“When we first met, Nadia and I,” Melissa said, “it was the summer. All us kids were taken down to the lake for the day, and I’d chosen to fish.”

I flew through the air stuck on that bone hook of hers. A wriggling thing like the fish in her recollection. Below me she hovered in the air; dragonfly wings buzzing away to preserve her stillness. The street below was still empty of people save the racing dot that I presumed was Ina. Though I didn’t have long to observe, Melissa’s back arched—my trek through air hadn’t concluded—flinging me back-first into the ceiling of a separate building.

She said, “I was alone—I hadn’t learned to swim yet—and her being her decided to rectify that. Joining me there on the pier, dripping wet with her hair pushed back, as I was mid-struggle against a great fish hiding below the surface.”

I had no idea why she was rambling about something so long ago. Roaring, I pushed through pain and confusion to find my feet. Cast a quick Atomic Glory to set fire to the hook curled through my shoulder, laughing as the flames scurried up the vine of muscle connecting the two of us in enmity. However, it took only one hand-spell for her body to still, to fall, and to shatter sideways. Slick with a Mutagenic vernix—the remnant of her quick-change—she burst from the flesh-shell that was her body.

Tumbling through the air, I unleashed a flailing flurry of Atomic Glories. Most went wide—rage and a lost eye made for poor accuracy—while the few that would strike clean, she escaped via rapid shedding of her body, afterimages of dermis and fat sizzling to cascading embers. A trail of dancing nothing marked her descent from the sky to our new rooftop arena.

Embers of nothing dancing in the wake of her descent from the sky to our new rooftop arena.

“She cheered me on,” she stated. “Me, the littlest Knitcroft who stood in her sister’s shadows. No one outside of my family looked at me, but she did. I was embarrassed—for her taste in who to root for—when the fish yanked the line and pulled me off the pier. Part of me was happy that it’d take me under the water—so I wouldn’t have to face the disappointment I’d expected. But there was never expecting Nadia. She dove after me, sliced through the water without fear, and took my hand hauling me up toward the sun. The sun danced across her skin, stored the memory of itself in her eyes, and I forget everything she said—I was busy falling in love.”

I laughed, “Why are you talking like I’m not—”

Vind’fulla—Melissa’s Baron—crashed into me. His antlers, for all that you could call the writhing neurons atop his head such, entangled themselves about my middle, my thighs, and under my armpits. Each attempt at escape earned me a muscle-failing shock. So away we went as he carried me off the roof and into the glass hide of another building. My body, the arrowhead, turned smooth hide into a vitreous web of cracks—a delightful snap behind my ears told me so.

“The second time I met Nadia,” Melissa sang, “was in my family’s dye house—her father had visited for work reasons—where she stood alone in shifting pools of sunset colors. Dark oranges shifting hues toward shining white before spiraling back up through pinks toward rose. So tranquil it pained me to intrude—I was scared that you’d dart off before I could say anything—but it hurt more to imagine doing nothing.”

The building shed glass—light splitting shards rained around me and Vind’fulla—which Melissa quickly took hold of with her field-spell. Glass melted, not from heat but by change, and flowed through air to shape into the head of a dragon. I hadn’t seen one like it since my birthday—the festival—when the town would make one to honor the Godtender of Collections who’d saved the knowledge of the Old World, what we’d need to sift through to make a new one.

“Inviolate Star,” I incanted, tongue nearly numb as the rambunctious shocks scattered the commands of my body.

It formed in the mouth of the dragon—a poison pill—which spoiled Melissa’s work. She was a Baron, so it wasn’t enough to cancel her effects outright, but it’d make the process more of a fight, even if ultimately a losing one. Most of that fight, on my part, was a losing one. Revelation is an esoteric Court at the best of times, and while its Sorcery moved from Real to Conceptual and back with ease. It struggled to stay on one side for long. Mutation, on the other hand, was extremely tactile; a gentle nudge that pushed things from their “proper” path to a new one. Leaving things largely Real, save the moment where it nudged. I had to disrupt that nudge.

Melissa continued, “I stepped forward—though she’d say I ran—to take her side. Nadia looked at me like there was nothing else in the world, nothing else that mattered, and asked how all of this worked. I explained that the fibers, our cottons and silks, were photoreceptive. Sucking the color of the light that shined on them. Of course, I struggled through the explanation—it was hard to remember vocabulary when impressing a beautiful girl—and when I’d found the limit of my tongue and studies…my heart shriveled into a corner thinking I’d fucked up.”

