Pijeru tried not to gag as she emptied a jar of moldy jam into the trash. Last one. She was glad to rinse them out and put them in the dishwasher. “You have to stop making this much jam, grandpa!”

“—jam, grandpa,” her own chiding voice echoed back from the other room, and Pijeru ducked her head. What was she, a kindergartener?

She had to get used to radios for work, she could always use the practice, and she wanted her grandpa to get used to this one. So stubbornly, she kept her voice on the community channels as she went on, “You give us tons, and we can’t eat it all, and you don’t eat it all. Nobody can eat this much jam.”

“—much jam,” the radio echoed.

“What was that?” His scratchy voice barely carried from the other room. “Kwa, this starry box! Not even a cable—”

“—a cable—”

“How do you turn it off!?”

Pijeru heard shuffling, a slap on plastic, and then a click. The low static of the radio cut out, leaving only the muffled noise of the city pressing in through the walls.

“You better not have broken it,” she mumbled. There came no reply and her feathers drooped. Was he listening to another station, or had he not heard her …?

She focused on the task at hand, shaking out a plastic bag to stuff it inside the bin. Trash, check. Pantry and fridge, cleaned out. Now she only had to … Water. She tore three bottles out of the plastic holster of one of the twelve packs and laid them in the fridge. She moved the old tea pots up in the pantry. The rest of the water bottles went onto the bottom shelf.

Then, she had to put the gasoline canisters in the insulated box under the table, put the battery packs and the water filters in the reorganized clutter drawer, hang the reflective emergency shirt up on the coat rack, put the second emergency kit in his bedroom—more like a nest closet—and sort out the packaging. Plastic to plastic, paper to paper.

Last but not least …? Ah! Sockets.

Pijeru ducked under the furniture and crawled over her grandpa on the couch to find and unplug the non-essentials.

Honestly, she didn’t know how he could live in this tiny apartment. A kitchen in a nook next to the door, a small living room, bathroom, and a closet. The balcony was narrow, too.

Maybe dad was right and they should ask him to move closer to the ground. It wouldn’t only have to be because he was getting older … though he was. Pijeru still remembered when he’d broken his arm on his way out a few years back. He used the elevator now. His balcony had begun to look more and more disheveled.

The old man didn’t seem to notice her thoughts when she glanced at him. He sat with closed eyes and puffed feathers on the couch like he was napping. The way his feathers twitched and he sometimes grumbled revealed he was awake, but his mind was elsewhere.

She nudged him with her elbow and stretched to unplug the corner lamp. “Which station are you listening to?”

He grumbled something unintelligible in response.

“What was that?”

“Eighty-seven point six.”

That number didn’t tell her anything. Pijeru shifted stations in her head, catching glimpses of songs and news reports until she tuned into … a talk show?

“—after they have been coring out our planet for the last two hundred years, the ground has finally come for what should have been the last generation of those elite,” the host was ranting, “and now they think they can keep themselves aloft by pouring more water into a broken jug. Golden Age? As if!”

Her grandpa scoffed in agreement.

Pijeru’s head slammed into the bottom shelf of the family shrine when she shot up. “Argh!” she winced.

Something toppled, and she slapped it against the couch before it could hit the floor. A picture frame.

She was holding herself up with her other hand, so her grandpa had to save her by taking the photograph. “What are you doing now?” he complained. He dusted the glass off with his wrist feathers and placed it back on the shelf behind the shards of Pijeru’s baby shell.

Other shards lay on the shelf. Of her dad, her aunt, and all but one of her cousins—her aunt had disposed of her eldest cousin’s shell, and her grandpa had never forgiven her for it.

To make up for it, they had photos. And some of the birthday presents they’d given him over the years: figurines, drawings, little pieces of homemade pottery, the sheet music to a song her cousin had written during a musician phase.

Grandpa even had some of her dad and aunt’s old award scarves and report cards, and one shelf dedicated to grandma and her great-grandparents.

The photo he set down showed Pijeru and him at her graduation. They stood on a grassy cliff near a gazebo behind her school, the sea behind them. Her grandpa was not short, but in his old age, his plumage had thinned and he’d begun to stoop. He stood tall in the photo. Pijeru believed it had had something to do with the ocean air.

