Aetheria

Bellhaven had begun feeling temporary long before Mira admitted it. The contracts were becoming familiar, Maelis no longer hovered over every seam she touched, and Hadran had started giving Kael unfinished steel with instructions instead of demonstrations.

They stayed another five days.

Mira spent most mornings in cultivation before Thread & Thorn opened. She had maintained the habit since leaving Eastmere, usually sitting somewhere quiet with an Essence crystal nearby while she traced the pathways she had discovered through her skeletal body, but Bellhaven had given her enough stability to push the practice much further.

The Disciple's Body Method lay open beside her during the first sessions. Mira gradually stopped referring to it once she realized she had memorized the sections she currently understood, leaving the scroll closed while she concentrated on the connections between her Essence, her skills and the strange structure holding her bones together.

Healing remained the part that interested her most.

Minor Heal had always seemed simple when judged only by the result. Essence entered damaged tissue, the wound changed, and the body recovered faster than it otherwise could, but Mira had grown dissatisfied with describing the process at that level.

She knew too much from Earth to leave the question there.

Mira had spent years learning how complicated systems became manageable when they were broken into processes rather than labels. A machine, an organism, a chemical reaction or a mathematical model became less mysterious once she could identify what changed, what carried the change and what conditions controlled it.

She began treating Minor Heal the same way.

The spell did several things so closely together that they had once felt like one action. Mira separated them as far as she could, varying the amount of Essence, where it entered, how quickly it spread and how long she maintained contact before allowing the spell to complete.

Maelis volunteered a scratched finger for precisely one experiment before deciding that Mira's expression made the entire process unsettling. After that, Mira used minor injuries from guild workers who already needed treatment and confined the stranger experiments to harmless changes in formation before the spell touched anyone.

The results accumulated.

Healing followed damage with unusual precision, but the Essence carrying it behaved differently depending on how Mira shaped the approach. A broader flow dispersed gently through healthy tissue, while a concentrated route moved much faster toward a defined injury.

Mira became particularly interested in what happened before the restorative effect took hold.

There was light there.

She had always seen the gold of her Cleric skills, but colour was only appearance. During cultivation, when she slowed the process enough to follow the Essence before it became a completed spell, she began sensing qualities that felt increasingly familiar from her experiments in the Glass Hollows.

Propagation changed with the medium.

Direction mattered.

Reflection could occur.

Different structures accepted or resisted the Essence unevenly.

She spent an entire morning passing tiny amounts through Crystal Fibre, Hollowglass, ordinary cloth and a bowl of clear water. The whispertail eventually became bored enough to sleep in her lap while Mira adjusted angles by fractions and watched how the same thread of Essence behaved after crossing different boundaries.

Kael found her on the roof during the twenty-third repetition.

A small golden bead hovered above Mira's palm, brighter at its centre than her usual moths and almost perfectly spherical. Instead of drifting, the light remained still while faint rays escaped through the air around it.

Kael sat beside her and began cutting bread with the second knife he had made at Hadran's forge. "That looks different from yesterday," he said, and Mira formed the sphere again while explaining that she had changed how the Essence gathered before release.

He watched the light tighten until the edges became difficult to look at directly. "How many times have you done that this morning?" he asked, and Mira answered that this was the twenty-third complete attempt, excluding the ones she had stopped before formation.

Kael offered her half the bread. Mira accepted it without dismissing the sphere, which remained suspended above one hand while she ate with the other.

"What are you trying to make?" he asked after a while. Mira watched the light bend faintly through the edge of a Hollowglass filament and replied that she was still learning what she could make.

That answer stayed with Kael.

His own cultivation had begun only recently.

Kael had always used Essence constantly, but most of his understanding had come through fighting. Frost slowed and stiffened, lightning disrupted and travelled rapidly through suitable paths, while fire expanded aggressively and carried heat through openings.

He knew those facts because they worked.

