Sich auf den Weg machen

(Hit the Road)

Authored: Collaborative - Hannah Nyland & Jerad Sayler Game: New World of Darkness by White Wolf & Onyx PathVenue: Mage: The Awakening

Chronicle: Mage 2: The Dethroned QueenTimeline: 31 May to 18 June 2014

“The thought burrowed into her heart as darkness fell. It coiled in her guts as she wedged herself amongst the boughs of a tree to

sleep. And in the morning, it woke with her and clung to her back, riding on her shoulders as she climbed down, hungry and

exhausted from nightmares.”― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Drowned Cities

Day 1: Somewhere over the AtlanticThis place isn’t hell yet, but it will be. Hell used to be an impersonal concept. Fire and brimstone and the torturer’s rack. Scary imagery sure, but so removed from the prospects of everyday reality that the terror was rendered impotent to me. It didn’t breathe down my neck. It wasn’t real. Now the clock is ticking down, and I’m sitting in the back pew of a Catholic basilica, waiting for fear to come bursting through the front doors like an unwelcome guest.I’ve tasted more flavors of fear in the last six months than I would have ever anticipated or wanted. The knee jerk fight-or-flight response to an undead thing falling from the roof in front of me, brandishing foot long claws. The concussion blasts of horror and helpless rage as my daimon took a sledgehammer to my psyche. The more subtle, creeping fear that accompanies doubt and painful introspection. And the soul-deep terror of this place, a fear that settled into my bones and refused to leave; a fear that suffocates me and turns my guts to jelly.

But not this time. Even a nightmare has to end. And if it doesn’t; well, then you make it end.My hands are shaking uncontrollably, evidently unconvinced by my bravado. That’s okay; I’m not all that convinced either. I make another sweep of the church with my eyes, but nothing has changed. White pillars, tall arches, stain glass windows, a wooden alter up at the front, and not a worshipper in sight. I’m intimately familiar with the architecture by now, and here in my dream it’s clearly been distorted by my perceptions. Everything is more imposing than it should be; the distances between objects longer, the already cavernous ceiling higher. The room is cast in dim orange candlelight, and the angels in the windows seem to leer. And there’s silence, perfect silence, but I can feel the church balanced on a knife’s edge, getting ready to pounce and sink its teeth into my throat. This is the third time today that I’ve run myself through this dream, and with each failure to control it, things just keep getting creepier. You’d think that repeat viewings would dull the effect a little, but if anything, this particular nightmare is shaping up to be even worse than the last two. This same horrible dream has been a constant companion ever since I Awakened as a mage. My powers are a gift and the nightmares are the price; nothing is ever truly free. At least, that’s how I’ve come to rationalize it to myself in my more lucid moments. But there is very little rationalizing taking place in my head right now.“Tick tock. Move it along. I don’t have all day here.” My voice trembles as I speak. I look up at the ceiling, as though directing the words at God. In reality, I have no idea who I’m intending them for - Myself? The demons? – and it probably doesn’t matter. Something presses against my mouth, something cold and steel, making further complaints impossible. An effective way of shutting me up. It’s a new brand of humiliation. A muzzle; the sort you would put on an unruly dog. Well, that part only makes sense, I think dully. The demons do keep making me their bitch . . .

The light in the room flickers and goes out, everything except for the dim red sanctuary lamp hung up at the front. Dread fills up my stomach. They’re here.The whispers spill out from the walls and descend on me; a swarm of flies on a corpse. Voices that fall just short of sounding human, raspy and slick with oil. They’re in my ears and my brain, laughing; urging mindless, animal fear.

And the things they say. . . I’m beyond comprehending them by now. I blank them out, but their shadowy imprints dance in the back of my skull. The church warps and twists in my peripheral vision, until it’s completely alien. No perspective, no distance, no time. Nothing makes sense.

In seconds, or whatever passes for seconds here, any semblance of coherent thought will be gone. It will all disintegrate into splintered memories and horrifying ideas; the dream will run its course. I know that none of this is real. I know it’s just my brain playing unresolved trauma and confusion on repeat. But it makes no real difference. Behind a near-incoherent stream of panic and unvoiced screams, my body obeys. I rise to my feet, and start into the aisle. It’s a well-trained reaction; I’ve been here, done this countless times now. What’s performing one more little trick in the face of that?Screw it. A simple act of willpower . . . that’s all it takes. I’m going to win. I’m going to win. I’m going to . . .

My mind scrabbles to grab hold of something: the shape of a spell, willpower in pure, concentrated form. With that, the scales tip and reason is back in the driver’s seat. I slip into an eerie calm, the perfect inner balance that I do my optimal casting from, grabbing hold of the threads that make up the nightmare. And for the first time, I change it. Control, finally. The muzzle vanishes from my face, and the whispers murmur uncertainly. A short, spiteful giggle slips from my lips as I feel a wicked surge of exaltation. “I’m not yours anymore -”Someone taps me on the shoulder. I ignore it. They tap harder. The dream blurs and runs around me, like wet paint in the rain. I’m losing it. No. No, this isn’t right. I set the spell to wake me up thirty-five minutes from now. I should have more time-

My eyelids slide slowly open. “What?” I growl.Alex seems a little taken aback. “Uh . . . sorry. You’ve been sleeping for hours, like since we got on the plane practically. And you have the aisle seat, I haven’t been able to get out and . . . and I need to go to the bathroom.” He looks at my face. “Wow. Someone’s grumpy today.”I glower. He shifts uncomfortably until I rise to my feet, almost smacking my head on the overhead bin before I remember to duck, and move into the aisle to let him out. As he hurries away, I turn to study him.We haven’t talked in a long time. He’s been my friend since kindergarten, creating imaginary heroes and monsters with me on the playground, but we

have very little in common anymore. People change. The truth is that we were drifting apart even before I took a couple of steps into a different world. But six months of distance on my part has done a lot to accelerate the process. Before my Awakening, I was looking forward to taking a class trip overseas alongside a friend. Not anymore.It’s only eighteen days, I remind myself. And then you can get back to your life of mageiness. My classmates from Jamestown High School’s German Club and I are packed into the economy class of an international flight. No points for guessing where to. I’ve been saving up for this trip for two years. I got my first job mostly to earn money for it. History, great food and sight-seeing; by all rights, I should be excited. But after running across undead monsters, visiting my Oneiros, and witnessing spells that violate the very nature of reality, it’s hard to get all that enthused about mundane matters. Of course, there’s the flipside of that: I’m a lone mage, about to wander into unfamiliar territory unannounced. There are a lot of people who wouldn’t be happy about that and a lot of things that would. Which is precisely why I have been advised to keep a low profile. I have no complaints about that. The trip itself is another story, but I have expectations to uphold. Though it would be nice just to kick back and relax for once. . . I pace up and down the aisle, drawing odd looks from the other passengers, as I wait for Alex to return. It’s an exercise in balance as the plane shifts almost imperceptivity under my feet. Traveling by air is a little more unsettling when you can calculate intuitively - and with pinpoint accuracy - the plane’s exact distance from the ground at any given moment. I wonder how Azazel is faring; he may not actually be my familiar, but I have to admit that I’m fond of him. As a spirit of Air, he might actually appreciate the high altitude. Actually, I don’t have to wonder. I’ve made enough advances the study of the Mind Arcanum lately to improvise a simple telepathy spell. And thank god for that; muttering under my breath to the miniature dragon familiar is a good way to look insane to Sleepers.I take a deep breath, slipping under focus and ice-water, falling into my ideal mindset for this as I did in the dream. It’s not always practical for impromptu casting, but I’m in no hurry right now. I forgo chanting in the high speech in case I might be overheard. The spell executes without a hitch, one mind reaching out to brush another. <Hey, Azazel. We should be landing shortly. How’re you doing?>

The voice on the other end of sounds more than a bit annoyed. <Well, we are moving along at a good clip and I’ve managed to avoid anyone from an opposing weather patterns. I’ve read the Skymall, the safety card, a few trashy airport novels, the Skymall. There’s a man with a Kindle has nothing but World War II stuff. Did I mention the Skymall? Its revolting…>I haven’t known Azazel to be sarcastic or bitter, but right now he seems downright pissed.<Okay. What’s wrong with a shopping magazine?><It lies. In a world full of so many confused and ignorant people there is nothing more aberrant than deliberate deceiving a mind. Promising things that will make your life better or easier; cure ills, add prestige, make your pet comfortable. But they exaggerate and extort. It is physically sickening to me, it hurts. That is why I am hanging out in the cargo compartment with the pets, coffins, and whatever books I can find down here…> I guess I was wrong about Azazel enjoying the flight. It occurs to me, somewhat guiltily, that I should’ve left him with my Kindle since I ended up dream-training nearly the entire time anyway. Somehow, I don’t think bringing that up would make him any less cranky. <Sorry to hear that. We should be landing soon though. And . . . wait, coffins?> I blink.<That’s what you took away from this? Sure, the deceased usually hitch a ride home on cargo plan, but your average aircrew ferries two coffins a day. Ever seen Zombies on a Plane? I’ve also read it’s often the only way the undead will go for air travel. Apparently in 2010 there was a Delta flight over Minnesota where a vampire was getting caught as the sun rose because of weather delays. He tore the emergency hatch at thirty thousand feet and jumped out in the dead of winter. You can imagine the other passengers had a very bad day after that.>The whole time Azazel has been talking my eyebrows have been trying to merge into one worried unibrow. I eye the other passengers, looking for a pale goth in a hoodie. Or something. <Well, assuming we land safely I’ll be dragging you around to whatever bookstores I can find. Or you’ll be dragging me, more likely.> I smile. <Then there’s- >

My smile falters and my pacing abruptly halts; there’s something not right about the Sleeper in the aisle seat a few rows ahead.

The girl is familiar looking, but for a few seconds I struggle to place her. Another one of the students in German Club, I finally realize, but still don’t have a name to match to the face. Blonde hair, blue eyes, round features. Fairly typical North Dakotan.And she’s got a gaping pit inside her.As I had paced the aisles in thought and conversation I’ve been using a daily perception spell called The Third Eye, reading the subtle and not-so subtle emotional resonance that bleeds off the human bodies crowding the seats of the plane. Looking for violent mental patterns and dangerous spikes of emotion. It’s become a habit of mine when encountering unfamiliar groups of people. A precaution. Even Sleepers can be dangerous. For proof, just look at the world.Resonance, the emanations of truth gleaned from things physical, emotional and spiritual, can be processed hundreds of different ways. I’ve learned, when it comes to people, that it largely registers to me as noise. Usually far too much noise, a bunch of confused syllables and sour notes that make my head hurt. I’m not sure if that’s more a commentary on the human condition, or simply how I perceive humanity, but looking into them (really looking), there’s nearly always sound. A living river of it.But not with her. Oh, there’s still a whisper around the edges, a faint trickle. But the core of her is dead air. Silent. Empty. Hollow. I’m drawn in despite myself and as I start to scrutinize, letting my magical senses dunk under all that aching nothingness… to look deeper…<Well! In that case I will just, as you teenagers say, “chill-out” until we can take a trip to the Berlin city Library, and we must see the Wiblingen Monastary Library in Ulm! I read about it in this guidebook, and -> Azazel’s

suddenly cheerful rambling continues on in some corner of my head, completely lost on me. It’s just background noise, like the drone of the jet engines.Embedded inside that ragged hole, I make out the impression of something else at the center; what looks like a bundle of fishing hooks jammed deep into her insides and I feel sharp shards in my mouth like broken glass, taste the coppery blood from the cuts. I pull my senses away from her. Enough looking. Perhaps the worst part is that, as far as I can tell, there’s nothing supernatural about this. Nothing pinging my radar or raising gooseflesh on my arms. Just old-fashioned and very human despair. Severe depression would be my guess. She has to be suffering, though it’s not glaringly obvious to an outside observer.I’m a warlock, a student of Hell. Those on the path of scourging have affinity to the abode of demons and land of nightmares. Mastigos are very adept at matters of mental manipulation, dreams, inner demons and sympathetic magic, or simply the Mind and Space Arcana, as they are better known. I’ve gotten quite good at Mind magic as of recently, but am I good enough to try to fix this? Should I even be using magic to fix someone’s mundane problem? Casstiel and I had a talk about that very thing, way back when I started my training. There’s enough more ambiguity to gray the earth. I realize that I’ve been standing here for far too long, looking at her far too intently. Ever get the feeling you’re being watched? Chances are good that you are. Science might not recognize this extra sense as a real thing, but to a mage it might as well be an air raid siren. People notice. The passengers seated nearby give me unsettled glances, and the girl turns, noting the intensity of my attention. Now that I’m looking for it, I notice that her eyes are dull, her mouth a flat line. She says, “Hey,” Her body language says: Stop staring at me, weirdo.“Sorry,” I mumble and continue walking. I’m still an apprentice and a long way from being able to reprogram a person like a computer the way Masters can. Maybe it’s not the right way to go about solving this anyway. Magic shouldn’t be the first answer to a problem, my master’s words echo in my head. I glance back over my shoulder once and return to my seat. I can at least keep an eye on her for the duration of the trip.

I reassure Azazel that my sudden silence was not, in fact, caused by my facilities being devoured by rogue copies of Skymall, and continue pacing down the back end of the plane. My spatially attuned senses measure the angles of the seats, the shifts in air pressure, and every inch I move relative to the earth below.

A few minutes later, I spot Alex back in his seat and circle back to sit in my own. Silence settles in between us; the unpleasantly awkward kind that arises when two people feel obligated to talk to each other yet have nothing to say. The kind that usually breeds desperation.Well, silence is workable for me. I can get used to -“So, what happened to your arm?” He blurts out and inclines his head toward the mark on my arm, visible below the short sleeves of my t-shirt. Hardly a massive wound, but it’s ugly, and very visible. I purposely avoided anything that might reduce the scarring; it represents the things that I shouldn’t forget, even if I want to.Normally I’d be running a Veiling spell to avoid attention being called to it, but somewhere in the bustle of the airports and thousands of miles away from home, I let it slip. Casstiel had a point when he said that I was getting burned out lately. A few months ago I wouldn’t have made such a careless mistake.The problem with trying to explain this away is that it’s on my upper arm; not a likely target for a slip with a kitchen knife. Not to mention that, while ugly, the mark is far too precise to appear accidental. It would take little imagination to ascribe it to a failed suicide attempt. “Oh, you know. I had to make a blood sacrifice. Ungodly occult ritual.” I say with a straight face, dangerously close to the truth. I did in fact cut my arm open to bleed upon the floor of an empty tower inside St. James Basilica to awaken a Supernal fount, the Pandemonian hallow slumbering there. He snorts. “Sure, sure. But what actually happened?” “I just told you.” I aim for a light, joking smile. Somehow though, it twists back into a smirk. The curse of being Mastigos: I’ve deduced that smirking is rarely optional. I must look significantly more deranged than I’d intended to with my unusually steady eye contact, because Alex turns away abruptly and buries

himself in the airline’s movie selection. He doesn’t talk to me for the rest of the flight. That may be for the best.The flight attendants make a final sweep down the aisles, cheerfully picking up the passenger’s garbage (my stomach growls; I realize that I slept through all the meals) and informing us that the plane will be landing shortly. The passengers stir, an even mix of excitement, anxiety, and dull, practiced acknowledgement. Exactly twenty-nine minutes later, we touch down in Munich Airport. The German Club grabs their carry-on and stumbles off the plane and into the light, in a dazed stupor after the eight-and-a-half hour flight, facing the prospect of a full sleepless day to adjust to the time change. They’re already tired from too little sleep. I’m sluggish after too much. The date is the first of June. A special day for me.“Happy Birthday,” I mutter to myself. Germany is my present.

Day 5: MunichThe days following are a blur. We leave the airport and find ourselves walking streets smelling like cigarette smoke. Exhaustion hangs heavy over the first fuzzy days; it’s more trudging on our parts than sight-seeing. We’re dragged around to tours and museums, spend time appreciating street performers and the artistry of German architecture, which seemingly allows nothing to remain unadorned. There are also old churches and cathedrals in our plans; each one a work of art. I try to find excuses to avoid going into them with everyone else, afraid of the reactions they might trigger from me, dodging the shadows of nightmares. A panic attack in one of those places it definitely wouldn't be inconspicuous; fancy churches have a tendency to trigger flashbacks of my confinement in Hell.

Aside from that, I’m surprised to find myself having a decent time. I’m sparing with my use of magic - outside of convenience I don't really need it, and I recall my mentor’s warnings to lay low. I notice that the rest of the group treats me with a quiet unease, and Alex doesn’t so much as say another word. If someone were to pick up on the group dynamic, I'd be sticking out like a sore thumb. Azazel’s company is enough for me; I drag his invisible presence off to bookstores in my free time, just as promised. As a spirit of Air and Intellect he gains vitality and sustenance from complex information. I find it fascinating, not to mention that it corresponds neatly with my own interests. As for Air, the weather is mild enough - gentle heat and warm breezes. A nice change from the burning hot summers back in North Dakota. I snap photos, more for my family’s benefit than mine (nobody looks at the scenery beyond the first couple of days). And at night, I admire the way the city lights shine against the darkness in dozens of different colors. There are no stars to be found here, but Munich has its charms.It’s a pleasant enough dream.Until the screaming wakes me up. It confuses me at first, when I sit bolt upright in the middle of the night, stunned and yanked out of my own miserable nightmare. I think that I must be the one screaming. Sometimes I do that, after such dreams, just to prove that I still can. Usually muffled by a pillow though. This isn’t. And anyway, it’s not my voice crying out in the darkness. It won’t stop; one continuous, helpless wail. And very close. I push myself up from the mattress on the floor, limbs heavy with sleep. It’s the girl on the single bed, the girl from the plane. She’s thrashing and convulsing in the sheets. Her eyes are open wide, but wherever she thinks she is right now is clearly far worse than a hotel room. My other roommates are already up, dazed and afraid. One of them is by her side, grabbing her by the shoulders and shaking her. “Emily”, she keeps saying, to no effect. Again her body jerks, and the scream keeps on pouring out of her. The other one runs to flick on the light switch, briefly blinding us all.I stumble across the room, dodging suitcases and clothing strewn about, bending down to touch a hand to her shoulder. Calm, I will, mouthing the words as my will forms a new spell, an emotional urging. Calm.

She starts to go slack for a second, but something kicks back, resisting the compulsion. She screams louder, flailing out an arm in panic and catching me full on across the face. I take a step back, more from surprise than pain, and the hairs on the back of my neck stand up straight. Shit.I say it out loud for good measure. I release the construct creating my near ultimate depth perceptions and call up the Third Eye, and it shows me something else this time. Beyond that core of fish hooks and broken glass there’s a faint whispering, lying coiled around her heart. And the rest of her, the Emily-part, isn’t silent anymore. Even her resonance is screaming. Her eyes roll back to whites as her aura flares brilliant with terror. Shit, shit, shit. . . My legs move without my conscious thought, and I go running for the bathroom. I fill a plastic cup with water, as cold as the facet will produce, then turn back and dump it all over Emily’s face, and at the same time shove a simple idea into her head: Wake up!

I’m not sure which part does it – the words or the water - but it works. She jerks one final time and shivers, and a semblance of recognition returns to her hazy eyes. Instantly the two other girls are on her, asking: “What happened?”“Are you okay?”“Bad dreams?”Emily says nothing, and instead climbs unsteadily to her feet. She has that dull, dead look in her eyes again. My roommates look at each other anxiously.I can hear the voices the next room over, chattering in alarm. Almost certainly, someone will be over here to check on us soon, after all that racket. I stare at Emily expressionlessly, wondering if whatever attacked her is still nearby. I scan the room from traces of something, some invisible force or cloud of consciousness, psychic residue the Third Eye can pick up just as easily as the thought clouds around people. But there’s nothing.She mutters something about needing fresh air, then turns and bolts from the room.

*****

Emily runs. Out of the room, down the spiral staircase of the hotel, and outside. Shaking.Too much. She’s grown used to thoughts that don’t feel quite like her own, slithering around her head like pythons. Nibbling on her gray matter until it feels like there isn’t an Emily left at all. She’s used to having a brain wired to hate itself. The doctors her family parents her off to (lots of doctors...) said it was depression, or some unwanted inner dialogue that she was refusing to acknowledge. This wasn’t a thought though, or the result of faulty brain chemistry. It was a presence. It . . . he . . . Something horrid, alien, something other.It’s on the tip of the tongue, tip of the brain, but the panic takes over and she can’t quite . . . can’t quite reach . . . . . .And then she was pulled back, by ice water and a command coming from somewhere inside her own head. Awake. Not that this place is much better anyway, with her twisted thoughts and her roommates’ pitying comments and the weird green eyed girl with the weird blank face, looking at her again. That stare telling her that she was broken. As though she needed to be reminded.She wonders if she’s in hell, if she always has been. Some high school days, the thought of this trip was the only thing keeping her from putting her dad’s gun to her head. And now, this.Too much.Emily sits down on the curb and cries.

*****I’m pacing the small hotel room with long strides; one step, two, three, four, five, then turn and start over. Think, stay calm, count the steps, because everything else is eerily quiet now. 15.1223 feet, turn, 15.145 feet... the distances pop into my head, along with endless geometric calculations based on my orientation; a comforting metronome of thought. The universe in the background is parsed into soothing X, Y and Z axes.

The other two girls ran off almost immediately, still in PJs, to grab a teacher’s help in finding Emily. For a handful of minutes the hallway buzzed with activity, students knocking on the door, asking about what happened, who was hurt, what’s with the screaming, is everything okay? Then there was one particularly surly German man threatening to complain to the front desk. But the right combination of explaining, reassuring and little mental nudges on my part – plus some placating in the German man’s case - and they all trudged right back to their rooms. It’s the middle of the night after all. No one really wants to be kept awake by one girl’s screams, thinking about what might be out there in the darkness. That’s my job. For the better part of the last half hour, I’ve been scrutinizing, post-cogging and pacing the hallway in search of unusual mental signatures. If the thing that went after Emily is still lurking around, I want to know. But so far, I’m finding little trace of anything out of the ordinary. My favored Postcognition spell (called post-cogging by my teachers) is a wealth of information, none of which is of much use at the moment. Just before she begins screaming, the girl’s sleep is troubled and restless, but there’s no sign of any supernatural creature nearby. Except for the small dragon familiar on my shoulder, every complex mental signature nearby is pinging as human and attached to their bodies. And the resonance in the room is about what you’d expect from a hotel, aside from the fresh stain of fear around the single bed. <There’s barely any physical presence here at all, but there was definite outside interference going on with her emotions and resonance. It’s like it attacked her from inside her own head. In her dreams. Know anything that fits?> I ask Azazel. Click. Click. Click. Steel-toed boots against a tiled floor; I rarely take them off anymore, even to sleep. Even mages have security blankets.<If there was not a spirit, ghost or other entity present (and you’re sure? They can sometimes be good at hiding), then she must have been attacked at range. Are you sure the girl wasn’t just a manic depressive with night terrors?>I glower in his general direction, unable to perceive him more than a glowing translucent shape with the use of the Third Eye.

