Richie, fists bouncing beside his head in a fluid guard position as he bounced on his feet, locked eyes on the figure of Thratta. In the cosmic space around him, he saw blue light drip down from the stars and spread across inky blackness, becoming sparks and arcs of electricity, surging around each other and combining into a halo-like thunderhead.

A column of blue lightning dropped down, enshrouding Richie in a mantle of Azure energy. It didn't hurt. In fact, he felt a lot like he had when Droplet's ambient influence had begun healing his carved body, and soothing his weary, despairing spirit. He felt that power gather in his palm, and he clutched it. As he had flung the released souls ripped from the Tide Town sea god's chest to the heavens, so too did he throw another blue javelin skyward. It pierced the ceiling of infinity above him, and the scene melted away, Richie and the memory of Thratta warping somewhere else and leaving the cosmic cave behind.

They were in a wide living room space whose carpeting had become a lawn of vibrant green glass. The walls of the house were like stalks of bamboo tightly packed together, growing infinitely upward through a canopy with vast blue skylights. The central room took up the vast majority of the house, while alcoves in the bamboo, like arboreal little grottos, formed reimagined replicas of his and his mother's rooms. Ella's bedroom was comparatively Spartan, housing a koi pond, while Richie's was decorated with fantastic tapestries and posters. His was one of the few rooms with true walls, and the back wall was lined with immense bookshelves crowded with fairy tale books and tomes of mythic lore.

The front door opened on a little stone island in the center of a vast pond, tranquil and blue like Droplet's had been, forming a natural moat around his house. The stepping stones that led to the shore revealed a sprawling panorama of rolling hills on one side, and a smooth beach shore with lapping ocean waves on the other.

He smelled sea salt on the air, and saw a red balloon float by on the breeze, reminding him simultaneously of Freyja and Cuppy. Elements of their personalities and innermost spiritual sanctuaries had bled into his, mixing with his own childhood memories, and the foundation of the Garden of the Forged. He decided to test out no-clip and godmod, to affirm that this was truly his yard.

He summoned Excalibur to his hand and slashed, parting the waves and sea to reveal the ivy tunnel he had first seen through the broken fence, back at the apartment complex. His dragons glowed as they perceived the flow of wandering corridors weaving in between the space of the known world and the Backyards, like portable airport terminals linking the building to the airplanes. Richie also remembered the DVD icon bouncing around the tv screen. What he ultimately pictured the corridors as though were mirage on a distant horizon, but ones with tentative physicality, ones which would become bridges if he could hook them and reel them into shore, beaching them on the banks of his soul's island. A myriad of destinations fluttered behind the fence of his conscious mind, offering him glimpses variously into abandoned stretches of Station Bay's cityscape, overgrown, wild tangles within the parks and forests, the unmanned gates of a massive, intricate sandcastle that still stood on the beach, and the underside of a condemned playground's main platform, boarded up and forming a dark alcove beneath the lip of a slide.

He also perceived, simultaneously, that the throughline of the ivy tunnel at his front carried on at his back, through the transparent image of his bamboo house, to a crowded sub-backyard of strewn rubbish, tangled weeds, and rotted parts, which eventually formed the junkyard back in Station Bay. He could see, a mile away, the junked car he had slept in before, when he had first tumbled out of the Backyards with no recollection of his voyage.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

The straight line linking the ivy tunnel and the junkyard steep seemed solid and fixed, as did the vistas of those places themselves. Unlike the transient gateways, drifting with the parapsychological currents of liminality, these didn't have to be wrangled. They were anchored points, as Cuppy had speculated.

So it seemed their theory that Crocus had turned the abandoned complex into a backdoor for his corralled monsters and shades was true. Beyond just the drifting icebergs of possible exit points in Station Bay, Richie could see, smell, taste, and touch the flickering whispers of other, farther places. A stream snaked its way across the hills, cutting through them and moving as though a living creature rather than a fixed location. Richie felt that it would settle and become an Australian backwater, the likes of which the bunyip he'd been told about might come from. Through the white clouds, he saw the floating silhouette of high, craggy cliffs, and smelled harpy droppings.

He heard the hushed murmurs of souls caught between life and death, led onward by eerie lanterns through dark glens and dead marshes encircling this place like strangle vines, ghostly processions of prospective ferals led on by the maddening scent of Black Rain.

They were transparent and blurry, as though their existences were in a state of question. Richie hadn't been there to see it, or he might have compared the effect to how Luchesi had begun fading in and out after Freyja's deciding blow. Richie saw that their icy breaths were like the ether fog, and that the ether fog itself was akin to the fog of the universal mind, the deep gray mass of uncertainty and possibility permeating and linking the collective unconscious.

"So which came first? The laws of nature, or the totality of all psyches?" Richie scratched his head.

'Thratta', folding his arms, looked out over the parted sea, through the ivy tunnel hugging the exposed weedy sands and mud, and between the planks of the Misty Glen fence at its end.

"Damned if I know." the Seal said. "These are questions for your witchdoctor friend."

Richie smiled. "Moses. Heh, I can part the sea too. Thanks for giving me the idea." he thought of the bokor. "Guess I'll have to find him. This Shinsei guy too. I have a lot of questions I want to ask the both of them. But before all that,"

His eyes became hardened flecks of steel.

"I have business to take care of." he envisioned Luchesi.

Richie dropped Excalibur point-first in the sand, and began walking down the exposed bank of the parted sea. Mud squished under his shoes, and he smelled dead shellfish as he crouched and climbed into the cylindrical tunnel of compact ivy vine.

Thratta nodded, and was gone. His anchor landed in the sand, resting beside King Arthur's legendary sword.

-

Richie emerged from the fence, and looked behind him - it was just the space of the missing planks, and the perpendicular fence which divided the backyard into forested and aquatic halves. He could feel the fairy ring of mushrooms in the forest, and the bubbling of the catfish in the reservoir. He looked onto the concrete back porch of the blue apartment unit he and his friends had restored.

The wampus cat, a dead gopher in its jaws, looked at Richie, confused, and dropped its meal, tilting its head.

"Hi Snaggles." Richie walked up to the weird predator and scratched his head.