"C'mon, Saw! What animal are you going to be?"

Brother Esau, projecting pink in a pointless attempt to hide the stir of green, scrunched up his face. Possibly rolled his eyes a little. (Chester remembers, but through the haze of nostalgia.) "Do we really have to do this, Chess? It's silly."

Chester mock-pouted, playing along. That had always been their little ritual; he knew Esau loved their adventures, but he never let himself get dragged into pretend without making Chester "convince him".

"We play pretend all the time," Chester pointed out. "And you've never said it's silly."

Esau put up a front of muddy brown pride. "Yeah, but we're almost adults now. The Holy Mother said we need to stop being childish and focus on enlightenment."

"That's why we're playing jungle pretend," Chester explained, sweeping his arm grandly at the forest past the edge of the ashram compound. "We're gonna focus on enlightenment just like she asked! The Holy Mother herself was enlightened in the jungles of Elytra. If we're animals we can understand the jungle and figure out what she learned!"

At that, there was no disguising Esau's green, but nevertheless, he stood up to his full thirteen-year-old height and crossed his arms, towering over the eleven-year-old Chester. "You're just gonna get lost and she's gonna get angry."

"That's why you should come with me, then!" Chester grabbed Esau's arm and dragged him toward the woods. "Come on!"

Soon, they were scampering through the trees together, laughing, Chester veering every which way between awesome distractions—glistening spiderwebs and starburst flowers and boulders to scramble atop. Esau seemed content to float in the wake of Chester's boundless exuberance, and spent a lot of time glancing behind them, but had soon worked up a vibrant purple to match Chester's, checking out all his discoveries.

Suddenly, as Chester was leading them toward a fallen log over a shallow ravine, Esau went violet and pulled Chester behind a bush.

"What"—Chester started, then dropped his voice at Esau's frantic shushing—"what is it, Saw?"

Esau reached forward through the brush to push branches apart until they had a small peephole looking down the ravine. "Check it out," he whispered back, smug muddy purple overlaying the violet as he showed off his discovery.

Chester peered through, then gasped. A family of deer were chewing grasses in the middle distance, heads up and ears perked, soft brown eyes scanning the brush in their direction.

"That's soooo cool," Chester whispered back, then turned to Esau, unable to contain his grin. "I'm gonna be a wolf today! I'm gonna hunt them, and sneak up on them, and burst out of the bushes and pounce!" He turned around, without waiting for an answer, and snuck forward to the cover of a thicket in the deers' direction—dropping to a half-crouched hands-and-feet scramble, awkward and altogether too noisy.

From his new cover, Chester held his breath and listened, his pulse quickening with the thrill of the hunt. Deadfall snapped and brush crackled downhill. He risked a glance around the bush, only to see the deer staring directly at him and slowly backing away.

Undaunted, the mighty predator ducked back behind his thicket, then crept to its far edge—managing to keep the rustling underfoot much quieter this time. Obscured by long grasses, Chester left the thicket's cover and circled away from the ravine, spiraling in to approach the deer from the side. He paused behind much closer cover and reassessed: the deer were continuing to slowly back away, heads locked on him to track his motion, but like the canny hunter he was, he'd managed to close about five feet of the 50-foot gap between them. With cleverness and patience, he could—

The bush where Chester had started his hunt rustled, then parted like curtains being thrown open. Esau lumbered out from the brush in a stiff-kneed waddle. "GRAAAAAWW!" he roared in chestnut red-brown challenge. He threw his arms overhead, arching his back, fingers curled into claws.

The deer instantly bolted.

Chester stood up as the crashing noises from their panicked leaps receded through the forest, and turned to Esau, who was radiating a smug muddy purple. Despite his foiled hunt, Chester couldn't help but laugh. "What was that?"

"Mission success," Esau gloated, bright puce. He lowered his arms and crossed them triumphantly. "The mighty grizzly bear, king of the forest, has driven off the intruders to his domain."

Glad to see Esau fully getting into it, Chester didn't bother to correct that they were pretending to be in the jungle. "That's silly," he said. "You should have been hunting them, like me."

"Pff." Esau went lilac. "You were just gonna wimp out anyway."

