No Need for a Core?

Moriko's body was wracked with agony as she dropped her pack to the floor, but it wasn't time to stop moving yet, not for her. The three of them had gone through the potion vials that they'd been able to make readily accessible, but they had more that they'd dared not stop long enough to fetch. Mordecai's and Kazue's voices whispered soft encouragement in her head as she reached into the wooden backpack to pull out the vials, but Kazue's voice went harsh when Moriko started to turn towards Kazue's avatar.

"Don't you dare," she scolded, "you know better already. Take care of yourself, then help Bridgette. My other self can wait for last. At the worst, her portion of our spirit will return to me. You two can not be recovered so easily."

Moriko knew that she was right, but it still hurt to leave Kazue's avatar in that state. She'd collapsed to her knees and had seemingly passed out in that position. Not that Bridgette was much better off, she was huddled into a ball and breathing with deep, heaving shudders.

Moriko forced the contents of the first vial down her own throat and immediately began hacking and coughing. The wet, dark mass she expelled looked anything but benign to her, and she kept an eye on it as she reached into the pack again to pull out a vial of acid. None of them might have the expertise of Shizoku, but a basic set of alchemical vials was fairly standard gear for a variety of uses. Especially acid and fire.

She carefully poured the vial of acid over the globule, emptying the whole thing slowly. Only when she felt certain that there was no life to be found in the mass did she move to Princess Bridgette to pour a healing vial down her throat as well. Drawing so deep on her phoenix magic had kept her safe in many ways, but she wasn't a true phoenix and she had needed to dig deep into her spirit to keep the phoenix fire lit past the limits of her normal mana reserves.

Then it was time to help Kazue. Her completely black eyes had a hard shininess that reminded Moriko eerily of an insect's eyes, though there was thankfully no faceting. Forcing her to drink a healing potion helped return some color to her skin and lighten the layer of black on her eyes, but it was nowhere near enough. Moriko made each of them take a few more healing potions and a couple of the honey stamina potions, but the potions were doing only so much to help after that sort of ordeal and no one had gone back to looking even somewhat normal. Moriko was fairly certain she did not want to know what she looked like in any detail, but she had noticed that some of the lightning scars she'd given herself were not entirely static. Becoming a bolt of living shadow lightning was not on her list of things she wanted to experience.

This was the first time she'd actually seen this sort of condition. She'd heard stories before, most of them were cautionary tales such as a legendary warrior who had pushed himself so far in a desperate bid to hold back an invading army that he'd transformed into a living spirit of war and rage. The one thing that all such stories had in common was the prolonged strain against a steady tide. The rising desperation, the need to keep digging just a bit deeper for power. It was not the sort of thing one experienced facing a near-equal opponent, it was the result of constantly fending off something that was just dangerous enough that you had to spend effort to deal with.

Which was exactly what they had been doing. Their foe had been fragile and weak, but relentless and seemingly endless. Still, she would have expected the recovery potions to have helped more by now. Restoring the body should make it easier to start gathering and generating spiritual energy to surround the soul with again. That should be enough to revert what should be superficial changes at this point. Moriko was the least visibly affected at this point, barring the difficulty with staying on the ground, but none of them seemed to be getting better.

Mordecai's core asked, "Who are you?"

"What? What do you mean?" Moriko asked back. She was certain now that she was missing at least part of her tongue, but she could still communicate this way at least.

"Answer the question true, but answer not to me. Query your heart, and answer to thee."

Moriko thought several bad words at him before she started working on the problem. Mordecai didn't do cryptic like this on a whim, and he'd even rhymed to draw attention to how deliberately unclear he was being. She was fairly certain that it was not related to the faerie stuff, which meant that figuring out what he meant was part of the solution she needed. Moriko didn't even know what she needed a solution for, but she trusted Mordecai to only be doing this if she needed it.

A certain amount of introspection was a necessary part of mastering herself and her passions, but this felt like it was going to be outright philosophical. Kazue and Bridgette had passed out in the few minutes while Moriko wasn't paying attention, so she sighed and sat down to meditate on the question of who she was.

At first, her mind simply bounced between some of the aspects of who she was, but for all of the labels she could give herself, none of them felt like they answered the question correctly. So she shifted her focus and started with her past. Who she had been, the wild child of two loving parents. The eldest child. Onward, a teen now, finding new trouble with boys, and then on to being a trainee at the temple. She was still good at finding trouble, but most people there were troublemakers of some sort. She fit in there, and that second home became part of who she was.

More than twenty years had passed between stepping into that monastery for the first time and stepping into Kazue's dungeon. Twenty years of change, but there was always a steady thread of self throughout that change. Who she was now tied to everything she had ever been, and the heart of that wild child could be seen still in the adult of the present, right down to her smirk when she was having a fun fight.

After that point, finding herself became harder. So many things had changed so fast, but there were still threads to tie them all together. Moriko didn't try to pull all of that into a tight focus yet, she simply gathered them up and made sure every piece was there and was true, right down to the secret, guilty thrill she'd had when she'd first slept with Mordecai. Letting him invade her soul had required surrendering control at a level she'd never done before, which had been a little scary and more than a little arousing. From a certain point of view, that moment had been more dangerous to her than even this recent battle.

