https://www.dropbox.com/s/syspbo19sno5yu4/WyNaughtandtheSandsofSolace.pdf

http://i.imgur.com/ICaL8eK.jpg

In which Wy thinks up her first crackpot theory, and Knot goes for a swim.

“Et s-semblio ocula, dela can carp-io vis.”

http://i.imgur.com/ZGWOsd9.jpg, filling her window with a mushroom of dust.

“Et semblio ocula,” she repeated. “What do you think that means, Knot?”

One of Knot’s bees buzzed lazily up from its bed of dittany. Dancing slothfully across the leather cover of Wy’s book, it wrote in the dust:

SOMETHING BORING. ARE YOU DONE YET?

Wy tsked. “No, I’m not. I still have this book on, uh, ‘White-Gold Tower.’ I know, why don’t I read it out to you?” She eagerly cracked open a second massive tome, pressing her face into its amber aroma.

LET’S GO SOMEWHERE. NOTHING BUT READING FOR WEEKS.

The little elf just shrugged. Knot buzzed on, drawing in the dust.

UNCLE WORKS YOU TOO HARD. ONE MORE BOOK, ONE MORE BOOK, ONE MORE BOOK!

His bee flew up and thwacked Wy in the temple with its bum. She waved it away absently.

“Yeah, I guess at first,” said the girl. “But it’s actually fun. Anyway, there isn’t much else to do here since Uncle put that lecture expulsion spell on me.”

SO WE SHOULD GO SOMEWHERE ELSE, DUH.

Wy turned a page. “That’s what I’m already doing, duh.”

WUT.

“Uh huh,” she whispered. “I read books, and I leave through their dust.” She blew a puff at him off the cover.

HOW? MAGICKA?

“Sort of. Here’s how I think it works.” She bent forward intensely. “See, all books have a pull on the world. That’s why people read at all, but it’s also why they’re dusty. Because this isn’t just dust,” she said, drawing a finger across the book, “it’s solid sunlight. Look at that!” She waved wildly about, conducting the dance of the motes in her window’s sunbeams. “All around us, because of books! They pull the sunlight in, gather it together into tiny solid pieces. And all the time they’re on the shelves they’re doing it, until WHOOSH! Someone opens them, and all that magic rushes out in a wave, carrying the eye of the person’s mind away to some other time or place or world or all three.”

Knot’s bee whirred about for a moment. Then it wrote:

MIND EYE?

“Yeah, you know. The, uh –“ she tapped her forehead rapidly, “the thing that lets you see things in here.”

I’VE NOT GOT ONE.

Wy frowned. “Oh. Well… I guess that would explain why you don’t like books. Sorry.”

But not sorry enough to stop reading, apparently, for the girl promptly buried her nose between crackly butterscotch pages of tiny text and drawings of magic towers.

Knot buzzed a sound frown. Then he spelled out a line in the dust of another book and tickled Wy’s ear until she looked up.

LET US DO SOMETHING TOGETHER.

“Like go somewhere, I suppose?” The bee cartwheeled in the air. “Oh, fine,” Wy said, slamming her book closed with another cloud of dust. “But I’m going to show you what I mean! This time I’ll navigate. You just do your thing and tune in.”

She hopped down from her window seat and crept out of her cubby into the looming library.

“Come with me,” she whispered to the bee as they pattered through long, powdery sunbeams, “https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQ61bMEK2Ak”

Dodging the glares and glances of the wizards at their tiny desks, Wy and her tree dove into the dark sea of the stacks. And as they swam deeper and deeper between the shelves, something began to happen. The books quivered in their covers, giving off a faint aura like smoke or breath at dawn, and the wood of their seats grew rougher, gnarled, hairy like bark. Their pages oozed, dripping hue and hearing to the grey stone floor. Then, suddenly, the shelves burst with a flood of color and sound, sweeping the little elf up in its wild rush toward something.

“See, Knot!” Wy yelled madly as she swirled down toward a http://i.imgur.com/kE3JcyR.jpg, where a snowy owl hooted excitedly in a cloud of bees. “See? This is how we see!” But then the current rushed even faster

http://i.imgur.com/JpFblh8.jpg

washed her through

to the sea.