<We’ve been over this. Yes, she was . . . hurt inside. I looked into her, and what I got was a gaping pit. When I tried to calm her down, something fought back. And the intensity of the fear resonance around her bed shouldn’t be this strong already if the cause is purely mundane. Sleepers don't have dreams that vivid on their own, right? Could an entity choose to target mentally ill or handicapped people because their issues make it easier to slip in?><Definitely.> Azazel replies, sounding a little proud of my question. It’s a part of Azazel’s personality that reflects his master well. <Children, elderly and the infirm are definitely easier to mentally influence. Chinks in their mental armor – compulsions, addictions, chemical imbalances – make them even easier for bad things to exploit. And who is going to think twice when the senile Grandma jumps up and bites someone?> <So it still makes sense. Her being mentally ill and assaulted by a supernatural force are not mutually exclusive.> <In point of fact, it makes the latter option more likely if the former is true as well.>My eyebrows furrow. <So, what kind of situation or creature is most likely? Can we test for some of them and narrow it down?> It takes a moment for Azazel to answer. <Well . . . it’s hard to say. The sidhe can be very effective Onieromancers and nasty in dream combat - powerful and tricky. Vampires are also capable of such. Certain spirits (like of the Dream or Nightmare choirs) are definitely be a possibility too. So it’s still possible it is a corporeal or ephemeral being.> That’s hardly what I would call narrowing things down.I'm about to voice that opinion when he cuts in again. Apparently he was just pausing for dramatic effect. My frustration level rises another few notches. <As for elimination, using your Spatiomancy spell of the Initiate Knowing practice that allows you to study sympathetic connections, you could study the victim and see if you can discover a sympathetic link to something spooky. If there is no link to be found, then the chances that it is something you could hunt down and kill on the material plane drop dramatically.><Now,> Azazel adds, pausing dramatically again <This is my time to preface that as a terrible idea. Running around on unknown streets full of communities of preternatural beings that don’t know you or why you are in their territory is bad enough. What if this thing has friends? What if it’s

more than you can handle? I won’t condone a monster hunt unless someone more adept could gauge the situation with what you have found and deal with it in the smartest way possible.>I like Azazel. He is what he is, flaws and all. But I hate it when he plays the role of a supervisor, as though he’s babysitting me or something. And wait, haven’t I been largely babysitting him? Stopping him from going off by himself on a reading bender is no easy task, especially when occult lore is involved. <Sure. And if it’s not on the material plane?> I press. I'm worried that we don’t have time to mess around, gathering info to pass on before the situation gets worse. Plus, I can handle this. This may well be the test that I’ve been waiting for. Casstiel suggested that I call him if I encountered supernatural weirdness on this trip, but it wouldn’t be the first time that I've been left to solve my own problems. <Then it means it could be an Astral being attacking her from inside her own Onerios.> Azazel continues. <I doubt it’s a native Goetic, Vice, or nightmare entity because you wouldn’t sense an external presence working against her; you would just see a part of her more internal resonance coming in strong and clashing with the rest of the resonance on the superficial level.

<That leaves free-traveling intruders coming from her threshold. The channel where every human being in the world connects to the greater reality (such as the Tenemos) can be breached with enough strength; a mental problem to exploit helps it lever the door open or pick the metaphorical lock - possibly literally.>It takes me a minute to chew over the last part of what he’s said, but it makes sense. I pace faster, anxious for the answers and his recommendation. <All sorts of things live in the Tenemos. Archetypes, larger and more carnivorous nightmares, emotions, sins incarnate, dream actors, memories, symbols, metaphors, beliefs - all can take form. Archetypes and Morpheans are the strongest of the more common denizens of the universal subconscious. There are things both deeper and stronger, but they tend to remain well removed from the casual sleeper.>Ever since the earliest progenitors of homo sapiens dreamed the Tenemos has been coalescing with persistent complexity, an amalgamation of all of mankind’s souls. If it’s been dreamed, thought, watched, heard or read, it probably exists in some form in the Tenemos.

<Archetypes are epitomized entities that represent a very strong fundamental idea . . . usually famous people (places or things), fictional or real, alive or dead, or any god man ever believed in. These lesser Astral gods sometimes possess people to venture into the moral world. It doesn’t really track in that sense, but there could still be an Archetype causing the problem. Maybe a manifestation of depression or mental illness found something that resonated with it and honed in her head to, well . . . feed in a sense. It is not unlike what a spirit does.>Is he this talkative because he feeds on the desire for me to want information? Is he dragging this out on purpose? These thoughts tend to go through my head when Azazel decides that he has the floor. Still, the flood of useful information is well worth it.<Lastly, Morpheans can be extremely dangerous, especially if you run into one that devours souls and is Abyssally tainted. The Horsemen fought a Nightmare Morphean - The Gentleman – before, and it was a close thing. Their superior numbers and ability to crowd control its minions were the difference between life and death. But I digress . . . Morpheans were once living physical beings that died or became disconnected from their bodies while they were in the Astral. Sometimes it’s done intentionally. Their minds and a chunk of their soul remains behind trapped in the Astral forever - arguably a form of immortality. To get rid of them, they have to be destroyed completely and it can be tricky. Mage Morpheans are the ones most talked about in the lore I have access to. They can be very powerful; they still retain enough supernal energy to cast spells and learn.>I fidget. <Could this be caused by her daimon? Or would that be apparent as part of her subconscious – part of her instead of an outsider?><Hmm. That would be apparent after enough scrutiny, perhaps. Depending on the state of the psyches they inhabit, daimons can manifest very differently. Sure, they’re still a part of the person, the quintessential persona of the entire subconscious, but if the individual is mentally ill, repressed, or conflicted . . . ><Their daimon could be fractured. Divergent and destructive to the whole> I offer, and can’t help but feel that this new turn in the conversation is beginning to hit a little too close to home. And this isn’t getting us any closer to identifying the thing.

<Perhaps we should look at this from a motivation standpoint.> I suggest. <Why would any of these outside beings – not daimons - want to get in someone’s head?>A long pause. The serpentine distortion in the air fidgets, then finally answers. <Many are like the denizens of the Shadow in that like calls to like. They need subconscious energy, dedication, emotions, remembrance or ideas to feed upon to reinforce what they are with more of the same. Morpheans would be the ones to do it out of pure spite; they can be pretty deranged and disconnected from morality after living so long in the infinite realms and sometimes do things without any discernible reason. If we apply Occam’s razor to this, then I would put my money on a Temenic being or outside astral entity that is associated with her condition. Lesser Archetypes or something that crawled out of someone’s head and found its way into a new home. Sometimes beings will find a safer haven in the Onerios of an unaware person, hoping to avoid being hunted down or caught out in the open, or for someplace to incubate and bear young... Kind of like hermit crabs, they can be.> He chuckles.<So. How do I get it to attack me instead of her? If it’s drawn to like, could I manipulate my aura to make myself seem like a better target? Or is there some way to give it an annoying, psychic poke in the eye?>The silence on his end is almost palpable. <Okay,> I say defensively. <It’s that stupid. I’ll try studying at the sympathetic connections beforehand, maybe even get some information from her directly if she’s willing to talk to me. But this is the fastest way to determine exactly what we’re dealing with here instead of relying on educated guesses.>Hoping to preempt a stern lecture, I continue: <And in addition to the powers and extra perceptions, mages are more mentally resilient, right? Not to mention, I have a fair amount of experience seeing screwed up things in my dreams. Maybe I would stand a chance. At the very least, I can gather more information for whoever does end up handling it. Worst case, if it completely messes me up, I have people I can call on to help mitigate the damage done. Emily doesn’t, and she’s not in a great state of mind to begin with. She may not have much time left.>More crickets. <Anyway Azazel, that was my big speech on why you should let me play human bait. Thoughts?>

Six months ago, I wouldn’t have even suggested something like this. But ever since Awakening, there’s been this feeling that I have something to prove. To myself more than anyone. The painful awareness of being a flawed vessel in a broken reality, and an itching dissatisfaction. So I have to push myself, even if it’s not smart. Have to.<Yes . . . > He offers grudgingly. <We do not know its vector; some aspect of the Tenemos we can assume, but I’d hate to be wrong. You could perhaps trick it by using Neuromancy to make your head look like hers, emotional haywire, depression . . . create the same Resonance its attracted to. Then you could shield her and create a strong sympathetic connection to her. Your plan is feasible.>Here comes the but. <But we have no idea how strong this entity is or its capacities. Yes, you are far more mentally tough than a Sleeper, and your understanding of the Mind Arcanum comes with an innate sense for when someone is trying to mentally manipulate you. But what if you are not strong enough? What if it rolls you and sets up shop?><Azazel, that’s-><How are you going to help anyone if it devours your mind and adds your abilities to its list, puppeting you to get more victims? There are things that can annihilate everything you are before the cavalry charges in. They are rare but this thing already rates powerful and rare. Additionally, you have only the most basic understanding of dream combat; if the fight occurs any deeper than that you have very little practice manipulating your Onerios . . . and from what I understand you have not established a functional relationship with your daimon. We need somebody more qualified to assess the sit-><Fine, fine. Then what am I supposed to do? Just sit around until it hurts someone again!?>Before he has a chance to answer, an idea occurs to me. A very unpleasant idea. <Fine, you wanted someone more adept than me gauging the situation? My daimon has more experience with dreams and the astral realms than I ever will . . . even if she is me, sort of. I’m going to give her a call.> There’s another long pause. Azazel is good at switching gears; he’s never forced a decision on me, only advised. While I know that he reports back to his master somehow, he himself never judges me and Casstiel rarely uses

what his familiar passes to him to chastise me - probably because if he did, I might begin to hold things back from both of them. In that instant, I finally get it. He is Doctor Watson, the intelligent partner who acts as a sounding board and is someone Casstiel can talk to, validating his thought processes. It makes a person feel smart. Wow, Casstiel really is arrogant; the sudden insight is pushed aside for later.<If you are going to cut a deal with a daimon such as her then you need to make sure that you are negotiating from a position of power. You need leverage. She can offer insight into this situation but it may not be enough. I do not recommend martyring yourself; nothing is gained and the world loses another mage.>That’s another thing. Over time I’ve come to the conclusion that Azazel is completely amoral; prudent and infinitely practical. He weighs what is at risk, and an Awakened soul is more valuable than a sleeper soul. That’s simply a fact established by the forces that barter in such currency. Azazel would recommend sacrificing a baby to save a mage’s life if that mage was a viable resource for the Cabals. The first (and last) time I saw my daimon, Grace, was only a few weeks ago, during my first trip to my Oneiros. I’ve gone Astral once before, but that was following the close instruction of my cousin Cass, and we both went into someone else's head; a trip to help one of his former Cabalmates, Kairos, get his own daimon (Dario) in line. It struck the point home: I needed to establish some kind of working relationship with my own daimon as soon as possible or risk having to deal with her when she became more powerful down the road. I admit that simple curiosity was also a motivator for my first trip into my own Oneiros. What would my daimon be like?, I wondered. What truths could she reveal about me?I underestimated Grace the first time I met her. She seemed pathetic and weak, nothing more than a child. For a moment, I let myself believe that she wasn’t a threat. Stupid. A warlock should know better than anyone that perceptions are fickle and deceptive. What she showed me . . . before my Awakening, the whole hellish experience would’ve reduced my psyche to pudding. Now, it’s another thing to look back on and say that I made it out sane. Perhaps even improved. What are a few more threads weaved into a tapestry of nightmares to a Mastigos? After all, I won.As far as I can tell – the excitable, clingy little girl? Real. The vicious, empathy-deficient sadist? Also real.

She’s fucked up.Better yet, I’ve discovered that I can reach out her without having to travel deep into my soul by tapping into the place where she resides in my deep sub-conscious. Most people never discover the subliminal messages playing out in the background of everyday life. But I do. It means that I always sort of picture her watching everything from the back of my mind, and it’s unnerving to think about; I can just imagine her taking it all as ammunition for future sessions. But at the moment, I count the fact as an advantage.I shut my eyes. After a second of calm, I let my head empty like a pitcher and she’s simply there, standing illuminated by the flickering streetlights of Jamestown after midnight. A gaunt, fidgety blonde, shorter than me but still quite tall for her young age, with a scrawniness to her which negates any impressiveness that height may carry. Clad in a black trench coat you could fit two of her in. And – this is new – she’s clutching a stuffed corgi plushie tight to her chest like a security blanket.Seriously? Now, Grace is the very manifestation of unflattering youth and twisted vulnerability. But does she have to be so freaking obvious about it? Doesn’t my daimon understand the concept of subtlety? As an aspiring writer, I’m a little offended.Grace gives me a wide-eyed and perfectly innocent look, answering my unspoken question. She raises her eyebrows, as though registering my dubiousness at her choice in symbols. “I just like dogs, Chimera.” She pats the stuffed corgi on the head and tucks it under her arm. A teeth baring smile slowly creeps across her face; unmistakably predatory yet somehow pure as snow in intent. No, no subtlety there. And that smile would tear out your throat in a bare instant, and do it with a clean conscience. Her eyes gleam with light and a crazed sense of sadism.This would be a logical opportunity to run away screaming – as if running away would accomplish anything. I continue to look at her, unmoved. Grace pouts. “You’re no fun today,” she whines. “Ugh. Fine. You rang looking for advice? Well, your tiny dragon study-buddy is right. Stupid idea. I mean like lethally stupid idea. C’mon, you didn’t need me to tell you that.” My stare is icy. “Hmm. You know, you didn’t used to be this scared, afraid, pent-up . . . it’s in the colors painted on your guts; red and black, like licorice. Churchlights and unfinished things . . . you sang the hymns once, but now you’ve forgotten

the words. Oh, ye of little faith.” She giggles, irritation forgotten. “Anyway, you want to save the damsel in distress? Play the heroine of this little story? Be patient and pay attention. For now, here’s something to think about.”She smiles sweetly, and without warning chucks the stuffed dog at my head. I snatch it out of the air by pure reflex, my attention shifting away from Grace for a split second. By the time I refocus she’s gone. I curse, but then notice that the stuffed dog in my hands has become something different entirely.

A tarot card. I know this one: Two of Cups. Coexistence of opposites. Reconciliation. A partnership. Honestly, I’d have not a clue what it means if Casstiel hadn’t shown me how he shifts probability and enacts supernal correspondences – practices known as cartomancy. Casstiel’s taught me a lot about the nature of magic using the symbols of the cards, and after examining the First Tarot - tiny fragments of a larger Atlantean Artifact, the literal first tarot deck ever created – I’ve picked up at least some small ability to interpret them.I refocus my eyes and turn my attention back to Azazel as the streetlights of home fade. I’m suddenly cognizant that he might have heard the entire thing; when you have a really smooth telepathic link, it’s easy for to transmit your surface thoughts unintentionally.<She agrees with you. She says to give it time.> I say simply. Aware that, at this point, I’m not going to win the argument, I stop pacing and sit back down on the mattress. <Azazel . . . how can I help her then? I have to do

something. I guess I could try putting up a mental wall on her, but would that even work? And even if it does, the thing will probably just move on to another victim once it’s not getting what it wants from her anymore.> <Or decide she is a threat and just kill her outright.> he adds. I nod, waiting for him to continue.< You could let her be so you can observe the entity and try to ascertain more specifics about its nature and methods. The risk is further harm to her. Or you could mentally fortify the girl; provide protections, and maybe it would save her. It may retreat and look for weaker prey, it may get in anyway and harm her more for the course, or it may try to attack you instead if it senses you. Any which way, there is also risk you will lose the trail of your quarry. You may have saved her, at least for now, but the entity moves on. Which is acceptable to you?>“If I may offer a suggestion Disciple Chimera,” STARK chirps in a crisp British accent. I nearly jump."Uh. How did you know what we were talking about? You can hear telepathy?" "No Disciple Chimera, but Master Casstiel is currently connected to my network in order to better transfer data. Master Casstiel is acting as a bridge between telepathic communications "Cass can hook his mind up to the internet?" I ask in disbelief."Disciple Chimera, that is not logically correct,” I swear he sounds slightly pained - no, I must be imagining it. “But for all intents and purposes, yes.""Is he trying to communicate with me? Or thinking of getting involved?""Disciple Chimera, the bridge effect appears to be a coincidence, as Master Casstiel is currently working other tasks and is not listening to this exchange. Would you like to hear the alternate course of action now? I predict that it has a 86% relevance factor."I’ll have to try to digest the bit about my cousin subconsciously acting as a router between psychic transitions and networking protocols later. “Sure, go ahead.” “Are you familiar with the term ‘Honey Pot’?”“Nope.”

“In computer networks, a Honey Pot refers to trapping hackers into breaking into an unimportant network in order to track or study them. A network defense team creates a network physically or virtually separated that appears to have valuable information, but separated from actual critical systems. They take the bait, and exploit the network, and the planted listening applications you have running record every bit of network traffic for analysis. You watch how your enemies attack your network, study their methods and possibly trace them back to their origins. Then you are in a better position to defend against them and conduct your own cyber network operations against them with the advantage of knowledge.”This is all very well, but something’s just dawned on me . . . holy shit, not only does the VI have a way to eavesdrop on telepathy, but it can also make associations and simulate human rationalizations. I mean I knew STARK was advanced - magic helps with that - but problem solving at this level raises a lot of concerns that I just can’t even scratch the surface of right now. “Thank you, STARK,” I say, frowning slightly. <Azazel, is it possible to plant bugs in someone’s mind? Their dreams? Onerios?> <I have never done it, and neither has the Boss as far as I know. Nor have I seen it done. But it should be theoretically possible to combine the practices of weaving and knowing to watch surface thoughts of a person, which would include their dreams when they are asleep. >This is one of the reasons I really like Azazel; he’s a fount of information. Despite the fact that he’s never done or seen someone do this before, he’s already working through the ramifications and pitfalls in a conceptual sense.<The sleeper’s subconscious will resist you, putting strain on the spell, and the creature might sense the observation unless you thoroughly veil your efforts> Azazel says. <Keep in mind that interpreting what she’s experiencing may prove difficult. The dreaming mind is a jumble of fragmented elements, largely without context or concept of time, cause and effect, or any other governing factors of normal life. Since this spell can't actually breach the archives of memory, you are going to miss a lot. I would expect it to be flashes of imagery and other sensory input as well as emotion.><All this little too close to insanity.> He finishes hotly. <So count me out. Make sure you do not pass me anything you see in there, or you may do grave harm to me. I am a being of facts, not the illogic of the subconscious.>

That’s the other thing about spirits; they inevitably have a weakness built into them; a bane. It’s part of their nature. Since a spirit of intellect like Azazel is literally made of solid well-organized information, an intrusion of chaotic data, mental illness, or any step too far away from the rational literally hurts him. It’s close enough to ordered information for him to spiritually consume but too different for him to digest properly. Which is why SkyMall magazine was such a problem for him - too much false advertising. I finally manage to get a word in: <No problem, I'll keep my telepathy under control. But, what about viewing the Onerios?> <You would have to find a very powerful Hallow, enter the Astral, travel through the infinite labyrinth of the Tenemos, and find the closest associations with her dreaming mind to try to locate the entrance to her Onerios - a herculean task similar to finding a needle in a haystack if you don't have very strong mental and sympathetic connections. Once there, you would plant the bugs inside her Onerios.><Yeah, I don’t think that’s going to work. I’m not exactly carrying a mega-Hallow around in my back pocket.> I can picture Azazel rolling his glassy bug eyes in exasperation even though I can't actually see him. I seem to be inspiring that reaction today.<Theoretically, you could plant listening and watching spells directly into her Onerios, but you would have to push the utter limits of your supernal connection and attempt to fudge your way through a patterning.> he says. <It would attract a lot of paradox and be moderately dangerous.> <I’m not desperate enough to do that yet. Keeping it away from Emily isn't good enough; I need to shut the thing down for good. Not shielding her may very well screw her up, but if I scare the monster off, it’ll just keep hurting people. For all we know, it already has.> I can’t see horrifying psychological assault mixing well with already emotionally fragile people, if we’re right in assuming that’s the sort it goes after. <I’ll observe; put bugs in her dreams, masked with Mind.>At that moment, Emily comes back in through the door, accompanied by a teacher and the other two girls. Her eyes are rimmed with red. She stares down at the floor, refusing to meet my gaze. The teacher mutters a few kind words, then leaves. The atmosphere in the room is uncomfortable. No one speaks, and slowly, we all find our way back to our beds.

Emily’s resonance looks normal now, if gaping emptiness can be called normal. I study her sympathetic connections, as Azazel suggested, but find no silver threads leading to anything spooky. Not on this plane of existence, anyway. As my classmates slow their restless movements and fall asleep again I get down to working out the combination of the weaving and knowing practices I need to watch her dreams remotely.The thirteen practices are kind of like descriptors for the core mechanisms or actions that make up any spell. They attempt to organize and codify what the raw forces of magic are directed to achieve. If you wanted to open a door you might push or pull it. You might also try to go around it, under it, over it or through it. Those options are like the practices. The common metaphor for the ten Arcana is comparing the cosmos to an infinite tapestry made up of all ten colors of thread. Among orthodox Awakened, the practices are codified as if they’re acting upon the world by sowing these threads. . . . or at least, that’s how Casstiel explained it to me. Doors and threads ... bleh, too many metaphors. Somehow abstract occult concepts don't count as insanity to Azazel?I’ve never done a spell like it before, though I believe Azazel when he says that it’s possible. Thankfully, I do know the practices I'll need and have a basic idea on how to make them work together. Though the veiling part definitely adds a layer of complexity I could do without, blurring the construction of the spell into a sort of boring smudge that hopefully won't ping on anyone's radar. Before I begin I scan the room, waiting until everyone is well and truly asleep. The city thankfully produces a fair amount of background noise, even at night; no one present should hear me whispering in the sacred tongue.I’ve been told that there’s an almost irrefutable theory among the heirs of Atlantis that exposing supernal symbols, language and spells to sleepers diminish their potency, weakening the Truth of the power they invoke. Supposedly magic used to be a lot stronger; a sigil alone could collapse the battlements of a fortress, and the High Speech was an actual, usable language instead of fragmented formulas. As crazy as that sounds - that the bottomless well of power could somehow be harmed by the acts of mere mortals - I don’t plan on harming magic further.

