A/N: It's the end times and I'm here to fulfill my divine purpose: writing a completed ToS self-insert. I'm also batch-uploading the first 9 chapters of this, crossposted from AO3! I hope you enjoy. OTL

Edit: I've been made aware that ffnet deleted my section markers, rendering the story essentially unreadable. I'm going through and adding them back in. Sorry for the confusion.


Dreams don't come true. This is a good thing - if they did, the world would be full of respectable people showing up to meetings without their clothes on, bogeymen, and unlikely trysts with the hot elf from The Santa Clause. (You know the one I'm talking about.)

Wishes don't come true, either, at least not entirely, because wishes aren't compatible with the real world. It'd be like one of those butter sculptures - you might be able to get the shape right, but it'd always go bad, in the end.

You don't get happy endings, either, because nothing ever really ends. Everything just keeps going - every spot of light casts a little more shadow. That's what adulthood is about - a slow accumulation of failures, misfortune and grief, carried day by day until it hobbles you - until it crushes you.

You carry the dreams, too, like balloons tethered to an anvil, but they only get smaller as the weight gets bigger.

It might surprise you to learn that I'm an optimist.

I don't think there's anything wrong with wishing. I do it all the time. I wish I could win the lottery. I wish I'd spent more time with my parents. I wish people were kinder to one another. Sometimes I just wish the bus would run on time or that my neighbors wouldn't leave their laundry to cool in the machines. It doesn't mean anything - it's just a little thing you say to yourself, an invocation of how the world might be.

But when I was little, I believed in wishes.

I kept my birthday wishes secret. I'd wish at eleven-eleven every day, and I'd wish on shooting stars. Home was wonderful, but the outside world was miserable, and I was always wishing for something better. I would stay up and watch for stars in the light-bleached night sky, and I'd wish.

You'd think that if a wish ever got granted, it'd be one of the easy ones. Or at least one of the ones that mattered. But nothing ever works out the way you think it should.


I woke up.

The girl in the brown dress and apron looked away while I vomited into a tin bucket. "Ugh," I said, "sorry." My hand looked very white beside hers. Mine were nicked here and there with silvery scars - when had that happened? The world undulated as I tried to focus. A hank of pale green hair fell into my face, and I blew it away before I could register the wrongness of it. "Where am I?"

"A House of Salvation, miss," the girl told me, "a cart picked you up in the desert. They said you were nearly buried in the sand, but they dug you out and brought you here."

"The desert? Where are we?"

"A few days south of Iselia."

I smiled. "Oh, like in Sylvarant."

She gave me an odd look. "Um, yes. Your things are in that sack over there, miss, we had to wash your clothes and everything. There's water, in the jug, and porridge if you're hungry."

"Oh. Thanks," I said.

"You..." she paused, fiddling with the edge of her skirt, "you're not a Desian, are you? Only Terry says since you're half-elf and have that stone, you must be, but I thought you looked too nice. You're not one, are you?"

I looked down at the greenish marble embedded just below the dip in my collarbones. I touched the pointed tip of one ear. "No," I said, faintly, "I'm not a Desian." I waited until she left me, thumping out of the room and down a set of wooden spiral steps, before I stumbled over to the burlap sack. I undid the cord and upturned it onto the bed, pawing through until my hand closed on something hard and cold. It was the handle of a sheathed dagger, the blade as long as my forearm and the pommel decorated with a tiny jeweled spider.

My clothes were practical: dark leggings, a mustard-colored tunic, a wide belt covered in pockets and pouches and straps, and a large, fleece-lined hooded coat, such a dark green that it was very nearly black, but not quite. The boots were dark, supple leather with soles like cleats. My undergarments, such as they were, were dark and simple. I had no jewelry, but I had two long daggers and four smaller daggers of varying make and model, strapped securely in a bandoleer below my arm.

I had a bedroll, and a stiff leather backpack filled with things like matches, a tinderbox, a canteen - a compass, too, and a handful of unlabeled vials filled with clear liquid. Most of them smelled of nothing, except for one that smelled like burnt almonds. I was clever enough not to taste them.

I looked out the window, then came running down the stairs, dressed and packed. "When did that show up?" I asked, pointing in the direction of the Tower of Salvation. I felt like I was just on the edge of insanity, and just the slightest nudge would tip me into the pit. The girl from earlier looked at me for a moment, eyes wide with incomprehension, before understanding bloomed. She smiled.

