Guha paced back and forth by the cabin's windows as the last dull haze of sunlight broke and slipped below the horizon, leaving only the hazy scattering of light around the still-accumulating snow. Bright violet hair had been clipped closely, extending down his jaw in dense sideburns over rich, coppery skin. The left side of his face bore a very distinct scar from just above his eyebrow, right on down through to his upper lip, causing the latter to fold and curl into a permanent sneer. The color of his eyes was like an oil slick, dark and flashing with a disturbing array of magentas, cyans and yellows when the light struck them at just the right angles. He kept them trained outside to scenery that resembled little more than static to the casual observer. He was one of three dressed in more than just the shorts and tanktop, robed in a black changshan with wide pants over the flexible, thin-soled boots that stepped so carefully across the floorboards, with a bright, cinnabar-red sash tied at his waist. He came to a halt in front of the window with his feet set wide, arms folded behind his back from some old instinctual movements he had yet to release. His voice released smoothly, clearly, in defiance of the embattled and otherworldly face that he presented. "She's still standing. The Spirit-storm arrives at nine minutes before midnight." He turned towards the cabin's interior, damaged lips drawing up at the corners to intimate the smile that creased the corners of his eyes. "She might make it through the entire process, Bianca."

The nine other applicants huddled together by the fireplace in the austere cabin, wrapped in the heavy red blankets that pulsed with a dim glow, each clutching a black jug and sipping the contents through bamboo straws. From the side of the most recent to enter, a slightly pudgy man nearing his mid-50s with salt-and-pepper waves brought to heel beneath a starkly receding hairline, the swipe of wild, bone-white curls and a flash of luminescent eyes cradled in a woman's face, ageless and unnaturally smooth of skin.

"Really, then?" Her rise to her feet came with a startling fluidity, more akin to boneless creatures in the deep sea than a creature beholden to ground and gravity. Her own changshan hung loose at the collar, undone enough to reveal the hint of a spiral's edge seared into her sternum. She certainly moved, yet the specifics of her having done so seemed far less distinct with the looseness of her uniform, making her appear to hover like an icon dragged and dropped around the cabin floor. "Think you that she bears enough wisdom that if she may yet perish out there, she might provide a vessel for another monstrosity like mineself?" Her own voice had a broken, sing-song quality, a collision of inflections and lingual tricks that gave the impression of a well-traveled accent to a voice that had just come back from years of exile from human contact. Though she smiled, determining whether or not the question bore any venom behind it proved impossible. "Perhaps she shall resist the entirety of it and face the perdition of a miraculous ascension, such as you? Do you hope for this, Guha?" Bianca stopped a meter short of Guha, her face straight ahead to the dip in his throat, while her eyes rolled up to meet his. Her face seemed childlike, inquiring, sympathetic despite the harsh presentation of her words. "Do you hope for others like you?"

Guha was far too polite to keep from hiding the tension that rose up his spine and through his shoulders as Bianca drifted close, his arms unfolding from behind his back to hang at his sides. His entire body moved into his breath, puffing out widely, holding, and slowly releasing the air, along with his instinctual tension from her presence. "I do... I always do." The last few beats of his breath released as a sigh as his head hung heavy, tilted forward, in preface to his shrug, his resigned smirk and a roll of his neck. "This whole... process has started to feel a little... prideful, if exploitative. Over half of these applicants fail every time. Richard is on his third cycle, and he's doing worse than he did his first round. Almost half, now, become students solely of Black Hell Ember." The music of Guha's voice crumbled as he spoke the name, like a knife run across a violin's strings.

The third Master seemed to rotate into view from the shadows of the fireplace, seated with his legs crossed and his hands on his knees. The ends of his robe and pants were ragged, tattered. His sash glistened in the light, like tanned skin dyed in blood. He bore no proper skin himself, merely a hard, black layer that bore cracks at the joints and points of articulation, glowing orange from the internal heat. He wore no shoes, and he had no face, no ears, no hair, just a smooth, shiny surface that offered a wicked reflection of the world. He seemed to unfold as he stood, and his footfalls were slow, methodical, heavy.

Bianca drifted back and to the side of Guha, giving clear passage for the Ember to approach his more celestial, lighter counterpart. Her reply to Guha's concern came through a whisper, mostly out of respect for the effort it took the onyx-husked master to approach. "You speak as if we were the sole reason that people choose to study under us. We simply offer the means and the space for change, which rarely arrives without challenges to the sensibilities."

