Chapter Text
1. The Impossible Trip
The Night Garden drifted through the upper dark, its titanic hull a hollowed branch carved from some forgotten world tree, now turned city and citadel. Pagodas and palaces clung to its back, lanterns burning in muted colors that smeared across lacquered wood and painted stone. Groves, meadows, and hidden lakes lay between those structures, threaded by avenues and bridges where no living foot fell anymore. The masts rose like living pillars into cloud and starlight, drinking in the sky.
It was not silent.
Every deck of the living citadel seethed with motion that was not quite real. In the fruit gardens, shadows stooped to tend trees that would never ripen again. On the promenades, dim silhouettes strolled arm in arm, heads tilted toward conversations no ears could hear. Children’s shapes darted along the lakeshores, throwing phantom stones that made no ripples. In the tall pagodas, veiled figures bent over desks, signing invisible papers, moving through the old routines of governance and war.
They were only darkness given form, tattered impressions burned into the ship’s skin — but they imitated what they had done while they were alive with unsettling fidelity. The Night Garden remembered its people, and in remembering, it cast them again and again upon its own planks and walls. Laughter without sound twisted through corridors, arguments played out in mime, tears fell that never touched the floor. The citadel had been a world once, and now that world survived only as an endless play of shadows.
High on the outer deck, by a railing that had tasted more storms than most worlds, a solitary figure stood unmoving. He might have seemed like one more shade, a darker cut against the night, if not for the way the other shadows flowed around him instead of through him. They hurried past, the echoes of sailors hauling ropes that were no longer there, of guards on patrol who no longer needed to guard anything. Their paths bent instinctively, skirting that one point of stillness as water curves around a buried stone.
The Night Garden needed no helmsmen now. It sailed without sails or oars, carried by an invisible intention that brushed against the currents of the Dream Realm like a hand against still water. The great citadel glided over the Nightmare Desert with the creak and groan of old wood full of ghosts, the murmur of phantom crowds layered beneath the true sounds of straining timbers and whispering wind. It was a city of echoes riding the sky.
Below, the desert spread in every direction — an ocean of flawless white dunes turned silver by moonlight. The sky above was a deep, unblemished blue-black, empty of clouds and full of unspoken things. Inky-black ruins jutted from the sands like colossal bones, their broken silhouettes hinting at shapes that had once been cities, or fortresses, or gods laid low. Between the dunes, other motions stirred: lines of shadow shifting in slow, tidal waves as Deathless rose to meet adversaries they had slain a thousand times before.
From this height, their struggle made no sound. But the imagination supplied it easily, because the citadel’s own chorus would not let the mind forget. The clatter of invisible markets, the distant bustle of phantom crowds, the remembered tolling of bells — all threaded together into a kind of murmur that never stopped. It was like listening to the sea through a wall: blurred, muffled, inhuman in its constancy. Once, those sounds had belonged to the living. Now, they were all that remained of a species.
After all, all of humanity had died the moment Changing Star failed the Fifth Nightmare.
It had not been a single instant, not really. Worlds do not vanish in a blink. Cities burn, oceans rise, skies fall; people scream, pray, fight, and cling to each other in the dark. But the line was there, sharp and merciless in memory: a choice made and lost, a trial failed, a light that did not rise one last time. Everything after that was just the long echo of a decision that could not be undone. The Nightmare’s victory did not end with one life; it unthreaded all of them.
The Lord of Shadows had watched that unthreading. He had watched the Fifth Nightmare close around her, watched the world falter and crack, watched the futures she had carried wither into dust. The Nightmare did not merely kill; it rewrote. It reached into minds, into dreams, into the secret architecture of meaning and hope, twisting them until they no longer fit the world that remained. Grief alone might have broken him. The Spell’s lingering effect finished the work.
Madness did not descend on him like a hammer. It seeped in like cold through cracked stone, slow and patient. Thoughts looped back on themselves, chasing what-ifs until they frayed. Memories rewrote themselves, then rewrote the rewrites, until he could no longer tell which version of a moment had actually happened and which were fantasies of a better failure. Each time he reached for a reason to go on, he found only her absence waiting at the end of the thought.
The Nightmare, satisfied with its triumph, left him alive but not unchanged. It pressed its thumb into every wound, every regret, until his mind became another battlefield — one where he could not tell which side he was on. Some days, he was sure he was still fighting to save something. Other days, he suspected he was only circling the ruins, counting them over and over so he would not have to admit there was nothing left to save.