The talk show host ranted in her mind so she cut out the whisperwind. “I don’t like it when you listen to stations like that.” Pijeru eyed the photographs of her family throughout the years. “What’s wrong with having a little hope?”

They were stuck in the past if they still believed avaty was driving the planet to ruin. Old people could say, ‘magic is dead and the rich ate it,’ all they wanted; things had gotten better in her lifetime, at least?

Her grandpa gave her a sidelong look full of pity, but he shook himself like a child trying to convince his parents he wasn’t listening to any bad stations anymore and gave her his full attention.

“It is a good thought. Songs for the masses. But it is something you have to be careful about. The things people will promise you … Just don’t let yourself be disappointed.”

“Well, even if the ritual doesn’t work, at least more people than ever are interested in the Horizon Festival?”

Though ‘interested’ was a generous word. The thing most people were excited about, the cynics and hopeful alike, was the prospect of another holiday when they wouldn’t have to go to school or work.

She should know; Pijeru had plans for tonight. The type of plans she couldn’t even share with her grandpa, let alone her parents. “We’ll see each other later, right? Will you be fine making it into the city on your own?”

He tossed his beak at the ceiling in annoyance. “Yes.”

“Hey, I’m relieved if you can! I’m just making sure I have more time to spend with my friends, old man,” Pijeru teased him. Maybe spite would give him an excuse to ‘claim’ he needed help if he really did need it. He didn’t respond so she went on, “And you know how to use the new generator?”

He leaned on the table to stand in a huff. “This won’t be the first hurricane season I’ll live through, young lady.”

“They mentioned there might also be smaller earthquakes, and floods, and … uhm,” she trailed off, seeing that Look in his eyes. It wandered from Pijeru to the stack of empty boxes and trash bags next to the apartment door.

She could imagine his thoughts, ‘They say that because the super markets and insurance companies bribed them to boost disaster sales. Don’t fall for that nonsense!’

Well, it was a little too late for that. Most of the things she had bought had been on sale. Even with the receipts, Pijeru wouldn’t be able to return them.

She weighed impressing the importance of taking the government warnings seriously against hearing a tirade of conspiracy theories. If the least of the effects the ritual had were an early hurricane season, that wasn’t too bad, but her family might be cut off from her grandpa for days. Or weeks, if the windsingers couldn’t handle the storms.

On the other hand, it was almost nine o’ clock, and she had to get ready, and she really wanted to make sure her parents were getting ready. The sooner they left the house, the sooner she could ditch them in the city, the sooner she could meet up with her friends.

“And you’ll keep the radio on …?” That was the last thing she had to make sure of before she could go.

He sneered in genuine annoyance now. “I’m not a child, Piji! Honestly, you didn’t even have to take that thing out of the box. You know they won’t take it back when you return it. I won’t need it. Not senile yet. Or deaf.”

“It’s supposed to work in emergency weather, too!” she rushed to say. “So maybe if the whisperwinds become too harsh, you—or maybe one of your neighbours!—can use it. We don’t know how much interference there will be so … Keep it on, please? Just in case?”

He hesitated in the door frame, facing the reflective jacket on his coat rack. His head wandered around the kitchen and then back to the living room as if he had just now noticed how much she had cleaned the place up.

With a sigh, he stooped his shoulders and peered up at her. “Fine. For you, little windsinger.”

Pijeru blushed. “I haven’t even started yet! And I won’t be a real singer, just a whisperwind moderator …”

He wagged a darkened, elderly claw at her. “Don’t think I haven’t seen you fiddling with the gate when you come and go. Keep at it and you can be a great windsinger someday.”

It was the type of hopeful praise every other grandparent would give their grandchildren, but Pijeru wasn’t used to hearing those kinds of words from her grandpa. She didn’t know what to say.

“Get on with it now,” he spoke first. “I’ll see you later.” He ushered her toward the balcony.

“Uhm, I still need the trash …” She inched past him through the doorway and pulled a bundle of cloth from her satchel to throw out across the kitchen floor. The trash bags and some of the paper packaging went on it. She tied the corners together to haul it over her shoulder.