Melissa flung herself from the opposing roof. Her reared back arm Mutated into the glass dragon’s head—she’d given up on making the full thing—and flew with her, a mirrored-gauntlet whose fangs reflected my own. Snarling in defiance of an old flame’s love I was committed to denying. It was that same love—as well as a dragon's head, the size of which was meant for parades and not boxing—that Melissa pistoned into me a half-second after Vind’fulla let me go. Behind me the glass gave way. The shards ricocheted light into my eyes—Melissa may have caused that, or my luck is just that bad—blinding me as I fell through the air’s teasing fingers and collided with the patterned hardwood of the atelier we’d crashed into.

Mannequins proved horrible guards as the force of our arrival toppled them all. Tables, sewing machines, and rolls of fabric fell with them. I tried to suck down air to replace the breath Melissa’s punch had evicted from my lungs, but the weight of her glass-wreathed fist was oppressive to their function. I rolled my eye toward her face—to see if she meant for me to suffocate—and discovered tears, ugly tears pouring faucet-fast from a face mauled by grief.

“Instead, Nadia hugged me,” Melissa cried. “Told me we could look up the answer later, or just appreciate not knowing. ‘Mysteries are pretty,’ she’d said while never once looking away from me. At the risk of no longer being a mystery—being pretty—I’d told her my name. She said it was pretty too.”

“Is this some torture you’ve devised?” I asked. “Are you trying to Resurrect something in me?”

From within my spirit, Sphinx begged, “Nadia, let me out. You need every advantage against—”

No, I thought, you need to heal. Every second you do makes a comeback possible.

“Then have me in pieces, in shards,” Sphinx said. “Those large enough to rend and reap. I won’t rest as you’re broken.”

Sphinx arched her back, breaching my spirit and spine like water, the eyes of her pelt burning bright before releasing a score of Atomic Glories. Long, harsh flames that pushed against the floor. Lifted me, that glass fist, and Melissa up into the air. I just had to roll over, slip free, and—Melissa splattered my hopes beneath her palm. She’d shifted into her chimeric warform—her hand broke the glass dragon’s head—and leveraged the weight of her muscles and extensive modifications to return me to the floor.

“The third time wasn’t a unique meeting,” Melissa admitted. “I’d known her for a while, we were playing one day in the woods outside of town. We shouldn’t have been there, but Nadia loved to push the bounds and see what she could find. Our discovery that day was an entity, unbonded. And, having climbed the nearby Staircase, it took notice of us, chased us down deeper into the woods. I thought we were doomed.”

Her voice, deepened to a thunder’s rumble, shook down her arm into me. Pressed into my bones, marked them up like an inked-up thumb onto paper. Like Dad’s records. A sad song able to be played long into the future.

“I couldn’t stop crying,” Melissa said. “I couldn’t remember the Mother’s Prayer—my teachers and parents drilled it into us, but tears and fear hid the knowledge. Nadia, however, didn’t cry or forget or yell at me for crying and forgetting. No, she comforted me. Wrote that formation out so fast, and held me. Told me a story about her sister dealing with scarier things every night. About how this formation was better than the rest. Taught to her by a shining lady. I knew she didn’t have a sister, I knew it was just a story, but it worked. It brought me peace.”

“Alls below, get a life,” I screamed at her, goading her toward a misstep. “All I’m hearing is memories of my use toward you. Servitude dressed up as love!”

Vind’fulla stepped beside her, disappearing into the black wings of my lost vision in accordance to Melissa’s unspoken command. The wood became amorphous, a wet clay that rolled over my legs and wrists; hardened into manacles that held me firm for my crucifixion. Melissa raised her hand—it was the size of me, encompassed me—then slammed it down, smothering my vocal tirade. The floor buckled, cried out in abuse one last time, and broke, depositing us into a lower floor. Whose ceilings were just as high as the atelier’s. We picked up speed. Shattered the floor, shattered the one after, assisted by high ceilings and the accumulated debris of previous stops not taken.

“We waited six hours,” Melissa said, her words dragging through the air like a bridal train. “Talking about our dreams, our fears, our families, and it was in this conversation that she told me her real name—introduced me to Nadia. Not a unique meeting, but the most important.”

