He should not be here.

  He should not be here.

  And yet here he is.

  Tiger and Panther were startled, certainly, when first he spoke. Who wouldn't be? And they did understand, on some level, that something was off with their unannounced new visitor.

  But they weren't properly terrified. Not yet. Not like they should have been.

  Not like I was, for their sakes.

  Nobody was making any particularly sudden moves. Tiger was sitting very still—in the way that prey often does, when startled and confused—whilst Panther's hand was creeping to the dagger on her back. She was playing things cool only because Tiger was playing things cool. And Casso—Casso Vos, the unflappable killer, the legendary mercenary, the single most skilled opponent that Panther had ever faced—was just squeezing his eyes shut, and bowing his head, and refusing to look at or even acknowledge the presence of their uninvited guest. In a single moment, Casso had simply shut down—and for this, he was by far the wisest amongst them.

  "Good evening," says The Eye, then. "Tiger." He tips his hat once. "Miss Panther." He tips his hat again. And then, to Casso, he merely remarks, "Old man," and he does so with just the faintest trace of mockery in that subterranean rumble of a voice.

  It is Tiger, characteristically, who first works up the nerve to reply. "Good evening..." he returns, slowly. Warily. He does not yet understand the nature of that with which he is dealing—but still, some part of him can already smell the danger in the air. Ancient instincts die hard. "Um, who—I'm sorry, but who exactly are you?"

  "I am called The Eye," the individual in question replies, with yet another tip of that damned hat. "And many other names."

  "And how do you know our names?" Panther demands, before Tiger can even get out another word. Her fingers curl tight around the hilt of her aforementioned dagger; already she is more than halfway inclined to fling said dagger right into the center of that golden-eyed stranger's skull. But it is that same ancient instinct that stops her, that unspeakably old and reptilian quadrant of her brain whispering do not.

  "I am The Eye," he repeats. "I see it all."

  And now Tiger is beginning to understand. As a child, he was subjected to countless cautionary tales of Equinox Beasts and other such forces of The Other Side donning human guise to walk about the physical world; now, invariably, his mind flashes back to the eyeless watcher who stood by as the six-legged beast savaged their caravan and wailed in the stolen voices of its victims. And so it is that when Tiger speaks again, he does so even more cautiously than before. "And, may I ask...what is it, exactly, that you and I disagree on?"

  The Eye's head swivels oh-so-smoothly to Tiger. He smiles. "You said that this was a shitty day. But I disagree. There has been so much suffering and death for such stupid reasons. So many little things in pain. Not a shitty day, Tiger. A beautiful day." The Eye spreads ebony arms wide—long arms, arms stretching so far that Panther realizes he must be nearly seven feet tall. And then The Eye's voice goes from a rumbling purr to a thunderous boom—like the eruption of some long-dormant volcano—as he declares, "What a GOOD day to be alive!"

  And then he lowers his arms, and folds them in his lap. And just smiles.

  Only silence follows; only the howl of the wind, and the distant swaying of reeds.

  I hate him. I hate him so much, because he is going to ruin my story. He is going to ruin my protagonists!

  "So what the hell do you want with us?" Panther snaps, finally. Defiant in the face of her own rising fear. Tiger, too, is frightened now; Casso, for his part, has been frightened since the moment The Eye first spoke.

  "I want the things that I want," replies The Eye. "And now I want two things. I want to tell you a thing, and then I want to ask you a thing."

  "I—okay..." Tiger trails off. "What—"

  "Why?" Panther interjects. And to that, The Eye's head swivels right back, and he blinks two times in a very poor imitation of surprise. Such ludicrous theater it was—the idea that an individual such as The Eye could ever know something so trivial as surprise!

  "Why," The Eye repeats, as though that word were the funniest thing in the world.

  "Do you intend to do us harm?" Tiger presses, jumping right in on Panther's unspoken cue. At their best, after all, the two of them were all but reading each another's minds.

  "No. I do not want to harm you. But I do love to watch little things squirm and suffer. And I do wish to see you harmed." The Eye's speech was, as always stilted and strange—as though his words had been disassembled, and reconstructed solely from scratch. The emphasis was always in the wrong place, with some syllables drawn unreasonably long and some cut inexplicably short. "Your benefactor and I disagree on a significant matter. He will not act to resolve it. Now he does not speak to me at all. I can not hurt him and so I will hurt him with you. He covets you so jealously...but he is only a paper tiger, and every one knows it, and no one is afraid of him any more. He will not help you. He will not act. His grip on you is loose. It is not like mine." The Eye leans in, closer, the gold swirling in his eyes. "No one gets loose from my grip." And then his eyes flick just to the side—right to me—and then, for just a moment, he smirks.

