"How is it that you radiate seduction like a furnace and your mother and siblings can work with humans without issues? Did your mother also lock Fin and Marya up in that tower attic when they were teens?"

  "Uhhh..." Sage rubbed her bone and ligament arm.

  "I’m sensing a… 'No'," Galateya paced around the fox, ready to strike the Skinwalker with the Truth sword while shielding herself with the Justice shield.

  Sage's ears drooped further. The rotting-flesh Skinwalker stood there, looking increasingly vulnerable "Fine. FINE. You want the real truth? The embarrassing, pathetic truth?"

  "Yes," Galateya said simply.

  "I'm fucking desperate..."

  "No," Galateya sliced the lie with the liminal sword. "Again, mere performance. Deflection. Tell me the Truth, Sanguine."

  The Skinwalker flinched at the use of her full name. The rotting flesh rippled, trying to reform into something more palatable, more attractive.

  Galateya's Justice aura-shield held it in check, not allowing Sage to target her properly.

  "I..." Sage's skull jaw worked soundlessly for a moment.

  "You said you're a virgin wizard," Galateya pressed, circling slowly. "And such takes forty years. How old are you really?"

  Sage covered her face with bone-flesh hands. “I can’t… it’s so embarrassing.”

  “Out with it!” the dragon girl demanded.

  “Promise to keep it a secret… as my Omnid best-friend-o?”

  “Promise.”

  "Forty two thousand nine hundred and sixty three years," Sage hissed out. "I'm a forty thousand year old virgin. HAPPY?!"

  "What?" Galateya blinked, stumped momentarily.

  The Truth Sword wavered having encountered a sinkhole, an unexpected, gaping cavern of dark, terrible wrongness. The monstrous shadow behind the girl. Thousands upon thousands of fox eyes staring down at her.

  "The foxes stack up," Sage lamented.

  "Uhmmm. Your mom eats animals too, no?" Galateya blinked. "As do your brother and sister. Are they also mentally… just as old then?"

  "Nope." Sage shook her head. "The stacking was a… dumb, personal choice on my part. When mom fed me my first fox, I chose not to dissolve her soul properly. She was so precious and cute. I kept her, even though I was specifically told not to do that. And then I kept the next one. And the next... and the next. Each one I thought 'this is the last one, I'll dissolve them properly.' But I couldn't. They were all so precious. So alive. So full of memories and experiences and little fox thoughts about warm dens and hunts and the way sunlight feels on fur."

  Galateya's Justice sense dug into the depth of the truth. "You're not simply feeding on them… You're hoarding them."

  "Yes." Sage's eyes filled with tears. "I'm a soul hoarder. Every fox I ate, I kept intact. Preserved. Because the alternative… Mmmmm… dissolving them, absorbing them, erasing their individuality, it felt like murder, like an ending the little cuties… didn’t deserve."

  "So instead you carry all of them." Understanding dawned upon the dragon.

  "Yes," Sage let out. "Please don't tell my siblings or my mom, she legit going to murderise me. I REALLY wasn't supposed to keep them all, but I did."

  "Why not just... dissolve them?" The dragon stepped closer. "Release them?"

  "I can't," Sage shook her head. "Noway, nohow. They're me. They're who I am. They don't want to die and I don't want to give it all up."

  "Give… what up?"

  "Wizard powers," Sage replied, lowering her eyes. "Daywalking. Astral projection. Breaking time. Bending space. Reaching beyond the edge of our dimension, listening and speaking to other worlds beyond the stars… Making artifacts."

  "Artifacts?" Galateya asked.

  "Artifacts forged with innate magic," Sage breathed out. "I can imbue a sword with greater sharpness or make a ring to let you breathe underwater. Skinwalkers are natural mages and the more souls we eat, the better we get at that sort of shebang."

  "Then why…" Galateya started.

  "Why am I stuck in a tower selling bottled sweat to degenerates?" Sage finished. "Because I'm actually pawning… artifacts to degenerates. Batteries of desire that feed power to my Fractal Engine heart. I discovered a loophole that my mom and siblings missed. A way to incredible Magic Power. The love of humans."

