“Nyx,” said Ethel with perfect seriousness, “this false identity could really open doors for you.”

She was lying on her stomach above grass and a wooden tray with sheets of paper strewn about. Around her were Nyx, Agi, and Darling, all with trays, all alike on the grass of a real, bona fide rainforest.

This was one of the Tellurom-Barkney Islands in the far southwest corner of Darshanna. It wasn’t like the greenhouse at all—the birds were real and native and chattering. No creature had bothered them yet, but occasionally a new rustle and band of color passed through the trees. It was the middle of autumn and yellow creeped into leaves, and yet, even as evening approached, Ethel and Nyx still felt new sweat.

The four of them looked like a bizarre coloring-book ring. Nyx and Agi sat upright, trays and papers on their laps, pencils idle. Darling curled across the grass, quietly reveling in her body again.

“I mean, after the dungeon is over,” Ethel went on, “you might find the identity more useful than you’d envisioned. You might...keep it.”

“I know what you’re implying,” said Nyx with some resignation, “but I don’t think it’s possible. Not for long.”

“Being a wayfarer, a lone agent, a free spirit—if you just hid behind a mortal identity, you could absolutely keep that up.”

“Isn’t the dungeon already a test for that?” said Agi. He’d surprised Nyx today with his creativity and, more than that, his will to contribute and cooperate. Ethel had said she wasn’t surprised at all, and that he clearly had “an elastic mind” like any crow.

“...Yeah, unintentionally,” said Nyx.

Ethel said, “This should be making you hopeful. It’s not. Why?”

“Because it’s your job to organize my hopes and dreams right now,” said Nyx, with a sweep of the arm that indicated all three of the underlings. “I want it all written out. If it’s not written out, I have trouble pulling my mind away from—old traumas.”

“You should get another lobotomy, my lord,” said Agi.

Nyx glared at him.

“He means,” said Darling in her ever-charming voice, “that if you simply remove the parts of your brain that hold the memories of all your traumas, it follows that you will not retain the traumas anymore.”

“Let’s go with that,” said Agi.

Nyx’s voice began to simmer. “Okay, that’s another reason why I would rather not have Darling out. The combination of you three together just gives too many opportunities for unreadable sarcasm and double meanings.”

“I embrace my role as a necessary evil,” said Agi.

“As well you should,” Ethel butted in. “Personally, I think that you stealing the tags could be the best thing that’s ever happened to Nyx’s hero’s journey. Or perhaps take a second-place behind the assumed identity. Although...I kind of expected a horde of demons to have broken the door down by now.”

Nyx said, “You’re forgetting the demon timescale. Lifespans get so huge that it makes more sense for them to plan against contingencies than to attack the castle and get, say, burned by a lightning hex.”

“And it’s not as if the whole underworld is after them, either,” noted Agi. “There are the auctioneers plus a few devotees.”

Ethel thought it over. She made a clumsy comparison: if the Mona Lisa was stolen, would all world governments band together to reclaim it? Even if planet Earth were filled with art-loving warrior bands, it would be slow, tangled going. She supposed the same went for the tags.

Either way Nyx was a criminal, a thief of art and culture whose collected tags held cultural importance for Gaia, for the hells, for a far-off world, and for whatever Powers That Be had brought the twelve “poppers” from here to there in the first place.

Eugh...”poppers.” Using the term like that just felt nasty to Nyx and Ethel, somehow.

Well, the real reason they’d come to this patch of forest in the tropics wasn’t to debate Nyx’s future...not in that way, anyhow. It was to create it—to manufacture Nyx’s false identity for the purpose of getting into Farander’s dungeon.

Forging identification wouldn’t be an issue. Arkadian documents were unforgeable—on Gaia. The underworld was capable of fudging any and all of Gaia’s rules. Gaia’s “impossible” was the underworld’s challenge.

As for convincing people that Nyx really would be who they’d say, they’d have to do a bit of sightseeing around the Tellurom-Barkneys, references notes in the castle libraries, and, whenever necessary, confidently lie. Again, this didn’t trouble Nyx at all—they were so used to transforming, and leaving trails of white lies, that the prospect of doing it again after being in the underworld was as refreshing as a seaside jaunt.

What wasn’t refreshing was the psychological pressure that the dungeon itself would bring, but Nyx had to put that aside for now.

“Can she be a half-elf?” said Ethel. Like the others, she’d returned to sketching and jotting on her papers for the past long while.

“That might be kinda hard,” said Nyx. “Why should she be?”

“If you ever take the identity on again—for the long haul—it’ll be easier for you to cover for any interactions with demons.”

Ethel was thinking of how common it was for elf societies to accept witches and warlocks. Even Arkadia, the human capital and seat of all the most glorious adventurers, had a steadfast suspicion of them. It made no sense to anyone in this circle, demons and Earth-born alike, but they had to chalk it up to cultural differences.

“And since you’re half-human,” she continued, “you can just say that all the stuff about elf culture you don’t know is due to your strange upbringing. Nobody would expect you to marry, either. So as long as you stayed confident, you could just roam the world as untethered as possible, in that identity. And then cast it off when it gets too old.”

Compared to Seeg’s words, her insistence that Nyx’s only chance at getting strong enough to make it was to keep falling headlong into demonry, Ethel’s game plan sounded too good to be true. It was so simple, too, and so straightforward. It meant more of the old duplicity, to be sure, but once that was gone, Nyx would have this world to themself—and it might be kind of peaceful—and they might even feel...home free.

They thought of hugging Ethel in that moment, or at least taking her hand in theirs. They didn’t act on it, didn’t want to disturb the moment with something so unexpected, but they did think powerfully on it.

And then they realized what Ethel’s suggestion was pointing to.

She’d said something about not having to marry, as if consciously throwing Nyx off the scent. But the message underneath was clear as day: the third way wasn’t for Nyx alone.