Wy blinked, and curtains of confusion parted from her eyes.

She was floating at the bottom of a brilliant ocean, buoyed by a stream of pearly wonder water above a bed of glittering sand. All around, kelps of a different color swayed gently in the many-flavoured currents, their strands blinking with eye-like splotches and neon flares.

Wy gasped, then almost choked when she realized what she had done. But then she gasped again anyway, for:

“I – I’m breathing! I’m breathing water!” Her words sent rainbow ripples through the waves. “Knot, Knot, I’m breathing water and talking in colors!” She spun around, looking for her tree. He was behind her, still in the gate form he had used to bring them there.

“Come on!” Wy yelled in snappy pink. “This is fantastic!” She spun head over heels toward him.

Back in the library, Knot’s bees milled about uncertainly, and owl Urim cocked its head.

“Oh, I see,” Wy replied. “You think trees don’t do very well underwater. But, gee, you’ve already changed shape. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lcd7uQw2ZtM! I bet you can be anything you want here.” She screwed her face into a wrinkly apricot for a moment, concentrating. Then, sure enough, she exploded in a burst of tangerine tunes and http://i.imgur.com/TwyzWGF.jpg.

“See?” she said when she had switched back. “Easy! Now you.”

She waited. Urim closed its eyes and the bees buzzed furiously, but still Knot stayed a big wooden arch. Wy sighed.

“Here, let me help you,” she said, and swam over to press her forehead against his broken keyring. Then, shifting like melting wax, http://i.imgur.com/p8ygdL3.jpg.

“There we go!” said the little girl happily, and took his twiggy fingers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kro27B8eXeE

The two set off into the rolling fields of kelp, Knot’s churning roots throwing up clouds of shining dust behind them. They passed through waves of curried cobalt, jets of anxiety, and deep, still wells where mirror fish flitted, but it wasn’t long before they came to a grove of coral.

“Look,” Wy whispered, pointing to the rainbows rippling out between the pink trunks. “Someone must be talking.” She looked up at her deep sea guardian. “Want to go say hello?”

Knot’s bees sketched a question inside his dittany helmet.

“Oh, don’t be such a pantywaist,” Wy scoffed. “Let’s go.” She pulled him down into the branches.

As they drifted closer through the coral, the voice they had seen grew clearer on Wy’s tongue, giving some kind of speech.

“And so,” it said, “it is with reverence, not with avarice, that we must cross the fields of the sea, always remembering that it was only through the grace of those sleeping souls beneath us that we learned to See, and then to see the errors of our old ways.”

Wy and Knot floated up quietly at the edge of the grove’s central clearing. Inside, http://i.imgur.com/Y4vMHFw.jpg, lecturing to a group of six or seven other slugs.

“We must atone,” it said, “for our early sins. We must tend and protect the souls as they grow, so that they too may bloom into that most blessed class of Angel,” it touched one of its appendages to what seemed to be its forehead, where a glittering ring, winged with kelp, was set into its skin, “those eyes of Magnus’ many minds that saved us from – I say, whose umami do I hear back there?”

The group of sea slugs swirled around to peer excitedly at the newcomers. Like the speaker, they all had rings set into their foreheads.

Wy swam forward. “Hello! I’m Wy and this is Knot. We just got here. Where is here, anyway?”

“Where?!” exclaimed the slug, leaning over its podium. “These are the Colored Currents and the Sands of Solace, young lady, and they welcome you very sweetly!”

“Oh, thank you!” Wy replied. “Who are you then?”

“We are the Sload Society of Reformed Reanimators.” It drew up proudly. “And we believe that ‘Souls Are Sacred, Not Slaves.’”

The little elf blinked. “Sload? Don’t you usually – um – kill people and make them into zombies?”

The sload sighed midnight. “Yes, sadly. We used to do that. In fact, we even came to the Currents for it, having heard of the huge numbers of souls that lodge and grow from the solace, which you see all around.” It fluttered an appendage at the kelp waving amidst the coral. “But instead of drawing a great army of animations, we were given our Angels and began to Hope, and then to See. Now we serve the souls as they grow in the solidified Hope of those who went before, protecting them from those who would cause harm to them and their contemplation of Solace.”

