With the Sword in hand, Suisei walked into the tunnel-hallway and followed it outside, to where it opened onto the Erboss-Tor's unliving city.

Nearly a dozen Erboss-Tor had gathered in a nearby courtyard. Suisei recognized Green-Eye among them, along with Giant, Poet, and Everbright. By the state of their core-lights, it was clear they'd been waiting for him.

Green-Eye stepped forward from the group, while the rest grouped into several small circles, the dry, gravelly earth crunching beneath their body-legs as they moved. They trumpeted in boisterous discussion.

Whatever the topic was, it was a lively one.

Green-Eye came to a stop a couple feet in front of Suisei.

"What's happening?"

We make manynesses, and remember the old ways, Green-Eye said. For you, we remember.

The Erboss-Tor's core-light regarded the Sword.

With Sword, you can waybring and wayfare. We will show you how.

"Can't you send me home directly?"

We do both, Green-Eye said. We give and we teach. Teachings will aid you, in case of error.

"You mean I will be able to wayfare myself home?" Suisei asked.

His heart raced.

This is our hope.

Suisei made the Bond-sign and then muttered a brief prayer.

What is that? Green-Eye asked.

"My hope," Suisei replied.

He let his gaze linger on the Sword's sinuous silver curves for a silent moment. Then he nodded, resolute, and looked Green-Eye in the nucleus.

"What should I do now?"

Gain yourself taskskill. Practice.

"I will."

You will need it.

Green-Eye's core-light moved to face the gathering.

Suisei nodded. "I understand."

He started to turn away, to head out into the hinterlands to practice when Green-Eye spoke up one last time.

Beware.

Suisei turned to face it.

Poet looked away from its group of four. Be swift, and it will keep. Tarry, and its futurhythm will change, as all things tend toward stillness.

Suisei stared at the Sword, wondering what that meant.

Worry not, Green-Eye said. We will accompany you.

"And so," Suisei told me, "I went out to practice, and my Erboss-Tor companions followed me."

They went to a mostly empty plateau, fringed with trees.

"What do I do?" Suisei asked, looking at Green-Eye for guidance.

Open yourself, Green-Eye said. Do not think. Merely feel.

Suisei had to swallow his pride, and he did, and it was good, because the Erboss-Tor had been right.

Suisei tensed his grip on the Sword. Following the Erboss-Tor's advice, he focused on it, letting its presence wash over him and banished both his fear and his reverence. He felt its presence without prejudice or preconception.

He slowly rose to his feet.

The effect was immediate.

It was like letting go of a breath he hadn't known he'd been holding. The dizziness and disorientation that had been hounding him vanished without a trace.

He felt… warm.

"Just like that," Suisei told me, "all my troubles with the pataphysics of the Erboss-Tor's world went away. It was like they were never even there. And…" He clutched the armrests. "…no thunderbolts ever came down to smite me." He smirked. "After all the storm and stress of trying to learn the magic of the Land of the Red Sun, I was able to master the Sword's basic functions with ease." He smiled. "It made me feel young again."

We watched him fly through the air. He reshaped the ground, flattening hills as if all the earth and rock were sand. With the Sword in his hand, he felt limitless. He rearranged the clouds and made holes in the sky. He altered rivers' courses while soaring above them, like a god of old.

It was humbling, and, in its own way, terrifying.

After this, Suisei discussed the Sword with Green-Eye and the others, theorizing about it as best as their psychic pidgin allowed.

"The Sword is a sword in name only," he explained to me. "As a blade, a sharpened tree branch would be more effective. But that wasn't the Sword's purpose."

"Then what is?" I asked.

"I doubt there's a single answer. It is a wand, charged with pataphysics of unparalleled strength. But it is also much more. It is a knife that can cut through the fabric of space. It is a resonator, like a tuning fork crossed with a loudspeaker. Its signals cross worlds. The destruction of Zid expended a lot of its power, and without the Angel there to repair it, the Sword was not at full strength. If it had been, it could cut through continents, perhaps even shatter planets."

I did a double take.

"What do you mean at full strength?"

"All things tend toward stillness," Suisei said, repeating the Erboss-Tor's words. Then he looked me in the eyes. "Genneth… the Sword is dying."

I rose up from my seat and stepped back.

"What…?" I shook my head in alarm.

Suisei pursed his lips. "I only noticed it after the second day of training."

He raised his head to the screen, which was now showing this part of his memory.

From the way the lone Erboss-Tor had been observing him, Suisei had a suspicion Green-Eye was scrutinizing him in some way.

It turned out that scrutiny would be very much justified.

Now, traveler, Green-Eye said, we show you the old way.

The Erboss-Tor had taken Suisei out to the middle of one of the flattened hills. Below, a greasy river that pitter-pattered with swimming life. The red dwarf star was up at high noon.

The Erboss-Tor stepped back several feet, making room between him and itself.

Watch, Green-Eye said.

Light and color shone forth as an endlessness of triangles bubbled into being in the open space between Suisei and the Erboss-Tor.

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"It was a weave unlike any I'd ever seen. The only part of it I understood was the one responsible for the light."

