Dad stares down the hall at me, smiling, eyes heavy with stifled tears.

“I’m… hey, I’m really sorry it took so long to check in on you. There was just a lot of… well, it doesn’t matter why. I should’ve tried harder,” he says.

Why? Why? Why? WHY? my voice hisses into my ear, over and over and over.

“Anyway, how’ve you been?” He scoops up his fallen bag and glances over me, forcing a grin. “You look, uh… good! I like the new look. It’s cool. Is that weird to say? Can’t be cool if I’m saying it, right? Hope that doesn’t ruin anything for you, but I do really think–”

“What are you doing here?” I ask. My voice is too quiet to really cut him off or speak over him, but after a second, he does trail off.

“Eh? Ah…” Dad glances off to the side, staring at the floor. After a moment, he comes a little closer, his expression resolving into a pained half-smile. “Yeah, I guess I should’ve called first, shouldn’t I? Hope I’m not interrupting any plans, I just–”

“It’s been two months. We’ve talked as many times. Why am I only worth your time now?” I do my best to snarl.

He stops in his tracks, wincing as if I’d hit him. We stand there, frozen while the world keeps moving around us. My shadow seethes to my side, draping herself around my shoulder.

You could eat him, she whispers. You could tear him up and feed him to someone who matters, someone who shut up shut up shut UP could you quit wasting both our time spewing insane garbage you know no one would ever do?

Why not? If he only wants to be part of your life now, he literally can!

“Liadain?” A shaky hand touches my arm. “Is everything alright?” Noirin’s voice asks.

“Uh… Hi. I’m her dad. We’re fine. It’s just. Been a while,” Dad mutters.

Noirin’s eyes flicker in his direction, but quickly return to me.

“I’m okay,” I lie.

“Ah, I see. It’s nice to finally meet you, Mr. Shiel. I’ll leave you both to it,” Noirin says. She’s smiling politely as ever, but her voice sounds a little chilly to me. She raises a shaky hand and shuffles back to her seat.

“She seems nice,” Dad says meekly. “Glad to see you’ve made some new friends here.”

“She is,” I say, quieter than before. Noirin looks awful. Where did she even come from? When her useless body fails her for the last time, will her light feet be the last thing to go or will she hold onto them until her soul loses its grip on its shell and goes off to suffer wherever souls that aren’t important enough for Nha go?

“…Lia, listen, I really am sorry. I should’ve said something before I just showed up, and I should’ve been here a lot sooner. I know all that. Could we just… talk about it, just for a bit? Maybe somewhere a little less busy?”

Glancing around, it doesn’t seem like we’ve quite made a scene in the front hall. Noirin is still watching Dad with a look I can only imagine as disguised suspicion, and the nurse who waved him over is clearly taken aback by all this.

“Fine.” I step around him, keeping my eyes to the ground, and lead the way back to my room. While Dad looks around uncertainly and my shadow glares at him, I scoot Pearl’s nest aside, raise the back of my bed, and settle into it.

“Okay. Obviously you can see what I’ve been doing.” I wave a hand at my face, brushing a few hairs out of my eyes. “So…” Where’ve you been? What’s your excuse this time? What’s the fucking occasion? “Who told you?” I ask. That doesn’t sound much better, but I don’t really care. There’s no way he decided to pop back into my life for no particular reason.

Dad breaks eye contact, glancing at the wall with a guilty smile. “I saw your ad,” he says.

I pick up a pillow, give it a violent squeeze, and groan. “What made it my ad? I told them not to use pictures. I didn’t give them any pictures.”

Dad only smiles at that. “Yeah, well, when I heard there was a local Keeper called Ill Wind Liadain, then read that she was looking for ‘health donations’ and doing tarot for donors? Ciara was always the smart one, but even I can put a three-piece puzzle together.”

“Ugh. Right.” I should’ve seen this coming. Should’ve kept using the fake name. I was just so sick of tripping over my own stupid, pointless secrets. “Don’t use that title, I hate it.”

“Sure. Sorry,” Dad says. He frowns, scrunching up his brow in thought.

“What?” I ask.

“If you don’t like it, why don’t you just change it? Having a hard time coming up with a better one?”

“I can’t, because I didn’t pick it. It’s written on my soul.” I slump forward, stopping just short of burying my face in my pillow.

