Two Bards: The Forum!

It starts with a man and his son, living in a little cottage only just within a day’s walk of the nearest village.

The villagers cannot say when the two moved in, simply that one day the man came to market to buy supplies for himself and his son. A stranger in town was a thing most unusual, and so when the town gossips tried and failed to get the man’s purpose, marital status, location, even his name - well. It did nothing to endear him to the town.

He purchased a nanny goat, several packs of seeds, some leather, and a number of yards of sturdy canvas and twine at the outrageous prices the villagers named without objecting or even attempting to haggle. While the villagers were pleased with their newfound wealth, they only grew more suspicious of the man. Several of the young adults in the village attempted to follow him to his home after he had left, but no matter how wily or cunning they were, he lost them all within the first hour.

The man himself went home to his cottage and his infant son, and cared for the child. He was efficient, if not loving, and the trend continued for years. The son grew from infant to toddler, from toddler to child, and from boy to man in this way. His father taught him lessons that would have left the village in a tizzy, and every night just before bed the father reminded his son of what he must do; what the grand plan was. And every night, the son agreed to do it.

The son never went with his father to the village, for his father had deemed it inadvisable for the son to form attachments among those people. The only time he saw a human other than his father was the one time a village lad successfully followed his father home, but he never saw the villager again after his father had sent the lad away with strong words. His childhood was lonely, though he never truly knew his loss and instead convinced himself that the creatures of the forest were companions enough. His father did not entirely approve, but did not dissuade him from practicing his skills upon them.

Eventually, the time began to arrive; its coming was heralded by a strange series of meteor strikes and hulking creatures in the forest. A blight crept upon the land and into the water, brought by the strange creatures with blood like ink. The man began making preparations for them to leave, and the son accepted his father’s decision.

The blight did not affect them, though many in the village sickened and died, and the man had not foreseen that. In a place of fear, jealousy grows of those who are not suffering. In the place of jealousy, suspicion takes root. And the blossoms of suspicion are hatred.

The night before the man had decreed they would leave, the villagers came; those that were left, anyway. They came with oil, and with straw, and with torches. They believed, with all their fear, their jealousy, their suspicion and hatred, that getting rid of the unnatural man and his no doubt equally unnatural offspring would remove the blight from their land.

It ends with a towering inferno, with choking smoke and not a single shred of hope for escape.

——

It starts with a man and his son, living in what might generously be called an apartment.

It is a single room, with a corner for a sort of kitchen and a single bathroom down the hall that is shared among the entire floor. The building itself is ten stories tall, and each floor is the same as the next. It is not a terribly tall building by the city’s standards, nor do its windows have a particularly nice view; it is designed to house workers for the nearby factory, and nothing else. The apartments are assigned at no cost to the factory workers, but if - when - the factory worker the unit was assigned to is killed, their apartments are emptied of people and furniture and the next worker is brought in to take their place.

The man worked the factory during the day; he could not live in the building otherwise. He was not the best of workers, but neither was he the worst. He somehow managed to avoid the everyday accidents and cover-ups that took life after life among his fellow factory workers, and came home every night to tell his son the stories he needed to know and tell him knowledge of what the future would bring.

During the day, however, the son was given over to the mothers and those unable to work, who stayed in the building during factory hours. Not every factory worker had a family, and those who had children did not always have spouses. A system had evolved where every morning just before all the workers left for the factory, the mothers of the other children on the floor where they lived would come by and collect those children who would otherwise go unsupervised and take care of them for the day. The people unable to work became ‘uncles’ to the children, helping in their care and upkeep. If they were good at it, more often than not when their factory worker died another would be willing to marry them or bring them into a new apartment, to keep them and their own children in the building.

The man had been reluctant at first, but had capitulated to the need. The son grew from infant to toddler, from toddler to child, and from boy to man with the lessons of his father ringing in his ears at night, and the lessons of the mothers and uncles and the noise of the other children ringing in his ears during the day. His father said that he would save their people, that one day he would be expected to destroy the worlds to make them anew; the mothers said to wash his hands and say please when he needed something, and above all else to be kind to his fellow humans. The uncles said not to pick fights where one was not picked with him first, and the other children scoffed at the notion of destroying everything to make it anew - there was a lot of everything, after all - and so the son began to doubt.

He doubted as he grew from toddler to child, and from boy to man, and when he was old enough to go to the factories himself if he so desired, he stood before his father one night and asked him what would happen to the other people, when his destiny came to fruition. The father told him that these people were only reflections, shadows from a candle’s flames, and that the true people - his people - would be saved. Would be free.

The son went away and spoke to his friends in the building, and around it. He spoke to the mothers who had raised him to be kind, and the sort-of uncles who had taught him patience and how to knock back a shot of alcohol without falling on his ass. His friends scoffed at the idea of being mere shadows; the mothers patted his head and gave him a treat and told him that nothing lasts forever but should be treasured while it is here; the uncles gave him whiskey and told him seriously that while some things were beyond fixing, there was worth in them anyway.

And so when the son returned home, he looked his father in the eye and told him no.

The father accepted this only after a prolonged discussion. Finally, he said that the boy was as human as the rest, and free to do as he wished no matter the consequences. The son went to sleep that night, buoyed by his victory.

The next morning the father went to the factory and stepped calmly into a runaway drill press, saving the four other men it would have crushed had his body not gotten tangled in the gears. The son was given no time to grieve, and turned out on the street. With a minimum of skills, he drifted from job to job, from temporary house to temporary house.

It ends with an unseasonable frost and a still form huddled in an alleyway come morning.

——

It starts with a baby, placed on the steps of an orphanage.

He is not the first, and far from the last to be brought to the orphanage in such a fashion. The caretakers find him in the morning and bundle him inside, placing him in the nursery with all the other babes to which they tend. His swaddling is searched, but there is nothing to identify him or the person who brought him. He is given a name, and put into their records.

The orphanage is very full of children at all stages of growth, from teenagers who help corral the younger ones to unholy terrors who have figured out what legs and hands are for and are determined to use both to the very furthest extent of the law. One more baby is a blip in the background noise of the place, and the name he is given of little consequence.

The baby grows from infant to toddler, from toddler to child, and from boy to man in that place. He is one of the better behaved ones, which means he gets into a minimum of trouble and is trusted to help with the younger children at an earlier stage than most. His days are filled with the rambunctious noise of dozens of other children and he plays and learns and grows up alongside his many siblings of choice; the younger ones love him and the older ones tolerate him and he grows up as happy as one can be in a place where the adults have to spend nearly all their time keeping the children fed and clothed and never mind about nurturing.

He loves the orphanage, and so when the time comes to leave he instead chooses to stay and help. Being an adult in the orphanage is much, much harder than being a child in it, but he is determined.

Years pass, and eventually he begins to dream. He dreams of a figure in a black cloak that tells him how to use what it claims are his special powers. He does what the figure says to a bureaucrat looking to shut the orphanage down so that their funds may be given to other projects the bureaucrat values more highly, and is pleased with the result. He dreams of a figure in a black cloak telling him of danger in the near future, and wakes in time to deal with a fire one of the children accidentally starts.

He dreams of a figure in a black cloak telling him to leave the orphanage to fulfill his destiny. He wakes, and does not leave.

It ends with a revolution, sweeping through the city and leaving the orphanage a smoldering ruin with far too many still figures huddled inside.

——

It starts with a baby left in a hospital.

None of the doctors and nurses can figure out who left it, or to which of the pregnant mothers it should go. Finally, one of them locates a mother admitted for pregnancy but for whom no baby is listed; satisfied by their own oversight, they give the baby to the overjoyed mother and fill in the paperwork correctly as it should have been in the first place. The father is proud to have a son.

The trio go home to a luxurious mansion on the edge of town, and the son grows from infant to toddler, and from toddler to child. The proud parents go out for a night on the town to celebrate their child’s birthday - never mind that it is becoming clearer as he grows that his features match neither of them, he is theirs and that is all that matters - and decide to take a shortcut between the holoview station and the restaurant their child has chosen and where he will undoubtedly consume far too many sweets to sleep comfortably.

It ends with three gunshots and the sound of fleeing feet as blood pools on the street.

——

It starts with a baby, left on the steps of a childless pair of farmers.

They take the boy in and raise him right, as only farmers can. He learns to love the land from his father, and he learns to love other people from his mother, and by the time he begins to dream of a figure in a black cloak, he is well content to remain where he is for the rest of his life. His dreams do not need to be bigger, for what could be better than home?

It ends with a blight that kills first the crops, then the land, then the farmers.

——

It starts with a baby -

——

It starts with -

——

It starts -

——

It -

——

It starts with a baby, left in a basket on the steps of a monastery and taken in by the monks to live and to learn the ways of a parallel.

Tag bounced a little as he walked quickly through the familiar corridors of the Parallel Monastery.

It’d been his home for as long as he could remember, and he knew every nook and cranny like the back of his hand - much to the Old Guards’ displeasure when he decided he didn’t want them to find him. It didn’t happen often, but it always exasperated Toman when he hid and the faces he made while he lectured Tag about not doing it again were almost worth the trouble of doing it again - but only almost. Tag didn’t like to cause too much trouble, not when the Order Parallel had been so good to him.

Today, though, hiding was the last thing on Tag’s mind. Normally he wasn’t allowed to watch the parallels-to-be train with their elements, but Secundus had promised to show him the newest trick the older almost-parallel had picked up from one of the vids from the Lightning planet - Secundus’ home planet. Apparently, if you were clever enough, you could modulate the heat-frequency of lightning and make it play music! The thought made Tag wish, for just a moment, that he could control the lightning too - but he pushed the thought away. Toman always said he had more growing up to do when he asked about what magic he could do, even though Stephano always told him he didn’t have magic at all, and it was all very confusing.

Still, watching other people use magic was almost as cool as using magic himself, and he was very excited to see Secundus’ new trick. Tag picked up a little more speed into a sort of half-jog - there was no running in the corridors, they weren’t wide enough to accommodate more than two people across as if he ran that wouldn’t leave space for other people. According to Toman, anyway, and he always seemed to have the best answers to whatever questions popped into Tag’s head. Still, half-jogging wasn’t running and it got him to the Lightning practice room that much quicker.

Each element had their own specialized practice room in the monastery, designed specifically to contain any kind of magical accidents that happened inside of it. The Lightning room had a little bucket outside for people to leave anything metal they might be carrying, and a big copper rod stuck firmly into the solid stone of the floor. Tag hurriedly rifled his pockets, nearly hopping from foot to foot in his impatience as he made absolutely certain he hadn’t accidentally left a fork or something in one of his pockets. But the only things in there were a cool stone he’d found on the grounds and a small, equally interesting flower he’d found near it - he wanted to show them to Toman later, but they shouldn’t mess up any Lightning magic so he hurriedly shoved them back where he’d pulled them from and pushed the door open.

Secundus looked up from his lotus position on the floor and smiled when he saw Tag. “Tag! I’m glad you made it. Much longer, and I’d’ve had to start without you - I could only get the room to myself for so long on account of Blayze and Accalia wanting to practice their lightning spears today too.”

With a spry wiggle, Secundus unfolded himself from the floor and gestured to a corner of the room most notable for the heavy woven mat that rested on it. “You’ll have to stay in the observer’s corner - the bolts can get a little unpredictable when I modulate them.”

He looked very apologetic and Tag shook his head vigorously enough to flap his ears a little. “No, no! I’m so happy you’re letting me watch today, I don’t mind standing somewhere safe.”

To prove his point he ran over and jumped onto the mat - though the one inch of extra height it offered above the floor didn’t warrant such an exaggerated motion. Still, it was worth it to see the worry clear off of Secundus’ face and the parallel-in-training threw back his head to laugh.

“Well! With an attitude like that, I guess there isn’t much point in waiting any more! Just remember, stay on the mat. No matter what, okay?”

Tag nodded energetically, and Secundus laughed again. Without another word, the older boy turned to face the copper lightning rod and raised both his hands in front of him. Cyan sparks flickered between his fingers, and the stench of ozone filled the air as all the hairs on Tag’s head stood on end. He giggled at the feeling, and Secundus glanced at him inquiringly - and did a double take at whatever he saw, fear in his eyes.

“No-!”

Tag blinked, Secundus’ terrified face swimming into view not four inches from his own.

“I’m thirsty,” he said, and Secundus burst into tears.

Tag only had a dazed moment to think I can’t drink that before the door behind Secundus burst open and Toman sprinted inside, followed by a worried-looking Accalia and Blayze. He looked weird like Secundus looked weird, swimming in and out of focus in front of Tag even as the older man rushed over and pulled Secundus off of him. Blayze grabbed the sobbing boy and pulled him in close, patting his back awkwardly as Secundus soaked his tunic shoulder with tears.

Tag blinked. That, that wasn’t right, Secundus shouldn’t be crying, he’d only been- he was only going to-

“How many fingers am I holding up?” Toman demanded, blocking Tag’s view of Secundus with his hand.

Tag squinted. “Three. No, four. Two? Stop putting them up and down,” he complained, and watched Toman’s face darken with worry.

“Go tell the infirmary to prep for serious electrocution,” he said, half-turning to address Accalia, and the girl paled and gulped before vanishing out the door. Toman turned back to Tag and put a gentle hand under his shoulders.

“I’m going to pick you up, and I’m going to take you to the infirmary, okay?” he said seriously, looking Tag straight in the eye.

Tag nodded. “Okay.” Then a thought occurred to him. “Don’t be mad at Secundus, okay? He was just going to show me how they make music on the Lightning planet, it’s not his fault, I begged him to show me.”

Toman shook his head. “He should have known better - rules are in place for a reason.” He held up a hand to forestall Tag as the boy opened his mouth to retort. “We can discuss Secundus later. Right now, you need to get to the infirmary. I’m going to lift you on the count of three. One, two-”

Tag passed out.

When Tag woke up, he was lying on something soft and supportive with exactly zero memory of how he’d gotten there - the last thing he remembered was…was…

“Oh good, you’re awake.”

Tag looked up to see Toman walking towards him down the line of soft, white-linen-covered beds that constituted the infirmary of the monastery. He had a cup in each hand - one that steamed gently and one that didn’t. Upon reaching Tag’s bed, Toman reached down slowly and held out the cup that didn’t steam. Tag had to grip it with both hands - his muscles felt like jello - but an exploratory sip revealed it to contain cool well-water and he drink greedily until Toman reached over to stop him.

“Woah easy here, you’ll make yourself sick if you gulp it down like that. Small sips,” he cautioned as he guided the cup away from Tag’s lips. Tag sighed but nodded. The water he’d managed to get so far had sent pleasant tendrils of coolness through his chest, and while he still felt like he could drink a whole bucket of water he no longer felt inclined to try and drink the whole well. He licked his lips anyway, chasing any remaining droplets, and Toman shook his head with a huff of exasperated laughter before sobering again.

“Tag, I need to know what you remember,” he said in that too-calm way that Tag knew from past experience meant that he about to be in trouble.

He looked down and rubbed his forefinger along the line of scar that traced a path down the side of his thumb - Stephano had tried to break him of the habit many times, but Toman didn’t care. “I was in the Lightning practice room,” he said slowly, trying to stave off the inevitable scolding for as long as possible. “Secundus was there too; I’d forced him to promise me he’d show me something he saw in the vids from Lightning where they’d figured out how to make music from magic. He was going to play ‘The Planets Shine in the Continuum’s Light,’ I think, which I know is a kid’s song but we have to start somewhere, right?”

Toman’s expression didn’t change. “And then?”

Tag felt his heart speed up a little - or try to, anyway. It definitely skipped a beat in a way that didn’t exactly feel healthy, but he didn’t mention it as he continued. “And so we were in the practice room and I was on the safety mat, and…and..” Flashes of memory played in his mind - Secundus’ terrified face, the salty drip of tears, Toman cradling him against his chest, the hallways leading to the infirmary - but nothing concrete, nothing that made words come out of his mouth so Tag fell silent with a frustrated huff.

Toman nodded slowly and sat on the low stool that had been sitting next to the bed out of Tag’s line of sight before sighing deeply. “Secundus’ story matches up with yours, except that he insists it was all his idea and that you’d been punished enough already.”

Tag opened his mouth to object - it had been his idea, not Secundus’, and it wasn’t Secundus’ fault - but Toman held up a hand. “As it happens, I feel like you are both to blame for what happened. Granted, what happened was merely an accident; Secundus assures me that as far as he knew, he’d laid down the necessary pathing to put the Lightning into the rod and has no idea why it got diverted to you. Nobody intends for accidents to happen, which is why they are accidents and not anything else, and so I do not blame either of you for what actually happened. However,” he continued, with a stern look that made Tag want to sink into the floor and disappear forever, “that does not absolve either of you of the responsibility for the actions you took leading up to that accident. Rules are in place precisely to prevent accidents like this, and it was breaking those rules that allowed this accident to happen.”

He sighed and rubbed his forehead with his free hand, the other still occupied by the cup that was now no longer noticeably steaming. “I’m suspending all of Secundus’ outings for the next three months, and he’ll spend that same period scrubbing the refectory every night after supper. As for you,” he said, looking directly at Tag and making him squirm, “your library privileges are suspended for three months, and you’ll be washing dishes with the cooks after supper as well. People who don’t have the elements the training rooms are designed for aren’t allowed in them for a reason, Tag, and it’s not just you. The only reason we have extra safeguards is for testing days when an impartial judge is required and only people of the incorrect element are available.”

Tag hung his head as best he could, given that he was still mostly lying down. It ended up being more of a sulky head tilt than anything, but it was the best he could do without actually sliding to the floor and Toman seemed to sense that. Reaching over, he patted Tag’s shoulder with his free hand. “If it’s any consolation, Secundus is waiting outside to speak with you.”

The thought filled Tag with a sinking kind of dread - would the older boy yell at him for getting him into trouble? - but he put on a brave face and Toman ruffled his hair. “Chin up, Tag. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised. Drink this before I let him in, though,” he said, and held out the cup that he still had in one hand.

Tag took it in both of his and drank deeply - only just avoiding spitting the tepid, bitter liquid inside out all over his bed. He gulped the first mouthful of the nasty tea and looked at Toman, hoping against hope that that would be enough but the Old Guard simply gestured at him to drink up. Screwing his face up, Tag drank the rest down in two more big gulps and panted heavily afterwards in the vague hope that the air moving over his tongue would somehow diminish the bitter flavor.

Toman laughed and handed him the water cup, and patted him on the head before standing. He glanced down at the prone Tag, and his face softened. “Remember, Tag, I’m not angry you got hurt - that’s life. I’m disappointed you made choices that lead you to getting hurt unnecessarily. Try to be more careful next time, okay?”

Tag could only nod mutely, and Toman nodded back before walking away down the row of otherwise unoccupied beds. Tag sipped at the water to try and wash the awful, awful flavor of the bitter tea out of his mouth, but before he’d really succeeded Secundus was rushing down between the rows of beds.

“Tag! Thank the Continuum you’re all right!” Secundus skidded to a stop next to his bed, narrowly avoiding ramming it with his knees, and Tag looked up at him owl-eyed.

“Why wouldn’t I be alright? You’re good with the Lightning, and you didn’t mean to hurt me,” Tag said reasonably, and Secundus laughed a little wetly.

“That’s you all over Tag, always looking on the bright side.” Secundus slumped onto the stool so recently abandoned by Toman and hung his head. “I’m sorry, Tag, I didn’t mean for you to get hurt. You were just, just so excited to see the music, and it doesn’t take much power and I thought it’d be safe to show you but -” he paused to suck in a deep, thick breath, “ - but there was too much power, more than I meant, and - and - and you could have died, Tag,” Secundus said miserably, sounding very small, and Tag blinked.

Too much power? He could have died? He blinked and swallowed, suddenly feeling pretty unsteady himself. “Wh- what do you mean by 'too much power?’” he asked, fear making his throat tight and a miserable little noise pushed itself out of Secundus’ throat as tears began rolling down his face.

“The music doesn’t t-take much, b-but when the p-pathway switched to you it, it, it pulled all the power I had ready, for the whole song. You t-took nearly thirty th-thousand volts, Tag. I thought-t-t you were dead, like, like,” words failed him as he began to cry in earnest, and Tag felt sympathetic tears well up in his own eyes.

Everyone knew Secundus’ story. He used to help with the two cows the monastery kept for their milk - mucking out their stalls, bringing them hay and oats, walking them to and from pasture. He hadn’t needed to do it - he was here to learn to be a parallel, after all, not like Tag - but he’d wanted to and nobody had objected. He had loved those cows - Bessie and Spots - and they had loved him right back.

Right up until the storm blew in.

The lightning strike had been enough to wake up Secundus’ then-dormant lightning powers, and he’d been so overjoyed with his newfound power that he hadn’t realized it had also charged him up. He’d gone to hug Bessie and Spots…

A tear slid down Tag’s cheek as he reached over and laid a hand on Secundus’ arm. “Hey,” he said gently, and Secundus looked at him with a tear-stained face. “It’s not your fault. You didn’t know that would happen. Toman said accidents are just things that happen, and I agree with him. It’s not your fault I got hit - if anything, it’s mine for insisting on you showing me.”

Secundus shook his head vigorously, but seemed too choked up to speak. Tag thought for a moment before he squeezed Secundus’ arm again. “Okay, well, if it helps we’re both in trouble with Toman, so maybe we’re equally at fault? And we know enough not to do it again?”

Secundus laughed a laugh that was only a little better than a sob and reached over to squeeze Tag’s arm back.

“Yeah. Okay. Deal.”

Chase let his eyes rove around the darkened halls of the monastery nervously.

He’d worked at the place since his dad had deemed him old enough to start running simple errands there, sure, but this time of year never failed to be spooky in a way he couldn’t easily define. The empty halls that normally bustled with life echoed every foot step and labored breath until Chase found himself tiptoeing along and doing his best to keep his gulps of air quiet. It wasn’t just that the braziers were low, or that the lanterns that normally lit the place were dimmed; there was something in the corners, too, lurking in the shadows. His dad had told him it was nonsense, but Chase couldn’t help but wonder if all the centuries of psychics and magickers hadn’t…done something to the place.

The bucket of horse feed in his hands didn’t help any; while Gas had been drunkenly adamant he wanted more of the stuff, Chase privately thought that the man would likely be snoring in his chair by the time it actually got back to him. Still, Gas was probably the number one teacher you didn’t want to piss off, even if you weren’t one of his pupils, and so Chase had gone to refill the bucket. He had to hold it awkwardly away from his body while walking, otherwise the tiny kernels rattled and the handle clanked in a way that had nearly given him a heart attack a few corridors back. It made his shoulder ache from the effort, and he had to wonder if it would be easier and maybe even a bit less noisy to just hold the stupid thing up against his chest to muffle any noise when he turned a corner.

Someone tackled him.

“Oh my gosh!” Chase yelped as his bucket hit the floor with an almighty CRASH, tiny kernels of dried corn skittering and spreading across the cool flagstones of the hallway. He could feel his heart wildly trying to beat right out of his chest as he stared up into the equally startled face of Tag.

The older boy was something of an anomaly among the servants. Chase and his dad and nearly everyone else he knew went home at the end of the day. They lived in neat, white stucco houses about ten minutes walk down the wide, flat path from the gates and Chase shared his sleeping pallet with the family dog whenever the nights got too chilly. But Tag stayed at the monastery, and slept in the common dorms with the parallels-in-training - the thought of which gave Chase the shudders. Parallels were usually pretty good about not using their powers on other people, but that didn’t mean that the ones in training knew enough to not do that and Chase would rather sleep in the hayloft than in the barracks with a bunch of half-trained parallels. Especially the ones who had psychic powers - the thought of one of those getting inside his head made his guts curdle.

Tag didn’t seem to mind it, though, and Chase had never quite gotten up enough courage to offer a place in his family’s sleeping room to the older boy. There was something about him that discouraged it, which was probably why he’d never been fostered out to one of the caretaker families. Chase could think of at least half a dozen families who probably wouldn’t have noticed another mouth at the table, and a couple more who would actively welcome it, but none of them had taken Tag in.

Chase could almost understand why as he and Tag stared at each other wild-eyed for a few tense moments. There was something…off in the back of Tag’s eyes, though Chase was distracted almost immediately by Tag laying into him.

“Chase, what are you sneaking for??” Tag was clutching at wall, seemingly put off-balance by the same impact that had knocked Chase down, and looked nonplussed at the younger boy’s appearance behind him in the halls.

“It’s scary out here!” Chase snapped back defensively, hating the whine in his voice. It was stupid to be afraid, there was nothing on the moon that could harm them, but…

“Well yeah, it’s scary because you’re sneaking behind me!” Tag shot back, and Chase was a little relieved to hear how high his voice had gone as well. There was something obscurely comforting in the fact that Tag found the halls unnerving, too.

He did have to clear up one point, though. “I wasn’t sneaking behind you!”

“What were you doing??”

“I was just getting this parched corn!” Chase protested, holding up the empty bucket for a moment before remembering that the corn inside was now scattered over half the hallway around them and putting it back down with a grimace. He’d be in the soup for sure if he didn’t clean it up, never mind what Gas would do to him.

“Did you see me?” Tag asked, and Chase resisted the urge to push himself away on his elbows. That weird thing was back in Tag’s eyes, and he didn’t like it.

“No! Were you sneaking?” Chase asked suspiciously. Maybe he wasn’t the quietest person in the hallways, but he hadn’t heard anyone in front of him. Though he had to admit, if he had heard someone in front of him he would’ve probably tried to scare them - especially if it was Malia, a housekeeper about his age. Making her scream was one of the funniest pastimes whenever things got too dull, in Chase’s opinion - though she’d promised to thrash him if he did it again.

“No, I wasn’t sneaking. I thought you could see me and that therefore since I couldn’t see you, you were sneaking. But I guess if you couldn’t see me, you maybe weren’t sneaking…” Tag trailed off, stance relaxing a little, and Chase pushed himself to his feet.

“No. What are you doing?” Chase reached down and picked up the book that had fallen out of Tag’s arms when they’d collided, and noticed absently that it left a perfectly book-shaped clean spot in the middle of the mass of kernels.

“Do - don’t open that! Don’t open that! It’s Ser Drake’s!” Tag sounded panicked again, but it was too late as the book fell apart of its own accord in Chase’s hands.

The bottom cover fell away from it in a way Chase was pretty sure books weren’t supposed to be able to move, and he had one heart-stopping moment of fear as he wondered if he’d managed to damage Ser Drake’s book. Ser Drake wasn’t as actively scary as Gas was, but he was the head of the armory. Chase had heard from his cousin that Drake knew how to use every weapon in that room, and could kill you dead before you even knew he’d moved - and Chase had just damaged his book.

The moment was short-lived as a scroll fell out of a hollow place inside the book and the cover flapped a bit like a box on a hinge. Chase let out what felt like his entire soul in a sigh of relief - if the book was supposed to open that way, then he hadn’t broken it. Still, he was curious about what had fallen out and he stooped down to scoop it out of the mess on the floor.

“Oop, sorry,” he apologized to Tag as he flipped the book around and started trying to put the scroll back. For some reason, while it had been loose enough to fall out easily it was now too wide to fit in even slantwise. Maybe it had unrolled a little when it fell?

“It’s okay,” Tag said quietly, eyes on Chase’s hands as the younger man struggled to get the scroll back in the book - which just made him fumble it more because the older boy was watching him.

“What is it?” Chase asked, finally giving up on trying to cram the scroll back where it belonged. It was almost like the thing didn’t want to go back, like it was actively resisting his efforts - but that was stupid, objects couldn’t do that, not even magical ones.

“Well- it- y'know- it’s- look, honestly, I don’t know if I’m supposed to know…Look, Ser Drake gave this to me to take to his room. He might have been relying…”

“Ooooooooo” Chase said mockingly. Tag had been at the monastery for longer than Chase had been alive, sure, but he was such a teacher’s pet for someone who wasn’t even a candidate for the Order. Not even Malia - a suck-up of the first order - had it as bad as Tag did.

“‘Ooo’? What do you mean 'ooo’? Why are you saying it like that?”

“Oooooo,” Chase repeated. It was funny to watch Tag’s face work as he tried to parse out what Chase was saying, and Chase was not about to clue him in any time soon. It was almost as good as making Malia’s face scrunch up.

“What does that even mean?” Tag snapped, taking a step towards Chase, and the younger man suppressed the urge to take a step away.

“Teacher’s pet,” he taunted instead, making sure to layer the insinuation as thick as he could manage.

“No, dude, he just asked me to do it, it’s not a teacher’s pet thing! I was there,” Tag insisted, and Chase snickered rudely.

