The Dreadnought burst into a layer of floating buildings separated by open sky and Mark knew Eliot’s target was here, somewhere up ahead, even before Eliot got on the comms and confirmed this was the correct layer. Down, up, and to the sides, were floating city blocks, each one a jumble of buildings from every era Mark had ever heard of, and a lot more besides.

  Isoko floated beside Mark, saying, “Ohhh! Look at that one!”

  “It’s a pagoda, right?”

  It was a skyscraper made of Japanese pagodas, or at least they looked like pagodas; Mark wasn’t too familiar about architecture but Isoko had gone over a few parts of traditional architecture with Mark, Eliot, and Sally when they talked about shooting some shows in New Tokyo sometime, and so he was pretty sure calling it ‘a pagoda’ was correct.

  Isoko happily said, “And it’s made of floating bricks and neon lights— Oh fuck?”

  Her emotions turned on a swivel and Mark watched as the city square with the giant skyscraper pagoda kind of drifted, like it was all made of floating stuff and a wind had just pushed through the center of it, taking a big swipe at the whole city block. Roofs floated away from walls. Windows tumbled into other buildings and cracked and broke into a scattering of glass dust. Street lamps twisted and flowed in the wind. Even fountains and trees turned into mist and wooden planks and green grass.

  Mark never would have seen it without Quark’s help, and with his help, Mark watched as the brushed city reconfigured.

  The giant pagoda floated into the form of a new pair of buildings that were tall and glass-covered and 5-sided. At first, they were matching towers, but then one of the towers shrunk, like it was devoured downward, which is sort of what had happened. The pieces of the devoured tower became a neighborhood of old wooden houses.

  Broken glass formed stained glass windows in suddenly-appearing cathedrals.

  Trees became wooden boards in an outdoor porch. Leaves became grass which became carpets. Mist and streetlamps became an underground pool with lighting underwater, glowing gently in the soft, ambient light of the layer.

  Isoko went, “Whoaaaaa.”

  “You did that, right?” Mark asked.

  “All I did was reach out and touch it!” Isoko said, “It just… it just moved. It was like touching a kinetic sculpture; a bit of energy sent the whole system into a new configuration.”

  Mark looked down at the reconfigured city. “… Touch it again. Concentrate on the center. Punch straight through.”

  Isoko paused.

  And then Isoko touched the city again, concentrating on the center, punching straight through with a gentle breeze.

  David, up at the control room, slowed down the ship, and then stopped, anchoring them into the still sky. Everyone wanted to watch what happened as the wind reoriented the city block as Isoko turned it into a donut-city, centered around open cliffs and a deep hole. Minutes passed and one of the edges of the circled city thinned out, and the whole thing became a crescent city. 15 more minutes later and the crescent city had drawn back into a solid city block with the largest buildings at the middle and the smallest ones at the edges.

  It was like really slow-moving water in a zero-G environment, but not like water at all.

  It was all cityscape.

  Eliot came over the comms, saying, “That’s super cool.”

  Mark looked at the other city blocks floating in the sky all over the place. They were all kinda spherical… sort of. The tallest buildings were in the middle and the outskirts were little more than parks or parking lots. Each city block had land down below, some with subway tunnels, others with hanging rocks and deep waters, with the deepest waters and most protruding rocks in the center of the city block.

  One city block far in the distance was made almost entirely out of glass and metal, including the ground. It kinda looked like an iced-over, winter-locked city, but Quark labeled the ‘ice’ as glass, according to some refractive indexes that he had figured out and which Mark chose to simply trust him about. That city was perhaps the most spherical.

  Mark asked in the comms, “Wanna shove two city blocks together and see what happens?”

  Eliot said, “Let’s get moving again.”

  Isoko said to Mark, “I’ll do it in passing.”

  The Dreadnought moved at David’s whims, and at Isoko’s whims the sky came together on two separate city blocks like the brushstroke of a god. Or goddess, Mark corrected. It was like connecting two puddles of water together on a flat surface. Buildings from ancient Rome and some Daihoon cultures that Mark didn’t know the names of flowed into modern day townhouses and one giant tree that was really a skyscraper. As the Dreadnought flowed by, the city blocks became one major metropolitan city with skyways and overground trains, while an underground of roots and stone became an underground university, with class rooms dipping down and student chairs floating into the open air to settle into positions around chalkboards and televisions. The televisions even displayed some sort of show…

  Which raised a bunch of questions, actually.