I quietly reach into my bag and pull out a piece of notebook paper, a pencil, and a box of tacks. Under my tongue I place two tacks, one for her and one for me. I flip to a blank page and let my hand trace a slow circle without bothering to look at it; my sense of distance and separation of objects feeds me a perfect picture.Casstiel said that he learned to do a lot of his mind magic through autohypnosis, and being able to focus is a mage's first tool. I use tacks in my Oblations to maintain my focus; the very same reason I’m using them now. At this point, sticking myself sharp pointy objects is almost a psychological comfort. Which implies something . . . a bit off about me, I’m sure. I apply pressure to the metal tack points with my tongue and use it to narrow all sensation and awareness of my body into nothing but those two points of hot energy. As I do so, I begin to slide into a half dreaming state myself as I weave pieces of myself into Emily’s subconscious, the smooth syllables of High Speech rolling off my tongue. If it sounds invasive, that’s because it is. I’m climbing under her skin, slipping down the bleak, winding corridors of her head in fractured shards as a voice cries out that I’m not supposed to be there, trying desperately to push me away. That would be the resistance Azazel was referring to. Though Emily isn’t consciously aware of my intrusion, a little part of her knows and isn’t happy about it. But in contest of wills between a sleeper under duress and a Mind mage? Bet on the mage.My writing hand is no longer making big circles but writing by itself, applying supernal mathematics and trigonometries and tracing symbols without consciously thinking about them. Automatic drawing is usually applied as a remote viewing technique (like scrying) but since I am performing a surgical insertion of part of my sensory ability into someone else's dreamspace, a place I cannot perceive, I'm channeling what I am sensing psychically so that I can guide myself and the spell to where it needs to rest.Magic comes with horrific potential for misuse, and this spell is just one of many examples of where that would be possible. Then you get into advanced Mind magic and the capability for abuse goes through the ceiling. Rewrite thoughts, ideas, even memories? Sure. Make someone commit heinous acts against their will? Absolutely. Hey, why not just rewire them completely? Tell people what to think, make yourself a god in their minds, then make yourself believe it with the very same magic. It would take a lot of skill in the Arcanum, but you could do it, and all with impunity. Makes my skin crawl. It’s

honestly no wonder other mages tend to give Mastigos and other Mind practitioners wary looks. Even the most moral of us is a master manipulator by sheer virtue of what we are. When you add in the fact that warlocks hold the keys to sympathetic magic, that we can spy on anyone and work those same scary spells over any distance, the concept gets even scarier...The spell takes time hours of concentration, but I end up reasonably confident in the end result – our relatively close physical proximity made things easier. The hardest part was building up enough support constructs to house enough energy to keep the spell up for more than an hour. I estimate it lasting for a couple days. I pull the pin out of my finger and one drop of blood lands onto the page of insane scribbles. My drawing looks like the core of broken glass and emptiness I saw in Emily. I shove the pin into that tiny red eye-spot of blood, pinning the spell in place in her head and mine. There’s a zap of nerve responses, and a faint buzz of sensory input from her. The spell is in place. As the rays of early morning start creeping into the room, I put away my tools and lie back into bed.Despite the hour, I’m not all that drowsy; I’ve become accustomed to waking and sleeping at odd times ever since Pandemonium started reaching out to me. Nothing left to do but wait. I think about Grace’s words, run through mental games and training exercises in my head.Emily tosses and turns in her bed throughout the night. A few times I hear uneven breathing, but the sound is muffled.Neither of us sleep well.

Day 6: MunichFrowning, I test the metal of the knife in my hand. I’m hardly an expert when it comes to this - although I will admit a certain affinity for pointy objects - but this knife . . . frankly, it’s crap. Pretty though; all glossy silver and black, the hilt embellished with images of dragons.And I still have the distinct urge to kill something with it. Something cold and slimy slinking through the halls of nightmares. Someone blonde, gaunt and cryptic.After getting screened for anything fun before the plane ride over, I’m hurting for any small assurance of self-defense. I just feel better with a weapon in hand these days. Sure, I could apport one from overseas, but then

I'd have to stash it somewhere in Germany until I got back to the states. And why risk flaring my magic or leaving a strong resonance imprint? I don’t have the money to buy anything here, and frankly I wouldn’t even if I did. Not at these prices. “You have this listed as one hundred and eighty Euros?” I ask the storekeeper in perfectly accented German. “No offense, but that seems, well . . . a bit overpriced.” For a moment, he just stares at me. You’d think that a three legged, talking unicorn had just wandered into his shop. I wonder briefly if unicorns are a thing. Everything else seems to be. “I’ll be honest,” the man says. “We usually only get tourists. They’re drawn to flash and shine like a bunch of magpies. All deep pockets and no common sense.” He chuckles. “You sound like a local though. Can’t imagine what you’d be interested in here.”If there’s one thing I’ve learned on this trip thus far, it’s that I’m actually not that great at German. No one on this trip is, really. Three years of a basic high school course simply isn’t enough to achieve any degree of fluency. I spent the first couple of days stumbling through anything more complex than simple sentences before I decided: screw this, I’m cheating. Mind magic is completely capable of allowing you to understand and speak virtually any language or dialect in existence. Neuromancers have many theories and methodologies on how it works. Some say it’s a loophole left behind by the fall of Atlantis, an exploitation of the universal language of Babel. Others claim it's merely another use of dipping into the universal subconscious, pulling knowledge of the language by drawing upon the combined dream of the Tenemos, or boosting the parts of the brain that handle syntax and understanding. Eh. No idea which theory is true, if any. I generally don’t put a whole lot into the philosophy of my magic works beyond what Casstiel tells me. It simply does, and I tend to ponder more on how I can do better with what I’ve already got instead of the whys and hows behind it.Whatever the actual reason it works, the Mind magic kinda makes those three years of German class feel like a waste.Of course, as well as being a startling display of hubris, having knowledge that you shouldn’t can land you in uncomfortable social situations at times. Like this one, though I’m more worried about getting caught by my

classmates. I sound a little too polished, with none of the slight vocal imperfections that even an experienced foreigner would have. I may as well be a native.“Born and raised here,” I lie. “Got a friend in America though. She’s into knives, weapons, armor, all sorts of medieval stuff. I’m shopping for her birthday gift.”He grins. “Native to Munich, eh? My family got their start in Dresden. Now, when I went into this business . . .”So begins a long string of anecdotes, family history, and life stories; the guy seems really eager to talk, to the point where he seems to be willing to overlook my lack of social reciprocity. I muddle through, spending most of it coming up with creative lies and trying to think of a polite way to extricate myself from the store. At some point during the conversation, someone mutters in English, directly into my ear: “What. The. Fuck.” I tense up and whip around. “Jesus, Alex. Don’t do that.” I’m irritated to have been taken off guard so easily. Probably distracted by the conversation; social interaction tends to eat up a lot of my energy and attention. All the same, I nearly decked him.Alex continues on, “When we got here, you were barely able to order from a restaurant. Now you’re rattling on about . . . whatever you guys are rattling on about. How did your German get so good?”The clerk gives us both a quizzical look. It occurs to me that, like most Germans in this part of the country, he’s likely to also know English. In fact, he almost certainly does, since he’s used to dealing with tourists.I’m saved from having to come up with an explanation when I catch someone out of the corner of my eye. A girl peering in the shop window, gazed fixed on me and shifting nervously. Emily.We lock eyes for a moment, and then she’s gone, hurrying away down the street.“Excuse me, I really need to get going.” I slap the knife down on the counter in front of the startled clerk and bolt from the store, running after her. "Hannah, what the hell? Wait!"

It's the last thing I hear as the door jingles shut behind me. I don't stop.

Day 8: Neuschwanstein CastleThat green-eyed girl watches her again, with a brittle smile. She smiles often, Emily notes, but the smiles don’t seem to fit on her face. Like she’s putting on a mask. The still, blank look and shifty eyes - that fits better, but it’s wrong too. Unsettling. The girl asked her questions about her dreams the other day, the nightmares that, twice now, have left her screaming in the middle of the night. Emily had a few questions of her own to that. Why do you want to know? How is that any of your business? And there was that smile again, the brittle smile. Emily imagined she could step on it and watch it splinter like glass. “Believe me. I know a thing or two about nightmares. Maybe I can help you.”But she didn’t want to talk about it. Even thinking about the dreams makes her heart speed up, like the onset of another anxiety attack.The panic is faded now, out in the light of day, and she can remember – does remember – those nightmares, even if she doesn’t want to. There was a man, a something, in a black raincoat with black buttons. He moved with feline grace, smiled, spoke softly. His eyes held no smiles. They didn’t hold anything. On one night, one dream, he held out a pair of big silver scissors to her, and she took them. Whispered things in her ears (sick things, ugly things), and she listened. Snip. Snip. And just like that, no thumbs on Emily anymore. She looked down at the bloody stumps on her hands, wondered why, why, why? It’s silent, and the darkness is a weight upon her. She can't wake up. The pain came, the blood ran down her hands and the man looked at her with those eyes cold as corpses, satisfied.And Emily began to scream. Another night, another nightmare. The man came again (for he was both a man and a thing). He held out a box of matches this time, and though she knew it would be wrong to take it, she did. She lit the matches, and Emily burned. Cats danced at her feet, cried enough tears to fill a river. But it was too late. The flames tasted her skin, and all that was left were ashes.

The thoughts make her tremble. She focuses on the trail.The German club had a long bus ride early that morning – several hours of still sleep-bleary students mumbling half-hearted complaints - down to the small village of Hohenschwangau and the white capped mountains that surround it. From there it’s a long hike to reach Neuschwanstein Castle, the destination for the day. At the moment, it’s just shy of noon. Emily tries to take another swig of water from her canteen, only to note unhappily that she ran out some time ago. Her legs ache. Her throat burns. The weather isn’t really hot or oppressive, and the thick pine trees nestled on all sides go some ways towards sheltering them from the heat of the sun, but the journey is all steep uphill, and they’ve already been walking more than two hours.Suddenly, there are excited cries from the students up ahead on the trail. They’ve stopped to admire something. Emily strains forward, catches up, and a chunk of the castle is visible overhead, rising majestically above the trees from the high cliff face.

In style, the castle appears somewhere between Romanesque and Gothic; gray and white, slim towers, semicircular arches, ornamental turrets and fine embellishments. It was the ambitious project of King Ludwig II, a retreat for a reclusive man, a dream never fully brought to completion; only 14 out of 200 planned rooms were ever finished. It was dedicated to the life and works of Richard Wagner, who Ludwig greatly admired, and who ironically enough died before ever setting foot in the building. Ludwig himself only inhabited

the castle for 172 days. Before long it stopped being a home so much as an attraction, a mystery.

It looks like something out of Disney World. They call it “the castle of the fairy-tale king.”Emily traces a finger in the air, watches the sunlight play off the white towers and sheer rock walls. “Fairy-tales,” she mutters, and laughs without humor.

Day 9: Rothenberg <Fairy-tales.> I sidestep around a headstone and keep walking. <Thing in her head’s got a motif going, Azazel.>It’s early afternoon; we’ve been given free rein to wander as we like in the city of Rothenberg for our single day here. Naturally this means that I ended up in the cemetery. Partially because it’s a good place to be alone while I consult with STARK and Azazel, and partially because something about it gives me peace of mind. It’s encircled by a high, moss covered wall; inside vegetation and weathered headstones are worked into rows so irregular that they can hardly be called as such. There’s a sense of surety that wherever the spirits of these dead are now, they’re resting. I haven’t studied anything with my sights, but even without them this place gives off a very different vibe than the cemetery in Jamestown. Of course, that one had a pretty unsavory undead problem.

Most of my day up to this point has been spent tracking Emily, either in person or via scrying. I took a handful of her hair from her hairbrush last night to help with the sympathetic connection and used the link to remotely view her. Why yes, that does make me feel rather creepy. But in her current frame of mind, I feel the need to keep an eye on her; her emotions have been spiking all over the place during the last few days under the influence of the creature. Not an unforeseen outcome, but worrying. I had to reapply what I am coming to call my improvised 'Dream Bug' spell after it faded after the first couple days. It’s been torture to watch her fear and know that I could have shielded her, especially when I can so personally relate to her situation. I know exactly what it’s like for your nightmares to be a tangible haunting force, day and night; But instead of stopping it, I’m using her as bait, a honeypot, and studying the voyeuristic flashes of terror that have only been marginally helpful. I've been steadily getting more concerned that Emily might try to hurt herself. The entity might be having some deeper influence on her. She could choose to jump off a bridge or slit her wrists after one more session. Either of these things is perfectly possible, even plausible based on her deteriorating emotional state. She’s exhausted, mentally drained, and unable to drop her guard even at noon; abusing caffeine and anti-depressants, and I can literally watch the cracks in her psyche surface, the beginnings of what I think a psychotic meltdown looks like.Watching all of this in real-time, it takes the coldest part of me not to charge in, as if I could simply barrel in fists flying and solve it all. I have repeated the mantra: I need more information to stop it. I need more information to stop it, about a million times now and it’s still an effort each time. Emily isn't the only one under strain from the situation. Being subliminally tied to her lower brain waves is taking a tax on my mind as well.<The first dream of hers I saw resembled ‘The Story of Little Suck-A-Thumb’. Big creepy guy shows up with a pair of scissors, and pretty soon some poor misbehaving kid’s short a pair of thumbs. Then it was ‘The Dreadful Story of Pauline and the Matches’. Pretty much what it sounds like. Girl plays with matches and herself on fire. Last night it looked like Emily dreamt ‘The Story of the Soup-Kaspar.’ Boy refuses to eat his bowl of soup and slowly withers away into nothing. And then his family leaves the bowl of soup on his grave, judging by the illustrations. I always found that part kind of funny, in a sick way.>

My partner in crime is still considering this this in silence, so I continue with my findings. <All those stories are from the same book too; it’s called Struwwelpeter. German author. My parents have a copy with an English translation; I used to read through it when I was younger. Really not very child friendly, despite being a children’s book . . .> I trail off. Viewing Emily’s nightmares wasn’t a remote experience like watching security footage; it was more sifting through her blurred perceptions and impressions as it all happened, my own memory filling in the blanks. Given that the emotion she was feeling at those times was pure, consuming terror, it wasn’t especially pleasant for either of us. <I remember. It was one of the first dozen books I read at your house. Fascinating collection, and a bit obscure. And fairytales . . . interestingly enough, the ones that are less known and especially morbid tend to be the ones that retain much more of their original meaning. German myth has enough fairy boggles to fill up several books. Shall I state the obvious?>“Sure.”<Well, first - the fact we are seeing German fairytales in Germany points to this entity being somehow locality-based. It’s from around here and sniffed up the girl in the short amount of time since you arrived. Second – all these little tales are about misbehaving children with very disproportionate and malicious consequences. They were supposedly made to get young people to behave themselves and to push the blame onto some scary boogeyman. Does this point to man shaping the monster or the monster shaping mankind? Does it need some kind of guilt to intrude into the mind? Is it just fear, or the desire for punishment that it acquires nourishment from? These are things to consider.>So much of what Casstiel (and consequentially Azazel) says tends to be very open to critical thinking or of a complex rhetorical education style. This is a good example. It’s hard to get a straightforward answer to a straightforward question, even when they seem to think that they’re giving one. I’m starting to think it’s a mage thing. Everything is layers of metaphor, and dreams are even more so. He continues, <Third, these dreams all being pages right out of the book or books of a single author is very telling. It may point to a common origin, or that the author had a run-in with this entity before. The multiple visions and behavior patterns that are too specific to be more than one creature. It could just have been stories passed around the village from the fragmented

dreams of children suffering from night terrors. That also might narrow a location. It is also possible, if the intruder was originally a denizen of the Dreaming then the nightmares and stories of Struwwelpeter may actually be what created it. It could be an Archetype of these fables incarnate.<Perhaps we should start by looking for the traits that aren’t being flaunted. Most likely the entity is simply adorning these dreams with the visages of German boogeymen. If we can eliminate what is fairytale and separate it from what the entity is really like, we might get somewhere. So, from the top, what did it look like? As much detail as you can.>It’s tricky. Dreams are disjointed; the human brain does a lot to take the tiny bits that bubble up from the true subconscious and build whole scenes around them. That means the minor details tend to be forgotten or were simply generated as filler. But hopefully, if this thing is projecting itself into her dreams it’s pushing a more fleshed out image of itself and the message it’s trying to convey. Maybe it’s sloppy, pulling clues to its nature along with it without really trying to. That might just be the way the thing thinks. I can only hope that the interpretations and biases my brain added along the way hasn’t skewed the important details. I wrack my brain and slowly start reconstructing details from the beginning once again. <A shifty guy in a black coat…. umm . . . cold, dead eyes. Creepy. Here’s the thing though. I saw him, but it was like he wasn’t really there. After a few days of studying it with Space and Mind, I think I can say that he’s not actually in her dreams at all, but projecting itself from somewhere deeper, or from somewhere outside. It’s coming from deep inside her like my daimon does but is clearly a foreign presence there, I’m sure of it. That leaves her Oneiros. He’s still shown no signs of materializing on the material plane or being directly sympathetically connected to anything in the real world. Does that narrow things down any further?>Azazel is definitely excited at this bit of news. He coalesces into existence, going from simmering translucency to a shiny scaled eastern dragon of jade and aquamarine. He flits his humming bird wings and lands of the nearest headstone, unspooling his long serpentine body and regarding me with large round eyes that give the illusion that he is somehow wearing a pair of elderly spectacles. A simple leather thong collar marked with Atlantean sigils that hums with tangible power is his only ornamentation, save his stubby gecko horns.

Clothing a spirit in tangible flesh requires a substantial expenditure of energy. It's easier in more remote places, or locations with a spiritual resonance. A cemetery would be one such place. Good work, little boss!" He chirps with pride, voice lighter and less resonate than in his telepathic communications. Azazel rises to his hind legs like a tiny professor, body curled beneath his neck and the sticky pads of his claws clutching at a nearby headstone. "Beings that can attack a person psychologically or feed on emotion are a dime a dozen (even more so with phobophages), but beings that can channel into dreams are rarer. Beings that can stride through the multiverse of internal worlds and penetrate someone’s Onerios are even more specialized. Want a perfect fit? Why not the consolidated nightmares of all the children that have lost sleep over those tales? What if they are all mashed together because they are all in the same book? In the Astral planes, real monsters don’t have to be actually real to be... well real. They can spontaneously tulpate from emotions, perceptions and beliefs.""Tulpate huh? Is that even a real word? If it isn't, wouldn't using it hurt you?” I muse. “Okay, very specific, cool. So it’s a nightmare triad of German Bogey-archetypes?""It ought to be a word; it is certainly a truth and used in Geotic circles,” Azazel sniffs. “And yes, a conglomeration of Archetypes is a likely explanation. Though I suppose it could still just as well be one of the Fae that either have rare access directly to the Astral and may or may not have died while there. Its apparent lack of sympathy on the material plane despite it being tied to this part of the country would support both theories. It could have been dreamed up, left its soul in the higher realm and its body to rot away discarded somewhere.""Well, let’s see if we can find anything to support those theories.” I glance around to make sure no mourners have wondered close enough to hear me have a conversation with a green version of Mushu. Luckily, I’m still alone. “STARK?”“Yes, Disciple Chimera?” The Horsemen version of Siri asks, with a buzz my phone and a polished British accent.“We are trying to track down a creature that attacks people in their dreams. It seems to target the mentally ill and should be somewhat in this part of the country. Symptoms would be described as what I witnessed with Emily….” I

run down all the specifics I remember, things STARK wouldn’t have seen through the lens of my phone’s camera. “Maybe look for patterns of madness and suicide working backwards in time. Possible signs of psychosis relating to childhood behavior issues, fairies or bogeymen. Search children to young adults.”“Well done. Learning what questions to ask is the first step to true wisdom. There may be hope for you yet Apprentice." Azazel cracks a lipless smile. It looks more like he’s bearing his teeth at me, but I’ve hung around him long enough to know his approval when I see it.“Gee, thanks Azzy.”“Azzy?”“You call me little boss. I call the boss . . . well, boss. Why can’t I call you something?”“I think it takes away from the meaning of my name. I am named for one legendary in myth as both a dragon and a Goetic demon - Azazel. What does Azzy mean?”“Well . . . nothing.” I say, feeling rather foolish. “But we’re friends, right? Friends have nicknames.”“Oh. Okay then.” Azazel seems puzzled but not completely unreceptive. Where the hell did Azzy come from? I really need more sleep.The phone rapidly gets hot in my pocket as magically compressed data transfers through the millions of computer nodes across the Internet that make up the approximations of the Supernal computer’s artificial neural network.I let my phone cook for a bit as it chews through the data being sent. Even though I know this part is just a user interface it seems like the phone is actually doing the work. But STARK no more resides on my phone than someone you’re talking to on the other side of the country does. STARK is a virtual intelligence (or VI) first created by Indra, Nergal and Casstiel two and a half years ago using a few servers and a lot of supernal magic. They named him as a homage to the Ironman comics and movies, which features and a similar computer system called "Jarvis" prominently.As an aspiring Computer Science college major, I find STARK utterly fascinating. Despite the fact that STARK is a computer network with its own

