I held my breath. Leaves stirred in the dust as the wind blew through the open temple. I let one breath out and took another as the seconds of hush ticked by. The world hadn’t ended yet. Mycroft looked at me. We were all ready to react, not to act. Whispers started, and craning of necks. Somehow it didn’t occur to me until then to wonder what was in the temple. The ancient one would’ve had a statue of Janus with their double face looking both ways. I couldn’t see from where I stood, but Su-Hyeon was clearly peering in at something. Except now there was a murmur, and a voice which pierced the murmur.

“Mordred?” It was a cutting voice, worried.

A second voice: “Curie? Curiosity, can you hear me? Hello?”

Third: “Oz? Come in, Oz?”

“Poe? What’s going on? Poe? Answer me! Poe!”

Now all in a torrent, different voices all around the Forum screamed out names: “Kepler! Milton! Caspian! Quark! Avalon! Watson! Kirk! Adamant! Euclid! Svalinn! Joyeuse! Kili! Pix! Mallory! Fermi! Phoenix! Delany! Olivant! Polo! Clarke! Dragon! Shenzhou! Venture! Franken! Tianlong! Hal! Gulliver! Leto! Freeport! Bochica! Hadaly! Elric! Zamyatin! Quasar! Vimana! Galileo! Talaria! Shadow! Earheart! Pluto! Arcadia! Jules! Vinndálf! Kelvin! Sherwood! Mercury! Helicon! Bard! Zuse! Aegis! Wukong! Cabal! Chaucer! Galaxi! Kusanagi! Leif! Coyote! Bletchley! Ijiraq! Starbuck! Thule! Mina! Hyperion! Mulan! Atom! Yuri! Pan! Spaceway! Capricorn! Storm! Grimm! Kamalu! Perrin! Condor! Asphodel! Nig! Sirius! Kennedy! Appleseed! Enkidu! Han! Stardust! Abbas! Lyra! Altair! Deimos! Grendel! Char! Langley! Faun! Tesla! Carnwennan! Mab! Ovid! Gandiva! Akatsuki! Argo! Sampo! Turing! Jinn!” and finally, “Atlantis! They’ve attacked Atlantis!”

A rush of wing wind overflowed the Forum, tossing leaves, clothes, hair. Creatures lifted off all around us. We could only see them as they rose to go, abandoning invisibility for speed: rocs, hippogriffs, giant ravens, pterosaurs, dragonflies as long as horses, the twining flight-slither of Asian dragons, the hot, leathery flap of European dragons, and the rustle of coats as the U-beasts’ Utopian partners swung into their saddles, the Delian sun sigil blazing on every back. Bright fluttering things swarmed up too fast to name, joined by robots whose designers loved metal too much to feign biology, and above my head something between a kite and a stingray undulated on the wind in folds of turquoise and copper. The sky was color. Animals appeared too, and spread translucent rainbow wing films, so I saw a jaguar take to the air, a golden stag, a python, wolves, and unicorns, and hounds, and antelope. Every rider whose beast could hold two helped another rider on, so the sky lit up with overlapping coats that turned the clouds into cities and those cities into stars. Then all at once the sky’s glare seemed to turn harsh, but it was the coats, a hundred in the sky, two hundred, more, which all together turned to mourning static, blank save for the crisp lines of Delian suns.