Penny sat in the car for a half hour that morning. No one was going to miss her in the house, although Wolfe had given her a pat on the way out. Penny took this as a sign that he would, indeed, be somewhat upset if she died in Dolora today, but it also might have been one of his infamous subtle assertions of dominance. One day, Penelope was going to assert her dominance so hard that that man would never touch her again. Maybe she would get up on a stool and just stand over him until he was uncomfortable.

Yeah, that would show him.

Penny turned as her mom entered the car, looking unsettled. Ms. Whittaker leaned against the seat. Penny closed her eyes. Cue sigh. On command, Ms. Whittaker let out a defeated sigh. Penny gripped her hand, hard, because there was nothing else she could possibly have done.

"Everything's okay?" asked Penny.

Ms. Whittaker looked over at her daughter. "Of course. I'm just worried about all this."

"Well, you shouldn't be," Penny said, trying to move from the shotgun seat into a position where she could see out of the car and around her mother. "No matter what else happens out there. This is the one thing that you should be anti-worried about. Where's Guinevere Pendragon?"

"Gramma can't come today," said Ms. Whittaker.

"Oh," Penny said. She paused. "What's going to happen if I get hurt?"

"We'll have you out within the hour. You remember how to get a distress signal across to Julia?" asked Ms. Whittaker.

"Yes. It's the same protocol I use with Kenji," Penny said. "Three Ps."

"Protocol," whispered Ms. Whittaker. She suddenly enveloped Penny in a maternal hug, clutching her so tight Penny thought the air might be stricken from her lungs. She replaced whatever she'd lost with a deep breath of her mother's shirt, which smelled familiar and warm in a way nothing else could. "Penny, you're just twelve. We don't have to do this yet."

Penny removed herself. Maybe that'd been too affectionate, or she'd looked pathetic, or something stupid like that. Insistently, she pressed, "Yes, we do. It's what I was meant to do. It's in my blood." She'd heard someone say something like that in a book about their magical destiny, and it sounded cool, and more importantly, it sounded right.

Ms. Whittaker put the keys in the car.

"Kenji's more dangerous, anyways."

"Penny." Ms. Whittaker warned. "If you're trying to make me less nervous, what you're doing right now is not helping."

Penny shrugged. Most of the ride was done in more or less silence, glossed over by the dulled hum of the radio. Penny didn't like pop music that much, and neither did her mom, yet they always seemed to end up playing it when they were in the car. Sometimes they'd catch a song Melody, the music muse of Penny's generation, had worked on, and you could tell those were hers. They poured through the speakers, like cheese coming out of a grater.

Penny's nose wrinkled up. She figured she'd better have better figurative language than that when she was working with Julia.

"And we're here," said Ms. Whittaker, opening the car door. "The Pendragon taxi service has been happy to serve you, my lady."

"Mom," groaned Penny. "I'll talk next time, but you were being weird and awkward too. Anyways, what was I supposed to do? Ask about... ask..." Penny caught the concern in her mother's eyes and waved herself down. Ringing the doorbell, she concluded, "Things are fine. Forget about it."

"Pen-pen! You're here!" Julia opened the door and crushed Penny in another deadly tackle. This time, Penny did fall down the stairs, and things almost turned out terribly, if not for a midair glasses clutch by Penny. It was the most harrowing thing that had happened to her thus far in Julia's residence, and she had been held against the wall by a monstrous scorpion-human hybrid in a country town on a continent that didn't exist.

That had been fun.

"We should go," Penny said. She flexed her fingers to crack all her knuckles, which didn't do anything, strictly speaking, but it felt proper to do before getting down to business.

"Can we talk first?" asked Julia. "In the basement. Like, alone?"

Ms. Whittaker looked down at her daughter, trying to guess if she should be evaluating her as an adult on a job or as a twelve year old girl. "As long as you girls don't do any... musing... while you're downstairs, I can't really deny you your privacy. You're a big kid, Penny. I don't have to watch over your shoulder."

Well you're here, so you are, and I'm not just your daughter, I'm the heiress of an ancient bloodline, so maybe you do, Penny thought, but outwardly she just hugged her mom for being a good sport before following Julia into the basement. Julia turned a right into her room, which was the only other room on the floor besides a den and a sizeable closet. Penny was a little baffled by this, but she'd learned to hold her tongue when it came to people who didn't live in mansions. It must've been so much easier to get around, yes, but where were the secret passages?

Julia sat on her bed with her computer out, slumped slightly. Light fell on her face as if through a windowpane, softer on her than on Penny's cousins. Her dark hair lay gracefully around her shoulders, but her dark eyes were concerned, and it pulled at her entire expression.

