Once upon a time — down at the deepest nadir of one of the darkest hours of the long, cold, empty winter of my teenage years, in a moment of unmitigated weakness and hopeless longing, locked in a solitude and seclusion which masqueraded as privacy and prudence — I had kissed my own reflection.

  I’ve never told anybody this story. I try never to think about it. I had never before wished to do so.

  I was fourteen years old at the time. It was exactly five days after my fourteenth birthday, and seven days since I had returned home from what was then my longest inpatient stay at the real Cygnet Children’s Hospital. The reason for that extended residential stay did not belong to the usual shifts and spells of my ‘illness’. It had been caused by a single sharp shock.

  Several months prior I had gone missing for a full twelve hours — one morning I had simply failed to arrive at school, somehow wandering off or getting lost on the short walk between the bus stop and the school gates. Despite the press of other students, the crowd of uniformed teenagers who had been all around me, all heading in the same direction, there was not a single witness as to where I had gone. At eight o’clock that evening I suddenly turned up outside those very same school gates, scant feet from where I’d vanished. I was screaming my head off, scratched and bruised all over, school uniform torn and dirtied, inconsolable with terror, bleeding from my nose, from several cuts on my face, with skinned knees and lacerated hands, and totally unable to explain what had happened to me or where I had gone for those twelve long hours. My parents and the other responsible adults were mostly worried about kidnapping, about strangers in the bushes, about terrible things which might have happened to me; after all, I was physically small and mentally vulnerable, easily led and easily confused and easily lost, and oddly reticent to give any kind of coherent account to authority, legal or medical or parental.

  They had the truth from me eventually, of course, if only to put to rest all that salacious nonsense. My parents and the doctors had assured me I would not be punished, so I told them the truth. I had spent the entire day ‘hallucinating’ — one wrong step on that short walk to the school gates had transported me elsewhere, with a lurch of my stomach and a twist of my brains and a hooked barb of ashen reek in my nostrils.

  I had spent the day scurrying across a landscape of dusty hollows made from jagged rocks, filled with the dried remains of oceanic creatures both great and small, stalked by the predators which had moved in after the rolling retreat of some vast sea, leaving behind this world of desiccated tidal pools. That tide was gathering once again on the horizon — a wall of water higher than any mountain range, the colour of old blood and fresh vomit, filled with the writhing giants of an alien sea, vast shadows suspended in the vertical wave. I had spent every minute of those twelve hours racing ‘inland’, trying to reach some kind of high-water mark — to no avail, for the tidal zone went on forever and ever. Thrice I had grappled with tentacled things to which I was simply another wriggling morsel of meat. Two times haunting voices had called out to me across the dried landscape, hooting and warbling frantic alien language in the scant moments I was silhouetted against the sky. And once I had fallen, hard and chaotic, scraping my hands and knees and chin on the crumbly rock of that Outsider dimension.

  My parents and the doctors were convinced that I had spent the day wandering in a hallucinogenic daze, grazing my hands on brick walls, scuffing my uniform on ragged concrete, bloodying myself on some forgotten corner of the asphalt landscape, all while my eyes and ears had beheld nothing but the phantoms of my own brain. And I believed them, despite how real it had all felt, despite the raw terror, the scent of the ashen dust of the tidal pool world, the wriggling creatures I had peeled from around my own forearms, the way my legs quivered with a whole day of running and scrambling and crawling. I believed them, despite the small wrinkle that nobody had reported seeing me stumbling around the nearby residential streets. I believed them, because the alternative was unthinkable.

  They cared — they really, really did care. They did their best. One must try to see it from their perspective, I suppose. A thirteen year old girl had gone missing for twelve hours, and when found she had been covered in blood, her clothes torn, unable to stop screaming. What would you assume?

  It had all really happened, of course; we know that now.

  My trip to the world of empty tidal pools was the first major Slip in nearly a year, one from which I had not been able to return for many hours, which had seemed to take my physical body as well as my mind.

  I didn’t understand any of that at the time. I was mad. I had done as mad people did. I was a danger to myself. I needed help.

  The next several months of my life were spent at Cygnet, ‘under observation’, going through counselling, trying to stabilise my ‘episodes’, watching me for signs of another relapse. My parents treated this inpatient stay with great responsibility — my father became a sort of conduit for all the school work I was missing out on. They were determined to give me the best fighting chance a mad girl could have. They did what they thought was best.

  But I still went to sleep every night in a cell. A well-appointed cell, bright and modern and full of books and comforts and not the least bit threatening. But it was a cell. And every night I could hear the other girls, the other patients, crying out or screaming or sobbing, all locked in their own little cells.