"Nuh-uh!" Chester protested, feeling his face flush. "I'm a wolf today! I can too hunt!"

"No you can't. You even make me put spiders outside instead of killing them." That was an argument they'd had before, but Esau's colors were still lilac, merely teasing.

"Well, I thought you were okay with killing animals," Chester said, deflecting. "So you should be hunting."

"They're colorless, that's what they're for," Esau said, then went a confident brown. "But I'm not gonna today, because bears eat honey and berries and stuff."

Chester crossed his arms, savoring his chance to be the smug one. "Bears are om-nee-vores," he said, carefully pronouncing the word he had learned out of the textbook in the ashram library. "That means they eat those things plus also meat. You're totally a hunter."

Esau considered that for a moment, then flared lilac. "Well, then I guess it's a good thing I've got prey right here!" he shouted, lumbering at Chester with arms raised. "GRAAAAAWW!"

Chester scream-laughed, squirming away from Esau's lunging tackle and dashing through the woods with Esau at his heels. Esau, taller and faster, grabbed him again, but Chester managed to writhe out of the hold. He saw a boulder the height of his head and vaulted atop it. "Ha!" he crowed back at Esau. "I'm safe. Bears don't climb!"

Esau—his eyes level with Chester's ankles, within arm's reach—looked up, creamsicle. "What? That's not true. Where did you hear that?"

"It is too! Brother Bill said so last time he took us camping!"

"No he didn't," Esau pink-said.

"He told us about that time his friend had to sit in a tree overnight because of that pack of wild bears."

Esau went muddy orange, embarrassed for him. "Chess. That was wolves."

Chester paused. Had he gotten those confused again? Wolves and bears alike were giant fuzzy piles of nondescript woodland danger, without the grace to have color auras like people did—and since both of them had fur in brown, black and white, he couldn't even use that as a crutch.

He had mixed them up once in front of the Holy Mother, and after the sting of her laughter, had been second-guessing himself ever since. A few precious facts had managed to stick—like the fact that bears were the fat ones, which was why he had remembered that they were the omnivores—but for every detail he managed to sort out, three more blended together into a muddy misidentified mess.

"You hang your food from trees to keep it away from bears," Chester said defensively. That was another one of the ones he was pretty sure about. "That means wolves are the climbers."

"You hang it from ropes because if you just put the food up the tree, the bears could get it. Wolves can't climb, like, anything."

"I climbed up on the rock!"

"You jumped. That doesn't count." Esau turned to a nearby tree, running up the trunk with a brief burst of speed and jackknifing a leg over the lowest branch. He pulled himself up to straddle it and then lifted his feet onto the branch, standing and repeating the process with branches further up until he had laddered himself a good three body-lengths off the ground.

Chester sat down on the rock and slid back down the side to ground level, then dashed over to Esau's tree. By leaping, he could just barely get his hands around that lowest branch, but he struggled unsuccessfully to pull himself up with his noodly arms. He tried getting a handhold on the trunk and working his way up little by little, but the rough bark dug painfully into his hands and he quickly gave up.

"See?" Esau puce-said, leaning against the trunk from his high perch and languidly swinging his legs. "That's why I'm the bear. Wolves can't climb."

"Well, I'm the predator, and now I've got you trapped!"

Despite his boast, Chester was reduced to circling around the base of the trunk, rawring upward as Esau good-naturedly taunted him and occasionally threw pinecones.

Later—after Esau climbed down, and Chester led Esau in an unsuccessful attempt to track down the deer again, and they gave up and sat down on a fallen log to compare wolf and bear notes—Esau glanced around the forest. "It's getting late," he said, a bit of gray reluctance shading into his half of their mutual affable blues. "We should get back to the ashram before we miss dinner and the Holy Mother wonders where we went."

"Yeah," Chester agreed, allowing the moment to dampen his own mood. The jungle had seemed like a cool idea at first, but the shine of all the weird bugs and pretty flowers and whatnot had worn off over the afternoon without anything to occupy his color-sight, and he had to admit that he was approximately zero percent good at being an actual wolf. His stomach let out a low grumble. He was looking forward to dinner, and a soft bed, and getting back to his unfinished paintings.

