#endergame

He hadn’t exactly been avoiding coming back, but with all his actual clientele in the hospital, it had seemed kinda rude to leave them there. The village had been so lively that returning to the wrecked shell of his bar – in the middle of nowhere and in the middle of a lake even there – hadn’t been all that appealing. He supposed it could have been a worse location – all things considered – but from the glimpse he’d got of Blackrock, it’d be a long time before the neighbourhood was habitable again.

If anyone even came back at all.

Something crunched underfoot as he made his way further inside, casting increasingly-dejected glances around at the wreckage. Even more of the roof had collapsed, rain had soaked everything underneath the yawning holes, and there looked like something was starting to nest in the rags of curtains.

He wondered if the Sick Bay village needed a pub. He hadn’t found one, when he’d been wandering around. Could be an opportunity there.

There sure didn’t seem to be that much of one here.

He slung his pack down on the bar top and glared at the featureless black expanse of the not-a-TV, which had closed itself as soon as they had re-appeared. Lalna had been talking about it. Zoey had been talking about it. Hell, even Sjin had made comments, in his own way – and while Ravs would freely admit he didn’t have the slightest idea what the damn thing actually was, he was pretty sure that anyone poking around in it was a really, really bad idea. He ducked round under the bar, tossing a few things back onto his bag for later, and searched around until his fingers closed around the cool metal of his crowbar, still thankfully in place.

Right then.

The box was firmly bracketed to the wall, and turned out to be impressively flush with the uneven brickwork behind. The actual brackets came away easily but he tried out every angle he could reach with the crowbar after that, and there there just didn’t seem to be a way to get purchase. How the hell had he installed this thing?

…why had he installed this thing? Ravs hesitated, brow furrowing, as he glared at the smug blank surface in front of him, and tried to remember the wall without it. The TV had never worked, but he’d just assumed… something. Something important, maybe? Some reason he hadn’t tried to get rid of it before. The memory was slippery, dropping out of his attention as he grasped for it, and he gave an irritated growl as he turned around.

And stopped.

There was a man sitting at the bar, and Ravs would swear blind he hadn’t heard him enter. He looked supremely out of place in the disarray of the room – clad in black-and-gold and a painfully-crisp shirt that looked like it had come out of a really clean museum – except that the rest of the bar seemed suddenly faded in comparison, as if everything else was merely background to the new figure.

“Hello Ravs.” The voice was smooth, lightly accented, but there was a strange feeling to the words. They seemed heavy, somehow, weighing down against his mind, and Ravs couldn’t quite shake the impression he hadn’t heard them in the normal way. The man smiled. His expression was wide, faintly unsettling, and… slightly familiar?

Ravs rallied. He was a Wildlands barman, f’fucks’ sake, and there was no way some stealthy dandy was going to unnerve him. Not after the last month, certainly. He put the crowbar down, very deliberately-like, and met the smile with his own.

“Bad timing, mate. We’re a wee bit closed right now – ”

His voice died in his throat as the new man laughed softly and leaned forward, lacing his long fingers together in front of him. Brocade glittered at his wrists and his eyes gleamed with the same dark-gold light, as the hairs on Ravs’ own neck began to prickle alarmingly.

“Oh, I know. But I think you have something that belongs to me.”

"Seems fair," Honeydew nodded, and scratched his beard thoughtfully as he nodded back down at the roof. “We did alright. Condensers packed up and some of Lalna’s weird machines imploded, plus a whole load of pipes turned to sand – which gave me the collywobbles for a bit, I can fuckin’ tell you."

Lomadia laughed, as she stepped away from the mooring and slung her small pack over her shoulder.

“Yeah, some of the stuff he set up on the Island has gone a bit funny, but Nilesy’s determined to figure it out for himself. Magically, apparently – he’s stuck some gold stars on a hat, and everything. Want to bet if he’ll still have eyebrows when I get back?”

Honeydew chuckled and shook his head.

“Never put money against a Scotsman; old dwarven proverb. C’mon, we’re set up downstairs.”

“Set up…?” Lomadia blinked, but the dwarf was already heading back towards his entrance hatch. She followed him, a small frown nipping onto her brow, under the goggles. What was this about? Everything had been very busy since they’d got back – and if she’d thought that reality might have built in a little down-time after a crisis like that, she’d have been mistaken.

Getting back to the Island on an increasingly-malfunctioning flight ring had been tricky enough, and getting everyone onboard and ferried to somewhere actually medical had been yet another race against time; with half the group barely-conscious and Rythian fitting violently as the tangle of magic that was keeping him alive glitched and shifted. They’d got there though, and the combined negotiating forces of Sips, Xephos, and the appearance of Tee had cut through administrative chaos remarkably quickly.

Lomadia herself had got away with a few rounds of stitches, some vials of particularly unpleasant-tasting healing potions, and passing out on a sofa – until she’d been woken by Minty, with lowered voice and a hand-sketched map, and had grudgingly agreed to pilot for what amounted to a night-time raid on Lalna’s castle. It also had the bonus strategy of thoroughly stranding everyone else in the hospital village, under the formidable ministrations of the testificate staff – so they would take a bit of bloody time out to get put back together again.

The double-standard hadn’t escaped her attention, but she chose to ignore it.

When they got there, the portal room had been ridiculous – some strange hybrid of mad-science logic and weird engineering, bizarre even by Lalna’s standards – and the on-and-off frame itself was unnerving, but there had been something very satisfying about crowbaring the stones apart and watching that sheet of too-deep darkness dissipate. They’d split all the sockets they could find between them, including the empties. She had no idea what Minty had planned for hers – and the petite figure just smiled in an annoyingly serene way when she had asked. Lomadia had hidden her own half of the bargain in various roosts around the Island, for now. When she had a bit more time, sinking the damn things very far into the ocean sounded like a good idea. In very heavy boxes. With weights on.

After that, it was a lot of back-and-forth, and a certain amount of exhausted tears of relief when the messages came through, one by one, when the more battered members of the group were given all-clears. Zoey, Lalna, and – well.

“Rythian’s stabilized,” she remarked between her feet as she started to climb down the hatch ladder. “Potions started working – must’ve finally shed all the knackered magic.”

Honeydew gave a humph, but it was a relieved sort of noise.

“Aye, good; about ruddy time. Skinny bugger’s a hard one to take out, I’ll give him that.”

“It’s a mage thing,” Lomadia replied, lightly, but Honeydew stopped beneath her quite abruptly, and when he spoke next his voice was soft.

“Not always, lass.”

There was silence for a second, then a clang as the dwarf dropped down.

“C’mon,” he called up, with the odd tone almost gone. “You go through, I’ve got a couple of things to grab.”

Lomadia climbed down, still puzzled, and stepped out into the small corridor that adjoined the two penthouse rooms of the factory. Xephos’ door was open, and Honeydew’s had just shut firmly behind the retreating figure.

What was this all about? She hadn’t had much time since they’d got back to talk to Xephos, and certainly not about some things. Her own words – far away now, simultaneously very real and almost dream-like, in that literal otherworld – danced at the back of her mind, and her stomach tightened as she raised a hand and tapped lightly on the doorframe.

“Xeph? You there?”

At the affirmative, she stepped inside. Xephos was sitting crosslegged on the floor underneath one of the large skylights, with his sword across his knees. He looked less tired than he had last time they’d spoken, but there were still dark circles under his eyes, and a tight hunch to his shoulders. Still, the most obvious change was in what he was wearing, and Lomadia frowned as she approached, taking in details of the very-patched red and black outfit. The little bronze arrow was pinned to his chest, and several of the repaired sections were like fabric shadows of marks she knew lay underneath, scored into his skin.

It looked a bit like a uniform, although admittedly one that had gone through a blender.

“Hello,” he said, quietly, as he watched her approach. Lomadia dropped down in front of him, mirroring the pose as she shrugged off her bag, and hesitated for a moment before she reached out to run the back of her fingers down his cheek. It was damp, but he didn’t flinch, and leaned slightly into the contact.

“Hi,” she replied, equally softly, and dipped forward to catch that slightly over-bright gaze. “You alright? What’s with all this?” She waved her other hand up and down across him, and his lips twitched.

“I’m – well, I’m fine. For me, I mean.” He shifted position, rolling the flat of the blade back and forth, and the reflections played across his tensed features. “This is for… reference.”

There was a determined expression in his eyes, and Lomadia’s breath caught slightly as realisation dawned.