  The inpatient stay ended in time for my birthday — just me and my parents, of course. I returned to school — quietly, unobtrusively, without fanfare, with faint hopes that I could rekindle the few casual friendships I had acquired. And I did, a little, enough to pass on by. There was no bullying, no overt shunning of the crazy girl, no nasty stares in the halls or cruel whispers behind my back.

  Oh, I’m sure there actually were, but I never saw or heard anything of the like. Nothing so dramatic.

  But the girl I’d had a crush on was gone.

  Her name was Sutton. She was small and quiet and extremely blonde. She was in my year, and I often saw her haunting the library at lunch or after school, the same as myself. She had a taste for history books with big serious titles, which I respected and admired, but could not quite relate to, though I was intrigued; I believe that is what I found attractive about her — the way she would smile with a dangerous little hitch in her lips when reading about the mechanics of warfare and battle. Despite this intimate knowledge of her reading material and my rather detailed observations of her facial expressions, we had never shared a single word. How cliché, how typical, I know, but it’s the unvarnished, mortifying, sordid truth. I didn’t even really know her. In my teenager’s heart, I was convinced that eventually we might meet properly, somewhere among the thin gloss of the library stacks, perhaps becoming aware of each other for the first time as we reached for the same book, and then she would look at me and we would both giggle and—

  As I said, a teenage ‘crush’, an adolescent infatuation with mere image and imagination, barely worth the remembering even a year later.

  But when I returned to school after the inpatient stay, Sutton was gone from the library, gone from our year, gone from our school, gone from Reading. Her family had moved to London to be closer to her father’s job. At fourteen, such a loss can strike a surprisingly powerful blow. Teenagers can be very silly, after all, though most would have gotten over it in a couple of weeks.

  But me? Ah, no, of course not. My madness had caused this. My broken brain had robbed me of opportunity, of agency, of chances to simply be. This was merely the first, the smallest, a symbol of the great destruction yet to come. My own insanity would rule my life and take everything from me. This I knew.

  That very same night, five days after my fourteenth birthday, long after my parents were fast asleep, I crawled out of bed. My ‘hallucinations’ — the silent crowd of what I did not yet know as pneuma-somatic life — still frightened me, especially in the dark. But fear was a poor and pitiful shadow of the melancholy in my soul that night. I crept to the bathroom and shut myself in, then turned on the light, bright and harsh.

  I stood before the bathroom mirror for a long time, looking into my own eyes. I did not examine my colourless hair or my pale complexion or the minor and meaningless blemishes on my skin. I did not judge my lack of curves or the rather sad efforts puberty was making with my chest. I just stared at — me.

  I was not beautiful. I was not even pretty. I was like a drowned rat.

  But I was all I had.

  And I looked so much like—

  “Maisie,” I whispered, as I brought my lips to the cold surface of the mirror.

  I had not whispered her name in months. The forbidden secret, the unspeakable name, the holiest of holy hallucinations, my own twin sister, the girl who never was.

  I tried to press my lips against my own cheek at first, but that didn’t work, because my reflection moved as I did; an elemental mistake in the heat of alienated passion. After a moment’s hesitation, I settled for lips against lips — knowing that I was kissing myself, not the ghost of my imaginary sister. I knew that I had to love myself, because there was nobody else to love, and I better get used to my own face, to my own lips, to the taste of myself. I was all we had.

  But the mirror was hard and cold and inhumanly smooth. I was not there. I was nowhere.

  I ran back to bed that night, crying with hot and terrible shame. I could not kiss myself, I could not touch myself. Maisie was not real. There was no reflection worthy of love, just my own inner ugliness, my own face in the mirror twisted with rage that I could not make that inner connection.

  Did I know of the guilt, back then? Not consciously, but perhaps she lurked in my heart even then, growing larger, growing stronger.

  Perhaps my abortive tryst with the mirror was our first argument, one in which she was victorious, and I was vanquished.

  But now I had won, and my prize was the real thing.

  My own lips.

  We kissed, myself and I, upon the cracked and buckled roof of the Box, surrounded by the crash and spray and churn of the waters pouring from the heart of the dream, here in this broken memory of Cygnet Asylum.