"This morning! Isn't it wonderful? I wonder if she'll pass through here. The Chosen, I mean."


There was a lead weight on the rubber sheet of my personal universe, and I was rolling towards it.

They let me stay at the chapel another night - if only because I was clearly losing my grip and they didn't have the heart to kick me out. I didn't have any money, food, or anything I was willing to barter with, but the priests, too, were poor and hungry, and so there was plenty of nothing to share.

There was an elderly priest, another middle-aged, and a small flock of novices, all men or boys. The ancillary staff were all women, young and old. Most wore the Martellian holy symbol - an icon resembling the greek Phi - on chains or leather straps. The House itself was much larger than I expected, and not one house at all, but a clutch of buildings and small stretches of meager farmland, all tended to by the novices. There were chickens and goats, an old dairy cow and an old nag that might once have hauled a plow.

It all looked pastoral, in the way evoked by greenery and trees, but there was grey underneath it all, and death. I'd never seen anything so peaceful and depressing all at once.

I was strangely calm. Not sensible, but calm.

I went south, taking the road towards Triet.


It was only on the road that I really became aware of the Exsphere.

It was on my sternum - a tiny, smooth marble set into a piece of delicate metalwork, and flush with the skin. The Exsphere itself was the color of seafoam, cloudy, and gave off faint light in darkness. Without a Key Crest, Exspheres were deadly parasites. But awakened, and worn properly, they made you strong and fast and redoubtable.

I had a weird relationship with my body, and the Exsphere only exacerbated that feeling.

When you're sitting around, staring at walls and contemplating the thoughtless cruelty of the universe, it's easy to feel small and weak and stupid. I had a real talent for making myself miserable, too, and digging so down deep inside myself that there wasn't anything to hold the rest of me up. Exercise should have made me feel just as sick and powerless, but it didn't. It put me in touch with the rest of the world and made me feel alive and real, even when it hurt.

But the Exsphere made me feel like a superhero.

I didn't get tired, not in the same way, or achy. I could run faster, in great bounding leaps over the road, when I wanted to, and I seemed to float where before I had wobbled or slumped. It would have been euphoric if it weren't so dysphoric. It felt like at any moment my body would leap ahead in front of me and leave my brain behind in a grey puddle - or like the high would end and I would find myself crashing. But the crash didn't come.


There's not a lot to do, traveling by yourself.

It wasn't like driving or biking or taking the bus. I didn't have music or books or even someone to talk to.

"You're going to have to find something to eat," I said, making conversation with the only person available. "You know how to clean an animal, but I don't think you have the guts to kill one. You're gonna starve and die, and a wolf's gonna eat your corpse. Which is kind of beautiful, in a circle-of-life kind of way." I wasn't really good company. "You're so depressing. I'm so depressing. Haven't you ever heard of 'keeping it light'?"

In the end, I found something like a mulberry tree, and risked it.

I wondered if an Exsphere could prevent dysentery.

On the second day - as if summoned by the universe - I met a wolf.

Not a normal wolf - not even a wolf driven mad by hunger. This wolf, wandering in the road bold as anything in the middle of the day, was cow-sized and had teeth like a table saw. There were stretches of road canopied by trees, but so far things had kept away. I'd run into a dog-sized rabbit with red eyes, but I'd just punted that back into the trees and ran as far away as I could manage. This thing, huge and maddened, seemed to taste the air as it turned its massive head towards me, saliva drooling from one corner of its enormous mouth.

I hadn't spotted it in the trees. I hadn't paid attention. Now it was right in the middle of the road, some twenty yards away, eyes locked on mine.

Animal instinct took over. I bolted.

Even with the Exsphere, the wolf was faster. It caught up, heaving pants twisting into guttural moans, and caught my heel in between its front teeth, the barest bit of pressure cutting down to bone. It yanked and tossed me to the ground - I landed sideways, the handle of one of the daggers cracking against a lower rib. The wolf smelled of dog and grime and a kind of fetid sickness, and the halo of stench was almost as oppressive as its size - but only almost.