'I know you – but I know nothing about you.’

“Xeph, you don’t have to – ” she started, but he shook his head and managed a serious kind of smile.

“I know. But I want to; I want you to know who we really are; what I am. As much as I know.” His fingertips drummed arrhythmically along the sword. Lomadia let her own hand drop, and matched the pattern on the blade.

“I already do. Details, I’ll admit, are a bit sparse,” she conceded, and Xephos gave a small snort of laughter.

“There’re quite a lot of details.”

“Aye, and there’s no getting started on ‘em without me,” Honeydew’s voice cut in, and Lomadia looked up as he appeared, half-visible behind a large tray stacked high with his habitual cakes, bottles of dark beer and several still-steaming mugs. He shuffled inside, kicked the door closed with a surprisingly-coordinated boot, and stomped over to them. The precarious tray was set down near Xephos’ feet, and the dwarf dropped down heavily on his other side.

“Gotta make sure we get it all right, an’ I swear he weren’t paying attention for half of it,” he said. For a moment the stare that met Lomadia’s hardened, and she remembered when they had first met, how protective Honeydew had been over his friend. How long it had taken the dwarf to trust her – not out of malice, not with the sort of worried looks she had seen cast towards the taller of the partnership, but from caution. There was the flicker of it again here, an echo of the blustering, angry dwarf that had once stormed up in front of her, and demanded to know 'what she thought she was bloody playing at'. It had been a long time. But still...

“Sounds about right,” she said, carefully, as she leaned over to pick a jaffa out of the pile and nibbled at the edge. Honeydew watched her for another few heartbeats – then he winked, very quickly, and grabbed his own biscuit. Xephos looked between them both, once eyebrow raised, and the edge of an exasperated grin twitched at his lips.

“Everyone finished being symbolic with baked goods now?” he asked, amusement threaded through his words, and Honeydew snorted in response.

“I’m plannin’ on being symbolic on at least two packs, smart-arse.”

Lomadia failed to stifle a giggle as Xephos rolled his eyes.

“For pete’s sake – ” he started, but cut off when Lomadia slid her hand forward, and dropped her fingers over his own. There was another weighted silence, thick with unfocused possibility, as Xephos looked down at the diamond edge of his sword.

“I… remember light,” he said, finally, and it felt like the world had released a held breath; a strange tension that had been hidden behind the air, now starting to unravel with his words. “And falling, and snow. Nothing before that. Not where I started, not what these clothes are, or what the symbols mean. To be completely honest, even my name’s a bit of a guess.”

His fingers twitched up towards the little badge, which clicked softly under the touch, and he let out a long breath.

“And then it all got really complicated.”

---

It was quiet here.

Realisation condensed very slowly into Rythian’s mind and the thought seemed strangely sluggish, blurry, as if having to come in from far away. It was quiet. Not silent; not the yawning emptiness of nothing around him, but quiet – a warm calm, threaded through with soft noises. A few faint, unintrusive beeps; the careful brush and shuffle of measured footsteps; the shift of fabric. He couldn’t remember the last time things had just been quiet.

What he did remember was…

Darkness, pouring over him in a smothering surge of liquid-black; inescapable, rising, clawing down his throat as the scream howled through every shredded fibre of his being; because it was all failing, falling, as oblivion stretched out and all they could do was run -

Then something wet, cold, and breathing pressed abruptly into his ear, and the sheer disconnect between sensation and remembrance jolted him awake. He jerked half-upright, rigid in the sudden paralysis of confusion, and it took a good few seconds of staring before the bizarre mosaic of grey and white resolved, and recognition hit like a hammer.

“…Ghost?” His own voice was a croak, creaking and underused. The dog seemed delighted anyway, letting out a joyful whine at the sound of his name, and made another attempt to clamber up onto the bed – mostly just succeeding in getting even more tangled in the sheets.

Bed?

He was in a bed. Rythian stared down, disbelieving, at where his fingers had bunched into the sheets, at the disarrayed green blankets marking miniature hillsides around his legs. Green was a common colour – long verdant curtains made a small private space around him, and there was a vase of lush flowers sitting on a small wooden table nearby. Sunlight filtered in sedately through a thin white curtain, taking the edge off the glare, and Rythian blinked. Everything seemed strangely, intensely colourful after the violet-monochrome he’d been so used to.

Where was he? This wasn’t Blackrock. And it certainly wasn’t the End.

Maybe I’m dead. The notion flicked across his thoughts, but he dismissed it just as quickly. He may not be entirely certain in considerations of an afterlife, but he doubted it would come with a faint background scent of disinfectant. Ghost made another assault on the bedframe, managing this time to scramble up enough to start licking furiously at Rythian’s face and he found himself laughing underneath the resulting splutters, as he failed to ward off even a little of the enthusiastic affection.

His body felt strange – very weak, heavy and too light at the same time – and it took a while before he was able to get the dog shoved around into a less awkward position. He dug his fingers into Ghost’s thick fur, rubbing at the long head that pressed into his shoulder.

“I – missed you too, boy,” he managed hoarsely, voice catching a bit in his throat as he realised the weight of that statement. It had been so long since he’d allowed himself to think about anything – anyone – he had left behind. Sometimes he hadn’t been able to stop it, as bright wisps had darted across his sleepless mind, but those had been nothing but phantoms, a taunt as much as a memory.

There was something very real about a large dog endeavoring to lick your ears off. He ran his hands down Ghost’s back and the dog whined and flopped down, pinning his legs to the mattress and wagging hard enough to beat a dull rhythm from the nearby curtain, then Rythian hesitated as he looked at his own raised hands. Seeing his arms bare, minus the stained and cracked bandages that had become more familiar than his actual skin, was strange. His eyes tracked across the fine scarring that all but cross-hatched his forearms, tracing patterns of old pain from nearly his shoulders down to his fingertips.

Bare fingers too. He flexed, haltingly, and watched the long-etched lines where his rings should sit move uneasily with the motion. Different. He reached up, half-consciously, to trace across the long welt of old scar that crowned his neck. Something felt different there as well, but he couldn’t quite put the sense of it into words.

Something lost. Something gained.

His nails scraped skin, missing the tug of chain as they descended, and he realised with a start that there was nothing hanging around his neck either. No power-gleam of star, or its ruby-hearted partner, usually so bright even against his closed eyelids and weighing like paired lead against all his other senses. There was nothing there now, and that was particularly unbalancing. Those little pieces of careful alchemical craft, balanced and formed under his own hands, had been the only things keeping him alive for…

…for…

He stopped again, because his fingers had reached his chest, and the sensation there was new. Looking down, wedging his head at an awkward angle, Rythian stared at the fresh scar that stood out there, pale against his skin. Sealed edges of ragged tears trailed out around a sharply-defined centre. The mark of a blade cut deep and twisted.

He stared at it, framed between fingers that trembled only slightly. He felt…

Smaller. Sharper, in some ways; terribly blunted in others. The sense of loss was still there, a black-bloody gash on his soul that he doubted would ever truly close, but at the same time he felt… lighter. In several definitions of the word.

And it was quiet. Inside, too.

“Willow! You’re not supposed to be in here either!” A new voice cut in, half-hissed, and he turned around as quickly as he could manage with muscles that felt like wet cotton, as Ghost perked up even further at the sound. The curtains burst back in a flurry of brown fur and Rythian gave a whuf of his own as another four-legged shape launched onto the bed and made a damp assault on his chin. Slightly trampled, he looked up as the curtain swished back and an achingly-familiar figure ducked quickly inside. Zoey was already muttering some soft admonition as she turned, and saw him.

There was a very long moment, which might have seemed more poignant if there had been less barking in accompaniment. Zoey’s eyes widened.

“…hey,” she managed, hurrying forward and shooing Willow back into the floor – although Ghost refused to be budged – and sank down rather abruptly onto the edge of his bed. Warm hands closed over his own, tightening, and all Rythian could do was stare.

She held on. Through everything, everything, as the backlash of a magic he still didn’t truly understand had hit, had torn its ravenous price from his battered flesh – she'd held on. Lifeline. His own nexus, in that place, the joining link in the chain of offered lives, spreading his death between them all until it wasn’t quite enough anymore.

A wide, slightly-wobbly smile spread across Zoey’s face as she looked at him, and it was like the sun rising.

“Hey, good-lookin’,” she muttered, and to Rythian’s surprise reached over to brush a lock of hair from his forehead, smoothing it back gently. “You back with us now?”