consciousness, Cass swears he isn’t a true artificial intelligence, claiming that he acts very much like a person but is not truly sentient. He modeled the core operating system using a copy of his mind (much like Azazel) but trimmed it down to just understanding of computer networks and an engine for fuzzy logic. All in all, it makes it hard to know whether I should be referring to STARK as “it” or “he”.About five minutes later I my speakerphone breaks the silence again, sounding louder than before. Excitement? STARK doesn’t have emotions though, so it must be for my benefit. “Disciple Chimera, I have obtained the data that fits within the Sigma Five relevancy of what you described. Do you wish for a summary?”“Yes please.” “Four months prior to today, there were reports of three young students committing suicide in the nearby town of Crimmitschau. A fourth attempted and is now suffering from severe mental illness with little to no signs of mental illness prior. The three other students did have a record of prior mental disturbance. The short span in which this statistical outlier occurred flags this as a first possible related pattern.”“Any connection between the victims? Any talk about fairytales?” Despite the seriousness of the information, I realize that I’ve started chattering excitedly. STARK is cool. Super hacker, cyber-spy and light-speed dataminer all in a back pocket. “Disciple Chimera, besides the short time span (which greatly exceeds statistics when compared to statistics for similar ages and backgrounds) all four males admitted at one time to having disturbing nightmares, some with subjectively similar imagery. This was sometimes admitted to a friend, councilor and in two cases, suicide notes. The four victims suffered death or psychotic break within an average of 25 days of each other in a chain that only ever focused on one student at a time. The average time before first noted behavioral change males attempted suicide is 14.6 days. Without a larger sample size the timelines is only marginally accurate.”Well, I have no plans to see if it holds for a few more victims in the name of science. This is just confirmation that Emily stands a real chance of serious harm in the near future; I’m running out of time to save her. I tune out for a

minute as nerves eat at my stomach before I realize that STARK is still talking.“-similar chains of victims (suicide or declared insane) in an average of 3.2 people under the age of 21 date back to as early as 1954 in multiple towns in the immediate region. However specific details are obscure as few records were taken, remain, or were correlated. Most remaining data before this time point is too vague or obscure to be useful. The area of occurrence based on these towns create a circle centered on Zwickau with a radius of 206.78 miles.” “Thank you, STARK. That’s all for now.” I slide the phone back into my pocket as I make for the cemetery exit. "Alright, Azzy . . . Azazel. Some sort of astral manifestation or Fae morphean – I don’t think that we confirm either way with our capabilities right now. . . I’m just gonna call it “the Nightmare”. We do know a little more about what it can do now. It killed those kids – all but one – but it took time.""The Nightmare…" My borrowed familiar tries it out with no small amount of contempt. "How dramatic. I wonder if it can take smaller bites out of less broken people, or if it is similarly mad.”Cheery thought. I press on. "What this tells me is that it’s got some nasty capabilities, but it most likely doesn’t have the ability to instantly obliterate me like you were worried about. Otherwise, why draw out the process with its victims?" There could be other reasons, of course. Maybe it just savors the fear too much to bring it to a swift end. Maybe it needs the victim’s self-harm to receive nourishment from them, or maybe it’s simply sadistic and stuck in a pattern. But if I stop moving forward with this, Azazel will have time to doubt my reasoning. And then I’ll have to doubt it too. There’s not a whole lot of time, and I’m playing with a girl’s life right now. I can’t afford doubt. After a long pause I finally get, "Yes . . . it does sound like it needs quite a bit of time, and it doesn’t even bother unless the mind is already very fractured. Now, predators always go for the weakest prey to conserve energy (not a good metric of strength, just efficiency) but since its feeding has been limited over the years, we can assume that a stable person can repel it to some degree." He shifts his stance uncomfortably, his large eyes not meeting my gaze.

Well, we’re screwed. I no longer have confidence that I’m perfectly sane anymore. I haven’t been able to control my own nightmares since my Awakening cracked my head open like the gates of hell. But I decide not to think too hard about that - because leaving the situation well enough alone isn’t an option in my mind, even if the thing is capable of tearing me to shreds. I’m a Mastigos; sanity is overrated anyway.A desperate, familiar mantra chants over and over in my head: I’m going to win. I’m going to win. I’m going to win.

Time for a plan.

Day 10: BerlinAzazel doesn’t like my plan. I don’t like my plan either. Which would put us in agreement if I weren’t determined to act on it anyway. I’ll need a strong Hallow to have a chance at success. Thankfully, I’ve got Time magic backing me up here; my Augury concluded that I will find one. Soon. But I find optimism is in short supply for me lately. The information I gleaned from the geometry of water droplets falling from the bathroom facet wasn’t really specific enough that the universe wouldn’t have lots of outs. “Soon” could be a few weeks from now and it might well be the one at the Sanctum when I get back. Damn it. This is another thing that it’s better for me not to think too hard on.We spend our first day in Berlin being shuffled around via tour guide. She’s good at her job, running through a seemingly never-ending catalogue of history that that I would find fascinating in nearly any other context. But my mind is on other things.At first it seems like a wasted day when it comes to executing my plan; another day of watching Emily slip. But that evening, on our last stop on the tour, we come to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

Our guide rattles off facts about the place with banal precision. Designed by architect Peter Eisenman. Built to memorialize the Jewish lives lost during the Holocaust. Construction of the 4.7 acre site began in 2003 and finished December 2004. One block south of the Brandenburg Gate, Friedrichstadt neighborhood. 2,711 concrete slabs on a sloping field. Cost: approximately 25 million Euros. It’s almost too clean, too bullet-point for a memorial commemorating victims of genocide.She checks her watch, then continues on in accented but flawless English. Feel free to look around. Don’t run. Don’t jump from slab to slab. Be respectful. You have half an hour.

The slabs form perfectly measured rows, even and precise. The shortest barely measure up to my knees, while the tallest are nearly three times my height. I can imagine wading in and becoming lost, and I’m suddenly grateful for my ability to track distances. I could say something poetic about the way the slabs are arranged, that the varying heights give it a sort of flow, a sea of rolling gray concrete. But that would be a lie. What they really look like is a field of coffins. But no names on them. Those names were taken away. It feels like an insane industrial system, where death and pain are organized by a mad architect into neat little rows of discord.

The site thrums with death under the lens of mage sight; not the true thing, but the memory of it. How does that saying go? “One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.” Attributed to Stalin, I believe, not to mention an excerpt from a Marilyn Manson song. To a mage, the memorial has it both ways. There’s the hard concrete, visible symbols of the millions of faceless dead. But underneath, Pandemonium permeates the place; there’s a pain to it, a much more personal pain. Too much pain for a memorial only a decade old. And the feeling of a thousand eyes watching me. Tourists and survivors, family members and strangers. People. Their thoughts, memories emotions and prayers hang over the field like tethered balloons, pulled upward but unable to escape its pull. They seep into the porous concrete like grease. They remember.And this place. It remembers too. There’s another thing besides memories here. A buzz of energy that goes right down to my bones, a tugging sensation that leads me into the rows of concrete. Pandemonium bubbles up to the surface of the world and touches this place so profoundly that it warps the very fabric of reality in a million tiny ways among the waves of this concrete labyrinth. It’s a Hallow; the whole damn lot is charged with ambient mana. I’ve felt this before, when I walked by the Basilica of Saint James (the physical reflection of the church in my nightmares) the first time after Awakening. But that one wasn’t nearly so strong; this is more like the Hallow at the Sanctum San Antonio as far as intensity goes, maybe even stronger. I trace the palpable waves of supernal energy in and find it centered on one of the highest slabs, somewhere roughly near the center of the lot.Or . . . that’s where it would be, if the space here wasn’t warped to hell and back. It’s a subtle thing, at first. Like any truly good example of horror, it relishes the suspense, the slow build-up to the screams. If the demons from it are simply reflections of truths then Pandemonium itself is cunning. It tests. It scourges. It knows. Knows your secrets and your lies. Knows your failures, shames and mistakes. Knows your hells and forces you through them kicking and screaming. The walls aren’t right. There shouldn’t be eyes on them, is my first thought, before I realize that there aren’t any walls here to speak of. Just gray concrete, too much silence that flowing thick between the rows, and a crawling feeling under my skin. A conviction that the closer I move towards the source of the supernal energy, the further I am away.

It only gets more intense the closer I get…the thousands of micro distortions compound as space folds and loops back on itself. There’s a few too many angles and dimensions, a few too many concrete slabs boxing me in and blocking my escape when I turn around. Because that’s what I want now, whether the thought is truly mine or not. Escape. This is a place of chaos, not order. Dread and the shadow of death, to be led to oblivion mechanically… in neat little rows. And things that shouldn’t be. The even thud of boots hitting the ground, shattering glass, people crying out, the taste of ash in my mouth and the acrid stench of poisonous chemicals. A flash of pale skeletal bodies and graves. No concrete slabs, no walls. Graves.There’s no way out, a tiny voice whispers in the back of my head. I feel nausea rising in the pit of my stomach, and squeeze my eyes shut. Too much. Too much silence and too many bodies . . . Then a different voice in my head, long-suffering and irritable, joins in. Oh, don’t be an idiot. You’re a warlock, this is a pale shadow for God’s sake. First of all, you’ve seen disturbing things before. Second, you’ve got magically enhanced spatial perception. Use it properly.

I listen to the second voice. It seems to have more character.It takes far longer than it should to reach the source of the Hallow. There is in fact a path there, if a narrow and unforgiving one. It’s orderly but terrible in design, formed from the chaos in the system; impossible to find without the right perceptions. My spatial perceptions lead me in a wayward route around the memorial, dodging around the bizarre warps in space and bent angles that round sharp corners and cause structures to meet where they shouldn’t. Now that I’ve calmed down, I it slowly starts to dawn on me as I make my way through the labyrinth; all the spatial oddities, if viewed all as one shape, one pattern properly aligned… I mutter in High Speech as I focus my will. Focusing the spell, I cast my vision upwards to view the memorial from above and study the whole of the labyrinth with my sight. The designs converge as my senses feel around non-Euclidian corners and edges. The keys are the two extra dimensions that the place utilizes as part of its synchronicity. The rolling concrete isn’t chaos introduced into an ordered system. It’s been perfectly configured the whole time. Its system is a prayer wheel and the design snaps together like a spinning Rubik’s cube – the memorial forms huge glyphs in high speech. A message reading: THE PAST STILL BREATHES.

I exhale sharply and my vision snaps back to normal as I release the spell. I’m back in the thick of things again, and the idea of this structured chaos forming such a coherent, if morbid message seems almost laughable now.I wonder who Eisenman was, really. This place is awful, but utterly revealing in much the same manner that Pandemonium is; dark revelation. It had to be borne of a mind intimately familiar with knowing too much, even if that mind wasn’t a warlock – and it seems likely that he was. Perhaps his other works carry more of the same. Truth. If he wasn’t a mage, then... perhaps a denizen of that realm. The thought of a Demon escaped from the Supernal and on vacation in this puny world almost shakes me as hard as the message. Such a thing couldn't be possible. Shouldn't even be considered.There’s not a whole lot of time to ponder these things right now anyway; by the time I navigate to the source of the Hallow, twenty-one minutes and thirty-three seconds of the half hour are already up. I take a few moments to bask in the warm glow of Supernal energy, then weave my way back through the labyrinth and return to my group. No missteps this time; I have the pattern down. Sucks I have no time for an Oblation right now; I might need the precious Mana later. I’ve been rationing my supply the whole trip, determined to avoid the pain of scourging myself for more. There wasn’t any accumulated Tass there either; place must see a lot of use. I didn’t sense any wards or spells, but they could just as easily be veiled within the parameters of the maze, making them difficult to detect. Nothing for it now. I’ll just have to hope that I don’t run into mages or less savory things camping on the place when I return later. I’d like to think that a memorial of this nature wouldn’t be reduced to someone’s turf or the setup for an ambush, but a Hallow this powerful is an extremely desirable resource.That night, I slip out of the hotel, telling Azazel to keep an eye on Emily while I’m gone. Even this late, the city still feels alive; though fewer people are out and about, there’s still the occasional blur of motion, rumbling of cars, and bright splashes of light all-around that block out the stars. At these hours the S-Bahn isn’t operating, so I ask STARK to coordinate a good bus route for me, and ride down to the memorial. The trip passes uneventfully.Soon I’m back to weaving through the maze of meticulously constructed chaos, winding my way to the source of the energy. My navigation and my

footing is sure, my senses somehow tuned in to this place now rather than just enduring it. I easily halve my previous time in reaching the Hallow. The place is like a maze but its edges are rigid and unchanging. I know what I need to do next, little as I like it. But I pause, slip the box of tacks out of my pocket and kneel in an awkward seiza. May as well perform an Oblation first, while I’m here. It’s smart to be at my best for what’s coming, right? True. Also a rationalization. I’m delaying the inevitable. An hour drags its feet as I sit, steel tacks clasped in my palms and discomfort on my mind, listening to the wind whistling along the space distortions. Paradoxical as it might seem, that discomfort is very comforting to me right now, somehow grounding. I center myself around a nothingness that is not quite peace, allowing the slow filtering of mana back into my body. And finally, I’m ready.I slide the tacks back into my pocket, shift into a more comfortable mediation position, and find my focus once again. I quickly cast a basic veil on myself, hoping I’ll be missed if someone comes by. Then I place a mental alarm tied to tiny strands of sympathy webbed throughout the nearest passages; a standing web of the knowing practice. It should wake me from my meditation if something disturbs them. I sit in darkness and set to the task at hand. Time continues to tick by, although that no longer seems important; I’m slipping down a featureless black tunnel and into a deeper consciousness.

*****

Someone’s following me, and not very well. I’ve arrived in the vestibule of my Oneiros; a chaotic landscape of massive bookshelves – some overturned – seemingly organized not by genre but by random whim. Sofas and chairs are sprawled around with equal carelessness. Tiny birds flutter by on silver wings and nest in the shelves. An endless library, and the entrance to everything. Despite the disorder, it’s almost idyllic. But I know it. If I looked closely, I would see the signs of self-mutilation: the desecrated trail of books, the pretty little birds marred by bloodstains and missing limbs. It’s a jumble of barely suppressed violence hidden underneath a pleasant face.Perhaps the most disturbing thing is that this place and all its denizens come from inside me. It’s bad enough when you have true inhuman evil coming at you... but it gets worse when you know that a little piece of that evil is effectively you. The greatest foe lies within, Kairos told me once, when he

and Cass explained daimons to me. Having met Dario and Xelloss - their daimons - I already have a pretty good idea on how the whole foe-within-the-self-thing works. Neither of them were exactly cuddly.The Oneiros is the infinite world inside the self and the first layer of Astral space. Anyone with a soul has one, but most can't open it without the right conditions. Sure, it’s generated by the deepest part of your subconscious, but the soul is what makes it true. It goes far beyond just being a deep dream. Everything - and I mean everything – inside has some symbolism, some correlation to what you believe about yourself, what’s hurt you, what you fear, what you want, what you are.Normal logic doesn’t apply here; I shouldn’t be surprised to see everything more or less back in order (well, as in order as this place will ever be). But it’s still jarring to see the library again, like someone hit the reset button. Because the last time I was here . . .The last time I was here, my daimon took a page out of my childhood nightmares of being trapped in a burning house. I had thought that was one nightmare I had buried as the years went on. But the imagery was just the fuel she needed for my old fears, just as the countless books and wooden shelves were perfect fuel for the inferno. There were so many people, so many panicked bodies crashing against each other and me in their desperation to escape. They were just dream actors. Not people, not really. But that’s only a minor comfort when you’re watching fire melt the flesh off a man’s face, hearing the smoke-choked screams of strangers as they fall to their knees, smelling their burning hair and skin. Feeling the fire lick at your own skin – pure liquid pain - while you run just as desperately as the nameless mass of humanity around you, and all the while finding no way out. Terror building, smoke burning your lungs and throat, your heart bursting in your ribcage as walls of flame driving you deeper and deeper into the maze’s molten heart . . . And then there was Grace. She vanished once the fun started, but she kept watching. I heard her peals of girlish laughter, saw her in the odd dream actor; the man sobbing on his knees who looked up and leered at me, illuminated by the fire that was still eating his body whole. The woman with the ravaged skin running beside me who suddenly grabbed at my arm and raked her nails across my face, her eyes lit up with unholy glee.

So began my first trip to my Oneiros. It’s the kind of thing you want to forget, but never will. And maybe I wouldn’t even if I could. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice . . .Instead I pull the memory closer as I pace through the rows of shelves. Unafraid of being heard, I call out to my Watchtower in the High Speech. Grace has no problem doing what I can do and more; that includes mentally hijacking me. So I complete the patterns and throw up mental shielding with a slight entwining of my fingers. As my pursuer also draws closer – close enough to reach out and touch my back - I spin on my heels in a fighting stance, ready to attack.Grace looks at me indignantly. “You barge into my house without even a hello, metaphorical guns all a-blazing. Rude, Chimera.” I dreaded this moment, but I didn’t think that just seeing her again would provoke this visceral of a reaction. Calling her up before in my consciousness was different. There was a feeling of safety and distance, because however creepy she got there, she couldn’t actually hurt me; it’s the difference between talking to an incarcerated psychopath on the phone instead of face to face. But here . . . The big bad warlock is afraid of a little girl.

I want to run. I want to hide. I want to lash out at her. But I do none of those things.“I need your help.” The words are like pulling teeth.It’s as though someone flips a switch in her head. The irritated expression vanishes and her face lights up. A complete and disturbing 180 that immediately makes me wary. She gestures to a doorway to our right, marked non-fiction. “Let’s go for a walk.”

*****“Butterflies are not supposed to do that. They’re just not.” I watch, sickened and a little fascinated as the beautiful insect flutters away on gold and black wings. If I look very closely, I can still see the glitter of jagged fangs poking out from its head. They’re not supposed to have them. They’re not supposed to land on your arm and try to sink those teeth into it. They’re not supposed to have a taste for human blood . . . the list goes on.We’ve transitioned to another part of the Oneiros, another scene. Where? Elsewhere. The interlude past travel and the unexpected is the best way I

can describe it. Distance isn’t exactly a consistent factor when you’re traveling by theme and metaphor. It’s evening in this dream version of Berlin, and the city is filled with light, movement, and conversations that I can only decipher pieces of without magic. As we walk along, dodging the crowds, thousands of winged shapes hang in the air above us in a thick swarm; it’s easy to imagine them swooping down and sucking us dry. As if on cue, Grace flicks her wrist casually and a cluster of them break off and descend on a man talking on his cell phone. Dozens of sets of fangs rip into him, but the man doesn’t seem to notice. He keeps rattling on in clipped German, up until the point where the life goes out of his body and he slumps to the ground, a drained husk. The flow of city life continues on around him, uninterrupted.Grace watches the spectacle with childlike wonder. “Dunno, I think they’re pretty neat.”“You would.”She turns to me with sudden and uncharacteristic seriousness on her face. “It’s the little things you need to watch out for, Chimera. The petty things, the pretty things. The inconsequential and harmless. You make everything big and dramatic, but the deadliest pieces on the board are the ones no one expects to be dangerous.” She cocks her head. “Pawn takes king.”I skirt around a chattering group of students and study Grace warily from the corner of my eye. “Is that a warning, or an encouragement?”My daimon shrugs. “Either.” And with that she bounds ahead and vanishes into the crowd.“Mathematician’s answer,” I grumble, and reluctantly follow. I’m half expecting something horrible to happen - this is Grace I’m dealing with, after all - but to my surprise, I make my way through the throng of people without incident. When I catch up with her, she’s beside a little gelato stand on the street, happily shoveling chocolate ice cream into her mouth. A woman’s corpse lies crumpled on the ground next to the stand, bone white and surrounded by too-pretty butterflies.So much for nothing horrible.

“Hi again!” She beams, and takes another bite of gelato. Her foot nudges the body as she walks over to me, but she doesn’t seem to notice. “You should try some of this; it’s really good.”“I’ll pass.”“Pfff, more for me then.” She eyes the contents of the now unmanned gelato stand speculatively, then turns back to me and stabs a finger dramatically in the air. “Right! So on to business. You wanted something from me.”I nod. “Training. Dream combat training, to be specific.” I trust my daimon about as far as I can throw her, but as an inhabitant of my headspace she seems like a logical candidate for help if I don’t want the Nightmare destroying me in a fight. It doesn’t hurt that as far as teaching options go, she’s about all I have right now if I want to learn this quickly. “Can you help?”“Yes! I know lots about this. I could definitely give you some lessons.” Grace pauses thoughtfully. “You know, if you had told Cass about your nightmare thing earlier, he might’ve actually had time to prepare you for this.”“Thank you for that incredible bit of insight,” I say sourly. “I would never have realized that on my own.” “Really? Huh. I didn’t think you were that dense . . .” I wish I could accuse her of being a smartass, but Grace wears her twisted little heart on her sleeve and all I’m reading from her face right now is mild puzzlement. Evidently, my daimon is sarcasm-proof; this is a sad, sad day. I very much doubt that her teaching methods would be gentle. But I knew that from the start, and I’ve come this far. “I’ll take it. Teach me.”Her eyes glint excitedly, almost feverishly. “Hey wait. I’m always happy to help, but you’re forgetting something. Nothing comes free, not to a mage. And especially not to you. You would never allow it. There’s time for one quick game. See, last time there was one theme I reeeeally wanted to try out but didn’t get to. Kept pushing you towards it, and you kept avoiding it. Any semblance of it, in fact. Family.”I suppress a shudder, and the wheels in my head spin frantically. Just what would Grace do with that theme? Which of the myriad ways to twist the knife would she use? Azazel was right when he noted the importance of leverage when dealing with a daimon and in my position, I don’t have any; I knew that going in. There aren’t a whole lot of options here besides putting myself at

her mercy, which hardly an option at all, considering that she seems to have none. This is gonna suck.

