"Dr. Rathpalla?!"

Karl yelled, but no one seemed to hear him.

The roar of the triune fox had shattered air, space, and sky. One moment, Karl had been hurtling toward the ground while prismatic flames shot out from the fox's body. The next, he was somewhere else. Somewhere different.

The D'zd's world would have seemed mundane, in contrast.

It was not easy to see. Karl saw, but he scarcely understood what he was seeing. It was a struggle just to come up with the right words for it. Light and shadow had changed places, like the story of the Prince and the Pauper.

There was a sky, Karl was sure of that. It was overhead, and was too big to be anything else. A pair of Suns shone within it, but with darkness instead of light. Mountains sailed through that sky like galleons on the sea, casting brightness like shadow. Lush forests grew from the mountains' undersides in the colors of dreams. The air in between everything was hazy and dark.

"Dr. Rathpalla?"

But there was no response. Karl's song merely echoed.

Vitreous grass thumbed his underbelly like hardened gelatin. All the brush and sprigs and feather-shaped shrubs and paddle-leaved trees glowed, lighting the ambient dark, anti-shade twinkling beneath them.

In the distance, something bright moved. The motion caught Karl's attention and made him raise his neck and forepart in panic.

No, it was fog. It was just fog: pearlescent clouds drifting across the slope of the land, toward the sea embraced to the left. The "water" was richly patterned; light shimmered up from its depths like auroras. The bold glow reminded Karl of molten metal poured into a fresh mold. Black icebergs floated at the surface.

He'd never seen something so beautiful.

Then he heard wingbeats.

He raised his head and turned, slithering toward the sound. A flock of creatures flew by. They had radiant, wheel-shaped bodies, each with four, feathery wings.

Could he call them wheelbirds?

How did they live? What did they eat? And how? But the wheelbirds didn't have any faces, or mouths… or eyes.

Karl turned around, half-excited, half-terrified. "Geoffrey!" But there was no response.

"Geoffrey? Bever? Morgan?"

There was a rustling in the grass. Karl looked down. For a moment, he thought he saw some rabbits nestled nearby.

No, not rabbits. Rabbits had ears. These didn't. Their bodies were abstract, collections of smooth shapes floating close to one another, without anything to articulate them. No muscles. No sinew. No bones. Their heads were small globes with a hole that went all the way through.

Karl slithered toward them.

Their bodies' oddments fell apart like so many toy blocks. The pieces tumbled across the glowing grass with spritely movements, rolling of their own accord until they cobbled back together again and sprinted away, disappearing into thickets of tinted lenses.

Karl was at a loss to explain it. He called for Geoffrey again, but no one came.

Will I be here forever?

He looked up at the sky again, watching more wheelbirds flitter by. A great splash broke at the water's surface. Gobs of luminous fluid snaked through the air. They bit their own tails and solidified into rings. Wings blossomed from them like fingers as they soared away.

Starting to panic, Karl slithered across the grass and down a hill, but then a melodious howl caught his attention. He turned his head toward the sound, eyes following the land's rising curve.

A winged fox leaped out from the brightness of a mountain cave and soared after a flock of wheelbirds. It only had two heads.

Was that a good thing? Bad?

Karl didn't know.

It seemed to be winging toward him.

"No. No no no no no…"

Karl spooled backward, tail winding past his head as he pushed off the ground and took flight, darting into a thick shaft of shadow.

But the fox didn't seem to notice him.

Karl slowed. The fox flew past.

"Huh?"

There were golden markings painted on the fox's wings. Looking at them was like looking at Mewnee writing: Karl knew it had to mean something, just as he knew he would probably never understand what it meant.

The wheelbirds noticed the fox. Their wingbeats quickened.

Below and behind them, the fox slobbered, eager and hungry.

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The spokes in the wheelbirds' wheels revolved in place. They flew even faster.

The third eyes in the middle of the fox's heads glowed bright. Fiery beams shot out of the eyes, striking a few of the wheelbirds, striking a few.

Hurtling forward, the fox opened both of its mouths. With a crack, the opened wider still, unhinged, like the jaws of a snake. Tufts of their fur quivered and burst, spooling out in long strands—an eruption of rope. The fur-ropes tips frayed, winding themselves into different numbers of snapping fingers. The fingers shot at two passing wheelbirds, ensnared them, and reeled them in. The wheelbirds flapped their wings in a frenzy, tugging at the fox's fur ropes, but the fox was stronger.

It shoved them into its mouth and then crunched down with both jaws. Luminous blood trickling out from between the heads' fangs.

Karl wasn't the only wyrm to get sent on a journey across time, space, and memory.

Elsewhere, Merritt and Yuth raced down hall after hall like hovercars on an Expressway, trapped in the spatial labyrinth that had once been the Imperial Palace. Yuth smashed a window and flew out through it, just as Nathan had done—only this time, no mysterious force sucked anyone through the resulting opening.

Cracks shuddered through the wall as Yuth wriggled through. She turned around and yelled once she made it to the other side.

"Merritt, c'mon!"

Merritt followed her; anything to get away from the shadow chasing them like the specter of death. The thing was inhuman: a silhouette of living void-fire limned in a trace-line of many colors. Just being near it left Merritt feeling like her scales were being peeled off en masse.

Merritt thrashed as she struggled to get through the window. Yuth grabbed her by the horns and pulled, helping her through, and taking away a good chunk of the wall in the process.

Merritt bellowed fearfully. Instead of the outside world, the other side of the window opened onto only more hallways.

