Freefall is not a particularly pleasant experience when you’re not ready for it. The explosion of the levitation spheres had gutted the Star Runner’s hold and shattered her keel. Power failed simultaneously throughout the ship as overloaded reserve batteries exploded as well.

There was a reason that the most armored part of a Sky Galleon was the levitation sphere chamber. It was the one point where a hit would produce catastrophic results on any sky ship from Molly’s world. In theory the extra shielding and armor should have prevented any direct fire from reaching the levitation sphere. In practice the shielding and armor had never been meant to hold off the kind of firepower a hundred or more Oblivion Courtiers could bring to bear.

With the loss of flight capacity, the remains of the ship and the crew that survived the explosions dropped through the surface of the Lightning Road. Several of us could have taken flight on our own, but even Way wasn’t up for tangling with that many Oblivion Courtiers.

We couldn’t get to Olympus anymore. There were too many Courtiers ahead of us and I could see that they’d shattered the path ahead with their black fire. Instead, we clung to the fragmented hull as a shield against the storm of electricity that swallowed us as we made contact with the Lightning Road.

I’d cast aside my giant spider form as we started to fall. Glory of the Hidden Corners was a lot stronger than Jin but Jin flew a whole lot better than the spider lady. Also, for as awesome as Glory was, it was kind of creepy thinking like a spider.

Despite the protection the bits of hull we clung to offered, the Lightning Road would still have fried us when we hit it if not for Nell. Clinging to the far end of a piece of rope that Jessica had tossed to her, Nell flew like a kit above the plummeting ship and absorbed the Lightning Road’s energies before we hit them. She formed an teardrop shaped umbrella with her power where the lightning that rolled off it’s invisible surface funneled down to feed into her. She was glowing like a star with the accumulated energy by the time we broke through the edge of the Lightning Road.

Plummeting into the physical world below we found we had another problem though. Air.

On the plus side, it was amazing getting to see the Earth the way only an astronaut could. Pictures didn’t do it justice at all. On the minus side exposure to vacuum sucks.

Without waiting, or even thinking much, I cast a wide field out, merging the Dreamlit world and the physical one so that I could conjure up an atmosphere and some heat before we boiled or froze.

That earned me another punctured torso courtesy of one of the Oblivion Courtiers that had ridden the wreckage down with us. Even as reanimated black fire shadows, they really liked to go for heart shots when they weren’t toying with their prey it seemed. My dream self wasn’t mortal but she was close enough to the “real” Jin that being skewered still hurt like hell.

“Big mistake”, a large and growly voice behind the Oblivion Courtier said. Two enormous minotaur hands then grasped the Courtier and crushed him like a grape. Minnie probably couldn’t have caught him if he was free to dodge as he normally would but I was just enough of an anchor to prevent that. Under Minnie’s fierce grip, the Courtier burst into a shower of dark sparks that were swiftly left behind as we continue to plummet downwards

Rather than reenact the artistic death scene from the last time Minnie and I had tangled with a Courtier, I passed my hand over my chest and imagined myself whole again. I considered imagining myself immune to pain as well but that was something I definitely didn’t want to risk transferring to my real body.

“Are you ok?” Way dream spoke to me.

“Yeah, how about you?” I asked back.

“I’m beneath the ship. There are three of them down here. They’re trying to blast you all from below the decks.”

“I think we have four left up here. Can you handle those?”

“There are two left now.” there was the sense of a gleefully smug smile that came along with the words. The Courtiers were an extension of her father’s will, so this was a form of teenage rebellion that was long overdue.

“I’ll take that as a yes.” I sent back, sharing my own smile as well.

“One left.”

“You’re only beating the topside team two-to-one, Patches just pegged one to the mast for Jess to BBQ.”

“There’s something you should see down here. It looks like another ship.”

“Be right there.” I dream spoke.

“Can you keep Jess and Nell safe?” I asked Minnie.

“No.” she said pointing upwards. Far above us I saw dozens more Oblivion Courtiers exiting the Lightning Road and giving pursuit.

“Buy me as much time as you can then, but stay alive.” I said before launching myself into the air and swooping around to the underside of Star Runner’s remains.

The damage to the ship was horrible, not simply because of the impossibility of repair but because of what it meant for the crew members who’d been working below decks when the levitation spheres went up. Molly could name each of them, remember each of their faces, so I focused on being Jin. A pirates life wasn’t a safe one, but the dead would still be grieved in the proper time.

A moaning cry from inside the hull brought me up short. Some of the below decks crew had survived! I zipped inside the ship and saw that survival was perhaps an optimistic assessment. The crew who’d been hit by the black fire bolts were missing whatever body part had been touched. Most of them had avoided that fate but few had escaped the levitation sphere explosion unscathed. They needed medical attention immediately.

I flew out of the hold and saw the Earth again. It was closer but still much too far away for medical care to arrive in time. We were going to lose fifty or more men and women well before we landed. I prayed that the ship Way had seen was something insane like a medical frigate that NASA had developed in secret and launched just for situations like that. It didn’t seem likely but the alternative was for me to reimagine them whole and I wasn’t sure how well that would work. Worst case I’d overwrite their personalities with copies of my own, effectively killing their minds to save their bodies.

I found Way by the blast of golden light that incinerated the last of the Oblivion Courtiers she was pursuing. The blast was roughly as wide as a football field, probably to ensure the dodgy little Courtier couldn’t avoid it.

“Where’s the other ship?” I asked her.

“There. Just above the auroras.” she said pointing at a dot far below us.

I repeated the trick I’d used with the Star Runner’s firing squad and imagined a viewing circle into existence in front of me. With the added magnification I was able to make out the dot in greater detail. It was a large hexagonal ring around a smaller cone in the center. The tip of the cone was pointing down towards the Earth with the ring rotating around it clockwise.

With the help of superhuman inventors, humanity had developed a number of functional spaceships. Many were driven by the powers of the various superhumans who used them. None, that I knew of, looked like the one I saw below us. As I looked over the writing on the side of the ship, meta-awareness confirmed it. The text belonged to no human culture and none of the friendly alien species that I knew of.

“This is the VoidBreacher ‘Persephone’ to all personnel on incoming dimensionally displaced craft, sensors indicate your ship has suffered catastrophic failure. Please standby for evacuation via containment portal.” The voice that spoke in my mind was clearly dream speaking to me but I got no emotional content with the words. Even the sound of the words had a perfectly crisp quality to them that seemed at odds with their originating from any natural source.

Before I had the chance to question what a ‘containment portal’ was I fell through one. At the speed we were falling towards the Earth, I expected slam into something when I arrived but instead I simply passed through a shimmering rainbow disk that appeared in front me and arrived in an amber tube suspended and motionless.

“Jin?” a familiar voice said.

I looked over to see one of the girls from my science class sitting at a control console beside Agent Lynn Haffrun. I couldn’t move so answering verbally was out but I could still dream speak.

“Becky? What are you doing…” I started to dream speak to her when a whole bunch of things became clear thanks to intuition and meta-awareness teaming up.

Agent Haffrun was an alien, I knew that from before. She was here to judge Earth and yet she’d also been pretty nice to me. Why? Because she already had a sense of who I was.

She’d been working with the pre-cogs of the FBMA. Pre-cogs don’t see the future in exact detail but they could probably see that someone from my school would wind up gaining powers. Agent Haffrun had also needed a place to send one of her newest charges. So she’d sent the heroine Heartbeat to school with the usual kids. With me.

Becky looked nothing like Heartbeat, but then Heartbeat could shapeshift so why should her secret identity look anything like her heroic one?

In a sense Becky had been spying on me for Haffrun. I probably should have been upset by that but given what I could sense was coming next I found myself feeling fairly grateful.

“Oh!” Becky’s eyes flew open in shock. I could see her frantically trying to think up a cover story.

“It’s ok, Jin’s figured things out already I believe.” Agent Haffrun said.

“Disengaging containment field. Commencing emergency care procedures on designated subjects.” the robotic voice that had spoken before the first portal appeared said. The amber tube I was in faded away, gently depositing me on the deck of the ship. To my left and right I saw Way, Minnie and the others who’d escaped injury being similarly released.

“Thank you Persephone. Please keep me appraised of their condition.” Agent Haffrun said.

“You’re patching up our injured?” I asked, already knowing the answer but wanting the others to hear it.

“Yes. Any that were alive we will be able to save, though some may need a while in the regrowth tanks.”

“Thank you.” I said.

“Jin, my god, it is you. How did you wind up in space?” Becky asked. She’d shapeshifted to look like Heartbeat once more but I still heard her voice as Becky’s.

“It’s a long story. Are we safe here? There are some seriously powerful bad guys after us.” I said, looking at Agent Haffrun.

“I’ve adjusted our position. I believe we’re outside their effective range.” she confirmed.

“Where did you take us?” I asked.

“Take a look.” she said and gestured to the central view screen. A planet hung outside the simulated window but it wasn’t the Earth. My breath stuck in my throat. I hadn’t expected to ever see the Earth from an astronaut’s point of view but it had been at least a vague possibility as technology progressed. Seeing Saturn’s Rings up close and personal was a whole different story.

The Persephone was a faster than light ship. The more powerful supergroups had FTL ships but none of them could transit from Earth to Saturn as quickly as the Persephone had. Some part of me was terrified at being so ridiculously far from humanity’s cradle. The rest of me knew that we were safe though.

The Oblivion Knight was unimaginably powerful but at his core he had once been human and that limited the scope he worked on. He hated the world that had failed him, but he didn’t see the universe beyond it. We hadn’t made it to Olympus but we’d found a refuge. Neither the Knight nor the Courtiers nor the Oblivion Queen had a reach that extended this far.

“Can someone tell us what’s going on here?” Minnie asked.

“Your world is ending.” Agent Haffrun replied. She was looking right at me, a gentle smile on her lips while the judgment of humanity’s future lurked behind her eyes.

I’ve read that fire is one of the most painful ways to die. Every nerve screams and keeps screaming as you burn. As I wrapped my arms around Way and pulled her close I expected to be hit with an agony on par with grasping the Shadow Court’s empowered Heart gem. Instead I felt only her.

The black fires around her pulled back away from me and quietly sputtered out. Way wouldn’t let them touch me. I felt it when she shattered the compulsion the Oblivion Knight had laid on her. He’d never truly possessed the power to dictate what she did. At least not when she chose to believe in the “Way” she wanted to be. Believing in the Way that she saw herself as was the hardest thing in the world though.

Wordlessly she threw her arms around me and collapsed into quiet sobs.

The Star Runner began drifting forward but we stood still, alone at the far front of ship.

“It’ll be ok.” I told her.

“I don’t know what I am.” she said over my shoulder.

“Me either.” I said.

“I don’t know where to go.”

I broke the embrace and put my hands on her shoulders. All the confusion, all the conflict in her, it was all so painfully familiar.

“Maybe we can find out together?” I dream spoke to her, sharing my feelings with her as much as my words.

“Together?”

“Yeah, I thought since we’ve changed a lot in the last day, that we’re both kind of just starting out. So, if you’d want to, you could stay with here and we could figure things out as we go.”

“I’d like that.” Way dream spoke back to me. A small, hopeful smile grew on her lips and touched the corners of her eyes.

“Is it safe up here now?” Minnie asked from the top of the stairs that lead up to the Star Runner’s forecastle.

I turned to face her.

“Yeah. We’re ok.” I said.

“Good, cause it looks like the ship’s not. The Captain just ran downstairs and it didn’t sound like he was happy.”

“What did he say?”

“I’m pretty sure it was one long string of swears, but he might have been making some of them up.”

“That could mean anything from his breakfast is late to the ship’s about to explode. Let’s go see.”

“With the day we’ve been having I’ll tell the others to prep for an exploding ship.” Minnie said.

Way and I dropped down into the hold to find the Captain laughing great big belly laughs.

“Um, sir, what’s wrong?” I asked.

“Nothing much lass. Just a slight case of unstable levitation spheres.”

That wasn’t good news. The levitation spheres were the heart of the Star Runner’s engines. Instability tended to be followed by the kind of pyrotechnics that you could only enjoy if the ship in question was an enemy vessel.

“How unstable?” I asked.

“Well we can’t engage the primary or secondary shields.”

“If we can beat the Oblivion Courtiers to Olympus we may not need them.” I suggested.

“And we can’t disengage the forward impellers.” he added. Which meant that we couldn’t stop or even slow down.

“That could cause some problems.” I admitted.

“Oh but you haven’t heard the best part, tell her MacReady.” Rumbeard said.

“The cannons, they’re overloading and if we shut them down they’ll explode.” the Chief Electromancer said with a pained look on his face.

“So we’re flying towards a divine dominion, firing all guns and accelerating to an uncontrollable ramming speed?” I asked.

“And the best part? We’re flying our conquest flags and there’s too much lightning on the topsail  to take them down!” Rumbeard’s smile was both insane and slightly infectious.

“I can help.” Way offered.

“And who would you be lass? And where do you keep finding new crewmates Molly?” Rumbeard asked.

“She found us Captain. She’s the one who stopped the ship.”

Rumbeard cast a disbelieving eye at her.

“She’s stronger than she looks. A lot stronger.” I told him.

“That’ll take care of our problem with crashing but I expect we’ll get a poor welcome with our guns blazing away as they are.”

“Leave those to me!” I told him.

“No offense Molly, but the cannons are a mite delicate at the moment. Any fooling with them might set one off and if one goes they’re all going to blow.” MacReady explained.

“That’s why I’m going to have you fix them.” I said.

“Can’t be done. Not without draining all of them in a good ship dock.” he said.

“Hold that thought.” I told him and turned to Way, “Might as well get the ship under control, if you need a hand just call for me ok?”

“Be careful.” she said, holding my arm for emphasis.

“I will.” I promised before she turned and flew back above decks. A moment later I felt the ship slowing gradually to a steady speed.

“Ok Chief, take my hand. I’ll show you the workshop I have in mind for the Electrocannons.” I told him.

MacReady glanced to Captain Rumbeard, who nodded in agreement.

The Lightning Road was a “real” plane, but it wasn’t physical in the sense the world I came from was. That made it easier to step across the Dreamlit barrier with MacReady. I could have merged the two realms but with the levitation spheres being unstable I wasn’t entirely sure what affects that might have. If we blew up a cannon in the Dreamlit world the ship could get by without it. If we blew up the levitation spheres our ship would be less a sky galleon and more a big wooden block plummeting out of the celestial realms to land the gods wouldn’t even know where.

MacReady noticed the change immediately.

“What in the Tempest’s Belly have you done there Molly?” he asked.

“Brought you to my ‘workshop’. You know the Electrocannons better than anyone else on the ship. You can picture the spells that make them work in your head right?”

“Sure enough, but how does that help here.”

I lead him over to Dreamlit reflection of one of the cannons.

“Try imagining how this one should look, inside and out, materials and spell-paths.” I told him.

He frowned at me but then gave it a try. The change in the Dreamlit reflection of the cannon was immediate. Even I could tell that it was in much better shape. I brought us and the refurbished cannon back to the real world of the Lightning Road. It took effort but after a minute or so when we’d pushed back through the barrier, the Star Runner had a fully repaired cannon.

“Why do I remember that the cannon we just fixed never failed?” MacReady asked, confused by the bifurcation of history.

“It’s part of the magic. If we do this right, none of the cannons will have ever failed.” I told him.

“Always said having a witch on board was good luck!”, MacReady nodded and gave me his hand again.

I pulled us over to the Dreamlit world again.

“Let’s take care of all the rest this time. Instead of imagining them in perfect working order though, try imagining them as broken down with the easiest thing to repair that seems plausible after a levitation sphere failure like we’ve got.”

“Why do that?” MacReady asked.

“If we try to fix everything I don’t know how history will have to adjust to accomodate that. Small changes, especially plausible ones reduce the risk that we step back to find that the Star Runner’s exploded and we’re surrounded by perfectly working cannons as we fall to our dooms.”

“Broken cannons it is then!” he agreed.

It was a little harder bringing changes for all of the cannons back over to the real world, but not by much. The effort left me winded but pleased. The ship was in much better shape, though with only one working cannon to defend it.

It was almost simultaneous with noticing that things were in better shape that I also noticed that our speed was rapidly increasing.

“What’s happening? Are you ok?” I dream spoke to Way.

“The Oblivion Courtiers have found us. They’re trying to get ahead of us.” Way dream spoke back.

“I’ll be right there.”

“Get the cannons fixed up – trouble’s calling already.” I told MacReady.

Knowing how fast the Shadow Courtiers were, I didn’t expect I had any time to lose with the Oblivion Court so I flew up onto the Star Runner’s deck.

“They’re coming.” Adella warned as I appeared above decks.

“We need to stop them.” I replied

“Nell, you’re with me. Minnie, stay and guard Patches and Jin.” Jessica said. She morphed back to her abyssal form as she turned and headed to the stern of the ship.

Her plan made sense, except for one bit. I didn’t need a guard.

“If any of the Courtier’s land…” I started to say but Patches cut me off.

“They shall be dealt with my Queen.”

“They’re fast, faster than the Shadow Court was maybe.” I warned him.

“Between us that will not be a concern.” he replied, hefting a cutlass and a flame blaster.

“I need to get the shields back on line.” I said.

“Go. We’ll keep the crew safe.” Minnie said.

“Thanks.” I said. I believed her, even knowing the odds they faced, I believed her.

