Flashes of light, followed by ever-deep darkness. Tendrils coiled in that darkness, reaching, reaching. The tendrils folded into each other, and became shapes as Mark knew them. In that moment, Mark knew he was seeing himself, and the tendrils were the shape of his Binding. Hexagons and squares and triangles. Sigils of both depth and breadth turned onto each other, fading, fading. Back to black on black on black. But they weren’t him. They weren’t his Binding. They were something else. What were they? He didn’t know.

  A single golden pebble shone in the black, and the shine turned into a rainbow, and the rainbows became light and air and land and grasses.

  Mark walked up a short driveway that he knew, but which was strange and unfamiliar. It was concrete, but not. If Mark looked at it too hard he saw the black, black, black. But if he looked softly, then the rainbows appeared, and so Mark looked softly, and he saw light and air, and…

  And a house.

  Mark gazed upon a familiarity.

  It was a two story house with 10 rooms and four bathrooms that had been in the family for three generations so far, and Mark was looking forward to making it four. He didn’t know who he was going to find and love, and honestly the entire idea of being with another person just did not interest him, but he knew he wanted to raise kids of his own in this very same house. You know… theoretically.

  The garage was open, and Mark saw his bench press bench sitting there. Over there were some weighted, wooden kaiju swords, resting against the wall. He had used those trainers when he was preparing to undertake the Tutorial for Addashield, as a part of his Color Drop Emperor’s Child treatment.

  Everything else was gone.

  Then the bench was gone, too, and the swords vanished.

  Mark walked into the empty garage, out of the hurricane rain.

  A kaiju roared outside and then Mark was inside, in the kitchen, and Mom and Dad were making breakfast. Mark grinned at that. Mom was cutting up strawberries, and Dad was flipping pancakes. They both looked so happy.

  “Hey Mom. Hey Dad!”

  Mom looked up and smiled wide. “Mark! You want some orange juice? I just made it today.”

  “Hey, Mark!” Dad said. “Hope you’re hungry, champ!”

  Mark laughed, and said, “I’m not a champ. I didn’t even get to play in the finals this year. Stopped high school to go into the Tutorial, remember?”

  “Oh everyone stopped the team for senior year!” Dad said.

  “That star player, Adam,” Mom said, questioningly, “He went away over winter break, right?”

  “Yeah, he did,” Mark said, “The whole team decided to start disintegrating when Adam left.”

  “But you were champs the year before,” Dad said, “So you’re still a champ.”

  “And you saved Memphi!” Mom said, “Alexandro and Gabriel, too.”

  “I’m so glad you saved them, Mark,” Dad said. “My brother and I never really got along as well as we could have. It was all such stupid shit, too, that kept us apart.”

  Mark scoffed. “Oh come on! You guys loved each other? We were all going to move there before… before…”

  Before the badness.

  “Of course we loved each other,” Dad said, setting out a pile of pancakes for Mark.

  All of them were at the table now, and the pancakes were stacked high and loaded up with fresh strawberry sauce, and covered in fresh whipped cream. Butter abounded, and the syrup was thick and golden brown. The sausage was a little burnt, though Dad would have called it ‘caramelized’. It was just how Mark liked it. The homefries came with a side of spicy mayo/ketchup/whatever sauce that Mark had gotten once at a burger joint in the north of Orange City when they were kids, and which they never saw ever again. It tasted just as great this second time as Mark always imagined it would. The milkshakes were great, and the soda was even better.

  Dad continued, “Love isn’t always enough. I wish we could have made up with them while we were alive, but then that demon came and killed us at the behest of his archmage.”

  Mom said, “And now you’re some sort of Inheritor of an Empire? We won’t be able to be there for you for that… but then again, that’s what happens to parents, right?”

  “Parents die, and hopefully they leave their kids with something good to remember them by,” Dad nodded, as his skin fell off and blood flowed down his mangled face.

  The back of Mom’s head exploded, spreading pink goo onto the walls of the kitchen, as she kept herself perfectly composed, saying, “At least we can’t be used against you anymore, son, and that’s not nothing.”

  Grandpa sat at the table, too, and he looked like Dad, but different. He was not old at all, as he said, “I don’t envy Alexandro. That boy is going to go through hell. Better to be dead.”