“No, I understand that, but your presence doesn’t have to define who you are or what you go by any more than… well, maybe a little more than your face. Still!” he says. I can’t remember the last time there was this much energy in his voice. It’s weird.

I sit about halfway up and look his way. “Can you do that? Wait, how do you even know what I’m talking about?”

“Sure. I don’t keep up with Keeper news as much as I used to, but I was… well, that’s what I was into at your age. I know at least how the basics work.” He gives me that sad half-smile again. “So I know that there are no rules about what a Keeper calls themselves, and that precedent’s on your side. Do you know Tancra? Star-Shattering Song?”

“From the war?”

“Yeah. The first Riman Keeper to publicly turn against the war. He went through three titles – one he didn’t like, one he chose to replace it, and finally that one, which came from Emergence, not quite based on either of the other two. So you could just as well grow into one you’re happier with, but until you do, no one would stop you from going by something else.”

“Oh. I… never thought of that,” I admit. I probably just assumed there was nothing for it, like everything else I hate about my magic, and moved on. “Wish I had before I started doing things in public.”

“Eh, you’ve done one thing in public, right? Shouldn’t be too late to change your mind.”

“I guess so.” Changing my name immediately after I announced myself to the world might make me look like kind of an idiot, but it’s a little late for that.

Dad shuffles in place uncomfortably. I huddle into my pillow, watching him through the corner of my eye.

“You could’ve said something sooner,” he finally says. His voice is gentle, but unsteady.

Why does everyone say that like it’s just the easiest thing in the world?

“I mean, it’s good news, isn’t it? We finally have something to celebrate!”

I can’t help it. I collapse into my pillow and laugh and laugh and choke and laugh.

“Lia?” Slow, heavy footsteps cross the room. “It is good news. Right?” Dad sets a hand on my shoulder – gingerly, barely-there, like he’s testing something that might burn his hand off. I can’t find the energy to shove him away.

“I still don’t know! I mean, it probably didn’t make anything worse that wasn’t terrible before, I think? Unless you count making a friend just in time for her to get eaten last week, or…” Or the idea that I’m turning into a story about dying forever and clinging to the edge of the void with scraps of vigor stolen from everyone else, or what it means for that story that death isn’t even a thing that’s real, or whether all this power will even help if I ever end up in the place I’ve always been hurtling toward, trapped forever in the void beyond life with a soul full of passengers who never shut up–

“Nevermind,” I mutter. “Not getting into that.” I shake myself out of my thoughts before I look up at him, scowling. “Honestly, I still don’t understand why you’re here.”

Dad flinches again. “I mean, if it’s not, that’s okay too. I know it’s something really big you’re going through, good or bad or both, and I wanted to… be there for it. For you,” he says. His shoulders sag as he speaks, like even he can immediately see how it sounds.If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

“If I needed someone to be there for me, why would I tell you?” I snap. “When was the last time you were there for, I don’t know, anything real?”

Dad grits his teeth. “If this is about the time I forgot to pick you up, I’m still really sorry, but–”

“You know what it’s about! Quit acting like it’s just one mistake you can fix right up!” Blood rushes to my head in a numbing, chilling current. Something in me wants to flare, to reach out and wrap him in myself and drown him in my frozen feelings. I do my best to bite that impulse down. “It’s every time I could’ve been dead and you left me alone in some recovery room for days! I wasn’t worth your time or trouble or pain, so you ignored me just like everyone else!”

“That isn’t… Lia, that’s not why…” Dad draws back into the door, opening and closing his mouth soundlessly. “What did you need me for? What could I have done to help?” he pleads. “You never even seemed to need anything I could do, so…”

“You never asked! You just left! And now you think, what, did you think I’d forget all that as soon as you heard I mattered now and decided to stroll back into my life?”

“That’s really not…” Dad goes silent. He slumps against the wall, looking listlessly down at the floor. “Nevermind. You’re right. It doesn’t really matter why I did any of that. It was wrong. It wasn’t fair to you. And I’m sorry. I’m…” He pauses for only a moment, his brow furrowed as if he had glanced down to see a knife in his gut. But it’s only a moment before he blinks and swallows the expression back down. “…So, so sorry.”

Dragging himself upright, Dad puts his bag down on my desk, moves my chair to the foot of my bed, and sits there, meeting my gaze with wet eyes. “I did see your event before it happened. I just, you know, thought it might be embarrassing for you if I showed up there all of a sudden.”

“I wasn’t exactly counting on your support. What’s your point?”