Penny sat down besides her. "Is something wrong?"

"I wanted you to see it, before we got to it," Julia said. "Here, look at this."

It was pages of prose. They'd written at least five together, which was far longer than it had felt to Penny, given how quickly she ducked out and how short the scene was. "That's it?" Penny asked. It wasn't perfect, but she'd definitely been exaggerating some of the issues she'd seen in-book.

"I know it's not much," Julia said, defensively.

"No! I mean-- no!" Penny said. "It's just weird looking at it from this angle. I thought it had been so much less, but look at that." She put her hands to the page. Death had its scythe around... There it was, to the line. There was the bartender, not much later, and she translated perfectly. It was a pristine piece of work.

Julia pulled up another page of writing. "This is from four days ago, not long after you left. It's what I did without you." This was significantly messier. From an obvious glance, there was a smattering of unnecessary semicolons and run-ons, but there was also an obvious unsteadiness to the prose. Sentences were either too short or too long. Irrelevant detail spanned pages, not scene-setting, but rather just menial character motions, as if everyone was twitchy. Metaphors came off the wrong way. It was the literary equivalent of waking up in the morning with serious bedhead.

"Oh," Penny said. "You know, if you don't want to do this again, we don't have to. There have long been reports of people who find it harder to write when they're not being inspired. I don't want that for you. You're young, and your talent still needs to develop on its own, without my help, but I just thought your world was cool, and I wanted to make something beautiful, together." Please don't cut me out.

Julia shook her head. "I think I'm learning from this. There are bits and tricks that I get from you, and--" She paused. "Oh no, this is selfish."

Penny blinked. "You can tell me anything. We're a team, Julia."

Julia smiled. "I want to be your first novel, Penny Pendragon."

Penny smiled back, if only because she didn't know what kind of expression to pull. There was a warmth to the words she hadn't anticipated, and Julia released the sheets (when had she started grabbing them?) and closed her laptop. She tilted her head towards the stairs, where surely, the grownups were having lazy conversation on the couch. It was like having conversation in the coffee room while working on Project Manhattan, sure, but you could pull off small talk anywhere if you were Ms. Whittaker. Penny respected that about her mom.

"Are you ready?" asked Julia as she sat down on the upstairs couch.

Penny patted her shoulder, then winked at her mom. Hopefully that was a 'reassuring gesture', and not an indication that she was about to do something incredibly stupid. "I was born ready."

The world fell around them as Penny dove into the book. It was a lot faster this time, and she cut the sky with her wings, finding herself on an altered plane. There was grass here, and brush, although there were still no trees. She scanned the world for her protagonists, but a warm breeze nudged her head in their direction at once. She followed the wind down, which was even easier when flying, and her wings tucked back in as she landed in the grass, safely out of earshot.

Guinevere had mentioned sigils for silence. Penelope's blade shortened into something more akin to a drawing utensil, and she sketched out a quick glyph on her legs. She stomped on the ground once, for good measure, but there was no resulting sound. It was les that she'd made herself silent, and more that she wasn't supposed to be there, so she had just created the sound that there was supposed to be, that is, none, in place of the sound she would otherwise be creating. Guinevere could do invisibility, too, but Penelope wasn't sure she would come back if she tried to flicker out of existence now.

"Kai?" called Alisha. "Can you help with the firewood?"

There was a fwoosh as Kai's runes lit up red and when he was finished there was an intense, crackling fire, which the three of them were sitting around. He leaned over it. Arwen, who was slumped up against a bush, and Alisha, who was leaning on the bags, were sitting further away, but both of them looked amicable. It was different from seeing them in battle, but they still clustered close to each other, sitting on the side of the flames where the smoke was rising.

"Reminds me of home," Kai said.

"Which?" Alisha said.

Kai looked at the smoke. "The night they burned the palace down. That home."

Ah, Penelope thought. Background chapter. It wasn't the action-packed bit she'd gotten yesterday, but there was something comforting about being there, with them, even if she couldn't really be with them. The warmth of the fire permeated the air in the way one imagined real fires to act, rather than how they physically did.
Alisha currently wasn't manifesting arms, but she leaned her head against Kai. The wandering prince leaned back, looking more like a child than the adult he'd had to become. Kai continued, "I was up in the north for a while, waiting for good news, and I couldn't bring myself to strike up a fire the whole time I was there. I was oft cold, regularly frustrated, and I almost had to amputate some fingers."

"Could've fetched a pretty price for those," Alisha said.