  Grandpa rotted from the inside out, but he still sat there, eating breakfast.

  Great Grandpa, who had fought in the war alongside Grandpa, was also at the table. He was more of a shadow than anything real, because Mark didn’t know who he was. Not really. He still recognized his Great Grandpa, though, as the old shadow said, “I miss the Old World. I miss America. Everything was so much simpler back then. No kaiju. No Ever Wars. No people trying to assassinate me or my family. No archmages.”

  Addashield stood to the side, cutting up Mom’s thigh and turning it into steaks on the grill, smiling as his eyes turned to fire, as Kanda said, “And no demons back then, either!”

  Dad said, “God damn, that’s disgusting. You should at least be using some rosemary.”

  Addashield/Kanda quizzically asked, “I should?”

  “It hides the taste of human,” Mom said.

  “Oh, but I like the taste of human,” Kanda said, as Addashield wiped some brains off of the wall and then slapped it onto the grill. “It’s kinda disgusting and that’s what makes it good.”

  Grandpa said, “In the Reveal, one of those dragons flew into my squad and then snatched up a bunch of my mates. Ate them in one gulp, then made a face and puked them out. I remember this one guy, Pedro, he lived for a few more minutes after that.” Grandpa shook his head. “Terrible minutes. Worst minutes of his life!”

  Dad said, “Death to all monsters.”

  Grandpa raised a glass to that, saying, “Death to all monsters.”

  Mom, Dad, Great Grandpa, Addashield, and Mark, all raised their glasses over a meal of carrion and gore.

  “Death to all monsters.”

  Mark stood in an empty room, softly repeating, “Death to all monsters.”

  Mark looked at the bare walls of his kitchen.

  He walked down the bare hallway, then into his room.

  Sally was there, undressed and inviting, and then she sighed and said, “It’s not going to work, is it.”

  Mark was completely flaccid. “… Sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it… It’s… It’s all your fault,” Sally said, putting her shorts back on, and then pulling her shirt on, moving much faster now. “But it was my fault, too. I’m fucking stupid, and you’re never going to make a good home for either of us at this rate. It’s better that this place blew up.”

  And Mark was alone in his childhood room.

  The bed, the dressers, the bookshelf, the posters on the wall of Glorious Man, all faded.

  He walked down the hall again, following the sound of beeping, and breathing.

  Machines were hooked up to an invisible person, laying on a bed, under the covers. A breathing tube went down an invisible face, into invisible lungs. A machine, like forge bellows, like an accordion, pumped air into those lungs. Little green lines flickered on a black screen.

  The machines weren’t hooked up to an invisible person. They were hooked up to the space where Mark should be. He had never left that bed. He had never healed. He should still be in that bed, crippled and worthless.

  Mark looked away and all of that vanished.

  … It was a two story house with 10 rooms and four bathrooms that had been in the family for three generations so far, and Mark had been looking forward to making it four.

  But it was full of ghosts.

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  Even if he found the Holy Grail of Resurrection Magic…

  Grax stood beside him, overlooking a crater of the house, while Addavein and that walker kaiju fought in the hurricane in the distance. Grax said, “Resurrection Magic won’t ever bring them back how you want them back. They’re dead and scattered. Gone. Even if you put the pieces back together, you’d have two corpses that might vaguely resemble your parents, but they’d be freshly born again. Babies, in the bodies of adults.”

  Wongod stepped forward behind Grax, grinning evilly at Mark, showing fangs, saying, “I might do that, just to torture you with them. How’d you like your parents telling you to become a goblin, Mark? You can teach adult babies to say that much in a few years, as long as you torture them correctly, and though I haven’t done it in a while I’m sure it’s like riding a bike.”

  Mark turned away from them, and he walked on a path made of bones, under a burning sky. Worms curled through the bones and the city burned, great black clouds rising to blot out the light. Flashes of fire and explosions illuminated the bottoms of the black clouds.

  Kaiju roared.

  Mark roared back, anger soaring and then flowing like water, like knives, through the burning sky. He cut and cut and cut. Scales scattered. Blood burst from wounds. Mark dodged claws the size of skyscrapers and then raked open arteries with claws of his own. Black veins connected to red to infiltrate and destroy the red. One small heartbeat changed the course of a million lives, and Mark was that heartbeat.

