There’s a sudden rush of water as the airlock fills, and I gasp and then seize the instinct, hyperven­tilating as much as I can while there’s still air to be had, my heart pounding with an unaccust­omed force that would be terrifying if it didn’t also feel unstoppably strong. I haven’t just been made pretty, my whole system’s upgraded.



Lyra will be faster to be functional underwater than I will, so I fit her with orders to turn around and open the outer door and swim out as soon as she can see it again, then will my collar to extend into a harness that wraps around her breasts and shoulders in a way that will comfortably distribute the load, with D-ring to which my leash is connected right between her wings, and slip my wrist through the padded handle. Her gaze follows the leash quizzically over her shoulder, Hollow Heart Amulet glinting beautifully as she turns her head, so I tug on the leash and when she looks at me again I hold up both hands gripping the chain.

HAH! Yes Miss I’ll be your seahorse-pony. Blub there eyes open where’s the airlock door there...­wait grab hand love you okay going get ready Miss I’m swimming now STROKE!

The network of standing orders I’ve given her is working well: a soft, demonic hand fumbles for mine as the water closes over our heads and releases it and I hear the metal shriek of the outer door opening and we’re free, rushing for a moment through the water with the ship’s speed before I can fight my eyes open and look around as Lyra starts swimming, tightening the leash with a jerk and pulling us toward...

Yikes, this is humiliating. Not even a bit-gag and I’m totally melting. Unnf...oooh that’s pretty ahead look Miss that’s Charybdis’ Breath and the Stained Hall! The little end thing is where I’m going Miss that’s where I wanted to take you before.

Dear god, the scale.

I’d thought the rocks must be huge, as we approached, but I’d had no idea. They really are mountains floating in the Sea, miles, tens of miles, long, already looming above and around us as we swim deeper into the valley the ship has disgorged us into. Over most of the Hall as we saw it from the bridge before buildings and statues and eerie-glowing windows dotted the more natural-looking rocks, but these are raw and unformed, huge asteroids of the black-slivered stone that seems to dominate this part of the Hall.

And we’re falling...no. We’re in freefall...no. There’s simply no gravity. How could there be? This ocean defies all expectat­ions, and if objective gravity worked right here, the Sea would collapse into a black hole of unspeakable proportions. The ship carried its own gravity, and on the surface we were subject to our expectation that the surface of water describes the local gravity, but here deep in the Sea, there’s just no pull. The dropping sensation I felt during our first dive wasn’t Lyra’s strength at swimming, it was that we were really weightless.

It’s like falling...

We’re headed, I believe, into the tip or mouth of the whole formation, joined by hundreds of terrible beautiful monsters and humans - there’s a definite flow to traffic, whatever we’re heading toward is clearly only an entrance and not an exit, but it’s lost in the shimmering white foam of the waterfall below us. More insult to physics: the waterfall is strangely shaped, motion in the backlit spray picking out an exponent­ially curving depression below and before us, circling around a sort of center-point equidistant from the mountains around us, and I can understand why the captain wasn’t able to drop us off closer as around us the other swimmers brace against each other or fold wings more delicate-seeming than Lyra’s as the current seizes us all, drawing down into the—

Oh. Oh fuck. Yes, it’s much better if I don’t know about this ahead of time, if better means ‘I won’t demand some other plan’...hurri­edly, I reel Lyra in and grab her.

Yeah, put your arms around me, hold my wings down, the Throat’s kind of dangerous for wings but you seem to get that thank Sade.

Hold on tight Miss, here we gooooooo...

It’s been far longer than it would have taken before, but my lungs are finally starting to burn, the water around us starting to feel claustro­phobic.

I manage to get Lyra clutched in my arms just in time for the current to grab us with a force that feels surreally less like falling because we’re now under accelera­tion but is no less terrifying for it as the speed takes us and bubbles and mist begin to fill the water, clouding vision and then we’re tumbling in the turbulence and rushing along a dizzying path that feels curved but could simply be an effect of the vertigo and then the current’s accelera­tion is gone as quickly as it came and we’re just plummeting, rushing along with so much mist it doesn’t always even feel like we’re properly underwater, the turbulence and transitions between water and air pockets a deafening roar as we’re falling, falling, somehow I know it’s actual falling and not just a lack of gravity as we plummet for terrifying long seconds, long enough for me to begin to believe that we really are falling through space to our death and instinct­ively I want to draw my legs up under myself so that I won’t feel them shatter before I die and then—

More vertigo, changing light and sudden crushing accelera­tion but no hard surface and then AIR glorious blessed air and I take a chokingly spray-filled breath that’s as violent and involuntary as an orgasm as we rocket into empty space and then fall back, splashing into a roiling cauldron where we must surely be dragged under to our deaths battered against some rock or another but instead the upwelling drives us instantly back to the surface and then another far less powerful current takes us, pulling us along the surface—there is a surface now—to be buffeted with surprising gentleness against something hard and angular but kindly round-edged: polished stone. I reach out a blind hand and find that there’s a cusp or lip to take hold of—

“WOO!”

Wow, that really is a rush, I can see why people bother with it. Did you have fun too Miss?

Oh, poor Miss, that actually scared you! Please make me hug you better Miss...

—and let us float there clinging to the edge for long gasping, panting minutes, envying Lyra’s lack of need for oxygen and apparent knowledge of what we were in for. My eyes are open but all I can take in is the still-turbulent water surface and Lyra’s face before me, questing for a kiss that I take, calming my nerves on her nectar for long moments before I can look around.

Omigod Rocks, real rocks, the real actual Hall, omigod I wanna fuck the rocks I’m so homesick. I’m so actually gonna do it, too, Miss’ll love it. Just a statue with a cock to fuck...p­lease Miss let me have a hand free so I can touch the rocks, holy fuck HOME!

Oh home.

Lyra looks with me when I free her lips, gaze cast upward, expression exultant, and I grant her the hand to caress the rocks of her home.

We’re at the edge of a huge circular pool that churns and bubbles at the center, water upwelling and then rushing to the edge, slowing as it goes until it gently pours over through channels at intervals around the rim. Light glows, shimmering, from within the pool, and though I can’t see it I understand: we were pulled into an inside-out whirlpool that drops into this pool from the other side and the pool isn’t a bowl but a ring, gravity manipula­tion holding the water in place so that the surface we’ve erupted from is the depth to which the whirlpool hammered us.



The pool is carved from living rock, hanging in space, held by four statues cut from a dark-colored, complexly iridescent-sheening stone that are - how big? My mind is rejecting the scale as impossible, but even knowing that I can’t guess. Thousands of feet tall? Behind them, hazy with spray and roaring the like beginning or end of the world are the Falls we saw the back of before, huge waterfalls that fill the gaps between the mountains, falling ponderously upwards along the line of the statues’ height, reflecting the glow of brilliant white lights that shine from behind the polished black stone of the statues, refracting through spray and water to fill the the space with the dangerous, impending grey light of a thunders­torm’s climax.

Two are male, two are female. One of each gender stands towering over us, one hand upraised, the other reaching down to grasp the rim of the pool (presumably, the point where they hold it is out of sight), their faces burning down on us with a smirking, wicked expression. One of each gender kneels, upside down relative to the standing statues, arms stretched upward to support the pool (again, I can’t see where they hold it from here), heads bowed in submission, faces fearful and...ex­cited. They’re all four like the statues we saw in the sea, naked, unflinch­ingly detailed and unabashedly aroused.



The face is the same on all four statues, adjusted for gender and expression, but it’s somehow every face, a shifting stone mirror created by some trick of clever carving and careful lighting that keeps me from deciding if they do or don’t hauntingly remind me of my own face, or Lyra’s, or the captain’s...I could run through everyone I know this way. No, not quite. It could be anyone, but some more than others...

Below us, above us, the status raise a hand to support, kneel upon, the front of a building—it must be a building, it’s clearly engineered, but it’s the size of a mountain—encrusted with more stone-orgy statuary, an odd design with flat, dully-reflective panels in various shapes almost like bas-reliefs bordered by the statues so that the entire edifice is faceted with panels joined by stone flesh caught mid-writhe. The shape is liquid, branching through the space to meet the mountains or extend through the waterfalls like an explosion of something viscous but that the central mass or source isn’t visible from here if it exists, and the obvious metaphor seems somehow too specific as if there’s something deeper that and this are both referencing.



Waterfalls plummet from the edge of the pool we float in to buffet against the building and then pour away, washing over the carvings and finding channels among the limbs and bodies that would seem impossible if this place were anything but a monument to the mockery of gravity.

Iron-colored chains with links tens of feet thick team with stone buttresses carved into reaching statues or suggestive abstract shapes to suspend the building. They project gigantic, multiple looming shadows through the misty air like inverse godrays, betraying the presence of what must be the rows of lights we saw first looking through the window of the ferry.

Above us, ringed by a swell of statuary that leads the eye back and back to it, is a huge gate—it must be a gate, for the cylinders of hinges at its edges and gently S-curving seam down the center—of the same dully-gleaming material as the flat panels, a lopsided ellipse curvingly pointed at both ends like an eye. There’s no ‘down’, so no flat bottom, though that doesn’t make it impassable: the standing statues each reach a hand to one point, while the kneeling statues kneel close so that when the panels open they’ll lay across their knees, making a bridge. The statues are walkways, dotted with multicol­ored specks that resolve now into people walking along them, each with their own mutually incompat­ible but perfectly-logical seeming definition of down according to the rock they stand on.

More specks curve through the air, aiming for the gates, some close or large enough to show spread wings: swimmers who have become flyers.



Natural gravity, indeed. Gravity growing wild.



The water falling over the edge, the people and monsters walking or standing or playing on every surface...it’s a scifi proverb that there’s no up or down in space, and I’d have thought that would have prepared me for this, but it doesn’t. There’s not simply no up or down here, it’s as if the place really is designed specific­ally to preclude the concepts. Some of the waterfalls spill over the edge of the pool to drop back in the direction I’m beginning to understand Lyra and I fell from, contradi­cting those that fall toward the building, while still others fall askew, curving to spiral around the great statues as they drop into the sky or abyss or cavern.

Looking around with Miss. Pretty cool, huh?

“This is unbeliev­able. How did this even get built?”



If there are any seams in the stone, they’re invisible, hidden by scale or skill or both...c­ould there be? The only way to make this stand, gravity or not, would be to carve it from solid rock. I’m not sure on the material science, but I’m guessing even then you’d need strength and elasticity not found in anything ceramic on earth, too.

