“No. Should it?”

“Yeah,” I said, “it should.”

“Would you mind enlightening me?” he asked.

“The Hallowed Beast… Its name is Kléothag. I saw It, just now. The message coming from within Mr. Himichi? The one the fungus doesn’t want me to hear? It’s from Kléothag.”

Doubt quivered on Suisei’s lips. “Is this some kind of joke, Genneth?”

“I wish it were.” I shook my head. “It turns out the Old Believers were right after all. It wasn’t the delusions of the pagan witches of old. The Hallowed Beast lies dormant within the earth. The kaiju from Mr. Himichi’s dream told me so; that kaiju was also Mr. Himichi, by the way, just a different version of himself, apparently from a world where he’d turned into a kaiju.”

Suisei looked at me as if he’d seen a ghost. “This mystery is like a bottomless pit,” he said, softly. “The more I learn, the more I realize how little I know. Are you certain about that? Another version of Mr. Himichi turned into a kaiju?”

“100% certain,” I said.

“Remarkable. Truly… remarkable.” He nodded, and then sighed. “Thank you for telling me, Genneth. Though I still cannot risk telling you my greatest secret—that will have to wait until we are out of this dreadful place—I can tell you that… I am not from this world, Genneth,” he explained. “I am like Lord Uramaru, or that Kaiju Himichi; I am from a parallel version of this. I was born in Noyoko, just not in this world’s Noyoko. In my world, nearly everyone had access to pataphysical abilities. To your world, it would have seemed like magic. And our Nights were brilliant, filled with stars—the droplets of the Angel’s blood, shed when He cut off His face.”

“Your world had an Angel, too?”

“Yes, and from the looks of it, our two Angels were one and the same. The icons made here are identical to the ones from my homeworld.”

“How different was your world from mine?” I asked.

“I am not well-versed in matters of history. If you delved deeply, I imagine you would find many small differences. But, by large, our worlds’ histories are roughly equivalent. DAISHU existed in my world, just as it does in this one. I really did go to medical school, you know, but… my pataphysical skills were better than most, and that drew DAISHU’s attention. In the end, I was a doctor in name only. My actual job was, I said, to serve as one of the select few who cleaned up the messes that DAISHU and its VIPs left in its wake. Your world’s DAISHU has the Rabbit-Men, and—”

“—The Rabbit-Men of Mt. Aoi are real?” I asked.

Suisei nodded.

“I knew it!” I hissed, clenching my fists.

“Now, imagine how much worse DAISHU’s messes DAISHU could cause if it had access to ‘magic’.”

“That’s…” My jaw went slack. “Yikes…” My voice trailed off.

He nodded. “And it fell to people like me to tie up the loose ends.” He gestured at himself. “The weave I have been using to ward off the spores is just a simple electrostatic barrier, standard protocol for when working in hazardous environments, because of how it repels or immobilizes ionic compounds. I have had it on since I arrived in this world, and it was sheer luck that the fungus’ spores were so acidic that the barrier could block them.”

“You’ve been having difficulties using your abilities, haven’t you?” I asked.

He smirked. “So you noticed.”

“Do you know why it’s happening?”

“The pataphysical energies are so thinly spread, here. I feel like a child again, struggling with every little thing.”

“Do you know why it’s thin?” I asked.

Suisei shook his head. “It is thin because the stars are gone, or are the stars gone because it is thin? I have been puzzling over that since I arrived. I have only found one clue so far.”

“What is it?”

“The energies thickened when Green Death arrived. While the resulting energy levels are still a far cry from what they were in my homeworld, they were enough for me to regain some of my former powers. If I had not,” he shook his head, “I would not have been able to avoid being infected.”

“How long have you been… here?” I asked.

“Several months.”

“Is there any way you can go back home?” I asked.

“I would first have to know if I even have a home to return to.”

“I’m sorry,” I told him, “you didn’t deserve that. No one does.”

“Thank you,” he said, softly. Suisei took a deep, raggedy breath. “I hope this is enough to assuage your worries.”

“Suisei…” I said. My words got stuck in the back of my throat.

And then Andalon reached out and grasped my arm.

I turned to look.

She looked around fearfully. “I wanna keep moving, Mr. Genneth. I don’t like it here.”

I turned to Suisei. “Andalon wants to keep moving.”

“A wise idea,” he said.

“She says she doesn’t like it here.”

Suisei nodded. “Neither do I.”

So, off we went. After five minutes or so, a cold front whooshed through me, stopping me in my tracks and making Suisei groan. It felt like we were at the bottom of the world. You could have doused me in lava, and it wouldn’t have even taken the edge off the all-consuming chill.

“Genneth,” Suisei whispered, “do you hear that?”

I nodded. “I do.”

