By the point this week began, Excella Angelicus had already accepted a truth that would have frightened a lesser woman into distance. Sleep had changed because of him.

Before Dandemægus Auspiciouscrown entered her house, sleep for Excella had been practical. Efficient. Measured. She knew how to stop her mind, how to lower the blinds against the endless procession of messages, old missions, unresolved horrors, social breakdowns, occult disturbances, professional ghosts, private needs, and the perpetual noise of being a woman too capable for the world to leave alone. She had slept because the body demanded it, not because the soul had finally found somewhere safe enough to unclench. Her nights had been polished, controlled, and lonely in the disciplined way high-functioning people often mistake for strength.

Now she slept in the curve of another person’s presence.

The first morning of the week found them folded together beneath pale sheets, the room still dim with the softness of early light that had not yet decided whether to fully enter. Excella lay against his chest, one of Dandemægus’s arms draped around her with the instinctive protectiveness of a man who had no memory of his old life and yet somehow knew exactly how to hold someone like he had been born for it. Their skin still carried the faint sheen of heat and exertion from the night before. Not because the scene needed to be made into spectacle, but because intimacy had become one of the few places where the two of them no longer lied to themselves. His face in sleep had become her favorite contradiction. Awake, Dandemægus carried severity, fracture, restraint, and the constant shadow of some unnamed interior pressure. Asleep, that tension softened just enough to reveal the gentleness underneath. Excella could study him for whole stretches like that and feel something in her chest go quiet in gratitude.

She woke before him and did not move at first.

That was new too. Excella was not a woman built for passive lingering. She liked motion, liked task, liked the felt satisfaction of deciding and doing. Yet with him, there were mornings where she simply let herself remain. She listened to the slow measure of his breathing. She tracked the relaxed heaviness of his arm around her ribs. She watched how the light gathered on the line of his cheek and shoulder. It struck her again, as it often did, that a man so catastrophically fractured could still feel this solid. That whatever had taken his history had not touched the instinct by which he loved.

When she finally shifted, he woke almost immediately.

There was always a beat when his eyes opened where she could see the old blankness trying to rush up and take the room back from him. Then he saw her, and it passed.

“Morning,” she whispered.

He smiled in that quiet, dimpled way that never failed to hit her with more force than any grand declaration. “Morning.”

“You slept.”

“I did.”

“Like an actual person this time.”

He gave the smallest exhale that might have been laughter. “You’re making it sound rare.”

“With you, it is rare.”

That sobered him slightly, though not with pain. Only truth. His sleep had always been contested territory. Even with her near, even with the house warded, even with their growing rhythm, there were nights when he fought the unseen. Nights when his body twitched with the memory of some unseen assault, or when his breathing changed in the dark and Excella knew the ontological fractures were moving through him again. But last night had been different. Last night he had slept like the world had granted him, however briefly, the right to be just a man in bed beside the woman he loved.

He pressed a slow kiss to the bare curve of her shoulder.

Excella shut her eyes once and let herself feel it all the way through.

By the time she left the room, she was smiling.

That smile remained in place as she entered the kitchen wearing almost nothing practical and absolutely nothing apologetic. The house was full of morning now, pale gold over stone, countertops, cabinetry, and polished steel. Excella moved through it in black lace and strappy gold sandals, not because she was performing for anyone, though she was too beautiful not to look like a performance by accident, but because she genuinely enjoyed being alive in her own body. That confidence shaped even the smallest domestic acts. She did not merely make breakfast. She took ownership of the room while doing it.

On the island, bowls and metal dishes were already arranged. Rice. marinated vegetables. eggs. greens. seared proteins. broth. sauces. She stirred one bowl with a casual concentration, turned at the sound of footsteps, and looked over her shoulder just in time to catch Dandemægus standing in the doorway staring with an expression that was somehow reverent, amused, and faintly overwhelmed all at once.

“Well,” she said, one brow lifting, “good morning to you too.”

He leaned lightly against the frame. “You’re making breakfast like this on purpose.”

“Of course I am.” She gave him a look that was almost severe but ruined instantly by warmth. “I’ve learned that if I’m going to spend my life stabilizing a wounded country with a handsome impossible man, I might as well enjoy the visual texture of the morning.”

He stepped farther into the kitchen, eyes still on her. “You’re trouble.”

