genius loci

Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at http://archiveofourown.org/works/35105707.

Rating: Mature
Archive Warning: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Category: M/M
Fandom: Мор. Утопия | Pathologic
Relationship: Artemiy Burakh | Artemy Burakh/Daniel Dankovskiy | Daniil Dankovsky
Character: Daniel Dankovskiy | Daniil Dankovsky, Artemiy Burakh | Artemy Burakh,
Town-on-Gorkhon Ensemble, and their daemons naturally
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Canon-adjacent, During the Plague,
Canon-Typical Plague Nonsense, Canon-Typical Violence, Gore, Body
Horror, Angst, Self-Loathing, because having a daemon all of a sudden
prompts a lot of self-reflection, Character Study, Canon-Typical Racism,
Eventual Diurnal Ending, Other Additional Tags to Be Added
Stats: Published: 2021-11-13 Updated: 2022-02-05 Chapters: 4/? Words:
24212

genius loci
by evanescent_jasmine

Summary

When Rubin had said Isidor Burakh’s son was bullheaded, Daniil should have known he’d
meant that literally, given everything else he’s seen in this absurd town. Because a little
ways behind Burakh is, indeed, a massive brown bull.

The Town-on-Gorkhon is home to many miracles. Daemons are only one of them.
 Chapter 1
Chapter Notes

See the end of the chapter for notes

The sun is so, so painfully bright after the cramped dark of the train car. The large standing stones
do nothing to shield him, they only keep him from the long flat horizon of swaying twyre beyond.
He knows the faces milling around the stones, even if he does not recognize individual people.
They watch him, in the middle of the circle. They murmur with a familiar cadence, though he can
catch none of the words.

Artemy knows, without knowing how or when he got there, that he is home.

And that he is not alone.

Opposite him is a bull. A broad, massive thing of warm brown, he dips his head to Artemy in what
might be greeting or might also be showing off his horns, long and curved and sharp. There is
danger here and yet Artemy finds himself thinking: beautiful.

He raises his hands in front of him, planning to reach out to the bull or perhaps surrender, but his
fingers curl into fists, his feet shift to ground him. He realises he’s in the Circle of Suok. He is here
to fight. His body knows it, even if he doesn’t. The bull, his nyur, knows it too, because a second
later he comes charging.

Artemy slips away at the last, tapping his nyur’s flank as he does. The bull huffs and says, “Good.
This much, at least, you haven’t forgotten.”

“What makes you think I’ve forgotten anything?”

His nyur turns one large, dark eye on him. Disapproval? Reproach? He can’t tell.

“A lot of time passed,” he says. “You were gone. You were without your guide. Of course you’ve
forgotten. The question is, how much? Your heart has spoiled, Artemy, but is it rotten?”

Artemy’s heart clenches in response.

Or maybe in fear since there is, after all, a bull charging at him.

The Circle of Suok demands blood, and blood She shall have. To throw the fight would be an
insult, so he does do his best. He skids to the side, out of the way of those horns, and even manages
to land a few punches. But each one serves only to make his own sides twinge, and his head rings
with the force of the last. They hurt him more than they’d ever hurt something the size of this bull.
Even without them, though, it’s only a matter of time before the bull’s horns catch in his flesh.

His nyur pins him against the stone, lifting him entirely off his feet. Artemy can see a wound open
in the bull’s chest in return, dripping red turning to gold dust before it can hit the ground. That’s
alright. Artemy’s blood isn’t so elusive.

But it smells wrong. Under the thick copper scent is something sickly sweet, and his nyur’s dark
eyes are sad, now, as they look up at him.

Spoiled. Rotten. His heart is rotten, after all.

“I’m sorry, Noukher,” Artemy gasps.

Noukher backs away, letting him drop. Artemy crumples to the ground, strings cut into a bloody
mess.

“I still know the Lines, even if you don’t,” Noukher says. His voice feels like a rumble in the earth
under Artemy’s palms. “And I am you, and so you will remember.”

“What if this rotten heart of mine kills me before I can?”

“What kind of guide would I be, if I let you stay with a rotten heart? No. A river of good washes
away a drop of rot. You are here now. Here, there is no you or I, only a we. The we that is the two
of us, and the we that is the people.”

He feels wrung out and parched. He feels wronged and wrong-footed. His going away wasn’t by
choice, and Noukher had promised that he would be staying with Artemy the whole time, even if
Artemy couldn’t see him. Why, then, is he being judged like this? Why did he go wrong, how did
he go wrong?

And because he can say none of that, Artemy instead says, wryly, “Going to find me another one?”

Noukher cracks a grin. “There would be volunteers for trade, I’m sure. But why go that far, when I
have enough to share?”

Noukher’s horns are not, should not be, an implement for fine surgery, but the line he cuts down
Artemy’s chest is as steady and even as any surgeon could hope for. He can barely feel it, though
he sees his blood run and his flesh part. And as his nyur, Noukher’s chest opens up as well, and
there is his massive beating heart, ribcage already conveniently spread wide. Inviting. Artemy
finds a blade in his own hand the next moment, and he reaches in and neatly bisects it.

Even halved, it’s far too large to replace a human heart.

“Quick, now,” Noukher says. “Before it disappears.”

He can see the gold glowing at its edges already. And so Artemy reaches into his own chest cavity
and gingerly plucks out the rot-soft heart, then he slowly works half of a bull’s heart between his
ribs in its place. He has to crack them wider to make room. It’s uncomfortable, impractical. The
beat of that heart, when he connects it to his veins, reverberates in his teeth.

But it does beat.

And Noukher, who has to make do with only half a heart, still manages to get up, casting a
powerful shadow over Artemy, who remains splayed on the ground. The rotten heart lies not far
from them, blackened under the sun.

Noukher stomps on it, and it bursts like an overfed tick under his hoof.

A light burns in the night sky. Nothing like the neat round illumination of the moon, no, no, this
blazes, indistinct at its edges, impossible to hide from or to deny. It hurts to look at for too long.
Daniil looks, and looks, and keeps looking. He dares not even squint.

He is supposed to go up.
He is surrounded by a whispering dark, dry and brittle as steppe grass under his fingertips. It wants
to swallow him. He needs to get away but it stretches endless, and so the only away left to him is
up.

This is a dream, obviously. The metaphor is a painfully heavy-handed one, even so. From the
darkness into the light? Really? But the pull is on him nonetheless, the burn terrible and so
exquisitely sweet. What does it matter if it’s a dream? Let him clamber upwards, ad lucem, and see
what enlightenment awaits at the other end.

This assumes it was ever a choice and not a compulsion, but making the decision himself as well
seems to have been important. As though summoned by his thought, stairs materialise to his left,
rising into the sky. Each step is steep, translucent, only visible by the gossamer outline of their
geometry. Each step, when he trusts his weight to it, burns the soles of his bare feet in cold
pinpricks that burrow deeper the longer he lingers. He will simply have to be quick about it.

Daniil ascends.

He still cannot look away from the light. Each moment, each step closer, reveals a new facet he
hadn’t been able to see from so far below in the drowning dark. New colours ripple across its
surface, subtle, colours he doesn’t have words for. Angles resolve themselves into shapes that bend
and change and shift and beckon.

His eyes, mortal, fallible, they burn, they water, tears running salt-warm down his face. He needs
to blink. He cannot.

Time as a concept doesn’t exist here. He climbs and he climbs and he climbs, and the tears wear
grooves into his cheeks, and he climbs and he climbs.

The first sound in this breathless silence is a crack. Daniil sees the chip more than he feels it, a
shard like porcelain popping out from his face. He keeps climbing, but touches his face to find the
hole.

The crack spreads further, spiderwebbing all the way up to his temple, all the way down to his jaw.

And with the increasing sound comes an increasing pressure, as though something in this endless
shapeless expanse has noticed him, turned the weight of its attention upon him struggling up these
flimsy stairs. The aches of the waking world find him now; his knees and feet from walking all that
way to the Town, his back from sleeping in the steppe, his shoulders and elbows from the lopsided
weight of his bag. It’s not fair.

All it takes is a moment. Daniil stops for one moment to try and breathe through the crush of his
lungs, and the stairs have him. The sharp cold has hooked into his bones. He is held there, a foot
on one step, a foot on the step above, and cannot move them.

And still, he cannot look away from the light.

Another crack-pop of porcelain, this time up his shins. Insult to injury, that.

Daniil digs into the cracks of his leg on the lower step. Blood seeps from the porcelain, he knows it
by its scent, hot slippery between his fingers. Too much of it, it feels like. But he’s free to take
another step, once he digs himself out of his other leg, and then another.

This feels right. This makes sense. Foregoing flesh for the divine, divesting himself of everything
holding him back. Cleansing, flensing. Yes. He peels away the sides of his face as well, the chips
of porcelain tinkling to the stairs beneath. He feels lighter for it, somewhat more equipped to
handle whatever force is pushing down upon him.

By touch alone—his gaze fixed still, as ever, on the light—Daniil finds the other cracks,
imperfections in his flesh. In his shoulder, his clavicle, his scalp, his chest. Sheds them without a
thought. He’s so close now that the darkness below is barely visible in his peripheral vision. Only
the light is left, swallowing the sky and promising to swallow him as well, if only he can reach out.

Daniil does. He raises his fingers, red-daubed porcelain falling away from his grip.

And he falls with it.

Clatters, like so much refuse, on the steps. He cannot rise. There are no legs beneath him to push
him up, no arms to reach, and he thinks for a moment that he went too far, took too much of
himself, presumed too much, shattered entirely in his attempt.

But ahead of him is a jagged figure. Bloody, pockmarked, with uneven broken edges, it climbs
from one step to the next with a feverish speed as it reaches for the light above.

Of all the oddities Bachelor Dankovsky has been subjected to in this shambles of a town, the
animals are perhaps the strangest.

Everything else can be explained. The insistence of even educated, ostensibly respectable men that
their wives and daughters are clairvoyant is either indulgent superstition or willful deception. The
children who tug at his coat to trade him palmfuls of pills and bullets is the town’s failure to
manage its orphan population, who run amok in the warehouses and get into all sorts of supplies.
Even the tower, wondrous and impossible as it is, is surely in the end just a marvellously clever
feat of physics and engineering beyond Daniil’s knowledge, not being an engineer himself.

This, all of this, is human.

But every single person he has spoken to thus far has had an animal or bird or reptile or something
nestled close to them. No cage or leash in sight, their pets nonetheless remain docile at their sides,
on their shoulders, in their pockets. If not for the fact both rich and poor seem to boast such bizarre
creatures, he might have said there was a thriving exotic pet trade here. As it is, he can find no
logical explanation and no one will answer him when he asks.

Mind you, no one in this town can answer a sodding question anyway, but this one especially.

Georgiy and Victor Kain, each with a brilliant and painfully bright red bird on their shoulders, had
given him some variation of You’ll understand soon. Olgimsky the Elder had been too busy
laughing at the fright his hulking vulture gave Daniil when it swooped down and settled at the
back of his chair. Classless bastard. Olgimsky the Younger, a frog peering silently out of his front
pocket, said it was something in the soil, or maybe the air.

Even Stanislav Rubin, who seemed otherwise to be a straightforward man and, as the only other
medical practitioner here, was the closest Daniil had to an equal, had started waffling on some
sentimental tosh about how they were reflections of their selves. Which was all well and good, but
still didn’t explain how his dog followed so demurely at his heels without needing even a word to
direct it. When Daniil pressed, unable to contain his frustration after a long day of disappointment
on disappointment, Rubin just said he wouldn’t get it until he had his own. As though Daniil has
the time.

And now, sat at Rubin’s desk, he can hear the echo of hooves clomping along in the stairwell of
the building, because of course someone in this backwater would keep cattle as pets too and have
them follow them around everywhere. Explains those slats he’d seen all along the stairs at least.
One can’t expect a—what? A cow? to climb up and down the steps otherwise.

The more he listens, the more he realises the clomping is uneven too, matching the uneven
footfalls of, presumably, the cow’s owner. There is something very disturbing about that.

He tries to put it out of his mind as the sound continues up those wooden slats, rattling, creaking,
distracting, when he’s trying to decipher Rubin’s handwriting and glean something of what
happened with the last plague. Bad enough that he can’t access Isidor’s accounts, but the Burakh
house is currently closed to him pending “investigation,” so Daniil has to make do.

Then the clatter stops, and he lifts his head to the open doorway that is suddenly blocked by—

Ah.

Judging by the snippets of description he’d gotten from various sources about town warning of the
killer, this tall man, scuffed and bloody and bright-eyed, a bruise blackening on his cheekbone,
would be Artemy Burakh.

When Rubin had said Isidor Burakh’s son was bullheaded, Daniil should have known he’d meant
that literally, given everything else he’s seen in this absurd town. Because a little ways behind
Burakh is, indeed, a massive brown bull.

This is what he has to work with. An incurable plague on the horizon, no hospital or in fact any sort
of medical facility, and of the two other medical professionals in this damned town, one of them
brings a bull everywhere.

But it’s fine. He’s fine. He’ll manage this as he does everything else.

Bachelor Daniil Dankovsky draws himself upright in his seat, draws the persona around him, and
says, “Well, one thing is very clear. You are a very, very lucky man, Vorakh.”

If it wasn’t luck, if Artemy Burakh was in fact the heartless killer everyone said he was, Daniil
imagines his own goading would get him more than just a little snark in return. He had seen the
men on the tracks this morning. He knows where the blood that flecks Burakh’s smock comes
from, even if some of it is his own. But even as Burakh makes his lack of appreciation at Daniil
getting his name wrong, and at Daniil’s questions, and at Daniil’s everything very evident, he keeps
his hands, knuckles red and scabbed as they are, beside him.

Daniil is satisfied he had the right measure of this man.

But then Burakh does that thing, that quick once-over glance that takes in, not Daniil’s person, but
the area just around him. Over his shoulder. Down by his feet. And that sense of satisfaction is
quickly banked by the annoyance Daniil has been feeling all day, because that’s the same look he’s
been getting from just about every person he’s met in this blasted town, usually before they give
him a pitying smile or clam up and become even more impossible to talk to.

The bull blinks at him serenely from over Burakh’s shoulder.

“If you’re looking for my pet, I don’t have one,” Daniil says. “Tell me, you were studying in the
Capital, am I right? How did you get around with that bull? Or did you just pick him up today?”

Burakh closes his eyes like he’s praying for patience. “He isn’t a pet. He’s—never mind, you
wouldn’t get it. Where’s Stakh and Taisya?”
“Taisya being...his dog, I take it?”

Burakh gives no answer, so that’s a yes.

“Be thankful I sent him away on an errand. Your Rubin has utterly murderous intents. Isidor meant
a lot to him, you know. Your father was his mentor. Rubin even considers himself Old Burakh’s
true son.” And a dramatic pause to let that sink in. “Unlike you. Anyway, he thinks you’re—”

Before he can finish that sentence, however, the bull snorts in what can only be described as a
derisive manner. It turns to leave.

“Noukher, wait,” Burakh says. The bull glances over at him. “I know. But let’s listen to what he
has to say.”

