Aelius had walked far enough into the graveyard that the ruins of the castle had become visible ahead of him before Nameless spoke, which meant it had been watching him approach for considerably longer than it had chosen to acknowledge, which was entirely consistent with everything he remembered about it.
"Welcome, little slayer."
The voice arrived the way it always had, several things simultaneously rather than any single coherent sound, a laugh and a screech and something barely above a whisper layered together into one delivery that his ears processed as language only because his brain had long since made its peace with the impossibility of it. The first time he had heard it, years ago, it had made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. Now it simply meant he had arrived.
Nameless itself was sprawled across the rubble of the castle's outer courtyard with the relaxed, boneless ease of something that had been lying there long enough to have formed an indent in the stone. It had shifted again since he had last seen it, which he had expected. Nameless shifted the way the weather shifted, continuously and without requiring input from anyone else on the matter. The form it wore now was vaguely humanoid in the broadest possible interpretation of that word, four arms stretched out across the broken stone, their surfaces shifting between blackish blue hues the way deep water shifted color when the light changed, every inch of them covered in mouths of varying sizes that moved independently of one another, some whispering, some simply open, some pressing closed and reopening in rhythms that corresponded to nothing he had ever managed to identify. Its skull remained the same unsettling hybrid it had always been, canine and human occupying the same space with neither quite winning the argument, though the snout had receded somewhat from the version he remembered, still pushing forward from the face but less dramatically, as though whatever process governed Nameless's form had decided to compromise in that particular direction without consulting anyone about it. The torso below was recognizably human in shape in the same approximate way that the arms were, covered in the same collection of mouths at different scales, and the overall impression it created was of something ancient and genuinely strange that had decided, for the afternoon at least, to simply lie in the ruins of a dead king's castle and exist without any particular agenda. It looked, as much as anything about Nameless could be said to look like any given thing, like it was relaxing.
Aelius stopped a reasonable distance away and looked at it for a moment. "You redecorated," he said.
Several of the mouths along its nearest arm smiled at once, which was an experience he had grown accustomed to without ever fully making peace with. "You took less time than I thought," Nameless said, the layered voice rolling through the gray air of the graveyard with no particular urgency. "Though I'll admit I'm surprised you came at all." A sound emerged from somewhere in the vicinity of its chest that resolved itself into something adjacent to laughter, pulling from the screech end and the whisper end in equal measure. "You were very committed to not coming back, for a while there."
"I had things to deal with," Aelius said.
"You had things to avoid," Nameless corrected pleasantly, tilting its skull toward him with the slow, considered motion of something that had all the time available and knew it. Several of the mouths along its shoulder shifted into expressions that might have been curiosity on something with a more conventional face. "There's a difference. You're quite good at the second one. You always dress it up as the first, though. I've always found that admirable in a limited sort of way."
Aelius looked at the ruins of the castle behind it rather than directly at Nameless for a moment. The great doors were gone entirely, the arch above where they had hung partially collapsed, the stone dark with age and the particular quality of weathering that happened in places where weather had stopped being natural. He had stood in the hall beyond those doors. Had spoken to a king in the throne room whose ceiling he had memorized during a conversation about a missing prince, back when he had still been young enough that memorizing ceilings during difficult conversations was something he did without fully understanding why. The castle had been home in the way that places became home when a person spent long enough inside them doing things that mattered, briefly and without intending to, and looking at its ruins now produced something in his chest that he did not like.
"You're staring at it," Nameless observed.
"I'm aware."
"Does it help?"
"No," Aelius said, which was honest, and turned his attention back to the creature lying in the rubble before him. "You said you were surprised I came at all."
"I did."
"Why?"
Nameless laughed at that, and not in any way that was meant to be pleasant. It arched its back off the rubble in a long, boneless curve, two of its four arms lifting into the air, the mouths along them all opening at once to let the sound out in overlapping waves. The laugh itself was a specific kind of performance, something Aelius recognized with the particular clarity of someone who had spent enough time around Nehzhar to have the shape of that specific cruelty memorized. The arched back, the arms raised, the sound designed to crawl under the skin and find purchase in whatever the listener least wanted touched. Nehzhar had done it when he was feeling particularly sadistic, when he wanted to remind someone of the exact distance between what they were and what he was, and Nameless had either learned it from him or had always known it and simply chosen now to deploy it, and neither possibility made it more tolerable.