Black Hell Ember stopped further away than Bianca had, two meters between the both of them, stopped like magnets with the same poles facing each other. "Her scar..." His voice came from all directions to the pair, the sound of magma boiling out of the earth shaped to approximate human speech. "... runs deep. A larva grows within. It feasted on her father. It will eat her from the inside out." The monotone bubble and scrape seemed to carry with it a sense of certainty, of dispassionate finality.

Guha set his palms on his hips and looked at the split-open, rainbow-spewing distortion of his face reflected on Black Hell Ember's, the scar-touched mouth pulling lopsidedly wider, drawing into a grin, and eventually parting. Serenity returned to him, in a sweet chuckle that bloomed into a light, gamboling laugh. "Your words bear truth, my friend... That is, if she doesn't eat the grub first!"

Saffron woke up raw and pink in the jar-like, pictograph-covered cylinder, no longer of ice, but an intricately-woven calcite. Her skin felt new, peeled of her calluses, of her little cuts and scrapes, yet the scar still remained across her nose, and her entire sinus cavity tingled with the ghost of old pathways and structure in fits and starts. Her braids' comfortable tug became an unbearable tension, yanking at her scalp's renewed awareness. With tender, fumbling fingers she undid the left, then he right, separating the sections of hair deliberately and meticulously to stem the swirls of vertigo that tossed around her equilibrium when she moved too fast or too forcefully.

Coppery red framed her cheeks, wavy at the ends from where the plaits had held, spilling evenly over collarbone, shoulder and back save for the fringe that curled in at her upper lip. The vicious cold had stayed behind on the other side of the threshold, yet her little pile of clothing had remained along with it. She winced as she fumbled around with hands and feet, hoping to kick something that wasn't tepid stone or her own skin. On finding nothing, aside from how obnoxiously smooth and disarmingly good the striations felt on her skin, Saffron flattened her lips in a bashful, resigned smirk and rolled her eyes. She rolled to her side and pushed herself up, very slowly, to sit, her legs folding over each other as she examined the glyphs in her vessel, pupils wide over the strip of scar tissue beneath them.

The shapes in the stone resembled the angular, harsh carvings of runes, at first. Lines intersected at variations on 60-degree angles, spilling out initially through the little Witches' Spellbooks she had read for fun in high school with her friends, not that she had ever indulged much in the performing of spells. Her own memories, her own fascination over the magical alphabet blossomed as she looked over the pictographs, memories playing across her skin in unison with her mind.

She curled her toes as she remembered the itch of carpet beneath her legs as she and her friends conspired and whispered in their creations of secret names and silly ceremonies. She remembered, through a striking burst of memory that popped behind her scar, the smells of incense and herbs. She remembered the special shawl she wore, the big, clumsy embroidery that started her love of needlework. Silver threads crossed the purple cloth like spiderwebs, and in the intersections, Saffron had embroidered little symbols and gems, as if caught by some mystic arachnid seeking to feed on the wisdom within their forms. The memory of the spider, the reintroduction of the scents to her awareness struck her hard, leaving her speechless and enraptured in the interlacing runes of her mystic vessel... until she felt a single tremble vibrate through the calcite.

Her mind bloomed with activity as the image unfolded, revealing an octagonal latticework of numerous little vessels just like hers. Some were dull and empty. Some still had yet to be filled. Some, even still had people situated within them. Most, however, contained the husks of others, all sitting with legs folded or in lotus, drained of their fluids and filled with eggs. A long, spindly leg had set down not five meters away from her own, with seven more ready in their stillness. The spider was the size of a small horse in body, with all eight eyes a reflective, labradorite sheen. Saffron curled her hand and inhaled slowly through her nose. The legs started to move in startling synchronization, closing the distance to situate just above the hole, fangs twitching in their setting.

Doubt and fear rushed through Saffron, tightening around her shoulders and neck. The runes around her kept snaring her eyes, firing off new associations, new recognitions of patterns that had brought her to this point, to have filled herself with all of that wisdom to sacrifice to the Spirit of the Loom. She felt the ripples from the tips of the spiders' back legs touch to the mineral floor around her, steadying. Her mind ached for the sacrifice, for the relief of the venom and the ease of purpose. The rest of her, however, settled into a calm, open state, the blades of her feet to thee gently-warmed stone, palms open atop her knees, and eyes closed.