  Tiger and Panther's heads turn on instinct, unconsciously following his gaze. They do not know the proper way to look and so they do not see me; they turn back and find The Eye sitting fully upright, back no longer hunched, and now even sitting does he tower a full half-foot over them all. He waits just a few moments for either of them to speak—they do not—and then he claps his hands together and declares, "Now I will tell you a thing. All of you are going to die soon."

  That does it. Tiger's eye sparks to life and Panther leaps right up, cloak flaring out behind her, dagger cocked back and all but begging to be thrown. "Is that a threat?" Panther growls, slipping automatically into the icy composure with which she has always faced her opponents, whilst Tiger looks on in growing alarm and Casso remains steadfastly silent. And to all of that, The Eye just bursts into his terrible laughter—that strange, undulating sound like a distant thunderstorm rolling in. He laughs like the shifting of tectonic plates, like the very motion of continents themselves.

  And now, he chuckles, "Oh, Panther. There are no threats. There are only things that happen. Now, I will ask you another thing. I have said that you are going to die soon—you all know this. Do you believe it?"

  "I am, ah, certainly skeptical," Tiger answers, playing along with utterly falsified confidence, even as lightning crackles weakly between his fingertips. With his free hand he gestures for Panther to desist; reluctantly she does so, drawing her cloak back once more and returning to her perch with weapon still very much in hand. "You're a stranger to us, after all—we have no idea who you really are, or where it is that you came from. How are we possibly to take you at your word?"

  "I will tell you more things," declares The Eye, as though the prince had not even spoken. "Twenty and two killers in bronze will come. They will recognize your faces. They will murder Tiger with a sword—" he reaches up, taps with one slender finger where his heart should have been, "—right here. Tiger will die with blood pooling in his eyes. Panther will see him die, and then she will act without thinking. She will kill five more before she, too, is murdered with many swords in many places. Casso..." he stretches the sss of that name out, long and loving, until it becomes all but a purr, "—will kill all of them, after you are already dead. But Casso will have failed Ibis, by letting you die, and so afterwards he will finally muster the courage to murder his own self." The Eye lets all those horrible prognostications just sit, for a moment—and then he leans even further back and tells them, with great satisfaction: "This will all happen very soon. Do you believe me?"

  It is eventually, and once again, Tiger who speaks up first. "Killers in bronze..." he whispers, voice cowed and hushed by the weight of the stranger's words. "Do you mean Sathai? Here? Soon?"

  The Eye just nods his head. "Very, very soon," he says.

  And then he asks: "Would you like me to remove them?"

  Tiger, you must remember, is Shalasharan born and bred. Tiger was raised in a land predicated upon an abundance of Sorcerers, upon a deeper understanding of the Other Side—of all the unknowable minds, forces, energies, and individuals dwelling within. Tiger knows enough to know that there are no exact sciences when it comes to the so-called Equinox Beasts; he knows that the Other Side defies all logic of the human world, that its denizens are cruel and mercurial creatures whose 'minds' are nothing like his own.

  But. Tiger—and every schoolchild on Xon, be they Shalasharan, or Vokian, or even Keloken—has also been taught the oldest and simplest of axioms: Never make a deal with an Equinox Beast. Ever. Accept no gift, no bargain, no exchange of favors. No matter the offer, no matter the terms, no matter the price, a deal with an Equinox Beast always ends in death. It is a fact as invariable as the rising and setting of the sun.

  So Tiger answers The Eye correctly. He doesn't entertain the offer for even a second; he does not ask for what price, and he doesn't even inquire as to what remove them could possibly entail. He just folds his hands and bows his head very politely, in the ways he was taught as youngest scion of the Qelas dynasty, and replies, "Thank you very much, good sir, for your generous offer—but we must, respectfully, decline."

  To which The Eye's smile only widens. As though that is exactly what he wanted to hear.

  "Respect," he hums, rolling that word around in his mouth. Tasting it. "Hah. Very well. Now I will give you two choices."

  "We've had enough of your offers—" Panther starts.

  "It is not an offer. It is a choice and it is not optional. There are two futures ahead—one where you are murdered in this place, as I have told, and one—" there comes a strange sound from the very depths of his throat, something like a clicking or shifting or rumbling of bone, "—where you flee to the forest, where no killer will dare follow."

