In the dream, Hazahnahkah had two arms and two legs. He prowled with bladed mouth, flattened ears, and beautiful earth eyes. It was incredible. He could feel every corner where his fangs fit into his gums, where his padded paws kissed dirt, where his whiskers, electrical, picked up even the slightest changes in the leaves around him.

  Hazahnahkah was a jaguar.

  The sword had never even imagined what it was to be biological before, much less human, much less a creature of fable such as this. The Fawn Cities had always dreamed of jaguars. Perhaps those dreams had reached him, the crevices of his mind.

  Hazahnahkah continued prowling, automatically, following his own way. Instead of manipulating reality with his Three Terrors he strode Serpent’s Ramble himself, hunched, hungry, scared—scared of what he was approaching.

  All Hazahnahkah’s life he’d never met an opponent who could even survive him, much less trick him. December 11th had proven that Hazahnahkah, despite his overwhelming power, still had room to grow. Perhaps there would always be. But more than a Fourth Terror, or even a Fifth. Hazahnahah wanted to understand. Why couldn’t he repair the Orphanspawn’s tower? Why couldn’t he save Ysan? Why was he now so scared for Hwayoung even though he should easily have been able to protect her? The forest deepened into a wall of water, of pure darkness and shadow fiends. Hazahnakah pressed his nose into it, cold. Then he pushed through with his whole body, severing cold. His body was no longer his own. It was just thoughts—feelings.

  That’s right, just beyond The Leviathan Sky was Ysan!

  Hazahnahkah pressed forward. He traveled far and long and fast. He reached the end, and just when he thought he’d pop up along Serpent’s Ramble and see the woman who had found him there, drowning in the river—there was a wall.

  A wall.

  Flowers grew in strange patterns along it, loosely forming a gate. No, it wasn’t any gate—this was the gate to The Orphanspawn’s Tower. And there was more than one. Millions of flowers stretched endlessly along the drowning wall—hiliagalae.

  They made water, but they weren’t meant to be in it.

  They were drowning.

  And so was he.

  But he was useless here, helpless. He was a land creature in an underwater realm. Hazahnahkah swept his claw through the brick binding them. He destroyed the wall and water flooded The Tower, but The Towers were free. Moments later, little shadows fell, giggling and snickering. They took more flowers and used those once again to repair the wall. Hazahnahkah cried out, but they couldn’t understand him. Those flowers were his children—and humans were killing them—but humans he viewed as his children also. He swept his claw through The Tower again, but then saw behind its windows—Ysan.

  She was a child now, but that was impossible. Humans didn’t age backwards…

  … Right, this was a dream.

  But Ysan felt so real, staring back at him in terror. Of course humans would repair The Tower. This was their home. Of course they would protect it.

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  A great pain ruptured through Hazahnahkah’s foreleg. He raised it, eyes bloodshot as blood pulsed his ears. Lodged inside him was a knife. December 11th’s knife.

  It was a small and sable blade, narrow and graceful, but also with a hilt that looked painful for a human, who had only fleshy fingers with nails to grip it. It was oddly familiar. It was something Hazahnahkah hadn’t noticed until now. It was the knife.

  The knife—the very same knife that plunged into December 11th—the very same blade Hazahnahkah had pleaded with to stop. All this time she’d been there, carried by the same man, carried by the same winds, all the way back since Ysan had been drowning in the river. It bothered Hazahnahkah deeply that the knife had not confessed this.

  But there was no time to process this discovery.

  Hazahnahkah was dying, dying in his own dream. “I activate my First Terror! I possess myself!” He bellowed, and at this he seized control of his dream with raw power, which somehow was more difficult to manipulate than actual reality itself. Then, as if in rebellion against his own control, the dream ended itself.

  Hazahnahkah was awake now—cradled in Hwayoung’s arms.

  It was extraordinarily comforting, and once again Hazahnahkah felt an experience he never had before, sanctuary in the arms of a child.

  However, Hwayoung was the one who needed comforting. Her sniffling and slobbering was muffled by her wool collar as she slumped against the storage shed waiting for her mother. Yulisca was speaking soft things to calm her as she swept, but Hazahnahkah’s heart shattered as he realized what she was cleaning.

  Someone had unrooted all of the flowers that had once kept the sword company in that little storage shed. Even the hiliagalae were no exception despite the droughts that often visited Osayn. It was madness. Hazahnahkah shouted in a vain attempt to alert her that these were his children, that they were his for years and years and years, with no one else but him and the knife within those damp dark corners of the closet. Even Hwayoung was confused as to why her mother would be sweeping hiliagalae, such an important source of water away. When she asked her mom, the answer was anything but rational.

  “Because they were haunting my dreams,” Yulisca whispered.

  But this was hysteria at best. Over the next several evenings Hazahnahkah was repeatedly disturbed by these dreams long after he had mourned his closet-born children. He could never make any sense of them, and he always needed his First Terror to wake up. He never even had the chance to grieve the soil they once sprung. Hwayoung was too attached to him to store him away with the knife, and the bullying from the other children of Osayn was worsening. Even June 33rd, March 8th, and October 1st joined in against her—contrary to what December 11th had directed them to do—to be her friend. They were anxious about the return of their older brother, and Thezca and Yumilom even more so, worried for the return of their father. While they were very different from the children of the village, they all shared one thing in common.

  Their hatred for Hwayoung.

  They stole her meals, they threw rocks, they put manure in buckets and hung them over Yulisca’s house door. Practically every inconvenience short of assaulting the girl, they committed. Hwayoung did not seem to mind this.

  But Hazahnahkah did.

  Hazahnahkah decided to tease them back, and give the girl a good push in her confidence while doing so.

  So, after training with some of the other children, Hazahnahkah did as he planned. The girl made a “woosh” sound with her mouth as she swung a childish swing, and promptly cleaned a mountain—off the face of the earth.

  The mountain was miles away and uninhabited by people, but the blast traveled devastatingly. It removed the earth on its journey and tore open the sky. Hwayoung’s village was mostly fine, but the mountain which cradled it was now missing a large part of its peak. Snow rained where Hazahnahkah had ever seen snow rain before. Then, they heard the screaming.

  One of the boys crashed to the dirt near the edge of the smouldering chasm. A dark crimson pooled around him and his wailing. His arm was gone, incinerated, completely seared from flesh to bone. From where his gaping shoulder rested was the rest of the lightless and endless rift Hazahnahkah had opened, stretching to the sunrise.

  It was Nazaki.

  Hwayoung ran to him with utter shock. Everyone was shocked. Everyone was appalled and scared and confused. No one felt this all more than Hazahnahkah himself. It was he who did that. It was he who hurt that boy.

  And Hwayoung blamed herself for it. For everything.

  Hwayoung: Dependent 50/100 → Withdrawn 25/100

  Ysan: Lamented 100/100