There's one more calculated risk on the road up to the ashram. Chester gives Ember a mental countdown as they approach the last major switchback, and then clears his throat as Anton slows for the turn. Anton turns his head to glance at Chester, and Ember leaps off the driver's side of the pickup bed. Chester coughs a bit and apologizes for his stuffy throat. Ember scampers into cover before Anton checks any rear-view mirrors.

Then she's gone, and it's just Chester and his reckoning.

The ashram comes into full view now that they're on the final stretch. The grim needles of Blackrock Spire tower behind the compound, jagged teeth tearing at the sky, and underneath them is a sprawling cluster of buildings that tries to be everything at once. There are thick stone walls, built as though the ashram were a fortress under siege, but inside them the grounds are open, airy, lush. There are sprawling flower gardens and fields full of vegetables, with dirt roads and an outdoor shower and a pump well, but the rustic image is shattered by the palatial main hall (which was designed by some big-shot architect Chester only ever knew as Brother Icon), sleek and angular yet somehow organic, some part of it always facing you no matter the angle. The roof is stainless steel, perpetually reflecting the sunlight, turning the hall into a lighthouse beacon visible throughout the entire Canterlot countryside; and closer in, a thousand tiny windows gleam amid the wood-and-concrete facade, making the main hall scintillate like a gemstone as you walk by.

None of the other buildings are even a fraction as notable, and none match. Some of the older cabins are stone; some are wood; one of the external dormitories is a squat corrugated-siding building, hastily slapped together when new recruits outstripped funding and then nearly forgotten once membership dwindled. There's a barely-used storage shed painted in bright murals (Chester helped with some of them), and a dilapidated outdoor amphitheater so frequently occupied that all the devotees know which seats to avoid upon pain of collapse. There's even an outhouse—despite the ashram having indoor plumbing—which Chester has long suspected the Holy Mother keeps around just so she can force unruly devotees to clean it.

Anton pulls past two gate guards into the compound—the Holy Mother is posting gate guards now!?—and around the main hall to the parking area. (He knows where that is. Chester ticks up the probability of the unicorns being here.) Chester sits still as Anton kills the engine and circles the truck to the passenger side, then goes limp as Anton jerks the door open and hauls him out. There's no point in resisting now.

Chester waits for an order to stand up and walk—an order which never comes. Instead, Anton simply grabs the back of Chester's bindings with one bulging arm and drags him behind as he walks. Chester's butt bounces over the uneven ground of the dirt lot, and his heels gouge two trails in the dust behind them.

As his hiney whacks roughly against the side of each of the main hall's three broad patio steps, Chester grunts in discomfort—and then flinches at a splintering crash which sounds like Anton kicking the front door open. The scent of incense, normally comforting, tickles in Chester's sinuses, and he jolts as he's jerked across the elevated door jamb and into the center of the common room.

"Chryssy!" Anton puce-shouts, and now there's no question that every eye is on the pair. "Found yer traitor!"

A hush falls over the room. Chester glances around. It's dinnertime, and virtually the entire ashram just witnessed his ignominious entrance.

Few seem to know what to make of the spectacle—though a warm spectrum dominates, which isn't a good sign. Peach, creamsicle, and rose pink seem like the collective mood. There's a distressing prevalence of background orange, though it's impossible to tell whether that's due to rumors of Chester's behavior, or Anton's presence, or something else entirely.

Individually, the devotees are all familiar faces, and there's even a few stirrings of sympathy. But no potential help. Chester doesn't need to read their emotions to know that nobody here will stick their neck out for someone branded a traitor, no matter how friendly they've been in the past. The Holy Mother's favor comes and goes, and when it goes, the unspoken rule of the ashram is to scramble away from the fallout zone.

For a fleeting moment, Chester entertains the fantasy of taking Holds-the-Fire's advice—stand up, give a rousing speech about the Holy Mother's secret sins, and make everyone abandon her. But that's an impossible fantasy, a wolf solution to a very non-wolf problem. If anything, the crowd's sea of shaved heads and identical saffron robes makes him feel more like a bug in a hive. There's only one queen, and everything about the ashram is set up to reinforce that.