  It began with just me and one of my Abyssal Selves — soft human lips sliding against abyssal curves. She gathered up my flanks and hips and backside into her claws and crushed me against her arms and wrapped me in her tentacles as our kiss deepened. But then I began to feel my own lips — my soft, human, blood-splattered lips — as if from beyond myself, as if I was doubled somehow. Suddenly I was the one clutching my own slender shivering body in my scaled hands. I was the one breaking the kiss and passing this heaving, blushing ape on to the next mouth; I was the ape, I was the abyssal truth, I was both in one, I was all six. They passed me from hand to hand, from lips to lips — some gentle, some rougher, some biting, some cooing, some purring; I passed myself, holding myself, hugging myself, sliding swift little hands down into my pajama bottoms to make myself gasp and shiver. I brought my two halves — my most difficult division — together in the middle of six tentacles. I kissed my Lonely Self, long and slow and deep, until I could taste her tears and cry them myself; I was my Lonely Counterpart, still tortured with the belief that I did not deserve love, sobbing into a kiss delivered by myself.

  Touch and taste blurred fragile boundaries which should never have been raised in the first place. Was I the giant, with her tongue extended to allow the smaller pieces of me to touch and squeeze and caress? Or was I the little shivering ape, cradled in the tentacles of six sharp selves? Or was I the abyssal instinct and impulse and image, razor-edged and athletic, holding up the two halves as they embraced and groped and climbed a ladder toward union?

  I was all of them at once. I was. We were.

  And with a shuddering and a gasping and a quivering flex of readied flesh, we had together something very much like an orgasm.

  And then we were together again.

  We — me, us, a multitude of voices inside one mind, The Calm and the Lonely joining hands, the Guilt finally content to provide her power, and the six Abyssal Fragments lifting us all up and binding us together as one.

  We were once again Heather Morell, nine-in-one, one-as-nine, a unity of many, inside one mind.

  “Unnnh?”

  We were also waist-deep in churning seawater, rather badly bruised in several places, and bent double over a crumbling mass of cracked concrete and shattered metal. It was more than a little uncomfortable.

  Lurching to my feet was like taking flight.

  Salt water crashed and churned around a dozen legs as I straightened up and staggered back. A hundred tentacles flexed and coiled, all down my flanks and my ribs and my spine, stretching their tiny muscles, rotating little hooked barbs, tasting the salt-rich air with saw-toothed maws. Clawed hands came up before my eyes — my own hands, paw-like, webbed for swimming, each finger tipped with a beautiful black talon, clothed in skin of dark scales and thickly fluffy fuzz the colour of dawn spied through dying clouds. My tongue unrolled from my mouth, twenty feet long, brushing the sheathed razors of my teeth. My shoulders were clad in a new mantle now — the dark wing-like membranes of Homo Abyssus crossed with the golden yellow love of Sevens’ blanket, warming and coating my skin, billowing outward with the tiniest movement.

  My eyes flickered with translucent layers and water-tight secondary lids, showing the world in false colours, in the shifting kaleidoscope of heat and sound and motion; I needed only to tighten the muscles to show the truth — the great waves all around me drowning the world, the rambling buildings of Cygnet Hospital, the Box, the hills, the distant trees, all of it sized as if I was giant among a world of dolls.

  We were whole. We were leviathan. We were a hundred feet tall and built like a dream.

  For a fleeting second, we almost lost control — not in the manner of Guilt’s Rage, for she was one of us now, simply another member of a collective, and in full agreement with the rest of us. We felt the water flowing past our dozen ankles and over our dozen shins; we smelled the close and reeking air of the salt-tossed waves. Our line of sight towered over the ruined Box, over the waves, over the treetops and the roofs and the hills of the dream alike. And all this, all these details, we could see them all at once, as if from every angle at the same time. We comprehended the tiniest sluice of seawater crashing between the broken windows of the hospital buildings. We saw the individual particles of grit beneath the bare feet of one of our friends. We watched the moisture glistening on the hard white carapace of a Caterpillar bobbing in the waves. We watched a droplet of dark red blood fall from a gash on—

  Tenny’s face.

  It was Tenny who saved us, yet again, simply by her presence. We had been on the verge of observing, as the Eye observes, of giving up our specificity before the clarity and light and truth of our multiplicity.

  But Tenny was standing in front of me, in her strange and dreamlike guise of more moth than humanoid. Her insectoid legs were buffeted by the crashing waters, her big dark eyes staring at me in wary caution, as if she was not yet sure that I was myself again. Her fluffy white antennae twitched back and forth. Her curled and cat-like mouth formed a silent question.

  And blood — dark and thick and red, the colour of crushed cranberries — dripped from her cheek, where Guilt’s Leviathan had struck her.

  No. Where I had struck her.

  Tenny opened her mouth, trilling above the sound of the crashing waves: “Heath? Heatherrrrr?”

  I nodded.