“Who would want to hurt them?” Wy asked. “Aside from other sload, I mean.”

But just then a light more piercing than any Wy had ever seen blazed out above the grove’s tangled roof, washing their hues weak and pale

as a voice of flat purity

and pure screech said,

http://i.imgur.com/UmChFjq.jpg

The sea slugs scattered, rippling madly in every direction, babbling words muffled to white noise by the great light. The water pressed panic against Wy’s ears as something huge and swift rushed up to curl around the coral and rip away the clearing’s roof.

It was only then, when Wy was already staring in terror up at the enormous sea horse looming above that the words of the slugs made it to her tongue.

“It’s the unicorn! IT’S THE UNICORN! Cover your light receptors! Cover your –“

“Greetings, infidels,” the wire voice said as its tail snapped out to curl around the lead slug where it was trying to bury itself in the sand. http://i.imgur.com/hqlmFb6.jpg.

“The light of Truth is here,” it said, casting the hue-hollow slug aside. “This is your reality check.” The light of its horn intensified, and though Wy tried to look away she found herself completely mesmerized, drifting slowly into its easy promise. The slugs, too, were too slow, and one by one swam up to let the unicorn drain them of color and hope. Their angels vanished, screaming bloody dawn, into its snout.

“Mm, a rarer vision,”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHdZPiykql0. She could barely see or hear anything but the unicorn’s absolutes, but she vaguely sensed that Knot rushed forward to save her and was swiftly caught by the horse’s tail. “But my list for you checks off as null.”

“Time to wake up, dear.” http://i.imgur.com/QVew8y4.jpg

But then a blast of amber shot past, slamming the horse in the side. It shrieked, and jetted backward, sending Wy swirling down to the bed of glittering sand. As she tumbled, she just managed to catch a glimpse of http://i.imgur.com/3y7B3d7.jpg Then she bumped softly down amidst the soul kelp and realized that her lungs were filled with water she could no longer breathe.

The unicorn gave two harsh whinnies punctuated by blasts of warmth and gold, and then the jet of its flight sent the souls around her whipping wildly. But her vision blackened as she suffocated on the sea, and when huge hands lifted her from the dust she could only barely feel the lips that closed over her mouth, breathing something tickly into her once, twice, thrice…

She coughed ferociously. A puff of glowing dust shot from her mouth as she stuck out her tongue and stared at the glitter stuck in her poisonous blue saliva.

“What fresh horror is this?” she said.

The person holding her chuckled rich auburn, his chest glowing with its warmth. Wy blinked, then rubbed at her left eye, which seemed to have caught a speck of sand. One-eyed, she squinted up at her savior.

http://i.imgur.com/FDezEuM.jpg, so tall that his head seemed as far away as the surface of the sea even though he was holding her close against his chest. His grey-streaked braids twisted away behind him as far as Wy could see, and his eyes crinkled down at her: one black, one gold.

“Not horror,” he said, smiling. “Solace. Just a bit of crystallized hope to keep you breathing.”

Wy blinked again, and immediately clapped a hand to her left eye in pain. “Who are you?” she asked.

“You may call me Tsiri,” the elf replied. “I’m just a construction worker for the Summerstrand. Who are you?”

“I’m Wy,” the girl said. “What’s the Summerstrand? And where’s Knot?”

“Your big hist-friend? The Harvester – that unicorn – took him. Carried him off when he cut my net.” Wy closed her eyes and turned her face against Tsiri’s chest.

His arms tightened comfortingly. “Now don’t worry, Wy. He’s still out there somewhere. We’ll find him.” He swam away from the wreckage of the coral grove, toward http://i.imgur.com/TvQT4FS.jpg

“Don’t lie to me,” Wy hissed back. “https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EA5b3FNI4w”

“I’m taking you somewhere safe,” he said gently as he leapt astride the serpent. “This is Myra, my clepsydra. She’ll take us back to camp. Where we can start a search for your friend,” he added.

The little elf shook her head again as the serpent whipped off into a cardamom current, grey tears welling up in her eyes. She rubbed them away angrily, setting the dust speck ablaze again.

