Maybe flying over a World War One battlefield in a pixie airship disguised as a biplane wasn't the very best place to start explaining everything that had been going on to Columbus and Koren, but-- wait, what the hell was I saying? That was an amazing place to be when I was explaining it. Yes, the battlefield below us was horrifying, and if I let myself really even consider what was actually happening down there for even a second, it would leave me feeling sick and broken. Those were real, living people down there being killed by the thousands for what amounted to nothing. Years of utterly senseless slaughter, and so much of it was happening below us. It made my soul want to shrivel up and expel itself from my body just to escape the awful feelings.

  But beyond that, if I could put the fact that all those people were suffering and dying and there was nothing I could do about it to the back of my mind, this really was one of the best possible places I could have chosen to explain the whole situation. Not just because being on a pixie airship was cool, but also because of the war thing. Seriously, what was happening below us was probably the closest that Bystander humanity had ever gotten to the sort of damage the Fomorians could do to us. You know, besides the actual Fomorian invasion. Even that apparently somehow hadn’t reached the levels of death that this war had, though not for lack of trying. And a full invasion would be so much worse.

  Yeah, the sheer magnitude of the meaningless deaths and suffering that had happened (and was happening) throughout the horrific war probably didn't even scratch the surface of what those monsters were really capable of, but it was a close enough comparison. The endless crying, suffering, and dying really set the mood for the things that I had to tell the other two about.

  And yes, I was still trying to push the horror of what I was hearing, seeing, and even smelling out of my mind. The very real tragedy playing out underneath us was a bit distracting from the even worse potential tragedy I was trying to explain to them. Which was part of the problem. Another part was that there was so much to get into, and I had no idea how long this trip would take. Or what was going to happen when we got wherever we were going. We still didn't know who had sent these pixies to find ‘Jacob’ in the first place. It could have been a friend, or very much not. But at least we had the privacy spell (Koren used one of her coins) to make sure they didn’t overhear. Unless they had a way of bypassing that to eavesdrop anyway. I kept reminding myself to be wary anyway. Not only could these pixies possibly share any information they picked up with the person who hired them (someone who might not be a friend), but it was probably dangerous for the timeline anyway. Even if part of me kept shouting that they were pixies with an awesome biplane airship, which meant they couldn't possibly be bad guys and should just automatically be trusted.

  Ah, I’m probably that part of ourself, Mountebank put in. What can I say? It really is a very cool plane. And they remind me of some of my old friends from my traveling days. I'm not exactly sure why.

  Let’s hope they’re the more altruistic version of your friends from after you spent time with them, I sent back, instead of the ones who were willing to withhold vital medical care from dying children just to get a bigger payday. But yeah, I want the cool biplane pixies to be fully on our side too.

  All of which was to say, even with the privacy coin protection, I didn't want to announce everything about who I was and what I was doing out loud for the pixies to hear, even if my current copilot really liked them already. We just didn't know enough about them or who they were working for. Let alone the timeline stuff. So, rather than talk out loud, I did something better. First, I asked the other two to let me possess them. Then I did so, one after the other. I possessed each one in turn and took a moment to push all my relevant thoughts and memories about everything that was going on into their minds. It was a lot to go through. But the bright side of doing it that way, besides the secrecy, was that I didn't actually have to take the time to say all of it. I just sort of took the relevant memories and shoved them into Columbus’s mind first, then I slid out of him, possessed Koren, and did the same for her. It only took a few seconds for each of them. Well, a few seconds for me to give them the information. It took a bit longer for them to process it. I just sat back, looked out over the side of the plane, and watched the horrific scenes play out below me as a reminder of what sort of things the whole world--scratch that, universe had to look forward to if the Fomorians managed to be transformed into their super Dragon-bonded versions. Yeah, this was definitely both the worst and best place to be when passing along that sort of information. I really hoped we would get away from the actual battlefield and trenches soon, but the more I looked out over the ground below us, the more I was afraid that those trenches, full of all their misery and suffering, would simply stretch on forever. At least we were finally high enough that I couldn’t actually hear most of the sounds down there. But that didn’t stop my imagination one little bit. And it certainly didn’t help the sensation of death that kept reaching me.

