Amaranthine

“What the fuck was that!?” Cait yelled, laying Kennedy on a bench seat and holding her steady as Gwyn gunned the APC away from the retreating horde.

“A shit ton of monsters, that’s what!” Gwyn called behind her, attention torn between the viewscreen and a bunch of nano-panes which only seemed to show empty forest. “Monsters I still can’t see on my recon feeds!”

“Fuck! We just got good at killing these things and now they’re invisible?” Cait muttered, but that wasn’t quite right. She’d seen the ones she’d just torn apart clear enough.

“Invisible to my drones. Which doesn’t make any sense,” Gwyn complained, dismissing her nano-panes. “Godammit! We could use B-man’s Altered sense right now. When Kennedy wakes up have her send Rose flying so we have some kind of early warning system.”

Cait refocused on her girlfriend, slumped on the bench seat, now being attended to by Willow. She wasn’t sleeping, actually, but looked like she was close. It was weird, she literally just looked tired.

“What’s going on with her?” Cait asked, sitting down and lifting Kennedy’s head to rest it on her thigh. The girl nuzzled comfortably into her hand, so she couldn’t be feeling that bad.

“Burnout, of a sense,” Willow said, looking up at Cait guiltily. “I helped her push power through to you but…”

She looked back at Kennedy, one hand waving arcanely over her stomach while the other stroked her hair in a surprisingly tender gesture.

“…the pathways between you, at least those used for that, were not so open as I thought. For lack of a better term, her soul is raw. The good news is she will be fine shortly, but don’t expect that kind of power from her consistently.”

“Huh. New twist on the ‘big thing, small hole’ complaint, but I’m familiar enough,” Cait said, and Kennedy slapped weakly at her thigh. Cait caught her hand, lacing their fingers together. “Shhhh, rest up. No need to waste energy protesting jokes we both know you think are funny.”

She made an adorable little ‘hmph!’ sound and cuddled into Cait’s stomach, breath evening out into sleep after less than a minute. Cait kept a hold of her hand as she fixed a glare on Willow.

“So, you’re a fan of the ‘push em off a cliff and see if they fly’, school of thought, huh?” she asked, and the witchy woman let her composure break a bit. She grimaced, and looked with real shame at Kennedy.

“I didn’t realize just how much she could send rushing through herself,” she explained. Her face regained a bit of its iron before she continued. “but, the fact is, there were too many and we weren’t killing them fast enough. The more vulnerable would have been overrun.”

“Yeah,” Cait sighed, letting the anger seep out of her features along with the dregs of the adrenalin rush of combat. “I know, I know. She’ll really be okay?”

“Better than okay, I expect,” Willow said, amused smile reasserting itself on her features. “While I won’t recommend she try something like that again for some time, the next time she does it should be much easier. We essentially sandblasted the rough edges off of the passages between you two.”

“What does that even mean?” Cait asked, suddenly feeling the urge to punch through the side of the APC. Things had gone from 0 to 100 so fuckin’ fast in her life again, and like always, she felt like she was a couple steps behind on the specifics. Willow sighed, and in a whistle of wind, breathed life into an image of the complex connection between Cait and Kennedy.

“That is a good question, Cait,” she said, and Cait could see her immediately beginning to lose herself in the pattern’s intricacies.

“Hey!” Cait snapped, making Willow’s eyes refocus. “No pondering. Answers time.”

“Right, yes,” Willow coughed, gathering herself. “So. Kennedy has been my sounding board for most of these musings, so this wouldn’t be news to her, but you are certainly involved enough to deserve what explanation I can give.”

She gestured at the image she’d conjured, which might as well have been modern art to Cait.

“Succinctly, this shouldn’t be possible. Moving past that, because that phrase matters less with each wave, it implies a level of interconnectedness between your two souls that defies all animantic convention.”

The lines twisted around, separating into two distinct patterns, but leaving at least as many behind in a floating jumble.

“Near as I can gather, these are your individual souls, in an unconscionably simplistic rendering. They are distinct, and I guarantee you would find no others exactly like them. Think fingerprints. A soul is a uncompromisingly individualistic entity. It may intertwine with others, but never mix, like oil and water.”

The diagram shifted, the jumble and one set of distinct lines disappearing. Another shimmered into existence next to the one that remained. They flowed into each other, forming a sort of Moire pattern on top of one another.