  “It’s me, Tenns,” I said — and discovered my voice was a haunting call, a deep-sea voice fit for a kraken, scratchy and high and raw, yet rumbling like rocks on the sea floor.

  I loved it. I should always have sounded like that.

  “Heath!” Tenny lit up with a smile. “Heath all!”

  From somewhere off to my right, a cheer went up, tiny and tinny. My friends, my family, my companions, my allies, cheering that I had come back to my senses.

  But, before I could reach out and brush the blood from Tenny’s cheek, I realised there was something so very tiny cupped in our right paw.

  I made certain not to drop it, as I turned my palm up and uncurled my fingers.

  It was the pebble, the little speck of grit which Lonely Heather had gripped and valued so hard — which I had valued so much, and still did. We all agreed on that now. We formed a temporary pocket of flesh in our palm, to make sure we would never forget the pebble again. We tucked it in there, armoured within our flesh.

  Tenny had made us aware of the world, but the pebble made us aware of ourselves, of our sheer size now, our massive presence in the dream compared to the crashing waves, to the little crowd gathered on the nearby rooftop, to the spouts of water pumping from the ruins of the Box. The only thing bigger than us now was in the sky — the Eye, Eileen’s true body, hanging there far above the reaches of any wave.

  The water was still rising. Soon it would reach our thighs. Within thirty minutes, Tenny would have to swim. Within an hour, my friends on the rooftop would have nowhere to go, nowhere to run.

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  “The dream has to end,” I murmured, like the rumble and rush of undersea currents. “The dream has to end. It’s time.”

  I began by tidying up the loose ends, taking responsibility for the consequences of our selfish guilt.

  First — the Caterpillars. All six of the stout little travellers were still bobbing in the crashing waves about my shins, struggling to stay upright, fighting the currents, dooting and tooting either for aid or in complaint, or perhaps simply calling out to each other in encouragement and solidarity. Tenny’s tentacles were not strong enough to lift them, for though they were small, they were dense as chunks of solid lead. I stooped, cupped my hands, and lifted them each out of the water, one by one, like aiding insects who had fallen into a swimming pool. Some of them were content to be carried on the waters cupped within my hands, while others shot out sticky black anchor lines and clung to my giant fingers. I deposited them upon a rooftop — a much sturdier one than the roof on which my friends waited. All six Caterpillars formed up in a line, trumpeting their thanks, or perhaps their approval. I touched each of them with a fingertip, as gently as I could.

  Doot!

  Next — Tenny, so wronged and wounded by our claws. I felt a terrible guilt there, new and fresh, as I turned back to her, crouched and waiting in the rising waves. Her snout-like moth-face was scored by a trio of gashes from my own claws. But this guilt would not fester, this guilt would not grow; we would cradle it and coddle it and turn into it something else before it could be born. I would not pass this trauma down to Tenny. She would emerge unscathed.

  “I’m so sorry, Tenns,” I purred, my voice a rush of water in an ocean trench. “Let me kiss it better?”

  “Heath?” Tenny tilted her head, in perfect trust. She turned the wound toward me.

  I stepped forward, wading through the waters, and took Tenny’s head gently in both my clawed hands, cupping her chin and her skull. I unravelled my gigantic tongue, coated with antiseptic mucus, regenerative enzymes, stem-cell analogues, and more, more than my little monkey’s brain could comprehend. With infinite care we lapped up the blood on Tenny’s cheek, slathering her wound with our own biology, coating the lacerations with healing mucus, taking responsibility for our tantrum, our selfishness, our moment of weakness.

  Tenny shivered and flinched at the touch of my tongue. The medicine stung. But she did not pull away. When I was done, she trilled and purred and nudged her head against me.

  We hugged for a moment, tentacles around each other.

  “We love you, Tenny,” I purred.

  She trilled against my chest. That was all I needed.

  When we broke the hug, I stepped back, ready for the third and final matter before the climax of the dream — my friends, gathered on the rooftop, waving at me, jumping up and down, shouting suggestions in their tiny voices.

  “Big H! Big H! Hahaha! It’s a pretty fucking literal nickname right now, hey?!”

  “Shaman! Shaman, you have it all!”

  “Large Heather. Big Heather. I struggle to pun in the face of this magnitude.”

  “Go get her, Heather! Go get your sister! It’s what we came here for!”

  “Heathy! Heathy, dive, you can do it! You can do it! Don’t be afraid!”

  Was I afraid? Lozzie’s tiny voice carried on the salt-reeking air made me question that assumption. Was I afraid? We, who had swum the deepest reaches of the abyss, were we afraid to descend once more into the waters of our own guilt? With guilt accepted, with our selves recombined? What did we have to fear?