“Grace, I get the whole tradeoff thing, but can’t we -”“If you’re thinking of backing out of your side of the deal – don’t.” Green eyes stare past me, flickering somewhere between kicked puppy and tormentor. “You saw what Dario did to Kairos. I can do worse. Much . . . much . . . worse.” She draws each syllable out for far too long, with all the petulance of a child. It should be laughable. Should be. Dario kept Kairos from getting any sleep for weeks at a time, leaving him with only his biomancy to keep his body and mind functioning. He looked like hell warmed over and left as roadkill; utterly tormented. Grace is planning on getting her way by crook or by rod.“There’s no escaping yourself. Got that?” Then she snaps her fingers. Boom. Gone. And just like that, I’m somewhere else; standing on the snow covered back porch of my parent’s house, wearing a thick winter coat.“Well, lovely.” I scowl. “What is it with daimons and their incessant need to get the last word in?” Fear hardens into resolve. Time to get this over with. I push open the backdoor of my home, and in seconds, a barking tan and white corgi comes barreling through the kitchen doorway and is upon me, tail wagging. I smile and bend down to scratch him behind the ears. “Missed you too, Griff.” Then my eyes fall across the kitchen doorway, and I tense up. I wait for something awful to happen. For the screams. For my freaking corgi to turn into a monster and eat my face, for all I know. There has to be something.But nothing happens. I take a deep breath, hang up my coat, and walk through the kitchen and into the dining room. The house is an eclectic mix of Christian and Buddhist imagery, statues and knickknacks wherever you look. Stacks of books piled waist high. Wooden surfaces in desperate need of dusting and polishing. It’s chaos, but a happy chaos. My mom, dad, and brother are seated at the worn dinner table in the center of the room, plates of food covering all available space. Turkey, mashed potatoes, corn, warm buttered rolls. My family greet me warmly, and I take a seat. Despite myself, I find myself smiling, relaxing, settling in.

We tear into our meals with gusto. My brother Dan and I squabble about who gets to choose the topic of conversation. My parents smile at me from across the table and ask me how my latest karate class went; I give them all the details, even though I have to make them up. We talk about everything, just like we used to. There’s no suspicion, no worry lining any of their faces now. No horrible secret and lies on my conscience. I’m not a mage, and I never pushed them away. It’s as though nothing ever changed.Like the burning strangers in my vestibule, this version of my family isn’t real. For the moment though, I allow them to become real to me. Perhaps you could call that weakness; I certainly would. And every weakness of mine is an Achilles heel that Grace will use to take me apart. But I want this, so badly.Maybe that’s why it takes me a while to notice the blood on the tablecloth.The glassy sheen over my brother’s eyes.The sunken gauntness of my father’s face.The deep red smile across my mother’s throat.And the soft, persistent buzzing of flies.“Who did this to you?” I whisper. My voice sounds strange to me. Thick. Choked.My mom smiles gently. “Oh, sweetie. You did.”“I . . . I . . .”She puts a hand on my arm reassuringly. I recoil from the touch; her skin is cold. No, not cold. Only room temperature. Dead. My fault. “You knew the risks. You knew what could happen to us because of what you are. You stayed anyway. It’s okay; we don’t blame you. Stay a little longer.”Grace has gone too far this time. But I’m Mastigos, survivor of the Iron Gauntlet. This is just one more nightmare. One more test. This doesn’t even truly exist, outside the confines of a guilt-ridden corner of the mind. So I should be able to stop the tears running down my face, the ache in my chest, the hard breathing. Can’t. “We’re supposed to be your protectors . . .” Is it just my imagination, the way they’re growing more stiff by the second, more still? And yet they’re so calm. So serene. So happy . . .

“Did Jerad tell you that?” My dad asks. A cluster of flies land on him; he makes no attempt to shake them off. “I knew I liked him. Good kid. You too. We were always so proud of you for th-”“NO!” I scream. “Grace, you bitch. I won’t let them be used against me like this, not for your sick amusement!” “Tsk. Language.” Dan turns to me with glassy eyes and a predatory smile that is not his own. “Then change it. Change their fates.”There’s a dispassionate pleasure to the way I normally cast a spell, in conceptualizing it, shaping the imago to my will, reaching out to my Watchtower. It’s a subtle form of indulgence, but I take pride in the mastery. In the control. For an instant, I hold my perfect self in the palm of my hand. This is different.There’s no control as I rip the scene down around our ears, no pleasure. Nothing resembling it; only raw anger and will. There’s a sharp pain behind my eyes, a roaring in my ears, and the sensation of another will pressed against my own, resisting. The effort is like tearing into a brick wall with my bare hands, if the wall could fight back. It’s a momentous strain. Impossible, up until the moment I break through. The scene stutters, then stops. Time stands still, and my family with it. And then I’m standing in the backyard of the house on a late summer evening. My family is sitting around a tiny bonfire, chattering happily. My mom roasts marshmallows over the fire while Dan and my dad throw a Frisbee for Griff. I exhale sharply; their eyes pass over me, unseeing, and then they return to their lives.Safe. Safe from me and the dangers of an Awakened life. It was the only thing I knew would change the scene, the only thing that made sense. The fact that it was also exactly what Grace wanted is not lost on me. She really baited the hook well this time.In my relief, it takes me a second to notice the gaunt blonde at my elbow. Grace gives a smile that would scare the Cheshire cat, and says, “That was your first lesson. Nice work. But I’m just getting started.”

*****I learn.Grace leads deeper into the folds of metaphor and imagery and I follow, even though what I want to do is wring her neck. Her stunt with my family leaves

me with what feels like a pit of acid in my stomach; a churning, almost sickening sense of resentment. Unlike my first trip into my Oneiros, I hold onto enough defiance to fight her brutal instruction tooth and nail – and in the process, learn more than I would ever have by gentler means. She enjoys it, of course. The whole thing leaves me feeling stripped raw, but I refuse to give her the satisfaction of seeing that. In a way this is a second scourging. Instead of absolute and unfiltered truth, this one is my cracked subconscious finally getting to swing the repressed guilt stick at my face. She’s really just teaching me how to take control of my dream scenes, how to find the keys that shift the whole world around me. But Grace… she takes every lesson on dream control and scene manipulation and makes them into twisted lessons on how I should “improve myself.” She always has a point, regardless of her sadistic bent and the changes she’d see me make of myself, and they always sting. I focus on the rage, the will from deep inside that feels like fire in my chest and puts a glint in her eyes.She got what she wanted, a chance to improve me by giving me what I wanted the way she wanted. It’s why she had agreed to helping me so easily when I had little to barter with. But I did, didn't I? With one's daimon, you always have your life to offer. And your mind.It hurts. I survive it. What more is there to say?There’s still the Nightmare. That’s what I should be focusing on now, not my daimon. Have to focus . . . I’m waiting back at the bus stop, thoughts sluggish and numb, when I remember that I never established the terms of that second favor with Grace. I need her to fight with me. Two of Cups. A partnership – two turned to one purpose. I think it means more than just enduring her training.I can call to Grace away from a Hallow, converse with her without crossing the Astral threshold, but she comes in less clear, like a radio that swaps static for omens and symbolic metaphors. And she doesn’t even show up if I push my luck and try it too often. I made a few half-hearted attempts at contacting her for more information in the days following Emily’s first nightmare, but it when I closed my eyes and reached out to her, it was only me standing on that midnight street corner in Jamestown. My own subconscious stood me up, and suspect she would do the same even if I had

the nerve to try it again now. I guess an internal negotiation later will have to do. Yeah, I bet that’ll be real fun.My next step is to bring Emily to the Hallow, of course. From there I should be able to link her Oneiros to mine, enter in, navigate through the maze of scenes inside, and take on the Nightmare. But there’s a trick I saw Casstiel pull off once. When he thought he might need more firepower, he used Mind magic to bring his daimon along with him to an Oneiros that wasn’t his own. I might be able to do the same, but that’s where things get dicey. I've never done that particular spell, only seen my master do it the one time. I know how both spells work on a theoretical level, but he’s a Master of the Mind Arcanum; understanding and doing are two different things and his understanding is several orders of magnitude better in every way.I’m not worried about the linking spell. The real problem is that the spell I need in order to bring Grace with me is well outside my capabilities. But not far outside them; having my Oneiros linked to Emily’s should make the whole thing a little easier. If I’m willing to push the limit and pull down more power than I’ve been able to handle safely - more than is wise - I think I could manage it. There is a fair amount of risk involved with just the spell alone and I am guessing that supernal magic will clash with a sleeping dreamscape. Azazel told me that paradox is stronger in front of sleepers because of the tiny bit of the abyss that slumbers their souls. Disbelief from the slumbering souls witnessing magic tends to decay and unravel spells. And potentially reaching out to the Abyss by stretching your magical capabilities too far . . . well. More risk. Pushing my limit is just asking for trouble.I’ve resolved to do it though, even if it means dealing with the consequences of my hubris. Even if it means having to face my sadistic little daimon again. But now, licking my psychological wounds and standing on a dirty, graffiti covered street corner in the middle of the night, I start to feel doubt crawling in. Seriously, fuck this entire situation. A fairy tale nightmare-monster and my daimon throwing my worst fears in my face. Emily doesn’t have to be my responsibility, does she? I could just –No. I was willing to throw her to the wolves, even if only temporarily, to gather more information so I could stop this thing. I’ll pay my own price if I have to. The life of an innocent sleeper and anyone else in the future. The death of a monster that’s killed kids before and will continue to kill. That’s what helps balance the rest out. It’s worth it.

My bus pulls up to the curb. I trudge onboard, dig out a fistful of Euros without bothering to count them, then hand them to the driver. “Keep the change,” I mutter to him in German, and slump down in a seat.All I wanted was a few days to refocus. Even a warlock can only tolerate so much fear and psychic trauma in a short period of time. I'm stressed the hell out. Wasn't this supposed to be a low-key vacation?I watch the dark streets slide by and try to find my center. It doesn't work. I know what I have to do but the doubts only get worse, only checked by my sheer stubborn sense of responsibility to Emily. I'm in this until it’s over, one way or another.

Day 13: BerlinI spend the next few days compartmentalizing Grace’s training, filing it into neat little categories of pain and experience in my brain. Shaping it into something functional and usable. And like so, the suffering becomes a little more distant. I do my best to set up sequences of thought and action so that when I need to perform a dream assault I will remember exactly the best way to go about it; more sleep would help solidify the new neural pathways but there’s little time for that. So I organize the knowledge, the successes and failures of the crash course I just went through into the parts of the brain used for subconscious movements until they become second nature. I’ll be able to read the dreamscape, feel the opposition, identify the key parts of the scene and leverage them into attacks. It’s incredible really, what a Mind mage can do with her own head. It also takes time to persuade Emily to go to the Hallow. I don’t approach her directly; she appears to find me unnerving more than anything else. It is painstakingly slow but a series of well-placed suggestions do the trick; urgings to open up to me, thoughts that I’m trustworthy and capable of saving her. To her, it must seem as though these ideas are her own. If her

state of mind weren’t ravaged as it is by the Nightmares’s attacks, maybe she would question that more. Ultimately, Emily is the one to approach me. She pulls me aside as we’re all walking the East Side Gallery, everyone broken up into their little pods of people as they marvel at the elaborate graffiti art on the length of the Berlin Wall.

The Nightmare’s work on her hasn’t been pretty, even after a mere week. Eyes that were previously dull and lifeless are red-rimmed and haunted now; it appears that she’s stopped taking care of herself altogether. She cringes at small sounds and movements, and constantly seems on the verge of breaking down. Unstable. Cracked. Her aura is almost painful to examine; bright as neon warning lights and flickering between colors by the second. She looks half dead already.How can my classmates and teachers miss this? Are all sleepers so oblivious, unable to see anything not shoved in their faces? Was I just as blind before my perception of the world changed? I see the hours of life-draining torture she’s suffered written across her features - and worse, what’s beneath - as she walks deliberately up to me. “I’ve been having nightmares . . . well, you know that, you’re in some of them.” She laughs nervously. “And you said you could help didn’t you?. . . it’s so stupid, but I just had this feeling that you could . . .”

“It’s not stupid. I did say I would help, remember?” I say firmly, pulling subtle strings within my spell. I can’t do much to actually change or implant memories, but the power of suggestion in my hands would make any hypnotist die of envy. “Meet me outside the hotel tonight. Let’s say . . . eleven? We’ll go from there.”“Why? What are you planning to do?” Emily shoots me a dubious look. She still has enough sense to be skeptical. Smart girl. Not quite so easily manipulated as I’d anticipated.I think about how strange this entire thing is going to seem to her. A girl she barely knows leads her down to the Holocaust Memorial in the middle of the night, weaves a convoluted pattern through its rows that seems downright insane without proper context. Somewhere in the thick of it, she falls asleep without warning, and when she wakes up, the girl claims her problem is gone. No explanation is forthcoming.Yes, it’s going to be a weird night for her. Or it would be, if she were able to remember any of it. By consulting with Azazel, I learned about an application of Mind that makes a person unable to process new memories for its duration by disabling the transition between short term and long term memory formations. It creates a sort of stutter effect, where they’re forgetting what they did and said every few seconds. While I am not skilled enough to change or implant memories, I am pretty sure I can prevent the formation of memories without having to push my connection to the Supernal too hard. The spell I’m going to put on Emily is a tweaked version of that. Her constantly not being able to recall where she is or why she’s with me would make this whole thing unnecessarily difficult. So instead, I’ll set up a temporary spell that makes the short term memories stick around without being copied over into long term memory. When the spell goes away, everything she experienced past the point the spell got tagged on her will just get dumped instead of copied over. So she’ll remember everything, at first. But when she wakes up tomorrow, her last memory of the night’s events will be meeting me outside the hotel.I realize that during the time I just spent thinking all that over, I’ve been staring at her blankly. She looks about ready to bolt. I hastily continue the conversation from where it left off.“I’m afraid you’re just going to have to trust me,” I shrug. “I know how shady this sounds, but there are certain things I can’t explain. But I want to help you. I have every intention to. You can believe me Emily. You can trust me.”

Her name helps strengthen the effect as I push her with my emotional urging spell again. I sound like a goddamn Jedi. It’s enough. She caves. “I just want them gone . . .” she says quietly.“I understand. They will be.” I honestly do. I wished my own nightmares away for a long, long time. I give her a sympathetic, if awkward pat on the back – my bedside manner has never been the best. “Tonight, okay?”She nods, looking pitiful. For once my lack of social skills didn’t make me off-putting. This stuff is dangerous.

*****That night, we meet as planned. I pull off the memory suppression spell successfully, and we walk down to the stop where we’ll catch a bus to the memorial. Emily is quiet. She doesn’t ask too many questions.All in all, the plan is going well.We’re waiting at the bus stop when it happens. A man in a black raincoat brushes by Emily and continues walking away down the street. At once she goes rigid, tension in every muscle and helpless fear in her eyes. The kind of fear that locks you up and paints a big freaking target on your back. But the response is understandable to me; I had a very similar reaction at first when I discovered that the church from my nightmares had a physical counterpart in the waking world (I hesitate to call it the ‘real world’). To her, the man is a reminder that, even here among other people and plenty of lighting, there’s no escaping from her tormentor. Mr. Raincoat is also perfectly human and demonstrates no interest in us, malicious or otherwise. His appearance is just a bad coincidence.“Emily?” No response. It’s as though I’m not even here. Her breathing becomes more rapid; I’m afraid she’s about to have a panic attack, right here on the street. “It’s okay, alright? He’s not going to hurt you.” The suggestion-laced words seem to do the trick again. I feel the tingle of my magic flow out of me, assured and powerful. Using magic is its own brand of euphoria, embodying the paradox of a healthy addiction, and I share that powerful feeling of well-being and rightness onto her. She shudders, but her muscles go slack and some semblance of recognition returns to her face. I’m like a walking psychiatric hospital. Too late, something not-quite human pings on my psychic radar. Several somethings. Mages are lucky enough to be able to sense magic without their sights up, but under some circumstances other supernatural creatures can sense it too. In my haste to calm Emily down, I overlooked even attempting

to mask my spell . . . which means that I’ve probably just pinged on their radar too if they’re at all sensitive to it.I curse.Three men across the street look over, and as though by silent agreement, start heading our way. They look human enough, but that doesn’t mean a whole lot; plenty of monsters either appear human or have methods to disguise themselves as such. Their movements are hurried and sharp as they close on us, their faces unforgiving masks; the intent is impossible to mistake for anything but hostile.Thoughts race through my mind. The cynical part of me can’t help but laugh. Talk about bad timing. I imagine that preternatural creatures and societies don’t just have goons on every corner waiting for intruders to give themselves away. Maybe these are their buildings; maybe they’ve been catching my psychic scent for a while and finally locked it down, or maybe they were simply waiting for someone else. Could just be a case of mistaken identity, but it’s too on-the-nose with my fears; that I’ve been too distracted with the Nightmare situation to gauge other potential threats. Doesn’t matter now; they don’t seem like the types to stop and chat about this. Emily has picked up on my tension; her eyes flit to the men, and she starts to go rigid again as they approach. The effects of my last calming spell aren’t enough to prevent her from diving back into panic.I have never been so happy to see a bus pull up in my life. “Get on. Now.” I hiss, and push Emily ahead. I climb on board behind her and the flimsy protection of the folding door squeals closed behind us. I don’t look back. The bus driver has the longsuffering look of a man who has worked too many hours for too long on too little money. I shove Euros at him, put on my most convincing ‘vulnerable and terrified’ face, and speak urgently in German: “Please, you need to leave now. There are men following who want to hurt us.” At least, that’s what I hope I said. I didn’t have time for the translation spell this time, so I had to rely purely on my mundane knowledge of German, which is sadly lacking. I had counted on two frightened-looking young women being pursued by hostile men provoking a visceral protective reaction, but he’s definitely not showing one. The bus driver looks at me dully. Genuine or not, my portrayal of emotions leaves something to be desired. Maybe it’s the way my eyes flit away from his, refusing to make contact for very long, that makes him suspect I’m not being completely sincere. “Take a seat,” he says. “I have a job to do.”

“Please,” I repeat, weaving a suggestion into the single word. Unfortunately, either my focus is shot right now or he’s simply not the sort to be easily swayed. My spell does nothing and falls apart, invisible lines of psychic energy dispersing into the air around us. He just jerks a hand towards the seats behind him and turns away, sweeping the door behind me open. I’m out of time to bespell him unless I want a knife in the back. I clench my fists and trudge down the aisle to where Emily is huddled mid-way back. The two of us are the only passengers onboard, until the three men get on a few moments later. The bus starts rolling as they file back to meet us.My body is charging headlong into “fight or flight” mode, adrenaline exploding through my veins. I stand in the aisle near my seat, so amped up that I can't sit down. Emily is just sitting there and there’s no time to move her. My brain is frantically mapping the seats and the gap of the aisle between them, trying to measure space and find the best fighting position as they continue down the walkway, heading right for us. I may be able to get in touch with my idealized super ego and become as good as one the best warriors who ever lived, but fighting in this narrow cramped space sucks. Sure, it’ll hurt them too since it makes it harder to flank me, but I’m significantly outnumbered. They have weight, reach, and without a doubt they hit a lot harder than me by sheer virtue of their gender. None of that takes into account any preternatural abilities they might have. I mutter my spell and prepare to rumble as the first one squares up to me in the aisle, just out of reach, the others crowding behind him. He’s mean looking, buzzed hair, with a black wrap around neck tattoo of a black widow spider and the eyes of an addict. He unfolds a large knife with a click and my heart sinks. If I ever get out of this one I’ll get a nice knife and make sure I always have it. The thug in front of me hesitates as if he is going to say something and my muscles tense. “Hey!” The voice of the driver booms of the round roof. I freeze. The back two gentlemen flinch and glance back at him. I shift my weight as we jounce to a stop and about a dozen people pour onto the bus.“Sich Setzen! Stop messing around.”I feel suddenly grateful for that crusty tough–as-nails driver. The thugs continue to glower at us but sit down instantly - which just goes to show that true belligerent authority is sometimes even better than Mind magic. I sit down next to Emily, watching them as they glare at me like hungry wolves. “Follow me, Emily.”

My hands are shaking as I slide out of the seat. There’s nowhere to go but the rear of the bus, but we can at least put as much distance between us and them as possible. People settle all around the three men, and a few seconds later, the thugs are up and heading back. Emily speeds up her pace.“Sit down!” The driver bellows and we all sit again. The other people aboard try not to stare. Emily and I are three rows from the back, with the thugs two rows ahead of us. <What the hell is this? A bad game of Redlight/Greenlight?> a perplexed voice asks.“Azazel, what can you do to help us?” I mutter, not bothering to waste time casting a telepathy spell. Emily leans in. “What?” I ignore her.<Unless you want me to shatter the veil into a million pieces, not much. I can slow them down a little maybe. Where is your gun?>“Not here. Too many Sleepers. I need your help. When I make my move, do it.”<You got it, little boss.>“What?” Emily pokes me in confusion, scared and annoyed. “Back of the bus Emily, go!” I whisper to her.She goes, keeping low, and I am silently grateful. It’s good survival instinct to follow when there isn't time for questions. I chance the driver’s anger again and shuffle out of my seat, keeping myself squared with the bad guys and stepping backwards between the last seats on the bus.Nowhere left to go bitch, I imagine Neck-Tattoo thinking. The leader gets up first and rushes back at us to have a little chat. His knife is out and low so that no one else can see.I pull at the emergency door at the rear of the bus for everything I’m worth, and thankfully, it gives.“Hurry! They’re coming!” Emily is at my back, voice rising into panic. “Go! Go!” I brace myself and push her towards the open door.“What! Are you crazy? I can’t!” She shrieks. I bend my knees and then drive my weight forward and upwards, shoving her off the back of the moving vehicle.

The bus isn’t going all that fast, but she definitely scrapes her elbows and knees as she half-runs, half tumbles to the street. The bad guys are about two inches from my back before I’m ready to jump. I glance behind me to gauge if I have time to make the jump, or if I need to prepare to defend myself. The bad guys are rushing forward until an invisible force hits the shins of the lead man and he slams his head into the floor with a thud. His buddy behind him trips over him and tumbles to the metal floor of the puss. I have a moment to note the phychokinetic energy disperse, something I have learned to recognize as a telltale sign of a being in Twilight exerting itself. I turn and jump. It doesn’t go as I planned. The bus driver has finally had enough of all the commotion and slams on the breaks just I make my leap. I fall badly and have about a second to position before I crash into asphalt. Pain lights up in a half-dozen places. “Ughhh!” I grit my teeth in and launch myself to my feet after Emily who hasn’t made much progress. The bus has braked to a stop and the last of the men casually hops down – jerk - and starts running to catch up to us, his friends not too far behind.I slip a hand into my coat and reach for the power, pulling my gun out from the other side of the planet. Screw my tonfas, if I need to Apport something it may as well be the best thing the first time. I’m surprised to find the grip of the rubber pellet gun Casstiel gave me before the trip, the one that, at the time, I thought was just a bad joke on his part. Definitely not what I wanted. I curse silently. My concentration is frayed right now; I’m having trouble getting a simple spell off the way I want it to.I don’t think; sometimes you have to use what you’ve got. I draw the p-shooter and backpedal to Emily’s side. She glances backwards and shrieks again. I get the feeling that she isn’t the action hero type, but to be fair, this is a pretty frightening situation. There’s nothing but dark streets in front of us and no sign of crowds – god, what I wouldn’t give for some crowds right now. First time for everything, I guess.No time for the ancient words. I line up my shot and allow my spell to expand my awareness, focusing my aim down to a narrow corridor of trajectories lined up perfectly with the man’s bobbing right eye. My little bee-bee gun pistol is armed with about three dozen rubber balls about the size of a pea each. Still, getting hit in the eyeball with one is really, really going to hurt.