Aelius watched it without changing his expression. After a moment, when it became clear he wasn't going to rise to it, Nameless straightened again, settling back into its relaxed sprawl across the castle rubble with the unhurried ease of something that had made its point and was content to move on. Several of the mouths along its nearest arm closed one by one, like candles being pinched out.
"Really now, godling," it said, the layered voice returning to its usual register, laugh and whisper and screech distributed evenly enough that none of them dominated. "I'm hardly the picture of what you mortals would call trustworthy." The skull tilted, the receded snout catching the gray light at an angle that made the hybrid features sharper than usual. Something moved through the mouths along its torso, like the various jaws were trying to smile but didn't have the lips to do so. "Or, there was a chance," it continued, drawing the word out with a deliberateness that suggested it had been saving this particular observation, "my favorite little godling has decided he's too good for me. That he is, though it's always failed before, enough."
Aelius was quiet for a moment, looking at it steadily. The gray sky sat above them both. The graveyard extended behind him in every direction, patient and enormous and finished. The ruined castle rose behind Nameless like something that had given up on being a castle and was in the process of becoming something else, stone by stone, over whatever passed for time in this place.
"I'm here because whatever you are, you honor deals," Aelius said. "You have in the past. And for you to give up years to train me, or whatever it is you actually have planned, you must have wanted that book badly enough to consider it a fair exchange." He held the skull's gaze, or as close to it as the thing's face allowed. "I won't ask you why. You wouldn't give me an answer anyway, and I've stopped pretending I'd trust the one you gave me even if you did." He let that settle for a moment before continuing, his voice dropping flatter. "So let's just get this over with. The sooner I'm stronger, the quicker you, Nehzhar, and that dragon can die."
Nameless was still for a moment, which was unusual enough that Aelius noticed it. All four arms resting against the rubble, the mouths along them neither opening nor closing, the layered breathing of the thing reduced to something barely perceptible in the gray air. The skull was angled toward him with the same quality of attention a predator gave something it had not yet decided whether to eat or keep.
Then the mouths began to move again, slowly, starting at the ends of the outermost arms and traveling inward toward the torso in a wave that arrived at the chest just as the voice assembled itself.
"Nehzhar," Nameless said, and the whisper layer of its voice was doing something Aelius hadn't heard it do before, something that sat closer to genuine feeling than performance. "And the dragon." The skull tilted. "You're including me in that list."
"You're on the list," Aelius confirmed. "Placement is negotiable depending on how the next few years go."
Several of the mouths along its nearest arm curved into something that was not quite a smile because the scale of it was wrong for smiling, too many of them moving at once, covering too much surface area to read as anything a human face might produce. "Honest," Nameless said. "You've always been honest with me, I'll give you that. Recklessly, stupidly honest, in ways that should have gotten you killed several times over and somehow haven't." The wave traveled across its torso again, slower this time. "It's one of the things I find tolerable about you."
"Deeply flattered," Aelius said.
"You should be." Nameless pushed itself upright from the rubble, which was a process that took longer than it should have given the number of limbs involved and produced sounds that Aelius chose not to interpret too closely. When it was fully upright it was considerably taller than he remembered, which meant it had grown since he left or had simply chosen to present itself at a different scale now that the conversation had shifted into something that warranted the adjustment. Several of the mouths along its arms were still moving silently, running through what might have been their own separate conversations or might have been something else entirely. "You're right that I wanted the book," it said, without looking at him, its skull angled instead toward the ruins of the castle behind it. "You're right that I won't tell you why. You're right that I honor deals." It turned back toward him then, all four arms shifting slightly, the blackish blue hues of its surface deepening momentarily before settling. "And you're right that the exchange is fair, from my end."
"Then we agree," Aelius said.