  The sky cleared.

  The roads flowed back into place.

  That Nigerian Restaurant came into being, and Mark was dancing along with that big bottomed black girl as Eliot, Sally, Isoko, Tartu, Shawn, and Lenny, all danced with him, with each other. The food was too good. The company too great. Mark never wanted to leave.

  But the kaiju still prowled beyond the walls.

  Mark left the party, to stand on the walls, to gaze out at the horrors that threatened everything and everyone. The horrors were in the trees, slinking and caustic. They were in the sky, hidden and darting. They were in the land itself, burrowing and snatching. The water held eyeballs, looking for weakness. The shadows clawed at everything they touched.

  All the horror was out there.

  But in here?

  In here were soft beds and easy friends. Good times and great food.

  … And assassins looking around corners, knives held behind their backs. Empresses and Princes who plotted Mark’s death from ten-thousand steps away, and then from much closer. Empires were here, and also out there, beyond the wall, like other walled cities just on the horizon, with nukes lined up in silos, ready to fire if the walls here should show the smallest of cracks.

  All the world was dangerous.

  Nothing was safe.

  Safety was an illusion.

  “Safety can only be found in a moving target, Mark,” Freyala said, standing with him on the wall. She was really there, too. The dream broke down around her golden ghost, revealing the prismatic black of Mark’s soul all around her, the illusion of his Watch on the Wall disrupted, ever so briefly. She continued, “Safety is strong, and adaptive. Nimble and resilient. Redundant, really. But safety isn’t Everything. Just look at the elves. They’re safe. But then you came into their world, and disrupted that safety. They’re going to move their target after this, for sure.”

  Mark thought about that and he gazed out at the elven realm.

  They were isolationist civilians.

  Nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with hiding, Mark supposed. He was not a hider, though. And yet, he still wanted safety.

  Mark said, “I want to make the world easier for humanity, and harder for monsters. And I want to do it safely, and forever. But if I’m safe, how can I help others? So I cannot be safe. I want to keep my friends safe, too, but they have the same desires I have… Not exactly the same, of course, but close enough. And if they’re safe, then they can’t help others, either.” Mark stared out into the elven lands, and he knew it was a dream, though not really. He was still asleep, and yet… was he actually asleep? Mark glanced over to Freyala, and said, “I’m having a Second Awakening dream, aren’t I.”

  “You are. And Tartu’s special Dreaming dream, too. It hasn’t even begun… but we’re here, now, yes. This is the other part.”

  “Rough fucking dream,” Mark said, looking down from the wall again, and this time the space beyond the wall was outer space. Stars and planets and nebulae. The Earth was down there, along with Daihoon, like an image imposed over another with rainbows linking them together. Which image was Earth? Which was Daihoon? Hard to tell. The Moon was also behind him, right over there, with its shattered grey surface and the Demon City Arakino glowing gold just beneath that surface… But Mark was seeing it from this angle, out here, beyond the orbit of the Two Worlds. Mark asked, “That… That’s not what it actually looks like from this angle, is it?”

  The dark side of the moon, the side that never faced Earth, was a lidless eye of gold, made out of the streets, the cities, the countryside of Arakino. The grey, shattered surface of Luna lay just beyond that golden eye that took up half of the dark side of the moon. Everything was gold down there, except where it was also prismatic white, and illusionary. The broken surface was a green paradise. The city of Arakino was also dead and demonic. All of it flowed together, all of it dreamy and changing by the moment.

  And then the vision of the eye faded, and the surface was just broken, cracks spreading everywhere, gold shining through the cracks.

  Freyala said, “The Eye of Arakino appears sometimes. Look outward, and see what it pushes away.”

  Mark turned, and saw a ripple in the stars. That ripple was fleeing. Mark shuddered, and asked, “What was it?”

  “We do know. You know, too. The System still works. It works a whole lot better with the Pantheon in operation, of course, but it never stopped working. The eye opens now and then. Happens about once a day. Sometimes more. And then whatever it saw sort of flows past the worlds.”

  … Past the worlds?

  It was then that Mark realized that the ripples of ‘something moving away’ were not ‘moving away’ at all. He turned and looked at Earth, at Daihoon, at the auroras in the atmosphere, at the invisibilities that stretched up from the poles and connected the Two Worlds together, and he saw ripples. Something flowed past the Two Worlds. Unseen. Unfelt. Untouched.