Wouldn’t you know it, the bull actually waits.

“Remarkably well-trained,” Daniil says.

Burakh sighs. “Look, whoever you are—”

“Ah, yes. I haven’t introduced myself. Daniil Dankovsky, Bachelor of Medicine, at your service.”

“Whoever you are,” Burakh says. Payback for Vorakh, no doubt. Daniil inclines his head in
acquiescence. Burakh is owed that much. “You clearly haven’t been here long enough to catch on
yet and no one’s bothered explaining, or maybe they have and you don’t believe them, I don’t
know. In either case, they’re not pets, and you’d do well not to talk about them like they’re
animals.”

Like they’re…?

Daniil looks from Burakh to his bull and back again. “Is that or is it not a bull?”

“He is in the shape of a bull. That doesn’t make him one.”

“I’m...afraid I don’t follow.”

“No, of course you wouldn’t.” And he sighs. Like Daniil is being the unreasonable one. “He’s my
—townsfolk call them daemons. Their souls, just on the outside. The Kin would call him my nyur,
my guide, my...face. Whatever the name, he’s my self. Me. We're one person.”

Daniil Dankovsky has made the study of the soul and self his life’s work. He is used to very many
outlandish beliefs regarding them. This is still beyond him.

Burakh must read his disbelief on his face, because he continues, “Whether you want to believe it
or not, the town does. Don’t call them pets. It won’t end well. “

“I...see. So you—all of you, this entire Town—believe your souls are external. And take the shape
of...animals.”

Why not.

Shaking his head, Burakh waves a hand. “I don’t have time for this. Forget I said anything. You
were saying something about Stakh, where can I find him?”

So Daniil gathers himself and continues with the accusation of patricide, the very generous favour
he’s done Burakh by vouching for him and establishing he couldn’t have been the murderer, and
how precisely he expects to be repaid. For the good of the town, of course. Meanwhile, that bloody
bull keeps flicking his tail. Likely it’s due to fleas or mange or whatever else afflicts cattle, he
doesn’t know. But between Burakh’s increasing agitation and this “daemon” nonsense…

It’s absurd, but Daniil cannot shake the sense that this bull is making fun of him.

He makes no comment, however, to that or to Burakh’s parting words of refusal. Burakh will see
he needs allies before long, and Daniil is content enough to turn in his seat and resume reading.

After a few moments, he hears Burakh call out, “Noukher! We’re leaving!”

Glancing up, Daniil finds the bull is, indeed, still in the doorway. Watching him.

“Didn’t you hear your master?” Daniil says, and makes a shooing motion.

There is a voice. A soft masculine voice that rumbles, “Things are different here, oynon. You’d do
well to remember that.”

And it’s coming from the bull.

This is either a stress-induced hallucination, a twyre-induced hallucination, or a demonstration of

Burakh’s truly exemplary ventriloquism and animal training, but the bull’s mouth is moving in
time with the words and Daniil can do nothing but stare.

“You’re an outsider, so yours hasn’t manifested itself yet,” the bull, apparently, continues. Unlike
his...Unlike Burakh, the bull is perfectly polite, using the formal you. “This is normal. But until it
does, you seem soulless to them, and the townsfolk take soullessness very, very seriously.”

Daniil smirks, more out of habit than anything else. Because there’s a bull talking to him. A bull.
Talking. “Would hardly be the first time I’ve been called soulless.”

“You? No. Never would have guessed.” The bull snorts. “Good day, Bachelor Dankovsky.
Remember what I said.”

“Good...day.”

The bull nods to him, concluding their conversation, then lumbers off after Burakh.

The real weight of this warning does not hit Daniil until he watches a woman burn, later, in the
Bone Stake Lot. He’s too late to do anything. By the time he’s reached her, the screaming has died
out.

He can see it, now, in the crowd. In the teeth bared and the wings spread and the heads tossed in
joy and victory and some bloodthirsty mimicry of justice. Daniil watches until the fire burns itself
down, leaving nothing more than boiled blood and charred flesh. He watches the animals tuck
beside their humans as doubt ripples through the crowd, robbed of their clay woman and righteous
revenge.

“Maybe she wasn’t the shabnak after all,” one says to another.

“Doesn’t matter, does it?” says the other. He spits to the side. “Still got no soul.”

And though the crowd has calmed, their animals remain wild-eyed and watching, ready to pounce
on something, anything, else.
Whatever they are, pets or faces or guides or souls...Daniil learns to watch them in return.

Safe within the walls of his home, Artemy breathes freely for the first time since he arrived. And
immediately feels bad for it. His father was murdered here and Artemy doesn’t know the first thing
about who might have done it or why. What right does he have to comfort? The voice in his head
sounds a lot like Stakh, which makes it marginally easier to ignore, but it’s not wrong.

This hasn’t been home for five years. Not by Artemy’s choice, but…

Noukher noses past him, and Artemy gets out of the doorway to let him through.

“It looks different,” Artemy says.

“It does. But that’s to be expected. We look different too.”

They do. Noukher, silhouetted in the half-dark of the station, had seemed like something out of
Artemy’s dream first. A delusion brought on by pain or maybe the image of Bos Turokh following
him into the waking world. He’s bigger than he had been before Artemy left, broader. His horns
are longer. He walks like he isn’t sure of his legs, and maybe he isn’t yet, newly reformed as he is.
But that hadn’t stopped him from rushing in to try and protect Artemy from his attackers—and
seeing that he shared Artemy’s limp had brought forth a wave of rightness that said yes, he’s
home, he’s whole. Even changed, this is right.

Noukher seems to have none of his misgivings and leads the way through the various rooms,
pointing out things for Artemy to open and show him. He’s much more comfortable too, now that
he’s in a house made for someone of his size. He doesn’t have to tilt his head to get his horns
through the doorways, the furniture is all sturdy and spaced apart enough to let him pass through
without worrying about jostling anything, and the staircase has a ramp so he can go to the second
floor, instead of having to wait downstairs like he did at Lara’s.

“We should find where Aba put your things,” Artemy says, following him upstairs.

“Ezhe said she would keep them with hers while we were away,” Noukher replies.

We. Being a we again makes his throat tighten and he nods, gesturing for Noukher to lead the way
because he doesn’t trust his voice to speak. Noukher glances back at him and leans his weight
against Artemy. Just a little. The good kind of crush, not the bad, and that’s overwhelming too in its
own way; it had taken Noukher a while to find the balance of just right when he first settled, and
seeing how unsteady he is on his feet with his new size, his new returned form, Artemy had
thought they might have a similar period of adjustment. Apparently not. In this, at least, Noukher is
sure of himself and the pressure he exerts.

Then, just as wordless, Noukher pulls away and does finally clomp ahead to his mother’s corner of
father’s room. Moihon-Ezhe is—had been...had been a horse, tall and regal, and the shelves where
she kept her things were likewise tall, at just about the height where she could have pulled them
with her teeth.

Noukher noses through one shelf and then the next gently while Artemy peers through father’s
drawers and cabinets. Needles, matches, discarded buttons, these are the things he takes. Useful
things. Soulless things. His fingers glide over father’s pocket watch (stopped), his handkerchiefs
(folded neatly), his cologne (barely used, only for important dinners and special occasions),
considering then dismissing the idea of stuffing these in his pockets too. The small things he can
use for trading, but these…

That voice in his head again, sneering something about plundering the old man. It doesn’t sound
like Stakh, not really, but that’s who Artemy quietly curses as he closes the drawer.

Anyway, father’s things aren’t going anywhere. He can sift through them, donate what needs
donating, do all of that after the funeral.

Behind him, Noukher hums that he’s found what he was looking for, and Artemy returns to take
the knotted bag from Noukher’s mouth and open it. Out unfurls Noukher’s knitted woolen blanket;
his hoof pick; his pockets, the rolled up leather-and-fabric lumpy from whatever trinkets had been
left within them; his very favourite books.

“Good thing I convinced you I should leave these, huh,” Artemy says, brushing his palm over the
cover of one of said books. “You wanted me to read them and keep you company while I was
away, but if I had, they’d still be with the rest of my stuff back there.”

“It was to keep you company, Artemy, not me.”

Artemy’s smile fades slowly. He still manages, “Well, I was never much for poetry. I wouldn’t
have been able to appreciate them properly anyway. Do you want me to get your pockets on you?”

At Noukher’s nod, Artemy unravels the roll and drapes it over Noukher’s back.

The problem becomes apparent even before he tries to tie it; Noukher’s grown, and the length of
material comes up far too short. Probably he could just lengthen the ties later, but there’s
something very funny about how the pockets look, that high on Noukher’s flanks. Artemy rolls his
lips back to keep his amusement at bay.

“I, ah...don’t think this fits anymore, my friend.”

Noukher sighs. “Not surprised. Ezhe’s pockets are on the next shelf. We can take them apart and
add another panel to mine.”

Something like panic spikes in Artemy’s gut at the thought.

“I. Are you sure about that?”

“Sure about your sewing ability? Cloth isn’t skin, but I’d be very surprised if you couldn’t at least
stitch two things together.”

“No, I mean, it’s not—it’s…Moihon-Ezhe’s.”

“...Yes, and she’s dead, Artemy.”

Artemy flinches from the reminder and then huffs at himself, his own ridiculousness. He’s lived a
life defined by one lost mother, what’s another one? But he realises he’s been avoiding thinking
about it. Father is gone. And so is his nyur. One follows from the other.

“There’s no one but us to claim their things,” Noukher says. “Who should we ask permission of?
Or do we leave the entire house unchanged in memoriam?”

“No, I don’t mean that. Just…”

“You’re thinking about Stakh and Taisya, aren’t you? What they’ll say when they see.”
Noukher’s ear flick shows what he thinks about both of them, and he steps back to the shelves to
pull out Moihon-Ezhe’s pockets anyway. With the roll between his teeth, he looks Artemy squarely
in the eyes and speaks around it.

“She’s my mother,” he says. “Not Taisya’s. Mine. I will not be shamed out of my inheritance.”

He drops the roll in Artemy’s hands. Artemy fumbles the catch, but manages not to drop it.

Daniil is unsettled but unsurprised by Andrey Stamatin’s daemon. From what he recalls of
Stamatin, and even his current demeanour, a lynx suits him. It sits at Andrey’s feet, large paws
crossed over each other, and though it does not look at Daniil while they talk, its large tufted ears
swivel this way and that. Despite its feigned disinterest, it is indeed paying attention. And judging
by its thumping tail, it does not like what he has to say.

“I’m not leaving without my brother,” Andrey tells him. He reaches down to scratch the top of his
daemon’s head. It swats at him, seemingly more for the principle of the thing, because it pushes its
head into Andrey’s hand a second later. “Bad enough you’d be asking me to leave Nastya here
behind, but I’ve lived my whole life without her already. I can manage. Convince my brother first.”

Peter’s daemon meanwhile is a graceful crane that keeps its head tucked under its wing for the
duration of their conversation. Is it asleep? Can daemons sleep when their owners are awake, or is
it merely suffering from whatever twyrine haze Peter seems perpetually under? Daniil is tempted
to touch it and see if its eyes are as bloodshot as its owner’s, see if he can’t prompt it to speak.
None of the daemons since Burakh’s have spoken to him and he isn’t sure whether this is because
he’s an outsider or because they won’t or can’t. Do they speak only to other daemons?

And when did the Stamatins manifest theirs? How? Where did they come from? What sets their
shape?

There is too much he wants to ask but not from the Stamatins. Peter is too...Peter to answer these
questions, and Daniil does not trust Andrey to give him actual answers.

It’s Eva he turns to that night, over a celebratory drink of that blasted burning twyrine, taking
advantage of her gratitude over securing her escape from this hellhole to ask after her daemon. If
she’s been here as long as the Stamatins have, surely she has one of her own?

Smiling, she looks up and to the right, lifting her finger. A butterfly alights on it, white marbled
black, although the longer he watches the gentle fold-spread-fold of the butterfly’s wings the less
sure he is about the colour. It’s no species he can identify, but maybe the steppe has its own, or
maybe daemons don’t subscribe to such mundane things as regular species.

“He’s shy,” Eva says. “Especially when we didn’t know how you would take it. It’s so strange
here, after all. But now that you know...it’s alright, Adam. Say hello.”

And there is, indeed, a gentle hello in response. The talking bull had been disturbing enough, but
hearing a deep human voice coming from a butterfly makes the hairs on the back of Daniil’s neck
stand on end. He manages to smile back nonetheless.

“Yes, hello, Adam,” he says, just to be polite. Or is that rude, actually, since none of the other
daemons have ever acknowledged him? What is the etiquette with these things?

Then, because flattery has never been a bad idea in his experience, he looks to Eva and adds, “He’s
a lovely specimen.”
And Eva does blush prettily, so he’ll mark that as a success.

“Have you…?” she starts to say, and makes that same overall sweeping look that’s made his
stomach clench since he realised what it meant.

Daniil keeps his voice light, his words flippant, as he says, “Oh, no. My soul remains firmly
invisible for now. Probably afraid I’ll try to study it.”

Her giggle helps him ignore the tug he feels internally at the thought. He doesn’t know what the
tug means yet.

“Do they normally appear so quickly?” he says.

“No. At least...I don’t think so? It was ever so long before I saw Adam, at least. I don’t know about
the rest.” She makes a small, wounded sound, looking at him with very large eyes. “And now you
won’t ever get to meet yours. Oh, Daniil, I’m so sorry.”

That tug again, a hook dragging blunt through his intestines. Probably it’s only guilt. Daniil doesn’t
have the heart to tell her he has no intention of leaving on that train, and here he is, accepting her
pity anyway.

“You agree with Andrey, then? He seems to be of the opinion they can’t exist beyond this town.”

“Oh, I hope they can. I hope we can bring them with us. But if we could, I imagine we would have
heard of wonderful talking animals—”

“And butterflies,” Adam adds.

“And butterflies and all manner of things before now. In the world outside, I mean.”

“You never know,” Daniil says. “Perhaps it’s merely a very well-kept secret, much like this town
is.”

“Maybe,” Eva says, but her smile is limited to her mouth.

It’s only when Daniil suggests he might ask for her assistance in a thanatological matter that her
smile spreads, a little more genuine, although whether that’s due to her fascination with his work or
the fact Daniil conjures his Bachelor of Medicine persona to speak about it is up for debate. With
the sort of smile he’s used to secure funding for his Thanatica, and all the charm he can muster, he
asks her about Adam. Does he sleep, does he eat, how does he speak, does he have her memories,
can he see through her eyes or she through his, can he feel her pain, can she feel his. Her answers
are circuitous and frustrating but, he thinks, probably the most honest he’s going to get in this
town, as both of them are very eager to help. He makes note of it all.

And then, when he’s done writing, he sets his pen down and gestures with his hand towards Adam.
Not touching, but close, his hand open in case the butterfly would like to settle on his finger as he
had with Eva. Inviting as he can be.

He’s barely even formulated his request when Eva cups her hands over her daemon, her fingers
forming a loose cage close against her chest. Adam makes no movement to push against her. Both
of them are frozen. Her eyes are wide, face aflame, and the overall impression he’s getting is
somewhere between mortification and...delight? He isn’t entirely sure how to read it.

