The trio made their way back to the lighthouse as the last rays of sunlight faded from the sky. The wails of the Night bells echoed across Shandria, warning citizens to seek shelter.
"Okki. I'ma get in my shadow-proof Baglix," Cedez announced as they entered the smithy loft.
Under Dave’s mental order, the dark Kitlix formed into a ring, dimensional gate opening with a flash. Cedez gave them both a quick hug before stepping through.
Once inside, she quickly stripped off her leather outfit, handing it to Remicra. "Keep an eye on my bestie, Shady!" She winked at the ring-shaped Kitlix.
Dave snapped the gate shut and the Kitlix reformed into a slender, six-pawed cat covered in blue eyes.
[Guard duty?] The Shadowbeast’s thoughts reached Dave as Cedez melted away.
[Yes.] Dave projected back.
[Understood. Vigilant. Alert. Ready to protect hive!]
[Snack on meat and beast cores, maintain energy,] he added.
[Understood.] The Shadow replied and fell silent.
"Here," Remicra said, detaching the rolled bundle from the large bag she bought this morning. “You can sleep beside the table.”
Dave unrolled what turned out to be a surprisingly comfortable-looking bedroll, complete with a pillow. He laid out the bedroll near Remicra's narrow bed, beside the small wooden table, beneath the round stained glass. The dragoness slid onto her small bed and pulled a raggedy curtain closed.
As they settled in for the night, a comfortable silence fell over the loft. Through the round window, Dave could see the massive form of Nightingale descending from the clouds. The thick walls and double pane window kept the leviathan’s song from grating on his nerves.
The black-hole corona-lit night settled over Shandria as Dave activated Dreamspace Communion, his consciousness splitting between watching over Cedez through Healy and joining Sherlock in his office.
In the extradimensional space, Shadow-Cedez was contently gnawing on a Thundersnarg leg, her many wings folded neatly against her serpentine form. [Meat good. Satisfying. Guard duty proceeding as ordered. No enemies.]
Meanwhile in the physical world, Dave could hear Remicra's soft breathing from behind the curtain. The dragoness's bed creaked slightly as she shifted position.
"Can't sleep?" Dave asked quietly.
"Too much happened today," Remicra replied after a moment. "My mind keeps racing."
"Want to talk about it?"
There was a pause, then the curtain rustled. "What's there to talk about? In one day I went from being a lonely, owned smith to... whatever this is. Part of some grand scheme to change Shandria, wearing fancy clothes, with my own Kitlix..."
Feely Aurora made a soft crystalline chime from where she was curled up on Remicra's pillow.
"Is that... bad?" Dave asked.
"No," Remicra said softly. "Just... overwhelming. I'm not used to people caring about me. To having friends. To having..." She trailed off.
"Having what?"
"Hope," she whispered. "For the first time in years, I have hope. And that terrifies me."
“Why?”
“Because it can be easily taken away,” she sighed. “Because I now have something to lose… again. The Shadow Empire took my kin from me, suffocated them at night while I couldn't do anything about it. Everything can be taken away by those with more power and there’s always a bigger mage out there. I learned that lesson when I lost my family. It's... safer not to hope.”
"Remy," Dave said gently. "I promise you, I won't let anyone take your hope away again."
The curtain parted slightly, revealing one violet-gold eye glowing in the darkness. "How can you promise that? You're just one person."
"A person who cares about you," Dave replied. "Who will fight to protect you and your freedom. Besides, I'm not alone - we have Cedez, the healers, grumpy Snailmancer Murdoc and his cafe maids on our side and even… Lari's Cantigeist.”
Remicra was quiet for a long moment. Then she whispered, "Thank you."
Her hand slid out from under the curtain reaching out for him. She was still wearing a dark glove that belonged to Castiss. Dave reached out and took her gloved hand, giving it a gentle squeeze. The leather barrier between their skin prevented further metal poisoning, allowing him to simply hold her hand comfortably.
"This is nice," Remicra murmured after a while. "Just... being here. Not having to be alone anymore."
"Yeah," Dave agreed. "It is."
As he lay there in comfortable silence, holding Remicra's gloved hand as he monitored Shadow-Cedez through Healy. His mind wandered over everything that had happened since his arrival in this strange world.
He had gone from losing Lari and being alone on Earth to being one of the many summoned millions in a city of bones to finding real connections and new purpose.
Through Shady, he watched as Shadow-Cedez contentedly guarded her dimensional space, no longer lost to mindless predatory instinct of serving the leviathan’s hive.
He had found a way to help her retain more of herself, and would continue working to improve her condition.
His gaze drifted to Remicra's crystalline dragon horns barely visible through the curtain. It was nice being able to hold her hand.