The spider's forelegs shot down to catch Saffron, fangs aiming for her shoulders to puncture through them. Saffron pushed down against the ground with her feet and rose, using the entanglement of her legs' cross to turn away from the spider's lunge and swing her fist around to the side of its face, bouncing its cephalothorax against the side of the vessel. Its back leg dropped one of is accordion-like joints toward her, in the hopes of knocking her back down into its grasp while the front two legs on the side facing her reached for her legs, to set its fangs into her ankle, her calf, anything to pacify her. Saffron rolled her elbow up from her punch and forced the leg back at its base, using the tug to spin in close and bring a satisfying crunch.

The spider's shell was too hard for her to break with her bare hands, yet the pop from the leg gave her a moment of promise. She stepped along the sides of the front legs, their load-bearing capacity compromised by the application of weight in just the wrong way, forcing each to snap in turn. The spider started to buck on the other side, slamming Saffron's back against the side of the cauldron once, enough to wind her. The sudden damage brought in her own fury, her breath reacquired deep, fast and hissing with a high-pitched, eerie growl deep in her throat. As the spider shoved back again, she swung one leg up and out of the hole and took hold of the leg by placing it over her shoulder, pushing opposite the body slam to send herself over its body and to use the spider's immense strength to break off its own leg.

The spider's book lungs fanned in and out, in and out in panic as its remaining seven legs scrambled for purchase. Saffron swung the leg around the back of her neck to set the leg's pointed end forward, one foot on the giant invertebrate's back to steady the downward swing that sent the leg back into the hole from which it emerged. She pushed off with her foot and jumped across as the spider spasmed, fangs, legs and body writhing frantically as the leg plunged into its internal workings, violating the sanctity of its shell and carving up its primitive insides.

As Saffron walked the leg forward and swished it around, she finally opened her eyes to the spider, watching its form slow its fight, stop, and finally slump in the pit. Its strange, glowing blue blood splattered across her body, marking her with her action, her battle with the spirit. Her grip on the enormous, severed leg quivered along with her breath. The backs of all of the mummified, crystallizing bodies drew out that bit of self-consciousness. Some faces she recognized from the news, others from senior students at Spirit Tree, all blissful and serene in their surrender. Her breath shortened as the endless landscape of octagons, each with a little turret at a corner, spread for as far as she could see. Her knees turned out and her shoulders shrugged in, suddenly very aware of her nudity in the wide open landscape.

"Ffff*ck... what did I do? Ohhh maaan I just killed this dude... The hell..." She focused on the strange beauty in the eyes' nebulaic sheen, celestial and glittering, and caught her breath. In through the nose, hold, out through the mouth, hold, repeat. She shifted to set her weight on her back leg, the front foot perpendicular and up on its ball, bent at the knee.

She followed her intuition, steadying herself through the twist of her front leg to a cross and using the motion to pull the leg out of the socket. The spider's gelatinous innards seeped out from the hole and into the pictograph-laden cubby, filling in the channels with hues of rich azure, of devastating reds and nuclear greens, shot through with smoky trails of gold. Her pupils ached from the sight, closing once again.

A burst trembled from the base of her spine, down through her knees and to her fingers. It took her another very, very deep breath to follow, yet follow it she did. She dipped her fingers into the leg that stuck from the creature, then ran them across her eyelids. The ache subsided with a wild burst of phosphenes, colors and shapes exploding behind her eyelids and rewiring deeply, following a tingle that extended all the way through her optic nerve and into that whole wild, webby network of synapses. The blue splatters on her skin shifted to dull silver, arranging themselves in a hexagonal net across her skin. She felt contained, for the first time in a very, very long time.

Once Saffron opened her eyes, she saw that much more clearly, shape and form clear in the bleak field in which she stood, shining with the reflection of gold across her retina. The spider seemed so much less a living creature, more a mystery, a puzzle to be solved in seven billion different ways. The octagon field seemed so much less a solid place, and the faces, the bodies there mere windows into the experiences of those past. Far, far off, she could see the shapes of other vanquished spiders, arranged around their traps in the haphazard grace that nature and circumstance provided. She set the leg next to the pit, giving it a gentle squeeze of appreciation. She had one more task, an itch in her palm that rang simultaneously with her scar.

Far beyond, in the outskirts where details became murky, a wild, warbling shape began to approach, twin golden eyes blinking, and catching sight of the pyrite-wrapped-in-graphite stare. Saffron sank back down low, going from Cat-stance to Snake-stance and shifting her weight from one leg to the other with fluid, sturdy ease. Her childlike hand took hold of one of the spider's fangs and twisted once.. twice... three times and broke it off in her hand. She dipped the furred portion into the transformative soup of innards below and drew it back up. Velvet-handled, with a ring on the end, the fang had become a black, vicious kerambit, hollow and filled with unthinkable venom. Saffron slunk back, reluctantly, from her starting point, eyes on the moving shape until it faded backwards into the imperceptible murk.

