I wake up at Gale's side in the main room, blinking twice to assure myself I'm seeing the right scenery.

"You couldn't sleep," Gale explains before I have the opportunity. "Glaze spent the night upstairs, and you staggered back down--late--and I... happened to be here. Fortunately for you, I'd imagine."

I nod in agreement. "Thank you, Gale."

"Always welcome," he says. He begins to move, and my wing flies out, forcing him back down. "Problem?"

"Please don't leave yet," I whisper.

He tilts his head, one of his long ears hitting my wing. "If you say so." he settles back down, and I lean against him, listening to the sound of his breath. I hadn't understood the power with which it could fill a body, or how fragile it was, how easily it could give. The warmth of his body, the lethargic pulse of his heart... when we first met, was it these things that stirred me against a multitude of heart-rending silences? It must've been.

What was there before you?

My wings fold in when I hear someone cry from across the room, "Rena! I was looking for you."

"What did I do?" I peep. Gale pops up at my side, ears held high.

Rain's eyes fall down to where my wing brushes Gale's flank. "Oh! Nothing, and I'm sorry if I've managed to startle you. I only wanted to share the results of my research, since I thought you might be invested."

"I'm interested," Gale objects.

Rain nods. "Thank goodness I've found you both, then... so, the most prominent mention of falling stars is the singularity at the beginning of our history. I believe I mentioned that to you, actually. While we did leave off with the sixty-second Auspicia, leaving us just short of a prophecy stating she will 'double and double over herself', there's other evidence of the Auspicia potentially bargaining lives away for the good of her fold. However, while the Plague is catastrophic on its own, I don't believe it's of holy significance--which means there might even be a celestial event to come--"

"Can you translate that into peasant terms?" asks Gale, unimpressed. "I'm sure this is all fascinating, but I can't understand a word you're saying."

"We're coming to the end of times," breathes Rain.

"Isn't that what we're trying to avoid?" I ask meekly.

"There are a lot of things that have been said about the end of times." Auma responds, emerging behind us like a shadow. Her presence casts a dim permenance over us, and I feel time dip out from under me. "Not all prophecies come to pass, and those that do are often subverted."

My eyes close, thinking of dozens of twinned apocalypses, and the dull image of teeth and the full heat of a furious sun blazes down upon me. "Rena." I blink, emerging from the depths of memory onto the still surface of the present. All three of them are watching me with concern. Gale continues, "You're blanking on us, Rena."

I can't help it floods through my mind, but I only wave my tail, willing myself back towards ignorant bliss. "Oh, sorry! So, are we going to do missions today?"

"We've sent some out." Auma assures me. The strategists at the table rise, as well as Glaze, whose salmon-hued fur is a disheveled, spiked mess filled with dirt and grief.

"That's strange. We're still sitting here." Gale mutters.

"For your safety," Auma responds.

"Oh, our safety. Is that why you sent two Sentients to an outpost?" asks Gale.

"Our numbers are thin." responds Auma, curtly.

"You're hardly utilizing them. Rena sits inside half of the time." Gale snaps.
Rain rises, but Auma holds her aside. With a dangerous darkness in her eyes, "Should I make this more simple for you, then? We can't trust her. We can't trust you either. We're planning around such. Is that clear?"

"Did Avery tell you to do this?" Gale asks, his voice low.

Auma nods. "Do you nod trust her?"

"I- I never said that." Gale retaliates.

Auma bares her teeth. "Then get back in line." As she leaves the room, she says to Rain, "If Glaze is up for it, she can run a routine check with them, but I want Surra on it too, with full communication gear. Is that understood?"

Rain nods. "Come on, you two." she says to us, and Glaze rises just as fast, a weariness in her eyes like that of the setting sun. Our party, now accompanied by the nice Felis (ah, she must be Surra), bound down the steps together, leaving the warmth of the room behind us. Downstairs smells like metal and rain, with a different aroma stemming from our fellow Defenders: both from those who are here and those who have departed. With a quick sniff, I ask, "Did Twitch and Thistle leave?"

"Good riddance," says Glaze.

"They're only out for the day." clarifies Surra, while Glaze stares back ruefully. "Glaze, are you certain you're up for this? If you're not, all you have to do is give the word and you can go back upstairs and sleep."

"No." Glaze stomps into the light. "Let's just go."

What curled up and died in her room this morning? Wait-- never mind. Gale says with a series of particularly sulky expressions.

Please stop being insensitive. She is my friend, I attempt to respond with the most sincere expression I can manage, inwardly grateful beyond belief that this is a private conversation.

Gale's ears flatten and he lowers his head as he looks to me with a swift jerk of his eyes towards the others.

"Are you done yet?" asks Glaze.

"Done with what? We're not doing anything." Gale responds.