The glove was just the beginning. Together, they would find ways to overcome the barriers between them, just as they would find ways to improve life in Shandria.
Looking up at the stained glass window where false stars of distant empires and explosions twinkled through colored panes, Dave smiled. This strange new world with its magic and monsters had become home in a way Earth never quite managed to be.
There was just one more thing to do before he could sleep.
He pulled out Saint Saria’s Phylactery from his bag and opened the page, setting his finger onto the inked hexagram. Saint Saria’s portrait was visible below the dim light of the black hole’s corona and the red triangle hexagrams scattered around the room.
“David?” The inked words formed below the Depictomancy construct as Lari blinked at him with sketched eyes. “How are you doing?”
Dave traced his finger across the page, quietly forming words with the hexagram that pulsed beneath his skin touching the page: "I'm okay, Lari. Better than okay."
"Are you? You're taking unnecessary risks," the book wrote back. "I saw Pathosteel poisoning bruises on your hands through Terri’s eyes. You can’t…”
“It’s fine,” he replied. “Remicra is wearing gloves now.”
The portrait frowned.
"I understand why you're worried," Dave wrote. "But Cedez and Remy aren’t just random people I met. They're... real friends. The kind that challenge me, support me, and make me want to be better."
Remicra’s hand stopped gripping his as hard, her breath now fully relaxed.
Saint Saria bit her lower lip, making a worried face.
"Like you did on Earth," he continued with a soft whisper so as not to disturb the sleeping smith. "Do you remember how you practically had to drag me to that first D&D session? How terrified I was of meeting new people, especially when I could barely walk upright, limping about like an old man with a cane? But you knew exactly what I needed - friends who would accept me as I was."
“That was so long ago, but I… remember,” The portrait's expression softened slightly. "You must realize that was different. Those were people I knew and trusted."
"Right. There’s just one thing I don’t get. Why me, Lari?" Dave asked the magic-animated portrait. "Out of all of our friends from the D&D group, why did you move in with me? Why did you make this phylactery specifically to help me? Why am I so special to you that you'd spend centuries preparing for my arrival? Why the hell did you even give me your number at the hospital?”
The portrait's eyes grew distant, lost in memory. "Funny… I never told you this.”
“Told me what?”
"That Wednesday... I had just gotten my diagnosis. Stage four. Terminal. I was going to quit everything, give up being a paramedic. What was the point? I had six months left."
The ink shifted, forming new words beneath her portrait. "Then the call came in. Car accident downtown. I almost went home, didn't want to bother. But... then it was like… something made me go. When we got there, you were clinically dead. No pulse. Standard procedure was to call it."
“And?”
"I saw a simple mood ring on a chain when I cut open your shirt to use the defibrillator," the ink flowed across the page. "I pulled it off you, wrapped it around my hand and then hit you with the paddles. When the charge struck… the ring... it did something impossible.”
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“What?”
“It… ignited with colors. Not just color change from the heat of my hand - real, impossible, inner light. Like a star being born woven from rainbows."
"What?" Dave blinked.
“My partner didn’t seem to notice it, but I did,” Lari confessed. “The light formed words. Glowing words that folded into themselves, like an endless fractal. There were so many words, like a story, like a book, like an entire library of alien, eldritch novels.”
"My mom's ring?" Dave whispered, his eyes wide.
“Yeah,” Saint Saria nodded. “The colorful light faded, but that impossible text burned itself into my corneas, refusing to let go of me. I thought I was hallucinating from stress at first," the ink portrait continued. "No one should have survived that level of trauma. My initial diagnosis was grim.”
“How grim?”
"Your injuries were fatal," the ink portrait continued. "Severe internal bleeding, multiple fractures, spinal trauma... Your spine was broken, the nerves obliterated. By all medical standards, you shouldn't have made it. The impact alone should have killed you instantly.”
“So then… how did I recover at all?” David blinked at the book, not believing Lari’s words.
"It was like the text I saw on the ring did something to me… snapped me in half from within. There was more impossible text, all over my hands and all over your body, wherever I touched it. Nobody else saw it, except for me. It was like… like the ring did something to me, infecting me… with the capacity to do more. I held onto it, used the defibrillator again and then… somehow, against all odds, your heart started beating again.”
David choked. “Shit. So then, then my mom… My mom really did it.”
“It was like… like I could push my life into you,” Lari continued, seemingly lost in her memories. “Do the impossible. Bend reality. So… I did. I somehow fixed your injuries one by one with the all-containing-text, somehow saved you, even though you were dead as dirt. The words I saw in your ring... they weren't just random text. They were instructions, formulas, diagrams - knowledge from elsewhere. Medical techniques that seemed impossible, yet somehow I understood them and used them to help you.”