With a finger around the ring and a steady grip on her armament, Saffron rose, backpedaling with sliding, deliberate steps until sure that the shadow-thing had gone. As she turned around, a soft, ruddy glow shimmered on the horizon, lost amidst curling, jagged shapes. She drew in a steadying breath, and padded, coated and blooded with her accomplishment, towards her next stop in her journey.

Large, tree-like stems locked together to form the walls of the Rose Fortress, cultivated in size and shape to provide an environment that at least nominally appeared architectural. The prickles interlaced between the stems to form tight seals, while those facing the halls' interior grew only as far as raised, textured bumps. The buds and florets along the stems provided the illumination. Initially, they appeared pink, yet as Saffron moved further inside, the red and violet pigments faded to scintillating white flowers. For their shimmering grace and purity, Saffron offered her skeptical scowl, slim eyebrows dropping as her lips pursed, small, full, yet taking a hardness to them from her apprehension. She crossed her arms beneath her bust, though still careful with the gleaming black hook of the kerambit jutting out from under her left hand. Her index finger in the ring began to sweat and ache, ready to put the damn thing down and explore. The thought coincided with the return of the itch along the hexagonal net that spread over her skin, now a hungry, constricting net that squeezed and wrestled with her form.

Saffron showed admittedly high patience with the sensation, taking deep breaths as she unfolded her arms and followed the movements and promptings of the honeycomb across her skin. As she writhed and rolled, wisps of silver string broke off from the pattern, dancing behind her motions. The hallway started to narrow and the stems that formed the walls became smaller, tighter. The raised bumps on the hall-facing stems started to show themselves as thorns with increasing frequency while the light-bringing florets appeared less and less, and with smaller and smaller buds.

Saffron's toes gripped the dirt as she passed through the gauntlet, reaching forward with her blade to tap ahead of her at any indistinct portion. Her pupils dilated in the lessening light, shining in fool's gold hues in the low light. Gaps started to form in the archways, and the structure began to come undone, just as the liquid netting across her skin unraveled into wild, wiry strands that grabbed at the hooks and membranes that encroached ever closer to touching her.

As more and more of the lattice peeled off from her in greater measures, Saffron took a wry look at her surroundings, at the netting across her skin, and finally to the weapon in her hand. She reached across her arm, dragging her nails and catching the liquid strands within them to peel the substance from her. It fell from her as a net, splitting and unfolding to become a unified plane. She hung it from the curved barbs on the walls, stretching it up and out, going so far as to use the spines as steps and climbing up to the height of the archway to spread it out. Once she had three points taut, she slapped the kerambit to the web, fixing it in place.

Saffron looked from the blade, to the web, back to the blade, and finally to the web's dangling corner, fingers flexing in excitement and reaching for the net to climb across it. At an inch away, she stopped. Slowly, she retracted her hand, pulling it towards a strand of hair that hung around her shoulders. She plucked out the hair and swung it towards the web's central strands. Sure enough, it bound fast, her tugs only sliding her fingers closer to the root, then off of the hair entirely. "Ohhhhkaaaay not such a good idea..." Step by step, she climbed down from her perch, strode across the floor, and pulled up one of the strands near the edge, which seemed more like hemp rope than adhesive deathtrap. A solid tug pulled the net taut, then set the last loop around a particularly nasty-looking spine, setting the net in place.

One creak from the net preceded a tremble across its span, felt all the way through the stalk Saffron had climbed. The net swayed wide as the rumble turned into a tremor, then a roar. Her toes gripped the inner curves of the spines on which she stood, and her hand flattened into its sconce. The free hand swept back to push the hair from her eyes, just in time to see the source of the rumbling.

A wave of beetles, sized from the tip of a thumb to a mid-sized sedan, blew through the entrance-hall, a rolling tsunami of black carapace sheen and clacking mandibles, shredding the giant stalks of plant matter in sprays of sap and atomized stalks. The stalks that held up both Saffron and her net began to rock at their foundation, the structure of the Fortress weakened terribly.

From between the floral pillars, flashes of bright yellow and sick black flashed, along with the gleam most often cast from a drawn, freshly sharpened blade from the wild depth of the hall behind Saffron. A drone, at first barely noticeable behind the rumbling of the beetle-horde, quickly rose to overbearing, innard-shaking prevalence. Two angular stalks crept, then four, then forty-eight, all set into vibrant heads the shapes of inverted teardrops with iridescent eyes that shone like mirror balls. Soon, the rush of dog-sized bees and wasps burst out from the Fortress' interior halls, barreling straight for the defoliating intruders, the net, and the tiny Canadian girl caught in between.