  "The forest—?" Tiger blinks, baffled. "What are you—"

  "There, maybe you will die," rumbles The Eye, barreling right through the prince's protestations. "Or maybe you will live. " He flashes for them all a full grin; his lips peel back to reveal twin rows of gleaming-white teeth. "I am eager to see it. Now, choose, or it will be chosen for you."

  "That's not—"

  "How long?"

  Tiger and Panther's heads snap around; The Eye's gaze shifts slowly, smoothly to where Casso now sits, with—for the first time—eyes wide open, albeit carefully refusing to settle upon their uninvited guest. "How long until the Sathai arrive?" Casso snaps a moment later, when The Eye does not immediately reply.

  "You can not go with them," says The Eye. "You owe too much to too many."

  "How long, stars-damn you!?"

  "One hundred and ten," he answers, finally. And then he adds, with a delighted purr, "Old man."

  "That means we're outta time." Casso turns to Tiger and Panther, hooks a thumb over his shoulder. Clicks his tongue. "You heard what that thing said. Both of you into the woods, now."

  "I—what—are you out of your mind!?" Tiger exclaims, gesticulating wildly, as Panther's eyes snap anxiously back and forth. "We are in the midst of a Yellow Equinox—that's suicide!"

  "If that thing says it's the only way, then that's the only way!" Casso thunders back, storming up to his feet with such shockingly uncharacteristic vehemence that Tiger nearly stumbles right over. "It never lies, not directly!" The old man surges forward, his form momentarily shrouding The Eye from view, and when he passes just a moment later the uninvited guest has vanished as though he never existed at all. "Listen," Casso insists, all the while, drawing uncomfortably close to the both of them—close enough that they can smell the liquor on his breath. Close enough that they can hear, too, the slight trembling of his voice. "When you two cross into the woods, you run fast as you possibly can and you do not stop, you do not ever stop, and you do not look anything in the eye, and no matter what you do not open any doors! There are no doors in that place, do you understand me?"

  "What are you talking about?" Panther demands—but Casso just snatches them both by their collars and starts literally hauling them outside, to which Tiger immediately thrashes free and Panther nearly breaks his wrist right then and there. But still does Casso continue on and still do they follow him, reluctantly, to the mouth of the tunnel, shouting after the old man all the while. And it is only when the three of them burst out from that shadowed cave to that yellow-moonlit roadside that they see them, twenty-two bronze-armored and black-cloaked Sathai, some thousand-or-so feet away, a full contingent that was marching in lockstep just a few seconds ago—a full contingent that is now sprinting ahead with glaives and shortswords drawn. Their combined footfalls are a thunder that shakes the very earth.

  And to all this, Casso just whirls around and shouts one word:

  "Go!"

  And so, before they can think better of it, Tiger and Panther do just that. They go. They turn around and race for the nearest treeline, boots and sandals slapping noisily against the mud, gasping breaths echoing in their own ears, as Casso turns to face the encroaching army with a flask in one hand and a knife in the other.

  Tiger looks back over his shoulder; he gets just the briefest glimpse of Casso taking a long, greedy swig of his flask just as a bronze-forged sword races down to bury itself in his clavicle. Half are focused solely on Casso; the other half are pointing and shouting, and Tiger and Panther both, and a few are already raising crossbows to fire.

  A trio of bolts surges forth—

  And then Tiger crosses the treeline.

  And then he, and they, and everything else disappears.

  And then he is somewhere else entirely.

  It is cold, in this place. Cold and dry. And darker than anything they have ever known.

  They're running for dear life, he and she, as fast as their feet will carry them. Desiccated leaves crunch noisily underfoot. Rows and rows of limbless dead trees stream by like monolithic pillars of salt. A thick, icy fog hangs over all and everything; there is no sky above, not even the starless void of the Yellow Equinox. Only a dire cover of murky, swirling shadow. Their vision stretches no further than twenty feet in any one direction.

  The boundary between Your Side and the Other Side is so very, very thin here, and by all stars above I tell you now that Tiger and Panther are by far the noisiest things in this twilit place. They are outsiders, intruders. Anomalies. They do not belong. And they have not gone unnoticed.

  They run for what may well have been a small eternity, until finally they can run no more. They do not give up willingly, mind you—stopping is the last thing that either of them wants to do. They halt only when their bodies physically give way. Tiger stumbles, staggers, and then abruptly drops, and Panther skids to a halt before she, too, collapses down to a cloak-draped and panting heap.

