Mark woke up slowly, and then all at once.

  The windows were dark, but a line of light stretched across the glass, prismatic white. It was dimmer than Mark thought it should be. Almost ephemeral. Almost like a contained aurora, in the night skies of Daihoon, but all mixed together until it was white.

  Mark blinked a bit, and he looked at his pale hand in the dim light of the room. His skin was not the healthy tan it used to be, back before the Tutorial, when he was out playing rugby and training with Instructor Gravel alongside Sally and the others. It was pretty common for Awakened people of all sorts to experience paling, but Mark’s case was rather extreme. His skin was too pale, like it was after getting Healthy Body and being talzarki-touched by Addavein. Perhaps his hair was still absolute black? His arm hair might be, he supposed... Mark had kept his hair short, so he’d need a mirror to check his hair, and he didn’t have a mirror at hand… but based on how dark his fingernails were, he imagined his hair was adamantine black, too.

  Mark dropped his hand back to the bed, feeling weak.

  He could tell his range had dropped precipitously, but he could still Union, and he did so, reaching out for the Good and exhaling the Bad. Darkness left his breath, to thread out into the world, and Mark felt stronger, even though his range was absolute shit. He sighed out a great gust of Badness, then breathed in soft white Goodness, feeling invigorated. Mark blinked a bit more, realizing that he was feeling gross right now in some ways he did not like to be gross, and so he did a small Union of Purity and Corruption. A little bit of nothing left, filtered out into the rest of the nearby world, to catch on the scratched-up wooden room around him.

  Moss spread on that wood, and tiny mushrooms started to grow in that moss.

  Mark frowned. Usually Mark could spread out the nutrients that left him a whole lot further than in the same room with him, but this was fine. For now.

  … Where was everyone?

  Mark sat up and he was suddenly deeply worried about treachery from the elves, or maybe he had accidentally killed everyone in his sleep, or maybe some unknown pathogen from the elven lands had killed everyone and they had all died in gasping for breath that would not come. Images of Mom’s blown-out brain on the walls inundated Mark’s thoughts and everything felt like harsh knives for a solid moment. He didn’t want to think about whatever that demon had done, but he did. And then he thought about the bed he had been in, and how he was injured once again and everything was terrible and all his friends were dead and gone forever.

  And then he saw the animatronic to the side, currently powered off, and the tracks leading from the animatronic to the door, down a path to the Dreadnought, in the distance. Lights were on, but Mark hadn’t noticed that people were running his way until that moment. There was Isoko, smiling wide. Sally was right behind her. Eliot was far behind that. All of them were rushing down a long wooden beam that connected Mark’s recovery room to the Dreadnought.

  It was like warm rays of the sun on a cold day.

  They had been using an animatronic to be here, when they could, because it was too dangerous otherwise. But they were on their way now.

  Isoko called out joyfully, “I know what your new scan says!”

  “So what’s it say!” Mark called back, standing, and then falling back to the bed a little, his hand extending from his body as he instinctively tried to put out a caltrop to stand up taller, straighter. And then his hand detached, a new one grew in its place, and now Mark had a hand on the remnants of his bed, and another hand on the end of his arm, like normal. “… Uhhh.”

  Isoko stopped just outside of the door. Very seriously, she said, “Your Scan says a bunch of gobbledygook.”

  “… What?”

  Isoko gestured at the dark world beyond the door. “We’re in Elf Land! The System is different! Maybe you’re connected now, though? Try a System Call. I have a bet going with Tartu that you can access the System here.” Isoko looked at him looking at his hand, adding, “And your range seems to be about 12 meters right now. It shrunk a lot. Which is some good news, in a way! No one is getting near you for a while, but at least you won’t destroy the ship in a puffball scenario.”

  Mark moved his extra hand like it was a part of him, and it kinda was. As he moved it into the air in front of him, he shifted the hand into a bunch of caltrops, and then into Quark’s ball of hands, and the ‘illusion’ of the flesh fell away. It was all solid black adamantium, for real. Quark rapidly spilled silver onto that adamantium, though, and now it was Quark’s.

  Quark said, “Good evening, everyone.”

  Mark grinned at that… And then he looked at himself, and he was nude, and he hadn’t really thought about that. No one seemed to care, though… or were Isoko and Sally and now Eliot too far away to Unionsense? They were, weren’t they. Huh. Mark laughed, and then said, “Can I get some clothes, Eliot?”

  Soon, Mark was dressed in real clothes, and then Isoko was there and hugging him tightly, holding on around his neck and weightlessly burying her head against his shoulder, softly crying, saying how glad she was that he was okay. Sally was right there with her. Mark felt overwhelmed, and then Eliot chuckled, and Eliot got in on the hug, too.

