I could feel Grunkle trying to take over my memory palace, tendrils reaching out and weaving through everything. I was sure that if I'd been anyone else, it would have been his instantly; only the fortifications I'd put in place and then strengthened through working with Betokat were slowing him down, and even then he'd made significant progress in that first moment before I was fighting back. Now that my attention was on him he was advancing at a crawl, but he shouldn't have been able to do even that.

The sensation of roots growing all through my personal domain was disturbing, but also frustrating because they felt extremely real and physical and yet didn't seem to actually exist; I wanted to push them out to the borders of my domain and then expel them, but I couldn't figure out how to apply any kind of force to something that was just a feeling. Much about my memory palace was defined by my own thoughts, but no matter how hard I imagined getting him out nothing was happening.

With two minds, and a limited amount that I could put towards fighting Grunkle until I figured out what the fuck I was supposed to do, it wasn't going to hurt anything to try talking to him. Even if he couldn't be reasoned with, it could give me an opening to try and just murder him. Normally I would have attacked the second he showed his face - well, giant eyeball - but he looked and felt very solid and I was worried that even my ghost would just be torn apart like tissue paper.

I smiled, as if he wasn't in the middle of trying to murder me. "Grunkle! We looked for you, we waited nearby and everything, but with Greg attacking - "

He cut me off with a gesture. "'Who is Grunkle', I asked. Do you remember what you said? A con artist body snatcher. I mean, you're not wrong - I'm both of those things - but I would have thought I'd earned a few more words in there. But no, you said you wouldn't lose any sleep over me. Well, that's fine. I won't loose sleep over this."

"Oh, fuck you," I said, immediately giving up on being friendly, "you've taken over countless people, and I don't believe for an instant you gave a shit about them. When your host and attendants got killed, your only concern was getting out of there with your money."

He shrugged. "You humans used to worship my family, you know that? They'd beg to be hosts. Actual begging, down on their knees. I was denied that. By the time I came around, the Twelve Families had fractured and we'd abandoned Zirkolo. We still had our domain in Enimondoa, but it was just me and my parent and their parent. No branches. We were cowering like animals, when we should have had a whole city full of servants. It was what I was owed."

The part of me not listening to him rant had come up with an idea; if the tendrils of his will weren't solid enough for me to push on, why couldn't I make them solid? I shifted my focus to giving them form, and these twisted black veins appeared all around the room that mind was in. I then imagined them being shifted away, and amazingly it seemed to be working.

Grunkle tilted his... head? Eye? But before he could comment on me fighting back, I tried to pull him back into conversation. "So you decided to run off to the prime plane and get your own followers?"

He laughed. "No, I had bigger plans. One of the queens of the Sahrger had gained control over another struglling family of spirits, and it made the Clockmaker so fucking pissed. He was jealous like you wouldn't believe, and had no way of doing anything about it. So I sold out my family's biggest detractor, gave him a chance to try and get a spot. My parent found out, though, and despite what it would have done for us they put a fucking bounty on my head. Ruined the deal with the Clockmaker, too.

"And for what? So they could waste away in some old mansion with no servants, no power, no allies, no family? They're dead now, all of them - or all the ones I know of - and I still can't go back without someone trying to kill me. I had to run to the fucking Clockmaker, and let him do experiments on me. Experiments! The fucking humiliation of it all. And then that comes back to me too, my bastard child sweeping in and ruining everything again so I end up with you losers."

Whoa there. "Are you saying Tindelus is your fucking kid?"

"Not literally. You'd be surprised how parentage works with some of the families, but even under the broadest definitions... no. The technique, though? That's what he wanted to learn. I showed him I could get access to people's Dumines after I took them over, and he wanted to... I don't know, use it in an emergency if his people revolted. He was a paranoid son of a bitch, though not the right kind of paranoid. He wasn't for one second worried that he'd fuck things up himself, he was just scared of things like demons - if those even really exist."

I was creating an ever-increasing zone that was clear of Grunkle's creeping tendrils, but the further I pushed them towards the edge of my domain the harder it got - and meanwhile more were still spreading from further away. He clearly sensed what my other mind was doing, and shook his head at me.

"Uh-uh, kid. It's not going to work. Just let it happen, it's easier that way." He was walking closer, and as did he lifted a hand. Grunkle wasn't wearing a robe so much as he was a robe, and his hand was just an extension of that black fabric-like substance... but the long fingers ended in sharp claws.

Okay, fuck this shit.