“You were 'just there’ hosting the teachers’ dinner,” he retorted.

“What are you doing with that pail of parched corn?” Tag shot back, and Chase glanced down at the empty bucket in his hand before making a vague 'what can you do’ gesture.

“Gas cornered me and told me to go get more parched corn.”

“Ooooooo,” said Tag, and Chase felt himself shrivel a little on the inside at the mocking edge in the older boy’s tone. “How does it feel? OooooOOoooOOoo.”

“My task was so much less cool and secretive,” Chase muttered sullenly. Tag gave him the stink eye and Chase hunched up so that his shoulders were at his ears. How Tag made him feel like he was getting a dressing down from his mother, he had no idea. “…but it felt bad,” he mumbled, and Tag took a step back apparently satisfied.

“Well, it’s just - it’s just a scroll,” Tag said as he pulled off the ring holding the scroll closed - a ring would should have prevented it from unrolling on its own even a little bit, and Chase glanced between it and the fake book again. It should have fit easily, but it hadn’t for whatever reason. The older boy unrolled it and looked for a few moments before looking over at Chase.

“Have you ever been to the Hall of Doors?” The older boy asked, and Chase started - the silence had started getting spooky again, in the time Tag had just stood there reading.

“I’ve-” Chase paused and glanced around, though he and Tag were definitely the only two even in this part of the building. While it wasn’t strictly speaking against the rules for a non-parallel to go into the Hall of Doors, it certainly wasn’t encouraged and even the parallels only went there once in a few years. “I’ve snuck in,” he murmured to Tag, quietly enough that the older boy had to lean in to hear him.

Tag blinked down at him. “Well it’s not- I mean, there’s, there’s nothing to- there’s nothing there. It’s like, everyone keeps talking about this like it’s this ancient, mystical, powerful thing, but they don’t DO anything. You can’t open the doors, not any of them.”

Chase could feel his eyebrows crawling for the top of his forehead and he leaned forward conspiratorially. “Have you ever been to the Hall of Doors?”

“Sure I’ve been to the Hall of Doors,” Tag said, waving a dismissive hand, “but it’s just like walking through a hall that has - I mean, I’m sorry, I’m not trying to be a, a you know, irreverent, but I, I just don’t get it. They’re doors. Maybe one time a long time ago they did powerful stuff, but now they’re just decorative. And,” he said, like this was the most important part, “they don’t even really gel together.”

Chase remembered his visit to the Hall vividly. It’d been a year or two ago, and Malia had said he was too scared to go into the room. He hadn’t been about to take that lying down, so he’d faked a stomachache the next day when he was supposed to be mopping the floors near the meditation halls and snuck away from the infirmary. There had been a few near-misses of people catching him where he wasn’t supposed to be, but by the time he’d gotten to the Hall most of the traffic had petered out. After all, the Hall didn’t lead anywhere anymore.

He’d taken a few steps inside, and been struck by the profound silence in the place. It was the kind of quiet that pressed on your eardrums hard enough that it felt like you needed to pop your ears - but no amount of swallowing would make the feeling go away. Tag was right in that none of the doors matched each other, but Chase had seen more jewels in the two minutes he’d spent in the place than he’d ever seen before - or, for that matter, since. It wasn’t that jewelry was forbidden to parallels, it was that it got in the way of combat training and could result in some pretty nasty injuries so most people chose not to wear it.

Still, there was definitely far more to the Hall than Tag made it out to be, and Chase could feel the sneer curling along his lips as he spoke.

“You’re just so cool and unfazed by any of this stuff, Tag. Can I see the scroll?” Whatever Tag had read on the scroll clearly had to do with the Hall of Doors, and if Tag was gonna be a wuss about it then Chase was definitely going to investigate.

Of course, it’d be easier if Tag just gave him the scroll.

“Are you mocking me?” Tag asked, and Chase gave him a look that he hoped conveyed that the taller boy was being thicker than two planks.

“Yeah,” he said pointedly, and Tag rolled his eyes briefly before holding out the yellowing parchment of the scroll.

“Okay, sure,” he said.

Chase reached out and took the yellowed parchment, and without waiting to see what Tag would do he took off down the left-hand corridor. The Hall of Doors wasn’t near, but there wouldn’t be anyone between him and it tonight so he could go as fast as he liked and nobody was going to scold him about running in the halls. Besides, Tag was just gonna do what Ser Drake told him to do and not even try and figure out the scroll, and that was boring.

“CHASE!” Tag shouted behind him, but Chase didn’t slow down one jot as he turned another corner.

He could hear the older boy starting to run after him, but there was no way Tag was going to catch him before he reached his destination. While Tag was definitely taller, he was gangly and uncoordinated at the best of times so his height wouldn’t work for him. Chase had seen him trying to run somewhere when he was late on more than one occasion and…a muffled thud and the painful sound of a body hitting the stone floor echoed behind Chase and he couldn’t help but wince in sympathy even as he continued to run. That happened; Tag would misjudge his clearance around a corner, or trip on a step, or over his own two feet, and down he’d go. It was never much of a deterrent, though, and Chase could hear the footsteps behind him resume as Tag apparently managed to find his feet again.

Still, Chase arrived at the Hall of Doors with a pretty comfortable lead, and he took a second to breath through the stitch in his side before unrolling the scroll. He’d left the door behind him open, but it wasn’t like anyone was going to catch him except Tag, and if he could figure out this scroll before the taller boy arrived then it wouldn’t matter.

A complex system of runes and astrological signs winked back at him from the paper, and Chase frowned. He didn’t get many chances to read, in spite of the monastery having a reasonably extensive library that was - at least, in the common sections - open to all on Cylvahl Cylesso. The hard labor of keeping the building clean and in good repair meant that Chase rarely had time to settle down with a book, and he’d only been a middling reader anyway when he’d finished the optional classes for the workers. Whatever these runes and stuff were, he’d never seen anything like it before outside of some very old books in a teacher’s sleeping quarters- didn’t even know if he was holding it the right way up, even, and he turned it upside down as soon as the thought occurred to him.

Upside down didn’t make any more sense than right side up, and turning it on its sides didn’t help either. Worst of all, the delay gave time for Tag to catch up, panting for breath and looking a little more disheveled than he had back in the hallway.

“Ch-” huff “Chase! C'mon man, this isn’t funny! I’m supposed to take the book to Ser Drake’s room,” Tag complained, and Chase stuck his tongue out at him before returning his attention to the scroll. Ser Drake wasn’t gonna follow Tag and immediately look for the book in his quarters, they had time. He just had to figure out what the scroll said, and then they could go put the book away.

“Ooo k are you 'one with the other side,’ Chase? C'mon, stop messing around, look through the key-hole and let’s go,” Tag ordered, and Chase stopped moving the scroll to turn slowly to look at the older boy.

“What do you mean?” He asked, puzzled. Chase hadn’t been able to make heads or tails of the runes in front of him - did Tag know how to read them? It wasn’t outside the realm of possibility, he did spend a lot more time here than Chase did (and, frankly, the teachers liked him more) but it seemed odd. He held out the scroll so Tag could see it but not grab it.

“I mean- are you gonna do it?” Tag sounded exasperated, but Chase still didn’t quite understand what he was talking about.

“Do what?” He asked blankly.

“Do- see- look through the keyhole. See if you’re one of the whatever.” Tag gestured at the scroll held in Chase’s hand, and he started.

“Wait- you can read this?”

“What- yeah, I can read- what, Chase, are you illiterate?” Tag sounded incredulous, and Chase puffed up in outrage. Sure, some of the servants never bothered learning to read, but his dad had made sure Chase got the opportunity.

“Illiterate? Those are arcane symbols, man! I don’t even know what language that is! I’ve seen that in some of Ser Drake’s books!” Books he technically speaking shouldn’t have snuck a peek at - but it had been winter, and he’d been brought up from his usual duties to clean the room because the usual person was sick and they’d just been laying there. He hadn’t been able to read them, and he’d gotten a clip round the ear from his dad for trying when the man had found him snooping.

Tag reached out and took the scroll from Chase’s unresisting fingers and glanced between him and the text for a few seconds before holding it up for Chase to see.

“What does that say?” He asked, pointing at a squiggle that kind of looked like an upside down moon with three dots above it, and Chase gave him a sarcastic look.

“I dunno, it looks like an upside down moon with three little dots over it,” he snipped back, and Tag looked down at the scroll for a long moment.

“Oh. Well, why can I see…” He trailed off, and Chase scooted a little closer to see if he could maybe decipher the runes with another look - but they looked just the same.

Tag wasn’t looking at Chase, though. He was staring at the least impressive of all the doors in the room - and that included the one that lead back into the rest of the monastery - with a very odd expression on his face. He glanced down at Chase, who shrugged - there was nothing really special about the door, and he had no idea why the teachers would get worked up about it. Tag looked back at the door and slowly knelt to look in the keyhole.

There was a breathless instant of time that felt like it took years, but in actuality was the space between one heartbeat and the next. Chase could feel as something coiled behind the door, something that felt like being watched by a huge predator, but put a taste in his mouth that reminded him of lightning storms. It wound tighter and tighter, but Chase couldn’t move a single muscle, couldn’t even edge towards the door away from whatever the hell Tag had set off when he’d looked into the keyhole.

It struck.

Chase let out the breath he hadn’t known he was holding as everything unwound, the pressure gone in an instant. Once again, the Hall of Doors was just a vaguely creepy room at the center of the monastery that no-one ever went to, not even to clean.

“What the Void was that, Tag? It felt like….Tag?”

Tag wasn’t moving.

He was laying on the ground in front of the door, crumpled onto his side like he’d just fallen over from his kneeling position. Chase moved a little closer - was Tag even breathing? He reached down to poke the older boy, though whether it was to confirm he was breathing or to try and wake him up, Chase himself couldn’t say at that point.

“Tag?” His hand made contact with Tag’s side.

Tag seized.

Chase was out the door and down the hall like a shot, running faster than he’d ever run in his life. That thing- whatever- Tag- he didn’t know. He didn’t know, but it was Ser Drake’s scroll. With any luck, the armory master would still be in the wine cellar.

Chase rocketed down the hallways, most of them empty until he got closer to his destination. A few teachers and a few servants shouted at him angrily as he ran by, but he didn’t have time to stop. He slammed his way through the door, took the stairs two at a time, and bowled over Malia at the bottom as she was about to step up the stairs with a handful of the thick earthenware plates they’d used for supper. The dishes broke with an almighty CRASH and Malia screeched, a fact that Chase would normally be reasonably pleased about, but he had more important things to worry about now. He could see his target in the corner - now halfway out of his chair at the commotion - and ran over and skidded to a stop that nearly took his own feet out from under him.

He grabbed at Ser Drake’s robes and gulped for air.

“Help- Tag- scroll- Hall- collapsed-”

Ser Drake’s hands clasped Chase’s forearms like iron shackles and held him up.

“What did you say, boy?”

Chase gulped a little more air. “Tag needs help- he read the scroll and looked at the door- won’t wake up- started seizing-” he wheezed, and suddenly he was being dragged through the wine cellar by Ser Drake’s grip on his arm.

Nobody stood in their way, the people who had been reluctant to move for Chase shrinking back at whatever look was on Ser Drake’s face. Chase simply wheezed and scrambled to keep up.

He could only pray to the Continuum that Tag would be alright.

Sam raised a finger, and the bartender obligingly placed another drink in front of him.

He grabbed it and tossed it back, missing the familiar clink against the glass as he did so. How did the saying go - third time’s a charm? Certainly wasn’t for him. He sighed and set the glass down, looking at the bare spot on his hand.

Sam had signed the final papers earlier in the night; she’d taken the ring, and he was a free man once again. Nothing to his name but a broken-down office that concealed a Murphy bed behind some filing cabinets, and a little black case sitting quietly on the stool beside him. Hell, the only reason he hadn’t pawned the little case years ago was because…because…

“Hey Nico, why ain’t I pawned this old thing yet?”

The bartender looked up to see him pointing at the little black case and snorted. “‘Cause I pay you fifty bucks a set and half the tips you make when you’re desperate for rent,” she told him bluntly, and Sam looked between his glass and the case with his lips set in a thin line. She wasn’t wrong, per se, but that wasn’t the reason he was here now.

“You’re all heart, Nico. Space open tonight?” He wasn’t really in the mood to head back to his shitty office with its lumpy bed. He’d been sleeping alone more often than not recently, but tonight felt more final than the others.

If he went back there now, he knew what he’d do and he wasn’t in the mood to deal with the well-meaning neighbors. Not tonight.

Nico made a show of wiping the bar down before she walked over to a little chalkboard hung next to the kitchen door for just such an occasion. “Says here we got an opening at 2, if you’re okay with waiting.”

He snorted and made an expansive gesture with his now-ringless hand. “I’m a free man, Nico. I ain’t got nobody waitin’ up for me.”

Maybe he’d sounded a little more bitter than he’d intended, because the next shot she poured him was a double. He locked eyes with her as he threw it back, and she broke the staring match first when Old Man Thatcher bellied up to the bar to get another three pints of the Blight swill only he and his cronies drank. She left Sam with a glass of water - which he pointedly ignored - and went to go pacify Thatcher with his beer.

Sam leaned back against the bar and looked out over the room. He liked to people-watch - part of what made him such a good gumshoe - and the crowd tonight was subdued. The calm jazz kept people from having to raise their voices or their tempers, and true to the nature of the workday on this planet the crowd was sparse. People came here to relax after ten hours of earning their pay, not to release their pent-up frustration. Not today, anyway, though Sam knew Nico kept a Void-charged truncheon behind the bar for when people tried to get rowdy on the weekends.

The wall still had a divot in it from when she’d last had to use the thing.

It felt like no time at all before it was half an hour to two and the set turn over, and Sam reached over and picked up the little black case. Nodding to Nico, he headed for the back door and pushed it open to reveal the relatively clean alleyway - thankfully not inhabited tonight. Nico despised it when she had to clean up some drunk’s bodily fluids, or when inconsiderate lovers left their mess near her door.

Fortunately, he was here for neither reason.

Setting the little black case down, he undid the dully gleaming latches to reveal the instrument within. Four sleek wooden pieces with brilliant silver fittings gleamed in the light of the overhead fixture, and his fingers found the hard case slipped into the edge of the lining. He pulled it out and cursed - another reed sported grey-green spots; he’d have to get more soon, or run the risk of one of the moldering ones splintering when he tried to play.

Picking the best one of the bunch, he popped it in his mouth while his hands went through the familiar ritual of assembly. First the two barrel pieces, fitted carefully together to make sure the keys lined up; they slid together a little reluctantly - it’d been a while since he’d needed to play bad enough to come to Nico’s and he never played anywhere else - but he didn’t bother pulling the apart to grease them. He’d just have to remember to do it when he put it away, or - more likely - before the next time he brought the thing out.

The bell was next, sliding into place more easily than the barrel pieces. He checked the orientation by habit, though it didn’t really matter for that part. Still, in his line of work it paid to be thorough. No reason not to treat his instrument the same way.

Finally he spat the reed out and affixed it to the mouthpiece. He measured the orientation with his thumb, and tightened it into place when his instincts told him it was in the right spot. Putting the mouthpiece on the rest of the instrument was the work of a moment, and he spent a few seconds just looking at it before he brought it up to test the tuning.

Notes drifted down the alleyway as he warmed up; Sam wasn’t a great virtuoso, but he didn’t play here ‘cause it paid. He played here because it beat any of the other things he could be doing instead. He went through scales, a few jazz riffs, a half-remembered melody and then Nico poked her head out of the door.

“Get in here you idiot, you’re five minutes behind already,” she said before pulling her head back inside.

Sam didn’t bother latching the case, and tucked it under one arm instead. When he got back inside the bar, the jazz group had already cleared out completely and a single stool with a microphone now dominated the small play area. He walked over to it and set his open case at the edge of the space; it wouldn’t be fair to Nico to leave it closed, though it always felt like people put in far too much when he played.

After all, he was nothing special.

Most of the patrons were too wrapped up in their drinks or in each other to notice that the music had stopped, or that Sam was taking the chair, but there were a few curious eyes looking at him with interest. Sam didn’t care; he wasn’t here for them, or for Nico. He was here because he needed to be, and that was enough.

He brought the clarinet to his lips, and started to play.

So, I’m cleaning up Patty’s regular morning coffee spill.

Honestly, the guy’s a ditz. If anyone asked me, the only reason the guy still has a job around here is because he’s got The Looks. You know what I mean, a jaw you could use to break stone and tousled hair that always seems to come off as just the perfect mix of untidy and coiffed. Has to be that, ‘cause the guy has nothing going on between his ears and every morning like clockwork he’s at his desk, spilling his coffee. It’s gotten to the point where I just leave the bucket there after my early-morning mop of the Atrium.

Anyway, so I’m cleaning up this spill and Patty’s being vapid at some poor fool on the other end of a holocall when the main doors slide open and in walks some kid. Well, I say kid - guy’s probably in his twenties. Still, the wide-eyed gawping around the lobby makes him look younger to my eyes. That, and I’m older than I care to think about; I’m damn good at what I do, and I know when to keep my trap shut. Most folks they hire on for the cleaning ain’t as wise - or lucky. I’ve had a few close scrapes over the years, but at least I ain’t ever ended up like Andrew. Poor guy; they had to do his funeral over a bucket.

Patty’s out of his chair before I even realize he’s moving, and he’s got the kid by the elbow and is steering him towards the lift doors. Interesting. Kid don’t look like much, but Patty’s pulling out his Professional Charm. Kid must have something the bigwigs want, and bad. I don’t know that he’s real Company material, though; even from this distance, he doesn’t quite seem the type. Still, I’ve been wrong before and maybe he’ll do well.

Just before they walk into the lifts, the indicator light above the doors blinks on to signal the car’s here and it reflects oddly off the floor. I frown and move in closer, bringing my mop and bucket with me. Spill’s cleaned up, and that patch of floor ought to be good past lunch; if Patty spills his coffee again, he can wait a couple minutes.

Sure enough, I get over to the path the kid walked from the doors to the lifts and I have to grimace. Kid’s younger than I thought, fresh out of college - I’d recognize that nasty, cheap floor wax they use over there from a mile away. If I’ve told Bertha once, I’ve told her a hundred times; doesn’t matter what the science department gives you or what kinda “miraculous” solution they tout for keepin’ floors nice, ain’t any chemicals that can take the place of good hard work. Oh sure, you need some cleanser for the stuff that doesn’t take to water, but beyond that a good scrubbin’s all you need to do.

I should leave it at least 'til the kid’s done ‘cause sure as the rockets rise every morning at 11 he’s gonna track more on my floors, but it’s unsightly and I ain’t got anything more pressing right at the moment. Mop, bucket, floor, and scrub. Bertha’s wax don’t do shit for the shine, but damn if it ain’t stubborn as hell about coming off. It takes me all the way to the kid coming back down and leaving out just to get the - unevenly distributed, kid walks with a limp; wonder what happened to him to cause that - bootprints off the section where he’d wandered towards the reception desk before Patty’d swept him up.

Kid looks a bit pensive when he comes back down, but at least he walks a pretty straight line out the doors. Most of the wax on his shoes goes back down the line he’s already walked and I gotta give myself a bit of a pat on the back about not having to repeat work. I get to mopping, and Patty comes down a few minutes after the kid leaves. I lean on my mop and give a polite cough.

Patty starts like a deer in headlights, freezing for a moment before he sees it’s just me. Not the first time he’s done that; I don’t think he realizes I’m not a piece of furniture, half the time.

“Which room?” I ask. If he left wax on this floor, he’ll have left wax on that floor and I don’t wanna hafta search every single conference and interview room to figure out which one it was.

Patty leans in conspiratorially, like that’ll stop the audio sensors the Company has embedded every three feet in the ceiling from hearing him. “Conference room A112, floor 35, and get this - it was Shavanaugh who was in there interviewing him!”

He leans back triumphantly and I raise an eyebrow. I ain’t dumb enough to comment on that out loud, but damn. Shavanaugh is an up-and-comer currently doing a stint in HR just to pull together a loyal power base before she makes a shot for the big leagues. If she ain’t killed in a “lab accident” or “corporate espionage” before then, she’ll be a power to contend with in a few years. If she has her eyes on the kid…

Still, it ain’t my place to wonder about the power struggles of the high and mighty - especially not in a building where they had more electronic bugs than real ones. They’d have me strung up before lunch, or my name ain’t Mervin. Patty, bless his dear little heart, just wilts at my silence and heads back to his desk. You’d think I murdered his dog or something. Eh, not my circus and certainly not my monkey. I refresh the mop and get back to work.

——————————————–

Took me four hours, all told, to clean the damn wax off the floors. Bertha must’ve gotten a new compound from the chem department; stuff seemed almost bonded to the floor. I ended up using some of the nastiest solvent I keep in my cart to get it off, and of course the fumes lingered. Got a memo about it this morning - some bigwig didn’t like the smell. Fortunately, my supervisor ain’t been replaced since the last one fell into some inventor’s new device for ore refinement so I signed off for the memo and wrote my own self up for it like they expected and put it with all the rest of the complaints.

I’m back cleaning up Patty’s spill again - I’d swear he does it on purpose except he’s been a little more frosty to me these days. Maybe he thinks he’s getting one over on me, maybe at this point it’s just habit for him too. Anyway, I’m cleaning up the spill and the kid comes in again. I keep my eye on him, but seems like he ain’t been back to the college since the last time he was by; there’s no weird wax crap left on my floors after he walks past me. He’s got some more equipment this time though, some kind of fancy pack and glove. Stupid of him; if he dies in a “lab accident” now, the Company will just pay for his funeral and keep everything he had with him. Especially if he doesn’t toe the line with the “Company Values”

Wouldn’t be the first time.

Sure enough, I get the call a couple hours later - cleanup in Lab 7. Bit slower than I would’ve expected, but maybe they wanted to make it look good. Any which way, I get my heavy-duty cleaning cart and head on up. Hopefully the kid’s in enough pieces for a decent funeral; burying an empty casket’s mighty hard on the family, from what I’ve seen. Plus I ain’t keen on having to wait for the pieces to, ah “pass through” whatever experiment or experiments they ended up in.

I get up to Lab 7 and end up pulling the cart in backwards - push doors, not sliding ones on this lab - so it takes me a minute to get everything sorted out. The smell hits first; old meat and the kind of mold you only find in old houses. I’ve smelled worse; this ain’t even worth a turn of the stomach, not a single rumble. Then I turn around.

“Huh,” I say, surprised enough to forget to keep my trap shut. “Looks like the kid’ll fit right in after all.”

I grab my mop and get to work.

Baxter Brautigan woke with a start.

He didn’t remember falling asleep, which honestly wasn’t that unusual. When he got an idea he simply had to pursue it to its logical conclusion and sometimes that precluded a set sleep schedule; he’d work until he fell asleep at his desk, then wake up a few hours later and continue working. His knee always complained when he did that, but some light stretching was usually sufficient to bring the pain down to manageable levels so that was fine. Some of his best prototypes had come out of extended engineering sessions like that, and it was always exciting to see something working.

This particular wake-up call was kind of unusual in that Baxter was lying mostly prone for once; normally when he fell asleep, he did so slumped over his desk. He was still in his laboratory, however, with its somewhat speckled ceiling beaming down at him, and had apparently had to foresight to dim the lights before he conked out - which was also unusual but very welcome in this instance as even the diminished lights exacerbated his headache. That, and the timer that was going off somewhere - about 1700 Hz, not one of his usual alarms but definitely not one of the alarming alarms that meant something was on fire or anything serious like that.

Baxter let out a gusty sigh that he felt more than heard - damn, that timer was louder than he thought - and began the arduous process of sitting up. Arduous, because he seemed to be in\under some of the boxes he’d left sitting in the back of his lab after unpacking the latest exotic chemicals shipment from the Company. He’d gotten a special grant to buy sulfur hexafluoride and diatomeceous silicate gel to enhance his current experiments in stabilizing magical energies in a definitive crystallite form, and he hadn’t quite gotten around to cleaning up after he’d finished taking inventory and storing those and the other assorted chemicals he’d gotten against future need. For some reason, he seemed to have chosen said boxes as the place to rest his head and while there were probably worse places to sleep in the lab, that didn’t stop a sharp cardboard corner from poking him in the kidneys.

And the timer was still going off, which was…concerning. Especially since he seemed to be waking to atypical resting circumstances. It was just so hard to think; it felt like his brains were trying to leak slowly from his ears. Still, a niggling suspicion began to worm its way into his conscious mind as he struggled to get upright in the sea of cardboard cubes. If he hadn’t chosen this place to sleep, then -

“Oh, Void.”

His lab was on fire.

Baxter blinked at the dancing orange flames stupidly for a moment before lunging for the first extinguisher on the nearby wall. His desk was a shambles, with blackened pieces of metal strewn all over - and in some cases, embedded in - the surface and char marks reaching to the ceiling. The lights weren’t dimmed so much as half of them were destroyed, hanging limply from the ceiling by frayed cables or staring up like empty, accusatory eyes from the floor where they’d fallen. His note-taking tablets were, for the most part, intact save for a crack or two, but he’d have to check them all thoroughly for data loss or hardware faults before he even considered using them again.

The lab recorder had char marks over the casing and several small pieces of metal embedded in the front, but it had been designed specifically to withstand explosions in case an accident needed more thorough review later, so he’d at least be able to piece together the sequence of events leading up to whatever had happened here. He couldn’t quite remember, which was somewhere between irritating and worrying; on the one hand, he needed to record the results for the testing and append them to the correct test and on the other hand brain damage wasn’t that easy to fix.

Baxter grimaced as the ringing in his ears continued unabated. Tinnitus was a frequent side effect of concussions if he was remembering his brief skims of medical texts correctly, but that didn’t mean it was any less annoying. On the positive side, if he called his father while he still couldn’t hear anything maybe he wouldn’t have to listen to the inevitable forty five minute lecture on lab safety. Simply because he couldn’t remember what he’d been doing to cause his lab to explode didn’t mean he hadn’t taken all necessary safety precautions - just maybe not the ones that would have prevented the explosion in the first place.

Fortunately, the fire wasn’t large - there wasn’t that much in the lab that was flammable, full stop. Baxter was an engineer, not a chemist, and the only thing that’d been available to burn had been the shipping manifests that had come with the chemicals. Which, of course, had been the things that caught fire in the first place and burned for a suspiciously long time for mere paper products; he resolved to sweep the lab for toxic chemicals after his ears had stopped ringing to make sure the burning papers hadn’t given off anything unsavory. And also wear gloves when handling any more manifests from the Company in the future - anything that burned that long and that brightly had to be some kind of health hazard.

Fire out, he turned and surveyed the blackened mess spread out all over his lab. Blackened hunks of metal that gave no hint to their origins were literally everywhere, and char marks sprawled across every surface in a two-meter radius of the distinctly bowed worktable. Heaving a sigh, he turned to the inter-office call panel near the door and poked the button marked Maintenance.

“Hello? Yes?” He said, perhaps a bit louder than he needed to - he still couldn’t hear anything over the tinnitus - and waited a few seconds for a possible reply before ploughing forward. “Yes, I’m afraid there’s been an accident in 4C; if I could please have a mop cart and data recovery unit sent up, I would definitely appreciate that.”

A thought occurred to him, suddenly. “I don’t need a staff member, just the tools; I want to catalogue everything that went wrong and I can’t do that if the evidence gets tossed around higgeldy-piggeldy.” That was a good phrase, higgeldy-piggeldy. His mother had used it to describe his room if he hadn’t cleaned it recently. “Thank you for your time and have a good day.”

Without waiting for a reply - he wouldn’t be able to hear it if they gave one anyway, the tinnitus of approximately 1700 Hz was still going strong - he switched the panel off and turned to survey his lab one more time.

“Higgeldy-piggeldy,” he said, and nodded decisively.

Time to start cleaning up.

He really, really should have seen this coming.

Professor Baxter Brautigan suppressed a wince as the robotic pilot C-NACK88 threw them into a hard turn, narrowly avoiding the spray of Void bolts one of the pursuing ships had just fired at them. The turn had been hard enough that the gyrostabilizers had lagged and jarred his bad knee against the bulkhead, and even through the brace it was letting him know in no uncertain terms that it did not appreciate the treatment. Fortunately, their pursuers hadn’t expected the move and overshot, allowing C-NACK88 to finally begin an approach to the Void relay they’d been intending to use the entire time.

