The train ride from Revelwood to the location of the dungeon Perish had identified was shorter than the one from King’s Hollow to Revelwood, but still took the better part of a day. Glory began teleporting the built-up mail from the estate to them, and Will was surprised by the density of reports on the Tainted.

“That’s all of them,” Glory said, dropping the final letters into a neat stack. “Eighty-five in total.”

“Christ,” said Will. He opened one, and found it was blank except for a winking smiley face and a surprisingly detailed anatomical diagram of something’s unmentionables.

Despite his embarrassed disappointment, he had to admire the level of attention, almost more like something from a medical textbook than porn. “How many pranks are there?”

“No idea,” said Glory. “I haven’t looked at any of them. Tampering with the mail is a serious crime.”

“It’s your mail,” said Will, but he started opening another few letters to examine their contents.

In total only twelve were trash or completely blank, which Will considered an acceptable margin of error. Not every legitimate report was of equal quality, but each had at least something Will could work with.

The amount of information, even when compressed, filled much of Will’s sketchbook. From the few Tainted he had noted before, he suddenly had nearly fifty. A few times, Virgil or Glory would take over transcription while Will dictated and rested. Rex and Dio had politely refused to write, but Rex did end up tracing and copying most of the drawings people had added.

The landscape had gone from forest to taiga as they traveled further north, and was beginning to spike into mountainous vistas. Will went out to an open-air car, similar to the picnic one he had seen on the last train, letting the cold air wash past him.

It felt good, he decided, and if he hadn’t gotten tired of using a pencil he might’ve sketched the jagged mountains in the distance.

Rex came out onto the deck as well, sitting down in a chair he turned around to sit backwards in. He whistled the song of the northern cardinal, as if saying something to Will in a coded message.

When he saw Will looking at him, he signed something defensively.

“I still can’t understand that,” Will said guiltily. “Sorry.”

Rex pulled out a folded piece of paper he had stored in a pocket. On one side it said “THAT’S OKAY” and the other “WE DON’T NEED WORDS”

Will blinked twice, and sat down a short distance away from Rex. He recalled a summer camp he had gone to at least a decade ago, and a trick one of the counselors had shown him. He was rusty, of course, but he was confident he would remember. He folded his hands together and put them to his mouth, attempting to whistle.

It did not go well. Ten years was a long time, both in terms of how his hands had grown and how clear his memory was, and the discordant tones Will managed were wavering and brief. Rex laughed, and doing the same trick, perfectly mimicked the wailing call of the common loon.

“Showoff,” Will said good-naturedly, which Rex seemed to deliberately ignore.

Rex continued to whistle for some time, until it began to lightly snow, forcing them back into the heated car of the train. Inside, Dio and Virgil were both apparently sleeping on something like a pullout bed, the halfling using one of Dio’s pecs as a pillow.

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“Oh good,” Glory said as Will and Rex sat down. “I was worried you’d freeze out there.”

“Do you actually have anything for that?” Will asked, pulling at his poorly-insulated leather jacket. “I’m definitely starting to feel underdressed for this weather.”

Glory conjured a parka from somewhere and tossed it to Will, who put it on gratefully. Like all shirts and jackets Will had tried it refused to close over his bare chest, but it was still miles better than the simple leather jacket he was wearing before.

“I don't know how anyone manages here without a full shirt," said Will. “This outfit is a little bit ridiculous, right? I’m not crazy?”

Virgil, who was evidently not asleep and who generally wore a vest that covered his whole torso, made a sound like he was going to say something contentious but stopped at the last second. “Some people use magic; enchanted clothes that remain warm even in the coldest environments.”

“I'll pass,” said Will. "I need all the grounding to physical reality that I can get at this point.”

That earned a laugh from Virgil and Rex. Glory wasn’t as amused, and he whispered to Will about the seemingly contrarian nature of armor, and how despite many valiant attempts to develop alternatives it remained steadfastly true that the most effective armors were the most revealing.

Will was not terribly surprised about this although he didn't much like having it directly confirmed. “It just doesn't make sense," Will said. “Nothing about how any of this works is consistent except that it invariably bends towards the fetishistic. It just seems… artificial to me.”

“As far as we know,” Glory said, "It's perfectly natural. You take it on faith that your own world exists because of the build up of trillions of random chances creating something perfectly unique and yet undeniably similar to many other realities. How do you know your own reality was not created to fulfill the perverted desires of some other unfathomable creator?"

"Yours is not more or less unique than ours, merely different in unique ways," Glory continued. "Do you know how rare it is for a universe to host exactly one sapient species? That in it of itself is a staggeringly unlikely thing.”

“Are you suggesting that my universe was created to act as a human fetishist's playground?” asked Will. He was incredulous, but not as incredulous as he would have liked.

“I’m suggesting that that is as likely a reason for your universe existing as some cosmic pervert deigning to create ours,” said Glory with some finality.

Will didn't have a counterargument for that.

“How do you know so much about this anyway?” asked Will, pivoting the topic away from that existential tangle. “It seems like it's really hard to get anywhere, given how much it requires to send someone to another universe.”

“It used to be easier," Glory said, with the barest twinge of regret. “Most of our ability to explore or observe was cut off when the gods were exterminated. It was an unfortunate side effect, but one we have managed to at least partially overcome. The deicide was slightly before my time, but I have the collective writings of several hundred years to study.”

“Why did you kill the gods?” asked Will. “That seems like a pretty serious undertaking, yeah?”

Glory looked to his side as if watching for something over his shoulder. “Whether or not the world was created for a reason, the gods sculpted it to their liking, and they didn’t appreciate it when their delicate balance was upset. The world spent nearly six hundred years trapped in a divinely mandated stasis where nothing could advance and nothing could ever really change.”

“Though they had free will, mortals were limited in what they could do and how far they could go for fear of stepping too far,” Glory paused, as if reflecting. “My kin, the angels, demons, and other spiritual beings of this world were reduced to almost nothing but extensions of their omnipresent will.”

“The Seven Scribes you’ve probably heard mentioned killed them,” Virgil said, taking over for Glory. “A bit under two hundred years ago. The experience changed them, diminished them as the curse of immortality supplanted mortality. They’re all voluntarily bound in sites like Daphnis’s revel and Arcadia. A lesser form of it causes respawning and affects everybody, but the Scribes cannot die at all.”

“Huh,” said Will, digesting this information quietly. He turned to Glory. “By ‘slightly before your time’ how slightly do you mean?”

“The gestational period of an angel larva,” said Glory, “which is exactly seven years.”

“Awesome,” said Will, who did not actually find that information awesome.