My red dot led me to... a tavern?

  Sort of. There was a tavern, built of cob and painted with cheerful images of fruit trees and red berry bushes and edible pnts low to the ground, a rectangur structure. A wooden building with an inn sign faced the street end-on, beside the tavern and down a short alley, and that turned out to be L-shaped and much rger than it looked from the street.

  The courtyard formed by the two buildings—even though they didn’t touch at any point—had grass and flowerbeds and a rock-bordered pool with a small fountain at one edge, bright fish swimming zily among the water-flowers. There was a canopied frame supporting a bench swing with colourful cushions. Most importantly, there were tables with chairs, for guests of all sizes, and my friends came in all sizes.

  Serru looked up from morose contemption of her gss of juice, and her eyes widened. “Nathan?” She shoved her chair back so hard that she stumbled getting up, but she caught her bance quickly and ran to me. I wrapped both arms around her tightly, although then I had to let go with one to hug Terenei at the same time.

  Logan, in his felid form, slouched in his chair and heaved a sigh. “I know Reese can read. The fact that you are here and not still with him or at least at the Axis tells me that you listen to him about as well as you listen to me. There’s a shock.”

  “Sorry,” I said, over the heads of my friends. “Not his fault. He did tell me off, gently and tactfully, for not listening to you before now. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the people who mattered to me were in danger, even if I couldn’t remember what it was.” Serru and Terenei let go, but there were further hugs from Aryennos and Heket and Zanshe, and the st pulled me over towards a jotun-sized chair.

  “I’m not even a little bit surprised. I’ve probably got a message from him telling me he tried and you buggered off before you even had your memory back. Fine. We’re at the edge of the Midnds. You can definitely reach it in less than a day from here, and you’ve got no excuses on height because the top of Drumsong Cascade is right there.”

  “All right. In the morning. I... slept rather badly st night.”

  “Nightmare? Yeah. That happens. Don’t fall asleep after dying without a sleeping potion. It’s gonna kick up memories and associations every time, even when the regur nightmares have gone away otherwise.”

  “What? How did you know...”

  “Because everyone does for a while. Part of the tutorial is, ‘See these squishy capsules? Take one before you sleep. After maybe three months you can try skipping the odd night to see if you still have nightmares. Even when they stop, keep some around and use one if you’ve had a really high-stress day. Always use a full-on potion if you die.’”

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to go there. “What happened in Whisperwillow?”

  “The Moss Queen did what she did at the festival,” Serru said, wrapping a hand around mine. “She slipped one mossling through and sent them after you directly. The... the good news is that the potion works. I threw it to Logan and he changed to felid to catch it and then he threw it at the mossling who attacked you while they were running away. And it worked.”

  “Well, at least we managed to test it. She didn’t try to infect me or anything? Just a quick kill?”

  “Infections take time,” Logan said. “No point when you’d just do a Rain directly over yourself and stop it. And she had to kill you fast to make sure you couldn’t just heal yourself. You bought enough time for most of Whisperwillow to be behind doors, either inside residences or inside businesses with doors barricaded, before you went down like a ton of bricks. Unfortunately, not everyone. She managed to take two of the three wardens and about a dozen others. That, she said, is to pay for disobeying her and consorting with her great adversary and remind them to never cross her again. Congratutions, you beat me out for top spot on her shit list.”

  “I thought you said there were consequences for breaking the rules! How is she getting away with that?”

  “I don’t fucking know, I’ve been careful not to break those rules and find out!”

  “We’re ripping this world apart between us. Everyone else is suffering for it.”

  “Yeah, tell me about it. And tell the mostly-felid family hiding in my house for the past seven years while I try to find a way to get three of them back from her fucking spawn camping, just because they were friendly to me without even knowing who I am! She is an absolutely out-of-control psychopath with way too much power who believes her own crap about being infallible and divine! I am not joking that this is for real hardcore serious!”

  I heard Serru’s breath catch, and gave her hand a squeeze; there were several other shocked noises around us.

  “Is that what you need help with?”

  Logan braced his elbows on the table and rubbed his forehead wearily. “I can’t save them. I built a metal-mesh dome over the spot one was born, but that only bought a little time, as soon as he came out she was waiting. I zombied almost an entire vilge where two of them were born, trying to keep mosslings out. She got past me with a fucking mossling bird and re-infected them. All they did was welcome a felid who was new in town. And I can’t stop her.”

  “You didn’t have to do that,” Aryennos said quietly.

  “I left enough to look after the animals and all, and I let them go right after. I’m getting a bit desperate!”