He glanced around the forest. Nothing looked familiar. He felt worry creep in.

Esau shook his head, aura flaring lilac. "I knew it," he said.

Chester freaked out. (Only a little.) "Are we lost?" he asked, whirling around, trying to remember which direction they'd come from before sitting down to rest. "Are we going to die out here? I got us lost, they're never gonna find us, we're gonna die—"

"Chess," Esau interrupted, blazing midnight blue. "Chill out. This is why you brought me, remember?"

Esau took Chester's hand, smiled, then turned and led him home.

Esau abruptly sat up. "Stop," he pink-said. "You're doing it wrong."

Chester fidgeted guiltily. He had initially been elated that Esau was willing to play pretend again—and had even asked Chester to play, after nearly a year of dragging his heels on Chester's entreaties since their "jungle" trip—but from the start, Esau's green had been fading pinker and pinker, like shaving away the rind of a watermelon.

Esau's face—now sprouting a scattering of wispy hairs around the lip—was growing a scowl to match. For months, his voice had been shifting through that raspy transitional stage toward a lower register. His mood spectrum, too, had shifted—much quicker to warm colors, with the cooler ones rarer and more fragile. (If that was what becoming an adult was like, twelve-year-old Chester had decided, he was in no hurry to get there.)

"I'm sorry," Chester said reflexively, projecting as much earnest guilt as he could into his words and hoping that his cream color looked as pure as it felt. "What should I do?"

Esau stared at him and then sighed, his pink slowly draining toward a more disappointed rosy hue. "Do you even understand what a drill sergeant is?"

"Yeah, you said," Chester said. "I give you orders. Make you exercise."

Esau's pink flared up again. "So give me orders!"

"I did!" Chester protested. "You're still getting upset!"

A thread of red stirred around Esau. "Because then you ordered me to stop!"

"You were starting to struggle!" Chester said defensively. "You weren't enjoying it any more!"

"That's the point!"

Chester opened his mouth to respond, but Esau's colors jolted into peach alarm as a familiar pink voice cut in. "Boys," the Holy Mother purred—in that syrupy, melodic tone which too frequently preceded a sudden storm of red. "What's all this racket?"

They whirled to face her, Esau scrambling upright and both of them snapping to rigid attention.

"He's helping me train, Swamini-ji," Esau orange-said while Chester was still assembling a response. Esau hesitated for a moment, then added in a more controlled brown, "I thought about our conversation, and I decided. I want to be a soldier."

The Holy Mother's emotions crystallized briefly into violet. But maroon suspicion quickly overtook it, and she frowned. "Don't waste my time. You've already said you won't do a soldier's job."

"Then with all respect, Swamini-ji, I failed to explain." Esau's orange intensified as he moved over to crouch at her feet, and Chester stiffened as his own fear stirred up; this was coming uncomfortably close to directly challenging the Holy Mother's word. Regardless, there was a core of brown determination under Esau's fear, the same determination that had driven him to recruit Chester into his training.

"You explained perfectly well," Chryssa-swamini snapped, shifting to pink. "Because of the special way you see things"—that was delivered with tawny resentment and caustic voice—"you're too weak to kill."

"I… yes, Swamini-ji?" Esau stammered, his brown dissolving into creamsicle confusion as he glanced up at her. "But I didn't think—I mean—did you want me to?"

The Holy Mother spiked into muddy orange. Her eyes flicked around the room, at the dozens of devotees who were suddenly pretending to have no interest in the conversation. Then the hue exploded into muddy red outrage, so quickly and smoothly that if Chester hadn't been watching when the orange spike came out, he might have missed it.

"Of course not!" she shouted, drawing herself up to full height. "Where have you been picking up such heresies!?"

"Swamini-ji, I—" Esau orange-said.

"Shame on you, Brother Esau. We follow the path of love."

"Of course, Swamini-ji!" Esau agreed, colors dissolving into pinkish-yellow distress. "I was only saying, that's why we need soldiers! People standing in the dark to protect the light!"

"Something you are unwilling to do!" the Holy Mother red-shouted.

Chester's heart sank. He saw where this was going. When the Holy Mother started swerving like this, logic stopped mattering—only her being correct. Esau was only arguing himself further into a corner. And if Chester spoke up, he would make it worse.