"The light faded after that," the drawing continued. "The knowledge slipped away like waking from a dream. But for those few minutes... I had touched something impossible. Something that gave me hope."
“Damn,” David exhaled.
“I grinned at you like a ditz, made dumb jokes about Wednesdays,” Lari confessed. “It was like… When I fixed you, I fixed myself a little too, ripped a gray curtain away from my eyes.”
“So it was the ring all along,” he whispered.
"Yes," the portrait nodded. "That's why I gave you my number, why I dragged you to D&D. Because that moment showed me that impossible things could happen."
"But you still died," Dave said softly.
"I did," the ink portrait agreed. "I also lived six years, not six months and I knew… I somehow knew that… That, maybe my diagnosis wasn't the end of my story. I never quit working as a paramedic, I kept smiling everyday… because of you, David.”
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this?” He asked.
“Would you have believed me?” Lari asked.
"No," Dave admitted after a long moment. "I probably would have thought you were having some kind of breakdown from the overworking. I was... pretty closed-minded back then about anything that didn't fit my hyper-rational, programming obsessed worldview."
“Exactly. You constantly ranted at me about your poor, insane mother, how she’s lost her mind and hoarded ‘magic’ crystals and 'magic' books. I never confessed about what I saw because I didn’t want you to kick me out of your life, didn’t want you to think that I was crazy too.”
“So what did you do then?”
“So I kept it to myself,” the drawing smiled softly. "I… moved in with you after your accident, pretending it was just to help with your recovery and also to save money," the ink portrait continued. "But really... I was fascinated by that ring, obsessed with it. I kept hoping to see that impossible light again, to understand everything everywhere, if just for another moment.”
"You were studying the ring?"
"Yeah," Lari admitted. "I tried everything I could think of to activate it again while you were sleeping. Different temperatures, different lighting conditions, even tried various electrical currents... nothing worked. The ring remained stubbornly ordinary, the heat-sensing element dead.”
“So you were my friend because of my magic ring?”
“No, David,” Lari’s portrait laughed. “That damn mood ring might have been a catalyst for what I did in the beginning… but then I genuinely started to like you.
"So why didn't we ever..." Dave trailed off.
"Date properly?" The ink portrait smiled sadly. "We talked about this so many times, David. Because I was dying. I didn't want to burden you with that. The friends with benefits arrangement was... safer. Easier.”
“Did you love me?” He asked.
The ink portrait's expression softened with a hint of regret. "I cared about you deeply, David. You were my best friend. But I deliberately didn't let myself fall in love. I couldn't. It wouldn't have been fair to either of us. I could give you companionship and physical comfort without the emotional devastation that would come from losing a girlfriend to cancer."
"That wasn't your decision to make," Dave said quietly.
"Maybe not," Lari admitted. "But I'd seen what losing your mother did to you. I couldn't bear the thought of putting you through that kind of pain again. So I kept things light, casual. Protected you the only way I knew how."
"By keeping me at arm's length," Dave sighed.
"While still being there for you," the portrait nodded. "Making sure you had a support system, friends, a social life. I wanted you to be strong enough to stand on your own when I was gone."
"And now here you are, centuries later, still trying to protect me," Dave observed.
"Old habits die hard," the ink portrait smiled wryly. "I'm honestly just worried about your... new friends," she added. "Remicra is poisoning you and Cedez... She's unstable, dangerous."
"Still trying to take care of me," Dave sighed. "Still trying to control everything around me. I'm not that broken person anymore, Lari. I don't need you to manage my life or choose my friends for me."
"I just want you to be safe," the portrait's expression turned pleading. "After everything I've seen happen to the other Davids..."
"I understand," Dave said. "But you have to let me make my own choices. My own mistakes, if that's what they turn out to be. You can't protect me forever."
"Even if those choices could get you killed?" The ink shifted anxiously. "Or worse?"
"They're my choices to make," Dave replied firmly. "Not yours. Not your Cantigeist's. Not your Maidenlynes'. Mine."
The ink portrait's expression grew troubled. "I just... I've seen so many versions of you fall into darkness, David. Each time thinking they could handle it, that they were different..."
"Look. Let me tell you about Cedez and Remicra," Dave interrupted. "Really tell you about them."
“I’m listening,” Lari crossed her arms.
"When I first met Cedez at the Snail Cafe, she was this enigmatic figure playing games, making Earth references, seemingly manipulating events around her. She acted like she knew everything about me, dropping hints about my past, my preferences. It was irritatingly unsettling."
The portrait frowned. "Exactly my point. She's-"
"Let me finish, damn it," Dave continued.
Shady-Cedez covered in myriads of blue eyes seemed to recognize that Dave was talking about her. She walked over to him and sat on his chest, tilting her head at him. Dave gave her a pet.