It dragged me a few feet down the packed dirt, as I screamed, and then it rested one heavy paw on my chest with shattering force. I could see what would happen next as a kind of flash-forward - it'd rip my head off, one easy movement, and I'd be a bloody smear in the dust for the next traveler to find. And then -

I was in the air. I was a good two feet above the wolf's back, the spot where I had been a scar in the earth, and I fell hard. The wolf, bewildered, twisted to right itself, neck bent and snapping in my direction. My foot was smearing red-black stains into the dirt and I couldn't quite feel it, but my faculties recovered just enough to bring my hand to the hilt of a dagger and drive it in the wolf's general direction.

It was sloppy and shallow, glancing along a shoulder blade as I struggled to find footing with one numb foot. The wolf howled, teeth clacking, and lunged at me just as I fell, the dagger coming back to cut a channel across its throat. It was like bursting a balloon - an explosion of viscera as the howls turned into burbling gasps and into nothing. The wolf fell, twitching, and with a bleary detachment I dug the dagger again into the base of its neck.

I watched until it stopped twitching.

I began to breathe again, scraping backwards along the gravel until I could rest against a tree. I felt faint. I felt exhilarated.

Soon enough the feeling in my heel came back - a twinge at first, and then a wrenching pain that made my hands shake and my eyes water. My breath came and went in a hiss, and I pressed my hands to the heel of the boot, until one kind of pain subsumed the other, and I started to really cry. "This can't be how it ends," I insisted, "you can't die from a wolf bite. You can't die here. You have to be able to walk. You have to live. This can't be how it ends."

The wretched mantra became a chant, then slurred into silence. I could see, through the haze of tears, red bubbles bursting between my fingers, and feel as the pain seeped away again. I guessed that this was how blood loss and death felt - a slow, creeping peace. I rocked in place, shaking with grief and fear, until I suddenly came back into myself again.

I blinked.

I was alive.

I flexed my foot. It didn't hurt.

I was still covered in blood - gone tacky over the intervening minutes - and there were half-circle punctures on either side of my bootheel. The wolf was still there, lying in its own still pool, my dagger buried in its neck.

I pried off my boot.

The wool sock was stiff with blood, and the inside of the boot itself had a grimy, sticky layer of the stuff, but underneath the crackling smear still on the surface, the skin was unbroken. I damped the sleeve of my jacket and rubbed at it, just to be sure - but I'd been right. There was no trace of the injury - except for those left on my earthly possessions. And there had been a moment there, hadn't there, where I'd suddenly appeared above the wolf?

I could only think in circles so long before my mind got tired.

There was magic in this world, wasn't there? Was it so strange I would have some?

I found a stream a little before dark, two hundred yards from the road and mostly hidden in tall cattails.

I didn't like the idea of bathing right in the middle of nowhere - especially after the attack - but I needed to, for my own well-being. I had two kinds of soap in my pack, and after some experimental scrubbing I found that one was definitely for people, and one for laundry. Nothing would ever really get set-in blood out of wool, but I found the color of my coat was almost perfect for concealing stains. You'd only notice if you were really looking for it.

The tunic would have brown patches, unless I happened to develop cleaning magic as well as teleportation and healing.

I felt much better after a bath.

The next day was harder and easier all at once.

The trees and long grass had given way to shrubland, and I could see the desert now, a shimmer of gold on the horizon. I lingered at the last watering hole until daylight forced me on. I took as much water as I could carry, and even then I suspected it wouldn't be enough.

I amused myself by trying to do magic.

I could shift myself a few feet in either direction - 'teleportation' seemed the wrong word, because there was no flash or pop or puff of smoke. It was, instead, as if I fell sideways into a different world that was just like this one - only I was standing somewhere else. It was disconcerting, and hard to aim, like trying to do free throws while on ice skates. If I was moving, I could maintain momentum on the other side, but too extreme a change and the world would go sideways as my internal gyroscope failed to compensate.

I was disappointed not to be able to throw fireballs, but only a little. At least, with this magic, I might be useful.

I'd already decided that I'd try to get involved. I couldn't help it.

There was still a bit of that kid left in me. I wanted adventure! I wanted to do something that mattered! It was so hard not to want it. The aftereffect of my fight - magic, adrenaline - only made the feeling more intense. If I tagged along (and 'tagging along' felt like the wrong description, at my age), I'd be able to help.


