When the black cleared completely to the white space, it was not to a hoard of dead gods waiting at the edges and ready to strike. D’Argen was tense, reaching for his mahee to open it at a moment’s notice.

There was no need though.

Lilian looked as surprised as he felt to see the empty around them.

“You said this is like a layer of Trace, correct?” D’Argen asked to confirm.

Lilian nodded.

“Then, where are we now?”

“Why?”

“My sword. If this is just a layer and my sword is in all realms at the same time, then it should be here in the same place. Sky Mountain.”

Lilian’s brows furrowed.

“It may be on Sky Mountain in that dream world, but are you sure it is there in the mortal realm?”

“Where else would it be? I never took it with me after I fell.” D’Argen had to wonder too. He could not remember ever taking the sword, but he also had a hard time splitting the two sets of memories apart. He only knew which was which through confirmation with others or events that were about to happen. But his sword. He never took it. He did not. He… he knew that.

Lilian was still frowning. They looked as uncertain as D’Argen was starting to feel about his statement. After a moment, they nodded and said, “We have to go north-east.”

D’Argen nodded and took a first step. Then stopped. Without terrain to guide him, he had no idea of any of the directions. He looked to Lilian for directions. Maybe the shadows on their face—

“If we walk, it will take months,” they said.

“Is time still relevant here?” D’Argen asked when a new thought attacked him. “Never mind, we walk, and you can tell me more.”

“It is and it is not,” Lilian replied, as cryptically as ever. When they started walking, D’Argen realized he had not been too far off with his random step earlier. Then Lilian said, “The same way space is not. If we walk, it would take months. If we fold the space between us, we could be there in a few steps. If we let time control us, even those few steps could take months, and the months of walking could take a few breaths.”

“Okay, okay.” D’Argen waved a hand around. “Is this one of those things that will break my mind or are you just being a pain for the fun of it?”

Lilian frowned at him. “This is not a laughing matter.”

“I’m not laughing. Do you see me laughing?”

“D’Argen—” Lilian suddenly stood in his way, forcing him to stop walking from one white spot to another where he could not tell the difference in each. “—if you lose your mind, you lose. That is it. There is no going back. Please, stop joking around.”

D’Argen made a show of stepping around them to continue walking. He said nothing. He loved Lilian, he really did. Right now, he just had to remind himself of that.

Lilian started walking behind him again and D’Argen wondered how he knew when he could not hear their steps on the ground. Their breath? Their presence? The wind nipping at his heels? At that final thought he smiled and slowed his step until the two were walking side-by-side. The breeze ruffled at the skirts of his robes and though Lilian had told him they did not control it, he knew it was them playing with him. He reached out to the side without looking and found Lilian’s hand. Their fingers linked.

After a heavy sigh that revealed Lilian was annoyed with him but not to the point of not talking to him, he smiled and started swinging their joined hands.

A walk through the empty white.

With his best friend.

There was nothing to complain about.

After what could have been hours or days or just a few heartbeats, D’Argen was already bored. “Now, will you explain it to me?” he asked without looking at Lilian beside him.

There was no answer.

He hesitated and chanced a glance to the side. What he saw had his steps faltering. It was not Lilian walking beside him and holding his hand. It was not Lilian’s slim fingers laced through his and their small arm waving through the air at his tug.

Asa was smiling so wide as they turned their head to look at D’Argen. Too wide. That smile did not belong on their small face.

D’Argen yanked his hand away, but Asa’s grip tightened to the point of it being painful.

Once again, D’Argen tried to yank his hand away but the hold was not only around his fingers. It was around his wrist and climbing up to his elbow. It was so tight that it would bruise. When he chanced a look down, it was to see multiple hands gripping his arm. They were all solid black, and only a few were visible up to the elbow where they turned into wisps of ink. The rest were only fingers or to the wrist. There were dozens of hands.

He felt the grip on his shoulder before the black fingers appeared on his bare skin there. When they shifted, a trace of them remained on his skin. When they gripped tight, they had long nails and sharp claws that turned the crescents into his skin into bloody canyons.

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Similar pain assaulted him from the other side, and he saw more hands there. Then he felt those hands at his ankles. At his calves. They slipped through the skirts of his robes and to the pants under. They wrapped around his thighs. The fingers there were too long to be natural, and the claws were sharp enough to rip him apart without a thought.

Varuba.

D’Argen did not know if she was real in the mortal realm—he had no memory of meeting her—and according to Kassar and the other Never Born in the dream world, she was not real there, but there was one thing she had that helped.

The staff she carried, though, would help. It was made of stone and carved with symbols that made his head spin. He could not recall the symbols themselves, having been unable to focus on them, but he remembered the staff and the feeling it gave off. He clutched at the hand that should have been Lilian’s and found hard stone under his grip instead. His vision swam when he looked at his hand, but so did the black hands on him. They wavered and dispersed. Asa no longer had a limb to touch him with. Black tendrils floated down from where their shoulder should have been.

All of the hands on him disappeared.

Asa’s wide smile, the one that had literally turned upside down and made him gag, was the last to fade away. Then D’Argen was alone surrounded by nothing but white.

