nightmare, sweating and breathing heavily.
That in itself was not so unusual. Nightmares were tools favored by several Elders, and many others inspired nightmares even in the most steel-willed.
But this was not an Elder nightmare. Not unless the Elders had taken to stirring up memories.
She remembered her birth.
Emerging from an alchemical bath in a body that she now recognized would be normal for a three- or four-year-old child, she had looked up and seen Nathanael Bareius’ glasses gleaming in the light.
There had been a whole team of alchemists in the room that day, and the memory was so distant that she wasn’t sure she took any particular notice of Bareius, but in her dreams he was the only one she remembered.
Likewise, she didn’t remember his actual words. She hadn’t been able to speak yet.
But she imagined him saying, “If she fails the tests, put her into the incinerator. Like the others.”
She knew that, in reality, he had probably said nothing of the sort.
He wouldn’t have needed to. Everyone in that room knew the procedure.
But she had passed their physical and mental examinations, and so she had been brought into her new home: a polished pink room.
There, he had kept her for years.
She only had three sorts of visitors in those years. First, her tutors, faceless interchangeable men and women in alchemist masks who taught her everything she would need to know about the world through textbooks and worksheets.
Second, Nathanael Bareius himself. He said he was her father, and a father was someone who should always be obeyed.
Third were Elderspawn of Tharlos.
Her first…few dozen…encounters with them had been just like any other child’s. She had screamed and panicked and tried to escape. Spawn of Tharlos were shapeshifters who held no form for long, bizarre ever-melting blends of animals and objects.
But she found you could grow used to anything over time.
Once she had learned to tolerate the Elderspawn, she had been given a length of yellowed bone. This time, she really did remember what Nathanael Bareius had said to her: “No one has ever managed to beat this before, but you will, won’t you? You’re such a good girl.”
She had wanted so badly to pass the test.
It had been weeks before she could even hold the Spear without turning her hand into a slithering mass of tendrils or her floor into honey.
Once she mastered that stage, they reintroduced the Elderspawn. This time, they were hostile.
She had defended herself with the Spear.
Bliss didn’t know how long the tests had continued, but she remembered when the Soulbinding was complete. The Spear of Tharlos’ Intent had become clearer and clearer to her until one day, its logic just made sense to her. It wanted things to change. Anything and everything, all the time.
That day, she had changed her location for the first time.
And she saw the facility where she had been trapped. The prison.
She saw the outside.
She saw what had happened to the others before her.
And now her nightmares showed her the label outside her cell. Her name: #4162B.
That facility no longer existed.
It had taken much longer for her to break the hold that Nathanael Bareius had over her, and she still sometimes woke shaking at the memories. It kept her anger hot.
She shivered in her nightgown and patted the Spear of Tharlos in its Intent-sealing harness beside her bed. Revenge was too difficult to achieve on the richest man in the world, she found. And she had a greater purpose now anyway.
How could she put her personal desire over protecting people from the Great Elders?
“You can’t, of course!” Bareius said from the foot of her bed. He adjusted his glasses, his smile wide. “I would never ask you to.”
Instantly she whirled, impaling him through the chest with her Spear.
He spurted blood and fell, but a second Bareius stepped out of her closet. “Bliss…that’s a wonderful name, a beautiful name for my daughter. I’m proud of it, if I do say so myself.”
“I picked my name,” Bliss muttered. “It’s mine.”
The room had gone from freezing to scalding hot.
She swept the Spear through the second Bareius, but he jumped backwards into a swirling portal into the void.
Bliss felt a brief surge of triumph. He was in league with the Elder cultists! She’d known it all along.
Well, she hadn’t known it, but that made a great excuse to kill him.
She followed him.
Somehow she was certain where the portal would come out, and she changed her location from her bedroom to the rooftop of a bell tower in the