I headed back to MacReady and cast a dream thought to Way.

“Can you pull the ship any faster?” I asked.

“Not without damaging it.” she dream spoke back. The prospect of fighting the Oblivion Courtiers didn’t bother her. Even before she’d shattered her father’s geas, she hadn’t liked them.

“If you can buy us any time that might help a lot.” I told her, sharing as well the idea I had of repairing the shields to hold off the Courtiers.

“It’s dangerous but you should make the shields stronger than this reality allows. The Courtiers won’t be held back by the normal defenses.” Way advised me.

I thought back to our first encounter and the role the Star Runner had played. It’s shields had been useful not sufficient and she’d been holding back as much as she could.

“Thanks, I’ll do what I can.” I told her.

I found MacReady directing his minions on the repairs of the Electrocannons.

“We need to get the shields back on line.” I said as I flew up to stop beside him.

“Tell me something I don’t know you witchy lass.”

“Can your team get the cannons up and running?”

“That worthless bunch of slackers? Aye, they’ll have the guns up and singing pretty in a couple minutes or there’ll be the lash for the lot of them!” MacReady bellowed. I’d never heard of him actually lashing one of his team, but he loved to say that he would.

“Good let’s get to work on the shields then.”

“I got it handled lass.” he said. It was deeply weird watching him pull himself across the barrier to the Dreamlit world. I sensed it as much with meta-awareness as anything else.

“What? But how?” I sputtered as I stepped over to join him.

“Once you showed me the trick of it, it all just sort of made sense.” he shrugged.

I could make other dreamwalkers. That was probably a bad thing but in the grand scale of bad things I had to deal with it ranked right around noticing I had an overdue library book.

“Be careful with it. Like I said, it’s hard to predict exactly what will turn out to be real. Oh, and you need to make the shields strong. Try about a hundred times their actual capacity. The things after us are that powerful at least. I’ll head back up to buy you some more time to manage that. ”

“I’ll be glad to have it.” MacReady said, looking undismayed.

Captain Rumbeard on the other hand looked downright grumpy when I found him on the decks. He and a dozen crew members were gathered around Jessica and Nell in an impromptu firing team. With the cannons offline still the crew was making due with acid firing dragon rifles.

Between Jessica, Nell and the rifles, half mile long tongues of fire, lightning and acid leapt out at the Oblivion Courtiers that were gaining on the ship. Despite the impressive reach of the attacks though, the Courtiers were able to avoid taking any hits. They were simply too fast to be tagged that way.

I considered trying to haul them over to the Dreamlit world. I’d have a lot more options for dealing with them there, but even if I left the ship that plan wouldn’t work out too well. The Shadow Courtiers had been real. They couldn’t dream walk. The Oblivion Courtiers definitely could by virtue of the fact that they were in one of the real worlds at all. Even if I could manage to drag them across the Dreamlit world’s barrier they’d simply step back over again, possibly damaging the barrier in the process.

I couldn’t use dream walking directly against them, but it occurred to me that I could still cheat a little bit.

“This will help you target them better I said.” as I touched Jessica, Nell and each gunner and twisted a little bit of the Dreamlit world into view in front of them. In the small Dreamlit window in front of them I placed targeting reticles that showed where their shots would land and the Courtiers likely positions when the shot reached them.

The next round of blasts proved startlingly more accurate but even with that the Oblivion Courtiers managed to avoid them.  What we needed was a way to stick them in place, or at least slow them down some. For some reason the myth of Arachne came to mind followed by a really horrible idea. Meta-awareness showed me it would work though and I was in the mood for being horrible to the Courtiers.

“Buy me ten seconds!” I asked Jessica and Nell before stepping around the Dreamlit barrier again.

My horrible idea was a simple one. I wasn’t actually Jin at the moment. I was my Dreamlit self. In theory that meant I could be whoever, or even whatever I wanted to be. Closing my eyes I put together the image of a real monster. Eight limbs to deal with several Courtiers at once, a hundred eyes to track them no matter where they went, reflexes and speed that they couldn’t beat and webs, lots and lots of web shooters.

Real spiders produce their silk from their abdomen. That was exactly the kind of gross I wasn’t interested in recreating, so I gave each of my monster’s limbs web spinners and added two more on each side her mouth. I gave her a carapace that was light but sturdy. Heavy armor would have warded off blows better, but avoiding the black oblivion fire was far better than trying to resist it. Lastly I gave her a cute pink bow on top of her head. Because I wanted the Oblivion Courtiers to be beaten by a scary spider monster with a cute pink bow. It just seemed right somehow.

With the image of her firmly in my mind, I became my spider monster. Glory of the Hidden Corners. Her history began to unfold as I dreamed her into partial reality. She’d eaten a radioactive mosquito that was full of human blood and had gained the proportionate intelligence and size of a human. Apparently she could also fly, thanks to the mosquito, even though I hadn’t planned on her having wings too. That was a little weird, but then I was a giant radioactive spider monster so, relatively speaking, not all that surprising.

As I settled into her form my thoughts took on a very alien cast. Hunter-thoughts. I was still smart but much more focused. Also less squeamish.

I stepped back into the real world. The nearest crewman screamed. He wasn’t prey. My prey was those aggravating black fire bugs that had closed most of the distance to the ship.

“Shoot after I do.” I told Jin’s friends and Molly’s crewmates. I raised my four front limbs and blasted out six streams of webbing at the two nearest Courtiers.

The webbing splattered on them and started to burn but not so quickly that their flight wasn’t impeded. Fire and lightning caught them and blasted both of their bodies into fading sparks. They would reform. Not in time to stop us. It still bothered me though. Prey should stay dead when you kill it.

I webbed three more but two managed to slip past.

“Way! They’re getting on board!” I dream spoke.

“We’ll have to fight them.” she answered.

“Right. Oh and I’ve changed, don’t squish me ok?”

I felt her smile back at me in her dream speech.

“I will always know you.” she assured me.

We didn’t have time for further chatting. Of the two dozen Courtiers that pursued us over half had caught up already.

I looked at Captain Rumbeard and the crew. Any misgivings they had were gone. A spider monster wasn’t a big deal to them if it was on their side. Molly had the best crew. Jessica and Nell didn’t care either. Jin had awesome friends.

We fought. I webbed. They shot. A half dozen Courtiers went down.

On the deck Adella, Patches and Minnie fought. Patches and Minnie weren’t as fast as the Courtier. Adella was. She trapped them. Patches and Minnie finished them.

They weren’t fast enough. Jessica, Nell and I weren’t fast enough. The Courtiers began to swarm the decks. Then the ship slowed down. Then Way showed up.

She still had to hold back. The Oblivion Courtiers didn’t. That didn’t save them. Way wasn’t using the black fire. She couldn’t anymore. She didn’t need it though.

Golden light speared through the Courtiers, blasting two of them apart instantly. It was enough to turn the tide. One by one we started driving the Courtiers off the ship. Until the levitation spheres exploded.

It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t MacReady’s fault. It was the hundred Oblivion Courtiers that were ahead of us. The one’s that had been sent to chase James down after I escaped from my room. I couldn’t sense them, but I could sense Way. I could sense her recognition of them and puzzle out what it meant.

We were cut off from Olympus and we were falling fast. The Star Runner was dead.

There’s a saying that goes “friends help you move, real friends help you move bodies”. From the looks on their faces, I was pretty sure what I was asking my companions to do went just a little beyond “moving bodies” on the friendship scale.

“You want us to sail where lass?” Captain Rumbeard asked.

“The Lightning Road, it’s the fastest path to Olympus.” I answered.

“You cannot be serious.” Jessica said, staring at the quarter mile wide stream of blindingly bright lightning that was coursing ahead of us from cloud to cloud.

“Fraid so.”

“There’s some slight chance we’ll survive the journey one presumes?” Patches asked.

“Anything’s possible.” I said with a cruel little smile. I didn’t have to be channeling the Faerie Queen to enjoy teasing them a little.

I probably wouldn’t have teased Nell or Adella the same way, but they were absorbed by the spectacle in their own unique ways. Adella was watching the continuous flow of lightning that I’d led us to with knowing interest. She’d slept for a millenia while the Courtier spirit had inhabited her body and used her memories. With the roles reversed, she was able to avail herself of of the former Queen’s considerable mass of experience and knowledge. In short, she knew just what she was looking at and power it led to.

Nell, on the other hand, was wide eyed with wonder. The Shadow Court had picked her for her natural gift with technology. That gift was rooted in a fundamental affinity to electricity. The Lightning Road was more a part of her than it was of me, and I was the one who summoned it here.

Captain Rumbeard knew me, or knew Molly, too well to miss that I was teasing and quickly called the crew to head for into the current.

“You’ll want to hang on for this next bit.” I told the others.

Patches helped Adella and Jessica tie down. He offered the same to Nell but she waved him away with a shake of her head.

“My Queen do you require any assistance?” he asked me.

“No. I think I’ll be ok.” I said, excitement slowly building in me. Meta-awareness told me what was going to happen but as we got close to the lightning the feeling of wild energy was too infectious to ignore. I felt a smile creep  across my face as I stepped away from the mast I was supporting myself against.

Bracing my knees, I put my hands out like a surfer for balance. Nell meanwhile had moved to the prow of the ship and had cast her arms out wide. Unlike in Titanic though she didn’t need anyone supporting her as she leaned forward.

We touched the edge of the Lightning Road and the world vanished, left behind us in a blur of light. The Lightning Road roared around us as it pulled us forward. It looked like we were in a vast tunnel whose edges were a solid stream of yellow bright electricity. Throughout the tunnel lightning of brilliant blues and silvers and yellows flashed beside us and around us. The air was so full of the tang of power I thought I was going to explode just from breathing.

Even with meta-awareness warning me, I’d ever so slightly underestimated how powerful the acceleration would be when we hit the road though. Patches, Adella, Jessica and the crew were all flattened into whatever nearby supports were handy. The scary part of that was that the Star Runner’s inertial compensators were still functioning, which meant what they were feeling was only the tiniest fraction of a percent of what our actual acceleration was.

Since I wasn’t tied down, I’d thought I could use my flight ability to compensate for the acceleration. That might even have worked if it hadn’t caught me by surprise. In place of cooly surfing on the Star Runner’s deck I was barely able to grab onto the rigging as I went flying backwards.

Nell on the other hand had no difficulty maintaining her position at all. What she had trouble with was maintaining her human shape. She was floating just above the prow, lightning stream over her and parting before her. It touched her and she touched it and it wasn’t entirely clear where each left off.

“How far do we have to go?” Minnie asked, forcing the question out through gritted teeth.

“All the way. The Lightning Road begins in Olympus.” I shouted back.

I had just begun picturing what my reunion with James would be like when I saw a streak of black fire shoot past the side of the Star Runner. I knew quicker than thought who it was. Only one person was fast enough to overtake a ship that was riding the lightning.

“Hold on!” I shouted, somewhat pointlessly. Everyone was already braced as best they could be. That didn’t save them from being pitched around as the Star Runner ground to an impossible halt on the Lightning Road. Looking forward, I saw Way, as I expected.

She was in front of the ship’s prow, one hand holding back the Star Runner’s progress while she stared across its deck with vacant eyes.

Nell floated an arms length in front of Way and for a moment neither registered the others presence. I flashed forward to interpose myself between the two but I was less than halfway there before the attack came. Surprisingly it was Nell who lashed out first. The lightning she’d gathered up while riding on the prow exploded from her in shockwave larger than the front of boat.

Way was knocked back, but the Star Runner’s progress had already been halted. It was like Way had grounded us on a shoal of black fire in the stream of lightning. I saw the same black fire gather around Way as she shook off the effect of the shockwave.

“Get back!” I told Nell.

“No! I can fight!” she said.

“I know, but not this. Not her. She’s mine.” I told her not wanting either of them to get hurt.

Way apparently had other ideas though. A lance of black fire speared out towards the Star Runner, devouring the lightning road as it flew forward.

It hurt to use it, but without any better alternative, I called out the Shadow Court’s Heart and the purple flames of sorrow to meet the black flames of the Unreal.

The two powers met, clashed and held even for a moment. The illusion of the Shadow Court’s power had to draw its reality from somewhere however and the only source at hand (or at least the only source I was willing to use) was myself.

Pouring out a shield of the Shadow Court’s purple flames meant opening the gates of sorrow within me. It wasn’t just one specific memory that the flames drew on either. It tore at all of them at once. Losing my Dad years ago, losing my Mom tonight and everything in between. The worst part was that for all that pain, I knew I didn’t have nearly enough within me to sustain the purple flames for long.

The former Queen had been right. I made a terrible Shadow Queen. I could have turned to Nell, to Jessica or to Minnie. With the Heart’s power I could have ripped their sorrow from them and left them with fresh wounds where memories and time had healed the old hurts to dull scars. That would have given me plenty of power to fight Way. I just couldn’t though. I couldn’t hurt them like that.

The immediate pain alone was inconceivable to inflict on them, but worse than that was the picture meta-awareness painted. The new wounds wouldn’t heal, the emotions would fester, rot and finally die, leaving them numb and uncaring.

I knew I ran the same risk myself and all I had to trust in was the added perspective that my meta-awareness gave me. That and the fact that it was my choice. Unlike the Shadow Court’s usual source for power, I wasn’t a victim. This wasn’t beyond my control.

Unfortunately that wasn’t enough. For all my good intentions, I still had limits and Way didn’t. She redoubled the force of the black flames and my shield buckled and shattered inwards.

The pressure of the shield shattering hurled me back into the deck. Minnie started to rise before I could but I motioned her to stay back. I’d summoned the Shadow Queen’s robes and accessories instinctively when I called the Heart gem, so the Star Runner’s deck had two black clad girls on it as I got to my feet. Way had landed gently at the front of the ship and stood no more than ten feet away from me, her black scythe held ready in her hands.

“Run.” she said, looking blankly past me.

I could still sense her with meta-awareness. She was still real, despite the black fire that played over her scythe and ran up her arms.

In the flickering purple light the sputtered from the Heart gem, I saw the pain in her. She was fighting the Knight’s compulsion. Fighting her love for him and being torn by the rift between who she was, a girl who wanted most of all to cherish and protect the innocent, and who the Oblivion Knight wanted her to be, a destroyer who lived to punish the world that had failed him.

“I can’t.” I told her. It was as true as it had been when we faced each other in my ruined sanctum. Even if we could escape the Lightning Road, the other Oblivion Courtiers would catch us by following her trail.

“You have to.”, she whispered, her voice catching on the words. The black fire on her arms and scythe flared and began to wind around the rest of her body. I knew if it touched me I would vanish the same as the Courtiers I destroyed.

The Shadow Queen’s voice in me spoke. It whispered that the only way to save my Mom and all of the others who’d been taken was to use the pain I saw in Way. Tear it out of her with the Heart gem and turn it against her. She’d overcome my power but she couldn’t overcome her own.

Meta-awareness showed me how it would work. From Way’s sacrifice I would have a near endless supply of power. I wouldn’t have to be terrible to anyone else. The Oblivion Knight wouldn’t be able to stand against that power backed by the power of Olympus when I reunited with James.

I’d be able to sweep the Oblivion Queen aside, and take command off all the Courtiers. I could drown them in the sea or imprison them for all time. The world would be safe from an evil that had plagued it since the dawn of humanity. Between James and I, we be able to push the Oblivion Knight out and seal the rift that had let him into the real world.

All it would take was the sacrifice of one girl.

“No.” I whispered. I let go of Queen’s scepter. The Heart gem tumbled away from me and shattered on the deck. I let the Queen’s robes melt away to my normal clothes. And I stepped forward.

“Stay away!” Way cried out.

I couldn’t though. I couldn’t turn away from her. She was burning with the black flames. They weren’t consuming her body but I could see they were destroying her spirit. I remembering vividly how that felt. Though the flames caused her no pain, she was in agony. She never wanted to be a destroyer. She never wanted to hurt anyone.

I took another step and I saw past the flames, saw past her unfocused stare. She had been real before I’d named her. She’d loved her father so much that even after he’d plunged into utter self destruction there’d been something left to pull himself back with.

In his rage and pain he’d lost sight of who he was and who she was. He didn’t know and couldn’t care anymore that the daughter he’d lost had never left him.

She couldn’t leave him, anymore than I could leave my mother.

Looking into her eyes was like looking into a mirror. I saw the same rift in her that I’d torn in myself. I’d denied it, hiding the pain under the idea of hiding myself behind a mask, but that just made the lie easier to swallow. It ate away at me the same as Way’s duty ate away at who she really was.

The same love was there too and the same unreasoning fear of love’s loss.

I took one more step and saw the black fire completely cover Way. Her beautiful eyes were covered over by the swirl of hungry galaxies. Any closer and I would burn.

We couldn’t stay as we were. I couldn’t see how I could change though. Giving up myself seemed so much easier than giving up my Mom’s love. It had seen me through so much. She’d been the rock I’d clung to and she still was.

I looked at Way though and saw the parallels between us. I saw her devotion to her father. I imagined her giving herself up. Imagined her becoming the soulless destroyer, the tool that he desired her to be.

It was wrong. Not just because of what she would be, but because of what she would lose.

She was a girl who loved so strongly that she’d been able to turn back the end of her world. She couldn’t see how amazing that was, couldn’t see that it was her and not her power that was precious beyond measure.