The Night Garden, being what it was, drank in that turmoil as easily as it drank storms and starlight. Its hull, once roots sinking into an endless ocean, now brushed thin air above the Land of the Dead and tasted the flavor of a mind in mourning. The shadows that walked its decks were not entirely innocent; they bent sometimes in strange directions, their old routines snagging on moods that were not theirs. A phantom merchant would pause mid-gesture, head turning toward a grief that did not belong to him. A shadow-child would stop her silent game, staring up at the sky with a fear she had never known in life.
Behind the solitary figure at the rail, the citadel’s inhabited levels pulsed with that spectral life. Promenades bustled with bodiless feet. Schools held classes no one attended anymore. Markets conducted business in pantomime, goods passed hand to hand in a commerce made only of memory. The Night Garden had carried millions once, and it refused to forget the weight of them. It replayed their lives in endless loops, perhaps to comfort itself, perhaps to keep from collapsing under the realization of its own emptiness.
He listened to the noise without seeming to hear it. The murmur of shadows washed around him, then washed through him, stirring up older sounds: the roar of crowds that had believed they still had a future, the low hum of engines carrying armies to their last chances, the hush of a world waiting for a miracle that never came. The more he sank into thought, the less distinction there was between the Night Garden’s mimicry and his own recollections. It all blurred together into one long, restless rustle.
Below, the Nightmare Desert fought on. Above, the phantom city lived out days that had already ended. Between them, he hung in place, a point of gravity that neither could touch. The Tomb of Ariel appeared now and then at the edge of sight — a black pyramid etched against the silver dunes, always distant, always precisely where it had been before. The citadel flew at incredible speed, but the tomb did not seem to draw nearer. Distance, here, was more a matter of meaning than of miles.
Somewhere in the middle of his circling thoughts, he realized that the outlines of the pyramid had sharpened. Its angles held, its apex pricked the sky like a nail driven into the world. No stars had shifted. No dunes had changed their pattern. Only something inside him had turned, aligning with that dark point on the horizon.
The Night Garden did not lurch or alter course. Yet the clamor of its shadow-population faltered for a heartbeat. Phantom vendors fell still behind their empty stalls. Silent children paused mid-run. The murmur of the dead lives dropped into a brief, uncanny hush, as if the whole citadel had taken a breath it did not need.
Then the noise resumed — softer, somehow, like voices in a temple. The living ship had come to the same conclusion he had. Whatever humanity had been, it had ended with her. Whatever he was now, it was something that walked on after the funeral. And whatever waited in the Tomb of Ariel, it was bound to that ending as tightly as he was.
Lost in thought, surrounded by shadows that only knew how to repeat what they had already done, he stayed by the rail. The Night Garden carried him on above the Battlefield of the Gods, a haunted, living citadel heavy with echoes, sailing toward a tomb that had waited through the death of a species and the slow unmaking of a man’s mind.
***
The Lord of Shadows let a fragment of himself ride the Night Garden down through the dark, an incarnation peeled from his vast being and sent arrow-straight toward the Tomb of Ariel. The phantom body cut across the Dream Realm like a flaw in glass, trailing a wake of warped starlight. Somewhere far below, the black pyramid waited with the patience of stone.
He watched that incarnation fly, then exhaled slowly. The sigh tasted old, like dust shaken from a closed tomb.
Strictly speaking, he was already there.
Five other incarnations of him waited inside the pyramid’s depths, deep in the Estuary where time pooled and knotted on itself. They had been working for… he could not remember, not precisely. Days, centuries, a handful of moments that had stretched until they felt like epochs — it all slid together into one long smear.
He had stopped counting after he became Sacred: no longer merely a man, but a spirit, a principle given shape, the living idea of shadows.
“Perhaps I should’ve taken psychological counseling when I was a young lad,” he murmured.
The words came out dry. The laugh that followed was thinner still, breaking halfway, as if it had forgotten how to be anything but hollow. None of the other hims looked up. They were too intent on their work, ten hands moving in concert, weaving something out of raw darkness and crystallized thought.
He turned from the sight of his traveling self and watched those hands instead.
Ten hands, each with seven long, precise fingers — too many joints, too much grace. They danced in the air before him, knitting luminous filaments of Memory into a shape that was not yet a weapon and not yet an idea. The half-formed construct hung between them like a wound in reality, pulsing faintly with stolen color.
“Too much, even for me,” he said under his breath. “Possibly brilliant. Possibly deranged.”
He tilted his head, considering, then raised his voice without looking away.
“What do you think, Song of the Fallen?”
