I polish the weapons in the morning, sometimes, usually looking for Gale, who comes down here whenever I talk to anyone besides him for very long. Sometimes he stares into the blades, other times, he paces around the room for a long spell. I've seen him hunched over a few times, ominously still. When he is not there, I just look into the weapons and imagine who used them. The figures in my head are familiar and teaming with heat. I imagine running the metal up their weapons to be like pressing up against their bodies, across time, being in the heap with Glaze and Mistral.

They are so kind, even though all of their faces are empty and their bodies are on fire.

"Sorry," I say.

What did you do to us? whisper the walls. What happened here?

Shouldn't be spending so much time alone, really, I tell myself, often. Shouldn't. Don't. Can't.

The door crawls open. Auma, Nina, and Gale slip through. Gale is cut in several places, including a long scar up his lip, and this time his teeth are tainted. Auma looks pressed over onto herself, hunched slightly, and I realize she's practically pulling one of her legs along. The strain of each movement draws my eyes. "Cult." explains Gale. "Don't worry about it."

"I'm not going to stop worrying because you said 'don't worry about it'," I explain, but he fixes me with this look-- really, Rena, just don't, and I shut my mouth reproachfully, swinging my tail.

Gale passes out when we get upstairs. He falls facefirst against the ground and several open wounds bleed profusely. All the others step around him, eyes wide, and Glaze comes to stand over the body, her face twitching. Slowly, she lifts him by the scruff and drags him off. His eyes open slightly, watching me, and the worry only grows, like an invasive vine in my stomach constricting my organs.

"She's not going to heal him." Twitch says, crossing his paws.

"But he'll be okay?" he nods.

"He'll be something, that's for sure. We have other ways of healing wounds." Twitch practically snorts smoke. "I haven't been healed in years."

"We don't send you on many missions." Fyera says, coldly.

"Correction," Kairu says. "We don't send you on many missions where you're not perched on Thistle's head."

Twitch sighs, "Whatever you say," and walks off, presumably to go sit on Thistle's head.

Fyera turns back to me, looking as if someone just bit her tail. "What a... anyways, don't worry about him. We need to get you out today." Her head jerks upwards, towards the other. "Tails. Take them. I'll come too."

"Who's 'Tails'?" I ask.

"It's an old thing. 'Verhamera's tails', you know? You'd say it as a... I'm sure Rain knows how all that linguistic stuff works." Fyera snorts, guiding us down. I'm just trying to stay out of the reach of her pointed tail.

"Old thing?" I pry, again, as I follow her. Fyera moves at an astounding pace, dragging Kairu, Blossom, and I along with her.

"Eh. Come along." she says. "We've got volunteers on the front, but you all know it's not going to be enough."

"Do you talk about Verha- Vera- her? Are you supposed to?" I press.

Fyera's shoulders drop, and she turns, giving me the impression I have asked a very stupid question. "I mean, I guess... we used to. There are still Fonts up and in use, that's where you go to listen to other Sentients sing about her. I don't understand why you'd ever want to commune with a goddess who abandoned us, but that's totally up to you."

She stalks through the foliage with a vengeance, slicing things out of the way with her tail even though the grass is barely short to make it up above our paws and the remaining plants are shrivelled and curled in on themselves. Occasionally she stops and growls about something, usually our current conditions, but Kairu and Blossom just nod without speaking, and I follow suit.

"They're over there," Fyera says. "Look at them squatting in the woods. I can only imagine how tremendously proud they are of themselves for making it past Two Sister's."

I follow her glare out to the edge of the forest, where shadows lurk in the mist, their mouths almost open and their faces dull. They look dead as any Plague victim, their movements mechanical, but they do not walk towards us--they only follow us along the edge, like our own reflections. Their watery eyes and noses glisten with the bits of light showing through both the forest and cloud canopies.

"S'another group of outrunners," Fyera explains.

"Did you say 'hi' to my parents?" Kairu asks, the slightest humorous undercurrent to his voice.

"Ech. Outrunners. These are peaceful." Fyera flicks her ears, which are covered in the same bone as her tail, sharpened to the point of natural weapons. They're nearly long as Gale's, which draws my eye to them over and over. "Did see some culties the other day, though. Waved hi with my tail through their neck-- don't worry, they weren't yours."

"Eh. My branch must've moved through." Kairu sighs.

"You're part of one of those?" I ask.

"I've been here as long as Indigo has." Kairu explains. "They sent out a ransom, attempted to stick a deal with an exchange of my welfare for the city's safety, and well, it turns out my parents didn't actually care if I came back."

"Oh." Fyera's ears twitch again. My mind is glass. Snow.

"We were the ones willing to steal a pup," Blossom says, quietly. Like Twitch, she's small and bipedal, and she looks like anyone else here could eat her alive.

Fyera rounds on her like she might. "Those first years had the highest casualty rates, Blossom. We would've tried anything to keep them off of us because it was the only way we could guarantee we wouldn't die."

Blossom nods.

