Fact: Chryssa-swamini actually hasn't connected with anyone ever.

Anton was already under her emotional control, Chester thinks as Holds-the-Fire springs out of the zombie minotaur's way and Ember charges in from behind. It took more effort to turn him into a hollowed-out puppet than to give him enough power to help her. But he saw her in a moment of weakness, and no matter how useful he could have been to her, she couldn't live with that knowledge.

Once—he thinks as wolf and girl duck under a bellowing sweep—she had to at least maintain some minimal pretense of cooperation. But now she has enough power that she doesn't need acolytes or servants or love-slaves, and the mask has come off entirely.

Ember sinks her fangs deep into the minotaur's tendons. With deceptive speed, it reaches behind itself to grab her by the scruff of the neck. She yelps. The minotaur whirls around and flings her at the main hall. The wolf impacts with a distant boom, sending a cloud of mortar dust billowing out from a new hole in the ashram wall.

Chester freaks out for a moment—until he realizes Holds-the-Fire is still receiving Ember's colors through their remote link. (At the moment, a big burst of yellow.) It's hard to believe she remained conscious through that hit, but the way the stones are surging, they probably used raw magical power to soak the impact.

The earth shudders as the minotaur whirls on Holds-the-Fire and stomps a challenge. It charges forward again, head lowered to spear her with horns, and she throws herself to one side—only to yelp, bright peach, as a barrage of fireballs comes streaking down from Chryssy. Holds-the-Fire ignites her bloodstone power a little brighter, barely zig-zagging through the blasts, then tries to break for open ground but has to fling herself backward to avoid a massive two-fisted overhead minotaur slam.

She squares off with the minotaur and dashes in. It takes another swipe—right as she launches herself into a head-first dive between its legs, tucking into a shoulder roll and coming up sprinting on the far side. She dives into the cover of the increasingly blasted-apart shed right before the minotaur spins around, and then she freezes, staying in hiding to silently catch her breath.

That gives Chester some time to refocus on the real threat.

Fact: Chryssy is taking specific precautions against absorbing him and Esau.

What she's avoiding is obvious: color-sight. Why she's making such an enormous point of avoiding it isn't—or, at least, is a question he has always papered over by thinking of his gift as transgressive. But now the answer seems much more related to her lack of connections.

Assume she's a changeling, then. Ember had told Chester that changelings come in two types: touchy-feely and ravenous. Chryssa-swamini's clearly been the ravenous kind all this time—her sparkling gold of "transcendence" had been her voidstone latching on to her hunger. And the entire time, all the love she drained from her victims and from the ashram's veneration—it was all fuel for power. She never actually felt any of it.

Is that why she was scared of stealing color-sight—actually experiencing those emotions felt new and overwhelming? Chester considers. That doesn't feel adequate for the extremity of her reaction. He had been freaked out by losing it, too, but he—

He blinks.

When he had lost color-sight, Chester had freaked out because everyone became a thing. Without it, there was nothing to distinguish people from the drab, passive world around them.

Fact: Chryssy has that problem in reverse.

She can't make connections because, to her, everyone is a thing. To gain color-sight must be like all the food at a banquet starting to scream in pain. Wait—no, it's worse than that.

Fact: Chryssy has personally killed people before.

All his evidence for that is indirect—but a final puzzle piece falls into place which forces the conclusion. Color-sight makes the horror of death inescapable. Even Esau, who once had been willing to do anything to be a soldier, had drawn a hard line at killing. (That also explains why Chryssy was so eager to recruit Anton, Chester notes.) Her sudden prior acquisitions of color-sight must have forced her to confront the magnitude of what she had done.

A final realization hits. The one person whose emotions Chester has never been able to see is himself. He imagines Chryssa-swamini surrounded by a world where everyone except her is a person. Where she looks down at her hands and she's as dull as the scenery, surrounded by shining people who matter. It's a scenario perfectly calibrated to break someone who has spent their life ravenous and parasitic.

If he can force her to see in colors again, that should end the fight entirely. But how is he going to do that when she specifically refuses to drain him?

Chester peeks back out the cabin door. With the new threat of the minotaur shifting the matchup, the fight has turned into a game of cat-and-mouse around the outbuildings by the ashram's parking lot. Holds-the-Fire—and Ember, back outside and back to brown fighting strength—are dashing from cover to cover, staying out of sight except when they deliberately expose themselves to cause a distraction.

It looks at first glance like a stalemate. Chryssy has aerial overwatch and a better position; all she needs to do is corner one of her opponents and then use her power advantage to do some real damage. But Ember and Holds-the-Fire are thinking with two brains to Chryssy's one, and taking advantage of their perfect coordination. Whichever one of them isn't being hunted is constantly repositioning, communicating their enemies' locations and preparing to launch distractions.

