Softness surrounded Kaylen. Something about this struck her as wrong. After a moment she realized it was because it was unfamiliar. It wasn’t the lumpiness of her bed at the Sanguian Temple or the unevenness of Riven’s divan or the hardness of the ground or the odd shape of a bed made to accomodate a body very different from her own.

She opened her eyes.

Around her was a stately room full of expensive furniture that looked like it belonged to a noble, even a royal. Everything looked like it had been designed to be as detailed as possible. Chair legs, bed posts, even the frame of the dressing mirror was carefully carved to look like vines or leaves or small animals. Everything made of wood gleamed with a fine finish. Across from her, a clock with a pendulum ticked away.

When had she gone to sleep here? She tried to remember. She had been in Calamity City with Nightingale; they had fought a monster. How had that fight ended? Wait, was it still going on? She shouldn’t be lying around if that creature could stomp on her at any moment. On the other hand, that fight hadn’t occurred in some rich house. So maybe she was safe, after all.

She decided to ask the old lady who was sitting in a chair nearby, working on a piece of embroidery.

“Where am I?” she asked.

The woman jerked in surprise, then gave Kaylen a motherly smile. “It’s okay, you’re safe. Your friend brought you here. How are you feeling?”

“I feel fine,” Kaylen said. For a moment she was confused until she remembered what had happened. “That thing tore up my shadow.”

The woman nodded. “A bleeding shadow is dangerous. Your shadow leaks out and the rest of you leaks in to replace it, leaving you a splotch of darkness on the ground. Priests and alchemists these days don’t know how to fix it, but thankfully Aunt Marin studied healing back during the Calamity. She knew just what to do.”

What she had just said made no sense to Kaylen. Her aunt was around during the Calamity? “Where am I, again?”

“House von Ekko.”

Kaylen thought about this for a long moment. The old woman did have a familiar look about her, more than just the dark complexion common in Obelisk. There was something of Andra’s father in her eyes.

“I’m in Obelisk?”

The woman laughed. “No, no, the True House von Ekko. In the Deadlands.”

Kaylen let out a long “Oh” to indicate her understanding before realizing that she didn’t understand at all. “Wait, how am I in the Deadlands?”

At that moment the door opened to admit Nightingale. She looked like she had recently bathed and washed her clothes. The hair cascading down the unshaven side of her head was smooth and shimmered as much as the furniture. When she saw Kaylen she rushed to her side, apparently intending to embrace her, but stopped suddenly and looked at the floor.

“Nightingale, how did we get here?” she asked.

“I tried to do that trick I told you about. The one where I attempt to use a summoning circle on ourselves. I tried to send us to Andra, but we ended up here instead.” Nightingale wrung her hands, still looking down.

“In the afterlife estate of her family,” Kaylen concluded. She didn’t fully understand summoning circles, or magic in general, but a mix-up like this made sense to her. “You know, when I was studying metaphysics in school, I remember reading that there was a whole philosophical debate over whether someone could enter the Deadlands while still living. Guess we answered that question, huh?”

She paused. “Wait, we aren’t dead, right?”

The old woman laughed. “No, you aren’t dead. In this realm the lines between the physical and spiritual become blurred. So a dead person like me is just as solid as a living person like you.”

After some coaxing from the old woman, who introduced herself as Edith von Ekko, Kaylen rose on unsteady legs and allowed Edith and Nightingale to help her get dressed. Her old clothes were brought to her, but to her horror she learned that they had thrown away her tattered cloak, having mistook it for a piece of garbage. Once dressed, she felt rejuvenated, so she asked Edith and Nightingale to take her on a walk through the halls. The True House von Ekko was as large as a castle, perhaps even larger, with hallways that stretched so far into the distance that Kaylen couldn’t see where they ended. Edith led her guests through room after room, passing through immaculate studies, opulent libraries, and tacky drawing rooms. When she glanced out a window, she found that the mansion was surrounded by a thick forest of the type often found in Obelisk, hardly a view fitting a plain called the Deadlands. It was the sort of place Andra would love. All the while, Edith introduced them to various family members, usually referring to them as aunts, uncles, and cousins. Strangely, many of these aunts and uncles appeared to be younger than Edith herself.