With a sigh, Fyera turns back to the woods. "There's more of them than usual. It's the Dog Days, for sure. We tell everyone when we get back."

"Are they going to attack us?" I ask.

"Unlikely. Not impossible--unlikely. A lot of 'Outrunner' packs are set up like normal packs, but especially as you get closer to the Dog Days, you get ghosts. Like you. Most of 'em probably couldn't even tell you their name."

"Ghosts?" I ask.

Fyera nods. "This world is a giant, living organism, and right now, it is in death throes. That affects all of us. Right now, the Plague organisms are taking a tremendous amount of magical energy. That comes from somewhere. It drains everything. Eh, that's one theory. Rain claims it's trauma."

"Do you know who you used to be, Rena?" asks Blossom.

I shake my head. "I don't think I was anyone," I respond shyly. In the deepest part of my head, a voice echoes back any one, any one, and it knows more than I could ever, stranded here on the surface of my mind.

The woods groan and a beast emerges through, a Plague victim who has been such for a long time. Their innards have hollowed out, so that there's only a thin, translucent layer of skin between their bones and the open air, and their guts are filled with water. As it emerges towards us, it lets out a groan from its distorted face, which has elongated into an almost reptilian shape. It's impossible to make out what it once was, and it takes aim not at us but at the ghosts.

Steam fills the air as burning water hits several of the Sentients, and we snap back into action. Fyera and I take one side, Kairu takes the other, and Blossom, small though she is, draws a packet of powder from her side and throws it so hard that it seems it's flying. It lands in the center and Fyera pushes me out of the way. Almost all the ghosts are hit and dozens of Sentients, their fur muted out, fall asleep.

"They can't run," I exclaim, fear and concern intermingling in my voice.

"You don't want them to panic. Trust me, please, Rena," exclaims Blossom.

With a growing pit in my stomach, I nod. Fyera dives for the Plague victim, turns, and swings its neck open with her tail. Itbegins to spew hot water from the wounds. "We just have to keep it busy until it runs out!" Fyera cries. "Easy."

The beast attempts to swing around to her, but it does so as if blind, its head-like appendage pouring with water and its makeshift eyes the same silver as most of the sky. Its pupils are dark dots in the patchwork, but these, too, focus on nothing. We fight a corpse, but it can hardly see us, let alone fight. Another spurt of water comes from its mouth, and weakly, it begins to stagger backwards. I shoot one of my light beams, miss, and singe Fyera's fur instead. She hardly notices me as she steps forwards with Gale's familiar raised haunches, his dark expression, everything about her reminds me of-- she swings her tail into the Sentient's body, and once, again... everything is blood.The air is smoke and water and red clouds and she keeps swinging, over and over, past the point where it has stopped moving. Her chest heaves.

"You shouldn't..." Blossom whines.

"I do what I want." Fyera responds.

"You could get infected."

Blood glints off the bone. Fyera wipes it in the grass. "How long's the sleep on that powder, Blossom?"
"Not long."
"Right, then, we're definitely gone," Fyera says, and continues walking. Blossom bounces after her and Kairu, who looks generally unimpressed, follows behind her. That leaves me, bringing up the rear again, and we hold to the edge for what feels like hours, the rim of forest a gaping maw that heads into an eternity we can hardly comprehend. All the noise-- animals screeching, water running somewhere, the wind through the branches-- condenses into a white fit of screeching, an endless cry that seems to pierce the very core of the land. It is the sound the runs through my head as Fyera, like Gale, slices close to a dozen beasts, each time dangerously close to the body, dancing around death with a fearless yet practiced grace. There are no complaints from the rest of us, who could not do her job if our lives depended on it (they do, don't they), so we stand a silent vigil around bodies too covered in blood and deformation to recognize. Once, the thing in this body lived, I tell myself, but I am thinking about all of us as parts of a whole, leeching off a world. This was the hungriest child of Dreamland, and now it is a corpse glutted past its own control.

Somewhere out there, trees blow on the roof of the building. I feel the sudden sick urge to go back to Gale.

When we return, no one greets us back, as we appear to be the first group in. The empty house hums when no one is in it, as if biding its own time until our return. "Strategists are on the bottom floors somewhere," Fyera explains, as if sensing my unease. "Avery and Arazel are out together, again. Don't worry too much about it. Rest of the world? Not our problem."

"If it were just us, we would be dead by now. We get food, weapons, and back-up from other cities all the time." Blossom explains.

"I'm speaking about focus, Blossom." Fyera retorts. "If we fixate on anything but ourselves and our job, we go down. Have you ever crossed a bridge?"

"I've never left the city, and fancy, we're not on any precipices," Blossom says, quietly.

"Yeah, well, the trick is you don't look down."
"Because below us is the rest of the world?" I ask.

"Sunds kind of awful when you put it that way," Fyera muses. "Hard to describe how it works spatially. Yeah, though. Like that."

The group eases back into a nice meal and simmer in the coziness of the room. The decorations on the shelves gleam, as if welcoming us to stay for the rest of our natural lives, and someone's polished them since the morning. I glow in the warmth of the multifaceted baubles hanging from the ceiling and take in the scent of whatever sprigs of plants have been hung up--come on, Rena, you should know this.

