Andalon floated behind me, looking away, not wanting to see. I could feel her trembling against my back. Or was that me?

Somehow, Yuta’s memory had changed. Wyrms’ memories and the memories of the souls within them were 100% accurate down to the last detail, and the base copies could not be tampered with. This shouldn’t have happened; it broke the rules.

I’d thought I’d gotten past all the mind-screwy surprises. Apparently, I hadn’t.

Before, the tear in the starry night sky had resembled a jagged claw mark, one longer than it was wide. But no longer. The rift had grown, swelling like the ulcers the fungus bit into the skin of the infected. The slender cut had expanded into a wide blot with an irregular edge, giving a clear view of what lay inside.

It, too, was a window in the air; a window to another place and time. I could see a sunset-tinged sky through the blot. I saw the sweep of a modern road, bustling traffic, and the distant red curve of a mag-lev Expressway’s supporting trestles. When I noticed the buildings beside the trestles and spied the hills rising up in the distance, I was able to recognize the area for what it was.

“That’s… Rebel’s Spark,” I said. “I drove through there when I took my family on a road trip through the Riscolts to Polovia.” I tugged at my lucky bowtie and shook my head. “I couldn’t see this before.”

“What do you mean?” Yuta said. “I remember it this way.” He pointed at the rift. “That is what I saw.”

“Okay, now this is really getting creepy,” I said. “Yuta, I know for a fact that the memory was different. The rift was much thinner. It’s grown.”

And I had proof. Yuta’s memory might have been corrupted, but mine was fully intact. With but a thought, I brought up my memory of Yuta’s memory. In a moment, we were staring at two copies of the same slice of sky, set side by side. On the right was what Yuta claimed his memory now showed; on the left, my (accurate) recollection of what his memory had really been.

The difference was stark. The old memory was grainy, crisscrossed by patches of static that had been spreading across the sky. The old memory’s rift was only faintly visible, like stretch marks on skin. The light shining through the gaps was weak and indistinct, like a reflection of moonlight. You couldn’t tell what lay on the other side of the rift. Compared to the corrupted copy, Yuta’s original memory of the rift was smaller, with less defined boundaries.

The new version, though? Its edges smoldered like burning paper, glowing faintly with many colors.

“The memory itself has changed!” I yelled.

Yuta stepped back, mouth wide and eyes full of fear. “No, no. This can’t be.”

“That looks like the hole that brought us to the future,” Geoffrey said.

Below, Andalon squatted on the ground, head down, eyes tightly shut. She covered her head with her hands, as if the sky was about to fall.

“Mr. Genneth, please,” she begged, “no more. No more!”

She didn’t need to tell me thrice.

I breathed in and out. A moment later, we were back in the Forgotten Sands.

Brand ran his fingers through his sponge-curls.

Geoffrey stammered in shock. He stood as stiff as a rod. He turned to Yuta. “That was from your memory?” he whispered.

“What is it?” Yuta asked.

Geoffrey took a single step forward. “This is the same as our rift,” he said. “I swear, on the honor of my House, the rift that brought me into this era looked like this.”

I nodded. “I agree. This comports with Duncan’s description.”

I played Duncan’s words for all to hear: “There were many colors, if I recall correctly. They were quite faint, and at the rift’s edge. It lasted for but a moment.”

Geoffrey exhaled sharply, clenching his fists. “You wanted to check my memories, Dr. Howle?” he asked. He spread his arms at his sides. “By all means, have at it! I insist!”

He was dead serious, and nearly as freaked out as I was.

I turned to Andalon. She was still kneeling on the ground, though she’d stopped covering her eyes and head.

“Are you okay?” I asked. “Are you ready for this? Can you handle it?”

“Just do it,” she implored. “Do it fast. Do it super fastly.”

And so I did.

A seam split down the middle of the sky, through the mountains and the sectors of half-remembered worlds sprawled out onto the desert sand. The two halves of the seam folded away, opening like a pair of double doors in one of WeElMed’s hallways.

My heart sank as Andalon started to cry.

We stood on a road in a town on a hill. Gun smoke spit left and right across the dirt-paved path as Munine and Trenton soldiers faced each other in pitched combat.