After some time, Kaylen felt her strength start to return, then leave her again as she realized she was growing hungry. When she mentioned this to Edith, the old woman responded that since the family was far too large to fit into any one dining room, and since everyone lived by different schedules, meals were served hourly. She led the pair to a dining room where a dozen other von Ekkos were gathered, and in a few minutes a plate of roast beef was placed before her, which she began to devour ravenously.

“This is amazing,” she said between bites. “This whole place is amazing. I can’t believe Andra gave up coming here. Do you think it would be in bad taste if I bragged to her about getting to visit?”

Nightingale shrugged. “Probably. But she’d do the same thing to you.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” Edith said, “Nightingale mentioned this Andra a couple of times. Who is she?”

“Just one of your living relatives,” Kaylen responded.

Edith frowned. “We keep in contact with the living. Granted, Bertrand⁠—my grandson—doesn’t call nearly as much as he should, but he still keeps me updated on all of the new births. He’s never mentioned an Andra.”

Kaylen cocked her head in confusion. “He never mentioned his daughter?”

“Uh, Kaylen…” Nightingale began.

“His what?” Edith interrupted, her voice growing angry. “No, he never mentioned a daughter. Only a son.”

“That’s weird, I thought Andra was an only⁠—” In a flash, the explanation struck her. “Oh, right. So, it turns out that Bertrand has a daughter, not a son. The person you know as Andrew is trans. She’s Andra now.”

“You aren’t making any sense,” said Edith.

“Oh, I know what she’s talking about,” another family member interjected. A long-necked woman who Kaylen thought had been introduced as Aunt Audrey. “Happens occasionally. A child is born, looking for all the world like a boy, but gets a little older and wants to start wearing dresses and playing with dolls. Doesn’t do any good fighting against it, so you just tell everyone there’s been a mixup and let him be a girl. A few of the serfs in my time were like that. You just correct the paperwork and after a few years everyone forgets about the whole thing. Good thing I saw it, too, or I wouldn’t have known what to do when Elizabeth came to me and said little Morgan was acting strangely.”

“Are you saying Aunt Morgan is a man?” Edith nearly shouted.

Audrey laughed. “Of course not. She’s the woman you’ve always known.” She paused. “It occurs to me that maybe we ought to talk about this sort of thing more often. When you let one child change and then forget about it, then you forget what to do the next time a child wants to change.”

“Ridiculous,” said a square-jawed man. Cousin William? “If I listened to people like you, I would have let my daughter start wearing trousers and cutting her hair and buying potions then where would she have ended up?”

“Does it happen the other way, too?” Audrey asked, surprised.

“I don’t know where she would have ended up,” said a man across from Cousin William, Uncle Alistair, “but I know where she did end up. Disowned and in an asylum.”

“Of course she did,” Cousin William replied. “She was sick. She thought she was a man, for Athor’s sake.”

Kaylen felt something twist in her stomach at those words. That poor young man.

“Well, I will not allow that to happen to Andrew,” Edith said sternly. “As soon as I’m done eating, I’m contacting Bertrand and telling him to get his son under control before he does something permanent to his body.”

“Yeah, that’s totally happening,” Nightingale muttered sarcastically.

“What difference does it make?” said a young woman on the far end of the table. “Andrew isn’t even his father’s son. He’s not a true von Ekko.”

Audrey rolled her eyes. “Please, half the family was adopted and the other half was born out of wedlock.”

“Not during my time,” the young woman protested.

Kaylen felt a tug on her sleeve and looked to see Nightingale gesturing to the door. The two slipped out without the arguing family noticing.

They found themselves in a study where Kaylen let out a sigh. “That got uncomfortable. Can you imagine spending an eternity with those people? I think Andra lucked out being disowned.”

Nightingale fidgeted with the cuff of her shirt and said nothing, staring at the wall. She had been awfully quiet since Kaylen had awoken. Did she feel guilty about summoning that monster? If so, it was probably best to just act like normal and show her that there weren’t any hard feelings.