“Correct.” She pointed the spoon at him. “And you adore me.”

“I do.”

The simplicity of it made her grin.

That was how the week moved at home. A practiced lightness over a foundation that had already become serious. Their mornings acquired habits quickly. He made coffee stronger than she admitted to liking. She plated food like she was feeding a fighter before battle. He stood too close when she cooked, which she pretended to complain about and absolutely encouraged. Sometimes she talked through her messages while chopping vegetables, forcing him to learn the names and structures of the shadow-work that moved around them. Sometimes he stood behind her with his hands on her waist while she texted former judges, retired detectives, hospital chiefs, and occult logistics brokers as though this were the most natural configuration in the world. Maybe, for them, it already was.

The errands began by late morning.

Excella did not separate errands from missions anymore. In her world, the phrase running errands could mean buying detergent and jasmine rice, or it could mean intercepting a predatory relic exchange before lunch. That week, as usual, it meant both.

On the second day of the week, she went out in a fitted peach-toned dress so deceptively simple that an ordinary eye might have read it as casual. It was not casual. Excella understood clothing the way generals understood terrain. The dress softened her silhouette without diminishing her authority. Flat slide sandals made her look domestic, approachable, unthreatening. The tiny crossbody purse was mostly empty except for her phone, a concealed blade, a charm key, two sigil strips, and a folded note with three addresses written in the clipped handwriting of an outreach coordinator too tired to waste loops on vowels. She picked her look for the day with full knowledge of what it needed to do. She was going downtown to move through spaces where people only told the truth after they decided you were not there to make them feel smaller.

Dandemægus came with her.

He wore white and gold again, clean-lined and bright against the drab fatigue of the city. The outfit should have looked too polished for the work ahead, but he carried it with a sobriety that made it feel almost ceremonial. To people on the street, they looked like a striking couple running ordinary city errands. That was useful. It meant the first frightened child, the first exhausted mother, the first shelter worker on the edge of collapse would not tense instantly and mistake them for another official problem.

Their first stop was not glamorous. It was a brick strip of exhausted urban commerce where six young people sat against a graffitied wall with duffel bags, thin blankets, plastic grocery sacks, and the exhausted hyper-alertness of those who had learned that public pavement sometimes became the only thing between them and worse places. Three boys were trying hard to perform indifference. One girl sat wrapped in a blanket too thin for the hour, watching everything with the dead stillness of someone who had already run out of novice terror. A tram stop stood nearby. Cars moved. Office workers passed. Nobody stopped.

Excella stopped.

She did not start with pity. She never did. Pity kept people at a moral distance and let the giver feel superior for the ache. Excella wanted connection, not moral theater. She crouched so her height would not work against her, let the warmth in her face arrive first, and said, “Who’s in charge of lying to me that everything’s fine?”

That got a blink from one boy in a gray beanie.

Another glanced at Dandemægus, then back to her. “Depends who’s asking.”

“A woman with snacks in the car, contacts in three shelters, legal aid on speed dial, and absolutely no interest in wasting your time.”

The girl under the blanket looked up properly then.

That was the thing about Excella. Her beauty got attention; her sincerity kept it. People looked once because she was impossible not to look at, then kept looking because her eyes never treated them like debris.

They spent the next two hours on that curb.

Excella learned the group’s names, or the names they preferred to use. She learned who was running from home, who had already been through state care, who had crossed from regional towns under the stupid delusion that the city would hide them better, who was avoiding police not because they were criminal but because prior contact had taught them uniforms meant humiliation, and who among them had already been approached by the wrong kind of adults offering food, work, or couches. Dandemægus said less, but his quiet landed well. He listened without interruption. He made eye contact at the right moments. He noticed the youngest boy’s right wrist was wrapped too tightly in an old bandage and quietly asked to see it with such plain concern that the child almost cried from not being handled roughly.

Excella made calls while sitting right there on the pavement.

One shelter director owed her a favor and pretended not to. An outreach nurse picked up on the second ring. A former detective she trusted sent a text with two names that had to be avoided because they posed as charity workers while scouting fresh trafficking inventory. By the time they left, the six had transportation, intake priority, clean meal tickets, and a warning list written in Excella’s own hand. She slipped the list to the girl in the blanket and held her gaze as she said, “If someone says help too fast, leaves out details, or wants to move you alone, call me first. I don’t care what hour it is.”

