She found that not much time, if any at all, had passed when she returned to the farmhouse. It was still painted white and the shutters a pale blue. The grass was brown and the chickens were all asleep in their coop. She could see her breath in the icy air. The breeze smelled of snow.

“How do we know this is any more real than that place for the dead?”

“We don’t.”

It had always been like that. They had no way of knowing what was really real, after all. They lived in this place and visited the other and that was that. How real was real anyway?

“It’s real enough,” Donner said, “to keep living.”

“I guess. It’s not like I have a choice about that, though.”

What did he mean they were pretending?

“Who knows?” Donner was rather agitated by the whole affair. “Who knows what a god is thinking or what he means by what he says? Father Time. Pretending to be a kindly father figure. I suppose it suits him, in a way.”

“What do you know about him? You recognized him.”

“Because I cared to find out if those old tales held any water. Nyx and Aether, the school you will attend after Arcane, is named after such gods of the old world. I believed them to be worth investigating, though I concluded that if they were ever real they had nothing to do with this world anymore.”

“And Father Time was one of the gods you studied?”

“Yes. The man we know now fits the profile, except that he is not presenting as clearly elderly. I see no reason to think him someone else. Some of the truth has been revealed. I was wrong, he wasn’t misinformed about the purpose of that place. However, his presence was keeping them from crossing the bridge and he was not aware of that.”

“So, he somehow forgot that he was Father Time and let me call him a whole different name? And he didn’t know that he was the reason the dead couldn’t cross the bridge, either.”

“So it would seem.”

“He said we’re doing the same thing he was and that your name is Helios. That’s weird, Donner.”

“I know it’s strange, it’s one of the reasons I kept it from you.”

“I mean the sun and moon thing is questionable, but I’m talking about the situation. Snowman did the same thing. You told me your name wasn’t Donner, but you didn’t care too much that I called you something else, like him. What if he’s right? What if we’re pretending something?”

“I don’t know what fantasy we could possibly be acting out.”

“You’re telling me an actual god is wrong?” Sarcastic.

“No,” he hedged. “But I am saying that we can’t know what he’s talking about so it does us no good to think about it now. Go to sleep.”

The issue for Donner was that he now suspected something about all those doors in Luna’s mind. He’d already put a few pieces together with previous comments from Snowman about her true identity, possibly as a primordial deity. It made a certain kind of sense. The extra space within her mind, the darkness hidden behind closed doors that she never came across. He’d thought before that the way she failed to find them was astounding, beyond coincidence.

What if she’d done it on purpose?

“Your mother named you the sun? That’s pretty pretentious.”

“Yes, well, yours named you the moon so I don’t think you have any room to speak on the matter.”

“I feel like the moon is less pretentious than the sun.”

“Your feelings don’t matter.”

Tonight they sat in a botanical garden. There was a winding stream and both the sun and moon were in the sky, but there were no stars. In the distance, Luna could see a darkness.

“What in the hell is Ink Pen doing here?” she asked no one. Donner still didn’t understand that whole situation like she thought he should and Ink Pen itself, or himself, she was pretty sure about that, hadn’t been around lately. “I don’t know what he’s been doing this whole time. How old am I again?” She had a hard time remembering.

“Six.” He sounded annoyed by that.

“So, I still have at least a year before I can go to Arcane Arts?” she paused. “You know what? We never call it Pinewood.”

“No, that first part of it’s full title never stuck. No one does.”

“I guess Arcane Arts is better alliteration. Anyway, do you think I can sell the information about Father Time?”

“Doubtful. While some would pay to know, they would do so after examining your mind. Memory extraction. No one would pay without proof.”

Which she couldn’t do because they’d see Donner, too.

“Okay, so, artifacts. How do I get them and how do I make them powerful? I’ve got a year to build up a reserve, find a way to sell, and have enough money to pay for Arcane. We gotta get a move on.”

“Artifacts are man-made objects. Relics lost to the sands of time. Ironically enough.” Thinking of Father Time. “That hourglass of his, for example, if we found one in an Egyptian tomb, would be a perfect conduit and good for selling. You will have to go and find these things, there is no way to fake them. The age of the objects matters.”

“Why can’t I make them and put power in them? I can do arts and crafts. They can look old.”

“No,” he shook his head. “There are too many spells able to suss that out. One fake and this business will flop.”

That made things more difficult. “Where do I need to go? You said Egypt.”

“South America, Aztec and Inca temples. Easter Island. I know for a fact that there are underground labyrinths undiscovered.”

