We passed through the wall of darkness. Into a room like the one we’d just left. More stark, barren… and with three more things like the one we’d just left behind. One made of blades that flowed in and out of themselves while having no individual substance beyond what they kicked up from the ground and carried up into their own mass. One was sleek, cat-like, and multicolored, quadrupedal, with a pattern like flames along its pale length, starting pale blue at the shoulders and reaching a pink-red at the hindquarters. Another existed as a mess of geometry, suspended in air, dark and still.

And all were still.

I could imagine this room rotating, the gates opening, the guardians taking their turns.

We carried on, out of the mutable rooms, and onto a plain of carmine crystal, with veins that could have been cracks, ore, or blood vessels. Above, just darkness. Below, more darkness, with flashes here and there.

We weren’t healed by the transition between spaces, and too many of us were dying.

Tristan didn’t speak as he laid his brother down, then went back for Rain and the kids, but I could see how stiff he was.

I looked into a spike of crystal to my right, and I saw my reflections. Faint, so fleeting I could barely make them out. They seemed to go blacker, illuminate again, then dim, and then I realized that was my own vision suffering. Each face had something different. A fixation on mouths. A fixation on—I could only interpret it as similarities to my parents, if I wasn’t seeing memories of them in the crystal too.

“How?” Sveta asked.

I looked.

Damsel was in one piece.

“Offer me something and I’ll show you how,” she told Sveta.

“Accolades,” I managed, my eyes not focusing well enough. “Awe. Admiration. When and if we figure out anything about this space, we’ll have to admit it was you who pioneered it, you who figured it out first. We’ll even have to tell the Wardens, eventually, and your name will come up.”

“Laying it on a little thick,” Damsel said.

“Is that even possible?” I asked her, managing a faltering smile. My lip cracked.

She approached, and motioned for Sveta to move with a sweep of the claw. She reached for me with clawed fingers, and I went stiff.

The blades didn’t touch me, but the lengths and backs of the fingers did. She caught me around the head and throat.

“Can’t replace me if I’m this good at this,” she said, forcing my head around so I looked at the spike of crystal. I could see myself, in various dimensions and aspects. And I could see her.

I could see Swansong, prominent among those jumbled images.

She pulled me off balance, accidentally scraping me with a finger, then pushed me.