  It was a nice moment, and then it was over, and Sally pushed at his face, saying, “You feel like the stuff they fed us 3 days ago, you know. Soft, but not.”

  “He’s clearly still adamantium, though,” Isoko said.

  Mark smiled as he pushed away Sally’s finger, saying, “I’m not falling through the floor, now!”

  “You weigh a weird amount, Mark,” Eliot said, disassembling the animatronic to the side, along with much of the room. Stuff flowed into the wood underfoot, and then out of sight, and it was very, very weird for Mark to not be able to sense where, exactly, the stuff was going.

  Isoko stood close to Mark, asking him, “Are you freaking out? It feels like you’re freaking out, but I can’t tell exactly.”

  “I feel… better?” Mark said. “A lot better. But…” Mark looked at the floor, and the bed turned into materials and flowed away, vanishing from Mark’s Unionsense. To his sight, the bed remained in view, like a bulge in a throat being swallowed, moving through the ‘throat’ that was the extension sticking out of the Dreadnought. “But the range is less— Oh. Do we have orichalcum?”

  “Yes!” Tartu said, standing down the way, walking this way fast and stopping faster. “I mean. No. We don’t have any, but what was that about? Why is orichalcum important?”

  Sally said, “Let’s save the interrogation for when we’re all back on the ship properly, please. You want to walk around, Mark?”

  Mark grinned a little, said yes, and soon, he was back aboard the Dreadnought properly, pulling a hand off and growing a new one, and watching as Eliot collapsed the extended prow back into the ship, like sliding in a telescope. Andria was there, and she smiled to see Mark’s floating hand, so she offered one of her own. No matter whatever weird thing was happening with his body, which Eliot had lots of observations about, Mark was able to grip Andria’s floating mithril hand very well. She said that Mark felt like flesh, and Mark said that she felt like mithril, and then they got into a strength contest, gripping each other as hard as they could. In that moment, everyone saw the illusion for what it was.

  Mark’s ‘normal looking’ disembodied hand turned solid black when he gripped hard. Andria gasped, worried she had hurt him, so she let go, and the color of Mark’s flesh returned.

  “I’m fine, Andria,” Mark said. “Already back to pale-as-fuck!”

  Andria shook her head a little, but said nothing.

  “Fascinating,” Tartu said, looking at a readout from one of Eliot’s tablets, while Eliot looked with a headset and Castellan. “It appears you are adamantium underneath it all, but when the pressure goes away you’re flesh and bone, with veins and all of that.”

  Eliot said, “Your weight goes up marginally when exposed to danger, but not nearly as much as it should.”

  And then Lola was there, tears in her eyes, and her arms went around Mark, and Mark hugged her back, feeling warm and soft and comforted. She said, “You’re not so solid anymore.”

  “I still am when I get punched.”

  Like a dam breaking, Lola chuckled, and then laughed. She hugged tighter, and said, “I’m so glad, Mark.” She pulled away, wiped her tears, and said, “We’ll figure out how to solve the range issue. It could be that you’re simply starting over, and there is nothing wrong with that, but if that is the case then we might consider a stay in some easy place out here in Endless Daihoon, after the elves kick us out.”

  “Has anyone talked to them?” Mark asked, “Because Eria talked to me in my dreams, saying some lights would turn on in the morning and show us the way out… She said a lot, actually, and yes, Tartu, I’ll talk about the orichalcum more… Actually, do you have the conversation recorded, Quark?”

  “I have most of it, sir, but I did not become aware of myself again until you resummoned me, so I am missing most of the ordeal.”

  Mark was fine with never seeing images of Mom and Dad as gore ever again… but try as he might to forget that, the thought of all of that passed through him like a shard of ice, digging into his head and then passing through his guts. Lola, Isoko, and even Derek standing back there, all got real concerned—

  Mark brushed it off, saying, “What you have is the meeting with Eria, and that’s the important part. The rest of it was probably that special dream that Tartu… sort of caused, I guess? Let’s play what you have on the screens in the hub.”

  Everyone got a distinct Look to them at the mention of ‘the dream’, with all of them becoming uncomfortable to varying degrees. Not truly frightened, though, which is what Mark had felt… Well. That, and the desire to fight, and in distinctly strange directions, too. Was the Inquisition the proper way to go about fighting ‘the good fight’? Maybe. But Mark felt much more kinship to those who fought giant monsters. And yet… Weren’t the empires monsters? And the Inquisitors fought the Empires. Sally and the Executioners of Drakarok, especially.

