Mark sat on the starboard railing of the Dreadnought as he gazed out at the desolate, red sand wastes. The Dreadnought plowed ahead, into the unknown, following the trail of lights that the elves had told them to follow. Wouldn’t be long, now.

  The ‘tower realm’ they were in now was rather compressed compared to the other realms they had flown through. It had taken 3 days to get through the original place with thick prismatic lines in the sky and all of the elves that they had met, and then another 3 days to get through ‘ocean land’, and yet another 3 days for ‘the ocean land and hidden cloud cities’. They would have already left this ‘red waste tower realm’ after only a day of travel, if the gate would have opened, but the gate to Earth was gone… theoretically.

  The ship flowed forward at a rather sedate pace, for no one wanted to get to the end of this trip too fast.

  Theoretically, wherever the line of lights was leading them was probably a gate to Daihoon, which probably meant it was going to open up somewhere in the demon city underneath Empire Okuana, which was theoretically directly underneath Godking Dominant, the dryad that had ruled Okuana for all of known history, and even for the parts of history that had been unknown and lost even to Dominant… or purposefully hidden, more like.

  A lot of stories had come out about Dominant in the last few hours, as David slow-rolled the Dreadnought forward, toward their destiny. A few of those stories Mark already knew. He knew about how Dominant had created the goblins as a weapon that he used against the original Aluatha and a whole bunch of other original empires back when the Dragon King was still around. He knew about how Aluatha and Okuana had been at eternal war ever since Aluatha came back around 350 years ago… which was probably the work of an Inheritor regaining the ‘big magics’ of Aluatha, but that was just a popular theory right now. No one knew for sure about that. Mark did know that Okuana ‘recently’ figured out how to kill demons, permanently, using adamantium, and that that was ‘the reason’ that Executioner Walter and Dominant wanted Mark to come to Empire Okuana.

  “But how true is that?” Mark asked himself.

  “How true is what, sir?” Quark asked.

  “I’m thinking, Quark, that if Okuana has been around since the time of the Dragon King, and if they’ve been around since the time of System Prime and the elves and all of that shit… That they probably knew how to kill…” Mark stopped talking, because that knowledge of ‘ultimate demon killing’ was still a very, very secret thing. Something that only Lola, Sally, Isoko, and Mark knew about. Eliot didn’t even know about that yet, or at least, if he did know, then it wasn’t through Mark. Mark openly wondered, “I think it might be time to talk about that big secret to everyone here, Quark.” Mark also looked out across the land again, and also openly wondered… “System Call, Help. How do you permanently kill a demon?”

  A blue box appeared.

  Mark tried, “System Call, Help. What do you call the algorithm-like dream-reflections of helper spirits that people can summon through ritual to have them do a specific task?”

  Mark hmm’d, muttering, “Unavailable ‘informative’, huh? Weird choice of word, there.” Mark moved on. “Let’s talk to people. We’ll start with a smaller topic, first. Comms open, Quark.”

  “Comms are open on Channel 4, Ship Talk.”

  Isoko was saying, “—could at least try, Tartu.”

  Isoko sounded serious.

  “Hey, everyone,” Mark said, “What’s going on?”

  Tartu replied to Isoko, “We’re not opening up a mini gate— Okay good. Mark is here now. Mark. Isoko wants to open a mini gate. I say it’s a bad idea.”

  “And I say it’s the best option from a bunch of bad ideas!” Isoko said.

  Mark rapidly decided, “I’d like to open a mini gate too, both to reconnect with Earth and Daihoon, and to throw our documentary out into the Two Worlds. But there’s obviously some sort of problem with that, Tartu?”

  “Ah ha! See!” Isoko said, “He thinks we should do it, too!”

  “And it’s a bad idea!” Tartu said, tense as fuck.

  The entire ship was tense, or at least most everyone on the comms was right now. From their vectors, it seemed like Andria, Sally, and Derek were disconnected from the comms and trying to busy themselves with something else… Or maybe that was true for the girls, but Derek was kinda unflappable when he was scattered around, and Derek had taken out a few hoverships to scatter around and explore the red wastes earlier, and Derek was always on the comms, though he was usually quiet. Derek was fine with mortal danger to himself as long as he was spread out.

