Chapter 19: The Montage (part 5)

  Out of all the uses Elizabeth had discovered for her odd and finicky ‘movement’ powers, her favorite was probably her ability to ski uphill. She swept upwards through the powder into the cold bright of day. She cut across snowy meadows without slowing, she banked at high speeds around copses of evergreens and frosted thickets, and she occasionally caught air off of an unexpected jump. Once she even skied right off a sudden cliff. She killed her momentum on the way down so that she touched lightly to the powder forty feet below, but the shock of it still left her heart racing. She paused there at the bottom to collect herself before she continued on—which was as simple as instilling herself with forward momentum.

  Elizabeth was still too nervous to try, but she was becoming increasingly sure that nothing was really stopping her from just skiing right up into the air and not coming down.

  Momentum was everywhere; Arcadelt had shown her. Movement was everything. Movement was change, as Deuteronomy had said in the dream. And it was also, as Lord Fair had said, life. She was beginning to understand why the symbol for movement—her symbol—was a flower.

  In direct contrast to her growing command over Newton’s laws, however, stood her utter inability to make a positive impact on the deteriorating situation of Sisyphus, the Garden Moon. The Five Rings had maintained a delicate balance with King Basileus at the center. Now, as Eric had so eloquently and concisely summarized it after she’d spent ten minutes explaining, it had all gone to shit. And it seemed there was little, if anything, the Hero of Movement could do about it. Oh, everyone wanted her to help. Everyone wanted her opinion, as long as it was the same as theirs. An emissary had spoken to her just an hour earlier, in fact. She had rattled the door on its hinges when leaving the greenhouse afterward.

  Now she cooled off on a jagged chunk of dark granite, one arm around Callie, watching the unending curtain of snow descend over the mountain landscape. The sight never failed to calm her nerves. Her skis, floral patterned, lay in the snow, and after a few minutes Elizabeth joined them. She sat in the powder and marched through a stretching routine, easing the sore muscles of her legs. So much skiing recently.

  Something popped nearby, a sound like the death of a soap bubble grown to massive proportions. A brief cry of alarm followed, then a muffled thud as something landed in the snow nearby. Elizabeth tensed, ready to spring to action, but Callie reassured her by reacting with only a curious look toward the sound.

  “What?” said a voice, its source hidden behind a deep snowbank. It was Isaac’s voice, faintly modulated as it came through his spacesuit. “Snow?” A white songbird flitted into view. “ARKO, where am I?”

  “Over here, Isaac,” she said.

  “Elizabeth?” After a moment he appeared, fully vested in his black spacesuit with the mirrored visor, floundering through the powder. He looked so awkward and out of his element that Elizabeth chuckled to herself as he approached.

  “How did you get here, Isaac?” she asked once he had cleared the snowbank.

  “I—hang on.” He removed his helmet with a hiss, then made it vanish. “I teleported! Although I was trying to go to Eric, so…” He adjusted his glasses, frowning. He looked even paler than usual in this world of white. Sweat beaded on his forehead, and he had shadows under his eyes. Maybe he was a bit too pale.

  “Are you ok?” she asked.

  “What? Yeah. Yeah, I just…man, that took a lot out of me.”

  “You came here all the way from the fleet?”

  He nodded, then gazed around. “Where are we? Is this that Mountain?”

  She shook her head. “No. Magic won’t work on the Mountain. You would not be able to teleport there.”

  “Woah! Cool.” He made a thick woolen hat from mist and pulled it down over his enormous ears.

  It wasn’t really ‘cool,’ though. No magic, no technology. There was only one way to get to the top of the Mountain: on foot. Or, conceivably, riding an animal—something she had never done.

  “Let’s go,” she said, rising from the snow. “You haven’t seen my greenhouse yet, have you?”

  Isaac petted Callie behind the ears. “Sure!”

  “Then I’ll lead the way.”

  “You’ll—what? Lead? Where? Why?” He said ‘lead’ like the metal. “Did you mean ‘led’? But that’s still not right…” He looked confused, and Elizabeth felt the same way.

  “What?” she said. “Lead, Isaac. ‘Leed.’ I’m leading the way.”

  “Oh, that lead. Haha, for some reason I thought you meant, like, the element. Probably because I was thinking earlier about the lead shielding in my ship. Like, I haven’t even considered cosmic radiation. Why would I? There’s no sun!”

  It took Elizabeth a quiet, snowy minute to understand. Isaac had just confused a spoken homograph. Lead and lead. How? Why?

  “It’s a ways down,” she said, shelving the question for the moment. “Can you ski, Isaac?”

  He grinned. “Yeah!”

  He made skis and they set off down the mountain. Elizabeth hadn’t gone far from home, and the way was not steep. It was a relaxing ride, retracing the ghostly remains of her former tracks, weaving over broad angled fields of crisp fresh-fallen powder. The greenhouse came into sight ahead, a glowing beacon of warmth and light. It made her realize the sky was slowly darkening. Evening was coming on.