But the memory was frozen in time. Horses were fixed in place, rearing up, lips flaring as they brayed. Riflemen knelt on the dirt, loading more powder into their guns. Soldiers charged. Paginates, swords, and bayonets were caught mid-clash. I even saw Geoffrey’s companions in the fray. Karl had run out into the middle of the street, following Fink the horse. Geoffrey had followed after him, with Bever, and all the rest not far behind him.

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The startled horse was running into the rift.

In appearance, this rift was indistinguishable from the one in Yuta’s changed memory.

“Genneth… look,” Brand said.

I stepped forward, phasing through an armored Munine soldier. My head passed through the haft of his naginata.

I shook my head and muttered. “No… that’s impossible.”

Behind me, Andalon did exactly the same, mimicking my movements with an accuracy that would have been uncanny, had I given it any attention.

Like with the rift in Yuta’s altered memory, I could see through the rift in Geoffrey’s memory, and what I saw made no sense.

No, worse than that: it wasn’t possible.

I reached for it, though I kept from making contact.

“By the Angel…” I muttered.

Through this window in the air, I saw… myself. I saw myself standing at the edge of Ward E’s reception area, hazmat suit and all, with the feral infected closing in on every side. Not only that, I saw Geoffrey and his comrades in the reception area, even though they were also out here, standing in the memory—and that wasn’t counting the copy of Geoffrey’s shocked soul watching from the sidelines.

I turned to him.

Count Athelmarch was speechless. He couldn’t believe it, either.

Turning back to the rift, I let the memory play, slowly advancing it forward, second by second. All around us, guns fired and horses shrieked. Metal clanged against metal as two worlds clashed.

The split second before the rift swallowed Geoffrey and his friends, the copy of myself on the other side of the rift stuck out his arm, exactly as I had. A moment later, all the feral infected returned to their senses.

Then a great flash of light swallowed up everything in sight, and the next thing we knew, we stood in Ward E’s lobby, alongside Geoffrey and his comrades. Chairs and benches that had been knocked to the floor a second ago were now back in place. Yuta and Ichigo stood at the far end of the room, deathly ill with the Green Death.

“This was when we arrived in your time, Dr. Howle,” Geoffrey muttered.

“Ichigo…” Yuta whispered.

Once again, the two worlds clashed. The Yuta and Ichigo in Geoffrey’s memory charged straight at Geoffrey and the others.

“Make it go away,” Andalon prayed. “Make it go away. Make it—”

I ran my fingers through my hair in panic. “—Stop!” I yelled. “Stop!”

All at once, we were back in the Forgotten Sands.

I fell to my knees. “That’s… this is impossible.”

“Mr. Genneth!” Andalon yelled. She ran across the desert sands and then threw her arms around me in a big, big hug.

“Genneth,” Brand asked, “what’s going on?”

I gently pried Andalon off me, though I made sure to keep hold of her hand in mine. I look her in the eyes. “That was when we channeled &alon,” I said. “I’d been looking at the wyrmsight rift when I’d done it.”

She nodded bigly. There were tears in her eyes. “But it wasn’t Amplersandalon, Mr. Genneth. It wasn’t.”

“Are you saying… more memories have been changed?” Yuta asked. “How is that possible?” He stared at us, and then at his own two hands. “Is any of this real?”

“What is going on Howle?” Geoffrey said. He clasped at his head and shook. “I don’t understand this. I… I remember seeing you in the rift, but… I remember laying eyes on you for the first time in that… that place.”

“Ward E’s lobby,” I said.

“Wait… you have two conflicting memories?” Brand asked.

Geoffrey trembled. “I don’t know. I… I don’t know!”

I gently grabbed hold of Andalon’s shoulders. “Please, Andalon, what is going on? What do you remember? What is happening?”

“It’s like you said, Mr. Genneth,” she whispered. “The darkness makes time melt. It’s so, so scary.”

“How can you be sure the second Dr. Howle was not standing in yet another world?” Yuta asked.

“There’s only one Andalon,” Andalon said. “And…” she looked up at me. “Mr. Genneth can’t do nekkomancy without Andalon.”

