ARIS

Body brought her back out to confusion and darkness. The endless sea of dark tendrils and body parts that sprouted out of nothingness filled the area around them.

“What is this place?” she shouted. The chaos was filled with wailing now - before it was Mind making all the noise, but in her absence, the disembodied mouths were screaming and crying.

“A different world,” Body shrugged. He was the one object of sanity in the confusion of tendrils. It looked like he was going out for a casual stroll, except he stood on nothing and seemed to walk in an arbitrary direction. “One in which the solvent doesn’t mix well with your world.”

“And all this stuff obeyed Mind?” She looked around the roiling mass. An eye opened and glared at her.

“A lot of ‘stuff’ obeys Mind. Lots of your people obey Mind,” Body said. “Now are we going to save your world or not?”

Aris ignored his pointed annoyance at her questions. If she was going to die she didn’t want to do it at the mercy of ignorance. “Why is it I can see now?” she pressed.

“It’s temporary,” Body said. “I fixed Heel’s eyes for you. Well, it’s ‘eye’ now since you gave Mind the other one.”

“What do you mean it’s temporary?”

“You still need it to see the solute keeping the Gate open. And you’ll probably need it to make it visible to that brother of yours, if I understand how the two of you operate.” Body made a gesture with his hands and something shifted in the mass of tendrils around them. What seemed like a hundred eyes popped open like open blisters and stared at them. Aris felt itchy at the sight of so many eyes. For once she wished she couldn’t ‘see’ any of this.

Then through the darkness she saw it. She had sensed it previously, with her other vision but now she saw it. It was a huge solute, like an oversized iridescent boulder floating in the dark. The last time she tried to approach it, Mind had stopped her.

“You’ll need to push it out. Then your brother needs to break it.”

“Whose solute is this?” Aris asked.

Body was silent, his face looking like he didn’t want to answer. “Heart,” he said finally. “Or what’s left of it. I kept it for the memories but I… I didn’t think Mind would use it for something like this.”

It was meant to be poetic, Aris realized. Heart had given so much to the mortals, Mind had wanted Heart to also take everything away.

“It’s a piece of her solute? Her solute must have been huge,” Aris said incredulously. She had no idea what a Part’s solute meant to look like.

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Body gave her a wry smile. “You’ve been here long enough. You should know better than to believe what you see.”

“I’m still confused how I can even see in the first place.”

“I told you. Heel’s eyes,” Body sighed. “You’re almost a Part at this point. But you have to use the ability on the solute now. Go on. Less talking, more doing. Your brother is waiting.”

Ral was waiting. Before Aris willed the smoke form to return, she rummaged around her clothes. Obviously she had no real clothes either here or in the dreamscape, nor any objects on her body. But Aris figured it was the thought that counted. She took out the handkerchief she had always kept hidden under her cloth belt and handed it to Body.

“Another thing for your collection,” she said. “I want you to have it. It was a debt I was supposed to pay forward, now I think… I think it belongs to you now.”

He stared at the handkerchief in his hand for a long time. “Thank you,” he finally said. “It holds many memories. I will remember them.”

Aris smiled and dissolved into smoke.

RAL

They were having a shit time.

The Unseeing surrounding the buildings only grew thicker as the eye in the sky widened and glared down at him. There were so many of them that the masses of uncannily white bodies piled together to gain leverage for others to climb up. Some of the better built Unseeing, the ones that could climb better or jump higher actually made it to the rooftop where they were hiding on. They were growing stronger by the heartbeat as well. They were able to eliminate or at least maim ones they fought on the rooftop, often pushing them off the roof as soon as they were able to. More than once, the injured Unseeing would come back, more furious than ever.

Between the three of them, it was far from an impossible fight. They were able to quickly and cleanly dispose of any Unseeing that came at them as only a handful managed to get up there. The worst part of all of it was there was a significant drop in morale.

It didn’t help the Gate grew bigger and bigger. They were beginning to feel its effects even if it was so far up in the sky. The feeling of despair pressed down on Ral like an oppressive hand of a giant being. But the overwhelming numbers of Unseeing gathered around them only made things worse. How long until the bodies piled up enough for most of them to reach them?

That begged the question: will Aris even achieve whatever she need to achieve before that happened? It had only been a day since she wandered into the the giant Gate and things were already looking so much worse.

A particularly fast Unseeing launched itself at him, long teeth in a screaming red mouth gnashing as it bounded at him like a mutated dog. Ral coiled and met the monster with an extended Freerunner staff and flung it as hard as he could off the edge of the roof with a pivot. It flew straight towards a neighboring building, crashing hard against the wall. The body dropped down to the ground and left a bloody stain where it landed.

Another made it up and Ral let out a frustrated shout and hit that one hard before it could attack Rask. It lay stunned on its side and Ral slammed the staff’s pointed end into it as hard as he could. The slate roofing under it cracked at the impact.

No, Aris had to have made it. Something desperate gripped at him. She had to have made it. He will wait for her as long as he needs to. He looked up at the growing dark sky, not knowing how else to send his hope to his twin.

Then he saw it. Verne gripped his arm, verifying he saw it too. Gray smoke - a kind of smoke that looked much too solid - squeezed out from the pupil of the giant eye in the sky. It took a few moments but then it became obvious it was in the shape of a hand clutching something.

“It’s time,” Rask shouted at them.