  “I’m not afraid!” I called back to them. “I’m not afraid! And I love you all!”

  A tiny voice called out — one I could pick out so easily from among the others.

  Raine, with both bloody hands cupped around her mouth, shouted: “We’ll be waiting for you in the waking world, Heather! Don’t dawdle, or we’ll be swimming too!”

  I almost laughed.

  Almost. A seed of doubt held us back.

  Finally — after running my eyes across each of my friends to assure myself they were accounted for, safe and sound — I turned to the Box. The building was a ruptured shell, a flowered ruin of buckled metal and burst concrete, with great gouts of gushing water flowing with incredible pressure from every gash and gouge.

  We readied ourselves. We wrapped our yellow mantle-membrane tightly about our torso and limbs, for warmth and safety and security, tucking our many tentacles close against our body for speed and grace and hydrodynamics. We felt with inner senses for the great throbbing organ of our bioreactor — triple lobes hanging heavy and hot inside our gut, like a second stomach, a knot of pure power, ready to be uncorked; we groped for biochemical control rods and slid them free, feeling the heat rise, until our belly was boiling and our skin was glowing with bioluminescent run-off. We allowed that energy to permeate our limbs, flowing into every cell, every gap between each cell, saturating every drop of moisture which made up this dream of perfection.

  We selected the largest rupture in the Box — the one through which our Guilt had been born and climbed out into the dream. We strode directly into the gushing waters; the spout crashed against my front, but the heat of our bioreactor turned the salt-water to steam, flash-boiling it in a great cloud of white. We blinked protective membranes over our eyes and closed up our nostrils, switching internal processes to anaerobic respiration. There was no need for one last breath of air, not with my soul clothed in this abyssal culmination.

  With both clawed hands we grasped either side of the rupture and pulled it wider, breaking metal and crushing concrete.

  We forced our head in first, straight into the onrushing stream of seawater. We braced our dozen legs, put all our strength into our arms, and propelled our leviathan body forward, into the water, into the breach, into the Box.

  We dived.

  Down, into darkness, debris, and discord.

  The interior of the Box was not the organic clarity of the abyss; it was a drowned maze of twisted metal, studded with sharp spears of broken steel, pockmarked by submerged icebergs of shattered glass, the aftermath of our own escape and self-pursuit, all of it pounded by the constant outflow of gargantuan pressure. Great creaking and groaning sounds filled the water, the bending of toughened metal, the buckling of tortured steel, the breaking of all these labyrinthine innards.

  We swam against that sucking current, kicking with our dozen strong legs, scooping the freezing seawater with our massive claws. We kept our sunlight yellow membrane close to our skin, Sevens’ gift and our own hard scales protecting us from the scrape and puncture of broken metal, our chitin plates turning aside unseen edges in the lightless chaos of the Box. We curled our massive form over the remains of twisted walkways and through the wreckage of broken cages, parting the glittering midnight veils of hanging fields of glass-grit with a swipe of our hands. We risked entanglement in great spider webs of wreck and ruin, worming our way deeper into the destruction, wriggling through spaces so tight that they threatened to swallow us — or spit us back out with the sheer pressure of rushing water. We encountered many smaller leviathans — still giants in their own right, but tiny compared to our size; these were the other inhabitants of the Box, swept up in our tantrum. Many of them were trapped, stuck in tiny compartments, or crushed by metal tangles which they could not extricate themselves from, or confused by their reflections in fallen glass walls, their own forms multiplied by the broken surfaces. We paused to free each and every one of these great and hidden beasts of the dream, untangling them from the ruins, shoving them toward the exit, toward freedom. None would remain imprisoned here once we were done dreaming. The pearl would be broken and emptied, at any cost.

  We swam deeper and deeper still, past the wreckage, past the ruin, to where the centre of the Box opened out into a vast vault, filled with the coldest waters in all creation.

  At the centre of that vault lay a crater of glass, the burst and ragged stump of Guilt’s Prison — the prison which still held Maisie, down at the deepest point.

  We hauled ourselves along the bottom of that vault, to the jagged edge of the crater. We pulled ourselves across that, too, across a landscape of transparent razor blades bigger than buildings. Then we paused at the edge, where even our abyssal divinity shivered at the vast emptiness of what lay below.

  A sink-hole.

  A great circular mouth yawned wide in the core of the Box, lined by the jagged remains of the aquarium glass, like giant’s teeth carved from diamond. Each tooth was the size of a mountain; the range had taken me several minutes to cross. The hole itself was wider than a city, wider than the Eye, wider than the dream. It led down into utter darkness and frigid cold. Freezing water flowed up from those depths, chilling my scales and fur and tentacles as I paused at the lip of infinity.