“Still, if it weren’t for them this place would be pretty nice, don’t you think? I mean, the decor is a little much, but⁠—”

“I don’t like it here,” Nightingale said suddenly.

“Because of the family?” Kaylen asked.

“No,” Nightingale said, taking a seat on the desk that dominated the room. “I mean, yes, but there’s more than that. I don’t like rich people.”

“At all?”

Nightingale shook her head.

Kaylen frowned. “Why? I mean, a lot of them are jerks, but I’m sure lots of them are nice, too. Like that Audrey woman.”

Nightingale shrugged, kicking her legs like a child. “Yeah, I guess she seemed nice enough. Except that she’s still here. She’s still part of it. She still has servants.”

“Is having servants bad?” Kaylen asked. They were just people hired to work, like most people. How could that be bad?

“I think so,” Nightingale replied. “Especially here. I mean, they’re just supposed to work for the von Ekkos for all eternity? For what, the privilege of living in a house where the von Ekkos get to live for free?”

Kaylen thought back to the various servants she had seen throughout her tour. Since Edith hadn’t bothered to introduce them, she had hardly noticed them. Now she wondered who they were and how long they had served the family. Had the maid who had placed her plate of food in front of her been doing the same thing for centuries?

“Okay, that’s pretty disturbing. But I don’t think it means that all rich people are bad. What about Finberry Willis?”

Nightingale snorted out a laugh, suddenly sounding cheerful. “That’s a dumb name.”

“You’ve never heard of him? He’s the guy who wrote all of the most famous nursery rhymes. ‘The Cow in the Courtyard’ and ‘The Little Baker Boy’ and so-forth. He made a fortune, but he lived alone and never even hired any servants.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t know about him,” replied Nightingale. “I’m not from this world. I didn’t grow up here.”

“I thought you were Starfallian.”

Nightingale gave an exaggerated frown. “That’s offensive.”

“No, because of your accent, not because you’re an elf.”

“Oh, right. No, I come from a world of concrete and glass. Everywhere you look it’s all roads and buildings and tiny vehicles that shoot past faster than trains.”

Kaylen stared at Nightingale. This seemed like a very strange world.

“And also trees and animals and oceans and all the other stuff that makes up a world. Only in my world, magic was dying.”

“Dying? Is that even possible.”

Nightingale nodded, a grim look on her face. “Over the course of the last few generations people began losing their sense of creativity. Music and art became simple and repetitive and people stopped reading and going to plays. And, slowly but surely, mages stopped being able to use magic.”

“That’s terrible,” Kaylen exclaimed.

“It gets worse. People started sealing away the fairies, severing the connections between our worlds. Said that they were too chaotic and unpredictable. Destroyed any sense of normalcy and order. Only us elves were allowed to stay, and only if we didn’t act too strange. By the time I was born, no one had seen a fairy in a century.”

That at least made a little sense, Kaylen thought. Fairies were dangerous, after all. Their glamours could do terrible things to people. However, she didn’t say anything.

Nightingale leaned in close, her voice taking on the dramatic tone of a storyteller. “I was a very clever little girl. Everyone said so. I read all the books I could get my hands on, I always got good grades in school, I would cook and clean, I barely spoke, I didn’t have any friends. All the things that make people say a little girl is very clever.

“My parents, on the other hand, were probably the least clever people in the world. They never came to my softball games, they made all their food in the microwave, and they always watched television instead of reading. They all told me that those things made my parents bad.”

“They?” Kaylen asked. She was beginning to have difficulty following. Nightingale was using several words that she didn’t understand, though they tickled memories somewhere in her mind of the other lifetimes she had brushed with.

“The other kids at my school, the books that I read, the people who eventually adopted me. They all said that parents who worked all the time and never patched their child’s skinned knees or bought her any books were awful, neglectful parents.”

“They certainly sound neglectful,” Kaylen agreed.

“Do they?” Nightingale asked. She looked directly into Kaylen’s eyes with a gaze that seemed to say “Think about it.”

“They weren’t?”

