worlds. He described it as a fringe between one world and the next, where the horrors of the Witchcraft-created void bled in to reality.

  This was the reason that Witchcraft had to be hated; its usage had the potential to eat away at the boundary between the worlds, and if this corruption spread further, it could destroy Alterra itself. And yet, Tana sought to wield Witchcraft once more. She had to, if she was going to create this new world. She would need more Witchcraft than ever before to protect the new world from the mistakes of the past.

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  When Elfric had returned from his work in the Badlands, he resigned his position on the Council. What he’d seen in that tear in the world—whatever it was—had broken him. He could not go on as he had. He could be a part of this no longer.

  But Cleo had stared into that void too, and her mind hadn’t broken. Whatever she’d seen in that void, she might still remember. In fact, Elfric suggested, it was the force that drove her on.

  ‘And her weakness?’ I asked at the very end.

  Elfric gave it considerable thought, plunging the cabin into silence for a minute or more before speaking. ‘Cleo isn’t strong with physical weapons. She doesn’t have considerable reserves of magicks. She is simply untouchable, hidden by her efficient shadow-blending magicks, her damage amplified tenfold by Stealth passives. And yet… it’s enough that in all the years we travelled together, I never saw her suffer more than a scratch. How can you attack that which you cannot see? It becomes a fight of attrition—you attacking at thin air, her bleeding your health with every well-placed stab of her blade. Sooner or later, she will win.

  ‘Her weakness? I suppose it’s the same weakness as everyone else.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘She can’t be in two places at once.’

  * * *

  After we held up our end of the bargain, and left Elfric’s cabin with its resident still alive, nobody spoke for three hours.

  The storm had quietened while Elfric had told us his tale, but it hadn’t gone completely. We weren’t in danger of being struck by lightning, but we were in danger of being drenched. And yet, it didn’t seem to matter. What we’d just been told—and had no reason to doubt—had shaken our understandings of this world. It only made sense that we needed some time to process it.

  We stepped through the woods, the mud slippery beneath our feet, the fallen water carving small streams between the roots.

  Val, finally, spoke first. ‘So…’ There was no need to finish the question.

  ‘We eat,’ I said. ‘We rest. We sleep on all we’ve learned. And we make our next move in the morning.’ Though I was still off-kilter from what Elfric had told us, I felt like this was the reasonable next step. Two years ago, I would have sprung immediately into action, and maybe as a result I wouldn’t have made the best decision. I was growing. This was probably a good thing, considering I had a child in my not-too-distant future. I would be mature, or at least mature enough to do a better job at raising my child than my mother had—not that this was a particularly high bar.

  And so it went quiet once more. Quiet, at least, until we grew close to the nearest town. Corminar’s ears pricked up first. ‘There is trouble ahead,’ he said, pulling his bow from his shoulder. The rest of the team took his lead, preparing ourselves for a fight.

  As we emerged from the underbrush onto a farm at the edge of town, the form of the trouble became clear. Dozens of hags—more than I’d ever seen together—swarmed the town, shrieking at its residents and attacking them as they fled.

  I sighed, drew my blade and opened a portal.