Something changed.

An opening to let in someone

who shouldn't be

from a place

that shouldn't exist.

A small shift

that changed everything.

Aj stirred in its slumber.

Alarms clamored.

As its watchers scrambled to alertness.

Chiaroscuro: the title of an art museum display Aida once viewed featuring an array of Caravaggio's high-contrast artworks. This place took his works and cranked them to maximum in real life as all but black and white ceased to exist beyond a few shades of near-white or off-black.

Lying on an unidentifiable dark surface, Aida scrunched her face, woozy and unable to see clearly. Every part of her body strained as though every sense squinted. Every sensation skewed just slightly off norm.

The identical twin of the Thorn they left behind stabbed out above her. Either Thorns all looked the same, the Thorn traveled with them, or the same one existed simultaneously in Earth and Vale.

Towering, pure-white cliffs loomed tall on either side, height and distance unclear or perhaps unknowable. The valley between ran straight to each horizon. There it met with a perfectly-straight white line stretching across the pure-black dome of heaven to join with the valley on the far side. She assumed the line arced, but for all her senses could make of this place some unearthly geometry might allow a straight line.

Dense snarls of thorns varying from hand- to body-length choked the space between the stark heights of the cliffs, thrusting sharp from twining, snaking stems. Gossamer lines skeined through them: strung wires or huge spiderwebs? The murderous tangle pressed close about them, confining them to a claustrophobic space barely larger than her room back in the nursing home.

"We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto," she said softly, pressing a hand against the surface upon which she lay. By resistance and texture she guessed rubber, dense Styrofoam, hard-packed soil, or some blend of the three.

Aside from the Valeer who stood reverently caressing the Thorn's curves, the others swayed, squinted, or rolled their shoulders in vain attempts to get comfortable. This place of light/anti-light made their faces hard to look at for long, every feature etched into a hard relief that shifted starkly every time they moved.

Fallon brushed himself off as though this place made him unclean and motioned for everyone to gather.

"Everyone knows there is no tarrying in the Vale." His voice distorted strangely, though Aida couldn't tell whether the cause lay in her ears or the syrupy air. "Likewise it never bodes well to leave the Black Court waiting."

He barked orders as he approached the Valeer, the man still... intimate with the Thorn.

"I could use a minute to adjust, if you do adjust anyway. Why no tarrying?" Aida 's imagination populated the canyon with eight-legged monstrosities. "Giant spiders lurking in those webs?"

Fallon looked at her like she'd made an inappropriate joke.

Aida took a deep breath, uncertain whether the air possessed a chalky tinge, a slippery feel, or both. If it was air. They weren't suffocating anyway.

An exchange of sign language between Feral and White Spiral that hurt her eyes to watch resolved in Feral angrily hauling Aida's still-protesting body back onto her shoulder. She barely snatched up her toiletry kit before she became a potato sack again.

White Spiral's eyes darted as her fists clenched and unclenched, bone-mask giving her an especially ghoulish look in this light. Ghillie stood stock-still, her camouflage performing the opposite role here with every twig and leaf adorning it edged in white neon.

"Valeer, take us to the Black Court." Fallon tugged at the Valeer, but the man seemed to not hear, groaning in pain, pleasure, or both.

White Spiral took several slightly-off-balance steps, shoved Fallon aside, and wrenched the Valeer away from his precious Thorn. His mumble-and-rub routine returned with feverish intensity as she pulled him away.

"Valeer, we go to the Black Court." A hard edge came to Fallon's voice. "Now."

A breeze passed through the thorny clearing in which they stood, carrying a barely-audible, creaking moan. Wind through a copse of dead trees. Except no trees and a mere breath of wind; not nearly enough to produce such a sound.

Feral shifted uneasily beneath Aida, moaning. Aida felt her tremble. "What was that?"

White Spiral shook the Valeer.

"The 'why one does not tarry.'" Fallon put his face in the Valeer's. "You like Thorns, yes? Take us to the Black Court and you can stroke the Thorn there until your fingers fall off, just get us there. Do you understand me?"