  Mark began with, “I know emotions are running hot right now, but now is a time of major decisions about major things. I’m handling one truly major decision at the moment that has nothing and maybe everything to do with what Okuana will do to us if we come out under their auspices. I’m setting that to the side for the moment, though. Tartu. What’s wrong with popping open a realm-hole right now, if we could? Aside from the obvious maybe-issues of opening a rift that Big Silver would try to find and open further.”

  A ripple of fresh anxiety flowed through the ship, and this time it hit Derek, too. Sally and Andria were off the comms at the moment, like Mark had guessed, because Sally was baking in the kitchen and Andria was working in her shop, neither of them caring about the happenings happening.

  Isoko said, “I withdraw my desire for a mini-gate. You win, Tartu.”

  “… Thank you for seeing reason, Isoko,” Tartu said.

  Mark was curious, though. He asked, “What was the original worry about a mini-gate?”

  “That some uber-elves would get pissed about us popping holes in their realm,” Isoko said, “To which I replied that there aren’t any uber-elves. We’re alone… probably.”

  Silence.

  Eliot spoke up, “I don’t see any people out there on the scanners, but what the fuck do I know?” He muttered, “Still don’t know how to scan for that drone still sitting on the deck, either.”

  Eliot had marked off the location where the drone sat on the deck with a yellow circle. To everyone else, there was nothing in that circle. Mark had to use his fragment of a divine mirror’d eyes to see the drone sitting there… and it had been tilted a little because of some wind or something, maybe? Mark didn’t bother to care too much about why the drone was sitting on the side. When the connection at that crack in the veil back at the other realm was gone, and the individual elven realms were once again separated, Eliot had lost the ability to contact the drone. It was still very much there, though.

  Derek had needed to cut off those parts of himself back in the other realm, too. All of the realms were fully separate from each other, it seemed.

  The seal seemed really strong, too… which could be dangerous to poke at in a lot of ways.

  Mark said, “We might be opening up a rift anyway, Tartu. Sure, uber-elves might be out there, but that’s fine. I do wonder about the place we’re in, though. About the super-structure of it, I mean. Where, in relation to Earth and Daihoon, are we? Yes, we’re in Endless Daihoon, but at the level of power of the elves… what would popping a hole in the realm look like?”

  “What do you mean?” Tartu asked, unsure what Mark was getting at.

  Mark said, “So every ribbon of Endless Daihoon connects from one world, then to the moon, then to the other world, right? Is that correct?”

  Tartu felt a lot less anxious to be able to say, “That’s more or less correct. Earth is the body, Endless Daihoon is the Astral Body, and Daihoon is the Binding. Endless Daihoon is concentrated ribbons of memory… sort of. It all exists in the same place, though. There’s a lot of perpendicularity to the dimensions that aren’t seen in anything else except in other living things, so I have no way to relate it to physical ideas besides that.”

  “Okay, so… What happens if you leave the surface of Daihoon and go straight up, forever?” Mark asked, thinking he already knew the answer.

  If you left Daihoon, headed straight up into the auroras, you ended up in Endless Daihoon… Right?

  “You end up in Endless Daihoon eventually,” Tartu said, “That’s how some people have historically gone to Endless Daihoon and come back, mostly through realm-piercing magics in order to decide which part of Endless Daihoon they fell into… Theoretically. They probably used a Storm Prism like we got? Now that I’m thinking… Yeah. That’s likely how they did it— Anyway. If you go up high enough you cross an unseen barrier and you fall into Endless Daihoon and you are never seen again.”

  Mark nodded to himself a little.

  Isoko was confused as she said, “But… I can stand on Daihoon and see stars beyond the auroras, and the Sun, too? And the Moon. So there’s still space out there?”