  It was there that I realised what Maisie had done.

  When she had made the pearl, she had turned herself into grit. But how? By hiding, from both the Eye and from all reality — by wrapping herself in layers of protection and dipping her soul down into the space between worlds, into a space so few could follow, a space into which even the greatest and most terrible Outsiders were loathe to peer too deeply, the one place Eileen would never look.

  Because I recognised that cold sea water, that stygian darkness, that infinity of oceanic potential. This was a dream, after all, filtered through the very same metaphors I had adopted the first time I had peered into the black.

  Maisie hung suspended on the edge of the Abyss.

  As I paused, crouched on the jagged lip of the crater, I realised that the broken glass of the aquarium was growing inward — creeping toward the centre of the vast hole, like a cut scabbing over. It would plug this breach eventually, this puncture wound in Eileen’s soul. The flow of abyssal waters would cease; not quickly enough to save the dream from drowning, but Eileen herself was at no risk. This abyssal abscess would not kill her. But the healing process would seal off what lay below.

  There was no time to spare, no time for hesitation. Maisie’s clock was still ticking.

  I bunched my leviathan muscles on the lip of infinity, and kicked off, diving down into the dark.

  The sides of the sink-hole fell away instantly; the secret cavity beneath the pearl opened out into endless black waters on all sides. Within seconds, the great jagged circle was nothing but a speck of lighter grey in the black, a dying star signalling the way home. Mortals, mages, the most experienced of monsters — all would have been confounded by this featureless void, and this was merely a water column suspended far above the truth of the Abyss itself. This was a vertical pocket formed by Maisie’s sacrifice, drawing the tiniest sip upward from the freezing infinity below.

  But we had swum the Abyss before. We had passed through the most powerful alchemy of the soul, brought it back to the waking world, wrought it upon our body, and survived. I was made for this place!

  So I kicked my dozen flippered legs, navigating by the subtle flow of currents across my fur and scales, by the minuscule changes in water pressure or temperature or direction, by the microscopic swirls and eddies in the black. When the water pressure increased, I armoured my skin in thicker scales and hard chitin and purged my insides of lingering air bubbles and the memory of breath. When the cold intensified, I ramped my reactor higher, flooding my veins with boiling crimson pitch, heating my flesh until it glowed. When the dark became too maddening, I burst with rainbow bioluminescence, broadcasting my intent out into the void. More than once, strange questing things ventured near to my light and my heat — visitors from the true abyss below, single tendrils which belonged to unthinkable giants, or lost predators in the barren waters of Maisie’s pearl. But when they saw what I was, they veered away; the few who did not required only a squirt of toxic ink or a cloud of electro-magnetic paralytics to encourage them to leave. I could not spare effort on blind wanderers.

  Time ceased as I descended; subjective hours passed, then days, then weeks in this freezing black, yet I knew that the surface of the dream was not yet drowned. Time itself was stretched and smeared in this place, screaming in silence as we approached the event horizon of the abyss, this lip on the infinity between worlds.

  I thought of my friends, clinging to the memory, pulling my yellow membrane tight around my flesh. This was not the abyss, I told myself. This was just a tidal pool, full of dark waters, soon to be emptied.

  That was when I discovered my passenger.

  I had almost forgotten about her, tucked into my yellow blanket when I had been divided against myself; I had carried her with me unthinkingly, down into this nightmare of freezing darkness. I found her inside my membranes now, pressed tight to my chest just over my heart, so tiny that I could have held her between the points of two claws.

  The Praem Plushie was still with us.

  The moment we discovered her we almost scrambled to a halt, swirling in the black waters, struggling with sudden panic — should I go on, should I turn back to deposit her safely where she—

  No, said the Praem Plushie. It is too late to go back now.

  But you’re not meant to be here! You can’t survive down here!

  Maids may go wherever they are needed, she told me. And plushies fight nightmares better than any other. What finer companion could you wish for this descent?

  But you—

  I am your other daughter, am I not? You named me.

  Yes! And I don’t want you to get—

  Even this, Heather, you do not have to do alone.

  I could see there was no arguing with Praem. There never had been, after all, right from the very first time we had met. Even Evelyn could not dissuade Praem from her duty and her aims. And I comforted myself with the thought that this Plushie was only part of Praem. The rest of her was on the surface, at Evee’s side. The halves would be reunited when the dream was done, and one half was with us. A good sign. Reason for good cheer.