Daniil clears his throat, mirroring her gesture by withdrawing his hand to his chest. His own fingers
are closed tight.
 “Forgive me, I was getting carried away with the scientific potential. I assure you, I meant no
harm.”

“No, it’s—I know, Daniil, of course you wouldn’t harm him.” Her eyes are on Adam as she
speaks, voice soft. Like she’s trying to convince the both of them. “And you’ve only been here a
little while, so you don’t know yet. Especially without one of your own. No one has told you what
it means, have they? To touch another person’s daemon.”

No, but he’s starting to get an inkling. Enough to at least turn down her offer when she does crack
her hands open to allow Adam out again.

Daniil is itching to see what they’re made of and how and why, and normally he would hold science
and the cold impartiality of medical examination up as his shield against this sort of thing. Worries
about impropriety have no room in scientific discovery. He doubts Eva could maintain that level of
detachment, however, much as she is clearly trying to, and he has no intention of crossing this
particular boundary with her.

“Perhaps another time,” he says, and her palpable relief tells him he made the right choice.
Nevermind his disappointment. “You need to prepare for your departure, after all. Did you need
help packing?”

Of course, there is no departure in the end. Not for Eva, not for Andrey, not for anyone at all,
thanks to the emergency powers Daniil himself bestowed on Saburov. They do not discuss this the
next morning, nor does Eva renew her offer to let him examine Adam. The only thing she says to
acknowledge the situation is, “At least you’ll get to meet yours now, Daniil. I wonder what it will
be.”

Chapter End Notes

I blame my friend rustkid for this fic existing. I was fine resisting a regular old daemon
AU and then she said "but what if they were only in ToG" and welp.

Thank you all for reading! Updates will be irregular, as my dayjob also involves
writing and sometimes that kicks my ass, but I'll do my best to keep them coming. In
the meantime, feel free to talk to me about daemons. <3
 Chapter 2

They are in the Circle of Suok again, and this time Noukher sees it from his own eyes. Artemy
stands opposite him, stance loose, gone soft from too long away. He looks around like he isn’t sure
where he is, like the Khatange are strangers, and the Khatange look to Noukher.

Fix him, their eyes say. Bring him back to us.

He doesn’t know how to say he was gone too. He was in the Capital too. He experienced the
euphoria of being unknown in a crowd, without expectations or a name to live up to, without
having to be careful where he steps or what he knocks over, without anyone watching too.

And he aches for missing it, the same way he ached for missing home. How can he admit that to
them, when he is supposed to be Artemy’s roots?

In this dream, when he offers half of his heart, Artemy lets out a sound like a wounded animal as
he reaches into Noukher’s chest cavity.

“Oh, my friend,” Artemy says. He does not cut Noukher’s heart in half this time, but takes the
whole thing out, cradled between his palms. It beats black and rot, a staccato sputter that spews not
blood but filth. “I’m so sorry. I ruined you too.”

“No,” Noukher says, settling his head in Artemy’s lap. “We’re one. If you’re ruined, it’s because I
am.”

And they watch his heart turn to gold dust together, and they bleed out together, and they feed
themselves to Suok, and Noukher wakes with a start.

The alien surroundings do not help him calm down from that dream, especially not when he finds a
goat watching them from the doorway. It takes several moments for Noukher to remember that this
bedroll he’s rising from was offered to him by Sahba, that the goat is Sahba’s nyur, that they’re in
Sahba’s Hospice.

They’re safe. It’s fine. Sahba is a friend and they're safe. Convincing his heartbeat of that is
another thing entirely, and he can see Artemy starting to stir on the other bedroll beside him as a
result.

Timur, Sahba’s nyur, says nothing. Noukher remembers all at once that Sahba is said to be a
souvilag'sh and has to wonder if that extends beyond just dream interpretation and into seeing
dreams as they happen. If so, Timur gives no indication. His bright eyes are inscrutable as he nods
at Noukher, so Noukher just nods back, because that seems like the thing to do. Thankfully, Timur
leaves them be, and Noukher can nudge Artemy awake the rest of the way.

“I’m up, I’m up,” Artemy grumbles.

Artemy pats Noukher’s flank and slowly, with a deep inhale, pushes himself upright. He sways on
his feet, looking shattered. He hasn’t gotten nearly enough sleep. Neither of them have. They were
up late listening to talk of sorely-needed uprising, trying to find their footing and decide how to feel
about what the Khatange were saying. Noukher is still reconsidering his and Artemy's responses,
sloshing the words around in his mind until they're a barely-coherent jumble. They don't feel
adequate, not a menkhu's guidance, not yet. He and Artemy still have a lot of work to do if they
want to live up to that trust and responsibility.
They should thank Sahba before they leave. She brought them into the fold and provided
hospitality—a bedroll for Noukher, even, when space is tight, and even Lara had only offered a
thin blanket when they stayed at the Shelter. It’s only polite.

But Noukher finds himself frozen at the prospect, hooves rooted to the ground.

Bleary-eyed as he is, Artemy still notices and, with a voice thick with sleep-gravel, asks, “What’s
wrong?”

“Nothing. We should...go say good morning to Sahba. Thank her.”

“...It didn’t go so great last night, did it?”

“It went as well as we could expect.”

Which isn’t an answer and they both know it. Artemy grunts, rubs a hand down his face, and says,
“I’ll do it. You head on.”

“I can’t open the door, Artemy. And anyway we’re both here, so we should both—”

“Then let’s both go.”

“That’s incredibly rude.”

“So?” From his pocket, Artemy takes out an egg he’s been saving from the night before and starts
peeling it into the palm of his hand. “We’ve been gone too long, right? Learned rudeness from the
Capital. Compared to the Bachelor, we still come out ahead.”

“I’d rather not be likened to him at all,” Noukher says.

Egg peeled, Artemy promptly puts the whole thing in his mouth and chews, watching Noukher
deliberate.

It goes against every instinct he has...but he does not want to face Sahba now. Perhaps later they
can apologize. Make excuses. He nods and follows Artemy to the door, where he merely calls his
thanks behind them and then heads out into the bracing morning. If Sahba makes any response,
they don’t hear it before Artemy closes the door behind them.

And now, finally, Noukher can breathe.

If Daniil had any sense of principle at all, he’d be marching out of those warehouses and straight to
Saburov to cordon them off. Quarantine those children and put them somewhere that isn’t a
dilapidated warehouse with a hundred other little plague carriers.

But he isn’t marching to Saburov, because clearly he doesn’t. He has enough of a head on his
shoulders not to waste antibiotics on the child, but not enough of a heart to wave down the first
leathercap he sees. Or maybe it’s too much heart. He doesn’t know. He’s fairly certain Chief
Notkin would claim he doesn’t have one at all, to leave Patches in the state he is, and maybe he’d
be right.

Reckless. Foolish. He’s going to regret this. The leathercaps will be rough with the kids, won’t
know how to handle them, would likely just throw them in the nearest cell and be done with it, all
of that is true. But. That still might be better than these warehouses. Cold, yes, unsuitable, but more
isolated than a warehouse, at least for the moment, and therefore potentially safer.

That’s just it, though, isn’t it?

Isolated. Scattered. Alone. Probably wouldn’t be allowed to keep their Halves either. Daniil doesn't
understand them but they're clearly important to the kids. At least when Patches dies, he will die
with his Half standing guard over him and his daemon, his friends all around him. A better death
than most can ask for.

Anyway. Daniil has work to do. If he’s fast enough, good enough, he might be able to make up for
his lapse of judgement here. He takes the more direct route back to the Stone Yard, over the tracks
and into the steppe, and tries to breathe past the weight of buzzing twyre.

The twyre, his footsteps, he doesn’t realise the rhythm of them has lulled him until something
breaks it, a shifting in the grass that sounds more purposeful than just the wind blowing through it.

Part of him, the part that’s been listening too long to the local nonsense, thinks: shabnak.

The part of him that’s learned to look around corners when crossing the town at night and knows
the reputation of the warehouses even in broad daylight thinks: mugger.

The rest of him thinks: well, you’ll have your answer now, Eva.

Daniil slides a hand into his pocket, fingers curling around his scalpel as he turns—just in case.
There is, of course, no shabnak. No mugger either. Instead, from the grass, a snake rears back and
flicks its tongue at him. The top of its head and its eyes are black. The underside is pale not-quite-
yellow, the same as the striping running along its length.

“Yellow? Hm.”

“What,” the snake says, “did you expect me to colour-coordinate with you?”

His—and Daniil knows it’s a he without thinking how or why—words come out fast, slamming
into each other in their haste. Daniil, who has worked at making himself slow down so he can
enunciate clearly and ensure he’s understood, recognises himself in it. In case there was any
leftover doubt.

“Why not,” Daniil replies. He is pointedly slow and measured. “You’ve already coordinated your
form.” And he gestures to his coat.

“Don’t flatter yourself. I no more chose this than you chose your face.”

“Who did, then? Where did you even come from? The Steppe? The Town?”

The snake only makes an infuriating I don’t know noise. He gets the sense that if his daemon could
have shrugged, he would have.

It’s...funny, almost. Everyone he’s met, their daemon has said something about them. Has felt
fitting in a way he would have assumed meant it was purposefully chosen, an image meant to be
conveyed to the world, had Eva not disabused him of that notion already. It occurs to him, of
course, that he may be justifying the creature based on his limited understanding of the person,
seeing a pattern where there is none, but still.

Compare, for instance, the raven that stares him down from Maria Kaina’s shoulder to the little
swallow perched restless on Capella’s head to Katerina Saburova’s blank-faced owl, which
scarcely seems to notice he’s there. Yulia Lyuricheva’s jewel-bright dragonfly, flitting all about
her, to Bad Grief’s clever raccoon, puffed up and half-rabid. Saburov’s impatiently prowling wolf
to the discontented cats he hears but can never see around that boy Notkin.

They fit.

And here is his, an apparently unchosen reflection.

(It’s strange, now that he thinks about it. The dearth of mirrors in this Town.)

The coat, the red, the appearance he’s constructed, it’s him, yes. But it is also, first and foremost,
Bachelor Daniil Dankovsky, Founder of Thanatica. He built it the same way he built his
laboratory, to his liking but always with an eye to its purpose. He shouldn’t be surprised his
daemon has manifested in line with that. And yet, and yet…

If his form wasn't chosen, what is he supposed to reflect? Is this, indeed, his soul, his truest self?
Or is it only that Bachelor Daniil Dankovsky, Founder of Thanatica is all that the Town knows,
and it is his image to the Town that is reflected back at him now?

These past days, in the last few moments before exhaustion pulled him to sleep, Daniil had
entertained notions of what his reflection might have been that were...fanciful, yes. Enjoying the
concept of beautiful flying creatures for the lofty-minded and brilliant, like the Kains, like Yulia.
Had thought perhaps he might also have one, that he would see his reflection as a bird soaring
overhead, exploring the cosmos, so on and so forth. Or a beautiful little beetle fluttering from his
hand to his lapels, iridescent and untouchable.

Instead, his daemon crawls on its belly among the weeds. What does that say?

What will the townsfolk know, when they see it?

And anyway, what does it matter? It’ll be gone when he returns to the Capital—

(If he returns to the Capital.)

—and in either case, no one outside of this Town will see or care. He has more important things to
concern himself with. Daniil returns to walking, and hears, feels, the snake follow.

The snake is not as content with the silence as Daniil is, however, and says, “You could have at
least spared some morphine.”

“The Town is short on medicine as it is without wasting it on the dead. Those kids are lucky I
didn’t take the ones they had.”

“He wasn’t dead yet.”

“Give it a couple of hours.”

“A couple of hours he could have spent without pain.”

“Which will be the difference between life and death for some other patient— why am I arguing
with you about this?” he says, turning on the snake.

The supposed reflection of his very soul appears and the first thing it does is lecture him, dear God.
Somewhere out there, someone is having a great deal of fun at his expense.

The daemon flicks his tongue at Daniil, little glass-bead eyes black and cold and knowing. Of
course he knows. Logically speaking—and never mind that none of this makes a lick of sense, that
doesn’t keep it from being real, apparently. Logically speaking, if this snake is indeed him, then he
would know Daniil’s life, his experiences, even perhaps his thoughts and feelings up until the
moment they went from one individual to two. He would know the edges of the squirm under
Daniil’s ribs since he left that boy.

And doesn’t that just curdle in his stomach.

They might have been one person before, him and his daemon, but they aren’t now. Daniil draws
himself straighter, tugging at the bottom of his waistcoat. He is still Daniil Dankovsky, and he
refuses to be bullied by a snake.

“I have made my decision and I do not regret it,” Daniil says. Which is a bit of a lie, and the
snake’s scoff suggests he knows it, but he barrels on, “The boy’s manner of death is, of course,
regretful, but until such a time as I can defeat death as a whole, preserving life is more important
and there was no use wasting on him what might be needed for someone with a better chance.
Besides, the little chieftain said he was calling for Burakh. Let him and his bleeding heart tend to
them, if he can.”

“So you’ve wasted the time of not one, but two of the town’s only three physicians. Oh, well
done.”

Daniil clicks his jaw shut and turns on his heel. He will not dignify that with a response. Soul,
guide, face, physical representation of his psyche, whatever it is, the snake is annoying and he has
a plague response to manage.

He has not ever had to pay any particular attention to the ground before. The well-worn grooves in
the cobblestones from endless toing and froing, the gaps in between where little sharp things can
fall or grow to tickle at his belly, the dirt, the...rodents.

Should he eat those? That’s what snakes do, don’t they? He feels no particular draw to them, but
then he’s never been a snake before.

He thinks.

Has he? Has he...been before?

The strangeness here is that he knows how to move even as he is confused by the change in
perspective, knows what the scents he catches on the air mean even as they are new to him, knows
very many things on an instinctive level or even, dare he say it, in his soul. He also knows things
on an intellectual level. He knows they’re going to Town Hall, he knows this place, and why they
are here, and the urgency dogging at his…well, tail.

And yet, he has never been, before this morning in the steppe. He should by all rights be clueless, a
newborn. Then again, if he is indeed Daniil’s soul, as the townsfolk say, then he has always been
here. But he has always been here as Daniil, which suggests that what he is now is merely a part
broken off and given flesh and voice.

Is he flesh? He feels solid enough, but flesh does not usually spring out from nothing either.

And if he has always been Daniil Dankovsky, Bachelor of Medicine, shouldn’t he be more
disorientated? If he has always been a human man who walked on two legs and had two arms,
shouldn’t this sudden metamorphosis be catastrophic? Shouldn’t—
Daniil is sweeping through the door to town hall with nary a glance behind him and the door is
closing fast. Existential questions have to be put temporarily on hold as he is forced to dart through
as fast as he can, pulling his tail to himself before the door closes on it.

The first time this happened, when Daniil went to the Lump to deliver the news to Olgimsky, he
had assumed it was just forgetfulness. If you’ve never had a daemon before, of course you don’t
remember to keep it close, and he had waited as patiently as he could outside the door until Daniil
emerged. It had been...uncomfortable, but thankfully hadn’t taken long, and the discomfort had
eased once Daniil was back outside.