  Okuana had made the goblins, and Godking Dominant was still around. That old crime was still a problem, to this day.

  How many old, giant horrors were still around, still causing problems?

  The dream suddenly made sense. It hadn’t been about any one thing; it had been about everything. It had been about Mark’s entire reason for fighting at all. To help people by ridding the world of problems.

  Mark thought about that as they all got to the hub at the center of the ship, and Quark played the recording of the dream meeting with Eria. Looking at the dream from Quark’s perspective brought Mark back to the present, for the dream was different from how Mark remembered it. Mostly, the ‘house’ was different.

  Mark’s house wasn’t there in Quark’s recording. Instead, the structure of it all, from the walls, to the floor, to the porch, to his Bindings, were kinda mangled. Directionalized. Instead of a general sphere shape, the whole thing was distorted beyond belief, into the general shape of a house, but with tendrils of black arcing off into a dreamland void of churning landscapes. The inside was all different, too, and it had a golden sheen to it.

  It was broken.

  So broken, that it was a wonder that Mark was standing. He should be actively dying from a catastrophic Binding failure. Tartu noticed it before Mark did, because Mark was still simply curious about why the heck it looked like that. Why had Quark taken this recording? Did he see differently than Mark in the Dream?

  Mark supposed so. All Quark had ever seen in any of the recordings he had taken of Mark’s Binding, to help Mark figure out Protect or any of the other small magics Mark had tried to learn, had been images of the shapes and styles of the Sigaldry that made up the Binding itself. Quark couldn’t see the memories at the bottom of the Binding, either; not like Mark could, like he was living them. Quark had been able to see the Green try to infiltrate, during that time with Wongod and the goblins, but he hadn’t been able to see the Green trying to eat those memories of others, outside of the Green, like that one picnic party that the Green had eaten.

  Quark paused the video.

  And Tartu exclaimed, “HOLY FUCK. Mark?! Are you… You look okay?”

  Suddenly everyone else realized what was going on, and Sally suspected treachery from the elves while Andria thought that Mark was going to die right then and there. Too many emotions swirled too strongly, and too many words burst out suddenly to make sense of them all. Mark spoke up, “I’m fine! Obviously, you see it differently than I do. Everyone calm down. I’m fine.”

  Eventually, everyone stopped worrying about him.

  The video played.

  Mark was surprised by a few things over the course of the next 78 seconds. First of all, the conversation should have lasted about 9 minutes, maybe; enough time for a short meet-and-greet on Mark’s porch. But it was barely over a minute long.

  This was because Eria was a bright golden halo made of pinks and purples and blues that came in, touched the black, and then Mark opened up his binding and Eria came inside. She spat out words and images faster than sound and vision could interpret, and Mark, as his Binding, was mostly just there, existing, until he acknowledged whatever the pink/purple/blue/gold thing had shown him, with a bit of a reflection of that showing as his acknowledgment. None of it made sense to anyone looking, but to Mark, it was like looking at notes for class.

  Eria had shown a reflection of the part of Mark’s Binding that was more Adamantiumkinesis than the rest, and then she gave impressions of armor and weapons and puddles of possibility, and Mark knew that was the part where she had spoken about how he should put some distinct forms and functions into his Adamantiumkinesis, so that he could recall those ways-of-being instantly, instead of having to manually shape everything on the fly. Eria did the same for all of the rest of her suggestions. Mark understood perfectly.

  Isoko asked, “What the fuck was that?”

  Tartu caught it a little, though, and he guessed, “Twisting oneself and then showing oneself to another, and then having that showing acknowledged... is how dreams communicate with each other?”

  Mark said, “It did not look like that to me at all… But yeah. That’s what happened.” And then Mark announced, “So! I need to experiment and stuff. How long are the nights here? I’ve been out for 3 days? Not sure if I heard that right, earlier.”

  Eliot said, “The nights and days are about 27 hours each, but you’ve only been out for about 78 hours, which is a strange coincidence considering it’s exactly as long your dream meeting with Eria went, and I don’t know what to make of that. If that part where she showed you an image of the sun rising and lights leading the way off onto Earth meant that we’re being sent off soon, like you said earlier, then we got about…” Eliot looked into the air, then came back, saying, “About 6 hours till sunrise.”