I wasn’t like her. I couldn’t love as deeply as she could. I was just me, but in seeing her I saw how maybe that was worth more than I thought. Way couldn’t see how worthy the girl that she wanted to be was, maybe I was missing the same thing.

I thought of James. He’d seen me covered in black fire like Way was, hurting like Way was, and he’d known what to do.

I stepped forward into the flames around Way knowing they would burn me and wrapped my arms around her pulling her into a tight and caring hug.

The life of a Sky Pirate is one of bold adventure and derring do. Plunder factors in there too, we’re not saints after all. That said, we do look out for our own.

While Adella had been crafting her new life I’d put out a call for my crewmates. Dream speaking across great distances was tricky, but the city didn’t exactly qualify as a “great distance” in this case and Molly knew the Captain pretty well.

The Star Runner looked worse for the wear, but the crew had done an excellent job restoring it after the damage Way had inflicted on it. The decks were patched with pilfered lumber, the sails patched with what looked to be stolen designer jeans and somehow they’d even managed to purloin a set of replacement levitation spheres.

I almost asked about that last one, but something told me I was better off not knowing.

The rope ladder landed beside me at the same time as I felt a furry hand on my shoulder.

“Allow me.” Patches said and hoisted himself onto the ladder.

“You don’t have to do this.” I told him and turned to face Adella, including her in that sentiment.

“You just got your lives back. You don’t have to risk them like this.” I added, looking from one to the other of them.

“Exactly!” Patches’ eyes sparkled and a grin spread across his face. Before I could argue any further for their safety, Patches was up the ladder with the speed and grace granted by his feline nature.

I turned to Adella and found her hoisting herself up the ladder as well.

“[A thousand years and many misdeeds, repayment begins tonight]” Adella said in Spanish. I didn’t speak Spanish, except, apparently, in the Dreamlit world.

I shook my head to clear away that surprise and gave Molly the reigns. Sky pirating was her domain. The catboy and the penitent had a head start but no land crawler could out climb a true air rider. It was a matter of Molly’s professional pride that got me to the sky galleon before Adella. Admittedly swinging off the ladder and free climbing up the netting that overhung the ship’s side wasn’t the safest of paths but it wasn’t like Molly hadn’t done it dozens of time before either.

“M’lady.” Patches said as Adella reached the top, offering her his hand in support as she climbed over the railing. As I hopped over the edge of ship to the side of the ladder, he assayed a small bow and added, “My Queen.”

Captain Rumbeard chortled when he heard that.

“[Stole a crown did you lass?]”, he asked.

“[And the crown jewel.]” I told him.

“[We ’d best be off then. Nothing makes a royal crankier than losing their favorite hat.]” Captain Rumbeard laughed.

“[Except maybe the losing the part the hat sits on.]” I replied.

“[And just how big a kettle of fish have you kicked over little witch?]” Rumbeard asked warily.

“[Just a tiny one, no bigger than Atlas’ bathtub.]” On Earth we would call that a kettle of fish the size of the Atlantic Ocean. It seemed like an apt metaphor and Captain Rumbeard certainly understood what I meant.

“[Stars remember us. Molly dear, you know we only have so much sail we can put up. How far, exactly, will we need to fly to be free of this disaster?]”

“[How far will the Fimbulwinter reach?]” I asked him, referring to the storm that would cover the world in ice at the end of days.

“[The Fimbulwinter’s just a myth.]” Rumbeard replied.

“[True enough but what’s coming is just as bad and all too real.]”, I told him.

“[That ’s impossible.]”

“[Patches , tell the good Captain what you’ve seen please?]” As I made the request it occurred to me that Patches probably had no idea what we’d been saying since we were speaking in a tongue that had no relation to any language on Earth.

“[I was a prisoner until Queen freed me. In her wake the prison burned but there are no ashes left.]” Patches said in fluent Low Cloudling.

“[And why is that.]” Rumbeard asked.

“[The enemy that follows the Queen burned the world we were imprisoned in. It’s no more, not even a memory.]”

“[How …]” Rumbeard started to ask.

“[Our enemy’s power is the same as that.]”, I said, pointing upwards to the rift into the Unreal that I’d torn in the sky when I struck down the fleeing Shadow Courtiers. “[Try to sight in on it. See if Gunny the Farseer can perceive what that is. For all her clairvoyance, she won’t be able to and that’s the smallest part of the power that’s after us.]”

Rumbeard observed the rift silently for a moment, a variety of expressions playing across his face.

“[Well , that explains my last fortune reading then.]” he finally said with a sigh.

“[What happened?]” I asked.

“[The cards exploded.]”

I looked at him surprise. Fortune telling, even in the Star Runner’s world was far from perfectly accurate but a reaction like that was pretty unambiguous.

“[I didn’t call you here to die Captain. We’ll get the Star Runner out of this.]” I promised him.

“[You ’re forgetting who we are girl.]”, he said with a twinkle in his eye, his good humor returning before my eyes, “[This crew’s the dirtiest, rottenest bunch of scalawags ever to sail the Sea of Stars. We don’t run from fights, we finished them!]”

“[And what sort of scalawags do you count as allies?]” Patches asked.

“[Allies ? Anyone who’ll swing a cutlass or run out a gun can be a friend of this ship.]” Rumbeard said, clapping Patches on the back, before leaving to put the crew in a pre-battle alert state.

“I was thinking of our absent friends.” Patches said, turning to face me.

“I was thinking of them too. Minnie was already attacked tonight. A Courtier possessed her father.” I said.

“The Court will move to collect their former vassals and whatever precious ones they can find nearby.”, Adella said in perfect English.

“Why?” I asked.

“They’re desperate for power. In their current state the Court is prey for the rest of the Nightmare Fey.” she replied.

“Not just the other Nightmare Fey.” I said and told them about the Oblivion Knight and the Court he was constructing.

“The Shadow Queen’s call is not easily resisted, even when only a little of her remains” Patches observed when I finished describing the legion of black fire courtiers the Oblivion Knight had at his disposal and the Oblivion Queen who stood at his side.

“All the more reason we need to get to them.” I said. “”

“[Rescues cost extra!]”, Rumbeard called back. “[What’s the heading?]”

With my meta-awareness I didn’t even need to look around to get my bearings.

“[A deuce of leagues six degrees forward off the port spar.]” I rattled off, meta-awareness and Molly’s knowledge of the ship blending together seemlessly.

With a buzzing whir, the lift engines spun to life and drove the Star Runner into a broad turn. It wasn’t as fast as I could travel on my own, but the advantage of the ship’s shields and guns wasn’t something I wanted to cast off lightly. I called out course corrections as we flew but as we drew closer it was all too easy to see which house was Minnies. It was the one with the flashing police lights in front it.

“[I ’ll be back in a minute, if I’m not…]”, I started to tell Captain Rumbeard.

“[Then we’ll want another minute. No running.]” he interrupted.

“[Thanks.]” I said and dove off the side of the Star Runner.

The wind whistling past me felt amazing, but my heart was in my throat with worry over what might have happened to Minnie. I landed on the ground outside the circle of lights from the police cars I could see in the real world. With an effort of will, I pushed my way through the barrier again, changing to Jin’s form as I did so.

Walking my dream self around in the real world wasn’t pleasant. I felt like either it or I was going to tear apart if I moved wrong, but I didn’t have time to thread my way through Minnie’s labyrinth in the Dreamlit world again.

I approached the front of her house and paused, wondering if I’d have any trouble with the two police cars that were there. Fortunately neither cop was outside and I caught sight of Minnie pacing back and forth in her room on the second floor.

Flying in the real world felt a little different than flying in the Dreamlit world. I had more sense of my own mass which left me feeling clumsier. Since I only needed to get to Minnie’s window though it wasn’t much of a problem.

“Minnie!”, I said, tapping lightly on her window. I didn’t want to alert the rest of the house since there were a whole lot of questions the police were sure to have and no where near enough time for me to answer them.

Minnie heard the tapping and jumped back, eyes wide for a second.

“It’s me! Jin! What happened? I thought we took care of the Shadow Courtier who was here?”

Minnie opened the window quietly and waved me in.

“My mother, and sister. They took them.”, she said.

My stomach fell.

“Oh no. There was more than the one?”

“There must have been.”

“I should have stayed!”

“No. They were gone already. As soon as you left I called out to my mother for help and she wasn’t there. My father woke up on his own and called the cops. I told him I’d seen a Shadow Courtier so they took it seriously.”

“Can you come with me?” I asked.

“Where?”

“A rescue. We’ve got to get back the people who’ve been taken.”

“What you mean?”

“They took my Mom and Dad too.”

“What? Why?”

“They lost a lot when they abandoned their realm.”

“How can we fight them? Even as a monster…”

“You’re not a monster!” I interrupted her.

“Fine, even in my bigger, badder body they’re too tough for me.”

I debated for all of second on what I said next before deciding two things; I trusted her and she needed to know.

“James is Aegis.” I said.

“Aegis? As in the superhero Aegis?”

“Yeah.”

“Ok, that’s insane, but, wait, how did they take your parents if Aegis was guarding them?”

“He was one of the heroes that assaulted their realm. They came back hiding in his shadow. He didn’t know, but he does now.”

“So he’s going to rescue them?”

“He’s gathering allies now. I’ve got a ship that can take us to him. I don’t know if you’re safe here. Patches said the Shadow Court was still calling to him.”

“They are. I can fight it off though. It’s like having a nagging toddler babbling in your ear.”

“You might be ok then. If they could have taken you by force, they would have when they took your Mom.” I went towards the window.

“Where are you going?” Minnie asked.

“To the others. The Court’s probably after them too.”

“I’m coming with you then.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Yes I do. They have my Mother! They’re not getting my friends too!” Minnie huffed and for a moment her “not-quite-five-foot-tall” frame had more force than her minotaur form.

“What about your Dad?” I asked.

“He’ll be safer if I’m not here.”

I wanted to argue with her, but that was probably true. Taking him with us, while possible, was certainly not going to improve his prospects for staying safe.

“Take my hand then.” I told her, offering my left hand to her, palm up.

As I levitated us both out of the window, she turned to me.

“Wait, you can fly too? What can’t you do?”

“I don’t know.” I told her and pulled both of back across the Dreamlit barrier. It was harder pulling her over with me than it had been to push my Dreamlit self into the real world, but I managed it. As I did a side “benefit” occurred to me. Her father wouldn’t have to worry about her. As far as the real world was concerned, she didn’t exist anymore. I couldn’t guess how history would shift around to accommodate her return but I hoped that if we made it back soon enough no one would notice.

“Welcome aboard.” Patches said with a bow to Minnie as we landed on the Star Runner.

“[Captain, we need to be a league to the starboard, three degrees port off the prow, in best time.]” I called up to Rumbeard, giving him the location of Nell’s house.

The Star Runner got us there is record time, which left me little time to explain things to Minnie. Even so, we were too late.

“Wait here for a second.” I told my friends. It took barely that to figure out something was wrong though. Nell’s house was empty. Looking in the Dreamlit world I noticed that her room was still heavily warded. Where my room was a castle and Minnie’s was a labyrinth, Nell’s was an impenetrable black cube of technology.

“She’s still free.” I told the others when I got back to the Star Runner.

“How do you know?” Minnie asked.

“Her room’s still her own. There’s no Shadow Court power in it. If they caught her they wouldn’t leave a her with a bolt hole that would keep them out. They must have caught her out of the room and she managed to escape some other way.”

“And her parents?” Patches asked.

“Not there.” I said.

“Taken?” Adella guessed.

“Probably.”

I gave Rumbeard the directions for Jessica’s. She was the furthest away but I didn’t think that would save her from the Court’s predations. There were too many of them, they moved too fast and they’d had too much time. As we sailed through the night sky, the image of another empty house, another missing friend, filled my mind. With it came anger and visions of the black fire. I pushed them away knowing that the more I indulged in that kind of imagining the more likely it was that I’d give in to temptation and lash out with it in a time of crisis.

What we found when we arrived at Jessica’s house wasn’t in anyway an empty building, but it definitely qualified as a “time of crisis”.

In the Dreamlit world, Jessica’s house was surrounded with a soft glow that shimmered in every color. It looked heavenly. The fires that rages around it on the other hand had a decidedly “abyssal” appearance. Shapes and faces writhed up out of the flames struggling to grasp the Shadow Court spirits that buzzed around the house like bodiless wraiths.

At the center of the flames, just outside the front door, a winged creature of smoke and nightmare stood. It’s back was to the house and from its mouth a torrent of white hot flames poured forth.

“Stay here!” I told the others.

Patches and Adella nodded. Minnie had other ideas.

“Like hell!”, she said as she jumped over the edge of the ship. We were at least two hundred feet in the air. Minnie couldn’t fly. That wasn’t a problem for her, but the sidewalk she landed on protested by shattering into a thousand pieces under the weight of her minotaur form.

I winged my way down to join her before the fight was joined. On the way, meta-awareness tipped me off to who the fire demon was and what she was fighting. The Shadow Court had found Jessica, except Jessica’s “fight or flight” response ran more towards “fight or incinerate”.

“We’ve got to help her!”, I told Minnie as I landed beside her, indicating the fire demon. Neither of us had ever seen Jessica let loose before. She’d held back in the Shadow Court realm to keep from frying us given the tight quarters we’d been fighting in. I knew she was still holding back for fear of what would happen her neighborhood and that was giving the Courtiers enough room to avoid her attacks. Fortunately I had the answer for that.

“She’s doing fine. It’s Nell that needs us!” Minnie said, looking for a path through the flames. Behind Jessica’s demon form but outside the safety of the house, Nell stood surrounded by a dome of electricity. It made a decent second line of defense against the Courtier spirits but it wouldn’t keep them out if the Courtiers attacked en masse. I couldn’t tell why she wasn’t taking advantage of the shield around the house until I saw her direct a stream of electricity to Jessica. Rather than damage Jessica, the electricity seemed to heal the wounds she’d sustained.

I merged the local Dreamlit world and the real one and considered conjuring a path through the flames to the house for us. That raised the immediate problem that it would also open a path for the Courtier spirits. They could fly over the towering walls of fire but when they did so the flames would lash out in long whips that forced them back.

“I think I can get through but its going to attract some attention.” I told Minnie.

“Go for it.” she replied, smacking her fist into her open palm.

With a wave of my hand I imagined a path under the ground into existence. Without prompting, Minnie moved to stand guard over it. As she did the path began to warp and twist. Minnie wasn’t a Dreamwalker but creating labyrinths was a natural ability for her. If she wanted to protect something it would be very hard for anyone else to get to it.

I raced down the short path underneath the flames as it quickly became a much longer one. In their spirit form, the Courtier’s were still blindingly fast, but limited as well. Crossing thresholds was difficult for them, especially ones that were actively guarded by someone who was aware of them. Their ability to slip into someone’s shadow was similarly constrained since in this merged realm, their spirit forms were plainly visible.

I exited the pathway five feet from Jessica’s left side. She whirled on me as I appeared and for a moment I expected to be bathed in a gout of white hot flame. Instead Jessica smiled a huge “demony” smile.

“You’re here too? How many did you bring with you?”, she asked.

“I’ve got Patches and Minnie.” I said.

“Yeah, whatever. How many Courtiers?”

“None. I got away from them.” Technically that was true. That I’d managed it by annihilating them wasn’t something I felt comfortable sharing with the power-drunk maniac just then.

“Fine. Go help Nell then. I can’t keep all these things off her.”

“We have to leave.” I told Jessica.

“Not until these things burn.” her tone left no room for discussion so I turned and went to Nell.

“Your shield’s defensive right?” I asked her.

“Yes.” she answered, opening a space in it for me to join her inside.

I waved my hand to say no to that.

“Can you move it?” I asked.

“Yes, why?”

“I need you to shield Jessica and I.”

“But she won’t be able to fight then.” Nell warned me.

“I’ve got that covered.” I assured her.

Nell nodded and walked over to me slowly, maintaining the lightning dome as she moved. Together we advanced so that the dome engulfed Jessica too.

“Get away from me! You’re spoiling my shots!”, Jessica complained.

“Just give me second. And watch the sky, you’re gonna like this.” I told her.

I didn’t wait for her response.

“[I need a full bombardment with the Thunder Cannons, my position, Captain!]”, I dream spoke to Captain Rumbeard.

“What? I don’t see anything?” Jessica said, peering up through the bars of Nell’s protective shield.

It was a dark night and, from directly underneath, the Star Runner wasn’t easy to spot. The green witchlight that adorned it’s rigging came into view the moment Jessica spoke though as the ship pitched into a sideways turns. Then the sky exploded with light.

The Star Runner’s Thunder Cannons are meant to disable enemy ships. Potentially several enemy ships all at once. Their effect on the Shadow Courtiers was similar to the effect of a stick of dynamite on a barrel of fish. The crew knew their business and placed the shots more or less everywhere except right on us. Nell’s shield then blocked out most of the indirect damage and noise that splashed over onto us. Even with all that though the three of us were thrown onto our butts on the lawn.

Before the Shadow Court could reform and mount a counter offensive, I grabbed Jessica’s hand (like grabbing a glowing coal) and Nell’s hand (like grabbing a live wire) and pulled them with me to the Dreamlit side of the barrier as I separated the two worlds. Minnie was there as well since I’d already pulled her over.