  “Eliot?” Mark asked, “Are there radio waves or signals in here?”

  “Radio waves? —Oh! The television has a show!” Isoko excitedly asked, “What’s it showing!”

  “It’s showing a video of us dying over and over again to collapsing walls.” Mark looked around at the city off of the starboard side, and Quark picked out different screens here and there showing a bunch of different horrors. “Spike traps. Industrial grinders— Ah. Recycling centers. That one over there at the top of that building has you being turning into aluminum cans, Isoko.”

  Fear spread in the ship.

  Isoko’s eyes went fractionally wider as her breath caught.

  Mark said, “A Union of Fear and Fearless, Isoko.”

  Isoko blinked, and then she began to do exactly that. Fear flowed away on the wind, darkening the skies in the distance—

  Isoko gasped, and the sky darkened even further, because the ship was flying by a giant stadium, with a huge projection screen at the back. Images of gore and broken bones and the faces of everyone on board screaming in terror shone upon that screen. Some steel girders and cloth slipped together in other parts of the flying, airy city, like a cloud reorganizing, each collection of flat surfaces gaining a projection screen. The sky darkened further with fear making each glowing screen stand out that much more.

  Isoko cracked the sky through the offending city, drilling through the entire floating structure with a sudden platinum spike that began to spin and twirl. Within moments the city fell into a tornado that turned brick, mortar, wood, and steel into floating campers and tiny homes on tiny lots that spun into the sky overhead and below, spreading out and away like thrown trash. Isoko consumed the city and the city became a crash of vehicles scattered on the dark wind.

  She was panicking.

  Mark didn’t understand why she was panicking, but he didn’t need to.

  Mark reached out and put a gentle hand on Isoko’s shoulder.

  Isoko came back to herself, shaking her head, saying, “Ah… thanks.” She put a hand onto Mark’s hand, and stayed there for a minute. Then she patted Mark’s hand and stepped away. “I’m good.”

  Mark nodded. Then he asked Eliot, “ETA to kaiju?”

  “3 hours. 390 kilometers away. Isoko. Reel in some debris, please. Metal, if you can get it. I want to see if I can get some supplies here.”

  Isoko nodded and she reached out with the sky. On platinum sparkles, a 2 story house came flying in softly, spinning gently, to land in a crash of mostly-bricks onto the deck of the Dreadnought.

  Eliot’s vector went from ‘intrigued’ to ‘OH MY GODS’. He was down on the deck in a hot minute, rushing forward, saying, “Holy shit it’s all real, and I can Manipulate it, too!” He reached out and turned the bricks into sand and then the sand into gravel. Wires and plastics popped out one way while glass and wood went another, all of the pieces sorting into organized piles. He said to Isoko, “Grab me some steel trailers! Any metal at all.”

  Isoko was almost sarcastic as she asked, “Are we not worried about inanimate airy cities making death threats against all of us?”

  “Nope,” Mark said.

  Isoko rolled her platinum eyes at him.

  “No worries here!” Eliot said. “All the scans showed no life out there so the images are a reaction of the layer itself; probably a mirroring. And all of this stuff here is good stuff! And since we couldn’t rip any metal from the dead city we passed through because of all the aforementioned death, we’re taking from here. I want any metal at all you can find out there! I’ll sort through it myself, so just grab whatever looks shiny.”

  Mark said, “There’s that all-glass city up ahead. Maybe there’s an all-metal city?”

  “Oh definitely,” Eliot said, “But it’s about 450 kilometers up there, past the kaiju, and I want metals before we get to the target.”

  Mark nodded.

  Isoko hummed, looked out across the way— She winced. “You’re really sure there’s nothing fucky out there, Eliot?”

