On Sevenday I went to Skydown without Nathan. As far as I'm concerned he has lost teleportation privileges. I left word with Vancy that if she saw him in the front of the building waiting for me, that he should make his own arrangements for church services.

  Sure it may read as a petty slight. But more and more I'm realizing that whenever I reach out to him or extend him an opportunity, I wind up being worse off for it and he seems to benefit at my expense. And the more he sees me aware of that, the more mask-off he gets about it. At first it was small subtle things, like using me to run interference against Elica on Lachel's behalf, or pull Yheta away from him and Filly. Or giving him advice how to help Kurumi's student president election. But as he saw me getting wise to his tricks, he did not try to scale down and drop the pressure, he instead went all-in to burn all the good will he had left with me to make sure he got every benefit he possibly could.

  So he does not get any more favors. Not a friendly reach, not a common courtesy. And not a ride to church. He's already found enough ways to use that as a method to exploit me.

  In Skydown, I was all smiles and laughter. I was still riding high from a highly successful social-calendar event last night, the congratulation party for the new president of the planning committee for the autumn festival was a smash hit. I did not need to do any damn thing at all to impress anyone, I did not need to fence words with anyone, there was no shouting or fist-fighting, no faction battles, I did not need to drag anyone away to cool off, I did not need to justify my life choices to anyone. I just sat still near the balcony doors on a cushioned bench and let an army of ladies that reminded me of my mother the duchess all fawn over me and fuss over me and talk about the most ordinary, low-stress subjects of all.

  Overnight I worked on writing out my music, and practiced operating my body without fully re-inhabiting it. I awoke feeling surprisingly refreshed, and now I was back among friends and practically-family. The man who used to be our gardener and would threaten to tan my hide for running through his boxwoods was now treating me like a favorite niece, that blend of comfortable familiarity and nostalgic mirage that turned every memory into a good memory. The rest of the village had a similar impression of me, the charming mascot that was taken away by unwelcome intruders but now is back to at least remind everyone of all the smiles and songs of the good old days.

  I had an interesting blend of conversations throughout- sometimes I would sit with serious-faced farmers who wanted to know what was being done about this blight that was messing up all the crop sales across the region. Sometimes I would gather round eager rows of children that wanted to know all about magic and monsters. Or standing in the sunny plaza with women who were wistful they had never had a chance to visit the city and the society. I chatted politics, violence, and etiquette in turn, and found I was a big hit pretty much everywhere I went.

  And I was shocked, honestly, that not a single one of them ever asked me why Nathan wasn't here with me. I really wanted to ask them why, I kept fighting back the urge to say "why are none of you surprised that he's not here, what do you know, what have you already noticed before I noticed it"... but there was no way to do that without dragging the question into the open, and I'd have to say out loud why it is that he's not here, why I chose not to bring him. And I'm not willing to do that on this Sevenday.

  I did not bring any adventurers to Skydown when I came from the Final Form Tavern. There were almost no berries here, the locals were warned in time. But I did bring more than the fair share of adventurers to towns near here to make sure that none of the monsters further afield would travel in this direction. So while nobody here had seen any of the mana warriors or magisters that were rooting out and destroying blight-frights, there were rumors aplenty. Almost anyone whose business took them to the nearby towns and villages would come back with a story they had heard while they were out, of a wildly-garbed madcap hewing through rows of decaying scarecrows or using fire magic to blast apart a writhing gelatinous mass.

  So, they were well aware that the area was becoming dangerous and that things were afoot. They also knew that I was about and keeping an eye on them, warning them. When I confessed that I had ferried adventurers in, one skinny old man had cackled and spoken for them all. "Ah-ha! I knew it! I knew you was the guardian angel keepin' us safe!"

  I could really, really get used to that. I don't need the adoration of many, but I would like to keep people safe. And a "good job" or a "thank you" would not go amiss. I'm like most people in that way, I'll go to remarkable lengths for a bit of heartfelt gratitude. There are few people that won't do you a great favor if they think you'd really appreciate it.

  But even without that... even if nobody called me a guardian angel, I'd still enjoy doing it. And this is how I do it. I don't have years of experience finding monsters in the wild, tracking them and finding where they hide, avoiding their ambushes. Monsters tend to be canny, and their lairs tend to be well-concealed. But an expert monster hunter can look over a map, and jab at a spot that has all the right conditions. I'm not nearly ready to try that, or to fight these things in the wild of the world. But I can run logistics and transportation.

  Yeah I've got some kind of divide-by-zero weapon that destroys everything. But that's not the same thing as being good at fighting, and I am not.