Nobody knows. Well, nobody young enough you can talk to them knows. Some stone-choir’s art project, most people think.

Stone-choir? I need to start making a list.

Ooooh that’s quoozy...

I’m about to ask her what’s quoozy, when it comes to me that a force other than the gently-buffeting water is keeping us in place: the world is, slowly, gently, rotating around us, so that the horizontal-to-us pool is becoming a vertical water-filled portal, and the gates that were far above become gates that are distantly in front of us. Quickly, I release Lyra from our hug and slip her an order to get to her feet on the subjecti­vely-tilting rim of the pool with me as it turns from wall to floor.

Yes Miss upWHEE GLOMP!

I manage to make rising into a dynamic entry that leaves us both standing and the rim level under our feet—and I choose to believe that we can walk around it and find down to always be away from the center of the circle, like the jogging scene in 2001. It’s still precarious: There are maybe eighteen inches of rim between the water’s surface licking at our backs and what is now a precipice over a yawning abyss with massive horizontal waterfalls and naked rocks far in the distance. Lyra clings and I gather her to me, as we gaze out over the now-empty expanse between us and the gates.

What—oooh you Dynamic Entried us to the one where there’s no statues! Go Miss!

I wonder what flying with you is like? I want to fly so bad. I’ve Missed being able to. Stupid Limbo. My wings work fine!

As Lyra thinks these thoughts, a black stone slab rotates into place by our feet seemingly from the outside surface of the rim until its companions fold into being ex nihilo in a half-circle around it, all spaced a few inches apart. There’s imagery I can’t make out shifting like out-of-focus holograms contained in the reflections in the deep-black surfaces. I nudge Lyra to look down and explain if she can.

It’s a Nexus, Miss. We’re in a place or like, moment, where there’s lots of stories coming together and we can Dynamic Entry across them just by walking if we use a tool like these Rocks to help us do it. You can almost see where we’ll go by scrying the reflections but to actually see we have to get on one of the Rocks because they’re connecting the stories and we’re in one where there are no statues to walk on which means we only see that story and not the other ones like the one where there were four statues we were in when we fell into the pool.

Miss I want to be on the Nexus-Rock because this ledge is so thin it’s hard to stand and Nexus-Rocks will catch you if you fall.

It’s only a few feet across, irregularly-shaped, and the surface is deep dark black making it impossible to gauge the texture, but it’s better than the current precipice, and maybe I’ll manage to process what she’s just said if I feel a little less on the verge of really testing out my new wings. Wrapping an arm tight around Lyra where she cuddles against me and ordering her to step with me, I walk onto the stone—

WHEE Whoah hehe!

Reality shifts like when I summoned Lyra, or opened the airlock, and the stone is solid under our feet, but things are different. The gates before us are lined up vertically from our perspective, now, and there’s a sense of having moved through space from our previous cockeyed perspective. Wispy, ghostly images surround us, reflections of various forms of statue projecting holograp­hically beyond the surfaces of the stones they seem to haunt, each cockeyed at a slightly different angle so stepping to it will require a gravity change—a Dynamic Entry.

“So are these, like, portals to parallel-universe versions of Rl’yeh Sade?”

Shake shake. Only parallel stories about what the statue between this pool and the Gates is like, Miss.

“How can you tell?”

There’s more flying people, but the people up by the Gates are the same and the extra flying people make sense because they’re flying without needing any statues like we could if you want which is probably why we started with this story, Nexuses usually start with something you’d like but that doesn’t mean it started with the best story it has, Miss, because sometimes it’s important that you choose your own path and this seems like a place where that would matter a lot—

She pauses as I consider this, trying to object, but really, it’s all of a kind with subjective gravity and what happened with Rada’s summoning partner while we had the airlock. I try on different underlying theories—a causal version of quantum foam, carefully arranged hyperdim­ensional passages, but none of them seems to have the elegance of the vision that slowly forms in my mind of what Lyra described aboard the Changepurse, of everyone’s individual narratives about what’s happening forking and merging like the threads of bondage I conjured before, interacting according to some sort of semi-external shared framework for how it all fits together—the Territory of this place is just everyone’s Maps plus a genre-protecting integration heuristic I haven’t understood yet.

...and yes, it matters a lot how I walk into Rl’yeh Sade with Lyra the first time—or fly. If she can really do it, flying together is the only remotely worthwhile option. I unpause her, to hear the rest of her thoughts:

—I mean like it’s our first time walking into Rl’yeh Sade which is probably why there’s a Nexus here. If This is a place where new people come to walk into Rl’yeh Sade for the first time and they all have different ways they’d want to do that but it wouldn’t be the same if this existed like a zillion times with all different statues or whatever so there’s one Gate but like zillions of ways to reach it isn’t that the coolest, Miss?

Great minds.

“Yes. So like, is this the front door to Rl’yeh Sade?”

No Miss because there’s lots of front doors but this is one I think. The others are different for different people who wouldn’t like this way but this way is right for us, Miss, I know now, I understand why I dreamed all that stuff the way I did finally—yes Miss explain um I dreamed just enough to be able to get us here to this Nexus Miss and that’s it there’s no more I can tell you but that’s good, Miss, because it means I know I’m just following you now and I can’t guide you any more which is what I want I want you to lead now Miss.

“I don’t know what’s behind the Gates, either, you know.”

I know, Miss. I don’t care that you don’t know because I know you’ll do something cool with whatever we find or you’ll take me someplace better if you can’t.

She clings tighter, as she says this, as if enthused about the helpless­ness—and, I suppose, absence of responsi­bility this truth brings. One day, little one, I’ll believe in myself as much as you believe in me, and maybe even deserve half a part-per-trillion of that.

...and there’s no time like the present for starting down that path. I regard the reflections around us:

Directly in front of us, a stretched-out, arched-back feminine body with limbs apparently bound behind it, lolls its head back to lick a gigantic cock projecting from the top limit of the reflection. The angle shows that this would replace the previous statue-bridge.

A far leap forward and to the left, another bare, feminine body, projecting down from the top limit of its reflection so I understand it would project from the far gate but not totally bridge the gap, hands pushing her breasts up and out as if to make them into a soft landing-pad.

Beyond a similar leap to the right, the same idea, but this time the landing-pad is the engorged cunt of a curvaceous feminine statue clinging to the point where the Gates would be and with her legs raised and splayed to spread her cunt to maximum effect.

Even further to the left, against the rim of the pool, a lithe feminine statue seems to stand on the pool’s rim with arms raised above its head in exultation, reaching for the Gates—a launch pad, instead of landing.

Finally, cockeyed and partially hidden below the rock we’re standing on, a pair of feminine statues intertwine, head by head pointed towards the Gates, how they’re having sex hidden along with everything below their breasts by the rock we’re standing on—but their expressions do make it clear they are having sex. One is taller, or higher, and seems to my eyes to be the dominant, inflicting unbearable pleasure on her pet.

“Do you remember what the captain said about—about Summoning Stars and deciding what it means to me as I create the scene? Is this the same?”

I do, Miss, and yes this is the same you can pick whatever statue you want and decide what it means to you and I’ll decide it means that too you just have to tell me unless it’s like really obvious, Miss.

What should have been obvious before clicks: Rada’s request for a once-sentence interpre­tation of the Summoning Star wasn’t just Socratic method.

Knowledge reconfig­ures in my mind, experience through my life with religious rituals re-processing itself as I realize the basic point of it is to communicate the meaning of what you’re doing to the people around you—not to say yourself—so they can, as the captain put it, fly along.

So what is the meaning of what I’m doing?

I don’t think this will evoke any power from me like the force by which I recently stuck Lyra to a window, and that’s not the point here...but maybe thinking like it might will help me navigate this.

We’re coming to find our home here among the other monsters, launched here by the lust and love we’ve shared, flying together connected by Lyra’s leash and need to be...played.

Down it is. The stone below is only about a foot below ours, so I just step us down and reality shifts again and the statue seen in the reflection is below and in front of us, projecting off into the void as promised, and we’ve shifted to be aligned with it—and around us are another set of stones with new reflections to consider.

To the right against the rim of the pool: a feminine statue is taken from behind by another who braces against what would be the area around the gates, their sex making a bridge.

To the left, hanging middlingly-far-away: two lovers, not touching, both feminine, one standing on the Gates-side, dressed in a dress a lot like mine, smirking up sweetly at the other, nude, seen from behind, reaching hopefully towards it from the pool-side of the gap.

Very far out to the right, angled so its reflection is barely visible, what might be an orgy stretched across the gap, forming a bridge of tangled bodies.

Just to the right, nearly overlapping our stone, a demon-statue shockingly like Lyra kneels from the pool-side to look up into the eyes of a dominant who smiles down, holding the kneeling statue’s leash by her side. Both are feminine, both are naked. At the other side of the gap—oh.

What does Miss—eep whoah, hot.

Omifuck is that just us?

“It could be.”

The same pair are seen across the gap with the demon bound hand and foot, terribly tight so that her back is arched, but her arms are raised behind her back by some clever arrangement of leather so that harp strings can be strung from along her arms to her back and legs. The dominant stands, revealing herself to be tall enough to hold her sub in one arm like the portable harp that is on Earth called the Lyre with the fingers of her other hand on the strings, ready to play.

If there’s a better statue-set in this possibly-infinite collection, I’ll never find it. Tugging Lyra along, I step us onto the new stone. There’s another shift, and we’re again facing the gates, with the new statue-pair there just a quick hop down from our stone. Across the gap, the other pair unexpect­edly face out so that the sub’s extended hands will brace against the foot of the Gates, making our landing runway.

“Is this obvious enough for you?”

Below our feet, the submissive statue is facing down so the her thighs, ass, and back make a hilly landscape leading up to the ridge of her head and the dominant statue towering sideways beyond it.

Nod nod UNF you’re going to tie me tight and play me, Miss.

“Yes. Good girl. Ready?”

I’m ready Miss this is already making me wet.

It’s barely a foot down to the swell of the submissive’s kneeling calf on our side. With an arm around Lyra’s waist, and her leash in my other hand, I usher us forward onto the statue.

OopsgahOOF!

Omifuck I fell on my knees and now we look exactly like the statue!

Quickly, I turn to face Lyra and take her chin in my hand to make her look at me to see what shape falling has left her in, but she’s unhurt, so I pet her hair for a moment while giving my collar the order to make the soles of her boots textured and (it can do it, amazingly) a surface that’s sticky like soft rubber, and then pull her to her feet with the leash and give her a quick kiss when she’s in reach.

Purrr up mmf!