Mira's experiments made him realize how rarely he had asked what happened before the enchantment reached the blade.

That afternoon he sat in Hadran's forge with his greatsword across his knees and cultivated without swinging it once.

Weapon Sense gave him more to work with than he expected.

When frost entered the reinforced channels, Kael could feel the changing balance of the sword as the metal cooled and the Essence spread toward the edge. Lightning barely seemed to inhabit the weapon in the same way, racing through the narrow routes and escaping whenever he allowed the path to remain open.

Fire pressed against everything around it.

Kael tested each enchantment separately until Hadran closed the forge for the night. The next morning he returned before breakfast and started again, changing the amount of Essence sent into individual channels rather than coating the entire sword by habit.

Mira joined him eventually.

They spent two hours arguing over fire.

"It keeps expanding toward the nearest outlet," Kael said while tracing the warm channel near the centre of the blade. Mira rested one finger against the cooled metal and suggested that he stop treating every outlet as equally available.

Kael tried closing the outer branches with his own Essence instead of physically changing the sword. Fire gathered farther down the blade before escaping through the final opening, producing a concentrated flare around the tip.

His smile appeared immediately.

Mira handed the sword back. "Do it with frost."

The frost responded differently enough that Kael's first attempt failed almost at once. He adjusted the route, tried again and spent the next hour building several configurations that Hadran had never engraved into the weapon because the metal itself did not need to change.

Weapon Sense followed every experiment.

Kael could feel the sword becoming more than a shape in his hands. Weight, flex, edge alignment, Essence pressure and the intended direction of force seemed increasingly connected, especially once he stopped separating forging knowledge from what he had learned through combat.

Mira recognized the expression on his face when he stopped speaking for almost ten minutes.

"You found something," she said while repairing a small tear in her sleeve. Kael looked along the greatsword's edge and replied that he had found several things but needed something hostile enough to test them properly.

Hadran overheard from across the forge. "Please discover patience instead," he said, and Kael promised to consider it with so little conviction that the smith threw a rag at him.

Their final days in Bellhaven passed quickly after that.

Mira finished two commissions under Maelis's supervision, including a reinforced travelling vest that used unequal material levels without allowing the stronger sections to tear apart the weaker cloth. Maelis inspected the internal transitions for nearly ten minutes before paying Mira a share of the commission instead of treating the work as apprenticeship practice.

Kael completed his first usable sword.

It was much smaller than his own weapon and deliberately ordinary, built for a caravan guard who wanted durability more than decoration. Kael spent almost as long balancing the blade after forging as he had shaping it, and Hadran finally approved the weapon by handing it directly to the customer without correcting anything.

They accepted one final guild contract together and finished it before midday.

After that, there was little left to justify staying.

Maelis pretended to be more interested in Mira's coat than in the fact that she was leaving. She replaced the damaged outer section from the Rook fight, reinforced two new channels Mira had added around the lower back and packed enough treated thread into her satchel to repair the garment several times.

"You are going to do something ridiculous to this before I see it again," Maelis said as she adjusted the ivory collar. Mira examined herself in the mirror and answered that she intended to improve it, which Maelis claimed was exactly what worried her.

The tailor looked at Mira's Hollowsteel Needle next. A long conductive thread now ran through the ring at its rear and disappeared into a small spool hidden beneath the coat.

"At least try to remember that sewing tools usually stay inside workshops," Maelis said, and Mira replied that this one had stopped being a sewing tool somewhere around the time Hadran forged a weapon point onto it.

Maelis hugged her anyway.

Mira stiffened for the first second before returning it carefully.

Hadran's farewell involved considerably less physical affection. He gave Kael a whetstone, told him the fire channels still ran too hot near the middle and warned him that if the greatsword cracked because Kael tried something stupid, the repair price would be doubled on principle.

Kael looked genuinely offended. "What if it cracks because I try something brilliant?" he asked, and Hadran replied that brilliant mistakes were usually the most expensive kind.