"We agree," Nameless confirmed. The layered voice carried all three of its components at equal weight for once, laugh and screech and whisper arriving with the same emphasis, which was the closest it had ever come, in his experience, to sounding serious. "Though I want something to be understood between us before we begin, little slayer. Simply a fact I want you to have clearly."
Aelius waited.
"What I intend to do to you over the next several years," Nameless said, with the same mild, unhurried tone it might use discussing the gray sky or the arrangement of stones in the graveyard behind him, "will not be kind. Not in the way your guild is kind to you, not even in the way the Labyrinth was unkind to you before, which you survived through stubbornness and regeneration in roughly equal measure." The mouths along its torso opened slightly, almost in unison. "I know what you are. I know what you're capable of becoming. And I know the distance between those two things well enough to tell you that the crossing will be the worst experience of your life, and your life has not been short on competitors for that distinction."
The graveyard sat around them, one and a half million names pressed into the gray earth in every direction.
"I know," Aelius said.
"You think you know," Nameless corrected, gently enough that the gentleness was its own kind of warning. "There's a difference." Several of the mouths along its uppermost arms closed slowly. "But you'll come to know. That's rather the point."
Aelius looked at it for a long moment. The ruined castle behind Nameless, the gray sky above it, the graveyard in every direction around them both. "When do we start?" he said.
"We already have," it said.
The first thing Nameless did was nothing. It stood there in the courtyard of the ruined castle, all four arms loose at its sides, the mouths along them moving in their usual independent rhythms, and looked at him with the skull tilted at the angle he had already learned to associate with calculation rather than idleness. Aelius stood across from it and waited, because the alternative was doing something, and doing something felt like exactly the wrong instinct.
Then Nameless reached out with one arm, almost casually, and removed his hand at the wrist. It simply came free, and landed in the rubble between them with a sound he chose not to dwell on.
Aelius looked at the stump. Then he looked at the hand on the ground. Then he poured all his magic he had into the healing and watched the wrist reknit itself in roughly three seconds, bone and tendon and skin reassembling with the focused urgency of a system that had done this before and understood the priority.
Nameless looked at the result the way a craftsman looked at a joint that had been glued rather than fitted.
"Again," it said, and took the hand again before he had finished the thought.
That was the first session. It lasted until he genuinely could not determine whether he was healing faster or simply had less left to heal, and Nameless apparently found that threshold as interesting as any other, because it stopped there and let him sit in the rubble for what might have been six hours or might have been considerably more, the gray sky offering nothing useful in the way of temporal reference.
He spent that time noticing something.vThe healing at full output was fast. He had always known it was fast, had relied on it in enough situations that the speed had become a kind of background assumption, a resource he drew on without examining the mechanics of the draw. But sitting in the rubble after three hours of losing and regrowing the same hand with gradually diminishing speed, he became aware for the first time of what the speed actually cost him in real terms. The magic expenditure per regenerated inch of tissue was not fixed. It spiked at the beginning of each regrowth cycle, dropped as the process found its rhythm, then spiked again whenever Nameless interrupted the cycle before completion and forced a restart. Three hours of interrupted cycles had consumed roughly what he would have expected four hours of uninterrupted maximum output to cost. The inefficiency was in the interruptions, in the way his healing kept having to reestablish momentum rather than sustain it.
Nameless said nothing either. It had resumed its sprawl across the rubble and appeared, as much as anything about it appeared anything, to be resting.
The second session began four hours later and involved both hands, which revealed a different problem. His focus split automatically, allocating roughly equal resources to each regrowth cycle simultaneously, which meant both healed at approximately sixty percent of the speed either would have achieved alone. This was not a surprise exactly, more a confirmation of something he had always known in practice but never measured. What surprised him was how much of the split was habitual rather than necessary. He spent the first forty minutes of the session trying to force both processes to run at full output simultaneously, which failed in ways that were educational if deeply unpleasant, and the last twenty minutes of it discovering that the actual ceiling on simultaneous healing was considerably higher than the habitual pattern suggested, accessible only under the specific condition of having very little else to think about, which the ongoing removal of his hands was, in its own way, providing.