The bundle wasn’t heavy, but it was large and unwieldy, and she had to reverse directions to carry it back through the apartment without knocking anything over. Her grandpa complained the entire way, got the veranda door for her, and Pijeru stepped out into the wind and noise of the cityscape.

She had moved his empty pots and chair inside his apartment, lest they become hazards in the hurricane, so it was empty aside from the dust. Her grandpa fell silent. Pijeru hesitated at the gate.

She had a bit of talent as a windsinger of Whispers, though that was nothing special. More people than not learned to sing a bit of whisperwind throughout the years, if only to speak on the community channels or to put on a resume.

But she had discovered another talent in the last two years. And the same way she liked to speak on the community channels to practice her whisperwind, she liked to find opportunities to practice this.

As her grandpa watched, Pijeru hummed a tune in her mind, following the instructions of her elective courses at school and amateur programmes she listened to late at night. She composed loops of magic that pulsed outward, magnetizing the latch of the gate.

When she changed her tune, the loops pushed. The latch wiggled in its ring and slowly rose up. Another gentle nudge and the gate swung open on its own.

Metalwind.

Her grandpa cackled and gave her a shove that made her stumble toward the edge. Pijeru ducked her head below the bundle to hide her delight. He locked the gate and closed the door with a goodbye.

The wind whipped through her feathers then. An eight story drop stretched to the streets below, which were themselves far from the actual dirt-and-grass ground. The clouds were so close to the rooftops.

People in the buildings across the street, or the apartments around her, were still removing flower pots and satellite dishes from their balconies. Some collected their laundry off the safety nets that extended out every five stories, growing larger the closer they got to the ground like pyramid trees.

Trains snaked alongside distant apartment buildings, and elevators and cable cars carried people up the outsides of grander structures.

Pijeru gauged the air traffic. A few people jumped off balconies. The occasional teenager slipped out of their bedroom window for convenience. She glanced up to make sure nobody was above her, reconsidered, and waved as she took a step back to signal anyone watching her she needed a moment for herself.

She savored the view. The rooftop gardens, looming clouds, and twinkling satellites beneath the daytime moon. Finally that distant, emerald star.

Vim.

It felt strange. She had grown up in an age where some of the adults claimed the government had gone crazy and bought into conspiracy theories, and others claimed their religions had gotten it right all along. The end times are near! The truth seemed to have landed somewhere in the middle, a leap in logic born of science, mythology, and religion.

Everyone knew spirits existed. There was a difference between accepting they could pop up in select magical locations around the world—as well as the existence of some sort of spirit realm they hailed from—and, well … this.

Ur spirits. What some might call Gods. Flying around through outer space like creepy aliens from old movies.

If Pijeru closed her eyes and listened, she thought she could hear a chorus that came from beyond the far side of the moon. It grew louder with every passing day.

Others could hear it, too. Many feared it, but Pijeru had sat on cliffs in the desert and listened to the whispers of distant stars before. She knew what those sounded like, eerie and haunting. Sounds that had informed many a belief in ancient cultures while science explained they were just cosmic background noise. No different from storms or cheap microwaves.

This was different. There was a design to it. Composition. It was just that the composition was difficult to discern because it sounded like so many alien songs overlapping.

Rather than fear for the future, she wanted to have hope.

School was over. She was eighteen. She’d found her first real job, where she would receive education and training, and she had a month until her first day at work began. Pijeru wanted to enjoy this last chance at freedom with her friends, old and new. She wanted to enjoy the festival, take some risks after all the studying, maybe visit another country for a weekend or two.

Whether or not this international ritual saved magic or the environment, everything felt like it was about to change.

As if to answer that divine chorus, Pijeru hummed a welcoming tune of her own, stepped off the ledge, and spread her wings to soar.

Heat radiated from the hallway like a volcanic vent. It caught in her feathers and urged her to fly, but Pijeru stood in a labyrinth of stone. There was nowhere to go. Nowhere she would want to go but back.