  They are both panting loudly, like wounded animals. Yet the forest surrounding is still. There are no shifting shapes, no watching eyes. It is all cold and sterile nihility. There is only the sound of their own exhausted breaths.

  And—

  "Do you miss her?" asks The Eye.

  Tiger yelps; Panther leaps back in startled shock, hands darting for her knives. And The Eye just grins down at them both. His whole face is drowned in the shadow of that wide-brimmed hat; there is naught visible of his features save for those twin golden suns and that eggshell-white gleam of his sneer. Yet even now, even from there, still can Tiger and Panther both feel it—the heat of those wretched, wretched eyes. The malice itching like ivy upon their skin.

  "Shut up," Panther snaps back, even as her blood runs cold. She tears her gaze away from The Eye, climbs halfway back to her feet, extends a hand to Tiger and tries with failing strength to haul her companion upright. "Come on," she whispers, feeling the young man's pulse all but jumping in his wrist. "Tiger, I'm with you, but you have to get up—we have to go!"

  But now the young Sorcerer's right eye burns emerald aflame. "It hurts—" he groans, with veins bulging in his forehead and jaw clenching rictus-tight. His left eye seems all but ready to roll back in its socket. Still; nevertheless, he grasps her hand in turn, and allows her to pull him back up—and the two rock unsteadily there, on their feet, for just a moment, before Tiger slumps hard against the nearest tree and Panther drops to one knee with an involuntary gasp of pain. They are both too exhausted, too wounded, too utterly depleted to run. The frigid air burns in Panther's lungs like nothing she's ever felt before.

  "Do you want her back?" asks The Eye.

  "I told you to shut your mouth," Panther snarls, not looking at him. Looking anywhere but at him. "You're not real. None of this is real." Her fists are balled white-knuckle tight and her teeth are grinding, grinding together. There is none of that steady and liquid calm in her eyes. Hers are only the manic eyes of prey. She repeats, again, like a mantra, "You are not real. None of this is real."

  "It's in my eye..." Tiger moans, whilst half-cradled like an oversized infant in her arms. His right eye—his conduit—has grown to a whole pillar of emerald flame. "Panther, I f-feel it, I feel it in my eye—my eye, my eye, I feel it going into my head—"

  "I could bring Ibis back," says The Eye.

  "Fuck you!" Panther screams, whirling around and hurling a dagger right into his miserable skull. But The Eye is not there; her knife embeds itself hilt-deep in a dead tree with a thunk that sounds, somehow, like the last echo of low-rumbling laughter.

  "Do you ever wonder," asks The Eye, his breath furnace-hot in her ear, "if Ibis really loved you?"

  Panther lets loose a lunatic cry of fury and whirls once more, her sabre leaping free of its sheath to cleave in one silver flash through a stretch of empty air. Now The Eye's chuckle echoes all around her, everywhere and nowhere, the clicks and rumbles creeping like ice-cold fingers up each segment of her spine. She whirls again—back, forth, back, forth—head and eyes snapping about in maddened asynchronicity, for Panther has only ever wanted to be a warrior, a weapon, an instrument, a vessel and so all she needs is a target, just a target, please give me an opponent please something to fight please, stars, please! Every one of those boughless dead trees is a shadow, a shape, a threat! And the crunching of leaves beneath her boots is all but deafening now.

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  "We have to go back!" Tiger cries out, stumbling forth and snapping Panther from that livid, desperate hysteria. She catches him head-on, her knees sagging, struggling with all her might to support him as he, now, is the one scrabbling like a wounded animal. "It's in my eye!" he shrieks, over and over again. "It's in my eye!"

  "Are you already tired of Casso telling you what to do?" The Eye asks him, from over Panther's shoulder. "Do you want to know every one of the old man's secrets? Do you want to know the reason why he drinks so heavily? Do you want to know the true nature of Ibis's plan?"

  "Gah!" Panther barks, shoving Tiger aside and jabbing her wrist-blade at absolutely nothing at all.

  "I do not even need to act," says The Eye, as Tiger hits hard upon a bed of crumbling leaves. He takes one long-legged step forward and then crouches down over the sprawled prince, and chuckles lowly as poor Tiger struggles in painful desperation to get away. "I need only to speak certain words. I see it all, and there is no thing that is not known to me."

  "No!" Tiger bellows, with one hand pressed tight over his burning eye. "I don't want your help! I don't need your help!"