Unarmed, unclothed and stuck up high, Saffron stared at the oncoming hordes with startled eyes, feeling the panic rise as her chosen stalk rocked back and forth more wildly. With no time to cross the floor and embark on another climb for her kerambit, Saffron trotted down to ground level, spreading her toes and digging them into the dirt, each step taken with her heels turned out to secure her stance. She brought her hands up, one outstretched, the other crossed over her midsection with the palm facing down. One single moment, her mind flooded with the distraction of considering her life choices that brought her to situate herself in between two waves of insects battling over a rosebush. For one moment, she remembered the pet name her father gave her, petit rose.

The moment passed quickly as the wasps rushed forward. She sank her stance low, dropping most of her weight into her back leg, and all of herself into an asymmetric crouch, lessening the surface area of her body available for the wasps to attack. She swatted her hands in waves, nudging the insects up and around her. Many of them accumulated in the sticky strands of the net, or spilled over the top of it. Those that passed through, however, underwent miraculous transformations as they emerged on the other side.

The lapdog-sized exoskeletons split as the wasps and bees emerged near the throng of beetles, the beings within exploding into humanoid size and shape, unmistakably female and all bearing clear, membranous wings. Black and yellow segmented armor covered their bodies. their helms resembled minimalist, yet stylized barbutes or burgonets, the cheek-guards brought close beneath bulging lenses on the visors. Each one bore vicious, bladed or piercing weapons, from rapiers to falces to rope darts to kamas to sharpened quarter-staves. They wrangled the invading beasts, turning the larger ones over, tearing them limb from limb to fashion shields from their shells and advance on the throng.

An archway of stuck insects formed behind Saffron across the net, full of jabbing stingers, wriggling legs and desperately struggling wings. She had received scratches all up and down her forearms and across her shins from the struggle, though her wounds remained little more than burning distractions to the protection of her core. She whipped her wrists and sprayed her blood into the eyes of oncoming wasps, using the blindness to bounce them across the hall and bash into the far parts of the net.

Eventually, only a few stragglers remained, their sights far from the battle behind them, centering their hover on the pale, bare redhead below, her focus narrowed to a single point through the stress of battle and the hum of adrenaline. The dirt around her had worn into parenthetical arcs where she had shifted her stance, back still kept to the net. Her breathing had quickened and her body pulsed with her rise and fall, blood streaming down her arms as her fingers hooked into vicious claws. As she lifted her eyes through the coppery veil of hair, she drew in a deep breath, accumulating her energy and refocusing her sights on the disparate points of movements through the hall.

The Rose Fortress' interior passed between Saffron's blinks as the wasp-knights carried her, caught in glimpses from her shoulder-high, exhausted sprawl. The hallway ran along like the background of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon, endless repetition of green stalks, graying thorns and bright white buds lighting the way.

One blink, and the troupe had her staring at a bright, crystalline Grand Hall. Branches of luminous crystal hung from the spine-and-ribcage of a ceiling, acting as chandeliers. The refractions and intersections of light combined to form holograms that changed as she passed, unfolding from one figure to the next, yet each curiously including her and a sphere. The sphere sometimes outsized her, sometimes sitting in the center of her palm. Its hue ranged from fiery red, to coal black, on to blinding white. The black spheres seemed brittle and ashen, save for one. The hologram depicted the solid, onyx black ball curled floating above an opalescent egg sitting in Saffron's lap, older and dressed in the ragged remnants of her changshan and wide pants, seated before them, entangled in both rose brambles and spider webs. The last pedestal seemed broken and indistinct. She felt her eyelids drop, rendering her sight to a vague splatter of color before she gave in and closed them.

To her, it felt like a single millisecond. The lurch from her center of gravity's shift and the sense that the ground's pull had become that much further 'down' than it had previously been awakened her to the contrary. Around and around, the throng of soldiers marched up the spiral stairs of a tower hewn from blocks of rose quartz. Se received an occasional glimpse out of the slotted windows, catching sight of redwood-scale forests of stalks and thorns, dotted with holes and strung with walkways, pulley systems, passages and doors. Insectoid beings, taking the shapes of domestic animals and humanoids alike, traversed the kingdom, climbing walls, clattering along the walkways and intermittently flying from one point to the next. The society seemed, from the few glances Saffron gleaned, to have reached a rare, tranquil moment of stability, albeit one that had already started to falter, as the wave of beetles had indicated.