The girl took the paper like it was some kind of impossible artifact. “Why?”

Excella did not answer with ideology. She answered with the truth. “Because you matter before the world agrees that you do.”

When they walked away, Dandemægus was quiet.

“Too much?” she asked.

“No.” He glanced back once. “Not enough.”

That answer pleased her more than she showed.

They kept moving.

At midday they crossed through the civic center district, where public architecture still pretended the nation was functioning smoothly. Excella changed registers with alarming ease. One moment she was kneeling on pavement explaining resource maps to runaway kids. The next she was gliding across open plaza stone in black fitted pants, lace-up heeled boots, and a glittering cropped top that flashed with impossible color whenever the light hit it, like joy refusing to be practical. That outfit was not for seduction. It was armor of another kind. She had a meeting in a semi-public atrium with a private donor who only ever transferred funds after being reminded that street-level suffering did not become less real because it was aesthetically inconvenient.

She let Dandemægus see her in that modality too.

He stood back while she negotiated, and what he saw was not merely charisma. It was dominion. Excella moved through donors, social entrepreneurs, boutique philanthropy types, and self-congratulatory city intermediaries the way a scalpel moved through rotten cloth. She flattered when it served the outcome, cut when it served the outcome, withheld warmth when it became necessary to make someone feel the moral vulgarity of their delay. By the time she left, thirty emergency housing placements were funded, a mobile clinic had been reopened for another month, and a private logistics company had quietly agreed to move relief supplies without billing. She exited the building with the same relaxed stride she would have used after picking up moisturizer.

“You terrify rich people,” Dandemægus said.

“I terrify lazy people,” she corrected.

He gave her a small smile. “The overlap is significant.”

She laughed hard enough to turn heads.

The week acquired rhythm.

One morning she wore crisp white, almost severe in its elegance, walking the edge of a fountain plaza with a silver bag on one shoulder, her expression set in that focused distance she got when three different tasks were fighting for priority in her head. That day’s errands involved visiting a trauma-informed counselor who volunteered after hours, checking on a safe apartment where two rescued siblings were finally sleeping through the night, and picking up a relic from a retired archivist who refused electronic communication and insisted on handoff in public because, as he put it, “if a man can’t be paranoid in old age, what was the point of surviving this long.” Dandemægus watched her switch between registers with breathtaking speed. One minute she was gentle enough to reassure a child who still flinched at footsteps in hallways. The next she was cool, exact, and almost judicial while pressing the archivist on chain-of-custody for an item that had already gotten three people hallucinated into traffic.

Through it all, their romance deepened not as interruption, but as infrastructure.

They kissed in ordinary places. In doorways. Against bookshelves. Beside the car before a mission. In refrigerated grocery aisles while fluorescent lights hummed over discount juice packs and an old woman pretended not to notice the way Excella lounged inside a red shopping cart like domestic life itself had become an inside joke between them. She loved making him laugh in public. Loved how his whole face changed when amusement caught him unguarded. In the grocery store he wore a baseball jersey with bright gold shoulders and looked so delighted by her ridiculousness that she nearly climbed out of the cart just to kiss him harder.

“People are looking,” he murmured.

“Good,” she said. “Let them see what functional devotion looks like.”

They bought too much fruit, three different teas, broth ingredients, painkillers, and a new phone charger because Excella had somehow acquired the habit of leaving hers in impossible locations. They argued playfully over cereal. He chose based on efficiency. She chose based on color and nostalgia. They ended up buying both. That, too, became part of the week: the accumulation of tiny shared decisions that turned two separate lives into one living arrangement.

At home, intimacy developed its own language.

There was the quiet kind, like the afternoon he found her barefoot in gold athletic shorts and a matching crop top standing in front of the study shelves. She was looking for a file and pretending not to notice him behind her until his hands settled at her waist and his mouth brushed the side of her neck. The study itself—books, desk, mirror, stacked spines of philosophy, law, science, occult theory, criminal procedure, and obscure cosmological texts—might have made another couple stiffer, more self-aware. Not them. Their affection remained startlingly unperformed. He held her as if holding her had already become muscle memory. She leaned back into him as if she had always known where his body would be.