Back in the real world we left behind a flaming yard and several puzzled Courtiers. History adjusted in our wake and left them with the belief that their prey had resisted and been burned to ash by the fires.

“What in the mother-loving-hell was that?”, Jessica asked, still blinking her eyes to clear away the after images of the lightning. She’d returned to the teenage girl I remembered from the Shadow Court’s realm.

“Thunder Cannons. Want to see them?”, I asked, knowing that rather than pretty clothes or jewelry, Jessica found loud, explosive things irresistable. The Star Runner had descended low enough to drop the boarding ladder down to us. Jessica didn’t need anymore urging than that.

“They took my family.” Nell said soberly as she began climbing too. I floated up near them as Minnie joined us and began climbing behind Nell.

“Mine too. And Minnie’s Mom. Jess, how about you?” I asked.

“Dad’s away on business, so I’m fine.” she said.

“Who next shall join our ensemble?” Patches asked as we clambered onto the Star Runner’s decks.

“Next we go for the big guns.” I said and cast out with meta-awareness, searching for the path to take us where I wanted to go.

“The Army?” Jessica guessed.

“Or perhaps a call to Unity City for a battalion of heroes?” Patches suggested.

“Nope. We’re going to see my brother and his patron.”

“And who would that be?” Patches asked.

“Athena, goddess of Wisdom and Battle.”

If the Oblivion Knight wanted to bring in allies then two could play that game.

One of the benefits to wearing heavy, padded robes is that they spread the force of giant fangs over a somewhat broader area. That’s not one of things I’d imagined when I’d dreamed up the robes I was wearing, but some surprises do turn out to be pleasant ones.

“Huh, that’s not so bad” isn’t exactly what I would have expected to be thinking while I was trapped in the jaws of an enormous beast that was engulfed in black flames but it beat almost all of the alternatives I could think of.

It took my mind a moment to catch up with the situation I was in, and to register how fast we were traveling. That’s when I realized that the beast wasn’t trying to tear me to pieces. It was carrying me away. Strange as it sounded, I was pretty sure it was trying to save me. The way it held me just tightly enough to be secure without crushing or piercing me supported that notion.

I tried to see where we were going but the surroundings were flashing past in too much of a blur. I knew we were still in the Dreamlit world’s reflection of my world, but with the way the streetlights and neon signs blurred together we might as well have been running through hyperspace.

When we stopped, we were in the graveyard behind one of the old churches at the far end of town. The purple flames that still clung to my scepter sputtered and choked out. The Shadow Court’s magics weren’t welcome on blessed ground. It wouldn’t stop them from following us, but it did make the graveyard one of the last places they would think to check. Maybe.

With surprising gentleness, the beast lowered its head to the ground and opened its mouth so that I could get to my feet.

“Thank you.” I said, more for my own benefit that anything else.

“You’re welcome.” the beast responded. The musical quality of her voice shocked me just slightly less than the fact that she talking in the first place.

“Gah! You can talk?” I leapt back on reflex.

“Yes.” she confirmed. I don’t know why a giant talking beast made of black flames struck me as unusual at this point. Old habits I guess.

“Do…do you have a name?” I asked.

“Not yet.” the beast replied.

“Do you want one?”

“Yes, but not from you. When my mistress is ready I will take a name from her.”

“Your mistress?”

“Yes. You named her.”

The pieces fell into place at last. The beast was Way’s. It was the same one that had pursued me at the police station. Way hadn’t wanted to hurt me but she’d been compelled to by the Oblivion Knight’s command. The beast had reacted to that and had carried me away to safety to spare Way from the conflict that was tearing her apart.

“Will the others be pursuing us?” I asked, thinking how much faster Way had been than her beast last time.

“Yes, but they will not find you, I will lead them away.”

“I can’t ask you to do that. They’ll destroy you if they catch you.”

“You aren’t asking, my mistress is, and they won’t catch me.” she said. An instant later she was gone.

I was alone. And in a graveyard. Even within the Dreamlit world that felt creepy. Worse, I didn’t need meta-awareness to tell me I wasn’t safe here. Graveyard spookiness aside, there were too many Oblivion Courtiers to think they would all chase after Way’s beast.

Without considering what I was doing, I stepped across the barrier to the physical world. It was hard. It felt like I was pushing through a sea of tar rather than the usual thin gossamer curtain. By the time I broke through I was exhausted. Weariness tried to drag me back to the Dreamlit world and it was almost enough to distract me from the crawling shivers that were playing all over my skin. Something was very wrong and it wasn’t just that I was surrounded by graves in the dark of the night.

“Now isn’t this interesting?” a woman said. Her voice was frail and weakened as though by injury or great age. She was tall, but so gnarled and hunched over that her head was bowed lower than mine. In the light of the street lamps and neon signs, I could see that her skin was covered in liver spots and hung off her in long, loose wrinkles. I didn’t recognize her at first, but when I saw Patches (clothed this time in a t-shirt and loose jeans, but still every inch the cat boy I’d met him as) beside her I clued in to her identity. She was the former Queen.

I looked at her again. She wasn’t wearing a glamour. Gone was not only the artificial perfection of her magic visage but also the grey horror of her “true” Shadow Court form.

“What happened to you?” I asked.

“I followed a foolish girl to the end of my world.” she replied with an bitterly amused wheeze.

“The Heart was an unkind lender.” Patches added.

I thought back to the final moments in the Shadow Court’s realm. Patches had carried the Queen into the Heart’s chamber and it had ripped the last vestiges of the Shadow Court’s power from her.

“What are you?” I asked her.

“Dying.” she said.

“You’re immortal though?” I knew I was wrong as soon as I asked the question. The Shadow Court couldn’t die, but she wasn’t a Courtier anymore. She’d lost all of that in our flight from their realm. First her title to me, then her power to the Heart.

“I was, but as I am I will perish before the sun rises.” She sounded almost pleasantly resigned to her fate.

“Is that true?” I asked Patches. I had to remind myself that the age I saw on her was coupled with cunning and treachery. I’d saved her from the destruction of the Shadow Court’s realm but that was no reason to think she’d be grateful to me.

“I suspect so. She has aged preternaturally fast since we return.” the catboy confirmed.

“Mortal years, the ones this body should have lived. They’re catching up with me.” the wizened crone cackled.

“What are you doing here then?” I asked. I knew a hospital wouldn’t have a hope of treating her but someone like Heartbeat might be able to pull off a miracle.

“Trying to live a little longer.” she said.

“In a graveyard?”

“It was to avoid the Court.” Patches explained.

“And to wait for you.” the crone added.

“Me? How did you know I would come here?”

“An area sheltered from the Court’s eyes? Where else would I think to look for you?” the crone replied.

“Why would you want to see me though? I’ve got things immensely more dangerous than the Shadow Court after me. Even being near me like this means you’re in danger.” I warned them.

“And you would shelter us from that danger?” the crone. Her voice was gentle but there was a keenness in her gaze that told me I was walking into a trap.

“Nobody deserves the kind of trouble that’s following me.” I told her.

“You are a kind girl. Your compassion is a credit to your humanity, and to those who have loved and nurtured you.” the crone said. I blinked. The complement seemed so out of character for her that I wondered if Patches had misplaced the former Queen and found some other old lady to take her place.

“That same kindness and compassion makes you an abomination as a Queen of the Shadow Court though.” she continued. Her gaze was fixed on me, dissecting me.

“You’re not the first person to call me an abomination tonight.” I told her.

“They did not see you as I do. They cannot have. Only one who understands what the Court is can see how poorly you wear your crown, how ill suited you are to its rule, how it is chaffing and wearing away at you.”

The crone wasn’t a Courtier anymore. She could lie freely, but I knew she wasn’t. She didn’t need too. The truth was the only weapon she needed for this battle.

“What is the Court then?” I asked. It felt like I was being spun into a web but at the same time the lure of knowing was too strong to resist.

“It is pain, it is cruelty, it is loss. It is a weapon.” she savored each word, her voice caressing them as she spoke.

“What do you mean?”

“Pain, cruelty, loss, these are all real. They are undeniable. They are true. That is the only weapon you can fight the Unreal with.”

“It wasn’t enough to save the Court’s realm.”

“The Queen chose to flee. She feared what was coming.”

“The black flames scared her that much?”

“No. You did.”

“What?” That didn’t seem vaguely possible at first, but then I thought of what I’d done to the ones in my house.

“You are the Queen Who Has Fallen. The Powerless Queen. But you aren’t powerless and you weren’t powerless then, were you?”

I thought back to the flight out of the Shadow Court’s domain. I’d literally cut my way to the heart of their realm and I’d lead a group of people there who had as much power as a team of superheroes. What would I have done if we’d had to get past the Reigning Queen? Especially after seeing the red garden?

I thought again of what I’d done at my house. I could have done that to their realm if the Oblivion Knight hadn’t beat me too it. I might easily have done that to the Queen after what I’d seen. The Reigning Queen wouldn’t care what using that kind of power would cost me. All that would have mattered was that I had the power in the first place.

The crawling feeling of wrongness hadn’t left my skin. My stomach joined the discomfort as I thought about the sort of power I had. The purple flames of the Shadow Court and the black flames of the Unreal. Using either one of them felt like I was ripping myself apart, but they were weapons I could use. Weapons I might have to use. I thought of Mom. And James. And Way and Minnie. Heck even Jessica. If it came down to it, if it was the only way to stop the Oblivion Knight and his minions, I’d use any and every power I could lay my hands on. It was that or annihilation.

“You’ve taken the title and worn it in battle. But you haven’t given yourself to it. You can’t. You’re too kind, too compassionate.”

“You have no idea what I’m like.” I told her. What scared me most wasn’t that she was right, but that she might be horribly wrong. Using the black flames, annihilating the Shadow Courtiers, had left me burned inside and numb, but thinking back on it, I’d relished it too. No restraints. No consequences. I’d only been disappointed that I couldn’t make the fire hurt them worse. When faced with loss, I’d been all too happy to wield cruelty and pain as weapons.

“Perhaps not, but is that how you truly wish to be? Do wish to become as I was?” she asked.

“I won’t be like you.” I replied. It was true, I wouldn’t be like her. If I wanted to be a monster, I’d be much worse than she ever could have been.

“This is all fascinated but I believe there’s an offer to made?” Patches cut in. He looked bored, sitting on the edge of a tombstone and filing his nails. Those focus he gave them though was unnaturally intense. Cats show fear it odd ways I guess but we all knew time was running out.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“To give you what you gave me. To balance the scales.” she replied.

“What did I give you?”

“Freedom.”

I laughed.

“Freedom? No offense, but the last thing I could ever trust you to give me is freedom.”

“Then you will slay me.”

“What? No, why would I kill you?”

“Refuse me and I die before dawn. Whether you choose to strike the final blow with your own hand or not doesn’t matter to me.”

“I can’t save you, I may not even be able to save myself. If you die of old age I don’t see how that’s my fault or what I could do about it.”

Her eyes lit up and she closed her trap around me

“You can save yourself and you can save me. All you need to do is one thing; Give me my title. Give me the Heart. Lay your burden on me and forget everything that happened here.”

“How would that…”, I trailed off. How would that help? I could see all too easily how that would help.

If I called her “Queen”, if I turned the title back to its rightful owner, she would be the one with the connection to the Shadow Court’s power. She was right that I wasn’t willing to use it, not really. She would be though. Even without any abductions, there was a lot of pain, cruelty and loss in the world. The reborn Queen would be able to command the Courtiers, maybe even the ones that had been lost to Oblivion. She’d be able to strike back at the Oblivion Knight and drive him off.

The real world was too big a target for him precisely because even forces like the Shadow Court would oppose its destruction. I didn’t have to chose between destroying myself and the annihilation of the Earth anymore. More importantly I didn’t have to try to fight something that was vastly older and more powerful than myself. Where I would have to scramble to figure things out on the fly and guess at everything I did, the reborn Queen would be able to draw on an age of experience in wielding her powers. She could win fights that I would barely even survive.

“What about my family. They took my parents!” It was selfish. In the face of global armageddon, I was more concerned about the fate of the few people who were dear to me than the billions who would die and the trillions who would never exist at all if the Oblivion Knight won.

“You could ask for a geas as part of the bargain.” Patches said.

The crone glared at him.

“Yes, the boy speaks truth. I would agree to spare them if you wished.”

“You would agree to more than that.” Patches said, a delighted look in his feline eyes, “A binding that the Shadow Court would never again hunt in Brassport and would never cause harm or distress to any who bear her favor or love. You would go as far as that.”

I leaned against a gravestone. What Patches suggested would be a huge restriction on the Shadow Court. “Never” for Faeries is exactly what it sounds like. Billions of years in the future when the sun swallowed the Earth, Brassport and my family would still be safe from them.

“Aye. I would go that far.” the crone confirmed. It meant more than power to her. It meant her life.

My heart leapt when she said that and I felt like the kid that I was. I’d been looking for someone else who would take responsibility for so long. Someone who would deal with the terrifying realities and the violence, someone who would shield me from harm.

Someone who would make things right.

I looked at the frail old woman before me. She looked back with patient eyes. She knew how much I needed what she could offer.

“I…”, my words caught in my throat. I swallowed and looked down, searching for the cause of my hesitation.

I wanted someone who would make things right. I remembered the red garden. I remembered touching the Shadow Court’s Heart. I remembered Samantha.

The Shadow Court would never make things right.

If I gave back the title, if I returned the former Queen to her rule and power, I would be a part of their evil. Relying on them to fight the Oblivion Knight meant accepting that what they did to the innocent was necessary.

“I‘m sorry. I can’t do that.” I said. What happened next, how things turned out with the Oblivion Knight, with my parents, with Way, it was my responsibility.

I had power. However much I didn’t want to accept that, however much I wouldn’t be accepted for it, I had power. I’d wanted so much for someone else to come in and make things right, to take responsibility but that desire came from the pain and fear in me.

I hadn’t been willing to accept what was real about myself because the thought was terrifying. If I had power, if I took responsibility then I could fail. It could be my fault that people like my Dad weren’t saved when they should have been.

It had taken looking at what turning my power over to the Shadow Court would mean to wake me up. Whether or not something was my fault didn’t matter. What mattered was whether or not it happened in the first place.

I knew that putting aside my insecurity was easier said than done, but somehow just seeing it for what it was made the burden a little lighter. I didn’t need someone to take care of everything. I hadn’t asked for my problems but I knew that’s what they were. My problems. And my chance to make things better.

“I see.” the crone said. I expected her to scream at me, or maybe to lunge forward with claws bared. Instead she sagged, the weight of her long years crushing her to ground as her last hope left her.

I turned away from her and looked at the rows of carefully tended headstones. This was an old church graveyard but people still cared for it. That’s what gave it the energy to ward off the Shadow Court’s magics.

I breathed out a small sigh and tried to accept that in doing what I thought was the right thing, I’d condemned the tired old lady near me to a swift and painful death. Her weakness could be a trick to play for sympathy, but I knew it wasn’t. She was a horrible creature, but weak and powerless as she was, I couldn’t hate her. Whatever she was, whatever she’d done, she’d been a person once too.

So had the Courtiers in my house, but I hadn’t spared them. I shook my head. I wasn’t going to beat myself up over that. The situations were different and I was different in the aftermath of that fight too. It wouldn’t happen again, and I was already going to pay for what I’d done by having to deal with the Oblivion Courtiers the Oblivion Knight has raised from their ashes.

That thought struck a spark in my mind though. The Oblivion Knight had raised his new troops from their ashes. But the Shadow Court doesn’t leave ashes. When they’re destroyed they’re just gone. It’s the humans they once were that held the promise of rebirth.

That wasn’t going to help me against the new Courtiers. Oblivion had claimed them and that was a one way trip as far as I could see. I couldn’t make any use of the human aspect of the Oblivion Courtiers, but the crone who sat before me was another story.

“I can’t offer you the title back, but I can offer you a chance to live, if you wish it.” I said, turning back to her. Patches cocked his head to the side, curiosity roused by my unexpected words.

“And what would I have to give you?” the crone rasped.

“Your name.” I told her quietly.

“I have no name. I had only the title you now bear.”

“There is one name that’s still yours, but you haven’t used it in a thousand years.”

”No. Not that name. That’s not who I am.” the crone coughed and the effort shook her entire body.

“I know. It’s the name of the human who gave herself to you to escape the torment your spirit inflicted. In tiny stages you made her your own until there was almost nothing left and almost no corner of her you didn’t control. She’s still there though, locked away within you. She’s slept and dreamed the nightmare of your existence across uncounted seasons.” I was letting meta-awareness fill me in as I spoke though I knew the broad strokes of what I was saying already.

“You would reverse the tables then? I would sleep and dream of her life?”

“If she wishes. Either of you can end this here. Either way her spirit won’t be enslaved to you any further.”

“I would cease to be me.”

“You would change. Just like all mortals do.”

“But I am an immortal!”

“As was she while you ruled her. Accept this, accept her rule, and you’d both be mortal. You’d have no more control over her than she has had over you but you would share her life, the parts she chose to give you, in your dreams. If that seems unbearable, then let it end here. There’ll be no pain for either of you.” I told her.

The crone looked at me for a long silent moment. Her face was still and expressionless, except for her eyes which were gazing off into eternity. At last she looked up into my eyes and gave me a simple nod.

“Adella.” she said, before breaking eye contact. She was afraid. Afraid in the way only someone who has not changed in over a thousands years can be afraid.