Mrs. Elbock never would have imagined there'd come a day when she'd pining for when buildings had distinct insides and outsides.

Yet here were are.

"Is this ever going to end?" Storn said.

But Merritt didn't get any time to ponder and answer.

Yuth rose mid-air and coiled, horns and neck cracking the hallway's ceiling in half. She pulled out all the breaks on her magicked flight, but then waves of prismatic fire phased through the walls in a rapidly expanding sphere.

"Shit!" the nurse yelled.

Yuth braced herself with forcefields, layering them, one after another.

Merritt spread out forcefields of her own directly ahead in a desperate attempt to slow herself down and change course. Turning, she pushed off the wall, breaking through the wallpaper and wood with her claws, as she wove a plexus around her tail and fired it.

Blue and gold glistened like an afterburner, sending Mrs. Elbock rocketing through a floating debris cloud, the wave of her acceleration flaring behind her.

Yuth screamed, making Merritt glance back in terror.

The fire-waves barreled toward Nurse Costran like a tsunami, engulfing Yuth's forcefields faster than Merritt could think. Yuth was next, and then Merritt herself.

Yuth felt as if the world was a movie whose director had just called "Cut!" and ordered a change of scene. The hallway and the prismatic wave were nowhere to be seen. Instead, Yuth found herself hurtling through a strange, dark air. A kind of gravity pulled her down, forcing her to readjust her weaves in order to stabilize her flight.

The world swung like a pendulum, the swaying dampening as Yuth's control grew. But then she started to make sense of the world around her, and whatever sense of control she'd gained by stabilizing her flight got dashed to pieces.

Yuth wanted to say it was a fever dream—the work of some teenage edgelord, doodling on their console in the middle of class—but young people these days didn't have imaginations quite like this.

Flying mountains? Shadow Suns?

Yuth roared in shock as a pair of winged foxes flew past her. She immediately followed after them.

One had five heads, the other had one, though all six were three-eyed. Their wings' rich plumage made Yuth think of the old stories her mother had told her when she was small—the tales of the Great Tern. But, more than anything else, it made her think of the freakish, crab-legged fox-head thing she and the others had seen in the Palace.

She'd bet her life there was some kind of connection.

Yuth turned around to see a collection of flying mountains. One was so close, she could reach out and press her claws into its strange rock.

The sound of wingbeats from below pulled Yuth's gaze downward.

The foxes were flying straight down.

Yuth did the same. She passed below the mountain's underbelly moments later. Instead of a flat surface, the mountain's underside was like an iceberg's; the stone tapered down to a point.

My, oh my…

The things she saw!

Yuth had built up a sizable reserve of crazy stories in her years of working in the Quiet Ward, tending to the neurologically damaged. But this one? Angel's breath, it put all the others to shame.

Structures hovered in place beneath the flying mountains, illuminated by the anti-shadow. They were hollow things, with sturdy polyhedral frames. Yuth saw cubes and pyramids and lots of other shapes she didn't know. Some were alone, others were grouped in stacks and rows. Platforms floated within the structures, confined to the space in between the frames.

And they were all massive. Hundreds—no, thousands—of the winged foxes lived among them, walking, talking, eagerly sitting on their haunches.

What the hell?

These things could talk?

Yuth couldn't understand a word of it, and not just because both of the fox's heads spoke at the same time.

"Tvin Moad g'nimxziq d'la, berum sha, nurulkp a'lad."

"Hedesh un'va, po poov ged d'la kurnesh stroon."

There were two foxes perched atop the frame of a great cube in a cluster of interlinked buildings of the same design. A hole opened up in the air, like a doorway, and the foxes dove in. The hole sealed itself behind them, disappearing without a trace.

Another fox flew past Yuth; this time, four-headed. it looked Yuth in the eyes and barked in irritation.

Yuth dove past the giant cube's frame.

She didn't know what was stranger: the foxes or the creatures that weren't foxes, and of those, there were quite a few. Some were obviously different species. She saw gemstones that walked on clusters of spider-like legs, and charming, fennec-eared imps with kind faces and svelte tails, their fur as white as snow, and many more. There was even a giant rabbit—as big as a draft horse!—with fur mottled in gray and black and a sleek, but muscled build. It also had a saddle on its back, and a harness, and other finery, almost like an afterthought.

But most of all, Yuth saw the two humans standing on the platform.

Two. Humans.

They stuck out like sore thumbs.

They were on the platform directly beneath her, maybe a dozen yards away at most.

She hovered toward it.

The humans were talking to a single-headed winged fox. Their figures subtly vibrated, occasionally flickering, as if they weren't quite there.

"Itizzi endodianni, kalarta mé tosa," one of the humans said; a blond woman in black and gray.

The man beside her patted her shoulder and laughed, as if someone had been teasing. "Piceno a mien, no casi." He crossed his arms, jostling about his flowing, violet robes. "Mé incendido lenda Lutresci," he pointed at himself, and then at his partner, "a nemi, no Lutrescina."

The fox clacked its jaws and pressed a paw against its chest.

"Moad."

But then they turned to Yuth. They'd finally noticed her presence. There was shock in their eyes. The fox—the Moad?—spread its wings, while the humans staggered back and yelled.

Had they never seen a wyrm before?

But before Yuth could say anything, everything changed.

Merritt, meanwhile, saw something completely different, not that she had any way of knowing it at the time.

Even now, I don't understand these events nearly as well as I'd like.

The Moad. The Lutresci.

There was an illicit exchange of magitech; that much, I'm sure of. And, of course, there was the disaster.

The Doom.

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