“Yeah, I’m sure you were real surprised not to see me around,” he says with a weak chuckle. “I’m only bringing it up because… listen, for all the stuff Ciara and I were into when we were kids, I can’t really know what it’s like for you. Of course I’d like to, however much you want to share, though I might’ve pretty much used up my good dadly advice about your situation with the title thing. But I really do want to help however I can. So…” He straightens his back and takes a deep breath, the way I do when my doctors are about to stick me with something. “If you need other people’s ‘health’ to do your new job, or just to be okay, you can use mine if you need it, alright? Feels like the least I can do after everything.”

My shadow cackles with delight.

“No,” I say. She shoots me a withering look.

A strange mix of relief and confusion washes over Dad’s face. “You sure? I mean, not that I was looking forward to it or anything, but I’m serious, if it’d help you–”

“No! There’s not some one magic thing you can do to make this okay! And… and even if I needed that, or wanted your help… you think it isn’t hard enough having to hurt random strangers I’ll never see again?”

Dad looks away. He puts a hand to his chin, clenching his teeth. Finally, he nods thoughtfully, smiling faintly through a steady trickle of tears. “Yeah. That’s fair,” he says.

After another long stretch of uneasy silence, he stands up. “I brought you some things. And hey, they aren’t even really from me, so if you don’t want anything to do with me, I just hope they do more for you than I have.” He takes a big stack of books out of his bag and sets them on my desk. I squint, glancing over their spines.

“Parenting After the Promise,” I say flatly.

“Uh, not that one. That one’s mine.” He stuffs it back into the bag in a rush, as if I’d caught him with something embarrassing. “The rest are the good stuff. Before we get into that, I should tell you I’m technically not sure if I’m supposed to have them, so, you know… this can be our little secret, okay? Or if it can’t, just use that Keeper prerogative to look out for your ol’ dad,” he says with a nervous laugh.

“Supposed to? Why not? They’re just books.”

“They were your mom’s,” he says quietly, as if that explains anything.

“Okay? Did she have a secret shelf for books on astrology or something?”

“Eh? N-no,” Dad says. But he pauses for a moment, frowning with uncertainty. “Well, no, I don’t think so. You’re on the right track, though. You know she studied magic, right?”

“Mhm.” Mom was some kind of academic who worked for the Church. Dad always had a hard time talking about her in too much depth, and I never really cared enough to push him, but there’s only so many things that can mean.

“I don’t think I’ve ever told you just how into it she was. See, when you make it in some of those fields, you come to a point where things get weird. Weird enough that they don’t want the experts sharing everything they know in public. Maybe some of what they’re working on would scare us normal people, or maybe it somehow wouldn’t be safe to know at all if you come at it with the wrong mindset. I don’t know if you’ve run into any of that yet, but I’m sure you get where I’m going.”

I nod. I probably knew something like this even before I started seeing what it means to die. Aisling’s talk about “infohazards.” Dr. Cantillon’s warning to Dr. Hines that he simply couldn’t be a normal doctor anymore if he knew the things she did.

“Basically, if the people in the know like what you’re doing, they’ll offer to read you in and share their work with you, long as you agree to keep all the secrets. Ciara made it there pretty quickly. I don’t think she was even supposed to talk to me about what she was doing after that, but, well… here we are. We always talked about everything.”

Dad drifts off for a bit, visibly lost in thought, before he looks back at the books. “These are some work books she brought home. Not sure if she was really supposed to take them out and leave them around, but, well, no one’s ever come looking for them.”

He gives the pile a few firm pats, and I stand, scooting past him to take a closer look. It’s a tall stack of thick hardbacks. The only cover I can see is almost completely unadorned, just a title on a dark background: On the Violability of the Soul. The titles on their spines are all embossed in a similar style, and they alternate between ominously clinical and vaguely poetic: The Eggs in the Sky. The Fading: Human Mortality Before the Fourth Scourge. Channeling Our Nightmares. Everlasting Ribbons.

“What are these?” I ask. “I mean, what are they about?”

“Her specialty was things that you can’t do with magic, as far as we know – the big no-go zones like precognition, but smaller, stranger exceptions too. She wanted to know why they were out of bounds and if there were ways to push at those boundaries, things we just couldn’t do yet because we haven’t figured out how. Honestly, though? I didn’t understand most of the stuff in here. Take that one on top. I think it was about mind control? How it’s impossible but also it happens all the time? Didn’t get it at all.”

