After Ember completes her csses on the ignition and extinguishing techniques — and has been nudged back into her uniform, now that she’s not in danger of incinerating her clothes — Ishaza pulls her aside into a small, stone office off the other side of the training ground. There’s a bed in the far corner, and a desk to sit behind with a sturdy-looking iron chair.

  Ishaza seats herself behind the desk, and leaves Ember to stand.

  “So,” Ishaza says without preamble. “Regarding intensifying orgasm. This is something that I’ve seen succeed and that I’ve seen fail. A decent number of cases of safe modifications to higher but bounded levels of pleasure. Twice that many of damage, but survivable damage. A handful where something truly unusual happened — both remarkably good and remarkably bad. And three cases of permanent loss of any ability to function.”

  She folds her hands before her on the desk. “While this is a more-explored area of modification than many, it is also known to cause serious issues. Lively Spark is an instructive example. She used to be a driven, passionate woman who wanted to save as many lives as possible. After changing herself to orgasm continuously, she has ended up instead running a small clinic and spending a lot of time simply… basking. Changing the intensity of her pleasure, pying with it like a toy.” Ishaza taps her fingers together.

  “By all accounts, she’s happy and fulfilled. She had enough time to mentor you despite her condition. She still has things of value in her life other than her constant orgasm. But she’s not quite the same person she was before. Whether she would have accepted this as the person she was beforehand… is an open question.”

  Ember frowns. That does seem somewhat concerning, though… Liv certainly seemed to be enjoying herself, running her clinic and sleeping around on the side. It’s hard to reconcile Ishaza’s words with the woman she knew, who had so much joy for life. “I see.”

  Ishaza settles her hands back down onto the desk. “Indeed. Liv’s case is only one of several I’ve seen involving increasing one’s ability to feel pleasure. The cases that go well tend to have specific, limited goals in mind — intensifying one’s sense of touch to twice its original strength, for example, or extending orgasms to always st exactly a minute. Beyond this area, changes tend to be… self-reinforcing. Even some who set specific goals ended up changing themselves much more than they pnned.”

  Ishaza taps her fingers against her silver-painted lips. “That being said. Some degree of change in this area is practically inevitable. The kindling process changes everyone, and especially so in areas that they find personally cking in themselves. You are someone who wants to experience more pleasurable things — thus, you slide that direction. It is up to you to decide how far.”

  Ember bows her head. “I understand, Courtesan.”

  Ishaza raises a skeptical eyebrow. “Do you.”

  Ember takes a breath. “I — I admit that it’s tempting to experience pleasure forever, but there are other things in my life that matter to me too. While I have been pushing to — be able to orgasm longer and more intensely — I do intend to stop at some point.”

  “What point is that?”

  Ember bites her lip. “I, ah —”

  “You haven’t set one, as I suspected.” Ishaza shakes her head. “... I believe this is partially my fault as well. I haven’t expined this to you as well as I could.” She opens her desk drawer and takes a snaggle-toothed iron key into her hands, then closes it.

  Ember’s eyebrows jump. Ishaza, saying she’s done something wrong? That’s the first time she’s done that in front of Ember, ever. She can’t help but ask. “How so?”

  In answer, Ishaza stands up from her desk. “Follow me,” she instructs. “And I’ll show you.” And she sweeps out the door and into the hallway outside.

  Ember hastens to follow, trailing Ishaza through the dark granite hallway. They take a left, then another right. She casts her gaze around, looking at darkened halls she’s never seen before. She’s not sure where Ishaza is taking her. Technically she’s not supposed to be off the training grounds at all —

  “Where are we going?” Ember asks.

  “To visit an old friend of mine,” Ishaza says quietly.

  At the end of the hallway, Ishaza comes to a door. She slips the snaggle-toothed iron key into the lock, and turns it till a sharp click rings out. Then she steps inside, and beckons Ember to follow her.

  There is a small stone room inside, with a coral-colored skylight above a small bed that’s fully furnished with bedsheets and mattress. There is a small stone desk by the door and two chairs, one by the bedside and one for the desk.

  In the bed, a lizard-woman with shining green scales stares sightlessly at the ceiling. She breathes slowly, a slight smile on her face as if she were seeing something faraway. Beneath her nightgown she’s rail-thin.

  Ishaza stops by the bedside. “You may come sit by the bedside, but do not touch her,” she instructs.

  Ember comes and sits in the chair by the bedside. Her gaze lingers on the scaled woman. She’s breathing, so she’s not dead, but something about her sightless gaze is uncanny. She hasn’t reacted to Ishaza or Ember’s presence at all. Is she asleep…? With her eyes open…?

  “Who is she?”, she asks.

  “Alicia Kaberdeen. A very old friend of mine.”

  Ishaza sits on the bed, and brushes one hand over Alicia’s forehead. “She was a researcher, a hundred years ago. One of my colleagues in studying the effects of kindling. We colborated for twenty-five years.”

  Ember bites back another question. It’s hard for her to imagine her teacher as having had a social life. Obviously she must have, but… That word. Was.

  “What’s happened to her? Why doesn’t she wake up?” The question slips out of Ember’s mouth unbidden.

  Ishaza takes her hand back into her p. “She started coming to guild meetings less and less often, until one day she simply didn’t arrive for a meeting that was scheduled. I went to her house to check up on her, and this is what I found.”

  Ishaza passes her hand over Alicia’s face. Her gaze doesn’t follow Ishaza’s fingers at all.

  “She is trapped in a very, very deep state of joy and pleasure. A continuous orgasm, you could call it, though she’s adapted so deeply to it that it’s more than that by now. She sees nothing, feels nothing, hears nothing. But if I touch her I can feel what she feels, and from that I know she is never coming back.”

  Ishaza looks over at Ember. “As she is not dangerous to others, it is safe to have her outside Bckstone Sanctum. She’s changed herself to be barely living: she doesn’t eat, sleep or pass water. All she does is experience absolute transcendent bliss day after day. She has for seventy-two years.”

  A frisson of fear runs through Ember at that pronouncement, and she swallows hard. In almost every way that matters, this woman is… effectively dead now. Seventy-two years of nothing but uttermost pleasure… She can’t imagine that there’s much of Alicia’s mind left inside that body.

  Ishaza continues, seemingly unnoticing Ember’s fear. “I have tried to retrieve her,” she says, “to disrupt the pleasure-technique her body now manifests by instinct. All my attempts have failed, and I have tried many dozens of times over the st three quarters of a century. Kindling manifests what you want in your soul, even if it would mean an end to you. I cannot change what she wants, and so she remains lost.”

  “So,” Ishaza says. “This is why you do not experiment with kindling. Especially not alone, without guidance from an expert, without someone to watch you to see if you are going wrong. Perhaps Alicia thought she was expert enough to avoid this, but she is trapped here nonetheless.”

  Ishaza looks Ember dead in the eye. “Kindling is not an understood process. There are less than a thousand sisters of the fme in the world at all, and none of us have any understanding of the more unusual cases. All we have is experience, hope, and the passionate nature of kindling’s fme. Even I cannot say what situation you might blunder into if you pursue this recklessly. I have lost seven students to careless changes like yours, and I do not wish you to join their number. Do you understand now?”

  Ember exhales hard. “Yes, Courtesan,” she says. “I think I do.”

  Ishaza’s gaze searches Ember’s face for a long moment, and then she nods. “Well enough. Let us leave Alicia to her long rest.”

  And she escorts Ember back out of the small room, and turns the key in the door once more.