The first month proceeded in this way, incrementally and without ceremony. Nameless never explained what it was doing. It never outlined a progression or indicated what came next or offered any framework for understanding the sessions beyond the sessions themselves. It simply continued, adjusting the parameters each time he adapted to the previous ones with the attentiveness of something that was reading him more carefully than he was reading himself. He began to understand, somewhere around the third week, that this was the point. Not the damage, or the pain, which was considerable and consistent and which he had made a deliberate decision to process as information rather than experience, with mixed results. The point was the efficiency.
Every time he healed, it cost him magic. The faster he healed, the more it cost per second, but the less it cost overall, because duration was the larger variable. Nameless was not trying to make him heal faster in the simple sense of the thing. It was trying to make him heal faster for less, to compress the expenditure curve until the speed he could sustain at full output became achievable at something closer to half output, freeing the rest for everything else that might be happening simultaneously.
He thought about this during the between periods with the focused attention he usually reserved for tactical problems, which it increasingly resembled. He thought about where the inefficiencies were and what produced them and what might reduce them, and then he tested his conclusions during the sessions, which Nameless seemed to find acceptable as a methodology because it never interfered with the testing, only with the results.
By the end of the first month he had reduced his full-output expenditure per regenerated limb by something he estimated at around fifteen percent. This felt significant until Nameless, apparently deciding that limbs had produced sufficient data, moved on to skinning, which revealed that everything he had learned about healing limbs applied only partially to healing surface tissue, which had its own inefficiency profile and its own ceiling, both of which were substantially different from what he had spent a month mapping.
He started over.
The skinning was worse than the limbs in the way that sustained things were always worse than acute ones, in that there was no discrete end point his mind could orient around as an upcoming relief. Nameless worked slowly and with what appeared to be genuine patience, and the healing ran constantly rather than in cycles, which meant the inefficiency he was trying to correct was live and active and measurable in real time rather than reconstructable after the fact from memory. This was, he eventually decided, more useful information than the limb sessions had produced, even if the process of obtaining it was considerably less tolerable.
He began to find the edges of something during the fourth week of it. Not the ceiling, he was nowhere near the ceiling, but the shape of the mechanism underneath the healing, the way it actually worked at a level below conscious direction, below even the instinctive patterns he had been operating on for years. There was a substrate to it, something that ran without his input and produced the healing as an output, and the substrate was not running efficiently. It was running the way any system ran when it had never been examined or optimized, through accumulated habit and good enough outcomes rather than genuine calibration.
Nameless was not teaching him to heal faster. It was teaching him to stop wasting.
He thought about that for a long time, spread across the rubble of the courtyard with the gray sky above him and the graveyard silent in every direction, during a between period long enough that he suspected Nameless was giving him room to reach the conclusion on his own. The poison, Nameless had been forced feeding him, moved through him steadily, converting to magic with the quiet reliability it always had, keeping the reserves from dropping into the range where the healing would start costing him more than it built.
He had been thinking about it as speed. Nameless had been working on cost from the first session.
When the next session began he approached the healing differently, and Nameless noticed within the first twenty minutes, which he could tell because two of its arms stopped moving entirely, the mouths along them going still in a way they never went still, and the skull tilted toward him at an angle he hadn't seen before.
It didn't say anything. It took his arm off at the shoulder instead, which by that point he recognized as enthusiasm.
He healed it in a second at roughly sixty percent of what that had cost him six weeks earlier. Not because he was moving faster. Because he had stopped moving wrong.
The mouths along Nameless's nearest arm curved slowly, one after another, each at a slightly different angle, in a wave that traveled from wrist to shoulder and back. "There," it said, the whisper layer briefly overtaking the other two, something almost private in the delivery. "Do you understand what just happened?"
"I stopped wasting," Aelius said. "Instead of just wanting my arm to regenerate, I build it up, the bone, then tissue, nerves and muscle, all the way up, brick by brick."
"Now you get it," Nameless said. "You've maximized your regeneration, in both speed and magic usage, and the constant regeneration has increased your container as an added bonus."
