Where a moat and keep had so recently stood, there was now something that was not entirely unlike a wall.

Imagine, if you would, dear Reader, a road that leads into the distance. It seems real, a true piece of the world, until you look more closely—and then it seems off, just ever so slightly. It is too like the road you stand on; the grasses which flank it and the rolling hills in the distance, likewise too like those which flank you and roll on behind you.

The wall was part illusion, part reflection, and part void.

But the road… ah, that was real. Because what is a road, if not something which connects two points through a journey?

“That’s our door,” Tanya said unnecessarily, nodding at where the road passed from ephemerally real into reflection. “Want some lunch?”

“I—” Nathan stopped himself from refusing it immediately, pausing to check in with his body and mind. “Not particularly hungry,” he said after a precise count and one deep, emotionally dead breath, “and not really in a place where I can appreciate the offer. Thank you though,” he added automatically.

“Right. Well.”

Tanya and Honeydew shared a glance, communicating wordlessly and in ways that weren’t a formal language, and which Nathan therefore was not able to follow with his language-mastery superpowers.

“May I,” the sorceress and priestess said, almost hesitantly, “offer you a blessing? Even if you’re not inclined to one of my Gods, I’ve seen enough of you to know that the Fulminator would smile upon you.”

“And if Mister Zapsalot thinks otherwise, he’s gonna smile on you anyway,” the warrior pointed out in her typical bitter snark, “because it’s her asking.”

“I… guess?” The question seemed jarring to Nathan, but he rolled the thought around in his head and found nothing particularly objectionable about it, except for the way it was going to delay him. “I don’t object to it, because I don’t give a fuck, I guess.”

“Wonderful!” Honeydew beamed, drawing herself up to her full height and bringing her hands together through a clearly ritualistic circular motion. “I am Honeydew Dream Brilliant-Flower-Opening-Softly,” she declared. “Heiress of House Brilliant Flower, Twice-Blessed, and Priestess of the Dreaming Fulmination Who Is God And Primordial Wrath.”

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Power began to crackle around her, coruscating in a thousand shades of seemingly identical actinic white. It arced and forked, touching nobody and nothing, because it was not real for all that it really was.

“I call on the Fulminator, who is my patron. By my power and bond, I claim the right to ask this; by His power, may you be blessed. May you possess the calm of the forest, the power of the fire which rages after the stormbolt, and the foresight of the seed which survives the flame to grow a forest anew.

“I am Honeydew Dream Brilliant-Flower-Opening-Softly,” she repeated, “Heiress of House Brilliant Flower, Twice-Blessed, and Priestess of the Dreaming Fulmination Who Is God And Primordial Wrath. And it is my will that it be so.”

The power slammed into and through Nathan like a bolt of lightning, and left him entirely unchanged and unaffected by it.

“I’m Tanya of no name or House, and I don’t claim shit nor fuckall, but here’s something anyway,” Tanya said casually before Nathan could process anything that was happening. There was a moment in which her eyes blazed with an intensity that left everything else, even the show of power she’d just performed, looking like parlor tricks; it was a degree of emotion that cast all other emotions into shadow if it did not absolutely refute their very existence. And then it ended, except that it didn’t—every thaum of that power poured into and through her voice. “Let none chain you.”

The power of her words sank into him not like a hammerblow or a lightning strike, but like an ocean—as though he’d happened to be transposed into the shallows, staring down where the continental shelf fell into the darkness, instantly soaked through.

Even in his fugue, it still resonated within him, and the deep breath he took was unsteady. After all, from Tanya of neither name nor House, a blessing like that most likely meant something.

“Thank you,” he managed, making it sound genuine. “I… from you, that probably means something.”

“From her,” Honeydew agreed wonderingly, “I should think so.”

“Oh, whatever.” Tanya’s face twisted uncomfortably, as though the very notion that this was more than just a passing whim grated against her.

“It’s…” Nathan stopped himself before lying and saying that it had been fun, just in time to catch the beginnings of a glare from Tanya. “There have been good moments,” he said instead, “and I appreciate many of the things you’ve taught me.”

“Well said.” Honeydew paused, and the silence went just long enough to start getting awkward. “Safe travels, and may your destinations be better than this world is.”

“Fair winds and following seas,” Nathan offered, and perhaps his blessing in return was a blessing in truth.

And then he died.