I darted forward and jabbed at his stupid giant eyeball, ghost-hand positioned not in a full fist but more to make a knuckle strike. He tried to swipe at me but I parried with my left arm as my hand violently dented his eye in, then I ducked out of his reach before he could retaliate. He was cursing, clearly in pain, but while I managed to not show it I wasn't doing so great either; both the parry and the attack had felt like I was going against a brick wall.

I was right that he was more substantive than my ghost, but also it wasn't as big a gap as I feared and I was clearly the better fighter. There was one more thing I had to check - I started throwing knives at him, a new one appearing every time the previous one was thrown, but while they annoyed him it didn't look like I was doing any damage; that made sense, they were less real than my ghost, just being baseline ephemeral matter from Ematse.

Okay, so it was hand-to-hand combat with my ghost or nothing. I could keep my other mind working on slowing or reversing his progress, but I absolutely couldn't allow it to be in the same room as him lest he destroy it in one hit. Even if I was winning I would be hurting myself, though, and I wasn't really sure how much abuse my ghost could take before the damage actually meant something. It felt like it would take a lot, probably, but I had no way to gauge it. The best plan would be to choose my attacks wisely, and be really conservative about it. Don't block hits, dodge them. Don't trade blows. I was better than him at fighting, I was sure of it.

I charged, but jumped back at the last second without making contact so he'd miss as he counter-attacked. And then, with him already committed to swinging, I grabbed his arm and threw him. Grunkle crashed through the wall and then the floor, but stopped himself short of flying out of my domain. It was dramatic as fuck, and if there had been any justice he would have been a bloody wreck, but again it was the ephemeral matter of the memory palace that was actually hitting him, so it didn't do much. Shit.

"You're good," he said, "but I'm already inside your body. It's over. Man, you have a fucked up lutore, you know that? It's fucking huge, first of all, but it also... I can't figure out what the hell is going on with the layers. There should be the mana core, to make your life mana, and a layer for contracts and bonds, and a layer for inscriptions of power, and a layer for planar imprints... but that's all just jumbled up. No near, medium, and far influence layers either. All nine layers are just mushed together, how does that even happen? And how fucking old are you? Any normal human, it would take the better part of a Grand Cycle to grow your lutore this big."

I dropped on him from above and dug my nails into his head, before launching myself away by kicking off his back - nails dragging through him as I tore free. He howled and swung wildly at me, but didn't manage to connect. "Motherfucker!" He yelled. "You know, I was going to cocoon you up real nice, maybe give you your body back some day. But now? Now I'm going to drain you down to a little scrap of mindless agony. Your mind will be like an itchfly you find twitching in the bottom of a cup. Just this pathetic, flimsy thing that wishes it was already dead."

I started summoning up a copy of the jungle that Katrin, Errod, and I had all trained in. I had to hope that he was still somewhat limited in what he could sense. "Sorry, you want me to... what, thank you? For the kind offer of being imprisoned by you?"

"Yes!" He yelled. "Did you not hear that whole rant about being worshiped a minute ago? People would have killed for this, once. Instead, I had to sit there and let you fuck everything up for me. You lost me my money, stole my airship, yelled at me for recruiting followers from the workers you hired..."

Sneaking between trees, I jumped out and swung a branch at him. Halfway through its arc I let go and darted closer; he blocked the ineffective blow on reflex, allowing me to get past his guard. In one motion, I grabbed the front of his robes - or his body, whatever it was - and pulled down as I swung my other fist upwards. His descending head met my rising uppercut and I felt something tear inside him... and damn near ripped my own arm off. Fuck.

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I was pretty sure it hurt him more than it hurt me, since I could feel his control on the tendrils weaken, but all things considered the claw attack I'd done before seemed to be the best option; less damage to Grunkle, but almost none to me. In that split second he was staggered my mind made some serious progress shoving them to the edges; no matter what I tried I couldn't expel them entirely, but it still felt better to have them pushed to the boundary of my domain.

As I worked, I felt something... wrong. The shape of my domain wasn't right, there was a strange bulge at one end. As my mind crept closer to the anomaly, I circled my ghost around back into the established rooms. Grunkle was obliterating the jungle with sweeps of his hand, searching for me.

"You can't blame me for the airship," I said, attempting to keep him as far from my mind as possible, "that thing didn't even work until I got there and then you said you wanted to just sell it."