Chester checks in. You okay?

Holds-the-Fire responds for both of them; it's Ember's turn to be cornered. We are hunting for an opening to safely attack the cow-man, she says, pale orange. Conditions are not favorable.

Hold out for a little longer, Chester bloodstone-says, trying to stifle his own worries. I'm… working on something.

"Well?" Chryssy cackles from above the battlefield, a dot of color in her floating void. "Have you been reduced to the vermin you are, scurrying into mouse-holes? Any more boasts, wolf?"

We may be unable to further delay, Holds-the-Fire says, shifting to a grim khaki. Already she has forced us to defensive footing. Unless you have a way to provoke her, she will soon control the duel.

Chester thinks. Then lean into that. If you have a way to hide, go silent. She won't take scaring you off as a win unless she can gloat to you about it.

I fear that will goad her into attacking targets we must defend, Holds-the-Fire khaki-says. But we will try.

Chester backs away from the doorway, keeping his footfalls as silent as he can, then turns around and crouches next to Celestia. "Alright," he whispers, "this is not looking great and I could use some ideas here."

She doesn't respond.

Chester blinks repeatedly, trying to readjust his eyes to the dim cabin light after all the fireworks outside. "Celestia?"

Still nothing. It takes him a few moments to realize her eyes are closed. He gently shakes her shoulder, and her body is limp—even though, paradoxically, her color has increased in intensity, now barely visible as something other than afterimages. There's a hint of cyan to her, and—oh, right—that leash leading to Chryssy, dull and quiescent. The Holy Mother must have finally gotten those tiny final scraps of power and set her up to become another zombie like the minotaur.

He bites his lip. That's… a thought in the same direction as a plan. Chryssy won't drain his powers directly, but she did drain Celestia, who's right here in the cabin with him. If he could only go back to right before she got the last of her love sucked out, and figure out a way to donate his color-sight to her…

Hang on.

Holds-the-Fire! he bloodstone-says, sharp and urgent as the pieces of a desperate but workable plan fall together. Where's the wolfpack?

A response comes back, precise and hushed—Holds-the-Fire seems to be minimizing her bloodstone use while trying to be stealthy. Not far, she says, though it's a pale orange that suggests concern at his question.

Change of plans! Chester says. Summon them!

What? she peach-says. I will not treat their lives as carrion, Ches-ter, they will be useless against the cow-man and worse than useless against Chris-sa—

She won't know that! Chester says. I just need you to get them into line of sight for a bluff. Make it as big and showy as you possibly can.

Green and black briefly war in her non-verbal response, and Chester double-checks his logic. The animals have no colors for Chryssy to drain, and if she's scanning for magic like she did earlier, they'll show up as touched by the bloodstones because of Holds-the-Fire's longtime link to them. He projects spyfeel back.

Holds-the-Fire's colors firm into brown. Very well. Make your plan count.

Then there's a surge of energy outside that Chester doesn't need to see to sense. A howl cuts through the night, clear and piercing and predatory, challenging the black hole's distortion, grounding the world back from battleground into hunting ground.

The sound itself is sparkling light brown, thick with magic—and Chester's never seen the color before, but he knows instantly it's the pure and primal emotion of the hunt. A chill runs down his spine, an involuntary prey-fear from deep in his instincts. Out in the surrounding mountainside, the howl is answered by a chorus—and, again, without even seeing them he can feel color ignite in each of her wolves as they join her song. For a moment, the world simplifies into the unity of hunters blazing in direct challenge to a predator of a very different kind. Holds-the-Fire is injecting bloodstone energy into her pack, pulling out all the stops with this one.

The howl dies away, though not the distant wolves' colors. And for a moment, the night is silent.

Then Chryssy bursts into laughter.

The demonic reverb of it retakes the night. "The little wolf-girl finally shows her fangs! Was that your big master plan? Mind-controlling a few mindless beasts? I haven't used a parlor trick that simple since Elytra!"

Chester's confidence wavers for a moment. Is she not going to bite? No. He's lived with her his whole lifetime. She doesn't just laugh things like this off, she needs to show off how much better she is. Her ego's got a hunger of its own.

"Yeah, well, let's see how funny it is when we've got you outnumbered," Ember chocolate-says, getting into the act.

The air outside ignites with green flame. "Yes," Chryssy says. "Let's."

Bingo.

Chester can't see Chryssy, but he knows exactly what's happening. She's sending power down those dozens of thin, quiet leashes, taking over the bodies of everyone in the ashram and raising a zombie pack of her own. But there's only two that matter right now. He watches the tethers connected to Sunset and Celestia… and sure enough, power surges toward them.