Her squad urged her to hurry up. She dreamed of curling up in her nest at home. Any of the homes she had built over the years. She wanted to whisper to Tuhrie across half a city, she wanted to whisper to her across a bed, listen to her clumsy replies that had never gotten any more eloquent.

She couldn’t. Their thoughts weren’t private anymore. Their magic had changed—what should have been a whisper on the radio had become a whisper on the wind, and she hadn’t yet learned how to fix that.

Their midnight conversations were nothing more than memories. And so were they.

That was why Pijeru moved. She made it most of the way across the pit and jumped when the earth opened up.

That odious boy, bless his heart, reached out to take her hand. He steadied her, and Pijeru felt the urge to shove him onto the pit spikes with her thanks. She defied the urge and herded him back to his classmates.

The shadows grew longer and snapped at their heels as if they were physical things. The alien children conjured lights and brought out bottles of glowing liquids to drive them back.

Pijeru carried a few magical items of her own, but she was not prepared to fight a shadow raptor here. Instead, she left the boy with his friends and took the lead. She could detect some of the traps with her metalwind, and she would use this temporary body of hers to secure the way if she had to. After all, these children had their entire lives ahead of them. All she had was memories. But she wouldn’t let anyone, not Gods or avashay, tarnish those memories.

They fled from the dusk through strange stone halls and when Tuhrie began to sing, Pijeru felt her heart ache.

----------------------------------------

“[Surge].” Ryan sprinted over the seats in a crowd of fantastical figures to run a spectral wolf through with a burning spear. The flames illuminated the audience in a ring around him, and they scrambled back in surprise.

“What are you doing!?” a frog woman hissed. Other voices drifted up. Startled yelps, murmured questions, and barked complaints.

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“Sit down!”

“Is this part of the play?”

“Did he seriously attack the special effects?”

None of them saw the wounded void woman huddled beneath her seat, clutching a hand which bled liquid smoke. None of them except her seat neighbours, who had pressed themselves further into their row to flee from the wolf rather than help her.

Their expressions were frozen in shock. The flames dancing in their eyes cast them in a hopeful light, like they wanted this to be part of the play. It was not.

“If I could have your attention everyone, please!” Navid called from where he stood atop his seat. He would only do that if Lisa had confirmed to him something was wrong.

Ryan dropped and assured the wounded woman everything would be alright.

“There has been an arcane malfunction in the special effects for the play. We are asking you to evacuate the premises in a safe and orderly fashion please—immediately!”

He rinsed the wound, slathered some salve on it—though he didn’t know if it would help someone who wasn’t human—added a compress, and wrapped it with a roll of bandages as he glanced over the dark rows of shoulders and heads.

Lisa swept the spectral fog away from the audience. It pooled beneath the stage like a liquid stormcloud. Frederick no longer stood up there. Jason and Sam hunted spectral beasts on the stairs as more and more dove up from below.

There was no way the six of them could keep up with their numbers here. Even if they had been at their best, which they were far from, they couldn’t fight around civilians. Not again.

Ryan helped the woman up, grabbed his spear, and ran down the steps before the crowds could fill them in.

Those closest to the stage were the first to leave. Some climbed over the backs of their seats to avoid going near the nightmare pool of purple and green fog. Those in the middle rows looked to each other to see how they should react. A few calmly collected their belongings but waited on their seat neighbours to file out before they left. Still others called out to Navid and the ushers and demanded an explanation; complained about refunds.

Ryan threaded his way through a short chain of bodies and pushed off into the witchlight. The pool crashed in waves against the stage, crackling and foaming. It slowed at his approach and turned in the air. Like iron dust to a magnet, a wave crashed over him.

From it, spectral spiderwolves formed with panting smiles like ghosts come to haunt him.

Ryan cut through them and the other nightmares as they shifted from spiders and rats to the wolf children he had slaughtered not three hours ago. They tried to flow around his spear like smoke, but the mana-infused wood cleaved them in two.

Yet, when he shoved mana into his foot to kick a lizard on reflex, it phased through his boot like a ghost and tore into the unprotected sole of his foot.