"It was a loan, or... well, we pawned it. But Poicelria promised, she said the last of our line would get it back. And since Poicelria's promises were burned into the fabric of reality, that means somehow, somewhere, there's another member of my family hiding out in the world - because I can't fucking use it! Except now I can, can't I? Because it works for you, and I've got your body now. Hell, maybe that's what she meant! Maybe those fuckers are all dead, and it was always my destiny to take you over. I'm going to find an Usmun'kiti and fly that fucker back to... wait, shit, I didn't get the mana battery. Fuck. Well, that's a problem for tomorrow."

He crossed into the room behind me, and stopped. I risked a glance, hoping to find him distracted and vulnerable, but he was just staring at my recreation of the strange things from my vision - in particular, the statue with gears tacked onto it like a cheap steampunk prop. "Speaking of Poicelria, why do you have a statue of her? And why does it have this clockwork shit in it? You're a strange kid."

I managed to make a copy of me, running at him from the other side. It wasn't an oydirme or anything, so it wasn't moving quite right, but it was enough to make him turn and allow me to once again dig my nails in and yank backwards, tearing long furrows in the back of Grunkle's stupid eye. As before, I immediately bolted away rather than risk getting hit by him.

"Fucking bitch! Well, I guess I have to give you credit for fighting back," he said, "not like that Tony guy. Nothing home, no mind or soul or anything. Pathetic little lutore, like cramming myself into a cupboard, but I still got his memories. You know, when I told him to break the fucking jar I was in on that shelf and eat me he just did it? No questions asked.

"I'm terrible at putting the whammy on someone while I'm in a host, but typically if I'm just an eye I can make people pop me in. Not you, you didn't even consider it. I knew right away you had some sort of thought magic. But with husks? Well, they're immune to most mental attacks but for the others they just roll over. Thing is... mine is the type they should be immune to.

"On top of that, husks are basically useless to me - I can't implant properly. But this Tony guy, not only did he immediately do what I asked, but that little pathetic bit of lutore gave me an opening. I'm pretty sure I could just take over Earth, walk right up to the leader of any nation or religion and tell them to hand me their body. And I just might, once I get some mana batteries. I'll be the emperor of a whole fucking planet, with more people than I thought could even exist."

I did the same trick again, but this time I sent two fakes at him before attacking. I didn't get as good of a hit in, but it was still progress. "Greg would just kill you, dumbass. And you can't stay away from Earth either, because if you don't let me do my thing the whole fucking world is going to end."

"Bullshit," he said, "everyone knows that at each Grand Alignment there's like five reasons people are yelling that the world is going to end. It never happens. But also, let's see how Greg deals with me dropping a bomb on him. I don't think a little magic will save him from something designed for Earth warfare. You went in there with guns and swords, I'm going to use - what are they called, air strikes or something. I'll figure it out when I'm in charge of the army."

I had to admit he was probably right. And if there was fallout, he could just switch hosts. Speaking of... "What happens to the old host when you switch?"

He laughed. "Worried about your boy Tony? You should be. I re-wire the whole brain while I'm in there, and when I leave it's just a fucking hole in their head. It's survivable, with a good healer, but I left Tony back there somewhere unconscious; even if the gaping hole in his skull doesn't directly kill him, some creature will find and eat him pretty fast."

I pushed aside concern for Tony, there wasn't anything I could do for him right now. Instead, I was focused on him saying Tony was 'back there somewhere'. That implied my body was already walking - where the fuck was he taking me? I couldn't manage to pull up divination for some reason, nor could I reach out to human Calliope. I was sealed in here.

My mind found the odd spot, and... it was like a tumor on my domain, some sort of extra room that bulged out from the otherwise spherical space like a hernia. There was some sort of barrier, but I just kept pushing and finally managed to break through... and suddenly I was standing in a small but comfortable room covered in layers and layers of carpets and thick with hanging silks. Huh.

Back near my ghost, Grunkle perked up. "Hey! Looks like some other part of you just came over for a visit! Bad news, that's my world. If you think I'm scary in your domain, you're going to love what I can do in my own. That part of you is trapped for good, kid."

I charged at him again, not bothering with the fake - I assumed he'd think that the first attack was a decoy again. He did not. A clawed hand lashed out and grabbed me by the throat, just barely hanging on as I kicked wildly at him. Fuck. I clawed at his wrist, but while it was clearly hurting him it wasn't doing enough.

Grunkle began to squeeze my throat. I tried to remind myself that I didn't need to breathe since this wasn't my physical body, but it didn't really matter; not only because some sort of power of suggestion thing was strongly making me think I was suffocating, but also because I knew if he just kept squeezing eventually my head would pop clean off and I'd die. With my other mind trapped, he didn't need this one. He might not need either, once he was established, but it sounded like he needed something to keep my domain propped up.