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He pushed White Spiral away and held the Valeer's shoulders as the man stared despondently at the Thorn and moaned again. "My life may have been torn to shambles by these wretched orders, but I am not going to end it here devoured by the Mourne, damn you. Get moving!"

The not-breeze blew through again stronger, the moan louder and ending in a sob. Aida wondered if her imagination inflated the sound's menace or if Feral's trembling did the trick. Whatever could make Feral afraid... Aida broke out in a cold sweat, craning her neck in search of some horror-movie creation scuttling through the hard shadows.

When the Valeer finally took his first stumbling steps towards the thicket of thorns pressing close about them, everyone released their breath and clustered behind him. He walked towards the tangle as though the seemingly-impenetrable mass of jabbing barbs wasn't even there. Just before impaling himself, he twisted, sidestepped, ducked, or weaved. Each time, Aida suddenly caught the trick of the thorns; a debunked magic trick or optical illusion after learning its secrets. As obviously harmless as each seemed after they passed, the way ahead always looked deadly as ever.

"How's he doing that?" Aida gasped, clinging tightly to Feral's coat as they stepped around a thorn she then recognized as a shadow given seeming substance by the harsh light.

Fallon shrugged. "He is a Valeer."

"Thanks," Aida said sarcastically.

Fallon glanced back with a frown and furrowed brow. "To know what he does, I would have to be made a Valeer as well and thus unable to explain it to you. In the Vale, he sees what we do not or perhaps we see what he does not. Whichever it is, to be wise of the Vale you must be stripped of all else. Slavants of whatever purpose lose much, but a Valeer's slavanting consumes so much that none retain the capacity to communicate after. Thus, only the Valeer can hope to understand the Vale but no one can hope to understand the Valeer."

"Slavant?"

An exaggerated roll of the eyes.

"Stop treating me like a child!" she shouted, her voice distorting. "This is all new to me."

"Stop asking questions even a child would know and I shall treat you likewise," Fallon snapped back.

"You say these things as if I know what they mean, then are annoyed when I don't."

"Every child knows the things you ask. If you wish to be spoken to as an adult, act the part."

Aida punched Feral's shoulder in frustration, earning an annoyed elbow jab in return. "We don't have any of these things where I come from! How can you expect me to know them?"

"You really try to tell me you know absolutely nothing of Vale and Valeer? Slavants? The Black Court?" His mouth fell slack. "In the remotest reach of the The All, every one of these are familiar to even the most ignorant menial. Even barbarian tribes cut off by the Kiss retain some memory."

"Well, congratulations, you found the exception," she said, not willing to ask about 'menials', 'The All' or 'the Kiss' lest she draw more scorn. "You win the booby prize."

After a moment staring at her, he sighed and sagged, turning his gaze back to the pathless path the Valeer tread before them. "Father, did my dishonor deserve so great a punishment?"

A cutting remark died on Aida's lips as they suddenly stepped out of the thicket and onto... a road? Not a road in the sense of paving or any other signs of civilization, but an arrow-straight path cleaving through the jagged bramble. In many places long thorns crossed above, but never blocked or impeded.

"What's this?"

Fallon straightened and half-closed his eyes, speaking as if reciting from memory. "And should you abandon one verse to seek another entry in the Book of Verses, stray not from the straight path, my sisters and brothers. Be wary of the Mourne for it... for it..."

He frowned and glared at Aida with such heat she hugged tighter to Feral.

"What's wrong? What did I do now?"

"I used to recite the entirety of the Ebon Saga from heart, but your filthy language has ripped it from me."

"My language did what?" Aida glared back. "How can you blame me for that?"

Fallon threw an angry, dismissive gesture over his shoulder and jogged to catch up with the Valeer's erratic wander. If Aida didn't know better, she'd think the Valeer was drunk, many times on the brink of wandering into the thorns before lurching away with inches to spare.

They followed close behind.

