Love Lost was the first one to give chase. Rain was second.

Gilpatrick followed.

⊙

The landscape screamed. The sky was illuminated by flashes of light, and those flashes reached down to touch the landscape around them.

The damage Victoria’s side had done had opened up cracks, broken connections, separated islands. Rain and Colt had done strategic damage, focused on Titans.

It gave them a hope that a sustained attack could be mounted, and the threat of the Titans forging enough connections to close this loop and shatter Earth at least had something of an answer, now. It wasn’t an easy or perfect answer, but they had their options.

But this… this was the opposite of that, in a way. Islands moved, creaking and screaming, scraping against one another, with a glass-on-glass sound. The light flashed down in beams and rays, and when they were done, what had been two was one, and flashes of light that had had nowhere to go were now traveling the distance.

They made their way through a forest of thin, spire-like crystals.

A funhouse, but there was nothing fun about it.

Gilpatrick saw himself in that forest of reflections. Not images he’d seen with his own eyes, but instead they were images captured from memories, surmising, from snapshots taken by a camera that hadn’t been there.

The one edge of the forest seemed to capture revulsion. A time he’d been sick. When he’d been a teenager and his face had been caked with acne for eight months. When he’d been low, so depressed his self image had been distorted, warped, and he hadn’t recognized his own face in the mirror. The face he’d thought he might have, then, was now represented on one blade of crystal.

Into another field of emotion. One was as recent as his bout of rage when the beast had howled at him. There was a look of satisfaction on his face, following a decisive line he’d dropped in a fight he now regretted having. His every ugliness, his every bit of himself he could hate, distilled in crystal.

They’d caught up with their targets. Valentin and Cox.

Gilpatrick glanced at Rain, and looked past the boy to see images. Contorted in rage. Beaten and bleeding. Hopeful, weirdly. There were more than a few of the boy wearing a demon mask. Several of his face lit by flame.

“What you’re doing, it’s dangerous,” Rain called out.

Valentin looked up.

Reflected in the crystal behind the androgynous man was a woman, with face coloration like a blindfold, and strict bangs across her forehead.

Behind Cox was a doll’s face, reflected a dozen times by a dozen different crystal faces. Sometimes slick with blood.

“Titan Fortuna, Contessa, she’s forming connections to the other Titan networks. Our reality is breaking down as hers wins out,” Rain said.

“Isn’t it fitting or fair that she gives us the distraction we need to fix a problem she helped create?” Cox asked.