It strikes me that I never bothered to test what this gun did. Cass gave it to me to help me work on my trajectories, manipulating space around bullets to make them teleport to their targets or zip around corners. But it’s enchanted; I noticed the tingle of embedded supernal energy the first time I touched it. He also cloaked the spells on it so that no one can effectively analyze what the spells on it do, and refused to tell me when I asked. This struck me as a bit twisted; the sort of thing his daimon would do.Maybe it’s some sort of test he set up to see what I would do with it. If you hand a mage something, you can count on them trying to figure out what it does even to the point of pulling the trigger just to see what will happen. The only reason I haven’t up until now is because I’ve been treating it as he designated - a training tool - and I haven’t had much time on my hands since finding myself a monster to hunt. Even looking at the gun makes my cheeks burn with embarrassment at my recent failures in training. As I line up the shot, Casstiel's words echo through my mind. “Be careful with that thing, it’s not a toy.”

I exhale half-way and stop running, squeezing the trigger. I feel the surge of power resonate with my soul, the warm heat of mana surging through the weapon. I have a split second to register the strength of the spell weaved around the rubber pellet streaking to its target and I feel a moment of horror as in my mind’s eye, the man’s head explodes in a gush of gore.TWACK! The man lets out a bark of surprise, hand slapping his eye as though swatting a bug. Then he lets of a slow tortured scream building to a rasp as every part of his body seems to tighten. His arms curl into his chest, his legs give out and he folds face first into the street. There he writhes on his belly, veins in his face bulging and face pulled back into a pained snarl, his wounded eye squeezed shut and the other rolling manically.I feel a surge of triumph and let out a short bark of a laugh. The other two have recovered and are catching up. I line up another shot. Well, I reflect, he wanted me to practice. My second shot hits the next thug in the center mass. He jerks in surprise but keeps coming, pulling out something from his waist band.The first thug squirms on the ground, and I finally have time to notice what’s happening under the telescopic clarity of the Third Eye Sight. All the nerves in his skeletal musculature are firing like mad, creating a white noise that’s completely paralyzing him. It’s sort of like an electrical stun gun. Feeling slightly more confident, I take my time and aim again as Emily gains distance behind me. I calculate the thousands of trajectories from the end of my weapon and weave another wordless spell. I fire again.

Despite the speed the projectile is traveling, I’m able to trace its path as it happens, carrying its payload to the hand of the first man. It strikes his naked hand in mid-draw and it immediately squeezes around the pistol in a vice grip. The gunshot rings out impossibly loud as he goes down twitching.My rubber pellet kept traveling; it deflects off the thug’s hand and to my left, bounces off a nearby shop window, and heads towards the neck of the last bad guy. I feel the heat of a double dose of mana burns away, fueling the channels of supernal magic resonating from within the weapon and within me, reaching out to lash through the bodies of the men. The last thug tumbles to the asphalt. Two for one. I smirk.The bus’ passengers are in chaos from the gunshot. Panicked people scream, run for cover, hide behind their seats, and jump out of the bus to scatter in all directions.I don’t wait to see how long the effect lasts. I don’t check to see if the man with the gun shot himself. I turn and sprint after Emily. The short little bit of action has me sucking air as I coast on my adrenaline. I run. I just run.

*****Emily eyes the girl warily. Green eyes flit around nervously, as though trying to keep track of every possible variable, never seeming to settle on any one place or person.She’s not sure which part of the experience they just had disturbed her the most, but there’s plenty to choose from. The man in the black raincoat, a page out of her worst nightmares. Three big and decidedly intimidating thugs threatening them. Her supposed savior muttering frantically to herself under her breath. Being pushed out the back of a moving bus. A gun fired and screams. Too much. Too many things. She rocks anxiously in her seat. She’s been scared before, yes, even terrified. But she’s never been quite so aware of her mortality as she was at the moment those three men closed in, bad intentions plain on their faces. The dread. The feeling of her stomach dropping and flashes of what they could do to her before the end. But the truth is, some sick part of her would be relieved when death came; it’s all so tiring. Is this what life is for her? Numbing fear and pointlessness?Deep breaths. Deep breaths.They’re on another bus that the girl found now, a safe distance away from the chaos. She seems to have a far better grasp of the bus routes here than someone who’s only spent a few days sight-seeing in the city should. It was a relief before, but now . . . and was that the flash of a gun she glimpsed in the girl’s hand as they both ran away down the street?

The girl frowns, an absent look on her face, one foot tapping on the floor in a steady rhythm. Then without warning, she jerks to face Emily, who flinches in surprise. She almost preferred it when the she wasn’t looking at her at all - this sudden burst of eye contact seems to be an attempt at sincerity, but the intensity of it is all wrong.“Ah, so. Sorry about that whole thing. Those three guys, and the guns, and the running,” she says lamely. “That stuff . . . well, it just sort of happens around me.” “Just sort of happens!?” Emily snaps, incredulous – and too loud. A few people glance over, frowns and annoyance on their faces.The girl winces. “Keep your voice down. And yeah. It does. Weird shit and general badness. But I need you to just trust me a little bit longer. We’ll solve your problem and you won’t have to think about this again, promise.” She gives Emily another one of those obviously uncomfortable pats on the back.Emily stews in silence. This miracle cure is starting to sound more than a little suspicious, but it wouldn’t make sense to save her just to kill or hurt her . . . would it? Who cares!? she rails at herself. This is still better than staying in the room, drifting into dreams, drifting into death. . . In the dark of night, everyone is looking a little more sinister.A few blocks more and they disembark. She still doesn’t know where they’re going, and at this point she’s just hoping this doesn’t end with her bleeding out in a dark alley. Nothing quite so dire, it turns out, though their destination is still plenty morbid. The Holocaust Memorial; she recalls visiting it briefly earlier. Something it the place rubbed her the wrong way even then, but to be here now, at night? She can’t quite pinpoint why, but this place is utterly paranoia inducing, a further tax on her already shattered nerves. The next ten minutes are a downright surreal experience as her guide leads her through a bizarre, convoluted path through the slabs, all the while squinting and frowning. The slabs look like gravestones; the shadows they cast are complete and sinister. They’re just... wrong. Finally, the girl smiles in relief and comes to a stop. “We’re here!”‘Here’ looks almost exactly like every other section of the memorial they’ve passed through. The slabs here are at their highest, three times Emily’s

height, but other than that there’s little that makes where they are stand out.Emily feels her heart sink into her stomach; she’s not so certain that she’s the crazy one here anymore.They’re completely hidden. They’re completely alone. Her heart flutters as her eyes flit to the nearest turns, worried suddenly that someone or something might round the corner and trap them. This isn’t a place for people. What a strange thought.“Okay, so what now?” she asks, in the neutral tone you reserve for aggressive dogs and crazy people. Silence would be worse; at least talking she can try to distract herself from the unsettling atmosphere that she can’t seem to ignore. The girl’s eyes actively avoid her own, and Emily suddenly finds herself glancing around looking for a rock or weapon in case she needs to jump her. The girl is nearly a foot taller, most likely stronger and please God, don’t let her have a gun. She’ll run away then; maybe she can lose her in the maze. But Emily finds herself thinking about running through the darkness alone, and the fear paralyzes her legs.“Sit down and get comfy,” the girl says.

*****After Emily has been compelled to drift off into a deep sleep, I carefully weave a spell to connect our Oneri so that I’ll be able to find her sub-conscious without trying to navigate the infinite Temenic realms between them. I’ve seen the spell done before, but this is an improvisation; the first of many on this crazy plan only theory-crafted with Azazel. After the spell is set, I study it for what seems like forever, trying to make sure it’s working the way it’s intended to. One of the first things a fledgling mage learns is the limits of her concentration. You have to be able to partition off the standing imagos as they fill with up magic, or you’ll only be capable of keeping one spell going at a time. At the moment, I have four spells going: a protective spell on my body, a mage sight, the sleep spell, the adjoined rooms of our minds - my limit is just one more.No good. I need to figure out how to bring Grace with me and still be capable of fighting. I grit my teeth and ponder letting the spell that I weaved around myself to protect me from harm unravel. At the last second, I decide to lose the mage sight instead. I feel it come apart and disperse as some mental knot I barely noticed was there relaxes.

I sit down at the center of the Hallow, just out of arm’s reach from Emily. “Azazel, STARK, keep an eye on us. I can’t fight and still keep an alarm spell up.” Without his help or that spell, our bodies will be completely helpless and at the mercy of anyone and anything that happens upon us while we we’re out. My cousin told me that it’s possible to remain aware of your surroundings while you’re in the Astral by using a spell to duplicate your thought streams; one stays inside while the other controls the body and keeps a look out. With concentration, you can sync up with the other. It’s utterly bizarre and undeniably cool but it’s another gamble on top of every other whacked out thing I’m trying tonight. And it’s one more spell, causing me to hit that personal brick wall again. I’m just not good enough to keep all those very disparate and complex constructs apart.“Can you also boost my concentration, Azzy? I need all the help I can get.”<If you really believed that you’d ask for help.>“I am.” Can’t spare focus for a telepathic reply either. I’m already straining.<You know what I mean - help from Casstiel and the others.> Azazel’s thoughts transmit around me. Without my sight up, I can’t even tell where his ephemeral consciousness is coming from.“This is a test,” I say flatly. “Everything is. Maybe not my master’s test this time, but if nothing else it’s a trial of my will and conscience. If I forfeit now, I fail it.”<Forget the test, this isn’t a game anymore. You are taking too many risks. Hubris, Chimera. Hubris is the gravest danger to any magus and you’re writing checks that will bounce sooner or later.> “Azazel. I’m going in. We can’t afford to wait any longer; this thing is killing kids. We’re here, I’m going in. So are you going to help or not?” I try to hold back my anger. This was never a game to me.<I could tell on you.> He says solemnly.“It would destroy my trust,” I reply. “And I would forever have an umbilical cord wrapped around my neck. Isn’t that why Casstiel wanted me to go in the first place? To take risks and solve my own problems?”Azazel growls telepathically; it sounds high-pitched and exceedingly annoyed. <You owe me big time little boss. After this you’re taking me to the Berlin State Library. I will need the sustenance just to keep going at that point.>

“Wish me luck,” I close my eyes.<Wish you luck? You better come back soon. If this drags on too long I will call the boss. Why, I’ll->I tune him out, concentrating again, focusing on the practiced images of my descent deep within myself, until I don’t have to anymore, until the world starts creating itself around me.Into the maelstrom.

*****I enter my inner Astral space where I always do, the place I’m starting to think of as The Broken Library - my vestibule, the gateway of my Oneiros. I navigate impatiently through the maze of bookshelves and doors, looking for signs of a metaphorical bridge between Emily and I. When I finally find it, I see that Grace is already there waiting for me, standing beside a door simply marked ‘Emily’. I've seen countless doors scattered around my vestibule, passages to endless scenes and ideas, a microcosmic representation of Hell and trials within me. If I searched long enough I could find a door to any memory, any dream and any desire or fear I’ve ever experienced. The mind remembers everything. Emily’s door doesn’t quite seem to fit in with the rest. My doors are all grand and arched high in the middle, fashioned from a dark wood that I can’t quite identify. Emily’s door is small, perfectly rectangular, and unobtrusive; the wood is covered in deep, ugly scratches. Claw marks. Grace admires the long gouges with a long look over her shoulder before leisurely turning back to me. “Hiya, Chimera! What brings you here again?” Control yourself, Casstiel’s oft repeated reprimand echoes in my head.I raise an eyebrow. “You have access to my plans, desires, fears, and innermost thoughts. I think you know why I’m here.”“Of course, of course. Just trying to be polite, make pleasantries and what-not,” She says cheerfully. I can’t help but find it a little surreal, that someone who takes such joy in screwing with people is also always so hung up on proper manners. Maybe it’s because I myself often struggle to find structure and logical rules in social interactions. Who am I kidding? Of course that’s the reason.“Soooo, it’s time for our oh-so-principled heroine to save the damsel. But you left your shining armor and valiant steed at home. What a shame.”

“Wow. That’s just cliché.” Although come to think of it, so are surly antiheroes in trenchcoats. “But to put it in your terms, I still need a sidekick. You seem like a viable choice.”She smiles. I don’t like it. “I can do that! Unfortunately, it’ll cost you; nothing comes free, and all that. I know you didn’t like our last playdate much, but it was super fun for me! And you learned a lot! I’m sure we can work out anoth-”My temper flares, that all-too familiar burn of anger from somewhere deep within my chest, and a flutter of fear.“No.”“Huh?”“I said no. You’re already getting exactly what you want out of this. This is probably going to be the most dangerous fight I’ve ever been in. You love a show, love a challenge, love your fun – how could you pass up the chance to see this firsthand? In fact, you’re the one who suggested this idea to me in the first place, via that Tarot card. I’m not paying you for what you want anyway.”“No! No!!! You’re not supposed to do this!” It’s like watching a kid throwing a tantrum. Grace’s face contorts into a pout as her voices rises to a screech. “I have power over you, Chimera; I know you better than you know yourself! Did seeing them dead hurt? Because that’s nothing compared to what I could do if I wanted to. There are things crawling around inside your head that would make you-”I hit her. Hard. In the face.It’s not the most eloquent or controlled response. But damn if it isn’t satisfying. Grace squeals and drops to the ground like a load of bricks. Her eyes are wide with shock and hurt as she cowers away from me. She looks betrayed, like she’s just had her world shattered, and I realize that for all the struggle I put up, she never expected me to actually try to harm her – which means that on some level, I didn’t expect to either. In a warped way, she still thought were friends; I’d be laughing if it weren’t so monumentally screwed up. It’s almost enough to make me feel sorry for her. Almost. Grace is far from the harmless kid she looks like.She flinches as I take a step forward, towering above her, and my carefully constructed calm shatters into pieces. “Listen, you twisted little brat. You do

have power over me. But never forget that I have a lot more power over you. Without me, you wouldn’t be what you are – you wouldn’t even exist.” My voice is a low growl as I continue, “I made you. I am you. So be careful how far you push me. I’m not your goddamn toy.”Threats are one thing, but you can’t force a daimon’s cooperation in the long term. Knowing Grace, the backlash from this will be highly unpleasant. But for the moment, I find myself not caring much. “I’m going to help Emily if I can. Are you coming along?”“Yes . . .” she stands up slowly, lip quivering. “Good. Let’s do this.” I take a deep breath, and perform my third big trick of the night. I imagine a silver tether formed from my memories of my daimon, a single thread that slithers around my wrist and ties it to Grace’s. Where I go in my Oneiros, she must go as well. And when I enter Emily's dreamscape, she’ll hopefully be pulled along for the ride. That’s the imago, but my raw will alone isn’t enough to execute it - and the imago itself is a crude simulacrum of the one used by my master. Time to reach for power that I don’t have.It’s the first time I’ve ever pushed the limit outside of very controlled conditions, and I’m not prepared for what it feels like. For a few seconds, nothing matters besides the intoxicating rush of power, begging me to pull down more, more, more. Responsibility? Just another word for limitations. Consequences? They don’t apply to me, and they never have. The only thing that exists is the power; the unfiltered Truth of the higher reality hailing down like heavenly, golden light and a chorus of archangels.For a moment I am a luminous being. Cracks in the floor, walls and nearby doors radiate from me and climb in all directions as my Nimbus flares. Grace's eyes glint hungrily at me as the aura around her does the same. Discordant church bells shake the ground and a low pitched hum climbs into the screams of the damned, drowning out all other sounds.I drag myself out of that bout of megalomania just in time to remember to be mindful of the paradox that will be bearing down on me – a result of supernal truth so out of line with the fallen world that it calls down a malicious, semi-intelligent piece of the Abyss.I brace to absorb the backlash. I learned the proper technique for this, of course; my mentor made sure of that. The collision of truths and tearing corruption of the Abyss can manifest in a hundred different ways but usually it comes in the form of horrible muscle spasms, painful bruises, bleeding and strange burns.

I try not to wince in anticipation. But nothing else happens. No sensation of razor burn across every inch of my body. I don't see any physical damage visible on my skin but it occurs to me that my body is back in the physical. Could it have taken the damage, however bad it was, without me feeling it?I won't find out how bad the backlash was until I wake up again. At this point I'm thinking that simply letting the paradox take its course would’ve been less risky to me . . . but that way lies further hubris. Still, exactly how much did this cost me? The thought is chilling.Grace is laughing as she watches my confusion. Didn’t take her long to get back up to form. Decking her again is looking extraordinarily tempting right now. I hate it when she clearly knows something I don’t . . . which, with her being an aspect of my subconscious, is most of the time. You’re not going to beat your daimon at their own game, at least not for long. "Something funny?!" I snap."You!" She giggles, "Acting like you're expecting to be struck dead by lightning.""I didn't feel any backlash, in fact I didn't feel paradox at all, and that was a vulgar spell if there ever was one. What should I be expecting?"At that she just laughs harder. "Think about where you are. You’re standing in one of the few places on earth without paradox; the soul of a mage, us, a direct standing connection to the Supernal. Everything from above is true here, silly!"Oh. Duh.

"Fine then, do you want to get to the uh... fun part or do you want to stay here and laugh at me a while longer?" "By all means, let's get on with the fun." She smiles maliciously, knowing eyes also smiling from behind her locks of disheveled hair.I nod to Grace, and together we step through the door and directly into Emily's Oneiros.

*****We emerge in what appears to be the world’s largest apple orchard. Row upon row of trees swaying and a field blanketed in soft green grass. There are no fences here, no borders. Just the soft rustle of wind in the grass and seemingly endless lines of apple trees, their branches ripe with crisp fruit.The orchard exudes familiarity; comforting nostalgia and a feeling of safety. Perhaps it’s a place in the physical world that Emily once knew, a place that

calmed her. Or maybe it’s simply a symbolic representation of her concept of comfort and the familiar. Either way, it’s clearly something deeply personal to her. I would feel like an intruder here if I wasn’t so soothed by it myself. My nerves start to even out, and my tense muscles relax. All the same, I allow the spell that allowed us to get into her head to unravel and set my remaining concentration to casting a simple spell to detect nearby mental signatures. It's not a good idea to get too complacent here, however nice it may be.This was Emily’s sanctuary once. Which is what makes what we see as we wade further in even more distressing.A single dead tree among thousands of live ones. The bark black, barren branches and tortured shape, the slick red fluid that smells like copper oozing out from the tree; all these things mark it as an abomination. And it’s not alone. The deeper we delve into the orchard, the more of them we see – until there are so many surrounding us that if I hadn’t seen otherwise, I would never have imagined there was ever anything living in the orchard at all. The sky overhead is a warped imitation of a patchwork quilt; blue gives way to ragged sections of gray and poisonous green. The grass is brown, the wind perfectly stilled. The previously gentle resonance twists into paranoia and mindless fear. There’s nothing but death here - death of the mind. “Christ,” I whisper. It was bad enough seeing Emily’s physical deterioration, but this is a particularly vivid and painful demonstration of the trauma on her psyche. After seeing her aura from the outside, I’d anticipated seeing something like this, but that doesn’t compare to being enveloped by it. Only now can I get a true appreciation of what’s been happening to her.“Grace . . . we have to stop this.” Grace just shrugs, clearly not all that interested in the whole “saving Emily” aspect of this mission despite the barbs she kept throwing me about it earlier. It doesn’t help that she’s flickering at the edges, like an old television set with bad reception. Xelloss didn’t do that when Casstiel brought him into Kairos’ Oneiros. Maybe I just don’t have quite the same finesse yet, or maybe the spell pulling her into this place isn't potent enough. Regardless, she won’t be at her full strength here.“If we can’t find her daimon and the monster doesn’t come looking for us, my guess is that we need to follow the symbolism. If we can find imagery and scenes representative of fear, we may get closer to the Nightmare. I mean, it is at the very core of what she’s terrified of right now. Thoughts?”