“Tsiri,” she said as she rubbed at it, “there’s something in my eye.” http://i.imgur.com/SQgNdwB.jpg,

gone hue-hollow and hopeless beneath the sea.

“And I think the unicorn ate

my Eye.”

[http://i.imgur.com/oLVialj.jpg]

[http://i.imgur.com/31Tvvsl.jpg]

“Ahhhhhhh.”

Tsiri took his long finger off her tongue, and Wy closed her mouth. Completely colorless from head to toe to robe, she was done out instead in harsh black and white relief. The only bit of color left on her was in her mouth – her spit was still the vivid blue of the Pear-She-Ate.

“Curious,” said Tsiri. “Very curious.”

“Am I going to die?” asked Wy. “Is that what happens without an eye in your mind?”

The elf chucked her under the chin. “I’m quite positive you won’t. But that isn’t so odd. What’s odd is that you’re still yourself. I’ve never seen anyone with even a speck of color left after the unicorn’s been at them. How long has your mouth been blue?”

Wy shrugged. “I dunno. A few months?”

“How did it happen?”

“Oh, I took a bite of a pear that turned out to be a dragon or something. Then I got this. It’s called witchspit, isn’t it?”

Tsiri raised an eyebrow. “I suppose it could be,” he said. “Was that when you met your friend?”

The little elf nodded. “Yes, and then we went hunting, and met werewolves, and broke up some baby slavery…” The whole of her adventures with Knot spilled out in a rush as Tsiri listened and his sea snake carried them on through the Currents.

“And he’s the only one who keeps me company in the library and I really really really miss him,” she finished, and then had to rest for a moment. The other elf nodded, staring ahead with a tiny frown.

“Why are these things happening to me, Tsiri?” Wy asked, her voice turned terribly tiny.

Tsiri mustered a smile, pulling on a coil of her hair. “I don’t know, Wy. I’ve heard tales of ‘witchspit’ from time to time, usually from escapees of the sea’s lowest workgangs. There was something about using it for chains… Anyway, it causes permanent changes in how people see themselves.”

“And do other witches get it from dragons too?”

“Oh no, I’ve never heard of that,” Tsiri answered. “In fact-“

But his clepsydra reared back suddenly, hissing and refusing to go on. Before them the Colored Currents milled and swirled aimlessly, broken by a wide, chilly swath of grey waters. Floating within that dead channel was a massive dragon, coiling and uncoiling slowly as it nibbled at its own tail.

“This again,” Tsiri muttered. “That sea horse causes me more trouble with every hour.” He straightened up.

“I see you, Greyscale,” he called out in ripples of amber and then grey. “I am only returning to my camp, having snatched this girl from the snout of the Harvester. The way was clear when I departed. Let us pass!”

“Perhaps I will,” the dragon mused, “and perhaps I won’t. It might not be permitted for one so colorful as yourself to enter such a dreary Canol. Although she looks quite drab enough. Are you sure you snatched her properly?”

“I was tardy,” Tsiri admitted. “And our return is urgent. Will you at least permit me to heal part of this breach so we may cross?”

Old Greyscale laughed, a storm gurgling behind his fangs. “That would not be the nature of the Currents, dirty elf. They might rebel.”

Tsiri sighed. “Very well then. We shall have to find another passage.” He gathered Myra’s reigns.

“Maybe you will,” Greyscale said, “and maybe she won’t.”

Tsiri paused. “What do you mean?”

“Sometimes a dragon wants a little youthful conversation.” He blinked at Wy. “Come speak with me, grey girl.”

“I think not,” the older elf answered. “It would-“ But Wy put her hand over his mouth, shaking her head, and wriggled out of his arms.http://i.imgur.com/Q7Xbl3T.jpg

“Hello,” she said, a few feet from the dragon’s snout. “I’m Wy… Who are you?”

“I am called Greyscale,” he replied, “Also Old. And as you may have noticed,” he went on, rolling over and looking at her upside down, “I’m grey. Do you know why?”

Wy shook her head.