The door of the Holy Mother's audience chamber creaks open, and Chester braces himself. But it's another saffron robe which comes through. And a very familiar face.

"Untie him," Esau red-says, walking up to Anton.

This is the great-grandmother of mixed blessings. If there were anyone here willing to hear Chester's discoveries out, it would be Esau, even given their falling out. But that color really doesn't bode well for his chances. It's diffuse enough to feel untargeted—it's not a guaranteed bad sign—but Chester wishes that their first meeting since all this craziness began would have started with literally any other hue.

By Anton's shift to pink, the rancher is clearly unimpressed. Esau has filled out nicely now that he's out of his teens, and the robe adds some bulk to his whipcord frame, but he's still a young man on the small side of average staring up into the face of a comically large wall of muscle.

"You givin' me orders, son?" Anton chestnut-says.

"No," Esau says, not looking at Chester. He's gone orange, an entirely understandable reaction to staring Anton in the eyes. "I'm telling you what the Holy Mother wants." His colors abruptly transition into yellow. "It's up to you whether you want to listen to her head enforcer or not." Then, oddly, green: "But she's not going to be happy if I have to interrupt her because you're being an ass."

Chester tries to puzzle that color out—does Esau have hopes that Anton picks a fight so Chryssa-swamini sees his true nature?—but the conversation's already barreling onward.

"Your little traitor's been too feisty for my liking," Anton maroon-says. "He's already tried to wriggle away a couple times."

"You really think he's going anywhere now?" Esau shifts to the solid blue of gratitude as he gestures around the room, and now Chester is really struggling to understand what's going through his mind. Then, with the purple of satisfaction: "Untie him."

Anton grunts and spins Chester around, wrestling with the knots. Chester stays entirely still, mind madly whirling as pressure on the ropes jerks him back and forth. Why is Esau pleased with having to argue with Anton? What's going on with him?

Chester sneaks another look over his shoulder as Anton unwraps him. During that process, Esau has been consumed by doubt. Chester at least can take some tiny relief in that black—it doesn't make Esau's earlier emotions any less odd, but maybe it means he's willing to listen to what Chester's discovered.

And then Esau notices Chester's glance and catches his eyes. The motion clearly gets him feeling the weight of his actions—his black quickly shifts into a depressed white. Then Esau tears away from the shared look, all his doubts immediately returning.

Chester thinks. This, at least, is a stroke of good fortune—assuming he somehow manages to get Esau alone. Or… no, he's overthinking it. They can talk secretly, right out in the open. He and Esau are the only two people here with color-sight, meaning that Chester can just make himself feel different emotions in order to communicate…

… oh.

Chester mentally facepalms as Esau crosses his arms depressedly, going from black to white again. Of course that's what Esau has been doing this whole time. Going first through the rainbow to signal him, and then back and forth between black and white when Chester didn't get the hint. Chester thinks depressing thoughts for a moment to echo Esau's color back at him, and is rewarded with a flash of unmistakable—and apparently genuine—indigo relief.

That quickly transitions into dark blue protectiveness as Esau continues to stare at him. It's unnecessary, but it's good to see—the fact that he's communicating to Chester at all means their falling-out wasn't permanent, which was the crucial question. The blue merely confirms that Esau is (yet again) determined to protect Chester from himself, a role he has always leapt into instinctively.

Chester's ropes are nearly untied, and he doesn't have the time for subtlety. He leans into the desperation he's starting to legitimately feel, letting himself sink into that feeling of being cornered in order to project a dark orange to Esau. A silent plea for help, while he turns his head in Anton's direction.

Esau taps his foot and glances at his smartphone while he turns a wary pale orange. A warning? Chester hopes it's a warning, and not just a sign that Chester has finally crossed a line where Esau hesitates to follow. Either way, that's a no.