“This is a representation of the link between Kennedy and myself.”

The pattern flicked through a few more variations.

“Qi. Lira. The Director,” Willow named each as it passed. There were differences, beyond the pattern itself, with each, but not in the complexity. It was more like… more like Lira and The Director’s were more in focus than Qi’s. Then the pattern resolved back into the one Cait shared with Kennedy.

Seeing it like this, the difference wasn’t exactly subtle. It was like the gap in complexity between an emoji and the Mona Lisa. That jumble of extra lines adorned their souls like moulding in a venerable house, enhancing both, and providing a sense of continuity and connection.

“Huh.” Cait said, understanding this was probably significant, but not having the foggiest as to how. Willow’s eerie laugh, more of a giggle this time, filled the cabin.

“Huh indeed,” she said, and the image wiped away. “The point of all of this is that the two of you are linked in a way far beyond what her powers should account for.”

She caught Cait’s grin even as it spread across her face, frowning and snapping at her.

“No!” Willow scolded, “No. I know what you’re thinking. This is not ‘the power of love’, Cait, unless you honestly think you are more deeply connected to her than her adoptive mother or best friend and lover.”

Cait scowled, but didn’t protest. She had been thinking it was the power of love, after all.

“Moving on,” Willow said, returning Cait’s scowl with that familiar amused smirk, “the upshot is your connection allows for a much higher degree of intermingling than Kennedy is used to with her powers. She was already beginning to utilize this, or at least that’s how I interpret your firebreathing when you took down the Bookkeeper, I just… I gave her a slightly premature push.”

“That… huh, that actually makes sense.” Cait agreed.

“No it doesn’t!” Gwyn called from up front. “Magic is bullshit!”

“Quiet you,” Willow said, making what Cait was pretty sure was a Witcher sign at the girl. Gwyn yelped, and ceased criticizing the metaphysical. She turned back to Cait with a conspiratorial smile. “She is, however a little right. This falls squarely into Bullshit.”

“Can you teach me how to do that?” Cait asked, immediately latching onto the promise of an effective long-range comeback for Gwyn. She hadn’t forgotten her threat to turducken Cait with nano-bots.

“I think that would be irresponsible,” Willow chuckled.

“Seconded,” said Gwyn, dashing hopes of a silencing spell. “If you guys are doin’ hexes and shit back there, could you spare some time from fucking around to take a peek at my boyfriend?”

She slapped B-Man’s container, strapped into the co-pilot’s seat. Cait was 90% sure she’d heard Gwyn muttering to it a few times on the trip, and agreed that it was high time to get the guy out before she had a mental break.

Willow bit her lip, eyes flicking from Kennedy to the box. Then she patted her cheeks, swept back her spider silk hair, and glided over to kneel next to the container.

“Need me to drop the stasis?” Gwyn asked, clearly hoping the answer was yes.

“No…. No, your machines shouldn’t be affecting what I’m looking at,” she responded, fingers going crazy in the air in front of B-man. Cait really wondered if that actually did anything or if she was just aura-farming, but declined to ask. If it did, she’d be rude, and if it didn’t… well, It actually did look pretty cool.

Willow’s eyes unfocused, their silver sheen becoming dominant as she fell into herself, then fell further, into Cait’s friend. She remained like that for a long moment, before all hell broke loose.

Willow’s head shot back, tendons stretched and tight like a possession victim. Her mouth gaped and her eyes opened nearly as wide, while spears of brilliant silver light seeped from every orifice and pore.

A seething mass of the soul symbols flooded out of her, somehow gaining enough physical form to blast through the roof of the APC. Tires screeched as Gwyn skidded the vehicle to a halt, unwilling to continue under the massive structural damage.

Through the newly convertible roof, Cait looked up, and what she saw felt downright biblical.

Countless patterns, ragged and torn, spun, separating themselves for an instant from a massive, central cubic design, before being sucked back in. All different, all wrong, all emitting a sense of pain so pure and primal it brought Cait to her knees.

Slowly, as if sneaking, another pattern, whole and vibrant, dropped from the central cube. Somehow, Cait could tell it was her friend. It might as well have been wearing his hat for how clear it was, but damn if she could tell why.

