Cold waves crashed against the gray glass-pebble shore. Gargantuan, alien bones loomed in the distance. A supercell storm spun overhead. Cold gale struck her body.

  Cinder winced, shivering. There were no pancakes, no warmth in this place.

  She must have fallen asleep after their wild, absurd, mild-melting, delicious ship-venture.

  The massive leviathan bones in the distance seemed to watch her, silent witnesses of eons of rise and fall of civilizations. Each vertebra was larger than a mountain, a permanent reminder of the thing that had once perished here.

  Her feathers shifted through muted grays and deep blacks, the colors of stress, of grief, of uncertainty. The pancake-warmth from earlier felt like a distant dream now, replaced by the cold, cruel reality.

  Her wings felt heavy, weighed down by a rising panic attack. The storm overhead mirrored the chaos inside her heart - Lance could be dead. Perma-dead because of Martin's actions.

  Each gust of blade-like icy wind seemed to stab at her body, singing of betrayal, of hope crushed beneath indifferent cosmic wheels.

  All of the Arx delvers could be dead.

  If Gate-Keeper Vassily was dead, if the gate was damaged from this end, then there would be no way back to Earth. She would never see her parents, never see Lance again. Kat would die too without access to the incarnator.

  The weight of potential loss pressed down on her like the heavy, broiling, dark clouds overhead.

  Memories flashed through her mind.

  Lance teaching her how to glide from a cliff when she was too scared to spread her wings. Lance defending her from upperclassmen bullies at Skyfall Academy. Lance, who always knew how to make her laugh even on her darkest days when she was just a kid.

  Lance, who always tried to help, always defended her. Her big brother whom she pushed away like an absolute knob.

  Her claws dug into her wings, drawing blood, pure black feathers tearing and breaking.

  She began sobbing, the landscape around her fracturing.

  "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," She cried. "I'm so sorry, Lance. It's my fault. This is all my fault. I came to this damned place. I should have been there for you," she whispered to the bones, to the wind, to her absent brother. "I was so busy being angry, so determined to prove I was strong... I let Em control me. I let fear dictate everything. I effed up! I am a terrible daughter, a terrible sister! I let Alex... Martin into my heart and now you're dead! You're dead and it's all my fault... again!"

  Suddenly, a sound cut through her grief.

  Footsteps.

  Soft. Deliberate. Crunching on the crystalline silver-gray glass. Coming from behind her.

  Cinder whirled, her feathers shifting through defensive reds and sharp silvers, ready to fight. Her claws extended, her body coiled like a spring.

  "Who's there?!" she screamed into the howling storm.

  The footsteps continued. Slow. Measured. Impossibly calm against the raging winds.

  A figure emerged from the mist. Tall. Elongated. Shifting between human and something... else. A wolf.

  "Hello, little songbird," a familiar voice purred.

  Valor.

  "You... you're dead! I perma-killed you!" Cinder howled retreating back into the icy water.

  "Did you now?" Valor smiled, his right hand Phase-Shifting into a jagged saw blade. "A God cannot die, I'm afraid. You heard what I wished for, didn't you?"

  "A god?" Cinder's voice cracked, her feathers bristling with a hurricane of colors - terror, rage, desperation. "You're no god. You're a monster! Your effing birchknob ritual went tits up! Piss off!"

  Valor's form continued to shift, bone and flesh melting and reforming like living, glossy, beige liquid metal. His smile stretched impossibly wide, revealing rows of razor-sharp teeth that glinted like polished obsidian in the storm's electric light.

  "Perhaps," the Skinwalker shrugged. "Maybe so. You and your dragon girlfriend poured all of my Lazarus bracelets into a concrete mold and threw it into the deep ocean trench and yet I still persist… Sideways across reality."

  Silver eyes bloomed across Valor's head and hands.

  "Do you know why we used singers like you?" He asked. "To imprint your voices into this lakeshore. To always have a point to follow back. Even if we die!"