He grabs Sunset's limp arm as the green fire vanishes underneath her skin. And as her body starts filling with Chryssy's energy, eager to reshape her, he focuses a tiny fraction of his remaining love into a fingertip to the center of her chest, and pushes.

Chester has nowhere near the strength or skill to contest Chryssy's control. But that's not what he's doing. Right now, the Holy Mother is pouring raw energy back into a body after draining its love down to zero. Her control relies on that complete lack of consciousness. And all he should need to wake a well-fueled body back up is the tiniest spark of love—

Sunset's body explodes into color.

She sits up equally explosively, her eyes shooting open and her muscles jerking to life all at once. She barely misses headbutting Chester, and he catches a face full of hair. There's a loud gasp as she fills her lungs, and he's assaulted by flailing arms and intense creamsicle.

"Whoah!" Chester yelps, flinching back and doing some flailing of his own in an attempt to disentangle them. "Sunset!"

"Chester?" she says, spiking violet as she reorients. "I—aah!"

That last bit comes with a full-body spasm as the green fire of Chryssy's tether flares to a hungrier shade, reversing the flow. She already noticed.

Blue starts to pour out of Sunset, being sucked back toward the demon like gravity pulling water down a drain. Sunset slams down a wall of gray, thin and porous, fighting the drain with everything her disoriented self can muster.

"Don't fight it!" Chester shouts. "Hold onto me and let her take everything!"

She locks eyes with him, color intensity rapidly fading, orange spiking behind her improvised defenses. He wishes he had time to explain, but he barely has the time to make this work. The best he can do is grab her forearm with both hands, stare at her with intense resolve, and give her a firm nod.

Her fear eases. Then cerulean trust stirs up—which starts getting pulled away before it can even settle in—and she nods back.

Chester summons every scrap of love he can feel, pouring it all straight through into Sunset.

It's like stepping into a raging river. The instant his love leaves its body, it's snatched away, and he is suddenly keenly aware of Chryssy's roaring void outside—catching him, pulling him inexorably closer.

He clings to Sunset for dear life, swept into the flow with her, and lets the current wash them away.

… Everything is emptiness.

Chester's awareness stirs, dimly. It's hard to tell that there's anything to be aware of. It's hard to think. There's nothing to think about. But he becomes slowly aware, in the infinite void, of a nearby hunger—the gravity of inexorable need, a sense of devouring finality, oblivion like the ground rushing to greet him after a long fall. But it's not rushing anywhere. In fact, that void seems to be internally roiling, temporarily distracted from its ceaseless ingestion. Not sated—never sated—but nauseous.

A thought struggles to the surface of his brain-sludge. The voidstone?

"Is that what it is?" Sunset says. "It doesn't look happy."

Chester refocuses. He's not alone. The nothingness is rapidly receding like evaporating black fog, leaving a tiny bubble of somethingness behind—an inner space like the bloodstones'. There alongside him is Sunset, floating in the void and staring with him at the source of that hunger, a ravenous black hole looming over them and burbling with indigestion. Her fingers are clenched tightly around his arm, and he's got a death grip on hers. And she's also colorless—but here in weird voidstone space, maybe that's the default?

It's becoming easier to think, too—Chester can feel energy seeping into him, a giving backwash in the ever-taking current. It's weird and prickly and foreign, like a million ants crawling inside his body, but his fatigue is evaporating and his memories are reasserting themselves and reassembling into identity.

"Gotta admit, I'm getting a little too familiar with weird magical limbo spaces these days," Sunset says, then gestures to their clenched arms. "Sorry for dragging you in here, though."

Chester chuckles uneasily. "Uh, exact same, but back at you."

Sunset laughs, though with a bit of a grimace, and glances around the void, which remains utterly featureless except for the agitated singularity. "Okay, fair. If that's the case—I know enough about this scenario to know that one of us has something to accomplish with the artifact that's in here with us. And if it's that voidstone, I don't think it's me. So what's up with it right now?"

Chester thinks. "Well, I was pouring love into you while Chryssy was draining you dry again," he says, assembling memory fragments back into a coherent picture. "She sucked my love out too. Meaning she ate my color-sight." Which answers his earlier question. "And now it's—"

Sunset cuts off the next part of his explanation. "That's why you needed my help! After that incident when you were a kid, she wasn't going to eat your powers on her own."

Chester had chosen Sunset over Celestia exactly because her mind-reading power was the final piece of the plan. He's known for a while that she got a glance through his memories. But it still throws him to realize she saw that particular one.

Then another realization hits. "Wait—you learned I was still actively working for Chryssy back when you read my mind the first time," he says. "And you still welcomed me onto the team?"