  They ended their run in a shallow valley that opened into a long narrow fir-scattered clearing at the foot of the Greenhouse. She could have coasted all the way there, but she stopped to walk the rest of the way with Isaac. They allowed their skis to evaporate before continuing on foot.

  “We’re close now,” she said. He could see that perfectly well for himself, but this comment was an experiment. She’d pronounced ‘close’ wrongly, as in, ‘to close a book.’ Isaac either did not notice or declined to point it out. She tried again with a more obvious one. “It’s like an icy desert up here sometimes.” She pronounced ‘desert’ as though she meant the act of deserting. Like ‘dessert.’

  “Hmm,” said Isaac, looking around. “A desert? I guess. It’s pretty cool, though. Reminds me of home.”

  “Indeed,” she said. “I feel the same. Sometimes it brings a tear to my eye.” She pronounced ‘tear’ as in the verb. Isaac, being Isaac, was sure to comment on these incorrect pronunciations if he noticed them. But he did not appear to notice.

  “Did you, like, ski up the hill, by the way?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  “Cool. Heh—cool, right? Ha ha.”

  They crunched through the snow for a moment in silence. Elizabeth recalled something she’d wanted to ask.

  “Isaac,” she said, “these gods say their race is actually called the daimon.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you know what that word means?”

  “Um. Does it have anything to do with diamonds?”

  “I think it’s Greek. It means the same thing as daemon, which is the word that became ‘demon’ in English.”

  “Oh. Woah, I wonder if that’s significant?”

  “Well, in Latin, ‘daemon’ didn’t always mean ‘demon’ the way we think of it now, evil spirits and such. It also meant, just generally, spiritual powers or gods. I think.”

  “Oh!” he said. “I get it. Because like in the Bible, other ‘gods’ are actually just demons, or ‘powers’ they’re sometimes called.”

  Elizabeth didn’t know how much the Bible had to do with it, but she agreed. “One could essentially say that ‘daimon’ is synonymous with ‘god.’ In a language from Earth.”

  He grasped what she was getting at. “You think they’re just a part of the story too?”

  “What is ‘the story?’”

  “Well, in the Narrative,” said Isaac, “there’s us, and there’s everything else. But there’s also these gods, or daimon, but they’re actually outside right now. They’re not, like, in here with us. And then there’s the beings that seem to understand, sort of, that this is all just a contrived scenario, like Arcadelt and the Guardians. I mean, this world is called ‘The Narrative,’ and everybody knows it!”

  “And so?”

  “So like everything here is real, but some things are more real than others.”

  “Very Orwellian of you.”

  “And Black,” said Isaac, suddenly serious. “Abraham Black. Like, is he even a human?”

  “Why does that matter?”

  “He’s on Earth right now. Or, like, a version of him. But he’s also here.”

  “Do you know where?”

  “Yeah, I had ARKO check it out,” he said. “Turns out Heidi’s already met him. The one here, in our Narrative.”

  This was news to Elizabeth. Heidi had said nothing about that. And from Isaac’s tone of voice, he was concerned as well.

  Here they reached the back door to Elizabeth’s greenhouse. They stepped through, greeted by one of the handful of guards Laska had insisted on sending back with Elizabeth. This one, lizard-like, was surprised to see Isaac. The feeling was mutual, and it took some coaxing from Elizabeth to get Isaac to stop staring at the lizard-person and come along into the greenhouse.

  She gave him a brief tour: the biomes, her living quarters, her guest rooms should he be interested in staying. The cable lift, of all things, particularly fascinated him. Why, he wondered, was Detach Cabin an option on the lift system? A valid question.

  “Hey,” he said as they peered down through the dark evening to the lights of Kotho far below. “Wanna make a door?”

  “I thought your station exploded,” she replied.

  “It did, for sure,” he said. “But look. My platform is safe.” He raised his hands as though holding an invisible basketball. A pale cube appeared there, and he caught it before it fell. “Tada! This is ARKO, by the way.” The little cube had a miniature door on the center of one face, a perfect tiny replica of Isaac’s futuristic archway that served as his door atop the Citadel. Charlie, still in a songbird form, hopped down onto Isaac’s sleeve for a closer look. Isaac turned the cube to show her another door: Jimothy’s. “I’ve only got Jim’s so far,” he said. “Actually, this is why I was going to see Eric.”

  “What happens if Jimothy tries to go through his door onto your platform while it is that size?” she asked. Isaac’s eyes widened in curiosity. The question had not occurred to him.

  “Let’s find out!” he said.

  Soon after, they stood upon the flat, frozen flower that served as her own platform: golden, hexagonal, crusted with frost.