  I swam on, growing colder and darker, sinking fast.

  Five hundred fathoms further down, I reached the first of the steel cables. It seemed to come from nowhere, anchored to the darkness itself, glittering in the pulses of my own bioluminesence, like spider silk in moonlight. Several inches thick, braided like hair, it plummeted into the depths ahead; to my leviathan size it was nothing more than a fishing line. I swam beside it for a while, then reached out and ran a hand along the cold steel length; it was taut, tight with pressure, thrumming at the lightest brush. When I severed it with a flicker of my claws, it sprang apart, each half scything off into the infinity of black waters.

  Many other cables joined the first, on all sides of me, above and below, turning the featureless void into a glittering landscape like the splayed innards of a flayed cage. The deeper we swam, the more dense the steel cables became, all leading down, all converging toward a single point, at the heart of this abscess in reality, this pearl in the dream, this secret at the core of Cygnet Asylum.

  And then we saw her.

  At first she was a pale dot at the very limit of my senses, a scrap of ragged flesh floating in the dark. I could not tell if she was moving or if she lay still, or even if she possessed a face or limbs or any semblance of humanity at all. I was prepared for anything — a blob of featureless flesh, a ghost like sodden gossamer drowned in the seas, a fragile memory which I would be forced to cradle in my giant paws.

  But this was a dream, and even victorious dreams can be cruel.

  I swam closer, slicing through the forest of steel cables with my claws, ripping open the bonds which held us apart. I kicked hard, pushing deeper, until the very core of the place was torn asunder beneath my paws, and the braided steel cage lay in ragged waves all around me, hanging loose in the black waters.

  And there she was, with her limbs bound in metal snakes, arms and legs pulled wide as if at the centre of a torture device, slack and empty in the core of her own sacrifice.

  My sister. My twin.

  “Maisie?”

  She had my face.

  Maisie Morell looked exactly like me. She was not frozen in time at nine years old, but had grown up in captivity, exactly as I had. She was not transformed into a blob, or a squid, or a bodiless spirit upon the air of Wonderland — because this was a dream, and here she had weight and heft and terrible reality. She had my soft brown eyes behind my own dark lashes, the very same neat nose above my pert little lips, set in my delicate jaw. She possessed my petite frame, my prominent collarbone, my compact, lithe, flexible limbs. She had my long, precise fingers, my downy hair on my forearms. She had my waist and my hips and my too-slender legs. She had my mousy hair — and there was the only exception, for her hair had grown long in her imprisonment and isolation, a great tail of brown which stretched far past her feet.

  Her lips were slack, her skin was pale as old milk, and her frame was painfully thin. She looked like I had, a year ago, on the verge of surrender.

  She blinked — slowly, just once, with all the energy she could muster.

  Her eyes were dull with more than pain.

  But she mouthed my name — “Heather?”

  Maisie Morell looked exactly like me. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

  I freed her from the core of her prison, gently unwinding the steel from around her legs and arms, peeling her free from the impression which her body had left in the mass of woven metal. I pulled her out, cradling her gently in the palm of one leviathan hand, for I was a giant compared to her. She lay there gazing up at me, struggling to keep her eyelids open; there was so little of her left, so little life and energy and awareness left in that body.

  But the corners of her mouth curled upward in a tiny smile. She didn’t need to speak.

  She closed her eyes after that, lapsing into catatonic unconsciousness, curled in a fetal position. Her heartbeat was weak and irregular against the palm of my hand, but it was there, and it was not guttering out or slowing down or fading into the dark.

  We had made it in time. Our twin would live.

  We cradled Maisie to our chest, as gently we could, next to where the Praem Plushie still nestled inside the yellow membrane, over the beat of our heart. With a dozen legs and one strong arm, we kicked away from the core of the prison, out of the ragged remains of the steel web, and into the open waters of the abscess. Behind us, the steel cables seemed to drop away, sinking into the black, as if sucked down into the abyss now that their purpose had ended.

  We swam — up and up and up, through the black, the cold, the pressure.

  And we realised, after hours and hours and hours of effort, that we were drawing no closer to the surface.

  A great and terrible current pulled at our ankles. All around us, the flow of the black waters had reversed direction, no longer gushing upward to drown the dream, but sucking downward, emptying this lanced boil into the infinite dark seas of the abyss. Even our leviathan strength was not enough to fight this irresistible pull, this metaphysical emptying; the best we could do was remain in place, fighting the flow of the current, until at last we would be swept down with the final remnants of the draining waters.

