Eternity woke up. He didn’t open his eyes. He didn’t move the slightest muscle. Nothing to show he was awake. Amon?

Look, I sleep too.

Eternity nearly sighed, but, then again, something had woken him up. Slowly, surely, he grabbed his Flesh, turning his sense of touch up to extreme levels. The slightest brushes of pressure against his right arm nearly made Amon spear a tendril through whoever was there before she realized it was Drake. Neither of them spoke as Et-

Jay increased his senses further, moving them up to their maximum limit quickly. His practice with them back in the Academy made sure he wouldn’t have a seizure when he did this, for his brain was already used to the incredible sensitivity. Then he felt it. The pressure of the room was off. There was someone other than Drake, breathing… at the foot of their bed. A sharp object slowly lifted above their head, parting the air. Amon counted down for the both of them. Three, two, one, GET THAT BASTARD.

Jay’s eyes opened, and he altered them with Flesh to instantly accommodate the cloying darkness as a revolver formed in his hands, six bullets of perfect Onyx rocketing into their attacker’s chest and head. His Storm Sapphire formed as a gauntlet over his left hand, lightning crackling down it into a vicious punch he stopped right before hitting his now-fallen opponent in the head.

Drake was up now, teleporting out of bed to Jay’s side, a shadowy dagger at his ready. “Get his mask off,” Jay told Drake, grabbing the man and holding him down with bonds of hardened air.

Drake grabbed it, tearing it off. Jay nearly stumbled back, but didn’t. Short blond hair peeped up over the man’s sparkling black eyes. Jay didn’t get the chance to choke out a warning before their entire building disappeared, sucked away.

Eternity woke up to Catherine roughly shaking him. Blearily, he opened his eyes and noted a fiery cocoon surrounding them. Crystal floated in the orb with them, but Drake was nowhere to be found. “W-where’s Drake?,” Jay hissed, suddenly realizing he was floating in midair. He flailed for a couple moments, the orb of fire they were in going out before he gave up. The fire reappeared, and he suddenly realized that he was creating it, not Crystal.

Catherine grabbed him, preventing him from floating into the fire. “To move, just think yourself somewhere.”

Jay pulled himself upright. The action was disconnected from any sort of magic-you just had to think, and you’d fly. “Drake.”

Catherine shrugged. “I don’t know. We were waiting for you to come out of unconsciousness before finding him.”

Jay nodded. “Then we go.”

The orb flickered out and Jay, for the first time, noticed where they were. Endless black surrounded them, with no light visible anywhere. Memories assaulted him.

Jay.

They stopped, and he came back to himself, staring at the darkness. “The Void. We’re in the Void.”

Amon pulled out of his body and floated next to him. She pointed at a current. That one?

Jay looked around and suddenly noted all the currents in the Void, now that he had the knowledge to identify them. Yes. We need to get to a city before we can deal with finding Drake.

Jay guided Catherine and Crystal to the current. Amon stepped back into him, and tendrils reached out of his wrist, helping his hand pull apart the metaphysical barriers of the current. The currents were part of the Void, but, like most of the Void, worked in confusing ways. You could walk through a current and feel nothing. You could check every overlapping dimension in the Void and the current would be there in every single one, but you’d never find one where it was solid. If currents were dimensional, you’d be able to find a dimension in which they were solid. If they were ethereal, many would be able to touch them.

And yet they worked, and that was all the Void cared about.

Pulling apart the outer membrane, he guided everyone inside. It closed itself, quickly sealing them into the current. They started to move, just as a barrier formed around them, one of Force, sustained by Jay and Amon. It cleaved through the magic permeating the current, which would have otherwise slowly dissolved them. “What is this?,” Crystal asked, attempting to illuminate their surroundings.

“A Current,” Jay said, giving Amon full control of the bubble protecting them in order to speak. “They permeate the Void and let you travel across it.”

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Crystal nodded, leaning back. She didn’t press on how he knew, which was something he liked about her. He took the strain off Amon once again, and they held the bubble together. Soon, Amon poked a tendril out of the bubble and through the wall of the current. We’re here.

Jay dismantled the bubble, pulling apart the walls of the Current. They jumped out, the dissolving magic too weak to do any damage when they were simply entering or exiting. The real danger was when you were moving in the Current at mach speeds, and you’d hit far more of the magic than you would staying still.

A massive city loomed in front of them. Black, twisted spires, and spiked walls were but a few of the delightful sights. Jay sighed. Goddamnit, Drake. Why’d you have to go to Moon’s Dream?