  “Has Kate been pestering you about our band?” he asked as they ascended the final stairway. “She keeps pushing me to write music. But like, it’s so hard! And nothing I write is good, anyway.”

  “She wants me to sing,” said Elizabeth.

  “And you don’t want to.” It wasn’t a question. He knew she didn’t want to. They rose up into the snowy night around her platform. Hers had three doors now: her own, Jimothy’s, and Kate’s. “You’re actually a good singer,” he added.

  “Skill is a matter of perspective,” she replied. “The trouble is that we always compare ourselves to those with greater skill. Better singers, better writers. As it should be.”

  Isaac made another hat for himself against the cold. Elizabeth had no need; she’d donned actual, real clothes made of wool, not mist. Warm and soft. “I guess,” he said. “But it’s still really hard not to get down on myself. When everything else I see is so much better.”

  She understood that entirely.

  “I always ask myself,” he continued, “‘why do I do this?’”

  “A fair question,” she said as she bent to stroke Callie. “Do you have an answer? Why do you do it?”

  He looked up into the snowy dark, glasses partly fogged from his breath; the lenses reflected the lights of the greenhouse. “I mean I guess it—don’t laugh—but it’s like, through my silly, useless, insignificant art, I just try to imitate God. He’s the real Creator, right?”

  Hmm.

  “What about you?” he asked.

  Why did she sing? Why did she write poetry? Why did she keep doing it even though it never ceased to disappoint? But when she heard such beautiful music, and read such beautiful poems…what else was she supposed to do? That was her answer: “What else am I supposed to do?”

  “Cool,” he said. “So are you gonna dance or sing?”

  He meant for the door. She hadn’t considered.

  “Also, do you have a piano?”

  She did, downstairs. It was an upright, white and wooden, painted with poppies. Isaac transported it onto her flower.

  And still she didn’t know what exactly to do. With Jim, she hadn’t even planned on making a door. And with Kate, it had been easy. But… “What are you going to play?” she asked Isaac.

  “Well,” he replied, “what are you gonna do? Can you improvise?”

  Elizabeth did not want to improvise. She had never liked improvisational singing. She always felt the urge to sing lyrics, and then to rhyme them, but she could not compose a poem so quickly in her head. Nor, however, did she wish to dance for an audience of just Isaac. Kate was her best friend, and Jimothy was…well, Jimothy. Isaac was a clown who would feel no compunctions about laughing at her. He wouldn’t mean anything by it, but still, he would laugh.

  “I’m going to write,” she said. The words came out of her mouth before she had fully processed them.

  Isaac cocked his head, looking out at the snowy darkness. “Will that work?” he wondered.

  “Why wouldn’t it?” Jimothy had painted; she had danced. It obviously didn’t have to be music.

  Isaac shrugged. He turned back to the piano. He played a scale: two octaves, up and down. “So…”

  “So just play something.” Elizabeth sat cross-legged on the platform, vaguely annoyed without understanding exactly why. She removed the magic poetry book from her coat and materialized a pencil to write with.

  Isaac tapped one note a few times, thinking. Then he began to play. It was something simple at first: an arpeggio, major, with an ostinato in the left hand. It was cool and calm like the falling snow. It made her realize that she hadn’t heard him play very much, and that he was better than she’d thought.

  Callie brushed against Elizabeth’s knees as she struggled to think of something to write. She thought that the inspiration would simply come, as it had for her dance with Jimothy or her singing with Kate. But no. Here she was, pencil against blank page, while Isaac hit an off-key note and stumbled with the rhythm. Maybe this simply wasn’t the time. Maybe it would be more difficult with Isaac.

  Or maybe she just had to begin. Wasn’t it always this way? She doubted herself, doubted her skill. And the doubt might be justified, but that was no reason not to try.

  But what to write? There were no words. Callie nuzzled up against her as if to say, just write something.

  So she wrote the word snow, with no idea what, if anything, might come after. The soft scrape of the pencil lead across the page agitated the falling snow around the platform. It flurried softly as though disturbed by an unfelt breeze.

  Isaac didn’t appear to notice; his eyes were closed. But his music, by coincidence, became a bit more excited. He began experimenting. Here was a new chord. There was a repetition now of one note, a bassline against all the rest.

  The paper shivered under her cold fingers, wanting to be written on. She took a deep breath, and tried.

  It’s been snowing days and nights –

  A winter without end

  And Isaac there is lost in lights

  But still he is my friend.

  He and I love snow

  And things we do not know

  And we both have far to go

  Before we reach The End.

  She didn’t sign her name or close the book. She frowned critically at what she had written. It was nothing special. She realized that she had used “The Garden of Proserpine” as a baseline for the rhythm and rhyme scheme. Isaac being ‘lost in lights’ was a reference to how he devoted so much time and energy to thinking about things otherworldly and spiritual. But they were similar in loving things they did not know. For Isaac it was God; for Elizabeth it was the mysterious pain of art. Maybe Isaac would have said that those weren’t such different things.