Chester is considering his next message when Esau goes peach. That one's easy—or, well, it would be easy if he had a good way to distinguish between Esau warning him of an upcoming surprise, or just being surprised himself—

The world lurches as Anton hauls Chester to his feet, jerking the last of the rope so roughly that the final coil digs into his ribs before whipping away. "Fine," he pink-says. "One traitor, delivered as promised. Why were you so het up to get those ropes off, anyhow?"

A flicker of pale orange returns, then Esau coalesces into drab brown as he strides forward. "Because they were in the way of this," he says, and drives his fist deep into Chester's gut.

The wind explodes out of Chester's lungs as his gut folds around the punch.

He collapses in half, all his muscles contracting at once. Everything is pain, centered in an ugly knot deep in his torso. It's a different kind of debilitating than that long-ago shot to the jibblies—it doesn't take him out of the moment—but in a way that's worse. It means he can see Esau's follow-up kick coming but do absolutely nothing about it.

The world spins, and for a moment he's unmoored, until the floor roughly catches his face. Then gravity settles, and it's just gasp, gag, and dry-heave as a wave of nausea ripples up from that burning knot, balling him up and setting his nerves afire anew.

Esau grabs him by the back of his neck and screams into his ear. "DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU MADE THE HOLY MOTHER DO? DO YOU KNOW WHAT SHE WENT THROUGH BECAUSE OF YOU?" The words wash over him, registering barely more than their waves of drab brown. "IF I HAD KNOWN YOU WOULD HURT HER THIS BADLY, I'D HAVE PUT YOU IN THE GROUND!"

Fact: Esau was forced to do this.

Chester's thoughts are shattered for a moment by another round of dry-heaving, but his mind clings desperately to that fact as agony and nausea war for control of his body. The brown was… not warning, there wasn't time for that, but explanation. The deliberate focus of following Chester's order back in the Soldier Incident. And there's not a wisp of red to his threats. Esau is play-acting at angry.

That thought doesn't stop Chester's vision from fuzzing out as he catches another fist to the face, but he keeps it in a death-grip nonetheless. And when a familiar female voice sharply blue-says "That's enough," that thought is the foundation he rebuilds the world from.

Esau isn't angry. He's got a fist clenched around Chester's collar, and the other drawn back for an interrupted punch, but he's gone tawny yellow-brown—silently resentful of something. His head is turned, staring at the source of that new voice.

It's Chryssa-swamini, and holy smokes has she cranked up her aura intensity for this. She's radiating blue, a veritable fountain of it, so that Chester can barely make out the woman stalking toward them in a black double-slit dress, arms out and palms upturned to mimic the transcendent posture of the dozens of statues of her in every room of the ashram. And from the greens suddenly rippling through the audience, that aura strength is compelling reverence even in people who can't see the colors.

She approaches the fight like a heaven-sent angel, a miracle shielding her devotee from further injury. But Chester can't ignore that that's not what is really going on. There's an impossible-to-conceal red buried beneath her front of compassion and concern.

"Hey, Chryssy," Anton says with rising olive green lust, stepping forward to interrupt the proceedings. She swivels an open palm toward him, then holds up a single silent finger. He opens his mouth, swirling with colors, then thinks better of it and steps back.

"Swamini-ji," Esau says, lowering his arm. After a moment, he shades blue too, a near copy of hers but without the underlying menace.

"Brother Esau," the Holy Mother says. She crosses her arms, her primary color shifting to a patchy and washed-out rose pink (still papering over a simmering red), an emotion in the same room as disappointment. "I expected better of you. No matter how far Brother Chester has fallen, we only want the best for him—that he remember the light of truth and return to the path."

To the side, Anton crosses his arms and shades into dubious dark gray, but Chester doesn't need that cue to listen to his own doubts. An earlier him would have taken this at face value and begged for mercy, but too much has changed. In fact, with his eyes open, Chester's beginning to wonder how he ever saw Chryssy as sincere. She's horrible at faking emotions—when she even bothers to try—and her current pretend disappointment at Esau is… well. Chester allows himself to think it. Kind of sad.