I took her hands.

“Adella, remember yourself.” I said softly as I joined the Dreamlit and real worlds together once more.

“Come back.” I whispered, calling her to wakefulness across the centuries she had slumbered.

The Dreamlit world settled around me was like the gentle caress of warmth from a cozy fire on an icy day. It felt oh so very right after the “wrongness” that had been crawling over my skin since I stepped into the real graveyard. That’s when I worked out what I’d done.

I hadn’t reintegrated with my physical body when I’d entered the real world. My body wasn’t on Earth any longer. James had carried it away to Olympus. I’d forced my Dreamlit body to be real for a time! My Dreamlit body that I could change into anything I dreamed of. That couldn’t really die. I might be human still, but I wasn’t sure I was technically “mortal” anymore.

There wasn’t the gut churning shock I expected at discovering that. I was what I was and I was beginning to accept that. Any problems that caused me, I’d face when they came up. Till then I had more immediate concerns.

“Who am I?” Adella asked.

“You’re the only one who can say.” I told her holding up an empty mirror. “Imagine yourself as you were, as you want to be. Imagine and remember.”

It took time. Precious time, but it couldn’t be rushed. Slowly the image of a Spanish woman in her mid-twenties began to appear in empty mirror. She was older than the child Adella must have been when she was captured, but even though she’d slept the centuries away, some part of Adella had aged and slowly grown.

I’d been worried when I healed myself in the Dreamlit world that the any major changes would change my history beyond recognition. The change Adella was working on herself was less like a butterfly flapping its wings and more like an asteroid impact on her history. Her life had been stolen from her and in its place she was unconsciously weaving a whole new one for herself.

Patches and I watched as the mirror filled with her image, some pieces appearing out of nowhere, others coming slowly into focus, shifting and changing to fit as they did. While Adella crafted her new life, I plotted and planned as well, putting my own imagination to work.

It was almost an hour later when the image of Adella in the mirror was complete. It was a miracle that the Oblivion Courtiers hadn’t found us, a miracle and probably some very hard work by Way’s beast.

“It’s me.” Adella said, raising a withered old hand towards the supple young one in the mirror.

“If you want her to be.” I told her. “You can embrace her and make that life your own. “

“What will cost me?”

“You’ll have to give up what you are now. Everything you do, will be on you. There won’t be a Shadow Court spirit in charge. You’ll have to decide how to live your own life.”

She nodded.

“I’m ready.” and with that she stepped forward into the mirror. The image of the young woman stepped out of the mirror while the reflection of the old crone faded away leaving only emptiness behind.

I started to ask Adella how she felt but I was cut off by a gust of wind and the sizzle of nearby lightning. Bracing myself against the wind, I watched as a familiar sky galleon aero-braked into position above us.

“Ahoy the land! Be there a lass by the name of Molly among you?”, Captain Rumbeard of the Star Runner hollered down, his voice lilting in the slippery song of his native language.

“Aye Captain! Permission to come aboard!” I hollered back as I shifted into being a Sky Pirate once more.

I’d run long enough. There was a battle coming and it was high time I got ready for it.

I sat in the wreckage of my home, grateful that it wasn’t also the wreckage of my life. I was myself, but after losing my parents, destroying my house and burning in the flames of the unreal, I wasn’t sure I knew what that meant anymore.

The black flames hadn’t hurt me physically, my skin wasn’t singed, my hair was fine, but inside I felt nothing but emptiness.

“We have a lot to talk about.” James said.

“I know.” I replied. There were so many answers I wanted, so much I had to tell him but none of it seemed to matter.

“First thing: Are you ok?” James asked.

I tried to answer that and came up short a few times before settling on “I don’t need any medical attention.”

“Good.” He was eyeing me critically though. He wasn’t sure what he believed anymore, but he had a few scraps of faith he could afford to give me.

“So you’re Aegis?” I asked. I was afraid to let silence settle in. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever be able to start talking again if it did.

“How did you know?”

“The costume. Kind of a giveaway there.”

“Before that. You knew when you woke me up.”

“Yeah.” I tried to picture how I could start explaining what had happened tonight and I came up blank.

“Ok.”, he said, letting my non-answer slide, ”What about Mom and Dad. What…what happened to them?”

“The Shadow Court took them. Possessed them.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. Below the Earth.” I almost couldn’t say the words. It felt like the more I said, the more I was accepting it.

“That’s not possible. The Shadow Court’s dead. We saw them.”

“It was a trick. They were scared. They abandoned their bodies and hid in your shadows.”

“My shadows?”

“Yours and the other heroes.”

“They can’t do that!”

“Yes they can. They just haven’t had to for a long time.”

“How do you know that? What are you?” James was being torn apart by denial and terror at what he’d unwittingly unleashed.

“I don’t know.”, I admitted. I fought to keep the tears out of my eyes but it was a losing battle. A long silent moment dragged on before I looked up. James lifted his head too and smiled at me strangely.

“Oh god, I know how that feels.”

It was my turn to be confused.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I wasn’t always Aegis.” he replied.

“When…” I started to ask him, but he cut me off.

“We should probably compare notes on that later. If Mom and Dad are in trouble, we need to help them.”

“How?” I asked. From the Dreamlit world I could see through the Shadow Court’s glamours, but I didn’t know where to look for them. Meta-awareness might have been able to tell me, but it felt numb, deaf and blind. Probably due to channeling the black fire, I guessed.

“I don’t know. We need to think of something though.”

“What about Athena?”

“She was the one who put me on the Shadow Court’s trail in the first place. That’s why I was late tonight. I’m sorry.”

I nodded in acceptance of the apology, refusing to speculate on how things might have gone differently. Feeling empty seemed better than dealing with regrets on that scale.

“So if she had you hunting them, then she wasn’t sure where they were before they escaped from their lair right?”

“Probably.”

“We won’t be able to track them then. If the Shadow Court could hide from her sight before, I’m sure they’re hidden from it now.”

“I don’t understand though. Why would they do this? Mom and Dad? They don’t take adults. They take kids. It’s always kids.”

“A lot’s changed tonight.” I said. I didn’t want to be cryptic. I wanted to tell him everything. I wanted him to know everything that I did and then tell me it was all ok and he’d be able to handle everything. That wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t right, but I wanted it anyways.

“It was at the library wasn’t it?” James asked with a strange catch in his voice.

“What?”

“That’s when you got the call right?”

“The call?”

“That’s when you changed, when you got whatever that shape changing, death fire power thing you can do.”

Something about his description hit a weird nerve in me and I actually laughed.

“Shape Changing Death Fire Power? You make it sounds like I’m the drummer for a metal band or something.”

James smiled back, without laughing.

“Yeah, maybe. It’d be easier than having another metahuman in the house.” his grin was wry but I could see a lot more pain hiding behind it than there should have been. Meta-awareness was still shot but I knew him. It took a moment of knocking my gray cells together to catch a glimpse of things from his perspective.

“It’s not your fault.” I assured him.

“Yeah.” there was zero conviction in his agreement, so I grabbed his arm.

“No. Seriously. What’s happening with me? It started way before the library. Remember in the morning when I was totally zoning out?”

“Yeah?”

“I was already ‘waking up’ at that point.”

“Waking up?”

“I don’t know how else to describe it. You said it was a “call” for you right? Because Athena chose you? No one chose me. I kind of “chose” myself.”

“You just decided to develop superpowers and you did?”

“No. More like, I was in the right place at the right time and made a choice that put me in the position to ‘wake up’ in a way I hadn’t before. Most of what I can do? It’s just applying my imagination to things.”

“Imagination? How do you shoot black fire with your imagination?”

“In the real world, I can’t. Here though? I guess I just need to be pushed far enough.”

“What do you mean ‘here’?”

“Ah, right. Sorry, this still looks like home. That’s the other thing I can do. There’s another world, it’s dangerous to know about, but well, here you are. It’s called the ‘Dreamlit world’.”

“So you can create portals?”

“No…or actually yes, but this isn’t a parallel Earth. It’s not actually even “real”. Think of it like a dream. I can push the real world and the dreamlit world together. So we’re sort of partially real now and partially just a dream. When I let them go, well, you’ll see what really happened to our house then.”

“So you can make your imagination real?”

“Not exactly. What happens in the Dreamlit world doesn’t map precisely to what happens in the real world.”

“What about the Shadow Court then? What really happened to them?”

“In the real world? The ones that were here, the ones that I burned, they never existed in the first place. We can remember them because we were partially outside the real world when they were annihilated.”

“I don’t understand.”

“That black fire? It doesn’t just burn you. It erases you from history. Past, present, and future. You’re more than gone, you never were and never will be. I…I shouldn’t have done that, I shouldn’t have used it.”

“Why?”

“If you hadn’t stopped me, I wouldn’t have stopped it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I wasn’t burning them because I wanted to, I was burning them because I couldn’t stop myself. After they were gone, I would have been the only one left holding any of their power. I didn’t want you to see that.” I fell silent. I felt ashamed of what I’d been thinking then. I was glad James had stopped me when he did.

“You’re an idiot.”

“What?” I drew back, stung by the anger in his words.

“Don’t ever think like that. Ever.”

“Why?”

“I don’t care how bad it is. You come to us. To me. To Dad. To Mom. You don’t leave us like that.”

“I don’t…”

“No. Don’t. I’m not losing someone like that. Not ever again.”

His rage and pain wasn’t directed at me, but I felt the force of them anyways. I knew that James and his Dad had stepped in to fill the hole in my family from when my Dad had died. I’d never thought that Mom and I were filling a hole in his family too.

“I won’t.” I promised. My new family wouldn’t have remembered me if the black fire had consumed me. They wouldn’t have been able to grieve, but the hole would still have been there, the absence of me.

I felt less empty inside thinking about that.

“We should go. Even if you got all of the Shadow Court that were here, it sounds like there are still others left right?” James said.

“Yeah, all of them in fact. They all came through with you guys. I think you had the fewest because of your shield.”

“I can’t believe they were able to do that at all.”

“They’re millenia old. They don’t have to tangle with things tougher than themselves very often because they’re scary good at hiding. Secret hidey holes? Those are like catnip to them. It’s not your fault. If anything its probably mine.”

“How?”

“If I’d let them take Samantha, none of this would have happened.”

“Samantha?”

“There was a little girl at the library. I…I didn’t tell you everything about what happened there.”

“So let me get this straight: you just started developing your powers today and the first thing you did was take on a mob of boogeymen to save a girl you’d never met before?”

“Umm…”

“It’s gotta be something in Dad’s cooking.” James shook his head in disbelief.

“What do you mean.”

“That’s what I did too. That’s why Athena chose me.”

“I don’t suppose you had a little guy in white show up to give you a cryptic starters guide speech?”

“Owl. Couldn’t speak. Just hooted when I was headed in the right direction.”

“Nice. I’m starting to think I should write a book.”

“Later, first we get you somewhere safe.”

“Where do you have in mind?”

“Olympus.”

“Is that allowed?”

“Don’t really care, but in this case I’m pretty sure its cool.”

I turned the idea over in my head. Olympus, not the mountain in Greece, but the celestial realm. Home of the ultra-powerful spirits humanity knew as the Greek and Roman gods. I’d be safe from the Shadow Court there. James would be able to recruit some serious help and there was a decent chance the Goddess of Wisdom and Battle Strategy, aka his patron, could put together a plan to get our parents back.

“That sounds perfect. We should get my body though. I kind of lose track of it when I’m on a different plane.”

“Uh, what?” James asked.

“Easier to show you.” I said. I led the way up to my room. My fiery rampage had left the stairs wrecked but talking with James had helped me pull myself back together well enough that I was able to conjure supports and new steps as needed.

“So, one thing, my bedroom looks a little weird. It’s a side effect of some stuff that happened, but, just don’t freak out ok?” I said. Explaining the whole “by the way, I’m also a Faerie Queen now” thing was more than I wanted to get into.

I stepped into my room and felt naked terror run through me. We weren’t alone. Swifter than words or thought, I transformed again, black robes exploding around me in a flare of purple fire.

All throughout the palatial room beyond my door, in precise formation, knelt figures engulfed in black fire. Figures that resembled the Shadow Courtiers I’d seen earlier. The Oblivion Knight sat on a throne of silent flames, behind and above them, an orb of black fire held lazily in his hand. At his right side stood a Shadow Courtier that was taller than the rest.

Her features were lost to black fire that had consumed her but her bearing was unmistakable. We stood before the Queen of the Shadow Court. Not the former Queen who I had rescued, this was the reigning Queen. The one who carried the true power of the Shadow Court. The Oblivion Knight has burned her up. That was why the Shadow Court didn’t remember having a Queen anymore. She’d been erased from their history. In here place stood the Oblivion Queen.

“You join us at last.” the Oblivion Knight said. His voice was different. Less cosmic. More real. I wasn’t sure what that meant exactly, but I was certain it wasn’t good.

“Who is that, Jin?” James asked.

“That’s the Oblivion Knight. He’s here to destroy the world.”

We were dead. Aegis’ shield was powerful but it did have its limits. Even giving myself over to the rage that had destroyed the Shadow Court the first time wouldn’t save us. The black fire wouldn’t harm them anymore. It’s what they had become.

“I am here to offer you again a place at my side. To end this.”

“End what?” James, or rather Aegis asked. In between us and the Oblivion Courtiers, the blue radiance of Athena’s shield flickered to life.

“Everything.” the Oblivion Knight answered. There was a tone of amusement in his voice. It was creepy, but also puzzling. Meta-awareness gave me short bursts of insight, but nothing that fit together to form a coherent picture.

“Have you forgotten what I told you?” I asked him.

“Empty words and empty threats.”

“I won’t join you.” I told him. It seemed like a futile gesture. He’d picked this spot to prove a point. He had the power to break through any barrier I could put up. Olympus would be only a temporary refuge and while I cowered there, my world would burn.

“Then perhaps you will join her instead?”, the Oblivion Knight said. A sweep of his hands parted the Oblivion Courtiers from his side, revealing the girl who stood at his left hand.

Way rose to her feet, silent with unfocused eyes.

“You seem to have some fondness for my little doll.” the Oblivion Knight observed. “You know her strength too. Join me or perish at her hands, the choice is yours.”

“Aegis, get out of here.” I told my brother quickly.

“No way in hell.” he answered back through clenched teeth.

“Wasn’t a suggestion.” I dream spoke to him.

I didn’t wait for an answer or a response from anyone before I split the Dreamlit World apart from the physical world. On the real side of the barrier, James and my physical body, on the other all of the baddies, Way and my Dreamlit self.

“I’m not going to join you and I’m not going to fight her.” I told the Oblivion Knight. In the physical world, I felt James lift me up. A second later there was a tingle of electric charge in the air and then my body was gone, whisked away by Zeus’s Lightning. Separated across the dimensions again, I couldn’t feel my physical body any more than I could when I’d been in the Shadow Court’s realm. At least this time it wasn’t trapped in a burning building though.

“An unfortunate choice. Destroy her.” the Oblivion Knight waved Way forward with a flick of his hand.

Her steps were slow and halting. At first I thought the Oblivion Knight had broken her but then I saw the pauses for what they were. Way was fighting the command.

I looked into her eyes.

“Run! Please!”, she dream spoke to me. She was lost in a tumult of confusion but some part of her knew she didn’t want to obey the command she’s received.

“I can’t.” I dream spoke back to her. I was surrounded by Oblivion Courtiers. They were only immobile because there was no need for them to move. If I ran they would catch me and if they didn’t the Oblivion Queen’s Guard would.

They were the other major heroes from the Task Force. Professor Platinum, Invertix, the Red Shadow, and Constellation. They stood beside the Oblivion Queen as her personal guard. Even if I could weave some trick with my title as Queen to usurp control of the Oblivion Court, even if I could talk Way into not fighting me, I would still have to deal with them.

I couldn’t win this fight. I’d promised James I wouldn’t give up again though, so no matter what it cost, I had to try.

The purple flames of the Shadow Court wouldn’t be enough against the Oblivion Courtiers but I summoned them forth anyways and sent them coursing down my scepter. Way flashed forward, striking with her black scythe as I did. Scythe and scepter locked, bringing us face to face. In her eyes I saw panic and fear.

“I won’t hurt you!” I promised her. Except she wasn’t worried about me hurting her. She was terrified of what she might do to me. Or how she might let down the Oblivion Knight. Or both. My meta-awareness had recovered enough to whisper that much to me. There was a geas, a compulsion laid on her, but that alone wasn’t enough to control her will. There was something beneath it, something she clung to willingly that was threatening to rip her in two.

And yet still she resisted the order to fight me. I didn’t understand it and I knew she didn’t either, but we didn’t need to. Neither of us could finish this fight.

As though bending to that thought, the black flames on her scythe and the purple Shadow Court flames on my scepter recoiled away from each other. They weren’t responding to us though. They couldn’t touch one another. I thought back to the Shadow Court’s realm and the way the Heart of the Realm had held off the black flames. It was a refuge but it wasn’t going to save me. I couldn’t call up anywhere near as much power as the Heart of the Realm had and even that hadn’t been enough to hold off the Oblivion Knight.

I struggled desperately to think of some other path I could take, some trick that would save me or at least buy me time. I was walking in the Dreamlit world so I had lot of options, but unfortunately so did my adversaries. I couldn’t be killed, but the black fire didn’t kill, it unmade. I wasn’t sure what that would mean but I suspected I wouldn’t be able to recover from it as easily as a regular dream death.

