"I was looking at some of your designs and I wanted to talk to you about them, can you come to the door?"

"I - I'm busy." 

"Ember. I know what you're doing to yourself. You miss your lame leg, don't you?"

"I said I'm busy." 

"I'm not going away until I see you at the door again." 

Ember swears under her breath. 

She gets out of bed, throws on her clothes, staggers to the door and opens it schooling her face as still as she can. 

"Fine," she says. "You've seen me. Now go."

There is an obvious bloodstain on Ember's skirt by the thigh and she looks haggard as fuck. 

She channels energy. 

"Why do you hurt yourself like this?"

She grits her teeth, sharp pain flooding her mouth. "It is none of your business."

"I think it is my business, actually, when my work partner insists on laming herself and damaging her body." 

She crosses her arms. "You've been crying, I can see your eyes are red. I say this not to say you're weak but to offer to help. There are better ways of healing than hurting yourself more."

There's no such thing as healing.

And that is where you are wrong, and why I win this one. 

You wanted her to fall apart? That's step one in putting yourself back together. 

You've spent budget on things I wanted. You fell for an obvious bait because you couldn't help but want to hurt me and her and Kumi. 

You lose.

Kumi offers her hand to Ember. 

"You've been suffering all your life. Isn't it time it stopped?"

She stares at the hand. 

After a long, long moment, she takes it.

She steps back from the doorway, and lets Kumi see the bloody knife on the floor, the bloodstained bedsheets. 

"I knew it."

Kumi squeezes Ember's hand once, reassuringly. 

"Do you want to tell me about it?"

"No."

"Do it anyway."

"... Alright."

She lets go Kumi's hand, and goes and sits on the bloodstained bed.

Kumi comes and sits next to her. 

"Kon-Zuthon doesn't believe in suffering that builds you up. He just wants people to hurt. Whatever you've learnt, it's because of a god who wants you, personally, to be damaged and weakened and lose your capacities and ultimately die, so that those who cared about you then suffer the pain of grief."

Kumi looks Ember in the eyes. 

"You're playing into the hands of someone who wants to break you every time you take that knife to yourself, Ember. So why do you do it? There must be a reason."

It's hard to say it. 

"... Pain is real," she says. "And it - feels right? It clarifies me. It gives me something to focus on. It's intense."

"They say that in Nidal. Pain is the only real and eternal thing. I think they are wrong; pain comes and goes like many other things. The Kuthites teach that suffering is life, and they have control of the country, so they infict much pain. But even despite their hold, beauty endures. It cannot be killed either. You found the inspiration to make your designs, to mark yourself in a way you found striking, to escape and do something else other than suffer. And that puts the lie to the idea that pain is the only eternal thing, if you can find beauty even in a land where everything is deliberately ugly and stark and bleak."

"It - fills me up, it drives all the thoughts out of my head. It shuts up my doubts. It's overwhelming in a way few things are."

"And pleasure does not do the same thing?"

"I -"

She pauses. 

The berries... 

"Until today I had never encountered pleasure intense enough to make my mind shut up."

"That's because you shun it. You've been taught it can't be as bright as pain, that it's inherently inferior. But that is wrong. It is a bald-faced lie told by Zon-Kuthon to ensure that all his victims suffer more and have less relief."

"It seems the truth to me."