Esau tried once more, regardless. "That's not what I said! Aside from killing I'll do anything!"

Chryssa-swamini's red spiked and ebbed. The hesitation this time was unmistakable.

"… Anything?" she maroon-asked.

Esau lunged for the opening. "Yes!" he pled, a bit of faint green stirring up. "Please! Let me show you!"

She studied them for several seconds, emotions muddying as she considered. Then, as she slowly nodded, her aura settled into a color Chester had only ever seen once before: a weirdly scintillating deep yellow.

… Gold?

Chester turned his head fractionally to catch Esau's eye. Given Esau's creamsicle, he wasn't the only one seeing it.

"I see," the Holy Mother said, sending ripples through that odd new color. It glistened as it moved, as if reflecting the light. "Then I'm glad you've finally decided to take your studies more seriously." For a moment a more familiar lilac took over. "Though it seems Chester here was your drill sergeant?"

Chester tried to ignore her silent laughter. "Yes, Swamini-ji."

"How pathetic." She stepped forward and gave Chester a rose-pink side-eye, then stepped up to Esau and brushed two fingernails lightly under his chin, colors passing through caramel before resettling back into languid gold. "You're lucky I'm here."

Chester and Esau's eyes flicked back and forth between each other and her. It wasn't entirely clear who she was addressing, or whether that had even been a question. And trying to interpret that new color at the same time wasn't helping.

Esau swallowed and broke the silence first. "Of course, Swam—"

Magenta abruptly shattered the Holy Mother's aura, and her face twisted into a snarl.

"BUT THIS ISN'T ONE OF YOUR GAMES ANY MORE, MAGGOT!" she interrupted at full volume. Esau flinched back, a distressed peach, and Chester heard the rustling of fabric as half the ashram turned to openly stare.

Esau's peach swirled as he made the same calculations as Chester—her magenta meant the Holy Mother wasn't actually angry, just enjoying his squirming a little too much. He swallowed, Adam's apple bobbing, and tried again. "I—"

The Holy Mother grabbed Esau under the arms, lifting and slamming him into the wall.

Esau spiked yellow as she shook him and magenta-screamed, face flushing. "THERE IS EXACTLY ONE THOUGHT IN A SOLDIER'S HEAD! AND THAT IS TO DO WHAT I WANT WITHOUT QUESTION OR HESITATION! UNTIL YOU CRAWL THROUGH TARTARUS JUST BECAUSE I POINTED DOWN, YOU ARE A LITTLE BOY IN A MAN'S UNIFORM! IS THAT CLEAR?"

"Yes, Swamini-ji!" Esau shouted back, fresh orange obscuring his pain. She shook him hard again, sending his arms and legs ragdolling around.

Chester stared, frozen in terror. He had never seen Esau's panic so vivid, either. Even if she wasn't angry, neither of them had expected the Holy Mother to hurt Esau, and it wasn't at all clear how far this would go. But what could Chester do?

"WHAT'S WRONG? ISN'T THIS WHAT YOU WANTED, LITTLE MAGGOT?"

"No—I mean, yes—"

"NO? DO YOU DESERVE ANYTHING BETTER?" The Holy Mother's magenta was almost unnaturally bright, making it hard to see much else.

"Ye—no—" A flare of yellow erupted through Esau's orange as she slammed him to the wall again. "Aah!"

At Esau's cry of pain, all the fear and horror inside Chester crystallized. "Stop!"

She did, her magenta distorting into peach. And the room went dead silent, aside from a few muffled gasps in the background.

The Holy Mother slowly turned her head toward Chester, deep red boiling up like a summer thundercloud. Her face split into a broad smile. "I'm sorry," she red-asked, tone dripping in honey, "was that an order, drill sergeant?"

"S-Swamini-ji, I, ah," Chester stammered.

Suddenly, this was real trouble. He had seen her this furious once or twice, but never at him.

"Why would you ask me to stop?" she red-asked, voice high and innocent. "Did I do something wrong? Are you better at this than your enlightened mother?" Her smile grew a predatory edge. "Or, perhaps, is your brother not cut out to be a soldier?"

