"Burning - I'm burning! Don't, please don't -"

She slumps with sudden relief. "I - I thought - oh, dear. I suppose I won't get away with the barrow excuse again."

"...that's a no on Delay Pain?"

"I'm not in pain anymore," she says ruefully. "It - I suppose I should start from the beginning. As long as I can remember, I've heard... voices, that are not quite my own. This is only the second time the voices have been accompanied by pain, like the time in the barrow. I keep hoping to find some logic to the whispers, but they just come and go without reason. They sound human... familiar, almost. Usually, the voices are more of a distant haze. But sometimes, whole words come across. When I was young, I read from the wrong scroll and, not knowing what I was doing, nearly incinerated myself. Before I could finish the chant, a voice in my head cried out and broke my concentration. It saved my life."

"...what do they say?"

"When I can hear the words... it varies, quite a bit. I've heard arcane musings, soliloquies from classic plays, distant weeping. When they interrupted me with the scroll, it was just a shout of 'No!'"

"...and now they're hurting you..."

"It's - it's not that they're hurting me - I think it's that they're hurting. Typically I'll hear the voices as if they were across the room, but this time I almost got lost in it... I thought, for a moment, that the voice was my own."

"...want a Mind Blank?"

She smiles wanly. "I cast it every morning. It's not... like that, I don't think." She shakes her head. "That's enough talk of my troubles - let's save Lienna."

"Okay." Into the breach.

There's a Red Wizard and an erinyes immediately through the portal, in the Shadow Plane reflection of the back room, but they don't put up too much of a fight.

In the next room, the backstage's reflection, there's a table. It's got straps on it, to hold down someone's arms and legs, and it's soaked with still-tacky blood.

It looks... sickeningly familiar.

"I don't remember that but I feel like I should."

Safiya looks at it, disturbed. "What a gruesome thing. You say you feel like you should remember it? In the Plane of Shadow, memories are closer to the surface of the mind. You could see if you remember anything when you touch it."

Belmarniss - braces herself a bit, and pokes the table.

Little care was taken in the table's construction, save to ensure that its surface was smooth and that it was long enough to accomodate a prone humanoid. It smells newly built, the wood felled from local Rashemi trees.

The tabletop is smooth. Polished. Something twists inside Belmarniss, where the Relic of the Reaper once lay.

Her ears ring, filling with noise. A voice rises through the din: a woman's voice. Or is it two? They sound so much the same. Her vision blurs; dark shapes are standing over her, tightening the straps on her hands and feet, so tight that her wrists and ankles burn and bleed from struggling. The shapes clarify: two women, their faces nearly identical to each other's and to Safiya's, one garbed in red, the other in white. Other figures lurk behind, shadowy and more bestial in form. The cold fingers of the women brush Belmarniss' chest, run a cold blade across her skin. She cannot move. She cannot scream. She can only watch.

The twisting in her chest becomes a burning. An echo of blinding pain, growing and growing in its intensity. The women's arms are red to the elbows, their faces spattered in blood. One of the women, the one garbed in red, withdraws her hand from inside Belmarniss' chest. She holds a darkly glittering arrowhead.

The red woman gazes into Belmarniss' eyes. For love, she whispers.

"Any of your school chums wear white?" breathes Belmarniss after a moment.

"...not on any regular basis," Safiya says. "Red robes have always been, well, if not mandatory then overwhelmingly expected."

"Folks who looked like you - I might just be bad at telling bald human women apart - one in white, one in red, yanking my murder weapon out of my chest, and like, I did not actually want it there and it could meaningfully have been complicated to remove but the restraints situation and the missing memory is suspicious. Also it wasn't ongoingly troubling me the last thing I have continuous memories of though possibly there has been some sort of shenanigan with my original body and the facsimile I brought to Cania during my little jaunt there."

Safiya considers. "...I'm going to tentatively say you're bad at telling bald human women apart," she says, "because while my mother does look remarkably like me and wears red robes, I've no knowledge of any white-robed relations. Also - I'm not going to say my mother would have the decency to ask before performing elective surgery on someone, but you're powerful enough that she'd at least be cautious of retaliation."

"Your relations never change clothes?"

"I'm not aware of any other relations," she corrects. "If I had a father, no one's ever seen fit to tell me of him."

"Uh-huh. Also at the end the one in red held up the extracted object and said 'for love', which, what the fuck is that supposed to mean. And then by whatever mechanism I was relieved of this memory and dumped in a barrow and acquired a mysterious hunger problem."

"...yes, this all sounds deeply concerning. Let's see if Lienna's got any answers for us."

"I hope very much that she has."

The next room, the shadowy reflection of the Veil's stage, contains: one Red Wizard, two erinyes, and a charred corpse.

     "Safiya?!" one of the Wizards asks. "What are you doing here?"

"I thought I smelled incompetence," Safiya grimaces. "Belmarniss, this is Khai Khmun, one of the most worthless piles of sputum ever to wear the red robes of Thay. He's a junior instructor at the Academy, as well... I can only wonder why he's strayed so far from his mentor's leash."

     "Things are changing at the Academy," Khai sneers. "Araman rewards his allies well. With Lienna dead, I've surely earned a promotion. A shame the old hag didn't put up much of a fight... she incinerated herself rather than face me."