ONE FINAL BIT of explanation. You might be wondering what the spirit did to Yumi and Painter.
Well, by building that Connection between them, it protected Yumi.
For when she was in spiritual form, she was immune to the machine’s touch. (Much like the hion lines.) The spirit who Connected them hadn’t had a plan beyond this: the hope that Yumi, once protected, would be able to help. The spirit hadn’t actually expected Yumi and Painter to begin swapping—but when you play with things like Spiritual Connection, irregularities pop up.
This meddling by the spirit placed the machine in a predicament.
Suddenly one of the yoki-hijo couldn’t have her mind erased. While machines can’t generally plan, they can assess a situation in all of its complexities and quickly devise a solution. The solution in this case?
To keep the narrative going. To let Yumi “travel” to a new town each day and simply continue her life.
Thus, as she slept, it evaporated the previous town and created a new one using imprints left long ago on the shroud. At first, it thought creating a new town for her each day would be enough.
However, she refused to move on. She stayed in that second town for weeks, acting irregularly. The wrongness compounded, and the machine reassessed. Yumi was dangerous, and there was something distinctly odd about her behavior. So the machine called upon its most dedicated servants, the scholars: its creators. They had been kept apart from the soup of the shroud and held in reserve, their wills dominated but their minds left partially free, for just such a situation.
The scholars had been sent, therefore, as agents. They’d played a role like everyone else, reenacting things they’d done seventeen hundred years before. Showing off their machine prototype to the small towns. However, they’d come with a secondary mandate: to discover what was wrong in the town and to fix the problem, no matter what that required.
That brings us, finally, to the present. Where Yumi had a different problem. The tree she was flying on was made from the shroud.
That made sense to her. The buildings hadn’t been real, nor had the people. Why would the plants be real? It had all been a charade orchestrated to control her. Better if every element, then, could be controlled exactly.
As she rose higher in the air, the tree started to warp beneath her fingers. Wisps of smoke began to trail from it. Being created from the shroud, the tree was subject to her enemy’s control—which meant the machine could make its form vanish back into the shroud.
Something it was starting to do, if more slowly than the machine would have liked.
She soon hit the invisible wall around her little town. Here the shroud had been painted to give the illusion of a landscape extending forever. Once she touched it, that wall warped and bent—letting her pass through. For the first time in almost two thousand years, she physically left that pocket of land and entered the shroud proper.
The darkness was strangely transparent to her. (And she didn’t even have to burn tin.) Perhaps this was because she was made of its same substance. Once she was within it—hovering on a tree that was shrinking by the minute—she saw a dark and ruined landscape below. Nothing growing—just dark stone that had been hidden from the sun for millennia. Behind her, the town faded. She could see it retreating, a column with a dome on top. A piece of her broke when
she realized even the sunlight she’d basked in and loved—even the sight of the daystar itself—had somehow been fake. (She was wrong, by the way. The sunlight, actually, was real—the domes over the cities let sunlight through in one direction without allowing light back out the other way. So while what she felt was authentic, those of us surveying the world from above didn’t spot these prisons. In addition, the heat from the ground was real, created by the machine using a concentration of Invested essence.) From this height, Yumi could make out other dome-topped columns in the distance. These too were transparent to her eyes, lights standing out like candles on a dark night. The prisons of the thirteen other yoki-hijo. And in the middle of it all, a brilliant larger light that she figured must be Torio City, the capital. Home of the festival. Seat
of the queen.
Yumi was drifting away from it.
That was a much smaller problem than the fact that her tree was unraveling faster now—joining with the smoky blackness. Beneath her, dark shapes gathered. The scholars had not given up. Indeed, she flew like a banner out here, hard to miss. She started to drift downward as her tree continued to cease being a tree. She clung to it, eyes closed, resting her forehead against the wood.
Please. Please, spirits. Let it continue.
The bark beneath her forehead hardened. The tree stabilized in the air. Yumi opened her eyes, surprised—and embarrassed by that surprise. She’d prayed. The spirits had answered. It was just…she didn’t usually see them answer so quickly… She started to fall again, the tree unraveling.
No! she thought. And again it recovered. Because…Because what I believe to be true is true, Yumi realized. This tree is created from the shroud. And by thinking of it as something else, I can force that to be the reality.
As she thought this way, the tree indeed became even more solid.
And the wind, Yumi thought forcefully. I am lucky. Because it blows the right direction.
The tree shifted in the wind, turning the way she needed it to go, toward Torio City. Toward the machine.