  "Is that true?" leers The Eye. "Come, poor Tiger. Do you not want the freedom to choose? I see you, poor Tiger. You have never had a real choice in all your sad little life. Until now. Now you can choose. And when you do choose, poor Tiger, every thing can change." He lifts one hand, presses thumb to middle finger, and snaps. "Like that. Tell me, poor Tiger—are you tired of losing yet?"

  "Stay away from him!" Panther bellows, staggering over and nearly tripping upon an upturned root. She makes her way to Tiger—Tiger, now alone—and once more has his head in one hand, and the other clenched tight around his wrist. Every breath is jagged agony in her chest; Tiger's conduit burns so brightly, now, that it is all but blinding to even behold. His other eye is squeezed firmly shut and he writhes, thrashes, moans in the throes of a pain she cannot possibly imagine.

  "I could fix the world for you both," purrs The Eye, kneeling down beside them. He leans in so close, so very, very close, and then he whispers:

  "All you have to do is ask."

  A long silence passes. And then slowly, Panther turns her head to face him, and to look dead in the center of those swirling-gold eyes. And she answers back: "Fuck you. We'll fix it on our own."

  "Sure you will," grins The Eye.

  And then he is gone.

  And they are alone.

  And for a moment, there are only the sounds of their own panicked breathing.

  And then something moves.

  A leaf crunches.

  A twig snaps.

  More movement. Where—?

  Panther whirls—

  A shadow just behind her—

  Something darts between her legs—

  Below—no, above! In the trees! Shapes in the branches!

  Her heart leaping, pounding. Sweat dripping. Pupils dilated. Things moving all around her. Shifting, stalking, circling. Watching!

  Eyes, so many eyes—

  A hand on her wrist—

  "Panther," Tiger whimpers, trembling like a leaf in the wind. But Panther is no bastion. Panther is paralyzed, unable to move a muscle. Raw animal terror pins her like a dead butterfly to a board. The forest is alive with so much, so many, so many hands and teeth and tongues and eyes and eyes and EYES and—

  Breath, on the back of her neck.

  The sweet and sickly stench of rot.

  "P-Panther?" Tiger repeats—and this time with a new pitch, a new urgency such that without thinking she turns, her whole body on autonomous command, her eyes drawing all the way along the forest floor and up, up, right up to—

  Her heart stops.

  It comes from between two trees, long fingers digging furrows into dead bark, an equine head at the end of an undulating leathery neck with brutish, herbivorous teeth split and splayed in all directions like so many scattered dominoes embedded in those gore-red gums as the snout parts wide and that fat, lolling, steaming tongue bifurcates into prehensile segments grasping and tasting and those eyes, those eyes—they are a man's eyes, they are eyes shimmering with horrible delight as it asks them—

  DO YOU KNOW

  A spindly second set of arms reaching—

  WHAT IT IS

  Saliva pooling, eyes watering, tongue flicking—

  TO FLY FOREVER?

  Mania. Sheer mania. Something breaks at the cores of Tiger and Panther and then they are running, running, running, feeling nothing and thinking nothing—their thoughts are naught but one long, sustained, gibberish and wordless scream. They run and run and run past tree after tree after identical fucking tree, the forest never changing the dark never changing the leaves never changing as there stumbles forth from the shadows a lanky and curled-up giant with jewelry-studded tusks and bulging eyes and a leering, lecherous grin, and from the trees above a chittering deer with thirty-three horns curling in a cage around its own lumpen skull, black wings above and oily scales below and so many hands, so many mouths, so many eyes, whispering and laughing and whispering and laughing and—

  There—shelter! Safety! An old shack! An impossible break in that endless array of dead trees; a dilapidated little cabin, a miserable lean-to structure of rotten wood and broken glass with one ramshackle, red-painted door waiting right there at its center.

  They do not think. They are far beyond thought. Tiger and Panther all but leap upon that derelict old porch; decaying lumber sags and buckles beneath their weight as they thrown open the door, storm into the house, slam said door shut behind them, and then they finally—mercifully, blessedly— are alone.

  The moment that door closes, Tiger's flame is snuffed out.