“Neither do I,” the dragon said. “I’ve often wondered. Maybe it’s because I was born between two times, and didn’t like either of them well enough to pick it for good. Maybe it’s because I only have two eyes, one for black, one for white. Or maybe,” it hissed, “I’m grey because maybe is my only hope. What do you think?”

“I think that hope is made up,” she answered sadly, “and that you can’t be grey just because of how you see things. You just are, or you’re not.”

“Maybe,” replied Greyscale. “Maybe. But I thought I heard some ripples of witchspit on the waters. Do you have some, mayhap?” Wy stuck out her tongue. The dragon purred. “I’m not sure,” it said, “but if you were to lick my eyes with that, it might happen that I could see between other colors than black and white. And if that were true,” it said as the little elf shook her head, “perhaps my Canol would be colorful enough for your dirty hero there to cross.”

“It won’t work,” Wy said, “but whatever.” And she swam up to each of Old Greyscale’s eyes and gave them a long lick.

“We’ll see, we’ll see,” the dragon rumbled with a sigh. “Well, I’ll See,” it corrected, letting its eyes slip closed. “Maybe you will. Maybe you won’t. Farewell, little witch.”

Wy swam back to Tsiri. “He’s not very smart,” she whispered. “But I guess we can go now.”

So they did, slipping through the cold grey,

http://i.imgur.com/SBkUI52.jpg

to roll away.

[http://i.imgur.com/ga9se3J.jpg]

Tsiri’s sea serpent nosed through a forest of neon kelp, slipping between the roots of giant mangroves.

“Is it close?” Wy whispered.

“Yes,” answered Tsiri. “It’s right – here.”

They broke through the weedy wall at last. Before them was a shallow, sandy bowl, surrounded by kelp and pierced by thick white roots like upside down trees. Elves swam about between them, leading sea snakes or http://i.imgur.com/IDfIUmT.jpg.

“Only temporary,” the elf explained as Myra took them down toward a cluster of makeshift metal huts. “The unicorn set up its lair right over our portal to the Summerstrand. We’re trying to gather enough raw solace to make another, but our collection parties,” he pointed to a group of svcker fish with elven keepers, “keep getting their eyes eaten.”

“What’s the Summerstrand?” Wy asked.

“Our home,” Tsiri answered as he swung her down. “We’re only here to gather solace sand, actually. It’s a little bit complex, but basically my friends and I are builders, and we build the Strand out of solace sand and solid sunlight.”

Wy rubbed at her irritated eye. “How?” she asked.

Tsiri turned up his huge palms, exposing webs of string between his fingers, cat’s-cradling two woven eyes. “With these,” he explained. “They’re a lot like angels, but we call them ‘sikuli,’ the eyes of God’s many minds. Through them, I look at the world. And by looking, I make it into what I See.”

“But that makes no sense.” Wy frowned. “You can’t change anything just by looking at it.”

“Can’t you?”

“No,” Wy answered firmly. “Your sikuli must be the product of a wrong world-view.” She stalked off between the tangled roots and many-hued huts. Tsiri sighed, and followed.

He caught up to her in a single stride, leading her through the camp. The other elves eyed her warily from their peaky heights as they went, nudging their fish away as though afraid she would steal their color. But the camp was small, and they left it for the depths of the tangled mangrove roots almost before they had properly entered. Angels floated around them, twitching their wings of kelp, and rooted souls waved silently with waves of color that Wy could no longer taste.

They stopped beneath a chandelier root formation, from which angels hung at the tips of pale branches.

“What are we doing?” Wy asked Tsiri. “What’s here?”

“A friend,” he said. “He might be able to help us.”

“Oh. Well, where is he?”

“Right here,” said a new voice, and the chandelier above morphed into an amber octopus floating upside down over their heads. “Welcome to my garden. Who are you?”

“This is Wy,” Tsiri answered. “Wy, meet Mantle-Bright, my friend and advisor. Mantle, Wy has something in her eye.”

“Does she?” the octopus said, and blinked down at the colorless elf. “Well, I’ll See what she can See.”

“What are you doing up there?” Wy interrupted rudely.