  Mark and Eliot looked out at the settling city, where trailers, hovercars, and small houses were regathering into streets, subways, and towers… and a whole lot of billboards. Each billboard had writing on it, along with various images of dead Dereks, Eliots, Isokos, and even a few Marks. Isoko was being processed into mirrors. Eliot and Derek were being turned into canned meat (and the cans were labeled ‘MEAT’), with some of Isoko’s metal making up the cans.

  It got Mark wrong, though.

  The billboards had Mark being turned into meat and then composted into ‘Premium AAA Black Gold Fertilizer! 79 GL for a 20 pound bag! Buy 2 get 1 free!’.

  Mark Called to the city, “Stupid city! I’m metal, not blood!” He detached a whole arm and turned it into swords and daggers, before he pulled it back into an arm shape and waved at the city. “See?!”

  The billboards updated to showing Mark ripped apart and made into railroad tracks.

  Mark nodded. “That’s better.”

  Isoko and Eliot looked at him.

  “What?”

  Isoko shook her head, saying, “Nothing! So… Eliot. Metals?”

  “Yes please!”

  Isoko twisted a floating city into crashing sheds, snapping power lines, and a whole bunch of trash. Eliot sorted through all parts of it as it flowed into his range, inside of the Castellan-bubble of the Dreadnought. The stone and glass became discarded parts that Eliot shoved off of the side and let gravity do the rest of the work of disposal.

  Mark watched as the falling trash continued to fall… and fall, and fall, and it wasn’t turning back into an airy city at all. Sally was standing next to him by then, watching with him. Mark said, “It’s not turning back into a city, right?”

  Sally said, “Yeah. It’s ‘dead’, now…” She turned toward Eliot, way over there, and yelled out, “Hey! You’re killing the cities when you take from them like this!”

  The funnel of buildings continued to fall onto the deck beside Eliot and Eliot continued to rip apart everything into its constituent parts, as he replied, “There’s nothing in any of these buildings at all— Keep it coming, Isoko!”

  Isoko had paused, but she resumed and spoke up, “I don’t feel any life out there.”

  Mark asked, “Could the vectors be too small to feel?”

  Isoko paused a lot at that idea. In fact, she diverted the sky away, letting the crash of buildings go as she said, “Maybe?”

  Eliot groaned at the loss of materials, but then he sighed, thought, and shook his head, watching the scattered untouched buildings float away into large townhouses with cars parked out front and telephone-pole-wires connecting them to each other. Those telephone poles pulled at their connecting electrical wires, pulling places closer together, back into a city far overhead and behind all of them.

  … It kinda looked like desperate sailors all tied on a rescue line together, pulling each other back into a group.

  Mark was probably anthropomorphizing it.

  But then some of the houses crashed together and formed fortresses in the sky with tall walls and turrets all around. Those turrets pointed toward the Dreadnought and kept pointing their way even as the ship got far out of range, whereupon the fortresses crashed into the shapes of graveyards and small abodes on grassy soil.

  Everyone kinda just watched.

  Eliot said, “It doesn’t feel alive, but… It looks alive.”

  “I felt no vectors at all!” Isoko said.

  Mark had a sudden, wild idea. “Could it be AI life? No vectors at all? Or vectors too small to feel?”

  “It has no signals, Mark,” Eliot added. “Nothing at all! It’s just… it’s just the way the layer is? And everything is Man-made Manipulation’able. Nothing here is monstrous. It’s all… human made.”

  “Can you Manipulate unawakened AIs?” Mark asked.

  “Not usually, and I have talked to United Sapients about that specific thing a while ago,” Eliot said, frowning a little. “United Sapients does not consider unwakened AIs as ‘alive’. No one does. So even if those are unawakened AIs… nanobot swarms or whatever. This is like pulling fish out of the ocean; not killing anything.” Eliot finished with, “I want more fish.”

  Mark looked over to Andria, sitting at the front of the ship near her little house, watching. He called her on the comms, asking, “Andria? Can you Mindless Manipulate anything out there?”

  Andria startled, and then Mark felt a moment of supreme annoyance from her. There was no response on the comms, but Mark looked over and saw her standing up and getting a little embarrassed as she looked at her comm system by her house. The comm system was sparking and a little bit on fire.

  Andria pulled some mithril out of the computer.

  Ah.

  Mark had surprised her.