The constant, unilateral tilt lulled her. She glanced down towards the helmeted faces around her, looking from one set of bulging eyes to the other. She found little in the way of intimacy, even less in the way of humanity. She did, however, find comfort. The soldiers seemed relaxed, yet alert. They seemed content, distant, neither cold nor warm. Once more, she faltered from awareness, feeling her body finally break down and relax, bit by bit, into the bridge of arms and hands beneath her.

Voices clattered together like a crowd trapped in an elevator during a power outage, just barely on the edge of distinction as Saffron felt her body disentangle itself from its shape. For once, she let go of the uncertainty of her father's fate, her mother's emotional stability, her failure to finish college and her progress in the martial arts. She stopped worrying about her scar, about how short she was, her left-handedness.

The substance moved her mind outside of time, outside of space, perpendicular to the wild array of time, space, and spirit in her world.If she looked down, she saw a trail of who she was, a ladder of herself stretching back to infancy. When she looked up, she saw the strobe of future selves, bearing some features that kept indistinct, yet those that she recognized stood out; her scar, her hair, her mother's laugh lines around her eyes and the inevitable effects of gravity and time on her shape. Her peripheral vision, however, seemed too much for her to bear. Flickering shapes, pieces of her mind's eye flashed, giving her impressions of alternate versions of herself that all branched out from the time that she received her scar. Looking seemed forbidden, as if moving her vision a hair to the left or right would collapse her consciousness from the enormity of truth. With that, she simply kept her eyes straight ahead, locked in a column to include the lights and the pedestal. The light that had met her at the bowl became diffuse and unfocused, its shape separating into three other lights. One shined brighter as the other dimmed, becoming dark and spherical, yet bathed in a smoky corona. The third trembled red and churned to something between liquid and flame, pulsing and blinking like a luminous heart.

Expecting you/self. Fix/heal/make. Thought/mind/self meet body/plug. Reformat.

She felt numb, yet lacking the benefit of pins and needles to help her locate her limbs. She went to test her voice, yet it seemed just as much a thought as spoken aloud, with no true distinction between the two. "Why can't I feel anything?"

The black sphere shuddered, an insectoid buzzing and snarl snapping out its words in a menacing, monotone transmission. We/self reformat you/self/unit. AllTime Now learn of mind/process. See self/other. Knot/sick disentangle. New process/thought spread. The sphere initially seemed still, yet on close examination, its surface consumed its own shape, breaking down into parts that consumed other parts, growing and providing material to break down into yet more pieces. The lightless ball became little more than a haze of motion with its corona as the only method to display its contrast with the world around it. Its wilderness seemed serene, however, an eternal destruction of form, with its shape only given to it by those who sought to observe it.

The bright light seemed frozen, lacking shimmer and motion. Something like a flavor touched Saffron's mind as she looked at it, harkening to the wounded wasp in the hallway that had unfolded into the divine, humanoid form. Though it remained still, its stillness unfurled innumerable sources of knowledge and thought. It spoke, in its placidity, of events in time unfolding to meet this singular moment, yet seen from an infinite number of angles, each different progression of events offering a new view of the eternal moment in which it existed. It knew no separation, and thus its constancy, its fundamental solidity, its flawlessness reflected the imbalance of time right back to it. However, its flawlessness could only show itself through flaws, unveiling a fundamental paradox to its being. It spoke nothing, it did nothing, yet Saffron's young mind watched itself cavort around the frozen white light, offered a chance to see what passed for Heaven in its symbolic, superlative nature that so contrasted with the roiling black orb.

The red, pulsing phlogiston rested between the light and the black cloud. Its color moved up and down the spectrum at its edges, and the intensity of its light grew and shrank with a rhythm that, outside of time, had no discernible tempo, yet existed beyond simple observation, ever blooming, ever withering. Its voice spoke somewhere in between genders, in between ages, bubbling up into discernible context for Saffron's benefit, though the beginnings and endings of its words grew and faded from a sea of glossolalia. "Your core shifts outside of AllTime. The changes represent the ripples created from that shift. Symbol offers ground. Symbol intersects here through the . Learning and unlearning will commence. The form of change comes from the instinct, choosing shapes from , embodying association with . sees in between. We/self needs in-between to speak, to investigate. In-between is symbol, and is symbol of symbol. Doer of black-sphere, messenger of white-light. Source of in body, firm as stone in you. AllTime NOW commence."