“It was all a lie,” Nightingale said. “When I grew up, I figured it out. My parents were poor. They spent their days working factory jobs, making barely enough money to feed us. There was no time for them to watch over me or cook me fancy meals. They were constantly exhausted, bodies ruined by constant, grueling work; Dad was addicted to painkillers. And so what if they liked television more than reading? There’s nothing wrong with that. I was a bratty little snot who thought I was better than everyone because I did well in school and enjoyed public radio.”

She looked down at the ground.

“Except that was a lie, too. I was just a kid who didn’t understand why her parents couldn’t buy her books or tuck her in at night. It was nobody’s fault. We were just poor.”

Kaylen was starting to pick up on what Nightingale was saying. “That was a lie, too, wasn’t it?”

Nightingale kicked at a chair, sending it crashing to the floor with a loud thud. “Of course it was someone’s fault we were poor. Godhood worked a little differently in my world, you see? If you made enough money you could buy it. Then you gained all sorts of power over others. Of course, once someone became a god, they didn’t stop making money. They just gained even more power over everyone else’s lives. The factory my parents worked for? It made pleasant dreams. People used to be able to have their own dreams, but the gods made it so that they had to buy them. And the dreams they bought told them that if they kept working hard, that they, too, would one day become gods.

“But it was a lie. Everything about my home world was a lie. Art had changed, but so what? Things change. Repetitive music was popular, but it had always been popular, it’s not like people in the past only listened to symphonies. And plenty of people still read, it’s just that newer forms of entertainment had been invented. All of that was lies the powerful made up to pit us against each other. To get us to look at each other and say ‘I’m better than all of these fools because I read books. These mindless zombies are the reason magic left the world and only I’m smart enough to see the truth.’ And I bought every word of it. I was actually stupid enough to believe that people around me were so dull and boring that they’d caused magic to stop working.”

As she had spoken, Nightingale’s voice had become louder and louder until she shouted that final sentence.

“Nightingale…” Kaylen began, but Nightingale looked up at her and smiled sweetly.

“Don’t worry, it all worked out in the end. One day, I found a book entitled The Edhru Prophecies. It was a fantasy novel. I started reading and was completely entranced by the story. I kept reading, becoming more and more drawn in until… well… I was completely drawn in.” She gestured around her. “And now I get to live here, in this storybook world where nothing is real!”

“Our world is a story to you?” Kaylen asked.

Nightingale grinned. “Well, yeah, think about it. It’s all prophecies and adventurers and fighting demons. It’s exactly like a story.”

Kaylen smirked. “Is that so? Our world is a story and nothing is real, huh? Well, what about your world? It sounds like a bad sci-fi novel. You’ve even got ridiculous technobabble terms like ‘television’ and ‘microwave.’ In fact, I’m pretty sure Riven used the word ‘microwave’ in one of her stories. It was a device that shrunk people.”

Nightingale scoffed in mock indignation. “That is not what a microwave does. Anyway, it’s true. My world is real and yours isn’t. I probably just fell asleep reading and I’m going to wake up one day and go back to being a helpless little girl in a world full of miserable people who shouldn’t have to be miserable. That’s why I don’t like rich people.”

“Then we should get out of here,” Kaylen said.

Nightingale blinked. “What?”

“We should leave. Get back to our search.”

Nightingale held up a hand in protest. “Wait, don’t you need to rest? Even if you take a healing potion, you need rest after a bad wound.”

“I feel fine.” Kaylen tapped a horn. “Guess I have demon healing or something. We don’t need to stay. Especially if this place reminds you of something terrible you think is going to happen. Even though you’re definitely insane and that’s something you made up.”

Nightingale stared at Kaylen for a long time, eventually letting out a soft whine that turned into words as she pulled her into an embrace. “Kaylen, you’re so sweet and considerate and kind and brave and talented, and I want to sell my soul to you, and I want us to burn down this house and then build a smaller, more tasteful one on top of the remains and then live there together.”

Kaylen tried to laugh at the sudden burst of affection, but Nightingale’s grip tightened until she couldn’t breathe. She tried to push her off, but found that the elf was unmoveable. Since when was she this strong?

