14 — Stepping Through One month ter, te in the evening after a very long night, Daelus closed the doors to his bedchambers.

  He–and Sheam–had been doing very special work. The archeology expedition had borne fruit.

  Real solid information about the delegates, the Benefactors, the old world, was rarely written down and Daelus had never seen nor heard of an artifact from that time being recovered. They were supposed to hand it over to Grégoire, but they kept it.

  It was covered in writing. Sheam could read it. It was a story. The surface was a mess but the more they cleaned it the more they could piece together.

  They had been at it for five hours, deep into the night, Daelus cleaning and Sheam reading and transcribing. Soon their eyes could barely stay open and they decided it was time to come at it fresh at sun-up. They closed the museum office and headed home–Sheam and Daelus both.

  Sheam home, already in bed, asleep. She was always manifested these days, but her sleeping dramatically reduced the mental load required to be both selves at once. Lately, though, the load had felt less and less like one. Lately not being her felt more difficult.

  He would have emptied his pockets and began to strip out of the yers and yers of clothing, but something was wrong.

  It was that unmistakable smell, the one that was deeper than that, further into the brain. An entourage was nearby.

  He forced himself to not react. How he reacted depended on many things. A wrong move would be fatal.

  He listened. Together with the scent, he tried to get a sense of how they were moving.

  Some delegates could pop their entourage to and fro as if teleporting them, but that didn't seem to be happening. They felt and sounded solid. Consistent. They were moving room to room. Slowly making their way upstairs.

  Some delegates could project many entourage at once. It would be a swarm. This didn't feel like the case. It was a small number. Three at most. Whoever this was wasn’t doing anything fancy. They were careful.

  Some delegates knew the yout of Daelus' estate. If so, the entourage could be operating on simple instructions and running like automatons. Otherwise the delegate could be controlling one or even all three directly. Something in between was likely–one direct controlled, the other moving as automatons. There was no way to sense or hear this. It was an educated guess.

  Daelus moved. He had to get out. He wasn't an incompetent fighter, but no one would secretly send three entourage to a fellow delegate's house unless they were very lethal.

  The central stairs would be obvious and he sensed one was already coming up that way. There was the dumbwaiter but he wouldn't fit and the thing would colpse under his weight. There was a second stair, used by staff, that a fellow delegate likely wouldn't know about. He went for it.

  It felt empty. He descended. It led to the kitchen. He froze. His outfit was covered in decorative bits that clicked and ccked. They’d be able to hear him. The estate was quiet at night. He liked it that way, but at the moment it was going to be a problem.

  He felt something in the hall outside the kitchen. He went the other way. A second too te he remembered that this hall was connected to a side door leading to the garden. It was an escape route but it was also an entry. An assassin lunged.

  The bde bit. The entourage hadn't expected to find Dealus here; the attack was reflexive. The delegate wasn't in direct control. Daelus kicked. He grabbed a nearby broomstick. The delegate was aware by now, and would be assuming control. Daelus beat the thing with vicious determination until it de-manifested. Daelus knew an entourage couldn't be killed. But he knew more than anyone how much they could feel.

  He was too slow. The enemy delegate knew exactly where he was and he took too long defeating the entourage. The others were upon him, and he was now bleeding badly from the initial attack. Three others were now in the hall with Daelus. He had miscounted. He was forced to retreat, back the way he came, back upstairs.

  Once back upstairs, back in his chambers, there was no escape route. He could hear the three push against the door but then go quiet. They were not using brute force against the lock. He could hear them beginning to remove the hinges.

  There was the window. The drop would hurt enough to keep him from getting too far. He could try to manifest an entourage, a brand new one, to fight them off. But then–

  What about Sheam?

  I sat up bolt upright in my bed. I was safe in my apartment, alone, secure. I could see that the door was still deadbolted shut. But I was also still cornered in my chambers in my estate miles away.

  Daelus was afraid. He could feel his resolve giving way to terror any panic. He could feel the pain in his side and his vision going dark as blood spttered the floor.

  I knew what to do. It was my only option.

  I didn't want it to be like this though. I wanted to wait until I was ready. I wanted to feel safe when I did it. I didn't want it to be a matter of survival. But that choice was taken from me in an instant.

  In truth, there were other options. But I didn't want them. I wanted this.

  It wasn't supposed to be possible.

  I decided it was possible. And I'd do it. Right now.

  I filled my mind with surety that this was going to happen. I formed a clear and precise understanding of my goal. I filled myself, my real self, with the intentionality to complete the act. I didn't need to empty myself of doubt. Doubt was no longer conceivable. This was simply real.

  Daelus emptied himself of being. He put it all into Sheam. As he did so, he found there was nothing to give. She already had all that he was. She already was all that he was. She wasn't the entourage and he wasn't the delegate. He wasn't at all. She was all there was.

  The he that he wasn't didn't feel his body waste away. He wasn't there to feel it because he was not there at all. The act was so complete and absolute that it almost stretched back into time retroactively unmaking him. He was gone.

  When the assassins got the door off they found a pile of clothes. There was something in them. A matter that could have maybe been a body at some point. A residue. Whatever the material was, it was never Daelus. Because this entire time he had always been–

  SHEAM a tale long overdue in the telling

  by Dana Nightingale

  I felt the world pop around me as if there was somehow more world in the universe and the fabric of reality didn't quite know yet how to make it fit.

  It definitely wasn't my imagination.

  The bed I was sitting up in shattered. My clothes became a bst of tatters that embedded into the cracked in the cratered architecture all around me. Reality curmudgeonly objected to this addition but slowly settled down. I fell.

  I hit the broken floorboards. It hurt.

  I stood. Reality shuddered one more time, groaning, angry. It wasn't quite ready to accept what I had done to it. I froze, half expecting the air around me to suddenly become solid and crush me to dust.

  Nothing more happened.

  “We good?” I asked the air. I asked the physical reality around me. I asked the fucking universe. No reply came.

  “I'll take that as a yes.”

  I paused as I felt the danger pass and my emotions rolled through me as if very offended that I dared make them wait their turn. It came as a chill that rattled through my frame violently.

  He was gone.

  I couldn't even remember how it felt to be him.

  He was g o n e.

  I was only me.

  I colpsed, curled into myself, my feelings vomiting out as a sob. And then I was ughing. And then I was screaming with joy. I bounded off the floor and found the mirror in my washroom. It was cracked. I didn't care. I saw myself.

  I looked different. As fully as I had felt the projection to be perfect, an entourage was never as imperfect as a real human being always was. That was the difference, and it made me love what I saw even more.

  What I saw in the mirror was a real human being. Realer than real. I was the most real thing I had ever seen in my life.

  I ran my hands over my face. I rubbed and pulled and tugged at my skin all over my body, discovering it, all while daring reality to intervene and take this from me.

  It didn't dare.

  I jumped. I danced. I screamed and cried some more.

  Finally I returned to the mirror. There I was, as if was now the most normal thing in the world.

  “Fuck,” I said to my reflection in the broken mirror. “I don't actually own any real clothes.”