Ghost barked, happily, and Rythian couldn’t suppress a snort of laughter as the dog nearly wagged himself off the bed.

“We… got out?” he asked, when he could persuade words to happen. Obviously they had. Obviously – but he needed to hear it. Zoey nodded.

“Sure. Operation Ender-day? Total success.” She stopped, shrugged, and continued. “Well, I mean the pub’s a writeoff really, after most of a mountain came down on it, and I don’t think anyone managed to bring much stuff back, plus it all went a bit dicey at the end there and Sips has already started trying to fit that into adverts. But – well – even this is kinda cool, right?”

She reached up and rather suddenly yanked down the neck of her shirt; but before even Rythian could go pink, he saw what she was referring to, and embarrassment died under the jolt of shock. His hand jerked back up to his chest, pressed against the new scar there, as he stared at the same shape, sketched in a still-angry red against Zoey’s skin.

He remembered the feedback echoes; sharp enough to hurt.

Zoey let her neckline rise back and shrugged again.

“Tee’s got one too. Kind of, bit weird with the scales, and Ravs’ gone all bleached in the chest-fuzz, but yeah. Think it was a bit too spread out after it got past us to leave anything permanent. Bit of a Blackrock Crew badge, see?” There was a deliberately-airy tone to her voice when she spoke, a careful lightness that didn’t quite reach her eyes.

“I’m… I’m sorry, Zoey,” Rythian started, past the lump tightening in his throat. Marked. Scarred, by that place, because of him – but Zoey made an impatient sound, and swatted at his tensing hand. She dipped down, meeting his gaze again, and now her eyes were diamond.

“None of that, alright?” she said; softly but firmly. “We’re fine. It’s not the first scar I’ve got, and most of them’ve got nothing to do with you. No one did anything they didn’t want to.”

“But – ”

“But nothing.” She caught his hand again and shook it, emphatically. “We all got out. Everyone, like we said.”

“I don’t – ” Rythian stopped, frowning. “I remember. Sort of. It’s all a bit…”

"Blurry?" Zoey finished, and gave a small smile as she shook her head. "I know, right? I mean, I didn’t get hit as hard as you, and I wasn’t dragon-chow at all, but it’s not real clear to me either." She tapped her forehead. "Lom made notes outa all the jabbering, I think; on the way here."

A very, very brief shard of memory lit up – the creak of rigging, lurch of a deck beneath, and the howl of wind in the clouds either side – and Rythian blinked as he looked around again.

"Where is ‘here’?” he finally asked. Now he was listening, he could hear faint snatches of testificate speech drifting in around the curtains, low and careful. “A… village?”

"Sort of. Paul did the directions – he came to find us when everything went weird, and Lom’d already gone to get the airship, so it was easy enough. We’ve been calling it Sick Bay, cos we’re near the sea and it’s like a hospital, and we really needed – “

"Wait – ‘went weird’?" Rythian hadn’t missed that little vocal note, amongst everything else. "What went weird?"

Zoey hesitated, then reached into her pocket and held out a fistful of metal.

“…magic, I guess. Not long after we got back,” she said, and her voice dropped again. “Blackrock’s… messed up, Paul says. All the – all the spells went wrong. At the same time. I mean, they all got well out of dodge, and he says it was pretty dramatic to watch, but… yeah.”

Rythian barely heard her. His attention was fixed on the sad little shapes in her hand. Their klein stars. Once brilliant coils of crafted magic, but now dull, cataract-glazed; more like wax-yellow marbles than anything else. He half went to reach out, then carefully nudged the dead stars aside, staring at the pair of lifestones. One with its heart dulled to a clotted brown, the other an empty hole, littered with tiny shards of reddish glass.

He picked up the broken one – his, the slightly rougher of the two – and felt the runes as little more than raised ridges under his touch. No shiver of power, sparking against his skin, and now he had thought about it, realised, his less-standard senses as a whole felt numbed. Distant – blurred, almost, and he shifted awkwardly, as if that would shake the misaligned feeling.

It wasn’t just him that had changed.

“It was… well, it was a bit bad. Just after,” Zoey continued, “I mean, you weren’t exactly… you were a bit reliant, I guess. But we got here, and – and you’ve kinda been in and out for weeks, but you’re okay now. So that’s fine!” she finished, bluntly cheerful, but there was a shake in her voice and she hadn’t quite managed to get her expression to fit around the tone.

Rythian rubbed his thumb across the lifestone again and tried not to shudder. He was under no illusions to how reliant he had been on the maintaining magic there. If it had failed?

“Thank you,” he said, quietly.

"I figured you’d want to see."

"No," he swallowed and put the stone down, where Ghost sniffed at it curiously. "No, I mean… Thank you, Zoey. For… just for everything. Before all this, I never – I never told you enough."

He stopped again; not because there were no words, but because there were too many, rising and knotting around each other with a sudden urgency. So many things unsaid, so many times he’d brushed her away. So many almost-truths, diverting and dismissing under the awkward mantle of ‘protection’, and yet…

She'd held on; to him, and to everyone else. Thirteen kinds of impossible and the heart of an inferno, and looking at him right now with open curiosity in her eyes. He swallowed hard.

“Not about anything. Magic, my past, what I’ve done or how I – how -“

Come on, man! The words, those words, the ones that burned as bright as she did across his thoughts – they were right there, pressed against his tongue and even now he couldn’t -

Zoey leaned forward and squeezed his shaking fingers.

“You love me,” she said, in such a matter-of-fact way that it took his tangled brain a few moments to realise what he’d heard, and her grin widened at his thunderstruck expression. “I’m still not an idiot, Rythian. Plus, y’know, not to dilute the Moment or anything, but you spent the first two weeks here right up to the eyeballs on a lot of painkillers, and you’ve declared affection for two nurses, Paul, the alchemist-guy topping up your meds, and a lamp. Like, twice on the lamp.”

Heat flared under his cheeks, embarrassment catching hard and he went to pull away – stupid, stupid – but Zoey held on, and her smile didn’t falter.

“And me. I guess I couldn’t be your apprentice anymore…?”

“You’re not my apprentice,” Rythian replied and continued quickly at her faintly-hurt blink. “Zoey, you found your own way into the End. Fought the Queen. Did this – “ he gestured between their chests, touching his own scar “- and got us back out. Most mages won’t manage even a tenth of that in their entire lifetime. I didn’t. There’s nothing I can teach you anymore.”

Now it was her turn to blush – but pleased – as she ran a hand back down one side of her hair.

“There’s loads I don’t know, though. And it’s all changed, now,” she nodded down at the broken lifestones, “I mean, potions still work, and Lalna was saying something about thoumattognomic flex, but I don’t – “

“Magic changes.” Rythian shrugged. “It always has. We can find out how. Together, if – you want that.”

He couldn’t do much to disguise the raw hope in his voice – didn’t dare even dwell on it too much, in case reality caught up and his luck turned back down its more usual path. Zoey held his gaze, just long enough for worry to start circling under his thoughts, and then she smiled.

“That… sounds pretty awesome, actually.” She hesitated, then a flash of grin broke across her face and she leaned forward, bringing Rythian’s hand up to press a short kiss onto his fingers. For a moment there was a very different spark there, bright beneath his skin, then Zoey drew back and winked at him, a pink tinge weaving between her freckles.

"We can work with that. All of that, I mean."

Before either of them could say anything else, Ghost yawned loudly, and Zoey giggled as the dog flopped back across Rythian’s legs.

"Okay, okay. Criticism accepted. Gettin’ mushy. So!" She bounced up, beaming. "You want to go for a walk? There’s a bay, and Fishton’ll be glad to see you up and rollin’."

The thought of actually standing up sent a knot down into Rythian’s stomach, a note of physical uncertainty that intruded rudely on his otherwise elated thoughts

"I – don’t think I can stand all that well yet," he said, a little awkwardly, but Zoey waved a hand.

"I said rolling. They’ve got chairs, so long as you don’t mind me pushing?" She glanced up at the window as she spoke, and looked so hopeful that Rythian decided his stomach could just take it.

"Alright."

"Cool-cool; I’ll go grab one – come on guys, give him some air."

She swung back out through the curtain, followed eagerly by the pair of dogs, and Rythian let himself flop back onto the pillows, trying to ignore the way his arms were shaking. He needed some time to process this. The world seemed to have shifted in so many ways, and he felt that he was teetering, like if he moved too fast or thought too hard on any of it, something would snap. He glanced down and the ruined lifestones gleamed dully up at him from a hummock of blanket, as a little twist of fresh uncertainty began to worm its way to the front of his mind.