"I'm sorry, Swamini-ji." Esau retreats from Chester and sinks to one knee. His emotions gray out for a moment, and then redden into an imitation of her rose-pink that feels vastly more genuine than the original. "But what he did today was unforgivable."

The message in Esau's colors this time is clear as day. Now he's simply echoing the Holy Mother. The earlier brown of following orders? This is whose.

She set this up. Of course she did. Even if Chester had arrived wanting to return, the Holy Mother wouldn't have been satisfied unless his redemption was entirely about her miraculous power to redeem.

"And yet we must forgive." She steps forward, her glow intensifying into a pure and shimmering cyan.

That jolts Chester to full attention. The color of her siddhis.

He's seen it twice on her, but never at this intensity. He has to squint a little as she steps forward, it's so bright. And in the full light of her transcendence, he can feel his doubts start to evaporate in his grasp. Is she actually forgiving him? She's so bright now, he can't look at her directly enough to see the underlying red—

Anton clears his throat, stepping between them.

"Okay, Chryssy," he says, an enormous pink planet eclipsing her form, in turn dwarfed by the blazing sun of her shimmering cyan aura. "I think you owe me an explanation."

Ah, and there's her red—little whorls outgassing to the surface of the blinding cyan haze. "Long-horn," she hisses in an all-too-familiar cadence.

He's not familiar enough with her to be deterred. "You told me we had to round up this traitor or the plan could be in danger. You were pretty damn clear what he'd done. And I respect family, but if everything you said was a lie to drag your kid back in for a group hug—"

Chryssy reaches up and clamps her hand onto his shoulder. Anton stiffens. And within the span of an eye-blink, his pink has vanished, devoured by a cyan which floods from her outline to his.

It's the first time Chester has seen her do this from the outside. And that final puzzle piece clicks together the others into a terrifying conclusion.

Fact: Chryssa-swamini has mind-control magic.

Holds-the-Fire did something almost identical to her wolves with the dominating power of her Bloodstone Crown (or some remnant of it). But those were aura-less animals, and the Holy Mother just dominated the emotions of a full-grown man. One with unusual aura intensity, no less.

She dominated him, twice upon a time. When the whole world went cyan, when her transcendence had been unquestionable and he had lost himself in the craving to worship her—that was because she had blasted his feelings away and had filled him with artificial love.

Everything had rested on those moments of transcendence, and the certainty of what he had concluded within.

Everything had been a lie.

"Oh, Anton," Chryssy croons, trailing her long fingernails across his collarbone and brushing his bearded chin. With all that summoned cyan power poured into him, she's back to her own colors now—a simmering red at the interruption, now joined by a glistening gold that Chester no longer finds reassuring in the slightest. "I am infinite love, pure and transcendent. He has fallen, but I am powerful enough to redeem even the unworthy. Just let me sort this out and then"—she gives him a slow wink, trailing her finger down his chest—"there will be plenty of time to explore my depths."

Olive-green lust and amber greed stir up into the mix of Anton's emotions, but they're both muted, still overwhelmed by his artificial rapture. He sinks to one knee, carefully taking her slim hand with his beefy one, and kisses her fingers. "Of course, love." A smirk flits across his face. "And even more when we're ruling the world together. Me a king and you a queen."

"Empress," she corrects, her gold outshining his amber.

"Empress," Anton says, floating back into giddy artificial cyan.

Okay, this is sounding worse by the minute. But at least Chester's brain is now safe. Her siddhi is an all-out effort—last time she did this to him, she was barely able to move for several days.

Chryssy again gestures for Anton to wait, then steps around him, towering over the still-crumpled Chester. "Now then."

She spreads her arms again, palms up, the alluring pose of her cultivated image of perfection. Then shimmering cyan bursts out of her again, that impossible sun-like aura reigniting, as trivially as if she were breathing.

Chester's eyes widen, and adrenaline overwhelms his pain. What? How!?

