The crowd made way for us, and I was aware of many eyes being turned in our direction. They were mostly looking at Naomi, of course, but a lot of glances fell on me as well.

It was sort of unnerving, but I tried to remind myself that the last time I’d tried to infiltrate some place, I’d had to wear bits of a dead person and pretend to be a sex slave. Not to mention I had been surrounded by monsters. Acting like some strange servant leaving a trail of fire behind us was not so bad, as long as I didn’t think too hard about how much I disliked the person I was following.

Dislike? I wondered. I’m not really even sure how I feel, at this point. She apologized, and that means a lot to me, for some reason, but part of me still hates her, and I can’t ignore that feeling.

Can I even trust my own feelings? My feelings tell me to hate Naomi for having slighted and betrayed me, but my feelings also told me to murder people. Naomi stopped me from killing people, but it is a fact that she betrayed me.

The walk through the crowd led to the front of the shop. It had a wide counter with many clerks tending to customers. One of the clerks - an older man - seemed to recognize Naomi, and gestured for the others to bow. The bow was strange. They bent at both the waist and the neck, then held their hands up, elbows touching, wrists against their foreheads, palms upwards as if ready to receive something.

Naomi strode past them, meanwhile making some small gesture to me that I should stop lighting fires now that we were entering into the shop.

The interior was clearly made only for the workers, and was little more than a large storage room full of vials, bottles, and jars. In the back - and I wondered at how Naomi knew this - was what looked like an large elevator. We entered, Naomi closed the lattice-work gate, banged her staff on the metal cage, and sure enough, we rose.

We were the only ones inside, so I thought I had time for a question or two.

“How does this thing work?” I asked. I immediately realized I should have asked something else, but it’s what was on my mind, at that second.

“Look ahead,” Naomi said.

I did. There was nothing beyond the cage but a wall of rock, the shaft having been cleared through the hills, clearly.

Then, suddenly, the wall disappeared, and for a brief moment I saw a number of freakishly muscular men pulling lengths of chain. Then they were gone, the view swallowed again by rock.

“You have people hauling us up?” I asked. “How did you even know that? Isn’t this your first time here?”

“I know my parents.”

She was being short with her answers, and spoke in such a way that told me she wasn’t in the mood for talking. Maybe she was mentally preparing for talking to her parents. Or maybe we were being listened in on. I couldn’t imagine how.

It was a long trip up - and not just up, but at a slight angle, at times - so I took the opportunity to think, again. It felt like my thoughts had been in disarray for months, one way or the other.

I’m not special, I reminded myself. The words were comforting, like an oft-repeated mantra, full of such meaning that each repetition brought new understanding. But I am powerful. I don’t have a spark. But I do have fire.

Tom has a spark. Naomi, Cadoc, and Amaia, I’m certain that they all have sparks. They are unpredictable, unique, and awake.

I can make choices, but they are like choices in a dream, impotent. Only, it seems that if I burn hot enough in the dream, it starts to leak into the real world, and make real changes.

I’m not Tom. That thought hurt. Felt wrong. But it’s true. Tom isn’t here, and even if he was, Tom never had power. Wouldn’t know what to do with it.

Does that make me better than Tom?

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No. Maybe.

Another voice. Who are you, Miles? If not Tom, then who?

A murderer, one voice said. A friend, said another.

A psychopath, I heard in Naomi’s voice. A fool, a voice from my childhood.

Vividly I saw flash before me the image of Naomi on the ground beneath me, squirming as I poured hot wax over her neck. I saw Cadoc, hand on my shoulder, as I was about to strike him down. I saw the innocent men I’d almost murdered, bubbling wax choking them as I held their mouths open, then the gurgling sounds cutting off as I ignited their throats.

I saw the look of terror on Nolan’s face - Tom’s face - as I fell with him into the abyss.

A monster.

Maybe, I said. Maybe I am a monster. What’s wrong with that? Don’t let Tom answer for you, Miles. Shut him out. You can’t use him anymore. If you throw his voice aside, then what is wrong with anything, really?

What if, for once in your life, you can get what you want? Isn’t that what’s happening right now? Didn’t you rage against the world until it finally gave up and gave you what you fucking deserve? What it owed you?

Just then the elevator stopped, and light spilled in from behind us. Naomi had already turned the other way, and that crisscrossing metal wall of the cage opened.

Another time, I thought, shaking my head. I don’t need to figure it all out right now. Power is new to me. It’ll take some time to work out the kinks. For now, I want to get the reward from Naomi’s family. After that, I want to pay off my debts. And I’d like to keep our little group together, Cadoc and Amaia, at least, and maybe even Naomi. I do want Naomi around, I think.

Do I? Yes, Miles, I do. And if she doesn’t want to be around, we’ll burn that bridge when we cross it.