  "You're not real," Cinder hissed, her wings flaring with defensive colors as she poured magic into her voice. "Go away! You're just another nightmare. Another ghost. Part of the nightmare in my head!"

  Valor's laugh was like broken glass scraping against metal. "Am I? Are you certain? If I'm just a nightmare, a figment of your shattered psyche, then why can't you wake up from this dream? The point of our Clan's ritual wasn't simply to make wishes on the Leviathan's bones, it was to be more. To attain true immortality, outside of the bracelets. To anchor ourselves permanently to a domain, to our victims' souls!”

  Cinder retreated further into the icy water.

  "My Clan brothers are still shapeless and formless," Valor said. "But not me. You lived. You got away. I'm bound to you. Bound to your fear and pain. Devouring your soul from within. Bit by bit. Someday, the thing that will wake up in your body won't be you anymore. It will be me."

  Cinder's feathers erupted in a violent storm of crimson and obsidian, her voice a razor-edged scream. "MARTIN WILL STOP YOU!"

  "Really?" Valor laughed. "A human? With no magic? Against a being who has transcended mortality? Who has woven himself into the very fabric of your soul, into every grain of sand on this beach, into every drop of water of lake Eerie?"

  Cinder choked, falling into the water, suffocating, drowning in the waves washing over her trembling body.

  Her Charmchain skills weren't working against Valor. They never did in her dreams.

  "You killed my brothers," Valor said coldly. "With that black railgun. Buried their bracelets in concrete tombs. Delayed our work. But I will resume it to all as soon as you shatter, give in to me!”

  As Valor's words echoed, the lake began to pulse with an unnatural, sickly green light. The bones of the leviathan in the distance seemed to vibrate, their massive vertebrae casting long, twisted shadows across the shoreline.

  "You cannot escape me," Valor whispered, his form liquefying and reforming with each step. "I am everywhere, an Astral Phantom far beyond the physical. I cannot be killed by a mundane gun anymore nor a magic blade, for I have ascended further than any Omnid before me has!”

  Cinder flailed in the icy water, her body refusing to obey.

  With a blinding flash, the water froze, trapping her in its cold embrace. She wept and thrashed.

  "I am the storm that devours souls," Valor's voice distorted, multiplying into a chorus as he bent down to her, saw-blade arm pointed at her neck. "I am the hunger that never ends. I am the darkness between stars, the void that waits to consume everything."

  Reality behind him fractured, like an impossible shear, splitting into countless mirror-like shards that reflected Cinder's terrified face back at her from every angle. Each reflection showed a different version of her death, her suffering, her eventual transformation into something monstrous.

  A dead walker, a ghoul.

  Cinder saw ghoulish versions of herself picking up the teacher's railgun, a magic sword, a bow, a hammer. Her killing everyone. Executing her friends, her family, her brother, Kat, Io, Vespera, and her little pink, defenseless human.

  Again and again. Across myriads of possibilities.

  "See? No matter where you go, I follow," Valor smiled. "No matter what you do, I win in the end, take everything, everyone from you. Because with each breath you take, I grow stronger. Your very persistence feeds me, shapes me, gives me physical form."

  The shattered reflections multiplied, showing thousands of possible futures - each more horrific than the last. Cinder watched herself transform into a monster, saw herself carving up and devouring her loved ones, heard her own voice twisted into something cruel, laughing as she fired the railgun at her friends.

  "Your human pet thinks he understands love?" Valor laughed. "He knows nothing of true power. The power of fear. The power of hate, despair and darkness! The power of destruction, Entropy itself!"

  Cinder struggled in the frozen water.

  "You cannot escape me," Valor sang. "I am beyond mortality. Beyond mundane Omnid magic. I am pure intention given form!”

  His body continued to shift - sometimes a perfect human form, sometimes a writhing mass of bone and liquid flesh, sometimes a thing with too many teeth and too many eyes.

  "Your soul is my gateway," he continued. "Every time you close your eyes, every moment of weakness, I slip deeper."

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  "I... I'll throw myself into the Abystall dungeon!" Cinder snarled. "The mites will deprive me of magic. The shit are you gonna do then?!"