  Now he and Panther sink in unison to the floor and once more all is quiet, so very quiet and so very, very still. Whilst the forest was all bitter and biting cold, here it is warm—uncomfortably warm, if anything, the air turgid and suffocatingly thick. There is no illumination to be found in this place, only indistinct shapes in the shadows surrounding as Tiger and Panther hold one another tight, gasping and crying and drowning in the wake of their own terror as slowly, gradually do their higher functions return. Gradually do their heartbeats slow; gradually do their eyes adjust to the darkness, and gradually are their surroundings made clear. They lie prone amidst the decaying ruin of what was perhaps once a living room, the two of them directly adjacent to a shorn-open sofa and a tea table split cleanly in two. Everything here is coated in a thick filament of dust; Panther feels stiff, dry-crusted carpet shifting beneath the palms of her hands.

  They sit there, in the sweltering corpse of this place, for what feels like an eternity. Eventually they do separate for a brief moment until, inevitably, Panther's hand finds its way back to Tiger's—and he is relieved beyond all words to take it once more. They are desperate, the two of them, so desperate for any semblance of human physical contact. For anything real at all in this nightmare they have found themselves. They are both of them intruders, after all, and there is some minuscule solidarity to be taken in that fact.

  It is Panther, after a while, who first dares to speak. "What the fuck do we do?" she croaks, voice hoarse and cracked and terribly, terribly hushed. For surely there are certain individuals listening very closely indeed.

  "We just—we wait—" Tiger breathes, still gripping her hand for dear life. Still struggling to shackle his thoughts, his mind. Still struggling to forget that hideous sensation of a finger worming its way into his brain.

  "Those things—" Panther chokes out, unable to conjure sufficient words. She forces herself to swallow before continuing; tries to re-approach this nightmare with a semblance her usual steadfast calm. "Why aren't they—following us—surely they could just break down the door—"

  The door. The door, the door, the door. Realization strikes. Both pairs of eyes go wide. "Oh fuck," Panther gasps. "Oh, no, oh nonononono—"

  "It's okay, it's okay," Tiger babbles, even as his own panic is roaring and rearing up within him, and even as he releases her hand and begins crawling back to the door—and as Panther is reaching for the hand that has fled, and an involuntary whimper escapes her lips. "We're fine, we're fine," Tiger keeps whispering, trying to convince her and trying to convince himself. He presses his body up flat against the wall and then slowly, slowly does he dare to rise and peer out from the vantage of that broken-glass little window. "We'll just wait here until...those things are gone," he mutters, partly to himself, "until they...g-get bored, I don't know—or Casso will come back for us, and we'll all just—" And then Tiger's last word turns to a horrendously full-throated scream and he is leaping back as though he has been shocked, crashing down hard upon the bisected table, and in an instant Panther is rushing right to his side.

  "Tiger, what's happening?" she demands, as the seventh prince thrashes and flails with stark-wide eyes. "Tiger? Tiger, talk to me! Tiger!"

  "There's a man!" Tiger shrieks, finger pointed square at the window. "A m-man, he was on his hands, and he was—he, he was looking at me and he saw me and knows, he knows, he knows—we're not safe here! We cannot be here!" Then he breaks free of her grip with what feels like impossible strength and shoots to his feet, head snapping around with a madman's desperate alacrity until he finds the other doorway at the far end of the room—and then he tears off, tears right around the corner, and then Tiger is gone.

  Just gone. It is astonishing how quickly she loses sight and sound of him. It is as though he had never existed at all.

  Panther rises slowly, then, to her feet—and as she does, once more does something break inside of her. Some quintessentially human fragment of her soul shatters beneath the weight and suddenly her mind is all cool, rational lucidity. Tiger is all that she has left, and Tiger needs help. Simple. This is not a nightmare; this is only a problem to solve. An enemy to fight. Another duel, yes, another duel. This is all just another duel.

  So she takes her sabre in one hand and her knife in the other and then she goes, stalking and silent, through that same doorway as he.

  The living room was hot. This hallway is even hotter; so hot that the walls seem to ripple and shimmer, and the air is all but a physical fog that Panther must push through, eyes narrowed and jaw set and mouth drawn to a determined line. Periodically—every five seconds or so—there comes a faint gust of torrid wind against her ankles, a gust that grows warmer and stronger with each and every step. The walls surrounding her are all rotted and peeling; the carpet below, once crunchy and solid, has now begun to audibly squish beneath her boot-heels. Panther kneels down, curious, puts two fingers to floor—and finds the carpet to be damp with some manner of cloudy, red-yellow fluid that reeks of copper and salt.

  She pauses for just a moment there, listening carefully—and detects nothing at all. The house does not creak, nor groan, nor shift in any way. Nothing moves. Everything is still as the grave.