One step at a time, I told myself. Planning too far ahead doesn’t do me any good. Money. Make money.

We stepped out from the elevator, and though none of us had spoken another word, there seemed to be an implicit understanding that we didn’t need to keep up the show anymore.

Whatever angle the shaft had followed had brought us not to the front of the building, as I might have expected, but somewhere on the western side, just outside of an imposing wall that ran around the pyramidal architecture.

The building was massive. From a distance, peering up the hill, it was hard to get the proper sense of scale. Standing at its base, it seemed a mountain of its own, the yellow-white stonework rising in squared layers towards a domed peak.

The walls on the lowest level were ribbed with buttressing semi-circled towers, whose curved tops ended in points like minarets, making it looked armed and unwelcoming. But higher up the stonework of the walls held high decorative arches like a wedding cake, and the intricacy grew as the stones were piled closer to the sun.

Eventually I took a moment to look around us, and saw that the structure was placed on a plateau, though I didn’t think it was natural. Instead, I thought that someone had shaved the top of the hill clean off, so that they had more room to build this admittedly very impressive building.

I could only see off of it to the west, and in that direction lay more foothills, valleys with little streams and precarious cliffs butted up against each other in violent combinations. I could also see Zinthur’s Mantle to our south, rising above it all.

I couldn’t take any more time than that, because Naomi had hurried on ahead, leaving the rest of us. Cadoc had caught up first, and the only person who took as long as I did staring at the scenery was Amaia. We exchanged a glance before running to catch up, and her eyes were glowing like a child’s.

Directly ahead of the elevator we had exited - which was housed in a little stone building of it’s own, no larger than needed to hold the cage - was a little entrance into the pyramid. There were guards there, but Naomi passed through without issue, receiving those strange bows again, and said something that made the guards let us through as well.

At this point, I was starting to become very impressed with Naomi’s parents. And very, very hopeful about my chances of a reward.

“I thought you said you were poor?” I asked just before stepping inside.

“We were.”

We entered into some sort of hallway, clearly used by servants, primarily. Naomi seemed to know the way through, and led us through darkened corridors I couldn’t have retraced again without help. Eventually she found the door she’d been looking for, and we all filed in.

We must have been somewhere near the center of the structure, though that didn’t seem right, because of how massive it was and how little we’d walked, comparatively. But there seemed to be windows above us letting in sunlight - I only learned later that they were using mirrors which reflected the light in intricate paths. Either way, the light shined down from many points above, shining down on a still pool of water in the center of the wide room.

The pool was large, crystal clear, and surrounded by desert plants like palm trees without the trunks, which grew seemingly out of the stone floor itself. The plants obscured much of the water, and seemed built specifically to create little alcoves that swimmers could hide in.

“Mom!” Naomi yelled. “It’s me!”

“Naomi!” a voice returned - a voice closer to Amaia’s than Naomi’s, truth be told. It was deeper than Naomi’s, certainly, but it wasn’t as gruff as Amaia’s, only deeper in a strange, sultry way that made my hair stand on end.

A woman I hadn’t seen before stood up from behind a wall of fronds. The sight of her was a shock to my system in all the wrong ways, and I have to admit I let out a little yelp.

First of all, she was completely naked. Apparently that habit ran in the family. But you wouldn’t have been able to tell that she was naked, not really, because your mind would be too busy trying, first, to tell whether or not she was human.

She was unbelievingly fat, obese beyond even Earth standards. If I had to guess, she was probably four or five feet both tall and wide, and all of the structure of her had long disappeared. It was impossible to tell where arms and legs began and ended, to say nothing of breasts or anything else which I should, perhaps, have been ashamed of staring at so intently, but instead which I shamelessly searched for among the blob, and found nothing.

“Mom!” Naomi yelled again, practically stomping her feet. “I have guests.”

“Oh!” the woman said, glancing at us, and she squatted down behind the fronds once again.

“Unbelievable,” Naomi muttered. For awhile the woman didn’t reappear, and I began to wonder if she would ever return. I kind of hoped she wouldn’t.

Eventually, she did, but then again, she didn’t. I would never have imagined in a million years that the woman who walked out again was the same woman, and it took a lot of convincing to get me to think otherwise.

This new woman was a giant, bordering on eight feet tall, or perhaps taller - once someone is that tall, my ability to guess their height is pretty inadequate. Instead of the formless flesh-slime I’d been cursed with the vision of a moment before, this woman was elegant and lithe beyond imagination, a towering goddess of grace. Long white robes flowed from her shoulders like clouds, each one bordering on complete transparency but layered so many deep that it gave the appearance of a solid though shifting white.

Her face was immaculate, and all I could recognize of Naomi in it was the tan, and the eyes.

“My child,” she said, and the voice sounded now like rain. “You have finally returned to us.”