“Darn it!” I said, stamping my foot. “There are too many threads! The Lantor Incursion, Andalon’s attackers, the fungus, and now, the War in Paradise.”

“War in Paradise?” Geoffrey asked.

Sniffling, Andalon wiped her arm on her sleeve and then turned to Geoffrey. “Mr. Genneth was talkin’ about it with Dr. Brandy and Mr. Oota before you guys all fought in the spooky stone place,” she said.

“Spooky stone place?” I asked.

“With the humminbirbs,” she said.

My eyes widened. “You were watching that?”

She nodded. “Andalon has so many sees.” She turned to Yuta and then to Geoffrey. “Mr. Oota… Mr. Joffy…” Tears welled in her eyes. “You have so much sad and hurt. So much…”

“Yes,” I said, telling Geoffrey about our theory. “The more I think about it, the more sense it makes. Everything fits.” I turned to Andalon. “I once asked Andalon if there was a ‘good place’ for souls to go after they died other than inside her wyrms, and she told me, ‘no’.”

Andalon nodded in agreement.

“Now, we finally know why: there’s a war going on in Paradise—and Paradise lost. The fungus—Hell itself—has infected it. That’s what we were seeing.”

Geoffrey stared at me, comprehending. “The great darkness.”

“Yes,” I said. “Paradise has fallen, and Andalon is a refugee, perhaps even one of the other Angels. Maybe one of the Angels sided with the fungus, and that’s how it managed to break into Paradise.”

Geoffrey stared at Andalon with religious awe. “You… you’re an Angel?”

“Wha’s a Ain-gel?” she asked me.

“A Shiny Guy,” I said.

She shook her head at him. “I dunno what I am…”

“Let’s just take that as a probable ‘yes’, for now,” I said. “She’ll probably remember more later.”

“The fungus is trying to finish the job,” Brand said, “and that means taking over the wyrms, and destroying the afterlives within them.”

I shook my head. “Flibbertigibbet… all this time, I’ve been looking for something to believe in when it was staring me in the face all along. I was just too stubborn to see it.”

“But why is Andalon so afraid of these rifts?” Yuta asked.

“‘Cuz it’s the darkness!” she answered.

A shiver ran down my spine as more facts clicked into place.

“Andalon told me that the fungus is making time melt. Though I’m no physicist, even I know that things get pretty wonky when you add time travel to the mix.” I looked at the two time-travelers in our midst, “Both of your memories have been changed. If someone or something went back in time and changed the past, the memories of everyone involved in the event would change accordingly. That sounds a lot like ‘time melting’ to me. No wonder the wyrms have extreme eidetic memory: they have to keep track of the changes made to the timeline as the fungus rewrites history!”

But then I pursed my lips in worry. “But… that Yuta’s memory changed in only a matter of hours of real-world time.” I said. “I first saw his memory of the rift earlier today.”

“It’s advancing…” Geoffrey said, almost like an afterthought. “This evil has been advancing toward its goal all this time.”

“Then the altered memories and the widening rifts are a sign of the fungus’ progressive destruction of the time stream,” Brand said. His eyes widened in shock. “Genneth, the pit in Geoffrey’s memory is in E Ward’s Lobby. What if—”

—My heart got caught in my throat.

“—Fudge,” I said. “The rift there might be widening as we speak!”

Oh God oh God oh God oh God.

“The lobby rift is like the Lantor incursion, only it’s happening out in the real world! It’s an ulcer on space and time!”

“There will be great bloodshed if the battle at Lightsbreath spills over into this era,” Geoffrey said.

“Not just that,” I added, “the violence will trigger more of the infected to turn into zombies, and we’ll have another disaster on our hands!”

“It’s coming, Mr. Genneth!” Andalon yelled. “It’s coming!”

“We need to get those people out of that lobby, now!” I yelled.

I could feel the weight of the approaching disaster creep onto my shoulders.

Actually, it felt like someone was gripping my shoulder.

I noticed Brand staring at his own shoulder. He opened his mouth: “Do you feel th—”

—And then I felt the familiar and highly uncomfortable sensation of being yanked out of my link with Brand. Everything faded to white as Lantor flew away from us at a thousand miles a second.