  Eliot focused.

  Andria’s voice came through, “—esting? Tes— Ah. Okay. What, Mark?”

  “Can you Mindless Manipulate the environment out there?”

  Andria shook her head, saying, “All I feel in this entire layer is a general sense of worth. If I have a ‘Mindless sense’ like I have a Prosperity sense, then I can’t make sense of it at all right now.”

  “Okay. Thanks,” Mark said, as he thought. He rapidly made an executive decision, “No more harvesting, just to be safe. Let’s speed up and get you your kaiju, Eliot.”

  Eliot hmm’d, then nodded.

  The Dreadnought sped up, flying fast past airy, floaty city block after city block.

  - - - -

  The city blocks were denser now. Infrastructure coiled between the floating, airy cities. Highways full of cars and carts and even bicycles, massive trains that never stopped moving, subway tunnels half-exposed to the sky, and canals full of water and boats. No people. The vehicles and everything else moved on their own. There was stuff from every era in human history, and a few more histories besides. Fantastical histories, with boats made of shining lights and glass, or houses made of still-growing trees.

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  And there, far in the distance, among the burning city and blackened clouds that tried to turn to stone, to walls, was the kaiju who tried to destroy it all, but who never got anywhere with that goal. Theoretically it was there. The scanners said as much and the city burned in the distance, flames filling the sky with black soot that flowed in every direction. The kaiju was behind that black wall of obscurity.

  It was silent, too.

  If the scanners didn’t say that it was there, Mark wouldn’t have thought that it was there at all.

  The city certainly saw the kaiju, though. The cityscape was on fire, but it was also lit up with rockets that landed on deep-blue scales, tracer bullets that passed across massive eyes of every size and shape, and furls of wind that whipped away from unseen wings—

  For a moment, it was visible.

  That moment tore across Mark’s body, disintegrating his ego in a flash of construction, splashing away the surface of his body into letter openers and bolts and railroad spikes. But he maintained the center of himself and he reacted instinctively, Unioning with Integrity and shoving away all Disruption.

  That action is what saved their lives.

  And then the smoke curled back around the kaiju, and Mark yelled at Isoko to darken the sky and block the light and Isoko did nothing, because Isoko was impaled by mithril and adamantium blades, sticking out of her chest and stomach. Mark did not panic. He did not panic when Andria was unconscious and her head was separated from her body. He did not panic when he felt Lola heavily injured down there, or any of the hundreds of horrific injuries that had suddenly strung through the entire ship.

  David was okay, and David was already moving.

  Eliot had turned on some unknown part of the ship, too, doing something with the Castellan shield, turning it onto high power or something and igniting the entire ship with golden flames. In a flash of fire and David’s vector, Andria was deep inside the Dreadnought and still at the front, in a secondary protected space under the forecastle. Eliot, Lola, Tartu, Sally, and a whole lot of Derek, were moved into the main castle of the ship, leaving Isoko and Mark out in the open.

  Isoko gripped the world with Good and Bad, turning the sky beyond the golden flames into a dark hurricane and rapidly healing everyone on the ship with concentrated Good.

  10 seconds; that’s all it took to almost kill Andria and Lola. Everyone had been injured, but those two had almost died.

  A hundred Dereks straight up died, but Derek came back two hundred times as strong, his bodies spreading out far and wide into the entire ship, filling the ship with a secondary source of Good/Bad.

  Mark switched to Glory and Fear now that the stability of the ship was regained, saying, “Darken the sky completely, Isoko. What was that! Anyone!”

  Isoko pulled a length of mithril/adamantium swirl out of her platinum chest, like she was removing an entire spear. She spurted bright red blood from her chest and her mouth, nodding, as her wounds sealed. The sky darkened further and crackles of lightning sparked through the dark, while the Dreadnought remained perfectly illuminated.

  Eliot spoke with an injured voice, “That was a mass… Fuck. The ship is all fucked… I need 2 minutes.”

  David said, “Could have been Material Manipulation. Andria burst from inside, her mithril pulled out of her.”

  Andria had lost her head for a bit, but she was physically better, now. Rapid, really good healing could heal a lot, and Andria had some of the best healers in the world with her right now. She was still freaking out, about 50 meters below Mark. Alone.