  "That's not going to stop me," Valor shrugged. "Do you really think that I have only one anchor? You're one of many, an incomplete, partial flesh-phylactery!”

  A silver-fluid thing burst from Cinder's body, forming into a human figure standing above her.

  "You know," I said, staring at Valor's ever-shifting form. "I expected an incomprehensible, eldritch Outsider entity, not a teenage Skinwalker knob."

  "Pathetic human!" Valor snarled. "I am a God and I will carve up and infest your soul to serve as my second body!"

  He leapt at me and struck at me with his serrated bone-blade saw arm, cutting deep into my chest. I grabbed the blade with my hands, jagged teeth sinking into my hands, blood pouring onto the ice.

  "What you are," I hissed. "Is basically a magical incel who couldn't get a date without phase-shifting."

  "I SUMMONED THE LEVIATHAN'S ECHO!" Valor howled, bone blade teeth extending from his hand deeper into my body and fingers, pinning me to where I stood. “You will bleed to death here and then you will become my other door!”

  "You summoned a temper tantrum," I said. "With beast cores. And murdered defenseless girls. Real impressive."

  "You will die here, human," Valor laughed. "You have no heart core to keep me out! Tomorrow I will wake up in your flesh. You shouldn't have come into her dreams!”

  I closed my eyes and then snapped off, letting go of the first layer of my being, leaving Alexander Glock behind like an empty shell. Like a shadow moving sideways made from liquid silver I stood in front of Valor.

  "W-what?" The Skinwalker sputtered.

  My fist connected with Valor's ever-shifting face, sending ripples through his liquid-metal form.

  Valor staggered back, his silver eyes widening in confusion. "Impossible! You're just a human!”

  "Am I?" I asked. "Or am I something else? Something that understands the rules of this place better than you do?"

  "You cannot hope to escape me!" Valor roared, his body twisting into a mass of blades and teeth. "I am beyond physical form!"

  "Really?" I asked. "Then why are you still trying to look so solid, so Valor-y? Why maintain any form at all? Why not embrace mommy Entropy?”

  Cinder looked up at my two bodies with wide eyes. One frozen, stabbed through the heart by Valor, the other taunting him.

  Valor's second arm formed into a blade and stuck me through the heart. I grabbed the blade, trapping it in my chest, squeezing hard and growling as the teeth dug into my hands.

  "You're afraid," I hissed as blood bubbled from my chest and hands. "Afraid of being nothing. Of dissolving into static. That's why you need an anchor. That's why you need Cinder. That's why you are feeding on this dream.”

  Valor's silver eyes flickered with uncertainty.

  "You're not a god," I continued. "You're a parasite. A remnant. Something that got left behind when your shitty ritual failed."

  "Die," jagged teeth stretched away from the blade cutting deeper into me.

  "If Slayer Nazareth steps on a river, does he stand still atop it or does he flow along with the current moving him downstream like a conveyor belt?" I asked, bleeding out.

  "What..." Valor sputtered, derailed by my theological question.

  The bone-teeth reached my heart and my second shell shattered, came apart as I stepped out of good-boy-NPC Christophorus Elijah.

  I reformed behind Valor. Silver eyes bloomed in the back of his head, staring at me.

  "How?!" He hissed, thinning out as he rapidly grew an arm behind himself.

  "Let me tell you a story," I said, trembling as I watched Valor's flesh rearrange itself with grotesque squelching sounds.

  "What story?!" Valor growled, his entire face flowing into itself and out from the back of his skull to face me.

  "There was a boy named Martin Kilborne once," I said. "A boy whose mother sent him to live with Uncle George - a man who taught him that the world was nothing more than a series of systems waiting to be manipulated. Uncle George wasn't just a thief - he was an artist. A con man who could walk into any room and become exactly what people expected him to be."

  Valor blinked at me.