Magic did change, that was true. The wax and wane of etharic potentia was a common – usually frustrated – discussion in many texts, running through a hundred different reasons as to the why of it, again and again, and there really were no satisfying conclusions. Just that, every now and then, all the rules would shift around, and some element of how it all worked would change.

It could have been about to happen for years. It could be purely a coincidence – but that moment was rising again, that half-remembered memory that had managed to hang on, even through the beyond-exhausted mess his mind had been in after the Queen went down. When the ruptured power of the End’s heart folded back against itself. He had felt it, as past and potential and the sharpened edges of future pivoted around the, and the sheer impossibility of what they had just done, shockwaves rippling outwards beyond even what he could see. They had ended something, back in the unmaking midnight of an utterly alien world.

But there was balance in everything. What had they started there?

The curtain drew open again and Rythian looked up quickly, a smile rising onto his lips before he had time to focus – and then the expression froze, when he saw who it was framed in the fabric green.

Lalna.

The scientist was pale, his face was scattered with the still-fading edges of bruising, but he looked considerably better than the last time Rythian had seen him. He wasn’t wearing his habitual labcoat either; clad instead in black and grey with obnoxiously colourful laces in his shoes, and Rythian’s gaze was drawn to where the right sleeve of his shirt was pinned up, folded like punctuation a few inches below his shoulder. The ghost of scent and sensation passed across his senses and his throat clenched slightly. Of course, more of the arm would had to have been removed. With his fire basically cooking the wound, along with the ragged damage from the Queen’s jaws – honestly, it was remarkable there was anything saved below the shoulder at all.

That almost helped.

Lalna met his gaze. Tthere was a heavy moment before his expression changed, and an only-slightly forced grin appeared.

"Saw Zoey pretty much skipping towards the nurse station," he said, jerking his thumb in the direction she’d gone in. "So, figured you were back in the land of the living."

"Hello Lalna," Rythian managed, going for cold civility in the hope that might drown out the memories of screaming. "You look… well."

Lalna chuckled and dragged his hand back through his hair, shoving the blonde locks into a different disarray.

"Yeah, well. Discharged myself a few days ago actually. All zipped up – " he patted the stump of arm, cheerfully, although Rythian didn’t miss the way his fingers shook slightly as they touched the folded fabric there. "Was going a bit stir-crazy in here. Honeydew kept bringing me jaffas, and Xeph flat refused to smuggle in any decent beer. Gonna convalese a bit."

"Any part of ‘convalese’ involve ‘get the fucking End portal out of your basement’?” He hadn’t entirely meant to snap, but the words got out anyway and Rythian felt a strange twinned twinge of satisfaction and guilt at the wince that shot across Lalna’s face. The scientist shook his head.

"Don’t need to. Minty and Lomadia already shifted it, apparently. Minty just flat out won’t tell me what they did. And Lom hit me with a spanner when I asked."

"She's a sensible woman." Rythian sat back again, very deliberately, but Lalna just came further into the room. He was carrying a satchel under his arm and shrugged it down into the crook of his elbow as he came over to the bed.

"Mind if I sit?"

"I’m glad you’re not dead, Lalna," Rythian growled. "Don’t push it."

Lalna laughed. The sound seemed remarkably genuine. He sat down anyway, nudging the bag between his feet, and peered over – and there was another of those unsettling moments of assessment, as the grey stare tracked between details. Rythian could almost feel Lalna’s attention lingering, along the scar on his neck, at the new mark on his chest, and he folded his arms – if more achingly-slowly than he might have liked – and tilted his chin down, summoning as good a glare as he could manage. Lalna didn’t seem to notice, and infact leaned in even further, his eyebrows nipping together.

“D’you know your eyes’ve gone greenish?”

“…yes,” Rythian lied. Lalna sat back and cocked his head.

“Does it feel different?”

“Does that?” He nodded sharply towards the stump, and Lalna’s gaze dropped as he went quiet, just long enough for another flicker of guilt to skitter across Rythian’s thoughts.

“Well… yeah. But I’ve got some ideas,” he added, rallying. “Been meaning to do some more neural-interface stuff with the power-armour anyway. Bit robocop, y’know?”

“Of course. Who doesn’t want an arm that might explode at any moment?” Rythian replied, sarcastically, but Lalna just grinned again.

“I know, right?” He raised the truncated limb, and made a great show of sighting down it. “Pew-pew.”

His hand trembled, just a little, as he let go again, and fidgeted with the hem of his shirt.

“…thanks, by the way,” he continued, quietly. “I know you didn’t – have to.”

“You know perfectly well I wouldn’t just – “ Rythian stopped, swallowing at the weird knot in his throat. “… what do you want, Lalna?”

“I brought you a thing.”

Lalna hoisted the bag up quickly and wedged it between his knees, flipping it open so he could rummage around. A couple of blue-and-orange packets slid out, rolling onto the floor, but he ignored them and he pulled out a thick, flat shape, wrapped in paper. He held it out and Rythian eyed him suspiciously, before taking the package. It was heavier than he’d expected – or his arms were really weak – and he dropped it into his lap almost immediately.

“What is it?” he asked, fiddling hesitantly with the wrapping.

“My old thaumonomicon.”

Whatever answer he’d been expecting, that hadn’t been it. Rythian frowned as he pulled back the thin paper and looked down at the rune-inlaid cover it revealed. The book was rather battered, and there where imprints in the leather, like it had been pressed under a lot of other things for a long time. Lalna bit his lip, and when he spoke there was a distant edge to his voice.

“You lost yours, right? Back in the village, when me and Sjin – “

“Yes,” Rythian cut in, sharply, but Lalna just shrugged.

“It never worked all that well, this stuff, when we tried it. Compared to your alchemy, I mean.”

That was true enough. Rythian ran a finger across the cover, odd sparks of old memories lighting up. Another lifetime ago, in many ways.

“There wasn’t much we didn’t try,” he pointed out. “It wasn’t reliable.”

Old magic, he thought; so old he had sometimes wondered if it had worn out, somehow. The stories were there, the tales of great Thaumic achievements and terrible perils, but the reality had always proved disappointing.

Lalna’s lips twitched again. It was a strange half-smile, that tugged odd flickers of expression across his face as he stood up, tapping gently on the book’s scuffed surface.

“Yeah, well. Give it a go again, sometime, alright?”

He hoisted the bag back onto his shoulder and gave a jaunty salute as he ducked back around the curtain. Rythian heard his footsteps vanishing off back down the corridor, waiting until they were definitely gone before he turned his attention back to the old book in his lap.

The cover creaked as he opened it, gingerly. Lalna’s cramped handwriting spilled out across the thin parchment within, and his stomach gave a small lurch as he noticed a few bits of his own writing mixed in there, around the diagrams in the centre of the page. Correcting. Suggesting, discussing. Back when discussion had been something they had done; so late into the night that it would become early again, trying to puzzle out a way of getting those frustratingly-uncooperative runes to work. It never really had, and their paired attention had waned, drifting towards the next idea.

And they all knew what that had been.

Rythian reached down, towards the carefully-drawn spell-pattern, trying to remember what this one had meant to do. His fingers brushed the paper, rough under his touch with ink and age – and it was like a door opening, as power crackled up through his hand. Not the dusty, worn-down echo of a faded ancient, but live magic, young and hot and hungry, and surging up the dulled pathways of his thoughts like a burst of fresh lightning.

It wasn’t the same, so very much not the same as the alchemical balance he had been so used to – but that didn’t matter. His muted awareness flared, the moment of connection like a shock to his soul, and he gasped at air that suddenly seemed to taste of a lot more than disinfectant. Magic had changed, but so had he. Whether that was for the better or worse, he was yet to find out – but as he raised his still-shaking hand, and watched the air start to shiver around his fingertips, he found he wasn’t too worried about the technicalities right now.

He could hear footsteps approaching again, accompanied by Zoey’s soft whistling and the faint squeak of wheels, and a slow smile began to spread onto his lips.

He was still Rythian, after all.

And it was going to be interesting to find out what that meant now.

The explosion wasn't huge, but it didn't have to be; not now, not with so much of the Ender-focus on that last crystal spire, already shaking with the strain. Detonation was a thunderclap,an eruption of broken powerthat cut across the fractal-weave of magic here, as that last nexus failed and the severed force of it all slammed back against itself.