Forget this. Injured or no, Chester scrambles to his knees, trying to bolt before she can touch him. He'll take his chances of making it to the woods with the entire ashram at his heels.

Then rough hands clamp on his shoulders and pin him down.

Chester flails. It's no use. Esau isn't nearly Anton's size, but even at Chester's best, was always more than enough to overwhelm him.

Chester, silently radiating raw desperation, glances back at Esau's face. Esau returns the gaze, raw orange fear and the muddier pale orange of apology. He doesn't let go.

Chryssy rotates one hand and reaches toward Chester. Raw terror blasts away his thoughts, except for one:

He's failed.

In a moment, he'll once again worship the monster taking over the world.

A thousand regrets are screaming. But the only one that matters is how he hurt Holds-the-Fire.

All he can do is think of her one last time as the cyan rushes in.

* * *

Chester knows what happened last time he got mind-controlled. And this isn't how it goes.

The world is supposed to go floaty blue. It isn't supposed to shatter.

But that's the only way to describe what happens. As the cyan expands out from Chryssy's sun, gray crashes in from the edge of his vision, and time

slows to

a crawl

with it. The edges of the gray and cyan charge toward each other, then creep, then inch. Then everything glitches, and he's seeing six images at

Holds-the-Fire. Frozen mid-battle with an ice-blue wolf. Reeling, startled, toppling off the boulder. Balled up and despondent. Hoping he'll do the right thing and yield. Licking his teeth. Sharing a laugh. A full rainbow of experiences, reduced to shards of color, whirling and duplicating. Each shard becomes a tiny point of light in a mosaic, and his vision zooms out, and those tiny dots become a portrait of her in light, facing him with solid red gemstone eyes, gleaming unearthly flame. She opens her mouth to speak and

roaring tsunami of cyan, swept away, tumbling in the flow. Colors whirl, reassemble, fragmentary images ripped back away by the flood. Chester screams, lungs filling with love, and then suddenly is tumbling through space instead of sea. He bounces on the floor of a cave, dank and chill, ghosts of ice-blue wolf Holds-the-Fire and ice-blue dragon Ember glaring eye to eye as a storm rages outside. In the cave entrance is an enormous gemstone monster, scintillating red, standing in the firehose-blast of the infinite cyan and diverting it as ugly cracks spread through its form. It turns its head to Chester, its open muzzle shaping a

relentless cyan through the cave wall, blasting stone into sand. But before everything is swept away again, Chester lunges for the ghost of Holds-the-Fire. He tumbles, drowning, but now he has something to cling to. The world is love, love is everything, insistent and inevitable—but something is fighting back along with him, sacrificing to shelter the tiniest fragment of his volition.

He will love—but he can choose who.

Chester loves Holds-the-Fire.

Suddenly, he is no longer battered by the infinite cyan flow, because he is part of it. He loves, purely and wholly, and thus there's nothing to wash away. Love has dissolved the world but it can't dissolve itself. He floats in the bliss of the only thing that matters.

Her.

There is the abstract sensation of being snared, without pressure or motion. Then he is fished from the cyan sea, breaking the surface into sweet, sweet air. Something has lifted him up into the meditation room in the ashram where he retreats to paint. The carpet is bright cyan, and as he scrambles up out of the cyan ocean and onto the carpet's surface, his motions send waves lapping at the baseboards.

Chester gasps for breath, looking around. Outside the window is the infinite pressure of the cyan sea—he's still in some weird mental space, and this is fragile sanctuary. He's alone, aside from his easel. There's a painting on it. And the upper half of a humanoid figure has come to three-dimensional life out from the canvas, a single living ruby, the ugly color of fresh blood.

He already knows that gemstone monster, but now, as he freezes and stares, he gets his first good look. It's a misshapen, grotesque parody of a person, radiating overlapping Wrong and Wolf. One spindly triple-jointed arm is retreating from his back, its fingers gleaming needles. Crown-like spikes protrude upward from its head, half-ghostly as if only visible with one eye, and there's a weird tumor-esque lump on one side of its face—similarly halfway real—with a single massive rod extending most of a body length sideways.