AN HOUR LATER, painters gathered at the western edge of the city, laying down stacks of canvases and large jars of ink. Favors had been cashed in. Promises given. Debts incurred. In total, thirty-seven had come.
Painter watched it all with excruciating anxiety, worried that the assault would come while they were still preparing. But now that he had them all organized—a good ten to fifteen percent of the city’s total painters—he found himself overwhelmed with gratitude. His friends had not gone halfway in their efforts. It was still a small force, considering what was coming. And not one of them save him had any experience painting stable nightmares.
But it was a far, far cry from where he’d been before, standing here alone.
“All right, Akane,” a lanky painter called. “What are we doing here again?”
“Waiting,” she said. “Something might be coming. Something dangerous. Have your paints ready.”
The others settled in, chatting in groups, some sitting with their backs to the wall of warehouse buildings around the city. Painter turned his eyes to the shroud and waited.
And waited.
And waited.
A full hour with all of them gathered there, grumbles increasing. His anxiety rising. What if he’d picked the wrong location? What if the others got bored and left right before the attack happened?
What if… While Tojin placated one of the leaders among the other groups.
Akane walked up, hands clasped behind her back. She looked tired.
“Nikaro,” she said, “is your sister safe? Please tell me she’s staying, for once, in your room.”
“She’s…not going to be painting. I will explain eventually, but you don’t need to worry about her.” I’ll do enough of that for all of us.
Telling the truth was one thing. Explaining what had been happening with him and Yumi…well, that would have to wait. Akane glanced out at the shroud, concern written across her face. Then she looked back at him. “Tell me again what we’re waiting for?”
“They’ll come,” Painter promised her before she could continue. “A hundred nightmares. It’s going to happen.”
“It’s all right if it doesn’t, you know.”
“You all put your reputations on the line for this,” Painter said. He’d noticed the glares from some painters as they realized he was involved. The others had left his name out of the recruitment efforts.
Wisely.
She shrugged. “Like Tojin said. We might get embarrassed for a little while. Nothing we can’t live down.”
“Akane,” he said, “I know it sounds strange, but I did speak to a nightmare. I…I can’t explain it all. I promise though, this is really
going to happen.”
“And…if it doesn’t, Nikaro?”
“I wouldn’t lie to you,” he said, his voice strained. “Not again.”
“I’m not saying you would,” she whispered. “But Nikaro, what if… maybe you imagined it. What if you…need help? Because sometimes, things you want to be real feel real?”
“I—”
“Please,” Akane said. “Consider it.”
He forced himself to. For her; for the effort they’d given him. He closed his eyes, and actually wondered. The things he’d experienced seemed so incredible, even outlandish. There was an easy explanation.
He’d wanted so badly to be someone special. He’d viewed himself, all these months, as a lone warrior wandering the night, looking for people to save. Could he have just…made it all up? Formed everything out of the shroud? Or even worse, simply imagined it?
He rebelled against the thought, but a calmer part of him—the part that had survived the shame of his previous lies—stood fast. Willing to examine this. If it was true, if he’d devised all of this, then Akane was right. He needed help. It wasn’t a lie, or even a moral failing, to admit that.
“If it turns out,” he said, opening his eyes, “that nothing comes of this…then yes, Akane. I’ll get help.”
She nodded toward the others. “Why don’t I tell them this was a drill of sorts? Us trying to figure out how quickly we could gather a force to protect the city in an emergency.”
“No,” Painter said, taking her arm. “Don’t lie to them. If you decide you need to dismiss them…tell them the truth. That you were humoring me. In remembrance of our former friendship.”
She hugged him then.
“I’m truly sorry,” he whispered, holding to her. “About everything I’ve done. Said. And the things I haven’t said most of all.”
“We know,” she said, pulling back. “I can’t speak for the others, but I forgive you, Nikaro. I know you didn’t want to hurt us.”
He smiled.
“Uh, guys?” Masaka said, hurrying over. “Have you ever seen it do
that before?”
Painter turned.
The shroud was undulating. Agitating, frothing.
“Grab your things!” Painter shouted. “They’re coming!”
People scrambled to their feet, gaping. Stunned.
As the nightmares began to emerge.
YUMI KNEW, AS she approached Torio City, that she needed to let the tree land.
She couldn’t defeat the machine while dealing with the nightmares who were still down there hunting her. She needed to confront them first. Instinct propelled her, but also good logic. Because she remembered something Design had told her.
Her tree floated down, unraveling as it lowered. As she landed, she stepped free, allowing it to vanish fully. Four ghastly figures stood before her, blocking the way into Torio City. All around was eternal night, barren stone veiled by a pervasive black smoke.