As the red fire-liquid's words broke apart, Saffron felt something very strong, very distinct in the sensation of falling down from a great height, from a body's warmth into the biting cold...

Gravity seemed to draw Saffron from all directions, then release, leaving her spinning within the Great Hall and toward an unknowable source. It felt as if someone had picked up the Fortress and thrown it in the air with backspin. The shadows seemed sharper, still limited in color, yet possessing distinct shape and form; this didn't help her at all in attempting to catch her bearings. She closed her eyes and withdrew herself with a breath, feeling her center of gravity reach out to her equilibrium in the panic.

The tingle began between her ears and against her pelvic floor simultaneously, and new pathways fired between the two like strings of fire through her body. Her legs and arms felt as they always had, at first, though they soon flickered between quadrupedal and bipedal arrangements in the tumult of her mind's eye. Another deep breath calmed the tremor between her limbs, and with a flex of her digits, she reclaimed her shape with fine-tuned fire spiraling from palms and soles, all the way through to the column of her spine in ecstatic, agonizing recognition. Denied its spread through her limbs, however, the vulpine traits followed a new vector; with the tumbling chaos and her disorientation, Saffron had no option but to submit to the change.

The crinkles of Saffron's ears unfolded and the muscles beneath her scalp and down the back of her neck awoke with a scream, burning into lost life from a former vestigial state. her hairline crept downward, and after a burning itch, the skin along the backs of her ears erupted into bright red fur. A solid ring of ache rattled from the nape of her neck to the muscles just beneath her cheekbones. Saffron inhaled, drawing deeper, deeper into the sources of that pain, and on her exhale, she felt the formerly dainty shells of her ears shoot out in size, massive fronds of scarlet a few shades brighter than her hair, tipped in sensitive points. A world of sound burst open for her; blood pumping through her veins, water crawling through the roots of trees, the digestive tracts of at least eleven different animals tearing into the stores of nuts, foliage and flesh as they slept, the echoes of hooting, rattling spirits as the Tempest's last vestiges unfastened from the land. At the very least, she could at least find 'down,' and it zoomed to greet her in the form of a massive, old oak bough aimed right for her solar plexus.

Saffron opened her eyes to no avail; the shimmer of eyeshine still brought in the clattering confusion of the Tempest, like a broken, three-dimensional kaleidoscope made of the broken-off bits from innumerable different worlds. She closed them promptly afterwards. "Sh*t... F*ckityf*ck!" Fingers and toes spread and scrambled as she felt the branch approach, turning her body in mid-air to initiate a grab onto the branch. With the bark millimeters away from her fingertips and her body fully extended, the Fox laid claim to the base of her body's support structure.

The tiny nub at the base of Saffron's spine harkened to the same ache that had overcome her head, locking her body from the hips down. "Gh-Aw come onnn! My butt!? Really!? Uuugh! Better not make it any bigger, yo!" Another deep breath drew in, driving all the way down to the knotted root, and released. Her palms met with the branch as the energy shot downwards, new vertebrae forming as the line of her body drew in an old vestige to bring to the tiny shaman a new appendage. At first it felt stiff, canine, paddle-like and ragged with thick fur. As she swung forward on the branch, she closed her eyes to draw in a second breath, reaching into her own reserves, and drawing them to the base. As she released, she exhaled, and the tail coiled with energy. Its length outstripped her torso's by a good margin, and wiry, powerful muscle laced through it, drawing another burst of pain through Saffron's tiny frame. The fur became dense, long, and the follicles all sang with the breeze of motion around her. The tail whipped around between her legs as she tumbled, slapping the trunk of a maple tree and redirecting her towards a branch thick enough to support her weight.

She landed on the balls of her feet in a crouch, arms out at either side, elbows bent, and wrists loose. One final burst scrambled through her, creeping into her deep, internal workings, into her Spirit. Her eyes shot open as she landed, the burning fire that had rang through her skull and ears pulsing with a migraine's barrage of lightning. The black shape that had prompted her decision unfolded before her eyes, descending on the Rose Fortress. Beetles climbed at its edges to devour the structure, sheer numbers overpowering the streaks of insectoid yellow that sought to intercept them. Four of the yellow points escaped. Between them, they carried a rose hip, a spider's egg sac and an opal bird egg. Saffron felt the hum as they closed in, drawing the snap of tension out of her head to the rattle of her teeth. As the essence descended, her jaw and gums popped. By the slightest of margins, as the potential essences nestled into the far corners of her Spirit, she felt her cuspids lengthen, sharpening into four small, but distinct points.