With one sound, the Endermen screamed. They had been frozen, still and silent in the moment of invasive command that had rippled outwards, part suggestion, part plea, spilling up from the misplaced figure who stood in their centre; the prodigal thief so strangely tangled with the heart of this place. Hesitant, waiting – but now the split-open agony of shattered magic cut out across each connected mind.

And the towers began to fall.

-

Rythian’s knees hit the ground hard, rattling a twin-impact crack all the way up to his spine, but he barely noticed. He had been too open, his displaced awareness stretched too thin, and the howling black storm of the Queen’s will crushed down around him. Too far, too much, because it – he – his tiny tattered spark of soul, set against the alien brilliance of this place – could never be enough.

And then the shattering, screaming impact of the final crystal-fail tore into Them all, and there was nowhere to hide. He felt it; felt it with his own skin and the half-solid hide above, as slivers of embedded crystal there burst into reverberating agony, cutting into the oilslick flesh and biting even deeper with shrill feedback. It wasn’t his skin, but even the echo was razor at the edges, and he felt his own surface giving way again under the sharpened reflection. The Queen screamed, a sound like ripping iron, and Rythian’s own nerves shrieked as the broken power sparked and earthed across Her body.

The towers were falling, listing in their cradling chasms as the Void's hungry gravity stretched upwards, dragging against the splintering web of magic that wove around each listing spire. Unseen fissures crackled out behind the air, sending waves of discordant howling through the shifting, panicking Ender as the first tower teetered on its axis, caught between whatever wounded power had held it up and the plunge of raw inevitability below.

And failed. Debris burst skyward as the toppled monolith slammed down, hurling up slabs of stone that broke apart like chipped wood. The Queen howled as the resultant shockwave rolled out, battering and buffeting, and tore into Her already-smoking wings. The second tower followed in moments and this time even the dragon's movements faltered, lurching drunkenly against the sky, spiralling and sinking as the pillar fell. He could feel it, every impact, every snap and shatter of stone, and his – her – wings were bleeding, shaking, unable to maintain even that enhanced lift, and they landed hard even as the third tower tilted towards oblivion.

The maelstrom stone was uneasy under her – his – claws, shifting and buckling over the brilliance beneath, but they could brace here, in the heart of it, bleeding and torn and so very, very angry. They – She – no, no, it was him, him here as well. There was rock under his fingers too, and other sounds around him, but it was so hard to hold onto the sense of that, to find his own wavering self in the roiling tempest of it all, and he was just echoes and fragments and drowning in the storm.

I – am Rythian. I – I am…

The words swirled, unfocused across his fraying mind, but he needed – he needed –

Warmth. Warmth against his freezing skin; hot and human and there, a scarlet burn against the black-ice world, and he clung for the sense of it. Something. Something real, and here, and repeating back his name as it spilled from his own numb lips.

"Rythian – Rythian c'mon, look at me; look at me, alright?"

The voice. Her voice; tight and worried, and so familiar it was like coming home.

"– Zoey –" he managed, choking on the name – because his lungs were empty, his heart was drumming a staccato-beat in his chest, and the feel of his own body – his own edges, his own shaking limbs – slammed back hard as his awareness finally drew together.

Everything hurt – again – and there was a pervasive smell of burning hair, but at least he seemed to be mostly back in his own head. Zoey made an odd noise, somewhere between a sob and a grumble, and Rythian realised her arms were wrapped around him, taking a good amount of weight from his slumped crouch – and despite everything else, he felt his cheeks colour slightly.

'I'm okay' - he started to say, but the enormity of the lie caught in his throat and he shook his head, patting awkwardly at Zoey’s sides in muted assurance. She moved back, staring at him as she helped him up, and he tried to get a rapid grip on the new situation. The slightly-bloodstained area of rock around them was suddenly rather crowded.

Tee was hunkered down nearby, tail braced hard against the ground, with an arrow already notched as he swept from side to side, keeping as wide a field of shot as he could. Ravs was visible just beyond him, saying something to Nilesy, who had his bucket wedged onto his head in a rudimentary replacement helmet. Lomadia was stalking back and forth, flanked by Honeydew's stocky shape, their weapons drawn, and everyone else was either spread out in a defensive crowd, or part of the little group clustered around Lalna.

And there was Zoey. Right there, staring at him with unguarded relief.

“I thought – I mean, I didn't know –” she reached out again, hesitantly now the immediate urgency had gone, her fingertips trailing through the air just above his arm. "You're okay..."

The word was a spear, breaking apart the warm moment of reunion like thin glass, and Rythian’s stomach lurched violently. He was so suddenly very, very aware of the burn of severed flesh against his hairline, and the ongoing echoes of distress and fury not his own that were hammering against the so-thin wall of his thoughts.

"I'm not," he managed, with the admittance catching in his throat. "I'm –”

Too late, he registered the sound of electronic warm-up, the edge-of-hearing whine that accompanied a beam-weapon setting change. He looked up just in time to see Sjin and Sips – broken back apart and standing shoulder-to-shoulder – with their guns raised and the tail-end of some half-gibberish bravado on their lips.

"Wait -!" he started, but not fast enough. Paired blasts of crimson shot out, lancing through the fog and churned dust at centre of the maelstrom, aimed at the shape still within, still tangled in the convulsing web of injured power. The unearthly miasma whirled unpleasantly as the Queen’s movements tore at the air, but She would have been a difficult target to miss blindfolded at this point, so the shots hit home and an answer in hot pain burst across Rythian’s right thigh. His warning shout turned into a cry and he grasped down at the two strips of sudden agony that scored themselves into his skin.

"Rythian!" Zoey darted forward, catching his shoulders as he stumbled, his leg spasming with reflected pain before the lifestone could focus. He slumped against her, panting, and gritted his teeth.

“The Queen," he muttered, trying to find the right words. "She did something – took my – ” he stopped, and pressed a hand to his forehead. "I'm... linked. To her. I can feel it, different to before. When she's – hurt, I get – I – "

"It hurts you too?" Zoey asked, with more understanding than question in her voice, and she was wheeling round to shout back at the rest of the group almost before he had managed to nod. "Hey! Stop firing – Rythian's getting hit too! "

A general puzzled exclamation rose, and the second salvo was halved; Sips dropped his aim abruptly, accompanied by an inventive curse, but Sjin was slower and a few bright bolts sprayed out again before he swung the weapon aside. His mouthed ‘oops’ was almost believable and Rythian bit down on a hiss as another scalded wound bloomed, this time along his bicep. The pain was… less this time, somehow, but he barely had time to dwell on that as Zoey gave a yelp of shock and snatched back her hands from his shoulder.

She wasn’t wearing armour anymore, and a sudden scarlet line was burned right across the angular tattoos that crept down from under her tattered sleeve. Rythian stared dumbly at the wound then back at his own, perfectly matched, injury.

That’s…. that’s not possible…?

Zoey’s fingers tightened around the scorch, which was already fading under her own lifestone’s attentions, and looked back towards the Queen’s indistinct form.

“You can… share it?”

She had gone even paler, but there was a realisation in her eyes, racing into place before his own had finished reeling. Rythian blinked.

“What?”

“Share it,” she repeated, gesturing in a sharp motion that sailed above the bloody bandages on his arms, to finish in a hover at his forehead. Her eyes met his, bright and bedrock-determined, and she jerked her head back at the maelstrom.

“This place, it’s all one thing, you said? The whole of them, all of them, all against us? Well then they’re not doing it alone. Not ever, y’know?” She shifted a little. “And – and we said. We promised. One for all, right, that’s just how it is.”

“Zoey, I can’t – ”

“We are getting out,” she said firmly, and there was only a slight shake to her voice as she continued. “Not – not you, then us. Everyone. Same time, same way, same deal.”

“Oi! Team wizard!” Honeydew's shout barged into the exchange with a typical lack of subtlety. The dwarf waved his axe back at them, shedding fading motes of Ender from whichever of the randomly-flickering figures had got within range. "Whatever yer yapping about, get a bloody move on!"

"Just… wait, okay?" Zoey insisted as she darted away, grabbing at Nilesy's arm to pull him closer as she started to speak frantically. Rythian tried to work out what she was saying, but he couldn't persuade his brain to focus on something as mundane as eavesdropping.