The guild gave them updated maps and recommendations for settlements farther east. Several higher-ranked dungeons lay along that route, while the roads eventually connected to regions Bellhaven's adventurers spoke about with the casual familiarity Mira still lacked.

By early afternoon, the town walls had disappeared behind them.

The whispertail rode across Mira's shoulders, five tails spilling over the black and ivory coat. Kael carried the greatsword normally for the first hour before eventually drawing it and testing channel configurations as they walked.

Mira cultivated whenever the road remained quiet.

She had become capable of circulating Essence while moving, although the process remained less precise than sitting meditation. The rhythm of walking actually helped her understand several routes through her skeletal structure because every step changed the way balance passed through her hips, spine and shoulders.

The Disciple's Body Method had changed her posture without her noticing.

Kael noticed.

"You don't walk the same way anymore," he said as they crossed a long stretch of road between low wooded hills. Mira considered the comment and asked what was different.

Kael took several moments to answer. "Your weight is ready to go somewhere before you decide where," he said eventually, and Mira tested the feeling through three more steps before agreeing that something had changed.

The road curved through a shallow valley late in the afternoon.

There were no farms nearby.

The trees grew farther apart than they had around Bellhaven, leaving open grass between pale trunks and scattered boulders. A weathered milestone stood beside the road with most of its lettering worn away.

The whispertail woke.

Its claws tightened against Mira's shoulder.

Kael lowered his sword.

Music drifted through the valley.

The melody sounded as though someone were playing a small hand organ badly and enjoying every mistake. High bells accompanied it at irregular intervals, moving closer even though neither Mira nor Kael could identify where the sound came from.

The pressure arrived before the musician did.

Mira stopped breathing out of habit despite having no lungs to require it.

Her body locked.

Every magical connection between her bones tightened at once, and the instinct carried through something deeper than muscle or nerves. The certainty that moving would make the thing approaching them notice was so overwhelming that Mira's own will disappeared beneath it for several seconds.

Kael stood beside her in exactly the same condition.

His greatsword remained lowered.

His fingers could not close farther around the grip.

A figure stepped from behind the milestone.

It was tall and narrow beneath layers of mismatched cloth, with one sleeve striped red and gold while the other had been sewn from black diamonds and faded blue patches. Bells hung from its wrists, ankles and the four curling points of a floppy jester's cap.

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A porcelain mask covered its face.

The painted smile reached almost to both ears.

The Jester placed both hands against its chest and bowed.

Then it spun once on the road.

Its bells chimed.

A monster label appeared in Mira's vision.

Patchwork Jester

Level: ???

The Jester straightened and placed one finger against the smile painted over its mouth.

Mira could not move.

It tiptoed toward Kael.

Each exaggerated step brought the creature close enough to touch him before it leaned away again, pretending to inspect his sword from different angles. Kael's eyes followed it even though the rest of his body remained rigid.

The Jester tapped the greatsword.

A clear note rang through the metal.

Kael's face tightened.

The creature skipped toward Mira.

It crouched until the painted mask was level with her skull and stared into the empty sockets where eyes should have been, then reached toward the gold embroidery around her collar.

The whispertail hissed.

The Jester drew its hand back dramatically.

It pressed both hands against its cheeks as though shocked.

Then it laughed.

The sound came from everywhere inside its clothing at once.

Mira's fear worsened.

The pressure carried enough intent that part of her mind had already accepted the conclusion.

They were going to die here.

The Jester danced away from her and reached into one sleeve.

Three coloured balls appeared between its fingers.

It began juggling them while moving backward along the road, occasionally tossing one behind its back or beneath a raised leg. Halfway through the pattern, one ball unfolded into a narrow throwing knife while another sprouted a smoking fuse and became a bright red bomb.

The third remained harmlessly round.

The Jester tossed all three toward Kael within the same playful motion.

Mira forced Essence toward her right hand.

The circulation faltered near the shoulder.

She pushed again.