Chester screams, terror overwhelming him. And the room shatters like glass, ocean flooding

and he flails and bursts up through the carpet back into the meditation room, gasping for breath as he scrambles onto its cyan surface. The window is cracked, the infinity of love outside now that much more eager to sweep him away. This time there is only him and a normal, two-dimensional painting on the easel.

No—two paintings.

Chester squints, but the overlapping images refuse to resolve. It's a stiff, austere portrait of Holds-the-Fire, staring into the middle distance, a comically oversized bloodstone-studded crown draped around her throat like a necklace. It's also a portrait of Ember as a dragon, similarly withdrawn and unyielding, clutching an enormous scepter that looks like a stone claw wrapped around a fist-sized blood-boil of a gemstone.

Seeing both at once in the same space makes something behind Chester's eyes throb. He tries to parse them nonetheless.

Fact: Chester loves Holds-the-Fire.

… No. He massages his temple (everything is weird and floaty, and there's no sensation to the touch). That overwhelming, artificial love is the cyan outside. There's something important here, not in the infinite ocean. But the water pressure is overwhelming. Cracks relentlessly spiderweb across the sanctuary windows. He knows somehow that this matters enough to fight the tsunami for, but he has so little time.

The painting is broken. They stare at him with gemstone-red eyes. He stares back, struggling to pull context and logic through the throbbing pressure in his head.

Fact: The bloodstones are desperate to talk to him.

The painting in front of him is just as Wolf-Wrong as the shimmering red monstrosity a moment ago, but clothed in comforting imagery and familiar faces. It?—they?—this weird two-in-one entity—terrified him, and then promptly tried again with less terror.

A chill passes through Chester as another fact clicks: they were so desperate for this moment that they just fought the mind control with him. He would be entirely lost without the magical parasites trying to kill the girl he loves. It is the worst possible idea to hear them out, and yet they have given him a gift without price.

Almost involuntarily, Chester stares at the painting, and it tells him… no. It's more knowledge than communication, a blunt, desperate, raw dump directly into his brain, of new facts which overlap like the faces. It shades the room dark orange. It is broken and needs fixing.

Damn it. He knows the bloodstones want to be fixed! Them looking different doesn't change the math—if they wake up, someone dies.

The message intensifies nonetheless. Fix me, Ember's red-eyed face says, and fix me, Holds-the-Fire's red-eyed face says, and like an optical illusion Chester's perception shifts imperceptibly and it's them begging to be fixed, the waking world's wolf and girl—

—he knows they need fixing! He's trying! They're both doing their best but they're being corrupted by this little festering core of shimmering red—

—and they're the bloodstones again, fix me fix me, screaming at top volume, and he can't fix the stones unless they stop poisoning their wielders—

—and the optical illusion blurs together, stone and stone and Wolf and Wrong and dragon and girl, images stacking on top of each other like a fractal dropping away into the infinite distance; and the tip of a thought-iceberg, strange and momentous and disconnected, surfaces in Chester's brain as he loses track of the layers:

Who's poisoning who?

—and that thought by itself is comprehensible, but the instant he comprehends, he's pinned by the scope of everything connected to it. Gemstone-red eyes. Holds-the-Ember both stare at him beseechingly. Glimmering, the color of fresh blood. It is broken. (The window cracks redouble.) Chester stares helplessly at the painting, they stare back, gemstone-red eyes, shading dark orange, fix me fix me fix me and

cyan blasts away the room and he doesn't return.

* * *

Chester loves Holds-the-Fire, and the main hall of the ashram slowly swims back into focus.

Reality just broke as competing magic collided, and some tiny voice, drowning amidst all the love, begs him to pin down what in Tartarus the bloodstones were trying to say. But that analysis quickly takes a back seat to two urgent observations. One, he loves Holds-the-Fire, and two, a mind-controlling villainess is towering over him with her hand on his shoulder. A rigid smile is plastered on her face, and she radiates peach as she stares at him.

