Her sleep was, to put it kindly, restless. She tossed, she turned, she grumbled about Kes' snoring while being careful not to actually wake the little chainsaw up. The whole process was miserable and she had no recourse but to suffer through it. She was tempted to just get up and throw away the whole idea of getting sleep, but that was the path to even more suffering, as well she knew. On the bright side, she didn't have a phone to stare at for countless hours while lamenting the fact that she wasn't asleep, nor did she have the ever-present clock indicator on that phone to let her know exactly how much she was screwing herself over. It didn't help things as much as she might have liked, but it still kept things from spiraling completely out of control. All things considered, it sucked but at least it didn't suck as badly as it could. The process eventually boiled down to her actually counting sheep, a thing she'd have scoffed at in ages past but really couldn't come up with better solution to than she had at that moment. She made it to 5,386 before she passed out in earnest.

  "Man, took you long enough," said a darkly handsome stranger on the edge of her consciousness. I was beginning to wonder if we'd even get to have this chat tonight."

  "Oh great, another mysterious visitor. You'd think I'd have run out of you lot by now."

  "Come now, Len, don't tell me you've already forgotten about me," the man said with a smirk.

  "Pitch."

  "The very same."

  It was strange seeing him in a proper fleshy form like Cammie, but she still caught on to his presence quick enough once the cobwebs had faded. The form he had taken might best be described as 'dapper'. A proper English gentleman adorned with top hat, monocle, and the very same cane that she wielded when she chose to draw upon those shadowy powers that held immense risk.

  "What's with the wardrobe change?"

  "I told you that I was going to be undergoing changes now that you'd inflicted a more specific form of contract on me. What do you think?" So asking, he did a slight twirl then removed his hat and dropped into a courtly bow. "Does it suit me?"

  "I mean, it's less creepy than the whole shadowy doom and gloom that you had going on before, but it's not like it changes anything about you. Honestly, it's a little creepier that you seem to care about how I think you look."

  "Everyone's a critic. Fine, enough with the pleasantries. Let's talk about your thrall."

  "You mean Cammie."

  "Yes, if that's what you insist on calling it."

  "What's there to talk about?"

  "Do you even realize what you're doing to her? How you're molding her? That shouldn't be possible."

  "Go on," she managed to bite back the instinctive 'what the hell is that supposed to mean' by sheer force of will. Somehow, she knew that was the reaction he was aiming for and she refused to give in to his cryptic nonsense.

  "We are creatures of imagination, formed from the subconscious in an instant and given permanent form. There was the briefest moment when you reforged her when that change was possible anew, you could've made a perfect slave and reveled in it. Instead you created a pet. That should have been her whole existence upon assimilating. How are you able to change her even now?"

  "Uh, by talking to her, I guess? You mean she's actually taking some of it to heart? How do you even know that?"

  "As the primary, I get to have a certain level of understanding of the Thralls that no one else is privy to. I can feel the fabric of her being shifting as she continues to converse with you. It's... unsettling."

  "It's unsettling that she's able to grow beyond a single moment in time? Seems pretty normal to me."

  "But that's the thing, isn't it? We're not supposed to BE normal. We aren't supposed to be like the rest of you mortals. The fact that you're able to do that to her makes me wonder what else you can do. Wonder... and worry."

  "Is that supposed to be some sort of threat? I thought we'd been over this already. You work for me, not the other way around."

  "Of course I work for you, you simpleton," Pitch snapped, adopting a tone that she'd never heard him take: genuine anger. "Every fiber of my being is now committed to the task of keeping the both of us alive while on your fool errand to not ruffle feathers or do something that violates your oh-so-precious morals. A part of that task is dependent on being able to predict the course of action as you encounter more of my kind. You will have to shackle many more of us if you're even to have the slightest chance of surviving what's to come and I can't have those expectations changing just because you happened to have a conversation that made one of the Thralls reconsider their existence."

  "Sounds to me like you're gonna have to learn to adapt, bucko. I'm not about to change my approach to relationships with my shadowy doom servants just because the biggest and baddest of those doom servants is a tad uncomfortable. It's not how I roll."

  "Are you going to insist on being difficult at every damn step of this journey?"

  "I'd think that would be obvious by now, of course I am."

  "Don't you get it, Len," Pitch said with an exasperated sigh. "This is not a game we're playing."