There was a... pressure building up again, something rising and furious and stretching out tighter and tighter, as the persistent echoes of his strange shout finally began to die away. He could feel the Ender, flickering erratically across the landscape, disorientated and enraged. Their collected attention had been split by the feedback chaos of the breaking crystals, dragged and snagged like hooks in twine, but it wouldn’t be long before they got some sort of coherence back.

Think, Rythian.

He could still feel the Queen, of course, the strange ghost-echoes of her movements mapping bizarrely against his own body. He could feel the places where shattered crystals had bitten into the substance of her, crackling their damaged power out into the surrounding half-flesh, gouts of injured smoke rising everywhere they touched. She was down, and She was hurt, and he tried to draw some confidence from that. Maybe, just maybe…

I can get myself killed in a really dramatic way?

Great.

He stooped down, reaching for the fallen shape of Enderbane for whatever masochistic comfort the weapon would bring. As his fingertips grazed its hilt, for a second – just a second – the embedded sister-shards sang out, an alien pitch that was all angles and sharpness, and so much worse than even the crushed-glass scream that he felt in his bones whenever that damned blade bit home. Rythian froze, and it was as if his own history was suddenly crowded in around him. all fragments and flickers like images in a broken mirror, but so similar at their heart.

He remembered teeth in his chest, and the blacked-out horror of that monstrous will ripping his mind apart. Felt the tremble behind Sjin's steadying hands, the still-sticky catch of Lalna's blood against his own fingers, and the macabre echo-taste of it still on his tongue. Saw Zoey's upturned face, vanishing in a brilliant impact of fractal-fire, and the memories skipped, further back, until it was the torn-rubber screech of Ender movement, hidden to every eye but his; when he had plunged out of the shredded sky, frantic, towards that little pool of light atop the castle, heart in his throat and Enderbane screaming in his grip, as old nightmares made themselves newly real.

He remembered all the fear, and where it really started.

There was another crash, more distant, and Rythian looked up as the Queen reared again, massive against the sky. Her shaking wings swung open, spilling smoke and violet fractals, and their gazes locked. He could hear the echo, the mirror of what might have been thought in that alien mind – flickers of curiosity, indignant pain and loss, and a deep, malevolent rage. Her eyes were an inferno as She rose, a little unsteadily at first, and began to thunder forward.

Rythian tightened his fingers against Enderbane's hilt, shifting his weight, and magic started to catch and snap around him, bleeding out of the star at his chest, his rings shivering back into life. He could feel the lifestone straining, anticipating, as he stared unblinking into the white-purple fury of the dragon's oncoming gaze, and was strangely calm.

I feared I was you. Every day, since the first time, I looked into myself and didn’t know what I was even seeing.

Now I know. I’m still here. I might be tainted; I might be scarred; and I might ever be Enderborn.

But I am Rythian. And that's enough.

The Queen was so close now that the ground shook with clawed footfalls as she surged up over the edge of the maelstrom, shedding smoke and trails of unreal brightness. Her mouth yawned open, lightning crackling between the teeth, a black incandescence blooming in that cavernous throat – as a hand closed on Rythian's shoulder, and suddenly there was more than his own magic in the air.

Emerald and firelight, twisting up like a flare as his extra senses jolted in synaesthetic exclamation – but still more beyond that, strung out behind him like a chain of sudden lights, burning against the Void. Steel, and earth, and the shriek of wings in clear sky; shadow and tide and aching starlight, and a hundred other fragments of strange-translation sensation that whirled across his awareness as the chain lit up, anchored to his own battered etheric aura by that point of contact.

We all get out.

There was shouting behind him; instructions, timings, all unimportant to his own personal universe, which had narrowed down to the onrushing form, the shake and crack of stone beneath his feet, and the weird dozen-way heartbeat pulsing undercurrents in his mind. Laser cut the air again, accompanied by the deeper boom of more conventional firearms. He felt the echoed impacts – lines of pain across his face, against his sides – but they were quickly swept away, poured back down the open thaumic channel, divided and distributed, muted amongst the pooled connection there.

Again – again – again – and the ground was shuddering, leaping under his swaying balance, the sound and the pressure and everything hammering down around him, crushing the air from his lungs, black ice racing down his veins. Enderbane was screaming in his fingers; a discordant, terrible harmony turned back on itself, twisted by his own blood as much as he had been by Theirs, and the embedded shards shivered to the tune as the Queen was there – all shifting darkness and sharpened angles and the roar as She filled the world, side-to-side in all entirety and there was no space even to strike.

Sudden firelight bloomed, a match in the darkness that swelled into coiled inferno. The heat of it washed back across Rythian's face – from both actual proximity, and feedback-sense as the thaumic meteor slammed into the Queen's snout – but there was the twinned swirl of Ignition's ruby heart and the phoenix-burn of Zoey's own magic, curled around him like a shield, and the seething impact didn't catch them. The Queen's jaw jerked aside – just a little, just enough – as the blaze hit home and Rythian lunged, with everything he had left and everything he could borrow, and a little more than even that.

Enderbane was a slice of white-out brilliance against the scales above, the shard-edge of chance and choice and tangled fate, and it plunged into the dragon's chest with a scream that crackled like sheared lightning. Raw agony exploded in Rythian's own ribs, shock and spasm loosing his grip as he went rigid, split-empty lungs contracting violently around the too-solid ghost of a blade. He could feel the distress behind him as the backwash of impact swept down the chain, as connections faltered and slipped, and he heard Zoey give a horrible wet gasp, the rattle of lungs too empty even for a scream.

But she held on. Even as Rythian crumpled backwards, each edge of breath a serrated agony and with metallic dampness rising on his lips. Even as the dragon twisted above them, contorting back at an angle that had no place in reasonable geometry, with the blazing-bright hilt of the sword like a star against Her midnight scales. The scream hadn’t stopped, hadn't slowed, and if anything it was getting louder, reverberating up through the shaking stone beneath as if it were rising with the very light of this place. Fractal lightning pulsed between the embedded fragments of crystal, but whenever a line crossed Enderbane the lightning seemed to freeze in place, held bizarrely solid against the smoking flesh beneath. More, and more, until there was a crackling cage of hard brightness wrapped around that massive chest, loosing darts of it up the unfurled wings, to even the tips of those jet-shard claws, spilling more smoke everywhere they touched.

The dragon howled. One huge wing jerked and swung downwards in violent spasm, slamming into the churning heart of the maelstrom. A plume of boulders and brilliance fountained upwards at the impact, raining down to pin the wing and the dragon's roar took on a different pitch – and then there was a new strain running through the huge form, as the frozen lightning bit down and the trapped wing spasmed, twisted at angles unpleasant even by Her standards. Her tail whipped round, shedding smoky blood and tearing new gouges into the rock beneath, as there was a shift in the underlying chaos, and one of her legs broke down through the stone below. New chasms radiated outwards as she scrabbled for footing, trying to get purchase on the breaking ground.

" – uggers are legging it!"

The sound of a human voice seemed terrifyingly mundane and Rythian blinked as he suddenly found other hands under his shoulders, hauling him painfully upright and swinging him away from the scene. His head lolled, his vision blurring, but even he could see the widening area of open plains, as the massed Ender flowed erratically away, a distinct pattern of panic carved into their movements. Zoey's grip finally dislodged, but he could still feel the press of the connection, the chain of bright motes blurred and fading but still present, as someone pulled his arm over their shoulder.

It was Sjin, again, breathing heavily and with his spare hand pressed to his chest. He looked pale, and nodded grimly at someone outside of his eyeline.

"Time to blow this popsicle stand," he said, and Rythian sagged against him. He tried to speak, but there was no breath to use, and he was starting to have trouble remembering where his limbs actually were. There was another thud of bootfall, another grip on the other side of him, and a rasping rumble in his other ear.

“Buck it up, magical-Mary,” Sips snapped, as he added his own shoulder into the stumbling tableau. “I’m fucked if I’m having ‘died from friendship-chain voodoo’ on my goddamn gravestone.”

They started forward, unsteady on the shaking ground, with Rythian hanging between them, deadweight. He wanted to focus, wanted to say or do something, but there was nothing in his chest but an ice-burn furnace of pain, and he couldn't even feel his hands anymore.

The roar was a shriek now, high and sharp and horrible. Both his lifting escorts were maintaining a low, constant litany of cursing and it blended strangely with the Queen’s distress – although even that was starting to fade now. Everything was dulling, dimming around him, his vision blurring in and out of focus.

And it was going dark.