  That was the worst part. I liked the power that I could feel, until my conscious mind thought about where it was coming from. It was like drooling over mouth-watering barbecue every weekend and then finding out your neighbors were cannibals. All that power was there and I felt like a filthy piece of shit for even noticing it.

  It really did take the other two a fair bit of time to digest what I’d given them. Which I honestly couldn’t blame them for. I had dumped a lot of memories into their minds. Everything about what had happened with Laramie Falls, Godfather, meeting Gaia (and the subsequent invention of the whole Jacob identity thing), killing Fahsteth and taking his spaceship (and meeting Laein), the tower of Lashra Vaeil, the Ankou and everything that had changed about me in the aftermath of that, fighting Ruthers and the other Crossroads people, meeting Odysseus’s ghost, finding that first Rift, and… and everything that had come as a result of Ehn going through it. Everything that had come as a result of that man ignoring the warnings he was given from people he didn’t listen to just because they happened to not be human. The danger he’d put the whole universe into.

  I shoved all that into their minds in a few seconds. It was understandable that it was going to take a couple minutes for them to experience those memories and have any sort of reaction to them.

  Unfortunately, all that time just left me with nothing to do but focus on all the dead people below us. There were so many of them, more than I had ever felt in one place before. At least like that. The ghosts, both of the recently dead and of those who had been killed all the way back to the beginning of this war, filled those trenches, that bloodsoaked ground. They were there, not just metaphorically in the dreams and cries of the living, but literally. There were so many dead beings down there. So many lost, terrified, broken souls trapped in the very nightmare where they had been killed to begin with. They might end up being stuck there forever.

  Except no, they wouldn't be. Absolutely not. I wasn't going to let that happen, not if I had anything to say about it. And as it happened, I did. Yes, maybe I was completely helpless to change the past. I couldn't save any of those people below from being killed. I had to let that awful, tragic history play out no matter how much I wanted to put a stop to it. I had to sit on my hands instead of using my power to actually help all those desperate living people. That was hard enough on its own. The fact that I had all this power, all this strength, and I still couldn't do anything for the suffering people below us made me feel almost as helpless as I had ever felt.

  I couldn't do anything for the living, but you know what? I sure as hell could do something for the dead.

  Because I was a fucking Necromancer, damn it.

  I had the power to help make sure those soldiers weren't lost on that battlefield, the ability to help them in their deaths even when no one could help in their lives. Which, in my mind, meant I had the responsibility to do that. I had said that I wanted to use my Necromancy for good things, and right now, at this moment, I was being presented with a way to do that.

  So, I glanced at the other two briefly. Their eyes were closed, heads rocking back a bit as they each digested everything I had given them. Honestly, even if they were experiencing it more quickly then I had when I lived through it, it would still take them a couple minutes. And it really wasn't something I wanted to rush them through. They could just take their time when it came to coming to terms with things like me not being human anymore or Dragon power Fomorians.

  Closing my eyes, I settled back in the seat as well as I could with the other girl beside me. Then I took a deep breath and slowly let it out before pushing my Necromancy down through that battlefield. I sent it as far and as wide as I could, toward every hint of death that I could sense. I didn't care if they were British, American, Italian, German, or any other side. I didn't care about any of that. It didn't matter. Whatever they had been, whatever side they had fought for when they were living was completely immaterial. I reached out to all of them regardless.

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  At first, I wasn't exactly sure how firmly I should pull them. I didn't want to force the dead to do anything against their will. Not outside of an actual battle where I might have to grab an enemy ghost temporarily or something like that. I was not going to become the sort of Necromancer who enslaved the ghosts of my enemies, no matter how much it felt like some of them might deserve it. That wasn't a line I was willing to ever cross. Not after what I'd seen from Fossor.