  “Can… Can I move to the main castle— Fuck, no,” Andria said, wincing. “I can’t be near anyone right… fuck.”

  “Come up to the forecastle, Andria,” Mark said, “I’ll stand with you. I’m not leaving the ship because I’m gonna need to counter whatever it was that kaiju did this whole time. My entire body spiraled apart into weaponry.”

  “I noticed,” Isoko muttered, voice full of blood.

  “We need an alternate kill-vector,” Mark said. “Isoko with some platinum lightning maybe. Andria with some distant power? Anyone else for a guess as to whatever that Power was? How to counter it?”

  Eliot’s vectors crawled into the ship through golden fire and damaged things sealed up. Something inside the ship had died, but in that moment it crackled back to life, and suddenly the engines turned back on; Mark felt the vibrations through his feet and through all his adamantium bits everywhere. Up overhead the broken hover ring, which had been splashed into pieces, burned, melted kinda, and reappeared in its proper position. It was damaged. Eliot could fix it better later.

  Eliot said, “It was Material Manipulation; David had it right. Man-made Manipulation is the Arch-offset on the Arcane spell Repair. Material Manipulation is closer to Reality Manipulation, but only for materials. It has no lesser ‘Arcane Power version’.”

  “Mark,” Lola said, “Do a Union of Integrity and Disruption like you were and keep that going. It should ward off all—” She coughed. “It should do what we need. Isoko can concentrate on destruction.”

  Mark switched to Integrity and Disruption, and said, “Okay Isoko. You’re probably gonna want to fly away from the ship, but not out of the shield, and then we go in as far as we need to for you to be able to hit it with lightning.”

  Isoko was terrified, but the only thing that had hurt her was being anywhere near Mark and the ship, so she nodded and took off into the air, to hover inside the shield but above it all. The sky was still dark with Isoko’s Dark and Light, but—

  Andria came up to below the forecastle, down within sight of Mark. She was crying heavily, sobbing, but she maintained as much as she could and she grabbed the stone railing down there, and crashed to her knees on the ground, grabbing her neck and holding on to a memory of death.

  A hand of mithril shot up and grabbed onto Mark’s forearm, and Mark held it there with his other hand.

  Andria calmed a little.

  Mark shifted his Union of Integrity and Disruption slightly, altering the mentality of the Union to give her some relief from the close call, shoving away the Disruption of an unorganized battle far into the world as it could go. Panic was not useful for Integrity, after all. Andria breathed a bit easier. Mark switched back to a Union fully against the Disruption of kaiju Powers, drawing Integrity into the team, into the world surrounding the Dreadnought. Derek supported Mark’s Union into the ship and into every person there. Even though Derek wasn’t doing Integrity/Disruption directly, Good/Bad was still good enough.

  Isoko knew it was go-time, and so she went.

  The sky lightened—

  The eyes of the kaiju were there, 20 kilometers ahead, and the entire thing was visible. A blast of pure Manipulation washed across the Dreadnought’s golden fire shield like a sandblaster against stone, and the stone held. Fires whipped away, and Mark felt something try to touch his adamantium, and the ship, but Mark held the ship together and Eliot did the rest.

  But the kaiju…

  The kaiju was wrong.

  The kaiju was a mess of floating eyes in the shape of a sphere, and that was it. Something existed between those eyes. Something beyond Mark’s ability to understand, to see. Perhaps he could see it, between blinks. There were blue scales for sure. But with the monster fully revealed it was just eyes of every sort.

  So many eyes.

  Stretching up and out and in and—

  Mark glared, roaring out an unintelligible Call to fight, to stand firm against the enemy, to kill the thing. His Kaiju Call stabilized his Union and stabilized the ship and Mark averted his eyes, not looking. He couldn’t be distracted trying to understand whatever it was he was seeing. The Dreadnought’s surface had peeled a little in his distraction revealing eyes in the wood all around, but Mark Unioned with Integrity, blasting away Disruption, and the eyes in the wood went away—

  Lightning crashed across the sky in rivers of illumination, Isoko roaring her defiance.