The knife crossed Kael's cheek and buried itself in the road behind him. The harmless ball bounced from his forehead, while the red bomb landed beside his boots with the fuse already burning low.

The Jester clapped excitedly.

Mira's thoughts raced against the shrinking fuse.

Her body remained locked.

Essence resisted the route she was trying to force through it.

Kael could not move.

The whispertail's claws dug into her scarf.

Mira stopped pushing against everything at once.

The pressure.

Her fear.

Kael.

The bomb.

The Jester.

Her Essence.

The coat.

The moths.

Every part of the problem mattered, but they did not matter in the same way.

The fuse would finish first.

Kael could not move.

Her hand did not need to move if Essence could reach the coat.

The Hollowglass junction sat behind her shoulders.

Three routes led from it toward the lower seams.

One Lumen Moth could form there.

Mira gathered the relationships together.

Something changed.

The confusion vanished without the information disappearing.

Her thoughts accelerated into an order so clean that fear remained present without controlling what received attention. She knew where Kael stood, how long the fuse had left, which Essence route remained clear, where the Jester had shifted its weight and which part of her body could respond first if the paralysis weakened.

The moth formed against the lower edge of her coat.

It flew.

The golden construct struck the bomb and carried it just far enough across the road before the explosion filled the valley.

Heat and dirt rolled around Kael.

The blast threw the Jester's cap sideways.

For the first time, the painted mask turned directly toward Mira without any exaggerated performance.

A notification crossed her vision.

Ability Development Recognized

Simplification has evolved.

Adaptive Cognition — Common

Mira dismissed it before the Jester finished turning.

Her body still refused to move properly.

Her thoughts did not.

She circulated Essence through several routes at once and stopped treating the paralysis as something she had to overpower everywhere. The connections along one leg loosened first, followed by her hip and the structure supporting her spine.

Mira moved.

The first step barely carried her forward.

The second was different.

Her body organized around the destination before the movement fully began. Essence reached the supporting joints while her balance shifted, and the usual preparation between deciding to move and actually moving became frighteningly small.

The Jester tilted its head.

Mira crossed several metres before the paralysis seized her again.

She forced another route open.

The Hollowsteel Needle left her hand.

The Jester caught it between two fingers.

Its painted grin remained unchanged.

Mira pulled the thread.

A moth travelled along the conductive line.

The Jester looked at the approaching light and opened its other hand as though inviting it to land.

The moth touched its palm.

Golden Essence burst outward.

The Jester's sleeve smoked.

It looked at the mark.

Then it began applauding.

The pressure increased.

Mira nearly collapsed.

Kael made a sound beside her that was halfway between a growl and a gasp.

His greatsword moved several centimetres.

The Jester spun toward him.

Kael's arm shook.

Weapon Sense flooded him with information he had never tried to hold during cultivation until the last few days.

The sword's weight.

The tension in his wrist.

The pressure locking his shoulder.

The vibration travelling through the blade from the Jester's earlier tap.

Frost waiting in one channel.

Lightning in another.

Fire pressing against the closed routes near the edge.

Kael shifted his grip.

The paralysis resisted.

He used the greatsword against it.

Instead of trying to free his whole body, he let the sword's weight pull one shoulder forward. Momentum carried into his hips, and the movement opened enough of his stance for the rest of him to follow.

The Jester appeared in front of him.

Kael swung.

The creature leaned backward until the sword passed within a finger's width of the porcelain mask.

Kael changed the recovery.

Lightning ran through the narrow central channel and Crescent Sever released almost sideways from the returning blade.

The Jester folded at the waist.

The projected slash passed over it.

Kael changed again.

Momentum Break carried the greatsword around before the first technique had fully dispersed, and frost spread toward the lower edge as he drove the weapon through a rising cut.

The Jester skipped backward.

The blade clipped one bell from its sleeve.

The tiny piece of metal landed on the road.

Kael stared at it.

The Jester did too.

