I flew through a terrifying dream landscape.

Flashes of light.

Sudden strikes.

Hit, again, and again, and again.

Dying each time.

Image of Hinete, her bloody body blasted.

Dead, doornail dead.

Nightmarish fear.

The images of those who could have lived hundreds of years more, cut off in their full bloom.

He’d taken so long to die.

That bald man, full of life, a sardonic grin. And then he was dying.

And his eyes. God his eyes.

He had not expected to die. The profound soul had expected a near eternity of life, five hundred years more before him.

Hacked. Hacked to death.

God his eyes.

Hinete’s dead eyes. Gasping. Blood dripped out the sides.

And then a face I’d not seen yet in Sesako’s memories.

His mother.

Smiling, looking, and then the whole house collapsed on her. Sister, brother, father,

Dead. Like Hinete.

And then suddenly the nightmare dissolved into butterflies, and we faced each other in a grassy field. Water burbled pleasantly. Surrounded by grass instead of a brick sidewalk was the big fountain in Central Park.

On the other side of the fountain, across the lawn was the huge thousand columned facade of the palace of the clans.

This park was now a merger of my dream and Sesako’s dream, and there he was.

He wore his long cultivator’s robe, sashed with blue, and he approached me with a forced cheer. “Hail! Hail and well met, we fought well together!”

We clasped our arms.

And I could feel his anxiety, and his heartsickness vibrate through the skin.

“You are not well,” I said.

“We won a great victory — Gakonga’s death is a worthy sacrifice for one of their profound souls.”

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Eyes.

The eyes of a man who ought to have been invincible, who ought to have lived five hundred years more.

Caught in his own trap.

The false cheer faded.

Solemn.

“We have not won,” Sesako said, “But there is a hope — at last there is hope! How did you force it open?”

“I… it just was… it’s a structure. It responds to will, and I’d been playing with it. Trying to understand. You know, like I was debugging it. I kept playing around and then…”

I flinched away from the memory. What it cost me to keep it open.

I had my own horrors from the fight.

“Pain. It demanded pain to work.”

I nodded.

No words.

“We fought well together.” The solemn voice was the proper voice for that claim. Our fighting together was no matter to celebrate. But it was the truth.

“Next time it shall not hurt so much.” He added.

“I know. It has been forced open.”

“Gakonga was Hinete’s favorite uncle… poor Hinete. So, fucking stupid and worthless. We’ve done nothing to slow them. Fitzuki — I should have listened to him.”

I shrugged. What else was there to say?

“And others. So many others died. So many of my men.”

“Not only them,” I replied with harsh strain in my voice. “He was a tragedy. That man. And each of those who ripped their core out. Dead, sad. Each was a victory of the real enemy — like your father was his victory. Each death. Each fucking death. Death itself is the goddamned enemy, do you not see? Every death is wrongness — those eyes! Those eyes? Did you watch his eyes as we killed him? His eyes!”

“He was a warrior; he chose the risk.”

“A fucking coward’s answer. Look it straight in the eye: Look at what we have chosen. Look at what we have wrought. No statement of ‘he chose this fate.’ No, no, no — death is the enemy. And it is the enemy we must defeat.”

“It is the way of nature.”

“Then fuck nature.” I pressed my hand against my breast. “Nature created us. Nature created that which is better than itself. Our hearts, our minds, our souls. We can care. We can desire better than the endless cycle of hunger, war, starvation, death, and limits enforced by brutal suffering. We shall overcome nature. There is a bit of heaven in our hearts. We must nurture it. The brokenness of the world demands we fight, we struggle, that we kill, lest family, country, and our love be murdered and pillaged. Never, never, never forget the true goal. The nature that demands murder and death is an enemy.”

“A peaceful, pleasant world? — We have become the second celestial. Perhaps we shall not age, as the emperor has seemed not to age. And if I to never age? I do not believe I would be happy if all who I love, if each was doomed to that death that comes to all.”

Hinete’s face flashed through the dream. My parents too, aging year by year.

I would never see them again.

Not one of those my friends. Not my brother and neither my sister. Neither my cat nor my favorite cafe. Not that walk around the fountain in Central Park.

I mourned myself, my own death on earth.

He placed his hand upon my shoulder.

I wiped the tears from my eyes, and I smiled back. For there was joy in the pain of loss.

“But why do you suggest such small things?” Sesako asked. “If your goal is to fix everything, why even speak of simply feeding the poor, or providing healers?”

“Do you not see? It is all one! All the same fight. Do you not see? — but yes, yes, a path to the deepest changes must be found.”

The land around us changed. The skyscrapers of New York, one of those flashing illustrated maps of the human brain, two tiger cubs wrestling together.

Joy.

And Sesako’s mind produced his own images.

The sheer freedom of flight. The Great One, high in the sky, her scales glimmering in the sunlight. Hinete’s serious expression the first day he met her, as she explained with pursed lips and diagrams drawn on creamy white paper how she had improved upon the enchantment for a music stone from a book he’d written. A different image, making love with the woman who'd broken his heart sixty years before.

And I saw how Sesako had forgotten the joy from the pain of its end.

The two of us again.

Eye to eye.

Nothing else but swirling flickers of reconstructed memories.

“You know, we still may easily lose and die. The emperor is deadly.” Sesako said.

I smiled.

Sesako laughed. And we clasped our hands.

And with a clap of light, I awoke.