  “Not entirely correct, but on the surface? Yes, correct,” Tartu said, “You can see the stars of Earth… mostly. They’re a bit different. But that’s only because some parts of the darklight have been changed by life on Daihoon. What you’re seeing is not some other dimension, but Earth’s sky, for real, but also through the lens of dream.” Tartu seemed almost happy to be distracted as he continued, “There’s actually a neat story about the North Star of Earth and Daihoon. That star used to be on Daihoon until 400 years ago, when Godking Dominant sent the dryad warboats of Okuana against the shores of Toth, seeking to destroy the Great Hero Jamasani. In response, he reached up and grabbed the Northern Star from the sky and turned it into one of the Founder Weapons. He used the Star Sword against those warboats, and with Okuana’s greatest weapons turned to shipwrecks in the Meteor Sea, Jamasani set the scattered tribes of Toth onto a path for the Unification of Aluatha in another 50-ish years.

  “It’s a mostly apocryphal story, but the North Star did vanish from the skies of Daihoon, and the Star Sword is on display in Domal’Takela as one of the Founder Swords…” Tartu went, “Eh... The actual sword on display is probably not the Star Sword. I have seen the one on display and it has some illusions on it to make it look nicer, but you can’t tell they’re illusions most of the time, and the real sword surely exists somewhere.

  “But anyway.

  “The skies of Daihoon are the same as the skies of Earth, except where they’re viewed differently through the collective dreams of the Two Worlds and all that lay in between, in the Darklight.”

  Isoko went, “So some guy really did grab a star from the sky and turn it into a sword?”

  “Yes,” Tartu said. “The Star Sword is thought to be a divine realm at this point, akin to a worshiped item.” Tartu came back to the problems of the moment, reluctantly, and asked, “So what were you thinking, Mark? About the nature of the realm we’re in?”

  Mark said, “I’m thinking the elven realms, and maybe even Kabberjaw, too, are actually in space stations. Maybe that’s what these closed-realms are? Maybe someone took a dream and twisted it around into itself to make a realm, and maybe that’s all it is— Actually… Maybe someone took a dream and twisted it around and then encapsulated it in real metal or dream metal, or maybe even orichalcum, and we’re actually skipping between space stations when we follow the dots between elven realms. The godly realms are probably orichalcum-solidified realms, too, right? That Star Sword is made of orichalcum, too, isn’t it?”

  Tartu had a moment, then he said, “I think… it might be?”

  Derek spoke up, “It is! I’ve seen the real one, and it’s in an underground vault below the viewing room of the fake sword inside Domal’Takela.”

  Tartu sputtered, “You invaded the private rooms of Domal’Takela?!”

  “Not for very long, but yeah,” Derek said.

  Mark spoke up, “Not sure how knowing where we are would help our situation at all, if that’s what’s happening here, but maybe understanding where we are and what we’re inside of can help us figure out how to leave in a way we want to leave. I don’t want to piss off elves or meet Big Silver eye-to-eye ever again.” Mark had another thought. He asked, “Do you think the divine realms are out here in Endless Daihoon with all of us, somewhere just beyond sight? Could we ask Freyala for a sojourn into Heaven?”

  Silence.

  Lola softly said, “Now… Mark. No. Just… No.”

  “Okay, yeah…” Mark felt sheepish as he said, “Maybe that’s a bit too blasphemous.”

  Tartu said, “Let’s meet in the hub and talk.”

  Mark got off of the railing and soon he met Tartu, Eliot, and then everyone else in the hub. Andria and Sally were there, too; Isoko had grabbed them, apparently. Isoko was ready for a big conversation about everything that the girls had missed on Channel 4.

  Tartu started off with, “I’ve had some time to think, and I’m near 100% sure that we are going to end up underneath Godking Dominant if we continue on the path we’re on right now. And since that seems to be a terribly undesirable option—”

  “Quite terrible,” Sally said, and she meant it.

  Sally didn’t want a confrontation with a ‘Godking’, despite her earlier sarcasm about doing such a worldwide assassination run. She was dealing with the same issues that Mark was; Sally also knew that Dominant knew how to kill demons permanently, and that capability was a Big Deal.