Affection radiates through her mind like a brilliant purple light.

“Tell me you love me.”

I love you SO MUCH Miss! Purring purring this like, really is me PURR.

“I love you too.”

When I’m sure we’re both steady on the smooth, curving stone beneath our feet, I—can’t hold back any longer. I adjust the leash, order it to lengthen a bit, and then turn toward the Gates, give Lyra a “come on” tug, stride off in a purposeful walk that instantly becomes a full-tilt run, pelting towards the end of this statue, the Gates, and the void in between.

YUS CHARGE I FEEL THE SAME WAY MISS—Whoah traction thank you Miss!

I unfold my wings as we dash, letting them trail out behind me like our hair and even the swinging, jingling leash—we’re fast. The wind of our motion feels powerful, like driving with the windows down, and muscle memory for flying makes itself known, telling me how I can launch from the fast-approaching cliff of the submissive statue’s head to get the most glide out of all this forward momentum.

Here’s the edge SPRING FLAP WHEE GLIDE Miss is gliding—

Moving fast enough not to have time for fear, I push off the ridge of the submissive statue’s upturned brow and lay out like launching myself swimming, and reflex makes my wings rigidly-flat and curled just so and I’m flying, gliding steadily along as the dominant statue’s midriff zooms past beneath us and then the swell of her breasts is fast approaching and I cross mental fingers and flap for altitude and it works, bringing me just high enough to realize the dominant statue’s chest and head aren’t enough to be a worthwhile runway so I just flap again, this time for speed as much as altitude—it’s a long gap to cross. Lyra keeps pace and perfect formation with me through all of this, just a wingspan away, but I lengthen the leash consider­ably anyway, to make sure I don’t yank her unintent­ionally while flying.

Flying I’m FLYING WITH YOU THIS IS WHY I HAVE WINGS! Flap keep up self I HAVE WINGS SO WE CAN FLY TOGETHER!

There’s another shift of reality as we pass the head of the dominant statue, and thousands more fellow flyers appear ahead, converging on the Gates, but they fade in and out of being, almost all of them vanishing before they would have to think about landing on our statue. Gravity vanishes as the statue passes from beneath us, so that suddenly we’re swimming through the air with our wings as much as flying—but this lets us put on tremendous speed as my wings curl to drive me forward with each toward-my-feet flap and then lay flat to scissor through the air for the next stroke.

The ecstatic face and thrown-back head of the submissive statue on the far side are already looming up fast. Grateful to myself for leaving my collar in harness form this whole way, I order Lyra to fly in front and ‘below’ me where I can see her.

Okay whoof fast FLAP there.

She pulls into position, clearly straining to outpace me. She’s a vision in the air just as much in the water, tail trailing back, angling this way and that to help her steer, wings pumping powerfully, arms back by her sides, hair streaming back around her horns from her raised head. With her extremities almost-hidden by her outfit it’s easy to imagine her as a very sexy dragon flapping along beside me—but there’s only a little time to admire her, because we’re about to run out of zero gravity and this maneuver’s not going to work if she has to fly.

Stop flying fold my wings okay falling now but I know Miss will catch me—

I coast, and pull her to me by the leash, and when she’s in reach flip her around into a princess carry in my arms.

—YUS HAH okay arms around your neck and hold on tight YES MISS AWESOME PURR!!

With a mighty flap, I change our momentum to have us arcing up as the statue’s gravity takes hold of us, and then it’s rushing beneath us and we’re heading face-first for a crowd of Sade as varied as the rest we’ve seen and who part as we approach revealing the mercifully-smooth surface of the armbinder holding the statue’s posture and I flip upright and flare and it’s not enough, we’re going so fast my wings are blown back by the force of it, so in desperation I lean back and extend my feet and in a moment of inspiration that’s born of equal parts self-preserva­tion and the desire to make this look cool I order the heels of my sandals to become hard, pushing the impression of metal my collar seems to have taken from the Hollow-Heart Amulet to make the leash’s chain at them, and then with a brutal shock my heels collide with the statue’s surface and there’s an echoing clack and the sound of metal on stone and as I will learn later a massive rooster-tail of brilliant blue sparks as we grind to a stumbling halt I barely keep upright, leaving me panting and the critical part of me that was offline because I was too busy fucking flying screaming what did you just intentio­nally do, but we’re in one piece and landed and Lyra’s expression and furious purring makes the whole thing absolutely worth it.

WHEEEEEEE PURR THAT WAS INCREDIBLE!

I’d planned to set Lyra down when we landed, but it something tells me to keep her in my arms. I shorten the leash back to a reasonable length and restore my collar to collar-form, leaving just a loop of leash dangling between my hand with the handle and Lyra’s form in my arms.

My wings feel a bit the worse for the wear of that landing, and seem to come with the knowledge that folding them will let them rest, so I do.

The crowd’s eyes are hot on my back as they disappear inside me, and the people make a corridor in front of us, leaving an open walkway in front of us up to the Gates that tower over everything like a mountain­side—the gap was, thinking now of our speed at landing, probably a mile or more, and the Gates are at least a few thousand feet tall. My mind just won’t accept the scale of this place until something actively forces it to.

Eeeeep like everyone is looking at us, Miss!

The closed Gates.

Miss I’m really glad you can control me because I can’t be a good girl for this I would try to hide.

She’s not being dramatic—it’s a big crowd, and everyone is watching us expectantly. Not knowing what else to do, I stride forward along the road picked out by the lines of spectators, towards the Gates.

Things start happening when we reach the elbows or so of the statue, and the Gates seem for an instant to be opening. Images shift and blur in their surface, above their surface, optically-impossible holograms like the images of the statues as we navigated the Nexus before, the outline of something as tall as the gates indistinct until I step suddenly and unawares into range of the projection and it collapses like a wavefunc­tion and rushes forwards to—

What?! What the fuck, what happened, where...­wait, what? Oh fuck, that’s not possible, there’s no way something could...why would...no. Okay. I can still feel my tail, and my wings are still all awkwardly pushed up. This is such a mindfuck!

Holy fuck why is it deadgend­ering Miss what’s going on?

Why is it deadgend­ering Miss so well?

The Gates seem to become liquid, burst, and a torrent of black water thunders out of the gate, too fast to dodge or even brace against, but when it hits us instead of a deluge it feels like smoke and suddenly we’re in a dark space, black as the abyss of space, bottomless beneath my feet but feeling, dreamlike, no different than the stone of the statue.

Details resolve and my heart drops a million miles because for just a moment I think I’ve woken from what must be a dream into a twilight space halfway between reality and vision:

In my arms, in Lyra’s place, is a human girl with Lyra’s features and body, but her inhuman flesh has been replaced by pale-but-pink skin and bleached-white, blue-tinged hair, and she’s dressed in something that’s clearly a wedding dress but somehow archaic or overly traditional and I notice on my arms that cradle her the black sleeves of something like a tuxedo but again older, more formal, as if pulled from the same historical fiction as the dress. Somehow, it hides my breasts as if they never existed—and does the same to my hips. A look of horror passes over her now pale-violet eyes as she looks down at herself and then is replaced by relief and understa­nding and the knowing smirk of which she’s so fond returns, comforting me.

This isn’t real. She looks human in my arms, but I can still smell her nectar, feel her tail clutching my arm, membranes of her wings brushing my bare arm where it cradles her. She’s too startled to feed and I’m too startled to be edible, but it’s still demon skin against my own and I can still feel the strange supernat­ural warmth of her presence, that sense of touching something other in a way no creature of Earth’s universe can be. I can still feel the straps of my thong, still taste the Sea-spray in the air.

And I get it: this isn’t supposed to trick us. This isn’t supposed to be a riddle or a challenge.

It’s being shown in love.

This is a party.



The image of the Nexus-stone floats over my vision like we’re inside it for an instant, and vanishes when I realize that we’re inside a new Nexus, and the way we exit this illusory church will be the step to another stone.



A light to the left draws my eye and when I look, Lyra cranes her head to follow my gaze, digging a reassuri­ngly real horn into my arm.

I want to know what you see, Miss.

“There’s an altar. I think we’re at our wedding.”

I twist a bit more, allowing Lyra to see.

How is anyone supposed to do a ritual with that? I guess maybe if all the flowers meant something, but the plain white table’s not going to be very helpful. Oh. Dur. Miss says wedding and I’m thinking Venus wedding because I don’t wanna think about Earth. Blech. I’m SO GLAD we’re not doing that.

“Me too.”

It’s surprising to me to say, who have spent a positively girly amount of time wishing for romance and my own walk down the aisle, but now that we’re here I find I truly mean it.

My eyes are starting to adjust to the ‘gloom’, making it clear that we’re not actually in a featureless void - there’s definitely one beneath my feet, but above and around us is a vaulted, gray stone room the size and rough shape of a cathedral. I’m standing on empty black space, but one step behind me is a path of white flower petals strewn on the void, leading up to the altar to the left, and vanishing into blackness and distance on the right.

The path from which I’ve departed. I already took the first step on the raft, on the ferry. A leap of faith into a bottomless void, but I’ve already taken it. Oddly, we’re standing cockeyed, so that a path made of the worn red flagstone’s of my father’s church-floor on Earth that intersects the flower-path to the altar at a right angle heads off a bit to our right instead of dead ahead of us. Down it, in the distance, an empty-eyed figure in Christian liturgical robes holds a bell, book and candle signific­antly, and I can’t help thinking at it because that so worked for you last time, but the figure remains impassive, waiting to see if I’ll choose the path of ‘holiness’.

The flagstone path seems to reek of the musty, floor-wax-scented sense of mundanity-of-the-numinous that always seemed to impossibly infect the huge stone-and-stained-glass building its stones are ripped from, so I turn from it to regard the void in front of us, and the ‘choices’ the faith of my youth offered me: ahead, to the altar to marry, if God hadn’t condemned me to the other path of holy celibacy (strange now, I realize, associating that with the church when it explicitly allowed its clergy to marry, but I did), or back down the path away from the altar, away and away and away yet never free of the judgment God would rain on me for spurning the options he—it—offered: I might become an atheist, but he would always be there, undermining my attempts to be happy as such. The only options ever offered were to fulfill my sexual and relation­ship needs in one very specific way—if God decided to allow me to at all—or march off into Hell. How often, during her incubation, did Lyra call out to me, only to be ignored in favor of my laser-focus on managing to walk that white-rose path that’s taunting me from the floor now?