Then the creature kicked him in the chest.

Kael travelled across the road and hit a tree hard enough to split the bark.

Mira moved before he landed.

Her new awareness held Kael's position while following the Jester, the whispertail, her needle's thread, the coat's Essence channels and the pressure trying to lock her body again.

The Jester danced around the first three attacks she attempted.

Mira stopped trying to catch the creature with direct strikes.

Her moths spread.

The Jester weaved between them effortlessly.

Mira changed their arrangement.

The moths entered her coat.

One disappeared through the gold embroidery near her wrist. Another sank into the ivory layer around the collar, followed by three more along her shoulders and several smaller lights that emerged from the Hollowglass junction only to vanish into the garment again.

The channels brightened beneath the black fabric.

Light travelled across her back.

Mira felt the routes joining.

The Hollowglass junction took more Essence than she had ever passed through it at once.

The coat held.

Two enormous shapes opened behind her.

They resembled wings only in outline at first, formed from branching lines of gold and white that followed the same structural logic as the channels hidden inside her clothing. Smaller moths filled the spaces between those lines until the wings became luminous and almost solid.

The Jester stopped dancing.

Mira moved.

The wings did not flap like those of a bird. Light shifted through one side, her body accelerated in response, and the road vanished beneath her before the Jester completed its next step.

The needle struck the mask.

Porcelain rang.

The Jester spun away.

Mira followed.

Light transferred between the wings and her coat as quickly as her thoughts changed direction. Structural adjustments that had taken conscious effort during training now happened continuously through her feet, hips, spine, shoulders and Essence pathways.

The Bone Disciple's principles remained inside the movement.

They had become hers.

The Jester finally caught the needle between its palms and twisted.

Mira allowed the weapon to turn.

Her body followed.

The wings shifted.

She passed around the creature instead of resisting the force, recovered the needle through the ringed thread and attacked from the opposite side.

The Jester laughed louder.

Kael returned to the road with blood running from his mouth.

He saw the wings.

His eyes widened for a fraction of a second before the Jester threw a handful of knives at him.

Kael's greatsword moved through them.

He stopped thinking of his enchantments as separate coatings.

Fire gathered where the blade needed explosive expansion.

Lightning travelled through the route that would reach first.

Frost occupied the section where the sword expected contact.

Weapon Sense carried all of it alongside balance, momentum and edge alignment.

Then the ability changed.

Weapon Sense has evolved.

Weapon Savant — Uncommon

Kael barely seemed to notice the words.

The Jester reached him.

Their next exchange sounded like a forge collapsing.

Kael's greatsword became brutally difficult to predict because each technique changed shape depending on the moment that produced it. Crescent Sever came from shortened cuts, full rotations and reversed grips, sometimes carrying frost through only one edge of the projection while lightning accelerated another section ahead of it.

Gravebreaker changed even more.

Kael struck the road beside the Jester rather than beneath it, sending the eruption sideways through broken stone and forcing the creature into Mira's approach.

Mira crossed the displaced rubble on luminous wings.

Her needle caught the Jester's shoulder.

Kael arrived from the other side.

The greatsword hit.

The Jester was thrown through a boulder.

For several seconds, neither Mira nor Kael moved toward the crater.

The pressure had weakened.

They were breathing hard despite Mira having nothing to breathe with, and their Essence had already fallen much farther than either wanted.

The whispertail landed beside Mira.

Its fur stood on end.

Something inside the crater squeaked.

A small cloth hand appeared over the edge.

Then another.

A doll climbed out.

Its body had been sewn from faded green fabric, with wooden buttons for eyes and two disproportionately long arms ending in padded fists.

A second doll followed.

This one wore a tiny paper crown and carried scissors almost as large as its torso.

More emerged behind them.

A stitched hound crawled over the broken stone with three mismatched legs and a jaw lined with polished wooden teeth. A round doll dragged a miniature cannon behind it, while another figure with a cracked porcelain face carried several red bombs in a basket.