  Except—

  There is something, there, at the most remote edge of her hearing. A certain drone, a certain...buzzing, perhaps? It is so very distant and so very quiet, and yet the absence of any other sounds makes it starkly impossible to ignore. Panther listens to this errant tone for just a few moments longer—motionless and patient, like a hunter—and then she simply gets back up, and keeps walking down that hall.

  She is aware, on some level, that things are catastrophically wrong. With her. That this composed, pragmatic state of mind is starkly at odds with her situation and surroundings. She is aware of the fact that Tiger is gone and that she is not worried for him, not afraid—only stoically determined to get him back. This is how a character in a book might behave, yes, but not a real person. Not a sane person.

  Panther is aware, on some level, that she is no longer thinking clearly.

  This not does stop her. She continues on, down the hall, through another door—one already creaking ajar, in Tiger's wake—and into yet another hall. And then another. And another. And all the while that buzzing grows louder, louder, humming now so prominently in both her ears. It is pure monotone white noise, and yet: is it mere pareidolia that it seems even now to mutate from whine, to hum, to buzz, to thrum, to...voices?

  She continues on. The wind against her ankles is grows stronger, hotter. The air thickens. The droning gets louder, and louder, and louder. She does not realize that she can no longer hear her own footsteps.

  She continues on.

  She rounds another corner.

  And then there he is, standing there with arms dangling at his sides, framed like a full-body portrait in the archway of one final door.

  His right eye is belching black smoke.

  He mutters, and somehow she is able to hear him: "A dream...a dream...just a dream, surely this is all just a dream..."

  Panther steps forward. Puts one hand on his shoulder, draws him back. He does not resist.

  The sound is deafening now. Panther is not bothered.

  She steps into the room, and stands beside him.

  She steps squarely into a puddle of that same copper-smelling fluid.

  The door swings shut behind them.

  The heat is unbearable.

  Before her, lengthwise upon the floor, a pair of lungs—enormous, swollen, leathery grey-blue things that press up against the walls, greedy for space in this enclosed little room. They swell like overripe balloons, skin audibly stretching at the seams, then deflate down to mere wrinkled sacks of flesh with a heavy wheeze and a burst of sickly-hot air to follow. Bulging, semitranslucent intestines run like vines up and along the walls, delving into every seam and every crack of the house, pulsing and throbbing as that same murky fluid pumps through. And in the back, a pillar of pallid human skin rises horizontal between floor and ceiling, blue-veined and throbbing as well, with its front-facing center sitting flayed-open and peeled back. It is from within this exposed panoply of raw red meat—ligaments clenching, tendons flexing within—that four glistening, rigid, hollow tubes jut forth.

  They are throats.

  The noise stops, then. The droning ceases. The silence to follow is agonizing, an absence louder than anything Panther has ever heard before.

  And then the throats begin to sing.

  It is pure vibration, that torpid-thick air shuddering and jittering with a sound that Panther feels in the roots of her teeth, in the marrow of her bones, in all the little crevasses and folds of her brain. It is a chorus of ten thousand voices without voices—it is the absence of voices. It is only the echoes, overlapping again and again and again and again and again. It obliterates all thought.

  AND THE WHEEL TURNS ON

  Tiger and Panther are kneeling on the floor, eyes squeezed shut, hands pressed tight against bleeding ears. They scream, and scream, and scream. Their screams are swallowed whole.

  ON A LADDER TO GOD

  Panther reaches for him, through what is now a physically oppressive force. The heat is like acid against her skin; the immense weight of sound crushes her down to all fours. She can hardly even draw breath.

  ON A LADDER TO GOD

  He manages to take her hand, barely. Their fingers curl tight. His right eye is a cloud of black, and he nearly bites off his tongue. Both her eyes are flooding with involuntary tears.

  ON A LADDER TO GOD

  She squeezes his hand with such terrible force that she feels something shift, something pop. Yet still their eyes remain locked together. They do not dare look away.

  ON A LADDER TO GOD

  One meager little fraction of a thought slips through to the forefront of Panther's psyche. We are going to die.