  "You think of yourself as a killer? You are nothing compared to the Frontenachii Wendigo Clan, a boy playing with fire he doesn't fully understand. Let me tell you about real monsters," I said, stepping towards him. "My mother died very slowly. Not the quick, merciful death people romanticize. Lung cancer ate her from the inside out, a predator far more insidious than any Skinwalker. She worked for the Frontenachii as a compsci engineer."

  "Another sob story? I've heard hundreds from my victims as I cut them down with my blades," Valor sneered at me. "Knobfold tales don't impress me, human."

  "Ah," I sniffed. "But my story isn't done yet. That was just the beginning. Mom never told me that she was dying. She lied to me, pushed me away. The hospital called my Uncle, told him that she was in a coma. I arrived too late to do anything. I held her hand when her heart stopped and then... I broke. Mentally."

  "Pathetic humans break so easily. What are you even trying to prove?" Valor asked as he struck through me with his third hand. "You are weak, you are just a little snack for me to devour!"

  I grabbed the blade, squeezing it hard.

  "I went to the Frontenachii compound," I spat blood. "They had the most advanced Fear Wards in North Acadia. Psychological warfare shit designed to scare humans away. I went up against it. Again and again. Day after day for six months. Until my soul shattered too."

  Martin's heart stopped. I stepped out of his shell, liquid silver flowing into the last figure.

  "W-what?!" Valor blinked at me. "What the shit are you?! Why won't you just effing die?!"

  "I am a human soul of a supervillain wearing a shawl of other human souls," I grinned.

  Valor-tripod struggled between my three cast-off shells as I walked in a circle around him. Thunder rumbled above us.

  "How can you fragment yourself like this?!" he hissed. "No human..."

  "Can't I?" I asked. Each version of me spoke simultaneously. Four voices, one question. "I must admit, I did shatter rather spectacularly into quite the mess, so it took me a bit of time to put myself back together as distinctive concepts."

  "What effing concepts?!" Valor barked.

  "The Architect." I pointed a finger at Alexander.

  "The Understanding." My finger moved to Christophorus.

  "The Champion." I pointed at Martin.

  "The Leader," I tapped the fractal shear on my forehead, my silver hair fluttering in the wind. "Each shell layered above the other, moving, spinning constantly around me like an armillary sphere. Each with cracks, big holes… occasionally aligned just right to present one face or another to the Truth Runes. A mind-map soul system designed to fool any Scrut-sight into thinking whatever I need, whatever I want them to think."

  "Clever," Valor admitted, his silver eyes narrowing. "But even a cleverly fractured soul cannot stop me. All you've done is annoy me and reveal your cards!"

  "You revealed yourself to me," I shrugged. "So I have revealed myself to you in turn. It's only fair. Also, I'm just a distraction," I grinned as I pointed a finger gun at Valor's head, noticing that warm, feathery, black and white, magisteel-talon armed hands wrapped around mine.

  Valor's silver eyes widened as black and white wings spread behind me, Vespera's beak resting on my shoulder.

  "Pancakes!" Both of us declared as one.

  A thunderbolt of pure electrical energy erupted from Vespera's talons, channeled through my finger-gun, striking Valor directly between his shifting silver eyes. Another bolt rushed from Martin's body. The third bolt detonated from Alexander's pierced heart. The fourth struck the Skinwalker from the heart of Nazarite-novitiate Christophorus.

  The monster screamed, flailing, shaking, burning in my tripod-trap of souls.

  Valor's form began to disintegrate, his lanky body bubbling and hissing under the electrical assault.

  "Arghhhhh!" he shrieked. "I cannot be destroyed! Cannot be unmade! I will..."

  "Return? Reform to haunt us?" I asked. "Yeah, I pretty much expect it. Who said anything about destruction? You're the Wolfermort to my Larry Plotter. I bet you'll return to Oddwarts to harass me on See-Mass day!”

  More brilliant lightning burned the Skinwalker from all sides, melting, vaporizing, unmaking his figure. He bubbled and warped like the liquid terminator sinking into molten steel, face after face flashing across his twisting, shaking head.