Six floors in total we fell. Melissa’s chimeric hands clutched the chunk of flooring I was bound to—wielding it like a shield. I felt each collision through my back, in my blood, to my teeth. In the midst of our fall, it’d begun to rain outside; fat droplets that slammed heedlessly into the lobby’s glass front—our final stop. The flooring and my bonds were reduced to splinters which rehomed themselves in my legs and arms, but I was free. Too broken to take advantage of it but still free.

Her shadow fell over me. A series of eyelids shuttered in examination of the ruin I’d become. Sphinx, just as broken as me with barely any time to heal, hobbled from my spirit to guard me. On three legs she stood, back arched and fangs bared. Her wings, one full and the other…healing, outstretched in defense. Melissa ignored her and enveloped me in her field-spell. She could’ve done it at any point in our fight—my spell resistance was locked away alongside my explosive fate—and I honestly couldn’t tell you why she’d not done it earlier. Ended this farce of a fight sooner.

Through bloody breaths—a rib had lanced my lung—I asked, “Why?”

“To most people, these are relatively small moments,” she stated. “Vignettes from a longer romance—meant to be longer still if life bent another way—but to Nadia, every moment, every memory, stood on the next. ‘Ours was a love built fastidiously,’ she’d say. Whether we fought or laughed, it all went back to that love.”

Melissa’s field-spell felt like kisses. Smelled like chai. Bent colors from what they were to what they could be. It overpowered me with its softness. Silenced the booming taiko that’d been my heart—it was a tempo not meant to last. Sphinx launched herself at Melissa, unwilling to let her treat my flesh as clay. However spirited the attempt, it couldn’t make up for the wounds that dragged her down—specters of fights past—allowing Vind’fulla to catch her with his antlers and escort her beyond reach of me. This was to be a private affair between Melissa and myself.

Melissa said, “The edifice of affection Nadia created, I’ll always cherish, but I want her to know that I’m freeing her now. From every responsibility, from every dream unmet, and from the duty she so nobly upheld when it comes to loving me. Nadia, I know you were never religious, but allow me to ask that Our Guiding Lady Who Shepherds the Dead greet you with a broad smile. Rest now, forever, and know that no matter what you’ll be a dear part of my story. Your parents will be in my story. I’ll climb as high as must so that someone in this broken world can remember you all. Can say that there was once a girl named Nadia Temple, and she was loved.”

As she spoke, she put me back together. Gently pulled apart muscle to slide bones back in place. Rewove said muscle to be just a bit better than before. She repaired my blood-drowned lung. Every bit of me the fight had broken she repaired. Then when she’d finished, she left.

“What the fuck?” I asked, stumbling to my feet—the new legs, because they were new legs, were still a smidge unfamiliar to me.

She ignored my question, passed by Vind’fulla—who at that point released Sphinx, and left the building we’d wrecked. I chased after her like a jar rolling down the stairs. Always close to falling, coming undone, but staying together for the next step. Sphinx hobbled after me, and together we stumbled into the rain where Melissa had sloughed off her steaming chimeric flesh. I called out to her as she swung herself onto Vind’fulla’s back.

“Is that it?” I asked. “You’re going to beat the shit out of me, rambling about some fucking scenes of our past, and then heal me!”

“You’re mad I healed you?” she asked.

Finger aloft, quivering with the violence of a sword, I shouted, “No. Yes. Alls below, why the fuck would you heal me rather than kill me? Why not kill me?”

Melissa slumped against Vind’fulla’s neck, shoulders shoved low from exhaustion. Her gaze to me was flat, not reading me like Amber or Secretary would, not seeing me like Sinaya. I was more like a thing to her. Fit for pity, exhaustion, but not true connection.

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“Cause you’ve done that yourself,” Melissa answered with a smile. “I was…I was just burying the woman I loved. She’d been gone for a long time, and I wanted to say goodbye.”

In her finally realizing that that Nadia was dead…I’d turned myself into a grave. A memorial to a better person smothered on the cusp of her entire life by all the world’s callousness. The rain stroked my hair down to my scalp. Patted at my clothes until they were heavy with moisture. At some point in my internal vigil—her words had stunned me harder than falling through six floors—Melissa had left. I didn’t know where. I didn’t really care. I was free. Alone in the rain of a city I’d doomed, but I was free.

Sphinx and I wandered in silence. When I’d tried to return her to my spirit, so she could heal, she’d placed a paw against my chest. Told me, “I want to enjoy the rain.” Far be it from me to keep her from getting her pelt wet if that’s what she wanted. Thinking back, she probably didn’t, and she walked with me—even though it had to hurt hobbling like that—for block after block. Never allowing space—from her side to my leg. We hobbled together, all the way to a square that was plenty familiar.

