Sometimes a sound will penetrate my sleep, though it is quiet. I raised my head, saw nothing but the cloudy night sky through the blackened hole in the ceiling, save a couple of stars flashing in the firmament. I closed my eyes again, remembering that pengoons were still at work fixing the fire damage. The dracken and the seneschal were still talking, their plates empty now.

“So you can understand,” drawled the dracken named W. H. Gobo, “why I need you out of my hair.” Hwah ah need you outta mah hay-uh.

“So let us go, old chap,” said Helmgarth. “We’ve caused enough excitement for one day. Although I daresay you’d be in bad shape if we hadn’t come along.”

“You can go. But your friend stays.”

I was too tired to believe he was truly talking about keeping my human here as a prisoner. Because if he had been, I would have gotten up on the table and raised the kind of ruckus that only dogs can raise. But finally becoming warm in my spot by the window, and the fact that Commander Zideo had saved Gobo from a fate of both ice and flame, all made the prospect of making a big stink about things feel so far away and unnecessary. The mission itself, the Princess, all of it struck me as incomparably distant. Was it still important to bring the sun back to Ludopolis and what was left of the Screenwilds, when there was cozy warmth and the prospect of someone accidentally dropping scraps from the table?

“What?” Helmgarth half-whispered, as unwilling to accept it as I was. “But he saved you!”

Gobo exhaled the sigh of someone used to delivering bad news. “Here’s the thing. Your friend un-Crystalliced me.”

“I should think that means you owe us one!” Helmgarth laughed, but without mirth.

“What it means,” persisted Gobo, “is that your friend is one of two people. Either he’s Xue-Fang, the shape-changer who’s been put in charge of all of Shard Platformia—making him my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s…”

“I get it.”

“…boss’s Boss. Or else he’s a main character inhabited by a you-know-what, coming from outside the whole… everything!”

Helmgarth’s chair groaned against the floor as he stood. “He is, chum. I believe it with my soul. And I am sworn to carry his burdens. To the end of the world, if need be.”

“The world has ended!” said Gobo, slamming his fist on the table. Dishes jumped an inch into the air (as did I, and the various pengoons at the table and in the town hall) and clattered back down. “If he’s a Player, he shouldn’t be here. He should be… wherever they come from. They can’t help us anymore.”

“You don’t mean that,” said Helmgarth. “You don’t believe that.”

The dracken held his eye. I smelled something familiar, and a tingle ran through my spine.

“If he’s a Player, I’m a dead man when Xue-Fang finds out I’m unfrozen. And you’re telling me he’s here, somewhere in the Blue Frost. How do you know your friend isn’t him?”

I knew.

“And,” the dracken continued, “if he is the shapeshifter, well… then I put the governor of the whole Shard behind bars, and I’m a dead man ten times over. And all my charges with me. My best bet is to keep ‘im where I can see ‘im.” He exhaled and ran his claw over the spines on his head. “Look. I know it ain’t a good look. But I’ve got no other option.”

“You believed in them,” said Helmgarth, almost out of breath from some emotional exertion. “The players. Once.” He pointed to the dracken’s chest, where a slight fold betrayed the pendant beneath the pinstripe vest.

“Look around you, son. It’s chaos here now. A new world order. I’m afraid of what would happen if there really were a Player in our midst.” He snorted angrily. “Besides, it’d take a miracle for me to believe a Player returned in the middle of… all this.” He circled his claw in the air, gesturing I supposed to everything.

“What about a prison break, my guy?” came a voice above us. My body had already begun tail-wagging in anticipation before I consciously knew my human was in the room with us. He squatted on a crossbeam in the exposed rafters, framed by a night sky. Peligrosa popped several hearts into the air. “Does that count as a miraaAOHSHIT,” said Zideo, slipping off the beam and destroying the dining table.

Wood cracked and dining ware flipped spectacularly. Gobo jumped to his feet.

Helmgarth waded into the mess of splintered wood, ceramic shards and silverware, pulling Zideo to his feet and out of the disaster area. “Wouldn’t you know it, old bean,” said Helmgarth, dusting off my human. I pawed at him, helpless with glee.

Peligrosa threw her flippers around his knee. “Human!” she cried.

“Well, ain’t that just a kick in the scales,” muttered Gobo.

Helmgarth beamed at him, as if to say, see?

“This doesn’t mean a damn thing,” said the dracken. “But… it does change things.”

Commander Zideo folded his arms across his chest and stood in the coolest action guy pose I have ever seen. It occurred to me then that it was possible that the world really did revolve around him. I had always suspected Airy Zone did, and now could not help but entertain the likelihood that this one did too. He’s the best!

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He stared down Gobo. The dracken filled his lungs, and I feared that he might breathe fire at my human, but he let his shoulders sink. “Fine,” he said. “Listen. I am no longer under the impression that you are the shapeshifter. That makes it even worse, for me and for Pengoon Peaks.” He turned to leave. “I want you all out of my town,” he said over his shoulder.

Zideo looked to Helmgarth, whose jaw was set, and he clutched his crystal-topped cane tightly. He opened his mouth to say something, but in the end only expelled a puff of air through his nostrils.

“Well that’s just… jolly lovely.” He threw his cane into the air and clutched it. “We’ll gather our things, catch our breath—”

“Tonight,” said Gobo, half-turning. “Now.”

At that, Helmgarth stopped seeing the dracken, and the pengoons, and the entire town. “Let’s go, chum,” he muttered to Zideo, and made for the newly repaired and yet unpainted door. When he reached it, it banged open, sending him stumbling backwards to catch his footing. His unwieldy backpack swiped Zideo off his feet, who tripped over me, and the three of us fell backward into an awkward pile. It was not nearly as auspicious an exit as Zideo’s entrance.

