The arrival at the dugout was heralded by nothing; goals seldom get fanfare. There were faceless, half-remembered people practicing on the field. The Yankee’s uniform was sharp, details clear. The sun, high overhead, did not beat down oppressively but came with the gentle warmth of a perfect day. The baseball diamond was wide and green, the halcyon dream of every child ever mesmerized by the game. Even the lingering scents of athletes—leather, shoes, sweat—was welcomed and muted by memory. This was not Yankee Stadium. This was the dream of it, made flawless by a young boy, perfected by a man.

  Mattias, of course, was right where Henry thought he’d be. The old man’s expression soured when he saw them. He made no effort to rise, but looked straight ahead at the players. And he was not in the white robes of the Archon of Light, or in the more pedestrian layers of a Holian resident. No, he wore a baseball uniform, complete with cap. He looked, if anything, like a grizzled old coach watching his team through practice. If only the players on the field had proper faces.

  Shadow started forward, taking point with his friend. But Henry stopped him. “Excuse me?” Shadow said.

  “My dream.” Henry said. “My logic. His body, but we’re sharing right now, right? I think I got an idea about what’s going on.”

  Henry, in his proper body, was a young man. Younger, Hawk realized, than he was in reality. He walked over to Mattias, frowning down at his hands. And suddenly there was a cracker jack box, freshly opened, where before there had been only air. Henry took a few bites as he walked, clearly enjoying the caramel corn and peanuts. When he reached Mattias, he said nothing, but watched the players with him for a few minutes. The sun, so incredibly bright, the sky, so incredibly blue, and the neon green of the field, all combined into perfection. It was, Hawk thought, Henry’s love-letter to the game itself.

  And then Henry began to talk. “It’s called baseball.”

  “Ah,” Mattias said. He continued to be silent.

  “Like, it’s an important word to me. I’ve only heard it pronounced properly once in my entire life. There’s this movie with James Earl Jones in it, called Field of Dreams. He says it right. Baseball.” He tried to imitate the tones of the great actor and, naturally, failed. Too much emphasis on the consonants, perhaps. “Like it’s the greatest word in the whole world.” A long pause, with a munching of caramel corn. “I was thirteen when I figured out I was never going to be good enough to play. And I don’t mean like pickup games in the backyard. I mean play, like this kind of play. Like when I wasn’t thinking about bugs, I was thinking about this field. My heroes were Jackie Robinson, the Babe, Lou Gehrig. I remember when Sammy Sosa and Mark McGuire were fighting over who could get the most home runs.” Henry had stars in his eyes, shaking his head back and forth with a sigh. “It was great, man. And I was never gonna be good enough for it.”

  “A strange thing, isn’t it? Realizing that you fall short of so basic a mark.” Mattias’s tone was clipped, his face set.

  “Thing is…as a grown up? I know I could have tried anyway. And I should have. I shouldn’t have listened to the adults telling me I couldn’t…or listened to the voice inside saying I wasn’t good enough. Sure, I’d have failed. But I’d be sitting here with a few more great stories…and at least I’d know. ‘Cause that’s the thing, isn’t it? I’m sitting here with a goddamn doctorate under my belt, knowing how hard that work was, involved in one of the biggest crisises the world ever saw. Hell, Hawk told me I’ve got the person I always wanted. I can’t wrap my head around that, because last I heard Emile hates me. But…I wish I’d tried that one last season at Little League. I wish I’d kept that dream alive one more year. No matter how much it hurt, or how useless it felt.” He paused. “And I was about to say I wished that so that I’d know I wouldn’t have made it, but that’s not the reason at all. I want those memories my self-doubt cost myself. Because, all in all, even if I could never reach it, it’s still my favorite dream.”

  Silence from Mattias. Then, “I never had a dream. It was never allowed. There was no freedom in our world, and we were never allowed the possibility of another. That’s what our gods stole from us, I think; the right to dream beyond their reach. Or, I think, to dream at all.”

  “Alright,” Henry said, and offered him some caramel corn.

  A longer silence. Then, “How can I go back to a cave when I have seen your sun? How can I leave so many deserving people behind, and walk into this light alone? And yet I cannot go back, do you understand? I have seen your sun. I have seen your dreams. I have seen wonders that I am not worthy—”

  “Stop,” Henry said. “Stop right there. That’s your problem. Don’t you see? You are worthy. Everyone is. We’re all worth our dreams and ambitions. Our failures too, because those aren’t signs of our worth as a person, or, you know, our lack thereof.” He grinned and munched on his crackerjacks. “They mean we were here. They mean we tried. They matter just as much as our successes.” A pause. “More, I’d say. Sometimes that’s all we get to have.”

  “None of this matters. Shadow will force me to live. Won’t you, old friend?” The bitterness dripping from these words was palatable.

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  Silence, and the crack of the baseball, the sound of the wind rushing past the dugout, and the munch of Henry’s crackerjacks. And Shadow crossed to his friend. “No. I will not. Not if you…if this is what you will. But I have to ask, my friend…why?”

  “How am I to start over, in a new world, as an old man? I am tired. Soul-tired. I have no grandchildren. No wife for my old age. There is only the worst of the dying ahead of me now. I will write no great poems or eddas. I will accomplish no great deeds. I am too old to lead my people out of the darkness. I have nothing. I am as all who serve the gods—spent. Utterly spent. There was only a calm moldering left to me, and even that is destroyed. And now I come to the threshold of a vibrant land and…I will only mar its surface.”