"We weren't going after Chryssy then, and you sincerely wanted to do the right thing," Sunset says. "I figured giving you the chance to do that would help you find an outside perspective. I'm pretty big on second chances." She eyes the increasingly unstable voidstone; red light spills out of it from deep within, and it is building up an ominous rumble. "But we really should talk about that later."

"Right," Chester says. "Speaking of second chances. What this looks like is Chryssy about to vomit my color-sight back up. Out in the real world, Ember and Holds-the-Fire are fighting her—that distraction might be enough of an opening for them to take her down. But she doesn't just need to be defeated, she needs to be a better person, and she needs color-sight to do that."

He steadies himself with a breath—this is exactly what he had been hoping to accomplish, but a little creeping dread settles into the pit of his stomach as the finality of it settles in.

"When she barfs our powers back out," Chester says, "I need you to activate your mind-reading power on her and turn into a mirror, so she gives her color-sight back to herself instead of me."

"Wait, what?" Sunset says, her face scrunching up in a way that Chester assumes means confusion. "That's not how it works."

"I know it works off skin contact and you're not touching each other," he says with a rising edge of desperation, "but right now she's got an open two-way emotional link with you, that should be good enough—"

"No, I mean, the geode gave me empathy, to help me learn to connect with people better," Sunset says. "It only lets me learn from others. I can't use my power to force things to happen to others. That was a hard lesson I had to learn to get back on the right path."

"Oh," Chester says, an odd mix of relief and panic settling in. Maybe he doesn't have to give up his sight… but then, what can he do? And why are they here?

He doesn't have much time to figure it out. The black hole is erratically bulging, now. Its internal red is almost to the surface, and either it's beginning to vibrate or else it's rattling the entire limbo around it.

Sunset stares at the roiling black hole, thinking. Suddenly, her eyes widen. Then a smile spreads across her face.

"However," she slowly says, "I can do you one better."

"How?"

"You were right, I do have a two-way link with her." Sunset's smile opens into a toothy grin. "And I can feel the geode in there."

"Right!" Chester says, a new plan assembling from that fact. "Chryssy's using it as a power source. It's part of her demon form now—she can't get rid of it. You can affect her through it?"

"I can wake it up and make it want to do its job. And if I pony up while Chryssy and I are linked, it'll go into overdrive." Sunset lets go of Chester's arm to crack her knuckles together. "She wants power from empathy? We'll give her Elements of Harmony levels of it."

Chester lets go, but turns to face the voidstone. Its internal pressure is so tremendous now that light is starting to leak from little cracks all along its surface. "I'm coming along. We need her seeing colors."

"Got it." Sunset reaches for his forearm again, squaring off against the voidstone with him. "We'll head inside—"

—and with a lightning-like crack, the surface of the voidstone bursts, and they're washed away in a torrent of power—

—and electricity contracts all Chester's muscles as he jolts back into his own body.

He gasps for breath, head swimming as the world assaults him with sensory data. There's the texture of concrete and cotton and a hot burnt scent and staccato pops and booms and bursts of firecracker light from the cabin door. That itchy, crawling sensation of insects under his skin, foreign energy urging him to motion. Vertigo as he finally orients to gravity and pushes himself away from it, the floor lurching away. More motion in the corner of his eye as Sunset, too, struggles upright, a vague and colorless shape in the dimness of the cabin.

For a moment, Chester freaks out at the colorless world—but, wait, that means Chryssy's still got his sight. They've still got a chance! Still, getting ejected out of voidstone space probably signals something bad—

Out in the distance, there's an unearthly shriek, then a boom as the night flares daytime-bright for a split second.

Chester blinks away the afterimages of both Sunset and Celestia struggling to their feet. Chryssy's losing control, but is far from done with fighting.

"Can you still do the thing?" he yells at Sunset over the echoing roar of the explosion, as the building sways and a series of sharp pocks rattle the roof.

"Yes!" Sunset shouts back, bracing herself against the cabin wall. "But it's not working here, I need to touch her—"

There's another distant crack. She and Celestia simultaneously spasm and stagger backward, away from the cabin door, as if hit by an invisible wave leaving Chester untouched.

Fact: He can't see it without color-sight, but their links to Chryssy are still active.

Chryssy must be vomiting up random bursts of power as she fights to disgorge Chester's unwelcome sustenance. That's why all of them are awake again, and why the energy animating Chester feels so foreign—and also why Sunset is fighting to stay upright despite her fresh recharge. Now she's getting battered by energy infusions, blasted over and over again through her tether.

Chester snatches her into a fireman's carry and dashes out the door.

Author's Note

And now, a brief moment of celebration for the first thing I've ever written which has crossed the 100,000 word mark:

We're rapidly closing in on the end, and what a ride it's been. We're back to twice-per-week chapters, so tune in Wednesday, Oct. 2 for "Not Quite Harmony"!