The octopus flipped over and fluttered down. “Reading,” he said, and held up one of the angels as explanation. Its ring tinted everything beyond a bright, sweet orange.

“You can’t read that. It’s an angel, not a book.”

Mantle-Bright’s skin splotched rosy with humor. “Hoo hoo hoo, look who knows so much. Angels and books grow from the same things, girl: solace, which is just old hope, and the souls that seed there. And they show you the same thing: the hue of new hope.” The octopus blinked at her through a lonely blue ring. “Haven’t you ever looked through a book?”

“Well,” Wy hesitated, “I guess. So they’re like windows?”

“More like the many eyes of Mister Magnus, changing the world with their Sight. ‘Et semblio ocula, dela can carpio vis.’”

“Oh, please,” scoffed the little elf. “What does that even mean? Tell the truth!”

Mantle mottled green. “All right. But which truth?”

“There’s only one, duh.”

“That’s one perspective,” the octopus agreed. “https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZl7zl2Yozk That’s what it’s all about, Wy. My people used to call it their Solace Creed: ‘Et semblio ocula, dela can carpio vis,’ which means many things. Among them,” his skin flushed mysterious maroon, “these. ‘Flesh and light become the images in our eyes,’ and ‘The images in our eyes light the flesh of ‘and.’”

“So?” Wy replied stubbornly. “You can look at things any old way, but only one way is right. You can’t make something true just by seeing it differently.”

Mantle-Bright curled his tentacles like a shrug. “It happened to me.http://i.imgur.com/WDu3sCy.jpg, you know, and I’m still not on the inside. I’m a Tower, and I’ve got the eye to prove it.” He lifted up to show his mouth, where a single crystal eyetooth gleamed gold. “But some humans won a war, and looked at me through my own eye. And they didn’t see me like this anymore, and so I had to come here just to survive.”

“But I don’t expect you to believe that,” he went on. “I don’t look like I could color the world with my ink anymore. Let me show you something, though. You too, Tsiri. We found something at the portal to the Strand just a bit before you arrived.”

He led them a short swim away to a cage of multicolored metal.http://i.imgur.com/HpHBppr.jpg.

“What is it?” Wy asked in horror.

“A zombie,” Tsiri replied grimly. “An Animation, raised from the dust and powered by enslaved souls. They see only absolutes, do only what they have already done, and hate all hope.” Through its empty eyes, Wy could just see the stares of soul kelp floating helplessly in darkness.

[http://i.imgur.com/k3qOI4a.jpg, Knot and Anafynn http://i.imgur.com/HeQh6aL.jpg.]

[http://i.imgur.com/zD1Q0D5.jpg]

“Yes, the unicorn must have recruited a necromancer,” Mantle-Bright said. “The portal is swarming with them now. But watch this, Wy, watch.” He lifted an angel, then held it in front of the zombie’s eyes. An echo of the angel’s orange flared in the animation – and, immediately, the zombie crumbled to glittering dust.

“Get it?” Mantle-Bright said. “Get it? They have no inner eye! And when all you can see is black and white, imagination is deadly. For zombies, hope is death.”

“But I don’t have a mind’s eye either,” Wy pointed out stubbornly. “And it didn’t happen to me.”

“Don’t you?” He loomed over her, curling and uncurling his tentacles above a broiling cloud of inky curls. “You can still see in color, can’t you? So what’s wrong with your eye, hm? What’s wrong with it? What’s wrong?” Wy snatched her hand away from her face, stumbling backward.

“What do you know?” she muttered. “You’re just a crazy octopus that thinks it’s a magic tower inside.” Mantle-Bright deflated pathetically.

Tsiri laid a staring hand on her head, frowning down. “Everyone has their own perspective, Wy,” he said. “Just like every angel has its own color. In a way, we all have our own angels, painting our perceptions.”

“And it’s hard to look through someone else’s eyes,” he continued. “Very hard. But when we can’t even try, it is often more because of what the color of their beliefs would mean about our own lives and actions than anything else. Don’t punish others because the way you think about yourself might not be right.”

“Mantle-Bright,” he went on in her shamed silence, “Wy came here with a hist-ship in the shape of a neganaut. The unicorn has him.”