  “Uh…so how’s it going?” asked Isaac. His music faltered. He was looking at her. The light made his thin face seem almost ghoulishly pale against the dark night. “Should I try something else? Something, uh…more classical? Or, like…a waltz?”

  “No,” she said. “It was fine.” She hadn’t really been listening, but it had been nice, hadn’t it? Yes. Nice. But maybe ‘nice’ wasn’t good enough. Jimothy’s painting went far beyond ‘nice.’ So did Kate’s skills as a bassist. Perhaps they had carried her with their talent. Perhaps she and Isaac both lacked the skill to create a door.

  Isaac’s fingers fell from the keys. He scrunched his eyebrows at her. “What? It doesn’t have to be perfect.”

  “Are you sure?” she asked.

  He rolled his eyes. “Come on. ‘Perfection’ isn’t even a real thing. It’s like Dwayne told me once, God is pleased by sincerity, not quality. And his opinion is the one that matters, right?”

  Very helpful. “Do you play for God, Isaac? Isn’t that a lot of pressure? Isn’t he perfect? How could anything you do…anything anyone does…”

  Isaac spread his hands. “Well, that’s it. We’re so far from perfection, there’s no sense trying. Like, even if my music or my writing isn’t great—which it isn’t, I know—but still…like, that’s no reason not to try. If it was, then, like, there’d be no point anyone ever doing anything.”

  They had been here before, the two of them. Isaac was not her closest friend, but he shared experiences with her that no one else did: the joy of reading, the trials of writing, the self-doubt and the agony of creation which none of their other friends seemed to feel.

  “I know,” she said. “I’ll never be Millay, or Swinburne, or Shelley. Of course not. I know, Isaac. It’s still hard sometimes.”

  Isaac nodded enthusiastically and turned back to the keyboard. “Well for me it’s hard, like, all the time. But…” He shrugged. “I think I can speak for all of us when I say I think it’s okay you’re not Millay or Shinburn. You know, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want them here instead of you if I had the choice. I think Elizabeth Eddison—and her poetry—is pretty cool too. Even if neither is perfect.”

  A warm sensation grew within Elizabeth upon hearing that. AJ would have said something like that. It didn’t sound much like Isaac, though. “Isaac,” she said with a coy inquisitiveness to her tone, “was that piece of encouragement a Dwayne Hartman Special?”

  “Eh…yeah.” He laughed and tapped his thin fingers on the keys. He was itching to keep playing, she could tell. “If you ever hear me say something wise, you can probably make that same assumption. Still true, though.”

  She smiled. “Let’s try again.”

  Isaac needed no further encouragement. He did go for a waltz this time, one with just a trace of the blues.

  And Elizabeth wrote, thinking of the music and how it made her feel. It was about her home, and her family, and her childhood. And no, it wasn’t perfect. But when she signed her name and closed the book, it burst open in a blizzard of pages.

  Snow and paper swirled away up into the dark, dancing a waltz, pulling Elizabeth up in their wake, a flock of paper birds in the cold winter’s night.

  The stars were dancing too; she felt them even beyond the clouds. They turned like a key in the mechanism of a vast lock, and the lock was made of stars, and when the last tumbler clicked into place, the Bright World blazed in the Empyrean.

  And it turned out that if you went through a door to Isaac’s platform while it was still small, then you became small as well.

  Poetry is not in my words. It never has been, nor ever shall be.

  Poetry is not in my mouth; it graces not my tongue, nor dances flaming from my lips.

  Poetry is in my eyes.

  It is in the stars, and in the skies

  It is in my memories and scars.

  It drinks the thunder, and pours forth song!

  It is the pain of beauty

  The sadness of the skies

  The lostness of the far horizons

  The bitter pain of parting

  And the warmth of hoping to meet again.

  - Elizabeth Eddison

  *

  EW: Hey

  EW: yo

  EW: Hey you should go talk to your dragon

  EW: oh yeah?

  EW: yeah

  EW: whats the code

  EW: the what?

  EW: the secret code that i decided id use if i ever tried to contact my past self

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  EW: when did you decide that?

  EW: I mean when did I decide that

  EW: fuck

  EW: i decided it just now when i realized that some bonehead might try to trip me up only they forgot that i never fucking capitalize anything in text

  EW: dumbass

  EW blocked EW

  Eric’s texts now float glowing in the air in front of him. A bit of ARKO-tech, borrowed from Isaac because it is too much of a pain in the ass to whip his phone out every time someone wants to talk to him. “Never been so fuckin popular,” he says, his voice loud inside the helmet. It’s funny that he’s popular because his moon is a deserted wasteland.