Ryan felt a sharp pain and lurched. His sock squished like he had stepped into a river and the nightmares closed in around him. He flourished his spear in a wide arc to drive them back and hopped up onto the— His leg caught. His knee knocked into the edge of the stage and he fell.

He caught himself before he smacked onto the floor, then immediately reached out to catch his spear before it could tumble into the pool below. A frog man caught his left arm—some actor or stage hand he didn’t recognize. A smaller nightmare used the chance to leap straight up from the horde and bit him. Its teeth phased through his arm guard and the layers of his gambeson and tore into his flesh.

Rather than a spiderwolf, it looked like a Teacup Salamander. An old Teacup Salamander. The ones he’d fought for over a year before the Towers had changed.

These nightmares weighed nothing, but they could exert force. A spiderwolf latched onto the lizard and pulled. And so did others. Nightmare after nightmare bit into each other. They began to fuse into a thick chain of spectral metal that tried to drown him. It almost did.

A blast of wind smacked the chain into the stage. The Teacup Salamander let go and without its anchor, the slackened chain crashed into the pond.

Ryan saluted Lisa where she stood on the stairs, thanked the frog man who had helped him, and ran.

He knew who had to be responsible for this. He recognized his mistake. He still didn’t understand why.

Anne wielded a glowing sword and drove back nightmares on her own—faceless men and women clambering up from the orchestra pit with shivs and knives.

Backstage, Frederick cut down similar figures as they rose from a trail of spilled ichor. An overturned cauldron leaked fog next to a wok layered with fire crystals.

The orchestra members, the cast, and crew huddled near the wall to give him space. A few fended off any nightmare that came close with canes or chairs.

The nightmares here looked thinner and fainter than the ones outside. Had he disrupted the spell by kicking over the cauldron? If so then why …?

Ryan noticed something missing in the backstage area and turned back. He only had to search the auditorium for a second to find what he was looking for: fog crept into the room from side doors and spilled down the stairs, not just the stage.

“Where is Demir!?” he demanded from the huddled crowd.

They startled and looked at one person, his assistant. “I don’t know!” the man insisted. “He said he forgot something in his office and—” He gestured toward the hallway Navid had gone down earlier.

Ryan stepped back onto the stage. “Lisa! There should be cauldrons set up throughout the theatre! Demir had a stack of them, four or five—”

She stood on a seat to make way for the crowd, and her eyes widened at his words. They searched the walls for something only she could sense.

They would have to find and topple every one of those cauldrons to stop the spell, but how long would that take?

Ryan saw another option. He stuck to his instincts and ran. Past the crowd and down the hallway, he knew which way Navid had gone but the paths split again and again. Stairs led up and down. Signs and plaques, arrows pointed toward emergency exits, open doors and locked ones—

A vein throbbed on the side of his neck. Screams echoed from the auditorium and people fled through the halls. His listening was no good here so he closed his eyes and sniffed. He had no idea what Demir smelled like, but he had spent an hour hunting down the ingredients the man had used to— to do this.

A trail lit up in his mind’s eye and Ryan chased it with an odd sense of vertigo. His feet moved like in a dream. His nose told him he was running toward the workshop at school. Toward Micah.

He burst out of an emergency exit into an alleyway behind the theatre and thought, [Surge]. Too soon. Nothing happened. He tried to pump mana into his legs and swayed when fissures of pain cracked their way up his skull. He was too low on mana for even that. His muscles felt like mud. He left his teammates behind and couldn’t even borrow their strength.

Anger drove him forward.

When he found the man, three streets away, Ryan sprinted with a mad roar and slammed him into a wall.

“Drop—“ he heaved. “Drop the spell.”

Demir staggered and braced himself against the wall. His head lolled as he stood with a smile. “I can’t—”

Ryan gripped his shirt in two fists and shoved him up along the stone. “Drop it now!”

“I can’t!” the man cheered. He held onto Ryan’s wounded wrist with one fist and swept the other out. “It’s out of my hands—”

“Bullshit! What kind of spellcaster can’t end their own spell?”

In an instant, his smile vanished. “It is as much a potion as it is a spell, not that I’d expect the likes of you to understand. Why else would I ask travelers to collect my ingredients?” His voice became a snarl. His grip tightened. “Do you think I’m supplying magic across two city blocks!?”