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  “—for a hundred different reasons,” Tartu continued, “Not the least of which is that we’re high powered people entering a foreign nation that our backers, the Aluatha Empire, have been historically enemies of, and we’re carrying lots of stuff that we picked up from many different places, including those mana plants that Okuana forcefully maintains a monopoly upon… We don’t want to go to Okuana. So let’s talk about what it takes to actually make a gate, including the magic involved, and why I think it would be a terrible idea to pierce through the elven realms into Daihoon, or Earth, and maybe… maybe we need to chance it with Okuana, anyway.” Tartu looked at Mark, and said, “Your idea of this place being a ‘space station’ is likely correct, but only in the broadest of terms. I would think of it more as a contained layer of Endless Daihoon, like Kabberjaw, but moreso. Maybe it’s a lot of different layers, all with their ends clipped off and then the ends stuck together, and we’re in a bunch of different ring-shaped layers all held together in a key chain, or whatever.

  “When we first got out here we appeared to be in some sort of illusionary planet-space that degraded the ship when you couldn’t hold it all together, and now your range is even less. And Big Silver is out there. So those are also reasons we do not want to open holes into Elsewhere.

  “Even forgetting the elves, who I still believe will show up if we start messing with major systems, if we do punch through into the world beyond then… I’m rather certain that I would be punching into a death zone.”

  “We can make a smaller boat,” Mark said, “And thus solve the range issue.”

  Eliot winced. “Ehhhhh.”

  He said nothing else, though.

  “It’s still a bad idea,” Tartu said. “And… I’m not even sure I can punch out of here.”

  Everyone tensed.

  Mark asked, “But you were able to punch into this place? And you were able to make mini-gates to Earth when we did that data dump? What makes this situation actually different?”

  Tartu took a breath, and said, “I was able to punch into this place… on pure… acknowledgment that there was something to punch into. I… trusted that you knew what you were seeing, and went with it. You were the one that actually opened the way.” Rapidly getting through his deep, deep embarrassment, Tartu quickly added, “And, if you recall, I had no idea which of the Two Worlds I was punching through the Veil to open up that mini-gate. It was random, because all I was doing was punching into reality. I have no idea where to punch right now, and if I punched, I’m rather sure that Big Silver would notice… And I’m really, really hesitant about that option.”

  Mark went, “Huh.” He asked, “What were you targeting when you targeted ‘the space in front of us’, when we were out there in that fake outer space?”

  “… I have no idea,” Tartu admitted.

  Isoko paled a little, her vector going weirdly worried as she said, “We could have died back there. We got Lucky, didn’t we.”

  Ah.

  Fuck.

  The Kardi Problem again.

  “I did NOT say that word. We did not get… that,” Tartu proclaimed, “Mark knew where we were going, and then he made it happen. I just weakened the barrier.” Tartu found his stance fast enough, and methodically began to explain, “This place is sort of like a real place, so it was easy enough to hammer into. Most realms are not like this. To get from reality to dream is difficult without a guide, or without exposing yourself to a lot of danger.

  “I spoke earlier about us being able to lift off from Daihoon and end up in Endless Daihoon if we went up far enough? That is mostly true. It’s damned difficult to target anything directly, though.

  “But we’re in the dream right now, and moving around while inside here is easy.

  “As an aside, moving from dream to reality is easy, too.

  “In all cases, you need a guide. A pointer. A purpose. We’ve done a lot of that with the Storm Prism, you know? … You do know that… Okay, yes, you know that now. That’s what that was. Moving from dreams to reality is simple enough as waking up once you know the direction to wake up in, and so that’s what I did… sort of— There was a whole lot of skill involved, Isoko. Years upon years of magical training.

  “As for getting back to Earth, first we would need to leave this place. It’s too well protected. We have to get back to the dream. And from there, we need a guide back to Earth and Daihoon, and we have that guide. That guide is us. Me, specifically, in this case. My ‘wavelength’ of physicality.