Not a word from my daimon. She just looks at all the madness, and grins.“Thanks for your input. I’ll be sure to take that under advisement,” I say, exasperated. “We’ll keep going this way; I think we’re on the right track here.”We walk through rows of dead trees and an uneasy, encompassing silence. Grace says nothing. I say nothing. There’s no sound here, not even the slight rustling of wind. It’s the sort of silence that seems to grow heavier with time, the sort that wraps itself around your neck and suffocates you. We’re deep in the orchard now, and darkness falls like a stage curtain. It’s becoming harder and harder to see, and easier and easier to imagine monsters crouching in the shadows, just waiting for their chance. It’s almost a relief when I catch the signature of an intelligent mind, close by. If there’s going to be a fight, let there be a fight. Beside me, Grace perks up. “She knows you, green-eyed girl.” A figure slips out from the trees. Not a complete mind, I realize, but a powerful exemplar of the whole of the psyche around us.Emily’s daimon stands tall, even taller than me, and arrow straight. She’s clad in stylized white and gold armor and wears a curved sword on her hip, looking like she walked straight out of the Lord of the Rings movie. Her blue eyes are bright and piercing. There’s a distinct confidence and ease of bearing in the way she moves; the contrast with Emily is stark enough to be night and day. Even with them having identical facial features, they’re barely recognizable as the same person.She doesn’t seem to fit in with this place, or even what I’ve seen of Emily. “You’re different than I would’ve expected.”“I am Emily’s potential - what she still harbors hope that she could become, even if she doesn’t fully realize it.”“A badass Valkyrie?” I venture.“More,” she says simply.It does make sense, when I think about it. Daimons are a reflection of the deep recesses of the minds that produce them; what you want to be, should be or might be. They also represent the supernal spark of the soul and mind in every person, no matter how repressed. Some writings about them point to them being some sort of spirit animal or guide to self-actualization and enlightenment. After Xelloss, Dario, and Grace I’m used to seeing them as the largely negative aspects of the self, but that doesn’t have to be the case. My daimon is a walking manifestation of the bad things that I believe about

myself; in both what I am and what I could become. Emily’s is her belief that, even with what she’s going through, she’ll come out of it a stronger person.I can’t help but feel inspired – and a little twinge of daimon-envy. Apparently that's a thing now. As if in response to my assessment, Grace shifts beside me.“This is boring,” She pipes up, voice coming out slightly tinny and distorted here. “When do we get to kill stuff?”I sigh. Emily's daimon’s eyes narrow as she studies at Grace. “Emily knows you, but I don’t know this one. There’s something . . . wrong about her. She should not be here. You’re both trespassers and neither of you has stated your purpose.” Her hand goes to her sword. Grace leans forward, an eager look in her eyes. “She wants to be something, the poor girl. Oh, I could give her a taste . . .”“Behave,” I say firmly, and take a step in front of her. I don’t doubt that we could beat this daimon if it came down to a fight, but that’s far from the reason why we’re here. “We’ve come with good intentions. This is Grace. And I’m Chimera.” I extend a hand.She keeps hers on the sword. Those eyes are still wary. “My name is Victoria.”“Victoria. Have you by any chance run across a man in a black rain coat? Weird eyes, all-around creepy?” The daimon flinches visibly. For a second her entire form wavers. Huge black, bruise-like stains appear across most of her skin, as though liquid darkness is pooled under the surface. Her face and neck are crisscrossed with festering welts; her eyes bloodshot and edged with fear. I have a second to watch the drops of blood fall from maimed fingers and a whiff of wood smoke before the moment ends. Victoria's form distorts and instantly reverts back to her old self, whole, but her eyes still show the fear and pain underneath. “I have. When he made his presence known, I went to destroy him on Emily’s behalf. I... I wasn’t strong enough. He . . . hurt me. After a while I was released. He said that it wasn’t entertaining anymore.” Her voice turns bitter. “He was certain that I wasn’t a threat to him. So arrogant – but he was right. I was Emily’s hope, and now I’m not even a worthwhile opponent. I failed her. Now I’m on the run from him, day and night as he consolidates his power here.”

A phobophage. He’s feeding off of tormenting them both, giving them a sliver of hope of escaping the pain before ripping it away. “I’m sorry." It's all I can say, and somehow it falls short. I have to give her something to hang on to or she won't be any help. "Emily still needs you. Grace and I are here to kill the thing that’s hurting her, and I think you can help. Know where he’s holed up?” She narrows her eyes. “I assume that you want me to take you to him, and I could. He'll get me if I do.""Exactly. We’re the bait. From what you’ve said, he’s too cocky to run away, but he won’t be able to just ignore the three of us scurrying around ‘his’ domain. He’ll have to make a stand. And when he does, we’re going to get him.”"But . . . are you really so certain that this is a fight we can win?”No, I think. My augury on the subject today was sketchy at best. I couldn’t get a clear reading one way or the other. Not exactly encouraging.What I say is: “I’m betting my life on it, aren’t I?” She looks at me for a moment, and I swear I catch the shadow of a smile on her face, but then her eyes harden in hard purpose. “I will help you. I will even fight with you. But understand something. Afterwards, I expect both of you to leave without incident. Emily has been through enough already, and while I do appreciate your help, I admit to some skepticism of your choice in allies. She cannot be allowed to usurp me in our weakened state.”Usurp? Is that even possible? But then, that’s exactly what’s happened here already; the Nightmare thrashed Emily’s daimon and took her place.Grace rolls her eyes, seemingly unperturbed. “Sure, sure. C’mon Chimera, let’s do this!” She bounces from foot to foot. Apparently excitement has gotten the better of her again. It’s not that unusual; my daimon flips between emotions on a dime like a bipolar on speed.“I promise, we’ll leave after this is done.” I confirm, making a mental note to keep my daimon from getting too uppity if - when we win. It wouldn’t do to have Emily trading one monster in her head for another.Victoria nods. “Follow me.”

*****Emily’s Oneiros looks like the Devil’s playground. A square room filled with nothing but blood stained scissors and sneering faces. Pools of ink deep enough to drown in. A feral looking boy with a whip in his hand. Singed-

naked cats weeping over piles of ashes. We pass by all this and more. I recognize a lot of it - imagery ripped straight out of the pages of Struwwelpeter. The Nightmare has begun to shape this place to his whims.Grace stops a few times to get a closer look at some of it, grinning and clapping her hands in delight. It’s like the whole thing is a field trip to her; I do the best I can to keep dragging her along. Victoria says very little, although she occasionally casts looks of distaste at my daimon and exudes growing unease at each tableaux. When I’m not corralling Grace, I simply walk in silence.We exit yet another morbid scene and come into a vast woods, stretching as far as the eye can see. The path ahead is hard to make out, shrouded by mist and the dark outline of trees. A sickly blue light filters down from above, casting shadows that stretch on far longer than they should, reaching out greedily for us. There’s a thickness in the air that seems to eat up even sound. This place could devour you - and no one would ever know. Everything about it fosters the mindless, animal instinct to run.

“The Black Forest,” Victoria says in a hushed tone. “Emily’s great-grandfather was a German immigrant, and used to tell her stories of it. The place has always had its legends; they say it holds darkness and secrets. Marksmen that with the devil’s aid, never miss their targets. Sorcerers in the guise of wolves. Lake kings that drag women down to their watery kingdoms. And others. . .”That doesn’t seem to bode well for our little hike through here; in her Oneiros, the stories about the real Black Forest in the might manifest as the

freaky things she envisioned when her Grandfather spun them. Imagination can be dangerous here. But at the moment I’m not picking up any nearby dream actors and no thinking minds besides ours. “Victoria, anyone or anything you know that usually takes up residence here?”She glances around warily. “Yes. In fact, I used to hunt game here, but now he’s spun it to be his own. This place was here even before he arrived, but it’s different now . . . hungry. Festering.” Wonderful. A monster that scares all the other scary things away. I’m opening my mouth to reply to Victoria, when –Something pings on my mental radar.A chill runs down my spine. And I hear a voice coming from somewhere out of sight:

“So she was burnt with all her clothes,And arms and hands, and eyes and nose;Till she had nothing more to loseExcept her little scarlet shoes;And nothing else but these was foundAmong her ashes on the ground.”

The voice is smooth and pleasant, almost a purr. The words that pour over us are anything but.

“The great tall tailor always comesTo little boys that suck their thumbs.And ere they dream what he's aboutHe takes his great sharp scissorsAnd cuts their thumbs clean off, - and thenYou know, they never grow again.”

It’s impossible to tell exactly where the twisted nursery rhymes are coming

from as they reverberate through the trees. He’s just entered my scope, but the spell I’m using relies on sensory range; I need to be able to see, hear, smell, taste, or touch him to actually locate him beyond the goosebumps I'm feeling right now. And between the darkness limiting my sight and the way the forest seems to muffle all sound beyond his voice, sensory range isn’t much to speak of. Not even my innate sense of space and distances helps much; too many branches and too many angles crowding my perceptions. Too much darkness . . .But I still know he’s close. Very close. And right now, without space spells up to help me pin him down, I’m practically blind; darkness and grasping branches all around. Dread and claustrophobia crawl through my head as I assess our options. But panic is what he wants. I can’t give him that.<Grace, get any spells you want for combat up now.> I say grimly.<Already done!> My daimon sounds positively gleeful.I reluctantly let the consciousness detecting spell disperse and rally my focus for a Space spell, something that will give me an unimpaired top-down view of the forest. I softly chant the words of power and feel my consciousness expand, spreading outwards like a thousand tiny hands brushing against every obstacle, feeding me information as a tactical overhead map begins to take shape. Just a moment more, and I’ll have him . . . “Victoria, get ready. He’s nearby. If you give me a second, I can tell you exactly where-”“Unnecessary,” the voice purrs from behind me.I spin on my heels.It’s the eyes that get me. For a living nightmare, the man is ordinary enough; disheveled brown hair, drooping, almost somber features, and a pitch black rain coat. Nothing shocking. Nothing I didn’t see in Emily’s nightmares, albeit with far less coherence. But his eyes . . . He smirks, he smiles, he gloats, but those eyes remain empty. I’m staring into the surface of a mirror and seeing no reflection – no spitting image looking back at me, no spark of feeling, just a pit without a bottom. His humanity, if he ever had any, was obliterated a long time ago.“Welcome, ladies,” he says, soft as silk, and pain splits my skull wide open.So much for banter.

I stagger as my vision blurs, and I gasp in agony. Arggghhh!” I scream, clenching my body and raising my arms to protect my face as the pain urges me into a fetal position, but somehow I manage to stay on my feet.The Nightmare doesn’t move in for the kill. He doesn’t get the chance. I hear Grace roar with something– bloodlust, joy, primal rage - as she dives at him. I wouldn’t even know she had if not for the almost useless spatial map that’s still giving me data that I’m in no position to even think about right now.I take several deep breaths, trying to slow my breathing into some controlled release and focusing on locking the pain out. Your body is fine. It’s just meditating; this pain is all in the mind. Not exactly true; it’s in the will, in the soul - Emily’s as well as mine. I let the spatial mapping spell drop and bark out a new spell, sort of an inverse of a really bad headache. With a push of will and a hiss of air the pain lets up, muted by the trick. My head still hums with the incoming pain, but it’s dull now, having lost the edge and immediacy. I rebalance myself and finally get a look at what’s happening around me. Grace is cackling manically and pummeling the Nightmare with a machine-gun barrage of fists. She’s happy, really happy to be let out of the cage, and I can’t help but feel a twinge of pride despite myself. When the director of your nightmares is kicking someone else’s ass for a change, you have to appreciate the reversal.But then I notice something. Her blows are landing hard and fast, and yet they sound almost hollow as they impact, like she’s hitting layers of spongy cardboard instead of flesh and blood.Victoria drives her sword at the creature’s back and nearly shish-kabobs Grace as the spindly form of the Nightmare twists away from the blow like a shadow flickering in firelight. The shining warrior chases after the Nightmare’s retreating form with Grace at her heels as it slithers away through the trees.Time to try out what I’ve learned from my crash course in dream combat. The pain of whatever the creature inflicted upon me finally eases away as the Nightmare's attention is diverted and I let the focus on my own spell unravel, turning my attention upon the environment of the dream itself. With Victoria granting us permission to help, it should be easier . . . But it isn’t. The Nightmare has weighted down this place, twisting it into a malformed parody of itself - maybe even causing Emily’s depression to get worse, solidifying the core of her mental illness and making a nice nest for the thing. It’s not going to budge easily until the will of our quarry has been

tenderized a bit. I focus my attention inward as I charge after him, deeper into the darkness and menace of the forest. Well, if just hitting him isn’t going to work, why not try something sharp? I’ve always had a thing for pointy objects.

Somewhere in the waking world, I grind my teeth and a tack resting perfectly on my tongue is driven up into the roof of my mouth. I taste the copper of my own blood from inside the dreamscape as a single barbed dart arches out from above the middle finger on each of my hands. Cold, hard, trusty steel.This time when he pops into existence behind me I spin and sweep his leg, dropping to waist height as my momentum pulls me into the turn.He simply steps into the air; rising over my sweep with his black pointed shoes hovering just above my leg. I plant my feet, pushing into the ground and thrust upwards, driving my right fist into an uppercut, the curved spike glancing off his chin.Grace pops into existence a second later, teleporting behind the Nightmare with a burst of supernal energy and pinning one of his arms to his back, cranking it as hard as she can. Mr. Happy hunches over and I take the opening to drive a quick one-two shot into his ribs, feeling the flesh pop like a balloon as my blades slide in. Then I’m suddenly seeing Grace’s rictus of a grin as the creature dissolves back into shadows and I barely avoid driving the spike into her. I dive to the side on instinct, my awareness screaming at me to move, just in time.A long straight blade whirrs over my head as I hit the soft mulch of the dark earth and feel at least a dozen crawling things trying to get out from under me. Victoria’s back in again, and I roll as I hear the clang of her sword meeting his oversized pair of rusty metal scissors“What kind of thumbs are you cutting, pretty boy!?” Grace chortles, with the tongue for one-liners that I’ve never had. With a flicker, he makes another tactical retreat into the darkness – no doubt looking for a chance to shank us from stealth again.“This place gives it power!” Victoria yells. She swivels her head, desperately searching for clues in the crawling darkness around us for signs of the thing. “Grace, Victoria - focus on the forest. If we want the advantage, we have to change it!” I shout. Like so many predators that prey upon the weak, the Nightmare never expected a serious fight. Even when Victoria came at him alone, I doubt he anticipated it. Straight up combat against capable foes just isn’t his style.

But we’re standing in his seat of power now; he can’t retreat and regroup without forfeiting everything that he’s worked for.I sense the oncoming tide of darkness again and start to backpedal, but in the near-complete darkness, my foot catches on roots I didn’t see and I tumble to the ground. Those same roots grasp out, holding me down by legs before I can roll clear. Then he’s there, looming over me and driving those twin blades down at my belly. I have an instant to imagine how much it’s going to hurt before the rusty points of the scissors are biting into the wood and through, white hot pain hits my belly like a sledgehammer. The man’s eyes are light-sucking pools, his face ashen as he releases his hold on the scissors, and a mass of squirming tendrils slither out of his hand. A cat of nine tails, the ends tipped in shards of glass and razor sharp obsidian. His lips twitch into a smile as he raises the torture weapon over his head. Something metallic arcs through the air hits the Nightmare in the back with a THWACK, bowing him over before he can flog me to death. A glittering knife sticks out of his upper back, right through the raincoat, and sizzles with preternatural heat.“Cold iron!” Victoria shouts and I hear the muffled footsteps of the two daimons fast approaching. Another knife goes whizzing by a second later, missing its mark by a hair. The Nightmare lets out a pained, rasping hiss and slithers back into the darkness surrounding us as the awful shears dissolves from inside me, loosing me from the earth. I feel the push of the daimons’ wills on the dream world around us and as I tug on the roots pinning me down, they break like dried, brittle kindling under our combined focus. They’re doing it. They’re weakening this place, if only a little.“I’m hit.” I scramble back to my feet, letting out a sharp gasp of pain as my stomach protests at the movement.“Now remember, Chimera - it’s not real, is it?” Grace asks mockingly as she tugs on my arm; a repetition of old taunts from my visits to her realm. I don’t register what she’s saying at first – words being of little concern next to the twin gaping holes in my stomach. But while it may be intended as a mean-spirited jibe, she’s right. These wounds are just sensory input; they represent the bruising of an Astral traveler’s concentration and resolve. It’s literally a head game where the first to fall of mental exhaustion wakes up - and damn, I’m tired already.

“Cold iron?” I manage, wrapping the pain into a tight ball for later filing. Grace holds another slim knife in her hand, and I note that Victoria’s sword is now coated in a glittering silver sheen.“Even the sleeper’s daimon figures out this thing is somehow fairy-related, and you can’t keep up? Tsk.” Grace’s already running nimbly away to give the Nightmare chase. I don’t have anything clever to say to that, so I flip off her back instead.Somehow Emily’s subconscious has connected this thing to the Fae. But how does one go about willing a dream construct into existence that’s true enough to affect fairies? Unlike me, the daimons don’t seem to have a problem conjuring cold iron, but they’re like fish in water when it comes to knowing how the astral realms work. A piercing whistle splits the air as Victoria holds up two fingers to her lips. From behind her a chorus of howls echoes off the skeletal canopy of the black forest, and a pack of some huge cross-breed of wolf and mastiff stampede into shadows where the Nightmare has made its retreat. Their hides glow with radiant tribal sigils, their entire bodies emitting a dim corpselight. I get it; she’s invoking one of the legends of the black forest; the men in the forms of wolves. The beasts charge like bloodhounds, yipping and growling with excitement as they converge on their invisible quarry. They surround and lunge forward to engulf him.The Nightmare must have laid a trap, expecting us to once again venture deeper into the forest. Suddenly, the wolves let out howls of terror as the entire side of the forest comes alive with a crawling darkness. A moment later their cries are cut off, falling into silence – and their lights flicker out as a tidal wave of inky fluid floods over them and us. The coldness of it engulfs me up to the waist as I lose all sensation in my lower body. It’s a struggle just to stay on my feet as the blackness crashes over me. When it’s over I see nothing. Everything is pitch black now, swallowed up by the darkness.“We can’t overcome him! I told you this would . . . I told you!” Victoria cries out, panic in her voice. She’s slipping.“Fuck that!” I roar. “Damn it Grace, burn it down, burn the whole forest DOWN!” I throw my sheer brute force of will against the dreamscape we’re drowning in and push outwards with everything I have.I don’t hear Grace respond, and as I push I wonder if I am doing so alone. Doesn’t matter. It’s too late to change course. I chant in the language of

truths at the top of my lungs only to hear it come out a whisper, choked off by the darkness. The air vibrates and I feel something in the pit of my stomach fall away.The Abyss is here. It’s said a tiny piece of it resides in all sleeping souls, keeping them from Awakening. Bringing it down is always, always a bad idea. I chance it anyway and release my spell, an amplification of my ability to control immediate dream scenes. I feel my Nimbus uncloak around me - an echo of church bells and screams - and the Abyss grasping at it as I multiply the force of my will. But my Nimbus slips through its fingers as I grease the core of power inside me with all the magic I can feed it. I got lucky this time; everything below my waist erupts into pins and needles, but I at least I’ve got the feeling back in my legsAll at once the dream gives, and comets of fire flash through the air, exploding in waves of napalm that instantly engulf the forest, outlining the bare black trees and wreathing them in flame. Grace is beside me now, throwing palm after palm of hot red fire across the landscape, and the darkness breaks before us. Fire . . . I’ve always found it terrifying. And this is hellfire, powered by Pandemonium itself, abode of demons and true realm of nightmares. How many times has Grace burned me in my dreams with flames just like these? Now she uses my fear against it, the same fear the Nightmare would have fed upon. Maybe Grace’s merciless games have finally desensitized me to the fear of it. Or maybe it just feels right to finally get some payback. For Emily, and for me.None of us are running on full tanks anymore. Victoria finally emerges from the blackness, dodging fireballs aimed at the spot of her sudden appearance, scuffed with bruises with ligature marks across all visible skin. Grace is flickering like a shorted television and I don’t know how much time she has left. And me? I’ve still got holes in my stomach and a will that’s being strained to its limits.But there’s nowhere left for our enemy to hide now. The air is a squall of sparks. We stand on a field of cinders and the corpses of trees, illuminated by red and orange light filtering down from the sky. We’re changing this place. We’re actually winning.And then, lit up by the conflagration, the Nightmare charges from the nearest cluster of burning trees and idea of victory goes to hell. I swivel, trying to catch him in the jet of fire still shooting from my splayed fingers. But he’s not coming for me. He hits Grace like a freight train, even as she continues burning him, and they go rolling to the ground in a blur of

motion and burping gouts of flames, both of them trying to immolate the other now. I’m somehow not surprised that the Nightmare has an affinity for fire too. After all, he needs something to make an example of all those naughty children playing with matches.My daimon may be a vicious monster, but the Nightmare is bigger; physically and somehow spiritually stronger. When they finally come to a stop both are ablaze, but the Nightmare’s got her pinned in his arms the scissors open across her throat. Her cold iron knife is on the ground, out of reach and glinting among the cinders.She resembles nothing more than a fire-blackened doll now, all charred skin and gangly limbs – and most nightmarish of all, that rictus grin never left her face. She looks at me, frame flickering one last time and hisses, “Burn, pretty boy. Burn.” Just as the scissors close around her neck with a loud snip, severing her head, my daimon explodes into flaming shrapnel. One last act of spite.I tackle Victoria to the ground before the wave of burning gristle washes over us and I hear the Nightmare cry out in pain and rage as he takes the brunt of it. There’s a scream building in my chest as I glimpse pieces of my daimon go flying by overhead. Later. Later you can scream. Not now . . . not now . . . I climb back to my feet, pulling Victoria up with me. The landscape around us is shifting again; without Grace’s will helping to prop our vision of it up, it’s reverting back into some bizarre half-state: patches of orange and red light in a pitch black darkness. And out of that darkness staggers the Nightmare, black bony fragments jutting from his fire-ravaged coat, bloodless slashes and third degree burns on every inch of naked skin. He looks like a walking corpse; no body should be able to take that degree of punishment and remain standing. But here he is - a dead body to match those dead eyes.“Victoria,” he says, still silk smooth. “I think it’s time for your friend to run along now. It was a nice try, but she won’t want to see this part.” He steps back into the darkness, and we’re left circling defensively in our small bubble of firelight, trying to keep it from collapsing in on itself as we stand back to back, trying to cover all directions at once as that soft voice leers at us from somewhere out of sight.“You knew they wouldn’t be enough. You knew nothing would ever be enough, with your little Emily slithering on her belly through the darkness. And yet you call yourself ‘Victory’.”She shivers.