"I can't believe that. None?" Rain's dismayed voice sounds from around the corner.

"Avery'll work it out better than I could, but I'm telling you the calculations I've run don't stack up. It's as if we're trying to pile a mountain on a foundation of sticks." Axel grunts.

"Have you spoken with Sukoma?" Rain turns around the corner with her fellow strategists to her left and right.

"They'll be happy to help themselves," Surra sighs. "Unless we want to sign over our name deeds, our firstborns, most of our food reservoirs, and our dignity? We might as well best forget it."

"I take it the calculations for the Dog Days are not going as well as you'd hoped." Blossom says, nose twitching.

"Hoped? No. Expected? Absolutely." Rain's ears flatten. "Unfortunately, it appears we'll have to bring in drafted civilians to do much of anything. We're very fortunate we got Rena and Gale--" she trails off, seeing me. "I'll let Avery speak to that."
I am suddenly quite, quite relieved that Gale is not in the room. He would be pitching a fit right now.

"We could always put Thistle and Twitch in a group with others instead of sending them out alone again." Blossom says. "Seeing as Thistle can't continue such a strenuous position on his own."

Fyera leers down at her. "Well, Blossom, we know you're a newbie, too, so we might be able to excuse your blatant ignorance. Might. Anyways, we're coming up on the Dog Days, so we'll need to be a little more careful with how we make lineups. You feel the urge to kill anyone? Tell us. You want to spontaneously make out with someone? Well, I doubt you'll tell us, but just... just don't, really. Mercy pact stands."

"Mercy pact?" I ask.

"If it doesn't concern you, Rena, don't worry about it." Fyera half-laughs this.

My ears fall.

The talk of strategy increases, and Fyera and Blossom join in the rounds while Kairu just sits watching the fire. I join him, because the light and movement keep me here, but sometimes that's not enough. I walk back over to the strategists, settle myself down, and try to understand the torrent of words, but all the positioning is foreign and the other parts? Worse. Eventually I give up and stalk out of the conversation to the groups who've just returned. Ignis's nostrils flare with smoke.

"Fyera."
Fyera turns. "Eh?"

Ignis leers. "You are absolutely covered in scratches."
"Not infectious ones." Fyera makes her way towards Ignis, and they stand so close together their snouts are almost touching.

"If things get worse, we might have to take you out."

"I can handle it, Ignis."

"I don't want you getting hurt."

"You're not saying that as my superior."

"I'm not your superior." Her breath is soft.

They're practically writhing in each other's fur, now, as they argue in lower tones. I feel myself crossing streams, thinking about the best thing to hold onto in the currents, and my head bashes against a rock.

Gale drags me aside by the ear. The sudden pain is enough to make me jump out of my fur, but no one seems to notice or care I'm being dragged off. A whine dies in my throat as I shake my throbbing ear out. "What's the matter with you?" I ask.

Gale looks me dead in the face. "Dog Days start tomorrow."

"You're not going to ask me to dash, are you?" I ask. "Because we can't."
Gale's eyes widen. "What? No. I just... the Dog Days are hard for me."
"Did someone die?" I ask.

"Not... exactly. Rena, I know you don't remember anything, but this is dangerous, and it's especially dangerous for you. If you're really something... they think you're something, okay?"

"I've lost you."

"I can't explain it if I don't know what it is either," Gale says. "but for my sake and yours, I just need you to promise we watch each other's backs. Same missions. We protest if we don't get them. If you feel anything coming on, you tell me. If you think you might pass out, or have some kind of fit, you tell me that too. We tell each other everything-- alright, almost everything--"

"Did Nina say something to you?" I ask. "You're being jumpy."

"This has nothing to do with Nina." Gale bares his teeth. "Can you please just agree to this?"

I blink. "I always tell you everything, Gale."
"Rena."

"Yes," I say, finally, "But you're being dumb and jumpy and need to calm down."

Gale seethes under his fur. "Okay. Fine. Thank you," he turns. We're right next to his room. "Tomorrow, then."

As if we're going to war. "Tomorrow."

The door shuts and part of the day ends with him. I eat without him, but I see why he didn't bother-- I'm not hungry. No one is. Food is picked over, even though it's an underwhelming meal taken straight out of storage without any preparation, and Indy talks about all the meals of the Dog Days while everyone else nods and indulges him.

This ends quickly.

"Everything'll be different tomorrow," muses Glaze, later, halfway asleep.

The room agrees with her in one ascending hum. I think of Arazel, tucked away with Avery somewhere, discussing a past where things were a normal none of us can comprehend. I think of Gale, twitching in his sleep, and Nina mimics his motions. Everything here fills me with unspeakable trepidation, and when I raise my head, I can sense whoever I used to be there, hanging in the air. Someone has been waiting for me to come home.

All of us.

I look at all the sleeping bodies, imagining them cloaked in magical fire.