I’d met Secretary there before the wild hunt. Sphinx had greeted my emergence there after my date with Sinaya. It was a square with a beautiful fountain—that was off at the time—and very nice benches that I and Sphinx sprawled ourselves out on. Her flowing into my lap. Me flowing over its back. With a clear view above so many buildings down to the bay where the city’s eponymous gate looked exactly like what it was, a shabby relic of a time long since past.

It was there from my meager bench, I saw the horizon—the water—bulge like a pimple. Swelling and swelling, yet rather than how one reddens the flesh, this darkened the bay’s waters into ebon iridescence. When the bulge could swell no more, it burst, and from the bay what came forth shattered that old relic, its pieces falling beneath the water, while Marduk ascended into the sky.

Twice I’d encountered only a sliver of Marduk’s entity. The first was its belly and the second its back, but from the bench, so far away, I could finally see its awful entirety. Swimming in a sine motion through the air was a woman’s veiled face with a body plan melded in sick design to that of a leopard seal, its flesh, milky and luminescent, like the moon as it was in the Old World. Sporting more breasts than a woman, and to call them breasts would be generous because they stretched to exaggerative tentacular lengths, and split down said length to reveal mouths filled with a panoply’s worth of needle teeth that ran just below the dual areolas they had—eyes, in truth. While atop its back were jagged spikes—Atlantis, for those who knew—whereupon its head, sitting like a crown, was the spire that served as the throne’s center.

So large was it, that even far away down many hills and a few miles, my hands couldn’t block it from view, its mass spilling over the sides to tease sight of it, that awful sight, which threatened my mind’s cohesion. To think anything could be that big.

Before Sphinx or myself could fall to terror or melancholy about what had arrived, the rain stopped. Not stopped as in ended, but stopped as in still. Twirling spheres waiting for command—which came rather promptly. In unison, the raindrops vibrated into a tinny whine before striking harmony enough to carry a tune, a message.

“Hear me now, sons of Brightgate, for I come bearing grand news,” Marduk proclaimed, his voice heard by the entire city. “You have been chosen to receive a most glorious purpose, to aid me in finding that stage just beyond meager humanity. Terrifying as this news might be, try not to let it spoil your day, for what might at first feel like oppression is only the firm hand of a father trying to lift you up to a better place. A better world. The Lightless World.”

From where his entity swam in the sky, reality rippled and flipped like the tiles of a game. The underside of which was Abyssal blue, essentially black, and caused a cascading transition from Real to Conceptual; Marduk was spreading his territory. The people in the square, those on the streets nearby, and likely all across the district as well as the city, panicked. They dropped bags, food on skewers, anything that’d slow their escape. They didn’t know there was no escape.

“I win,” I muttered to myself and Sphinx. “I win. I win. I win?”

A phrase on repeat like a badly skipping record. I only wanted to see if there was a way to pronounce the words that didn’t taste like bile on my tongue. In the meantime, the Staircases opened, entities from the Menagerie stormed into the district—not even weakened as one would expect due to Marduk’s territory being established first, and flanking them were Lurkers and allies. I repeated myself, and Brightgate was at war.

* * *

Beneath the gloaming blanket of unReal sky, Sphinx and I listened to the dying cries of a city. There was the klaxon wail of an emergency broadcast instructing people to reach the shelter gates of their city segment. Tolling along were the bells of Tenders’ Row declaring the Nine’s palaces to be safe—not like the Nine showed for any of this. Of course, there were choral screams; defiant at fate’s dealing to them, terrified at entities they couldn’t fell, and mourning those already claimed and lost to death as if corpses could hear. Cymbal-sharp thunderclaps and bass-boom blasts of bullets and spells slipped through the orchestration of violence which congested every road, street, and alley. Lodgemembers fought Lurkers in the street only to strike meaty thuds on each downbeat.

“The city’s dying,” I stated.

Sphinx said, “They’re wont to do that on occasion.”

My hand found her hair, twined it between my fingers like the bars of a loom. Perhaps it was her nature, Revelation is composed of Stars after all, but even in that forced twilight it glistened. Sphinx purred in pleasure, her head settling into my chest. We basked in the purple glow of a shrine-lamp—its light sorcerous and committed to resist the pressing dark. It wasn’t much, resistance never had to be, but, dying though it was, the city still pushed back with every convulsion. Bony death throes intended for its conqueror to choke on.