  "Love? Without… physical contact? Without shared understanding?" Galateya repeated, trying to parse Sage's statement. “Without blood bonds?!”

  "Okay, not love per say," Sage corrected with a sheepish expression. "More like... parasocial obsession? Devotion? The kind of focused emotional energy that fans pour into their favorite online hoes?"

  "You're harvesting your followers," Galateya uttered.

  "Harvesting makes me sound like an evil witch," Sage protested. "I prefer 'sustainably collecting ambient emotional radiation from consenting adults who willingly choose to give me money in exchange for adult content.'"

  "That's just harvesting with extra steps!"

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “I'm not hurting anyone,” Sage waved her boney arms. “Not like the Frontenachii! My fans get parasocial fulfillment and I get just enough emotional energy to keep my Fractal Engine stable despite carrying thousands of fox souls that I definitely wasn't supposed to keep."

  Galateya frowned, another Truth unravelling itself in her mind. "You have to keep it up?"

  "I have to keep it up," Sage affirmed. "I have to dig more followers, have to sell more sweat jars with runes etched into the fluid. I MUST keep my foxes alive. All of them. Forever."

  "Catch twenty two," the book-obsessed dragon said.

  "Mhmmm," Sage nodded.

  Galateya's Justice sense analyzed the confession, weighing it against her understanding of right and wrong. The Taniwha in her wanted to condemn Sage.

  This was exploitation, wasn't it? Harvesting human devotion, even if voluntary. But the deeper she looked, the more complex the issue became.

  "You're not taking anything they don't freely give," Galateya said. "They get what they paid for. You get sustenance. It's... transactional."

  "Super transactional," Sage agreed. "I even make sure they're getting quality content! Custom voice messages, personalized videos, actual effort! I'm not some lazy cryptid just phoning it in!"

  "But you're trapped," Galateya continued, the full picture clarifying. "You can't stop. Can't drop your online work. Can't have real relationships because your Phase-shift is overcharged by all the fox souls and the emotional energy you're channeling. You're not simply a virgin—you're socially isolated. Completely. Even from your family... Because they'll never understand. Because they dissolved the animal souls they ate into themselves and you didn't?"

  Galateya reached out and grabbed Sage's hands.

  "Yep,” the Skinwalker agreed. "Mimi, Fin and Mom think I'm... bad at shift-control. That I haven't 'matured' properly. They don't know about my skulk. About my many permanent foxy houseguests." Her voice slid to a whisper. "If they knew what I'd done, hoarding all those souls instead of properly integrating them, Mom would be mega disappointed. She'd try to fix me. Force me to dissolve them. And I can't. I CAN'T!"

  Galateya's grip on Sage's hands tightened. The wriggly ligaments felt warm beneath her claws. "They're not just power to you."

  "No," Sage let out. "They're friends. Companions. Besties. My… animal spirits. Every single fox I ate—I know them personally. Not merely their instincts or their skills. I remember their entire lives. The old vixen who died peacefully in her den, dreaming of her kits. The young male who got hit by a car and suffered for hours before I found him. The clever female who figured out how to open garbage cans and taught her whole family. They're all in here." She tapped her chest. "All still themselves. Still thinking fox thoughts. Externally living through me."

  Galateya felt the Justice sense settle into particular certainty. This wasn't exploitation. This was... mercy? Preservation? Something that didn't fit neatly into moral categories.

  "You gave them immortality," Galateya judged.

  Sage's skull tilted. "Is that... a good thing?"

  "I don't know yet," Galateya admitted. "But it's not evil. It's complicated. Messy. Not cruel." Her scales shifted to contemplative silver-blue. "You saved them from oblivion. They would have died and become calcified to the Astral. Instead they live on. Experience things no fox should ever experience… Comicons, the internet, this conversation. Right?"

  Sage nodded.

  Galateya let go of Sage's hands and hugged the Skinwalker. "Thanks for being honest and showing me the real you. Forty-three-thousand-year-old virgin, soul-hoarder you."

  "That's a terrible dating profile tag," Sage quipped, skull slowly foxing up with red fur as she returned the hug. "Thanks for being an understanding friend. You know, you're the first person I told this fucked up shit too."