  Mark said, “Then I’m gonna be alone for about 6 hours. See if I can solve some stuff before we get shoved along.” He said to Eliot, Tartu, and Andria, “We need a proper Ego Shield. If I can’t solve my range issue, then it’s up to you, Isoko, to figure out a more solid Purpose. Maybe some sort of mage thing could help you focus? Trance magic? I’m not sure. Can you TT with the whole ship, Sally? Because if you can, then that might help. Derek, too.” He said to everyone, “Or maybe you did solve that issue while I was sleeping? But from the look of it, we still have that issue. Okay? Okay! And the orichalcum issue. Do we have any?”

  Eliot said, “We don’t have any orichalcum on board at all.”

  Derek pipped up, “But there are some elves out there that have offered help in whatever ways we want it, as long as those ways are not actually helping us at all. Resource help might be easy? I’ll ask for orichalcum?”

  “Please do so,” Mark said, and then he continued, “Have there been many developments while I was out?”

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  Derek said, “The elves scattered when I asked about orichalcum.”

  “Oh NOW they get squeamish about resources,” Andria said, voice laden with derision. “I see how it is.”

  Mark chuckled at that.

  Eliot went on to talk a bit about this and that; nothing too important, just updates with the environment. Isoko excused herself to go practice Unioning with Purpose. Sally went with her. Tartu and Andria got to work, and soon Eliot was going that way, too. And for a little while, Derek, Lola, and David had all the answers about everything that had happened when Mark was out.

  The long and the short of it was nothing had happened.

  “That Kialo of the Plains was caught on the ship twice,” Lola said, “Both times he was in the garden, talking to the Pantheon.”

  David said, “Freyala said to let him do that, so we did not interrupt. He rapidly vanished when he saw that we had seen him, though, so we haven’t been back there for the last 8 hours, and Freyala says that he’s been back to talk to everyone a few times. About what? We don’t know, and we cannot know, for such discussions are sacred.” He added, “Also, Freyala said not to worry about it.”

  Mark asked, “Are we concerned about elves invading Earth or Daihoon and siding with the goblins? Have there been any goblin/elf talks, anywhere?”

  “Not a concern at the moment,” David said, even though his vector was full of concern. He shrugged. “Who knows.”

  Derek asked, “Want me to ask some elves about that?”

  “Heck no,” Mark said.

  “That’s what I thought, yeah,” Derek said, “But then you brought up how a maybe-elf adopted you at the behest of an evil god, and Eria of the Central Spire said ‘take care of my nephew’ when she dropped you off. So they’ve accepted you as one of them through the goblin connection.”

  Mark looked longingly at the walkway toward the Dreadnought’s deck, where he could practice his new Powers in the open, but he knew that it was important to figure out this possible disaster happening with the elf/goblin connection, so he stayed, and said, “Tartu once spoke of how we might know the Endless Court by another name, and we know that the goblins came about from Empire Okuana blasting some elves out of the sky and then corrupting them into goblins. Could the Endless Court be Wongod and his ilk?”

  Derek, David, and Lola all kinda shrugged. They had had such a conversation while Mark was out of it. They rehashed some of that conversation with Mark right then and there, but they didn’t know anything, and all they had were guesses based on lore. Nothing had been figured out regarding the Dragon King, Kabberjaw, that ‘final battle’ or whatever it was that caused Kabberjaw to live, and then die, and nothing at all had been figured out regarding the goblins.

  Mark moved on, “What about the Full Self elves? Any of those show up at all?”

  Derek said, “We’re pretty sure those guys are a myth. Maybe they existed at one point in time, and they controlled everything at its base, but… it’s like when you’re talking to someone who is telling you that all of their problems are caused by ‘Them’. The mythical ‘Them’ or, ‘It’s Their fault’; that sort of stuff. The running theory is that maybe Full Self elves existed at one time, but that culture dwindled and dwindled, and eventually every Full Self elf decided not to be that kinda person anymore.”

  Mark took that in, and it sounded plausible to him. “Huh… Yeah…” He asked, “Is Myranial not willing to talk anymore?”

  “Nope! I saw her once, but she asked me not to pursue her again, and she had a lot to think about,” Derek said, “So I respected those wishes.”

  Mark nodded. “Anyone say anything about the Inheritor nonsense?”

  Derek grinned. “Not directly, but I know enough to put together a few things. You know how every empire out there has some big magics that are only accessible through genetic markers?”

  Mark had a flash of realization. “Like they say about Aurora and the hidden powers of Aluatha?”