But then— Then why was Ryan here? There had been children in the seats behind his. If he could have ended the spell as soon as possible— He should have stayed in the theatre. He should have been defending people.

He let go and staggered away. There was that sick darkness. It had been inevitable that the mistake would make a mistake.

“What was I supposed to do?” Ryan demanded. “Rat you out!?” He had tried so hard. Had it all been for nothing?

He thought about running back immediately— His foot burned. His arm burned. He had a stitch and felt dizzy.

“Don’t you understand it yet?” Demir laughed. “‘What were you supposed to do?’ Whatever the fuck you want!”

Everything snapped into focus. Ryan rounded on him. “Not if it means hurting people! Not if it means— Who would want to murder people!?”

His face twisted as he hissed the words, but the man smiled, and Ryan wanted to beat him until he couldn’t smile again.

Worse than that, Demir laughed. “Murder? I didn’t hurt anyone. It’s fake. All of it. The pain, the wounds, the blood—ink and illusions. Fears come to life.”

Ryan stared. “What?”

“They may think of it as—”

He began to tear off his arm guard and wrenched up his gambeson.

“—my letter of resignation if they will, but I—”

Ryan shoved his right arm in the man’s face. “Does this look fake to you?”

He propped it up with his left hand and used his thumb and index finger to pry the torn wound open.

He could smell the blood, taste it from afar, feel its warmth and the depth of the cut in his skin. Ryan had been hurt often enough to feel when wounds were serious and when they were just illusions plastered onto his skin.

Demir rolled his eyes. His painted face inside his head looked away as if uninterested, but something must have caught his attention. Maybe dark blood flowing free. Maybe it was the glimpse of bone.

He frowned. “Did you cut yourself?”

“One of your nightmares bit me.”

“That’s impossible. They’re not physical beings. They can’t—“ His conviction began to waver. “It was just supposed to be a prank. My brother—”

Ryan shoved his bloody elbow into the man’s neck. “So you made a mistake?”

Demir’s face twisted in indignation to match his own. “No. No! I do not make mistakes. Someone must have tampered with one of my cauldrons. I couldn’t possibly keep an eye on all of them.”

“Do you honestly expect me to believe that? You’re the one who did this. We’re the only ones to blame here. If not you, who else would do something as disgusting as this!?”

----------------------------------------

Lemon strode into the storage space with a grin. Set pieces and decorations leaned layered against the walls and collected dust. Boxes sat piled up on skeletal shelves. Spectral fog drifted below his feet. It kicked up whenever a nightmare creature dashed out of the room.

A ghost hugged his knees in the corner and cried.

His sobs had carried all the way down the hallway. He looked like a human boy, surprisingly, maybe a few years younger than Jason or Frederick, though his form was a translucent and drab blue like a concrete sky.

Lemon wondered if he was supposed to look like someone one of the children had lost. He doubted it would be one of his two puppets—he would have noticed by now if a dead childhood friend was figuratively haunting one of their minds …

… or perhaps literally. Like the physical food and some of the magic items the children could earn in this space, this ‘ghost’ had not been made from the essence of the theatre. It meant someone must have brought him here.

He doubted it was a ghost from Lisa’s past either, though it wasn’t impossible she had made a human friend once upon a time who had later died.

Ryan … Ryan had other insecurities, Lemon had begun to realize. That should have made him an easy candidate to manipulate into being one of his followers, but Lemon would rather see him suffer for annoying him.

That left Navid or Anne. They had both faced the fewest challenges of the group so far, and the boy looked similar to either of him. In that way all humans did. His skin was dark beneath the layer of blue. Maybe a younger brother or cousin who had died in … battle …?

The boy flickered. He skipped from the middle of a sob to the hoarse hiccoughs of someone trying to catch their breath after a cry, to something impacting him. As if he had been kicked, he swayed where he sat. Bite marks appeared on his cheek, and he shoved at things that weren’t there as he curled in on himself.

Reliving his last moments?