"The gods don't like mutilated organs, and they like them fresh. I must've been miles and miles from the nearest known fount at the time. Anyways, I said nearly," Kai wriggled ten intact fingers, all of which were calloused or in some way afflicted by years of travel and hard labor. He looked to the flames. "Strange to have the Blazing Lady for a campmate tonight, when she's so long been my mortal foe."

Julia, you're switching between vernaculars, warned Penelope.

"It's not that cold tonight. We can put the fire out if it's bothering you," insisted Arwen.

"I overcame that trouble when I got the runes. I swore I'd turn the flames back on them. For a while, I imagined little else but seas of fire devouring their sorry bodies."

"And now?"

"Now, I suppose I like keeping warm." Kai scooted closer to the flames. Alisha almost fell, but he dragged her back up, too. Arwen moved in closer, so that they were all leaning on each other again. "Not that I don't have other ways to do it. Other, potentially vastly superior ways, as I'm sure you'd all agree?"

The three of them shared a good-natured laugh. They sat there for a while after, just drinking in each other's presence. It was uncanny how well they seemed to be able to communicate without talking, and Penelope leaned into it, too, from her little place on the outskirts. She could feel the warmth of the fire as if it were against her own face, brushing her own skin. The prose was doing a wonderful job of getting across the inherent comfort of the scene.

She hated putting it like that. Sometimes, doing all the analysis felt like creating magic from the raw materials of the prose, but sometimes, it felt like she was trying to put a unicorn in a cell. Some things just had to be.

"What was it like for you, at the Fount?" asked Alisha, as the fire quieted to a dull hiss of crackling wood and grasses.

"Noise," Kai said. "More noise than all the worlds possess, hundreds of voices, from noble down to the vagabonds who crouched at our doors, begging mercy from gods who could no longer save them. Then the world cried back for all the bodies, and all the souls resting inside them like yolks inside an egg, spilled into a golden mess and then burned to cinders. I felt something heavy on my back, as if all their blood was being poured out onto me, and then, someone told me in a voice like the sky, that that's what had happened, and although I had killed no man and severed no part of my body, the gods would be accepting my sacrifice, and in the stead of hundreds, they made me."

Alisha and Arwen drew closer. It was a telling they'd both heard before, Penelope could tell by the looks of their eyes, but Julia had wanted it down in writing, and now that Penelope had heard it, she wanted it down in writing, too. I hadn't touched it, she reminded herself. If Julia wants proof she can do this, then there it is.

"I was being sold to a slaver," Alisha said. "They thought they'd get a pretty price for my arms from the gods, and there was a pretty price, but the one who got paid was me. I turned on 'em, shot em all off, and then I was free. Arwen?"
Arwen shrugged. "I am missing most of my organs. My body is constantly healing itself to create the functions it needs to live. Usually, almost everything is magically generated, and I have just enough leftover energy to heal. The tradeoff is..." she went silent, and there was something deeper there now than what had been there before, an energy like the gathering darkness before a storm rather than your average strong-but-silent stony darkness. "...endless pain."

Alisha leaned even further, so that she was slumped not just over Kai's body but over Arwen's as well. She looked up with round, sad eyes.

"I don't think it does us much good to dwell on all this tonight," Kai said. The fire was beginning to die out, reaching its wanting orange hands out for more fuel. "We should sleep."

"We should," agreed Alisha. "But first, Kai? Even as many times as I've heard your story, I've always been confused by a single thing."

"You're free to ask," Kai said, stroking Alisha's hair.

"It wasn't all noble blood, was it, that was given to you when you went to the Fount of Fate?" Alisha asked. "Not the way you described it, anyways."

"Oh, the others who were there?" asked Kai. "I fight for them, too, and I hope the kingdom I restore will have more places for outcasts. They've been kinder to me on this journey than anyone of professed noble blood."

"They say noble blood fetches a higher price from the gods," Arwen said. She clutched her stomach. "I'd have to wonder how it all breaks down."

"Blood is blood. Pain is pain. People make up lots of stories to separate themselves from each other," Kai said. "I feel that if we're going to make up tales to rule our thoughts, we might as well make up stories that draw us all together."

Arwen moved her eyes away. "Forgive me, my lord."

Kai rested his other hand around her shoulder. "We're all learning out here."

Alisha looked into the fire, as if she might see through it to a better future. "Four more emblems."
Had they gotten the first one without her?