The four nightmares came for her and slammed their claws into her. Seeking to draw out her strength, to sap it, to freeze her.
But she was stronger than they were.
You could consume them.
As they tried to pull her strength away, she simply…refused.
“I am the one who the spirits chose,” she said, feeling their claws pass through her harmlessly. “I am the thing you had to lock up.”
They stumbled back from her, shrinking. As nightmares sometimes do when no longer feared.
“I am the one that nightmares fear,” she said, imagining them.
Knowing them for what they were. Forcing the figures to coalesce into four spindly scholars. “And you shall bow to me.”
Color flooded them and they gasped, falling to the ground.
Yumi walked to the lead scholar, who sat up first, looking at her with frightened eyes. She didn’t attack him though. She sat before him in a pose of meditation.
“Tell me,” she said softly, “how to destroy the machine.”
“You…” He glanced toward his colleagues, who lay in a lump. “You can’t. I’m sorry.” He bowed his head and began to shake. “I’m sorry… Oh, what have we done? What have we done…”
“It’s all right,” Yumi said. “What has happened is in the past. I am the yoki-hijo. My word is law. You may rest, once this is through.”
“Thank you,” he said, taking her by the hand. “But you can’t stop it.”
“There is no need to protect the machine. You are free from its control. It cannot hurt you, no matter how much it wants to.”
“You don’t understand,” the scholar said. “It doesn’t want anything.
It’s not alive.”
“But the way everyone has acted,” she said. “Something is controlling them.”
“That is because of the instructions we gave the machine,” he explained. “We built it to protect itself and to harvest energy from the spirits. These are not the machine’s wishes, any more than a tree wants to grow. But once it started drawing on us, on all of us…we defended it because…because we were then part of it somehow.”
She frowned, looking beyond him into the city. A shining, beautiful city full of buildings like towers, with fountains, trees, red roofs, and sculptures of dragons. Empty of people.
“It uses our souls as energy,” she said.
“Originally it did,” the scholar said. “Now it uses the spirits, which are trapped eternally to fuel the machine. Oh…what have we done?”
“Our people became but memories,” another of the scholars whispered, eyes down. “Their souls as smoke.”
“Our shame,” another said. “Our sorrow. Powered perpetually by the spirits now, the machine will never run out, never shut down on its
own.”
“We must turn it off,” Yumi said.
The lead scholar shook his head. “It is shielded. Protected as per its core instructions. There is no plug or hion line to remove. It self- perpetuates, fed by thousands of eternal spirits. I’m sorry. I wish… wish we could have left you alone. It’s incredible that you made it this far.”
“But worthless in the end,” another scholar said. “It will wipe out the city of Kilahito now. Any trace of what happened with you and that boy will be annihilated.”
“No,” Yumi whispered, standing. “My world. My rules.”
She stepped forward and commanded her nightgown to change.
Black smoke swirled and she emerged from it wearing the dress that Akane had bought her.
She strode past the scholars, and at long last—seventeen hundred years after the first time she asked Liyun for the privilege—entered
Torio City.
And found rubble.
“NIKARO!” A SHRILL voice shouted.
He tore away from his current painting, leaving a nightmare on the ground, curled up in the shape of a sleeping cat. The painters had formed an irregular circle, shoulder to shoulder—but some faltered.
Painter rushed across the center of the circle, to the side of a painter he barely recognized. She was breaking, trembling, turning away from the nightmares in a panic.
Painter stepped in and slammed the tip of his brush down, ignoring her canvas. With a powerful swirl, he created a flower on the ground itself—a lotus, floating, opening its many petals to the air like a fist unclenching.
The nightmare shrank into the shape, forced to conform to his will.
But like every other nightmare they’d faced tonight, it didn’t evaporate away as usual.
In all honesty, the painters probably should have been slaughtered.
But the machine was distracted by Yumi, and the nightmares were momentarily confused, surprised at the unexpected resistance. They prowled around the ring, looking to feed on the painters, but not rushing in a throng to attack. That didn’t make it easy on Painter and his team, as the nightmares were terrifying and mostly stable. But these minutes of confusion made resisting them possible.
Still, the humans were not prepared for such a fight as this. They had to ward away each nightmare that came close—had to face down stable monsters and not break. They painted with trembling hands, and kept stopping and staring, panicking. Painter had to watch for this, because he had a sense the sole thing keeping them alive was this unified front. This collective force of painting, not allowing any one nightmare to attack the circle and break it completely. Even as he finished his lotus, he noticed Izzy freezing in terror.