Well, this is shaping up to be pretty annoying. You want to use… his mask? Or one of our own?

A mask appeared in his mind when Eternity dared to slightly open the box containing his memories. Then he shut it. The mask was what Eternity had used at all times when in the Void. The left eye was bloodred. The right was a deep black, with maybe a slight tinge of deep purple to the center. The eyes drew you in, almost hypnotically. A crack cut through the mask’s right cheek, left on purpose. Purple and red tears flowed from the eyes. The rest of the mask was white with streaks of black running across it. It formed in his hands, somehow familiar. Then Jay shattered it with a brief flex of his fingers. We make our own.

Eternity made this mask before we met.

Jay nodded, a brief mental thanks going out for the information, before he and Amon spooled out quicksilver into a cracked mask, half of a whole. It was completely silver metal, with no eyeholes at all. Force rippled, and the mask settled, perfectly made for his face. Blood, Bone, and Flesh acted as one, a bright red dot forming in the eyehole, an eye for him to use when he had the mask on. Finally, a touch of fire gave the mask a perfect sheen. If you looked into the shiny surface, you could barely see a reflection of dancing flames.

Then came the other half. Onyx and sapphire appeared to create the other half of the mask, strands of deep sapphire blue cutting through the dark onyx surface. With a thought, the mask shifted, and the blue turned to black, the onyx shifting into the sapphire to create the inverse of what had been there before. Force smoothed out the mask, Blood, Bone, and Flesh generating an eye of swirling twilight, with the night sky visible in the eyehole. The Lonely Star was clearly visible, at the forefront of the sky. Amon’s influence was shown as well, her metal bleeding through the crystal and creating small stars of quicksilver on its surface.

Jay sighed, holding the mask. He turned to Crystal and Catherine. “Make yourselves masks. Of anything you want. No one shows their faces in the City of Moon’s Dream.”

Avarice stared down the three arrivals from his spot in the alleyway. One wore a mask, half-metal, half-crystal. Another, a woman, simply covered her face in flames. The last had a swirling mask of water, somehow impossible to see through. “Two Simples, one Grand, boys! It’s a good haul we’re gonna get,” he turned around and told his team, waiting behind them.

They were undoubtedly not new to the city, but he hadn’t seen them before, so they didn’t know about him. The masks were probably bought from three different cities, given how different they were from each other. “Where’d they buy em?,” Avarice asked, almost as an afterthought, turning around again. If they’d bought em’ from Moon’s Dream, they’d be worth almost nothing here.

His expert, a scraggly man behind him, who claimed to have traveled to every city in this god-forsaken place, smiled. “Never seen masks like these b’fore, sir.”

Avarice shrugged. That was a definite that they didn’t come from Moon’s Dream, at least. “Well, then, boys? CHARGE!”

They surged out of the alleyway, and the three turned to face them. At once, he noted the starry eye of the one with the Grand mask. The other was a deep red. That’d fetch an even higher price. The one wearing the Grand mask waved at the other two. “I’d like to test out my Storm Sapphire. Can you wait a moment?,” he asked.

The others shrugged. Suddenly, the blue lines going down the crystalline side of the mask glowed, and spread out to replace the black, which flowed into the vacated lines. SO MUCH MONEY!

Then the man snapped, and a gauntlet of blue sapphire formed, a storm crackling deep inside. Lightning coalesced in the man’s palm and shot at their group. Avarice chuckled and activated his best barrier charm. Then he ran at the man.

The man was the same distance away. He moved his legs. Why wasn’t he going? Avarice looked down. “Oh,” he said, after seeing the charred stumps.

Then the next blast of lightning came, and Avarice was no more.

Jay stared out through the mask at his hand, where the gauntlet of Storm Sapphire rested. It continued to crackle, the depths holding a storm. Reabsorbing it, Jay turned to his friends. “It doesn’t want to change. I’d have to combine it with some Onyx if I want to change its shape.”

Catherine shrugged. “That’s just a slight inconvenience.”

Jay nodded. “Onyx is Change. Sapphire is the Storm. What else?”

Crystal turned to look at him. “It’ll depend on you, and whatever jewel you both choose to accept.”

Dark blue crystal crawled out of Jay’s arm, forming into a sword. There was a storm held within, guided by the onyx he’d combined with the sapphire. Amon’s tendrils reached in through the handle, but then they stopped, just before she could turn the sword into a combination of her and him. Later?

Yup.