He could not look at the stone in his hand, only grip it tighter. He did, however, see something else. A shadow. His own shadow. It was directly under him in an almost perfect circle. But it was too dark. And too perfect. When he took a hesitant step, the shadow was barely a moment too late. It did not stretch or have a limb extend. It moved so one of his feet was on nothing but white.

D’Argen clutched the stone so tight that he could feel the engravings on it leave an imprint on his palm. He had no idea what those carvings were or what his hand would say afterwards.

On the next step he took, the black circle under him remained where it was. Not the shadow. He took another tentative step, and it caught up with him. His fingers were starting to hurt with how hard he was clutching the stone.

Then the white in front of him shimmered. It was not black tendrils but the heat waves from the desert. A pair of eyes appeared at the same time as freckles like stars. But the stars did not land on Darania’s skin as they should have. Instead, they grew. Each star turned into a dark spot that grew its own limbs much farther in the distance than the eyes. By the time the silhouettes had stopped growing, D’Argen could not tell if they were fully formed.

The first of the shades that caught his attention was either much closer than the others or much larger. It had more limbs than D’Argen thought possible. Yet he had seen a creature with so many before. And it was not that long ago. The thought of the demon as Vain had drawn it in his books made light bounce off the silhouette and shadows form to give it dimensions and features. The smaller forms around it also gained shape, the extra limbs turning into wings and horns and tails. They did not move. Yet the demon with a dozen arms like pincers charged at him.

While touching the stone he could not use his mahee. He tried anyway, out of habit. When that did nothing, not even to bring him pain, he lowered his centre of gravity, ready to jump away at the last moment. Then he had a thought. Gravity. A walled city.

The stones that formed between him and the charging demon seemed to both appear on the spot and fall from the sky at the same time. He heard the impact of the demon hitting the wall he had formed. The stone shook visibly. But it had taken him at least a dozen steps to pass that gate with Haur by his side. The walls were thick. The sounds faded away into the distance.

But the walls were not that tall.

Either the demon read his mind, or it had seen the disadvantage earlier because one of its pincers broke the bricks at the top from where it had climbed up.

D’Argen ran.

Without a weapon on him, he had no chance of winning. Even worse, without Lilian by his side, he had no idea for a direction. The wall kept forming beside him as he ran, the stones behind him fading away into nothing or flying forward to join the new ones forming.

A black smudge appeared in front of him. It looked far enough away, yet not even a moment later D’Argen had to drop to his knees and imagine ice under him to slide under the sharp blade that would have cut him in half. The ice turned into soft dirt and then hard rocks as he got up to his feet again and continued to run without stopping.

One of the Never Born chased him down.

The demon ran along the top of the wall in step with him.

Floating eyes followed him.

And then light from nowhere at all reflected off a blade too sharp and too fast to be stopped by anything at all. It was connected to a long black staff with engravings on it that D’Argen knew as well as his own hands. The silver etched into the black metal formed patterns that told stories of millennia past. The blade did not touch him, he was able to duck under it, but the glaive spun fast through the white. The carvings depicting the fall of the gods to the mortal realm would leave an impression on his back.

If he survived.

He landed hard on his face in the white and it turned into deep water too late for him not to feel the impact. He did, however, drop Varuba’s stone staff. It sank below into the white and then deeper and deeper, falling from view.

D’Argen was on all fours in what felt like wrist-deep water but was nothing but white. He tried to call that piece of stone back into his hand, but nothing happened. It would fall like his—

No.

D’Argen remembered the small cliff that Abbot had sat on to draw the sunset when they climbed Sky Mountain together. The piece of stone bounced off the white then landed heavy at the bottom of an invisible cliff. One that D’Argen recalled in as much detail as he could. It was not that tall. The stone was suddenly much closer.

Before he could lie down and grab it though, that black glaive appeared in his vision again. He flipped and rolled away at the last moment as it struck the ground and dislodged rocks. Another roll had him right under the demon’s long body as its pincers aimed for him. The glaive’s blade flashed, and the demon jumped away and below. The cliff was much taller. The demon and the staff were so far. The blade came at D’Argen this time. He rolled once more and remembered the drop.

It hurt.

He was on level with the demon. It reared up and D’Argen rolled into another drop just before it could skewer him.

He landed hard on a sharp rock he recalled for some reason. It felt like it tore into his back. But that still hurt a lot less than the sharp blade would have as it struck the white above him. Or the demon that tried to reach him but could not, as if there was an invisible wall. The glaive and sharp pincers both came down again and again and again but did not reach him.

Finally, D’Argen took a breath and looked at its wielder.

Vah’mor.

D’Argen had never been able to best them when they wielded that glaive. The only time he came close was by cheating and using his speed while Vah’mor used no magic at all. That was not an option. Without tearing his eyes away from Vah’mor’s angry expression or the demon’s pincers as it climbed down an invisible rock to reach him, his hand searched the rocks under him. He touched one that was too round to be natural. The demon jumped into the air at him. The rock had carvings. The demon felt like a bucket of cold water that doused him as it disappeared into nothing.

Then the invisible wall separating him from the most dangerous being D’Argen ever knew in existence disappeared as well.

Vah’mor fell at him, blade first.