… Wait. He still knows she's evil. Chester's tiny detective voice leaps to the foreground and starts screaming in relief. Her mind control didn't work. It didn't work!

Chester just wants to ride his intoxication high over the world's most amazing wolf-girl, but that detective voice is on a roll now. It adds that Chryssy's peach means she knows it didn't work. He's still in trouble. He loves Holds-the-Fire but he really should do something about that.

Step one: Go full Chet Land.

"Swamini-ji!" Chester wriggles down below Esau's grasp and throws himself at Chryssy's feet, nose touching the floor. His heart flutters only for Holds-the-Fire, but that's fine—full grovel mode is so instinctive for him that he doesn't have to let go of his universe-sized love to fake this. "I'm so sorry—how could I ever have doubted you!"

The hall erupts in whispers and applause. Chester sneaks a glance at the surrounding colors—awe, hope, relief. They don't know that Chester loves Holds-the-Fire; all they can see is his apparent redemption. (Even Esau shouldn't know—cyan is cyan; he can see that but not the target.)

Even Anton is getting into it, simmering in his own cyan bliss. Only Chryssy and Esau are feeling anything unusual. Esau is the vibrant cream of guilt. And Chryssy's peach has shifted into a blurry rainbow of reassessment, with a significant swirl of black uncertainty.

Chester suspects he understands that. Holds-the-Fire, whom Chester loves, had known from Chester's "echo" that he didn't yield to her calming command. (That was how he taught her to understand colors; high on the list of reasons why she's the most amazing person in the universe.) But there's no way Chryssy had ever acquired that level of exposure—her use of her siddhi was rare and expensive, a far cry from constant interaction with a wolfpack. So when Chester's "echo" came back weird just now—because the bloodstones helped him derail her effect—all she could deduce was that it felt different from her past successes. But now he's not acting like she failed, so she's trying to square that circle.

Speaking of which.

"They promised me shortcuts to transcendence!" Chester lies. "Showed me false powers and claimed levels of enlightenment surpassing yours. That's when I should have known they were frauds." His instinct now is to play to the room—the more he makes Chryssy's intervention look like an unqualified success, the more her pride will motivate her to play along. That technique walks a fine line, but it's one he's had lifelong practice at. "It was so persuasive at the time. They had your cunning, but not your mercy. Another reason I should have known. My shame is eternal."

Chester hopes Holds-the-Fire would be proud of him for that last bit of rhetorical judo. Chryssy's little drama required her to play up her mercy; doubling down on that means that she risks looking foolish if she shifts into punishment mode. He can see red stir up as she realizes that, too—but the consequences for that one will come later, and Chester doesn't plan to stick around for them.

Anyway, for once the red isn't the important color. Chester is carefully watching Chryssy's war between maroon and puce, suspicion and triumph. Maroon's foothold is strong, but every word of Chester's boxes it in, and Chryssy's pride needs very little cultivation to grow.

Still, the colors clash for an uncomfortably long time. Then she shoots Esau a silently questioning glance. That can only mean she wants to know what his color-sight sees—which makes it fortunate just how overwhelmingly and purely Chester loves right now. He fixes his eyes on Chryssy, and sinks back into the rapture of Holds-the-Fire.

Esau stares at Chester for several moments, cream and white. Then he gives Chryssy a nod. Her maroon wavers. Doesn't vanish, but recedes to a simmer, fading into the caramel of spyfeel.

Chryssy steps back, walks to Anton and leans into his chest, giving Esau a little hand-wave as she does.

"Take Brother Chester to my personal meditation room," she caramel-says. "He needs some time alone to think about his actions. We'll speak in the morning."

Author's Note

Welcome home, Chester. This time, with your eyes open. Which makes it a much more dangerous place...

This chapter also marks the story's halfway point, with 13 of its 25 chapters live. Next chapter, "Reglurgitation," will post on Sunday, Sept. 8!