  And with that thought comes one final surge of defiant will; now, with every ounce of strength she can still conjure, Panther commands her body to MOVE—

  And it does. It moves. Panther tears off, tears away, nearly yanks Tiger's arm right from its socket as she bursts back through that door, back down the same hallway after hallway after hallway, no thoughts no plans no nothing her lower primordial reptilian brain in full control as she sprints further and further and as that terrible chorus gets louder, and louder, and louder, and now the two of them burst once more into the living room—to find a bird, a crow, a sleek and gleaming raven with feathers of cool azure perched atop the back of that ruined chair. It turns its head and it looks at them both with eyes like wide pools of pure beautiful emerald, and then it opens its back and caws out:

  A

  PO

  THE

  OS

  IS

  And then the house's sole denizen just watches, perched and unmoving, as Panther storms past, and—with no hesitation at all—kicks that damn red-painted door right off its rotting hinges.

  And then she and Tiger stumble outside.

  And then—

  —they each plant face-first into the mud.

  And they each look up, blinking and bewildered, to find that it is now broad daylight. And that they are laying here—at the very edge of the road, well beyond that shadowy treeline—with no sign of any derelict house in sight.

  Tiger and Panther spend a long while just splayed there, in the mud, learning how to breathe again. Their faces are caked with dry blood and dry tears, their eyes forced to squint beneath the light of a quivering midday sun. Their ears are still ringing. And their hands are still interlocked—interlocked so tightly that when they do, finally, release one another, Tiger cannot help but let out a sharp hiss of pain.

  "Sorry," Panther mutters, in a voice so hoarse that it is barely audible at all.

  "That's...okay..." Tiger gasps, still thoroughly out of breath. "Don't...worry about it..."

  And they do, eventually, rise to their feet. Panther's cloak is utterly soaked in mud; she unclasps it, ties it tight around her waist like an impromptu sarong, then kneels down and methodically re-laces her boots. Tiger, just beside her, runs fingers over and over along his swollen tattoos, and then with trembling hands does he rummage through the pockets of his own filthy coat until, finally, he manages to produce one more rolled-up old cigarette. "You got a...?"

  "Light? Yeah. One sec." Panther does some rummaging of her own, finds a match, strikes it hard against her boot. Thus do the two of them pass the cigarette back and forth until it is done; though Panther never smokes, Tiger in no way questions her desire to do so now.

  They do not discuss what they have seen, the two of them. Where they have been. They try with all their might to bury those memories.

  And, eventually, they start walking again.

  They trek on for just a little over an hour—long enough to see the sun sloping towards the west, to see the shadows of all those limbless trees stretching long and lankly—until they find him there, sitting on the side of the road, propped up against a boulder in a pool of his own blood. Casso Vos. A beaten, bloodied, bruised Casso Vos in a coat now slashed and shorn to ribbons—but Casso Vos, nevertheless. And his eyes flick to them, as they approach, with what can only be described as total lack of surprise.

  "Good," he tells them, as they draw near. "You didn't die. That makes my life easier."

  Tiger and Panther will not speak of that which they have just endured. They do not dare. So Tiger blurts, instead, in a voice still dry-cracked and hushed: "Casso...surely you didn't kill twenty-two Sathai on your own."

  "Killed enough of 'em," Casso grunts, climbing now to his feet with a long-suffering groan.

  "But—" Tiger sighs, sounding as exhausted as he has ever sounded in his entire life. "Casso, that is fucking impossible."

  The old mercenary shoots them both a sidelong glance. "Kid," he says, eventually, in tone of a man explaining the brutally obvious, "how many times do I have to tell you? I'm a pro." He tips his head back, takes one long swig of his beloved flask, then belches loudly and tucks it away. "Now c'mon," he grunts, turning right around and walking right away. "Let's get moving."

  "I—hang on—" Tiger sputters, to Casso's retreating back, and as Panther just watches it all unfold in weary silence. "We haven't slept! We haven't eaten! Can't we all just take a minute to—"

  "Kid." Casso stops, very briefly, and turns his head. Spares for them only the coldest of glances over his shoulder. "Our mutual friend has us on a very strict timetable, and you just pissed away half our day. If we're late to Shalashar, all this shit is over. So c'mon." He turns back, resumes walking, and gestures for the two of them to follow. "Pick up the fuckin' pace."

  Tiger and Panther exchange a look. Each looks the worst the other has ever seen them; each looks like a walking corpse, mud-stained and sunken-eyed and hunched. Panther's olive skin has paled to all but ash; Tiger, too, is pallid and wan.

  Eyes of slate meet eyes of green. They are two people worlds apart.

  The world is not yet finished with them, my beloved protagonists. Not just yet.

  And so they turn, and so north do they trudge—on and on, in the Ibis's wake, beneath the dying rays of a spiteful afternoon sun.

  End Credits Song

  —

  (allegedly) smell like metal and salt!