Chester let out a deflated squeak, then swallowed through a dry throat. His brain locked up. It was bad enough that his profane arrogance had provoked the Holy Mother's wrath—but now his screw-up was about to destroy Brother Esau's dream, too.

Esau locked eyes with Chester, a sudden surge of dark blue protectiveness flooding into his bright orange. "Swamini-ji, it's all my fault," he blurted out. "A soldier has to be able to endure anything, I understand that, but he doesn't, and I dragged him into this—"

"And a good soldier wouldn't have any say in this," the Holy Mother snapped, whirling her head back to Esau. Her face twisted into grim ferocity for a moment, and then the smile returned. She set Esau down and gave Chester a broad, mocking bow. "So let's see how a real drill sergeant handles the situation."

She stepped back, leaving Chester and Esau face to face.

Esau took a deep breath, sparks of yellow bursting around him as the ribs where he'd been picked up twitched. He locked eyes with Chester. His aura whirled with uncertainty for a moment… and then settled into a grim khaki, still threaded through with dark blue.

It was a silent plea. I can take it, the colors said. Push me harder than she did. Hurt me more. Chester broke eye contact for a moment to glance at the Holy Mother, whose red was beginning to sprout anticipatory blotches of magenta. Chester knew Esau saw it, too: she wanted to see someone hurt, and Esau was begging for it to be him.

But that was unthinkable. Chester was responsible for this mess.

He steeled himself, swallowing again as he fought for words. "B-brother Esau," he started, voice cracking, "what is a soldier's one job?"

Esau shot to attention, straightening to full height. "Doing what the sergeant wants without question or hesitation, SIR!" he shouted back, smothering his orange in layers of brown determination.

"And a sergeant's job," Chester shot back, raising his voice, "is giving orders in line with the will of the Holy Mother!"

Esau hesitated, fractionally. The improvised line sounded like it was playing along with the plan, but he must have caught something of Chester's intentions from Chester's sudden resolve. "I… of course, SIR!"

"So you're going to punish Brother Chester for his insolence!" Chester shouted, shifting his stance to widen his legs. "I order you to kick him in the junk as hard as you can."

Esau wilted, a wave of yellow and cream and peach battering away his brown. He glanced back at the Holy Mother uncertainly. At his hesitation, her smile spread wider, magenta eagerly blazing back in to wrestle her red into submission.

Chester could see Esau's inner turmoil as they both came to the same conclusion. Asking for Esau to hurt him was intensely unfair, but the Holy Mother's anger evaporating was a chance neither of them could turn down.

Esau set his jaw, muting his emotions into a drab brown. Chester braced himself, giving Esau the tiniest of nods to go along with the resolve he hoped he too was projecting. Esau turned squarely back to Chester, a spark of apologetic cream bursting and dying away.

His leg shot out.

Fireworks exploded through Chester's vision, leaving behind only static. He sank to the ground, whimpering and balling up.

As his vision slowly cleared, the Holy Mother was standing over him with crossed arms—violet threads floating in an intense magenta. "I didn't think you had that in you," she purred. "Your arrogance was unforgivable, but at least you've learned something today."

"Th-thank you, Swamini-ji," Chester forced out, tears streaming down his cheeks.

"And you." She turned to Esau, and the ominous weight of her attention on Chester suddenly evaporated. "Jumping jacks, as fast as you can without stopping, until you vomit. Then one hundred push-ups. Then clean the floor and go peel all the dinner potatoes."

"Of course, Swamini-ji," Esau said, and began vigorously jumping.

Without another word, the Holy Mother wheeled and strolled away.

By unspoken agreement, they didn't discuss the incident until they were in the vegetable garden the next day. There was no way to have a private conversation in the children's dormitory, and Chester had long since learned to minimize discussion about their vision around the other devotees—one such conversation had ended up with weeks of chartreuse stares, endless whisper campaigns, and a lecture from the Holy Mother about hampering the others' path to enlightenment by provoking jealousy.

"That color," Esau said, a pale orange as his eyes flicked around the ashram grounds. There were others outside, but not close enough to hear. He put on some gloves and crouched down where a young thistle was growing among the carrots. "You saw it too."