Is this what Dad listened to? Everyone agreed he destroyed that first city, but what about the second and third and every sighting after…was that him? I didn’t want to think it was and yet that made more sense than the idea of him showing up to witness this. The noise, the mess, the bodies turned bulwarks, and the scent of smoky violence—I think someone lit a fire somewhere. My senses were overwhelmed alongside my sensibility. There was death, of that I’d seen plenty, but it was something frameable, romanceable. A committed nobility to fight and die in the name of…something. This was war. A city tumbling toward the grave. There was too much to frame.

Is that why there are historians? People who can sit from temporal distance, and look upon tragedy and travesty like a speck on time’s horizon—make it frameable. While a tad mythic, that’s what they did for Dad. Would they do that for me? I hope they don’t. Make a story of it, sure, dye these events with the colors of something causal—not necessarily palatable, we’re not seeking distortion here—just an arrangement that pulls something from all of this. It’s what I do—have done—am doing…

“You stalk great thoughts, Nadia,” Sphinx whispered, “but prey is easier caught with company.”

I said, “True, but it’s all running wild in my mind right now.”

“Pick one to catch,” she said. “The others can be killed later.”

“Where did I go wrong?” I asked.

Sphinx’s head tilted toward confusion. “Whoever said you did something wrong?”

“You. The Barons,” I answered. “Every time you said I was on the beleaguered path was a warning of that, wasn’t it? That I chose the wrong thing, again!”

“Nadia,” Sphinx purred, her face buried into my neck, “that’s not what it means. Who can judge, whether upstream or down the flow of consequence, the rightness or wrongness of an action?”

I waved my hand at the chaos that the city had fallen to. Sphinx chuckled at my offering of evidence, and shook her hair free of my fingers—she wanted the whole of me to listen.

Sphinx said, “This is what it is. Destruction and death—those coming as dates often—are a part of life. Many someones died to make this city’s first incarnation. Many died to create this one. Many die right now to usher in the next of whatever this place will be. These things happen.”

“No, they don’t,” I snapped. “People do things. Make decisions. I made a decision.”

Sphinx bobbed her head side-to-side. “Okay then, you did, but in that chain you have Marduk deciding he’d try to take this city. You decided to let this happen. Everyone is deciding to fight back. Nemesis, wherever this place’s woeful Lodgemaster hides, is deciding to do nothing.”

Sphinx gestured with her wing at the city, “Are you so important that your decision countermands all others?”

“No.”

“Is your choice more grave than the one who sought this battle in the first place?”

“No.”

“Is your—”

“Sphinx,” I shouted. “I…I get it, but I don’t accept it. I can’t.”

“You must,” she said. “This is the fruit of the beleaguered path, Nadia.”

“Atrocity?”

“Wisdom. The beleaguered path is not a condemnation of choices made,” Sphinx stated, “but a descriptor of how you walk the Canonical Path. To be beleaguered is to face trials and tribulation. Pulling wisdom from pain and growing toward enlightenment.”

“Then why point it out every time?” I bemoaned.

Sphinx kissed my cheek. “Would you not want to do your best in steering a love from pain if possible? Many days ago I told you that if the way was strewn with glass, I’d walk beside you, and still I’d do so. It doesn’t mean I want to see you bleed.”

Above us a gossiping clique of vampire squid mermaids flew past, cadavers hung from their toxic hooks—to where they took the bodies, I don’t know. Marduk’s entity, flying fortress it was, swam toward the city with breasts eager and drooling to sink teeth into its flank. Behind us the rolling din of violence pinged and ponged off the street’s buildings before hitting something and causing an alley-racer to barrel roll past us, snuffing out the shrine-lamp by way of decapitation.

“Am I the alley-racer, then?” I asked. “Pursuing enlightenment with destruction in my wake, apocalypse fluttering behind my every step, and living up to the bitter reality that as a hybridae I’m a walking curse whose life means another’s death?”

Sphinx said, “Only if you want it to. Decisions are what set you on the beleaguered path. They could just as soon get you off.”

Noting how that did nothing for my dour disposition, Sphinx decided to amend her statement.

“Nadia, there is nothing following you,” she said. “The agent spoke with…muddled accuracy, at best. If you don’t want this, the death and destruction, then you have to find new choices. Ones that may be hard for you to make, seemingly cruel on the face of it, and persevere. They may lead you off of the beleaguered path, they may not, but as someone who walks the Canonical Path your decisions—much like anyone’s—are tied into the tapestry of this world. You will make waves, of that unfortunately you can not escape, but whether the waves scatter to summon rainbows or drown these nation-seeds is within the purview of your decisions.”