"Please," I whisper beneath my breath. I can smell fire crackling on dry grass. When we get outside, everything is gold, red, and disorienting. The sun's bright eye peers down at us with abject disgust, subjecting all of our bodies to the inferno, and all of yesterday's subtle cloud cover is upon us. Almost no one lines the streets, now, although I see strangers reflected back out of every window. All of their fear is dulled out by the glass, leaving only empty sensation-- she's not coming back-- and the sound of our paws on the ground, the insistent grind and clatter of them.

"Dog days will be on us soon," Surra says this as if we are being hunted by something far greater than ourselves. I imagine a celestial beast tearing our bodies to shreds, but beneath that, this, too, stirs memory. I nod, thinking of the colors of the sun and sky attached to bodies and everyone glowing with such violent force that it wounds the eyes.

"That's when the world breathes," Gale explains. "There's massive magical discharge, and that means everyone is super cranky. It is every bit as awful as it sounds."

"I know." It speaks through me.

Gale looks back with a quick head tilt. His nose flares. "Riiiight."

"What it means is that things are going to get much harder, much faster." Surra says. "We're going to need both of you, in earnest."

"Oh," my tail waves. Need. This is something my mind can work with. I use needed to hook together the most dissonant regions of my brain, all of my body filling with light and air: need, need, need.

We make it out of the city, in the most general sense of the word: past the "end", things continue just the same, but the houses here are made out of trees and stone, elaborate figures curled into themselves in elaborate shapes that make the dull squares of the city green with envy. The Sentients here go about their daily business, light glinting off their fur as if they already know. Most of them are Canira, lithe of muscle, and when they see us pass quite a few of them bow.

My fur is levitating above my body. None of the light I am producing belongs to me. I have to close my eyes when I go past them, each breath taken to a corresponding venture past...

The woods are full today. I willingly fall into this, primarily because regardless of circumstance I end up behind Gale. Glaze and Surra both attempt a battle plan, but their words are feeble noise on the air and he is a lightning bolt. He is the crack things make when they go past sound (I've heard that. I've heard that. I've heard that.) and he is swinging through abominations, ripping them apart, and it is unclear what is shadow and what is beast. The blood passes right through the shadows, the oozing dark substance decaying on the floor, and it seems the sun can no longer reach us in the mess of trees.

Gale's chest rises and falls. "Bastards."

"You're going to get yourself killed." Glaze steps like a deer into the nearest patch of sunlight, holding herself up on her pads and looking down on him.

"If you think you can do better, feel free to do it, Glaze. I haven't seen any of you--any of you-- kill anything today. Says a lot more about you than it does me, huh?" he snaps. A vindictive scowl traces up the sides of his mouth, barring rows of unblodied teeth.

"I helped," I say, remembering an errant beam of light. I had only been following him through the woods, for the most part--wandering after him-- oh, that's embarrassing.

"I heal." Glaze says coolly.

"Congratulations. Let me lead, then." Gale sighs.

"You're a reckless bastard, do you know that?" Glaze snaps.

"Combat ability and ability to plan have nothing to do with each other. Just because you can dispatch of our enemies quickly doesn't mean you can strategize." Surra explains. My eyes are fixed on the jewels around her neck. They are staring right through me. She has her eyes on me. Someone is watching and someone is unhappy and we have done a bad job.
"Maybe it should. Maybe if anything was backed up with force around here, it might work better." Gale sinks low, circling her, and the two enter a violent ring about each other. The sunlight sharpens like a dilating eye. I breathe in and exhale heat rather than air. The temperature fluctuates around me and I am keenly aware I now belong entirely to the sun.

"Would you like to say that again?" Every animal in the trees is watching us.

"What about 'two members on a outpost right before the Dog Days' do you not understand?" Gale says.

Glaze breaks the circle, stepping right towards him. "How dare you accuse--"

"Poor management killed your friend and it will kill you too. Is that clear? You are very much at risk of dying and all you can think to do is project your insecurities onto me."

"You're... you're just like Twitch!" she says. "You utter... I don't think I can even tell you how... you..." she stops, hiccuping something back. She whispers, half to herself, and her whole body shaking with grief and rage, looks back to him.

Gale stares right down at Glaze with unpitying twin moon eyes. I can not tell what is shadow and what is beast, and right now it is all brutal, uncut coolness.

The walk back is quiet. We leave the ichor-stained forest to tend to the bodies of its children, and the bodies of the disfigured beasts remain in my mind. Ribcages cut open, aquatic features on terrestrial beasts, the occasional extra limb too small to stand upon... but most of all, the wings and horns littered across their bodies, pointing and grasping towards something I can not reach or understand. My own wings are numb with the feeling.

"You should say something," I say to Glaze under the cold grip of the entryway. "He's only prickly. I've seen him better than that. I swear."

"I don't want to talk to him, Rena." Glaze walks upstairs without me.

I bound after, and our living space is colder and much, much smaller than usual. It has been decorated, but strings are bound on one side and fall off on the other. Many of the decorations are still in boxes and the sticks in front of the hearth are kicked over. I look up and see evidence of a scorch mark on the ceiling. My mouth opens and I aim for it, which only leads to a small hole in the ceiling.