You hope, approaching strangers on an empty road, that everyone involved is going to be decent and upstanding and go on their way.

The two men in bandannas and skull caps didn't inspire optimism, but I held out hope right until they drew steel. There wasn't anywhere to go, I realized. Beyond the packed sandstone path, it was all dunes, and dunes were harder to run in even than snow. Snow didn't get in your eyes and under your fingernails, either, or find its way into your scrapes and cuts. Both men were much taller and heavier than me, and while I might have been faster, I doubted I had the greater endurance.

"This doesn't have to be hard," said one of them, just audible over the howling wind.

I was too afraid to speak, but not too afraid to move.

I fell on one of them, weight augmented by the three-foot drop, and stomped down hard on his sword hand. The other one - who hadn't been trusting enough of his partner to stand very close - lunged for me. I scrabbled for the fallen sword, swinging it with the flat of the blade turned to hit. This was different than the wolf, I realized. These were people! I stumbled backwards. The man, still armed, grabbed my wrist. If he bore me to the ground, that'd be it.

I shifted again, so that I was standing behind him - the ghost of his hand felt like a rug burn - and swung the sword like a baseball bat. He wasn't wearing armor, not in the heat, and the ragged sword tore a long, ugly cut in his back. He screamed, and I dropped the sword out of shock.

"This doesn't have to be hard," I repeated, voice thin.

I backed up, grasping numbly for the hilt of a dagger.

He swung around, blade bared. He was trying to skewer me - but I was just faster, and all he managed was to scrape along my shoulder. The one I had fallen on still wasn't moving - he was motionless in the sand. Had I knocked him out? Killed him?

I'd taken self-defense classes, once upon a time.

'If you're being attacked,' the woman had told me, 'you have to fight back with everything you've got. If they're willing to hurt you, you can't go halfway and hope that they'll change their mind. If you're afraid, hold onto that feeling. When a guy's got a knife or a gun or your arm twisted behind your back, you're not two people anymore. You're predator and prey. And it sounds cold, I know, but you can't let yourself be prey.'

I'd cold-cocked a guy with an axe handle, once. He'd climbed in through the first-story window of my college dorm room.

This was almost the same.

The dagger was more natural in my hand than the sword. I shifted, reversed my grip and plunged it with all I had into the meat of the man's deltoid. I was aiming for the neck - after all, it'd worked once - but I was too short, and he was moving in the wrong direction. But seven inches of steel hurts pretty bad, regardless of where you put it, and I held on as he jerked away from me. I could hear the blade tear through muscle and sinew - and a horrible, wet sucking sound as the dagger came free, blood splattering in the sand.

He fell over. He was still breathing, but he was losing a lot of blood. If he wasn't dead yet, he would be soon.

I made a frantic, chilly calculation, and took the purses, weapons, and mostly-full waterskins from both bodies. And then I went on.

I had just killed someone. I hadn't done it outright, not on purpose, but I'd left them there and taken their water. That was a death sentence, one way or the other. That was something that always bothered me about RPGs. Was that supposed to feel all right? Yes, they'd come at me, but maybe I could have reasoned with them. Or I could have at least left them water. It was too late to go back - or maybe I told myself that, as an excuse.

There was no one here to judge me but me. And I was awfully critical.

I slept a few hours in the night, curled in my coat like a pillbug, and woke up face-to-face with a snake the thickness of my arm. We frightened each other off, although I started to notice more and more like it, just hidden in the sand. There were scorpions, too, some the size of cats, others larger than I was. I hated the way they scuttled. They were so fast, too, and moved over the surface of the dunes like hovercraft. I had a general idea of how to kill snakes, but there were just too many moving parts on a scorpion.

I kept mistaking distant mirages for Triet. By the time I saw the real thing, it was getting dark, and I had to leg it to make it to the city walls by sundown.

Triet was much larger than I expected. Adobe houses, pale gold and angular, climbed into geometric terraces over narrow dirt streets lined with stalls and tents. Drifting sand made the buildings look as if they had sprouted out of the dunes like trees. Yellow-green palm leaves spread like umbrellas over the little avenues. Cacti, bulbous and pale with spines, protruded from clay pots and window sills. Some were flowering, and some were flocked in miniature birds, each one smaller than a ping-pong ball, so that they seemed to be teeming with multicolored blooms.