"How so?"

"Unlike wyrms, the human eye does not come with a pre-installed pataphysical sense," he said. "To make pataphysics easier to work with, we use certain weaves to make other weaves glow with visible light. It's a lot like how iron filings let us see the action of magnetic fields. When teaching beginners, this gets done constantly, so that they can see what they're doing and learn to detect things in their mind's eye." He chuckled. "Now, Green-Eye was doing just that with this new power, for me,"

The weave was a hollow plane of triangles, infinitely subdivided. Triangles within triangles within triangles, repeating at smaller and smaller self-similar scales—nests within nests—until the motes of light were indistinguishable from one another. The weave revolved in place, gyrating slowly, unfolding from itself, like a flower forever opening against the currents of space and time.

Merely being in its presence made Suisei's every hair stand on end.

"What is this…?" He was utterly spellbound. Excitement raced through his heart.

A fragment of the old way, Green-Eye said.

"What does it do?"

What cannot be done.

That was music to Suisei's ears.

The alien's core-light gazed at the Sword.

The Sword holds this power.

Green-Eye hovered the claws at his tendrils' tips over the Sword. It is… strange. It is like what was made, yet it is different.

"What do you mean?"

You are not the first, Green-Eye said. Others came, long ago. They asked. We helped. This elseself made and gave.

"What did you make?"

The old way, Green-Eye replied, that they might use for… justice.

Then, all at once, the magic vanished. The demonstration was complete.

"Can I use this power?" Suisei asked. "If so, how? How can I conjure it? I must know. It—"

—You cannot, Green-Eye replied.

Suisei lurched back, dismayed. "Why not?"

You are not strong enough.

Suisei let his arms go slack at his sides. "No…"

But Sword will help you.

"What?"

The power dwells within. Find it. We will help.

Suisei reached out to the Sword, opening himself to its power.

"I went beyond the contours I could recognize, down to the depths I scarcely comprehended. I was playing touch and go with an instrument of the divine,"

And, to Suisei's astonishment, once again, the Erboss-Tor were right.

In the memory, Suisei's senses went wild.

"I felt the Erboss-Tor's presence guide me. It was feeling, rather than words. Green-Eye's guidance bubbled up inside me like an obsession. It tugged at my focus, pulling it down to the power buried deep within the Sword. And when I found it, it was like I'd suddenly rediscovered a lost train of thought, as if I'd reached for it once before and had carelessly tugged at it too hard. I knew it the instant I found it. It was just so different to use, compared to anything I'd used before."

Suisei's memories provided me with a far more impactful description of the experience than his words ever could. The new power flowed through his body uncomfortably, like sand blasting through his blood and nerves.

I gasped. "I've felt this, too! This is what it felt like when I channeled &alon's power to seal away the darkness in the lobby."

Suisei nodded. "I recognized the power when you drew from it."

Awe rippled through me. "The power of the Angels…" I whispered.

Suisei's first experiment with this new power resulted in something that should have been pataphysically impossible: he teleported. Because he'd taken precautions to trigger the smallest possible effect, to minimize the damage done in case he'd screwed up, he'd only teleported a couple dozen yards. One moment, he stood in one of the behemoths' dim shadows, the next, he stood by a many-branched ground-crawling tree on the opposite side of a viscous river.

After that, he tried a little more, and ended up teleporting the top of a decent-sized hill into the middle of a river, much to the dismay of the local wildlife.

"I admit, I ended up going a little overboard, though the Erboss-Tor had definitely been encouraging it."

Essential, Everbright said. It is essential.

At the end of the day, Suisei returned to the calligraphy chamber. He slept like a child, blissfully exhausted.

"I don't understand," I said. "What does this have to do with the Sword dying?"

"With each use of this sand-power, the Sword faded a little bit more," he said. "Its metal became a little less lustrous, and their movements slowed."

"Had I not gone overboard on that first day," he said, "I might not have noticed it, nor the profound implications." He looked me in the eyes. "Show them side-by-side, in a before-after comparison."

I did.

The changes were unmistakable.

Slowly but surely, the Sword's strength was waning.

Sitting back down in my theater seat, I grabbed a handful of sweet, sweet caramel corn and stuffed my face with it. (What can I say? I was something of a nervous eater.)

I waited until I'd chewed and swallowed before broaching my worries.

"Alright, so, the Sword is… dying. You said there were profound implications. What are they?"

Suisei stared at the screen. "Lassedicy teaches that, through Angelfall, the Holy Angel told mankind of the sacrifice He had made; that He had cut off His face and made it the Sun. To the Lass, He entrusted the promise of the faith and our sacred covenant: the Bond of Light. And then He vanished, returning to Paradise."

"Yes," I said.

Suisei turned to face me. "Genneth, the Angel did not return to Paradise. He died."

I slumped back in my seat. "No…" I said. "That… that can't be."

"Think about it: the Hallowed Beast died, and His power has faded. If the Angel was dead, that would explain why the Sword's power fades with use. It's disconnected from its source. As Poet said: all things tend toward stillness."

"Did you ask the Erboss-Tor about this?"