Baxter leaned back and rubbed his sore knee. He wasn’t the best at reading people; even on a planet with fifteen trillion inhabitants, he’d been able to count his friends on one hand as a kid and he’d just never picked up the knack. When he’d been offered a position at the Company, he’d thought it was a dream come true - a chance to travel to other planets and continue the experiments that lit up his brain like fireworks. He should’ve known better; sure, that’s what it had been in the beginning - but then he’d caught a lab assistant copying files. He’d reprimanded them and sent a report off to the Company, and had never seen that assistant again.

He’d played it a little closer to the chest after that, keeping his files encrypted. Encoding his notebooks. It was still a grand adventure of science that made his heart race with excitement, of course, but some of the shine had worn off. Then, too, there had been the Company’s insistence that he try live subjects - he’d tried to keep those experiments to a minimum, but he’d had to know if the first one was a fluke or not. His process worked perfectly every time, and the Company had been very impressed - impressed enough to give him a special assignment.

And that was really the kicker, wasn’t it. He’d been told to retrieve critical research from the Bloom planet; what he hadn’t been told was that it was his research. Baxter wasn’t an arrogant man, he just knew with a stone-cold certainty that his research was the only such research to have successfully crystallized magic. He’d heard tell of some rituals that could do it too, but he’d dismissed those stories as the unfounded rumors that they clearly were. So the only natural conclusion to finding an enormous Bloom aeryx on the Bloom planet was that someone was using his research without his knowledge or consent.

Baxter was careful with his creations, and the aeryxes he made. He’d made sure to keep them for defensive or utilitarian uses as much as possible, no matter how much the Company had pushed him to make weapons. In addition, he was very careful about the sources he used to make them; aside from the living subjects, he tried to take only from things that occurred naturally or in abundance. He’d sunk years, decades of his life into this research, and he rubbed his hand over the heavy metal gauntlet that represented the culmination of those decades as the thought weighed on him. He had done his damndest to make sure that his research and experiments were conducted responsibly and ethically as much as was possible.

Whoever had taken his research to Bloom had had no such compunctions.

The gauntlet creaked as Baxter involuntarily clenched his fist at the memories, and he absently made a note to check the integrity of the joints and oil them later. The death of Summoner Langorium had only been the tip of the iceberg; he hadn’t known the man - or any other Summoner, before that trip - personally, but he’d seemed well-liked in the town by his people. Choking to death on his own blood in the middle of a laboratory seemed like an ignominious way to go, an insult to the work he’d done for his people. More even than that, the Company would want to reclaim as much as possible from the laboratory - the pleasant little meadow that Langorium had released into the world with his death would like be trampled underfoot if it wasn’t meticulously collected for analyzing in some other cold lab later.

The real sore spot there had been the missing workers. Even the memory of that room made Baxter gag slightly; he’d certainly never forget the way the corpses had been carelessly butchered to make room inside of them for the scorpion’s spawn. He’d heard, vaguely, of some species of insects that laid their eggs in corpses so their young could take full advantage of an abundant food supply - life sciences hadn’t really been his thing, except where they intersected with magic - but he’d never really considered what that meant. Especially when said insects were the size of small shuttles and equipped with toxic stingers. The thing had hunted down, killed, and slaughtered hundreds of people - in a facility where the Company had apparently trapped and caged it to bring about an enormous Bloom aeryx.

Baxter may not have been the best at figuring out other people, but even he could connect those dots. His research, his technology, his contributions to the Company - his fault.

So he’d cut his ties to the Company in more ways than one, and run for it. He’d gotten away from Haven clean, with most of his equipment and the samples he’d managed to acquire of that strange black stuff that had infested the insect life on Bloom, but he’d made a mistake not too long ago that had lead to the most recent predicament of two Company ships on their ass and gunning for them.

In his defense, he hadn’t had much of a plan when he’d fled Haven. It mostly involved not being incarcerated on a tiny moon and forced to go through the motions of lab work for the rest of his life, however long that actually ended up being. He’d managed to take out the Problem Solvers in his way and grab C-NACK before the robot had been decommissioned for parts, but once they were out of the system his well of ideas had run somewhat dry. By sheer force of habit, he’d grabbed his tablet and pulled up his email and calendar; unfortunately, it was his work email and work calendar, which had given away his position immediately.

It had paid unexpected dividends, though; in addition to the expected 56 mB message from his father and 47 increasingly hysterical messages from his mother, there’d also been one from the cousin he hadn’t heard from in years. It had contained nothing but a picture of some kind of grassland at night, with the caption “Your eyes are open and you are not alone.” He’d only begun to decipher what it could possibly mean when the Company ships had started shooting; he’d ended up downloading the thing to a quarantine tablet and jettisoning the tablet he had been using out the waste disposal airlock; C-NACK had managed to connect to the Void relay to prep it for a random jump, and now all they had to do was get there.

Warnings blared as they approached the relay; missile lock. Baxter cursed under his breath and leaned forward to tinker with the console. If he could just coax a little bit more speed out of the countdown to jump, he could -

With a sound like a million angry bees, the Void relay activated and both Baxter and C-NACK were suddenly someplace far, far away.

“Bryn, if you can hear me-!”

A red flash of light, and the message cut out again and Bryn bit her lip, glancing over at the chronometer. Once Rex had replaced Shavanaugh as the Company representative on the ship, they’d gotten underway towards home as fast as they could. Unfortunately, that didn’t feel very fast, not with her mother - her mother-

Bryn restarted the message and watched it play again.

“Bryn, honey, I’m sorry I missed you…”

Bryn watched the message play out again - the same as it had the last four times she’d watched it. Her mother wished her well, hoped she was having a good meeting with Summoner Langourium, some trouble with Variq, seismic activity and power troubles, Variq-

“Bryn, if you can hear me-!”

Red flash. The message cut out once again and Bryn tapped the desk. She wasn’t usually one given much to nervous fidgeting, but right now, she couldn’t keep her hands still if she tried. The message had been waiting a month - a whole month! Who knows what could have happened to her mother in that time.

Plus, it’d said something about Variq. Bryn didn’t remember her real father very well, but throughout her childhood Variq had always been there for her. He’d answered her silly questions with a patience only surpassed by her mother, he’d come and fetched her when she tried to run away again, had as a general rule been a sort of substitute father slash confidant when she needed it. She couldn’t imagine something being wrong with him; was he sick? Had he been poisoned?

She reached out and played the message again.

“Bryn, honey, I’m sorry I missed you…”

Bryn watched the message play out again, eyes straining for any clue she might’ve missed. She could hear Tag shifting uneasily from where he’d stood himself by the door, but he didn’t interrupt her and that was all that mattered right now; it was the fifth time she’d watched the recording all the way through in the last half an hour. Again it played out in exactly the same fashion, with no new details jumping out at her as she watched her mother - Light above, she looked tired - talk about her troubles, the picture wobbled -

“Bryn, if you can hear me -!”

Red flash. Nothing. Bryn glanced at the chronometer again, and found the hands hadn’t moved at all. She gave the direct line to the Captain a considering glance, and there was a soft rustle of fabric as Tag moved up to stand beside her.

“Bryn -”

“What is it Tag?” She snapped, and he flinched away a little before drawing himself up again.

“Calling the Captain won’t help. We’re traveling as fast as we can.”

Bryn glared at him and his stupid, apologetic face. “Well, as fast as we can’s not fast enough! My mother is in trouble, and this message has been waiting almost a whole month! There’s no time, we should’ve been on the Fire planet a month ago!”

Tag put a hand cautiously on her shoulder, and she allowed it even as she glared at him mulishly. “Bryn, you and I both know there’s only so fast the ship can go, and Captain Matt Vancil is pushing it already. We will get there soon.”

Bryn twitched her shoulder out from under his hand and turned back to the screen, flicking it back to the start of the message again.

“Bryn, honey, I’m sorry I missed you…”

As fast as they could wasn’t fast enough. Her mother, pillar of her young life and bulwark in troubled times, was in very real danger.

And she was running out of time.

Sam stumbled over a rough patch of floor as Variq pushed him roughly from behind.

Truth be told, it wasn’t the first time Sam’d been shoved somewhere against his will while wearing handcuffs. Not the first time it’d probably end in the pull of a trigger somewhere quiet without witnesses or mourners, either. No, Sam’s an old hat at this kind of nonsense - and, judging by the way Variq had secured his arms, it wasn’t the parallel’s first rodeo either. Sam had tried every trick in the book - clenched fists, hands presented together in the front, pop-click-unlock pin concealed up his sleeve - and Variq had had none of it; he’d wrenched Sam’s arms around behind him and secured his flattened hands sides together, then patted him down for not only the pin in his sleeve but the knife in his boot.

All of it had been done calmly, coolly, professionally. Not the slightest hint of boredom, which Sam would have exploited the hell out of. Nothing better for an escape plan than bored captors. Sure, some of the sadistic types would torture you for fun if they were bored, but with the prodding you could usually get them to spill the beans at the same time. For most of the other types, all it took was a show of willingness to co-operate or alleviate their boredom, and they’d sing like canaries; if you were really good and pushed the right buttons, they’d get so caught up in what they were saying they’d ignore almost anything you did.

And Sam was a master at pushing buttons.

“Bet your Summoner will have something to say about pushing an honored guest around. Bet you’ll be out of a job when she hears from her daughter about what you’re doing in that secret, secret lab downstairs. Might even be criminal charges attached. Isn’t the method of execution on this planet burning at the stake?”

This guy Variq, though, had refused to rise to any of the bait Sam threw his way; comments about the parallel’s plans, jibes about what the Summoner would do to him for messing with guests, cracks about how he couldn’t possibly hope to get away with it - all of it met with the same non-reaction. It didn’t matter how Sam phrased it or what kind of insinuation he threw into his tone, Variq just kept on moving without changing pace, expression, or breathing pattern.

“Wonder if you’ll be publicly executed or if she’ll keep it private. That’d be a sight, people all gathering up to toast marshmallows on your ashy ass.”

Not that Sam was bringing his A-game; the verbal - and currently somewhat one-sided - repartee was more a cover for his racing thoughts. Not being able to read any of the people in the jail had rattled him, thrown him off - and he’d bought their stupid trick hook, line, and sinker. What were the odds he’d get the right guy on the first try? What were the odds on a servant trying to bare-knuckle fight the second most powerful person in the palace? It’d been too easy, too neat; he should have smelled a rat. Nothing ever came that easy, not in his line of work.

Genuine hurt and regret welled up from the depths of his mind, and he bit off his latest insult to Variq with a curse. The Puq might’ve been able to see through the illusions, sure, but Sam would literally rather set himself on fire before he accepted the spriggan’s help. Sure, maybe he hadn’t been doing the greatest all by his lonesome with three divorces and a run-down office, but things had definitely gone even more to shit after he’d found himself bound to the thing.

Plus, it was always so Void-damned cheerful. Insults barely phased it and threats only made it faintly contrite. Sam couldn’t be sure if it was because the thing wasn’t human in the slightest and therefore couldn’t feel anything but cheerful, or if it was a personal failing of the Puq itself. Either way, he’d never willingly give over to it. Not now, not ever. The memory of the Tine who’d disguised themselves as the Puq popped into his mind, and he made sure to concentrate extra hard on what pulling the trigger on it had felt like.

That didn’t quite get the reaction he’d hoped. A wave of reassurance and forgiveness slipped into his brain, and the awareness of the Puq faded. Sam suppressed a snarl of annoyance; that watchful awareness made privacy nearly non-existent and made relaxing a chore. The Puq was very curious, and those kinds of feelings nearly always attracted his attention - resulting in several very awkward evenings back in their cell.

Sam pushed the memory away; they were getting to the end of the secret tunnel, and now wasn’t the time to wallow. The opening mechanism on this side of things was much less arcane than when they’d entered. Variq simply pushed a button on the wall and the door slid open smoothly. The throne room beyond it was slightly more populated than Sam remembered it being; Tag was sitting on the throne.

The kid’s expression was pinched, but he didn’t look at them when they entered. Well, his head did turn and his eyes were kinda pointed towards them but the focus seemed to be somewhere else entirely. Sam didn’t need Variq jerking him to a stop and shoving him to his knees to realize there was something going on that he couldn’t quite make out. The profound silence was part of it, sure - he couldn’t even hear the curtains fluttering in the light breeze - but real big clue was the way the kid flickered in and out like a bad vidcomm signal. It made Sam nauseated just to look at it, though he could feel a thrill of excitement roll down his spine from his unwanted tag-along.

Sam scowled and surreptitiously tested his handcuffs again; anything that made the Puq go !!!!! was something he’d prefer to avoid. But just like the last four times, Variq had done a professional job on cuffing him. Not a bit of give to dislocate a thumb and slip out, not a twist of space to get enough leverage to break them apart, and not a single piece of wire or similar object to pick the locks with. Nothing in reasonable shuffling range either, otherwise he might’ve taken advantage of the staring contest to try.

At least it wasn’t a long wait; less than two minutes after Variq had shoved Sam to the floor, Tag steadied and solidified. Sam could feel a faint disappointment ruffling the back of his mind, but he had more important things to think about. He could see the moment Tag actually saw the scene laid out in front of him instead of whatever the Void he’d been staring at before. He started sweating like a first-time offender at their court date, though his gaze remained remarkably steady. His eyes flickered just the tiniest bit, and he delivered the biggest lie Sam’d heard in a while with enough aplomb that Sam was struck for a moment with the bizarre urge to applaud. Go big or go home, kid; Tag was swinging for the bleachers with this one.

“You make it too hard on yourself, you don’t need to convince me. You said I had friends that mattered; in a sense, that’s true. Tag had friends that mattered. But it seems like we both know that was a mask that I was wearing, even if unbeknownst to me.” Tag delivered the line better than Sam expected, but it still pinged pretty high on his bullshit-o-meter and Sam gave an internal sigh of relief. He’d been afraid he’d lost his touch after the jail, and it was nice to know that he still had it when it mattered. There was a note of truth to it, though, that was mildly concerning; was Tag just a mask?

Sam put that thought aside for later and concentrated on what was happening now; kid had done well enough on the speech, but he needed to work on his sneer. To Sam’s eyes it looked more like the kid’d bitten a lemon than anything else. Sam summoned up a memory of staring down a gun in a particularly fraught case where he’d tracked the purportedly cheating husband to his actual nocturnal habit of running drugs to a local night club. He’d gotten paid, in the end, but it’d been a long and sordid affair that’d been completely hushed up by the bankrollers; either way, the memory let him give the kid his best fuck-you expression and a reasonably pithy one-liner.

“Well, piss on you, man.”

He winced internally but didn’t let it show on his face. Ever since that damn spriggan’d taken up residence in the back of his head, he’d noticed a shift towards cleaner, less vulgar language and it pissed him off. ‘Piss on you, man’ fucking juvenile-ass kind of one-liner that made him look like the worst kind of green kid who didn’t know what they were getting into. It was times like this he wished he could actually punch himself hard enough for the Puq to feel it.

The kid laughed the fakest laugh Sam’d heard since the last time he’d been suckered into going to an upper-crust shindig to get the dirt on a shady business partner. He’d heard laugh tracks that were more convincing, but it seemed to throw Variq for a loop and the man almost stammered through his next sentence.

“I….was tasked with…unrelated things; your being here is…complicating that. But…I was also…told…not to…trust you. It seems maybe…you’ve come around.”

Sam’s scowl faded to a puzzled frown as his mind raced. Just who had tasked Variq with anything? Sam wasn’t exactly the kind of man who hung around in the lofty circles of summoners and parallels - present circumstances excepted because it was definitely the Puq’s fault he was here - but it seemed like the only person who could order a parallel around was their Summoner and possibly whoever trained parallels in the first place. That didn’t leave a lot of suspects in the pool, and none of them were good news. Given the way the Tine had counterfeited people in the jail, it wasn’t unreasonable to think that the Summoner might not be involved in this full stop. He’d be the first to admit parents weren’t perfect, but Bryn hadn’t shown any of the signs he’d expect from a person raised by the kind of psychopath that tortured people to death in secret dungeons; that kind of thing tended to leave a mark on the offspring, one way or the other.

Then, too, there was the question of what the Void, exactly, Variq had been tasked to do. Sam would be the first to admit he didn’t have a clue as to what half the stuff down in the lab did; thanks to the Puq, he had a general idea of what some of the pieces were for, but the whole picture? Nothing like it. Yet whatever it was involved siphons, gems, aerixes, and some kind of lunatic not in evidence. Sam slid his gaze over to where Variq was trying to talk himself into believing the kid’s latest load of horse puckey. The man didn’t look like a lunatic who’d spend three whole pages repeating the word 'traitor’ over and over again, but Sam knew better than most that just because he looked to have it together now didn’t mean he had it together all of the time.

Of course, it didn’t happen to most people quite as literally as it happened to Sam.

Tag was walking towards them now and putting his hand on Variq’s shoulder. A ballsy move, considering the kid appeared to be unarmed; Sam’s ribs were still tender from where Variq had kicked him in their earlier hallway scuffle and Sam was used to taking a beating.

“I haven’t had a change of heart; I’ve had a change of will. And I’ve recognized that what’s happening cannot be stopped. And what better purpose is there than to play one’s role?” Tag’s voice was steady, but Sam could see the subtle bob of a partially concealed swallow, and the kid was sweating bullets.

Variq didn’t seem to see anything, fortunately. “Yesss,” he hissed, and Sam might’ve been a little more concerned about how pleased the guy sounded if Tag hadn’t just stolen the void blaster off him.

Shoot him with it, he urged silently. Just bring it up and aim for the eyes, quickest route to the brain.

Instead, the kid took a step back and did that thing with his face again; Tag had very clearly never sneered before in his life, and Sam was struck by a bizarre desire to laugh. Of all the tough scrapes and bad situations he’d been through in his career, and this kid was going to blow it for him. Figured.

“This human’s useless to us; he poses no threat, he’s wasting our time.”

And in one clean motion, Tag brought up the blaster and shot Sam in the chest with it.

“No- no- no!” Sam could barely speak even as the actual force of the blast knocked him backwards into the air. He could feel it starting - it was always his heart, first. The Puq had never explained why, but the first part to make the switch was always his heart. Sam tensed uselessly, trying to fight back the change with everything he was - trying, and failing like always. Still, he had a deep and viscerally terrifying notion of what might happen if he stopped fighting it, so while it always made the pain worse he fought tooth and nail to try and stop the change before it began.

Shredding pain ripped into the muscles of his chest as his heart gave one last feeble beat before becoming a many-pointed crystal. His lungs caught on the jagged spires as they always did, and he could feel the air leaking out of them even as they in turn began to harden and change. His lungs always heralded a bigger section making the switch - ribs and diaphragm, and the first of the external crystals pushing out against the back of his shirt. Guts were next, the vital organs in the thorax - each one crushed a little more by the weight of the ones before it until it, too, was joining with the rest as Void crystal. More external crystals as well, sheathing his front and burning away at his shirt.

Nerves screamed until the crystalline structure overtook them, then screamed anyway as his brain desperately tried to fill in the blanks where nerves should be. Sam also suspected that part of it was his brain trying to figure out what the hell the Void crystal was sending it, because the Puq could always move somehow, but it didn’t really matter. All that mattered was it hurt, hurt like a hit to the funny bone except it was his entire torso.

Arms were next, bones turning into spears of the crystal more than twice the length of the originals and tearing at their muscle attachments before the muscles, too, turned. Big spars pushed out from his shoulders, counter-balancing the heavy hands and - when it got there - head. Joints seized and cracked as they became the crystalline substance that made up the Puq - completely destroying the wrist restraints in the process - and Sam could feel the alien consciousness at once unutterably strange and unbearably familiar start to flex them a little.

That was the worst part. Sam could deal with pain; pain was an old friend more familiar to him than his battered trench coat. It was the fact that he was helpless in his own head, unable to do anything but watch as the Puq blundered about a world that wasn’t designed for it, making social gaffes and breaking things with equal aplomb and an almost childlike delight. The crystal had robbed him of his voice already; however the Puq spoke, Sam still needed lungs and air to make sounds, and right now he had neither.

The crystallization went down his legs, next. Bones first again, heavy plating replacing kneecaps and heavy, four-toed slabs replacing the feet. Almost two more feet in height as well, the replacing crystal redoubling the original bone length. The Puq was stronger now too, more present in their shared consciousness; Sam almost wished that the change would bring him oblivion. No matter how much control the Puq had, Sam always got to feel every last excruciating part of the turn as nerves screamed with energies they weren’t meant to carry before being silenced in the worst possible way. He never blacked out, never forgot the feeling - yet somehow it was never any better, each turn never inuring him to any of the pain from the next.

It crept up his throat, crunching audibly in the echo chamber of his own skull as his vertebrae and trachea were overtaken by the winding purple crystals. Once the organs crystallized, they merged of course - if you somehow managed to split the Puq open, you wouldn’t find crystallized organs inside - yet they never switched over that way. It was always one at a time marching up to the last one - his brain. Fortunately, that always ended the pain; with nothing left to generate phantom signals from nerves that no longer existed, Sam got some kind of relief from the physical agony of the change.

The change itself always felt like it took an eternity, one blinding moment of pain stretching into hours of it as Sam fought, but in reality it never took more than a few seconds. The Puq oof’d as they landed, though their landing didn’t truly hurt, and sat up as Bryn and Rex made their way into the room.

“Hey guys! Y'all’re in trouble! Sam’s pissed!”

Damn right he was.

Tag watched steadily as his half-dad approached him.

Even as the figure cloaked in black raised the shining glaive high into the air, he couldn’t find it within himself to be afraid. Not of the person in front of him - so very strange and at once strangely familiar. Family may fight, but it held in adversity; that’s what he’d always been told, anyway.

The glaive struck him.

Tag flew back, spending the brief moment of his flight marveling at the lack of pain in his chest - had his half-dad hit him with the flat? - before he landed.

He knew where he was, the moment he stopped moving; the feeling was unmistakable. Winded from the hard landing, he couldn’t even cry out as the ichor around the throne began crawling up his arms and legs. It was unlike anything he’d ever felt, and yet so familiar on a level he could only begin to touch upon. It crawled up his arms and legs, covered his chest, and poured itself into his nose and mouth.

As it did so, it was like his eyes had truly opened for the first time in his life. He could see - he could see everything, from the brilliant Fire of his Summoner, Bryn, to the hard-edged Void of the Spriggan, Puq. He could see Rex, and what Variq had done to her - he could see the pulsing core of the planet, so very far below. It was more than he’d ever seen in his life, and even as he watched, more details became apparent to him.

Anything with even the faintest brush of magic - Bryn, Puq, Rex, Variq - was being drained. The planet was being drained. Even the light from the Continuum fell into the pulsing maw above him. Tag could hardly catch his breath as he looked up into the avatar of hunger. The open mouth, the consuming maw, the black hole that not even Time could escape - it looked wrong. Bad. It didn’t belong in this world, and yet the shape was not unfamiliar; had he known something like it once?

He had no time to consider that thought, because the ichor hadn’t just brought him true sight. Power slammed him in the space between one eyeblink and the next. Tainted by the malediction, it poured down the throat of hunger and into the throne - and into Tag. He wasn’t hungry, he neither needed nor wanted the power - but the hunger consumed without cessation, and the power was forced into him. It felt like pouring water into a cup that was already full - or, more accurately, like pumping air into a tire that didn’t need it. He felt full - overfull, stretched thin in a way that scared him. His back arched involuntarily as the power scorched along nerves not designed to hold it, and he could feel his limbs start to shake.

And yet, something in him…welcomed it. It was a small part Tag didn’t like to think about, the part that cried out in the darkness for more, to take beyond what he was given, but a part of him nonetheless. That part remembered hunger, and cried out for more. More ichor, more corrupted power, more. Feed me, it whispered in the back of his mind, and he could do nothing but grit his teeth against it. He wasn’t hungry, he didn’t need this power; he would not give in.

And then, a whisper of fresh air brushed his soul.

With his eyes open in true sight, Tag could see what Bryn had done; the power of her will manifested as a swirl of Void magic, the magic of negation, and brushed aside some of the ichor that was holding him in the chair. He could see, too, Variq’s desperate attempt to stop Bryn’s work to lessen the ichor’s hold, but the other parallel’s efforts were too little, too late. Freed of enough of the ichor that held him, Tag’s spasming muscles launched him off the throne and partway across the floor.

It was easier to think, now, without the constant stream of power and malice battering at his mind and soul, and yet he felt unmoored. One blink brought the brilliant colors of true sight, the next the more solid tones of the physical realm, and Tag was reasonably sure that at several points he could see the floor through his own hands. The malice pulled at him - he could see it, whenever he was in the phase state, long tendrils of an almost tar-like consistency trying to pull him back onto the throne. He could feel it, sitting alongside his bones, inside of him, whispering in a language he could almost understand, much as he wished he couldn’t.

Tag clawed forward, shaking hands losing grip whenever his whole body left the physical plane. He had to get away from the malice, from the hunger - he could feel it, inside. He wasn’t hungry, not yet, but the possibility was there and the pain of it was enough to drive him to his feet in front of his half-dad. His knees felt like jello, though, and the shaking in his hands wouldn’t stop even when he clenched them into fists. That, combined with the constant shifting between states - though it seemed easier to remain in the phase state, more natural, but he didn’t have time to think about that now - put any thought of doing actual harm to his half-dad out of his mind.

Still, he’d learned a number of lessons in the monastery - in this case, the importance of maintaining concentration and focus.

“Hey! Hey, what’s up, jerk? Ohhhh, you’re such a great dad! Well, you know what? I’m gonna borrow the car and put in my Sum 41 CD, blast it real loud when I bring the car back I’m gonna turn the car off without reducing the volume first so that YOU’RE gonna get in the car the next time YOU wanna go to run an errand, and it’s gonna be SO LOUD and so PUNK ROCK, and you’re not gonna understand it ‘cause you’re OLD and a SHITTY DAD, half dad! In your FACE! Think about THAT! I’m gonna borrow your ties, too, but I’m not gonna roll 'em up when I return 'em, I’m just gonna FOLD 'em and throw 'em on the floor at the bottom of the laundry hamper! That’s where your ties are gonna be! You shitty HOT POCKET of a father!”

Tag couldn’t say where half the things that spewed from his mouth came from; he’d never listened to a musical group by that name, or eaten anything like hot pockets, and yet the memories were there. Buried in the ichor, and pulled up out of his soul in his anger, they spilled out of his mouth with surprising vitriol. Less surprising was the way his half-dad started swinging at him with the glaive. He had to force his limbs into motion to avoid it, yet while his half-dad focused on him, he could see - in the glimpses he could snatch of the physical plane - that Variq was suffering from his half-dad’s inattention.

He couldn’t pay too much attention to his friends, however; while he had managed to synchronize enough to avoid his half-dad’s swings, it was taking all his concentration to maintain their deadly dance. He could tell by the angle of the swings that his half-dad wanted him back on the throne, but while the ichor-stained part of him rejoiced in the thought, Tag himself found the idea abhorrent. If he gave in to the hunger, to the malediction, he knew in some primal part of his soul that he would cease to be Tag, eater of moonberry pies. He would be something else. Someone else.

And he refused to be that person.

(again?)

In fact, so engrossed was he with avoiding the striking glaive that the gout of fire visible on all planes took him by surprise. It took his half-dad by surprise, too, even as it launched Variq across the room and into Tag’s arms. His half-dad vanished, and the explosion of ash as the fire consumed Variq utterly was enough to bring Tag mostly back onto the material plane; enough so that he started hacking out the ash in his lungs, anyway. He still trembled, too, where the ichor had poured corrupted power along nerves and pathways that weren’t designed for it, but the motion was comforting in its humanity.

Still, if the coughing hadn’t taken his breath away, the sight in front of him would have. Bryn stood to her full height and laughed as the fiery might of the planet itself swept through her. To his true sight she shone, twice as bright as the Continuum and three times as blinding, yet he couldn’t look away from that great and terrible beauty.

Fortunately, his knees gave out just as fire swept the room, and he watched it pass uncomfortably close overhead. The Sammy Serpent that followed it was a surprise, but the fact that it dissolved into Bryn’s staff seemed somehow right. The fact that she collapsed as well was…concerning, but not as concerning as the ichor that continued to pour from the maw of hunger that had not closed on Variq’s death. He could see it as it continued to gorge on the magics of Bryn and her home; he didn’t like to think what would happen if it remained unchecked.

Tag took a deep breath, and let go of his physical shell.

Instantly, he was in the deep phase state. Magic roiled around him like a high wind, and yet not a single strand of his hair was disarranged. He looked across a vast gulf that was simultaneously no distance at all, and saw Bryn’s golden radiance looking back at him. They both stood in the roil, untouched and unmoved by the mouth that consumed above them, and the magic that swirled around them.