  So that's why I brought the people that are. And word is getting around. And the residents of Skydown are tickled pink to find out that I was involved. Here at least I'm the good guy, and it's not any more complicated than that. Frankly, I like having that.

  The doors were thrown open, and I walked arm-in-arm with old friends up to the church, where I greeted the deacons, wished the preacher well, and took a place near the front so that anyone I did not chat with outside would at least pass by my seat so I could get a momentary handclasp or a brush of fingertips and a passing smile. Sometimes it doesn't need to be a heartfelt conversation. Sometimes just a passing moment of "I'm happy to see you, and I'm glad that you're happy to see me" is all it takes to establish genuine human connection.

  Most of the people today needed a message about perseverance and strength, and that was what they got. For most of the congregation, this was a lesson about dealing with the economic hard times that would be brought on by this embargo. Or perhaps about deadly attacks by monsters. They had plenty of very straightforward adversities to deal with, very obvious and apparent difficulties that did not need much metaphor or allegory to really understand.

  I on the other hand was hitting the same message at a more symbolic level.

  My perseverance was not a struggle against monsters or hostile markets. I was not struggling against revenue slumps or the ongoing worry of whether my family would starve in the winter. My strength was not against those battles. Instead, I was pushing against many fights that were more nebulous. Opinion, belief, preference. Opportunity, logistics, timing. Destiny, agency, intention. How much of myself would I compromise to overcome these challenges? How would I navigate the secrets and lies that were laid out like a maze before me?

  Sevenday makes me maudlin, and maybe a little melodramatic.

  But, it did give me plenty to think about. That I would need personal resilience and tenacity. To dig in when things weren't easy. And that the people around me were fighting hard and counting on me to do my part.

  I thanked the preacher for his wise and well-chosen words, and then I stopped at the public house for brunch with the locals. When I was a child, I was the strange and too-serious girl that people were sometimes charmed by and sometimes unnerved by. Growing to an adolescent has not really changed the ratio of charmed-to-unnerved. But when rumors spread of monsters in the meadows and undead in the uplands, suddenly the too-sad too-serious girl fit in a lot better.

  For a decade they had known the rumors about the Duke's daughter who knew too much and saw too much. Rumors had trickled out bit by bit about my prophetic visions. After all, it's not like I ever swore anyone to secrecy. Word was always going to get out. And so for a decade people had been idly wondering what it was that I had seen. I think that was a large part of the question that unnerved them: it's not about me, it's about the unknown future that I represented. And now that disaster and tragedy is walking in the open... well, obviously that's bad news. Obviously that's a terrible thing to happen. But it does mean that my stock goes up relative to the rest of the disaster.

  As far as Meadowtam was convinced, these Guild commandos and conjurers that were fighting the monsters were "Lady Natalie's adventurers". Before the Duke had even made a formal declaration or started ordering troops mobilized out of reserves, his daughter had already brought in cadres of creature-killers.

  This was the warmest reception I had ever gotten at a pub. People might be loyal to the local gentry, proud of their liege lords and ladies, but that rarely translated to warmth. But it was here.

  It was honestly kind of hard to pull myself away. More and more I felt like I could just spend all of Sevenday, all of my weekends, all of my free time here. But, as Professor Ryichsur had pointed out, there are multiple routes to good mental health and for my sake I should pursue several of them concurrently. And, as much as possible, he had said, I need to make those habits a part of my process for accomplishing my goals and living my life.

  To that end:

  One of my goals is to prepare the nation for the wars it would be facing. One of my goals is to make lots of money. One of my goals is fuck House Freckentop. And one of my major mental-health strategies is to blow shit up.

  We start with a proof of concept.

  I waved goodbye to some cheering children, and shared a double-cheek kiss with one of the family's retired maids. And with a light heart and a spring in my step, I walked through a portal into the void, and stepped out into a new landscape, a grand windswept vista.

  To the north of me spread a vast wash of ancient glacier hills, spread unevenly like a lumpy blanket over lazy cats. It was covered in gray-green scrub, harsh grasses and stubby shrubs that were still growing and feeding the small game animals of this region despite being deep midwinter. To the south of me an identical landscape. Blanket hills, gray-green grass, the occasional flirt of a rabbit's ear catching the attention of my owl-channeling perceptions.

  They were separated by almost six thousand feet of sheer cliff. The face was not as smooth as a plastered wall from an accredited professional. Up close it's shoddy work, with pits and strata showing, vertical ridges and striations. The wall is not perfectly straight, it bows southward a little in one place and recedes slightly to the north a little further down. But when you look at it from a distance, it is eerily perfect. Imperfections the size of your fist disappear on a wall that's a mile high and stretches to the horizon on either side.