Once is forgivable, twice in the same day is just being a stubborn bastard.

He slithers in between Daniil’s feet, a pointed reminder, and is satisfied at the resulting surprised
yelp as Daniil tries to keep from tripping. He continues on without glancing back, slithering his
way up onto the table to observe the room and attendees.

And Daniil, of course, who tugs on the bottom of his waistcoat to straighten it out the way he
always does when his feathers have been ruffled, and purses his lips at him.

No, he decides that he does not feel like part of Daniil Dankovsky. Even if it’s only Daniil’s
memories and Daniil’s eyes that he, the daemon or face or guide or whatever they want to call him,
can recall living through, he is very clear on the fact they are separate now, even if they were one
once. Frankly, he’s glad for it.

Saburov is, of course, already here, this being his seat of power, but Katerina’s presence as well is
something of a surprise. She makes no move to greet Daniil from where she sits, perched on the
table beside her husband. Her owl stares vacantly at Daniil. Rubin sits to the side, his head in his
hands. His massive dog is at his feet, tail tucked close.

And then there are very many empty chairs, waiting for the rest.

“You’ve informed the Kains of the meeting?” Daniil asks Rubin, and the answering, “Yes...yes,” is
already so very exhausted. All Daniil can do is pace. All he, Daniil’s daemon, can do is watch.

The Kains do arrive, eventually, as do the elder and younger Olgimskies. Burakh is still nowhere to
be seen, but then he’s out saving children, isn’t he? They decide they can’t wait and plow through
with the meeting. Plague confirmed, emergency powers officially conferred, the planning
commences, and now it is time to dole out roles and responsibilities. Naturally, each of them argue
their allotted part as either far too much or not enough.

The humans, at least.

None of them address him, though they certainly took note of his presence, as there were more
than a few double-takes when they first saw him. It rankles, this speaking over his head as though
he doesn’t exist. But...they don’t speak to any of the other daemons either, so it is not a personal
slight. And, admittedly, seeing Daniil’s frustration at the roundabout words and power brokering
still, still happening, he finds he doesn’t mind not having to be the one to sift through it.

But if he has opinions, he’s sure that the daemons—the...other daemons, he needs to get used to
that—must as well. He is beginning to inch his way to Rubin’s dog, sat on the floor still, when the
shadow of something winged and massive descends upon him. He flinches away despite himself,
only to feel like a fool when Vlad the Elder’s vulture settles on the back of a chair. Its amusement
is the same as when it did this trick with Daniil too, and one would think he would expect this sort
of thing from Vlad the Elder’s daemon by now.
In his defense, those sharp claws and that curved beak look much worse at his current size.

“Finally, we can get the proper measure of you, Bachelor. I thought I sensed something new about
him earlier,” the vulture says. “Now then, I believe proper introductions are in order.”

There is then a pause, wherein she stares at him, seemingly waiting for said introduction.
Eventually, he is forced to say, “I haven’t decided on a name yet.”

He isn’t well-versed in reading a vulture’s facial reactions—do vultures have facial reactions?
Likely daemons are more expressive. It would be par for the course, as he’s fairly sure snakes and
vultures don’t have the requisite structure and vocal chords to allow them to speak Russian either
and—

Anyway, he isn’t well-versed in what a vulture might look like when surprised, but he’s fairly sure
this vulture is surprised.

“Interesting,” is all she says. She stretches her neck towards him, shifting her weight from side to
side as she settles. The urge to sink back into his coils is immense, but he resists.

“Don’t bully the poor thing, Zlata,” says another daemon. The smaller of the two red-feathered
Kain daemons has come to join them. From this close, what Daniil—or, well, he and Daniil, since
they’d been one at the time—had taken for the sheen of sunlight on her feathers is revealed to
actually be some sort of internal glow.

Because of course. Why wouldn’t someone have a firebird for a daemon?

The firebird settles on the back of the chair at his other side, opposite to...Zlata, apparently, and
tilts her head to the side.

“You emerged today, I take it? Welcome. I’m Vera, and my human is Victor Kain.”

“A pleasure,” he says.

Vera inclines her head in response. “I’m sure you and Bachelor Dankovsky haven’t had the time to
speak in private yet and settle on details such as a name, but for now, may we call you Bachelor as
well?”

Yes, that feels right. He was there for those studies and partook in those exams just as much as
Daniil did. He nods.

“Bachelor Daemon, then,” Zlata says. “And how are you liking your new existence, Bachelor
Daemon?”

“I find myself wondering if this is to be our lot in life. Spoken over,” he says, and nods to the
humans’ heated discussions.

Something Young Vlad is saying seems to have displeased Saburov, but Big Vlad cuts them both
off firmly. Young Vlad’s frog hides down in his front pocket. Saburov’s wolf snarls.

And Big Vlad’s vulture, Zlata, she barely pays them any mind.

“Why would we need humans to speak to us?” Zlata says. “We have our own bullshit to contend
with as it is.”

“They talk about their things, we talk about ours,” Vera adds, gentler. “It’s a different world,
Bachelor. But I expect it will take a bit of adjustment, not being part of a human anymore.”

“I suppose it will. Then if you have any advice, I would be—”

The doors are pushed open, bringing all conversation to a halt. Burakh staggers in, panting, and
looks from one face to the next in concern. He and his daemon limp through to the meeting. That
limp seems heavier than last they met; running across town to answer the bell’s call must have
been hard on their injury.

Their injury? Are these things shared between human and daemon? If so, does it go both ways?
Concerning, that. He files the thought away for later research. This is not a setting in which he
would like to flaunt his ignorance further.

Zlata spreads her wings without a word and, while Burakh speaks to Vlad the Elder, she alights on
his bull’s horn, dipping her head to speak into his ear. She must be heavy—even her own wings can
barely manage her, and her flight, brief as it is, was laboured—but the bull does not tilt his head
under her weight. He remains perfectly still, what must be an incredible strain on him no matter
how strong he is.

It’s a power struggle, he realises. Much as Vlad the Elder is trying to claim ownership of Burakh,
Zlata is very literally throwing her weight against Burakh’s daemon and trying to force him into
bowing his head. He, like Burakh, is refusing. But when Burakh leaves Vlad to speak to others,
Zlata remains, and so none of the other daemons approach him.

Daniil had learned to watch the daemons, and when he meets his human’s eye, he can tell Daniil’s
noticed too.

Whether or not Daniil agrees with what he’s about to do is another question.

“Excuse me,” he murmurs to Vera, and slithers his way to Burakh’s bull.

It is...intimidating, to put it lightly. Being so low to the ground, he is for the first time aware of the
other daemon’s hooves, and how easily he could be trampled.

It’s also rather undignified, having to clear his throat several times just to get the bull to look down.
Mind, he’s fairly sure the daemon heard him and was, in fact, just ignoring him, considering their
first meeting.

And the tone Burakh seems to be taking with Daniil, not too far away.

But finally, the bull meets his eyes, never moving his head. The bull says nothing. Zlata looms.

There are layers he and Daniil have not had to consider, when he had not manifested yet. He gets
the sense he should probably have waited to discuss this sort of thing with his human beforehand,
but his human has barely said a word to him since this morning, so…

“I wanted to thank you for the advice you gave us earlier. Gave him, rather, I...wasn’t quite here
yet.”

The bull glances over to Daniil then back to him. Still, nothing.

“And...I also wanted to apologize. For how that meeting went. Daniil can be…”

Zlata hunches down further, amused. Hungry.

“Well. Anyway. You have my apologies.”

He decides to leave it at that and returns, not to his previous perch, but to his human’s side. He gets
there in time to hear Burakh tell Daniil to go to hell, which is about what he expected to find.

“You must forgive Daniil; he’s bad at asking for help,” he says, and both Burakh and Daniil turn to
look at him. He coils himself by Daniil’s feet, in case there was any doubt as to who he—not
belongs to. Came from. “But we would very much appreciate your expertise.”

“Yes, as I was already saying…” Daniil nudges him aside with his foot, and the temptation to bite
his human right then and there is overwhelming. Daniil is wearing very sturdy shoes but it would
be a good test of his new fangs to see if he can bite through them. “I will make the vaccine, but I
can't do it without you. All you need to do is be at hand and do as I say. I will take full
responsibility for the situation.”

Burakh’s scowl deepens. “Perhaps I’ll drop by...if I have the time.” Then Burakh glances down
and nods towards him. “My people call them guides for a reason. You should listen to him.”

Oh, and Daniil hates that, doesn’t he?

Once the meeting is concluded, they begin to filter out. Burakh presumably to check on the
Stamatins at the Judge’s behest, the Vlads to begin their confiscation of the town’s medical
supplies, Rubin heading with the Kains to prepare for examining Simon’s body at last, and Saburov
to wordlessly escort his still-blank wife back to the Rod.

He hangs back, and so does Daniil, until there is only the two of them in Town Hall as the sky
begins to darken outside.

Well, and the clerks, but those don’t count, and they keep to the other room anyway.

Neither of them speak for a long moment, merely watching each other. They have work to get to—
testing which medicines might be most effective, helping Rubin, developing a vaccine—but until
Daniil says something, they’re just going to sit here. Glaring.

The clock tick-tick-ticks steadily. He pointedly thumps his tail against the table in time with it.

As he knew would be the case, Daniil breaks first.

“Why do you insist on undermining me?” Daniil says. “I would have thought a daemon wouldn’t
want their human to look like a fool, but apparently I was wrong.”

“Oh no, you accomplish that all by yourself.” He stops his thumping, drawing himself higher. “I,
on the other hand, am trying to ensure we actually get things done. Can you tell me what you
hoped to achieve by antagonising Burakh that way?”

“I was not—”

“You know full well what you were doing, Daniil. Would it have killed you to try to speak to him
on equal footing? Humour him, if nothing else. For God’s sake, you know how this game is
played.”

“And so, presumably, do you. Even if you disagree with what I did, apologising to him on my
behalf was uncalled for. You may be my daemon, whatever it is that means, but do not presume to
speak for me.”
“Duly noted. I shall be sure to apologise on my own behalf from now on.”

It is somehow not surprising when Daniil lunges for him across the table. What is surprising is
how fast he manages to dart away, the hiss that tears from him without thinking. He manages to
keep from chomping Daniil’s hand, however, and that’s the most surprising of all.

“Really, Daniil? And if one of the clerks in the next room came and saw this right now? You’re
having an argument with your self.”

He can tell from the venomous look Daniil is levelling at him that he would like very much to try
again. Instead, Daniil leans down and hisses, “Another word out of you and I will lock you away
somewhere.”

He flicks his tongue, tasting the sour, nervous sweat smell coming off of Daniil. It’s very
unbecoming. “You’re welcome to try.”

Noukher is of the opinion this is a bad idea. He thought it was a bad idea when Artemy suggested
it to Lara and Ignat, he knew it was a bad idea when Artemy extended the invitation to Stakh and
Taisya, and he would have said it was a bad idea once the plague was announced if Stakh hadn’t
said more or less that in Town Hall. He kept it to himself, then, out of nothing more than
contrarianism, because he’ll be damned if he agrees with Stakh on something.

He regrets this now.

The scratch-scrape of Death is in his ears even in the hum of the steppe. He still feels the zing of
his nerves from that house, the surety something was—is still chasing them. Frankly, the only
thing that kept Noukher from trying to break his way through that door was that he could hear
Jester-or-Artist’s yowling, see Ozymandias flitting from form to form on Khan’s shoulder in a way
that belied his nerves; and he felt sure that if he and Artemy left without trying to find those
damned candles, those kids would stay behind. Alone and afraid but so, so stubborn.

So they’d stayed, until they had supposedly thwarted Death and could see the kids out, and then
they’d gone into the night before Noukher could bully them into coming back to the Lair.

And Artemy is rushing ahead to the old place, where he still seems to think he’ll find his childhood
friends waiting. Noukher had heard him muttering about it under his breath as he’d fumbled with
the matches, how he hadn’t gone to all that trouble to convince Stakh and Grief just for this
damned house to make him miss it. It was something to complain about, to cover up the fear,
Noukher knows that. But part of it is genuine.

He wishes he had spoken up about this earlier. He wishes they could sleep.

“We just came out of the House of Death, Artemy. Is it really a good idea to see someone else?
What if we carry the infection on us?”

Artemy stops in his tracks and turns on Noukher, grasping either side of his face to peer into his
eyes. “Do you feel ill? Shudkher, we got so caught up with Khan and Notkin that I forgot to check
on you.”

“I feel fine.” Noukher shakes Artemy’s hands away. “Exhausted, but not ill. But we don’t know a
great deal about the mode of transmission yet. And there was something in the air there. I know
you felt it.”
“I did.”

“We won’t be doing anyone a favour if we bring them the plague.”

“If we can carry it on our clothes, then we already brought them the plague when we saw them
earlier. It’s too late now either way.” Noukher doesn’t need to reply. His flat look tells Artemy all
he needs to know about how reassuring that is. Or perhaps he can tell it’s an excuse. Either way,
Artemy continues, “Look, if it’s worrying you, we’ll just...keep our distance. Alright? But we have
to go, Noukher. If we don’t show up now, it’ll be worse than if we didn’t set this up at all. It’ll be
fine, I promise.”

Noukher knows Artemy won’t keep his distance. But he also knows that look on his face, that
open, foolish hope. Knows how lonely it was in the Capital, made starker by the bright new
freedom and no one to share it with. Artemy is, despite everything, glad to be home. Glad to have
roots, glad to see his friends. Jeopardising those relationships from their side is not the way to go
about this, even if Noukher would rather get it over with now instead of dragging it out to its slow,
mewling end.

So he nods and continues on beside Artemy until they reach the old place. Three human figures
wait around that fire, each nyur huddled close to them. Only Lara, and Ignat who is perched on her
head, are keeping an eye out for them, and when Ignat sees them he winds down to Lara’s
shoulders to whisper in her ear before scurrying down to the ground.

Ignat reaches Noukher just as Artemy reaches Lara, and that promise of distance goes out the
window right away as the sable promptly clambers over Noukher without so much as a by-your-
leave. Artemy gives him a pointed but amused glance from over his shoulder, his eyebrow raised.

“We just saw you earlier,” Noukher rumbles. “Not that I’m complaining, but what brings this on?
You didn’t even do this when we first returned to Town.”

“That was then, this is now,” Ignat says, making himself comfortable on Noukher’s head. “And I
can greet whomever I like, however I like.”

Which isn’t an answer, but that in itself says plenty. Probably this is worry about the Pest, about
them, but there is at least a grain of posturing in it. A point being made, a loyalty struck.

“Course you can,” Noukher says, which is as much appreciation as he’d admit to.

And with the promise already so thoroughly broken, Noukher isn’t surprised in the least when
Artemy and Lara hug. Who started it doesn’t matter; Artemy sags into the embrace, curved around
Lara tightly. He needed that. He rarely reaches for it, rarely says, but Noukher knows.

Then it’s Grief’s turn, sat staring into the fire.