Tag looked her in the eyes, and spoke clearly.

“Hey. That was a really, really cool thing that you just did. And I know it’s scary, and it’s probably always going to be scary.”

A self-deprecating smile tugged at his lips, and he made a vague gesture that encompassed his phase-state self - still human, still Tag. No sign of the hunger, or of his half-dad.

“I’m a kid. I can’t talk about what it’s like to be an adult and spend years reflecting on this, but one thing I’m already starting to figure out? They don’t want us acting like kids. Because kids, they throw tantrums. They scream. They cry. Because they’re in touch with how they feel, and over time we’re told to just, push that away and push that away and push that away, over and over again.” He took a deep breath and spread his hands before him, palms up. “And I think that’s just dumb. You’re my bud, and I suspect that you might think that it’s a little dumb too.”

Bryn’s smile matched his own, and he reached across the distance between them to take her hand in a gesture at once politely distant and achingly intimate. Her world, her palace, her rules - and here he was, just Tag, in the right place at the right time.

“This is your power. This is your home.” His heart pinged at the thought, but he pushed it away. “This is your frickin’ throne room. There’s no shame in that power. There’s no shame in yelling, and shouting, and screaming, and crying, and laughing, and blowing the fuckin’ shit out of some Fire power.”

She didn’t say anything, but her eyes turned back to the hole in the sky and his involuntarily followed. They didn’t need to speak anymore; their bond was new, and relatively untested, but all they needed in this moment was the assurance of the other’s presence.

Tag grounded himself in the warmth of her fire magic; no longer did he feel like he was riding some sick carnival ride as the ichor in his body attempted to draw him body and soul deeper into the phase state. It wasn’t gone, and he wasn’t sure he could return to the physical realm right at this moment of time, but he was no longer in danger of flying away to where the others couldn’t follow and lose himself in the eternal hunger he felt nibbling at his soul. Embracing it would bring power unimaginable - at a price far too high to pay. To Tag’s mind, anyway.

It wasn’t until a flash of light entered the corner of his vision that he could tear himself away from the mesmerizing sight of the gash in the sky. Looking down, Tag saw glowing purple symbols draw themselves onto Bryn’s face and neck; he couldn’t read them, but something about their shape was…familiar. He looked around and saw Sam kneeling and drawing symbols; it took him a moment to realize it was probably Puq drawing those symbols on the physical plane, and not Sam suddenly knowing an ancient language. He pulled his eyes away just in time to see a wash of green, green light explode from Bryn’s staff.

The scorpion god of the Bloom planet looked even more impressive from Tag’s position in the phase. Its glossy black carapace reflected glints of cyan and magenta in the light of Bryn’s radiance, and orange sparks flickered from it every now and again as the roiling magic in the air roiled too close. There was no mistaking it for the ichor-soaked monstrosity that had come so close to killing them on The Preserve, and he felt his heart swell with something like pride when he looked at it. They had done that, all of them; they could save this place too.

The swirl of healing gold that came out of Bryn’s staff wasn’t surprising, though the scorpion’s use of its tail to shoot all the magic into the hungry wound in the sky caught Tag somewhat off-guard. It made sense, when he thought about it, he just hadn’t been expecting it. And it seemed highly effective; the tear became smaller and smaller until it was finally nothing but an ugly scar in the sky. Then that, too, was healed away and there was a beat of perfect stillness.

And then Tag was flung back into his body on the physical plane with almost as much force as half-dad had used to throw him into the throne. He felt almost bruised, on his psyche, but that discomfort was rapidly eclipsed by whatever the hell was making its way up his throat. He rolled desperately onto his front just as ichor began coming out of his mouth and nose in heavy heaves. He could feel his body rejecting it, rejecting the hunger, pulling him more firmly back into this reality. For some reason, though, the taste of the ichor wasn’t unpleasant; it was almost sweet, in its own way. Yet he could tell that that sweetness was a lie, in the same way that a rainbow shimmer on oil was a lie; its very sweetness betrayed its toxicity and his body wanted it out.

Now.

He collapsed into the rapidly-dissipating mist that was all that remained of the ichor, and had never been more glad to be human.

When it came down to it, it was always the humans.

The first plan was simple; go out into the mortal world, create a coil for their chosen one, and bring it to maturity in the safety of obscurity. One more mortal human amongst billions, lost in the background noise of the buzzing masses. Of course, that also necessitated a usable shell to raise it with, but it was no real trouble to pluck one of those out of the drug den it had been inhabiting. The mind was destroyed by what it had consumed and was the perfect vehicle for the raising process.

Of course, mortals and their mortal ways meant the shell had to hold down a job; tedious, but not insurmountable. Certainly, it was no great hardship for that which saw time from a step to the left. The chosen one was given his instruction in the evenings and taken away for care in the mornings. It had been going so well; they should have known that ‘so well’ was actually 'too well.’

It started with questions, as these things often do. “What happens after? Will my friends be alright? Why should I do this?” They answered him to the best of their abilities and took the shell again to the factory. When they’d come back that night, the chosen one had looked directly into their shell’s eyes and told them no.

Inconceivable.

They bargained. Pleaded. Begged. Threatened. Wheedled. Coerced. Through that and more, the chosen one remained adamant; he refused.

They withdrew and disposed of their mortal shell the next day.

The chosen one refused as they came to him in his dreams. He refused as they manipulated the jobs he took, pushing him ever closer to the edge. He refused as housing units mysteriously filled as he walked into them. He refused as gangs, egged on by the darkness in their souls descended upon him. He refused as the weather turned, as the seasons were subverted around him for one night.

He refused as the cold stole his feet, then his hands, then his breath.

Standing to the left of time, they watched as the possibility stream closed. This chosen one had not been wholly mortal, yet their investment did not return upon his demise. No matter, there was more where that had come from. They simply had to trace a single thread back from their desired outcome to a possible starting point and try again.

This time, they deliberately chose a strand that intersected with very few other mortals. Clearly their chosen one had been swayed from the prescribed path by the other mortals; if they could prevent those influences, and keep the chosen one wholly under their own, it would do much better. Another mortal coil was spun with star stuff, and another shell was found to care for it.

The location this time was remote, hard to find. Their chosen one could be raised in complete autonomy there, without interference. He would be raised to know what he needed to do, and when he needed to do it, and there would be no errors. No outside variables would be allowed to corrupt him away from the purpose they gave him, and they would reach the end goal whose web they desperately wove.

And thusly it seemed to go well. The boy was raised obedient but not stupid. He had no objections to the plans they told him, no inclination to balk at what would happen afterwards. Without the influence of the other mortals, this one was much easier to bend to their will.

Still, they had underestimated the other humans. As time slipped away into the web, the other humans came. There was nothing to be done about the fire that followed, and once again they were forced to take a step to the left of time and follow the threads.

The next three roils in the timelines do not go well. When no suitable shells are nearby to care for the chosen one’s mortal form, they are forced to give him over to the humans. Their first attempt is cut short by the vagaries of fate; the chosen one and his chosen caretakers are shot by a deranged mortal with a gun. Even with their ability to manipulate, they could not cut through the derangement in time and were forced to give the thread up as a loss.

Their next try is the worst; the mortals they left the chosen one with managed to ensnare him so thoroughly in their personal truths that to extricate him would be the work of more decades than the mortal coil would have time left. They reach a consensus in the third year of refusal and cut the thread to an abbreviated end.

The try after that comes the closest; his will worn down by the years and the hustle and bustle of his chosen habitation, he listens to them in the beginning. He taps the power they let him taste of, and agrees to their plans twice over. But when the time comes, he is as stubborn now as in the rest of the threads. He refused to leave the place where he lived. They are running out of threads, and so action is taken to try and encourage him to leave. He saves six children before the fire claims his life; they had miscalculated and brought the early terminus to this thread, rather than changing its direction to go to the end they wished.

The threads of possibility grow thin. The next four snap before they can be well-established; an unexpected sinking, a serial killer with a taste for the young, a mother who recognizes a changeling when she sees one, and an unfortunate slip on ice leave them with few enough threads left to try.

The next is by far the most promising, though its design is winding and uncertain. They spin up the mortal coil and set it on the steps of a very particular monastery. They watch from shadows within shadows as the place takes him in; from thread to thread they are not remembered, yet of all who would recognize them on sight the people here are the most likely.

They watch from afar as their chosen one grows, taking a certain amount of delight in the lessons being taught to the boy. If this thread followed the design they wished for it, the knowledge gained here would enhance the pattern they wished to achieve more than any other attempt they’d made so far. Of course, the chosen one had to get there; they watched from the shadows and made adjustments as required. A stumble here, undermined self-confidence there, an enhancement of the tendency of the upper echelon to notice their chosen one - it all added up, and their chosen one was given over to a powerful light holder.

A young, powerful light holder more specifically; they could not touch her dreams, but they could touch others. Greed, ambition, a lust for power - or even simple lust - were their tools, and in this thread they were heard. Tools beyond merely animate bodies gave themselves over, and now they had the chosen one where they wanted him.

And he refused again.

The bonds between him and his family of happenstance were strong; in some cases, they were strong enough to see. Yet even the strongest bond could be frayed in time, and their plans had advanced beyond simple dreams.

His attempts to trick them were almost amusing, and they gave him a chance. They could not always understand mortal nature; it was why they needed a chosen one, after all. Perhaps his changeable mortal side had finally seen the true way they laid out in front of him and had chosen to embrace it.

Or maybe not.

Their chosen one landed in the focus, and they wasted no time. Their influence spread over him, and they felt him fight; he was of them as much as he was of the mortal world, and like called to like. His other side called them, and his mortal side called the light that had gathered in the crack of their prison. Power came, and they smiled at the chosen one.

“We told you; it’s always been you.”

As the power flooded him and their influence spread higher, they closed the distance. a little bit more.

“And this time, there can be no refusing.”

If it wasn’t for the burning, howling unreality in front of him, Milt Felling would be highly intrigued by the place he found himself in.

Truth to tell he was still intrigued - it wasn’t every day you got sucked into an inter-dimensional void between reality and unreality; that was usually reserved for the annual arcano-engineer Company mixer - but getting away from the shredding inverse of nothingness in front of him was a higher priority. It wasn’t sucking him toward it yet, but that was highly likely to change at any moment. He’d been in one too many prototype explosions to think otherwise.

Milt spun in place, looking to see if there was an obvious path back, and was surprised to see the entire ship’s complement standing in the space with him. The rest of the engineers were closest, with the rest of the crew spread out somewhat randomly - the largest group was a gaggle in the uniforms of ship’s cooks, looking terrified and clinging to one another. The command crew and the away teams were standing closest to the only other figure Milt didn’t recognize, some guy done up in a Dunklesnicht costume carrying some kind of staff weapon.

Milt could only be glad he didn’t have to deal with that guy. Completing his rotation, he saw the Fire system stretching out behind what looked to be some kind of filter or barrier. It wasn’t close enough to touch, and one glance at his instruments saw the readouts spewing page after page of strange glyphs he didn’t recognize. He flipped record on, because glyphs he didn’t recognize were rare and he’d really like to have data to analyze later, but stowed the detectors away in their cases after doing so. Whatever the hell they were picking up wasn’t useful right this second; he’d have to figure this one out the hard way. He took a step-

The world shattered.

Milt found himself standing on a fragment of reality. Above him he could see an infinite number of other shards spinning in directions human minds weren’t truly mean to contemplate and which translated to his human brain as simply “away.” A quick glance around showed him he was at once standing before the figure in the costume he’d seen earlier, and also doing an infinite number of other things in an unknown number of ways. He was standing here, but he was also fixing Haven’s engines, tinkering with the Void Jumper, getting a drink, getting some exercise, eating dinner, lunch, breakfast, midnight snack, kissing his wife, kissing his husband, ruffling his kid’s hair -

Milt forcibly looked away from everything and focused back on the figure in the costume. He had so very many questions; what was this place, what was the figure, how could he replicate this, what was the hungry place he’d seen, what were his personal scanning devices actually picking up, what were those strange symbols, was he even still alive -

What actually came out of his mouth was “so, uh. Is this real?”

The figure seemed to consider for a moment.

“Yes, in as much as anything can be real. Crossing the borders of Reality to get here as we did meant we had to cross the borders of all Reality, not just the thread which you are currently experiencing. When the Heir shattered the tether, he did so across all Reality and, just for this moment, your limited mortal understanding is allowed to see all the permutations of Reality and not just the linear one created from the choices you have made in the past.”

Milt considered this for a moment. “But then why-”

Reality collapsed.

Milt found himself standing in the tiny machine shop he’d been relegated to since Baxter’s desertion. Not a single tool was out of place that hadn’t been knocked about before that strange event, and there were no alarms blaring overhead. He looked around, still feeling a tad shell-shocked.

“Huh.” He said.

And then he leaned over and threw up all over the floor.

——

Claire was not certain she liked this place.

The part in front of her looked awful scary - like a big, hungry mouth - but it couldn’t get to her because of the curtain. Behind her was much nicer, with the stars all glittering and the planet all glowing red. The moons made a nice contrast to it. She liked looking that way.

She didn’t like the scary man standing in front of her daddy. He was tall and he sounded funny and he carried a big stick. There was something about him that reminded her of the hungry place, though, a kind of sensation like he’d gobble her all up and not be sorry about it afterward. He looked scary-mean, but her daddy was between her and the hungry man, so that was okay. Her daddy could stop anything, and he’d never let the scary man hurt her.

She was watching the pretty red planet slowly turn when-

Everything broke.

Claire blinked. She was alone, and the scary-hungry man was right in front of her. The sky above him was weird; it was like the time she’d accidentally broken daddy’s glass tablet, all pieces and broken jagged edges with rainbows glimmering on them flying apart at once very fast and very slow.

Daddy wasn’t there.

She looked around and saw herself, also looking around, and that was scary too, so she looked back at the scary-hungry man as her eyes began to water. “Are you going to eat me?” She asked in a wobbly voice.

The scary-hungry man didn’t move. “Yes. It is our nature to consume everything; when the Continuum is destroyed, nothing shall remain before us. We will swallow all of creation, and finally each other. So were we made, so shall we do.”

That sounded even worse to Claire! The scary-hungry man was going to eat everything up, like the wolf in the story her daddy would read to her sometimes before bed. They’d eat the stars, and the planets, and-

“Daddy!” Claire screamed-

Everything collapsed inward.

As the warm lights of the Captain’s room off the bridge became real around her, Claire wobbled. She felt bad, dizzy, and she really just wanted her daddy.

Plunking herself down on the floor, she leaned her head back and wailed.

——

Arrn had been polishing one of the Fire-powered lasers when the magic took hold.

Suddenly finding himself standing in the middle of nowhere on nothing and staring down the gaping maw of a hellscape was mildly concerning. The fact that he was also doing so without the F'laser he’d been holding in his hands not ten seconds ago was highly irritating. Fire-powered weaponry was harder to manufacture than your average Void-powered blasters, but the difference in damage dealt more than made up for the difficulty. Your standard Void-blaster could put a decent-sized hole in your average soft target; the smallest Fire-powered laser you could buy would punch a two-inch hole through five inches of steel. Starship security forces were not allowed to carry F'lasers for that reason, but the Haven had a few onboard because, well, you’d never know when or where you’d need them when escorting around dignitaries.

He performed a quick area scan/threat assessment, and zeroed in immediately on the person standing way too close to the command/VIP contingent. The person was tall, of indeterminate gender and age - and was also carrying the most impressive glaive Arrn had ever seen. Half again as long as the person wielding it, the blade was polished to almost mirrored sheen with edges that looked sharp enough to cut between atoms. He’d seen some monomolecularly-edged weaponry in his time, but he’d never seen anyone foolish enough to put it at the end of a polearm. And, truth to tell, this blade looked even sharper still.

On the one hand, it was kind of his job to at least try and put himself between such an obvious threat and the VIPs. On the other hand, Rex was already standing nearly in hand-to-hand distance with the hooded figure and she was a good kid more than capable of taking down one asshole with a polearm all by herself. Plus if he tried to ease up between the VIPs and Hoodie he’d have to get closer to the clawing, grasping nothing on the other side of some kind of veil in front of him, and he really, really didn’t want to do that.

On the other other hand, he didn’t have to go forward to get between some of the other crew members and Hoodie, so Arrn shifted his weight and prepared to take a step and-

Reality shattered like glass.

Arrn found himself standing on a plane that was at once infinite and infinitesimal; before him stood the Hooded Figure, well within the reach of the glaive it still carried. Above him the sky was a-whirl with broken pieces, spinning this way and that like snowflakes in a blizzard. Out of the corner of his eyes he saw - impossible things. Things he absolutely refused to contemplate. He concentrated on the figure in front of him instead.

“Am I going to have to deal with you?”

The question was a reflex; being so far out of his depth pushed him back to old habits, ones that had kept him alive for year after year of serving as Company muscle.

The figure before him spread its hands in a gesture Arrn might interpret as helpless if it hadn’t included the nine-foot glaive. “You are dealing with us now; as it stands, however, your interactions with the timeline have been minimal, inconsequential. Your thread of reality interacts with ours very little, and if you stay on the path you have chosen they will remain that way. You will continue to maintain the armory on the ship, handing weapons and gear to others, and nothing of true consequence will come of your life. You will die an old man, alone in your bunk, and be buried in the soil of your home planet to rot in peace.”

The figure spoke without even a tinge of judgement in their tone; whatever else, they seemed to truly not give a single shit about him or anything he did. Arrn wasn’t sure if he was offended or pleased by this; he opened his mouth to say something - a witty quip, a snarky rejoinder, something - he-

The shards collapsed.

Finding himself suddenly standing back in the armory holding the precious F'laser was jarring. The vertigo and nausea that rushed in a second later were surprising only in their force, and Arrn had to put down the F'laser for a second as he breathed through them. He didn’t throw up - he’s had to deal with much worse in his years as a Problem-Solver - but it was a little closer than he’d like. A quick glance around to make sure nothing had fallen from where he’d secured it - nothing had; when he’d felt the evasive maneuvers start he’d locked his workspace down tighter than a miser’s purse - and a quick motion to magnetically secure the F'laser to a nearby weapon mooring allowed him to go to the small room that contained his bunk with a clear conscience.

Looking around at the small space, bare of anything truly personal save for the weapons he’d picked up over the years as trophies, he was reminded vividly of what the figure had said. “You will die an old man, alone in your bunk, and be buried in the soil of your home planet to rot in peace.” He threw himself down on the bunk and smiled.

That was really all he’d asked for, after all.

——

Luke was not having a good time.

Naturally high-strung, suddenly finding himself standing on nothing and staring into a place that his lizard brain gibbered at even attempting to understand was giving him heart palpitations. Blindly he flailed around to his left where he’d remembered Zaza standing before something weird had happened to throw them here, and managed to get a hold of her arm. “Zaza, oh Elements preserve us, Zaza, we’re going to die, it’s going to kill us and suck the marrow from our bones and destroy us in tiny microns we can’t fight it we can’t survive oh elementselementselements-”

A resounding crack confused him for a moment as he head jerked around, and then the pain made itself known. He swung around to face - ah. Not Zaza.

Fran glared down at him, the white showing all the way around her eyes belying her fierce expression. “Now ain’t the time to panic, Luke. We gotta hold on to something or this whole thing’ll fall apart and then we’ll really be in the soup.”

Luke gulped and nodded, looking around. Besides the - oh dear sweet elemental creators preserve us - howling void in front of them, the reassuring red of the Fire planet hung in space behind them. Above and below them were just stars, and all around them seemed to be some kind of darkness both supporting them and keeping them separate from the void. It didn’t look particularly strong to Luke, but it’d been doing the job so far.

He turned back to Fran, whose elbow he still clutched. “So-”

Everything exploded.

Luke found himself standing right in front of a tall figure wearing a black robe and carrying some kind of long weapon. He stared at the blade on the end of it, hypnotized by the shining metal. That thing could kill him fast enough he probably wouldn’t even know it before he found out what came on the far side of life. He could almost see it now, sweeping down and slicing him in half, with the top taking a few minutes to fall, it was so clean. He could almost-

“Are you the Grim Reaper?” he asked the figure in front of him, mostly to drown out the images trying to overwhelm him with primordial terror.

The figure seems to consider this question for a moment. “No. I may be described as grim, but I am not here to harvest. I am here to collect the Heir and be gone - something which I have apparently failed to do. His continued resistance has grown irksome; we will need to take stronger measures, it seems, though this current attempt has failed utterly.”

“Oh.”

Luke didn’t quite know what to say to that. He wasn’t sure what an Heir was, and while failing at something sucked he couldn’t help but feel a little glad such a scary person hadn’t gotten what they wanted. Something in the back of his mind still gibbered about how the person in front of him could absolutely kill him at a moment’s notice, and he didn’t really have much sympathy for murderers. He opened his mouth to offer some kind of meaningless platitude-

Everything collapsed.

Luke staggered as he found himself back in the galley of Haven, almost knocking a dazed-looking Zaza to the floor. The various other cooks looked about as good as Luke himself felt. He blinked, feeling his head start to swim. “I-”

He fainted to the sound of Big Mike cursing up a storm.

——

There was something at once terrible and fascinating about the whirling unreality that raged behind the veil in front of her.

Mika wasn’t one much for mysticism; sure, everything worked on magic but that was no reason to go assigning spiritual value to it. You plugged your grill in, let the Void energy spin up the heating coils, and went about your day. Nothing special to that, it was just what you did if you were a cook. Worrying about what was going to happen to you when you died didn’t get the morning flapjacks made or the orange juice squeezed; there were just better things to do with her time.

Still, seeing the burning, swirling maw in front of her was rapidly beginning to make her rethink this stance. She leaned over to Zip, who appeared to be having some kind of religious experience, and jabbed him hard in the shoulder with one finger. “What do you make of that?” She asked, gesturing to the sight in front of them.

Zip didn’t quite answer her, but he half-turned so that whatever he’d been saying became audible to her. “…So shall the elements wither and wane before the Unmaker, but the Continuum shall be the light evermore and save us from the Darkness…”

Mika tuned him out; whatever was going on in that head of his was obviously pretty far removed from whatever reality they were currently experiencing. She turned in a slow circle; besides Zip standing next to her, the rest of the kitchen staff was clumped up pretty close together and the rest of the crew kinda spread out along…whatever the Void they were standing on. Furthest forward were the special guests and the command folks, and furthest back were the new brig security people they’d picked up to replace the ones who hadn’t survived the Company rep’s short but tyrannical reign aboard ship.

She turned a little more to see what was behind them, and-

Everything exploded.

Mika blinked as pieces of reality danced before her eyes; looking around didn’t bring any further clarity as all she saw was herself. Doing things - washing dishes, mostly, though there was the odd scene of her attending some kind of rocket launch, or being handed a certificate on a stage, or being murdered in an alley. She blinked and turned away from that last one hurriedly; it didn’t seem to bode well for how this whole situation was going to turn out.

As she looked away from that scene, a tall, hooded figure caught her eye. Seven foot tall at least, she’d’ve piled their plate high if they’d come into her kitchen. There was something hungry about them; she would bet there wouldn’t be any meat on their bones if she could see through the flowing layers they wore.

Or maybe she wouldn’t give ‘em a plate at all, not if they were still carrying that pig-sticker they clutched in one hand. Mika had a strict no-weapons policy for the galleys she worked in, and the rest of the staff aboard Haven had been quick to agree with her. Kitchen implements were one thing; sure, you could murder people with ‘em but that tended to dull the blades dreadfully so you were better off just using them to, y'know, actually cook. Weapons just made for killing were worse than useless in a kitchen - even blasters.

“Who’re you supposed to be, then?” She asked, using her best I’m-not-impressed voice.

The hooded figure didn’t seem to care. “I am Asahel Keturah Pipe-Wolferstan, and we are the Other. I am supposed to be servant of the Heir, but I cannot be so until he takes up his true purpose and name. Until he does, I am merely the one chosen to deal with Reality to make him take up his duties to us.” They paused for the merest sliver on an instant. “It is…uncomfortable, but I am the second best able to exist in Reality, and so it is my duty to do so.”

Mika raised an eyebrow. “Well, it seems to me-”

Everything collapsed.

Mika blinked through the sudden wooziness of finding herself back in the kitchen of Haven. Zaza was hyperventilating, Luke had straight-up fainted, Zip sounded like he was still praying, Fran was clutching her face and weeping, Hank was making unpleasant noises in the corner, and Zeiriogh was breathing heavily from where they were leaning on the counter. Mika barely registered her count was off before a nasty sizzling noise heralded a bout of cursing from behind her; she spun around to find Big Mike near the stove, cradling one hand with the other. Apparently he’d tried to copy Zeiriogh in leaning on something, but had chosen his leaning surface poorly.

Mika heaved a sigh and rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “What a rotten way to get out of a conversation,” she remarked to no-one. If the universe somehow carried her parting shot to Asahel, it gave no sign, and she went over to start tending to Mike’s hand.

One mess at a time, in her kitchen.

——

Today was definitely going to be a red-letter day in her daybook, and not in a good way.

To be fair, Fran didn’t get too many red-letter days, full stop. There was the day she got assigned to Haven, that’d been a good one; the day Silas had kissed her and promised her his hand, that’d been a really excellent one; the day she’d gotten a letter and Silas’ ring from the Company, that’d been a bad one; the day Roger’d been eaten by the giant bug on the Bloom planet, that’d been a bad one; and so on, and so forth. Point being, there were more bad red-letter days than good ones, and this was shaping up to be a really bad red-letter one.

For starters, she was standing on nothing in the middle of nowhere with what looked like the descriptions of the Underworld the local cults used to try and scare people with back on her home world stretched out in front of her. Standing to her right was Luke and to her left was Zaza, and she could hear Zip babbling somewhere behind her; he sounded like he’d taken some kind of religion to heart and was regurgitating it to deal with whatever was going on in his head. Fran mentally dismissed him as unhelpful and started to turn around when something grabbed a hold of her elbow.

Spinning to face the possible threat, she found herself face to saucer-plate-sized-eyes face with Luke. He was also babbling, though he sounded a lot more hysterical than Zip did. Voice high and breathy, chest going like someone on speed pumping a bellows, pupils the approximate size of pinpricks - Luke was clearly less than ten seconds away from complete meltdown. So Fran did the only thing she could think of to snap him out of it.

She slapped him.

Hard.

“Now ain’t the time to panic, Luke. We gotta hold on to something or this whole thing’ll fall apart and then we’ll really be in the soup.” He stared at her owl-eyed as she spoke, the imprint of her hand reddening on his cheek, and nodded jerkily while making an odd gulping noise - like he’d tried to swallow but didn’t have anything in his mouth to swallow. His eyes were still darting around crazily, however, and he had a glint in them she didn’t like.

He opened his mouth and said hoarsely “so-”

Everything exploded.

Fran found herself moving very fast and yet at the same time standing perfectly still as reality fractured like a cheap window. Luke’s hand was gone from her elbow, and the whirling shards of what she had the nasty feeling was literally Everything were going too fast for her to see if he’d ended up in one of those. The fragments were actually kind of pretty, in the same way that broken glass could reflect rainbows if turned just right, but the fact that they were fragments and not whole was probably a bad thing.

So entranced was she by the whirling bits of Reality above her, she didn’t even realize someone was standing in front of her until they cleared their throat. Or at least, made a noise like they were clearing their throat, and she glanced down in surprise. The figure was tall, taller than Big Mike - no mean feat as Big Mike was the biggest person she’d ever seen - and shrouded from head to toe in black cloth. They looked almost funerary in that get-up, and a terrible thought struck her as she glanced between them and the broken sky above.

Fran took a deep breath, and asked the question that had plagued her mind for decades. “How did Silas really die?”

She’d asked that question many times of many different people, and had never gotten a satisfactory answer. There was no real reason this person would know who Silas was, or anything about him but - that clothing. That weapon. The broken sky above them. If she didn’t at least ask, she’d hate herself for the rest of her life.

The figure looked at her - or maybe through her - for a long moment before answering. “Silas Marner was an informational security specialist in a minor branch of The Company on the planet most notable for its vast reserves of the elemental magic your kind classifies as 'water.’ He was a dependable worker, and good at his job - too good. One day he intercepted leaked plans for a siphon the Company had planned for the planet on which he stood, plans he knew were illegal. He deleted them, and all mentions of them, from the Company database. The Company sent a Problem Solver to his quarters, who beat him to death in an attempt to retrieve the plans. If the Problem Solver had not arrived when he did, Silas would have been summarily executed by the Industrialist faction who had been responsible for trying to data-mine the leak in the first place and whose kill team was waiting outside while the Problem Solver worked.”