“Could I have done anything different here?” I asked.

“You could’ve been less greedy,” Sphinx said. “Allow the Abyssal knight to perish, leave Mutation’s maiden at home, or reject the fealty of the mummer. Morning’s bard was a good choice though…I liked her. Shame.”

“I liked her too,” I said. “Why couldn’t I let go?”

Sphinx’s lips pursed, she had the answer but also the grace not to say it out loud. My smile stretched, wan and knowing, Just say it.

“You’ve already lost,” she said, “and though loss is life it’s never easy. Nadia, if you…”

“No, no,” I said, feeling forming drops along my lashes, “royalty isn’t supposed to show emotion at the natural flow of things. I’m a princess, so…and emotion got me this. I don’t deserve—”

Sphinx stretched her wings around me. Curtains from the world. In the dark of this intimacy, there were just the blazing stars that were her eyes, and they cried for me who’d cried so much already.

“No crown sits on your head, and lest it be an illusion,” she whispered, “we’re on a bench. Not a throne. Be mortal enough to cry, my love, royalty can wait.”

And so I cried. Not tears of shock or rage at what was taken from me. I just cried, without outlet or direction. Grief is a potent Court, and it made me, like everyone, into a child. Wailing for a mother and a father to hold her, make sense of death, but there’s no sense to be made. All lessons are in the thing itself. Which leaves us only the task of feeling. Only feeling. What I felt was Absence, Melancholy, Nostalgia, and ruinous soul-breaking Love.

When I’d sputtered cold—Love’s flame stealing heat from my heart in its passage—Sphinx pulled back her wings. The city I’d declared was ugly and made an offering of for my parents, was bent and broken. It wheezed—flickering snaps of violence, glared—dropped bright warding shields around the district’s edge to barricade the madness, and bit whatever it could—buildings collapsed tactically onto attackers. Dying with its middle finger to the sky, was Brightgate.

However, my attention was on the hulking form that heralded the creeping fortress-shadow. With a tiger or bear’s bulk, it was black and bereft of gloss or iridescence. Spiked like a sea urchin, tips bloodied and dripping—the blood was what traced each plate into distinction. One hand dragged, uncaring, a sword whose hilt was a spine, whose guard a pelvis, and whose vertebrae wound sinuously as support for a blade of ice. At this fell knight’s hip was a gourd I’d recognize forever, Memories of the Diluvian World. From gait to gourd, it was Sinaya.

Spinx struggled from my lap, but soon took position before me. I rose after and waited, with baited breath and teetering hope. At the edge of the square, he raised his sword in salute.

“Sinaya, I didn’t betray you,” I yelled. “Secretary used the curse—the mask’s curse—against me and you and Lupe. I wanted to run back for you, but I couldn’t. You were taken and I—”

He raised his hand, quiet. The drawbridge to my voice and excuses, raised shut. He crossed the distance between us. Sphinx hissed, her fur at attention, and the eyes of her pelt blazing bright in expectation of violence’s outbreak. I set my hand on her head.

“Sphinx, stop. It’s Sinaya,” I pleaded. “It’s him.”

“It’s not,” Sphinx hissed.

“My lady, it’s best you heed your companion,” the knight stated, his voice one of smoky dusk supported by velvet shadow. “You speak of the young master, of whom I am confidante, and am not.”

“You sound like him,” I argued. “You have his gourd! His Conceptual weapon. Did you steal it from him? Did you do something to him?”

The knight settled the sword’s tip to the ground where it shattered stone from sheer cold. He raised a hand to halt my hurried interrogation. I swallowed my hope in waiting for his answer.

“On good terms, the young master and I are,” he said, “but he is committed to worlds of slumber rather than the ones we waking folk make our own.”

His helm’s top half parted, and Sinaya’s mane tumbled forth to catch the breeze rolling like a wave. This reveal was only enough to show me that his eyes—those beautiful eyes—were closed, and tendrils of muscle like that of a sea anemone clung to his skin. He’d finally found the eternal sleep he sought. Though not death—which would’ve been an unbearable loss—this puppeting made me question that assumption.

“Then what are you?” I asked.

“The Angler Knight, the Everlasting Night,” he said with a bow.