Warden slipped through the fringes of Daniel’s mindscape, taking care not to be noticed. It became significantly easier and more urgent when the blanket of sleep fell like a thick fog over the entire realm. That interloper had managed it, then. Warden had failed.

Cautiously, he turned his awareness outward, feeling at the strands of Daniel’s external senses. It had been difficult to do without being seen, up until this point. Yes, there it was. The creature, its fabric woven from the Lane by Daniel’s unwitting will. But something was off. Daniel was not resisting it.

There was a surge all around Warden. He nearly lost his footing, and with it his cover. Daniel’s thoughts, heavy with sleep though they were, were wrapping into thick coils. Of course. But Daniel was untrained. He had barely managed to create Warden, and he had been entirely duped by the arrival of the interloper. The creature’s weight would be too much. Sure enough, Daniel barely managed to set the net of thoughts over the creature before, one by one, his senses winked out. A constant thrum and rising and falling of Daniel’s breath were all that remained.

Cautiously, Warden approached one of the coils of the net. It was intact. It was still taut. Perhaps…he grabbed a coil and pulled on it experimentally. Yes, the metaphor had been snared. But it had not been captured, not fully. It had not been reintegrated into the mindscape.

Well, the enemy of my enemy, thought Warden. He set his feet, such as they were, and pulled harder against the coil. There was a sudden pressure against the whole mindscape. This had better work, because Warden was sure to be caught either way. He heaved again, and one of the creature’s arms slid into view above him. All around him, the smokey thoughts of sleep shivered. Daniel was reacting to this on some level as well.

Warden reset his grip and heaved a third time. The creature, entangled completely in coils of will and thought, was yanked into Daniel Corners’s mindscape. Its many limbs were thrashing ineffectually against the net.

“Been wondering where you’ve been hiding,” said a voice that Warden recognized. It was Daniel’s voice. It was his voice. He turned, letting go of the net. The creature was inside. That was what mattered. It had no more love for the interloper than Warden.

A thought-form stood a short distance away. Its features, like Warden’s, were a perfect match for Daniel. But its material was of another mind entirely. Warden wasn’t yet sure whose mind, and he wasn’t likely to find out now. He had fought the interloper when it had first arrived, and he had barely escaped intact.

Warden did not answer the other thought-form. Instead, he lashed out, lunging at it with a furious kick. He enhanced his kick with all of Daniel’s willpower, which was not a lot at the moment. The interloper dodged easily, and Warden’s kick collided with a heavy cord of thought, nearly a pillar, instead. The interloper was on him then, wrapping him in strands of Daniel’s own thought, mixed with something foreign. “You are annoying me, construct. I think it’s time you retired.” The strands tightened. Warden didn’t need to breathe, but something like it, some essential part of him, was denied him. Desperately, he reached out, brushing his hand against the trunk-like pillar of thought. Into it he pushed his sense of purpose, manifested as a simple toy deputy’s badge Daniel probably didn’t even know he remembered getting as a child. The interloper must have assumed Warden was trying to escape, because the strands tightened on Warden, and he lost all his senses.

Warden was shocked when those senses returned to him. He had been certain the interloper would destroy him. But then…of course. If Warden were destroyed, the fragments of him would return to Daniel. There was always a chance that Daniel would consciously regonize that his Warden had fallen and create a new one. Now that he was aware it was something he could do, the next Warden, Warden’s successor, would be more powerful. More focused. The interloper couldn’t risk that.

So he had imprisoned Warden. Warden explored the confines of his new home, barely able to sense anything. Daniel’s mind was locked away from him. The walls were smooth, rigid. Illusion, most likely. Warden tried attacking them, but to no success. The floor seemed to be made of Daniel’s mindscape, which was good. Warden was not removed from Daniel entirely. But from within these walls of illusion, he could do nothing. Experimentally, he reached up. The ceiling was the same glassy illusion as the walls. Following it along to each wall, and each wall along to the next, Warden realized that the entire illusion was masterfully built as a single piece. Above it, he could just make out the shimmering fog of Daniel’s thoughts. Daniel must have been awake, it was more active out there than it had been when Warden was captured. Good, that meant the creature had integrated correctly. It remained to be seen whether it would carry on Warden’s duty, but he had hope.

The interloper’s voice grated against his ears. He turned to the nearest wall. The image of the interloper plastered itself across the illusion, shuddering and flickering with each step. “You know, Warden. I think irony is the most appropriate end for thoughtforms like you and I. I was impressed with your efforts, I will admit it. Your creator built you with scarcely any power at all, but you had such moxie.

“Of course, I have to keep you here for now. It shouldn’t be forever. After all, Daniel’s part in this will end once that box reaches its destination. Your prison, unattended, might fall apart in ten or twenty years of his life. My creator spent nearly five times that building it, you know.”

The interloper’s image turned away and flickered into nothingness. “Incidentally, I have a name, now. Remind me when this is all over and I’ll tell you what it is,” it said as it faded.

