Both ended up falling asleep in the basin, and the next day, they went through each room to discuss future plans.

“We have a storage room,” Dema said at some point. “But I guess your ingredients are still gonna be an issue, right?”

“That’s true,” Theora answered.

If they were to use this place as their home, then it was better to have the dilation device slow down time outside. But keeping that mode active all the time would mean Theora’s ingredients would expire much more quickly. They could still switch modes whenever they left their home, but they only had to mess up once for everything to spoil.

Of course, if Theora had to decide between storing ingredients for longer or having a place to live in with Dema and sleep as long as she wanted, the choice was clear.

“I was going to ask you if you could move lava with your earth magic,” Theora said, grazing through the fabric of the Shade that had materialised in her lap. “But if we are going to use it as a home, it might not be worth it.”

Dema was using a little crystal blood rod to measure distances inside the bedroom to figure out what sizes the stuff should have that they were to fetch from outside, and she kept jotting the measurements down on a piece of paper. “Yeah, I can definitely move lava, I think,” she said.

“But you can’t make it yourself, right? You were able to condense Isobel’s shale into slate. But you can’t compress it enough for it to melt?”

“Huh.” Dema looked up from her notes. “Don’t think so. At least not at that Skill’s current Level. Hm…” She used the rod to graze through her hair. “I could maybe try and make a new Skill for that, though? I thought I couldn’t since I don’t have [Fire] affinity, but I never considered creating heat from pressure.”

“You can create Skills yourself?”

“Yeah? Of course! Made all my Skills myself. Class Skills, I mean.” She smiled, then turned down to continue measuring. “But why’s that surprise you? Didn’t you make your [Stargazer]-Skills yourself too? Pretty sure I never heard of a Class like that before.”

“I don’t think I could have made that Class myself,” Theora said. “It keeps trying to tease me, and there is even a Skill that talks to me in a very cheeky way.”

“Oh, [Head in the Clouds], you mean? Lemme talk to it too! Lil lil rabbit!”

“It’s not ‘lil lil rabbit’.” Theora sighed. “As I said, it’s cheeky. It’s very different from me. I don’t think I could have made it.”

“Why,” Dema started, acting slightly ticked off, “you tryna tell me you’re never cheeky? How cheeky, li’l bun bun, don’t think I’m not onto you!”

Theora had no idea what Dema was insinuating, but it still made something click. Theora used to be a cheeky brat, as a child. That was true, even though it was ages ago. Was Theora somehow teasing herself?

Seemingly done measuring the room, Dema left, and Theora followed, carrying the Shade in front of her chest. The next room was one that could become a little library, so the Shade proceeded to spit out books from Theora’s storage. At some point, the Shade started puffing out envelopes.

“Why, what’s that?” Dema picked one up, folded it open, and pulled out a letter. “Addressed to you. Can I read?”

Theora joined and peeked over Dema’s shoulder. The letter seemed to have been written by a child, and was very yellowed and partly decomposed. “I don’t see why not.”

The truth was, Theora wanted to say she’d never seen it before. But it was far more likely she’d forgotten about it.

Clearing her throat, Dema read out, “Dear Theora. Thank you for saving my dad. My dad even cries and he never cries. Come visit.” Beneath it was the name of a town Theora knew had ceased to exist about a thousand years ago, with a drawing of a house. “That’s cute,” Dema added. “You got more. We should store them in a drawer.”

“I don’t think I recognise any of them…”

“But you kept them!” Dema said, carefully spreading them out on a desk. “And now you get to remember. I guess the oldest ones must have turned to dust, judging from how degraded these are… Should I seal them?”

Theora perked up. “Seal them?”

“Yeah, like…” Dema scrunched up her face and whirled her index finger around, blood pouring from under her fingernail. Then, with the other hand, she took a piece of paper from her cloak. After a few more whirling movements, the blood crystallised, and formed a thick transparent sheet around the paper. She handed it to Theora.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

The note inside was still readable inside the crystal, tinged in red, as if preserved in amber or glass.

“Like that!” Dema went, and smiled.

“Please do that,” Theora replied. “I don’t want to lose them.”

With a nod, Dema got to work.

“Don’t worry about my ingredients,” Theora said eventually, sitting on the table as she watched Dema preserve her letters. “We can turn the device into slow-mode whenever nobody is home, so that this place doesn’t degrade. And while we are here, we turn it into fast-mode so things outside don’t degrade. I will figure something out.”

Dema grumbled, unsatisfied. “This is a headache… Slow mode… fast mode… Let’s call it…” She took a break from sealing the next letter, and her face lit up. “Catapult mode! For what it does right now. And ice mode for the other.”