There was the playful kind, like the mirror selfie she absolutely forced him into after deciding his refusal to participate in one was proof that he needed to be corrected. Excella in gold lingerie, looking impossible and very pleased with herself; Dandemægus beside her in an open shirt and the resigned expression of a man who had already lost this argument before it began. She snapped the photo, studied it, and announced it was “for historical record in case either of us ever becomes annoying enough to need reminding that we were once unbearably attractive together.” He kissed the side of her face in response and ruined the compositional symmetry. She saved the picture anyway.

There was the ordinary sacred kind, too. The type that never made it into grand speeches. Her hand automatically finding his across a grocery cart handle. His thumb brushing the inside of her wrist while she checked messages. The way she now slept turned toward him. The way he relaxed one visible degree whenever she entered the room.

Yet for all the romance and the errands and the new domestic softness, the week still belonged to the world they lived in.

Which meant the Voideater had to be understood.

The file opened three nights into the week after a string of impossible silence events near a decommissioned tram maintenance corridor on the edge of a warehouse district. Excella had returned from a call with an old contact in urban planning and found Dandemægus already seated at the island, waiting with that look he got when he knew a lesson was coming and had decided he wanted the harsh version. She set down her phone, pulled the file up on a tablet, and said, “All right. You wanted a better category for what we fought last week. You’re getting one.”

He leaned forward.

“Voideaters vary in appearance,” she began, “but do not let that fool you. Different shells. Same hunger. Fundamentally the same order of entity. They are not merely large predators from some adjacent ruin-space. They are negative appetites wearing locally admissible projections.”

She enlarged a diagram, then another, then a failing satellite still that showed only distortion and pressure.

“A Voideater has no true physical mass. None. What it carries instead is imaginary mass that still affects the real world as though the universe has been bullied into honoring a lie. That means infrastructure bends around them, atmosphere negotiates around them, local laws distort in deference to a burden that should not mechanically exist and yet does. Their visible projections, when fully expressed, stand no lower than two thousand nine hundred eighty-four feet in local measure. That’s minimum height. Not ceremonial size. Not upper limit. Just the point below which they apparently don’t bother to enter.”

Dandemægus held still.

“They exist outside the normal eleven dimensions of reality,” she continued, “and project only parts of themselves into the physical world. What we see is never the whole body, never the true essence. The true essence is unbound, effectively high-jump with unbounded excess closure cardinal in scale. You are not looking at an organism in the ordinary sense. You are looking at a manageable wound-surface of something much larger.”

She tapped again and a nested energy analysis bloomed.

“Every single atom inside a Voideater contains eruptions equivalent to real gamma ray bursts found in pulsars of supermassive black holes. Minimum local output per atomic eruption: 50 KiloFoe. Not theoretical upper-end fantasy. Minimum. A single cubic meter of Voideater projection carries a burden scaled at high-jump with unbounded excess closure cardinal. So if one ever looks locally ‘small’ to you, remember that size has already become deceit by that point.”

He did not interrupt, so she kept going.

“The silence around them is one of the real threats. Not just emotional silence. Structural silence. Their presence beckons beyond the far reach of normal human comprehension. The mind tries to grasp them and they slide through all available understanding like wet absence. Formal logic fails first. Then causality. Then the things people usually mistake for deeper anchors—concept, metaphysical ordering, even the transcendence patterns fiction itself uses to reassure readers that the higher frame will eventually hold. A Voideater overshadows all of that. It extends beyond the chart. Beyond the categories. But for whatever reason, these things like to reside precisely where reality and illusion overlap. Threshold zones. Wounded districts. Failed corridors. Half-remembered spaces. Places where people are already half-unseen.”

Dandemægus took that in, face tightening slightly. “Sounds like easy work.”

Excella smiled with no softness in it. “You don’t respect description, do you?”

That night, they found one.

It emerged over an abandoned civic data vault whose basement had once been converted into an illegal holding system for unprocessed identity archives—thousands of names, welfare records, medical ghosts, school disappearances, erased juvenile case files, and sealed intervention lists that someone had tried to bury under private ownership when the city changed software. The result was predictable to anyone who understood the moral weather of a place. The unseen and the uncounted had fermented together long enough to attract a higher eater.

When it rose, it rose as if silhouette itself had decided to become famine.