I wanted to know what had happened to the Hallowed Beast. I wanted to know what had happened to Mr. Himichi and the tea garden from a world that was mine and yet not. But there wasn’t any time to ask.

Andalon huddled behind me.

“Somethin’s comin’…” she muttered.

I heard them before I saw them. A bamboo organ’s clustered tones shot through the hallway, echoing against the beat of a single drum. Voices accompanied the sounds in a pentatonic chorale, with long, arcing melismata. Pieces of metal rattled like gusted grass.

Suisei looked at me, and I at him.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

“Is that…?”

He nodded.

“The sounds of old Mu,” Suisei replied. “There can be no mistake.”

Slowly, step by step, a cluster of weak lights came into view from around the corner up ahead. The sight of the glow made something click in the back of my head.

Lanterns.

Lights to guide the souls of the dead to their next reincarnation.

“What’s going on?” Andalon asked. “What’s that?” Wisps of light flicked out of her mouth, like breath on a winter’s day.

“I think it’s a funeral…” I answered, in a whisper, bracing myself for the unexpected.

Then the procession came around the corner.

It was a Munine funeral procession, done in the old ways—of that, there was no doubt. And yet, it was anything but.

It was a six-man procession, though it was hard to call them men. The figures marching toward us were not human. They had lithe, distended bodies, maybe half and again my height. They had deep blue skin and four arms, two at each side of their bodies, one pair below the other. The beings passed like phantoms, translucent and mist-like, as if they weren’t entirely there.

All three of us stared.

The music was coming from the two in the rear. One had a bamboo organ in hand, the other, a taiko drum slung over his shoulder, dangling at his side. The four remaining figures stood at the corner of a simple palanquin, each holding one of its poles in hand. The passenger was dead, covered by a white funeral veil. The veil was interwoven with golden threads, indicating the corpse was of the highest, most honored status.

Like the room I’d just left, they seemed plucked from another age, albeit an utterly inhuman one.

I guessed they were male, based on their armor. All six were fully decked in samurai armor: triple-horned helmets styled after the male Tchwangan beetle; cloth-covered sandals, enmeshed with chain mail that glistened in the paper lanterns’ light. Their armor was ribbed and ridged, covering their haori and hakama trousers’ fabrics like rooftop tiles. Gently curved katanas were sheathed in the scabbards at their waists, beside the tops of their breeches.

Most astonishingly, the hallway was actively changing around them. Wherever they stood, the hallway transmuted into stone. Ogival windows blossomed on the walls as the ceiling grew tall and vaulted. All traces of the fungus vanished with the change. With every step they took, part of the hallway behind them returned to its previous state as the change spread forward.

Blue flames emerged from the transfigured walls, where they flowed into Andalon.

“Andalon, what’s happening?” I hissed.

Her eyes were now glowing continuously. Even her skin was luminous. It was like she was supercharged. The light pulsed through her body. Her blue locks floated, as if underwater, flaring like a torch with an ethereal blue flame.

Now, it was my turn to shiver.

There was no trace of her earlier fear. Instead, there was an almost stern vigilance, even as she continued to cling to my arm.

“I can feel the power here,” she said. Her words were calm and measured. “The walls are thin.” She turned to one of the walls as the procession of altered space passed us by. “&alon is close,” she said.”

The funeral march passed through us, heads and limbs looming over us like a herd of blue giraffes. I couldn’t resist turning around and watching them trod off into the distance. Just when I thought they were about to disappear around the next corner, all at once, the procession vanished, along with the shifting walls.

The darkness swallowed it all.

“Was that from another world, Andalon?” I asked. “Munine, but not our Munine?”

She nodded in the affirmative.

More flames streamed into her.

“The darkness thins the walls between the worlds,” Andalon explained, as she continued to glow. “It makes when and where lose their meaning.”

I grabbed hold of the most comforting thought within reach.

“Like in Catamander Brave?” I asked.

Andalon nodded. “Yeah…”

For a moment, she looked up at me, and then turned her gaze back to the floor. “…I don’t want it to destroy this one, too.”

I made sure to tell Suisei everything Andalon had just told me, and the fact that her connection with &alon was strengthening due to the “thinness” of this space.

“Do you know anything about this?” I asked him.

Dr. Horosha shook his head. “Both of us are in the dark,” he replied.

She let her head come to rest on my side. “I don’t want it to destroy you.”

The hallway shook, making Andalon gasp. It seemed like an earthquake at first, it seemed like an earthquake, but then… the walls throbbed. They quivered, seemingly fragmenting—duplicating—into multiple copies, like a hundred thousand ghosts overlapping one another.

Andalon panicked, looked this way and that. “No… no!”

“What’s happening?!” I yelled.

Suisei turned to face me. “If you can… you should run.”

A menagerie’s worth of ghostly silhouettes flickered in and out of existence, faster and faster.