“Ignore him,” I urge. “He’s baiting you.” I know it’s a psychological attack, but here the words are as real as bullets. To her especially.He reappears ten feet in front of us; a sly smile on his face formed from cracked lips and yellowed teeth. “Soon enough, we’ll be alone again. I’m looking forward to it.”This is the moment it all becomes too much. She he finally loses it. Victoria screams and screams, voice tinged with a madness lacking in all self-consciousness and control. A great black dog appears by her side, coalescing out of wood smoke. No wolf in this one; just a big old mutt. I don’t have time to wonder about that before they’re on him. I start to move, but it’s over in a matter of seconds; Emily’s daimon is berserk now, cold iron sword a blur of frenzied stabs and cuts, screaming in mindless fury, as the dog flanks from behind, tearing at his heels. Once, twice, three times, she lands a grazing blow and the Nightmare hisses in pain – and then her luck runs out. She missteps, and the blackened scissors impale her clean through the torso. Victoria has time to gasp before she flickers out of existence, her sword hitting the ground with a muffled thump. Her dog lets out a pitiful whine as the Nightmare bisects him a split second later.And all the lights go out.Being by yourself in the dark with something after you is one of the most terrifying things a human being can experience, and I say that as a survivor of the Iron Gauntlet. It’s knowing that somewhere out there (but you don’t know where, oh god, you wish you knew where . . .) a predator is waiting and slavering, capable of disposing of you at its leisure. It’s knowing that, whatever else comes, you are utterly alone in the face of your terror.It’s an ugly, sinking, screaming feeling.I fight for even a scrap of light, reaching out again with my extra senses to touch the landscape and shape it to my needs. Light! Please light! But without the daimons’ help, I don’t have a chance. He’s too experienced, too practiced, too entrenched in this place; his will pushes back hard against my own like an alien thing, slippery and unyielding. My spatial senses flicker and diminish until I can’t sense anything beyond my own body.So it’s down to a game of cat and mouse in the dark, a desperate struggle I know I’m going to lose, but fight anyway, because the alternative is to just roll over and give in to despair, to start screaming and keep screaming until my end. He catches me twice by the wrists, snipping the steel barbs on my fists off at the bases. The next few minutes are a blur; spinning, turning,

punching, trying to anticipate his next move as he hits me again and again before falling back, only to return. And the waiting, just waiting in the dark for him to strike again. Is it my imagination, or are his attacks coming slower now? Is he finally starting to weaken or is he purposefully worsening my fear through anticipation? Doesn’t matter. The wait between cuts is its own torture now. At this point, he could finish me off whenever he likes, drive those scissors right into my heart. He won’t though. Not yet. He’s having too much fun.Bastard.I’m barely keeping my footing as mental exhaustion takes its toll, and at last it’s too much. I slip, landing hard on my back. I hear a man’s quiet chuckle, then feel only pain. Twin points of agony, one in each leg, as the massive pair of scissors come down and drive clean through, pinning them into the ground.I can’t help it this time - I scream. I shut my eyes, focus on waking up from this nightmare – but the pain in my legs snaps me back. It’s too real. Why can’t I wake up? He has me pinned somehow, unable to rejoin my astral body with the physical one. The seconds tick by in slow motion as he lazily circles around to kneel by my side; I can’t see him, but I can sense his motions in the dark as he approaches. There’s no doubt in my mind that he’s going to kill me here, and no doubt that he’s going to make it slow. Maybe Azazel will manage to wake me up before it happens. But if he doesn’t, my body will wither and die, never waking. I’ll be just another cautionary tale about meddling apprentices. Casstiel will have another dead friend. And my parents, well . . . All that’s left now is stall for a little more time. Because there’s one last trick up my sleeve, one last thing I can do.“Were you . . . were you the inspiration for Struwwelpeter?” I gasp out.He laughs uproariously. “You’re not in a position to be asking questions, little doe.”“Not . . . in a position to do much else either. And I’m curious. I’d like to know.” I gather up the last remnants of my willpower, training it on one purpose.The Nightmare lets out another short laugh; surprise or simple amusement, I can’t tell. “Heinrich Hoffman – yes, I painted his dreams once. The truth is, I miss the old tales, little doe. The new ones . . . well, they just don’t sing.

Bloodless and sterile and boring.” He leans over to whisper softly in my ear: “But the one we’re spinning right now – it’s a fine story, don’t you think?”At that moment Grace’s cold iron knife apports into my hand and my nimbus flares in the instant that I slash the knife across his face.I hear, rather than see, his flesh sizzle, and he jerks back with a howl. Paradox twists at my tissues, until all the major muscle groups are seizing up in the worst muscle cramps I’ve ever had. Like a good Mastigos, I ignore it.This is my moment. My last chance. His attention is broken, just for an instant. One final burst of will, and I reach out to mold the landscape, take us someplace different. Why fight him in his place of power when I can take us elsewhere? I don’t think about the where. I don’t care about the where; just reach down deep inside myself for my magic, and there I find the answer.And the world around us changes.

We’re in a church. My church. Stained glass windows, high arches, white pillars. A deceptively pretty prison for the mind. But there’s light. Thank god, there’s light.

The Nightmare cowers a few yards away, cringing at the bright light and the fresh wound on his face. He seems smaller here, out of his element. Almost . . . pathetic.I stagger forward, despite the flashes of images, agony but no scissors in my legs, and the memories exploding inside my skull. And as I do, something fundamental shifts. It all happens in the space of mere seconds, but to me it feel like an eternity.

She’s known pain before, but never like this.

My Awakening changed things for me. It does for everyone who ever experiences it. One perfect moment. One horrifying moment of realizing that the world you thought you knew never existed at all. Not after watching all the places in my mundane life warp into a twisted waking nightmare, where nothing ever seemed safe anymore. Not too long ago, I was even terrified of my own allies, the very people who helped me through all of it. I learned to accept what happened eventually. But I was never completely able to accept that I let it affect me as it did, and so it continued to haunt me.A month of suffering. Penance for her impurities and flaws. A church and its demons haunt her sleep. Somewhere off in the distance there’s an altar; she runs until the skin sloughs off her legs, but she never reaches it. And the demons all whisper, whisper, whisper - poison poured into her ears, all self-control sapped away. She learns a lot about herself. Things she never wanted to know.

Now, jagged pieces of an ugly puzzle fit together. Fractured nightmare imagery comes to coherence. Something inside me mends, broken pieces of a mirror fuse back together into a new face. I understand. I remember. I was really never broken, simply re-made into who I really was all along. A new strength floods into me.Those dreams seep into the waking word, bit by bit, until reality is little different than the nightmares that torment her. And the pain doesn’t stop. She wonders if this what insanity feels like; her brain being stretched like taffy until, at last, it will tear in two.

This is my hell and right here, right now, I hold it on a leash. The exertion on my will is enormous - and utterly worth it. Grace’s sleek silver knife is still in my hand, but it feels different now. A little piece of my soul; the church is the knife, and the knife is the church. Both weapons.It’s a mundane enough place, a classroom, where it happens. Where it finally ends. It doesn’t end, of course. Not really. But that’s what she wants to believe.

Stained glass windows ripple as I close in. The red carpeting underfoot spiderwebs into a billion fissures beneath my boots, letting the firelight of hell seep in from below. A low, inhuman hum rises in my ears.Her teacher addresses the class; a demon’s words come out. His bulbous head is twisted, adorned with the twisted horns of a ram, but that’s hardly surprising by now. Horrifying still, but hardly surprising. The remarkable part

is the piece of paper he places on her desk. Just a math test. But there’s something about it . . .

There’s a supernal heartbeat under my palms and a golden light that radiates off my body like a halo. But here, in this nightmarish place, I would never be mistaken for an angel.The letters on the page wriggle like worms under her scrutiny. She shuts her eyes, fighting an immense sense of nausea and dread. And all at once, the classroom is an infinity away.

Church bells ring, echoing down the hall. Louder. Louder. Louder.

She’s seated at the altar, looking out over the church that has been her torturer.

And they come. My demons.But the place is different this time; it waits in silence. Unyielding metal - cold iron – surrounds her, and freezes her blood to ice. The altar is the only constant.

Dark shapes swirl around on the Nightmare, enfolding it in voices edged like teeth. They rush past me to engulf him, swarming like a million bats. Imagine broken glass, acid vomit, caustic smoke, rotting carcasses – all these things made sound, and you have only a fraction of what it’s hearing right now. I know. I’ve been in its place. This is the memory of Pandemonium. This is my Hell. And this is where it all happened.A blank piece of paper lies flat under her palm, white and unmarred. Beside it is a pen.

As I draw closer, I swear I catch a shadow of emotion in the Nightmare’s cold liquid eyes. Fear. The church is starving for it. I feel a force against my will as he scrabbles to shift the landscape once again, and right now I don’t have the strength to directly oppose him. But one last surge of effort, one last spell, and I preserve a small pocket of astral space around us, a bubble of only a few yards. A tiny church within an empty darkness. It’s enough.Certainty is a fragile thing. But it’s clear what needs to be done now.

I take one more step, and slide the knife against his throat.She signs her name.

“Checkmate,” I say softly, and smirk.

And for a single instant in the eye of that perfect calm, she has no doubt that it was all meant to be.

The Nightmare screams as the church rips it apart. *****

Emily stirs in her sleep.*****

I keep my word to Victoria. Not hard when all I need to do is wake up. A large part of me is glad my daimon isn’t here right now; I’m not so sure she’d be quite so willing to leave. Emily’s head is just another playground to her, after all, and one markedly less resilient than my own. There would be a falling out between Grace and I, and I’m in no shape for a struggle of wills at the moment.In fact, I’m in no shape to do much of anything. Even tackling the implications of what I just did seems to take up too much brainpower right now. When I wake up beneath a starless Berlin sky, all I can think is, I won. That’s all. I won.<Oh good> a voice pipes up in my head. <You can stop gagging on your own blood now. If not for the bizarre gurgling noises you were making, I would’ve thought you were dead. I was worried it would attract attention.>“I’m fine,” I mutter. My throat feels raw and my mouth aches something terrible. Something dried and sticky plasters my chin.Blood? What is he . . . ?Ah. The tacks. I start to stand up from my cross legged position but stop with a groan, spitting out a mouthful of bloody tacks in the process. I settle for uncrossing my legs, slowly feeling the blood starting to circulate properly. It feels like someone took a hammer to my ribs while I was out. And there’s something wet dripping from my nose. More blood. As I reach to wipe it off, my hands tremble and I realize that my shirt is soaked through with the stuff. It’s possible to sustain damage in the physical world if the dream combat gets brutal enough but such a thing is usually very rare, at least from what I was told. It’s a frightening sign of just how close I came to losing. But I won.

I chuckle. Then can't help myself anymore and peals of laughter escape me. I laugh until it hurts too much, great bloody guffaws as I hold my sides and wince. Azazel graciously refrains from commenting on the spectacle.Exhaustion and pain weigh heavy as lead. I’ve had this feeling before; that feeling of having hit my utter limit. I lean against a cold slab of concrete for a minute. It’s tempting, so very tempting, just to lay down here and sleep. Azazel and STARK are keeping lookout for us. Both our daimons should be back given some time to recover. Emily will be fine for a few hours. I’ll be fine . . .A sharp gasp comes from off to my right, and I turn my head in time to see Emily jerk awake. There’s an odd look on her face; part shocked, part disoriented, part afraid. Weird. The sleep spell I put her under should still be in place at this point, but my connection to it has been severed.I brush it off. She’s been through a lot lately. The psychological shock of the battle raging inside her head probably jarred the spell out of place. I quickly button up my trenchcoat before she notices the blood covering my shirt. I can’t see that going over real well right now.Wincing, I force myself to my feet and offer her a hand. For a moment Emily just stares at me with that same dazed look, then ignores it and stands up on her own. Her eyes are wide, and when she looks at me, distrustful. “Wh-what was that? What . . .”I try to improvise at least a token explanation, but my fried brain is coming up empty right now. So instead, I give what I hope is a reassuring smile. “Tomorrow. We can talk about it tomorrow.” Emily must be just as worn out as me, because she doesn't push it. Besides, tomorrow there will be nothing to explain. The whole thing will be less than a faded dream to her. I turn away and start stumbling back through the maze, not going too far until I hear the soft thud of footsteps following behind me. I don’t say anything else to her on the way back. Neither does Emily – she just stares straight ahead with that same shell-shocked look. I make a few weak attempts at an emotional urging spell to calm her down, but my concentration fizzles out each time before I can execute it. I mull over the idea that I’ve overexerted myself and somehow blown a supernal circuit, but the more likely culprit is simple fatigue. At least soon Emily won’t have to remember any of this.The trip to the hotel passes in the soft rumble of the city, muted in the early morning, but still present. I navigate us through the bus stops completely on autopilot. Emily has no questions for me. The hardest thing to believe, after

it’s all over, is that there are still four days left on the trip. Four days of honest-to-god, no mortal peril vacation. I stop at a little stand and buy myself a gelato to celebrate. Chocolate.

Day 18: The flight backFor Emily, the first eighteen days of the trip passed at a miserable, glacial pace, and the rest sped by far too quickly. Nights filled with horrors that she still has a hard time even thinking about. Days spent in paranoia and dread of what her next dream would bring. Then that fear was lifted off her shoulders – suddenly, inexplicably, and she was simply on vacation. And without the nightmares and depression, it was almost like she went on vacation from herself. She doesn't know how, she doesn't know why, but it’s over now. To her, the world may as well have been righted after falling off its axis. But no one else seemed to notice. So she marveled at the city and its history. Went on tours. Ate at nice restaurants. She bought and mailed post cards for family members, mostly out of a sense of obligation. That was what all her classmates were, doing after all. Funny how postcards have become the Facebook "Check-In" equivalents of yesteryear. That's good, she thinks, I need to post that. For the first the first time, her online presence isn't just random tidbits of suffering and complaining. During the last few days of the trip, she posted thoughts and images on her blog with an almost superhuman zeal. It must’ve caught someone’s eye, because the response was immediate. Her blog is getting more traffic than ever.At the moment, she’s shifting uncomfortably in a cramped airplane seat, on her way back to the US. Hard to believe. So much time spent preparing, worrying, anticipating for this trip – clinging to the idea of it sometimes. Emily doesn’t know what she’s going to fill that space in her life with when she returns home, but she can't wait to get back online – to make something of herself. Instinctively, she knows that she’s been granted a new lease on life. Nothing is going to keep her down anymore.Then there’s the matter of her dreams. The new ones.Emily doesn’t want to think too hard about them either, but for a different reason - fear that if she does, they’ll slip right out of her grasp, and they’re not something she wants to lose. In a way they’re actually scarier than her nightmares, but in a way that inspires awe instead of a sense of defilement. They’re different, some kind of message. A strange thought, but she can’t deny it.

She glances over. That girl, that odd girl, has a seat across the aisle. She’s sleeping now, as many of the other passengers are, and Emily notes that the smile on her face is peaceful.It occurs to her that she still doesn’t know the girl’s name.She was supposed to go to her for help, wasn’t she? And she did, outside the hotel late one night. Beyond that, it gets too fuzzy to recall, but she finds herself unwilling to look into the matter too closely. No point in dwelling on it. The worst of her nightmares are over now, regardless of what did or didn’t happen. And now she has her own sleep to catch up on. She’s tired too; a day of constant travel by plane will do that to you. Emily closes her eyes, and the drone of the engines lulls her to sleep- and dreams.There’s a girl in a church, and each one seems like an extension of the other – almost a second skin. The church isn’t right. The girl isn’t right. Both radiate a subtle menace and cold, dispassionate judgment.The girl’s eyes are green. Murky green. She looks at Emily then, regards her with a blank, unreadable expression. And then, slowly, she nods and holds out her hand, curls open her fingers. There’s a light cupped in her palm – a light that envelops them both in gold. And as Emily looks at it, she sees through the gray, depression-filled haze that’s made up her life for such a long time. For a handful of moments, she witnesses something wonderful and terrible. She’s not sure how long she stands there, simply looking at that light, before she wakes up in a daze.

Many dreams appear very real to their dreamer, but in the waking world, most become about as tangible as ghosts. They fade. This one doesn’t.

Epilogue: Two Weeks Later I sleep soundly these days.At first, I thought it was a side effect from the temporary loss of my daimon. But as the days rolled on, empty sleep shifted into peaceful dreams. On occasion, new nightmares: my daimon exploding into bloody shrapnel, Victoria impaled through the chest with a pair of rusty scissors, me laughing as I press a knife to a man’s throat, and a darkness that eats me up alive. As one of the Awakened, especially with my friends, bad dreams are par for the course.And honestly, these dreams hold about as much weight as tissue paper compared to what’s behind me. I got lucky. Maybe luckier than I had the right to be under the circumstances. Frankly, Azazel had a point; I was reckless, hubristic, and stubborn. I cut it really, really close.And I won. I saved people. That’s worth something.Once or twice I visit my church – the basilica in Jamestown that became the model for my Awakening nightmares – and sit in on the Mass, despite my continued agnosticism, despite all the doubt and the questions about God spinning unanswered through my head. Though the place is as demonic as ever, it doesn’t hold the terror for me that it used to. Before, it was up to the flip of a coin whether even looking around it too long would trigger vivid and debilitating flashbacks. Now the rhythm of a frenzied choir, the hellish wail of the organ, the fervor of judgment - all of it seems to suit me. It’s almost like coming home. It's my church, after all. It always has been.For the moment, I’m content. Although . . . I’m still tired out from my so called ‘vacation’. I’ve got a little time to relax though, and a clear enough mind to do it. That’s a luxury I haven’t had for a long time. To me, it’s practically a miracle.Today, I’m sprawled on the sofa in my living room one day after lunch, slowly drifting off, when the doorbell rings. I ignore it. It rings again.I groan. I’ve always hated answering the door. Plus I’m still barefoot and dressed in pajamas, my hair sticking up in the back like a particularly pissed off porcupine. But my mom is at work, Dan is at day care, and my dad is off indulging his thrift store addiction, so it looks like this one falls to me. I force myself to my feet and walk the ten or so feet to open the front door. I’m expecting a door to door salesman. Or perhaps our eccentric next-door

neighbor, who has a habit of coming over simply to rail against the Jamestown police department. Emily stands on my front step, wearing shorts and a blue tank top, long blonde hair back in a ponytail. She looks at me anxiously. I stare at her. I’ve scryed on her a few times since returning to America, just to make sure she was actually recovering from her experience, even given her a few Mind-enhanced nudges in the right direction. I figured that it was the least I could do. But my scrutiny never went too deep; I was afraid. What would my senses show me - that gaping pit of emptiness and jagged glass again, or something far worse? Just how badly did the Nightmare fuck her up? I wasn’t completely convinced that I’d actually saved her. Call me a pessimist, but it seemed like too much to hope for. All I could think about was her daimon screaming in madness, the twisted mockery of an orchard, and the words your fault.Now I finally, truly look. The hole is still present, but faded and stitched up, and the glass and sharp metal have been removed. She’s healing. No blinding fear or self-destructive impulses, and no trace of the Fae that made her dreams a living hell. Inwardly, I breathe a sigh of relief.There’s something else too. A grasping, silvery mist wrapped around her like a blanket. The faint underpinnings of a newborn Nimbus. I can feel the supernal upon her like a soft brush against my skin.My world seems to slow to a crawl as three very relevant facts spring to mind.One: Emily experienced exposure to a mage and her daimon in perhaps the most personal way possible; both of us tromping around her Oneiros, casting spells in her headspace. Our encounter with her own daimon probably complicated things further. Not to mention that Victoria dying when she did might’ve left Emily open to deeper influence.Two: When I used my church as a weapon against the Nightmare, I brought a chunk of Pandemonium into her head, symbolically if nothing else. Not only that, it was the memory of my Awakening itself; a piece of the very essence of who I am as a mage.Three: She spent a large portion of a night physically located on the most powerful Hallow I have ever encountered, a place intimately linked with one of the Supernal realms; its power filled her as she slumbered there, drawn to a soul reaching out for the light.God. I triggered an Awakening.

By this point, Griff has thundered up to the door to greet our guest, tail wagging and corgi butt wiggling back and forth. Emily is babbling something to fill the awkward silence as her aura colors with more and more anxiety. She had a dog too one, a big black mutt . . . I snap out of my daze and grab her by the shoulders. “Emily. Did you sign your name on the tower?”She jerks back, but then forcibly relaxes, as though reminding herself that I’m not her enemy. “No . . . I almost did. It was too much all at once, I got scared . . .” She bows her head, obviously ashamed. “No.”Makes sense. The supernal resonance on her is present but faint; I’m definitely not pinning her as a full-blown mage. But she’s seeing me, actually feeling my magic without recoiling. So that makes her what? A sleepwalker? I release her shoulders. My head is spinning, and Emily’s looking at me like I have all the answers. It strikes me that even noon is far too early in the morning for this kind of thing. “Come inside.” I say. “There are a few things you need to know.”

Out of Character (OOC) Story Notes:At the time of the story *Chimera’s Gnosis: 2*Chimera’s Arcana: Matter 1 –Space 2 – Time 2 – Mind 3Previous stories referenced (in order of their occurrence)*Short Story: Chimera’s Awakening*Story: The Scavengers*DTS: A Talk With Dario*Short Story: Game of Graces*Short Story: LucidusIntegrity checks*Viewing Emily’s nightmares: (4 comp + 4 resolve + 1 integrity + 1 removed from the situation - 2 – 1 Aloof + 1 Steadfast) = 2 successes, guilty*Grace’s training: (4 comp + 4 resolve + 1 integrity - 5 + 2 Steadfast) = 2 successes, spooked*Fighting the Nightmare: (4 comp + 4 resolve -4 + 1 integrity +1 not alone + 1 trained for this + 1 steadfast +1 I killed it) = 3

successes*(4 resolve + 4 comp + 3) = 2 successes, no integrity changeFairy-tales (English Translations)*The Story of Little Suck-A-Thumb - X*The Dreadful Story of Pauline and the Matches - X*The Story of the Soup-Kaspar - XResults*Experience Points (XP, Arcane XP, & Cabal XP)1. Chimera - 19XP 19AP 3CP Plus 38 Bonus XP!2. Eos - 19XP 18AP 3CP3. Azazel - 10XP 5AP4. Frekki - 10XP 5AP 2CP5. Casstiel - 10XP 5AP 1CP

Chimera's Justified Purchases:*Gnosis 3*Condition resolved (Chimera): PTSD (Awakening)*Sleepwalker Retainer: Emily/Eos

About the Authors:

Hannah Nyland is a Computer Science student in her first year at North Dakota State University. She graduated from High School in 2014 and placed second in the Ayn Rand essay contest for The Fountainhead in 2013. Her hobbies include reading, martial arts, writing fiction, gaming, playing Mage the Awakening and plotting to take over the world with an army of corgis.

Jerad Sayler is a Cyber Operations Officer in the US Air Force of six years. He graduated from the University of North Dakota with a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science in 2009 and received his MBA in 2014. He has been writing short urban fantasy and Storytelling World of Darkness games since 2005 and has been

running his current Chronicle of Mage: The Awakening since 2010. He enjoys creative writing involving role playing and game mechanics.