Willow’s hands shot up, and Breastman’s pattern crept towards her, moving like a scared cat. Then the cube shifted, and Cait realized why. One of its faces contained a pattern, unmistakably a representation of the terrible eye Breastman carried within himself. Deep black lines, wickedly barbed, shot out towards his fleeing soul.

Well, I’ve been making a habit of punching ghosts. I don’t understand theology well enough to think there’s a difference between that and punching a god.

The APC shook as Cait launched herself, meeting the barbed lines head on. Despite their impossibility, when she hit them, they were harder than steel, but even steel had begun to yield to her strength.

A screech Cait felt, more than heard rippled the air around her as she forced the tendrils back. Always moving, kicking off, pulling herself through the air, letting recoil knock her back, she created chaos within the chaotic order of the malevolent cuboid pattern. She just hoped she could fight this… oversoul long enough that Willow could guard B-man.

Cait felt Kennedy’s mind brush her own, like a lover stroking your hair in the morning sun. It was like the girl was looking through her eyes, working through her hands, as Cait suddenly saw… no, saw wasn’t the right word, it was like the world was a house of mirrors, but in that instant Cait knew with absolute certainty which one needed to be broken to escape. She dodged a grabbing tendril, then kicked off of it to smash through a pattern linking Willow’s heart to the cube, pulled taut in a tug of war.

Another of those sub-sonic screeches, before it cut off abruptly and the whole mess in the sky disappeared. Cait dropped back into the APC, where Qi and Gwyn were fussing over a collapsed Willow in a panic.

“What the fuck! What the fuck! What the fuck!” the chorus came from all of them as they scrambled for a both an explanation and a plan of action. Despite what Cait had felt from Kennedy, the girl had somehow slept through all of that, and now their APC was…

“Gwyn, can this thing still drive?” Cait asked, as she heard a foreboding howl outside. Their resident tech wizard did a quick look around the cab, then nodded. With a last concerned look at Willow, she jumped into the driver’s seat, wind whistling through the new sun roof as she burned rubber away.

Willow was starting to stir, and Cait pulled her into her lap, helping her sit up. The witch panted as she rested her head back against Cait’s chest, gripping tight onto the big woman’s hand in what felt a lot like primal terror. Then she laughed, which was unexpected.

“I’m going to have to stop using the word ‘impossible’,” she said, tilting her head back to meet Cait’s eyes. “it just never seems to actually be relevant anymore.”

“What was that!? Is B-money okay now?” Cait asked. She had more questions, but those seemed the most pressing.

Willow coughed weakly as she laughed again, a sad laugh, the kind a scientist might make when shown something that invalidates a dearly held theorem.

“Don’t know! Shouldn’t exist,” she wheezed. “Thought souls were the highest state of being. Obviously wrong.”

“Ominous,” Cait said, and Willow laughed again. Weak as she was, it just sounded human, carrying none of its normal unsettling ambiance.

“I imagine so,” she agreed, “whatever that was, the only way I could fit it into traditional eschatology would be to call it a god.”

Cait couldn’t help but grin.

“So I did just punch god?”

Willow chuckled, and slapped weakly at Cait’s thigh. “Not the Judeo-Christian one, I should think, but close enough. Score one for the little guy.”

“And B-man?” Cait asked anxiously, catching Gwyn’s eye as she looked back over her shoulder. Willow’s assured expression broke slightly, and she sighed.

“While what we just saw makes me want to err on the side of caution, I believe he will have broken free from its immediate influence,” she admitted.

“So we can let him out!?” Gwyn asked excitedly, hand hovering over an instrument panel on the side of the box. Willow glared at the hand, sighed again, then nodded.

“May as well do it in the middle of nowhere with nothing to destroy but hordes of monsters!” Gwyn said, with an air of pleading, voice jittery with anticipation as she tapped at the panel. Lights winked out with each tap, before the box dissipated into a cloud of bots with a foreboding hiss.

The solid silver puddle that currently composed BREASTMAN plonked to the seat below, and Gwyn bit her lip as she waved her hand. The silver coating began to flake away, revealing dark purple flesh below. It took a moment even after the last of the coating disappeared, but laboriously, the little guy regained his shape, hat sliding back to pride of place atop his head.

WHAT THE FUCK