Andalon’s eyes went wide. “I… I can stop it.” Her head nodded like a bobblehead doll’s. “I—I can stop it!”

Levitating out in front of me, Andalon stuck out her hands, shouting, “Go away!”

Only it didn’t. The light in her flared in and out, as if threatening to smolder.

The vibrations threw me onto my knees.

“Why…” she said, “why isn’t it working?” She looked back at me, jaw slack.

“I… I think you have to do it for me, Mr. Genneth. I’m in you, not the world…”

“What do I need to do?”

Suisei narrowed his eyes. “What? What is she saying?”

“It’s gonna hurt.” A tear trickled down her face. “I’ll make Ampersandalon’s power go through you.”

From the rumbling distance, I felt the sound of a rising tide. It shook me like a rickety bridge.

“You need to turn it,” Andalon said.

“Turn?” I asked. “Turn what?”

“Everything,” she replied. “It’s… it’s like a dirty cookie. The dirty part tastes bad, but… if you turn it around, the dirty part’s on the other side. Well, it’s on the inside, ‘cause the inside goes to where the outside was.”

“Wha—”

“—There’s no time,” she said. “You gotta do it!”

Before I could say anything else, Andalon flickered into non-existence, disappearing in a burst of blue fire.

A moment later, my body started to glow—just like hers had.

Suisei stammered. “W-What’s happening…?” He stared at me, wide eyed.

I tried to answer him, but things developed too quickly. &alon’s power surrounded me in an instant, swathing me in flickering tongues of pale fire. And it burned. I hunched over and screamed. Every nerve ending in my body was firing, and all the signals were pain—and only pain.

I saw true wonder in Suisei’s eyes as he stared at me. He said something to me, but the words were lost to the thunder in between my ears.

“Use it!” Andalon’s voice yelled. “Quickly!”

I strained against the pain and the tremors, struggling to lift my head, but I managed to look up.

Angel’s Breath!

I saw a wave of darkness pouring into the corridor from up ahead. It was a deluge, a torrent. It crashed against the floor and walls, raging toward us.

“Suisei,” I strained to speak, “get out… of the way…”

He dashed to the side and crouched to the floor.

I raised my arms, screaming as I channeled &alon’s power. The energy flowing through me was like sand blasting through my veins. I saw it leap off me: the pale fire blasted out of me in swirling cones of fractals petals burning in the wind. The florid light hissed and sparked as it zipped through the oncoming wave. The wave of darkness froze with crystal cracks, riddled through by tubes of emptiness where the petals had shot through. The searing flames vanished as the power was spent.

I fell forward, but Suisei ran up to grab me and hold me up. We watched, stupefied as the wave turned, as if the hallway and the space within it were folding in upon themselves. The turning spread, rippling out from the wave in larger and larger pieces, spreading in a mounting chain reaction that engulfed the halls. The world turned upside down and inside out, and for a moment, everything was lost in a blinding brightness that persisted even as I blinked. The brightness vanished.

I blinked. Afterimages flashed on my vision, only to die away and reveal that everything was… back to normal. The labyrinth was gone. Suisei and I stood inside one of the hallways that lead into the lobby. A pair of double doors stood a couple yards away, dead ahead. I knew exactly where we were: the lobby was just beyond the doors.

“What just happened?” I asked, panting for breath.

Andalon responded by appearing to me. She still glowed with light, but the light was flickering, as if dying away. “We turned everything inside-out, Mr. Genneth. The darkness was small enough that we could make it go away, for now, but—”

—And then, her light went out. It was as if someone had flipped a switch. Suddenly, Andalon was looking around nervously again. She walked back over to me and clung to my leg. “I’m scared, Mr. Genneth. I’m scared.”

“Did Andalon answer you?” Suisei asked me.

“I…” I glanced at her. “I think being in that place put us in touch with &alon—Ampersandalon, I mean; her greater self.”

I turned to Andalon. “Do you remember what happened?”

“I…” she looked me in the eyes. “I think I was… brave?”

I didn’t seem like I was going to get much more of an answer than that, so I stopped pushing. We could figure it out later.

Suisei looked around the hall, still awestruck by what had just transpired.

“This… this changes everything,” he said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

He looked me in the eyes. “That was the Angel’s power, Genneth, I’m sure of it.”

As my eyes widened in shock, the double doors beside us flung open.

“Suisei! Genneth!“

It was Heggy.

“Angel’s grace, you’re safe!”

Before we could react, she embraced the both of us with a soldier’s hug. As Heggy embraced us, I felt a warmth blossom in my chest. It was like the feeling of &alon’s power flowing through me, but infinitely more gentle. There was no pain, only urgency.

Andalon looked up at me in shock. “Mr. Genneth…”

Yeah, I thought-said, I feel it, too.

With the darkness dispelled, Kléothag’s message was finally coming through.