It takes me bare moments after Amber leaves the room to fall asleep, and if I dream at all during that slumber, I don’t remember them on waking. She’s there when I wake up; rather, I’m wrapped around her like a sloth on a log, face pillowed on her chest and legs hugging her thigh.

It’s nice, until I realize that I had drooled on her in my sleep, and then I’m mortified. She’s beset by giggles as I wipe her chest dry with a towel, and soon enough I get over my embarrassment enough to laugh at how ridiculous I’m being. The kiss reinforces that feeling, and provokes some others, and at her insistence we take our time getting ready, to Zidanya’s knowing looks when we finally emerge.

We take stock and help each other with the little fiddly bits of getting fully ready. For me, that’s mostly Amber brushing my hair until it’s free of tangles; I show her how it’s braided, the simple, this-should-last-a-month no frills braid that I can do by myself, and she makes delighted sounds running my hair through her hands as she works. She makes me promise to show her a more complex one when we have the time, and I assent with pleasure, since I’ve always loved having my hair played with, whether it’s its current mid-shoulder length or shorter. The rest of my preparations is just getting dressed: relatively frail shirt under a tougher hooded sweater that’s open in the front, a rugged pair of pants, thick socks, and steel-toed work boots.

Zidanya takes a bit more time with herself. Her skin is a little darker than it was the day before, a little closer, or so she says, to what she looked like in life, rather than the paint-contrast-maximizing paleness she’d manifested at the party. There’s something else changing about her, which I can’t quite pin down; I try not to stare, anyway, out of a possibly unreasonable sense that the changes she’s making to her body with the limited shapeshifting capabilities she’s currently equipped with are her own business. She’s actually dressed sensibly, too, which makes it a lot harder to try to figure out what’s going on; loose pants tucked into boots a bit below the knee, a tough shirt that felt like some kind of cotton canvass variant tucked into the pants, and bracers anchoring the shirt at the wrists. She’s got a bow on her back and a staff that tapers at both ends, and her previously-long hair is almost entirely gone, cut above the neck and by turns pinned and clipped into twists that rest securely on her scalp.

It’s a good look on her, less the fertility-goddess-on-the-prowl Druid - which was, to be fair, an extremely appealing look in its own way - and more an explorer, playing up the Ranger side of her experience. I tell her so, and she kisses me in return, fierce and hungry. There’s a strength in her arms, a feeling of coiling muscle that I’m pretty sure wasn’t there the day before, and I wonder how much other than her skin was a product of the Temple rather than what she looked like in life.

Well, eventually I wonder that. It takes me a moment to respond, and then more than a few moments to remember that we have other things to do; I flush a little, catching Amber watching us with something in her eyes I can’t quite place but that might be consideration or pensive, and I’m tempted to play it down. I don’t, and instead drift over to the titanically-built blonde I’d woken up with, and ask if she’d like me to do her hair.

It’s glorious hair, thick and glossy and down to her waist, when it’s free. It had been in a three-plait braid, twisted up into a bun and pinned to fit into her helmet; I fuss a bit, brushing it out and running my hands through it and using it as leverage to pull her in for a kiss, but ultimately I wind up doing something pretty similar to what she already had. Five plaits instead of three, and just enough off-center that it naturally comes up into a coil for the bun, it’ll fit just as well as the plainer style under her helmet and stay out of her way as she fights. It’s nice, it’s elegant, even pretty, for all that I didn’t do a perfect job - I’m not used to the asymmetric style, it’s not how I do my own hair and it’s been a couple of years since I had someone in my life whom it looked good on - and she’s a little overcome when she sees it in the mirror, in a way that doesn’t make much sense to me. I accept it, though, especially since it comes with a crushing hug, but we’re all starting to feel a little bit of a time crunch, and suddenly things are moving faster.

Amber getting dressed is a little bit more of a production. She strips out of most of the clothes she was wearing for the day, giving me - and, to her apparent surprise, Zidanya - a good chance to ogle her while she rummages around the stack of her armor and its attendant clothing, wearing tight drawstring shorts and an impressively structured brassiere. Thick cloth with metal bits woven onto the surface goes over her legs, and a couple of layers of soft cloth followed by a thick padded one that she tells us is a gambeson, whatever that means, goes over her chest, doing about as good a job at flattening her figure out as anyone could expect any piece of clothing to do.

The gambeson is new, and the pants are different, but the rest of the armor is familiar; bracers on her wrists, gauntlets and helmet, and the chainmail coat - hauberk, she corrects me - that covers her entire torso in yet another layer and descends down to her mid-thighs, extending on her arms until her elbows. With her gauntlets and helmet on, including the additional mesh of chain that comes down from the helmet to cover her throat and neck, there isn’t an inch of exposed skin other than her face, and even there the helmet isn’t entirely open-faced; there’s a vertical bar of steel coming down from the top of the helmet, and when she swings the lower-face plates in, it all somehow attaches together in a way I can’t follow to anchor the whole thing and cover her jaw while leaving her vision about as unimpaired as possible.

I approve. I approve rather a lot, because she’s going to be in front, taking the brunt of any blows coming our way, and if I had more armor to shove her in I’d be telling her to put that on too.

When it comes time to actually leave Keyhome, I almost can’t. My hands are shaking when I close my fingers around the doorknob, and my breath is short, and I turn the doorknob anyway, and pull. The panic that spikes when I look at the featureless expanse of black nega-space where the doorway is might be the worst panic I’ve had in my life; I know exactly what’s on the other side of there, know it in a way I certainly didn’t when I found a lifeline in the void between universes and fetched up in the Temple’s antechamber. There’s murder on the other side of that door; killing and pain and fury and ugliness, it’s everything I’ve tried to avoid cultivating in myself for the last thirty-and-change years.

I step through. I’m the last one past the threshold, and if I didn’t have Amber on the other side of that door I might never have made that step, but I know exactly what would happen if I don’t: Amber and Zidanya would understand exactly why, and they would move forwards without me, and come back to find me once they fetched up at the next pylon.

If they didn’t die.

I don’t want Amber to die. I don’t want Zidanya to die, either, but Amber is the Reca, whatever that means or stands for; I trust Zidanya because I’m an idiot and trust people when I have no particular reason to do so, but something in me unknots and relaxes when I think of Amber in a way I haven’t experienced since I was a child.

The key is loose in my hand, the door gone by the time I finish stepping through. I put it away in one of the pockets of my pants, square my shoulders, nod to my two partners, and pull a Mote together just to fidget with. We’re still in the space between realms, that liminal domain with its tessellated patterns that shift as I look at them and stretch across the endless, otherwise featureless plane, and there’s a stone on a plinth where the pylon used to be, with three handprints.

My hand fits into one of them perfectly. Theirs, each into their own, go likewise, and then everything goes white.