The haze of gloom that surrounded him thickened, and the illusory nightmares that spilled from the bubbling cauldron in front of him left the room with a corporeal shimmer.

Lemon nodded in appreciation. “Good show. You helped ruin their night, though I doubt it will push them. Say, wouldn’t you like to do more? I have just the item that could help you …?” He raised a hand over his face and began to reshape its skin.

The boy didn’t seem to register his words until Lemon stepped closer and it was clear he was speaking to him. He startled and looked up. For an instant, he was a black skeleton. Empty eye sockets stared at him like yawning voids. Then he was a translucent boy again.

The ghost dropped his arms and opened his mouth, a frantic hope blooming in his expression as he scampered toward him. But something made him freeze. Primal terror twitched in his irises. With a start, he ran—straight through the wall. He phased through it and screamed at the top of his lungs, “Help, HELP! Someone, please help me!” His passing left a paper-thin impression in the stone.

… What?

Lemon hadn’t even lowered his hand to reveal his mask. There had been nothing to be afraid of except …

Huh. He had even been able to hide from that ‘Heswaren’ girl during the trip to the Kobold camp—a moderately difficult task, but Lemon had done it. What kind of a ‘ghost’ could glimpse into his prison?

His lips twitched in dissatisfaction, but they slowly curved up again. It had been quite some time since someone had run from him in terror. That was enjoyable to see. And the ghost’s aura of gloom lingered. That was all he needed.

Lemon stepped up to the cauldron and craned over it with his hands in his pockets, staring into that bubbling purple ichor. A handprint-shaped cutout in his face had laid his yellow mask bare and slowly, he began to cry. A single rose-gold tear welled up from the eye-shaped bars of his prison and fell into the cauldron. Its ichor ran red and thickened, bubbling over like pastry in an oven. It erupted with a spray of lava as something shot out.

Lemon chuckled as he fixed his face and ducked out into the chaos. Lisa had shot ‘Pepper’ down, but he wouldn’t give up so easily. While they were still here, he could at least ensure she would learn the right lesson.

Behind him, more and more forms burst from the cauldron and cried out like hungry children.

He rejoined the crowd and took a detour through the main auditorium to avoid one of his puppets when he noticed another oddity.

The children had scattered across the theatre to search for the cauldrons. Ryan was outside returning to the theatre. The only figures still inside the auditorium were the wounded and trampled, an opportunistic thief rifling through abandoned belongings in the dark, and four flame spirits who carried piles of lanterns stacked up in their arms. They held onto them with their chins and hurried after the crowd after they had taken the time to circle the room and rescue all the spirit children.

Their presence made sense for the setting. But the actors, and even some of the orchestra members …?

Why were they still performing?

Lemon walked down the steps over a carpet of spilled food and drinks, dropped items, and sprays of blood.

He came close enough to hear the words the actors spoke over the sounds of the chaos and the crying children he had left behind. The actor playing the protagonist, Haley, rejected her friend’s offer to help her bind a spirit because it would just leave sooner or later anyway.

Her acting skills had improved remarkably since the last time she had been on-stage.

He came close enough to see the frog woman Anne had spoken to earlier, Tierah, directing two musicians. Except, the music he heard did not correspond to two instruments alone.

And then he came close enough to see their eyes: voids among cosmic clouds with twin pinpricks of distant, emerald stars.

“Pretenders,” Lemon said.

Their performance abruptly stopped. Six starry eyes stared at him and widened a fraction. Thierah spoke, “Cousin.”

Lemon rushed down the steps. “You’re here. You’re free! I knew what that heretic said couldn’t be true. Are the Gods watching over us? Do they know I am stuck in this prison? Can you show me the way to Pantheon?”

He hit the edge of the stage with both palms to arrest his momentum and looked up with a wide smile. For the first time since he had awoken from that long slumber, Lemon felt his doubts wash away. Here stood salvation—his equals of Vim. They could help him, free him, take him home.

His cousins were slow to reply. They looked at each other. Their hands twitched on their instruments and their mouths parted but no words came out.

The change in their expressions were so microscopic, Lemon didn’t catch them at first—didn’t want to catch them.