  "Oh fuck off with that," Len snapped. "Don't think for an instant that I've believed that a single damn thing that's happened to me in this world is a fucking game. I'm dancing on the razor's edge every fucking second. I'm spending every goddamn moment of my life wondering what the next disaster that's going to show up is going to be and how I can possibly make my way through it without blowing everything. I'm wondering what happens to me if the real Lenore dies on whatever quest she's been summoned to undertake, I'm wondering what happens to her if I'M the one to die, and I'm wondering how I can keep these honestly wonderful people alive as everything comes to a head with Claymar and his goons. You really think I have time to just sit back and feel bad about the fact that I'm maybe not making you perfectly comfortable as you deal with some sort of metaphysical crisis of conscience?"

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

  She paused for a second to catch her breath. That rant had been a bit more than she'd intended on getting into at the moment but she'd meant every word of it and felt good to have it out. A serious problem of the current environment that she was stuck in was that the practice of psychology was a good five hundred years off at the very best unless she felt like founding a school and that meant that she really didn't have a confidential ear to talk to about all of this. Certainly not one that could give her solid unbiased advice or prescribe medication to help her get through things. To say nothing of the fact that if she ever did get back home there'd be no way to have an honest conversation with even the best of shrinks that wouldn't lead to her occupying a small padded room for years to come. It was frustrating as hell.

  "You say that this is a problem, but doesn't it just boil down to you not being able to control the board exactly as you see fit. Shouldn't that be my job, anyway?"

  "You don't even accept our powers unless you absolutely have to. You really expect me to believe that you have what it takes to manage a full force of my kind to tackle the unknowable horrors that are readying themselves to take you on?"

  "Hold up, maybe let's talk about the unknowable horrors part again. You've mentioned before that now that there are two of you living... in me? Maybe we ought to ask that question first: ARE you living in me, how's THAT work?"

  "No, we're not literally living inside you, Len," Pitch said with a chuckle. More like we're psychically linked and dependent on your existence. Your mind is connected to the plane on which we primarily exist and that allows us to... 'feed' isn't quite the right word for it, but it's about as close to one as works in your understanding."

  "Great, I've got a pair of parasites and I'm advertising that I'm open to more."

  "Close enough, I suppose."

  "That would've been a great opportunity for you to assure me that you weren't doing that," Len pointed out.

  "Apologies," he (that pronoun definitely seemed to apply now). "I'm quite devoted to the obligation of speaking only the truth to you. Were I to waver from that, our relationship would break down and I don't see how we could move forward effectively."

  "Oh come off it, you know that I don't take a damn thing you say at face value or even necessarily as truth. A little white lie sure as hell isn't what's going to change that."

  "Nevertheless, I must adhere to this."

  "Right, right," Len shrugged, accepting that she wasn't going to get any farther on that front. "Look, it's going to take me a while to figure this shit out but I don't see how Cammie growing could possibly be a bad thing. Growth makes us stronger, it lets us adapt to new circumstances and assimilate info that makes us better people."

  "We're not people, Len. You know that fact perfectly well."

  "Fine, it will make you better shadow beasts or whatever you want to call yourselves. Adaptation is a fundamental skill of existence. If, somehow, all the other beings in this grand game of yours don't possess the ability to do that, there's all the more reason to embrace the fact that with me you can. It's an amazing edge. All those other things know to do is consume. That's their only method of getting stronger and it's a pretty basic trick. We just need to figure out how to use it to our advantage if another one of your kind shows up. Speaking of which, can you actually detect them or anything useful like that? It'd be pretty unfortunate if they can just show up out of nowhere on us."

  "It doesn't work like a radar or anything like that. I can sometimes feel one poking at the edges of my awareness, but I won't know for certain that one's close to us until they're actually on top of us. Depending on how powerful they are, of course."

  "And what about us? You mentioned that they were more likely to see us because of how I adopted Cammie rather than letting you devour her."

  "We shine a touch brighter, for lack of a better example. It'll become more obvious as you gain more 'adoptees' but for the moment, it's a relatively slight tug. They might be able to track you down easily enough if they actually reached the city, but it wouldn't take me that long to notice them and I'd likely be able to warn you in time."

  "That's... not very encouraging."

  "My apologies again. Perhaps next time you'll consider my advice more carefully before charging blindly into a fundamental rearrangement of our existence based on your petty moralistic whims rather than the reality that you are in a fight for your very survival and you don't get the luxury of being a good person to survive."

  "Mate, I'm not so deluded that I think I'm a good person, I'm just doing what I can to make sure that I can live with myself at the end of the day."

  "How quaint, I'm more concerned with you actually LIVING to the end of the day. Perhaps you should spend a bit more time on the same concern."