Painter shoved her aside and attacked her nightmare with a painting. “Hold the circle!” he shouted as he crafted a bird, seeing that in the shape of the nightmare. It looked a little like the great ravens he’d seen in Yumi’s world. “Keep painting! See how most of them mill around, distracted by our work. They cannot take us so long as we are painting! You’ve fought nightmares before. These are the same!”
But they weren’t. These were bigger, their forms more terrible.
Those eyes like the hollow insides of bones. The scraping of claws on the ground. Worst of all, none of them vanished when painted. They shrank down, but smoldered there like embers—then started growing again once attention was no longer on them.
Paintings alone weren’t enough to hold these. His one consolation was that instead of continuing in through the city, the monsters had surrounded the circle. For now, Kilahito was safe. But as Painter finished helping Izzy, a scream rose from across the circle. He spun to find Nanakai—a painter in her forties—falling in a flash of blood as a nightmare seized upon her nervousness and pushed forward, attacking.
Two others grabbed her as she stammered on the ground, staring with horror at the gouges across her side and arm. Painter had to leap over her and hold the line, but he needed to capture three nightmares at once. And so, without thinking, he defaulted to bamboo. Simple bamboo.
In that moment, it was actually what he needed. It froze all three nightmares briefly, long enough for someone else to step in and help.
He couldn’t stop the entire army himself. He couldn’t stop them at all, not permanently. It was only a matter of time.
RUBBLE. THE BEAUTIFUL city she’d seen outside was an illusion, a veneer painted on the surface of the wall protecting the place.
Perhaps that was how it had once looked, hundreds of years ago.
Now Yumi walked amid fallen stones and crumbling walls. Roofs had long since decayed away. Turned out she couldn’t visit Torio City itself. Only its grave.
One structure remained at the very center of the city. Yumi imagined it as a grand exhibit hall, with banners out front for the festival of the spirits. Where the scholars had unveiled their amazing new project: a machine that could summon spirits and provide a new
form of energy. Hion.
It would change the world.
From the top of the steps, Yumi turned to gaze out through the shroud. In the distance glowed the points of light spaced around Torio City.
“It cannot defeat us like the others,” she whispered to herself.
“Remember that.” She stepped inside the building.
The machine was there, dominating the interior like a fat mushroom overgrowing all its siblings. Fully thirty feet tall, with hundreds of legs, it piled stones on all sides in an eternal process—other legs knocking them over as it went. It would have long since broken down, but Investiture—the smoke—repaired each worn joint, replaced each cracked limb. It was, you might say, an undead machine.
Thousands of spirits surrounded it, just beyond the ring of stones.
Shimmering entities of liquid light, blue and red in swirls. Imagine
them like frozen orbs of water, yet undulating, moving in a rhythm.
Like an audience at a concert. Or a sermon.
Yumi steeled herself and stepped forward…before planting face- first into an invisible barrier right inside the doorway.
She pressed her hands against it, then looked through, trapped outside. This place was shielded, as the scholars had said.
“WE CAN’T HOLD these!” Tojin shouted, pulling Painter by the arm. “It’s not working! They recover after we paint them!”
Painter glanced toward the center of the circle, to where six of their colleagues now huddled with various dire wounds, bleeding out blood like ink on the ground. One woman wasn’t moving at all. Others groaned in pain.
Nightmares had flooded the street around them—a churning, seemingly endless mass of black punctuated by those sickly white eyes. Pressing in, shrinking the circle. Growing increasingly bold as they recovered from their momentary confusion.
The painters were running out of canvases. The ground was covered in ink, such that stepping was slick.
“What do we do?” Tojin asked, panicked. “Nikaro, what do we do?”
“We paint.”
“But—”
“We paint!” Painter shouted. “Because if we do not, they get into the city. Without us, the people die.”
“The people ignore us!” another cried. “They turn off their lights.
They sleep.”
“Because they can’t do anything else,” Painter shouted, starting his next painting. “We are the line between their fears and their flesh. We are the Dreamwatch now.”
“We are the Dreamwatch now,” Tojin said, raising his brush. “We are the Dreamwatch now!”
Others took up the cry as a particularly large nightmare loomed over the group. At least fifteen feet high, but familiar.
Yes. Familiar.
Lupine. Smoky shape like jagged edges of glass. Liyun was here… Liyun. Painter’s eyes widened.
That was the answer.
YUMI KNELT, DEFEATED, at the invisible barrier surrounding the machine’s hall.