Fran’s mind went blank. she’d always suspected the Company had been involved - that it hadn’t been an accident - that - that-

Everything collapsed.

Finding herself standing back in the kitchen of Haven, not having moved a single inch from where she could remember being before being sucked into space was surreal. Not a single ladle was out of place, not a pot had moved, and yet everything had changed. Everything was different. Silas had died a good man, and he’d died at the hands of the Company - the Company she was working for.

It was all too much. Fran buried her face in her hands and wept.

——

Zaza was fascinated.

The constantly-moving energy patterns of the whatever that was in front of her were mesmerizing. The sudden unpredictable shifts that drew the eye for just a moment, only for something else to change and attract her attention - she felt like she could stare at it for hours. If only there wasn’t that weird darkness in the way so she could see it properly. She reached out, but her hands met nothing; whatever was between her and those wonderful, swirling flames was at once close enough to touch and far out of reach.

She took a step forward, and another, and then-

Everything exploded.

If Zaza had thought the flames were beautiful, they had nothing on the whirling shards of Reality itself that spun in an infinite number of fragments above her head. She couldn’t see into any of them, of course - she suspected that was her eyes failing to comprehend what they were seeing, rather than any actual attempt by the universe to keep her from peeking. She huffed, impatient with the failings of her optic nerves - the Company did offer upgrades, but they cost an arm and a leg and Zaza’d never be able to afford them on her salary as a cook - and nearly jumped out of her skin when she heard a low laugh in response.

Looking around suspiciously, her eyes landed on a strange figure dressed all in black. Strange costume, she thought, and turned her gaze back to the sky in its infinite complexity.

“I want to see this all the time,” she stated baldly, never taking her eyes off the up there.

“You would wish this view all the time?” The figure sounded surprised. Zaza snorted.

“Of course, who wouldn’t? The firey place wasn’t too shabby either.”

There was a long stretch of silence.

“Seek me out on your return, and I’ll give you the eyes to see what you so desperately desire.”

Zaza dropped her gaze from the sky, finally. “How-”

Everything collapsed.

-do I find you died on her lips as she took in the boring normality of the kitchen around her. She could feel her heart racing and her breath coming in too fast as she tried to reign in the feelings that adventure had brought out in her. Clearly she needed to find the guy dressed all in black, and asap.

After I finish cleaning, she amended mentally as Hank threw up in the corner. Sighing, she went and fetched the mop and bucket and got to work.

——

Hank felt like he ought to be sick.

He’d never had a head for heights, and from when he could see there was nothing below him but a long, long way to fall. Whatever he was standing on was at least semi-transparent, reminding him vividly of the time his little sister had convinced him to walk on the glass bridge that went out over a waterfall on the Bloom planet. It was apparently a must-see on all the tourist guides, but he’d very nearly had a heart attack just taking the first few steps and his sister had eventually given up and gone the rest of the way without him. He’d been dragged off the clear surface after she’d left by a kindly security guard who’d forced him to drink two cups of peppermint tea before releasing him from “custody.”

The strange thing this time was that he wasn’t sick. At least, not sick to his stomach; he couldn’t look up from the vast emptiness of space beneath his feet, but he didn’t feel like he was about to throw up. Maybe those therapy sessions his sister had forced him to go to after the bridge incident hadn’t been a total waste of time after all.

He still couldn’t look up, though.

He felt Big Mike’s hand - no way it was anyone else, Big Mike had hands big enough he needed custom oven mitts - settle between his shoulder blades. “Breathe,” the bigger man commanded with his deep voice and Hank sucked in a breath, the spots at the edge of his vision clearing. He could feel Mike’s hand giving him a soothing rub. “You gonna be-”

Everything exploded.

Hank missed Mike’s hand on his back immediately, but at least whatever the hell he was standing on now was opaque. He looked up and around, and blinked in surprise. He saw himself, but like, in a weird funhouse-mirror kind of way. The reflections - if that’s what they really were - nearest to him looked the most like him, while the more outlandish ones looked like they were further away - though he wasn’t sure if distance had a real meaning here.

Though, actually, that wasn’t quite right. The nearest person to him didn’t look like him at all. Hank wasn’t seven foot tall, for one, and for another he’d never wear a crown. He’d despised them ever since his sister had shoved the paper crown you’d get from Void Burger Conglomerate for your birthday down over his eyes and given him paper cuts on both ears and the bridge of his nose.

Which, of course, begged the question. “Why are you wearing a crown?” He asked the not-him figure.

They shifted uncomfortably - or maybe they didn’t, Hank’s eyes couldn’t quite resolve the gesture they made. “It is a symbol of my power. I am a titan of the third order among my people, but human minds cannot even conceive of us in our entirety. Your minds simply interpret our power as a crown.”

“That’s cool?” Hank hazarded. What were you supposed to say to something like that? Still-

Everything collapsed.

Hank blinked around at the warmly-lit kitchen. It was good to firmly be planted back on the ground after- after-

He leaned over and threw up in the corner with the drain. Apparently he hadn’t quite gotten over his fear of heights after all.

——

“The Continuum shall light my path; it shall drive away the darkness, and keep me safe.”

This place was everything the mystics of home had warned Zip about, from the swirling maw of the Unmaker in front of him to the vastness of space swirling to either side.

“I shall place my faith in the Continuum, that it may shelter me against the storms and the raging fires, and all that would destroy It’s joyous work.”

He couldn’t exactly confess himself regularly, being the only practicing Bright Spot Continuuist on the ship, but he made sure to send the proper percentage of his pay-packet home to the priests and they, in return, sent him monthly recordings of the lessons he missed by being aboard ship.

“For the Continuum holds the light, and life, of all the worlds safe in Its hands.”

Something poked him hard in the shoulder, and he half-turned while keeping up the Litany Against Darkness.

“When faith is gone, so shall the elements with and wane before the Unmaker, but the Continuum shall be the light evermore, and save us from the Darkness when all other hopes have failed.”

Mika was the one who’d poked him, but he couldn’t spare a thought for her right now. He-

Everything exploded.

Zip couldn’t look up. The Continuum - the Continuum was - he couldn’t look up. Couldn’t look around, either; he could just see the terrible lies crowding the edges of his vision, versions of himself that have not existed and will never exist so he will not pay them any mind now. Looking down showed him a simple, opaque blackness, and in front of him was-

“Are you the Unmaker?” He blurted, heart seizing in his chest.

The terrible figure shrouded all in black with a bleak crown and black staff leaned over him, and Zip could feel its terrible, awful gaze in his very soul, and-

“One of them.” It replied.

Zip reeled back and-

Everything collapsed.

Zip looked around at the warm, familiar shapes of the kitchen, closed his eyes, and prayed.

——

Michael “Big Mike” Derane was not an easy man to startle; when you were as big as he was, you didn’t have the luxury of starting at every little thing. When you moved instinctively, chances were better than even you’d accidentally elbow another person in the face - especially in the close quarters of a kitchen. If he’d become a Problem Solver like the Company reps had wanted him to, it wouldn’t’ve been a problem, but Big Mike liked cooking and so to the galley of Haven he went.

All that being said, he definitely froze when something jerked him away from the stove he’d been in the process of shutting down - it would have been nice to have more warning before evasive maneuvers started, he’d been lucky there hadn’t been anything actively cooking on the stove when the Captain had done something that threw them all across the kitchen - and into a great, big, nothing.

He could see things all around him - things beyond just the other cooks, though it was good to see them here too - but they seemed to be separated from space by some kind of smoke. It didn’t bode well, but they also weren’t actively dying at that point so that was something. Well, most of them weren’t actively dying.

Big Mike walked over and put a hand carefully between Hank’s hunched shoulder blades. “Breathe,” he advised the shorter man, taking a deep breath himself to demonstrate. Hank sucked in a short breath that sounded like he’d just been dunked in a barrel of icy water, and Big Mike carefully started rubbing up and down the bony back beneath his hand. “Easy, you’re gonna be-”

Everything exploded.

Big Mike found himself standing on a featureless plane while the world whirled above him. There was someone standing right in front of him, taller than he was, but he ignored them in favor of looking around. Everywhere he looked, he could see himself looking back, like a mirror maze or something.

Except no two of the reflections were exactly alike. Most of them looked like him, generally speaking, but one or two looked very different. It was one of the very different ones - a much-older version of himself with snow-white hair and, more importantly, a wedding ring - that caught his attention, and he stepped away from the weirdo in black to get a better look.

The older him smiled at his approach, and held out one wrinkled hand for him to shake. He took it, and looked himself straight in the eyes.

“Who?”

The older him’s smile grew dazzling. “Marlene Aschamps-Marie, in a little diner on the Void planet.”

Big Mike’s smile grew to match older him’s, and-

Everything collapsed.

Big Mike found himself right back where he’d been, in front of the stove in the kitchen of Haven. His heart felt lighter than air, his stomach was doing flip-flops, and a whole lifetime had passed since he’d last been here. A wave of dizziness struck him and he had to put both hands down to make sure he wouldn’t fall over.

A mistake.

A nasty sizzling noise preceded a burning pain in his hand made him jerk his hand away from the still-hot stove top. “Blighted son of a dog and serpent!” he roared - one of his mother’s favorite curses, from way back. “Void-begotten cock-mangling rotten-”

——

This wasn’t how they’d really expected this day to go.

Granted, Zeiriogh was pretty certain that “the way they’d expected today to go” had gotten shot in the foot somewhat further back than “being launched into the void between spaces,” but this was pretty much the icing on the cake. Unexpected evasive maneuvers, fine, nobody’d been handling a knife at least and they could always clean up the mess from the not-quite-empty gravy boat, but being yanked out of the ship to watch the VIPs and Command crew jaw with some weirdo in a shroud?

Yeah, that hadn’t really been on the docket for today.

Still, at least it didn’t look like they were going to be consumed by the awful flames any time soon. Whatever they were standing on seemed firm enough, and was possibly also responsible for keeping the flames from coming any closer which, honestly, was a relief. Zeiriogh had dealt with a fair amount of nonsense in their tenure with the Company, but reality-warping flames were the purview of actual scientists and not cooks, and they’d very much like to keep it that way.

They looked around, noting that the rest of the cooks were standing reasonably close to them. A lot closer than the rest of the crew, anyway, though they weren’t sure how much distance actually meant in this place. The furthest one away looked like one of the engineers, and he appeared to be pirouetting which was about what they expected from an engineer in a place that defied the normal laws of physics. They could only hope the hapless engineer didn’t get any ideas or there stood the real possibility of a repeat performance.

The thought made them facepalm, but just as their hand reached their face-

Everything exploded.

Zeiriogh slowly removed their hand from their face as it became apparent that things had changed yet again. This time it looked like none of the crew were nearby. Instead, they saw a tall figure wearing all black and carrying a glaive standing at attention nearby. They gave the whole ensemble 10/10 for good thinking - a glaive was a nice, versatile weapon - but minus several million points for style. All black did nothing but make you overheat; if you wanted to blend in, you were better off going with neutral mottling of brown and grey, and if you wanted to stand out you’d highlight the important parts in other colors to really emphasize the black.

Whatever; whoever this person was, it wasn’t Zeiriogh’s job to tell them they’d fucked up their outfit. Whoever they had to do that had obviously fallen down on the job, but if you were good at something you should never do it for free - or so they’d heard.

Zeiriogh huffed a gusty sigh. “Is there likely to be a repeat performance of this?” They asked in their most bored, disinterested tone.

The figure shifted slightly. “No; you may thank the Heir for even this much. Such a shattering has never happened before, and is all the more proof we must cut this iteration short. That the Heir could do this with only the most basic grasp of the abilities open to him is…troubling. We will have to try harder to bring him back and try again or this entire cycle could end badly for everyone.”

Zeiriogh didn’t like the sound of that. They straightened out of their careful slouch, and tried to look the other person straight in the eye. “You mean-”

Everything collapsed.

Zeiriogh blinked as the kitchen swam into and out of focus around them. Wherever they had been, the journey back had been one hell of a ride. They leaned against the counter and tried to breathe through the nausea.

Fucking doomsayers.

Tag almost missed it, at first. It was such a little thing.

To be fair, there was a lot going on. A person from Bryn’s childhood, here? Experiments done on elemental-human hybrids? Twenty thousand leagues of sea slowly starting to invade the hallway outside of the lab? That was like twenty different levels of awful all trying to crowd his brain at once.

All of it dropped away for a single crystallized instant when he saw Bryn lean down next to Fresca with her compact open.

Tag had still been reeling from his confrontation with his half-dad when Bryn’s mother had given her the powerful little artifact. Something that shows a person’s true face, her mother had said, and it’d been hard to miss the first time Bryn had looked into it. He’d been in a position to see the brilliant light of the Summoner that he’d first seen in the deep phase state less than half an hour earlier, and it had still been enough to drive the air from his lungs - and a paralyzing spike of fear into his brain.

You are one of us, his half-dad had told him, you just don’t remember.

He had rejected the notion at the time, but a little seed of doubt had planted itself in his head. He was Tag, Parallel to a Fire Summoner, human. He was not some all-consuming juggernaut here to destroy existence, not some weird and terrifying form of blackened ichor hardened into something that shouldn’t exist in this reality. Two hands, two feet, one head, a slightly goofy-looking face - that was him, that was Tag. Just a human.

But.

Asahel Keturah Pipe-Wolferstan had claimed to be a sort of father to him. What kind of human had a thing like that for a dad? Even a half-dad?

Tag could just see Fresca’s reflection in the compact. Her form looked washed out, faded in a way that spoke of not enough substance to make a whole person, which would have been concerning enough on its own. Tag, however, could see something else in her that made his blood freeze; thin threads of ichor, none of them big enough to be a whole snake but still very much present in her body that pulsed sluggishly in time with her heartbeat. He wasn’t sure if Bryn could see them or not, couldn’t remember if the mirror worked for just the holder or each viewer separately, but he felt a chill pass through him at what she might see if she looked at him with that artifact.

Bryn stood up from Fresca and turned to face them. “Do any of you want to use this thing? I wouldn’t use it on any of you without your permission, it just seems like an invasion of privacy,” she said in that frank and honest way of hers and Tag exhaled an internal sigh of relief. He could refuse-

“Sure, I could do with some rouge,” Puq said brightly as he took the mirror. Tag slid a glance over to Rex, and saw the interest in her eyes as well. He knew in that instant, without a shred of doubt, that if this continued then Rex would want to look into the compact as well - and then they would expect him to.

Tag didn’t know what he’d see if he did. Maybe he would see just his face; maybe he would see the plain human face with its plain human eyes and plain human nose and plain human mouth. Maybe he was only Tag, human kid.

But.

Maybe it would show something else. Maybe he wasn’t just Tag.

And that idea terrified him most of all.

“I’m just, sorry, I’m just - I’m trying really hard to be a hero and cool, but I just can’t stop thinking about how-” how much he didn’t want to know if he wasn’t really human "-how far below the surface we are, and the fact that there is water pouring in outside this lab door.“

Rex, Bryn, and Gwennaig all turned to stare at the door while Puq closed the compact and look a little sad - in as much as a huge proto-humaniform lump of Void crystal could look sad, anyway - and Tag felt some of the tension inside of him release. He felt a little bad about talking over Puq’s difficulties, and rushed to try and fix his error in speaking over what the elemental was going through.

"Puq, I want you to get separated if you want to get separated. I, ah, want to get rid of this - of this slug-worm, but I think we’re in a pinch y'all.”

Puq handed the compact silently back to Bryn, who tucked it away inside her robes before Gwennaig started to speak again. Tag let himself go a little limp with relief. On the one hand, having a confirmation that he was human through and through would be a relief; on the other hand, if he saw something else in the mirror…

If he saw something else in the mirror, then he wouldn’t just be Tag.

And that was the worst thought of all.

So. This was it.

Truth to tell, Sam had always on some level expected to die at the bottom of the ocean. First at the hands of the scientists back in the station they’d just left, then in whatever harebrained escape plan he’d manage to hatch after being bonded to the Puq, then at the tentacles of whatever the hell was lurking down here; him and the bottom of the ocean were never going to end well, and that was all there was to it.

A vasty kind of resignation welled up within him as his breaths grew short in the stale air of the suit. In his line of work, he couldn’t be too outraged at the inevitability of death. Every day was a chance to get shot, stabbed, sued, or worse, and while it was more unlikely to happen some days than others, he’d reconciled himself to it long ago. Looking back now on the things he’d done, memories welling up in the absence of light that was pressing on his eyeballs, he couldn’t bring himself to really regret any of the things he’d done.

We got it wrong every time, his alternate self had told him. It was strangely comforting to know that he’d always chosen wrongly, no matter what reality he was in. Three ex-wives here, and uncountable more across every variation of reality, and he’d never managed to pick the right one; if there were no right choices, he couldn’t regret taking the chances he’d had. Just because he’d never managed to keep one didn’t mean that the times he’d had with them were any less special - he’d loved each one enough to marry her, after all. No, he couldn’t regret the choices he’d made and the times he’d had, and that in and of itself was a kind of solace in the lightless depths a mile and more below the surface.

It was the things he’d left undone that he regretted. The words he hadn’t said when his wives tired of him, the destruction he hadn’t wreaked on the facility behind him - the overtures he hadn’t made to the entity tied to his soul. Sam didn’t want to die; not now, not here, not with so much left unfinished. There just didn’t seem to be much he could do about it, trapped in what might as well be a coffin that fit him like a second skin.

“Hey Sam, it looks like we’re pretty stuck, eh?”

Sam blinked, a little hazily. Ever since they’d spoken to each other in the facility, Sam could hear the Puq much more clearly. Apparently they could exchange words now, not just vague feelings and flashes of memories, and Sam felt a wave of regret batter against the bulwarks of resignation he’d armored himself with against his impending death. When he died, would he take the Puq with him? Or would the elemental be freed to enter the cycle of rebirth for spriggans once again? It was the same kind of doubt they’d both had over being separated, and Sam could only regret that they hadn’t tried it now. If they were separate, maybe the Puq wouldn’t be trapped here in this suit with him, dying slowly of oxygen deprivation.

“Yeah. Yeah. Think, uh, this is it.”

Sam’s words were slow and a little slurred; lack of oxygen was a hell of a drug. He could feel a wave of worry that wasn’t his own wash down his spine, and it warmed him a little. Whatever his past coldness towards the spriggan, the Puq didn’t seem to be blaming him for it now and that…that was something. More than his second ex-wife had ever given him, that was for sure.

“Well, it doesn’t have to be. You, uh, you want to…tag me in? I could probably get us out of this pickle. I wanna keep everyone alive!”

Sam blinked again, mind racing. That was everything he’d been afraid of since he’d woken up with a new passenger in his body. Every shock of void magic that sent him away and let the Puq control his body, every second of agony he endured when he tried in vain to hold on to his physical form - for as long as he’d been the Puq’s other half, he’d clung desperately to himself and his human body. He’d been terrified that if he let go, he wouldn’t be Sam anymore, that the Puq would take him over and never let him return and that would be the end of Sam.

But now he’d spoken face to face with the Puq, and remembered that there were two victims in this body, not one - the Puq hadn’t asked to be a part of him any more than Sam had asked to have an elemental tied to his soul. Being tied to Sam had changed the Puq in ways so fundamental that the spriggan could only truly express them in his own language; Sam had changed too, but he’d obstinately rejected those changes. Now, though, what did he have to lose? If this was truly it, he’d be embracing oblivion either way.

And, if only just, he trusted the Puq enough to get them out of this mess.

“You know what? I’m okay with tagging you in. ‘Cause…I don’t think there’s a backseat anymore. All right.” He sucked in a breath that didn’t really help any and grunted as black spots danced across his vision. It had to be now, or it was going to be never. “Have at.”

The Puq didn’t need any more permission than that, and Sam steeled himself against the first frissions of pain even as he quelled the almost overwhelming urge to resist. This time, though, he had chosen the change; it had not been forced upon him by an outside agent. His heart turned to crystal, and he could feel the Puq right with him shudder as the sharp points pierced the other nearby organs. And then…the pain continued, but almost muffled? It still hurt, but it wasn’t the all-consuming, bone-crunching agony he was used to.

He and the Puq were equals as their body shifted, side-by-side each other metaphorically, and he felt the wave of cheer that rippled through the Puq even as the spoke on a level they’d never manage at any other time.

Don’t you know, Sam? A pain shared is a pain halved.

Sam had to smile even as he fully submerged into the phase state. The Puq was right.

And maybe not working alone had its advantages after all.

Tag had been afraid.

He’d been afraid when Bryn had suggested they go through the portal to the Other side. When he’d known to look for it, the secondary portal had been obvious; an open mouth, drawing both from the Real world around them and the Phase state in front of them, that lead to the whirling place of Unreality he’d last seen when he’d destroyed half-dad’s tether. That place had been bad enough simply seen through the veil of the torn tether; seeing it up close and personal, without that veiling presence, had been both terrifying and…exhilarating?

They had ultimately decided to go through, of course; neither Bryn nor Rex had seemed particularly keen on passing up the opportunity to attack the enemy’s stronghold. Sam had agreed with them, once Tag had looped Puq telepathically into communication with the rest of the team, and Puq had been happy enough to follow Sam’s lead. Tag had kept his worries to himself and done what he had been trained to do since he was very young: Follow his Summoner.

Tag had felt another frission of fear going through the first portal. He was well-used to the phase state, though Bryn’s brilliant Fire never ceased to take his breath away, but - he hadn’t been able to see the rest of their party. For the breathless instant where the world turned the color of the wine-dark sea and vast currents of sea-foam and storm-wave slipped by him as the tides of the world ebbed and flowed, Sam, Puq, and Rex had vanished even from his Phase-sight. He had strained his eyes for the refulgent purple glow, so out of place in this world of ocean-flowing blue, that would at least mark out the Puq - but he had seen nothing, and then the second portal had swallowed them whole.

Stepping into the Other side had been like stepping into a nightmare. It was a horribly alien place; nothing about it was Real, and even while the shapes were functionally familiar they looked wrong. Bad. His feet sank into the floor, though no matter how much sinking occurred it never went up over his shoe. The walls were perpetually melting like some kind of horrible fountain, material oozing along from the top down towards the floor in a never-ending stream that looked like it should have run out of ichor to ooze long ago, but was still going in defiance of all the known laws of physics.

Even the things that were definitely from the Real world had only contributed to the subtle horror of the place. Solid shapes that didn’t melt, in colors other than black, with the most ubiquitous logo in the galaxy stamped on them? Somehow they only managed to highlight the dripping ichor in ways that defied the eye to explain it. The ichor, in its turn, had given the Company technology a decidedly sinister aura that Puq had been the only one brave enough to voice; if the Company was making the equipment the Others were using to take and take and take from the Real world, maybe the Company was also using the equipment to take and take and take to use for their own purposes?

And yet the worst part of the Other side had been the way it made him feel. Part of him was so comfortable here, possibly even luxuriating in the feeling of the unreality; that part wanted him to dig his toes into the constantly-melting floor like it was a deep shag carpet, stretch out, lean against a wall, revel in the ichor as it ran through and around him. The other part, the part he had clung to desperately ever since his first encounter with his half-dad, rejected the place around him. The walls, floor, ceiling, door - everything was wrong and he didn’t know what to do about it.

The psychic dissonance had left him reeling internally, torn between the strong desire to puke and the equally strong desire to consume. He had felt unmoored, in a way he hadn’t since the fight with Variq. His very soul had felt disconnected from his body, almost a step up and to the left - like a poorly-set third-person view of the body known as Tag. His hands, fingers, legs, toes - all of them had felt like they belonged to someone else, like he was a puppetmaster pulling on strings to make this body move. His limbs hadn’t been jerking and twitching from power overload this time, which had made things easier, but there was a certain lack of whatever might be called his usual grace.

The fact that his kick had connected with the Other soldier had surprised Tag almost as much as it had surprised the rest of his party; the fact that the kick was hard enough to send a seven-foot-tall being wearing half-plate-mail out of its native reality and all the way through two portals was…something. Tag wasn’t the most physical of fighters, and though he’d received the same basic hand-to-hand training that the rest of the parallels in the monastery had gotten, he wasn’t Rex levels of asskicking…in the Real world. Here, though, in a place that was at once awful and awfully familiar, he had felt the Other side of him - the part he’d so resolutely tried to deny and ignore - getting stronger by the moment.

The alarm that had blared when they reversed the streams on the capacitors had hurt. The others had all heard the howls of the damned coming through the speaking-trumpets mounted high on the walls above them, but as the distance between himself and his physical form had increased Tag had heard the other parts to it as well, a sour, metallic taste in his mouth and the feeling of a thousand tiny insects crawling up and down his spine as the noise echoed in dimensions humans were simply incapable of accessing. Underneath that, he had heard the sound of movement headed their way.

He had been so afraid. He had been so terrified - what would happen if he let go? What would happen if he stepped forth? But one fear, overriding them all, had tipped his hand:

What would happen to his family-of-choice if he didn’t?

So he had stepped forward.

Stepping out of his body was a relief, the likes of which he’d never known before. Tag hadn’t realized until now just exactly how far he had needed to compress to fit in such a tiny mortal shell. Even as the representation of his intent formed itself out of the ichor, he unfolded along planes and dimensions that human minds were not built to comprehend. Wings vast enough to encompass whole planets stretched along the eleventh dimension, uncountable eyes blinking from among the feathers. Dog heads with jaws that opened down to their chest stretched and yawned in the seventh, eighth, and ninth dimensions. Limbs of uncountable numbers, unfathomable sizes, and incomprehensible shapes stretched out from where he’d folded and tucked them away inside his human shell along dimensions innumerable.

As his simplest form stretched into three dimensions, he could see the Others freeze before him. They were as ants before a mountain - it wasn’t the crown on his form’s brow that arrested them, that was merely a symbol of the power and majesty of his full existence; it was the vastness of all that he was, in all the planes they existed in. Compared to him, they were insignificantly tiny and they knew it, their own shapes - smaller and less complex than his - curling into themselves as they awaited his orders. He looked over them, and dismissed them as the insignificant beings they were.

After all, he was not afraid.

And why should he be afraid? This was his place, and his people; his powers here were unlimited. This was the place he belonged; no more doubt, no more fear, no more wondering what he had done wrong. In this place, there were only absolutes. And the very most basic absolute was…him.

“Tag. Tag!”

A prodding in a lower dimension shook him from his contemplation. It took him several moments to focus in on the very limited line of communication one of the Real people was trying to open up to his psyche. It took him several moments longer to marshal his cognition to the point where responding wouldn’t simply overwhelm the mind of the person he was talking to.

“Dark figure with a lot of power! I don’t know what to call you.”

Several of his mouths curled up into smiles that would drive a human mad to even glimpse them; Bryn was as eloquent as always, and her attempts to give him a different name sent a curl of warmth shivering through his feathers.

“Tag will be fine.”

Asahel Keturah Pipe-Wolferstan had chosen a very long name to represent themselves to the Real people; Tag suspected the Other had gotten it from a human who had no more need of it when they had taken the Company machines from the Real world. It was the kind of utterly wrong-headed thing they’d do.

“He doesn’t look fine! He’s frozen! What the fuck are you doing with my friend?”

Ah, she hadn’t made the connection yet. He supposed that the iron-clad figure that was visible to her and the others looked nothing like his human shell - and all of himself that was contained in higher dimensions even less so. She sounded rather upset at the thought that Tag might have been harmed, which gave him a warm feeling that pushed away some of the empty hunger at his core - and the idea that he had been the one to do the harming was somewhat amusing.

“I am your friend.”

The statement was very simple, but he spoke it on all the planes he had a mouth to say it with. She could only hear it on the ones she had access to, of course, but such a statement said in such a fashion in this place was more binding than iron chains; he could feel the hunger that plagued him and all his kin abate somewhat more, buttressed by that fact.

“You are my friend? What’s my favorite color?”

“Magenta.”

The response slipped out before he could really think about it; it was the color that poured off of her in the fifth plane where Fire met Time. He could see it so clearly; true magenta, not the poor imitation his human eyes had seen when they tried to fill in a gap in the visible light spectrum. True magenta was a much more powerful color, filled with the vibrancy of life and the urgency of fire.

Yes, he’d always associate her with magenta now.

“Wrong.”

She sounded so offended and he sighed a great gust of wind into the fifteenth dimension.

“Bryn, you and I both know that we have not had the favorite color conversation. We’ve had the favorite t-shirt conversation, which is that one you picked up at that punk rock show when you turned fourteen. It was the first time you’d left home by yourself, and you felt like a badass.”

She was silent for several long moments, but Tag was content to wait. Time did not truly pass here, not in the same way it passed in the Real world; they had all the time they needed.