The visible projection was not the full 2,984-foot expression, because the city could not have survived that much local honesty all at once, but even partial, it forced the skyline to bend around its impossible implication. Black armor. Star-flecked inner surfaces. Horn-like arcs. Hands cupping collapsed stellar systems. Its very stillness felt hungry. Windows trembled. Streetlights dimmed. Birds dropped out of the air mid-flight because their little navigational certainties had no answer to the thing’s pressure.

Dandemægus moved to step forward.

Excella touched his forearm once. “Watch me.”

It was not dismissal. It was trust of another kind. He stepped back.

She went alone in the black dress with silver patterning and the violet-edged blade humming at her side like a promise the world had no right to hear. High heels on pavement. Bare legs in open city air. Hair moving over one shoulder. She looked less like someone marching to war and more like war had briefly chosen an aesthetic preference.

The Voideater turned toward her.

Its silence spread first. A broad descending hush that reached into building interiors, wet tram rails, traffic engines, sleeping apartment dogs, and the little frightened electrical conversations inside the human nervous system. For ordinary prey, that silence came before panic. For Excella, it came before irritation.

“You always do that first,” she said.

Then she drew the blade.

The violet ring at its edge widened, not as raw energy but as disciplined disagreement. Excella never fought monsters by trying to exceed their scale directly. She fought by finding the principle they had grown lazy around. Colossai trusted spectacle. Fractiflux trusted superiority. Men trusted appetite. Voideaters trusted hunger. They believed the right to consume was self-validating once it became large enough.

Excella disagreed.

She moved faster than the street could comfortably process. By the time the Voideater widened its feeding field, she had already crossed the first line of pressure, stepped through the silence as if it were only weather, and carved a violet crescent through the local articulation point where its projection touched the overlap between reality and illusion. The effect was immediate. The thing shuddered. The city block behind it briefly returned to proper scale. Excella pivoted, let the second swing rise higher, and opened a rotating wound across the secondary anchoring seam beneath its left arm constellation. This time the Voideater reacted with anger, voidal spheres brightening in its hands like unborn negations preparing to fall.

She smiled.

“Good,” she said. “Now you’re paying attention.”

The fight lasted less than 0.03 attoseconds.

To ordinary witnesses—those few who saw enough to later distrust their own testimony—it looked like a woman in impossible shoes and a black dress somehow teaching the skyline to reject a star-holding god. To Dandemægus, who knew more now, it looked like a masterclass in moral violence. Excella did not overpower the Voideater by brute scale. She dismantled its permission. First the feeding field. Then the silence. Then the overlap residency. Then the imaginary mass agreement. Each strike of the blade cut a layer of tolerated impossibility away until the thing had to bear the insult of local consequence.

By the time she severed the last operative seam, the Voideater had stopped looking majestic and started looking embarrassed.

It collapsed inward, swallowed by its own failed appetite, and vanished into a violet spiral no wider than her shoulders. Excella stood there breathing lightly, blade still humming, the road around her suddenly ordinary again.

Dandemægus approached only after the final light went out.

“You said watch me,” he murmured.

“I did.”

“That was showing off.”

“It absolutely was.”

He laughed then, helplessly, and the sound in the cooling street did something to her that was more intimate than any kiss.

The week brightened around those moments.

They took a sunset walk through a near-empty parking lot with the day’s last gold hitting her hair and the side of her face so warmly that Dandemægus forgot whatever he had been trying to say and simply stared. She wore a peach dress and flat slides again, one hand brushing lightly at the chain of her purse, expression distant until she noticed him looking. Then her face changed in that specific way it only changed for him—something between amusement and surrender.

“What?” she asked.

“You know what.”

“I like hearing you say it.”

“You’re beautiful.”

She tilted her head. “That’s ordinary. Do better.”

He stepped closer. “You look like the last warm thing the world doesn’t deserve.”

That one made her go quiet.

She never admitted how much she cherished his language when it arrived unguarded. Dandemægus could be sparse for long stretches, thoughtful to the point of internal disappearance, but when a sentence broke through from the deepest layer of him, it carried an honesty that almost hurt to hear.

They walked on.