So why are we standing cockeyed? It’s an anvilicious clue, but only because I’ve come into this with the amount of the answer I’ve already figured out for myself brought into the image with us. I’ve drunk—the signific­ance of eating Lyra’s fruit followed by drinking her nectar leading to my transfor­mation finally sinks in—already the cup of salvation from this nightmare, and she’s warm in my arms ready with another drink even now, but I already have changed in the way I need for this.

Fuck this game. I choose none of the above.

As violently as I can, I spread my wings, bend my knees, leap and flap straight up from where we stand. There’s a flash of brilliant light through the chapel that flares into the orange-and-yellow flicker of fire as illusory flames cool as the rushing air wreathe our ascent: we’ve become a flaming meteor rising out of this false chapel.

BAD. ASS.

HELL YES WHEEEEEEEE—

The roof approaches, but I don’t slow down—it’ll be an illusion, like the rest of this.

GAH EEP

Before we can reach the roof, gravity swings around like the entire chapel is rotating, and I’m suddenly desperately trying to flip upright again and control a precipitous descent without dropping Lyra. Just in time, I manage it, and land hard in the center-peak of the vault, like standing in the keel of a huge ship. There’s a flat place along the ridgeline wide enough to comfortable accommodate my fully-spread wings and then some.

PHEW OMIFUCK

The source of the firelight is revealed when I look down to check on Lyra and see my tux burning away, revealing cleavage I didn’t realize I’d missed, and lower down the swells of my hips. Oddly, Lyra’s dress is untouched.

No, not oddly. Perfectly appropri­ately. The chapel is turned upside down, but it’s still here. Ahead, another cut-out empty-eyed figure stands in the path—we’ve become axis-aligned during my maneuvering—again dressed in liturgical robes and holding a book, but the bell and candle are missing now, and the figure seems less menacing.

The chapel vanishes into darkness beyond them, hiding the place I need to go in their looming, flickering shadow cast by the dying light of my tux burning: the Gates, just-visible in the darkness, a new hint of our true location not visible before.

The figure turns towards us, and opens its book, held up ready to read, and a projection of the pages fills the space above our heads, the size of a city block. Like the mirror-vision on the Changepurse, verses are highlighted, one on each facing page, but this time it’s a prayerbook instead of a Bible:

To have and to hold

to honor and obey

Wait, that’s in normal wedding contracts? What the fuck? I thought that was just you being kinky, Miss!

...and the riddle is answered as the pieces of Lyra’s shock slam home.

Yes, that’s in standard Christian wedding vows, much to lots of people’s dismay, but until this moment I’ve never realized the sheer level of “oh that’s just something we say” doublethink involved in the use of these words, nor have I really given countenance to the various Bible verses that gave rise to these words in the prayer-book—or the common ground this low-poly liturgist is trying to claim between the relation­ship these vows are supposed to actually define and what I have with Lyra.

Incensed, I stride forward, poising anyway, and ordering Lyra to hang on tight. If he tries any gravity tricks to preserve the integrity of his insubsta­ntial image, we’ll be ready.

The figure’s mouth is moving, silent, reading, and it stands its ground as we approach. Overhead, the projected book highlights groups of word like subtitles, reading through the wedding ceremony, rushing as if to reach “man and wife” before anyone notices half of that phrase doesn’t apply here.

I find myself furious at this empty figure’s presumption upon our relation­ship, and as I walk I do in this summation of the churches of my youth and what I never before had the courage to do but which the same part of me that demanded the heart-shaped purse always desired, and talk back.

“Noone here is gathered in the name of the Christian god, and we’re two universes beyond his sight.”

My voices booms through the space, louder than intended as always seems to happen when I’m angry, so that it seems like the whole chapel shudders.

“That god condemned her to wander my nightmares rather than allow me to know of her. It ordained none of this.”

Another tremor. It’s not just my voice being loud, I’m actually shaking the chapel’s foundations.

Why? I’m doing this out of it feeling right, but what’s earthsha­king about two women one of whom is also a demon rejecting the idea that their union could be blessed as a Christian marriage? Shouldn’t the Right Reverend Cardboard agree with me about that?

Who cares. It’s satisfying.

“Yeah, but I prefer girl-on-girl with a strapon.”

YUS HAH! Miss I want to say stuff too I want to say I’ll honor and obey you but only because that’s what I want!

Done, little Lyra, but before that your first words out loud to me are to tell me you love me.

“I love you Miss1!”

Twist to yell at the stupid image-priest-thing. “I honor and obey her but only because I decided I want to!”

There’s more in her heart, so I keep her talking after what she asked permission for, and it clicks as she shouts, vehement even for Lyra, inflating noticeably in my arms as she inhales to project:

“WE DON’T NEED YOUR STUPID RITUAL!”

I might never see it but for the pointed arrangement of the tiered seating on the Changepurse’s bridge, the way Lyra looks gazing up at me from my arms or my feet, the consider­ation of the meaning of space as I chose the statue by which we’ve traversed to this point:

Power.

Churches always try to be as pointedly tall as possible, with God loftily gazing down at you from the rafters.

The thing shaking the foundations of the chapel isn’t the theological correctness or not of my relation­ship with Lyra, it’s power. As if to confirm my thought, the priest-figure glances up from his prayerbook to see if I will ratify Lyra’s outburst, or chastise her.

“Yes we took each other and yes I will cherish her and have and hold her and yes she honors and obeys me every moment forever, but that doesn’t make us yours and it doesn’t mean we need your blessing.”

The figure ahead can’t find a way to stop Lyra and I marching inexorably towards our previously-hidden destination together, which leaves it only the option to find a way of bringing our relation­ship under its power, claiming we only are successful as a couple out of its god’s blessing. What power is left to it, without the key to Heaven and immortality (carrying that in my arms already), the threat of Hell (already escaped it), or the ability to gatekeep basic human needs?

I’m face to face with the figure now, and it’s reading off “I now pronounce...”

“You wish.”

There’s a massive crack, and the chapel breaks, light suddenly filtering in from our true location in a toroidal godray as the fracture circles all the way around from floor to ceiling and back, illumina­ting the empty priest’s ghostly transpar­ency as it vanishes in a puff of floating-down Bible-pages so that the last bit of the understa­nding fills in: we’ve been dealing with empty-eyed cutouts because the thing we were fighting was Christia­nity itself, the system of systems that’s made that one particular belief system in its various forms hegemonic on Earth.

HOLY FUCK GO MISS BREAK IT MORE!

That’s the plan.

I step as primly as I know how to do over the fracture, and feel the shift in reality as my feet move from the near floor to the slightly-askew far one. Surely this must just be about dealing with the Christia­nity in my own head, but it’d be nice to think this break runs all the way to Earth breaking the back of the machine of Christia­nity there—as I cross the gap, there’s a flash-vision of a tiny stress-fracture in the corner of a marble altar-cross, and then it’s gone and we’re in the new story.

Ahead is a mirror in the shape and size of the gates, showing the statues, and the pool, and the Falls, and, tiny at the bottom point, Lyra and I, our true selves, a nectar-changed human cradling a glittering demon.

Oooh, I can see better in the light! This is such a mindfuck. Look Miss, pores and everything.

Hold up a hand to show you how detailed the illusion is.

Does Lyra not have pores? It would account for the alien feeling to her skin.

“I like you better as a demon, but you make a cute human.”

She’s still beautiful, but rendered in human flesh and framed by a biologic­ally possible color of hair, her fae features are ten thousand times more freakish.

Me too, Miss.

...and this is the next part of the party, the next step along the Nexus: Lyra’s still clothed in illusory bridal humanity, and although it’s broken the chapel is still standing.

“I would’ve thought they’d give you a sluttier dress. Hell, I would’ve expected them to find a way to give me a slutty tuxedo.”

I think that’s the point, Miss. Miss I want you to undress me with your teeth and bite me while you do it BLUSH AAH SO NAKED—

“You have the best ideas.”

Yus! That means you might do it!

“Touch your reflection.”

We’ve arrived at the mirror, and I’m not sure what happens next, and after my adventure with the roof don’t want to look like an idiot blundering into a mirror that’s not actually illusory.

Aww. I was so sure the last word of that sentence was going to be ‘self’.

So, what do we have here? Rocks. The real Gates, Miss.

I can see the sensation in her mind: smooth-polished stone with a bit of texture, but nothing I wouldn’t fuck her against. Through the mirror I can see the crowd from before, watching interest­edly, and suddenly what to do is so obvious.

Ooof!

I set Lyra down, and as soon as she’s on her feet I push her face-down against the mirror with a hand between her invisible wings and another on her ass, holding her in place, and growl in her ear:

“Let’s celebrate not needing anyone’s blessing but each other’s.”

Unnnnnnff romantic, yes Miss...

Kicking my legs apart, that’s going to mean OHGOD— “AAH!”

...or that.

The first spank is a warmup - I’ve read enough to know that you’re technically supposed to start light and ramp up with things like spanking, and I’m suspecting that just a few blows isn’t going to count as knocking - but I’m not quite going to start that yet.

I put the fingers of the hand that just smacked her ass to her lips...

“Nectar.”

Hehe, this I can be surprising with.

...and am surprised at the thickness of the layer that clings and the stretching thread that connects it to her lips for a moment when I withdraw from the slick warmth of her mouth. On breaking, it falls to her shoulder, burning a hissing, smoking hole in the dress that erodes slowly larger as it goes, revealing a streak of purply-grey demon flesh where it lands.

The illusory fabric pushes in at first, when I reach between her legs, and then splits satisfyi­ngly open in a long rent, effortle­ssly shredding lining and petticoats, to let my hand pass.



Neep! Finger against my ass I should have...ooh that’s right, you’re slippery enough, just push and it won’t be able to...keep you...out...­ooooooh fuck I can barely move that’s intense...­omigod so owned, I can see everyone watching in the reflection...



There’s a moment of resistance, of her body trying to keep me out, and then it’s like her whole body relaxes at the inevitab­ility along with her ass when I find the right angle to push inside, melting in my hands and voice going silent even as she keeps trying vainly to moan.



“...mmm..­ooooooo ooohh...”

My thumb is probably a lot to start with, but Lyra’s magic and it’s slid inside without incident once past the point of resistab­ility, and using my thumb means my fingers—the dimensions are, surprise, perfect—are free to snake their way up, parting her lips, teasing the opening of her pussy.

I shift my grip, working the rest of my thumb inside her and getting a proper angle on her cunt to reward her for a moment...and make the next bit more interesting. Unlike her pussy, her ass is perfectly smooth inside and somehow even more yielding—and delicate, or at least sensitive, to look at her expression and how she gives in to my other hand still holding her down.