“What’s our band name?”

The question was flat, caught somewhere between suspicion and hope, and he smiled again.

“Snakes on a brain stem.”

“Okay, phew. What are you doing? Why do you sound all weird? What’s going on on this planet?”

Her tone changed from relief to one of confusion in the span of a few seconds, and Tag decided that these were questions better answered for everyone.

It was simple enough to loop the others into the telepathic conference; their minds could not resist his will, though in this case he was merely establishing clear lines of communication. The spriggan’s reaction was the most interesting; it appeared Puq could see a few more dimensions that the normal humans, and there was something about his face that suggested that if he were human, the whites would be showing all the way around his eyes.

“Bryn. Puq. Sam - hello in there. Rex, welcome.”

Tag turned his attention briefly to the Others before him; in the limited visible dimensions they stood motionless, but in the higher dimensions they crouched and twisted under the force of his gaze.

“Stand down. I have this under control.”

Energies dissipated and lower-order weapons were set down from ready positions. He could see their confusion in every ripple and twist of their forms, their own wings - much smaller than his - and limited numbers of eyes and mouths moving between him and the four Real people who stood in this place.

Still, their confusion was not his concern. He returned his attention to his friends, who all stared at him in varying stages of confusion and dismay.

“You think that things happen one after the other, that we siphon energy from planets, that we take over galaxies, that we crush them and move on. The reality is that is has all already happened, it will all happen, it is all happening now. The allegiances that you think you have, your plans, your course of action, are just strands of thread moving underwater. What we’re doing here is the plan, inasmuch as the plan is merely what is happening.”

Explaining the nonlinear nature of time to creatures stuck in three dimensions was frustrating. Their language did not quite have the words or tenses to make true sense of the concepts he was trying to get across. Blinkered and fettered by their own mortal nature, they could not comprehend that the beginning of time and the end of it were the selfsame spot, and that everything in between did not always happen in order.

Turning, he addressed the Others in the room.

“Now, you can attempt to stop us,” the word he used encompassed himself and the four Real people; their lives were short and when the plan did not depend on Time to happen, it would be easy enough to continue after they had gone. “And I will have no moral qualms about snuffing your lives out. Or you can run back to the castle and tell you-know-who that we’re here.” Asahel did not have a castle, per se, but it was the closest analogue Tag could use for the benefit of the four people in the room who did not have the lexicon he did.

The second largest Other in the room - one of those who had supped, just a little, on the elemental magics of the Real world they had been supposed to use against intruders - sent the lesser Others flying away at great speeds, while themselves remaining near the door. Tag watched them go, switching to eyes on other planes when they moved beyond range of mortal vision. When Asahel came, he would see the Other long before they entered mortal visual range.

In said mortal visual range, however, there was a great deal going on. Bryn appeared to be inspecting the room while the spriggan heaved a machine over his head and Rex tackled Tag’s mortal shell. A simple brush over her mind and that physical shell was enough to verify that she hadn’t damaged it significantly, and Tag couldn’t help murmuring in relief. For all it was damned uncomfortable to fit himself into, he didn’t wish to leave it behind entirely just yet.

Looming figures visible in the fifth dimension and beyond drew his attention. One towered above the others, whirling concentric rings concealing the heads of animals and more mouths than he’d seen on any Other; the form was unmistakably Asahel. The Other was not quite so large as Tag himself, of course, but still several orders of magnitude beyond the retinue that accompanied them. Tag stretched again, luxuriating in the feel of having space enough to move - and, of course, appearing just that little bit bigger.

Naturally, it was at that point Rex started shaking his human body like a terrier with a particularly dense rat. Tag turned his attention to her and spoke on the mortal plane.

“Rex, it cannot respond. It’s not necessary; I’m right here, whatever you have to say, I’m listening.”

Rex kept shaking. “It’s like a magic 8-ball, right? I’m looking for answers here, buddy.”

Tag felt a trace of exasperation creep into him. “Rex, it is not a magic 8-ball - yes, I know what that is. Please stop shaking it, I would like to return to that form at some point.” Though she could neither see nor feel them, he still flapped some of his wings along the seventeenth dimension in agitation. “It has a certain, naïve, je na sais quoi that tickles.”

It was at that moment that Asahel chose to make their appearance into the room where those with limited perception could finally see them, and Rex stopped shaking Tag’s human form finally. The lesser Others fanned out as the two titans contemplated each other for a long moment.

Tag’s mind raced as he looked at the forces arrayed before them. He could take the guards out relatively easily if he had to, but not if he had to hold off Asahel at the same time. And, while he trusted his friends with a number of things, six to one were pretty long odds even for Rex; he had to buy time for his friends to make it back through the portal, or they’d all die here and the thought of that happening was…unpleasant.

“Interesting,” Asahel said, the first to break the silence. Eyes blinked along their body, and a googolplex of wings unfurled in an artfully casual fashion as they, too, took the opportunity to ‘stretch.’ Tag was unimpressed; their wingspan was less than two-thirds of his own.

“While I’m sure we have a lot to talk about, let’s tidy up the loose ends first.” Reaching out with an arm and his will. Tag lifted the last remaining piece of Company tech and crushed it slowly and carefully in front of the Other. None of them moved physically, but several shifted into better positions to flee from on the sixth plane. He released it, and let it drop to the approximated floor with a dull thud before meeting all of Asahel’s eyes.

“I’d always been curious about the scar running down my body. It had been there for as long as I could remember; now, I finally see it for what it is. It’s just a zipper, allowing me to take off this clumsy, limiting, if not overly-sincere shell. He has his uses, and I intend to keep him intact, but - gosh. It’s fun to flex.” So saying, he ‘stretched’ too - and by far more impressively than Asahel had. The physical body that was there for the humans’ benefit did not move, but in the dimensions beyond wings stretched, mouths gaped, eyes squeezed shut, and limbs reached across the infinite nothing around them. The lesser Others shrank even further, and Asahel tucked their wings away almost sulkily.

“Eh. I…know the feeling. I’m curious, though, as to why you’re here, Tag. And why you…summoned me.” There was the faintest tinge of uncertainty in Asahel’s voice, and Tag smiled blandly with mouths big enough to swallow whales whole.

Time to begin his gambit. “Well, there’s really no reason to beat around the bush; I’m not trying to sneak out of my room past curfew. I’m here as a direct challenge.” Asahel ceased movement on every dimension, all of their attention riveted on Tag as he continued. “We have the option, it seems, to continue doing what we’re doing; you’ll open rifts, we’ll close them. Every so often, as an interlude, we’ll come face to face and inevitably one will run off without getting anything satisfactory from the other. So I thought, why not skip that?”

Tag stopped and leaned back, and Asahel remained stock still for a moment before nodding slowly.

“Interesting.”

They made a gesture, and the guards lowered their mortal weapons and stepped back from the two titans. Another gesture, and a rack of weapons formed up between the two combatants on the physical plane. On the planes above, wings once more unfurled - this time revealing steel feathers and obsidian-tipped claws. Tag could hear Rex hyperventilating a little behind him, but he only had eyes for his opponent - who, in turn, was sizing him up.

“I’d be interested to know your proposed reward,” Asahel said, apropos of nothing, and Tag paused for a long moment. There was only one thing he could ask for without raising suspicions that he was merely buying time, but it was also the one thing he’d been denying since the first time his human form had laid eyes on Asahel.

“My birthright,” he said clearly, and Asahel was once again frozen in surprise. “You have your way of doing things, and when I take the throne I’ll have mine. Whether our objectives are the same or not, I think you’ve gotten sloppy. Please,” he gestured broadly to the newly-manifested weapons rack, “take first pick of the weapons.”

It took Asahel a moment to move, but when they did their form picked up a vary familiar glaive. Turning towards Tag, Asahel pointed the glaive directly at where Tag’s heart would be if he were human.

“I can agree to your terms. Mine are; should I win this duel, you will enact your destiny as we have foreseen. There will be no more arguments, no more perceived debt to lower order creatures,” Here Asahel’s eyes moved to Tag’s compatriots, and Tag instinctively mantled with six dozen of his largest wings. Something like triumph gleamed in Asahel’s eyes as they continued. “There will be no more fussing and fighting. You will take up your correct position, and do what we put you on that side of the Rift to do.”

Tag responded in the only way he could. “Without a second thought.”

Asahel’s ninth-dimensional rings rotated as their physical form gestured to the weapons rack. “Choose your weapon.”

Before Tag’s physical form could approach the weapons rack, Rex strode forward and claimed one of the weapons - an enormous double-bladed harvest scythe, with one blade at each end of the crooked pole. Tag and Asahel watched her move in silence, before Asahel addressed Tag again.

“If you add combatants to your side, I will match them stroke for stroke. Is that agreeable?”

Tag shrugged, the movement accentuated by the floor-length cape his physical form was wearing. “You do whatever you need to do; I will be fighting alone in this,” he said, stressing the word alone so that his friends would know to let him deal. If they moved in, it would only give Asahel license to attack them in ways they couldn’t even see - and he very much doubted their ability to survive that.

Puq piped up unexpectedly. “Hey Tag, if, uh, you get to pick weapons, I suggest compliments!” The spriggan’s tone was as up-beat and cheerful as ever, and totally at odds with the large piece of machinery he still held threateningly over his head.

Tag smiled just a bit, grateful for the reminder of why he counted these people among his friends. “Thank you, Puq.” Even as he spoke he, too, flexed his form in the dimensions beyond the physical. Claws extended, feathers hardened, teeth gnashed, and eyelids contracted to protective slits.

Asahel merely shook their head and gestured to the rack of weaponry. “Standard rules will apply; you can use any of the powers that you have in this place, as I will. You may choose any weapon you wish - if it is not on the rack now, it can be manifested upon request. No ranged weaponry allowed.”

Something in Tag bristled a little at Asahel’s tone, and several of his sixth-dimensional mouths snarled. “Of course. You can’t help but to condescend a little, even now as you face your own death. You don’t need to manifest anything for me; this is my home.” He gestured contemptuously and the weapons rack dissolved back into the ichor from whence it had come. He didn’t need that kind of weaponry - not here, not now. He knew more tricks about fitting into simple three-dimensional space than Asahel could ever dream of, and he used them to his fullest advantage. The same tricks that let him fit the entirety of his multi-dimensional form into a three-dimensional human also let him fit some of the more exotic parts of himself onto the material plane.

The ichor of the floor rose up and joined with his cape to surround him in a cocoon; the shifting of mass and shape along dimensions humans didn’t have words for was bad for their fragile psyches and he’d rather have four fully-functional teammates at his back than three gibbering, crying, messes and Puq. He shuffled the most useful, least disturbing features he could into the mortal plane - as handy as a mouth that hinged at his midsection would be, that seemed a bit too much. A tail for balance, clawed paws for weapons, mountains for armor, and horns for intimidation.

Asahel paused for a moment, taking in the new configurations Tag had forced on the first three dimensions and all the ones after them, and nodded. “Right,” they said forcefully, and a surge of will heralded the reappearance of the weapons rack. They stowed the glaive carefully before reaching down and grabbing a bastard sword and a heavy tower shield. Tapping the sword against the shield experimentally, they nod to Tag. “Fair.”

Tag didn’t wait, immediately rushing forward to attack. Claw connected with shield in a resounding clang, and in the planes beyond wings met rings. Whatever Asahel had been expecting, it wasn’t such an immediate response and the Other went sailing through space and dimensions only to fetch up hard against a wall. The wall itself began to bleed in response, but Tag couldn’t smell any tearing damage to the other’s form and huffed in disappointment.

Still, he had bought himself time and that was all he really needed. Pushing his physical form up onto two legs, he reached first for the last piece of undamaged machinery in the room with his paw and his will. With a screeching complaint, the brightly-glowing keystone tore itself out of the arch and flew into his waiting paw. Without pause, he turned and faced Asahel, who was leaning on their shield and trying to regain their balance.

Asahel Keturah Pipe-Wolferstan was no more a father of his than Rex was his mother for having made him an energy weapon. Asahel’s help had been invaluable for constructing his mortal shell, but they were more akin to siblings than father and son. So, too, did their crowns share a purpose; a physical manifestation of powers beyond mortal ken.

So Tag reached out and took it.

In the physical realm, he simply reached out with his hand and bent his will upon Asahel’s crown. In the dimensions beyond, he reached across the gulf between them and began tearing Asahel’s wings away, snapping at the very substance that comprised all that the Other was - their source of power. Asahel resisted, trying desperately to fight a battle on two fronts - and losing both. As the crown came away from their head with an awful snapping crunch, their wings shredded underneath Tag’s onslaught. Wings on the ninth, sixth, seventeenth, eleventh, twenty-third, and more dimensions fell apart under his claws - as did a number of rings and eyes - and into a thousand of Tag’s gaping mouths.

When Tag finally withdrew as the crown fell into his heavy claws, Asahel’s size had been reduced by almost a full third and ichor dripped in directions humans couldn’t name. Tag himself had gained noticeably in size, and his form rippled as he found a new stable configuration. Throwing his head - heads - back, he roared his triumph across the Other plane of existence. Mouths on every dimension howled, and the walls around them shattered under the onslaught.

A strange tug at his heel had him whipping around, and he saw Bryn looking at him with desperate eyes - and the portal beginning to fritz out behind her.

An enormous crash to his left distracted him for just a moment - apparently Puq had taken exception to some of the guards and had dropped the generator on them? - but that moment was enough. Rex flung his human form through the fritzing portal and, like a fish on a line, Tag was pulled from his home and flung once more into the heavily limited, three-dimensional form of Tag the Parallel. It was a shock, and Tag did the only appropriate thing he could do in that moment.

Tag passed the fuck out.

“Maybe you should heal yourself first -”

Puq’s warning came too late as Bryn’s hand landed on Gwennaig’s forehead. Tag had just a brief moment of stunned horror as he saw blood bloom on Bryn’s temple before something hooked him, in his mind. He could feel Bryn, their psychic connection dragging at his mind like a rope with dead weight tied to the end. He clasped it fiercely, with both hands, and felt the world around him drop away. It wasn’t like entering the phase state, he was still present in the real world, it was just so much less important than what he held in his hands. He may have fallen, it may have hurt - he didn’t know, couldn’t look to himself beyond the bond he shared.

He reached down it desperately, searching for a hold on Bryn that he could anchor to. She had anchored him, when the Malice had poured itself down his throat on the Fire planet; he could do this, for her.

“Bryn. Bryn. Hey, can you hear me? Bryn.”

Even in this non-space that felt almost like the space between reality and the phase state, his voice was hoarse with desperation as he felt his heart try and climb its way into his throat. Unimportant, unimportant, had to focus on Bryn; he could feel it when she latched on to him, though her grip was far weaker than he would have liked.

“…yeah?”

A wave of relief swept through Tag like a breeze; at least she had responded. Though that relief was swiftly followed by more dread; she was slipping, her grip on this world fading.

“Hey, hey buddy, how ya doin’?”

He tried to keep his tone soothing, though she seemed so out of it he wasn’t sure she’d recognize it if he was screaming in fear like he desperately wanted to - though his throat was so tight, he didn’t think he could do more than squeak if he tried it.

“I feel really weird, um…”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know what happened, I just, I…”

Her voice trailed at the end of every sentence, like there was more to say but she was forgetting before she could finish. Like she was drifting away from him, away to a place he wasn’t sure he could follow - wasn’t sure the Malice in his soul would let him go, for all he’d gladly follow her anywhere.

“Um…I don’t know either but just, just stay with me, okay? Just listen to my voice, look at me.” He cast his mind through his memories in desperation - anything, anything, what could he say to convince her to stay? To tie her to this world, where she belonged? “Y'know let’s just, let’s go, let’s go through the things that are hooking us here, alright? Um, what are you so excited to eat as soon as we get out of this lab?”

Several long moments passed and Tag waited as patiently as he could, heart in his throat. He could only hope that the others were helping Bryn into the healing machine Gwennaig had set up, but he couldn’t spare even one iota of attention to be sure. All his will, all his mind was concentrated on the lead-weighted gossamer of their psychic connection.

“…Moonberry pie?”

He had to smile at the memory, the sweet tartness exploding across his tongue in her first gift to him. He’d never had the like; the monastery believed that pleasures of the flesh were a distraction of the mind and never served anything but plain and simple and filling dishes. Perhaps some of the other parallels had tasted of such delights before they came to the monastery, or when they were allowed liberty in the town, but Tag never had. Not until he’d met Bryn.

“Moon. Berry. Pie. Me too. Tell me what it tastes like.”

He waited, and resisted the urge to prompt her as the moments between them stretched like slowly ripping taffy. She had to reach out, she had to remember to anchor herself here.

“Um…it’s so weird, Tag. I can’t focus very well, and I, I can’t…”

Fear spiked his throat and he swallowed. “You need to try. Bryn, I need to you to try. Imagine you’re picking up a slice in your hand, I’m there at your door…” He could feel her attention slipping, the bond becoming even more attenuated, and he grabbed as much of a hold as he could on it. It felt like silken thread in his fingers; gossamer, strong when held together, but prone to shredding as the individual fibers snapped one by one.

“Bryn. Bryn. Hey, Bryn. Your mother. Your mom, Bryn. Your last birthday, do you remember?” He hadn’t been there, but she’d told him about it on Haven on their way to this planet. About how her mother had loved her enough not to listen to her even when she thought she was right - and how much she’d loved it, loved her mother.

“…yes?”

“You remember she, she surprised you - you didn’t think that anything was planned because you said ‘I have a big test tomorrow, I don’t want a big deal for my birthday.’ And she said 'okay, I understand,’ so the day before that you woke up and she did this fake pre-birthday day. Do you remember that?”

He felt her hold strengthen slightly.

“…yeah.”

Desperate, Tag pushed on; he couldn’t lose her. Without her to anchor him to this reality…He wasn’t like the other parallels. He couldn’t go back to the monastery a failure. In fact, he wasn’t sure how much he could hold on to this reality without her help; now that he had stepped into his true self once, he could feel it almost itching at the back of his mind, could feel every excruciating confining edge of his mortal self. Bryn let him ignore that, let him suppress those feelings; without her…

“Okay. Stay with me there, Bryn. Bryn we’re, we’re, we’re, we’re in trouble right now, you and I, but I need you to just stay hooked into me, okay? Stay hooked into our connection to what you can remember.”

“I think I can see my dad.”

Not good. “What do you see?” He prompted her, willing to try anything to keep her talking.

“Huh. Um. I see…a figure. Tall. Large. Super warm and comforting and familiar - but not familiar. I don’t know. He’s reaching out his hand.”

He could feel her reaching out to something he couldn’t see, something even further away from the world they’d left behind.

“Bryn-”

Tag’s throat seized and he choked; it felt like someone had their hands at his neck, stopping his throat from working. He could still breathe, could still swallow - which he did, convulsively - but he couldn’t make a single noise.

Bryn, he mouthed. Bryn!

He couldn’t hear her, but he could still feel her - just barely within his reach, near the end of their shared tether. Not drawing any closer, but not getting any further away either. He could hear her speaking - what was she saying? The sounds wouldn’t resolve themselves into words, staying just beyond the edge of understanding. He gritted his teeth in frustration; how could he help her if he couldn’t speak to her?

Bryn!

Tag shouted with all of his might, but not a syllable escaped. He sucked in a breath to try again and-

“I’m not - I don’t - I’m not ready to give them up. I’m sorry.”

Bryn’s voice reached him as the hand disappeared from his throat. He had to smile; he wasn’t ready to give up on her, either. Now, if only-

The world exploded in a bloom of fire.

“Millie’s a good goat, and would never do such a thing! How dare you slander…”

Amelia Cosaint suppressed a sigh as Millie’s owner, Maegan, went off on a vitriol-filled rant about the long-suffering plaintiff standing across from her - a tall man named Ivor. They’d been summoned to court today so that Amelia could hear both sides of a complaint filed by Ivor that Millie had gotten out of her pen and eaten two of his best moonberry bushes. The charge was a serious one; the Fire planet boasted very few species of plants that could live on its surface, and fewer still that bore fruit, and moonberries were by far the most sought-after. Ivor was among the best growers of the fruit, and he could only maintain fifteen smallish bushes. If the goat had indeed eaten the bushes, it would be cause to award serious damages.

“…And so there! Millie didn’t eat those bushes, your own incompetence caused them to die!”

Ivor’s expression didn’t change, but he looked like he’d rather be literally anywhere else. Amelia took a deep breath and drew on the grounding coolness of the Water planet, so recently rejoined to the Continuum. Without the stabilizing presence of Variq - no matter that the man himself had become so unstable in recent months - it was that much harder to hold on to her temper, and Maegan was a trying person at the best of times. The return of the Water planet had ben an unlooked-for boon, one Amelia took advantage of shamelessly. Water banked the heat of a Firey temper, and the flow of cool blue allowed her to ground the rising red of her ire at these petty squabbles. She really missed Variq at times like this, for all she didn’t regret his final fate.

It wasn’t until he was gone that Amelia had really appreciated exactly how much Variq used to take care of in day-to-day administrative tasks. Suddenly, instead of the neat summaries of current affairs she used to receive every morning, her desk was covered in handwritten notes and complaints, bills of lading, births, deaths, marriage licenses - all the things Variq had used to intercept and organize for her, she now had to do herself. In addition to that she had to hold court for the more serious issues such as the one she was hearing now, and organize the dismantling of whatever the hell Variq had been building, and re-establish diplomatic communication with all the Tine on the planet, and a thousand and one other little things that went with running a planet.

She was exhausted in more ways than one, yet she couldn’t let her people continue to suffer from what Variq had done. It was up to her, as their Summoner, to find the strength to deal with the problems at hand, and if that meant missing a little sleep and drinking coffee made from Variq’s personal stash of the stuff, well. She buckled down and did it. Besides, it wasn’t like this state of affairs could last forever; she’d already sent a notice to the Order of Parallels to inform them of Variq’s death, and while they hadn’t responded yet Amelia was certain they would see about sending some possible parallel candidates in reasonably short order. It wasn’t like them to leave a Summoner without one for long, though what with everything going on she wasn’t sure if they’d be able to get off planet or not; the little moon they lived on may have suffered the same fate as the rest of the planets and she would never know.

But for now all she could do was draw on her reserves of patience and the cooling influence of the water planet - and a brief brush the bond with Bryn, who was coincidentally on the water planet currently - she smiled and spoke diplomatically.

“Thank you, Maegan, I’m sure Millie’s a perfectly lovely goat. Ivor, if you would please give us your part of the story?”

Ivor set his jaw but nodded, drawing himself up to his full height before he began. “I been keepin’ care o’ my moonberry bushes for more'n forty year, and I inherited ‘em from my mother before me, and I knows how t’ take care of 'em. Now, I know a goat’s a goat, but if you’ve a goat the way I figure it is that you’ve a responsibility to make sure the goat don’t get out to do what goats do where they hadn’t ought to be doing it. I’m askin’ for water enough to get a few new bushes started, comin’ out o’ her allotment, and no more 'n that.”

The only thing dearer on the Fire planet than food was water, and it wasn’t a small demand Ivor was making - but it was a fair one, and less than she might have awarded him if she’d had to come up with damages herself. Amelia leaned over to make a note on her now-ever-present tablet and nodded to Ivor. “That seems fair, given all the facts submitted in evidence. Additionally -”

Something tugged at the back of her mind, and she stopped abruptly. Something had changed, somewhere far away, something important. Maegan said something but Amelia ignored her; this was too important. Something was wrong…with Bryn?

Her heart turned to ice and she turned her full attention to her bond with Bryn - or rather, where her bond with Bryn should have been. All that was there now were some fading embers and an impassable gulf.

“No.”

No, this couldn’t be happening, not here, not now. Her daughter, her kind, beautiful, willful daughter couldn’t be - couldn’t be dead. It was as unthinkable as the Continuum going out or the moons rising in the North; it was wrong. It couldn’t be, she wouldn’t let it be. Bryn was just a little bit out of reach, was all, Amelia would just have to reach a bit further. She grabbed power from the Continuum and stretched and felt…nothing, there was nothing to feel her daughter was dead.

Amelia rejected that notion a second time, and threw open her connection to the Fire planet with a grim determination; Bryn had to be alive, it would just take more power to reach her.

Amelia was dimly aware of the screams echoing in the throne room as the Fire of the planet surged through her and across the room - some of those screams may have been her own for all she knew - but she couldn’t spare the attention for that now, not with all her will bent on finding Bryn, on reaching Bryn, getting closer to Bryn. She could feel the Fire of the planet begin to consume her, as it would consume all Fire Summoners, but she didn’t care; she was getting nearer to Bryn she could almost feel it. The closer she got, the hotter the Fire burned. Closer, she was nearly there -

And then light bloomed across the connection and Bryn was back, back where Amelia could reach her without assistance, back where she belonged, and Amelia released the Fire in her hands without a second thought - and never mind how it had blistered and burned them, and the throne room around her. Her daughter, her Bryn, was alive.

And that, in the end, was what mattered.

Bryn watched as the smoking wreckage of Last Shore faded to a dirty brown spot in an endless sea of blue as the dropship pulled away from the Water planet.

She wasn’t sorry to see it go, though the explosion had been jarring. It had been a bad place, full of evils both large and small, and she very resolutely did not cut her eyes over to the still-unconscious form of Gwennaig that rested in a seat nearby. The experimentation that had been conducted had been disgusting, and the monsters it had attracted - she felt a shudder pass through her as she remembered the feeling of the thing that had been in her head - had been just the worst.

Bryn didn’t like water. There hadn’t been much of it when she was a child - certainly not enough actually swim in - and it felt cold. Alien. Unfamiliar. All planets had traces of other magics as well as their own signature wells of power - some more so than others - but on the Water planet, any trace of Fire had been buried deep.

Water was innately hostile to fire. It didn’t have enough free oxygen to sustain combustion, and quenched active flames. Then, too, was it resistant to changes in temperature; it took so much energy, so much more work to raise water even a single degree, that fighting it had felt like an uphill battle. The only Fire magics Bryn had been able to sense had been buried deep beneath the surface, and in little dots on the ocean floor - the rest of it was overwhelmingly Water, Water, Water. It had been oppressive even before they’d been sent to the ocean floor, and she could only hope she never felt that way again.

Then, too, so very much had happened on the Water planet - almost none of it good. First Tag had gotten a brainworm, then she had, then she’d found her old friend Gwennaig, then she’d fought to save Olly, then that weird black-ooze place through the portal, and then she’d died - or so Tag had told her quietly afterwards, unable to meet her eyes. She didn’t remember much about that part, just feeling weird and grey and her father was there? That had been strange.

The brainworms had probably been the worst part. Tag begging her with his eyes to help him while his mouth had smiled and told her he was just fine, thanks - she shuddered at the memory, though everyone else in the shuttle seemed too absorbed in their own thoughts to comment. She knew now what he’d felt then - not an erasure of himself, but a subversion of it. When the worm had been in her head, her worries had seemed strange and distant. Her priorities had given way to the priorities of the thing that had attached itself to her brain - and she hadn’t been able to care. Anything that hadn’t been of the brainworm or for the brainworm had fallen by the wayside like so much trash.

And yet the brainworm had given her such warm feelings of kinship with those it also held sway over. It was a sense of belonging she hadn’t known since she was a small child with her mother and Variq; they’d been her whole world, and they had been enough for the first few years of her life. Once she’d looked around and realized how few friends she had, how far apart she stood from the other children - that feeling had broken, and she’d never properly gotten it back. She had grown independent and - occasionally - resentful of her mother, and Variq, creating the smallest of rifts that had grown wider until she’d been sent away to the Bloom planet to meet Summoner Langorium.

Variq. Bryn had tried not to think about him much while down on the Water planet. She couldn’t regret what she’d done to him, not after what he’d done to her people, her planet, and her mother, but - they’d been family once. Close to it, anyway; he’d been her rock when she needed to speak to someone who wasn’t her mother when she was younger, and while he’d ended up tarred with the same brush of authority as her mother as Bryn had grown independent and rebellious, he hadn’t been a bad man then. Whoever had been in the throne room, whoever it really was that she’d turned to dust with a lash of fire - that wasn’t the Variq she knew. The Variq she’d known could never have done that, and she mourned the loss of the quiet, diplomatic man she’d known for her entire childhood. He’d been dead before her mother had even sent her a message, and she hadn’t gotten to say goodbye.

