Shady found a lush patch of moss near the crumbling edge of the rooftop, where the broken brick and concrete parapet came apart into colorful sand and met the endless dream-ocean.

  She flopped down with a satisfied "oomph," the dream moss cushioning her massive frame like whimsical memory foam, rippling with dancing colors. Without warning, she grabbed me with her tail and yanked me onto her stomach, settling me there like I was her personal emotional support teddy bear.

  “Wa—” I voiced.

  "This is therapy!" she announced, her claws petting through my hair and sliding under my shirt. I shuddered at her touch but then relaxed as the knives that sliced me just ten minutes ago were now harmlessly soft, as soft as rubber covered in silk.

  "Pretty sure that's not how therapy works," I commented, leaning deeper into her embrace. The dream view from my Shady-couch was spectacular—an endless procession of quirky memory-islands floating past on the silver-purple ocean waves.

  "Not therapy for you," Shady clarified. "Therapy for me! After murdering my bestie too many times, I need some serious healing circles. Definitely murdered you lots last night too—can kinda taste the echo of your latent fear in my hooks. Very metallic. Like licking dead batteries except very emotional. Bleh."

  "As I said, can't remember any of it—"

  "Doesn't make it better!" she huffed. "I am remembering it. I hunted and tormented you through dream-halls like… a fuzzy Pac-Man. Tore you apart over and over while you made the most delicious screaming sounds."

  I turned my head to stare at her judgingly.

  “Delicious and disturbing,” she huffed. “It can be both. Like, my idiot hooks are part of me, but also not really. Look at that one,” she pointed. “She’s chewing a tree.”

  The Shady-hook in question was indeed chewing on a large tree branch with her skull face.

  Nexxali padded over and settled beside us, leaning against Shady.

  "Good kitten!" Shady wrapped an arm around Nexxali too, pulling her close. "So happy I found such a sweet, helpful Knight! Otherwise I'd be stuck murdering Ash every night forever, which would probably put a bigly damper on our whole relationship."

  "You probably would've figured it out eventually," Nexxali said.

  "Maybe? Maybe not? My hooks are currently more disconnected and scrambled than Ash's attempt at making eggs." Shady voiced. "They just go full murder-mode whenever they smell fear. That cannot be good for the fragile human psyche long term.”

  Around us, the various Wendigo shards settled into different activities. Some stretched out in the grass, others sat at the roof's edge watching the floating buildings drift by. One was carefully collecting cherry blossoms, cradling them like precious gems.

  A Circuit City drifted past, a grimy, red neon sign flickering.

  "Your subconscious really likes dead retail chains," Shady observed.

  "Nostalgic trauma," I said. "All the pieces of my childhood, floating away forever."

  "Deep," Shady snorted. "Very philosophical. Much metaphor."

  "Hey, uh, Princess. Why are you so different?" Nexxali’s gold eyes studied Shady. "I mean, from other Frontenachii. You're so... Local-ish? Human-adjacent? Human-flavored? How did you even meet Ash as kids? And how'd you even find this Earth? It's supposed to be outside the finite curve, impossible to reach, no?"

  Shady's claws stilled in my hair for a moment before resuming their gentle motion.

  "Oh boy, story time!" she said. "So… I was… born on Corpse-God Citadel, which, by the way, worst nursery ever. Zero stars out of ten. Would not recommend."

  "The god-corpse the Frontenachii Empress hollowed out and turned into her capital," Nexxali nodded. "Creepy place. Was there a few times for medal award ceremonies with the Third Fleet Command."

  "Super creepy! Full of freaky shit and ancient ghosts that definitely shouldn't exist but do anyway because nobody told them they couldn't." Shady rumbled beneath us. "Was a very lonely little Wendigo princess.”

  "What about your parents?" I asked.

  "Ah, parents," Shady sighed. "My mother's Arrennia Frontenachii, a pure-blood beerch, very traditional. Dumped my baby self on a few of her ancient kobolds and joined the colonial expansion, second fleet, as apparently motherhood was cutting into her terrorizing schedule. Called me an 'adequate heir' like I was a participation trophy the few times we met at dinner."