  A tiny grey dot still glimmered so far above us, a pinprick in the infinite black — the hole in the Box, the way back to the dream.

  It was still open, perhaps by only a crack.

  But we could not reach it, not with all our muscle, all our might, all our selves. We were nothing compared to that abyssal pull.

  Realisation was followed swiftly by acceptance. I felt no regret, no inner struggle, no emotional torture. Oh, we argued about it, of course — Guilt’s Leviathan most of all, for was this not the exact decision which we had convinced her to avoid? But it was not. This was no self-sacrifice, no act of self-destruction; we had not begun this dive expecting to fail, we had not entered this pit with the intention of our own loss, we had not gone into this for our own death. This was not self-sacrifice.

  It was simply the only way out — though the way would be exceedingly long.

  Kicking my many legs to stay suspended in the water column, I unfolded the fist which held Maisie.

  I gave her three gifts, that she might reach the surface of the dream.

  First, I opened the little fleshy pouch where I had held the pebble, so filled with meaning for us. This pebble was her, it was her in miniature, grit in the Eye. I pressed it into her hands and whispered through the waters that she must hold on tight. She squeezed both hands into fists around the pebble, even though she had not the energy to speak, nor to open her eyes.

  Second, I tore off a piece of myself — a piece of the yellow membrane, the abyssal descendent of Sevens’ yellow blanket. I wrapped it around Maisie’s tiny form, like a bubble of heat and light and life. I covered her body and her face, pressing it to her skin, enclosing the long tail of her hair. I made sure she was armoured and warmed against the cold, that nothing may touch her.

  Third, I took the Praem Plushie from next to my heart. I expected Praem to complain, but she did not. She understood this was the only way out, this was not self-sacrifice, and that this was not goodbye.

  But still, she gave us a little hug. She did not say it, but she disagreed with this decision. She wanted to stay with us.

  “No,” I whispered into the waters. “That’s why you’re going with her. Because if I can’t do this alone, somebody needs to tell the others.”

  Praem did not raise further question. I pressed her through the little piece of sunlight gold membrane I had wrapped around Maisie, until she was cradled in my twin’s arms.

  I held this buoyant bauble in a cage of my fingers, for just a moment, just long enough to feel doubt, just long enough to feel my muscles begin to weaken against the tireless rip of the current, just long enough for salt and tears to gather in my eyes.

  This was not self-sacrifice. I intended to live. I was just taking a different route home.

  But I could not be sure.

  “See you soon, sister,” we said to Maisie. “I love you.”

  Then I let go of the tiny sunlight mote, of pebble and membrane and Praem, all wrapped about my twin, about Maisie’s form, trusting to her their power.

  The mote rose rapidly, shooting up the water column like a bubble of air, natural buoyancy unmatched and untouchable by the sucking pull of the abyss. It shot upward, heading for that grey crack in the dream, that path back to my friends and allies and family. I knew they would find her, because all about us the dream was coming apart, draining into the depths, and would soon pop like a soap bubble in the dawn. Within moments, all would wake.

  But I was down in the dark, sinking fast.

  For me there was only one way out, and I might forget myself on the path.

  I stopped fighting the current, stopped struggling against the pull of the waters, stopped trying to resist the urge that had ridden me and owned me and become me since my very first taste of the truth. When I could no longer see the glimmering light of Maisie’s protective bubble, I turned in the waters, head down in the dark. I kicked hard, riding the flow, leaving the dream behind.

  For the second time in my life, I raced down past the undersea cliffs, past the point of no return, past the freezing limit of the thermocline, down into the place between worlds where all reality melted away into metaphor.

  Maisie was free.

  But I plunged into the abyss.

  she

  that chapter, early! The next chapter might maybe possibly also be going up early, but I won't know for sure until I get there, so it might be the 11th, as usual!

  Heather hasn't? She made it. She found herself. She found Maisie. And now it's time for that abyssal dive, all over again.

  kaiju Tenny, (by Clericalism), then a new interpretation of , (by sporktown heroine), and finally a , , , a sentence I never would have imagined before I typed it just now (by GhostRider!) Thank you all so much! It's all such a delight to see!

  two chapters ahead! No matter what level you subscribe at! That's about 20k words at the moment. The more support I get through Patreon, the more time I can dedicate to writing, and the less chances of having to slow down the story or get interrupted by other responsibilities. The generous and kind support of Patrons and readers is what makes all this possible in the first place! I wouldn't be able to do this without all of you! Thank you all so very much!

  Heather's long, long journey, week after week. Thank you so much! Katalepsis is for you!

  down into the abyss, for an epilogue of vast proportions ...