Holding her in place, really doing it and broaching no resistance, feels good.

Oh god gasp please keep going, please...­make me...cum...

There’s no sense of time when any part of me is lost in the wet heaven between her legs, but presently her breath comes from parted lips and she starts to voice her lust, little moans that grow as I work her lips and tease at her cunt like I really am playing her like an instrument.

“Oooh oh Miss...”

There. That’s the sound of real need.

...oop oh grabbing me by the tail this is going to be good oooh slippery that’s kinda kinky...

The dress tears more, the fabric sizzling inside at the nectar on my hand, as I run my fingers up between her cheeks to find the base of her tail and curl my nectar-slick fingers around it and run them up—shredding and burning the dress and revealing Lyra’s familiar demon-tail where the nectar touches it, freakishly half-transparent at the edges—before I seize the base tightly and yank her down with a gasp into an ass-out spank- or fuck-me position and then immediately deliver a sharp, quelling blow with the hand that’s now free from between her wings.

Unh.

Her dress in flames burns brightly, and the light illuminates something on the surface of the mirror - or at least, creates shadows, shadows with no casting object but in the shape of rings like door pulls set at waist-height for a giant.

Perfect. With simple nudge to take hold of the rings, and a command to my collar to reshape her gloves, she’s helpless.

Nnnnn bondage squirm STRUGGLE NNF—

Well. Is she helpless?

OUCH NIPPLE! “Aaah! Nnn...mrr.” Fuck OW yes see I can’t get away eeep neep oooooh okay, breast caressing is good, yum, thank you Miss...

She drinks hungrily of my fondling, so I spoil her with it for a moment by way of a reward for so effectively demonstr­ating her helpless­ness, savoring the weight and softness of the breast I’ve just been tormenting, but then it’s time.

The dress is in tatters, split down the back from tail to feet and in front...I don’t have a good look at it with the angle, but smoke curls up around her shoulder and the cloth hangs limp, demolished by the passage of my hand. Even for the context it’s a surreal scene, looking down to see pink human skin peeking out of the gashes where nectar hasn’t yet ‘changed’ her, seeing my own body clothed in the smoldering remains of my tuxedo, and then ahead to see the reflection of my newly-voluptuous, Lyra-leather-dress-clad self putting Lyra’s naked, demonic form in bondage.

It’s not there and I can’t feel it, but the dress acts like a physical object when I ‘touch’ it, so lets have some fun. I place an open palm on either side of her butt, and then clutch inward, gathering folds of unreal fabric into my fists while my nails rake across Lyra’s real flesh, pulling a gasping, pain-and-pleasure moan from her and then I lift the fabric away from her and tear throwing my arms open and it parts, disinteg­rating with an ear-splitting rip into burning shreds that arc away, consumed before they hit the ground, leaving a sea of pink human-skin in front of me, streaked with purple-grey where nectar has touched her.

“Alright, let’s see how many spanks it takes to knock your stockings off.”

Under the dress was a full set of bridal lingerie—good enough that I’m almost disappoi­nted to have just mostly destroyed it. What remains is the stockings, white with lacy tops, covering my much better and kinkier legwear.

The crowd’s been respectf­ully quiet to this point, sort of carefully there-but-distant, but I catch a few smirks in response to this in their reflection, picking out who speaks English.



Oh god yes Miss’s hands on me, grab my ass yes see all yours take it and enjoy it, yes hold me by the waist with the other hand come on dig your fingers in you know you want to.

Argh...fuck, so wet, oh my god I’m starting to do the drippy thing in front of everyone, so humiliating. I bet it’s totally running down Miss’s arm, I can feel it on my thighs...

How about a little audience particip­ation? My hand drips with nectar when I withdraw it, and I hold it high for a moment, turning to face the crowd I can’t see but know is there.

“But first, anyone want a taste? She tastes awesome when she’s desperate.”

A tremor goes through the illusory chapel as I speak the words, dropping dust and fragments of ceiling around us.

NNNG OMIFUCK MISS!

“Is that a safeword?”



“No Miss...”

Holy fuck, though, so humiliating. Mrf.

I can’t believe I like this.

Belatedly, I realize I’ve sent a pretty clear signal by letting my eyes settle on the reflection of the cat-girl I noticed before when I really had meant to address the whole crowd, but this doesn’t seem to offend anyone. She catches my eye in return and then looks at the tawny succubus holding her and they have a murmured exchange that ends with her making pleading eyes at him that are almost as good as Lyra’s and then being sent off towards us with a sharp look from her owner.

The false reality bubbles and tears around her like melting celluloid to allow her in as she comes near, leaving a smoking rent in the image of the chapel that shows where we really are in her wake.

“I’m allowed to lick it off your fingers, or off her cunt, but that’s it.”

Real cat ears covered in real black fur that matches her hair, a real, lashing, cat’s tail. Soft features, clear, soft skin, medium-built-but-perfect body clad in what would be a black leather bikini but that wide straps united by silver metal rings make it one piece.

“How about both?”

Another tremor, and the menacing light of our real location shows through a crack in the ceiling, god-raying in through curling smoke or dust that wasn’t visible in the gloom.

Huh? Wait, oh fuck—

She grins and takes my nectary hand by the wrist with both of hers when I bring it near, licking it clean (but never taking any part into her mouth) by dozens of quick, feline laps with a broad pink tongue, eyes shut in pleasure.

Definitely human, cat parts or no: there’s no burn of feeding, and though she has a smell it’s just a subtle, human musk of fresh sweat and horny girl.

“Want me to cross your path, once you’re on your way in again?”

She must read the shadow of confusion that passes over my face, because she goes on, black tail curled around herself so that she can smooth out the end of it with her hands:

“Y’know, for luck.”

Oh. Isn’t that not...well. If that sort of thing were working properly, I’d be a lot less interested in opening these doors.



“Yeah. Thanks.”

...aw...­sweet...

Done with my hand, the new girl kneels behind Lyra, who has been peering back at us, but now lowers her head, eyes shut. Is she going to be okay? I want for obvious reasons to watch the cat-girl have her lick but instead I take one of Lyra’s horns - invisible but solid - gently lifting her head so she has to look at me, and her eyes open, expression a tangle of pride and embarras­sment.

Tenderly: “Hey.”

Miss...

Yes, pet my cheek, just see me, I need to know you see...

She’s okay, or at least, not being horribly traumatized, just a little humiliated.

“I’m proud of you. That’s why I show you off.”

“I—OOooh...” Oh fuck, that’s a soft tongue on me, oh fuck nothing like getting licked by a girl when you need to cum fuuuck please nrf of course only one lick.

Whatever Lyra was going to reply is lost in an open-mouthed moan that dies away with a whimper when the new girl finishes and scampers back to her place in the crowd.

Cupping Lyra’s cheek: “Good girl.”

Smile.

Please touch me...or kiss me, kissing is good too, mm kiss me deep yes I know I’m so passive and compliant after you tie me up and hit me and share me, how about that...

The nectar in her mouth is different, thicker and more like that of her cunt than usual, and I can feel it stretch out between our lips for a split second as we separate so I can take my place by her ass, giving another swat and getting a satisfying yelp as I get in position.

Lyra follows me with her strange blue eyes, lips smeared purple by our kiss, watching over her shoulder with a curious awkwardness I finally place as the unfamili­arity of not looking around her wing, so I meet her gaze as I lay my hand on her ass, preparing.

“Get ready.”

Shift shift. Spread a little wider, ‘s not like there’s a way I’m going to keep all this nectar in me anyhow even if I was closed all up, and I’m—

Oof!

Wait, was that an actual warmup blow? You do remember reading that! Woo!

Unh!

Spanked on the other cheek, that’s—

Ah! That was harder, and we’re speeding up, oh please—

The blows reverberate through the chapel, echoing, and then more as I hit harder, dropping dust and then rocks from the ceiling, beginning to open new cracks.

The repeating smack of my hand against Lyra’s ass is surprisi­ngly sensual, full of her softness backed up by the solidness of her hipbones inside, telling me where I’m landing each strike, her flesh warm or cool depending on whether that place has been struck often, allowing me to distribute the blows evenly.

Oh god so good so fast like a wave I can ride...o­ooooohhh....

She seems to be building to something, there’s something in her way as she surrenders a little more under each blow that’s like an edge I’m driving her toward and I try to find the sweet spot of this progression as best I can as I build each blow just a tiny bit harder than the last.

...just...­ooooh...

I’m delivering real solid whacks that sting my hand now, but Lyra’s surrendered, supple-ly meeting each blow and rolling with it, moaning a bit on some but otherwise lost in the rush of it, and then on one particul­arly dead-on blow that brings my fingertips perilously close to her tender pussy, I can see the flash of lightning through her mind and know it’s time. Working fast, I shift away the front of my dress, slam my cock into place between my legs and in the same motion plunge it into Lyra’s dripping cunt so that excess nectar is squeezed out to spurt against my hips and make us smack together wetly with the first collision of our hips—and the next, and the next, replacing the rhythm of hand-blows with the rhythm of my hips. I have to squat to reach her cunt, so I grasp her hips and lift her nearly-horizontal to be at a good fucking-height.

On the last thrust before I explode, I fix Lyra’s gaze in the mirror, and slipping her the silent order to repeat the next sentence after me, gasp through the incipience of my orgasm as that same sense of rails from Limbo guides me once more:

“I am Sade, and this is my blessing of our relation­SHIP!”

Gasp gasp “I am Sade ooh and this is my blessing of our relation­shipOH!” fuuuuuuuuck yes omifuck AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH...

Everything happens at once. I come, quickly with the lust this celebration has raised in me and (fuck it, it’s true) the encourag­ement of the crowd in the background, hard, and Lyra glows bright, illumina­ting the chapel with light that finally does annihilate her stockings and then we’re blinded by purple fire that shockwaves out from our bodies, oblitera­ting all sight and sound for an instant to leave no trace of the chapel or any other illusions, but for one: a tiny point of light, hovering above my forehead, where the jewel of a tiara would be if I were wearing one.

—HHHAAAAA­AAAAAAAH­HHHH—

The Gates open, deadbolts thudding back inside with a boom like thunder and then the reflections in the surface shift apart dizzily as the panels of the massive door move, silently pivoting free just an inch before they stop, whatever lies within still rendered invisible by thickness that must be commensu­rate with their titanic scale.

Gasping raggedly as I pull us together, a sense of a shifting world makes me look up to see that the gates have moved, however fraction­ally, from her weight on the restraints as I tug at her.