“If they’re undiscovered how do you know they’re there?”

“Because that was the sort of thing I researched. It doesn’t matter. What is left behind down there I don’t know, but there must be something and it’s unlikely to have competition.”

“Competition? You mean I’ll have to fight for the old junk?”

“There are treasure seekers who use the pursuit to fund their lives.”

The darkness in the distance was coming closer. “Do you see that?” she asked Donner. “What’s he doing?”

He squinted into the horizon. “I have no idea.”

“Argh! I don’t want to deal with Ink Pen!”

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Awake again, the sun in the sky and Ant helping her get dressed, Luna waited for it to happen. Ink Pen was on the way and she didn’t know why or what form he would take, if he could even take one at all.

Was he a god like Snowman?

That was a scary thought. If that was true, then she was fighting against a god to keep the world from ending.

What did that make her?

“Don’t think about it,” Donner ordered. “I have concerns about that myself and we will discuss them, but not now. If that Ink Pen is heading here, there will be other things to worry about.”

It was odd for the day to proceed as usual, for the air to be the same as ever.

If Father Time was real, what else was real?

“Do you think the chickens know about all this?” The coop was under maintenance, otherwise known as weekly cleaning, and the birds themselves roamed the yard, pecking at the dirt and sparse grass.

“No. Even if they do, they don’t care.”

“I guess they don’t try to fight fate, do they?” Not like humans and were they fighting fate? Maybe not. It was more like ignoring it. Ignoring the reality that everything would end and as the thought crossed her mind, there he was.

The actual devil, she now suspected.

Ink Pen arrived and he was a man in a suit. His hair was so black that it shone blue and so were his eyes. They didn’t seem especially alive, but neither were they quite dead; he was very pale.

“Anyone would think you were from the government,” she said, grabbing his hand and dragging him away so neither Ant or Georgia would see him. It was too late about Georgia, actually, and she was following them, which Luna felt was dangerous so she magicked them away to the woods, to the tree formerly known as Prince, and supposed this would be a test of her mind-altering attempt. If she returned with no one the wiser, then it'd worked. She'd pulled a whole disappearing act right in front of Georgia, which Donner was flipping out about but that was mostly because he was trying not to acknowledge Ink Pen and how uncomfortable he, it, was.

The air was cold in a different way and stale. Where he walked the grass turned gray and all the usual sounds of the forest were missing.

“What the hell are you doing here?” she hissed. “Go back to where you came from! No one wants you here!”

“I am never not here,” he said and his voice was exactly as it should be, so soft that it brought forth images of ultimate destruction and the horrid silence that followed.

“I didn’t think he could talk in sentences like this,” she told Donner. “He’s smarter than I thought. Being on the edge of existence and all, I thought it wouldn’t know words properly.”

“Fine,” she spoke aloud. “So you’re in the air or dark matter or black holes that we can’t see or something, but that doesn’t explain what you’re doing showing up in my yard, in front of my cousin and everything! Go back to outer space!”

“I won’t.”

Somehow she knew she couldn’t make him. Ink Pen was on another level.

“Okay,” she crossed her arms and paced. “Okay. But you’re not taking the earth, got it? You’re not allowed. This is mine, not yours, and I have shit to handle so don’t go messing it all up!”

The tilt of his head was unnatural. Everything about him was freakish and surreal. He was the uncanny valley. “You hold me back. Until you can’t.”

“Stop listening to him,” Donner ordered, but Ink Pen was still talking and Luna was still listening.

“Until you can no longer run from the reality that they have failed, the last one has died, and there is nothing left of them. No matter how far they manage to go, they end. And you watch every time. And you try. Because you must, I think. As I must.”

“Must what?” she asked. “What are you talking about?”

The air wavered and she felt something in her mind. Snowman said she was like him, but that was before he remembered he was Father Time. What did he think he was back then? Why did he never tell her? Why didn’t the reclaimed god tell her either?

“You wanted to forget,” Ink Pen told her, “and you did. Not even I can make you remember if you refuse. Will you refuse?”

“Refuse!” The roar made her ears ring and her palms covered her ears, but there was no blocking a sound that came from inside her own head.

Donner didn’t want her to know.

Ink Pen did.

“Forget it,” she turned her back on the abomination. “Whatever you’re talking about, keep it a secret. I must not need to know since I’ve lived fine until now.”

“Have you? I don’t think you believe that.”

When she whirled around to argue that her feelings were the ones that mattered, she found him vanished.