Artemy might have told them all to come, they might even have talked a bit while waiting, but
Noukher doesn’t miss how they’re all sat apart, waiting to be talked to individually. It’s useless.

After several moments, Noukher remembers himself and whistles for Riddance anyway, the old
signal from when they were younger and had more malleable forms to flit around with. She peeks
out from behind Grief’s chair and grins, then scurries over as well. None of the puffed up posturing
of the warehouse here, where she’d been curled over Grief’s perch more like a wild animal than a
nyur, spitting and screeching. She, like Ignat, finds her way atop Noukher’s back, except she goes
the added step of dangling herself from one of his horns, clever little racoon hands keeping firm
hold.
“Look at me, taking the bull by the horns,” Riddance says. “Not hiding away like some people.”

“No, just acting the fool,” Ignat says primly. But he is starting to creep to Noukher’s forehead, to
where Noukher can just start to see the underside of his chin if he looks up.

“We all have our parts to play, don’t we? And I’ll play mine, oh, I’ll play mine, same as I always
have.” There’s something manic in that grin, the teeth bared in something just left of happiness.
“No one ever gave me the new lines, you know? Me ‘n Grief, we’ve been spinning it out ourselves,
best we can. We ain’t writers, not weavers, not made for this, but we’ve done it all the same so far,
only now the roles are changing again and I don’t know if we can write fast enough.”

Ignat sighs, peering down at Noukher. “See? Impossible to talk to. I told you.”

“He’s the one out of balance. He should be on your other horn. Instead you’re listing to the side,
Noukh, look at you.”

“You’re too heavy for me to balance out anyway!” Ignat protests.

He’s right. Whatever balance of personalities they’d had before seems to have been precarious, a
house of cards toppled by nothing more than Artemy plucking two out when he left. Noukher
doesn’t know how or why they’d worked before. Ignat had always been willing to play along;
Gravel was the stuffy one, with her books and her lessons, but Ignat could be trusted to egg her on
and more often than not she was the perfect respectable cover for their shenanigans. And Riddance
had always tempered Grief’s recklessness with tales of caution, a twice-bitten fear to her that
reminded them their fun could have consequences.

Now it’s all wrong, and Noukher doesn’t remember what part he’d been supposed to play in the
middle or even if it still fits him. He tries to interject himself in their bickering, something silly
about being strong enough to handle it, and Ignat replies, “Someone has to be. I’m sorry it has to
be you, Noukher.” And they return, again, to the plague. Again, to the responsibility on his and
Artemy’s shoulders. Again, to the bandits already in the streets and the tension already in the air.
Riddance’s cackle is sharp. Ignat is puffed up and tense.

And Taisya lurks at the edges, not quite looking at them, never talking. But from the tips of his
eyes, he sees her sidling up slowly, her tail low in a reluctant wag.

Noukher says nothing to dissuade her. He can see Artemy and Stakh talking civilly for a change
and won’t ruin that.

When Ignat calls her over, however, Taisya and Stakh both freeze. Stakh tilts to the side to look
beyond Artemy and over at her. That purse of his lips, Noukher knows, is meant to keep her in
place. Taisya slinks lower obligingly, but she doesn’t move away.

And now eyes are on Noukher, waiting. Taisya can’t climb over his back the way the other two
can. Usually, with his friends, he would lie down, settle on the ground so they’re at a level and he
doesn’t have to worry about accidentally stepping on anyone’s paws. They expect him to lie down.

Noukher looks down at Taisya. Her slow-wagging tail.

Remembers when her teeth were bared and how she said nothing, nothing at all, to settle Stakh
down or protest his accusations that they might as well have killed their Isidor-Aba and Ezhe even
if they hadn’t wielded the knife themselves.

He remains standing.
 Chapter 3

Not a single one of the passersby comes forward to help Eva Yan drag the unconscious Bachelor
back into the Stillwater. She has her arms looped under his armpits and is giving it a good go
anyway, but it’s plain she’s struggling with every step, her butterfly in a frenzy over her head. One
or two stop to look, whether because it’s funny or because they’re weighing their chances at
snatching the bag from Dankovsky’s side and running.

Artemy grabs it before anyone gets any ideas. Although it’s tempting to root through it himself,
from the clinking of glass he can hear within it, he holds it out to Eva Yan. She startles, looking up
at him with wide rabbit eyes, and he presses the bag forward.

“I’m here to help. Let me. I can at least carry him inside for you.”

Reluctantly, she lets go of the Bachelor in favor of taking his bag, murmuring a thank you.

Artemy loops his arms under the Bachelor and hefts him up, grimacing at the twinge of his knee,
and follows Eva Yan into the Stillwater, Noukher lumbering slowly after him. She babbles, thanks
and worries and horrible possibilities tripping over each other in their haste to be at the forefront,
and insists the Bachelor had seemed fine the night before and this morning, in fact, even though
she hadn’t actually gotten a good look at him but he’d walked out as he usually does and then just
fallen, like he was having trouble breathing, and oh—

“His poor snake, he must be outside. Oh, what if he got trampled?” Eva says. The sound of
Noukher’s hooves on the floorboard must have reminded her. “I’ve gotten so used to seeing the
Bachelor without a daemon I forgot all about him. What if—”

“I saw no snakes in the grass,” Artemy reassures her. “But just in case, why don’t you go have a
look while I take Dankovsky up to his room?”

Despite her trepidation around him, she only hesitates a little before running outside. If she’d been
less worried maybe she’d have realised that if Dankovsky’s nyur had gotten trampled, they would
have seen the resulting puff of gold dust and Dankovsky himself wouldn’t still be breathing.
Artemy sees no reason to remind her. At least this way she can hover elsewhere for a bit.

He makes his way to the end of the hallway and has to shift Dankovsky in his arms awkwardly to
get the door open. And there, behind the door that leads up to the loft, is the answer to everything.

Dankovsky’s snake is coiled on the ground, motionless.

With both of them here, there is the whine of a string plucked too hard, vibrating from the strain.
The Line between the man and his nyur has taken quite the beating. The damned fool had, what?
Forgotten his nyur home and just pushed through the resulting stretch? Artemy steps carefully over
the snake.

“Noukher, can you—”

Noukher grunts his assent, already hunkering down.

It wouldn’t help to get Dankovsky all the way up to the loft with his nyur down here, but nor can
Artemy bring himself to pick the snake up. Not when there’s an alternative. Noukher manages to
manoeuvre his horns under the snake’s coils and lift him up just enough that Artemy can, in turn,
lower his arms and let Noukher drop Dankovsky’s nyur onto Dankovsky’s chest. Then it’s up the
curve of those stairs, round and round, making sure to keep them balanced so the nyur doesn’t just
roll against Artemy.

Noukher, of course, has to wait downstairs.

“Could you let Eva know we found his nyur? And that they’ll be fine?” Artemy calls back

“And that we haven’t murdered the Bachelor and painted the walls with his blood? Sure,” Noukher
says. And then, under his breath but audible even from here, “Whether she’ll believe me…well, I
guess we’ll see.”

He can feel the thread of their connection unspooling behind his navel as Noukher leaves the room.
Not a stretch, though, not yet.

Artemy is fairly confident he knows what the issue is by now but once he’s set Dankovsky down
in his bed, just in case, he makes a cursory examination of the Bachelor’s pulse, temperature,
pupils. No signs of infection. The nyur is a little paler than before, his scales looking dull, but that
isn’t necessarily a sign of infection either. Which is just as well. The shmowder he had just traded
for is heavy in his pocket, but it’s meant for Notkin and Jester and Artist. He would have hated to
be weighing their life against Dankovsky’s.

As that isn’t a concern, he simply slaps the side of Dankovsky’s face gently, one cheek and then
the other.

“Wake up, emshen, no need for dramatics. You’re fine.”

Artemy flicks water on his face for good measure until they stir.

It’s the snake that wakes first, lifting his head, and then Dankovsky slowly follows suit. Artemy is
about to say something witty until Dankovsky’s eyes land on the snake and they snap open the rest
of the way.

“Sna—!” is all Dankovsky manages to get out, flailing, before he falls off the bed and to the floor,
flat on his face.

“Astute observation,” his nyur replies dryly as he emerges from under Dankovsky. “I could do that
too, you know. Oh no, a prick!”

His tongue-flick in Dankovsky’s direction feels like a rude gesture and is not helping Artemy’s
valiant effort not to laugh.

Rolling his lips back to keep it at bay, Artemy offers his hand as a peace offering.

“So.” He clears his throat. “Not used to having a daemon yet, I’m guessing.”

Dankovsky’s nyur slithers up the bedframe and settles himself on a pillow, throwing his coils down
in a way that can only be described as huffily. Dankovsky himself remains on the floor, turning
onto his back now with a groan.

“Burakh...What time is it? Why are you here?”

“Ten. Still early, emshen.” Since Dankovsky ignored his hand, Artemy pulls him upright anyway,
putting a steadying hand on his shoulder when he sways. “Do you know what happened?”

“Fuck. I was supposed to be at Saburov’s already.” He pats his pockets, seems satisfied by what he
finds, then starts casting about. Presumably for his bag. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen—”

“Your bag is with Miss Yan downstairs. If anything’s missing from it, it’ll be her you want to—
hey, no,” he says, because Dankovsky is heading for the stairs like he hadn’t just been unconscious
a moment ago. Artemy catches him by the elbow. Not hard, but insistent enough that he stops,
shooting Artemy an annoyed glance over his shoulder.

“What is it, Burakh?”

“Do you know what happened to you?” Artemy says again.

“Presumably that blasted twyre has gotten to me. Or the lack of sleep. Or that children’s
concoction I took the other day. The possibilities truly are endless in this Town.”

“What chil—do you mean a shmowder?”

“That’s what they call it, yes. Burns like the devil but aside from that I had no lingering side-
effects, or so I thought at the time. I suppose I should have known better. I’ll test it when I’m
back.”

Questions of how or why or what the hell he was thinking, tantalisingly bizarre as they are, have to
wait. Artemy holds fast, despite Dankovsky’s attempts to pull away and head down again.

“I’m afraid it’s a little more complicated than that, emshen.”

Dankovsky’s annoyance is palpable. “Tempus fugit, Burakh. Will you kindly get to the point?”

“Don’t play stupid, Daniil, it’s beneath us,” the snake says from where he’s been scratching his
head gently against the bedpost. He takes a break from that to look up and face Artemy properly.
“You’re talking about me, isn’t that right? Explain, if you please.”

Seeing a person argue with their nyur has never been comfortable, and usually he’d stay out of it.
But Artemy can’t deny some amusement that Dankovsky’s getting the treatment he subjects other
people to. And at least the nyur said please.

Gently, he says, “Let’s review your symptoms, Bachelor. You went outside and you felt a little
discomfort, a little tightness of breath. And then you took another few steps and it was like
someone was pulling your lungs out through your throat. Sound about right?”

“More or less.”

“Yeah, that’s because you forgot your daemon.” Dankovsky starts to scoff, but Artemy raises his
voice to speak over him. “Did you think everyone carries theirs as, what, a fashion statement? He’s
you. Part of you. Even external, a Line connects you, and that’s what happens when you try to
stretch your Line too far. You might as well slam the door on your fingers and try to walk off
without them.”

“Am I supposed to swan about with that thing on my shoulders now?”

Artemy winces at thing. “Goes with your coat, anyway.”

“You can go more than a few steps without yours,” Dankovsky says, and gestures to the
conspicuous lack of a gigantic bull filling the room. “If you’re able to stretch this - this whatever it
is that ropes you to your bull, I see no reason I can’t do the same.”
“I’m sure you could. If you put in the years of practice Noukher and I have,” Artemy says. And it’s
hardly as though they had a choice, once Noukher settled. But, of course, why would Bachelor
Dankovsky notice the winding stairs up his loft or have to think about the logistics of getting a bull
up there? “But sure. Keep collapsing in the street. I’m sure that’s exactly what we need in the
middle of a plague. Not like I had my own shit to do instead of carrying you up to your bed or
anything.”

For once, Dankovsky finds nothing smart to say, but by the way he’s working his jaw, he’s trying
very hard to. Artemy decides to push it that extra bit.

“You’re welcome, by the way.”

“Right...Yes, of course,” Dankovsky mumbles, abashed. Even that seems too much for him, and he
busies himself in straightening out his clothing and dusting himself off. “Thank you.”

It’s something.

“And don’t worry. I promise I didn’t take advantage and touch your daemon while you were out of
it. I’m a gentleman like that.”

Artemy offers what he has been reliably told is his shit-eating grin.

Dankovsky snorts. “Oh, come on, Burakh, you’ve already said you don’t believe in that soul
nonsense, what does it matter? Just another one of this town’s ridiculous taboos to go with all the
rest.”

Spoken like someone who’s never had his nyur touched. Artemy just shrugs. He’ll learn.

“Anyway. Take it easy today, Dankovsky. You and—what’s his name?”

“I haven’t given him—”

“Asclepius,” the snake says. “I named myself, thank you.”

Asclepius. Of course.

“Well, you and Asclepius will probably feel fatigued the rest of the day while you recover, but it
shouldn’t be too bad. Send word if you get any more chest pains.”

“Wonderful,” Dankovsky mutters. “Because running from looters needed to be more exciting.”

He heaves a sigh and extends his arm without looking at Asclepius. Asclepius, with an equally
dramatic huff, slithers up the bedframe and from there to Dankovsky’s arm. “It’s your own fault,
Daniil,” the snake says, settling around his shoulders.

And yes, the Bachelor looks ridiculous with a snake wound over his snakeskin coat. But he looks
right too. Like a whole person.

As they head back downstairs, Artemy asks, “Looters?”

Dankovsky makes an exasperated sound, waving a hand. “People are breaking into abandoned
houses in areas where there was plague yesterday. Victor Kain seems to be under the opinion the
plague has moved on from those areas. Needs me to verify it. Apparently.”

“Well. Maybe leave that till the end of the day, at least. Give yourself time to recover.”
“I suppose. I still need to check in on the hospital, and that’s on the way.”

Dankovsky opens the door and startles back half a step at the sight of Noukher, who had been
waiting in the corridor with no way to get back in once the door had closed behind him. Noukher
only nods to see Dankovsky and his nyur up and about and leads the way back outside, clearly
having decided their work is done.

Miss Yan must have been listening for them, because she bursts from her room as soon as they
pass by it, with a call of, “Daniil! Oh, I was so worried.”

Her arms are in the air, clearly ready to wrap around Dankovsky’s shoulders, but the snake’s
presence makes her skitter back. The gesture aborted, she’s left at loose ends, and reluctantly
returns her arms to her sides.

“Are you alright?” she says. “Do you need anything?”

“Yes, quite fine. I am very sorry to have worried you, but I really must be going.”

Artemy is leaning over Noukher to open the front door for him when he hears someone clearing
their throat behind him. Not Dankovsky. Asclepius? Only Artemy glances back.

“Noukher, wasn’t it?” Asclepius says. “Sorry, I know this is late-coming—I...presume you carried
me up, since Burakh says he didn’t.”

There is no response from Noukher, who is more intent on getting his horns through the doorway.

“Not much of a talker,” Artemy says, apologetic.