—AAAAAAAHHHHAAAaaah please hold me together because ooooOOOOOOH it’s like flying wait fuck the restraints are movingaa­aaaaAAAAAAAAAAHH—

I’m gripping her tight, fingers crooked into the folds between hip and thigh, her softness pouring over my hands like cream or...suc­cubus nectar.

Standing brings her almost horizontal, clinging to the restraints to take the strain off her wrists, and I pull us back, gently, careful, just a tiny tug, and the gates move soundlessly, swinging with an only just-visible inexorable slowness. They must weigh as much as a city, each, but they’re balanced flawlessly on friction­less hinges (that lubrication tech is post-singularity here is no surprise) and so move like they’re floating in space, gliding soundlessly once set in motion, but slow, slow. Long minutes will pass before I even need to think about releasing Lyra’s arms.

—HHHAAAAAAAAAAaaaah HHAAH AAaaah pant pant pant...

All of this fades into clarity as in a block I begin to subside. I’m learning, oddly, how to come, with her, from her, how to open myself to the pleasure, to ride the explosion instead of fearing or fighting it, and as my mind clears enough to feel her cunt clench around me and her body arch, writhing against the restraints I find there’s a way I can relax into the aftershocks, letting them squeeze pleasure from me in a terrifying-but-wonderful way.



Woo, that was intense. I’m getting a grip on my restraints? Oh, I see, pulling the gates. Yes Miss. There.

When I look down in response to the hot drops of nectar that fall on my feet, forced from her pussy as she’s come, a memory floats fuzzily to the surface of her post-orgasmic mind, standing here with someone tall (superhum­anly so, nine feet or more) and feminine whose identity isn’t important because they’re just teaching a geography class, being shown an inlay on the surface of the hand we stand on, a V of silver lines showing where the gates will swing as they open.

They’re beneath us, still only a few inches apart, seeming all but parallel: the gates have a huge arc and will move simply outward a great distance before they part.

I could fuck her again, want to fuck her again, but we must move to let the gates open and so I withdraw, shudderi­ngly, clenching myself as I pull out so my head will be even bigger, spread her even more as it passes—

Oooh oh fuck eep OOH don’t go...

I miss you inside me, Miss.

I know. Soon we’re going have sex for like a month straight.

Smile.

Reaching forwards, and leaning over her to bring our bodies close as I do it, I wrap my hands around hers where they’re bound to the rings, and pull, and slip her the order to pull with me.



Aww, like the car’s lever YES MISS LEt’S GET HOME RRRRRR PULL UNH!

Huh, gates are moving a lot. I wonder what Miss’s going to do about that...

This.

This last pull has set the gates opening fraction­ally more precipit­ously, and there’s just time to set her to the ground and wrap a supporting arm around her middle while I release her hands from the rings, pulling upright with the other so my grip pins her wings and nestles my still-slick, permanently-hard cock into her ass, and then we backpedal slowly, outpacing the Gates easily...

MMMmm grind it’s so slippery puurrr....

...until I judge there will be room and time enough for the amazing idea that’s come together in my mind.

Turn around, face Miss. Kneel. Okay, down.



I’ve had all the pieces since she swallowed my cock into her soul. I just hadn’t put them together until now.

Reaching down—I have to bend a bit to get there, and the same long-denied exhibiti­onism that demanded this dress insists I not do it by going to one knee—I tilt her head back, and hold my hand against my collar at her neck to receive the tiny leather ring I have it bud off, a minuscule mirror-image of itself. Its counterpart is already around my other wrist, at the end of the leash.

Hnnnngh Miss-cleavage...boo.

It’s the right size for her finger, but that’s not where it’s going. Without further ado, I clasp the ring in my fingers and slide them into Lyra’s partway-open mouth.

MMF YUM...

Whoah face-fisting UNF streeeetch oof tight Miss has girly hands now but they’re still so big....MMMF UNH HOW DEEP ARE YOU GOING AAAAAAAAA—

Her mind is overwhelmed by the intensity as, just like she promised, my entire hand slips easily into her mouth and her soft, engulfing throat stretches—tightly-fittingly—to allow my fingers back past her tongue and beyond the back of her mouth. I get a sense from her like she’d be keening an overwhelmed whine, could she breathe or make noise, but her breath is entirely cut off. I push deeper, bringing the ring to the tip of my hand as she writhes on my arm, eyes squeezing shut and then blinking open again. Her jaw widens, expanding to allow my forearm in, without seeming to dislocate or otherwise do anything but be a jaw, and rounded teeth with stubby fangs drag softly at my flesh and it finally registers that they’re springy-hard, like the material of my present cock.

—AAAAAH Intense GAAAAH—

There. I can feel the weirdness of her...heart, I suppose...­touch my fingers, and with a nudge toward that I release the ring.

—WHAT OMIFUCK THAT—

The instant it’s inside her mind I command it: reshape and resize, become a collar around her soul the way I have a physical collar around her neck, present but not overwhel­ming or covering, encircling but not choking, a visible reminder of my owning her—and of the love that goes with that.

—NNNGH GAH Your collar omifuck your collar is in my heart it’s omifuck like you....put...it HUG AAW comforting Miss I’m yours AAAAH—

I yelp, girlish, as it feels like threads of power pull into place dragged out of me like the last dregs of my last orgasm—and possibly without that lesson I wouldn’t let this happen, but the tendrils I’m wrapping around the infinitely-complicated boundary of her soul via my collar belong inside her just as much as much my come does—and projecting them out of myself is just as natural. For a terrifying instant it feels like I won’t be able to withdraw my hand from her—something pulls at my fingers—and then as I start to slide carefully out of her the strands I felt snap into place seem to whip through an extra dimension singing like harp-strings and become a thick cable from my hand to her heart.

MMmmff hooh pant pant pant WHOAH

My hand slides slippery back past her kissing tongue and wetly out of her as I straighten, leaving her open-mouthed and wide-eyed. The strands have become a leash, invisible and insubsta­ntial, with thousands of different strands I can feel I could by will pull on independ­ently, which like the binding from our games with the pentagram would tug various parts of her body, or silence her voice, or any number of other things. It’s as long or short as I like, can be left slack and forgotten or carried like the physical leash in my other hand—but there’s no way of putting it down—no. I’m not capable of wanting to put it down, and there’s no chance of anything altering my values so that will change.

Good.

HHHHHNNNNGH YOU’RE PULLING EVERYING MISS FFFUCK...

I wrap the strings into my hand and pull, tugging her upwards and trying to find the individual strings to tilt her head to the angle I want and open her mouth, and she rises like a puppet, tugged by every point along her arms, legs, body, until she’s dangling from the strands in my hand, off the ground.

I hold her there, watching her face carefully, as my collar settles into place around her soul, pulled tight by this use of the, her puppet strings. On her left cheek, there’s constell­ation of new glittering freckles coalescing into the shape of a calligra­phically-stylized eye with a dramatic brow on top and long lashes extending below—

Memories roil inside me, idyll, innocence of youth, black stone, senses of space big and small achingly familiar yet utterly alien to anything I know from Earth, and an image coalesces, of the reflection of light numinous on the surface of milk in a wide bowl that’s gigantic in the way everything seems balefully huge when you’re five, I’m drinking the milk and there’s so much but it’s so good and I will drink it all, because, because—in the surface of the milk, another kid my age but the silver hair and mischievous purple eyes are unmistak­able as this new-old memory resolves with now. I’m intent, dreaming of her, wishing, calling out, while the milk slides down warm inside me. I tip the bowl higher, drinking fast, burning with suspense.

This was a test, a test to see if I could implant her this young.

I can remember the words of, of—fragments slip and slide in my mind, unfamiliar, hard to place, like my mind is a filesystem that’s lost its index. Everything is there, if I can just—the words were explaining, reminding, reminding that I would still be the first person ever to implant so young, and not to despair if it didn’t work this time because that was only this time, and it would work one day, when I was old enough.



When you’re five, that’s the same as never, so I just wished as hard as I could wish.

And then the milk is gone and I don’t remember what happened to the bowl after I emptied it because I’m looking inside myself because she’s there, excited and smiling back up at me ready to play—

I snap from my reverie, reeling, still holding my seedling off the ground by her puppet strings.

Past lives, silly girl. Telepathy and time-travel and demon-summoning and overlapping realities are cool but you should have been thinking about past lives.

How—the memory is raw facts, but that’s me, stripping off all the unnecessary details of how and where I learned a thing so as to better understand it in itself—unripe (Infernal idiom for prepubes­cent) children are presexual, but they’re capable of desiring a person. Succubi are the sexual subspecies of a huge class of psychoem­otional symbiote, the, the su’khora which are themselves of the order demon (dreamborn), with billions of other varieties, one of which likes asexual humans. The theory was that a succubus (which must just be the Romaniza­tion of su’khora but will serve to mean sexual su’khora for now) might be able to hang on using the same nourishment of simple wanting that asexual su’khora thrive on if it only had to do so as a seedling during my prepubes­cent years as we grew together. It had worked, and she sexualized along with me when I hit puberty immediately resulting in the same cutely bottomless lust that looks up at me in an orgasmic daze now.

This memory sounds like an older me than the first one.

Why me, why me was important, I was an experiment, they were saving me, from...I should have died. My mind wasn’t born able to work right on it’s own, I would have, would have collapsed. The pieces of me wouldn’t have come together into a person.

If they didn’t have something to all pull together for...but it couldn’t wait one moment longer than it had to, so we had to start trying early on, as early as we could.

I knew none of that when I implanted her, on purpose. They waited until almost her birthday to tell me, because it had to be about my wanting her to work.

“They” are violently the opposite of a faceless abstraction, but the memories seem not to be able to come back online all at once. I’m breaking some kind of rule getting this much back...b­eing reincarn­ated wrecks your memory, I remember being horrified that there were places out there where it was something that happened to everyone, more than once.

Enough. If I don’t remember right now, that’s only right now, and I will remember some day, when it’s time.

My name—it’s weird to have only one name. Trying to claim a global name, or saying you’re the keeper of some kind of global namespace is really pretentious! Everyone had different names for different contexts, though it was pretty common to use the same words for lots of them...

But the name I used with Lyra, with my seedling, was—

“Say my name.”

“Isiul’vo.”

WHAT HOW

HOLY FUCK

Omigod I remember stuff I remember you as a kid Miss I remember ME as a kid I remember you DRINKING ME WHOAH

OMIFUCK THAT’S HOW I IMPLANTED THAT’S MY REAL FIRST MEMORY!!