A pengoon with a short spear stood in the doorway—the prison guard. “Human escaped!” he shouted to Gobo.

In the frigid dark of night, with nothing but snow flurries to see us off, we made our way back out into the mountainside. The snow reflected the ambient light and appeared almost to conduct it, painting the dim landscape in the pale glow of moonlight, though I yet saw no moon. I was sad to leave behind the comfortable warmth of the town, and sadder to part with Peligrosa, who my heart desired to protect forevermore. Even though I was outside of her “cuteness aura,” which was the working theory I was forming about the pengoons, I turned back and saw her flippers and beak pressed against the non-destroyed window, her breath fogging it. An icicle transfixed my heart, and I forced my attention back to the journey at hand.

We marched sullenly into the cold, wet slopes of polar Platformia—what Gobo had referred to as the Blue Frost—the humans speaking in the hushed tones of people afraid they are speaking too loudly in an awkwardly quiet room. Commander Zideo had not been fed and Helmgarth provided him with some jerky and vegetables preserved in his backpack. It was a far cry from the sizzling hamburger I had been given, and I was ashamed that my human had to subsist on scraps while I had eaten like a human.

Zideo crunched a mouthful of leek, and I saw his head look at Helmgarth for a long time before speaking. “Do you think those guys were tamagotchis?” he whispered.

“Come again, old sport?”

“The penguins. Pengoons,” he said, and crunched and forced a swallow. “I think they were tamagotchis.”

“That’s quite beyond my wheelhouse,” replied Helmgarth.

“Think about it,” said Zideo. “They’re always like, ‘I’m hungry, I’m cold…’ Speaking of which, you got any coats in your pack? Cloaks? Anything?”

Helmgarth shook his head. “I’m afraid not. Here,” he said, stopping and beginning to unbuckle his backpack. “Take my coat.”

Zideo’s eyebrows went down. “No, no,” he said, his voice still low. “Let’s just get moving. I’ll warm up. Maybe.”

Their steps became long, loping slides as the ground dropped, each footfall a very literal fall. I, being quadrupedal, crept a little lower, shivering at times as the snow reached the thinner fur of my belly. The humans may not have noticed the scars in the land, the distinct plots of stone and soil over which we strode, mismatched and uneven. We passed by and beneath the same floating hillocks I had seen stood upon previously, their undersides dark with exposed stone that dripped runoff onto the snow below. “I’ll b-bet Addrion’s wa-ar-arm right n-now,” he said through chattering teeth, “wherever sh-she is. And safe.”

Helmgarth shook his head. “If she hasn’t found us yet…” He did not dare finish the thought. “You know,” said Helmgarth, “there is something I’d like to know, old chap.”

“Sure. Hit m-me.”

Helmgarth gestured a few times, trying to find the words. “No… I ought not to ask. It’s not tactful.”

“I s-said h-hit me,” said Zideo. “Any-th-thing.”

The seneschal steeled himself. “I… why were you screaming?”

“H-huh?”

“In the tower. On the balcony, when you met her majesty for the first time.” His steps crunched through mountain snow. “You began screaming, and I would have come to your aid, if it had not meant…”

“Getting bodied by Shiori?”

“…breaching etiquette in her majesty’s upper courts.”

“Yeah m-man,” shivered my human. “Don’t r-remind me. It was… g-word stuff. Do you know much about Platformers?”

Helmgarth splayed both fingers in a gesture that seemed to say “no, but go ahead.”

“She sh-showed me the Overworld,” he said. “It’s a… qu-quality of life thing, really. Or it’s supposed to b-be. It’s like a m-map, but…” He trailed off.

Helmgarth didn’t seem to know what to ask. “Can you see it now?”

Zideo laughed, then blanched. “Ha! No,” he said. “I c-couldn’t hack it. I almost barfed right there over the balcony.” That image shut Helmgarth up, and not, I think, because of the repulsive image—rather, the idea of offending the Princess in that way.

A light shot from the heavens, like a single flare or firework plummeting toward the dark earth—rather, the Shard. Colors do not map one-to-one between dogs’ eyes and those of humans, but it seemed to me that the light grappled with itself whether to be blue or green, bursting in a cloud of sparks each time it changed its hue. It disappeared into the shadowy forest far ahead and downhill, I could not say where.

Zideo and Helmgarth shared a long look at one another. I was surprised to find that no words passed between them, none audible to me at least, and yet they simultaneously renewed their forward progress with considerably more gumption. Helmgarth, carrying a heavy load, dropped each heel cautiously in controlled downhill slides. Zideo’s every step was a combination between a hop and a fall.

Once more the path made itself clear to us, though perhaps no human or dog feet had ever been here before. A welcoming gap between trees, a climb up floating stones, a trace along the side of a ridge.

Zideo began to pick up on this. I could tell some realization was slowly donning on him. “Huh.” he said, after hopping across to a floating clod of stone and snow. He easily crossed a sequence of exposed stumps, chopped ages ago and perhaps halfway across the universe before coming here. “Huh!” He flipped in the air, accomplishing leaps that neither Helmgarth nor I could keep up with.

“Bro!” he shouted across a frozen pond, landing on a floating plank of pure ice. “This is like a platformer game!” His tone of excitement echoed across the ice, against stone and trunk and leaf. It carried.

A low rumble issued from the top of the mountain. Loose pebbles pattered past us, skidding across ice and down off the sharp drops of the mountainside, followed by hand-sized comets of snow sailing through the trees. At the top of the mountain behind us, a furious cloud of white roared to life.

“Oh, crap,” said Zideo, waving us forward while looking behind. “Run. Run run run run runrunrun!”