The same way you can die and still suffer forever, if I had to guess. Magic seems to like making strict definitions of anything into incoherent soup.

“Well, guess that’s why Ciara was in the secret club and I’m in Sea security.” He scratches the back of his head, smiling sheepishly. Then he reaches into the bag, pulls out a small stack of unmarked black notebooks with a few sheaves of printed paper tucked between them, and sets them next to the pile. “Oh, there’s some of her journals, too.” Dad drifts off for a bit, visibly lost in thought. “Some of them are in some kind of shorthand or cipher, and I can’t help you too much with those, but… well, you’re a smart girl. You’ll figure it all out.”

“Maybe. If I can’t, I do have a friend who’s good at this sort of thing. Um… thank you, for these.” I doubt I’ll open these books up and stumble into the answers to all my problems, but they do sound like the sort of thing that might at least connect to my big horrible questions.

“Don’t mention it. I just thought it’d be something nice for you to have. Thought you’d get more out of this stuff than I did.” Dad wipes his eyes and smiles to himself. “You remind me so much of her, you know?”

“Mm.” I did see Mom not too long ago, in the closest thing to the flesh I ever will. It was just a monster trying to bludgeon me with memories I barely even have, but it was plenty to really see the resemblance.

…Less so now than then. I glance down at the shimmery grey veins on the back of my hand.

“It’s not just seeing her in you. It’s so many of the things you like – most of your favorite books growing up came from her collection, you know? And the way you took to so much of her old occult stuff. And how much you hate letting anyone think there’s anything wrong with you. You would’ve liked her. Plus she knew enough that she’d have something helpful to say right now. She would’ve handled all this much better than I did.”

“How do you know? You barely even tried,” I say.

“Yeah. I should’ve done more, I know. I… I should’ve done everything I could’ve. I just… I couldn’t.” He trails off, blinking rapidly.

“It was like watching her die again,” he almost whispers. “Sorry, I… I know how it sounds. But… that’s why.”

I don’t say anything. I don’t have anything to say. I don’t understand love. I’ve never had anyone or anything that matters more to me than myself.

But if I did, and I lost them, and all I had left of them was some distorted echo wasting away just like they did… I don’t think I’d do any better than he has.

“She would’ve been so proud of you,” he says, shutting his shimmering eyes as he smiles a little wider.

What? Why? What have I ever done but scare people away and hurt people to feed myself and kill monsters who might not even deserve it any more than I do? And even if she would, what do I care? I never knew her. She’s dead. Or she’s… whatever passes for dead, I don’t know. In the sea, if that’s where normal people go. Is it? Could she be haunting us right now? Would it change anything if she was?

I obviously don’t say any of that. I just ask “Would she?”

“Yeah. I’m sure of it,” he insists. “You know, we were both a little down when we left the Promise range, but I think what Ciara really always wanted was to be one of those characters in her books who could change the world just with what they know. The wise old mages delving through their libraries for the secrets of the universe. That series about the girl who discovered magic in a world where it was hidden from everyone was her favorite. But in the real world, learning can only ever get you so far, right? She’d have been so happy to see you going places we never could. To teach you everything she knew until she started learning from you firsthand. She’d have loved being your mom.” He chokes on the last words.

“I’m sorry you’re stuck with me instead,” he says, and with a blink, the tears he’s been struggling to hold back start to pour out.

But I still don’t believe him.

I think he believes what he’s saying, and I don’t think he’s saying anything wrong or making anything worse. It’s just that…

If Mom and I were really so alike, and she really loved magic enough to make it her life without ever being able to use it? If I knew someone who was exactly like me, only she had something I wanted more than anything and couldn’t have…

I’d hate her. I’d hate her so much. Sitting in my hospital bed and hearing about her living the life I’d never have would be torture. All I’d want to do with her is steal that missing thing for myself. And if I couldn’t?

Tear her open. Crawl into her heart. Sew yourself in and do your best to forget that you were ever anyone else. Live happily there until you find the next thing that isn’t enough.

It doesn’t really matter, though, does it? She’s gone, at least in every way that counts, and Dad’s still here. He isn’t a great dad, but I’m not a great anything, and he’s here.

Maybe that’s worth a little more than nothing.

I draw a tiny breath of life to steady myself, set my cane down, and hug him, leaning into his chest while he sobs.