I could see that Way was struggling the same as I was. Her eyes were darting in every direction, until they landed on something behind me and flared open. I saw clarity there and the briefest moment of relief.

Then I felt the fangs of a monstrous beast bite into me.

My living room was filled with Shadow Courtier spirits and one person shielded from them by an aura of blue light. The same blue aura that shields the hero Aegis. But the person within the aura was James.

My brother was a superhero. That hit me harder than the fact that my house had been invaded by hundreds of Shadow Courtiers. He was a superhero and I hadn’t had the first clue.

For a moment, the presence of the Shadow Courtiers didn’t enter my mind. They might as well have been socks that I’d left on the floor for as much of my attention as they commanded.

James was Aegis.

That wasn’t possible, but I could see his shield, right there on his arm. I could see the sanctuary it created around him. Looking closely I could even see the Mark of Athena on his brow. He was her Chosen One. The vessel the ancient goddess empowered to safeguard the mortals she loved so much.

My brother was a superhero!

A sleeping superhero?

At first it looked like the Shadow Courtiers had smothered him but the way he lay on the couch in the living room was all too familiar. It didn’t say “smothered by alien monsters”, it said “passed out from studying too late in front of the TV.”

I wanted to go and wake him up. I wanted to shake about a dozen answers out of him right away but the thought that I’d wind up waking up a few hundred Shadow Courtiers in the process was sufficient to convince me to tread lightly. I might be the next best thing to indestructible in the Dreamlit world but that didn’t mean I was ready to fight an army like that.

Instead, I checked out my room. Using my physical body was slow and sluggish but I was able to confirm there were no signs of the Shadow Court. Like Minnie’s labyrinth, my room was a sanctum sanctorum. A refuge. In the Dreamlit world that translated to it being very hard to invade. With the title I carried, and backed by the power I was developing, even the army of evil Faeries camped outside weren’t powerful enough to force their way in.

That’s why I hadn’t woken up possessed by one or more of them.

“What the hell are they doing here?” I wondered.

Following Aegis.

I winced. James had mentioned that Aegis had joined the heroes who assaulted the Shadow Court’s realm. I knew that the Courtiers had abandoned their bodies and traveled back with the heroes to the physical world. Clearly as Aegis, James had been shielded from them, and still was to some degree. Just as clearly though that shield didn’t protect him completely.

He wasn’t possessed, which was cause for celebration, but he was the spiritual equivalent of a plague carrier. Once the Shadow Court woke up, they would be on the hunt for new bodies. For long term use they needed children but under the current circumstances anyone would do.

Meta-awareness had told me that the Shadow Court needed time to regain their energy. Based on the sleeping horde in my house, it was right. I’d missed one important bit of information though. They needed time to regain their strength, but if an immediate opportunity (or threat) presented itself they’d react. Like in Minnie’s room.

Like with my parents.

Meta-awareness gave me that bit of information like an icicle to the abdomen. I’d left them alone with James. James and the horde of Courtier spirits that were tagging along with him.

I raced to their room in the Dreamlit world and peered over into the physical world. It was empty in both worlds and the bed in their real room was still made.

They hadn’t been protected like James was, or like I was.

I tried to picture what had happened. They’d come back from meeting with the police, if they’d even been able to get to see the police? I couldn’t tell. Worry was cramming all awareness, meta or otherwise out of my skull. One way or the other, they’d come back and then…

And then the Court had taken them. I didn’t want to think about that. I couldn’t.

Meta-awareness forced its way back in. I had to know.

The Court had been drowsing only lightly when my parents got back. The monsters had noticed their arrival. My parents on the other hand had never noticed the danger they were in. How could they? Silent, invisible spirits weren’t something they could defend themselves against.

The Shadow Court had awoken, just a few of them, but that was enough. They’d crept into my Mom’s shadow. Into James’ Dad’s reflection. My parents had screamed at last, but the Shadow Court held their voices. Once they felt the Shadow Court creeping inside them, Mom and Dad had fought, just like all the other victims of the Shadow Court, and just like all the other victims it had been to no avail.

James hadn’t suspected anything either. Mom and Dad going up to bed after a long night? Ok, in other breaking news water was still wet. The Shadow Court couldn’t control him thanks to Athena’s gifts but they didn’t have to wait long before sleep claimed him and they were free to move about.

They’d been consumed by rage and terror then at both James and me.

The Court wanted to kill James. To kill me. They craved it badly. We weren’t their usual class of prey. In their archaic eyes we both counted as adults rather than children. Even so our deaths would provoke the sense of loss they needed so desperately.

James was beyond their reach though. No force either of my parents could exert would breech Athena’s shield.

As for me? On some level they knew to fear me. They could have lit our house on fire to try to get to me through the wards around my sanctum. Burning things had become something of a theme for the night after all, but they chose not to. They knew that what walked out of those flames would not be something they could deal with.

It wouldn’t be me, not anymore. If they pushed me that far, I wasn’t sure what I would become, but I could feel how terrible it would be. Terrible and wondrous.

The temptation I’d felt when I was channeling the title of the Faerie Queen was still there. The raw desire to hurt those that hurt me, to take everything from those who had taken away the person who was the most precious to me. No extreme of punishment was too far go, no damnation too horrible to lay against them.

Tears that I couldn’t hold back poured down my face. They had my mother! She’d been coming to talk to me and they’d stopped her!

I slammed my hand against the wall of the Dreamlit over and over.

I knew what they were going to do with her too.

She was too old for them to mold into their own image. That was something they could only manage with children and not even all children. Instead they would use her up. Each spell, each bit of magic they cast while possessing her would be fueled by her life force. They wouldn’t spend that casually, but they wouldn’t hesitate to use it either, especially not when they had the opportunity to reach their real objective.

The Shadow Court needed many things. A new realm. New bodies. Even a new Queen, though they were unaware of that need still. In the end though there was one need that surpassed all of the others. Power. They needed raw power. It was bred into them. They had to draw in the pain of loss. Without it they would fade away.

They were immortal, they could never die, but that didn’t mean they were without end. Where death held the promise of rebirth, the end for a Shadow Courtier held no such comfort. When they ended, they were simply gone.

They’d use my Mom and James’ Dad and all the other adults they could capture to stave off that end. To gather the sort of power they required. To kidnap and destroy children.

I stopped pounding the Dreamlit wall and noticed that I’d cracked it almost the whole way through. From the other side of the wall an inky blackness seeped. I hadn’t broken only the wall, I’d been beating on the Dreamlit barrier to the Unreal.

The ethereal smoke from the Unreal was oddly familiar but it took me a few seconds to place it. The Oblivion Knight’s flames. I’d wondered what would drive someone to where the Oblivion Knight was. Looking at the empty room, I began to understand.

“I need to wake James up”, I told myself. The risk of waking up the Shadow Court didn’t matter anymore. I didn’t care what they tried to do. They couldn’t hurt James and all they could do to me was given me an excuse to “deal with them”.

I started to head back downstairs to the living room. I felt heavy robes settle on my shoulders as I walked. The Faerie Queen’s robes. I felt a warm, smooth weight in my hand. The Queen’s sceptre. I felt the heat of blazing briars on my bow.

I wasn’t consciously willing the change, but I wasn’t consciously fighting it either. Around me, the Dreamlit world and the real world began to merge. From the unlit corners of the house I heard the first stirrings of the Court.

I laughed and it didn’t sound like me at all. By the time I reached the living room, I was taller and stronger, faster and more graceful.

“Wake up.”, I said. I stood over James with my sceptre burning in one hand like an unholy torch. I couldn’t touch him. Athena’s shield kept me away as easily as it did the Shadow Court.

James made a barely coherent grumbling sound and turned away from me on the couch.

“Wake Up! They’ve got Mom and Dad!” I screamed. That penetrated whatever happy dream he was having. With a jolt, he was upright and blinking.

“Who are you?”, he demanded not recognizing me.

We weren’t in Faerie, but we were surrounded by them. Names were as dangerous here as they had been in the Shadow Court’s realm.

I didn’t care.

“I’m Jin, you idiot.” It wasn’t fair to be angry with him. I didn’t look like myself anymore, and the ‘Jin’ he knew would never have dressed the way I was.

“Shadow Court.” he spit the words out like a curse.

“She is not one of us. Just a little pretender playing dress up.” said one of Shadow Courtiers that had assembled behind me.

“How are you here? What have you done to my family?” James clenched his fists and I saw his clothes fade away, replaced by Aegis’ armor.

“You brought them! And they took Mom and Dad!” I was shaking. I didn’t want to hate him. I knew I should have been paying attention to the Courtiers, but they didn’t matter. James did. He was a hero. He was supposed to prevent things like this, but they never did. Not with my Dad. Not with my Mom. Heroes were never there when you needed them.

“Yes. The Mother and the Father. Like so many others for the Grand Feast.”

The Shadow Court took turns, a different Courtier saying each words.

“Like we shall take the Sister.” they continued. And then one of them touched me. A light finger, brushing gently down my cheek.

Black fire burst from my sceptre. The flames of the unreal wreathed my head. When I spoke my voice was unrecognizable as human, much less as my own.

“No.” I felt like I whispered it, but the word resounded off the walls and shook the foundations of the house.

The Shadow Court froze, every one of them, except for the Courtier that had touched me. That one tried to scramble away, blurring into inhuman speed. It wasn’t fast enough.

I buried the burning end of my scepter in his chest and watched as he turned to ash. In two seconds he was consumed and the next second he was gone, erased from all of history. I could remember his screams but they weren’t enough.

The black flames lit my robe and caught in my hair and along my bare skin. I didn’t burn though, I transformed. Black armor and eyes like galaxies in an empty sky.

With a sweep of my hand, I cast the flames outwards. The Shadow Courtiers burned by the score. Our house didn’t do so well either, but what did it matter? Without my family it wasn’t a home anymore, it was just a box of wood. Wood the Shadow Court had touched, as rotten as they were.

The Courtiers tried to fight me. I’d given them my name. The ones who were the most adept at glamour casting, who counted themselves among the High Magicians of the Court, sang rhyming chants of binding to hold me and strip me of both power and life. They couldn’t have made a worse mistake.

Names are dangerous things. To know something’s name is to hold the power to command its attention. There are some entities that should never be invoked though. Entities that you never, ever want the attention of.

I was one them.

As each Courtier spoke, they gained my attention. The breath they uttered my name with became black fire on their lips. The flames ignited them from within and they burned away without even being able to choke out a cry for mercy.

I saw James standing in the flames. His costume covered him head-to-toe so all I could see was his body language. He was horrified. The Shadow Court burned and vanished around him and all he could see was the out of control monster was that bent on destroying everything.

“Go.” I whispered and again the house shook with the thunder of my word. I didn’t want him to be a part of this. I hated him for not saving my Mom, but I loved him too. Athena’s shield held back the flames, but my word reached him.

I saw him reach skyward for Zeus’s Lightning. The bolt would carry him to Athena’s reflecting pool in the celestial realm of Olympus. The Shadow Court was too distracted being destroyed at my hands to follow him there and even if they could they were tiny things compared to the might of even a single goddess, much less a pantheon of them.

James would be able to regroup there. He could consult Athena’s wisdom. He could gather allies. He wouldn’t have to see what I was going to become.

Through my rage, a bubble of happiness rose at the thought that James wouldn’t know what I’d done. Once my rage burned out, the black fire would consume what was left and I’d be no more either. There’d be no pain for anyone I left behind. They wouldn’t even know I’d ever been there.

“Go.” I dream spoke to him. I turned away both unable to watch him leave and intent on finishing the last of the Shadow Court off. Or the last of the ones that had invaded my home. Someone else would have to take care of the rest.

The Shadow Court was streaming out of the confines of the house at supersonic speeds. They thought that put them beyond my reach. Unfortunately for them, my meta-awareness could track them all too easily. I was so focused, they were the only thing I could see in fact.

Clenching my fist on the scepter of darkness, I raised it overhead and called down bolts of the unmaking fire from the sky. Wherever the Courtiers ran, the bolts sought them out. I destroyed cars and trees, burned holes through houses and knocked out power for three blocks around us.

In the sky above, I saw a vast rift start to form. The emptiness of the Unreal waited beyond it, ready to swallow whatever I chose to throw into it. I could toss Brassport, the entire city, in there if I wanted. The Shadow Court hadn’t had time to move far beyond its borders with their limited energy. I could rid the world from a plague that was millenia old for the cost of one small city.

Strong arms wrapped me into a deep hug.

“Jin?” James asked, still disbelieving what some part of him knew to be true.

I struggled against the hug for a moment. It was too alien a thing to what I’d become. Or was on the verge of becoming. I didn’t know anymore.

It didn’t matter.

I felt the black flames sputter out. I felt the briars on my head and the scepter in my hand vanish into the ether. I felt my robes disappear and my normal clothes return. I slumped into myself and I was shorter and slower, weaker and clumsier.

I was me, or whatever was left of me.

We tend to think of the big moments in life as things that have a lot of build up. Maybe that’s because admitting that everything can change in less than the blink of an eye is too hard to bear. We need to feel some level of safety in order to go about our lives.

I’d felt safe with Minnie. I had to. Her house (apart from her room) was like any other house. Her family was like any other family. When my meta-awareness screamed a warning that danger was approaching I’d been slow to react to it because danger was so out of context for the moment. I paid for that hesitation with blood.

One moment I saw the Shadow Courtier enter Minnie’s room, strolling casually in from the hallway. My first thought, before recognizing it, was to separate the Dreamlit world from the physical one so that Minnie’s father wouldn’t notice anything weird.

My next thought was the observation that I kind of needed those internal organs that the Shadow Courtier had perforated with his knife-like hand.

“JIN!”, Minnie yelled. Without meta-awareness to warn her, Minnie was lagging a little behind me and so she merely got to see the gory spectacle after it was far too late to prevent it.

The Shadow Courtier was surprised by the turn of events too though. It had acted on pure instinct and so was slow, by Shadow Court standards, as it whipped its head to see Minnie, all four feet eight of her cowering on the blood splattered bed.

Meta-awareness hammered in a truckload of information in the brief instant of confusion the Courtier displayed.

I’d mistaken the Courtier for her father because that’s who the Courtier’s spirit was possessing. It had been latched onto her father but was sleeping to until it could leech enough energy from him to act at full power. By entering her bedroom, her father had stepped into the Dreamlit world and the Shadow Courtier had found a being of like-power waiting for it. Me.

To say it found my presence disturbing was an understatement. It knew on some instinctive level that I neither prey nor pawn and that I had the power to challenge it. For the Shadow Court that was the definition of “deadly enemy”. That had woken it up in a big hurry. In between one heartbeat and the next it had seized control and reacted.

In the millisecond window available, meta-awareness wasn’t able to tell me how Minnie’s father had become possessed, just that the body underneath the glamour was his but the mind in control was not. The last tidbit of knowledge it was able to impart was that the Shadow Courtier would certainly kill Minnie next. A former pawn it couldn’t control anymore definitely made the list of “deadly enemies”.

I grabbed the arm that the Courtier had buried in my chest and wrenched the Dreamlit world apart from the physical world. It was like trying to rip a phonebook in half. Pulling with all my might in one direction was impossible. I couldn’t take just the Shadow Courtier with me, so I had to, metaphorically, open the phonebook up and tear it in half another way. I brought the Shadow Courtier over with me and Minnie as well. Everyone with glamour tumbled onto the Dreamlit side of the barrier, while Minnie’s Dad and her bedroom remained in the physical world.

That even carried my blood off her sheets.

Then I died.

Or at least appeared to. It was rather artistic I felt. My body sublimated into a gentle stream of rose petals that fluttered softly away. The Shadow Courtier was left at a complete loss. Mission accomplished, except that I wasn’t able to share what was really happening with Minnie.

There’s a myth that if you die in your dreams you’ll die in real life too. Even before I’d gotten my powers I’d known that wasn’t true. My nightmares had proven it early on. When you die in your dreams, the dream simply changes and you re-enter it later in some other guise.

The implications of the same thing being true for me even when I wasn’t technically dreaming weren’t lost on me. The Shadow Courtier had been right to strike quickly at me. And also very, very foolish.

This wasn’t the first time I’d died in the Dreamlit world, Way had “killed” me too, but this time I learned something new. I knew Minnie hated her minotaur form. What I didn’t know was how much that didn’t matter when one of her friends was in trouble. Where the Shadow Courtier’s attack had been like lightning, Minnie’s roared like rolling thunder.

She rose from her bed as the tiny human girl she was but by the time her feet hit the floor she’d cast that off. Reason was left behind as well. In the eyes of the beast that towered over the Shadow Courtier there was only blinding rage.

When she struck, her fist flew fast enough that even the Courtier’s hyper-natural speed wasn’t sufficient to avoid the blow. Her fists struck the the monster before her like a stick of dynamite detonating in the small central chamber of the labyrinth. The impact shattered the Courtier’s spirit body to a bag of pulp and imparted enough force to blast him through the nearest wall. That the wall was solid stone barely slowed him down.

Unfortunately, as a spirit body, the Shadow Courtier was able to recover from the blow. From the hole in the wall, he oozed forth and congealed upwards into a vaguely humanoid shape.