Perhaps an hour passed, Fallon refusing to speak further and the others all apparently mutes. Aida's sense of time and distance distorted just as perspective, sound, and even touch did. When she asked how long they had to go, Fallon non-answered "what is a footstep or heartbeat to the Vale?"

Only the constant stream of the Valeer's soft ramble, Feral's increasingly-heavy breathing, and their strangely echoing footfalls broke the silence, all blending together to a long, monotonous, monochromatic, miserable experience unmarred by conversation, landmark, or event. Though the path branched on occasion, the Valeer barely noticed, shambling down one or another as if by chance. He often strayed to caress, tickle, or sing to random thorns until Fallon prodded or White Spiral roughly shoved him on his way.

Plaintive cries occasionally echoed distantly behind them. Each time Aida peered intently into the bizarro landscape behind them, half-hoping, half-fearing to catch a glimpse of whatever the Mourne was. She saw nothing.

An interminable stretch later they suddenly stopped, their path ending in a Thorn hollow over-arched by a spread of thorny branches so interwoven the place seemed a cave. A patchwork of jagged light patterned the ground, dappling them with tiger stripes of pure whiteness as they approached the Thorn.

"Take us through, Valeer," Fallon commanded, carefully avoiding eye-contact with Aida.

The Valeer groped at the Thorn like a blind man trying to read a lover's face.

Feral collapsed. Aida let out a cry of surprise and landed atop her. Ghillie helped Aida to stand as White Spiral kicked Feral amid a storm of angry gestures. Chest heaving and breathing ragged, Feral lay otherwise unmoving.

"What's wrong with her? Fallon? Fallon! Talk to me." When he refused to even look at her, Aida's temper snapped. She pried away from Ghillie, holding herself painfully erect. "Fallon, I order you to tell me what's wrong with her!"

He turned to face her slowly, teeth gritted. "She dies."

Aida looked down at Feral, horrified. "She what? Why?"

"Starving you might say."

"Starving? Don't you have any food you can give her?" Aida wobbled over to Feral and dropped down beside her. She barely knew and even feared the woman, but Fallon's indifference to her plight pissed Aida right off.

Aida's fingers searched for the bone mask's edges, seeking an edge or strap she might loosen. To her growing horror she found nothing. The mask fused tight from below her nose to the join with her neck: no mask, but bare, seamless, fused skull. Goosebumps prickled as shivers of revulsion ran down Aida's bent spine, tinged with vertigo as the Valeer's disturbing caress coaxed this new Thorn to spiral loose.

"Who did this to her?" Aida looked between White Spiral and Ghillie, gut clenched. "To them?"

"She did, after a sense." Fallon sighed. "I bear food, but none that might nourish her. I suppose a barbarian menial may be forgiven for not understanding Ferals."

"You're the one being barbaric! Wait. Ferals, multiple? I thought she was Feral? What does she... they eat?"

"You. She was meant to drink water-" he pronounced the word strangely, holding the t a moment too long "-bearing your essence when we collected you. So too were your other Ferals, but nothing worked the way it should."

"My Ferals?" Aida stared at Ghillie and White Spiral. "They're all Ferals? What's my essence? Can't we just give her some now?"

He shook his head. "The Vale is too unpredictable. Nothing works quite the way it should here."

"So we're just going to leave her?"

Fallon stared at her. "Of course not. Ferals are too expensive to abandon so casually. Carrying you has worn her out, but she will likely survive until we reach the Black Court."

"Likely?" Aida felt her mind and body teetering the brink of shutdown: overloaded, overtired, overstimulated, and out of their depths. Tired, sore, joints aching, sick, frustrated, hungry, confused, and overwhelmed, she wished Fallon had never showed up to drag her away in the first place. Right now she'd take back the predictable doldrums of nursing home life in a heartbeat.

Rising painfully and unstably from Feral's side, she prepared to unload on Fallon, but the Valeer turned from the Thorn, knelt, took her hand, and held it to his forehead. "Mother."

"What?" She and Fallon said simultaneously, exchanging equally surprised looks.

Everything folded inward. The Vale departed and left them someplace even worse.