"Rena!" yells Surra. "What are you doing?"

"I wanted to get the darkness out." I mumble. All the others in the room are looking at me, including Gale, who looks... amused. I feel my face flush even further, all of my hollow bones tingling with guilt and shame. "Sorry." I say to no one in particular.

The room returns to silence as Surra bolts down the hall. I'm still fixated on her jewels, but now, in this room, I can see dozens of eyes. Who looks out of the black insets on the wall, out of the stones, the cabinets? Gale, too, is looking at them, and for a second, we are each other's breath, each other's raised heartbeat, a shared communion of paranoia.

"Hey, Indy, you were right about the kinegraph drama." Glaze kicks aside some dirt as she passes the table, where Indy sits, his back slit a dozen times and pink showing between his dark fur. "It was a suicide."

Indy's eyes are soft and distant as pools of rainwater left out below a full moon. "The blue guy?"

Glaze nods stiffly. "I'm going to go."

"Okay," I say, but I don't want her to go, really. I follow her halfway down a hall, after Surra, and when her scent diverges from Surra's partway down I'm in control of my body again and not entirely sure why I thought she would benefit from my presence. Let her go.

I don't know who's talking to me. They're stepping on my paws. I haven't been this bad in a while.

"Mistral?"

Let her go.

"You're not Mistral, are you?"

My head is turned around. I reenter the room, white light blazing under my paws like the surface of the sun. Mistral is all over the room, lying in every cranny, humming, soft, only waiting. Gale is watching the hole in the room that leads up into more darkness, has, indeed, permeated all light in the area, and he turns to me with a cold, passive respect. "Rena."

"You shouldn't have provoked them."

"I did it for you."

"You don't have to do anything for me."

"I'm serious. We really could die."
"Better here than anywhere else."
"That's... I don't even think I can begin to tell you how stupid you sound."

"Have you considered you might fit in better if you weren't being intentionally mean to everyone?" I snap, practically pounding my paws against the ground. He flinches at the noise, ears falling back in one long sweep, and we watch each other for what feels like the first time.

Gale's eyes catch everything: Indy, the hole, me. "I'm trying." he says. "But I can't compromise on this."

That night at dinner is even more strained. The usual undercurrent of chatter prevails for a while, although I've never heard Auma so excited about bizarre varieties of ox from the north. Indy is happy to supply information on the texture of the meat, the juiciness, all the qualities he can possibly think of, and Auma nods vigorously, all the while looking over him at the other Defenders, who look like the walking dead. Indy continues, loudly: "Course, that has nothing on terrapynna, but I think I'm not entirely supposed to eat those. No one truly knows if they're extinct or not, so there's... that makes them harder to sample."

"How do you know if it's good if you've never had one?" she asks, as if in a stupor.

"Well, have you ever had a turtle bowl? They're delicious. You hollow out a turtle, reintegrate the meat into a broth, and sip that... I mean, it takes a skilled chef to prepare, but I'm sure Glaze could handle it if you gave the two of us the day." Indigo beams at Glaze, who almost drops the dark expression.

"We can't give you the day. We're almost into the Dog Days and that means all of our lives are currently at stake. Unfortunately, that doesn't leave much time for cooking soup or whatever other tomfoolery you might've planned." Twitch responds curtly.

"Do you have to put me down right now?" Glaze asks, her voice far wearier than angry, but nonetheless cold. "Is that the only reason you ever talk to me? To pull something on me or those I care about? Because I'm tired of it, Twitch."

"I wasn't trying to pull anything." Twitch snaps. "Could you go one second without su-suspecting me of something that wasn't even my fault? Really?"

"I'm not suspecting you of anything. You're... still a danger to all of us, and you know that, and I don't even know why you're here right now. If we really have any 'failure in management', huh, that might be it." Glaze looks to Auma. "You know it. Everyone knows it."
Twitch's tail blazes. "Okay, now you're just being unfair."

"Unfair is losing the two Sentients closest to you."

"You had two!"

"Oh, please don't make this about you."

"You cut the sob story first--"

"That is enough," roars Ignis, practically overturning the table when she slams it with her front paws. "Glaze, get rest. Now. That's an order from your senior." Glaze does not protest. When she exits the room, Ignis's gaze turns on Twitch. "She is grieving and yet you still have the nerve to pull this on her."

Twitch's face twists. "I didn't pull anything. She has it out for me."
"Cut it out." Fyera warns. She and Ignis, standing side by side, leer over him.

Thistle lies silent, his head still tilted down far enough for Twitch to be atop it. Slowly, he tilts Twitch back. "Losing battle," he says.

The silence returns.

Losing battle, my mind repeats. Losing battle.

No one fixes the ceiling. I dream of things emerging from it, and all of them are full of knotted grudges and have stomachs swollen with grief.