  He’s parked by the lakeshore, halfway around his moon, observing a chasm in the earth from the padded seat of his LZR-17, or laserbike, as he’s calling it. Because the roads are clear, he can go halfway around his moon via the great equatorial highway in a single afternoon, leaving the protection of the metronomes in the three capable and amazingly strong hands of Shgthaskhtaskhad or whatever-the-fuck his name is.

  The laserbike goes fast, really fast, but he’s found out that the default safety settings make it almost impossible to wreck even if he’s trying to. It’s almost weird how easy it is to use. Except not really, because he’s obviously supposed to use it. He’s supposed to roll around his big dead moon on a laserbike, just like he’s supposed to go down the ramp in front of him into the bottomless dark chasm, into the empty center of the Hollow Moon.

  The opening is hundreds of yards across. And unlike a lot of the gaping abysses scattered around his moon, which are the result of collapse, this one is here on purpose. Several roads turn into ramps that corkscrew down around the concrete edge of the hole until lost in the darkness below. It is not lost on Eric that this shaft is easily large enough for a dragon the size of Eranex.

  Eric has never been to the heart of his moon. Probably that’s where the fucking dragon’s lair is, down in there among all the skeletal framework that his moon has on the inside instead of actual, like, rock and lava.

  Frisby chirps nervously and bites Eric’s hair from his perch on Eric’s shoulder.

  “That’s right,” Eric agrees. “Why doesn’t the lake drain down to the center of the moon?” The body of water curves around his moon, covering a solid quarter of the total surface, but he calls it a lake because it is fresh water.

  Well, he has to do it. Eventually he has to fucking go down there and check it out. Way down to the center, way deeper than he’s gone before with Jacob. But he’ll need some backup. Jacob? Yeah, he’d be good. And maybe Kate. He wants Kate for this one. He voices these ideas to Frisby. “What you think, Mr. Wiser?”

  Frisby wants to know: why Kate?

  Eric opens his mouth, expecting an easy answer, but it isn’t there. He shrugs. “Just seems right. I’ll ask.”

  With Frisby on lookout, Eric throws a message to Kate, the words glowing red overlaid onto the pit in front of him.

  EW: yo

  KC: yo

  EW: down for an adventure?

  KC: um

  KC: not now, sorry!

  EW: damn what happened to ‘adventure awaits’ and all that shit

  KC: just not right now :(

  EW: aight

  EW: busy with something?

  KC: no

  KC: just

  KC: not feeling good

  EW: bummer

  EW: whats wrong?

  KC: I’m just not feeling good

  EW: well yeah you said that

  EW: but like in what way are you not feeling good

  KC: I’m just not!

  EW: what the fuck does that even mean

  EW: like are you sick or did a monster jump you or what

  KC: I’m not sick!

  KC: or injured

  EW: then whats the deal

  EW: get drugged again?

  KC: no!

  KC: I just don’t want to talk about it!

  EW: well damn now you got me curious

  KC: don’t worry about it, Eric

  EW: maybe i can guess

  KC: I said leave me alone!

  EW: you didnt say that

  KC: I’m saying it now!

  EW: okay but like

  EW: how long do you think youll not be feeling good

  KC: what did I just say?!

  EW: but like is it serious

  KC: fine!

  EW: whats fine

  KC: I’m on my period, you asshole!

  EW: well damn

  EW: you could have led with that

  KC: no!

  KC: no I could not have, Eric!

  KC: goodbye

  EW: okay see ya

  EW: guess ill catch you later

  EW: in like a few days or whatever

  EW: wonder how long that shit lasts

  EW: maybe jacob knows

  EW: whoops didnt mean to ramble

  EW: i mean i guess youre just ignoring me now

  EW: like youll read these later

  EW: maybe when youve calmed down or whatever

  EW: yo future kate

  EW: whats up

  EW: man this is sorta like time travel

  EW: thats my jam

  EW: i guess anything put in writing is time travel

  KC: Jesus Christ Eric just shut the fuck up!

  EW: damn

  EW: language

  KC blocked EW

  The text fades from the air, leaving Eric staring at the dark pit. He taps a simple rhythm on the grip of the laserbike with one hand. “You know,” he says to Frisby after a long moment of contemplation, “that shit’s the kind of reason I told Liz to warn me when I’m being an asshole.” He keeps tapping. “Should probably apologize for that later.”

  One of the things the laserbike does with texting is to display a little picture of whoever he’s talking to. He’d set Kate’s picture to be the one taken by the Theians on the first night of her arrival on her moon: muddy, soaked, a total mess, grinning stupidly and clutching her guitar. He clicks off the communications function with a flick of his thumb. Then, with another efficient motion, he sets some melodic techno music playing in his headphones. He leans forward onto the bike and begins easing his way down the broad, spiraling ramp and into the depths of his moon.

