A wave of emotion crashed over Cass. She collapsed back into her chair, looking at her options.

  Salos was finally done absorbing the soul.

  He was back. The tension slipped from her shoulders.

  With him at her side, who could stop her?

  Well, there was a new worry that he wouldn’t be on board to rescue the dragon, but she was pretty used to bulldozing that kind of complaint these days. She’d figure something out.

  She just needed to pick one of these upgrades.

  Evolution Complete.

  Choose new functionality:

  [1. Shifting Mind - allows you to swap bodies with your demon, allowing you to use his Separate Form and he to use your main body. General skills, Concepts, and levels remain your own. Racial skills remain tied to the body.

  2. Fused Mind - allows you to subsume your demon’s mental facilities, fusing your knowledge and skills into a single identity. Reduces independent functionality of Separate Form greatly.

  3. Subordinate Mind - allows you access to your demon’s mental facilities at will, allowing double the mental tracks. Limited facilities reserved for control of Separate From as necessary.]

  She grimaced at the options. Most of them were unpleasant. Very unpleasant.

  She discarded Fused Mind immediately. That sounded far too much like she and Salos would get squished into one person. Not Cass and not Salos, but something new and different. Maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe she’d get all of Salos’s knowledge and walk out of it still Cass, but she doubted it.

  Subordinate Mind didn’t sound much better. Best case, that was absolute mind reading—not terribly interesting to Cass. Worst case—and if Cass’s reading of this was accurate, more likely—this would let her hijack his brain to think her own thoughts. What exactly happened to Salos’s consciousness when she did that? She didn’t know and didn’t like what she was imagining.

  Which left just one option: Shifting Mind. It was aggressively fine, but she struggled to think of a use case for it. Was there a reason she would want to be a cat, or she’d want Salos to be her?

  But, even if it was only mediocre, it was leagues better than the other two options that creeped her out just thinking about them.

  She picked Shifting Mind.

  There was a new pressure on her head and a warmth on her chest. Around her, the wind whirled and pulled. Everything shook. The trees behind her fell.

  Cass leapt to her feet, scrambling away, even as the wind pulled her toward the destruction.

  To her horror, the ground on that side of the camp collapsed, the edge racing toward her as the darkness ate up dirt and plants. It stopped a few feet from her campfire.

  Hesitantly, Cass took a step toward the edge. She hadn’t felt any fear standing hundreds of feet in the air on that suspension bridge a few days ago, but here in her soul well, her old fear of heights reared its head.

  Still, she made it to the edge. The soft dirt along the edge had become solid, black stone. From beneath it, a torrent of water poured down the cliffside.

  Rather than cliffs, it was closer to a chasm cutting through her soul well. Water poured down each side, pooling at the bottom before flowing off somewhere else, the water never rising or falling.

  It was familiar, yet she was still surprised to see it here. She was certain that her campground had not featured such a chasm.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Before she could question it, a familiar voice floated up the chasm.

  “Abyss and blood, what was that?” There, at the bottom of the chasm, standing up to his knees in the water, was a slender man, maybe an inch or two taller than Cass, but easily a quarter lighter. His body was all lean muscle under dusty purple skin. He looked up, and familiar gold eyes met hers.

  “Salos?” Cass asked.

  “Cass?” he replied. “What are you doing here?”

  “Isn’t this my space?” Cass asked.

  “Oh. Huh.” He looked around, confusion on his face. “One second.”

  He stepped into the waterfall below her, reappearing a few minutes later at the top, hauling himself over the stone lip.

  “Ah, that makes more sense,” he muttered.

  “What?” Cass asked.

  “Yes, this does appear to be your soul well,” he said. A smirk slid over his lips. “But I didn’t think you knew how to come and go as you pleased.”

  “Well, I don’t,” Cass admitted and then explained her recent predicament. For now, she left out the part with Alyx.

  “How do you get yourself in so much trouble in so little time?” Salos asked.

  They moved over to the fire pit. Cass sat back in her big camp chair while Salos perched on Robin’s stool.

  Cass shrugged. “Anyway, that’s enough about me. How are you feeling? You look more solid than the last time I saw you here and a lot less cat-ish than last I saw you at all.”

  Salos looked down at his hands. “Yes. It seems two portions of one’s soul does wonders for one’s self-image. And did you really expect me to picture myself as a cat?”

  Cass shrugged. “I don’t know how any of this stuff works.”

  “Well, it works off image. I don’t think of myself as a cat, so I am not.” He shook his head. “I think we’re getting sidetracked. I assume you were given a choice in upgrades for my necklace?”

  Cass nodded and shared the options and her pick.

  He grimaced at the options. “Oh. It looks like I can once again only thank you for your choice. Those sound…”

  “Absolutely awful,” Cass finished for him.

  He nodded. “I don’t think I would have woken up at all if you had chosen Fused Mind.”

  Cass nodded. “That’s what I thought too.”

  He shook his head. “What a terrifying artifact. I can’t help but wonder why it was designed this way. What was she trying to accomplish? Why did it end up in storage instead?”

  Huh. Cass hadn’t even considered that. Her relationship with Salos wasn’t how most demons worked from what she’d gathered—though how much she could trust those accounts was open for debate. It stood to reason it was the necklace that was different. But that just begged the question, why? “The System didn’t make it?”

  Salos shook his head. “I do not think so. At least, probably not. It is too man-made. The System likes gems. Natural treasures. Skills. Traits.

  “It isn’t impossible,” he allowed. “But objects like this are usually made by people and redistributed by the System. Especially given where you found it, the System said it came from somewhere specific, did it not?”

  “Some sort of Restricted Reward Pool, I think?” Cass said.

  Salos nodded. “That means it was probably in one of the locked stores we had in the Deep.”

  “Which means?” Cass asked.

  Salos sighed. “It means she did not intend for it to get out into the world.”

  Why had she made it? For what purpose would the goddess have intentionally hurt Salos like this? Alacrity had mentioned that she’d sliced Salos’s soul apart multiple times. Was this necklace just the prototype for something else? Or had her experiments with his soul taken her in a different direction after this first attempt?

  Cass changed the subject instead of poking any of that. “So, what’s up with the chasm?”

  Salos glanced over at it. “I think it is what remains of my soul well.”

  “Is that normal?” Cass asked. “For soul wells to fuse?”

  His lips pursed, still staring at it. “No. Not to my knowledge. Perhaps in this era of dragons and knights, this is common. But when I am from, it was one soul per soul well. There was certainly no fusing of them.”

  “Should we be worried about it?” Cass asked.

  He was still staring at the chasm. “It is probably fine. It just means that I have a little more influence in this space than I would have expected.”

  “That sounds like something I should worry about.”

  “You are welcome to try to stop it,” he said. It wasn’t a challenge. Rather, it was a resigned sigh. “Come on, you said you were in a magic circle with a feral dragon? You should wake up and make sure it isn’t biting your arm off.”

  “Wait, is time passing?” Cass asked. She’d just assumed things had paused in her soul well. That was what happened when she talked to Alacrity in her temple.

  “Yes, very much so.” Salos stood up and offered Cass a hand. “Come along now.”

  Cass grabbed it. “How do I get out of here again?”

  “I would have thought you’d know that, you’ve done it before.”

  She had, hadn’t she? The wind gusted around her, eager. Cass stepped onto it and rode it up.