  So, I was hesitant to pull them too hard. But the fact was, they would be very confused and lost, to say nothing of how terrified they had to be. They had died in the middle of possibly the worst war that had ever happened here on Earth that didn't involve the actual Fomorians. And we were flying past them in a plane, so I didn't have a lot of time to explain everything enough to give them the chance to make an actual educated choice. With all that in mind, I decided to pull them all, every ghost I could reach. I would bring them along with us and sort them out later. Once I had a chance to explain things properly, I would do that. And then I would let all of them make their own decisions about what to do. I would help them move on, send them somewhere else (even back to these battlefields if they chose), or let them stay with us at the Roundabout. They would still get to choose. I just didn’t have time to let them choose right now.

  It wasn't exactly easy. Not the actually reaching out with my power to find the dead part. That was depressingly easy. They were everywhere, thousands of them, more than I could ever hope to actually manage to pull along. All I had to do was reach out a bit and my metaphorical arms were completely full. No, finding ghosts to contact was the easy part. But every time I did, I kept getting flashes of how they died. Just bits and pieces, usually too disjointed to really follow. But I picked out enough to have bile in my throat that kept trying to push its way higher. I saw so much horror in those moments, flashes of being killed on those battlefields over and over.

  Part of me wanted desperately to pull back, to let go of this idea. I wanted to leave them alone. They were shoving all these terrifying images at me, screaming in my brain, crying at me, pleading for answers, for help, for their loved ones. They had been alone for so long, and now I was there. There was someone who could hear them, who could listen to them. They bombarded me with all those feelings and memories of their own terrifying deaths. It was a lot.

  I had no idea how much time passed as I was doing that. My eyes were closed and I was doing my best not to think too much about what was happening below us. It was already hard enough not to let the images of death that kept flashing through my mind every time I touched another ghost completely overwhelm me. The echoes of tragedy that were playing through my mind were very nearly more than I could handle. I couldn't let myself think about the actual current tragedy that was still going on at that exact moment. It was just too much. I was only one person. Well, just one person with a whole bunch of other versions of myself sharing space in my brain, but still.

  No, I wasn’t stopping. I didn’t care how much of their trauma they threw at me. I couldn't help the living. I just couldn't. But the dead were another story. I wasn't going to give up on them, no matter how hard it was, no matter how many horrifying images they pushed into my mind when I reached out to them. I pulled them with us. I wrapped my power around them, trying to make them understand that I was a friend, that I was there to help, even if I couldn't explain how or why or anything else right then. I didn't want to make things worse. I didn't want to traumatize them even more. I tried to fill them with a sense of warmth and guidance. I had no idea how successful I was with that, or how helpful it would be for them. There just wasn't time to check, and I honestly didn't have the focus or energy to spare, not considering how many ghosts I was trying to pick up right then. That took everything I had.

  There was a voice in the back of my head telling me to stop, shouting that I had done enough, that it was over, that I was going to lose myself if I stretched any further. I could feel it. I could feel myself falling apart, losing the essence of what made me me. Mountebank was clinging to me, with some help from the others, all of them pulling back to stop me from completely falling off the edge of the cliff. No, that wasn't quite right. I was over the edge. I was halfway down the mountain side and into what would have been freefall without them. If they hadn't been there, if they hadn't been able to hold me and stop my descent, I would have been lost, my essence ripped apart by the sheer force of what those ghosts were throwing at me, even accidentally. My siblings clutched me, kept me together, stopped me from completely losing who I was. And with their help, I held on to all those ghosts I had gathered, the ones who didn't pull away too hard for me to maintain my grip. I held them and sent as much warmth and reassurance as I could, trying to make them understand that I would manifest them and talk to them with real details as soon as I could. At the moment, they were basically disembodied energy. Not even that, the potential for energy. It was hard to explain, even to myself. But the point was, I had thousands of soldier ghosts right then, pulled from as far out as I had been able to reach.

  My face was soaked with sweat. No, not just sweat. There were tears too. So many tears, and so few of them my own. I had been crying the tears of those who couldn't cry for themselves anymore. All those images they pushed at me, all those deaths filling up my mind, each one breaking off another tiny piece of my soul. They could have it. After what they had been through, after what they had suffered, if taking a piece of my soul gave them even a small bit of comfort, warmed the cold in their hearts at all, they could have it. As much as I could give.