  Galateya pulled back slightly, looking down at the shirt Sage wore. "PUSSY EATS U" glared at her with the cartoon fox face with heart pupils.

  "This shirt," Galateya said, Justice sense tingling. "It's an artifact battery too?"

  Sage's ears perked up, then flattened sheepishly. "...Maybe?"

  "Sage."

  "Okay, yes! Fine! You got me!" The Skinwalker gestured at the ridiculous garment. "Every piece of merch I sell is enchanted. Not heavily, basically enough to establish a tiiiiny sympathetic Astral link. When someone wears my shirts, uses my plastic water bottles, displays my prints, installs my software, or collects one of my juice jars... there's this tiny thread of connection. They think about me, I feel it. They look at the fox face on the shirt, I get a little trickle of attention-energy. Put them together and thousands of fans allow me to keep my foxes and make even more artifacts."

  Galateya's scales rippled through a variety of textures and colors as the implications crashed through her mind like falling dominos.

  "The Frontenachii must never find this out," she said, voice turning cold and hard. "Never. Do you understand? If they learn what you can do—"

  "I'm not, like, planning to advertise my dumb fox virgin-ness..."

  "I'm serious." Galateya's grip on Sage's shoulders tightened. "If Admiral Evelithria or the Empress or any of the High Command discover that you've developed a sustainable method for harvesting emotional energy from humans? That you've created a voluntary system that feeds your Fractal Engine indefinitely?"

  Sage's face went slack.

  "They would dissect you," Galateya continued, Justice sense burning with the absolute certainty of it. "They would take you apart piece by piece to understand how you did it. They would replicate your artifact battery system across this planet and every other colony world. Every human and prad would be wearing Frontenachii merch, thinking Frontenachii thoughts, empowering the Frontenachii fleet and the Empress... The Frontenachii don't think small. They think in billions. Trillions. They would turn your clever little side hustle into an industrial-scale operation."

  Sage swallowed. "You won't sell me out, right, T?"

  "Not directly," Galateya sighed, "but you do know that I suck at lying, right? My great-grandmother could fish this out of my head."

  Sage's expression soured further.

  "Welp, fuck me I guess," the Skinwalker whispered. "Thought that I was having a nice heart to heart with my new BFF. I didn't think… I mean, I knew the Frontenachii were bad news, but I thought I was just... Selling sweat jars to lonely nerds? Not, like, sitting on the magical equivalent of a nuclear weapon recipe."

  "It's worse than that," Galateya said, "You're not sitting on a weapon. You're proof of concept. Proof that voluntary human emotional harvesting works. Considering how many humans are on this planet, you'd probably get an ocean of energy out of them."

  Sage's skull reformed completely back to rotting flesh, soft vulpine features melting away. "So what do I do? Run? Hide? Delete all my accounts? Burn my tower and disappear into the wilderness?"

  "No." Galateya's scales shifted to determined steel-blue. "You do exactly what you've been doing. Keep being you. Play the role of the isolated Skinwalker who's bad at controlling her Phase-shift. And when the Frontenachii come asking questions… Which they will, eventually, you let me handle it."

  "Handle it how?" Sage asked.

  "I don't know yet," Galateya admitted. "But you're going to be my Knight. That means protecting you is my job. My bound duty. My Justice."

  Sage's eyes widened, hope flickering in them like candlelight. "You'd do that? Protect me from your own family? You know, the way you are putting it... It sounds like you are going to be my knight." She let out a nervous giggle.

  "They're not my family," Galateya said firmly. "They can all go fuck themselves! I'm done. I'm so done with their shit."

  "So what are you... Going to do about the whole mind reading thing?" Sage tilted her head.

  "I don't know," the dragon girl sighed, "but I think that I'm getting better at using Justice and Truth. I cracked you open, didn't I? I'll figure out my consort next... Go from there. As long as I make my great-grandmother happy, she won’t dig too hard into my affairs. Ugh. I guess that Ash did try to help me out with the whole fake vamps thing."

  Sage’s tail wagged as Galateya smiled softly.

  “If he thinks that using the lake will aid in his escape, he’s made a terrible mistake,” the Taniwha stated boldly.