Another day found them in the city center again, more polished this time. Excella in a bright sequined top with black fitted pants and heeled lace-up boots, moving with the confidence of someone fully aware that every public surface could become either a stage or a battleground depending on who arrived next. Dandemægus beside her, alert and handsome and still faintly bemused by how often her errands forced them to look like the most attractive couple in a radius while doing grim work. That afternoon’s task was a meeting with a civilian network quietly extracting women from coercive “private housing” setups that official channels refused to classify correctly. Excella spent one hour in a café back room with three advocates, a burned-out paralegal, and a hairdresser who doubled as an information node, then came out carrying no visible weapon and three entirely new plans for how to ruin a man who thought economic power made consent optional. Dandemægus did not ask how she managed to terrify predators without raising her voice. He had already seen it enough to know the answer: she believed they were smaller than the harm they caused, and people sensed when she meant that literally.

By the end of the week, the romance had become readable to others.

Children at the shelter watched them and smiled differently. One elderly volunteer asked Dandemægus, with no tact whatsoever, whether he had any idea how lucky he was. A clerk at the market started setting aside the tea Excella preferred because “your lady always gets annoyed when I’m sold out.” Dandemægus corrected none of it. Neither did she.

On the seventh night, they were back home.

The house had fallen into that lovely late hush where every room seemed to loosen its shoulders. Dinner plates had been cleared. The kitchen smelled faintly of broth, spice, and dish soap. Somewhere upstairs a window was cracked to let in cooler air. Excella stood in the bedroom half-undressed, one hand in her hair, the other reaching toward him as if this were the most natural ending to any day in the world. Dandemægus crossed to her and kissed her with the deep familiarity they had somehow built in so little measurable time that it felt indecently earned.

Later, in the last quiet before sleep, they lay together again.

His hand moved slowly along her back. Her head rested against him. No one was saving anybody in that moment. No files were open. No phone calls demanded judgment. No entity strained at the edge of the world. It was simply the two of them in a bed, breath against skin, bodies finally trusting the mattress beneath them enough not to anticipate violence from every silence.

“Tell me something true,” Excella murmured.

He thought for a moment. “You’re the first place I’ve woken into that feels like it wants me alive.”

She shut her eyes. “Dandemægus.”

“It’s true.”

Her hand rose to his chest. “You make it difficult to remain casually in love.”

He kissed the top of her head. “I’m not casual either.”

That should have been the end of the week.

It should have settled there, in warmth and earned softness and the beautiful illusion that perhaps the world might allow them one full night of unpunished peace.

Instead, sometime just before dawn, Dandemægus collapsed.

It began with a tremor under the skin. Not in the room. In him. Excella woke because his breathing changed, then changed again, then seemed to separate from the body producing it. She pushed herself upright instantly. Dandemægus’s outline shimmered once against the dim light and then doubled, one version of him still in the bed, another half a foot to the left, both briefly real and then neither fully so. The sheets passed partly through his arm. The headboard behind him showed through the line of his shoulder and then vanished again. Reality and illusion were not merely confusing him now. They were taking turns hosting him.

“Dandemægus.”

His eyes opened, but not fully to her. He looked like someone falling through stacked rooms.

The air around the bed went wrong.

Not cold. Wrong. The familiar architecture of the bedroom loosened. The wall near the dresser showed, for one blinding second, the outline of a different space behind it: black brick, red light, a corridor of symbols, a handprint on glass, some older geography of pain. Dandemægus reached for her and his hand phased through the blanket first, then found substance again halfway to her wrist. His mouth opened like he was trying to speak and instead a low broken sound came out, the sound of a person feeling too many realities tug at once.

Excella moved without thinking.

She slid closer, caught his face between both hands, and anchored her forehead to his. “Stay here.”

He shuddered. His body flickered again, outline peeling into illusion then snapping back.

“Excella—”

“I know.”

Her pulse was hard now, fast with fear she did not bother disguising. This was not a migraine. Not the same kind. The fractures in him had deepened. He was not merely in pain. He was phasing between admissible versions of himself, slipping through the seams between what was locally real and what only remembered being real. If she waited, she might lose the stable surface of him entirely.

So she did the one thing left.

She touched his mind.

Not gently. Not in the hesitant, surface-skimming way one makes psychic contact with a stranger. Excella entered with intent, her trained consciousness moving through the collapsing threshold inside him, through the broken signal of his current awareness, through the phasing architecture of his inner world. The bedroom vanished from her perception in one violent inward motion.

And as reality and illusion continued tearing him apart from the outside, Excella Angelicus crossed into the shattered country of Dandemægus Auspiciouscrown’s psyche.