>>5828322You shared a glance with Izirna, who quickly rummaged in her pack and produced a notebook. However, no sooner had she taken it out, and a pencil tow rite, than a winged fey snatched them both up.
“Hey! Give that back!” she protested.
“This is something I will share with you, but it is NOT for everyone,” the spriggan warned you both. “There are secrets that are meant to REMAIN secret… Things that mortals were not meant to know.”
“But we NEED to know,” Izzy protested. “What I—what we’re trying to do—”
“Is wrong,” the spriggan said. “You MUST stop now.”
“Why?” you asked quietly.
“What you are doing threatens a delicate balance,” the spriggan told you. “Our parents and yours… And even the Dark Ones… They struck a deal long ago. To give a soul to something without one would break that bargain. It might break EVERYTHING. It is why the summoning of elementals is a dangerous thing, and why the... MYSTERY of the goblinkin troubles even those in Heaven."
The jackalopes to either side of you trembled at the terrible tone of the old tree-spirit, who reached out to scoop them up. You felt yourself trembling as well, though you couldn’t tell if it was with fear or with excitement. It was a lot to take in, but you understood intuitively that THIS was what you were missing: that with the combination of magic, and biology, and the addition of INTENT…
You could create life. Not merely duplicate it, or transfigure and change it, or imitate it. You could CREATE A SOUL.
You also now understood that it was forbidden to do so… And dangerous, dangerous on a level you could scarcely comprehend.
After that revelation, the levity of the evening gradually returned… But you, yourself, were alien to it. Your mind was far away, whirling with possibilities. Your heart was torn between conflicting feelings and instincts. Only one other being here could understand… And so she found you, too wall-flowers on a dancefloor without walls, standing next to the maple, beside the carved names of unknown lovers.
“Hi,” Izzy said, quietly.
“Hey,” you replied.
You both lapsed into silence.
“So,” she said, “are you going to do it?”
“Do what?” you asked, but it was a perfunctory question—performative. You both knew what she was asking.
She turned to you, her pupils slits, her eyes almost aglow in the gloom.
“Are you going to create life?” she asked.
Izirina Henzler smiled again—a different smile from the innocent one earlier, a smile you had only seen on her face once before, in the Mirror Maze, when she declared her intent to transcend the material world and her own flawed, apparently ‘tainted’ body.
“Are you going to play god?”
>Yes>No>Write-in 