“Right. Well.” The snake awkwardly tastes at the air. “Nonetheless, thank you. I shan’t hold you
back much longer.”

Asclepius ducks into Dankovsky’s collar after that, much to the man’s own surprise. Artemy
throws a, “You’re welcome!” behind him as Noukher, finally through the door, continues on,
heedless. Artemy has to jog to catch up to him.

“I don’t like that place,” is all Noukher says. “Feels wrong.”

Here is his hospital. A theatre with a handful of beds, orderlies in bizarre costumes, what scant
supplies Vlad the Younger could bully out of the populace, and half-expired medicines Daniil had
to test on himself before he could in good conscience use them on anyone else. Daniil looks over
the sea of groaning bodies and tries to project a confidence he decidedly does not feel.

He misses his Thanatica, clean and uncomplicated. There, the unknowns were exciting, puzzles to
be solved, and with both time and the help of his colleagues he was confident he could solve them.
Sometimes, he was even right.

In this...hospital, if one can call it that, his only colleagues are a surgeon who never finished his
education and a pathoanatomist who accused the former of patricide and seems to harbour a bitter
resentment towards him. Better than nothing, certainly, but not precisely the most confidence-
inspiring group, are they? Especially when Daniil hasn’t had his hand in practical medicine in an
age.

But every doctor is required to do his duty, himself included, and so he pulls a cloth over his mouth
and nose and gets to work. He takes note of the patients’ symptoms; he listens to the rattle of their
chests, observes the progression of jaundice on their skin, even saves some of the flakes of skin
they leave behind in case they’re useful later. His mumbled assurances that this will all help him
find a solution feel hollow even to Daniil’s ears.

Asclepius, wound around his shoulders, has a much better bedside manner. Daniil is fairly sure
Asclepius’ presence is the only reason he’s allowed to take blood samples, because all the coaxing
in the world didn’t seem to convince them of the necessity until Asclepius opened his mouth.

“You’ll be up and about before you know it,” Asclepius says, more chipper than anyone here has
right to be.

And, “Science has made such strides. There might not have been a cure five years ago, but five
years is a long time in the scientific field. We’ll find a way to defeat it.”

And, Asclepius’ voice so soft that Daniil’s teeth ache from clenching his jaw, “We know it hurts,
we’re sorry, we promise we’re doing everything we can.”

It isn’t the words, he doesn’t think, because Daniil says some variation of all that tosh. It’s the
sincerity. And the begrudging hope he sees cresting in these people’s faces as a result is almost too
much to bear.

When they’re out of earshot, washing his hands backstage, Daniil murmurs, “You shouldn’t give
them false hope. I’m doing what I can but I doubt anyone will be up and about anytime soon.”

“Alright, perhaps that part was an exaggeration, but the rest is true. Isn’t it?”

Asclepius leans out and turns his head to look Daniil in the eyes.

Daniil watches him for a long moment before picking up a towel and drying his hands off.

“We aren’t trying to find a cure. That’s Burakh’s windmill to tilt at,” Daniil says, pulling his
gloves back on. Asclepius scoffs, like he knows full well of the quiet hope Daniil harbors, a gentle
flame cupped between his hands so the wind doesn’t blow it out. “And anyway, have you seen the
state of their daemons?”

Some of the daemons are sat at their humans’ sides, curled and silent or frantically attempting to
soothe them, with no apparent symptoms of their own. Some are equally bloodshot, equally
groaning, leaving feathers or scales or tufts of fur everywhere they touch. Some are husks of
animals, gasping for breath, while their humans show only the beginning stages of plague. He
doesn’t know what to make of it.

“If, as I’m starting to suspect, daemons are also susceptible to the Sand Pest,” Daniil says. “This
means that any vaccine would need to take them into account as well. How in the hell am I
supposed to inoculate these people’s souls? There are so many added dimensions I can barely even
begin to grasp, dimensions science has never thought to ask—”

“That’s hardly ever stopped us before. If the Pest has metaphysical or spiritual elements, who here
is more qualified than us to get to the core of it?”

Us. Us, again. Because this snake, who has named himself Asclepius, is supposed to be his soul or
his face or his guide in life, his other half, and he needs to get used to that. What does it say about
him, that it’s so earnest? So...openly hopeful? How do these people walk around with their insides
exposed all the time?
Asclepius wraps around his shoulders tighter, an almost unbearable pressure that nonetheless
brings Daniil back into his skin. “Dum vita est, spes est, Daniil. We haven’t lost yet.”

“Yet being the operative word, here.”

“We can run tests on me later. Consider just how physical or otherwise I am. For now, we have a
doctor accustomed to patients with daemons. Ask him.”

Daniil has an inkling of how Rubin will respond, but he knows that if he doesn’t ask, Asclepius
likely will anyway. So, fine. He pulls Rubin from his own ministrations to offer the man some
water and confer. As expected, Rubin dismisses his worries regarding the metaphysical nature of
the Pest immediately.

“Daemons reflect their humans, that’s all. It’s not unheard of for a disease that claims one to claim
both.”

“You’re very blasé about the fact your souls can become diseased,” Daniil says, but notes this
down anyway.

“They aren’t diseased. They reflect our disease,” Rubin says. He reaches down for his dog, who
presses her head into his palm for an indulgent scratch. “They feel pain when we do. This is new to
you, that’s all, but I’ve seen daemons in pain before. It’s normal.”

“And does it go the other way around? If we feel pain when daemons do, does it not stand to
reason they can get infected before we do?”

“They don’t have physical forms the way you or I do, Bachelor. You keep thinking of them wrong.
They’re just reflections.”

“And the different symptom progression? Not much of a reflection if they’re reflecting incorrectly,
are they?” Rubin exhales what sounds like exasperation, but Daniil cuts him off before he can
protest. “I can feel this snake breathing, I can feel his heart beating. If he’s solid enough to breathe
and have organs and blood and all the makings of a physical form, there is no reason he can’t also
be infected.”

Rubin’s silence has a mulish quality to it that says he doesn’t agree but doesn’t think there’s any
point arguing. He merely fixes Daniil with a baleful look that Daniil, in turn, reflects to his
daemon.

“It’s worth testing, at least,” Asclepius says.

It’s become increasingly clear that the reason Daniil has hardly ever heard another daemon speak
is because they must not expect people to answer them. Another taboo, perhaps, or is it simply
politeness that makes people look at Daniil blankly the way Rubin does now, as though he can’t
hear Asclepius. Despite the fact Asclepius is right there beside his face.

Asclepius hisses softly.

“It does seem worth testing,” Daniil concedes. “Was Simon’s daemon stolen as well? Perhaps we
could—”

“Daemons disappear with their owners’ death. I told you. No real physical form.”

Damn it. And he knows already, without even needing to ask, that trying to get permission to
examine patients’ daemons will be out of the question. How in God’s name is he supposed to work
like this?

Some of his annoyance seeps into his voice, try as he may to keep it behind his teeth, as he says,
“And pray tell, Master Rubin, how is it that you treated these people if you can neither pierce their
skin nor examine the fullest extent of their symptoms. Surely there has to be some dispensation
somewhere for medical necessity?”

“There is. For the menkhu.”

And there is that predictable darkening of his expression at every mention of Burakh which means,
in turn, that Rubin will become even more impossible to talk to than usual.

“We can’t wait on one man and his bull,” Asclepius says, and abruptly drops from Daniil’s
shoulders to the ground. “Taisya, with me.”

Daniil has no idea who this is in reference to until he sees Rubin’s dog give him an unsure look and
then, haltingly, follow the snake slithering between the hospital beds. He and Rubin do the same,
quickly catching up.

“What are you doing?” Daniil says.

“I sat for those exams as well. I’m as much a Bachelor of Medicine as you are. It’s simply that I
lack the hands to do what you do and no one will bloody listen to anything I say.”

Asclepius comes to a stop in front of a patient whose symptoms would seem to be mild, if not for
the state of the fox curled into a tight ball at his feet.

“May I?” Asclepius asks not the man, but the fox.

The panicked silence that follows tells Daniil his daemon has committed another faux-pas. It does
occur to him that having your supposed-soul touched by someone else’s supposed-soul probably
has its own set of expectations and etiquette, but if he’s going to be the outsider, he might as well
take advantage of it.

“Medical necessity,” Daniil says to the patient. He pulls out his notebook and pencil, flipping to a
fresh page. “He is entirely qualified, I assure you.”

“God’s sake, he won’t bite,” Taisya says.

And with that...reassurance, the patient speaks gently to his fox. She unfurls with painful slowness,
revealing patches of missing fur, and sits up in front of Asclepius. He asks again, “May I?” and at
her nod, he immediately wraps himself around her ribs.

It does feel strange, a phantom touch along Daniil’s skin that makes his hair at the back of his neck
stand on end. Hardly anything worth pausing over, however, especially not when Asclepius starts
rattling off his observations. Neither of them have any veterinary training, and God only knows
whether daemons are animal enough for that to apply to them anyway, but Daniil dutifully writes
everything down nonetheless.

He should know better, by now, to think this Town would ever afford him a victory. In inceptum
finis est, after all, and his first day showed him that hope is a dangerous thing.

Part of him hopes anyway.

 Chapter 4

Heedless of the choking miasma, Murky sits astride her massive bear nyur outside the door to
Artemy’s Lair.

There’s something heartbreaking about seeing her and Bear. Seeing any child with a fully-grown
nyur form is heartbreaking in general—and Artemy clings to the hope that Bear hasn’t settled that
way, bolstered by the fact they didn’t see Bear in the Soul-and-a-Halves’ warehouse that first day,
when Murky had been huddled in the corner. But even aside from that, even if not settled, Bear
especially is…difficult to watch.

He’s large, yes, tall enough that when he gets to his paws at their approach, he raises Murky up to
where she’s almost at a height with Artemy. But he’s a long, ropy, gangly thing, like a toy that’s
lost all its stuffing or maybe never had it. To compensate, he fluffs himself up and growls,
yellowing teeth bared, as spiky and scary as he can be.

Artemy thinks Bear is probably terrified. He makes sure to slow to a stop a few steps away, palms
open and empty, as unthreatening as he can be.

He doubts it helps. There’s blood dried under his nails and, anyway, Murky and Bear have seen
what he can do with his bare hands, haven’t they?

“Hey, you two. Were you looking for me?” Artemy says.

Bear’s growl intensifies. Murky pets between his ears, although whether that’s to settle him down
or encourage him is hard to tell.

“My bear is just as big and strong as your bull,” she says.

“He sure is,” Artemy says, which is as much of a lie as he can muster.

Noukher, arriving behind him at last, is even less inclined to lie. He snorts and says, “Strong or
not, neither of you should be breathing this air. Get inside.”

“We’re not scared,” Murky says. She is looking at neither Artemy nor Noukher, but her fingers
have tightened in Bear’s fur. “We can protect ourselves. Bear’s big and strong, and smart too, and
we don’t need you for anything. We can stop loving you anytime we want.”

Loving. Like the idea of the responsibility on his shoulders hadn’t hollowed out Artemy’s insides
already, he needed to be told this child and her terrified other half had decided to love him too, a
lead weight pulling his heart right down to his stomach.

So, naturally, he’s going to breeze right by that and not address it. He needs to say something
before Noukher does.

“Well, we’re scared,” Artemy says. “Me and Noukher would be in there all the time if we could.
It’s pretty dangerous outside these days.”

Murky squints at him from under her hair, as though she’s trying to decide if he’s making fun or
not. Then she looks away again.

“Then maybe we should be the ones protecting you,” she says.

Another snort from Noukher, that shake of his head that means he’s about to give his opinion.
Artemy leans heavily against him and, when Noukher glances his way, gives him a wordless look
of warning.

“Maybe,” Artemy says. Assured Noukher is staying quiet, he turns his head to focus on Murky
again. “But first, why don’t we go inside?”

“Why would we come in? Nothing interesting in there, nuh-uh. Our train car is more interesting.
We made it real colourful.”

“Did you? That’s great. We haven’t had the time to make it colourful in here yet. But I bet it’s
warmer than the train car.” No response from Murky. A slow, rising growl from Bear. So Artemy
tries again, “And I don’t know about you, but I’m tired and I’m hungry, and I think we have some
food in the cupboard, if Sticky hasn’t gotten to it all. Could share, if you like.”

A second wary glance from Murky before, finally, she nods.

“I guess we could show you how to make it colourful.”

She nudges Bear and he does take a tentative step closer to the door. Then another, as Artemy
holds it open for them. At the threshold, though, Bear pauses. Murky digs her heels into his sides,
frowning.

Then all at once, Bear shrinks from bear to goat to swallow to a feral spitting cat that dashes off
into the warehouses. Murky, who didn’t make a single sound at being dropped to the ground, picks
herself up and, not a word, not a glance back, runs to chase after him.

“Might have gone too fast, there,” Artemy says, and steps in. He holds the door open so Noukher
can follow. “At least now we know for sure Bear didn’t settle like that.”

Noukher does not come through. Instead he stands there, head tilted, considering Artemy.

“So now you want to stand in the plague? Come on, Noukher, we don’t have time for this.”

“What was that?” Noukher says.

“What was what?”

“You didn’t want me to speak. Since when do you abide by the town’s rules?”

“Abide by…? Oh, no, come on. Obviously not. You know I don’t care what the town thinks about
you talking to other people and I doubt Murky would either.”

“Hm.”

Noukher deigns to step through, finally, and says nothing else. But the way he’s holding his ears,
the flick of his tail—sure, part of it is that he’s shaking the plague off of him, but Artemy also
knows the start of a grudge when he sees one.

Artemy tugs the mask from his face and sighs. “You’re too short with the children. Alright? I
didn’t want a repeat of last time.”

“Excuse me?”

The words drip insult. Noukher turns to face him, fully, each clomp of his hooves as he squares
himself a warning. Artemy stays where he is, stripping his gloves off at the wrist and tucking them
into his pocket. He can do pointed silences too.

“Don’t try that on me, Artemy. If we had the time, you know I could outlast you.”

“But we don’t. Anyway, I have nothing else to add. You were too short with her last time and Bear
is already scared enough as it is. I didn’t want you to make it worse.” But here, a concession. He
kneels down to undo the ties of Noukher’s pockets, and lowering his voice in case Sticky’s
eavesdropping as usual, he adds, “I get it. We’re under a lot of stress and Murky got our hopes up
about hearing Aba in the twyre. I was disappointed too.”

“I wasn’t angry about that,” Noukher grumbles “I was angry about the waste of time.”

“Wasn’t a total waste. We got some twyre from it.”

The knot picked free, Artemy pulls the ties loose and, rising to his feet, catches Noukher’s pockets
as they start to slide down his flank. He pulls the pockets off of Noukher entirely, a weight lifted
from his nyur’s back. The symbolism is very much meant and should hopefully mollify him a little.

Of course, now the weight’s in Artemy’s arms, and he’s already aching as it is without carrying
this too, and he doesn’t even know what’s dripping from the pockets into his sleeve—but all of that
he can fix as soon as they get downstairs.