  "Again and again. This is fine," I said. "I accept your terms as my dream-nemesis, Valor. Chase me if you dare. Strike me through the heart as much as you desire. I welcome you with my embrace. I love you!”

  Valor's scream stretched into an impossible harmonic, igniting the entire dreamscape around us. His body dissolved into a million silver fragments, each one catching the storm's lightning and burning away.

  The glass beach ignited with waves of electrical fire dancing between each pebble. The bones of the leviathan in the distance shattered, falling into the lake.

  The ice imprisoning Cinder shattered and she leapt up.

  My three human shells flowed back over me, covering me up one by one in proper order until I stood whole once again.

  The lake water retreated as a massive tidal wave created by the falling bones formed in the back, heading straight for us.

  Cinder smashed into Vespera and me, wrapping us in rainbow-wings, her eyes filled with tears.

  "Wolfermort?" she choke-hissed into my ear. "Really?"

  "What?" I grinned at her. "He's totally gonna come back in book four to compete in the Quad-Wizard tournament!”

  Cinder buried her face into my shoulder just as the tidal wave crashed into us.

  I shuddered awake tangled together with Vee and Ci in the crystal bed, the distant lights of Abystall dungeon shimmering beneath us through the transparent floor.

  All around us, gargantuan electrical fractal snowflake-shaped hexagrams shimmered, slowly dimming. Vespera's right hand held onto a wall, while her left hand wrapped around Cinder, magisteel talons digging into my forehead.

  Zee Captain's lighter was burning in my right hand as my left hand was wrapped around Cinder.

  I snapped it shut, staring at the floating dial.

  1/4 fuel left.

  Really need to add a core to my Wizard's tower before I run outta magic lighter fluid.

  "Wew! That was some topnotch baller Dreamancy!" Vespera clicked, removing her talons from the wall and my forehead. The electrical fractals dancing across our crystalline bedroom slowly faded away. “Good show!”

  "Did we just..." Cinder started, her feathers shifting through confused purples and uncertain blues.

  "Fight your nightmare parasite? Yep," I nodded.

  "Is he...?"

  "Going to come back? Probably," I nodded, making Cinder frown.

  "No questions about it," Vespera nodded. "We just zapped most of him outta your soul, but that doesn't really unmake what he is. I have no idea how to perma-kill Astral Phantoms."

  "He said he has... Phylacteries," Cinder let out.

  "Sounds like a Quest for Larry Plotter!" I declared. "Collect them all for Bumblyduur’s ghost!”

  "So are we..." She began.

  "Abyss no," I said. "That's like an effort and a half. I don't have time for that shit, babe. You know I don't plan to fight Abystall's dungeon Sentinels, right? It's much more effective to put them to work. Free labor force and whatnot. The same applies here. All enemies are essentially free resources one way or another.”

  "Right, resources, of course," Cinder rubbed her face tiredly. Then she looked down at herself. Her feathers shifted through embarrassed sunset-pinks as she pulled the covers over her chest. "Hey! Where's my hexasuit?"

  "On the floor with the rest of our clothes," Vee clicked cheerfully. "Along with like fifty pounds of pancake crumbs!"

  "P-pancake crumbs?" Cinder sputtered. “What? Did we actually…”

  She rotated and crawled to the edge of the bed to look at the transparent floor. There were no crumbs there, only our scattered outfits and the distant view of Abystall.

  "Ha! Sucka. Made you look," Vee cackled, swatting her behind.

  "Hey!" Cinder squawked, her feathers flaring with indignant violet-oranges. "You... you... Argh!"

  She lunged at Vespera, but the Thunderbird was already rolling away, exploding with laughter. "Next time I'll turn both of us human with your holofractal wings! Won't that be a treat! And we can make Lexxy look like an Omnid! Ha! See, I'm full of great ideas! Where would you be without me?"

  I yawned, my head throbbing.

  As fun as it was to picture a fully human Vee and Ci in my head, a few more hours of sleep was definitely in order.

  This time, hopefully without any hand-stabby-nightmares to fight.