“Good riddance,” Donner snarled in her mind. “That thing is the definition of a violation of nature! I’m sure it shouldn’t exist.”

“No, he’s got purpose,” she told him, “and it’s as glorious as mine, but it’s like the opposite.” Something was different, inside her head. There was a door, somewhere, she could feel it. Not open, but the keyhole. It was exposed and things were seeping out. Small things.

Donner felt it, too, and so the conversation about his suspicions on the reality of her existence was forced to be had; he didn’t know what would happen if the realization came to her organically. Or, not quite organically as it seemed to him that Ink Pen meant to force it.

“Before you return to the farmhouse, we’re going to have to discuss what I wanted to put off. Ink Pen’s arrival and the subsequent nightmarish conversation have unsealed something that was, minutes ago, so locked down it was unbelievable.”

“What do you mean?” She sat at the base of the tree. It was tall and thick; its leaves were all lost now. The branches were much too high for any practical use like hanging, but she was magic and she could go wherever she wanted and she’d been concerned that the rope might not hold and chose a branch high enough that the fall would kill her if nothing else. Now, she was thinking it might have been easier to go up and jump rather than choking herself out all those times.

“Suicidal ideations aside,” he cut in. She was in the habit of losing herself in the flow of thought. “When he was the Snowman, he heavily implied your true role in nature and I do believe now that he was correct about that. He forgot himself, it seems, but not you.”

“What-”

He continued. She was going to repeat her previous question and he could feel her growing irritation. Her deity, disturbing as it was, did not override the tendencies of a six year-old child. “Before he remembered his true form, he believed himself to be Life. When he said that you two were the same, he was implicating your role in the creation of this dimension. As you’ve thought many times before, he spoke of his place and yours as different and yet the same. He was familiar with many things you spoke of, though not all, and I think that was part of his self-deception. While there may be another world running parallel to this one, we’ve not been in contact with it. Father Time lied to himself for some purpose and so have you.”

“Wait,” she paused. “You think I’m Life Itself? Like, a god?” That didn’t make any sense.

“Your extreme magical abilities have confounded me. No matter who your father is, he cannot be strong enough to make up for your mother’s lack of ability. Magical aptitude, while able to be manipulated through intense work, is at the outset a genetic core. If one has none, they may train themselves into a low level of power, but there are limits they will not surpass. I, myself, have gone further than any to come before me and I had a fair amount to begin with. But you,” he shook his metaphysical head. “You are something else. The innate abilities you possess are unheard of and I knew it never made sense, but this offers an explanation.”

“You’re saying I can do all the things that make you upset because I’m not,” it was difficult to understand, “I’m not a real human?”

“Yes. I do not believe you to be human. You are pretending to be. For what purpose, I don’t know, and that may be why I’m here now. I can’t find a reason to have been pulled into anyone’s mind, much less yours. I should have died,” which was painful to admit, “and yet here I am.”

“That doesn’t follow,” she argued. “I tried to talk to Pink and Ungle, and some random people, on the bridge but they didn’t notice me. Why did you notice?”

“That I don’t know. Snowman implied a few things about my own existence for which I’ve yet to develop a theory.”

“If I’m not human then what am I? Life, you said, but what does that mean?”

“What it means I can’t tell you, but it does explain many of your behaviors and some of the arguments we’ve had. You’ve made ridiculous comments and assertions about Life as if it were a real thing making its own decisions before. If, in a place even deeper than your subconscious, your true identity is known, though mostly hidden, then those instances finally make some sense. You were defending yourself.”

“What have I said about life?” She didn’t remember. She’d thought about a lot of things in her few years on earth.

“Things like, life is trying its best and insisting that your aunt deserved more than your uncle’s death or whatever the hell you said. If you are life personified, it follows that those things may be true for you. It’s clearly in your power to influence the course of life, yet you cannot truly prevent a death though you may fight it. That is why your uncle died even though you saved him.”

“But I killed the murderer, I don’t think life could do that.”

“Neither do I, I would have thought that life would have some restrictions. As Father Time has his role in the universe, so should Life. What that means in our reality I don’t know. When you get to school we will study this and so I think it’s time to begin the process of your treasure hunting because, while it appears time is on your side to some extent, it continues to move forward whether we want it to or not.”

“I thought you weren’t down for all that?”

“It’s our best plan right now. If it fails to produce the results we need, we’ll have some opportunity to figure something else out.”

She walked slowly along the trail she’d made over months of going to visit Snowman. It was hardly visible and she-

Fell to the ground in a pooling of blood because she was shot.