"Yes and no," he replied. "I asked the Erboss-Tor why the Sword was dying, and they suggested to me what I just suggested to you: it was disconnected from its power source."

I waved my arm. "But disconnected doesn't mean dead! The Angel has to be alive!" I groaned and scratched my head. "What hope do we stand against the fungus if He's dead?"

"Genneth, I wonder if you might not be as much of an agnostic as you believe yourself to be."

"It should go without saying that recent events have altered my views," I said, but I sighed. "Still… I can see why you didn't want me to foist all this information onto myself at once." But then I paused. "Wait…" I said.

A thought was nagging me.

"How can you be sure the Angel is dead?" I asked. "Maybe He's just in trouble." I sat up straight. "Oh, fudge, do we need to rescue the Angel, too?"

That actually got me excited. "If the Angel isn't in Paradise—which, recall, as far as I understand it, is currently being ruled by the fungus—perhaps that means the Angel is out there, somewhere, in the great unknown!"

"Perhaps…" Suisei said, with a sad smile.

I let the memory continue, anyway.

He spent a couple more weeks training. Rather than try to do anything exceptionally impressive, Suisei made it his goal to maximize his ability to use the Sword as reliably and accurately as he could. He also strove to conserve the Sword's power as much as possible.

One morning—if it was morning, the days didn't quite work on this world they way they had on his own—Suisei awoke to find Green-Eye and two other Erboss-Tor standing beside the platform and the cushion-like object that they'd made for Suisei to use as a pillow.

Curiously, Suisei noticed didn't feel the slightest bit drowsy.

"What's going on?"

Green-Eye turned its core-light to the Sword, where Suisei had laid it against the wall—a humble resting place for an artifact of its power.

The Erboss-Tor stepped toward him. It motioned at him with a sweep of a tendril-arm.

It is time. I will show you. You will learn.

The next moment, Suisei received a message that, even by the aliens' standards, was unusual. It wasn't a feeling, nor a concept, but rather information, raw information, and it made all of the Erboss-Tor's previous messages seem like simple grunts by comparison. Mental images, and fractal veils of particles and radiance bombarded Suisei's awareness. They hung over him like the arc of the sky, branding themselves onto his thoughts. It was a moment of direct contact with Green-Eye's intelligence. The next thing Suisei knew, he was on hands and knees with a splitting headache and the frigid, pebbly black dirt digging into his palms. He tried to speak, but his mouth and tongue refused to cooperate, though, thankfully, after a few minutes and flashes of phosphenes in his vision, his neurological wiring stabilized and succeeded in pushing himself off the ground, with the certainty that, however briefly it might have been, he'd just had direct contact with a mind more deep and compassionate than words could ever tell.

Just watching it left me with a headache.

Key computed, Green-Eye said. Use to cut and travel. Stay safe. Find your home. Find your home.

It took several minutes of concerted temple-rubbing before Suisei managed to shake off the remaining traces of the electrical storms crackling through his head, and several more after that to comprehend what, exactly, the Erboss-Tor had just given him.

Other Erboss-Tor joined with Green-Eye's message. Key. Recipe. Use, they urged, no doubt having sensed Suisei's difficulties. Find your home.

Bit by bit, the pieces fell in place. The particle veil in his mind's-eye-view was the map of a pataphysical field, like what a conductor's score was to a piece of music.

One part of the web stuck out at him. He couldn't even think about it without the word BREATHING gusting through his head.

"Let me guess," I said, "that was the part that would allow you to breathe."

Chuckling, Suisei nodded. "Yes. I felt they made that sufficiently clear."

Slowly, in the memory, Suisei rose to his feet. Tightening his grip on the Sword—letting its power fill him with its dunes—he focused on the fractal ideation the Erboss-Tor had burned into his mind, and, like before, as he did so, the aliens guided him, feeding corrections and alterations directly into his thoughts.

Sand sparked beneath every hair on his head. It whirled inside his ears and blasted down his limbs. Pouring into his fingers and toes, it burst out of his hands in streams of milled starlight that twined across the Sword's silvery loxodrome, making Suisei flinch his arm in discomfort and sweep the divine weapon's tip across the empty space.

A point of light flashed at the tip where the particle streams coalesced. The light streaked across the space the Sword had cut. Then the ragged light-fissure expanded, spreading open like a seam coming loose, forming a portal that grew and grew. Suisei recognized the colors that swirled within it. He'd passed the same wonders on his arrival. The flash of light triggered particle recoil. The glistening streams wound their way around him, solidifying into a familiar eggshell of light that glowed briefly before fading, active, yet invisible.

Turning around, Suisei lowered his head as he knelt before his saviors.

"Thank you," he whispered.

He was overcome with emotion. He looked at their mantle-windows, at what he imagined were their eyes.

The Sword's hilt rattled in Suisei's trembling hands. He was almost lost for words, but he managed to speak, even though it came out cracked.

"How can I ever repay you?"

Remember us, Green-Eye said. Share us. Remember. Remember.

Solemnly, Suisei nodded. "I will. I promise, I will."

Then he stepped into the rift, ready to go home.

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