  *

  Isaac took Eric to Hyperion on a special mission to Eric and Jim to make a door. Isaac had grown the cube back to size inside one of the ADS Limitation’s hanger bays; with the artificial gravity turned off in the hangar, the cube could drift in the center of the room, held in place by invisible cushions of force, slowly rotating just as it had outside the Void Station.

  Isaac’s cube had three doors: his, Liz’s, and Jim’s.

  “How should we do it?” asked Eric. “Just a jam sesh, or what?” They jumped up toward the rotating cube, and both of them landed awkwardly as it flipped them and asserted its own soft gravity.

  “I guess,” Isaac replied. “I don’t know what the rules are for making a door.”

  “Can we do it on Jim’s moon?”

  Isaac shrugged. “Guess we’ll find out.” They’d landed on the doorless snowflake side of the cube; Kate’s side. Isaac led Eric over the edge onto Jim’s paintbrush-engraved side, where a big dark stone door loomed up out of the pale circuitry.

  “And you said we make stars by doing the door thing?”

  “Something like that. The stars are falling, right?” They fell regularly now, dropping from the Empyrean down to Ardia, where they burned up in the atmosphere with explosive rainbows of colors. “Well, new stars come from the Bright World.”

  “And I guess it likes music? Huh.” Eric put a hand on the solid dark rock of Jim’s door. “Gotta get me one of these. How’d you do it with Jim? He doesn’t do music.”

  “He painted me playing the piano,” said Isaac. “Let’s go.” He heaved open the door, which out of them all was heaviest and hardest to open. But it swung inward, and on the other side lay darkness and colored light.

  “Whoa,” said Eric. “Fucking nighttime over there.” They stepped through, and Isaac swung the door shut behind him.

  It was the middle of the night on Hyperion, which meant that monsters were about. But here at the top of the lighthouse they stood on stained glass, lit from below by a dazzling brilliance. They had stepped onto Jim’s slice, so it was all green below, but their other colors were only a few steps away. Out in the night, the searchlight-beam of the lighthouse swept in a regular circuit, describing a full circle once every six seconds. Each slice of the stained-glass hexagon at their feet shone brighter as the light turned below. Each of the four doors on Jim’s platform was lit in colors. Isaac thought that his own gleaming silvery arch looked pretty darn cool in the deep purple illumination.

  Eric was already on his way down; Isaac followed. They shielded their eyes as they passed the room with the shining crystals. Down they went, calling Jim’s name. He wasn’t in the art room, nor the floor with his bedroom, nor the guest rooms, nor the kitchen, nor the storage level.

  Only when they neared the ground floor, shouting Jim’s name, did he respond. “Down here!” But there was another sound from down there, a spooky muttering, scrabbling sound.

  Isaac led the way down the last flight of stairs along the curved wall. Colored lights dimly illuminated the ground floor. It smelled like paint and playdoh. The walls had been colored white. Jimothy stood at one of the walls, splattered with black, graffitiing something. An array of paints lay at his feet, both liquid paint in buckets and aerosol spray paint. Isaac registered these things in the first moment before the rest of the room caught and held his attention.

  It was filled with shadow monsters.

  His upgraded Void Suit (mk.17.4) now came equipped with a compact laser minigun on his right forearm. He raised it, ready to fire, and suddenly he was down the steps and beside Jimothy, without having moved in-between.

  Eric’s reaction was not as dramatic. “Jim,” he said, his voice level, “the fuck is going on here, bro?”

  Jimothy grinned at them. “Hey, guys!” he said. He gestured at the shuffling crowd of shadow monsters. “I’m teaching them how to paint!”

  “How to…” Eric shook his head and descended the stairs. “Put it down, Isaac.”

  Isaac lowered the laser gun. The shadow monsters didn’t seem aggressive. He could hardly discern their shapes in the dim light. Two playdoh golems lurked in the back, perhaps watching, though it was hard to say since they didn’t have faces. Were they bouncers? Did Jim even need bouncers?

  “Yeah,” said Jim, clearly excited about this. “They always mark things up, right? And I realized they were actually graffitiing! But they’re not very good at it. So, I thought, maybe they’d like it if I, you know, gave them some tips.”

  “Jim,” said Isaac, “they’re the bad guys.”

  Now Jim looked confused. “But,” he said, “weren’t you the one that told me that nobody is really a bad guy?”

  “Okay, yeah. But Jim, I was talking about people , not antagonistic narrative constructs!”

  Jim, now more confused than ever, said, “But….what’s the difference?”

  “Chill, Isaac,” said Eric. He’d taken a few steps toward the crowd of shadow monsters. Except it wasn’t so much a ‘crowd’ as a ‘class,’ was it? Isaac suddenly had a vision of Jimothy as a teacher in school, and all these shadow monsters sitting in desks fiddling with their pencils and trying to pay to attention. He laughed.

  The shadow monsters edged back from Eric. But they didn’t attack.