  Mark stood on a ‘wall’ again, though if there was a physical wall he did not see it. All he knew was that he was on the edge of the orbital space of the planet, and he saw a whole different ‘city’ and a whole different ‘wilds’. It was awesome and awful. Terrific and terrible.

  The Things From Beyond were too big.

  They shattered the mind to gaze upon them.

  Mark looked at them anyway.

  What was he even looking at? A tendril made of tendrils made of tendrils and eyes? Fangs the size of worlds? What did any of that even mean? It meant nothing to Mark. Nothing at all.

  Mark turned back toward Earth, toward Daihoon, and all of the problems of life down there seemed so much smaller, but also so, so much more important. Everything down there was important. Everything out here was dreadfully wrong. Mark did not want to be out here. And yet, who would he be, if he chose to look away from the real problems?

  Just another elf.

  And yet…

  “The elves run away from the big stuff because what could they even do?” Mark rhetorically asked… And then he looked at the silver surface of Luna, at the closed eye of Arakino and at the golden cracks all throughout, and said, “I suppose they have done a lot with inventing the System and all… Hmm. People help people…” And then he looked to Earth, where the Empires and the Cultists and the betrayers lived among civilization, trying to tear everyone down, all so that they could install themselves as the ultimate Powers That Be. Mark hated that. He hated the infighting. He told Freyala, “I don’t want to kill the people who cause problems. I don’t think I’m cut out to be an Inquisitor.”

  “That’s okay, Mark. You can be an Inheritor instead.”

  Mark laughed once. “What does that even mean?”

  “It’s probably like a prince, and that means surrounding yourself with good people, and having a good, nimble house for them to retreat to when the going gets tough.”

  Mark suddenly stood at the edge of the crater that was his former home in Orange City.

  The house was gone.

  The house remained, in Mark’s dreams.

  Christmases with palm trees covered in lights. A new bike to replace the one that Mark had broken. Grandpa telling stories of Xerkona from the Reveal, and having Mom and Dad chide him for Curtain Protocol, and Grandpa laughing it off, and saying how he wasn’t giving anything away; he was just teaching the boy manners!

  There was Mom cleaning house, in the living room, her feather duster shoving motes of dust into shafts of light while her cleaning magic vanished those dust motes. Mark excitedly accused her of using magic right now, and she brushed him off, trying to keep him under Curtain Protocol, to keep him safe the only way she knew how.

  There was Dad, throwing out tiny metal fish into the bay, and bringing back real fish. He was using magic, for sure, and he smiled and told Mark not to tell his mother, and that this much magic was fine as long as Mark didn’t ask questions.

  Then there was the Freyala healing center, where Mark made friends with a rival rugby player after a game, both of them injured and getting healed at the same time, by the same healers.

  They were the three centers of his Binding.

  Healthy Body. Adamantiumkinesis. Union.

  Mark’s childhood home was immaculate. Bright white walls. Clean windows. Two stories, with a balcony around front and if Mark wanted, he could climb out of his window and sit on the balcony’s roof. He had done that with Sally when they were younger. He had done that later, to sneak out and in, but Mom had caught him and told him that she didn’t care where he was sneaking off to, but he should use the front door so he didn’t slip and fall and break something. She cared so much. Dad mowed the lawn, he fixed the siding, and when Mark was young, when the house didn’t have a proper garage, Grandpa and Dad and Dad’s friends and Mark had built the walls around the garage, making it into a garage, into a living space. Dad cared so much. Grandpa had been such a big part of Mark’s life.

  Mom, Dad, and Grandpa were gone.

  The house was gone.

  But Mark remained.

  Mark would build a new house.

  Something that could not be destroyed at all, because it didn’t exist here, at all. It would exist in the dream. But still… Mark looked down at the edge of the crater, to the rocks and debris that had scattered wide when the Inquisitors and the guard of Orange City had tried to take Addavein by surprise. The ordnance did not work, of course. The forest around the crater, and for several city blocks in every direction, had been ripped up by the slashing tail and sundering claws of a dragon.

  Mark found a nice rock.

  It was golden.

  “This is all I need.”