With one final breath, the vision fell away, bringing Saffron to face the dawn above the cabin, and the fierce cold within the canopy. "Hawghf*ckin' A!" Her teeth chattered as she dropped down from the branch, catching herself on her feet, swinging down with her tail, and dropping in simian fashion to the forest floor. The snow had bent and twisted itself into large trenches lined with craggy points and twisting spires, held in place by layers of ice. Holes in the spires arranged themselves along the ecliptic, surrounding patches of dry ground. Saffron took note of the sun's beams passing through a hole, filled with thin ice, its varying densities etching glyphs onto the spire across from it in accordance with the snow's melt. Her tail wrapped around her snugly as the cold, wet air reached for her skin once again, attempting to sap her heat as it had not so long ago. She scampered to the cabin, banging on the door with the bottom of her fist. "Guys? Guys??"

Saffron splayed across a mat in the cabin, arms above her head and dense, shining red hair scattered over her face. Her upturned nose sucked in air, puffing out her abdomen, holding as she felt the energy coil and writhe beneath her skin, as she felt down into her tail, up into her ears, through palms and soles, through forearms and shins, through the powerful, tense little body, then set the breath free from her lips, allowing the wild whip and warp to spin down, for her to find the bottom of her deeper, wider, greater well of energy.

Little corners of the interior landscape felt closed off, awash with conundrums she had yet to understand, paradoxes that she had yet to reconcile. As she explored her inner landscape, her ears fidgeted towards the sounds outside, catching snippets of a conversation between Bianca and Guha. It seemed casual, anecdotal about their surroundings, about the shapes in the ice. Much of it involved Sanskrit astrological terms and roundabout descriptions couched in poetic meaning. Wisdom rested there, yet Saffron hadn't the energy or the comprehension to follow. She fell further into her relaxation, easing along with the creak and shift of the old house around her.

The calm that settled in her, however, broke as she felt the air in the room become wickedly damp, then startlingly dry in rapid sucession. Her tail's end flicked in agitation, followed by a noisy exhale and the slow, defiant opening of her eyes to the room. Four figures stood in the corner, barely visible, yet both having turned their attention directly toward Saffron. One seemed immediately familiar. Onyx black skin, glowing orange cracks at the joints, the flat, featureless canvas of a face showing the room in hellish reflection.

Black Hell Ember stood in front of the other three humanoid shapes, shorter than the others, though still the strongest, the heaviest, the most substantial of the quartet. The tallest, dressed in earth-brown rags, had a transucent, yet cracked block where its face ought to have been, and firm, icy spikes jutting out from the back of its head. Its skin was the white of fresh snow, and the crags at its joints a watery blue in contrast to Ember's dark fire. Across from it, a brown, stone-laden lump that vaguely passed for a human's form flexed its blocky fingers, headless, with only a collection of faceted gems sticking up fence-like from the rough approximation of its neck. The last seemed little more than a vague, bluish-green haze that held aloft a Spirit Tree uniform in a constant draft around it.

The cracking, sizzling, boiling noise of Ember's voice rattled from all around Saffron, her ears flitting forwards and back, up and down to pinpoint it externally, before relenting to the internal, craggy whisper.

The Spider and the Fox plan traps in the ruin of the Rosebush, preparing for the second intersection. Does the Egg walk as a Beetle, or does the Beetle sit enthroned as the Egg? Does the Egg break, or does the Egg hatch in secret before the Phoenix can show her feathers? The Fox misdirects; fire reflects in the dewdrops in the Spider's web.

Saffron's ears pinned back as he spoke, her eyes wide with pupils dilated, and tail straight as a blade, red fur puffed out big and wide. She had drawn herself up to sit, legs stacked in half-lotus and tail still curling and drumming behind her. A sigh puffed out her cheeks and blew the strands of her hair around before her, prefacing her attention settling more fully on the quartet. "I... thaaaaanks?" She showed her teeth, partially a nervous wince, partially an appreciative grin, but all in all stuck somewhere in between any settled expression.

Black Hell Ember raised his right hand, and just as quietly and innocuously as they appeared, the four vanished. Saffron shook out her head, her shoulders, all the way down to her waist before unfolding her legs, pushing up to stand and following her momentum towards the cabin's door. Her fingers took the knob carefully, buzzing with the unseen, unmanifest, but still felt energies on the opposite side. A deep breath aligned with her opening the door and stepping out into the dawn.