Minnie howled defiance and in her rage probably would have beat on the Courtier till no stones remained standing in the labyrinth. I would have let her too, except for the cost she would have paid. Apart from the physical toll that sort of violence would have taken on her, I wasn’t sure how well her mind would have handled the psychic cost of losing herself to her rage for that long.

I tried to think of what I could do, apart from “die” repeatedly, while I watched Minnie beat on the reforming Shadow Courtier. Her blows were unrelenting, smearing the reforming goop of the Shadow Courtier’s spirit body into the shattered remnants of the floor. Whatever level of regeneration he had, there was no way that didn’t hurt like hell.

Pain was hardly a foreign experience for the Shadow Court though. Through the fusillade of hammer blows it managed to reform a whip like arm that grasped Minnie around the neck. Against anyone else the Shadow Courtier could have pressed that advantage and either strangled or decapitated their foe. Minnie was far too durable for either of those tactics to be an option though so the Shadow Courtier had to settle for hurling her away to buy time to regain its shape and rise to its feet.

I knew what was going to happen next. With its body reassembled, the Shadow Courtier would regain its full speed. Minnie was too tough for the Courtier to skewer her the way it had me, but a thousand smaller wound would achieve the same result.

I needed to save her, and meta-awareness provided an answer. It wasn’t a good answer. It wasn’t even an answer I was sure I could live with. In the face of what lay one moment away for Minnie though neither of those was enough to hold me back.

“Hold!”, I called, appearing in a crack of lightning between the two combatants.

I was Jin, but not as the human girl I was. My casual clothes were gone, replaced by a regal gown of black cloth and silver spikes. On my brow a crown of silver thorns rested, purple flames rising from them. In my hand I held a thin scepter carved from a human bone and adorned at its head with the dead Heart of the Shadow Court’s realm. I’d poured myself into the title that the former Queen had given me and crafted the illusion of its authority around me.

“Who…who are you?”, Minnie whispered. The force of my entrance had shocked her out of her rage.

I turned to the Shadow Courtier who been caught off guard by my arrival as well. He was in human form and was tensed like a bowstring waiting to snap.

“Proclaim Me!” I commanded the Courtier, letting meta-awareness guide my words once more. I felt the mindset of the role I was playing steal over me. He was beneath me, a servant and a pawn to do with as I wished.

It was dangerous to think that way, but critical that I play the role right. There were expectations of royalty that I had to meet or he would be free to strike against me as a pretender to the throne.

The Shadow Courtier’s gaze shifted around rapidly. He could see the signs, he knew what my bearing and dress and command meant, but none of it made sense to him. I saw the source of the dissonance in my two streams of memory.

I knew that the Shadow Court was ruled by a Queen, but that was a memory from my time in the Shadow Court’s realm. In the real world, in the new history of the Court, there had never been a Queen. Only glorious, pointless anarchy. The Courtier before me had never bent his knee to any ruler, but within the essence of what he was there was the allegiance and submission to the title I carried.

The dissonance within the Courtier built to an unbearable level and he cast around, desperate for an avenue of escape. I gestured and imagined the broken walls back into solidity. Another gesture and the exits to the central chamber vanished. He wasn’t going anywhere till I was done with him.

“I do not know you.” the Courtier said at last. He covered his fear with disdain.

We really couldn’t have that though could we? I shuddered at the thought as it appeared in my mind. I was happy for his fear and I knew that wasn’t right.

I swept the scepter forward and pointed it directly at him. I needed to end this soon before I lost myself in the role entirely.

“Whose office do I hold in my hand? What title do I bear?” I felt my lips twist maliciously over the words. The questions caused the Courtier more dissonance and pain. That felt good, far too good.

I fought against the feeling, struggling to remain the normal Jin I wanted to be for my Mom, but I had to play things out to the end with the Courtier. If I retreated into “normal Jin” neither Minnie nor I would leave the room. She’d be dead and I’d be a thrall of the Shadow Court.

The Shadow Courtier flinched at my words, his face contorting as he fought to hold back the words that filled him with terror.

“Answer!” I called with royal authority. I thought of my Mother. I thought of losing her. I gave a tiny spark of that fear of loss to the Heart gem. The dead jewel awoke and began to burn, hungry for more power.

I’d thought it was only the illusion of the Heart, that I’d left the “real Heart” in my room. I was wrong. My outfit might be an illusion, the role I was playing perhaps a deception, but the Shadow Court’s dead Heart gem was all too terribly real. It had come at my unconscious bidding and was a mark of office that no one, not even I, could deny.

“You carry the Queen’s Sceptre! But…”, the Shadow Courtier trailed off, unable to reconcile what he saw before him with what his immortal memory told him to be true.

“But there was no Queen of the Shadow Court was there?” I taunted him, picking at the only resistance he could offer me.

“No.”

“What title do I carry? What have I been named by a Courtier’s own lips?”

That I’d been tricked into the title didn’t matter. It was mine. It might destroy me to carry it, but by claiming the title fully as my own, I’d branded myself in a way that no member of the Shadow Court could mistake. No matter how much they might wish to.

“You were the Queen Who Has Fallen.”

“And what Queen of the Court remains to oppose me?”

“The Shadow Court has no Queen.”

“Had. The Shadow Court had no Queen.” I whispered, confident he could hear me.

“The Shadow Court needs no Queen!”

“The needs of the Court are irrelevant. All that matters is power.” I sneered. I took three long steps towards him and brought the burning scepter down towards his head. The flames within the Heart gem flared, desperate to consume the power within him.

“Bow.” I commanded, “Bow to your once and future ruler.”

Snarling, shaking and hating me to his innermost core, the Shadow Courtier dropped slowly to one knee.

“Who am I?” I demanded.

A part of me, a frighteningly large part of me, wanted him to resist. If he broke form, if he addressed me improperly I would be free to do as I wished with him. The Heart gem was ravenous. Just a little breech in decorum and I could let it slurp down his power and his immortal spirit as well. It would be delicious.

“My Queen.” he responded, head bowed in proper supplication.

I hated him. How dare he submit so easily? That was treasonous to the Shadow Court all by itself wasn’t it? I could destroy him for that couldn’t I? Of course I could.

All that mattered was power.

The scepter drifted towards his head before I clamped my hand steady. I wasn’t an Evil Queen, this was just a trick. If I tricked myself I’d lose everything.

The purple fire from the Heart gem had other ideas. It cast its light on my hidden desires. Did I really mind losing everything? What did I have that didn’t bring me pain? My Mom? I was going to lose her anyways. Better to cut the cord on my own. All kids need to grow up at some point right?

As the Queen of the Court, I would be free. I would take what I wanted and destroy any that stood against me. All the horror in the world? Everything that I tried so hard to hide from? I’d be able to embrace it, drink it, wield it like a weapon.

And what would I lose? What would I miss from the pathetic, powerless, pointless life that I’d had as Jin? Casting all that away would take no more than a flick of my wrist. Destroy this one creature that I held dominion over and I would claim the Court’s true power, not the weak illusion I wielded in its place.

I heard laughter and only knew it was my own from the way it shook my chest.

One small step. One tiny act of destruction, of a monster that had no right to live anyways. If I wanted to flee from all the confusion and sorrow I’d felt, all the pain and fear, the path was one small step away.

Behind me I heard Minnie whisper a single frightened word.

“Jin?”

It hit me like a hammer. That’s what I would lose. I would lose me. I wouldn’t be Jin anymore, I would only be the Shadow Queen.

I staggered for a moment, caught between the hunger for power and the escape it offered and the fear of losing the life that I had.

“Why would I want to be Jin?” I asked myself.

Because my life wasn’t pathetic, it was enviable. I had choices. My destiny was my own in a way that a Faerie Queen’s never could be.

My life wasn’t powerless either. I could change things, even without the powers I’d gained, I could make a difference for people. Maybe not a lot of people, but maybe enough.

Most of all though, my life wasn’t pointless. It was mine. It was all I had. Casting it aside to hide under a monster’s skin wouldn’t make me stronger. It would make me small. I’d be nothing more than one tiny part of what I could possibly be and no matter how many I ruled, I’d be alone.

The purple flame in the Heart gem began to sputter as I grasped back onto my own heart, my own center.

“Begone!” I commanded, channeling the last of the Faerie Queen illusion that I had left in me and gesturing one of the exits from the labyrinth open. I wove the path from it out to the physical world. I couldn’t afford to drop the act while the Courtier was still here, but maintaining it any longer wasn’t an option either.

Without looking up the Courtier vanished, a trail of mist marking his passage out of the labyrinth. Once I was sure he was gone, I collapsed to my knees and let the path to the physical world vanish. I was shaking so badly I couldn’t stand.

“Jin? Is that you?”, Minnie asked, rushing to my side. She’d transformed back to her human form.

“Careful. It’s me, but I’m not fully me right now.” I shuddered.

“What are you?”

“This disguise, it’s tough to pull off. Dangerous too. I need to make sure my head is clear.” I told her.

“What happened to you?”

“I played a trick on him. And you too. Sorry. There wasn’t time to explain.”

“Are you ok?”

“I will be. Let me send you back. The Courtier, he had your Dad. You need to check on him. I think he’s ok but he’s probably confused. I’ll call you later.” I said and with another wave of my hand swooshed Minnie back to the other side of the Dreamlit barrier.

I was lucky, her Dad had fallen when I separated the worlds and stunned himself. Minnie was able to disappear and reappear without history needing to change to accommodate that. I collapsed onto my butt on the floor of the labyrinth. Casting off the Queen’s role had taken more out of me than I’d expected.

Once I was sure I was back to myself, I let go and “woke up” in my bedroom in the real world. Opening bleary eyes, I looked at the clock beside my bed and discovered that it was past 2:00am. The struggle against the Shadow Courtier had taken only a couple minutes but trip through the labyrinth had taken a while.

2:00am was late though. Mom and Dad should have been home by then and whatever they found, they would have wanted to talk to me again. Something wasn’t right.

I looked out my window and saw that both cars were in the driveway. So they’d come back. None of the rest of the lights in the house looked like they were on though.

Which meant what? They’d come back and then gone quietly to sleep? That was weird. And out of character for them.

Part of me wanted to leave my room and see what was up but another part of my wanted to crawl under the covers and hide. I think the part that wanted to hide knew what was coming. To be on the safe side, I decided to do both. I crawled under my covers in the real world while projecting my Dreamlit self out once again.

In the Dreamlit world, my room was still the Faerie Queen’s boudoir and as such it stood secure and empty. As I stepped outside it through and looked down into the living room, I saw a tableau more horrific than even the Court’s red garden.

Minnie’s house had been invaded by a single Courtier. There were hundreds in mine.

At the center of them lay James, a shield on the arm across his chest and a dome of scintillating blue light around him.

Minnie’s labyrinth echoed with the growls of terrible beasts. The rough stonework was splashed with stains that suggested tremendous violence lurked around every corner. Though it was winter, the chill that hung in the air felt anything but natural. Crossing over the threshold and stepping into the labyrinth proper, only one thought came to mind.

“Looks friendlier than my bedroom.”

I wouldn’t find Minnie herself in the labyrinth of course. She wasn’t a dream walker the way I was. Somewhere in there though, I’d find the spot that corresponded to her actual bedroom and we’d be able to have a chat.

Assuming she was home.

And in her room.

It wasn’t the greatest plan admittedly, but I needed to talk to her pretty badly and it was the only place I knew I’d eventually find her.

There’s a trick to navigating mazes. Several tricks actually. As a reflection of Minnie’s persona, her Dreamlit labyrinth made some of those strategies impossible. Following one of the walls consistently to find your way through a maze only worked when the maze didn’t morph around you for example. Trails of breadcrumbs were similarly useless. I held a ball of string that I’d imagined into existence but it wasn’t going to help in that regards either.

I paused before letting myself lose sight of the labyrinth’s entrance. With my physical body, I could see my bedroom in the physical world. To an outside observer I was simply staring off aimlessly into space. If I needed to, I knew I could instantly reintegrate and “wake up”. Like, if Mom came back and wanted to talk to me.

If I ventured into the labyrinth, if my fickle and untrustworthy meta-awareness wasn’t enough to lead me through it, I wasn’t sure what I’d be able to do. Worst case I could imagine my body being stuck “daydreaming” like I was in some kind of mental breakdown state, while my Dreamlit self spent an eternity trapped in the maze.

If I didn’t speak to Minnie though, she could spoil everything. She could blow my whole “secret identity” before it even got going. That made it worth the risk, so into the labyrinth I went.

Psychics have described deep mind readings as entering a labyrinth of the other person’s psyche. It’s weird and dangerous and enlightening. Wandering into the labyrinth in Minnie’s room was all those things, except I wasn’t in her mind.

The Dreamlit labyrinth was, in it’s own way, as solid and deadly as one in the real world would have been. Possibly more so. Where a real world labyrinth could have been stocked with perils they would have been constrained by reality’s limits. Real fire jets need fuel to burn. Real scythe blades will rust over time. In the Dreamlit world however dangers persisted as long as the underlying reality cast a dangerous reflection.

My meta-awareness went into overdrive as I ventured into the labyrinth to deal with those dangers. Around the first corner I noticed splatters of dark brown that radiated out from a central line in the hall. That drew my attention to the slit in the ceiling farther down the corridor where the pendulum blade lay in wait.

It was exhilarating to feel the great gleaming blade whoosh past me as I passed down the hallway hugging the wall. Almost exhilarating enough to make me miss the pressure plates for the acid sprayers that were hidden around the next corner. Meta-awareness brought the sour smell of the acid up as an alarm though and I managed to step carefully past that trap too.

I moved forward and the sound of claws scratching on the rock above gave me warning to duck into a small alcove. I waited there as a sightless lizard the size of a pony dragged itself along the ceiling and around a corner.

As I dodged traps and hide from the lesser beasts that patrolled the corridors of the labyrinth, I came to understand what its presence meant. The labyrinth wasn’t in Minnie’s bedroom because the room was dangerous. It was there because she was dangerous and her bedroom was her sanctum. It was a reflection of her.

The Shadow Court had captured her years ago from what my meta-awareness could tell. As it guided me past more pits and pendulums, blow darts and flame traps, it filled in the details of what her story was and had been.

For Minnie, the time before her capture was fuzzy. The shift in the real world’s history had blurred her memories. What remained was that she’d been captured young and had spent years in captivity. She was my age now, physically, but it was hard to tell how old she really was since time flowed oddly in faerie worlds.

She’d been one of the children that they hadn’t been able to organize a rescue for in time. One day she was there, the next she was gone. It was only well after the fact that the police had worked out that she’d been taken by the Shadow Court and at that point she’d been gone too long for a rescue operation to be mounted.

She’d been held in the Shadow Court’s realm but, fortunately, they hadn’t interacted with her much. On the first day she’d arrived, they’d fitted her with the golden circlet I’d taken off her. From there she’d been left wandering in a labyrinth not unlike the one I was traversing.

The Shadow Court had wanted a fierce, powerful beast to act as a guard. One with human-level cunning but the kind of savagery needed to survive in their realm. In a way that was a mercy for Minnie. The Shadow Court couldn’t afford to “play with” the children that they needed in some way. The Court’s games were much too destructive on their “toys” to risk that.

Instead of having to endure the Shadow Court, Minnie had to endure the kind of loneliness usually reserved for prisoners condemned to solitary confinement. Only her confinement hadn’t been completely solitary. The circlet had called forth monsters from her psyche. She’d been hounded by the monsters of her Id so she’d learned to build her mind into a reflection of the labyrinth she was trapped in.

By hiding in her inner labyrinth, she was able to escape the Id monsters, but she also cut herself off from the outside world. When her mind withdrew into her inner labyrinth, her monsters were left in control of her slowly changing body. Eventually she would have disappeared into her inner labyrinth completely, leaving behind a beastial body and a beastial mind to guide it.

She was close to that when I found her, which was why the Shadow Court had moved her into the prison cell. Easier to feed her there. Easier to watch the progress of the change.

She was close but the transformation wasn’t complete. She wasn’t lost to the world, but she had changed in ways that left her mental scars visible for even the least observant. The Minnie who had been, the child I had never known, had been bright and gleeful. The new Minnie, the one I had “known” for a few months, was deeply introspective, but with a vicious temper when provoked.

She’d been suspended several times already and was at risk of either expulsion or repeating her freshman year due to the classes she missed. In a way none of that was her fault. She hadn’t broken a classmate’s nose who was making cracks about her height. She hadn’t sent a freshman boy to the emergency room for stitches when he tried to grab her butt. She’d been in the Shadow Court’s realm but thanks to the black fires that place had never existed. As far as our world was concerned, the Shadow Court’s realm had never been real, so history had to adjust.

I wondered why her history hadn’t switched to simply being imprisoned in one of the “new” subterranean Shadow Court realms. It was a closer fit and would have meant fewer alterations. Except that no one escaped the Shadow Court’s realms and I’d freed her and the others. So, apparently, these changes were the path of least resistance between those two fixed points in reality.

I explored my “new” memories of Minnie as I navigated closer to the center of the labyrinth.

My history had changed more significantly than I’d noticed at first. I hadn’t had many friends before. My friends from middle school had scattered to different high schools and I’d lost touch with most of them. There were a couple of girls that I hung out with a few times, but apart from having some classes together our lives didn’t parallel each others that much. I tended to bury myself in books a lot too, so I wasn’t all that aware when people were doing things.