“Whatever you were angry about, the result is the same,” Artemy says. “She’s just a kid. Sticky
can maybe hande it, but not Murky. We need to be gentle.”

“Sure, Artemy.”

“We’ve lost a lot but so have they. And if we’re responsible for them, then—”

“Fine, alright? I’ll...be gentle.”

Although his ear flick says what Noukher thinks of that. This time, though, Artemy won’t push.

And when they descend into the lab at last just in time to catch a flash of a rattail as Skitter dashes
from the brewery to the floor, when Sticky scoops her up protectively between his palms, when he
looks at them with his shoulders hunched like he’s waiting for a fight…Artemy figures that makes
his point for him. These kids’ lives have been hard enough as it is.

“I told you we were going to fix that,” Artemy says, pushing past Sticky to set Noukher’s pockets
down on one of the workbenches in the back.

“You don’t know how,” says Skitter, her voice muffled by Sticky’s closed palms. “I could figure it
out if I poke around a bit more. I’ve been in smaller spaces. I’m not scared.”

“Fine. Get your tail caught in the mechanisms,” Noukher grumbles. “See if crushed rat is what we
need to get it working.”

Heedless of Artemy’s exasperation, Noukher turns away and lumbers off into the side room

“I’m getting an hour’s sleep,” he says.

Normally, Noukher would sleep upstairs since there’s no room for him beside the cot. Artemy
hears the scrape and rattle of items moving as Noukher squeezes himself in anyway. He’s clearly
just being petty. Fine, let him. Artemy just gets to work unloading both of their pockets so they can
organise this mess before they head out again.
“Uh…He okay?” Sticky asks.

“He’ll be fine. Here, you want to be useful?” Artemy tosses a hastily wrapped bundle of twyre at
Sticky. Skitter squeaks as she’s launched from Sticky’s hands so he can catch the bundle, but she
lands on the autopsy table unharmed and quickly scurries back to him, just as eager to help. “Strip
the leaves from these. I need to get some tinctures going. Then we can figure out how to fix that
thing.”

Sticky and Skitter take over the other workbench with their competition to see who can get the
most stalks of twyre done the fastest. Artemy tips the scales by occasionally adding a stalk to
Sticky’s pile, which is nearest to him, whenever he finds one he’d missed before. He figures that
makes up for Sticky’s advantage of having hands.

The bark of Daniil’s pistol is painfully loud within the closed interior of the house. It wouldn’t be a
problem if a spasm of pain spiking in his gut hadn’t made him miss the shot, but as it is, the looter
is still there and still coming for him, and now Daniil can hear the quick, heavy footfalls of another
rushing down the stairs.

It’s Asclepius who saves him from an ignominious end in the form of a blade aiming for his
kidney, snapping downwards with a loud hiss at the hand holding the knife. The taboo against
touching daemons apparently runs so deep that this makes the looter recoil instantly.

He doubts the trick will work twice—if they’ve overcome their taboo about sharp objects, they’ll
get over this before long—but all he needs is the time to aim again. He takes a deep breath, or as
deep as he can with the vice that’s been around his lungs all day, and fires.

His knee shot out, the looter crumples, and his badger daemon at the other end of the room wails.
That’s one less person trying to kill him, at least.

Daniil tells himself he fully intended to at least help staunch the bleeding, but the bat daemon that
comes screeching through, snatching Asclepius right off of his shoulders, makes that less of a
priority. And there it is again, the phantom touch of a cutting grip around his middle. The weight
of something between his teeth as Asclepius bites through one of the bat’s wings.

The next shot is less careful, less effective, only managing to find the second looter’s shoulder as
he comes charging in. Once again, it’s Asclepius who wins them this surrender, wrapped so tightly
around the bat that the looter begs them not to crush her. Daniil upends the man’s pockets before
he lets him go, and the looters drag each other away under Daniil and Asclepius’ watchful eyes, a
smear of blood in their wake.

Asclepius is sure to avoid it as he slithers back to him.

“They’ll return before long,” he says, winding his way up Daniil’s leg.

Daniil resists the urge to shake the snake off, but barely.

“If they don’t bleed out first. But others might still be drawn by the sound of gunfire,” he says.
“It’s fine. I don’t intend to stay long anyway.”

He tucks his pistol away and makes quick work of the nearest cabinets.

Only his fourth day in this wretched place and already he’s reduced to bin-raking and robbery.
Daniil would like to think this is more a reflection of how fast the situation has deteriorated and
how desperate it has become rather than how fast his own morals have buckled.

He spares one needle to pick a locked drawer, and if his supposed-reflection has any objections to
the fact Daniil is taking what remains of these people’s wealth in coin and trinkets, all he does is
scratch his head against the side of Daniil’s brooch.

Nonetheless, Daniil feels compelled to say, “If I’m going to risk my life for this town, I should at
least not have to starve while doing so.”

Asclepius hums his assent, or close enough to it. “And if you don’t take their things, someone else
will. Not that food has done you much good today, mind. Your stomach’s been bothering you,
hasn’t it?”

It has. The milk and dry bread he’d scarfed down furtively in Town Hall earlier feel like they’re
trying to burn their way back up his digestive tract, and even that is a much better reaction than he
had to the canned…whatever it was that he ate the other night. He’d assumed it was due to the
dubious food, then, but now Daniil is forced to consider that perhaps the shmowder has left its
mark after all.

Out loud, he says, “It’s probably digesting itself from hunger thanks to this blasted twyre. Doesn’t
matter either way. I’m fine.”

“It matters if it will get you killed,” says Asclepius. When he remains silent, Asclepius adds,
“Well, at least those needles you just pocketed should help you get some morphine later. In the
meantime, try not to waste any more bullets.”

As though he did that on purpose, honestly. Still, Asclepius did save his life on that occasion, so he
can swallow his protest just this once.

“I’ll do my best,” Daniil bites out. “I suppose I should thank you for your help in that matter.”

“You should,” the snake says. He finally stops scratching himself, settling his head on Daniil’s
shoulder again. “Feel free to. Any day now.”

But Daniil doesn’t, and Asclepius doesn’t press it. After a few beats, Asclepius says, “One would
think the Kains, at least, wouldn’t be so eager to throw away the life of one of only three doctors in
the middle of a medical emergency.”

“And yet, here we are. Incepto ne desistam,” Daniil says, wry.

Speaking of, he should really do the work he was meant to be doing before the looters so rudely
interrupted. From his bag, Daniil retrieves his scalpel and begins to scrape off a sample of the
mould that has—he’s tempted to say scabbed over, but that’s absurd, because this is a building and
buildings don’t work that way. Even if the mould the other day had looked like open sores, red and
angry. Today, they are faded and flake away with little trouble.

“So,” he says over the scrape-scrape-scrape of his scalpel against the wall. Nonchalant, like he
hasn’t been chewing on this since the hospital-slash-theatre. “Why Asclepius?”

The snake hisses in what sounds distinctly like amusement. “Are you really telling me you can’t
see the connection?”

“I can, obviously. Bit too on the nose, if you ask me.”

“I didn’t ask you,” Asclepius says. “If you had better ideas, you should have suggested them
beforehand, but frankly it’s my name and I likely would have chosen it anyway. It feels right.”

“Well.”

Daniil tips the flakes into the waiting vial and corks it, trying to figure out his wording. Eventually,
he decides his daemon is, or was, him. Likely he still has a similar thought process. It's pointless to
be delicate.

“You...realise why I didn’t suggest any names for you, don’t you?” Daniil says, looking sidelong at
Asclepius. Asclepius, in turn, winds around his shoulders so he can face Daniil properly.

“Aside from the fact you abhor me, you mean?”

“I don’t—”

Asclepius scoffs. “It’s just us, Daniil. I don’t need your performance.”

Daniil looks into those glass-bead eyes for a long moment. “Like repels like.”

“And yet, as I'm sure you've noted by now, others don't seem to have this level of strife between
them and their daemons.”

“That we know of.” He deposits the vial into his bag and gets to cleaning his scalpel. “What do you
want me to say?”

“I don't know. But understand that I don't enjoy this vulnerability any more than you do, and I
enjoy the fact people can see the split between us even less.”

“...What do you mean?”

“It says something, doesn’t it?” Asclepius says. “When a man abhors his reflection.”

It does. Daniil has been choosing to ignore the implication, however, and sees no reason to stop
now.

“I thought we agreed earlier that daemons are not, in fact, a proper reflection.”

Asclepius evidently gives up, because he retracts to settle his head in Daniil's collar instead. Now
that he can actually see in front of him, stows the vial in his pocket and wipes down his scalpel. He
should take another sample of the mould outside as well.

Daniil makes it all the way to the front door before he stops, hand hovering over the doorknob. He
looks down at Asclepius. “You know you can’t stay?”

While Asclepius can’t roll his eyes, he does twist himself back in a gesture that gets his
exasperation across just as well. “Obviously. Is that what this was all about? Did you really think
I’d keep you here? Even if I had the power to, given my current form...No. I want to return to
Thanatica as well, and it’s likely once we do, I’ll disappear.”

“Then…?”

“But just because I’ll disappear one day soon doesn’t mean I’m not here now. The others have been
calling me Bachelor Daemon and, amusing as that is, I would like a name to refer to myself as
well. So I chose one. And while I’m external to you, whether you like it or not, you will use it.”

It still seems short-sighted to him and he foresees having to fight the damn snake to get back on
that train. But there’s clearly nothing he can do about it anyway, so Asclepius it is.

“So long as we understand each other, Asclepius,” Daniil says.

He takes a sample from outside the house as well, Asclepius peering over his head to and fro to act
as lookout. Lacking any means of labelling, Daniil notches the cork stoppers; one line for indoor
samples, two lines for outdoor. Even without examining them, though, there’s no ash in the air.
It...feels gone, somehow.

Feelings don’t factor into disease, however, and so he still needs to do his usual testing.

After he sees whatever new wild goose chase Saburov sends him on, that is.

Much as Noukher predicted, they do indeed find the Bachelor in Town Hall. Artemy had wanted to
try the Stillwater, but Noukher has always had the better feel for what the town wants to say to
them and something under his hooves told him, no, Town Hall. And here, he’s right again.
Because he is the one who should be guiding Artemy. Not the other way around.

Artemy scratches behind Noukher’s ear in acknowledgement of the fact Noukher was right, and
also probably to try and mollify him about earlier. Noukher doesn’t push him away, but he doesn’t
soften either. It’ll take more than that to ease the sting of being told off. And when Artemy grabs
the murky water bottle from Noukher’s pockets and brings it to the pacing Dankovsky, Noukher
hangs back. Wouldn’t want him to say the wrong thing, after all.

He merely watches as news of the infected water makes Dankovsky crumble more than Noukher
would have expected. Dankovsky’s angry, yes, understandably so, and upset. And exhausted, of
course. They all are. But the way he sinks back against the table, rubbing at his face, there’s some
deeper despair there.

Is it to do with the town? Something in the papers he has spread in front of him? Or has he just not
recovered yet from this morning? Might be worth a check up, either way. He’s a rude little man but
they can’t afford to lose any doctors. And between Dankovsky and his nyur, Noukher knows which
one is likely to be the better patient.

Noukher clomps over to the other end of the table, where Asclepius slithers back and forth over a
spread of papers, all of it covered in tight, spiky cursive Noukher can’t even begin to decipher.
Asclepius pauses at Noukher’s approach, coiled tight like a spring.

“How are you feeling now, both of you?” Noukher says.

Asclepius tastes the air with a flick of his tongue. “I thought you weren’t much of a talker.”

Noukher waits, looking down at the snake flatly, because he isn’t about to get told off by someone
else today, thank you. Asclepius looks away first, letting out a hissing sigh. He uncoils slowly.

“We’re fine, by and large. No symptoms from our…stretching, I suppose, beyond some shortness
of breath. At least, I haven’t observed anything else on Daniil."

“You’d have felt if there was anything else,” Noukher says. He watches Asclepius resume his slow
back and forth, and the restlessness makes him ask, “And you? You’re sure you’re alright?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“You seem to be—”

“As I’ve said, I’m fine. I appreciate the concern.”

Noukher mentally revises his previous assessment; Asclepius may be marginally more polite about
it, but he’s as bad a patient as his human. Should have known. Well, so be it. Noukher isn’t his
minder. So what if his scales look a little duller than before and he’s clearly discomfited by
something? That’s Dankovsky and Asclepius’ business. Noukher asks, instead, “That affair with
the infected districts, have you finished that yet?”

“We have. I think Victor and Vera were, perhaps, right. Daniil still needs to test the samples, but I
can…I don't know, I can smell? Taste? The plague in the air. It sounds absurd, I know, but I'm
fairly certain it's gone from those areas.”

Noukher had been asking more to determine if he and Artemy needed to swing by the Bachelor
again later, in case he got stabbed in the process, but neither Dankovsky nor Asclepius seem
wounded as far as he can see, so Noukher keeps that to himself and nods.

“You're probably right. We've observed as much ourselves today.” He's about to turn, leave
Asclepius to his notes and prompt Artemy to get moving, but Asclepius' evident relief at being
believed makes him hesitate. “You know, it's pretty normal for nyur to have better senses than their
human counterparts in some areas.”

“Oh.” From the perked up curiosity of before, now Asclepius seems to deflate, lowering his head
again. Noukher gets the distinct impression he’s misstepped somehow. “No, I hadn't known that,
but I suppose it does make sense for us to have some of the skills of the creatures we take the form
of. Although we can speak, even when we clearly don’t have the physical capabilities to do so, or
at least we shouldn’t, so there are clearly limits to anything making sense.”

“They make sense,” Noukher says. “You’re just working with the wrong framework. You’ll learn.”

“Will I? That seems very optimistic of you.”

“Then I guess you’ll just have to ask me and Artemy.”

Asclepius hisses what sounds like amusement. “Some things, I doubt you could help with. You
were born like this, from my understanding? Person and...nyur, was it? From the very start. You’ve
always been two. You’re used to an external reflection.”

Noukher mulls on that for several moments. There’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what they
are, if Asclepius really thinks of himself as merely a reflection as opposed to half of one whole
being, but at the core of it...yes, that would be strange, wouldn’t it? Living all of your life with all
of yourself contained in only one human body only to be ejected from it all of a sudden. The
Stamatins and Eva Yan and Yulia Lyuricheva and so on, all of them seem to have adjusted to life in
town just fine, but then by the time he and Artemy met them they’d already been settled. The
Bachelor, meanwhile, has only been here a handful of days and Asclepius even less than that.

He is, essentially, a newborn.

Noukher can hear Artemy approaching, so he doesn’t have time to mull over if he actually wants to
say this or not, and merely trusts his instincts in the matter.

“Artemy and I were in one body for a while. When he went off to university,” Noukher says. “It
was strange then, being contained like that. It’s stranger now, not being contained. Sometimes,
when we’re very tired, I forget that I can speak all on my own, out loud.”
And they are often very tired, these days.

Artemy’s hand is on his back, a wordless question or maybe a comfort, if he heard the tailend of
that. They haven’t talked about this yet. They probably won’t ever. Artemy doesn’t need more
guilt about going away and, frankly, Noukher doesn’t want to.