  “That’s why I can’t tell which of the Two Worlds I opened up that mini gate toward.

  “I’ve been on Earth and Daihoon both, a lot, and so has everyone here. So no matter who we used to punch our way into reality it would be a gamble. Most realm crossing requires a pure source to target the realm in question. But with us, we have no pure source. It does not exist. So we gamble. And the gamble worked… And I’m kinda talking about in general right now, for all of our situations, but that’s how it is.” Tartu asked, “So do you get it? Getting here was a matter of going from dream to reality. We were in the dreamlands, and now we’re in the elven lands.

  “The elven lands might even be space stations in Endless Daihoon, hovering high above all of the rest of the Endlessness, in which case if we punched out now then we’d end up in the Deep Dream, which would be very bad, but… Probably survivable. Maybe.

  “Going home will require us to get into the dream first, which means out there with Big Silver, and then punching through to Earth.” Tartu sighed, in a big way. “That’s what I was explaining. It won’t be a punch from here to Earth or Daihoon. We’ll be exposed in Endless Daihoon again before we can go home. Probably for a while.”

  Isoko looked a little mollified. She nodded, but she was still upset.

  “Thank you, Tartu, for explaining that,” Mark said. “So there’s no question; we will be exposed to Big Silver if we break out of here?”

  Tartu nodded. “Yes. I imagine Eliot can mitigate much of that problem by making the ship tougher, or smaller. Sleeker. But punching through to Earth or Daihoon would require us to be back in Endless Daihoon, first. Specifically in the dreamlands.” He added, “I know I can punch a hole back to the Two Worlds if we were inside of a normal Endless Daihoon layer, too. But not this place. These elven lands are too well-protected.”

  Mark nodded. “Good to know.”

  Isoko strongly said to everyone, “If That Bitch is here I don’t know what I’m gonna do, because you know she’s gonna fuck us up at the worst possible moment, and then fucking toy with us, too.” She looked to everyone, and said, “If you see her, kill her on sight. No talk. Just kill.”

  Lola said, “Quite right, Isoko.”

  Everyone felt more or less the same way.

  Mark looked to Eliot, trying to make things less angry as he said, “You said something about being able to exclude people from the castle right after you woke up from your Second Awakening, but then Kialo was able to be here. Did you try to exclude the elves yet? What about that drone still sitting on the deck of the Dreadnought? Can you move that away at all?”

  Eliot winced. “I think… I was overestimating my abilities at that moment. I can exclude people somewhat, but… not really— I have been working on a solution, though! It’s involved. I could disassemble the entire Dreadnought and put everyone on the ship through a large scanning gate to see what’s there… though there are some obvious problems with that whole idea. Building the scanning gate would inherently give any potential infiltrators time to move around us… Among other problems, like my complete inability to still see that damned drone on the deck, still.”

  Mark said, “It’s tilted on its side, now, if that matters.”

  Eliot paused. “Why would it be tilted on its side? The ship hasn’t made any big movements, and… and wind doesn’t move it, right?”

  Mark shrugged.

  No one had answers.

  Isoko hatefully said, “I want to talk about Kardi more, and now to negate her. With her Luck, she’d be able to take advantage of all of those potential holes in the defense, anyway, so what do we do against that?”

  Tartu countered, “The only way to fully negate any possible Luck is to not leave any avenues open except for the one that Kardi would need to walk, if she were actually here, like Kialo might still be here.” Tartu turned to Sally, adding, “So if Sally shrunk everything on the ship down, including us, and then we snuck through the gate of Okuana, she could make us bigger on the other side, hopefully far, far away from Dominant. And just us. If Kardi is here, or if Kialo is here, then they’ll be tiny and hopefully not an issue.” He added, “As a bonus, it’d make transitioning back to the Two Worlds a lot easier if the Dreadnought was shrunken.”

  Mark went, “… Huh.”

  Everyone looked at Sally.