They were holy actors and stoic at the best of times, but their silence now was not a serene consideration of his words, of this moment—reunion—it was hesitation.

That look from one to another was an expression of shared awkwardness. Like they didn’t know how to respond. Or they didn’t want to.

“Uh,” the frog woman said, “we have to go.”

“Wait—!” Lemon hopped into the foggy orchestra pit but even if he had not been in this prison, he was much too slow to keep up with spirits of Vim.

Like water down a drain, the Pretenders vanished one and all, and Lemon felt himself unravel as he scrambled through seats and note stands to where they had stood a moment ago. They clattered to the floor.

They had just … abandoned him. Snubbed him like he was Jason at a party when he tried to approach the cool kids at the poolside couch.

Him. Him!

He didn’t know what to say. Didn’t know what to think. To feel. Instead, Lemon drew on the months he had spent with Jason and Frederick, the many arguments he had watched unfold between them—most of which he had instigated himself—and he screamed into a rapidly-dwindling tunnel through the planes, “WELL FUCK YOU TOO!”

----------------------------------------

“You can scream at me all you want,” Demir said, “it won’t change a thing. I should leave before people think to search for me. You have to go back to save the day. We have places to be.”

Ryan leaned against the opposite wall in the alley and glared at him while he bandaged his foot. He had no way of arresting Demir except for rope, and he didn’t even have the time to treat his own wounds though he did it anyway—he was no use to anyone if he bled out before he could rejoin the battle.

Accident or not, this man was responsible for what was happening in the theatre.

Ryan wrestled his boot on, snatched up his spear, and stabbed Demir in the foot.

The paper man looked as surprised as he himself was, and then as horrified too, but Ryan couldn’t just let him escape without facing any consequences.

The stab was quick and easy, but his stomach still flipped at the sight of his own spearhead piercing a shoe. I did that, he reminded himself in the moment.

Demir tried to punch him, run, and scream at the same time. “You stabbed me!” He fell and scrambled away from him along the wall.

Ryan pushed down the guilt and revulsion and tossed the rest of his first aid supplies at his feet. “Call for a doctor if you can’t treat your wounds—“

Demir seemed to realize that was an option, because he immediately began to scream for help.

Ryan forced himself to remain calm. “—but if you think you have any place to be other than jail or a hospital, just know you won’t get far on one foot.” He leaned down. “And that I have your scent. I will hunt you down, do you hear me?”

“Get away from me, you monster! Criminal! Freak! Go die in a fire!”

Already on it, Ryan thought as he left. He jogged toward the theatre.

The sounds of a crowd outside the building grew louder as he approached—voyeurs wondered to each other what was going on, people called out names to find each other, children sobbed, and a group ranted at Veshim.

A siren started somewhere. A plume of smoke rose from a window.

Ryan turned the last corner into the alley behind the building and at the same time, a boy stepped out of its wall.

He was a ghost, Ryan thought, because he was transparent and he flickered on the spot. Also because he stepped out from a wall. Then again, he seemed to get stuck on it. Or rather, the stone seemed to be stuck inside of him.

The boy began to hyperventilate as he strained forward. His small panicked noises rose into a fevered pitch before he tore a stone arm free. He placed it on the wall and pressed himself forward, stretching his torso as far as he could. His stone foot rose from the ground. Veins of rock climbed up his skull to consume him. And when he broke free, he did it with clunking stomps as a waifish golem.

He panted and searched around with a terrified expression.

Ryan stood frozen in place. His voice escaped him, small and fearful, “No.”

The golem caught sight of him, hesitated, and stepped closer. “Please.”

“No,” Ryan repeated.

“You have to help me.”

“No, I saved you.”

The shape of his lips. His crooked jaw. His hair was tucked behind his ear on one side—this was before he had been told to cut it short. His nose twitched and it looked the same. His doey, emotional eyes looked the same. Ryan had watched him tear up so many times. He watched a single stone tear well up now and roll halfway down his cheek as a bump.

He looked as he had two years ago, but Ryan would recognize his features anywhere. Especially if someone carved them out of stone.

He took a step forward and asked, “Micah?”