Tseeulvuh, the final syllable like a short ‘o’, is the sound she makes, but the word I understand is Blueeyes. My mind is full of holes, places where the language of my youth—Infernal, the “sound-of-stars’-hearts”—has been ripped out but the way the language shaped who I am remains, but my name is back now, thanks to the sight of my pictogram—my home culture’s combination of signature and avatar—emblazoned on Lyra’s cheek.

A vague memory of childish pride warms me—I’d felt terribly clever when I realized the Infernal words Blue and Eyes contained characters that could be flipped and overlapped to make a pictogram that literally looked like an eye with pretty brow and lashes.

“Tell me you love me and use my name.”

“I love you, Isiul’vo!”

“I love you too, lura.”

The correct pronunci­ation, and true meaning of the word, come back to me as it reaches my tongue. Lura. Instrument...the word is from my childhood, in, in, I can’t help fighting for the name—The Wise and Innocent World On the Starglowing Mountain Underdream but it had an allitera­tive flow and didn’t take that long to say in Infernal, but I’ll deal with that later.

That’s right I’m your lura Miss your Instrument!

The word is from my childhood, I played an instrument, one that involved jumping around and hitting things—later. The memories are spilling out like from upended boxes, erupting whenever I get near an association I’m capable of connecting at the moment. The word is from my childhood but this instrument thing isn’t something we predicted...­except—

I look up from my lura—it’s not appropriate for an unborn seedling to be named, she’s supposed to just be Isiul’vo’s-seedling, except she is born, so maybe it should be Lura...I look up from her to the slowly-opening Gates, and rock with a new kind of deja-vu.

I’ve been here before. Not the statues-traversal, or the pool, or Nexi, but here watching the Gates open—except last time they opened a lot faster—my head swims, aching piercingly for an instant, as the memory surges to life, gigantic doors flying open in my mind’s eye.

They stood out, like an overlay on the room I was in, which was far too small to contain them. I’d done a dynamic entry—I wasn’t in Rl’yeh Sade because I was trying to go there—and I’d reached into a blank stone wall and pulled open a nonexistent door (pride: I was far and away the best in my class at this, and didn’t even need the aid of a real door to open one I was thinking of) that was supposed to just lead to the Absolute Shadows.

It was my seedling’s birthday. I was—the only English phrase that will do is ‘in labor’, and that’s a horrible metaphor. We were going to Rl’yeh Sade for her to be born and then...w­hatever adventure awaited us. No Limbo, no battle with perfekti, just a doorway and the total peace of the Absolute Shadows followed by the comfort of the Deep Haven and the joy of my seedling’s birth.

Instead, the Gates flared into life in front of me, taller than possible, all seven locks already open, swinging open luminous and unstoppable. I’d staggered back out of the way, scrambling too slow like in a dream—we all had, there were...well-wishers, my class, with me, to see me off—even while poising to leap through the moment there was space, and the Gates had flung open, their curved, inlay-encrusted edges rushing towards me in a blur so that it felt like I was falling, falling into them, and then they were open and I was inside a vision like the one about the chapel.

Terror pulses, trying to tear me away from the memory—something terrible happened here, this was moments before whatever tore me from the paradise of these memories and threw me to Earth—but I hold fast, trying to remember. Remembering is the way to make sure it can never, ever happen again—another message from my future self.

In the vision, I saw lights like sun dancing on black water somehow maddeningly “up” out of my field of view, distant inside something closer, transparent, all but invisible, and more lights, out of my field of view “down", glowing brilliantly. There was a sense, dreamlike, of mouthing a single inaudible word, and the lights had flared, and moved, filling out the form of my seedling climbing to settle herself onto my cock. She—her vision-self, anyway—had fucked me sweetly, energeti­cally, filling with light to the roiling moonglowing pleasure-whiteout I know so well as I “came", glowing so brilliant the vision whited out entirely and then her waters are still, flat within her transparent-again from standing ready with hands behind her back and head bowed aside, glimmering with the gentle light of her quiescence.

The vision shifted like a dream, and suddenly had always been light playing on the surface of a shining black fruit hanging from the bough of a gigantic tree with curled, so-purple-it’s-black leaves, one like the ones from my vision aboard the Changepurse, and like the fruit my Lura gave as she became all-Instrument. They had...Eena fruit, my favorite.

The Tree always grows your favorite fruit.

The Tree is a story, or idea, a metaphor we used for...there isn’t a good English word, that I can find. Transition, maybe. Those times in life, where you meet a fruit like this, that you know will be good, and nourishing, and exciting, and see things you never thought were possible, if you eat it, but if you do eat it, you can never be the same ever again, because eating it changes you, and there’s no way back even if you undo all the actions and choices of ‘eating’ the fruit.

The Tree represents the choice: do you eat the fruit, and trade in the known for transfor­mation, or leave it, and stay like you were?

In my case, as her mistress, I was presented the choice for both my Lura and myself. The vision of the Tree was, like the vision of the chapel, a Nexus, poured out of Gates before they even opened. How I acted—pick the fruit, walk away, caress the fruit longingly but leave it, grimace in disgust and stomp off, would change our path into Rl’yeh Sade massively, set us toward or away from the waypoint seen in the fruit’s skin.

I couldn’t decide. I wasn’t ready to see this. I was barely out of adolescence—I’d had a terrible impatience to birth her and be off to Rl’yeh Sade—and her seed-ghost had hidden it from us through her whole incubation. Noone, not me, not my mentors, not my Lura herself, had the least inkling of this. It must have been meant to have been part of my joymare-ride, like it was tonight—I thought that then, as now.

So I stood, in front of that Tree-vision, tearing in half with the fight between wanting what I saw in the light playing on the surface of that fruit, and fearful, feeling like the most absolute, abject monster for even considering it. I had the same fear then, as now: how could she be a person like that? It had been my one, fond mission for the entirety of my recallable life to be a good incubator, to help her become a person as much as she was helping me become one.

How could I want what I saw in the fruit?

The fruit of the Tree is good, but always terrifying—which must be how the myth got so messed up when it came to Earth.

I don’t know how long I was there. Her seed-ghost told me I’d fallen into the in-between (an idiom we used to describe decision paralysis, a common vice of mine) and it was going to try to get me out—I remember teachers, someone kind, a tender voice calling to me to tell me this wasn’t a test, it was a celebration.

I stood on the knife-edge for a moment after that, weighing my emotions against the years of training not to shrink from seeming siren-song nightmares, but instead find a way of carrying them out with love for all involved—

And then the vision broke and our eponymous star called via dreamtalk with the hyperspeed-for-a-star reflex it’d developed for talking to people who can’t wait thousands of years for a sentence to finish to tell me—tell us, it was broadcas­ting—as the Gates evaporated from before my eyes, that it couldn’t support the incoming children and was closing our world until the wave passed.

I panicked and ran, following years of training to respond to sensory or emotional overload by dreamwal­king (astral projection followed by sort of reality-bending flourish that swaps your physical body into the place your projected consciou­sness expects) for the officially-sanctioned hiding-place I had buried deep within the mountain where I could think and collect myself, but something went wrong, I exited the departure cave but couldn’t get back in to my hiding-place, and I found myself floating incorporeal not attached to any reality, still torn over the vision of the fruit.

In the absolute darkness between worlds, our seed-ghost tried to make me decide, tried to show me what it would be like, tried to make me see that this was something I needed, not just wanted, but I wouldn’t listen, sure that if this was what I needed then our experiment had failed and I should set my seedling free—which might mean my death, but so be it. She would be okay, saved by the vigil set up for her by the authors of her seed-pod bringing her somewhere safe, and the malleabi­lity of being yet unborn.

The reverie breaks, and I snap back to the present, the Gates rolling sedately open in front of us.

All I can think is that somehow, because it was foremost in my mind, I found myself in the one place where the story of the Tree which was at the front of my mind as I went is told as a myth about a tempting fruit of damnation whose taking closes forever the gate of paradise.



I laugh inwardly, sardonic. I must have finally decided to take the fruit, then.

But...how did that send me to Earth?

The imagery painted on the inner edges of the Gates shifts eye-wateringly, expands, becomes a black void filling my field of view. In the center, I float, seemingly only a little younger than now, weightless, drawn with the same anime-like vividness of the paintings that’ve come to life to create this vision.

I’m clutching my head with both hands, while around me a halo of something shadowy, infinitely complicated, betentacled, floats: our seed-ghost, looking every bit as Sadish as the seedling it’s building me. One tentacle mimics the Tree, dangling the fruit in front of my screwed-shut eyes, while others caress my arms, pulling gently, very slowly uncurling me so I’ll look at what it’s offering—yes, I was arguing with it, but a seed-ghost is a force capable of designing a soul that will reliably capture its incubator’s love and attention for the rest of eternity. I’d lost the argument before it even started. It’s only a matter of time until I open my eyes and do in the metaphor what I did literally aboard the Changepurse not an hour ago.

My hands are drawn away from my head, and my head begins horrifyi­ngly to unravel, peeling apart at the top, but more tentacles are already on their way to carefully smooth the pieces back into place, fit me back together as I try to dissociate. They wrap the floating fronds of my mind like bandages, slowly smoothing them back into place as my now-spasming eyes seem about to open, and then the background blurs and I plunge into grey water, hitting faceup, and the water shatters me, leaving a newborn infant floating in the epicenter...and our seed-ghost carefully picking up every broken piece in a just-spawned tentacle.

The view changes, so that the infant is floating in a vast grey river, with Earth luridly green-and-blue in the distance the river is flowing towards. Our seed-ghost follows, fragments in tow. A thin tendril reaches down to the infant: my seedling hasn’t let go, even now, despite her orders to flee and be safe if something like this ever happened to me.

I remember just enough, as my infant self floats down the river variously known to Earthling mythology as Lethe or Styx to fill with an emotion I can’t even name, something as far beyond fury as the lights of Rl’yeh Sade are beyond a child’s aquarium. What I’m looking at is a relic, the remnant of a medieval age when the brutality I’ve just witnessed passed for healing, preserved for reasons I could never understand, despite the mistake it’s just made thinking I needed its help because the usually-inviolable shield of ego that surrounds a human soul was down, and the far worse one it’s about to make as it tries to determine my home by reading the strongest emotional impression present in me at the moment, which will be the story of a Tree bearing a fruit of tempting damnation the taking of which proves your unworthi­ness for paradise, to be matched against a world that has that myth and also works like the spiritual equivalent of an iron lung—one that’s only necessary because it interrupted our seed-ghost from metaphor­ically building me a new respiratory system.