Noukher turns and nods for Artemy to go on ahead. He doesn’t, instead rummaging through the
pockets on Noukher’s back.

“Dankovsky seems under the impression that making you a mask would be a good idea, so…”

He pulls out the cloak Noukher knows had been meant to go toward expanding their pockets to
hold more tinctures, and instead loops it to fashion a makeshift covering for Noukher’s muzzle,
tying it off behind his horns. Only once that’s done does Artemy head out, but of course there’s no
point trying to carry on a conversation like this when it could just slip off. Noukher huffs a sigh
and in lieu of a farewell, says, “I won’t understand everything, but maybe I’ll understand a little.”

Asclepius flicks his tongue again. Reluctance, this time. “I’ll...keep that in mind.”

Noukher doubts it will come to anything, but he’s offered a figurative hand. It’s up to Asclepius if
he wants to take it.

It is the dead of night and he and Daniil are in the still heart of the warehouses, waiting on a
smuggler Vlad the Younger seemed certain they absolutely had to catch tonight or risk losing
medicine their makeshift hospital sorely needs. If not for that, for the possibility of a knife-glint
waiting around every corner and the necessity of being as still and silent as possible, Asclepius
would have thrown himself from Daniil's shoulders and scratched himself bloody on the nearest
sharp edge.

He...itches.

His skin feels like someone has turned it inside out and taken to tap-tap-tapping along every nerve
ending. It isn't the Pest, because Asclepius remembers the Pest, in those brief moments it burned
through him and Daniil before they tested the shmowder’s efficacy. The Pest is hollowing, an
inferno of dry heat that leaves dust and cracked earth in its wake. This itch is vital, living,
breathing. It's been building slowly throughout the day to where he's been able to keep it at bay by
scratching his nose against Daniil's brooch here and there, or dragging himself over the uneven
cobblestones that line the streets. But sometime in the last hour they've been lying in wait behind
this barrel, scarcely daring to breathe, it's grown into an all-consuming thing from his nose to the
tip of his tail, and he's going mad with it.

Daniil seems none the wiser, clutching his pistol tighter than life itself. He would have no
sympathy if Asclepius told him—an itch. Asclepius can well imagine the scoff—and so he doesn't.
He remains silent, he remains as still as he can, and if he occasionally tightens around Daniil's
shoulders...well, Daniil hasn't said anything, at least.

They wait. Child scouts race by, their Halves thankfully uninterested in sniffing Daniil and
Asclepius out. Occasionally they'll hear Grief and Riddance cackling about something or the other,
the sound made tinny by their surroundings.

The Cathedral Clock strikes midnight and finally, a glimmer of light from a lantern. Footsteps,
cautious, slow. The scent of sweat and grime and, more importantly, antiseptic as Asclepius tastes
the air.

"This one," he hisses, and Daniil gives a sharp nod that he's heard.

They remain in place until the man passes their barrel by and then Daniil straightens up slowly and
presses himself to the wall to peer around the corner.

Unexpectedly, their erstwhile smuggler does not head into Bad Grief's warehouse, as they'd been
expecting, but keeps walking. They follow him until he comes to a stop at another warehouse, as
nondescript as all the rest. Except for the taste of blood that, now Asclepius is paying attention, is
particularly strong in the air here.

"Look," he says, pointing with his head down at the ground.

Drip-drip-droplets of blood, marking a path towards its door.

Daniil doesn't speak, but as the man fumbles between his box and lantern and the door he needs to
open, Daniil slides silently behind him and presses the pistol to his back.

The man draws straighter and finally sets the lantern down on a crate by the door.

"Thought we had an understanding," he says.

Now that they're close enough to see his profile, and the praying mantis daemon that's climbing
onto his lapels, Asclepius thinks he recognises him. From the chemist's in the Stone Yard, the man
behind the counter. Now that water is too precious to trade for bandages, they'd bought some from
him just this morning.

"I'm not one of Grief's," Daniil says. "But I'll be taking that medicine all the same, thank you.
Please don't force me to use this."

Despite how miserable he's feeling, Asclepius backs that up by trying to hiss as menacingly as he
can. He doubts it's very effective, as the mantis daemon seems to be looking at him as though she
would very much like to try her luck, forelegs poised to strike.

Her human nudges her with his nose, and the mantis daemon retreats.

"Y'know what?" the shopkeeper says. "I'm not being paid enough for this. Take it, doc. You
medical types can figure this out between you. Just leave me be, alright?"

"I'd love nothing more. Put the box down by the lantern and walk away."

He does, and then raises his empty hands in surrender as he turns around. Daniil gestures him away
with the pistol and he and Asclepius watch the man shuffle away slowly until he's out of sight
entirely. Then they wait several beats longer, just in case.

Asclepius could cry with relief that it's done and he doesn't have to stay still anymore. He slithers
down Daniil's arm to the box, which he circles, scratching his head against its corner. It doesn't do
much for the itch, not anymore, but it's something. It gives him the space to regain enough mental
faculties to say, "Medical types. What did he mean by that?"

"I suppose we're about to find out," Daniil says grimly.

But first, Daniil opens the box, setting its lid aside. Inside are not immunity boosters, as Vlad the
Younger seemed to believe they were, but carefully packed glassware, preservatives—the sorts of
things Daniil himself has been gathering in the Stillwater's Loft in the vain hope he might be able
to find a solution to this plague.

Daniil stows his pistol, takes the box and—Asclepius quickly slithering inside of it—pushes the
warehouse door open.

Stanislav Rubin sits just opposite the door, head hanging low. Exhaustion is written in every line of
his body, but he meets Daniil's gaze unflinching. Likewise, Taisya's ears are perked up and she
looks alert, guarding the workstation behind her. Or what they've managed to cobble together into
a workstation, anyway; it's formed of what looks like a series of planks set haphazardly on top of
several crates. A microscope, some jars, some bloody rags and even bloodier tools. The place reeks
of it.

Off to the side, several curtains form a rectangle where, no doubt, the cadaver lies. It's lit soft gold
from within, probably a lantern Rubin was using to be able to see what he was doing.

The fact that Rubin and Taisya haven't responded to their interruption with violence yet is
encouraging. Daniil is a long way away from his student boxing days and Asclepius doubts he
could do anything that mattered to a creature of Taisya's size, even at his best.

Still, Daniil remains by the door rather than venture further inside, and Asclepius likewise remains
within the box Daniil is holding, only peeking over its lip.

"I'm sure there's a reason you felt it was necessary to skulk about the warehouses like a criminal,"
Daniil says. "But I admit I'm finding it difficult to think of one. We're not lacking in samples from
the hospital. Certainly the Loft isn't the most sterile of spaces to create a vaccine, but I daresay it
would be better than a warehouse, and that’s assuming your already existing workspace in your flat
was for some reason no longer viable. Explain yourself, Rubin."

Which isn’t the way Asclepius personally would have started, if he was trying to avoid violence.
Indeed, Rubin’s jaw clenches and he sits up, like he’s steeling himself. But if Asclepius had
spoken, Rubin wouldn’t have answered him anyway, so let the humans deal with each other.

"I didn't want anyone else dragged into this," Rubin says. "Walk away, Dankovsky."

"If you didn't want anyone else involved, you could have at least been more circumspect,” Daniil
says. “As it is, I've already been dragged into it because word got around that someone was
smuggling medicine. So congratulations, a job very well done."

Rubin curses under his breath and shakes his head. "Just tell them you didn't find anything. Or that
you did. Here. I have some immunity boosters, you can say you salvaged that from—"

Daniil stalks forward, closing the distance between them, and slams the box down on Rubin's
workstation. Whatever point he felt the need to so violently make is lost on Asclepius, however. It
hurts. The impact of the box beneath him, the shudder of glassware clinking together and against
him, he feels it in his teeth, his bones, a shrill burning whine that consumes his senses.

When Asclepius can regain control of his body enough to drag himself out of the box again, he can
tell several moments have passed and he's missed some part of the conversation, because now
Rubin is crowding Daniil to try and get him to leave, saying something or the other about not
bringing the entire warehouse district down on their heads.

He doesn't climb down the side of the desk so much as he falls off the edge, but this is why he
made sure to go down the side furthest from everyone, so no one could see the undignified heap
he's become. He stays there for a moment, enjoying the blessed damp cool of the tile beneath him.

And from his vantage point down there on the ground, Asclepius notices for the first time that
what he had assumed to be just a lantern behind a screen is...no, is all wrong. The light is all wrong
to be firelight. It's solid, unwavering, and yet...

Asclepius slithers closer, drawn despite himself to the motes of gold he can see drifting gently
downward before dissipating.

He and Daniil had had a patient die on them the other day, as they were trying to treat her. Much as
Rubin had said would be the case, her daemon had disappeared, dissolved into a puff of dust at the
very same time, nothing left behind but a faint shimmer in the air. That is what this light reminds
him of, but that daemon was gone in a flash. How many would Rubin need to have to produce that
much light? And so consistently? No, it doesn’t make sense.

Beyond the curtains, he finds the autopsy table and the human cadaver Rubin was working on, as
expected.

The light seems to be coming from within the cadaver itself, which is less expected.

Asclepius winds up the leg of the autopsy table, as quickly as he can to get ahead of the shooting
pains. And then he just settles there, curled around himself, as he looks upon the spitting image of
Judge Georgiy Kain.

This, then, is Simon. The so-called Immortal Leviathan himself.

"Of course you'd be bloody glowing," Asclepius mutters. "Why am I even surprised."

The light is seeping out of Simon Kain's open chest cavity, only barely covered with a blanket.
Presumably Rubin tossed this over the cadaver once he heard them outside. Asclepius doesn't
know if it's the light or something else, but Simon looks remarkably...lively, dare he say, for a man
who's been dead for going on five days now.

"Couldn't hang on long enough for us to meet you in person, could you? God, what we could have
learned..."

It looks like the incision in his chest had been sewn together before being opened back up, and
Asclepius can imagine, all too vividly, how Rubin must have furtively closed Simon Kain up again
once he had found this secret and realised he needed more time to study it than the Kains would
afford him.

Asclepius wishes, and not for the first time, that he had hands or paws or anything at all that meant
he didn't have to use his mouth to pull the blanket away, but need's must and all that. He clamps his
mouth over the blanket and pulls it down to get a better look at what's causing the glow.

Turns out? Everything.

Where a person's blood should be thick red all the way through, Simon Kain's is shot through with
veins of gold. His exposed lungs and heart shimmer faintly, the perfect confluence of an anatomical
diagram and a saint in a sun-bright stained glass window.

But it's still blood, it must be, because the iron taste is strong in the air, and Rubin's tools had been
covered in gore. Maybe the dust burns away, leaving only the earthly blood behind. Maybe it
settles after a time. Who knows. Asclepius catalogues what he can so he can tell Daniil later, and
doesn't look away when he hears the curtain shifting behind him.
Which is how he catches the gentle flutter of Simon Kain’s heart. Too faint to be beating, and he
might never have seen it if it was not accompanied by the gold glow intensifying in his veins, but
that was still unmistakably movement. The Immortal Leviathan living up to his name after all.

"We would have helped you," Asclepius says. "If you had told us, we would have helped."

"We know," says Taisya softly. "But someone needs to survive this."

Asclepius snaps to look at her. "What?"

"God, what's wrong with your eyes?"

"My—? They're fine." They itch too. Why can't snakes bloody blink? But they’re not important
here. "What do you mean, someone needs to survive this?"

She gets up on her hind legs, her front paws on the autopsy table, and with her mouth gently tugs
the blanket back up, staunching the flow of gold motes dancing around them. There's still enough
to halo her, bringing out all sorts of colours in the dark brown of her fur. She looks warm, like
firelight.

"We were going to write you once we made the vaccine," she says. "To make sure it gets
distributed."

Taisya meets Asclepius' gaze meaningfully as she settles back down onto her haunches. She does
not mean that they want to make use of Daniil's position of authority, organisational capabilities, or
the army of orderlies at his fingertips.

"They have to understand the necessity," Asclepius says. "Of everyone in this town, they especially
must understand. Yes, it’s terrible, iif his blood has what you need to make a vaccine..." Taisya
starts to shake her head but Asclepius insists. "We'll make them understand. It’s one life against the
entirety of the town."

"One life…” Taisya huffs, rueful. “We should get back to work, Bachelor."

And in case that dismissal wasn't clear enough, she tugs the curtain open with her mouth.

Rubin and Daniil glance over at the movement. They must have been having their own revelatory
conversation, because Daniil does not seem terribly surprised to see Simon Kain's body lying on
the autopsy table. Or all the gold dust seeping from him. While Asclepius is making his way back
across the warehouse, Daniil even manages to convince Rubin to give him a blood sample for the
road.

"I'll stop by again tomorrow to check in," Daniil says, tucking the vial into his bag.

"Please don't," Rubin says.

Daniil wrenches the warehouse door open and gestures Asclepius through.

"Tomorrow," he says again, before stepping out and closing the door behind him.

They still have to report their findings to Vlad the Younger—or, rather, report their failure, since
obviously they aren't about to tell him what actually happened—and there's that bull they still need
to get a sample from, and so, so many things they need to get to before morning. But without a
word between them, Asclepius and Daniil turn and cut through the steppe instead, heading back to
the Stillwater, where they can analyse Simon Kain's blood.
It's worse on his skin, the steppe. The cobblestones in town weren't doing Asclepius any favours,
but the steppe is full of little pains; the grit, the pebbles, the grass itself, he feels all of it keenly. He
doesn't want to climb Daniil's shoulders, though. The pain is clearer when it’s under his own
volition, not jostled along by someone else's movement.

"It won't be enough," Daniil says after a while. "Even wondrous as his blood apparently is, he’s
still just one man. There won’t be enough of him to inoculate the whole town."

"I know. But think of what we could learn. He was glowing like daemons glow, Daniil. How? We
know that’s not common to people here, so what does that mean?”

"I couldn't even begin to say."

It's dark, but there's a smile in Daniil's voice. Even if they do not often mirror each other like a man
and daemon should, Asclepius knows that this, at least—the giddy vertigo of being just on the cusp
of something, the breathtaking moment before the plunge, this much they share.

He passes over an angular stone, half-hidden in the dirt. Something in him tears, and the tearing is
glorious.

An instinct Asclepius barely understands has him circling back around to the stone, pushing his
nose against it and, with the satisfaction of picking at a scab and having it come away whole, he
induces another tear. Chases the feeling all the way down the length of his body until...

...finally...

...he's free.

For the first time today, Asclepius takes a deep breath. Nothing constricts him. Nothing hurts. The
itch, it seems, is gone with his old skin. A marker of growth, that's all. Asclepius peers down at it
curiously, this empty husk that used to contain him—be him, and starts to say, "Daniil, did you—"

When he realises Daniil is already a good way's away, either not caring or not noticing that he's left
Asclepius behind. It's tempting to stay right where he is until Daniil feels that stretch and reels
himself in, but the last thing they need is to collapse in the middle of the steppe.

So Asclepius hurries after Daniil. Nevermind the skin he left behind, they have far more promising
avenues of study.

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