  Sally’s eyes were wide, her vector intense. She slowly said, “I don’t know... if I could… do that— And there’s a problem with making things too small. Living things with an astral body can get really small, and I’ve made myself 2 inches tall, but anything inanimate turns ‘simplified’ when you get small enough. The Dreadnought would not be the Dreadnought if we made it that small… And I don’t know if I could make the ship that small in the first place. My astral body is huge now when I get big, but it’s not that big.”

  Eliot said, “I’m pretty sure I can help you work your Power over the whole ship.”

  “We could make a ritual out of it,” Isoko said, looking at Mark and Tartu, “Something witchy?”

  Before the conversation got much more nuanced, Mark said, “So the problem is that we’re probably coming out of the elven lands right into the middle of Okuana, which may or may not be a bad thing. It’s probably a bad thing. The solutions I see are thus:

  “We pop open the elven lands and end up in view of Big Silver, which is bad. Or we might end up in actual outer space, which would be… good, right Eliot?”

  Eliot answered, “The Dreadnought can handle actual outer space.”

  “The risks are too high to go out through a rift,” Tartu said. “But if we have to do it, then we have to do it. Can’t do it from here, though, and Sally would need to shrink the ship, first, so that we could all fit through the hole in the world.”

  Mark nodded. Mark continued, “We’re probably going to end up at Okuana, then, so we need some solutions to solve the possible issues there. We don’t want to be disappeared, so I want that documentary we’re working on to be finished in the next few hours. Tartu, you still have to give Lola your testimony, and then Eliot can edit the whole thing fast. That’s issue number 1.

  “Issue 2 is that there are probably stragglers on the ship. Eliot and Sally, I want you to see if you can shrink down the Dreadnought and use it for a Castellan battery while making a new, smaller ship, for the actual transition. Meanwhile, Derek, David, and I will be scouring the ship as much as we can. Now remember, Kardi probably has a Gore Body now. She could be inside any flesh anywhere, and just hiding out for a little while.

  “So I want this entire ship Purity’d from top to bottom.

  “Isoko can help with the majority of that, which you will do now, Isoko.”

  “Fuck yeah,” Isoko said, her vector rustling through the ship, eager to find and kill Kardi if she was here.

  Eliot almost spoke up, vector full of worry about things breaking, but he strangled that emotion away and then went with the flow.

  Mark said to Andria, “Andria, I want you to do some Prosperity to figure out what is the best and worst things we can do right now, because if Kardi is here and doing shit, she’s probably turning us toward something that is Prosperous until it’s suddenly not.”

  Andria looked a little scared as she said, “Prosperity doesn’t really… let me see the bad stuff. I can tell what is good for us. Not what is bad for us— But I can try! I’ll work on it. Right now.”

  Mark nodded. “Okay that’s everyone. We got about 3 hours till we cross into the next realm?” Mark looked at Eliot. Eliot nodded, mostly. Mark continued, “That realm might be the last before we need to make some serious decisions, so let’s get to it.”

  The team broke up and went their own ways, with Tartu looking scared to go talk to Lola in that dark room, Andria worried about disappointing Mark, Isoko taking to the sky and sweeping away a lot of things and breaking the ship in a lot of ways but Eliot was there to fix them, while Eliot and Sally worked together to figure out how to shrink the Dreadnought and turn it into a battery. Not too long later, Eliot and Sally spoke about how she could do it, but it would be bad for a lot of unknown reasons. A lot of magical things on the ship would have to be discarded, as most magical things had their own minor astral bodies and they would resist Sally’s Power, meaning they would remain large while everything else went small. Which could be bad.

  They’d work on it more.

  Maybe they could solve some of those issues.

  Derek multiplied by the thousands, filling up every part of the ship, while David did three quick passes before Derek got halfway through the place. David found nothing. Derek found nothing.

  Mark found nothing, too, but he did find a quiet part of the ship to delve into his soul and tell Quark, “Send a private message to Lola, Sally, and Isoko, and mark it as private, asking Eliot not to read it if he should look at it. I need to talk to them. It’s about the demon stuff at Okuana.”

  Quark did a little bow in Mark’s soul, standing on his porch, saying, “Sir.”