Rocks bounced off the shield when she tried to break it down. Her
shouts did nothing.
All this way. For nothing.
Pain stabbed at her. But not her own. She frowned and stepped back outside to look…toward something?
Painter, she thought. She could feel him, faintly. The Connection
had not been entirely severed.
He was frantic, fighting.
Nightmares will come. Endless nightmares. To destroy him, and all he knows. All that he might have told.
It was not a thought but an impression. Knowledge of what the machine would do to protect itself. The scholars weren’t completely right about it having no will. Any object as Invested as it was would take on at least some trappings of self-awareness.
Painter would die. If he survived this first wave of nightmares, others would come. Thousands upon thousands, until Kilahito was rubble.
Yumi turned back to the awful machine, tears in her eyes. It, in turn, continued its eternal stacking. To it, one pile was the same as another. Things to build, knock over, then build again. The walls inside, the floor, much of the stone beneath had been chopped up to continue feeding its efforts. Beneath lay the sand its earlier stones had become over the centuries.
It didn’t care what it made. All it did was keep going, maintaining its
hold on the spirits for power.
It didn’t care.
Yumi stalked away from the hall of the machine and down the steps, dress flowing and rippling in the wind. At the grand courtyard in front—once magnificent, now rubble—she knelt.
And started stacking.
PAINTER DIDN’T TRY to force Liyun’s nightmare into the shape of a bird, or cat, or even bamboo. He didn’t look at the shifting darkness to find some vague impression. He didn’t need that crutch. He knew what she was.
He knew her. Stern and unyielding, yet deep down just wanting to help. Those frown lines, those twin blades of hair, that bell-shaped dress… He didn’t look at her as he painted, but he felt the effects of what he was doing as the others nearby muttered. You weren’t supposed to paint nightmares as people. A person could still kill you. The goal was to pick something innocent, harmless.
Liyun was anything but harmless. Yet he knew this nightmare at its core. That changed everything. As he finished his canvas with a flourish, he looked up to find her kneeling outside the ring of painters.
Hands stained by the ink on the ground, gasping for breath.
And as Painter grabbed another canvas from their dwindling stack, Liyun did not revert back to a terrible monster like the others had. The
nightmares were people.
He needed to treat them as such.
STACKING.
You might not call it an art.
You might find it the strangest idea. This is what Yumi’s people revere? This is what they consider the highest aesthetic achievement of their culture? This?
Yet all art is meaningless without those to admire it. You don’t get to decide what constitutes art. But we together do.
They’d taken Yumi’s memories from her. Fortunately, as I’ve said, some things run deeper than memory. In many ways, despite the centuries, she was still a girl of nineteen. Her lived experience and her maturity aligned on that count.
But her skill…well, that had been growing. Day after day. Year after year. Ability distilled, like water drops forming stalactites through the course of primordial eons, she’d built something inside herself.
She wasn’t just good at stacking.
She wasn’t merely a master.
Yumi was literally the best who had ever lived. With twenty or more lifetimes’ worth of practice.
When she let loose, everything changed. For in her was a power far beyond that of hion.
PAINTER DIDN’T KNOW the other Torish people as well as he did Liyun, but he had painted some of them recently, during meditations. He started there, with broad sweeping lines, crafting the shape of the town mayor.
Out among the sea of nightmares, one changed. Transforming, becoming himself again. With a shout, Painter got several others to paint the nightmares between him and that one, shrinking them so he could see it better. As the details manifested, he was able to get more accurate.
The nightmare wanted to be a person again. Painter could feel it, and as he outlined the general shape, the mayor fed him other details. Until Painter left the balding man huddling on the ground, terrified and cold, but also harmless.
It was a slow process. But the others took heart as they saw what was happening—that somehow Painter had found a way to make progress, instead of just treading water. They surged with strength, Tojin and Akane calling encouragement, holding back the tide— freezing each nightmare in turn as it tried to break through. Giving Painter room.
One at a time. Person after person. He shrank them down to themselves. Until, exhausted—his fingers cramped, his arms aching —he gave a final flourish to finish Hwanji’s hair, and dropped her to the ground. He blinked to realize that the street outside the city had fallen still, save for the moans of the wounded painters and the exhausted sighs of the others.
It was over. Somehow, they’d done it. They’d finished their painting —and in so doing were left with a hundred very confused, very cold Torish townspeople.
Painter let his brush tumble from his fingers and clatter to the stone. He looked west, toward the shroud. Through it. Toward someone he felt beyond.
Someone who was concentrating with incredible focus.