  "Harsh," Nexxali murmured.

  "Father… Quintus Frontenachii, a brilliant architect of terror. He designs the Entertainment Decks where they torture kobolds for fun and profit! Super creative guy, if you're into that sort of thing." Her voice stayed cheerful as her claws tightened slightly. "He lives in Omnithornia now, teaching at Skyfall Academy. I stayed at his mansion while I went to school there. At dinners he usually asked about my grades while ranting about designing new ways to psychologically break prey while gaining max possible experience. Family bonding!"

  A floating Sears drifted past us.

  "Anyway! After mother went to do fleet things, I mostly lived with my Great-Great-Grandmother, the Empress herself! Aconny Frontenachii. Old, dominating, powerful and batshit terrifying. A model leader. Taught me how to terrify lesser beings, proper table manners for eating your enemies, that sort of thing."

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  "The actual Empress raised you?" Nexxali's ears perked up.

  "Her servants did. I occasionally hung out with the Empress until I was seven.”

  “What happened at seven?” Nexxali asked.

  “Got… bored and started roaming around the corpse interior… and found something that completely changed everything." Her feathered tail swished. "See, deep in its innards, there are these caves… Massive hollow spaces, wellsprings filled with ever-burning shards of the Wormwood Star the Frontenachii harvest from other doomed worlds. They boil and flare in ways that make reality cry, empowering the various temporal-accelerated dimensional bubbles… Where Silicanoids assemble fleet parts and children of the Frontenachii lower ranks grow up in sealed chambers. Adults said 'never go near the burning pits because they'll melt your brain or corrupt your soul'."

  "So naturally you went straight to them," I guessed.

  "Obviously! I was seven and desperately wanted a friend…” She grinned. "I tricked my old, dumb kobold minders and snuck down to the deepest parts where time moves a thousand times faster... Found the biggest, angriest shard and wished on it like it was a birthday candle as it tried to melt my face off!"

  "You wished on a reality-rewriting fragment of the Omnid Goddess?" Nexxali asked.

  "Seemed logical at the time! If the Wormwood Star Leviathan can grant wishes to the Slayer, why not a little, lonely Wendigo girl?" She grinned. "And it worked! Sort of. The shard ignited a path, led me through the caves with an emerald will-o-wisp to… Great-Aunt Zexxia."

  "Another relative?" I guessed.

  "Yep. The weirdest one! She lived so deep in the Corpse-God that time there was accelerated over ten thousand times. She'd been down there for... honestly, who knows? Thousands of years from her perspective? Millions? She was ancient even by Omnid standards, completely mad but in that fun way where she'd forget she was torturing you halfway through."

  “Sounds like a real fun person to hang out with,” the serval commented.

  “Uh-huh.” Shady's claws resumed their petting. “Anyways… Aunt Zexxia was mad. Completely bonkers. Bonkers enough to do terrible things to other Omnids.”

  “Slayer! She experimented on other… Omnids?” Nexxali’s eyes went wide.

  “Yep.” Shady nodded. “Very extra super illegal. Very dangerous too. Her prized treasure was this… suitcase. She called him Mr. Koppernacht. Koppernacht was a Mothman. She… uhhh… turned him inside out.”

  Nexxali choked.

  “Like not just a little bit inside out,” Shady clarified. “Completely. She inverted him conceptually, unfolded him infinitely and dimensionally. She said it took her millennia of experiments to do that successfully. She also told me that Mr. Koppernacht was a very naughty boy who did terrible things. What terrible things? She couldn’t even remember.”

  “An inverted Mothman…” Nexxali repeated. “Abyss. Did she…”

  “She used him to open doors to non-doomed worlds.” Shady nodded. “Places inaccessible by normal Mothman gaters. She took me on trips and showed off her vast kobold collection. Since I found her hidey-hole, and she was suffering from memory loss, she confused me with her… daughter whom she hadn’t seen in thousands of years. She taught me how to bind her kobolds to myself.”