  I admired the view for a good minute before I threw myself over the edge. I just enjoyed the free fall for a few seconds, and then I curved the air about me to slow my fall, prop me up, and swoop my momentum up and away, laughing giddily with the rush of flight.

  Okay, sometimes flying is a wonderful rush too. Almost cathartic, when I could allow myself to really enjoy it.

  After some long, spiraling arcs, I finally let down my speed and lowered myself to the ground, my feet tapping the tamped earth of this prairie. I was still flushed and giddy, but I smoothed my hair back and tucked it back into the combs that were supposed to control it. I fluffed my clothing, made sure I was pristine, and then I got to work.

  I walked the last dozen steps to the cliff face, jutting rudely up out of the ground. Rocks tumbled around the base of the cliff, knocked loose from above or shoved over when the Fissuring first broke the landscape in half. I don't know which. And even when channeling stone I don't have those answers. But I can start a tunnel.

  The stone moved as if liquid, a gelatinous flow that streamed out of the hole I was emptying. "Test number one," I said out loud, as the empty duct stretched deeper. Air rushed in and stone rushed out, streaming down to the base of the rockfall.

  I was limited how much stone I could curve safely at a time, and I stopped pushing my limits when I started tasting sand in my mouth. The deeper the tunnel got, the more stone I was moving at every moment, bringing the mass down a longer and longer mineshaft. So as it went deeper I started moving slower, and the rush of living stone that responded to my thoughts slowed to a rivulet, then a trickle. And finally, it was just more trouble than it was worth to carry on.

  I peered inside, but I did not have a good idea of how deep it really went. It was hard to judge this thing with sorcerous senses, and there was no light to see.

  In my pocket dimension, I pulled out a skein of yarn. I don't knit. But the wind could carry the lightweight, fluffy string, and I had the curved air carrying that yarn down the tunnel, unspooling the skein, until it reached the back end. Then I relaxed the magic and started spooling in the string, hand over hand, marking off the length.

  "Thirty feet? Not bad for test one," I declared. I put the yarn away, and then I started the next step. I took careful aim down the straight empty beam of a tunnel, and thirty feet deep I conjured void. The singularity appeared and started consuming air as fast as it could. I stepped back from the edge of the hole because the wind-tunnel effect here was strong, severe. Air howled as it was scraped against the edges of the hole in the stone, funneled down into the black hole at the far end. I stepped back, and concentrated on counting heartbeats. I knew this would be a big job, but I wanted to control my results for when I do this next.

  After all, you do your test runs in private so when there's witnesses you look like you know what you're doing.

  Sixty heartbeats seemed a good enough point, so I shut off the singularity. And all of the consumed air returned at once. I had the foresight to be standing a hundred feet away with ear protection on when I did that. I need to make sure that's a lesson I pass on to the scientists of this world: eye and ear protection.

  The explosion thudded through the ground and a flock of birds burst out of the shrubs to the west, gawking and awking as they took to the air. They were not the only local creatures to lodge their protests with the management, I could hear bleating and screeches from all directions as antelope, hares, and other creatures I had not been able to see all ran directly away from me.

  And then the next impacts hit- the stone wall had split upwards, jagged cracks shooting back and forth like Lichtenberg lightning bolts, and jutting up and away. Newly-broken stone carved out of the wall fell free, dropping in a series of cacophonous thuds. Boulders the size of houses rained down from above, and bounced off one another at the bottom. One block of stone, appropriate in size and vector for destroying a wicked witch, crashed down onto another and split in half, tumbling across the landscape, headed my way.

  I screamed my damn head off while I flew as fast as I could, heading straight up to get out of its way. It wound up being safely off to the side, it would have missed me entirely if I had held still. But in that moment, my don't die like a squashed bug instincts were running much faster than my act cool and brave instincts.

  "Next time, I'm standing much further back," I panted, hand over heart. Also, probably channel lightning for speed just in case.

  The main source of damage was the impact point itself, the stone for a dozen feet around the borehole was pulverized to gravel and sloughed out leaving a cavern that you could walk three abreast. And then the punished sedimentary stone above it gave way, cracked strata collapsing as well, sinking into the empty space and setting off a chain reaction above, each layer dropping almost as far as the one beneath.

  The reaction did not reach half-way up the wall, but it showed the collapse and damage reaching much farther than just the impact point, for sure. We were testing out the "firecracker in the hand" hypothesis from that Armageddon movie.

  "All right," I said to myself, as the dust billowed out and the rockslides started to slow down. "Let's try Test One-A."