  Oh then there was another voice, one that didn't come from inside me. In that moment, I couldn't understand it. I was too far gone, too faded and stretched too thin. Then I felt a hand touch my wet face, brushing the sweat and tears away before the voice came back. “Flick, hey, Flick.” It was Koren. And the moment after I realized that, I also realized that the plane had landed. We weren't flying anymore. When exactly that had happened, I couldn't even guess. I had been too lost in collecting all those ghosts. I couldn't even say how long we had been flying across the battlefield. It could have been ten minutes or several hours to be honest.

  One hour and thirty minutes, Mountebank informed me. Give or take a little bit. I think we came down just a minute ago, but I'm not sure how long the other two have been staring at us. I think I heard them try to say something before, but they figured out we were occupied pretty quickly.

  My eyes finally opened, and I found that, sure enough, the other two were definitely staring at us. I couldn't read their expressions, aside from the fact that they looked pretty overwhelmed. Which was definitely fair, considering the full extent of what I had dumped into their memories.

  Before I could actually say anything, Columbus spoke up from the other seat. “Goddamn, Flick, I knew you were an overachiever, but seriously.” He coughed, glancing away briefly before turning his gaze back to me. The next thing he said was a simple, “Are you okay?”

  The words themselves were simple, but there was a lot more behind it. He was asking a lot with that. He was asking if I was okay with becoming Fae, with having so many versions of myself in my head, with creating this Necromancy school, with needing to go through all these Rifts just to stop Ehn’s mistake from completely dooming the entire universe. Hell, the truth was that he probably had at least some idea of why I had just been so out of it and was asking if I was okay after that. There were entire essays behind those few deceptively simple words.

  I didn't answer at first. I wasn't sure how okay I was with any of it. It was so much, and more just kept piling on. Just in the time since I had gone back to the past, more had happened than I could ever have imagined. And now I had to think about the fact that there were dozens of copies of me spread throughout the timeline, dealing with all these rifts. Actually, I was one of those copies too, technically. Or none of us were--we were all the same--yeah, probably shouldn’t think about it too hard or I was going to have an existential crisis, which we definitely didn’t have time for.

  Sorry, me, you’re too busy to have an existential crisis, suck it up.

  So, I did the best I could under the circumstances. I shrugged. “I’m alive. We’re alive. Kind of a lot to take in, huh?”

  Koren was the one who spoke up then, her voice cracking considerably. “Yeah, kinda. You just--you’re… well at least there’s enough of you to actually do the things you keep getting roped into doing? Except I guess they’re all inside the--right.”

  “And we’re here to help with this one,” Columbus put in. “Along with a… bunch of pixies for some reason. Are you sure--”

  “I don’t know who they are, or who sent them,” I confirmed. I still felt a little woozy from pulling all those ghosts, who were sort of a giant blob of Necromantic power all around us. It was weird that the other two couldn’t feel it at all. Yeah they weren’t Necromancers but this was a lot of energy. It seemed like they should feel something.

  Before I could focus too much on that, or on the fact that I had the ghosts of several thousand dead soldiers waiting for some sort of instruction or explanation, the lead pixie popped his head up out of a hatch right in front of us. “Oy! You gonna explain where this Jacob guy is or what?”

  “She doesn’t need to explain anything,” an unfamiliar voice announced, as a figure came just within range of my item sense. She looked to be about my age, maybe a year or two older. Though that meant absolutely nothing, really. Her hair was chestnut-colored, with darkly tanned skin from a life spent outdoors in the sun, though she also wore a dark green cloak with the hood up. “I’m kind of all caught up. More than they are, really.”

  “Who the hell are you?” Koren asked bluntly.

  “Oh, sorry.” Lifting her chin, the girl gave an unabashed smile. “I guess I should introduce myself. I’m just used to you guys knowing me already from--never mind, time travel is funny. I’m Marian. Apprentice to Jacob Donn. But you’re probably more familiar with the famous person I’m connected to.

  “My great-times-about-fifteen grandfather was Arthur Pendragon’s brother, Chadwick.”

  Joke Tags: Genuinely Curious To Know How Many People Went ’Wait A Minute’ When The Girl With Chestnut Hair And A Green Hood Was Mentioned