Chester nodded, digging around the stem of a nearby bindweed to expose its roots. His own fear was probably more thickly layered—the last time he'd seen the gold was a memory best left buried—and he silently prayed Esau wouldn't press him on it. "What do you think it means?" he asked, deflecting the conversational momentum.

"Well"—Esau's orange intensified, with an undercurrent of guilty cream—"if it had been a golden shade of regular yellow, that would have been greed. But…"

"But that's not what we saw," Chester finished for him. "It was sparkly. Shiny."

"An enlightened emotion." Esau struggled to flatten his emotions into brown, but couldn't keep black threads of doubt out.

Chester knew that was correct. But that black gave him silent permission to voice his own doubts.

"But she hurt you!" Chester said—then glanced around at Esau's warning hiss, and lowered his voice. "I know Swamini-ji's enlightened, but you have to admit, even she's not completely immune to base emotions."

"She has to use base emotions, when we force her to," Esau reminded him. That, at least, was doubt-free; both of them had heard over and over again how fraught the path to enlightenment was, and how much pain the Holy Mother suffered every time her beloved children strayed from the path. Every time they failed her, she was disappointed at them, ashamed of them. But she put so much effort into them regardless.

"And if she's the only one who can be gold…" Esau's doubt crept back in as he continued. "Well, then, it has to be an enlightened emotion, doesn't it?"

After the previous day, that wasn't sitting well with Chester, either. But he'd twisted himself in knots trying to reach another conclusion, and hadn't had any better luck.

"I just don't understand how that would work," Chester said, teasing the bindweed out of the earth. "Enlightened greed?"

"Well, of course we wouldn't, we're not enlightened," Esau said, briefly flaring pink as he pointed out the obvious. But after a glance at Chester, he sighed, washing that out in a protective dark blue. "Chess. Just think about it like… she took that base emotion and purified it. Redeemed it into something noble. It's a thing she wants—but she wants it because it's what's best for us."

They pulled weeds in silence for several moments. Chester deliberated.

Esau sighed. "Out with it."

Chester looked down, not meeting Esau's eyes. "… I… just, with the way she hurt you, I'm not sure that it is best."

Esau nodded, a sober gray-brown. "Yeah, I wasn't ready for that either, yesterday. But this morning, she talked to me. Said I've got great things ahead of me. She wants me to succeed. Said I won't know what I'm capable of until she pushes me past my limits."

"What was she?"

"Gold. And a little worried. But mostly gold." Muddy orange guilt swept through Esau's aura. "And… she asked me if I trusted her."

Chester winced. It was an excessively dangerous question, and they both knew the correct answer by heart. "We don't have any business being here if we don't."

"Exactly." Esau finished pulling out the thistle and sat back, the gray-brown reappearing and then strengthening into a purer resolve. "I can't let her down on this." His voice softened, though the colors didn't. "And I don't want to."

Chester nodded. Then he noticed the threads of yellow creeping in, and his heart sank.

"What is it?" he asked.

This time it was Esau who couldn't look at him as the pain fully flooded in. "That means no more pretend."

Chester had been bracing for that, but his gut still twisted. "Of course, Saw, if that's what I have to do to help—"

"Not what I meant," Esau yellow-said, raising his voice to interrupt. "No more pretend for me. Being a soldier means I have to start acting different."

"Okay," Chester said. That was still disappointing, but it wasn't nearly as bad as he'd feared. "At least we can still hang out."

Swirls of orange and dark blue mixed into Esau's yellow, and his eyes flicked around the grounds again. "Of course," he said quietly. "Whenever I'm not working with the Holy Mother."

It took Chester a moment to parse the disconnect between words and emotions—and then he tensed. It was a warning. Esau couldn't tell Chester to stay away, but it was a hint that he was no longer safe to talk to. If the Holy Mother went digging for Chester's sins, she would naturally ask Esau; and the closer a devotee was to her, the less tolerance there was for anything less than total honesty. Esau would have to start volunteering everything he knew about Chester, down to the most trivial of errors which might previously have escaped her notice.

Esau, staring at Chester, shifted toward an indigo shade of relief. Chester wasn't sure what mixture of emotions he himself was projecting, but it was apparently enough to confirm the message had been received.