  Quark showed Mark all he needed to see.

  Rivers of lightning became conflagrations of destruction, striking the kaiju.

  Mark saw the kaiju for the first time, for real.

  It was blue scales and too many eyes everywhere and long, spindly arms that uncurled from the top and curled down through the body of the kaiju, grabbing at everything it could grab and then pulling those things it grabbed into a great mouth-hole at the bottom of the blue scales, or into the eyes, or into the body directly. It was sea anemone, an urchin, or simply a mouth; Mark couldn’t tell.

  The layer itself was fighting against the kaiju.

  Isoko was a better fighter than the layer.

  Isoko’s lightning crashed against the surface of the kaiju alongside cascades of rockets and bullets and explosions. The weaponry fired off from the city of the layer did almost nothing. Isoko’s lightning actually burned a few scales and popped a few eyes. And still, the kaiju was silent. It wasn’t Calling out like all kaiju usually Called.

  Something was very, very wrong with this kaiju.

  It still didn’t Call as all of the eyes on its surface turned toward Isoko and a great disruption crashed against her like invisible fingers hitting a deflection plate. Mark felt the attack a lot more than he saw the attack, but he did see the after effects. Mirages spilled across the flaming surface of Mark’s Union, and away from Eliot’s Castellan shield. Away from Isoko.

  Isoko faltered toward the castle of the Dreadnought, gasping—

  “You can do it, Isoko!” Mark Called out into the world, rebuffing whatever the Anemone Kaiju was doing. “Burst the eyeballs! Focus on them!”

  Isoko regained altitude, asking, “Is the ship grounded, Eliot? I can do more lightning!”

  “Setting it up in 5 seconds, 4, 3— Got it!” Eliot said, “Hit it, Isoko!”

  Isoko roared defiance and the sky turned to a hurricane, spreading, spreading, spreading. Darkness cut off the vision of the kaiju and Mark almost sagged at the sudden loss of pressure.

  And then light tore from the world.

  Blinding, shining, crackling.

  Sparks shocked from the Castellan fire shield and the floating city blasted into debris as Isoko turned the world on its edge, swirling the heavens with electricity, coming in on a counter-clockwise slam against the entire side of the anemone kaiju. It was a thousand piercing fingers of platinum-charged lightning, crushing into every eye and flaking away the surface of the kaiju.

  Isoko didn’t stop for a full minute—

  Suddenly, Mark heard a whimper of a Call from the kaiju—

  The pressure wave of Manipulation faded from the atmosphere and this time Mark did actually sag against the loss of counter-force, crashing to a knee, turning his head to see the whimpering, almost-dead kaiju.

  The scales were gone; ripped away by lightning. The eyes were ragged, burned holes. The arms had been real arms, blue and long and shaggy with hands at the end, but now they were tentacles and they had half-burned away. Half of the creature had a fissure along the entire length of it, exposing a soft rainbow light in the center.

  Isoko sank in the sky overhead and Mark reached up and caught her. She breathed out heavily, saying, “I stopped… I stopped when I felt the heart. It’s almost dead. Eliot— You need—” Isoko’s eyes fluttered.

  David was suddenly there, picking Isoko out of Mark’s adamantium hands, saying, “I put Eliot into his small ship. Escort him.”

  Down below Eliot was inside of a different room, right below the deck. He took a moment to orient himself after being moved so fast and without warning, but then he opened up the deck, opting to rip apart the wood instead of opening the hatch. And then the ship was in the air, its brightspeed hover ring glowing brightly with Castellan might.

  Mark grabbed onto a handle that appeared on the bottom of the small ship.

  And then Eliot took off, gunning it, and Mark held on.

  2 minutes later and Mark hovered in the air as Eliot drove his ship into the glowing heart of the almost-dead kaiju, whereupon the kaiju instantly died and Eliot’s ship blasted apart, leaving him nude and floating in the air. The kaiju died, just like that.

  As it died, Mark almost felt a joy from the monster.

  A relaxation.

  The kaiju didn’t even struggle against death; it seemed to welcome death and departure.

  … Eliot was an easy pickup in an adamantium cocoon.