-

It was going dark. Lomadia had been trying not to notice, as the group lurched across the plain, heading back towards that ragged peak that she hoped – really hoped – still housed their tavern-transport. She had marked the path as clearly as she could, so if they could just find it…

And if it works.

She cut the thought, because it wouldn’t help, and focused on staying upright, gripping onto the arm slung across her shoulder. Zoey wasn’t especially heavy and was managing most of a stumbling gait, even if she was sheet-white and sounded like she was trying to breathe through a throat full of wet gravel. She kept clutching her free hand to her chest, and every time she did the pounding ache in Lomadia’s own sternum seemed to rank up in sympathy. She wasn’t entirely sure what had happened back there, during that fever-dream moment of pain and bizarre echoes – but Rythian was at least still twitching, the dragon wasn’t flying around anymore, and something back in the mess behind them was definitely escalating.

And she felt like she'd been hit by a sodding train, but there was always something.

As if in commentary to her thoughts, an earth-shaking crack broke the thin air and Lomadia risked a glance backwards, just in time to rapidly wish she hadn’t. A second plume of off-bright fog had jetted up from the central chaos, and at this distance it was clear that not all of it was falling back again. Huge trails of brilliance twisted further and further skyward, moving at strange angles as if the mists were spiraling up through an unseen, crumpled helix.

The indistinct shape of the dragon was still visible, thrashing about in the middle of it all like a wounded thing – good lord let it be a wounded thing now – and the thundering howl of rage lashed into the back of her as she turned away, rising half-real slashes of translated pain against her skin.

Zoey muttered something, half-muffled by the shoulder of Lomadia's battered armour, and tightened her grip a little. Lomadia's frown deepened.

"What?"

" – c'n see – " the redhead managed, and gestured weakly forwards. Lomadia followed the motion, and nearly bit through her tongue. The horizon – that personal-perception layer of tar-thick nothing that had become weirdly familiar – was drawing in, running down the distant slopes of broken-slab mountains, now less a wall than a falling torrent. Lomadia glanced down even as the first wisps of darkness began to swirl around her boots, moving like ink in water, rising and thickening even as she watched.

"Oh fucking hell," she snapped, sharp with exasperation – because it was that or terror, and she was long out of patience with this bloody dimension. "It's doing the shadow nonsense thing again, watch out!"

This shouldn’t be familiar. Lomadia's teeth ground together painfully hard as she orientated herself as best she could, trying to make sure she was pointed in precisely the right direction for when that lot hit. Darkness like a soup of blacked-out nightmares, flowing down across the landscape in a wall-wave of disorientating, malevolent midnight – in what kind of reasonable reality was that a thing you could recognise?

It was moving fast, ankle-deep around them now, and she saw others in the group bracing themselves. Shallow rivers of flowing shadow merged and melded together across the plain, rising seamlessly around rocky outcrops as if the Void were bleeding up from below, taking everything it touched into liquid oblivion. Lomadia tried not to look down, at where it looked for all the world like she had just abruptly stopped at the shins. Her toes curled a little, tight against the inside of her boots, as she reminded herself that she could still feel them.

The mountain was barely visible anymore, sunken back through the advancing, erasing surface, and it hardly seemed any closer. Another tectonic sound broke out from the rearward chaos, where the now waist-deep tide had washed up against the edges of the maelstrom. The shadows paled and frayed where they met white-out brilliance, but didn’t stop; lining chasm edges with a blackout veneer that swept down, pouring into the swirling currents churned up by the dragon’s movements.

Black threads started to race upwards, tracing a spreading delta of cracked lines around the half-real shape, and there was sound, again, even beyond the ongoing roar – a grating, twisting, wrong noise that clawed itself down against Lomadia’s mind, sickening and disorientating and like a serrated pressure all at once, and it was getting louder with every step.

Oh for goodness' sake –

She swallowed a cry, hunched forward into the inevitable, as the mountain vanished and whatever the bloody fuck was happening in the centre of this nightmare finally went off.

It wasn’t bright. Nothing here was really bright, not properly, but whatever the inverted darkness was that bloomed now in the centre of the tangled, breaking spiral in the End’s heart – it burned. Beams of white-edge violet burst out in all directions, plunging down through the stone as if it were nothing, and speared up into the empty Void overhead like endless searchlights. A shape writhed at their centre, less a form now than a shadow cut out of the brilliance there.  Limbs twisted back against their own strange angles, half-solid flesh failing in the not-light that consumed it, as the massive wings broke apart, fading into fragments like paper under a flame. The massive body convulsed and twisted, slivers of crystal detonating along the length of it, and the scream was everything, in her heart and bones and mind and Lomadia could do nothing else but hold on to the shaking figure in her grasp, as the torrent of collapsing sky finally caught them up – and even that sight went dark.

She might as well have been falling. There was still hard pressure under her boots and Zoey’s tight grip on her arm, but even they seemed uncertain in the complete erasure that was the tar-thick night. The thunderous crack of breaking stone wasn’t slowing down, and closer than that there was muttering and speech and swearing, but all the sounds seemed sourceless, directionless in the utter darkness, and Lomadia tried unsuccessfully to bite down on her own surging, sightless panic.

Then firelight bloomed, a sudden point of flickering warmth that carved a gilden globe into the emptied world. Barely a few feet away from her, revealed so close she could have touched him, Xephos held his little torch up overhead. The tiny delimited-universe around the glow crowded in, with everyone shuffling together quickly, and the relief was palpable, if transient. Lomadia met Xephos' gaze, turned to mercury in the flickering light, and she managed half a smile. Walking blind was one thing, walking blind in a group was a little better. Now, if they could work out some way of actually navigating…

“...thattaway…”

Zoey’s voice was still ragged, still horribly thin compared to her usual alto-enthusiasm, but there was a surety in there. Lomadia blinked down at her.

“What?”

Zoey managed to raise one shaking hand, and jabbed it forwards hard enough that a tiny ember flicked from the tip of her nail.

“Thatway,” she said, strained, and Lomadia stared at her friend. The mage-woman’s eyes were half-rolled back in her head, but her expression was hardening, and she could see the glow of the busy lifestone pulsing through her shirt.

“Good enough fer me,” Honeydew declared, cutting across any hesitance, and grunted as he took the whole of Lalna’s weight across his arms, cradling a figure nearly twice his size with practised ease. Xephos moved over to link Zoey’s free arm, holding the torch above them like a beacon. “Follow us,” the dwarf added firmly as he fell into step. “We’ll lead the way.”

The instruction was punctuated by another rumble of falling stone, and an unpleasant echo that ran through the rocks beneath. The group started moving again, with every shuffling step a leap of faith, as déjà vu and vertigo twined tight around them. Lomadia found her exhausted mind adding in the remembered crunch of leaves underfoot and the swish and creak of hallucinatory branches, blending horribly with the pursuing sounds of tectonic distress. Something very big was collapsing, and she really didn't want to dwell on what that might be.

Progress seemed agonisingly slow, with each of them expecting any moment to find a sudden emptiness underfoot, but eventually the unseen ground began sloping upwards, and the first chunk of stacked white stone reared out of the torchlight wall. It took some doing to get their various prone companions hoisted up onto the cliffs; Zoey was at least able to cling onto helping hands, but the other two were deadweight. Lomadia swapped out with Nilesy for a while, taking a minute or two to try and bully some more engagement out of her aching muscles, and looked back the way they had come, out of nervous habit more than anything else.

So she saw the eyes. Her heart skipped a beat as the first smears of cold-violet opened in the darkness, and she jolted, grasping for the sunglasses that hung loose at her neck – but the Enderman didn’t move. Another pair of eyes opened, and another, and far too fucking soon there was a cluster of unblinking stares around the base of the cliff, bright just beyond the edge of their firelight.

“We’ve got company,” she gulped, warily as she found her voice. “They’re… not moving.”

“Well we fuckin’ are,” Honeydew muttered back, accompanied by a quiet ‘hup’ from Xephos as he scaled another layer. Lomadia backed up, keeping the Endermen in sight as best as she could, but they really didn’t seem to be moving, and even those eyes faded out as their little universe of light moved further upwards.

Climb. Pause – adjust, as the few of them that had actually come this way in the first place tried to get what barings there might be – pause and adjust again, following Zoey's muttered instructions. The rock shivered unpleasantly under their fingers and hidden avalanches of bouncing, breaking stone hurtled past, unseen, yet close enough to spit dust and fragments into their torchlight.