At that moment a maid stepped into the room. “Is everything okay? I heard a noise.”

Finally, Nightingale released Kaylen. “Sorry about that, that was my fault.” The maid noticed the fallen chair and immediately went to upright it.

“Anyway, where do we even go from here? Back to the Demonic Realms to find Comtesse Ember?” Nightingale asked.

“I’m not sure,” Kaylen admitted. “Do we really think she has any more information about the power that the gods fear?”

The maid froze.

Nightingale shook her head. “She’s the closest thing we have to a lead. And just wandering aimlessly got you nowhere. But I guess there’s no reason to believe she knows more than anyone else.”

The maid approached the pair, bowing. “Pardon me for eavesdropping, but did you say you were searching for the power that the gods fear?”

Kaylen and Nightingale looked at each other.

“Uh, yes,” Kaylen said.

“Follow me, please,” said the maid. She began to walk to the door.

Kaylen and Nightingale shared another look before hastening to follow her.

She led the pair deep into the house, to an area which seemed to be less frequented by the family. There were fewer decorations here, and some of the rooms were dusty. Kaylen wondered at first if these rooms had been built to accommodate future generations, but soon realized that the smaller rooms, lack of decoration, and less fine carpet meant that this was an older part of the house. One which family members had abandoned when the more lavish sections were constructed.

Eventually they reached a small library which was absolutely packed with books. Whoever had filled this library had filled the shelves, then stacked books on top of the rows of traditionally-placed books, then packed even more face-out in front of them so that it looked as if the slightest movement might make them fall. More books filled the reading desk, which had only a small amount of clear space near its table, and even more were stacked several feet high on the floor around it.

Without having to search, the maid selected a book, carefully sliding it out from its stack without causing the tower to collapse. She placed the book on the free space on the desk and, after gesturing for Kaylen and Nightingale to join her, began flipping through it.

“You won’t find the power by asking demons,” the maid explained. “They’ve been made to forget the details of everything that happened before and during the Calamity. They know it exists and that it’s in their lands, but nothing else.”

“Then how do you know?” Kaylen asked.

The maid looked at her as if the answer were the most obvious thing in the world. “Because I was here during the Calamity.”

Kaylen stared at the maid. She looked young, probably younger than Kaylen herself. She supposed those who died stopped aging. Or perhaps they got to choose what age they appeared. After her conversation with Nightingale, it was troubling to think that this girl had served the von Ekko family for a thousand years or more, receiving nothing in return but the right to live in this house.

“But what is the power?” Nightingale asked. “Is it a weapon?”

The maid continued flipping through pages. “It’s better if you see it for yourself. You can decide then whether or not you want to use it. By the way, what are you planning to use it for?”

Kaylen grinned “We’re going to—”

Nightingale made a nervous noise.

“—kill the gods,” Kaylen finished.

The maid nodded with satisfaction. “Oh, okay, that’s good. It just occurred to me that I was about to show you the location of an immense amount of power and I realized that maybe I shouldn’t do that without knowing what you intended to do with it. You know, in case you wanted to kill all the orcs or something. But if you’re just killing the gods, then no problem.”

She found the page she was looking for and pointed to it. It was a map depicting rivers and mountains in a region Kaylen didn’t recognize. One particular mountain was marked with a small red X.

“It’s there. Beneath that mountain in Hell.”

“I thought the power was supposed to be in demon territory,” Kaylen said. “It’s a common misconception that demons are from Hell. Demons are from the Demonic Realms. Hell is where the gods punish those they reject.”

The maid rolled her eyes. “In addition to the Demonic Realms and part of the world of the living, demons control land in both the Deadlands and in Hell.”

Kaylen looked at Nightingale. “Can you use your summoning trick to get us there?”

Nightingale stared back with wide eyes. “I think so, but are you sure about this? I mean, it’s Hell. It’s supposed to be the worst place in all existence.”

Kaylen shrugged. “I think we can handle it.”

Nightingale suddenly grinned. “In that case, let’s do it. I can’t believe I’m actually going to get to see Hell.”