There were skinny dogs resting in the shade of buildings, cats on fences and rooftops, and people everywhere, dressed in shawls and turbans and loose, airy linens.

There was only one inn, in the center of town, half submerged into the sandstone. Beside the stairwell was an enormous bulletin board covered in hand-drawn advertisements and notices - animals for sale and jobs that needed doing. Over all of that someone had pasted two enormous wanted posters. They had been printed on a press, and in color - one was for Lloyd Irving, wanted on Desian business. The other -

The other one was for me.

It wasn't a flattering likeness, but it was clearly me . The mint green hair, the hooded coat, the button nose and scar on the chin. I'd crashed my bike, really, but on the poster it made me look hardened and dangerous. I stood in front of it for too long, staring dumbly at my own picture. Why would I be wanted by Desians? I'd only just gotten here!

There was enough money between the highwaymen's purses to pay for a meal and a night's rest, or a new cloak, but not both. After a moment, I tore down the poster with my face on it and wedged it into the pocket of my coat, and hurried away, gathering my hair at the top of my head in a bun and shrugging out of the coat, tying it around my waist. Little things like that could throw people off, couldn't they? It would have to do.

The inn had copper wash tubs and hot water, if you were willing to wait for a kettle to boil.

I studied the wanted poster while I air-dried, seated naked on the end of the bed.

They didn't say what I was wanted for, or if there was a reward. I supposed Desians didn't give rewards, only spared you a bit of punishment for your trouble. And there was the other thing! Was I wanted by the Desians, or the Renegades? It'd been so long that I could hardly separate the two in my head. The Renegades had been Yuan's thing hadn't it? He had wanted to... do something with the Great Seed. I remembered that, at least, and how it had ended up destroying Palmacosta.

I crumpled the poster and stuffed it underneath the bed. I could worry about that sort of thing later.

I needed to find Colette. I couldn't be far, not if Lloyd's wanted poster was already up. Had they passed me on the road? Kratos probably knew backroads and shortcuts that kept away from well-trodden paths, and they would be moving carefully.

It would wait until morning.


They'd been here already. I knew because someone had set up a twine barricade around a hole in the side of their adobe shopfront - not quite person shaped, but unusual, at least - and was selling away bits of the brickwork on account that the Chosen herself had knocked them in. At least they're making the best of it , I thought. I had turned down an offer of just 300 gald for a quarter-sized lump of clay. I guess that's all you really can do.

I sold the few things I'd gotten off the bandit, probably for less than they were worth, but it was enough to buy food and a few gel jars.

They were palm-sized, made of metal and glass, and reminded me of cosmetics pots. I'd always assumed you ate gels - why else would they have food names? But an adventurous tasting told me that this was something you put on your body, not in it, unless you wanted the runs. The fruit scent barely concealed the odor of something skunky and medicinal, a back-of-your-throat smell that cleared out the nostrils. It was familiar, but I couldn't place it.

I ended up selling one of the smaller daggers - an ornamental one, with enamel and what I thought might be silver - to buy a mess set and another tinderbox, on the condition that the smith show me how you were actually supposed to use a flint and steel. I knew how to start a fire with a string and stick - the bow method - and with matches, but I'd never had any reason to use a flint and steel.

"I've seen you before," said the smith, in a thoughtful kind of way, as I was packing up again.

"I have one of those faces," I said, smiling.

He made a noncommittal noise and a grimace. "I guess so."

I moved on.

In what felt like no time at all, the sun was setting again and I'd managed to circumnavigate Triet four times without seeing the hide nor hair of Colette's party. It couldn't be that difficult! Her chaperones wore purple and orange, for chrissakes, and Colette had to be the only blonde in town. But no matter where I looked - the fresh market, the hawker's alley, the oasis - I couldn't find them. I had to find them before they left the desert, or I'd be stranded. Out of sync.

And then, just out of the corner of my eye, I saw a flash of red.

I hurried after it, hands white-knuckled on the straps of my backpack, eyes wide and searching. I'd seen him! I knew it had to be him! No one else wore so much red.

"Miss?"

I turned on instinct.

"That's her," said one, face hidden under his shiny steel helmet.

"Oh, come on!" I protested, just as another rounded the corner, baton held aloft.

I heard the stun gun before it hit me. And then I was gone.