“Dear Mister Magnus,” the octopus whispered, “lend us your light. We should go now.”

“Yes,” agreed Tsiri. He looked at Wy. “Will you come with us to the Strand?”

“Why should I?” she pouted. “Knot won’t be there. He’s gone forever.”

“You’re right,” Tsiri sighed. Wy stared up in surprise. “You’re right, Wy. Because you’ve given up on him. And https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_q-cy99XDk, he will be gone.”

He swam away without another word. Mantle-Bright laid a comforting tentacle across Wy’s shoulders.

“I’m – I’m sorry,” the girl said in a tiny voice. “I can’t help it. Hope is made up.”

“Of course it is,” said the octopus. “But why in all the seas should that matter?”

He held out an angel. Wy took it, and pressed it to her face,

daring to stare through

the inner eye

of God.

[http://i.imgur.com/4u2wrPv.jpg]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_na437vw6s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9VMfdG873E echoed eerily around them, spiraling down, down, down into its pit-portal, a gaping wound in the seabed. Despair bled from its edge as http://i.imgur.com/Y5T71sy.jpg, sending them out to reap the surrounding souls in shrieking arcs.

“Ah, love,” Tsiri breathed. “Must I kiss this missing?”

One of the sload pointed to where they floated above.

“Release the angels,” the big elf said. “Before they can alert the unicorn. Remember, hope is their only death.”

Winged rings drifted down onto the animations, a slow rain of lenses that collapsed the zombies to dust as soon as seen. But only some of them. http://i.imgur.com/pDWh9uo.jpg at the tiny band of construction elves, http://i.imgur.com/s30JLsw.jpg.

“Now that,” Tsiri whispered, “is fear.” And he fired a beam of amber from his sikuli, blasting a zombie to dust.

The eyeless animations flickered up toward them, followed by their blinded sload masters. The waters churned with streaks of amber and looping limbs as the elves struggled to keep their color. Wy clung to Tsiri astride Myra, but it was only moments before a massive slug slammed into them and sent her tumbling.

“Ho there!” Mantle-Bright snagged her with a tentacle, reeling her in. “Careful now, girly. Keep hold on that angel.”

A great keening pierced the moan of the Strand and the clamor of the tussle, and the unicorn rose from the yawning pit.

“Rise, brothers and sisters,” it hissed with dark humour, “and let the Bound of your delusion fall.” Its horn seared out, and purity washed away the amber strength of the elves’ staring sikuli.

“Stay here,” Mantle-Bright said, letting Wy go. “I’ve got a unicorn to poison.” He shot away with a great cloud of colors, tangling the horse in his tentacles.

“Heretic,” the sea horse crooned as it wrestled with the octopus. “It’s time to face the facts. There is no Mantle-Bright.” It struck out with its tail, slamming the octopus down. “There is only White-Gold Tower.” And it svcked out his color, leaving nothing but an empty, deflated skin.

http://i.imgur.com/nADWMbH.jpg

Wy’s empty chest hummed angrily, and she swam fiercely up to the whinnying white head to shove her angel right in front of its eye. It only stared at her, and svcked out the sight of three mesmerized elves.

“Do you think that is enough to poison me?” Its tail whipped up and curled around the tiny girl, sending her angel tumbling down its snout. “Did you think you could be a pretty rainbow and cast me down? Do you think my faith is so easily corrupted? I am a horse of the Sun, Steed of Anu, Destroyer of Delusion and Harvester of Eyes. I see all there is to see. False revelation shall not avail thee.” It whinnied a shrill laugh.

The little elf growled, her hollow chest vibrating fiercely. “Oh yeah?! Well Mantle-Bright got you anyway, didn’t he?!”

“I saw that empty skin for what it was, girl, and I see you for what you really are,” the unicorn replied. “I’m the only one who sees. You’re not a rainbow. You’re not wonderful. You’re black inside. Black.”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quVERH404pA “You chose evil once, and then you chose it again. And now they’ll never, ever let you choose anything else.”

“You’re a liar!” Wy yelled.

“Oh no,” the unicorn replied. “I cannot lie. You’re an evil little girl, and you always will be. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HY3NQUoT89k, and it brings darkness to everything it touches.”