Warden recuperated, settling into a pile of dust. He was trapped, then. No way to excise the tumors of illusion that hid beneath every fresh thought Daniel had. No was to patrol his idle inner monologue, keeping the metaphors from feeding on the energy of the Lane. But, the interloper had made no mention of the creature. Warden took that to be a good thing. If it had been captured too, Warden was certain the interloper would have delighted in taunting him about it. Probably, the creature had been left loose because its reintegration meant that Daniel had to face it every time he slept. Well, now so would the interloper. Because Warden had deputized the monster. And he was certain that Daniel had put more power into that being than he had into Warden.

Smiling to himself, he picked a corner of his cell, and he got to work. After all, if the floors were Daniel’s subconscious mindscape, that meant they were malleable, unlike the illusion. And with twenty years trapped in here ahead of him, he certainly had plenty of time.

______

I awoke. That seemed like a good thing in and of itself; people who were in a coma, by definition, did not awake. Therefore, I was not in a coma. Cogito ergo est. I took a deep breath. It hurt. The sleep creature had been trying to crush me, I suddenly remembered. It had succeeded in dragging me into sleep, but as I flickered out, I…some part of me had pulled it back into my own mind. It was, for better or ill, a part of me now. My thought construct, not a free one wreaking havoc on the lane.

My arms, legs, and ribs reported that I was lying on something soft. Definitely not hard cobbles. I opened my eyes. I was somewhat surprised to see wood paneling. Looking around, I took in my surroundings.

The soft thing I was lying on turned out to be a day bed. My grandmother had owned one just like it. The wood paneling was the walls of a modestly sized room. A few knick-knacks decorated the top of a dresser opposite me, arranged neatly by size. Picture frames hung above the bed, but their images were too indistinct for me to make out. Still on the Lane, then.

Carefully, I took another deep breath, focusing on the smells of the room and shutting out the creaking sensation from my ribs. This room did not seem to be one of Carver’s rooms. A different House, then. Perhaps Wanda had taken me in after I collapsed? Despite the unfortunate scene around me, I felt embarrassed at the thought.

Wait. Where were Maps and Boddy? I hadn’t been the only one from Carver’s House at that signpost. I hurriedly started to pull piles of blankets off of me, and slowed down only slightly when I saw Maps’s backpack neatly tucked into a corner next to the bed. Next to it stood my own and Boddy’s. Boddy had left his hunting rifle with the pack, but I didn’t see any sign of his revolver or his sword-cane. I tried to decide if that meant someone had taken them or if Boddy had been free to carry them after his belongings arrived here.

I finally pushed free of the blankets and moved to open the door. There was a long hallway on the other side. Shaking thoughts of endlessness from my mind, I walked to the end of it and found myself in what seemed to be a dining room. It wasn’t a grand hall like the estate at Carver’s, but neither was it a dinky little kitchen table like my own apartment. It was…modest but full. A display case on the opposite wall held plates and bowls that looked like something one would receive as a wedding gift from their great-aunt. Place settings were laid out on every seat of the table, but most of them had the stale look of a setting left to gather dust. More knick-knacks and portraits hung on the wall to my left, almost too many to see that the wall was painted a warm buttery yellow behind them. All of it, even the paint on the walls, gave me the sense of being old. Not old as in worn out, but old as in the sort of old that had been passed down and cared for by generations after generations. Antique.

An elderly-looking woman was sitting at the table. To her right was Maps, and to his right was Boddy. Both wore their hob shape that day. To the woman’s left was a manlike being I didn’t recognize, but which I suspected was not human. A little way down the table, Wanda the naiad was seated, and I was about to avert my eyes when I noticed that she was actually wearing a dress. It was a dated style, like something a 1950’s sitcom housewife would wear. Being a naiad, Wanda somehow managed to make it work. I checked down by her feet. Sure enough, a small stream of water was flowing through the room, Wanda’s bare left foot dipped just barely into it.

Everyone was staring at me. I realized that I had taken a few seconds to absorb the scene of the room, looking around wide-eyed like…well like a metaphor. I was learning my lesson. Either that or Rookie was back on duty, though his witty rhetoric was, at the moment, absent. Odd.

Right, staring people. Doing the only thing I could think of, I raised one hand slightly in a wave. “Umm…hello. You must be the Mistress of the House. My name is Daniel Corners, and I feel as though I should thank you for taking me in while I was unconscious. Might I ask where I am?”

Boddy broke into a wide grin. It still had too many teeth, but it was too warm to be threatening. “Didn’t know if you’d come back from it, Mister Daniel!” he crowed. “May I introduce our illustrious hosts. Mister Daniel, meet Lady Liu Ai. She is House Mistress for the House of Inheritance. To her left is her Steward.”

Numbly, I took Steward’s extended hand. I noticed that he offered his left, but it fit neatly into my right. Lady Liu Ai daintily placed her hand in mine, and in a half-remembered gesture, I bent over it.

“Please, Daniel,” She said, her accent unplaceable. “Sit next to your Mister Bodyguard. We were just discussing what assistance we might give your team. After all, we are allies, in the end, are we not?”

“I suppose we must be,” I responded, pulling out the chair next to Boddy and seating myself at the table.