  “I don’t think they’re so bad,” Jimothy continued. “They just don’t like bright light. And they actually really like colors. They just…they don’t have any!” Jimothy spoke this part aghast, as though he had stumbled upon the worst possible tragedy.

  Isaac didn’t know what to think. This didn’t fit with what he knew about the Narrative. The shadow monsters should be just mindless antagonistic constructs, right? They even looked like low-effort stock bad guys. He was pretty sure Jim wasn’t supposed to befriend them.

  “You guys want to help?” Jimothy asked. He offered a dripping bucket of blue paint to Isaac.

  “Teach shadow monsters how to graffiti properly?” said Eric. “Hell yeah. This is exactly how I like to spend my evenings. Gimme the spray paint.”

  Isaac sighed, shrugged, and reached for the bucket of blue.

  *

  Jimothy didn’t think he was a very good teacher, but he did his best. He couldn’t think of how to explain things with words, so he just showed the shadows how to do it. He painted things: trees and mountains and the lake of ink and the city of Chiaroscuro and his lighthouse and Maugrim and the village of the playdoh golems. And himself and his friends. And the shattered window that showed the ten gods; he recreated that in a mural on a wall. Eric and Isaac had fun goofing around and doing their best to paint stuff on the white walls, but the shadows watched Jimothy.

  After a while they got restless because day was approaching, so Jimothy gave them all of his paints and took all the color from the walls to make them white again. Then he and Eric and Isaac sat on the steps up to the next level, and Isaac went and got some popcorn, and they observed as the shadow creatures made a complete mess of the bottom floor. The shadows hooted and screeched, flinging paint and rupturing the aerosol cans, splattering and smearing color all over the floor and walls. Three white angels—dog, hummingbird, miniature dragon—mingled in with the shadows. It looked like a game developed in which the shadows tried to paint the angels. Of course, it didn’t work.

  The shadows were really trying to paint, though. And as Eric observed, they seemed to be having fun.

  But they had to go when day came, and the sky outside lightened to the blank white of dawn, and the black of night retreated across the canvas of the sky like a spreading ink stain in reverse. Jimothy opened the heavy front door from across the room with a passing thought to let the shadows ooze out into the dawn. He didn’t know where they went during the day. He didn’t really know anything about them, except that they seemed to like coloring.

  “Maybe what I should do,” he said, yawning, as they all surveyed the mess once the shadows had left, “is leave out a bunch of paint for them, so they can do it themselves at night. Maybe they can help me color my moon!”

  The room looked like a tornado had come in and thrown his paints all over everything. The smell of it was almost overwhelming. His shoes stuck to the floor with every step.

  “Hey look,” said Eric, “it’s you.” He pointed out a roughly humanoid figure that had been marked onto one wall. Its features were unrecognizable, but it had a long green mark at the end of one arm, and at its side was a white blob supported by four uneven white pillars. It was Jimothy with his cane, and Hazel at his side.

  “Aww,” said Isaac. “Look at this. Is this the sea of ink?” He was standing in front of a huge black smear on one wall. There was a tiny green triangle in the middle of it.

  “Yeah, I think so,” said Jim.

  Isaac put a hand to his chin in thought. “Maybe,” he said, “what you need to do is color the sea of ink. Then maybe the shadows will help you paint your whole moon!”

  “With ink?” asked Jim.

  Isaac shrugged. “Is it actually ink?”

  “Yeah,” said Jim. “It’s just ink. Um. Actual ink.”

  “Huh. Hey, the one painting you had earlier, that was the gods, right? The ten guys looking up at the sun or whatever?”

  Jimothy nodded. He yawned again and put a hand on the sticky wall, recreating the mural he’d made earlier. It was a faithful recreation of the stained-glass window he’d put back together in the nearby ruins. The mural appeared on the wall, just as it had been before. Eric swore under his breath.

  “So that’s them,” said Isaac.

  “Yeah,” said Jim. “That’s what Rasmus said. It’s them.”

  “There he is.” Isaac pointed at the biggest of the ten figures, the one with tiny chips of yellow highlights around his shoulders and face. The tallest of the others barely came up to his chest.

  “You tired Jim?” asked Eric. “Guess so; you’ve been up all night.”

  “Your moons all have different day/night cycles,” said Isaac. “We’re all on different sleep schedules.”

  “I think I’ll go to bed now,” said Jim. “For a bit.”

  “Cool,” said Eric. “We’ll just chill.”

  “Oh, bro,” said Isaac, “Why don’t we go get some crystals for him while he’s sleeping?”

  “Sounds good,” said Eric. “Just shoot us a message when you’re up, Jim. Then we can make a door or some shit.”

  Jimothy nodded. Yawning again, and realizing all at once how tired he was, he wrapped himself in light and carried himself up to the level of his living area. He paused to look at some of his paintings, finished and unfinished, around the room. Three were the best: of Elizabeth, Kate, and Isaac. The paintings that had made the doors.