"It's not enough," Aelius replied instantly, as he looked at his newly regenerated arm, turning it over once with the detached attention of someone inspecting workmanship rather than their own body. The skin was clean, unmarked, the same as it had been before the session began. Six months ago, that would have taken a few seconds of precious time, and a good portion of magic that he could admittedly spare even then. Now it costs him roughly what blinking costs a normal person. The fact that this was true and still insufficient was something he had made his peace with approximately three months ago, which didn't make saying it out loud any more comfortable.
"I never said it was," Nameless replied, the screech layer of its voice surfacing briefly, not in cruelty but in something closer to agreement. It had settled back onto the rubble with the ease of something that had never once been required to consider posture, two of its arms folded across its torso, the mouths along them moving in slow, independent murmurs. "You're still but a babe compared to me. Or that dragon you want to kill so badly." The skull tilted, the receded snout catching the gray light at the angle that sharpened everything. "If I'm being honest, any true dragon could wipe you out. Regeneration included."
Aelius didn't flinch at that. He had stopped flinching at true things sometime in the second month. "I know."
"Do you?" Nameless's skull tilted the other direction, slow and considering. "Not the words. The actual weight of it." Several of the mouths along its nearest arm opened slightly, not quite speaking, just present. "You watched Acnologia unmake Tenrou Island. You know, in the part of you that does the honest accounting, what the distance between where you are now and where you would need to be to survive that encounter looks like."
The graveyard sat around them in its usual silence. Aelius looked at his arm again, then set it down against the rubble beside him. "That's why I'm here," he said.
"That's why you're here," Nameless agreed. "And the regeneration was the foundation. Genuinely, in the narrow sense that impressing me requires a narrow set of criteria." The wave traveled across its torso, slower than usual. "But a foundation is not a structure. You've built the floor. What sits on top of it is a considerably larger project."
"Then tell me what comes next," Aelius said, impatiently.
Nameless smiled at something, a slow curve traveling across several of the mouths along its nearest arm, but it didn't voice whatever had produced the expression. It simply let the silence sit for a moment longer than was comfortable before speaking. "You had an awakening on Tenrou," it said. "A piece of your grandfather that attached itself to your psyche, a safeguard of sorts, should you begin to lose what you were meant to be." The skull tilted. "So tell me. Do you finally understand what you are?"
Aelius's eyes narrowed behind his mask. Something snagged in the back of his mind as Nameless said it, a detail he had been carrying without examining for months now. Nameless had always avoided the mask. Even during the worst of the sessions, even when it was doing things that required considerably more access to him than simple conversation allowed, it had worked around the mask with the particular care of something that had decided, for its own reasons, not to touch that specific thing. He had noticed it early and kept it away as a question for later, and later had kept arriving without the question getting asked, and now was apparently later enough.
He would ask about it. But not yet. "Before I answer that," he said, "Porlyusica pointed it out. Vanessa pointed it out. That I felt different after Tenrou. That my body felt wrong somehow, like something adjacent to me rather than actually me." He kept his voice even, framing it as an observation rather than a concern, because framing things as concerns in front of Nameless had historically produced responses calibrated to the concern rather than the question. "I want to know what that is first."
He didn't even finish the sentence before Nameless started cackling. It was not the performed laugh it had used earlier, the one shaped like Nehzhar's cruelty, designed to provoke a response. This was something else entirely, loud and uneven and genuinely uncontrolled in a way he had never heard from it before, all three layers of the voice collapsing into each other and losing their usual careful distribution, the mouths along its arms and torso all opening at different angles as the sound rolled out of it in waves. It struggled visibly to reassemble itself into coherent speech, which was, in its own deeply unsettling way, the most honest thing he had ever seen Nameless do.
"Oh," it managed, between what could only be described as wheezing, "I was hoping you would bring that up."
Aelius waited until the laughter cut off with the same abruptness it had started with, a clean stop, like something had been switched off. Nameless refocused on him with the skull angled forward, all four arms suddenly still, the mouths along them closed. The shift from genuine hilarity to complete composure took approximately two seconds and was, somehow, more unsettling than either state individually.
"Let me cut straight to it," it said. The layered voice had returned to its usual distribution, but something underneath it had changed quality, the way a room changed quality when something important had just been said in it. "You aren't real."