Wait. I had an idea. It was probably terrible, and it required me doing more than one thing that I'd never done before, but it was as good as I was going to get.

Step one, buy time by trying to stop Grunkle in a way that almost certainly wasn't going to work: templating him. When I'd done it to Betokat, I wasn't turning an actual spirit into an inanimate object - I was just pulling the information about Betokat out of it and leaving a blank oydirme behind. This would be very, very different.

I felt Grunkle's muscles lock up, and the pressure on my neck stopped getting worse. "What... are you doing to me?" he asked, sounding strained. I didn't answer. For a moment I thought it might actually work, and in fact I suddenly felt certain it could if he would just cooperate, but of course he was fighting it and so the best I could do was make him all stiff and uncomfortable.

Good enough. Step two: switch the templating to something external to Grunkle, specifically those fucking roots or tendrils or whatever that he was enveloping my domain with. This was, in a way, a callback to how I got past my Dumines when they weren't working; put all the pressure in one spot, then attack somewhere else.

And it worked. I felt them all seize up and vanish, locking into a tasteful if creepy sculpture that looked like a pitch-black tumbleweed. I knew Grunkle would immediately take control again, but without any kind of pause I went for steps three and four. I had to do them ridiculously quickly, since this was going to be an extremely brief window of being able to access the outside world.

Step three relied on a longshot, one that part of me hoped wouldn't even work. If it worked it might save me, but it would be further evidence that fate was fucking with me; that this whole chain of events was just to put me in a position where I would do this. I ducked into my view of my Dumines and slammed that fragment of magical code Glaistig had left in me into place.

I felt that force that controlled the inscriptions on my lutore take notice. Last time, it had given me that message that I translated as "this build is missing a key Perception component due to biological incompatibility" but I knew what the problem was - I couldn't think properly in four dimensions. Well, motherfucker, now I had another eye wired into my brain. Would that help? Hell if I knew, it all depended on what changes Grunkle was making up there. But I was willing to gamble on it.

There was no error this time, although it immediately formed a framework that linked back to my Perception gift as if it was adding an adapter or something. Without even trying to understand what it was doing I accepted. I had to just trust that it understood what I was going for and had hijacked my new brain modification to get me the ability I was asking for.

The world shifted, and I could see my domain in a new way. I'd been able to feel where the edges and center were before, but now... now it was different. The center was almost a whole axis, somehow, stretching off into the past and future; I also had this sensation that it was curved, like the cycle of the planes coming into and out of alignment formed some massive spiraling shape that I could only see some tiny fraction of.

Grunkle grabbed his head with his free hand. "Hey! Let go of that!"

Huh. I wasn't sure what that was about - presumably he could somehow feel that I was making use of his eye in a roundabout way? It didn't matter, I had to finish step four. With the little bit of control I could muster before Grunkle re-wrapped my domain and sealed me away from my body and Dumines, I spun out a fate thread that linked my mind... to the center of Grunkle's little mini domain.

The tendrils were spreading again, but it was too late. I pulled, as hard as I could, and used an ability I hadn't needed since the day I unlocked my gifts. I merged Grunkle's domain with mine, the way I'd merged the layers of my lutore. The centers of them drifted closer, and I remembered the feeling of temporarily binding two planes together back in the Temple of Convergence.

One more thread of fate, connecting the two centers and merging them into one, as Grunkle dropped me in shock and backed away. "What... what's happening? What the fuck is happening?"

"I ate your motherfucking domain, asshole."

He was shaking, clutching at his head. "No. No. That's not possible. That's... that's me! You can't, it's not... what the fuck are you?"

I templated the tendrils again, finding it much easier this time, and regained control of my body. I lifted up great-grandma's old iron scissors, my ancestral blade, and located the tiny thread coming from my new third eye. That was the last thing connecting the eye to Grunkle's wider consciousness he'd projected to my domain in Ematse. Burning mana in a way I didn't even fully understand, I positioned the blades on either side of that yellow-orange thread.

It just... felt right. I wouldn't be bound. I wouldn't be captured. I wouldn't be prevented from running free. Anyone that tried would die, even if that included fate. I closed the scissors, and Grunkle screamed one last time as the thread was severed. He seemed to shrivel, losing substance, until he was just a wretched little scrap - a twitching, flimsy thing that I could grind to dust under my foot.

Which I did.

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