Reminded of childhood memories, her eyes automatically sought the still form of Gwennaig - now beginning to stir - before she forced her gaze back out the window. Gwennaig had been an excellent friend and - she blushed at the memory - an attentive lover, but the things she’d said back in the facility…Bryn snuck another glance. Gwennaig didn’t look that much different from the last time Bryn had seen her, heading into the travel station all by herself, and she had to wonder - had she ever known the real Gwennaig? How much of it had been sincere, and how much of it had been a big act, a bid to befriend her for her clout? At least the Professor had come clean about his mission to study her at the behest of the Company; Gwennaig hadn’t even done that!

Though Gwennaig hadn’t been the only person she’d learned a lot about on the Water planet; she snuck a glance over at Tag, who seemed to be alternating staring into space with shooting worried glances at Rex. Bryn could only imagine what was going through his head; the fact that he was only human on the outside was…something. He’d sounded so weird in that Other place, and the things he’d done without even seeming to try…It scared her. More than a little bit.

And yet, he’d still saved her life after they’d gotten back. Bryn couldn’t remember much of it - something about moonberry pies? - but she remembered holding on to him, and him holding her back. Whatever he was, he was still her friend, he’d proved that. Actions spoke way louder than words, after all, but…She snuck another glance at him, and resolved to ask her mother about it. In hypothetical terms, of course; her mother would freak if she found out her daughter’s parallel was a planet-eating alien from another dimension. Actually, that sounded way worse than she thought it had. She resolved to find a better way to phrase it as AVER-E97 made a smooth bank and the Water planet slid out of view to be replaced by the familiar lines of Haven.

No, Summoner of the Fire planet Bryn did not like Water or the Water planet, and if she had her way she’d never return to this planet of secrets and lies buried beneath deceptively welcoming waves.

“Hello, Rex.”

Miss Kale sat placidly at her desk, perfectly centered in the camera view, and looked as perfectly put together as the day Rex had first met her. The private communications room was dark, and the viewscreen was the only thing projecting light, but Rex somehow got the impression that Miss Kale could see her perfectly. Whether that was because of some Company surveillance equipment or some spotlight on a frequency beyond the visual, Rex couldn’t be quite sure. Still, now was not the time to be impolite - and Miss Kale was certainly not a person to be impolite to.

“Miss Kale,” she responded with a dip of her head.

Miss Kale smiled - a big, wide thing that reminded Rex most strongly of what she’d seen on Last Shore. The only thing that kept her from reaching for a weapon was the stone-cold certainty that Miss Kale had never set foot on Last Shore. Well, that and the fact that this was a video call and that drawing a weapon on a hologrammatic projection was a token gesture at best.

“I think it’s time to circle back, Rex. It’s time we touched base about the customer journey we’re building up going forward; I know it’s not exactly your wheelhouse, but I think it’s time we instituted a paradigm shift to instigate some growth hacking. We need to pull back from a 10,000 ft view to a 30,000 ft view and see what our stakeholders have to say about the long-term.”

Rex stared. There was a point to this speech? Maybe? She’d never heard anyone talk like this, let alone Miss Kale.

“Um…My job is to protect the Summoner and break the shields preventing us from landing safely on planets,” she ventured. There was probably also subtext about protecting Company assets, but the more she learned about just what exactly the Company had been doing on various planets, the less inclined was she to honor that particular guideline.

Miss Kale nodded politely. “Right, right, let’s just put a pin in that idea for now. I really think your bandwidth would be better used in trying to remove disruptors to the Company growth. Little pain points that affect the bottom line in ways the shareholders don’t appreciate come dividends season.” She waved a hand dismissively. “Just a few simple tasks for you, Rex, and your work could be a real game-changer. But we need your buy-in to capitalize on ROI.”

Rex stared. If she parsed the sentences slowly enough, it almost sounded like…

“You’re reassigning me?” she asked, heart in her throat. On the one hand, she was still technically in the employ of the Company, and Brautigan had been a vivid example of just what exactly to took to quit the Company. On the other hand, she’d grown kind of attached to her charges. Most of them would have been dead several times over if she hadn’t been there, and she felt almost obligated at this point to make the trend continue.

Miss Kale shook her head and pushed back from her desk to steeple her fingers in front of her. The leftover momentum set the chair on a lazy spin, one Miss Kale seemed disinclined to stop or correct. “No, no, you’re not thinking strategically, Rex. Our business intelligence indicates that you’re right where you need to be. We simply need to collaborate on this project for a quick win. We need your core competencies to push actionable metrics to the next user story and optimize the team drill down.”

The spin of her chair had turned Miss Kale almost fully away from the camera now. “We have to keep things lean, and push the needle to think outside the box and unpack disruptive elements. We need influencers on the ground to ensure the right platform for our next-gen tendencies. It’s an all hands on deck sort of situation, Rex, and we’re counting on you to give 110% and make the right decision in a fast-paced environment.

Rex had had enough. "You’re not making any sense!” She snapped. “Just exactly what the hell do you want me to do?!”

The chair - which had been facing away from the camera fully at this point - suddenly spun back around at a dizzying speed and slammed to an exact stop directly facing the camera. A tall, black-cloaked form with ichor oozing from its head in some strange flamelike parody of hair slapped two iron-gauntleted hands on the once-pristine desk with a terrible crack. Rex didn’t flinch away from the sound only by dint of long practice at concealing her reactions.

“It means, you mortal idiot, that we want you to take the Summoner.”

The figure raised one hand with what would almost be a gem of some sort in it, except that instead of shining like she’d seen other gems do, it reflected a myriad of colors in sickly hues.

“Or we will.”

Rex woke with a start.

A great weight yanked on the back of Tag’s mind, and his body collapsed as his awareness was pulled outside himself.

“Bryn. Bryn. Hey, can you hear me? Bryn.”

This felt strangely familiar - had he done this before? - but his desperation was too great to think on that now. Bryn was here, he could see her - but she was fading fast, brilliant golden fire cooling and dimming. Instead of the beacon he knew her to be, she was a tracery of yellow-orange outlines with deep cherry painting the spaces in between. It was so far from her usual self, Tag felt his heart leap into his throat.

“…yeah?”

The reply to his question so weak and unfocused - so unlike the Bryn he knew. Even when she was distracted, he would never describe her as ‘weak.’ Now, though, she sounded the way a dying campfire looked; still warm, with motes of light here and there but - ashy. Dimming. Forgotten.

“Hey, hey buddy, how ya doin’?”

Tag deliberately kept his voice light as he worked desperately to keep her from floating away. He had to figure out some way to keep that warm fire from becoming so much ash and smoke on the breeze; she was holding on to him and their connection, but that couldn’t keep her present this way forever. He knew the others were working - knew they had to be working - on her body to keep her alive, he just had to make sure they had enough time to save her.

“I feel really weird, um…”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know what happened, I just, I…”

“Um…I don’t know either but just, just stay with me, okay? Just listen to my voice, look at me.” Her voice had trailed off and he could see the embers becoming dimmer. She was fading, and he cast his mind desperately for any fuel to feed the fire - anything to keep her warm. Alive. Connected to the world she belonged in. “Y'know let’s just, let’s go, let’s go through the things that are hooking us here, alright? Um, what are you so excited to eat as soon as we get out of this lab?”

Several long moments passed, and Tag kept his attention riveted on the fading Fire Summoner. He could only do so much; she had to ignite the fuel he offered to warm her. He could only offer it, coax her into burning it - he couldn’t start the fire for her, only help her feed it, keep it alive.

“…Moonberry pie?”

Her formed flared a little, outlines becoming more yellow than orange and the red brightening to the color of hot iron, and he smiled encouragement.

“Moon. Berry. Pie. Me too. Tell me what it tastes like.”

He waited for several long moments, but it seemed the spark hadn’t caught. Bryn faded, outlines dimming towards red and spots of ashy grey-white appeared between them. Whatever their friends were doing in the physical world, it was taking too long - she was fading fast.

“Um…it’s so weird, Tag. I can’t focus very well, and I, I can’t…”

Fear spiked his throat (again?) and he swallowed. “You need to try. Bryn, I need to you to try. Imagine you’re picking up a slice in your hand, I’m there at your door…”

Tag hadn’t paid it any attention before now, but the place they was in now was somewhere strange. A blanketing heaviness surrounded him, feeling almost like the membrane between the real world and the phase state and all was grey save for the golden thread he held with both hands. His connection to Bryn, he knew, and it was fraying even as he watched, golden threads dimming to red before dissolving in ash and smoke. Bryn wasn’t in quite the same place he was. He could see her, through what almost felt like some sort of veil, but she was beyond the phase state even as he saw her in her phase form - what was left of it, anyway.

The thought pinged something in his hindbrain. He would never have thought of it before, but - he knew what was beyond the phase state. One of the things beyond it, anyway, and while he didn’t know if Bryn would end up there, he knew he could make it. He could take them both beyond, to the place where he was all-powerful. He could do it, and save her.

And he owed it to her to at least try.

Tag pulled on the thready connection, forcibly yanking Bryn toward him even as he let go of his physical shell and launched himself forward. She made a soft sound of surprise as he crossed the membrane and collided with her, sending them both tumbling. The last few strands of their connection puffed into ash at the strain just as they crossed the second border. Strangely, he couldn’t feel the whole of himself - anything beyond three dimensions remained locked away - but that wasn’t the important thing. The important thing was the ashy, barely-there embers of Bryn that he held in his iron-clad arms.

Focusing his will, the ichor of the ground surged up to cover Bryn. He had to fix her, heal her, make her whole again - and here, in this place, he could. In this place, his will was absolute and his word was natural law. An honor guard of Others gathered as he worked, singing that strange hymn he’d heard in the desert, but he ignored them; they were unimportant, insignificant next to him and the whole of his attention had to be on Bryn. The ichor surged and roiled, obeying his will as he commanded it to heal her - to fix what was broken. Their connection did not reform, though he hadn’t really expected it to yet; it had taken an entire ritual to establish it the first time, after all, and he hoped he’d be able to establish it again with her.

Finally, the roil stopped and he let the ichor fall away. Bryn was in his arms, looking for all the world like she was asleep. It was her physical form, too, perfectly reformed to his specifications - if perhaps a bit pale. Her chest rose and fell, and he felt something in his chest ease. He nudged her gently, not wanting to wake her roughly after the time she’d had.

“Hey. Hey Bryn, it’s time to wake up,” Tag said, doing his best to keep the faintest hint of doubt from his voice.

Bryn’s eyes snapped open, and Tag couldn’t drop her.

“Thanks Tag! I’m feeling great.” Two empty holes where her eyes should be began to weep black ichor as she spoke, and more of it dripped from her lips at every word. It stained her teeth, and he could see little dribbles of it beginning to leak from her ears too.

“Bryn,“ he said numbly as horror began to creep up his spine. His arms refused to let her go, as much as he wanted to recoil. "No, no Bryn, I didn’t mean-”

“Oh Tag, I’m fine now. In fact, I’m better than ever!” She spread her arms even as her face fixed in that horrible ink-stained grin. “See? And it’s all thanks to you, Tag. You did this to me; you saved me.”

“No.” No no no no no Tag’s brain began screaming even as his mouth ceased moving. No, he hadn’t meant to- to- turn her! He hadn’t meant to make her like him! He’d meant to save her!

He could see their bond snapping into place, bonds of ichor tying them together like chains. He could feel her in his mind, only she felt more like an extension of himself - an anchor of ichor that dragged him down, where once the warmth of Fire had buoyed him up. It was wrong in the worst ways.

“You did this, Tag,” Bryn said again, somehow no longer in his arms despite him not having moved them. “You did this to me. And I’m feeling better than ever.”

Even as she spoke, a black iron crown formed on her brow - a twisted parody of the one he’d seen half-dad wearing - and all the Others in the room bent forward to bow to their great and terrible queen.

Tag awoke with a gasp, staring wildly around at the dimness of his room. The nightmare clung to him almost like the ichor did - it had felt so real. He had been so, so desperate to save Bryn that he’d-

He didn’t want to think about it.

But he couldn’t get that image out of his brain. Bryn, corpse-pale, grinning at him as ichor dripped down her cheeks like black oil tears. He hadn’t even thought of the consequences, he’d just instinctively pushed them both into the Malice’s arms and destroyed everything that she was to keep a mockery of her alive. Selfish, how could he be so selfish-

Bryn almost dying, finding out he truly was the seed of evil in the world, the destruction of Last Shore - he hadn’t really processed anything at all. Hadn’t really taken the time. But now it all came crashing down around him, surging up his throat and burning at his eyes until big, fat tears began streaking silently down his face.

It had been years since he’d cried, but now he couldn’t seem to stop. Everything that had happened, everything he’d learned - it was all so much. His hands twisted in his hair, tugging on it, while his forearms shielded his face from the world.

This body that he inhabited was just a created shell - the closest thing he had to a parent was half-dad. A monster. He’d never had a mother, or a real dad, never had someone who’d loved him enough to bring him into this world, and the childhood dreams he’d had of finding his parents crumbled into the ichor staining his soul. He’d cherished those dreams as a kid, hearing the other parallels talk about their families. He’d dreamed of one day his parents coming back for him, of making them a whole family again, of knowing where he’d come from - though those dreams had faded as he learned more and more about being a parallel.

Then, too, there was finding out what he really was - a monster in a human shell. Tag shakily traced the scar down his arm as his body shook with ugly, heavy sobs. Confined to this human form, he couldn’t quite visualize the whole of himself - human brains weren’t designed to think in more than three dimensions, even conceptually - but he remembered the hunger, the need to consume. The Others destroyed solar systems. They ate everything like a plague - and he was Other in a human skin. He wasn’t hungry now, but just the memory was enough to make his stomach cramp painfully. He was a planet-eating monster, not human at all, and nothing he did could ever change that.

And Bryn had nearly died. The beginning of the nightmare replayed painfully behind his eyelids, the feelings stamped into his brain. He could feel her across their bond, sleeping peacefully - he made sure to cordon off that section of his mind so she wouldn’t have to suffer from his stupid inability to control himself - but the memory of that bond turning into a chain and anchor was brutally clear. The others had managed to get her into the rejuvitube in time, and she’d lived - but what if she hadn’t? What if he’d failed, like so many other parallels? What was he supposed to do if his Summoner died? Would he just come back to his body like nothing had happened? Would he get pulled out entirely and get sent back to the Malice?

He didn’t know, and he couldn’t stop the tears that that uncertainty brought with it. Tag buried his face in his arms and sobbed, and sobbed, and sobbed. He cried for the things that might have been, for the things that were, and for the things that never could be. Great hitching breaths shuddered through his thin frame, more tears sliding out every time he thought he was almost done.

Eventually he fell into the grey, exhausted haze of not-sleep not-awake, and stayed there until the chronometer chirped with the start of the day.

Tag couldn’t suppress the silly grin that played about his lips even as he nocked an arrow. The fact that he did it smoothly, that his hands didn’t waver and his muscles didn’t protest the motion only added to the sense of giddy happiness that left him feeling on top of the world.

Part of that was probably the fact that he was literally above everyone else, that’d he’d managed to ninja flip himself into the rafters of the inn - and how cool was that? He, Tag, had managed to do moves that he’d never even seen Rex do, and he’d seen Rex do some pretty sick stunts. It’d been like that out in the swamp too - he hadn’t known he could, hadn’t even thought about moving that way, but he’d somehow managed to hop from tree stump to tree branch to log to lily pad to one particularly sweet move that had him swinging on a vine in the gap between some trees.

He had never done anything like that before; he’d never even considered that he could. Ever since he was young he’d always been clumsier than the other kids his age, prone to knocking his shins against furniture, forgetting things he was literally holding in his hand, tripping on slightly uneven flooring, hitting his elbows or hips against doorframes or doorknobs. Most days it wasn’t too bad, but some days it almost felt like he hadn’t even really been present in his body and those were the days he did stupid things like break his elbow falling down the stairs or break his foot by dropping something heavy on it that he’d misjudged the clearance on.

Tag knew why that happened now, of course. A lot of things about him as a kid had suddenly made a lot more sense after what they’d found in the depths of the Water planet - he just wished they didn’t. He and Bryn hadn’t really discussed what had happened on the Water planet - not his actions, not hers, and he didn’t know how she felt about…everything. It was, it was a lot, even before you factored in the whole keeping her from dying thing. His half-dad, the nature of his existence, his role in events past and events yet to come…

He didn’t want to think about it.

And that was the really wonderful thing about the amulet; he didn’t have to. By immersing himself in the physicality it granted, he didn’t have to think about any of it. He could just be, in a way he’d never done on this side of Reality. It felt right, in a fashion he’d only ever felt when he stepped outside of himself in that Other place, and that was enough. Feeling his lungs work, knowing where every inch of his body was at any given moment, knowing exactly how to make it move from point a to point b and keep balanced while doing so - it was exhilarating. It made him feel alive, and Tag had to wonder if this was what Rex felt like all the time and that was why she worked out so much. There was a freedom in surety that he’d never before experienced, and he clung to it.

It all came from the amulet, of course; he could feel its magic humming through his body. While he’d never received proper magical training from the Order Parallel - had never manifested one single element strongly enough for them to feel it warranted training - he had been exposed to all the elements at one point or another while he’d lived at the Monastery and knew what it felt like. Granted, that was because he’d been on the receiving end of far too many magical training accidents but he’d managed to make it through alive and that was really what counted.

Tag couldn’t quite place the magic from the amulet, but its effects were undeniable. Not that he was denying them - quite the opposite, Tag embraced them with a relieved sort of happiness. He didn’t need to use magic here, he had the bow. He didn’t need to look into the phase state here, he could sneak through above and around nearly any obstacle with others none the wiser. He didn’t have to reach out to touch Bryn’s thoughts and meet with any kind of fear or hesitation because of what he was and what he was destined to do, he had the dexterity to work his way through any lock or puzzle.

He didn’t have be Tag, Scion of Evil, Parallel of the Order Parallel to the Fire Summoner-to-be, Screw-up; he could be Tag, Rogue Extraordinaire.

And that would be a relief.

Tag couldn’t say he’d really been expecting to get a good night’s sleep; for one, he’d been having nightmares more often recently about…about things, and for two the house made like, a lot of noise. He’d gotten used to the soft thrum of the engines on Haven, the noise the air recirculators made as they kept things at a livable temperature, but this house creaked at every step, and sometimes even when people weren’t stepping. There was an eerie moan every now and again, which was weird because there hadn’t been much wind outside, and things skittered in the walls.

All that, plus the fact that the plan currently was to sneak downstairs to the basement once they were sure the whole Manor was asleep. That definitely contributed to his low expectations of getting some sleep in this strange room. Even so, as he lay completely still on the mattress - no rolling around tonight, no restless muscle twitches or random fidgeting, almost completely unlike his usual sleeping experience - the thoughts that rolled through his head were surprisingly dark as sleep eluded him.

The graveyard they’d come through on their way to the Manor…The headstones had all been in poor condition, stained by decades of swamp water and their inscriptions eroded into unreadability, and for some reason that struck a chord in Tag. He’d never really thought about death before - well, his own death anyway. People died, and that was natural, but they had all been much older than he had supposed himself to be and it had just never occurred to him to think about it. But then Bryn had died, and - and he’d felt it, through their bond, had been right there with her when her heart stopped.

That had honestly been the subject of not a few nightmares since, but combined with the imagery of that decaying graveyard…What would happen to him, when he died? Half-dad had said that he would be scattered, that they would have to gather him up before they could send him back again, but that was - that wasn’t him, not really. That was this Otherness, inside of him. What would happen to the human Tag, when this shell finally expired? Would he be remembered? Mourned? Would he end up buried in the clammy soil of a planet that had never been his home, with a clean white headstone to mark him? That would slowly forget about him as surely as the markers in the graveyard had forgotten what lay buried beneath them?

Or would he simply burn up and fade away? Would the human known as Tag be made to dust as surely as he’d been made from it? Half-dad had said they’d tried raising him in the human world before, and he sometimes got little flashes of things he couldn’t name but - he couldn’t remember them, the other people he’d been in the past. Not really. He didn’t know their names, where they’d lived, what they’d done with their lives - how they’d managed to refuse giving in to the same darkness that lurked beside his bones. He didn’t know their favorite foods or colors, the people they’d loved and the people who’d loved them - all of it gone, trapped in the inky darkness of the Malice.

Would the same thing happen to him?

If it hadn’t been for the amulet, keeping him grounded and in tune with his physical body, Tag would probably have never noticed the temperature dropping. Even with the amulet, it wasn’t enough to pull him out of the mire of his thoughts until his breath puffed into visibility above his face in the wan bit of full moon’s light that made it in through the clouded window. That was enough to draw him closer to the waking world, and the very faint sounds of…music? Some kind of threnody that wound its way around the very edge of hearing, notes tinkling like they were being plucked from something metallic while the tune itself set the hairs at the back of his neck prickling with recognition even if his conscious mind couldn’t name it.

At the very edge of his vision, something moved.

Tag spun off the bed, dropping into a fighting stance he scarcely recognized. His every nerve was screaming with tension, but…there was nothing. A blank wall greeted his questing eyes, covered in ancient, peeling wallpaper with a pattern on it that felt like it might have once been festive and fashionable when it was newly-placed. The longer he looked, though, the more there seemed to be something wrong with the pattern - he couldn’t be sure if it was changing right before his eyes, or if the shifting moonlight was revealing what the pattern really was.

Fascinated, Tag slowly rose from the bed and walked over to the wall. With the silver moon lighting the way through the smokey glass of the windowpane and the clouds of his own breath fogging the way in front of him, the three steps to the wall felt very much like a dream. Or some kind of magical experience, at least; with the amulet on, that magic drowned out nearly everything else. It filled his senses with a kind of background hum that made it much more difficult to feel anything beyond it, so he could not truly say if there was other magic in the room or not.

On reaching the wall, he reached out his hand and slowly began running it down one of the more intact sections of wallpaper. It was smooth and cool to the touch - and perhaps the slightest bit damp? - but more importantly, standing here made it extremely obvious that the music was coming elsewhere in the room. He glanced over his shoulder, but the light of the moon concealed far more than it revealed. It lay across his bed in a cool slice of silver, but the darkness beyond it was absolute and defied his eyes to pierce it.

His hand ran across a rough patch in the wall.

He turned his attention back to it immediately, dismissing the soft threnody as something to look into later as he focus on the rough area his fingers had found. Tag squinted, leaning in closer - had someone carved something into the wood? It looked like words, though they were difficult to make out in the soft moonlight.

A Parallel’s oath
is
Forever.

Ice tied a knot in Tag’s insides as he made out the last word, but he didn’t have time to dwell on them as the wallpaper deformed. He twitched backward in surprise as the face pushed further, now joined by a pair of hands as something - someone - tried desperately to fight their way free of that strange wallpaper. Maybe it was the moonlight, maybe it was the dark thoughts he’d been having as he lay in the bed, but the figure looked almost…sad, in a way. It was trapped behind some kind of barrier, clawing desperately for freedom and for some strange reason the look on its face made him think of the anguish on Sam’s when he’d shot the man with the Void blaster back in Bryn’s throne room.

His heart went out for it, and he reached forward to grasp and help it out of the barrier. He pulled, and pulled, and the wallpaper stretched like well-worked bread dough before finally reaching a snapping point. The look on the thing’s face seemed almost surprised, but it didn’t resist his grip and when the snap came it barreled forward towards freedom, knocking him back into a small table that seemed to serve no purpose except to hold a particularly ugly ceramic statuette. Neither object was designed to hold the weight of even a skinny parallel, and Tag fell into a heap of splintered wood and sharp, grey shards as the thing from the wallpaper flew through him to the other side of the room.

Tag lay there for a few moments, winded, before he twisted to look at the being he’d pulled from the wall. It was tall, taller than him if he’d been standing up but definitely taller than him while he was lying down. It looked mostly human, but the arms and legs were a little long in a way that didn’t seem natural - had its bones been pulled out of socket? If it had had bones. That had probably hurt a lot. The head bigger than he was used to, as well, but not too much bigger than Figmot’s. In fact, it reminded him a lot of Figmot, from the breadth of its shoulders to the shape of its hands. The way it moved, too - it was moving from shadow to shadow around him, almost like it was afraid of the moonlight Tag was currently bathed in, but it moved with the same solid step Figmot had used while escorting them to their rooms.

He couldn’t not reach out. “Hey, hey, big, uh, ghost. Um, I don’t - I don’t know what’s going on in you ghost brain, and if I say ‘Figmot’ I don’t know if you know, intellectually, who that is, but I think you know in - forgive me - but your blood and your bones who that is. You have people here, on this planet right now, and they’re suffering and we’re not here to make that worse, we are here to help them. If you can hear me, I just wanna, I just want to appeal to that last bit of a human that I think is - that I believe is inside of you.”

The ghost slowed as Tag spoke, pausing for several long moments in silence as he finished his entreaty. The door crashed open under the might of Rex as the silence stretched, but neither Tag nor the ghost could spare any attention from each other. Slowly, agonizingly slowly, the ghost held its hands out as if in supplication.

“̵T̵h̸e̴ ̴n̵a̴m̸e̶ ̷F̷i̷g̷m̴o̶t̸ ̷r̸i̷n̷g̴s̷ ̴a̶ ̴b̶e̵l̶l̵.̷ ̴B̵u̶t̴ ̸t̸h̵e̷ ̴m̴e̵m̴o̶r̵y̷ ̶i̷s̸ ̵s̵o̷ ̸f̴a̶r̴ ̸a̸w̷a̴y̸.̸ ̸P̴e̵r̴h̶a̴p̵s̷,̷ ̶I̴ ̷c̴o̷u̸l̴d̵ ̷l̸o̴o̴k̴ ̶i̸n̸t̶o̷ ̶y̵o̷u̸r̶s̶?̵"̸

Tag knew the pain of lost memories, the aching distance that it was to forget - though he truly didn’t know how much he’d forgotten. He hesitated for only a single instant, before nodding to the specter before him.

"Yeah. Yeah, of course.”

The ghost didn’t hesitate. As soon as Tag acquiesced, it floated towards him and -

There wasn’t enough room. That was Tag’s first thought. The Other that was Tag had folded, contorted, bent, spindled, and mutilated itself to fit into a measly three-dimensional human shell; on a good day, the fit wasn’t perfect and on a bad one it threatened to overspill its boundaries altogether but this - this was something else. The ghost was a human soul - at its core, anyway. That tiny mote of light was swaddled in layers and layers of necromancy, representing centuries of necromancers who had commanded and used it, and those layers oozed in to fill the disjoined, hair-fine distances that lay between the Other and the human it existed in.

The magic of the amulet kept Tag vividly aware of his own body and the world around him, yet at the same moment he could hear, see, and feel nothing but the ghost. It reached for his memories, the layers of necromantic magic oozing between roils of Malice and corruption, but - it was looking in the wrong place. Tag only looked human; the Other that resided inside his skin kept his memories in the embrace of its darkness, and he could feel the spirit’s frustration and fear as it looked in vain through the roils in his mind. So Tag did the only thing he could think to do - he reached out and touched the spirit’s memories.