"Four more emblems," confirmed Arwen and Kai, and the fire slowed to embers, and then stopped. The three of them were fast asleep, likely within the frame of a paragraph, and Penny was still almost full in terms of ink. There hadn't been much to fix in the dialogue, and the night was definitely going to be glossed over, so it stood to reason the best thing for her to do now would be to leave.

I can't stay the night, can I? Forcing myself through a timeskip, even a short one, is way over my head. There has to be something...

Something rustled in the bushes. Penny popped a comma from the air, which was a copyedit, but the slight rupture meant that Julia was still going with the scene. Penny drew her blades up towards her chest, bracing herself.

A spectre moved slowly towards the camp. It was lit only by the stars and a single ember, which gave up its light and died upon seeing the ghost imposing over it. The grim shape drew nearer still, as if it were a puppet being drawn by a single string, and no one in the camp moved, but the world began to grow misty around them.

They were all asleep, though. It didn't feel like Julia would plan to sic something on them now, but Julia barely had control of this story, and Penelope had to be bleeding all over it. Between the two of them, it wasn't completely out of the question that they'd somehow gotten carried away and brought some strange other into the fray.

Penelope shot a burst of ink at the hood, hoping to knock it off. At the very least, it would be a tantalizing scene for the audience, when they caught some antagonist the characters wouldn't know had paid them a midnight visit, and then departed into the woods...

...but there was nothing under the hood but darkness. It looked familiar to Penelope, for reasons she couldn't quite parse, not in a familial way, but in the way that one recognizes a day. Penelope watched the figure glide towards camp, and felt a sudden, cold dread run through her body. It removed its hood, but there was nothing underneath but a dark fog, a nebulous place where a person should have been. It fixed Penelope with a glare that made her whole body freeze up, and then it went dead silent. Penelope felt herself kneel over in excruciating pain, though she hadn't been hit.

Penelope leaned on the tree, clutching her chest. It was less material pain than a fear too great for words, and it had practically immobilized her. What was that? Was it possible, in a world where you could give up body parts to attain magic, to give up one's whole body? The phantom's fingers moved towards Kai's head, and it stroked him tenderly, like an animal being prepared for the slaughter that needed to be calmed. Kai stirred, and then his breath grew short.

Another shadow crouched in the bushes besides her: a place where a character was supposed to be, but only she was there. It would take her much too long to make someone competent from scratch, and the ghostly figure was drawing a scythe from under its cloak. Penelope drew her pointers together, and summoning all the offensive weaponry she'd trained with under Kenji, summoned forth a sword of pure light. It was shaped something like an old-fashioned pen, but the tip had extended to form a whole hilt, and where the lines for ink would be on a pen were a rush of gold. Penelope moved from the shadows, head turned to avoid the figure's gaze, and she thrust it through it, resulting in a crackling that faded to nothingness.

Her ink began depleting, rapidly, and it wasn't the sword that did it.

That was direct interference. Penelope had committed a blatant deus ex machina.

"Reaper!" Arwen bolted upright. She shouldn't have known that. The scene was a mess.

Penelope was behind a tree, the nearest, and she breathed like she'd never tasted oxygen before. No sound came from her mouth. Penelope could feel hot tears rolling down her cheeks, just from the fear, and she was down to three canisters and still falling. Why oh why was her stamina so tragic?

"There was a reaper? Here?" asked Kai.

What's a reaper? Why had we not gone over this?

"It's not here anymore, but we're going to have to keep moving," Arwen said. "This land is known as the Cryptwalk for a reason."

"Do you think I can go up to the Font of Fate and give them my dark circles? They're large enough to fetch us a fair fortune by now," complained Alisha with a yawn.

"The land is inhospitable, which is why the emblem's said to be buried here. We'll make good time to the Tomb of Kings," Kai promised. "But we're fortunate tonight. Someone out there is watching us," said Kai, and he sounded so sure of it that Penelope almost believed that he knew she was out there. Her heart fluttered, which was completely involuntary, and she bit her own tongue as hard as she could.

Her ink began depleting at the very sentence. This would be hell to get out of. She'd have to talk to Julia about making a whole other character who could have done that, some hidden ally on the Cryptwalk... it couldn't be too hard, but more importantly, she needed to go. Penelope opened up the tree nearest her, and gave herself back over to darkness, which brightened into another day, one where she was situated on Julia's couch, having been flung there by the whims of fate. Penny rolled onto the floor and put a hand against it, feeling it like a sailor felt out land on returning home. She could still see the reaper on her peripherals, the glistening blade reaching out like a hand.

"Are you doing okay?" asked Julia.

"Julia," said Penny. "I think I'm going to need you to give me a stronger story outline."