And they were being watched. Lomadia couldn’t tell if the brilliant eyes that snapped opened in the darkness around them were the same ones as before, and the strange illumination made it difficult to tell how close they were. The shaking-static noise of Ender anger was there, but seemed muted, somehow, and there was no attempt yet to get into the firelight. Small mercies.

“Hey – there's chalk here –” Xephos said, suddenly, and Lomadia looked up. He had scaled the next outcrop and for a moment the flickering torchlight shifted as he swung it around.

"...s'coming..." Zoey muttered, and Lomadia nearly lost her grip as the redhead swiveled sharply, staring back down into the hidden nothingness of the mountain slope. The fire’s light gleamed brighter in her eyes than perhaps it should have, casting strange shadows across her features, but there was no mistaking the alarm there now and the underfoot rumbling seemed to increase in response. "We're – running out – "

"Running out of what?" Minty asked, turning around warily at the back of the group, holding her emptied shotgun like a club.

"Everything," Zoey’s exhausted voice was as close as she ever came to a snarl, as she swung another accusatory finger outwards – downwards – and Lomadia realised that the ominous galaxy of staring eyes was going dark at the edges. Rythian’s earlier words seemed to echo for a moment, now laced with fresh dread.

'It’s all connected, all part of one… thing.'

And if we break it…?

They ran. As much as they could do, scrambling up onto the ledge, dragging the less coherent figures as gently as could be spared, and plunged into the first of the sloping tunnels. Lomadia went first, tracing her shaking fingers across equally-unsteady stone, following her own marks and fiercely hoping that she had done them right. Torchlight flickered over the walls, a fading strobe that danced dizzyingly before her eyes – but the crash of breaking stone was right behind them now, and the creak-screech of Ender voices crowded in around that, pouring out of every shadowed crevasse – so close now, all of it so close -

And then there was space open out in front of her, a horrible, yawning moment of raw emptiness before the torch caught up, and brickwork melted back out of the darkness. There wasn’t time for relief, but it swirled treacherously in her gut anyway as she swiveled, gesturing frantically at the exhausted figures emerging behind her. The air was thick with dust, angular fissures snaking up through the flanking walls and the ground bucked violently under their feet as the group dived for the doors.

The pub interior was a mess, but no more so than when they had left it. Rythian and Lalna were dumped unceremoniously down onto the largest sofa as the party spread out, automatically training the few weapons they had left on the windows. Lomadia came in last, pulling at the broken remains of the door behind her – and nearly swallowed her tongue as eyes opened just behind the crack-crazed glass.

“Oh fucking hell!” She leapt back and the shifting digits of Ender-fingers pressed tight against the window, as if grasping at her. “Barricade, now!”

“Let's get this place going, already!” Honeydew lumbered past, hauling a half-empty chest, and rammed it into place. Lomadia dodged around Xephos – one-handedly dragging another piece of bar furniture – and scrambled over to the still-open face of… well, whatever the hell Ravs’ “TV” actually was. The softly-glowing cube was still inside its shell, strange code still blinking on the folded-out screen, and she ducked down, snatching up another enderpearl from inside the box on the bar, and brought it into place. Bracing herself, she closed her still-armoured fingers hard around the little globe. It shattered, with that strange, oily-sharp sensation the breaking pearl had, and she caught a glimpse of a flicker, dark against the brightness of the cube.

And nothing happened. The screen kept blinking, the smooth rhythm a terrible contrast to the shaking, erratic chaos outside, as more and more Ender-shapes pressed up against the building’s windows, and their howls began to blend with the rumble of falling stone.

Blink. Blink.

-/tp CrCa ???-

Blink.

Heart plunging, passing the cut-sharp edges of broken hope on the way down, Lomadia stared around at the chaotic mess of chests and boxes, at the spilled tangle of innumerable objects that littered every surface. It had taken them ages to find the right combination before, and there was no more time.

“...fuck me.” She sat down heavily against the bar top. There was another crash as Ravs added an extra chair to the frontmost barricade.

“What’s the hold up?”

“It doesn’t work,” Lomadia managed, bile-burn rising in her throat as she tried to remember what Zoey had disjointedly explained, a lifetime ago. “It needs – something to follow, I think?”

“There’s a whole box of pearls,” Nilesy added, from where he was wedging a shutter back against itself, but Lomadia shook her head as she stumbled back over to the crumpled redhead and snapped her fingers in front of her face.

“Zoey, we need something else. The pearl didn’t work, and you – you know this, you said – come on, we need something else.” She knew her words were blurring, knew she was getting frantic, but Zoey barely moved, her eyelids fluttering just a little.

“...home,” she muttered, thickly, and Lomadia swallowed a scream. She grabbed the other woman’s shoulders and tried to shake her gently.

“Yes, Zoey, home. We’re nearly there, we’re so nearly there, we just need you to...”

“This is your fancy-ass box of tricks, then?” Sips had moved over to the opened screen and was peering inside, a frown creasing his blunt features. “I gotta say, I’ve never been all that keen on this teleporting shizzle. Few weird weeks as a dog, puts you off.”

“Sips, don’t,” Xephos’ voice was cracking, panic lacing through his tones, but the grey man gave a rumbling grunt and began to fish around in a pocket under his armour.

“Seems to me, what this piece of shit needs is a bit of an incentive.” He pulled his hand free and rammed it back into the box. Lomadia caught a glimpse of something crumbly, spilling from between his fingers –

– and the machine lit up, shockingly-bright in the fading torchlight. Fresh sparks began to swarm, the screen read-out breaking apart back into the rune-fractal nonsense as Sips drew away, shaking an emptied paper packet with a garish company logo emblazoned on the front. He looked up, a grin splitting his face as he brandished the packet, where ‘13 secret herbs and spices!’ exclaimed out in over-enthusiastic font.

“I keep telling you bastards – show me a problem that can’t be solved with some good old fashioned Sipsco dirt, and I’ll call you a fuckin’ liar.”

Cog-like patterns began to spill out across the surface of the box, crawling up the shaking walls and dragging a heavy, cloying static feel along with it. Lomadia steadied herself against the sofa, as the impact and crunch of falling stone hammered down onto the buckling roof, and watched the patterns creeping up across her hands. The strange aligning-pressure of it was bearing down, but it was difficult to judge the progress beyond all the chaos outside and she gritted her teeth as the whine of impossible machinery rose up around them.

Abruptly, the cogs turned, the pattern shifting against itself – and there was strain there, more than before, a strange sense of tearing running through the shift-out moment – as everything vanished; light, sound, shaking, screams, everything cut away all at once. It was falling, and floating, and waiting, eternity in a frozen moment – and she knew, suddenly, and with a thought that was very far from being her own, that something was ending here. In blood, and darkness, and a world unmade.

And behind that, so close that the line between was so thin, so sharp, that it would cut the world and never really be there at all, something else was starting. A new thing, if anything can ever be said to be truly new – or one so old that its time had circled back again. Born in breaking, caught between destiny and miracle; to take the next turn on the ever-spinning wheels of history,

Because in the true duality of all things, the end is only ever the beginning.

Then there was light, so sudden and bright and sharp that the strange moment shattered as Lomadia shied back in pain, letting out a short yelp. She snatched down for her glasses, then froze as her brain actually caught up to events, because there was sunlight outside the window and a faint, confused sound of clucking filtering in past the barricade.

She just... stared. Stared at the gleam of midday on water, just outside. Stared from face to face as they reanimated, as shock and disbelief and hesitant-hope chased each other across very different features; as Nilesy broke the revere with a hollered whoop of delight, followed swiftly by half a dozen variations on the theme.

They were back. They were back, as unbalancingly abruptly as they had left – and Lomadia’s mind immediately spun away in the sudden, swirling list of everything else that needed to be done. Food; sleep; application of an extremely stiff drink to anyone still upright; keeping Sjin and Tee apart now the immediate, unifying danger had swapped out. Medical attention, and lots of it, because she had no idea what sort of shit the mage-set had just pulled, but they were damn lucky they hadn’t been brought home in a fucking jar.

She turned, already trying to pry loose the memory of how close her airship actually was, and stopped as her eyes locked with Xephos’. He was crouched next to Lalna, practised fingers checking the makeshift binding on the groaning scientist’s arm, and looked as exhausted as she felt. For a moment, though, the turquoise stare met her own – open, and there, somehow, in a way he hadn’t been for a long time, and a faint flutter of warmth passed across her busy thoughts.

Then part of the roof fell in. But you couldn’t have everything.

---