A ripple passed through the surrounding shadow. From the black pool at his feet, a figure stepped forward: the shade of a petite young woman, exquisitely made, with delicate features and pale hair that fell like liquid gold. She would have been ethereal, almost unbearably lovely, had it not been for the ruin of her left eye — an empty socket, ringed by scars that never healed.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he sighed, finally turning to meet her gaze — or what remained of it. “You were the one who tried to use my True Name. What did you think would happen?”
She said nothing.
She never did, now. Whatever had once filled her — the sharp wit, the fierce loyalty, the stubborn warmth he had once, in a moment of reckless softness, called family — was gone. Her remaining eye stared through him, distant, its focus snagged somewhere between the present and a past that had been eaten away.
The Lord of Shadows closed his own eyes for a heartbeat, then reached out with a thought.
A lattice of sigils flared into being around them, faint as frost: the [Shared Thoughts] enchantment, one of his more delicate works. He wove the pattern tighter, linking his mind to what remained of hers, tugging gently on the dormant thread of her power.
Sight unfolded.
Song of the Fallen’s buried gift stirred, grudging and reluctant — the vision that once had skimmed futures like turning pages. Through her, he tasted possible tomorrows, half-rotted timelines where he had already failed in a thousand different ways.
“Yes,” he muttered a moment later, voice flat. “Still awful.”
The weaving ahead of him shuddered, then steadied, his five incarnations driving it toward completion. The construct sharpened, its edges resolving into something that could be held, something that could bleed.
He let out another long breath and, with a lazy flick of will, turned the Night Garden’s attention inward.
Outside, the citadel still rode above the Nightmare Desert, a haunted ark adrift over a battlefield that never truly ended. Inside, its roots — the ancient, world-tree bones hollowed into halls and arteries — reached down through stone and dream. At his command, they twisted, coiling through the intervening unreality like a great vine.
The city-ship slipped.
One moment it hovered above bleached dunes and silent wars; the next, it stood within the Tomb of Ariel, its titanic bulk anchored in a cavern of black stone veined with faint, gold light. The transition did not so much move the Night Garden as decide it had always been there.
In the Estuary — that confluence of lost rivers of time, where dead futures eddied and pooled — the Lord of Shadows stood at the heart of his workbench. A breath later, his traveling incarnation arrived in a whisper of displaced air, collapsing from streaking silhouette to a fully realized body at his side.
The two versions of him regarded each other.
“…I sincerely wish I were in the mood to talk to myself again,” he admitted.
His other self only inclined his head, weary in the same places. Around them, the remaining five incarnations straightened from their work. One by one, they stepped forward.
There was no ceremony.
Each walked directly into him and vanished, their forms dissolving into smoke and folding into his spine. With every merging, weight and memory slammed back into place: angles of pain, jagged shards of regret, slivers of half-mad brilliance. His shoulders bowed for an instant, then steadied.
When the last of them was gone, he was alone again.
Alone, and holding a weapon.
It sat in his hands with impossible lightness: a curved blade grown from the talon of the Vile Thieving Bird, polished to a muted sheen that swallowed the surrounding glow. Its edge was so thin it seemed to cut the light that fell across it, drinking it in until the steel was bordered by a line of pure absence.
Marks shimmered along the spine — not runes exactly, more like scars left by concepts that had brushed against reality too hard.
Memory: [Impossible Trip].
Memory Rank: Sacred.
Memory Tier: VII.
Memory Type: Weapon.
Memory Description: [If this works, I'm eating my shadows.]
Memory Enchantments: [Tactile Fate], [Timeless], [Package].
Enchantment: [Tactile Fate].
Enchantment Description: [This weapon can pull the strings of fate.]
Enchantment: [Timeless].
Enchantment Description: [This weapon can reach through time once.]
Enchantment: [Package].
Enchantment Description: [This weapon can carry seven memories and one Shadow.]
He studied it for what might have been seconds or centuries. In the Estuary, such distinctions were more a matter of stubbornness than of clocks.
Eventually, he lowered the blade and reached outward with a thought that was also a summons.
“Come,” he whispered.
His Shadows answered.
They assembled from the corners of the chamber, rising out of cracks in the stone, distilling from the darkness under his feet, stepping from the void between one heartbeat and the next.
Saint came first: his taciturn knight, tall and unmoving, armor black as a moonless sky, helm concealing everything but the glint of ruby eyes. Once, he had thought of her as an older sister; lately, the feeling had shifted, settled into something more parental and quietly terrified — as if he had somehow acquired a daughter who could accidentally kill a god.
Serpent followed, coils of smooth, ink-black scales piling silently beside Saint. He was small only if you ignored the way his body looped and looped into the dark, never quite showing its full length. Her golden eyes blinked up at him, pupils thin slits of adoration — and hunger big enough to swallow a world.