The Jester climbed out last.

Dust covered its clothing.

The needle had left a narrow scratch across the porcelain mask.

The creature touched the damage.

Its entire body trembled.

Mira tightened her grip.

The Jester threw both arms into the air and laughed with such obvious delight that the dolls began bouncing around it.

Then the little army attacked.

The road disappeared beneath chaos.

Mira's wings carried her above the first rush while Kael drove directly through the centre, his greatsword clearing enough space to keep the dolls from surrounding him. The long-armed figure stretched farther than its body should have allowed, catching Mira across one luminous wing and tearing several moths from the formation.

Pain did not accompany the damage.

Essence loss did.

Mira felt the missing section immediately.

She redistributed the remaining light before the wing destabilized and sent the broken moths toward Kael instead of rebuilding them.

He had taken a scissor blade beneath the ribs.

Blood darkened his side.

Mira reached for Minor Heal.

The spell formed through the coat.

Something inside it opened.

The same quality she had been studying during cultivation spread beyond the narrow shape she usually imposed on healing. Golden-white light poured from the channels across her shoulders and gathered above Kael in a broad radiance that resembled sunlight passing through clear morning air.

Kael's bleeding slowed.

The light remained.

Mira maintained it while moving.

The strain was enormous.

Kael looked up once, understood enough to keep fighting and drove his greatsword through the cannon doll before it could fire.

Mira's healing light followed him across the road.

It no longer behaved like a single cast ending after one wound. The radiance stayed around Kael, touching every new injury as it appeared and giving his body enough help to remain functional through punishment that should have forced him down.

The Jester found this fascinating.

It produced a tiny parasol.

Mira stared at it.

The creature opened the parasol beneath her healing light and walked underneath with exaggerated comfort while Kael fought for his life several metres away.

Mira sent the wings forward.

Hundreds of luminous segments collapsed inward.

The beautiful structure behind her disappeared into a single enormous sphere of white-gold light gathering above one shoulder.

The Jester lowered the parasol.

The sphere grew until it was wider than Mira.

The whispertail fled behind a tree.

Mira released it.

The road turned white.

The giant bead crossed the distance with none of the wandering motion of her old moths, carrying a concentrated mass of Light that made the Jester abandon the centre of the road entirely.

It dodged.

Mira changed the path.

The sphere curved.

The Jester's mask turned sharply.

Mira pulled through the coat's channels and split the sphere around the creature.

The enormous bead opened into dozens of luminous moths that passed on both sides before folding back toward one another.

They struck together.

The explosion tore apart half the road.

Several dolls vanished inside it.

The Jester emerged with one sleeve missing.

Kael laughed despite the blood in his mouth.

The Jester pointed at him.

Kael's laughter stopped.

A red bomb appeared beneath his feet.

He moved before it detonated.

Weapon Savant pulled everything he had learned into the escape. The greatsword struck the blast at an angle, Momentum Break carried the impact through the weapon, and Kael turned the borrowed force into a rushing entry that crossed the crater before the Jester expected him.

Fire erupted through the blade near the end of the charge.

Kael used the expansion to accelerate the final rotation.

The sword struck the Jester across the torso.

Frost entered at contact.

Lightning followed the cracked path.

The Jester crossed the road like a thrown toy.

Mira reached it before it landed.

Her wings reformed from the scattered moths behind her, thinner than before but still vast enough to fill the road with light.

The Hollowsteel Needle entered the Jester's side.

Kael arrived an instant later.

Falling Ruin came down through a rotation already carrying the whole greatsword's weight.

The impact crater swallowed all three of them.

Mira escaped upward.

Kael rolled clear.

The Jester remained at the centre.

Its mask was cracked.

One arm hung at an odd angle.

The bells had stopped ringing.

Mira landed beside Kael.

His HP appeared when he checked it.

HP: 18 / 102

Mira looked at her own.