“You’re the evil one! You took Knot and ate my mind’s eye!”

The sea horse slid its snout by her ear. “I don’t even know where your friend is,” it whispered. “And you still have your eye. For now.”

And as Wy despaired, the unicorn moved its snout over her head.

But just as it began to eat, a rainbow roar rattled the waves and a huge rush of light slammed into the horse, dashing it against the rocks of despair. Wy whirled through the water, freed from its coiled tail, and looked frantically around for what had saved her.

A gleaming dragon wrestled with the unicorn, tearing deep gashes in its hide with claws of bismuth. On its back rode Knot, an elf lady clinging behind.

“Knot!” Wy yelled, but the unicorn threw off the dragon, and, viciously swift, svcked the angel out of its temple.

Its scales drained of color, and Wy saw it was only Old Greyscale, wishy-washy and weak.

“Get thee to your grey,” the Harvester said, and huffed the dragon away with a single stream of light. It turned to Knot. “And now you.”

“I don’t think so!” yelled Wy. She licked her finger, held open her swollen lids, and rubbed witchspit on her irritated eye. And as she did, the dust that had stuck there melted back into the lens of her mind’s eye. “Because now I can See.”

“Not for long,” shrieked the horse. It sped toward her. Wy stared at Knot, Seeing.

DEATH IS THEIR ONLY HOPE, he wrote in the dust of her mind.

Hope is their only death, she wrote in the sand of his. And then, with two great blasts of golden light, their two flavors of hope shattered the horse of purity into a splintered spectrum.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9YMU0WeBwU. He picked her up, setting her gently on his shoulder, and the two drifted down to the unicorn’s broken body.

“You think you’re on the good side,” it wheezed, somehow still alive. “But you’re wrong. You’re so wrong. Those elves are evil. They trapped me in a stream of their Summerstrand, cut off from my herd for thousands of years. I was alone. So very, very alone.”

“That’s funny,” Wy said. “For a second, you saw things from our side.”

It coughed white noise. “They took – my family.”

Wy swam down to look it in the eye. “You just wanted to see them again, didn’t you?” she said gently. The unicorn thrashed.

“Don’t even try it,” it shrieked. “I’ll recover from this. Not you nor dragons nor the ichor of White-Gold As-It-Was can slay my faith.”

“You thought – you thought you might be able to get back if you could just destroy Tsiri and his friends,” Wy went on. A hint of color touched the edge of its irises. Mantle’s poison bubbled in its black blood with the taste of her words. “You hoped.”

The unicorn collapsed into a puddle of rainbow sludge.

“Well,” the girl said, dusting off her hands, “glad that’s done. Et semblio ocula, dela can carpio vis. Seeing is making.”

“Wy!” a raspy voice called suddenly. “Wy!”

It was Mantle-Bright, cut off from color but still barely alive. They rushed over to him.

“So saturated,” the octopus said, touching her amber cheek with a tentacle. “So beautiful. Wy, my Eye. My Eye. Give it to Knot.”

Behind them, Tsiri drew a sharp breath. “Why, Mantle?” he said. “Why?”

“I’m sorry, Tsiri,” Mantle said. “It’s in my ink.” http://i.imgur.com/FvIfOxe.jpg.

http://i.imgur.com/hsXeXcB.jpg The octopus skin crumpled, finally empty.

“There,” she said. “Now things are moving along nicely.” She exploded with light. http://i.imgur.com/zZEabuB.jpg

“Let us pray.”

“Mister Magnus,” the angel said, “this is Meridia. Thank you for helping my neganaut remember how to See, and for sending them to restore my Colored Currents from the touch of purity.”

“Wait,” Wy interrupted. “Your neganuat? Back up, punk!”

“Please See them safely home,” Meridia continued, “and lend your light to Tsiri’s Strand.” A wave of hue rolled out from the angel, and the pit of the Summerstrand https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bynKVT9HaOY. Tsiri smiled sadly at Wy.

“Good bye,” he said.

“But-“

But a gush of colors whirled from the iris of Meridia,

sweeping them across the sands

and back to their beach

of books.