This last explains my mishap with dreamwal­king, as well. Human children need a certain amount of objectivity to the external world to learn to exist as coherent beings, which is usually provided by a universe like the Earth of myth, full of magic and doorways to the beyond but still solid. The Wise and Innocent World was one of these, but special, bleeding-edge. We replaced the external physical reality with simulation in the mind of our star, so that every child could have individual, custom-tuned laws of physics that would open like a flower of possibility as they matured allowing them to develop like musical prodigies who practice with real instruments from the time they’re toddlers.

The whole thing was a grand experiment.

My specialty was dreamwal­king and space-bending like dynamic entry, and I was good, so probably noone thought to stop me when I vanished from the departure-cave after the Gates disappeared, or probably even look for me right away when I didn’t show up in Rl’yeh Sade immediately.

I’d graduated, which meant the safeties I’d lived with for years were suddenly entirely off. I could dreamwalk out and even our star closing the world couldn’t stop me—but it also wouldn’t grant me the power to dreamwalk into a world a star was simulating with its laws of physics set to make dreamwal­king in impossible, and so I ended up locked out.

Now, with the benefit of distance, and the shockingly-clear memory, I can ask instead: what the actual fuck does “can’t support the incoming children” mean? I have a vague memory that our star was prone to eccentric sayings when made to rush, but that’s a new level of surreality even for it.



The Gates oblige with an out-and-out schematic, plunging my lura and I into a dark void once more.

Eeep now what!?

“This is why the Gates disappeared. Do you remember?”

I remember, Miss, the Gates were open when I was about to be born, but you were surprised—

“Good. Watch with me. Turn around to see and cuddle close.”

YUS SPIN SNUGGLE

Earth hangs in the void in cold green-and-blue dotted wireframe. Around it, a halo of child-proporti­oned white figures orbits, hundreds of thousands, hemmed in by another pale-blue shell of dots like the planet is encased in a forcefield.

The view rushes, and I’m seed, standing at the wall I’m about to open the Gates out of, classmates behind me. It zooms out for a moment to show a mountain, hand-painted but with signs of radiosity rendering as from a CGI pipeline—the Wise and Innocent World, denoted as having our custom blend of physics as opposed to the ultra-mechanical Earth—contained within the childlike drawing of a star’s photosphere and chromosp­here (our star was young, as stars go), then repositions so the view is top-down on the cave I was supposed to depart from with Earth at the top of the view behind my hand-painted alter-ego. Between Earth and the mountain, the curve of the star makes a boundary that white motes of travelers flit back and forth across.

Rulers appear as I stride toward the wall I’m going to open in slow motion: five marks between me and the wall, and another, five marks between Earth and the star’s boundary.

The blue shell around Earth pulls open, and my stomach turns as the children and I cover ruler-marks at the exact same rate.

Holy fuck did someone DDOS our star with kids?

“I...”

The first of the children reach the boundary of the star, just as I reach the wall.

They pile up by the thousands, too many for our star’s carefully-developed reflexes, as I reach and open the Gates, and prevaricate—but in the vision, the radiosity-rendered aspect of the cave glitches and shimmers, wavering with the arrivals of the child-spirits, meaning that something in the math isn’t holding up, and the carefully-arranged superpos­ition of quantum mechanics and poetry is in danger of falling apart, killing everyone who wouldn’t be able to keep the coherence of their mind without it.

It looks terribly precarious, possibly so much so that my walking through the Gates would have destabil­ized the whole thing—which is clearly what the sociopath who arranged the DDOS was counting on.

I think back to the moment at the shore of Limbo, when on the way to this point I thought our way was barred by an actual angel armed with literally every weapon ever, and my response was to floor the gas and play chicken with it—and win.

The schematic vanishes, leaving us before the opening Gates once more. Tears well up, my throat tightens.

The Rocks of Rl’yeh Sade showed me the one thing, the only thing, in any possible universe that could stop me from crossing that threshold and dying for real. Nothing else would have even slowed me down.

Yes, it was a bit ejection-seat-breaks-your-spine, but the same Deep Images—that’s what this place is, the home of the Deep Images, one of the most powerful scrying tools ever conceived, so much so that what we’ve been seeing so far is leakage—that knew how to arrest my terrible momentum, knew our seed-ghost would be able to fix me afterwards.

If a fucking relic of it’s-for-your-own-good Victorian-sanitarium-style spiritual “medicine” hadn’t tried to “help”.

For a moment it feels like the rage will break me, like I’ll just evaporate in the heat of my own fury. Thoughts rattle through my head of drawing a copy of the angel’s abstract weapon from my purse—something I suspect it of being easily capable of providing—and finding the people who herded the children, who allowed the river of death to persist long after its usefulness, who were any part of this atrocity, to teach them a lesson, the way I did the perfekti that assaulted me way back in Limbo—

It’s almost like I crash, integer-overflowing the rage into a dazed numbness. The perfekti I destroyed became for me the avatar of the god I think I always knew was a machine, and the sad truth is, there was a hole still left after visiting my wish for revenge on it. It didn’t fix anything, or even give a one-down-billions-to-go satisfac­tion.

I’m left with the bleak realization none of that will un-happen what happened to me, or stop it happening again, or help anyone else it’s happened to.

...and as the tears roll down and the grimace peels back my lips, the pieces rearrange in my mind and a terrible, world-breaking resolve fills me: there is something that will end this madness, and help the other people it’s happened to. Whoever did this, herding the souls of lost children like some kind of fucked up botnet, to attack what I can finally for the first time in my life call an innocent teenager two universes away for reasons I can’t even begin to guess at will never, ever even theoreti­cally be able to do such a thing again...but that’s just the beginning.

I was the best in my class, maybe the best the Wise and Innocent World had ever seen, at dreamwal­king and dynamic entry. I remember now, what the captain of the Changepurse warned me I would need to dynamic entry a door I’d never seen before: its story. There was no way she could in the time she had have explained what exactly that means, but now I remember.

The true name of a thing is its story. That’s the best it can be rendered into English, and it’s worthless without the experience to explain what it means, like trying to learn to kiss from a book (except that’s sort of possible).

I contain the memories and visceral knowledge-of-place of what and where Earth is. I’d planned never to use them, to forget them with a smile on my face, but now, they have a purpose.

And I know exactly the story of the doors I want to open.

Dynamic entry is opening a door that’s here and having it open on a door that’s somewhere else. That somewhere else can be in another reality—as with the Gates in the Wise and Innocent World.

People usually do it the way that’s obvious, but there’s nothing that actually says the door that’s “here” has to be the one whose other side gets replaced—it could, with skill, go the other way, replacing the other side of a door that’s “there” with a door that’s “here", and there’s nothing that actually says you have to fly along with your down dynamic entry. You could easily get the door to the other end of the universe for someone else and then walk through to the next room like you hadn’t done anything at all.

So that is what we’re going to do. Because humans are human, many people find it helps with dynamic entry to flourish, do something cool, and open the door all in one moment, too fast to see that you’re doing something “impossible”—but there’s nothing that actually says it has to be fast, and my lura and I just carried off one of the most amazingly epic flourishes Rl’yeh Sade has probably ever seen.

All we need now is the wish.

I felt like the most hideous, awful aberration in that moment after the Gates vanished, too horrible to live, enraptured by the one nightmare even Sade couldn’t turn into a dream, and my years on Earth didn’t do anything to make me feel better. How many times did I want to crawl into the deepest, darkest shadow I could find and never come out again? How many times did I feel like an abomination that didn’t belong anywhere, a sick, failed thing that should never have lived in the first place?

So that is the story of the doors I’m opening from. The doorway to the hiding-place, the shadow that hides you from the crowd, the arch of foliage that just leads away, anyplace anyone on Earth, or anywhere, ever runs through a portal feeling lost, rejected, unlovable, irredeem­able, all these will become the “from” side of the Gates that are peeling open in front of my lura and I now.

Why stop there? Let any doorway to relief for the weary, the sick, the lost, the never-found, however slight or trivial it might have been, lead here.

And there is nothing that says you can only redirect one side. The other will lead to the Absolute Shadows, or the front door of whatever other of the Four Dreams people need to find. These Gates can tell people’s way that much.

Even the children and families, there will be playworlds like the Wise and Innocent World ready to welcome them with open arms as we always were if a lost child ever made its way to our doors.

And of course there’s nothing that says it has to be one door to one door. This will be trillions, to trillions.

My lura pulled on the Gates with me. She should make the wish with me. Formed, the exact wish is wordless, beyond description, but that’s okay, I don’t have to use words with her. Slipping the wish into her mind, I reach down and sweep her into my arms, then whirl around and spread my wings as wide as they’ll go. A muscle-like sense, something I can pull, makes itself known, and when I pull it blue light illuminate my lura’s curves from behind me: my wings are biolumin­escent, if I wish.

Whee!

Just as I whirl I think the stow my cock and fix my dress, then think the better of that and find that yes my outfit can indeed be invoked like my lura, becoming a mental reality like my cock and leaving me naked.

I want as much attention as possible, for this next part.

Omifuck.

My breasts bouncing free of the suddenly-vanished top feels a little painful, a little good.

Okay. Yes Miss when you push I’ll dynamic entry that with you but I have to follow Miss that’s really complicated.

Murmured to her: “It’s okay. I remember how, now. Get ready.”

Purr...c­omfy...

But this is a big wish, and to really do what I want, it’s going to need more than just me and my lura.

The crowd is huge. The encrust the statue, thousands making it bristle with beautiful monsters, more looking down from the statue’s hairline and still more flying to hang in the air. They’ve hung back a respectful distance as we played, but beyond that line, the statue is packed.

How many stories of lost planets are here, never to be told but for a moment like this?

They’re all looking at me, expectant. I simultan­eously feel like I could grow large enough to have to stoop to fit through the Gates, and like I’m going to reflexively dreamwalk away again.

I inhale, and ready myself, hoping my voice will obey when I ask it to project enough to be heard here.

“My name is Isiul’vo. I was lost from the Wise and Innocent World on the Starglowing Mountain on the day of my seedling’s birth, from the threshold of these very Gates.”

A murmur goes through the crowd, people turn to each other to whisper.

Wave wave yes Miss waving to the crowd.

“I lost my memory and spent a lifetime on a lost planet, not knowing any of this existed, not even this wonderful succubus who never gave up on me for a single second, until one day she snuck past the cruel god who I let watch over me because I didn’t know any better and we fought our way back out, to come here, to the Gates.”

Semicons­ciously, I’m walking slowly for