HP: 21 / 94

Their Essence was worse.

Kael had enough for several techniques if he used them carefully.

Mira had enough either to keep healing him or maintain the wings for a little longer.

The Jester stood.

Its broken arm rotated until the joint clicked back into place.

The painted smile remained.

The dolls began gathering around it again.

Kael shifted his sword onto one shoulder. "I hate this thing," he said, and Mira kept the healing radiance around him while answering that she had reached the same conclusion considerably earlier.

The Jester bowed.

Its bells started ringing again.

Then it vanished.

Mira's new awareness found the movement too late.

The kick landed against her side.

Her luminous wings shattered.

Mira crossed the road and struck a tree hard enough to break several ribs.

Kael attacked before the Jester finished recovering.

The greatsword caught empty air.

The Jester appeared behind him.

The scissor doll was already there.

Its blades opened across Kael's side.

He fell to one knee.

Mira forced herself upright.

Her HP had dropped to 7 / 94.

Kael checked his own and found 9 / 102 remaining.

The Jester danced between them.

It had stopped pretending to be clumsy.

The playful movements remained, but every skip covered impossible distance and every turn hid another attack. Mira's Adaptive Cognition kept the road coherent despite the speed, allowing her to follow the dolls, Kael, her remaining moths and the Jester's changing position without losing herself inside any one threat.

Following it did not make her fast enough.

The Jester struck her twice more before she found a route out.

Mira's HP fell to 3 / 94.

Kael intercepted the next attack.

His greatsword cracked the road.

Weapon Savant reshaped the technique during the swing, shifting lightning forward, frost toward the contact line and fire into the final burst.

The Jester took the hit.

Kael took a bomb against his back.

He landed beside Mira.

HP: 2 / 102

For several seconds, neither tried to stand.

Mira's wings had collapsed into four surviving moths resting weakly across her coat.

Her healing radiance had faded.

The Hollowsteel Needle remained attached by thread several metres away.

Kael still held the greatsword, although the point lay against the road because he lacked the strength to lift it fully.

The whispertail crawled from beneath a broken section of earth.

Its fur was scorched.

One rear leg dragged behind it.

Mira tried to gather Minor Heal for Kael.

A faint gold glow appeared around her fingers and faded.

The Jester approached with a jaunty little dance.

Its mask remained cracked from their attacks.

One sleeve was gone.

Several bells were missing.

It seemed happier than when the fight began.

The surviving dolls formed a loose circle around Mira and Kael.

The long-armed doll sat cross-legged.

The scissor doll polished one blade against the other.

The little bomb carrier reached into its basket and found another red sphere.

Kael managed to lift his head.

Mira turned her skull toward him.

They had enough strength left to understand the situation.

The Jester twirled between them and the dolls, occasionally balancing on one foot before changing direction with a flourish. It produced a handkerchief from its remaining sleeve, wiped imaginary tears from the smiling mask and tossed the cloth into the air.

The handkerchief became a bomb before it landed.

Mira's four remaining moths lifted from her coat.

Their light was faint.

Kael's sword scraped across the road as he forced one hand beneath the grip.

The Jester clapped.

Another bomb appeared.

Mira's thoughts remained clear.

Adaptive Cognition gave her every relevant piece of the road at once.

Kael had two HP.

She had three.

The whispertail could barely move.

Four moths remained.

Her needle lay beyond comfortable reach.

Kael could probably manage one more technique if his Essence answered.

Several dolls surrounded them.

The Jester had survived everything they had built together and still possessed enough strength to make the pressure in the valley shake the remaining leaves.

Mira searched the relationships again.

The answer did not appear.

The Jester began juggling.

One bomb became two.

Then three.

Its bells rang brightly as it danced around the children sprawled on the broken road, delighted by whatever game it believed they were still playing.

Kael's fingers closed around the sword.

Mira's moths gathered closer.

The first bomb rose high above them.

The Jester laughed as it came down.

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