Instantly, he was in the far, far past. A figure stood before him - a woman, wearing Summoner’s robes emblazoned with the Blight sigil. “F̶̢̧̡̢̢̛̘̟̞̩̭͓̰̤̲̫̟̜͔͕̞̘̅̅͑̋́̂͆̈́̀͊̑͜͠į̵̨̧̢̧̣̥̻̟̩̞͈̠̠̝̦̜̯̀̓̆̿̌́ṋ̸̖͖̗̠̳͙̪̙̱̙̼̺͂̀̽͐̂͐͆͛͊̚͘͠͝b̵̡̨̨͔͙̩̭̺̗̰̜̩̟͔̠̺̤̘̮͈͉͂̈́ͅͅȃ̴̡̡̧̨̡͍̲̹̻͙̘̰̯͙͇̩̯ͅc̵̥͎͇͙̦̺̭̘̥̒̃͒̍̃̉̂̌͆͑̎̈͋̀̓̉̓͘͜͝h̴̨̧̧̺̩̦̘̘̭̪̘̥̖̝͙̞̹̑̈́̾͠ͅ.” she said, looking up at him. “Ḩ̸̢̧̢̛̜̳̞̱͍̟͍̳̞̺̜̯͇͈̖̗̯̝̬͉͈̉͗̒̋͑̊̄̇̕͜ͅͅē̸̢̩͙͓͕̞͎͓͇̭̩̲̯͓̜͈̝̩͍͈̜͈͕̼̖̩̘ͅl̶̙̱͉͛̅͌̏̃̒̇̂̈̎̎̄͑͆̕͘p̷̢̻̰̺̰̲̞̘̮̮̓͊̔͒̚͜ ̴̨̨̡̹̥̞͇͕̩̠̹̻͈̬̱̭̝̦̬̞̹͓̈̌̈̂̅̆̾̐̔̅̇̀͘̕͜m̴̢̨̧̘̺̱̱̠͖̦̹͙͕̮͕̮̹̤̭̰̤͓͎̝̺̝͍̓͌̓͌̓͊̇͒̀̓͗̃̓̀̒͛̿́͐̀̄̎́̽̓͝e̷̡͚͕̾͐̾ ̵̛̲̽̌́̑̾̚͝͠͠ẘ̸̨̫̯̣͔͎̹̖̲̪̼͉͚̳͓̹̱̟̙͉̪̠̙̭̦̼̝͛̅̆̑̈́͒̏́̈͗̆͛̅̄̀ỉ̷̛͍̹̥͈͈̤͒́͂̄̑͛͘t̷͖͙̪̟̮̣̻̝̜̆̎͊̔̈́͠ḩ̶̨̛̣͓͕͇̗̼̬̱̺̩̣̙̲̞͉̥̮͍̖̰̻͙̤̱̎͌͑͋͐̌̈́̃͗̐̋̈́̈́͊̂̋́̀͛̚͠ͅ ̵̢̥̙͎̻̠̙͓̫͕̪̩̺̝͎̮̯̯̪͚̲͎͓̗̣̰̩͊̂̽͜ṫ̸̻̱͙͖̣̭͓̥͚̳̥͙̤̯̤͙͔̘̜̠̗͋̃͆̈́͆̓̒͛͛͘͘̕̕͜͠h̵̢̺̭̼̼̩̹̝͕̲̰̜̲̅̈́̑̍̔̐͆͑͐̽͑̉̈͑́̃͝ͅị̴̛̄̂͛̿̀̿͂̾̋͆͘̚͠s̶̨͆̀̿͐̃̔̈̏̐͛̄͊̽̒͐̓̾̏̓̋̚,̷̟̳͎̮̞̬̝̩͂̃͂́̊͋̐̕̚̕͠ ̶̨̛̞͕̦̮͕͖̞̳̫͎̈́́͊̒̿͗͑̃̈̂̀͐̂w̷͚̬͈͈͎̦̻͓̆̅̐͊̒̌́̈̂̉̿̑̏̚̚̕͜͝i̴͚̯̤̍̒̇̎͐̔̈́̃͛͑̈́͐̎͛̾̊̆̀̍͘͘ḽ̵̛͉͓̝͐̆͒͌̂̓̋̈́͘͝l̸̨͖͇͙̖͌͋̀͛͛̾̑̓̑́̌̀͜͝ͅ ̶̛̩̱̱͒̅̆̎͒̄͒̀̋̀̀̅͒͒̀̇͊͋̕y̷̧̢̨̞̯̩̦͔͍̮̪̯͍͍̟̼̬̟̝̥̥̑͊̂̈̾̇̃͂͋͂͊̃́͌͐͝ͅo̶̧̢̰͙͇̬̥̖̥̣̗̪͚̜͇̥͕̙̐̀͆̿̍̏́͜u̷̢̧͙̙̲̣͇͔̙̦̫̾̈́͒̀̾̇̄̌̒͗̐̚͘?̶̛̰̯̱͇̇̋̎̎͛̌̈́̾͒̍̿̅́̐̓̕̚͠͝”

He bowed and walked away. More flashes followed - the woman in Summoner robes featured many times, a place that might have been a castle, green fields, emerald swamps, pale but otherwise healthy men raising their mugs in toast and then - darkness, pain, a dungeon, the woman again, she was smiling and hurt, hurt with a pain that could kill him - she -

Tag pulled away from the memories, vaguely aware that his mouth was moving and that he wasn’t the one moving it, but he couldn’t focus on that. A Parallel stays with their Summoner until the Summoner dies, or until the Summoner sends them away. The Parallel cannot reject the Summoner, said a stray fragment of memory - he couldn’t say for sure if it was his or F̶̢̧̡̢̢̛̘̟̞̩̭͓̰̤̲̫̟̜͔͕̞̘̅̅͑̋́̂͆̈́̀͊̑͜͠į̵̨̧̢̧̣̥̻̟̩̞͈̠̠̝̦̜̯̀̓̆̿̌́ṋ̸̖͖̗̠̳͙̪̙̱̙̼̺͂̀̽͐̂͐͆͛͊̚͘͠͝b̵̡̨̨͔͙̩̭̺̗̰̜̩̟͔̠̺̤̘̮͈͉͂̈́ͅͅȃ̴̡̡̧̨̡͍̲̹̻͙̘̰̯͙͇̩̯ͅc̵̥͎͇͙̦̺̭̘̥̒̃͒̍̃̉̂̌͆͑̎̈͋̀̓̉̓͘͜͝h̴̨̧̧̺̩̦̘̘̭̪̘̥̖̝͙̞̹̑̈́̾͠ͅ’s. The ghost had been - had been a Parallel, to a previous Blight Summoner, one who had taken to necromancy long before the current day, and she’d - she’d -

The memory of the rack, the pain as it pulled his joints apart, the sound of the Summoner laughing as screams echoed - he pushed it away violently, back towards its source, and the ghost in his body shrank as a touch of Malice went along with the memory. Tag cast about for something, desperate for anything to take his mind off what he’d seen; the pain in his fingers caught his attention, and he only had a split second to realize the creeping necromancy that had oozed off the spirit in his body was a geas, one that forced it to attack anyone its master told it to - and that geas was in him now and -

Tag attacked the spirit’s control without a second thought, pulling his physical aim away and off true, and putting the arrow into the boards beside Puq’s head. Inside, he shoved at the spirit - at F̶̢̧̡̢̢̛̘̟̞̩̭͓̰̤̲̫̟̜͔͕̞̘̅̅͑̋́̂͆̈́̀͊̑͜͠į̵̨̧̢̧̣̥̻̟̩̞͈̠̠̝̦̜̯̀̓̆̿̌́ṋ̸̖͖̗̠̳͙̪̙̱̙̼̺͂̀̽͐̂͐͆͛͊̚͘͠͝b̵̡̨̨͔͙̩̭̺̗̰̜̩̟͔̠̺̤̘̮͈͉͂̈́ͅͅȃ̴̡̡̧̨̡͍̲̹̻͙̘̰̯͙͇̩̯ͅc̵̥͎͇͙̦̺̭̘̥̒̃͒̍̃̉̂̌͆͑̎̈͋̀̓̉̓͘͜͝h̴̨̧̧̺̩̦̘̘̭̪̘̥̖̝͙̞̹̑̈́̾͠ͅ - and attacked it with all the claws and teeth the Malice inside him could conjure up. He would NOT suffer his friends hurt! He would NOT be used by another for their own evil goals! He didn’t blame the ghost - the geas was clear and powerful and had had centuries to sink in - but the person holding that leash was not going to make him hurt his friends.

Tag had a single instant to see the trapped spirit’s pained face just in front of his own before the world became noise and F̶̢̧̡̢̢̛̘̟̞̩̭͓̰̤̲̫̟̜͔͕̞̘̅̅͑̋́̂͆̈́̀͊̑͜͠į̵̨̧̢̧̣̥̻̟̩̞͈̠̠̝̦̜̯̀̓̆̿̌́ṋ̸̖͖̗̠̳͙̪̙̱̙̼̺͂̀̽͐̂͐͆͛͊̚͘͠͝b̵̡̨̨͔͙̩̭̺̗̰̜̩̟͔̠̺̤̘̮͈͉͂̈́ͅͅȃ̴̡̡̧̨̡͍̲̹̻͙̘̰̯͙͇̩̯ͅc̵̥͎͇͙̦̺̭̘̥̒̃͒̍̃̉̂̌͆͑̎̈͋̀̓̉̓͘͜͝h̴̨̧̧̺̩̦̘̘̭̪̘̥̖̝͙̞̹̑̈́̾͠ͅ was no more.

Tag blinked as ice water ran down his spine.

It had seemed funny, at first. They’d all been riding high off the thrill of victory - Sam especially, the man mugging for the crowd until the last possible second and crowing about his victories on their way back to the ready room - and the exchange between Bryn and their ready man had been frankly hilarious. Can I bite your calf, with that serious look on her face that Tag had seen her use before when trying to be diplomatic. Can I bite your calf, and clearly the ready man had no idea what she was talking about - his once-over had been about as subtle as their landing on the Bloom planet, and he’d gone with her behind a screen readily enough. Rex had snickered rudely, which had set the rest of them off and they’d stood there and dripped saltwater and laughed. It’d felt good, the kind of laugh that was as much about relief as about how funny the joke was, and the acid burns - plus the lingering taste of Malice in the back of his throat - had become somewhat secondary to the bubble of relief that they’d managed to come through this test without anyone nearly dying…before the screaming had started.

It was the kind of awful, terrible scream that only came from a person who had no brain power to spare from trying to stay alive. The kind of scream that took as much air as you had in your lungs because it had to be heard and never mind about the quality. The kind of scream that signaled somebody was dying.

Tag had never heard anything like it before - Cylvahl Cylesso had never been boring by any means, but it hadn’t been this kind of interesting either - but there was no mistaking it for what it was. Before any of them could react, the privacy screen came crashing down as the ready man - they’d been calling him Danny but Tag had no idea if that was his actual name - fell backwards through it with Bryn right beside him. A long, crescent-shaped slash ran down Danny’s leg and Tag could see the wet gleam of yellow bone and red muscle in the light of the lamps. Blood splattered the floor as Bryn snarled, a sound so utterly inhuman it struck Tag to his core. That, that wasn’t right; between the two of them, he was the monster, the Hunger hidden in human form. Bryn was his anchor, his touchstone for his own humanity, she shouldn’t - she couldn’t be this hungry beast with blood dripping down her chin and a flat, dangerous look in her eyes.

It was wrong in the worst of ways, and Tag could feel the blood drain out of his own face as he ran forward blindly. “Bryn, stop, don’t - ” he began, trying to get a hold on her to pull her away. He wasn’t thinking, couldn’t see past the red, red blood; he didn’t know what he would do, once he got her away from her chosen prey, but he couldn’t just let her kill an innocent in front of him. It would - he knew Bryn, knew her on a level that most people never had the chance to know another person, and he knew that if she was in her right mind then she wouldn’t want to kill an innocent either.

Of course, that didn’t stop her from backhanding him away now. The force of the blow nearly lifted him off his feet in a way that almost reminded him of the last time Rex had clapped him on the shoulder, back on Haven. He didn’t know if it was the magic of the amulet she wore, or a side effect of the single-minded intensity she was displaying in going after Danny, but the power in her strike just reminded him of how far away from normal they’d come. Tag staggered as Bryn rushed past him and sank her fangs into Danny’s throat, blood fountaining from the wound and joining the other mysterious stains on their clothing. Tag just barely managed to keep his feet and set himself to lunge for Bryn once more to try and pry her off as Danny’s screaming stopped with a sickening gurgle and even more unsettling gulping sounds filled the room.

And then Rex’s shield hit him in the face.

Tag went down in a heap, his head ringing like the gong that had signaled the start of the last round. It was so loud, he couldn’t think around the noise; the pain crackled in his head and mixed unpleasantly with the feeling of the raw skin left from where the spider’s acidic blood had eaten away his epidermis. Things were happening around him, events unfolding before his eyes, but he couldn’t think, couldn’t process around the ringing in his brain. A swirl of magic in the course of events produced a kind of kaleidoscopic effect, and Tag could almost feel himself drift away from his body for a moment in a way that he hadn’t since he’d put on the amulet.

Tag blinked and forcibly re-centered himself, shaking his head in a way he immediately regretted as the pain in his cranium doubled. Now was not the time for floating away; he had to be present, in this moment, so he could help stop Bryn from eating Danny…who was lying not two feet away and no longer bleeding all over the place? Tag blinked at the shorter man as he moaned a little bit, then extended a shaky hand to give him a clumsy pat on the shoulder. Danny didn’t seem to be actively dying at the moment, so to Tag’s still somewhat scrambled mind it was up to him to make sure Bryn hadn’t permanently maimed the guy.

“Hey man, you got into a, a bad situa- you got into a bad little mix-up right there, but you’re okay. Hey, hey, hey, hey, Danny- DANNY.” Tag’s voice got louder than he’d intended on the last two words, and he flinched away from the sound as much as Danny did.

“Eh. Eh? What? Yeah, yeah,” Danny waved a vague hand, and Tag felt a wave of relief sweep through him at the somewhat weak response. Danny wasn’t dead, or being actively killed, and that was good.

“You’re okay.”

“What happened?”

Tag felt his brain kick into overdrive as words came spilling out of his mouth without stopping to check in with his brain first. “Uh, nothing to worry about. You’re gonna be - you’re healthy. Well, you’re not dying, you won’t BE dead. I am horrible at these speeches, I just, I’m tryin’ ta just…it’s cool. Bro.”

Tag consciously forced himself to stop talking, nearly biting his own tongue with his efforts, and gave Danny a thumbs-up instead. The other man returned it somewhat weakly, and Tag turned his attention back to the rest of the room just in time to see Rex yelling at Bryn. The ringing in his ears had finally abated to the point where he could actually distinguish other sounds again, and his brain finally up to the task of actually processing what he was hearing.

“You were biting his neck!”

Bryn looked uncomfortable, eyes sliding away from her teammates and back towards were Danny lay mostly comatose on the floor.

“That was - I don’t know what happened there.” Bryn’s voice wavered just the tiniest bit and she wiggled her eyebrows strangely, and Tag frowned.

The statement set off warning bells in Tag’s head. Even to his still-somewhat-addled brain, that didn’t sound right; Bryn not knowing why she was trying to do something sounded an awful lot like an external force making her try and do it - and there were only a few people not in their group in the room currently.

Slakta was a ghost and seemed perfectly content to just take their currency for her items, it didn’t seem like she’d want to make Bryn kill someone. He glanced over to confirm and found Slakta eating the pastel memory of popcorn while hovering over her cart, a sight that would normally have been fascinating enough to warrant a few seconds of staring but which right now just confirmed that she probably wasn’t the one influencing Bryn.

Then, of course, there was Danny himself - but Tag dismissed the thought as soon as it entered his head. The man wouldn’t have screamed if this had been some weird, elaborate suicide attempt and he very clearly had had an extremely different idea of how biting his calf was supposed to go.

Tag licked his lips as Bryn continued to stare at the prone Danny, preparing to put himself between the two if he had to, when a slick, oily sort of sweetness stole over his tongue for a moment and froze him in his tracks. The spider had been a creature of the Malice - he’d never forgotten the taste after what had happened on the Fire planet - and it had been after Bryn. Now Bryn was trying to do something he knew to be contrary to her nature, even with the curse of vampirism resting heavily on her shoulders.

Tag felt his spine stiffen in anger; of course, what had happened on the Water planet couldn’t have been the end of it. Of course, simply tearing half-dad’s crown and - his human mind stuttered at remembering what his Malice-self had done, the fleeting memory of a thousand mouths tearing apart a thousand wings echoing back into the void - couldn’t have been enough to stop the bastard. He’d just changed his targets.

Tag took a deep breath and - let go. Even with the amulet on, the Malice was always present where his soul should have been - as the ghost who had tried to possess him had found to its detriment. On some level it had always been, he simply hadn’t known it for what it was before meeting half-dad for the first time. It waited, lurking, inside of him, and to open himself up to it was as easy as breathing.

The memory-world - glitched. There was no other word for it. A ripple of colored static washed through everything save himself and his companions in less time than it would have taken to blink, leaving everything strangely off-colored and just the slightest bit hazy. Tag couldn’t say if that was what the phase state looked like on Blight all the time, or if this was because they were inside the chaos magic of Schalcta’s memory, and at this point he didn’t have the attention to spare to try and puzzle it out.

Because half-dad was here.

Tag kept his gaze steady despite the pounding in his head. Half-dad didn’t look quite as tall as he remembered him, and his crown was gone. In its place, little rivulets of Malice streamed up and off his head in a strange parody of hair and Tag felt a little flicker of triumph at the sight. It wasn’t much to his human eyes, but he could feel the way the Malice inside of him preened a little bit at the sight and knew that half-dad was steadily bleeding out his own life-essence. Even if the eldritch being replenished himself from the energies they were no doubt stealing from this planet and the others still caged, it was unmistakably a sign of weakness.

So distracted was he by half-dad’s new appearance, the taller being spoke before Tag could marshal his thoughts into words.

“Ah, excellent. The screw has been tightening, has it not, my boy?”

Tag felt his lip curl into a half-snarl, irritation bleeding into him at the smugness in half-dad’s voice.

“I don’t appreciate you getting into my friend’s heads like that,” he stated, drawing on as much composure as he could muster to keep his voice even.

“Ehhgh - I know you’re not going to like it, but it is your fault.”

A pulse of hot shame shot through Tag. If he wasn’t here, in this place, half-dad wouldn’t be after his friends. If he had acquiesced to what the Malice wanted of him, Bryn wouldn’t be trying to kill and eat someone. If, if, if - it hurt that he was the reason his friends were in danger, but not enough drive him away from them. Not here, not yet.

“I…don’t like that you’re correct, but that’s also…” his anger flared. Yes, refusing half-dad was on him - but half-dad was the one refusing to take no for an answer. “Such a shitty way to not take responsibility for what’s happening. I know that you don’t care about Bryn. I know that you don’t care about Danny. I know that you don’t care about me beyond my function in your plan,” the words were as bitter as hot ash on his tongue, but he couldn’t deny their truthfulness.

For all he called the being in front of him half-dad, it didn’t care about him as a parent should care about their offspring. The shell known as Tag had been created through some arcane means that he couldn’t think about the particulars of; it had never had a real mother or father, and Tag himself hadn’t been adopted by anyone either. It hurt too much to think about for long, so he plowed on ahead. “But you are an actor in this. At least have the courage to stand in front of me and talk about the truth.”

Half-dad made a vague gesture before sighing. “It’s - it’s difficult for me to communicate the scale at which I am forced to conceptualize your realm.” Tag knew the struggle - fitting into a limited three-dimensional human shell was not easy - but was content to remain silent instead of empathizing. Half-dad did not deserve his empathy. “You have weight there. You’ve brought some of me to them. I recognize you. The others, though I feign interest or…whatever, they, it’s, I don’t apologize to ants when I kick over their hill.”

Tag scowled. To compare his friends to ants was to do them a deep disservice - one he would not stand for. “Look, I’m not asking you to apologize. No-one is interested in you making this grandstanding, sinister bad-guy speech that we’ve all heard a million times about your inflated sense of grandiosity and by contrast everyone else’s minuscule function in the world. All I’m saying is,” here he stepped forward and put himself toe to toe with the heavily-armored, black-cloaked figure in front of him and stared directly into where the face should be, “pick on somebody your own size.”

Half-dad didn’t move, but Tag got the sense of something flinching away in dimensions he couldn’t see. “Okay. I just want to say for a moment, often when I’m making these grandiose speeches I’m complimentary to you. That just - it’d be nice to get a thank you every once in a while.”

Tag didn’t even think before responding.

“No.”

The compliments half-dad gave were never about things he’d done - only about how well he was fitting into their plans. It was never about Tag, the human - it was only ever about the Malice inside of him. They were not the kind of compliments Tag would accept from anyone, but especially not from the monster that claimed to be family and yet tried to drive his friends away and force him to do something he did not want to do.

“I’m not going to thank you for your back-handed passive-aggressive attempts to manipulate me, by positioning yourself in my friends’ brains and hearts, and then saying they are so insignificant that you don’t even consider it consequential, what you are doing. It matters to me, therefore it should matter to you, you dick.” If they were really family, it would. If half-dad was any real relation, it would.

Half-dad paused for a single instant, and something about his posture replaced all of Tag’s aggression with foreboding. “Fair. I’ll make you a deal. Unfortunately, while I am waiting in the wings, your Summoner friend keeps appearing on my doorstep. I can’t promise I won’t welcome her when she does. However, this one instance, if you would like to exchange a favor to me, I will release the current thrall on Bryn to save your little idiot friend.”

Tag paused for only an instant. Bryn was his friend, and one of the best people he’d ever known. Whatever vampirisim was doing to her, half-dad was doing worse. She didn’t deserve the things half-dad would make her do in the name of getting to Tag; underneath the curses and magic, she was still more warmly human than Tag could hope to be. And, in truth, it was only fair - if Tag hadn’t refused half-dad, half-dad wouldn’t be trying to reach out and destroy his friends. For all his fears about what half-dad could force him to do, the choice was obvious.

Looking back up into what passed for half-dad’s eyes, Tag gave the only answer he could give:

“Okay.”

For Bryn, wholly and unreservedly, he agreed.

Revess waited patiently as the soft, even breaths of his mate filled the wide halls of their city home.

It wasn’t much when compared to some of the other estates - the skeletal unicorn compound encompassed several blocks, and they were the main cause of some of the stranger traffic patterns of the city - but it was warm, and it was dry, and it was theirs. He’d fought hard for the territory that included the city, and he’d laid it at H'verr’s claws when he’d courted her so many years ago. She’d agreed to be his mate, out of all the others that had sought her favor, and they’d constructed this place together; it hadn’t been part of the city proper then, but the city had expanded out to include it.

H'verr loved the convenience of living in the city, and had been enthusiastically exacting as they’d constructed their home. No wind blew unpleasantly through gaps, no water dripped down the walls to mucky pools on the floor, and there was not a speck of mud to be found anywhere. It was a bit on the small side, being largely three rooms and some hallway sections, but she’d declared that she didn’t mind in the slightest and they’d lived very happily for several hundred years.

All that had changed two years ago. Dragons bred rarely, hatched slowly, and grew rapidly for their lifespans; both H'verr and Revess had been shocked and amazed when H'verr had laid twin eggs in their nest. They’d devoted that room immediately to the eggs, shuffling the bedding around to more firmly secure their precious offspring. Revess had gone out and purchased a clever human device that would keep the room at a steady, warm temperature for as long as it was fed equal parts wood and water, and H'verr had set about making their storage room into a temporary place to sleep.

The problem was that as the city had grown up around them, land had become quite dear. While it was true that their abode did not have many rooms, it was by no means actually small; the ceilings and corridors had to be both tall enough and wide enough to admit two fully-grown dragons, and they were not small creatures. All around them were other living places, apartments and boarding houses that were home to the roving multitudes that passed through on their way to perform in or simply watch the goings-on at the colosseum. Even purchasing one of the other buildings would cost more than the gold they had, and never mind about knocking it down and expanding their abode into the space.

Revess had done what he could; hauling things about the countryside like some form of airborne wagon was hardly work befitting a black dragon, but it paid and that was what counted. He’d managed to pull together enough in a year to buy one of the houses adjacent to theirs, and had nearly enough now to buy a second one before they started demolition. The real problem was that the hauling jobs were beginning to dry up. The Blight was beginning to reclaim the outlying farms, and anything within a certain radius of the city refused to pay his prices, even after he’d lowered them twice. He hadn’t worked in a week by the time things came to a head, and had in fact been forced to divest some of their hard-won gold to keep meat on the table.

It was actually at the butcher’s shop where he’d heard the news about the colosseum. Revess had never paid any particular attention to the colosseum; he’d watched it being constructed but H'verr had never shown any interest so there had been no pressing reason for them to visit the place. He hadn’t been the only person at the butcher’s shop, however, and he’d overheard two humans excitedly discussing the possibility of winning a large sum of gold coins by competing. The thought had stayed with him as he’d taken home the bog-lizards he’d purchased for himself and his mate. When he’d told her about what the humans had said about working at the colosseum, she’d been reluctant to agree but he’d managed to persuade her by promising her she could watch.

So the next day they’d gone to the colosseum together; H'verr had gone to the stands, and Revess had presented himself to the master of games. He’d ended up paired to a saw-billed reaverbird named Scraw, and had competed in the chariot races. The first lap had gone fine, Scraw being a surprisingly good match for him in flight speed, and Revess had been cautiously optimistic. The cheering of the crowd had been a heady thing, and he’d felt his wings beat just a little bit faster in response; he could get used to that.

And then everything had fallen apart.

They’d been running against a pair of skeletal unicorns - the family was large in the racing scene, apparently, though Revess hadn’t known at the time - and another pair of saw-billed reaverbirds whose names Revess had never learned. The second round had seen hazards begin to appear on the track, and while Revess had had to spend a great deal of concentration on avoiding them, the unicorns hadn’t been phased. They’d gored Scraw through the gut, his corpse dragging on the chariot until the charioteers had managed to cut the harness away to let him fall; that brought Revess’ chariot to the rear while the other two reaverbirds had continued forward with their charioteers harrassing the ones in the unicorns’ driving seat.

Revess had made a Herculean effort to pull up and back into the running as the unicorns had lost time and distance to evasive maneuvers, and driven by the loss of Scraw he’d made his biggest mistake of the race. Fueled by thoughts of revenge for his teammate - no matter that he’d been introduced to the bird all of five minutes before the race had started - Revess had tried to belch acid all over the unicorns and their damned chariot. He only managed to strike one of the unicorns a glancing blow with the spray, but it was enough to paint him as the largest threat and they’d gone after him single-mindedly. He’d ended up gored almost half a dozen times - and slashed even more - before the reaverbird chariot had managed to cross the finish line for the last time and the unicorns were hauled off him.

The workers at the colosseum had patched him up and given him a few coins for participating. H'verr had nearly been beside herself, and had forbidden him from ever going back to the colosseum. Revess had agreed, and had so far kept his promise. But food was getting harder to come by, jobs were still scarce, and the eggs were beginning to show signs of hatching in the next few months. All that, and he’d found himself almost missing the noise of the crowd as time went by; he’d only had a taste, but he found that he craved at least a little more.

Revess held his breath as he carefully eased himself from out of the half-bed they’d managed to construct in the larder. H'verr grumbled and he froze, but she merely curled up into the warm cavity he’d left behind in the bedding and he sighed silently in relief. His injuries had finally healed, and what H'verr didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. They’d have money enough to expand their home, and money enough to keep their dragonlings fed until they were ready to face the world on their own.

Resisting the urge to nuzzle her one last time, he stole quietly out of the room and walked as softly as he could manage down the hallway. The room with their eggs was further away from the main entrance and exit than their current sleeping quarters were, but Revess couldn’t leave without reassuring himself that they were all right. And, indeed, in the soft glow of the clever device the eggs glittered faintly with just a touch of humidity. They were a little bigger around than one of his eyes, and they were perfect. He couldn’t wait to meet his offspring and show them all the good things life had to offer. He snuffled first one then the other carefully, checking them for signs of being too damp or too chilly, but both seemed to be doing well.

With the scent of the eggs lingering in his nostrils, he turned and headed for the main door. His steps weren’t any noisier, but thoughts of golden coins and full-bellied dragonlings tucked up to sleep distracted him enough that until a deliberate scuff of a claw on the wooden floor came from behind him, he didn’t realize he couldn’t hear H'verr’s breathing anymore.

“You’re going to the colosseum again.”

Her voice was flat, but he could still hear the note of hurt and Revess winced before turning around.

H'verr’s scales weren’t puffed out into a threat display, and Revess silently thanked the Continuum for that. He couldn’t afford any injuries before trying to race again.

“Yes.”

As much as she was hurt by what he was trying to do, he wouldn’t hurt her any more by trying to lie to her. He loved her far too much to do that.

Her wings rustled as she stalked closer.

“Why would you go back there, you nearly died the last time. Do you want to leave your children fatherless just for the chance at some gold? Do you want me to raise two younglings by myself?”

Her voice had risen steadily as she’d spoken, and the last words were nearly a shriek. Revess ducked his head but met her eyes squarely.

“I’m doing this for our children. They deserve a better life than to have to eat bones for supper because there’s no jobs to be had. You deserve better than to have to grub for coins at the whims of some short-lived monkeys.”

H'verr snorted. “They deserve to grow up without a father? They deserve to be left alone while I pick up the slack? There’s food enough and space, we just have to keep working the jobs we have! There’s no need to go glory-seeking in some ridiculous death trap!”

Revess snarled, his own ire rising at her words. “I’m doing this for you! Not for some glory! Why can’t you see that?”

“All I see is a dragon who is abandoning his responsibilities. If you go to that, that place, you won’t come back! It’ll just use you up and sell your parts for magic and then where will we be?”

Revess’ temper flared. “Better off than you are right now I guess,” he snarled, and turned to slam his way out of the door. The thud of it closing behind him sounded far too final, but he didn’t look back as he spread his wings and took to the skies.


“Haven’t you heard? There was an awful accident at the races yesterday! All three chariots destroyed in a pit, and no survivors! Such a shame, Speed Demon the black dragon was a four-time winner…”