  But as Mark flew back to the ship and the dead kaiju began to float away, to be devoured by the layer itself, turned from meat into soil, bone into building, liquids into water…

  Something was watching.

  - - - -

  Eliot walked through a dream of gold to sit down on a nice rug by a nice fireplace, beside an older woman with wrinkled brown skin. She was weaving a basket, and that action reminded Eliot so much of when he went to Nigeria when he was a kid. That was when Eliot’s grandmother on his father’s side taught him how to weave a basket.

  This woman was not that woman. This woman was still grandmotherly, though.

  “You didn’t die when you were this old,” Eliot said, as he began to weave his own basket out of parts that had appeared.

  Hearthswell, also known as Maria Sanchez, scoffed. “I never died! I ascended.”

  “Same difference.”

  “Near enough.” Hearthswell looked at Eliot, her eyes full of divine fire. More than any other god or goddess, Hearthswell was the god of fire. Of civilization. Of true destruction and true creation. She revealed herself to Eliot in that small, enormous gaze, and she asked, “Did you see it?”

  … Oh.

  Suddenly, Eliot recalled the kaiju.

  The eyes.

  The thing looking in from Beyond—

  The Fires of Civilization seeped into Eliot’s very soul, pushing away a memory that was too big to hold onto, Awakening him for a second time.

  The goddess spoke,

  “The Executioners fight the battles within, purging our institutions of the failures of humanity. The Inquisitors fight the battles between, purging our institutions of the incursions of demons. But there is a third group, and it is us. We are the Endless Conflagration, and we burn That Which Must Be Destroyed. Guard your heart, your mind, your soul, and Burn Everything in the heat of Your Warmth, supporting civilization and burning away Those That Should Not Be, but be warned, when you wake your Sight will See more than most, and you will have hard choices to make. The people we call ‘humanity’ are so much more than just humans.

  “Our children in the artificial; people made of silicon and sparks.

  “The spirits in our creations of mana and purpose.

  “Our allies in the demons, in the archmages we allow among us.

  “And then there are the enemies we allow within our walls, because to burn them away would invite death inside and they, too, wish to survive.

  “Your fires will burn hotter than ever before, and so, you will either become a conflagration yourself, or you will temper yourself to lesser ideals than those spoken about in Inquisitor Halls the world over. Others will fight the biggest battles. You must be ready for the Other Battles.

  “You must never forget the true enemies.

  “Thrashtalon and his ilk are not what we face,” Hearthswell Burned Brightly, intoning, “We face Those That Must Remain Outside.

  “You have seen the influence of one of them today. It almost killed all of you.

  “It is up to you to make sure that can never happen, ever again.”

  Eliot didn’t understand at all. But in that moment, in the dream, there was a clarity just beyond the golden flames, dancing in his sight, promising him that he would understand completely, one day soon.

  Eliot said, “I see.”

  Hearthswell nodded.

  - -

  Mark sat on a platform far away from the Dreadnought, but still easily within sight and reach of his team.

  Eliot lay on a cot in front of him.

  And all around, for some reason, the layer full of buildings was doing something weird. Before, the billboards and the screens were showing the death and destruction of the team. But now…

  Mark watched himself on the big screen, standing on top of a hovercar that drove through the center of the street. He was waving at everyone, living it up in a celebration while confetti showered all around. Isoko flew behind him, also waving and smiling. Eliot was there on his own small Dreadnought float, maybe 1/100th sized, happily cheering alongside the crowd. Everyone was in on the action, either sitting down in a chair in the parade, or walking in the parade and handing out candy to others.

  Other screens showed the team sitting down to a big banquet of food. Whoever was running the broadcast had Mark eating piles of railroad ties, while Isoko spooned lightning into her mouth. Still more screens had random people in the team buying houses together and having babies.

  One hilarious screen showed Mark pregnant with a big belly and Sally holding his hand as they entered a new house together. Mark had Quark take a screenshot of that scene and send it off to Sally and the whole team with a ‘LOL’ attached, just because. Soon, everyone started picking out weird images here and there in the floating cities to show off to each other.

  Eliot slept.

  Golden fire occasionally licked across his arms and under his eyelids, but he was fine.

  He had Mark to watch over him.