"But underneath all that manipulation, it turns out that there was something genuine,” he said. “A lonely girl who lost her past who’s desperately trying to connect with others while terrified of losing herself to the shadows. She put on this act of being mysterious and all-knowing, but really... She's just scared. Scared of fading away, of becoming a Shadowbeast.”
Shady buried herself into his hands and then curled into a dark ball atop of his chest.
"And despite what she is, Cedez still tries to help others," Dave continued, petting the purring dark Kitlix. "She spent years anonymously sending tools to Remicra, trying to make her life a little better. She risks herself to protect me and Remy. She makes jokes and messes with Remy and tries to lift everyone's spirits. But, most of all—she pushes us to be more.”
The portrait's expression remained skeptical.
"And Remicra..." Dave glanced at the curtain where the dragoness slept. "When I first met her, she was this angry dragon who pushed everyone away. But can you blame her? She'd been enslaved, abused, treated like property. Her entire village was killed by the Shadow Empire. Of course she built walls around herself."
"Walls that you seem determined to break down," the ink portrait observed.
"Yes. Because behind those walls is someone incredible," Dave replied softly. "Someone who maintained her dignity and strength through years of slavery. Someone who still dreams of creating beautiful things despite everything that's been done to her. Did you know that she's my imaginary friend, the dragon I used to see in patterns as a kid before they put me on meds? The one who helped me cope with mom and dad fighting?"
The portrait frowned.
"I was wrong about a lot of things," Dave said. “Because I didn’t know everything. About you, about my mom, about the ring she gave me. But I think that I’m finally starting to understand everything, and finally seeing the entire picture. I think that the pattern I saw in TV static was Phantomancy and that somehow, for some reason it connects me to Remy and to you, to everyone I met here on Arx. Everyone I now care about.”
The portrait was quiet for a long moment. "You really care about them, don't you?"
"I do," Dave nodded. "They're not perfect. Cedez can be annoying, manipulative and cryptic. Remicra can be stubborn and prickly. But they're real. Genuine and supportive in their own way.”
The portrait exhaled, inked hair fluttering in unseen wind as she stepped back, looking almost like a final boss of a fantasy game… one that he had to defeat, perhaps not with weapons, but with his words.
"One of the anchors I left, a Seerscope Ward, is warning me that bad things are coming," the ink portrait warned. "I worry that the souls you absorb could fragment your mind, just like they did to Kells."
"That's why I'm not going to rely on magic alone," Dave replied firmly.
“What's your plan then?”
"I'm going to do what I do best - understand patterns, find solutions, create new things. I'm going to study every rule of this world and figure out how to work within them. Magic… programming.”
"And how exactly will that work?”
"By combining knowledge from Earth with what's possible here," Dave replied, scratching behind Shady's crystalline ears. "I'm going to reinvent plastic, make armor that doesn't need metal. I’m going to improve Shady's dimensional storage capabilities by applying computer architecture principles. I’m going to understand how magic points are given out and optimize this process, uplift my friends.”
"Hrm," the portrait admitted reluctantly. “That’s… clever of you.”
"Thanks. I'm not just going to blindly absorb souls and throw magic around, Lari," Dave continued. "I'm going to understand the underlying patterns, the rules that make everything work. Like how computer code has syntax and logic, this world has its own systems and structures. I’m going to figure them out and I’m going to figure out a variety of clever ways to overcome dungeons and to improve Kitlix. Tell me–did any of the other Davids bother do that?”
Saint Saria pursed her lips. “No… they didn’t. They lost themselves to their magic, went mad before I found them. You’re the first David that I was able to get to Shandria who’s still… unbroken.”
“There you go,” David smiled. “See? And I’m not just going to remain unbroken. I’m going to heal myself with Healy and get stronger physically and mentally… figure out how to solve every problem so that I can fulfill your Quest. Promise.”
The portrait nodded, seemingly pacified.
"Thank you, Lari," Dave whispered to the book with a yawn. "For telling me the truth. For helping me find my way to Shandria. For having that wyvern abduct me or whatever. But I think I can handle things from here on out. You don’t need to worry about me. I got it from here. I’m not alone anymore.”
He let go of the hexagram and Lari’s portrait stilled.
The violin in his soul played an encouraging melody as Sherlock nodded in approval as he closed the Phylactery and reached out with his right hand to Remicra’s gloved fingers once again, holding onto the dark Kitlix inhabiting his chest with his left.
Together they would face whatever challenges came next - mad dragon emperors, hostile shadows, scheming nobles. But they would face them as a team, working and fighting for a better future.
Dave held onto his new best friends as he drifted off to sleep, finally at peace with who and where he was. Tomorrow would bring new adventures, but for now, he believed that he was finally exactly where he needed to be.