  “Exactly,” Derek said, and then another Derek excitedly said, “I think something like 300-ish years ago, when Aluatha was just starting off, getting together out of the crumbs of whatever came before—” Another Derek said, “Say it right!” “Shit, yeah.” “So there were like tens of Empires before the Magefall that came from the death of the Dragon King. Okuana is one, and it still exists. No idea about the full history of Xerkona, but it’s been around in some form or another for a very long time, and its homeland has been abandoned for just as long. What remains of Xerkona —The Fates of Xerkona— sticks around Okuana, and it ‘always’ has.” “We’re pretty sure that Okuana has given refuge to Xerkona’s Fates, which are old as fuck, so long as Xerkona doesn’t pursue Empire ever again, which is why Xerkona assassinates anyone who shows up looking like an Inheritor.” “And then there’s Aluatha, which has only been around for 350-ish years. Not sure about that.” “But it has to be that someone became an Inheritor for Aluatha’s Dragon King Era magics maybe 350 years ago. Then they used those magics to revive Aluatha. And ever since then, Okuana has been at war with Aluatha, until the Reveal.” “And the goblins? Well they were a bit of war made on the original Aluatha Empire, and a whole bunch of other Dragon King Era Empires, 4,000 years ago. But they didn’t fully kill Aluatha’s genetic claiming line…” The 6 Dereks standing in front of Mark kinda lost steam. The central one said, “But it’s probably not a genetic line. It might be some sort of ‘qualification’ that happens through some arcane methodology. We’re still not sure about that.

  “But we are pretty sure that if you walked into the ancestral home of the Xerkonan Empire—” “Of which the elves do know the name of! They know ‘Xerkona’!” “—Then you’d be able to turn on some ancient Dragon King Empire Era artifacts, or whatever is down there in the ground… or in the air, or maybe in the dreamlands, most likely, and then… do something.” “We’re not sure what the result would be of any of that.”

  Mark had a moment, and then he said, “So that explains… a lot.” He looked to Lola and David, who were watching Mark with concern. “You’ve heard this before, yeah?”

  “Yes,” Lola said, “It makes a frightening amount of sense, in retrospect, and Derek has quite the breadth of knowledge… We have discussed it at length, and based on recordings of that tea ceremony at Peace, we believe he is correct. The pressure that Aluatha and Okuana exerted on you was a normal amount of pressure for a high powered individual, but the assassination attempts didn’t start in earnest until after Xerkona failed to kill you. I imagine that when we get back the attempts will be a lot worse. So you should go and practice, Mark. Master yourself, and then worry about the future at another time.”

  Mark took a breath. He sighed, “… Yeah.”

  Mark took a step toward the archway leading to the deck of the Dreadnought—

  “Wait!” Derek said, and another Derek said, “Before you go! We’ve seen some elves say ‘System Call: Status Update’, and a few other things. But start with that one?” Another Derek said, “You’re an elf now, so it might work!”

  Well if that worked, then Isoko would win her bet with Tartu.

  “… System Call: Status Update.”

  A blue box appeared in front of Mark, visible only to him, but Mark absolutely got a blue box floating in the air. Based on the excited vectors of the Dereks, and how David and Lola tried to see whatever Mark was obviously seeing, but they could not see it at all. The blue box rapidly vanished, and then reappeared several times, flickering with different words and symbols, before Mark could finally read whatever it was trying to say.

  The boxes vanished, and then several more appeared, including a big one in the middle of the rest.

  “What’s it say!” Derek asked.

  Mark felt himself pale a little as he read things twice, and then a third time. “… A lot of stuff,” Mark eventually said. “A lot of stuff.”

  And then he started explaining what he was seeing.

  Almost instantly, Eliot came back, and then Tartu showed up again, and then everyone had ideas of what it meant. Mark had Quark translate what he was seeing (which Quark could not see, apparently) onto the ship’s systems so that others could speculate. So far, the only thing that was painfully obvious was that he needed some more orichalcum.

  Isoko laughed at Tartu, being very Platinum Princess about it, and Tartu made a big production of bowing to her, and calling her his queen. It was all very HVP, over-the-top drama, and it made Isoko absolutely delighted. People were still on the Status, though, figuring out what it meant.

  Mark told them all that he loved them but he needed to be alone for a minute, so he tried to leave out of the hub, to the deck of the Dreadnought.

  But Derek said, “So I asked around, and none of the elves are gonna give me any orichalcum. Maybe Kialo will, but only if I fight him.” Another Derek thumbed at the path toward the garden, telling everyone, “He’s out by the garden right now and he’s being flighty. He says if you want to talk to him, he’ll talk, maybe.”

  “… Put a pin in that,” Mark said, “I have some figuring out to do, first.”

  Kialo poked his head in from the path to the garden, saying, “Ask the System for help about your Status!”

  Of course he spoke in perfect English, too, so that was fun.