Theora tried to turn this around in her head. It didn’t make sense. “But aren’t we in ice mode right now? We want no time to pass outside, so the outside is frozen.”

“Huh. I guess it kinda changes depending on where we are?” Dema looked at the Shade that was wrapping itself around Theora, as if for help. “So it’s ice mode when we’re inside and the outside is slow, and it’s also ice mode when we’re outside and the inside is slow?”

“If we do it like that, we’d mess it up. Maybe we should fix the reference point to always be outside? Ice mode is when, from the outside, things go slow here. And catapult mode is when, from the outside, things go fast here.”

Dema nodded. “Then we’re in catapult mode right now. And we gotta switch to ice when we leave.”

“Yes.”

They were so good at this.

A few days later, Dema was playing catch with the prowlers while Theora marvelled at how much Sounddoom Valley had regenerated in the past few months. Isobel had done an amazing job at helping it revitalise — the moss she had cultivated was somehow still alive and flourishing despite having gone through winter, and it had turned the place into a swampy landscape that even had little ponds to drink from.

The darkness daffodils were in full bloom. Theora found lots of seeds in them, and decided to take just two, in hopes of growing one at ‘home’.

In Hallmark, they visited Balinth and Hell. The first thing Theora did was to send a letter to Bell and Iso to organise their reunion, and it was a difficult letter to write because the two were staying in a town in the far south, which would lead them closer to Theora’s old training grounds, but further away from Treeka.

Meanwhile, Dema couldn’t stop gushing about their visit to the book, and they ended up discussing the similarities and differences for hours, mounting theories about what action might have caused which changes, and going into it in detail that almost seemed to rival Lostina’s understanding of stories.

Not that Theora could actually judge that, since almost all of it went over her head, in large parts because she’d not actually read the original. Dema also finally persuaded herself to read the story’s final pages, perhaps out of curiosity about what might happen to Lostina and Gonell now, despite Theora’s protest that this somehow seemed like an invasion of privacy.

“If we’d known that we could visit the inside of the cloak through the Shade, one of us could have taken the Frame into it and waited for Gonell to wake up,” Theora mused one day, and found herself curiously gazed upon by all the others.

“Huh,” Balinth said. “That makes sense, yeah. Guess Lostina would have had Gonell back earlier that way?”

“Don’t think that would have worked!” Dema said. “The Frame of the Lost’s the strongest seal in their world, right? And it’s time-based magic. Doubt it could have been fooled by some lower rank time effect. Like, the Cube of Solitude was space-based, but you wouldn’t be able to just teleport out of it either, or stuff like that.”

“Oh,” Bal let out. “Yep, that’s a surprisingly good point.”

“But you said they seemed fine with how it went anyway, right?” Helena said. “That they were okay with it?”

Balinth nodded, her gaze a bit glassy. She grazed through her grey hair. “I mean, especially from Lostina’s perspective… I think she considers herself really lucky. That she got off way lighter than she should have. Right? She thought she was going to die, and instead, Gonell went and completely destroyed the outline. That Deus ex Machina at the end could have… Could have tried something different.”

Theora shuddered. That ultimate author ability had indirectly been one of the reasons why she hadn’t interfered during the climax of the story. There had been other reasons, too — using [Obliterate] inside the story was always risky; maybe even riskier than outside, and her having accidentally blown up part of it was proof of that. She’d also not interfered because of her promise to Lostina.

There was no telling how the author would have reacted to a foreign entity meddling with the plot to that extent, and while Theora could have, of course, obliterated the author — and they may have even been deserving of that — that could still have led to a variety of adverse effects.

If only Theora had other ways to affect the world than through [Obliterate]. And sure, she was on her way to get there, but it was so slow. She’d managed to fetch the time dilation device from the Shade, but only by ‘fuzzing reality’, as Isobel would call it. Theora didn’t want to use [im//possibility] that way again. Although, in some situations, it might still be a better option than [Obliterate].

But if what Dema said was true, and she really made all [Stargazer] Skills herself, then perhaps she would at some point learn more Skills. Ones that could help her find new ways to interact with the world in a way that wasn’t permanently destructive and vile.

And perhaps her experiences in To Hell With the Author could be some kind of deciding test for that. If ever she came to the point where her abilities would have allowed her to help in that situation, to defeat — or at least oppose — the author, or meaningfully support Gonell and Lostina in their struggles, then maybe that could mean she had made it somewhere.

For now, Theora was just glad that Lostina and Gonell were so strong. That they had managed on their own, despite everything the world had tried to throw at them. It was, by all means, an inspiration. Theora would forever look up to them.