That was the way it had been. In the new history, I had Minnie as a friend. And Nell. And Patches. And even Jessica?

I did a double take as that memory surfaced. Jessica had clearly not been my biggest fan. How had we wound up as friends in this new history? My thoughts were interrupted by the vista that lay around the next corner.

I’d reached the center of the maze and Minnie was waiting for me.

“What the hell am I?” she asked.

The room at the center of the maze was a direct reflection of Minnie’s bedroom in the physical world. Apart from being painted light pink rather than light yellow, it looked pretty similar to mine; more books and fewer stuffed animals, but otherwise the same general assortment of stuff.

Minnie sat curled up on her bed, her knees held tight to her chest. In the Dreamlit world I saw her as the minotaur-girl I’d first encountered. Probably seven feet tall or more and heavily muscled. In the real world though she was tiny. Four feet eight or so? “Mini Minnie”. That had been the name the girl in gym class had taunted her with.

In both worlds she had the same lost look in her eyes, and in both worlds she was looking directly at me.

“Minnie?” I asked. Her eyes met mine and I saw recognition there.

“Jin? What…”, she trailed off. I didn’t know how she was able to see me, or recognize me. I was still wearing Jenny’s blue goblin form, but apparently that wasn’t much of a disguise from someone who’d seen me in both forms before.

“Yeah, you called right?” I asked.

In response she lunged out of her bed and tried to grab me by the collar. Her Dreamlit minotaur form was insubstantial though and passed right through me. She wasn’t a dream walker so she didn’t have more than the wisp of a presence in the Dreamlit world.

In the physical world, she hit the floor of her room and then leaped back up to swing a fist at me. Her punch failed to connect as well though which left her sprawled back on her bed.

“A ghost. She’s a ghost. Now I’m, haunted too.”, she half cried, half giggled.

“Minnie, I’m sorry, I’m not a ghost. This was just the only way I could see you tonight.” I explained.

“What the hell are you then?”, she turned eyes filled with tears and rage to me.

“I’m…” I stopped. What could I say? That I was as human as she was? Given her minotaur side, that didn’t strike me as being particularly comforting for her.

“I’m your friend.” I said, only understanding as I said it how much I wanted that to be true. With the new memories came a deeper understanding of who she was. I’d been lucky to meet her in the Shadow Court’s prison, but I’d been luckier that the new world hadn’t scattered us to the wind.

Underneath the pain and the rage and the scars, Minnie was an amazing girl. We’d bonded in school not because I’d seen how much she’d needed a friend but because she’d seen how much I needed one. I’d been feeling lost and empty in the new school, missing something important, and Minnie had been the one to start talking to me.

Mistrust and insecurity was the legacy of her time with the Shadow Court and it had translated into the present as problems that she could find no cause for. Despite that, she’d been the one to reach out to me for no more reason than that she saw that she was needed.

“My friend? My friend’s not a little blue monster. She’s not a ghost. She’s just a normal girl. She’s just Jin.”

Her world rolled over me and I heard them echoing in my Mom’s voice. It hadn’t occurred to me to be worried about Minnie feeling the same way.

Quietly, I merged the Dreamlit world and the physical world. As I did I let Jenny’s form melt away to Jin’s. I wasn’t going to lose Minnie either and I knew what was said next needed to be real in every sense of the word.

“I’ve never been ‘just Jin’.”, I told her, “But a lot of this…”, I spun and changed to Jenny again and then Molly, “…is new.”

“You’re a faerie, aren’t you?”, she said, her expression shifting from anger to confusion to wariness.

“No. Not a faerie, although I did get tricked into being a Faerie Queen.”

“Tricked?”

“Yeah, I thought I could outsmart one, and she stuck me with her title so she wouldn’t get in trouble for breaking out of jail.”

“So, wait, I remember that! That wasn’t just a weird dream?”

“No.”

“So, I’m not going crazy? I really am a minotaur?”

“You’re really you.”

“And I’m a monster. I can see it. When I look in the mirror. Sometimes I can see what I really look like.”

“You’re not a monster.”

“How do you know? Do you know the kind of things I want to do? Do you know what the voices I hear sound like? I’m either crazy or those memories are real and I shouldn’t be here.”

She wasn’t giving me much context for what she was saying, so I turned to my meta-awareness to sort it out.

“The voices that you hear? Those are the whispers of the Shadow Court. The rage you feel? The way you want to lash out and destroy things? With what you’ve been through you’d be crazy not to feel that way.” I told her.

“But…”

“No.”, I cut her off, “There’s no ‘but’. You’re not a monster. You have power and a lot to work through, but you’re a fantastic person. And you’re my friend.”

“I don’t want it. The power I mean. I remember the place that burned. I remember what they did to me. I don’t want anything to do with them.”

“I’m the last person in the world who will tell you that you have to use your powers, but there is something you should know about them. They’re yours. The Shadow Court didn’t give you your strength or toughness or any of that. They stole you because they saw what you were going to grow up to be. What you could do.” I explained.

“I don’t care.”

“That’s ok. You can be as normal as you want to be. You’re not going to change under the light of the full moon or anything like that.”

“So what about the mirrors? Someone’s going to see what I really look like.”

“It’s not that easy. You can see yourself because you can see through your own glamours.”

“My what?”

As much as she frightened by what she was and what she could do, Minnie was still eager to understand it, to know who and what she was. I flashed back to talking with Pen. Was this what it had been like for him when he was answering my questions? If so I appreciated the difficulty he’d been under a little more.

Minnie was listening to me, which meant on some level she trusted what I was saying. I didn’t want to overwhelm her and I didn’t want to mislead her. Finding the balance between those was harder than it sounded, even with meta-awareness to help guide the way.

“Your spells basically. One of the things you can do is manipulate ‘glamour’. It’s the stuff that faeries make their magics from. You do it on an unconscious level but its something you could learn greater control over.”

“Is that why I look human now?” she asked.

“Yes, but don’t think that you’re a minotaur hiding under an illusion or anything. The truth is you’re both, each form is ‘really’ you. You just use glamour to change from one to the other.”

“So that’s how you change what you look like too?”

“Not exactly. My powers are weirder than that. I’m kind of still figuring them out.”

“How do you know all this?” Minniie asked.

“That was the first ‘gift’ I got. Remember what I told Jessica? She’s got fire, you’ve got physical power? I’ve got the cheat sheet for how things work. Only I’m missing like half the pages.”

“So you could be wrong about me then?”

“Maybe. I can make mistakes like anyone else.” I admitted. I didn’t want to, but I felt like had to stick with the truth to keep my meta-awareness on track.

“Right.” she said. She’d curled back up on herself. If I was wrong about her, if she really was a monster, all the wishful thinking in the world wasn’t going to do anything to prevent a horrible tragedy from occurring.

I couldn’t see the future. I couldn’t tell her that everything would definitely be ok and even if I could, I don’t think she could have believed me. Not after what she’d been through.

The only way I could see to convince her was to take the long, hard road of being there with her as her wounds healed and she adjusted to the new life she had. It wasn’t quick, or certain, but that was life.

“You wanted to ask me something.” she said, looking at me with fatigue and wariness.

“What do you mean?” I asked, perplexed by the non-sequitur.

“You wanted something from me right? That’s why you did this, came to see me this way.”

“Oh yeah. Well not something. I just wanted to ask you to keep my secret.” It sounded so stupid when I said it that way.

“Or else what?”

“Or else? Or else my Mom…”, I couldn’t say it outloud, I couldn’t make even the possibility of losing her that real, “Or else I’ll get really hurt. Seriously. It would be really bad.”

“I guess we’re even then. We’ve both got secrets that can’t get out right? We’ve both got family to protect.”

“Right.” I agreed.

That’s when the Shadow Courtier walked into Minnie’s bedroom.

Sometimes people can be what lifts us up. Other times they can be what drags us down. The times to watch for are when both of those happen at once. Those are the times that can tear us apart.

“Want me to tell her you’re not feeling well if she calls back?” James asked, seeing my ambivalence at the news of Minnie’s call.

I didn’t know.

If Minnie called back, it would be because she was desperate. I could almost see how the journey back to the physical world had gone for her and the others. One moment they were adrift in interplanar space, the next they were back “home”, but not to a home they’d ever known. New memories of a life where they’d never been abducted by the Shadow Court would have fought with the memories of what they’d suffered at the Shadow Court’s hands. I had my meta-awareness to help me sort it out. They would have been left thinking they were going crazy. I knew the feeling.

James interrupted my thoughts with a racking cough from out of nowhere. When I looked over he’d clutched onto the doorframe for support but was recovering quickly.

“Wait, how are you doing?”, I asked. He hadn’t been coughing earlier. He hardly ever got sick in fact.

“I’m fine.”, he said, clearing his throat forcefully. “Just sucked in a bit of dust or something. I’ll go load up on vitamin C though. Can’t miss the meet this weekend.”

In addition to football, James was on the Track and Field team, which was probably why he managed to stay so healthy. He was always watching what he ate and getting enough sleep and exercise. I loved him, but I hated him as brothers and sisters do too since he was a hard act to follow. Jerk even got better grades than me.

“If Mom and Dad need to talk to us when they get back let me know ok?” I asked before he left. I needed to make things right with them, needed that down to the marrow of my bones, but I didn’t know how I could manage it.

“Sure. With all that’s going on, they probably won’t get back till pretty late, so they’ll probably want to talk tomorrow.” he said.

That was the worst of both worlds in some ways. To have that conversation looming over me, while having plenty of time to worry about it. I was going to stew in anxiety all evening and get nothing even remotely resembling a wink of sleep.

I flopped over onto my back after James left and tried to think about something else. Anything else.

Food was unappealing, but I knew I should eat something. Maybe later. Maybe when Mom got back? It occurred to me, far too late to do any good, that I’d once again refused food in exactly the same way an evil faerie trying to dodge the Laws of Hospitality would. I was so brilliant. That wasn’t a healthy train of thought though so I looked for something else.

School? I might have had a test coming up, but I honestly couldn’t remember anymore. Even assuming I did, I couldn’t find enough functioning grey cells to care about it. I’d always tried to get good grades. Mom valued education and had always made time to help me with my homework when I needed it, so it was important to me too.

I pictured her not being there to help me with a math problem, the way Dad wasn’t there anymore. That brought me back to the edge of screaming.

I had to tell her. I had to show her. To make her believe.

I could see her face if I did though. I could see that careful, brittle, calm expression finally shattering and revealing the horror she felt underneath. She’d know I wasn’t daughter. That I was something different.

She couldn’t know what I was. Ever. I couldn’t let her see that. I didn’t want to lie to her, but I didn’t want to lose her a whole lot more.

Pen had said I couldn’t give up the powers that I had. I could chose not to use them though. If that’s what it took to keep her, I could pretend that I was the same girl I’d been before I’d left in the morning.

I flipped over onto my stomach.

And when the weirdness comes? What will you do then? I asked myself.

When Minnie came over tomorrow to see how I was doing? When she said things in front of my Mom about what we’d seen together?

I could talk to Minnie. She wouldn’t blow my secrets open if she knew. None of them would.

Even the former Queen?

I could deal with her. I’d been unwilling to bring the police in the burning station over to the Dreamlit world for fear of what it might do to them. I couldn’t have that fear with the former Queen. If she was a danger still, I would have to deal with her.

Deal with her.

The thought shocked me. I was thinking in euphemisms. I meant kill her.

I flipped onto my back again.

Could I really kill her? Did I even want to think that way? Did I have a choice? I wanted her to be redeemable, but did she want to be redeemed? She’d been a monster. She’d hurt and destroyed people. Children. Helpless children. Did she even deserve a chance at redemption?

I flipped over again.

What about the others? What if they wouldn’t play along with me? Would I “deal with them” too?

Even asking the question sickened me.

One more flip, onto my back, and I was staring at the ceiling.

No, I wouldn’t “deal with” them. And I wouldn’t “deal with” the former Queen either. Not like that.

I glanced over at my phone.

So what was I going to do about Minnie then?

Talk to her. I had to. Whatever my Mom might think, I couldn’t abandon someone who needed me that much. I couldn’t become someone my Mom would be ashamed of in order to win her approval.

A thought occurred to me. I remembered James mentioning Aegis.

Aegis had only operated in Brassport for a few years but he already had developed a good reputation. He’d saved Heartbeat from an early mishap when a group of metahuman terrorists had turned out to actually be a group of bloodless robots. They been sent to cause mayhem as part of a pointlessly convoluted real estate scheme but they’d almost succeeded in taking out our cities fledgling super heroines on one of her first solo outtings.

Since then he’d showed up a number of times, defending people from harm and saving the day when the official heroes were tied up elsewhere. There were reports that he worked with the police sometimes and that he’d actively busted up a few groups before they had a chance to enact any of their plans.

Despite all that, no one knew who he was, apart from “a solidly build, reasonably tall guy”, and even that could have been a trick with the way his (or even her I suppose) superpowers worked.

I turned that thought around in my head.

I couldn’t be a hero. Even if Agent Haffrun checked out, Mom wouldn’t understand and wouldn’t be able to live with the fear of what might happen to me or what I might become. Even if I got certified by the FBMA as fully trained and safe to be around, seeing me would mean acknowledging the violence and danger in the world. I’d become a symbol, rather than a girl, or a daughter.

If I became a Mask though nothing would have to change. I could hide who I was, but still be me inside. That idea was terribly attractive. With the way my powers worked it would be all too easy to pull off. I could have my family and my friends. I could help Way and deal with the Oblivion Knight. It would mean leading two different lives but, as I’d seen with Jenny and Molly, I was already leading a lot more than that.

I breathed in and out in slow repetitions. It felt wrong, but I didn’t have any other answers. I couldn’t lose my Mom and I couldn’t hide from what I knew, or what I could do. Becoming a Mask meant living a lie, but the truth looked like it would destroy me.

“So what do I tell Mom?” I wondered to myself. The answer was simple, even if I didn’t like it. For her I was Jin, so I’d tell her the truth as it applied to Jin. I’d left the police station before the fire. I’d never been in any danger. Whoever was responsible wasn’t targeting a normal girl like me.

If she didn’t believe me then whatever security measures she wanted to take were fine. I’d sleep on a bed of iron nails if that’s what it took. For her, I’d be as normal as I’d ever been.

“And Minnie?”

I’d go visit her, but not as Jin. She really knew me as Jenny anyways so it made more sense to go as a goblin, though I suppose she had the same new memories that I did of meeting on the first day of high school and hanging out together with the other “misfits”. That’s why she my phone number. I had hers too, but I talking to her in the real world about the kind of stuff we had to discuss seemed terrifying. I just knew someone would overhear us if we did that. Fortunately I had another option available.

I projected myself out to the Dreamlit world as Jenny and was stunned for a long moment. My house was a castle! Or at least my room belonged in one.

My room in the real world was a plain little space with yellow painted walls and shelves filled with all the stuffed animals, books, dolls, toys and various clutter that I’d accumulated over the years.

In the Dreamlit world on the other hand, my room was enormous and decorated in the kind of rusted iron plating and open rock facings that would have looked appropriate for a sword and sorcery villain’s lair.

My Dreamlit bed was lusciously outfitted with red silks and white lace. That was the only color I could see in the room. Everything else was black and foreboding. The default accessory for the walls and ceiling seemed to be “spikes” with an occasional accent of “chains” to keep it properly dungeon-esque.

I blinked trying to understand how this could possibly be the nearest reflection of the comfy little space I called my room. Meta-awareness directed my attention down to my left hand where a burnt out gem the size of a large marble lay.

The Heart of the Shadow Court’s realm.

I’d brought it with me.

Because I was one of their Queens.

I screamed, only in the Dreamlit world fortunately, and flung it away from me. Dead or not, the artifact was unbelievably dangerous.

On the plus side, I knew why my room looked so strange. For Jin it didn’t fit at all, but for a Queen of the Shadow Court it felt, if anything, a little too drab. Some part of me knew that to be a proper Shadow Court bedroom it needed more red. Liquid, warm red. Preferably with plenty of screaming.

My Mom was right to be scared of me.

I jumped out of my window and took to the skies. In the open air it was easier to gain some perspective. I carried the Queen’s title, but I’d never been a member of the Shadow Court. If anything I’d been an instrument of their destruction. I’d feared them, but with what I learned I could do I knew they had every reason to fear me as well. If they didn’t…if they didn’t I’d be more than willing to “deal with” them.

I tucked that thought away though and focused on finding Minnie. There were a lot of options for dealing with the Shadow Court and some time before they regained enough strength to be a threat. Minnie needed me immediately.

From my new memories I found where her home was. On the outside it looked like mine; a normal small family home on a quiet side street. Given what was inside mine, I wasn’t surprised when I looked in the window to Minnie’s bedroom to see that it looked just a bit out of place too.

Her bedroom was the entrance to a labyrinth. From within it came the roaring of great beasts.

Of course. Nothing could be simple after all.

It would have been a lot easier to just pick up the phone and call her, but I couldn’t do that. It was the labyrinth or nothing.

I knocked on the window and it swung open invitingly. Minnie hadn’t consciously opened it but she did want to talk to me so the Dreamlit world reflected that. That made me wonder what the labyrinth meant.

If only Pen were here.

Stealing from mythology, I imagined a ball of yarn in my hands and felt its soft weight squish under my fingers. Suitably armed I entered the labyrinth.