Nightmare oozed in next, dragging sleep and old terror behind him, a shifting bulk of horned silhouette and storm-cloud mane. He radiated irritability, the air around him crackling with the particular anger of someone wrenched from a very pleasant dream.
Fiend came, for once, without theatrics: a compact, sharp-toothed gremlin of a thing whose outline never quite held still, as if he couldn’t decide which nightmare shape suited him best. Despite himself, he dropped into a kneel, head bowed.
Mimic hopped after him as a tiny chest with spidery legs, hinges clicking nervously. Once, Mimic had been his first experiment in fusing Memory and Shadow. Now, back in this smaller, humbler form, it clacked its lid in an approximation of attention.
Slayer arrived with a shrug, blade-lean and indifferent, eyes flat as a dead star. Violence clung to her like a smell.
And then Vile.
Vile took his time, sauntering out of a nearby wall with a grin too wide for his face, eyes bright with mischief and bad ideas. The Lord of Shadows had many regrets; parenting Vile ranked consistently in the top three.
He looked at them — his loyal monsters, his mistakes raised into something like family — and raised the weapon slightly.
“Well,” he said. “We all know what I want to do.”
The words dropped into the chamber like stones. Every Shadow tensed. Even the shade of Song of the Fallen, hovering at the periphery like a half-remembered melody, seemed to draw tighter.
“I don’t know if it will work,” he continued. “Or if I’m about to kill myself in the most embarrassing way possible. But here we are.”
Their gazes converged on [Impossible Trip]. The air thickened as unease and a grim, hungry anticipation warred in their expressions.
“I’ve been thinking for a long time.”
He let his gaze travel across them, one by one. Spines straightened. Coils coiled. Eyes sharpened. They were all soldiers at attention now, waiting for a sentence that might as well be a verdict.
“And I’ve made my decision about who to send back.”
Silence swelled. No one stepped forward. No one spoke. None of them wanted to be parted from him, not truly, but they also understood what it meant, to be chosen for this.
Despite his better judgment, despite every rational objection, the conclusion he had come to remained.
“Fiend,” he said softly. “Come closer.”
Every head snapped toward the shapeshifting gremlin.
“M–me?” Fiend’s voice cracked into a growl, his face twisting in naked shock. “Sire! Lord! But big sister Saint—”
“She’s selectively mute,” the Lord of Shadows cut in, not unkindly. “Stubborn. And if I hand her a communicator and ask her to press a button, she’ll call it sorcery and crush it.”
Saint’s helm turned away, the angle screaming offended dignity. He could all but sense the pout hidden under all that steel. Adorable.
“You, on the other hand,” he went on, “are a piece of work. Clever, dishonest, entirely too lucky for anyone’s good. If there’s a universe where my plan can be dragged, screaming and kicking, into success, it’s probably the one where you are lying through your teeth the whole way.”
A dangerous warmth spread through Fiend’s hunched shoulders. For all the Lord’s rough tongue and casual cruelties, praise from him was rare. To be called devilish and lucky, to be trusted with this, was no small thing.
Fiend dropped to one knee fully, trembling with something that was not quite fear and not quite joy.
“So,” the Lord of Shadows said, tone turning brisk. “Here’s what you’re going to do.
“You become my young self’s shadow. You stay with him, breathe with him, cling to his heels. You kill as many creatures as you can, flood his veins with essence until his body hums with stolen power. You twist the timeline wherever you can reach it, so that when the Nightmare Spell infects him, he doesn’t break under it. He plows through it. He lives it like a gods-damned power fantasy.”
Fiend bowed even lower, claws scraping stone.
“…And one more thing,” the Lord added quietly.
“Yes, Lord! Anything!” Fiend nearly vibrated with excitement.
“If I still end up with Shadow Slave as an Aspect…” His mouth twisted. “Make sure Cassie is the one to say my True Name.”
The room froze.
Saint actually flinched. Serpent’s coils tightened until the stone beneath him creaked. Nightmare’s mane crackled with static. Even the shade of Song of the Fallen seemed to flicker.
“Are you crazy?” Saint’s voice rang out, clear for the first time in a very long while.
“Yes,” he answered, utterly calm. “Any other questions?”
Saint stared at him, ruby eyes burning. Then, slowly, she turned her gaze toward the shade of the girl who had once tried to wield that forbidden Name and paid for it with everything she had been.
“Why?” Saint asked. The single word carried more weight than some men’s confessions.