  “My grandparents?” I guessed.

  “Yep,” Shady said. “Your grandparents were part of her collection."

  “I see.”

  "Yep! Aunt Zexxia bonded them in the 1940s or something. She had kobolds on thousands of worlds, all from linear places the Wormwood Star couldn't reach." Shady said. "That's how I first met them! Your grandma gave me snickerdoodles and I thought they were the best thing ever invented!"

  "Grandma's snickerdoodles were pretty good," I smiled softly.

  "Exactly! Aunt Zexxia owned tons of properties through her kobolds—the Cascade mansion was just one of many. She'd visit each every few years to check on things and terrorize the locals." Her voice grew darker. "Due to her age, she was losing herself to entropic decay, her personal Incarnator wasn’t helping her. She took me across countless worlds, said she was passing on her legacy while experimenting on how well I'd do in extra-linear Aether. Really I think she just didn't want to be alone in her madness." She hugged us tighter. "We visited this Earth once a year during summers, and that's… when I met my Ashy.”

  “Dang,” Nexxali let out. "So, um, what happened to your aunt?"

  "Oh. During my last visit... to her lovely abode, she told me that she was finished with her experiments and was ready to sell the non-doomed world gate access to the Empress, so naturally… I murdered her!" Shady said brightly. "Drowned her in a boiling Wormwood Star shard well. Kicked her in and watched her age a billion years in about thirty seconds. Very dramatic! Lots of screaming. She turned into cosmic dust that tasted like regret. Then, I destroyed her hoard from within with dragonfire so none of her research would get out. I think... at least that's what I was planning to do."

  We both stared at her.

  "She was doing really bad things and was planning to do even worse things," Shady explained. "Like, even by my family's standards. Anyways, I took her suitcase for one final trip here.”

  “So where’s Mr. Koppernacht now?” I asked.

  “I dunno,” Shady said. “I probably ate him? Missing a few days from my noggin.”

  "And the fleet found you how?" I wondered.

  Shady shrugged, making us bounce a little. "No idea! Admiral probably has some fancy tracking artifact tied to the royal line. I honestly didn’t think she’d find me. Sorry to put you on the spot, Ashykins.”

  "Yep. Admiral Evelithria has mountains of tracking stones, blood compasses and astral anchors in her Fleet hoard," Nexxali listed. "If she wanted to find a wayward Princess badly enough, she'd figure it out."

  "Probably! Doesn't matter now though." Shady resumed her aggressive petting. "I'm here with my Ashy and my kitten and everything’s great!"

  We sat in comfortable silence for a while, watching dream-fragments of my childhood float past. A Chuck G. Cheese complete with the animatronic band. The public library where I'd hidden from bullies. The tree where Shady and I carved our names into the bark.

  Nexxali began humming softly to herself, the notes haunting and soft.

  "Composing a new song?" I asked.

  "Mmm… No. I'm doing an inception of understanding of my feelings," she said simply, pausing her humming.

  “Come again?”

  “I'm using Riffweld on myself to deepen my care for you and Shady.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I'm so romantically incompetent that I need to use magic warfare tactics just to express myself properly," the serval explained. “Duh.”

  I frowned. "Wait, if you can just... incept feelings into yourself… Did you charm yourself into caring for us?"

  “Nu. Her feels are plenty real and yummy,” Shady commented. “My hooks are very hard to trick.”

  Nexxali's hummed a bit more.

  "It's nothing new," she shrugged. "I've been charming myself for decades. Every night, I used my voice on myself to wobble my blood contract chains and also make myself feel okay about another day of cleaning up Frontenachii messes. 'You're fine, Nexxali. You're valued. You're not just a tool. You're definitely not pathetically lonely.' Over and over, like the world's saddest motivational speaker living in my own head, messing with myself in my dreams."

  "Hrm. That's..." I started, but didn't know how to finish.

  "Pathetic?" She shrugged. "Yeah, I know."

  “Maximum sadge feels,” Shady commented, hugging Nexxali. “Cat needs much circle therapy too. Circle therapy for everyone!”