Aelius opened his mouth, and Nameless raised one of its hands, pressing a finger to the largest of the mouths on its face in a motion so unexpectedly human that it stopped him more effectively than any argument could have. The gesture was clear. He closed his mouth.
"You are the equivalent of one of the things you summon," Nameless continued, its voice unhurried and precise, the tone of something delivering information it found genuinely interesting rather than simply important. "A daemon. You have a form, presence, continuity of self, all the things that make a person a person to everyone looking at them from the outside. But the substance of that form is your own magic. All of it. Every inch of what you currently experience as a body is magical construct, not flesh." Several of the mouths along its nearest arm opened slightly. "Were it not for your clothing acting as a barrier, you would have rotted Magnolia into the ground the moment you set foot in it. Your friends. Your guild hall. That house of yours with the creaking step. All of it, gone."
"You said it's fixable."
"It is," Nameless confirmed. "When the rest of your guild is freed from the Fairy Sphere, so will you be, in a sense. The stasis preserved your physical form. When it releases, the two of you will reconcile themselves, the construct and the original, and the result will be something considerably more stable than either currently is alone." The skull tilted. "In the meantime, you've been running on construct and magic reserves and the poison I've been feeding you, which is why you haven't needed sleep. Or food, beyond that. Or any of the other biological requirements that would normally impose themselves on a person spending months in a dimensional fold being systematically taken apart and put back together." Something moved through the mouths along its torso. "It makes the training considerably more efficient, honestly. No fatigue variables from missed sleep. No nutritional interference. Clean data."
"You knew," Aelius said, he already knew the answer.
"From the moment you were destroyed by the dragon," Nameless said. "Yes."
Aelius looked at his hand again, the one that had been removed and reattached more times than he'd counted, that now healed faster and cheaper than it ever had. The hand that was not, technically, a hand. The hand that was his magic arranged into the shape of one, held together by whatever architecture the awakening on Tenrou had produced when the alternative was him simply ceasing to exist entirely.
"There are downsides," Nameless added, with the mild tone it used for things it had decided to disclose rather than conceal, which he had learned to pay particular attention to because the distinction was always deliberate. "If you encounter an anti-magic user of sufficient strength, the construct becomes unstable. The more powerful they are, the more unstable it becomes." The skull lowered slightly. "At a high enough threshold, you would simply poof, Just an absence where you had been."
"And if my magic runs empty," Aelius said, because he had already extrapolated the second one from the first.
"Same result," Nameless confirmed. "Which is why the work we've been doing on your container and your efficiency matters considerably more than it would for someone with a conventional body. For most mages, running dry is an inconvenience. For you, currently, it's a different category of problem entirely."
The gray sky sat above them both, enormous and colorless and patient. The graveyard extended in every direction around the ruined castle. One and a half million names in the ground, people who had lived here without knowing what they were living inside, and now Aelius standing in the middle of it discovering that he was, in his own way, operating on a version of the same principle. A form. A life. Real in every way that mattered until the magic ran out.
"The Fairy Sphere," he said finally, turning the piece over that Nameless had offered. "It preserved my physical form."
"It did," Nameless said. "Which means your physical form is currently suspended somewhere in the fold with your guild, waiting, the same as they are. The construct you're walking around in now is what the awakening produced when Acnologia hit that island and the alternative was nothing. It pulled everything you had left, shaped it into life, and kept you moving forward." Several of the mouths along its arms opened slowly. "It's why you survived something that should have killed you. And it's why Porlyusica and Vanessa felt the difference. Because there is one. They weren't wrong. They were simply missing the context to understand what they were sensing."
Aelius was quiet for a long moment. The between period stretched around him, gray and still and full of graves.
"You still haven't answered my question," Nameless said, with the patience of something that had all the time available. "Now that you have the context." The skull tilted at the angle he associated with genuine interest rather than performance. "Do you understand what you are?"
Aelius looked at the hand that was not a hand, at the arm that was not an arm, at the construct that had walked through a Council chamber and sat on a porch with Vanessa's tears soaking into its chest and looked at itself in a bathroom mirror and found the reflection unsatisfying without fully understanding why. "Im what he made me."