  He remembered something while washing up in the bathroom. Something he had meant to do ever since talking to Fiora, the green one. The black paint on his arms reminded him.

  JW: Hi

  JR: the fuck you want

  JR: i’m busy

  JW: Oh

  JW: Ok, then maybe we can talk later

  JW: Sorry

  JR: what could you possibly have to say to me you fuckin cut-rate color priest

  JR: i got godly shit to do

  JR: gotta figure out how to end you losers

  JR: maybe everyone else is gonna just fuckin give up

  JR: not me

  JW: Well like I said, if you’re busy maybe we can just talk later

  JR: gods damn it just fucking spit it out

  JR: all you humans are slow as shit

  JR: just fucking witless dipshits honestly

  JR: but you are the worst

  JR: you just talk and talk

  JR: but you never fucking say anything

  JW: Okay

  JW: It’s just that I was talking to the green one earlier

  JW: Fiora

  JR: that fucking halfwit?

  JR: this’ll be good

  JW: um

  JW: Well she said she’s worried about you

  JW: That you might be lonely and stuff

  JW: And I was just thinking

  JW: That wouldn’t be fun

  JW: I mean, I wouldn’t like that if it was me

  JW: So I just thought maybe we could talk

  JW: Are you still there?

  JR: hang on i gotta go kill fiora

  JR: just a sec

  JW: wait!

  JR: why?

  JW: don’t do that!

  JR: yeah it was a fucking joke you moron

  JR: i mean i would have done it months ago if i didn’t mind rasmus turning me into a gods damn stain on the wall afterward

  JR: now listen up you troglodyte

  JR: i don’t care about fiora and i don’t care about you and i especially don’t give a single rotting fucking tash about what either of you think

  JR: i don’t care that fiora’s got this some mental illness or whatever bullshit makes her concerned about people that hate her green fucking guts

  JR: i don’t care that you think you’re some kind of noble hero who’s gonna conquer the Narrative through the power of friendship

  JR: cause that’s all bullshit

  JR: it doesn’t work like that

  JR: pro tip, human: this isn’t that kind of story

  JR: and if you wanna see for yourself you can go ask the fucking bright world how things are gonna go

  JR: not that you’ll be around to see it, right?

  JR: at least you got that going for you, huh? won’t have to watch your friends die cause you’ll be already fucking dead

  JW: that

  JW: It might not

  JR: finish your gods damn sentences

  JR: might not happen?

  JR: who’s gonna stop it, you?

  JR: cause you’re the Big Fucking Hero?

  JR: heh

  JR: just wait

  JR: your art is stupid

  JR: you are stupid

  JR: aren’t even a real color priest

  JR: why am i even talking to you?

  JR: we’ll just see if you can save the whole fucking world, huh?

  JR: i’ll just be up here with my popcorn

  JW: maybe

  JW: we should talk later

  JR: no wait

  JR: i’m getting warmed up now

  JR: i’ve heard the fucking music

  JR: i know what it sounds like

  JR: can’t fight the bright world

  JR: we didn’t even need to try killing you

  JR: not that i’m gonna stop trying

  JR: my favorite part is gonna be watching all your friends cry their dumb little hearts out when you drop dead

  JR: like boo fucking hoo

  JR: who do you think will cry the most?

  JR: guess my money’s on the cat girl

  JR: we should take fucking bets up here

  JR: you can even get in the action, what do you say?

  JW: you’re mean

  JR: holy shit

  JR: i’m so fucking sorry

  JR: wait are you crying now?

  JR: i don’t have your book so i can’t fucking see you but i bet you are

  JR: you are, right?

  JR: that’s terrific

  JR: you guys are so damn fragile

  JW: I’m going to go now

  JR: already?

  JR: well hey, I changed my mind, this has been great

  JR: really cheered me up, just what I needed honestly

  JR: feel free to message me just absolutely fucking anytime

  Hazel growled at Jimothy’s phone as he set it on his bedside table with a shaking hand. Jimothy sniffed. He wiped his eyes. Hazel jumped halfway up into Jimothy’s lap. Jimothy hugged the dog fiercely, hard enough that he might have hurt Hazel if he had been a normal dog.

  “I don’t want to die, Hazel,” he said. The words were hoarse, because his throat was so tight it hurt. “I don’t want anyone to die. I’m scared.”

  His phone buzzed on the wood beside his bed, but he ignored it. He needed to sleep. Everything would be better after sleeping, even though he’d have the weird dreams again, the ones about rolling through endless mist in some huge car with a bunch of people he sort of knew.

  His phone vibrated again. Hazel growled at it, took it in his ivory jaws, and vanished for a moment in a blink of light. The phone was gone. Good boy.

  Hazel cuddled with Jim as he collapsed onto his bed and hauled a single thick sheet over them both.