Moriko focused now on the future. Where did her recent actions lead her, and where did she want to go? What impact on her future did her present labels imply? Was any of that something she didn't want? Could she accept everything that wasn't part of what she truly wanted?

The hardest adjustment to being a wife had been to become truly dedicated to the two of them, and she'd already dealt with that. The idea of becoming a mother was newer but had been very easy to accept once she considered it. Domestic bliss wasn't a bad image. Not that she imagined their lives were going to ever be truly tranquil.

She was also technically an adoptive mother to two women she hadn't met yet. Fuyuko seemed a delight, and she was happy to take that responsibility on. Carmilla on the other hand, well, Moriko was less than happy with the faerie princess. Being motherly might be difficult, but she could at least try to be a life guide and mentor where needed, and where it would be accepted.

Being a 'queen' was more difficult, and she was still working out what that meant to her. Her position in the dungeon was technically unequal to the cores, she was their wife but she was also their contractor, rather than a fellow core. But her position as a faerie queen was equal to theirs, and she wasn't entirely sure how that was going to affect things inside of their domain. All the inhabitants already treated her with the same respect as the cores, would it make much difference?

There was uncertainty in that part of her future, but that was okay. Moriko accepted those unknowns; her husband and her wife would be at her side through all of it, and all would be well.

Priestess was a new title too, and it carried more responsibility to help others than her position as a monk did. But she was enjoying it, and it was easy to see herself doing so in the future.

What did all of that mean when combined with her recent past? Who did that make her now? Moriko started pulling all of these aspects of herself into one coherent mental picture, and with a smirk decided on a family name for the three of them, using that change to reinforce her sense of identity. She was Moriko Azeria.

The family name was obvious, and she had no doubt the others would have agreed to it if she'd asked, but Moriko had deliberately not asked. A bit of mischief to acknowledge that part of herself, and also make her mark on their relationship, an action she took that affected all of them without being nearly so drastic as some of the things she'd been subjected to because of the dungeon.

When she opened her eyes, Moriko felt refreshed and at ease. She was still more tired than she could describe, but she felt intrinsically better than she had before she'd started her meditation.

This also gave her insight into why she had to center her identity like that. They had purged the physical manifestation of the corruption, but she could feel its aura still. Thankfully, it had been the last two fingers on her right hand that she'd had to remove because now she needed to write.

[Answer this in your heart: Who Are You?]

She woke her companions and showed the paper to each of them, and once she had their attention she flipped it over to write, [Yes, this is important. Meditate on it. Dig deep.]

Kazue frowned at her. "Why are you writing instead of speaking?"

Moriko had to resist the urge to just open her mouth and show Kazue. She shook her head instead and simply wrote down, [We can fix it later, do this first].

Bridgette and Kazue looked confused and like they'd rather pass out, but Moriko pestered them into focusing on the problem. Kazue found her answer first, though it still took her longer than it had taken Moriko. Bridgette might have had significantly more formal training and experience than Kazue had, but Kazue had been tested and pushed by life and death far harder than Bridgette had and had needed to decide who she wanted to be before, if not to so deep and fundamental a level.

When Kazue opened her eyes again, they were much clearer than before, though both her pupils and irises seemed a little large still to Moriko, and the whites of her eyes were still a touch gray. Kazue's smile from feeling better soon faded as she took a real look at Moriko and flew into a near panic as she began fussing over her wife's wounds. Moriko was happy to finally relax and be tended to, and Kazue was so very sweet in her attentions, right down to gently kissing even the worst looking of Moriko's wounds and being unbothered by Moriko's lack of a tongue when she kissed Moriko's mouth.

By the time Kazue was done cleaning and tending to Moriko's wounds, Bridgette had finished her meditations as well. Not that Moriko's wounds needed a lot of tending, the potions had seen to the most dangerous parts of all of their purely physical injuries, but she still had many spots of tender, raw-feeling flesh.

"Oh, Moriko," Bridgette whispered when she realized the extent of Moriko's injuries, "I, I will try in a day or two, I don't dare call upon my flames right now. But, I don't know how well that will work. A true phoenix could fix everything, but I don't have nearly that much power."

Moriko was amused; for all that the princess was calling directly upon a legendary font of healing power she couldn't regenerate missing bits, while Akahana had been able to set regeneration spells on multiple patients.

It was simply a power gap. Of the three of them, Moriko was the closest to Akahana's strength. At least, the strength that the kitsune druid had demonstrated after decades of not pursuing the development of her druidic powers. Who knows what insights having been a mother and a gardener for twenty years might provide her now that she was off traveling again; life and growth are key aspects of a druid's path after all.

One thing that helped keep Moriko's mood up enough to be amused at the situation was the knowledge that getting back home should get her tongue and fingers restored. Mordecai was less certain about some other things, but that could wait for later. Moriko didn't have the energy to pass on communications, or even do much more than listen to Mordecai and Kazue's core as she dragged out some blankets to curl up into. Even the bedrolls were too much work, and it wasn't long before the three women were passed out on the floor; they had pushed themselves to stay up for the crucial time period, and now there was nothing urgent enough to keep them conscious.