He scrubbed a hand through his raven-black hair, suddenly and acutely aware that, if he still kept calendars, this would be a date worth circling.
“Because,” he said, “I’ve learned not to stick my dick in crazy.”
Vile choked on a laugh. Even Mimic’s lid snapped once, sharply, like a smothered snicker.
“And because,” he continued, more quietly, “I have faith she’ll be more careful. More kind. More… human with me than Changing Star ever was.”
His gaze drifted into the middle distance, to a point only he could see — a memory of the Fifth Nightmare, of the moment everything had broken, of the girl who had been a miracle and a catastrophe in equal measure.
His Shadows knew. They knew that story. They had watched him come apart under that Spell, under that choice, under her.
He shook himself.
“Come on. I don’t have all day.” He paused, then amended, “Well, I do, but even a Sacred can get cold feet about dying for a time-travel scheme. Let’s move before I develop survival instincts.”
He flipped [Impossible Trip] in his hand, then tossed it to Fiend.
The gremlin caught it clumsily, claws closing around the hilt. For a moment, he only knelt there, staring at the blade as if it were the answer to every question he had never dared ask.
“Sire… Lord… Father…” Fiend’s voice shook. The word ‘father’ came out raw, an unhealed thing. “You understand you’re betting everything on my luck, yes?”
The Lord of Shadows stepped closer and laid a hand on Fiend’s narrow shoulder.
“I know, son.”
The room seemed to tilt around that word. Even Nightmare’s restless crackling went still.
“We’ve played chess with fate,” he said softly. “Tried to outthink it at every turn. Look where that’s gotten us.” He smiled — not gently, but not without affection. “So this time, we don’t outthink it. We throw a wrench into it.”
Fiend’s breathing slowed. His grip on the blade steadied. When he looked up again, the Lord of Shadows’ eyes were there, endless and hungry, swallowing light, swallowing fear.
Fiend moved.
The stab was quick and practiced, driven with all the strength his small body could muster. The blade slid between ribs, found the heart with surgical certainty. There was a brief resistance, a momentary catching — and then the [Impossible Trip] drank.
Pain flared white, then inverted into black. The world went out like a candle pinched between fingers.
In the dark that followed, gold threads bloomed.
They unspooled around Fiend in spiraling patterns — luminous strands of fate, each one humming with lives never lived, choices never made. They drifted like rivers in the void, converging, dividing, tangling on themselves. The gremlin realized, distantly, that he was no longer kneeling on stone. He was falling sideways, drawn into one specific strand that wrapped around him like a serpent and pulled.
He did not know how long he traveled.
It felt like a single heartbeat stretched until it sang, and also like an eternity in which nothing existed but motion and light. He heard things: distant laughter, weeping, a lullaby sung in a language he didn’t know yet. He saw flashes of scenes that might have been futures or pasts or dreams.
Somewhere along the way, sound cut through it all.
Crying.
Raw, newborn crying, thin and furious and impossibly loud.
Fiend slammed back into existence inside a shadow.
The world around him snapped into focus: white walls, sharp antiseptic smells, the low murmur of human voices. Machines hummed. Someone sobbed with relief. He lay flattened and coiled in darkness cast by a small body, a darkness that trembled as the body wailed.
A hospital.
Earth.
And the one whose shadow he now shared was tiny — smaller than he’d imagined — a baby held up for the first time under the sterile lights. Its first shadow shivered on the linoleum floor, and Fiend clung to it, hardly daring to move.
The newborn’s cries tore through him, dredging up an emotion perilously close to panic.
He knew this moment. He had never seen it, but he knew.
Nurses worked with practiced efficiency. A doctor said something reassuring. The baby was wrapped, gently, carefully, and then placed in the waiting arms of a woman lying exhausted on the bed.
The man standing beside her, the father, leaned in, eyes bright and wet. Their hands brushed over the tiny bundle, over the tiny fist that flexed blindly.
The woman turned her head, looking past them both for a second. Outside the wide window, the sky had darkened in an uncanny, wrong way. Daylight dimmed, bleeding out of the room as if someone had laid a veil across the sun.
Slowly, she looked back to her husband. Then, at last, down at the child.
It took everything Fiend had not to tear himself free of the newborn’s shadow and fall to his knees right there on the hospital floor.
His sire. His lord. His king. His god. His father.
Born on the day the sun itself faltered.
The woman’s eyes filled with radiant joy as she cradled the screaming bundle closer.
“Welcome to the world, Sunless,” she whispered.
And Fiend, buried in the first shadow his master ever cast, smiled through the tremor of his fear.
The Impossible Trip had begun.