  Shadow, stricken, began to weep. He gave no obvious, outward sign of it, but tears streaked across his face. “You’ve given me no hint of this.”

  “And what if I had? You would spend yourself to try and make our world something worth living in, and there would be no point to that. I know the truth now. We are all of us an accident. We are the result of a theft, and a murder, and a disaster beyond reckoning. We come from the hellish creation of our gods, and there is no mercy in them. I would be free of them at last…even of their memory.”

  And then Henry, who had not moved from Mattias’s side, said, “Yeah. I was suicidal too, when I realized what I wanted was out of reach. Not that I think your motives are the same as mine were. I was a melodramatic kid having a tantrum that the universe wasn’t delivering what I wanted on a silver platter.” He munched more caramel corn. “You’re an old man, and I think you’re realizing that you can have the kind of life you want. It’s just going to be a lot of work, and, like you said, you’re tired.”

  “I won’t live to see peace.” Mattias said.

  “And I won’t ever be remembered like Joe DiMaggio. I won’t be giving any little boys like me ambitious dreams. I won’t ever stand there, bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, score tied, crowd roaring my name. That’s not for me. But you know what? I still wish I’d fought for it.” Munch, munch, on his box of candy. “Suicidal ideation isn’t a real thing, Matt. Can I call you that? It’s not a real thought. It’s like your whole body looks at what’s coming—the hurt, the effort to push through that hurt, the loss of dreams and an unknown world without those dreams to support you—and it just nopes out. But you don’t have to listen to that.” Henry frowned and began shaking his crackerjack box. “Sky’s free, you know. You can pick a direction and start walking, and never come back to Holia. You can forget the gods exist. You can have a nice little job in a nice little town somewhere, where everybody cares about sports and farming, and be grandpa to kids who don’t have one. Kids like me.”

  “Why are you shaking that infernal box?” Mattias said, his own face tear-stained and worn to leather.

  “I think I forgot the prize. That’s the best part of a crackerjack box. You get a little cheap toy out of it, like a toy airplane or a ring. But I guess, since it’s a dream, I can’t make a surprise.”

  Silence.

  “So how about it, Mattias? Let’s forget about everything else. Dreams and loss and whatever. Let’s both wake up, and then we can go to the real Yankee Stadium and watch a real game of baseball, and get a box of real crackerjacks so I can show you the cheap junk prizes I used to love as a kid?”

  “You’re asking me to live, the same way he would,” and Mattias gestured at the Shadow.

  “No, because he’s asking you for forever. I’m asking you for, like, a week so we can go get a signed baseball and maybe do the wave a couple times.” He grinned. “Unless, you know, you realize that by the time you’ve watched a baseball game, you might have found something else worth living for.”

  Silence. “We do not know each other. Why would you want an old, wasted husk like me in your vibrant world?”

  “Because we’re all old, wasted husks. We feel like old, wasted husks when we’re eighteen and that feeling never really fades. We just realize it was a lie when we turn twenty-five, because now we’re old, wasted husks. Only we realize by thirty, that was a lie. And I imagine when I’m your age, I’ll look back and see my own vibrant self and wish I’d appreciated what I had then. But the way to solve that is…maybe realize that you’re just as vibrant at sixty, and seventy, as you were when you were thirty-five. And even if you only have a couple years ahead of you—and trust me, Matt. This world’s medicine, you’ve got a whole lot longer to go—you can have those few good years. What comes next is worth watching.”

  A longer, harsher silence, as the tears flowed freely. “And tell me how a young man got to be so wise?”

  “Because when I was thirteen I ran away to Yankee Stadium with intent to do something real stupid. And I ran into an old man here who talked me out of it. We were pretty much standing right here, too. Him where you are, me where I am.” A long pause. “He taught me how to want to be alive. And I do want it, but just…not at your expense.”

  “But my memories. My experiences. They are a stain on this world. I remember the darkness of Nasheth’s worship, the heat of Argon’s fires. Illyris’s drowning maidens. Kali’Mar’s blood eagles. I have stood where desecration waited to devour the innocent. The only mercy is that my god is dead, and I never needed to wield the knife myself. How can I stain your world with my worship?”

  “It’d join a bunch of other stains, dude. Our religion is just as fucked up as yours. We just hide our sacrifices behind politics and secularization. It’s not the religion doing it. It’s just the followers.” He turned to one side and spit out a peanut.

  But it was Hawk’s turn to speak. “Mattias…we are the sum of our experiences. It takes everything—every memory, every success, every failure, every scar—to make us into the people we are. And you are an amazing human being that I am glad I got to meet.”

  “I feel I have pulled the wool over your eyes, then, my dear Hawk-of-the-West,” Mattias said. But he sighed, a deep and heart wrenching gesture. “But…perhaps I would like to see this place for real. See your sky. Feel your world. Just for a little.” He tilted his head, watching the game for half a minute more. Then he said, “Yes. I will come back. Just long enough for one game.”

  “Just one. I promise,” Henry said, and he took hold of Mattias. “We’ll see it together.”

  And with a rosy haze of glory, the dream-world faded away.