"See you around, then," Esau said. He stood up and walked away.

Chester had been afraid, as usual, when the Holy Mother had called him in for a private meeting. But when Chester had arrived, she had been shining a languid gold, reclining on her lounge chair and idly browsing through some Bittish gossip magazine.

"You've been play-acting at being a spy again," she said without preamble, flipping a page and reading on.

Chester deliberated for a moment. She did this on occasion—opened conversations with an incriminating fact, forcing the devotee into an admission or a denial before they could get a word in edgewise. Usually, this was one of the games he excelled at; the Holy Mother was rarely subtle about her emotions, and it wasn't difficult to figure out whether she was looking for an admission of a sin she knew, or on a fishing expedition.

The gold, though, threw this into unfamiliar territory. Chester hadn't seen that color on the Holy Mother since the Soldier Incident a year ago. Her golden glow against the backdrop of her oversized black wicker chair gave her the aura of a queen bee, and he felt like an insect risking the provocation of a quick and painful sting.

Chester decided the safest path was admission. It seemed to have worked out well enough for Esau, even if they'd barely talked in a year.

"Yes, Swamini-ji," he said, trying to strike a balance of sounding ashamed but not too regretful. Playing pretend was technically a sin, a distraction from enlightenment, so he couldn't afford to treat his admission casually; but given her apparent desire, if he groveled too much, he was just going to annoy her. "I… might have found that Chet Land novel someone left in the reading room."

The Holy Mother nodded and flipped another page. (Apparently, he had assessed correctly.) "Are you any good at it?" she gold-said.

That question, on the other hand, he had no idea how to answer.

The truth was no—Chester's stealth skills were on par with his wilderness navigation, and the frequency with which Chet got into gunfights left Chester unsettled. And with Swamini-ji, sticking to the truth was often safest, but that felt dangerous here. If gold really did mean enlightened desire, then shooting down those desires was only going to get her angry.

"I hope so, Swamini-ji," he said, hoping she would let him get away with a non-response.

Pink destabilized her gold, and she looked up from her magazine. "Hmn," the Holy Mother said, a frown creasing her face. But, after a few agonizing seconds, she went back to reading. "So do I. It's about time you started making yourself useful around here."

Chester knelt at her feet, bending low and touching his nose to the ground. A little groveling probably wouldn't hurt. "I live for the path of enlightenment, Swamini-ji."

"You really don't," she said, although the pink behind the sentiment was mild, perfunctory. "You've been here a full decade and yet you're the furthest being from enlightenment I've ever met. I don't know why I even bother. But I'm giving you yet another chance you don't deserve." She flipped another page. "Brother Bill is acting strangely. You will find out why. And if Brother Bill finds out you're spying for me…"

The Holy Mother suddenly snapped her magazine closed, leaning forward and looking into Chester's eyes. Her pink darkened into a predatory magenta, and her lips curled into a toothy smile.

"How does that exploding tape in the movie go? 'If you're caught, the Secretariat will deny any knowledge of your existence.' I'd like you to think what the enlightenment equivalent of that might be."

Chester, already in full grovel mode, began to wish he had held something back so that he could go deeper. "Y-yes." He swallowed through a dry throat. "Swamini-ji."

The Holy Mother's eyes bore into his. She drew the moment out, staring in silence.

But finally, she reclined again, a golden shimmer re-overtaking her sated magenta. She reopened her magazine.

"I look forward to your discoveries," she said.

And if that gold was any indication, she meant it.

Author's Note

So, funny thing ...

When I was setting my publication schedule, part of why I settled on twice per week was that I'd be leaving for Everfree NW with Chapter 10 as the most recent one published. This would have been fitting for reasons I'll explain once we get there. But somewhere I seem to have miscounted by a week.

It's a little late to gracefully speed things up to make that happen anyhow, but I'll do the next best thing. We'll drop three chapters this week, instead of two, and so we'll reach Everfree on the Chapter 9 cliffhanger and I'll get to publish 10 on Sunday morning during the con.

So, look out for new chapters this week on Tuesday and Thursday. Return to the forest on Tues., Aug. 20, for "Miss Fire"!