  “That isn’t what I mean. If you told them what was happening, that vilge and a lot of other people would have put themselves in the middle with no hesitation to keep anyone from going through that over and over. And they would have been alert and keeping watch, and might have seen that bird. Everyone has lost someone at some point. Everyone knows it’s bad. There’s not one person alive in this world who would stand by and let that keep happening if they knew, even if it put them at risk.”

  “Any province,” Zanshe said, “any species, any settlement. Any effort and risk.”

  “And if they wouldn’t listen to you,” I said, “they might listen to one of the other newcomers, one who’s part of the local environment. I think there’s different kinds of strength, and they don’t have weapons but they have another kind. All right, we’re going to get them free somehow, because that is war-crimes atrocity levels of torture.” None of those words transted. “Right now, what’s our next practical step?”

  Logan sighed. “The one that I really hate to do to you, bro, because it’s gonna have a price, but at this point, I’m out of ideas. If you don’t visit the Axis, she’s going to be spawn-camping on you personally until you die of old age in order to keep you from being a threat to her and to make you a lesson for anyone else. If you do, we might have a thin chance at ganging up on her and at least forcing her into a truce. We can’t make other pns properly until after that because... eh, it’s complicated. After that, we can figure out what to do.”

  “Definitely not a way home.”

  “Bro, seriously. There is no way home.” He sighed again. “I hate this bit, but it’s the big important thing you really gotta know. You died.”

  “Dying means I can’t get home now?”

  Actually, the uncharacteristically gentle tone of his voice should have been a clue.

  “I don’t mean in Whisperwillow. I mean back before you woke up here. That’s what the nightmares are. There’s no going back because there, you’re already dead. Everyone you keep trying to get back to has already been to your funeral and they’re trying to get on with their lives. They are not wondering what happened to you. They know already.”

  “What? No. I’m not dead. I’m...” Red-blue-white lights, and rain, and screams, and... and something I desperately wanted to see and desperately wanted to hide from...

  Serru abandoned her chair to sit on my p, arms wrapped tightly around me.

  “No, you aren’t dead,” Logan said. “Not here. Here, you are entirely too much of a pain in the ass to not be alive. Dying is something you only do once there, and you did that, and then some complicated glitchy things happened that don’t matter right now and you woke up here with all the information that makes you yourself still intact. This is not any kind of afterlife. Technically, it’s a mistake that newcomers end up here as adults.”

  “That can’t be right. My family can’t... that would... I can’t never...”

  “Yeah, it’s a huge brutal thing to get your head around, but it’s the biggest thing you need to know and accept. This is what you’ve got. Even I think there’s something fucked up in you getting attacked by her for wanting to help people and being encouraged by someone to do stuff at high speed when they could have just added Do the tutorial to one of those notes Heket mentioned. It bites, sucks, and blows, all at once. I have chased you all the way around the world, literally because the cardinal tree where I spotted you isn’t far from the Grassnds Quincunx site, and it wasn’t to invite you over for tea and cookies.”

  “Leave, please,” Zanshe said quietly to Logan. “Just for a little while.”

  “One thing I bet newcomers don’t usually have already when they hear that,” Terenei said, “is a family here.” He got up only long enough to drag his chair over beside mine, then tucked himself against me, under my arm.

  Logan hesitated, then shrugged. “Well, that’s true. I need to go buy a couple of things. I’ll be back soon.”

  Serru nodded absently. “Perhaps ask on the way out if they could let us have a little time without interruption. People usually understand.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “I died,” I said bnkly. It refused to actually sink in. “My parents, my sister, Grace... they all had to deal with that. And I can’t... ever... see them again.”

  Did they know I loved them? Had I told them that recently?

  Would that make the slightest difference to the grief?

  Who had told them? Were they together at the time? What about Grace?

  Had Lee heard, did he care? What about my roommate?

  I hoped everyone else had made it out of the rain and the dark and the sshing lights safely.

  I didn’t realize I was crying until Zanshe pressed a jotun-sized square of thin fabric into my hand.

  “I’m sorry,” Serru said softly, and it sounded like she was on the edge of crying too, cuddled close against me. “You’ve gone from simply wanting to go back to your familiar world to wanting to explore ours but being drawn back by your love of your family. To have that door so completely closed, and knowing that it was a loss that hurt them... I’m sorry, I wish there was any way we could fix it.”

  “I don’t like to say it,” Heket said, “but are we reasonably sure it’s the truth?”

  I nodded. “At this point... I think... I have to believe him.” It came out broken, between sobs. “I don’t want to, I desperately don’t, but...”

  How could you give someone news like that gently, anyway? Even if you actually had any training, and I highly doubted Logan did?

  “We aren’t your parents and sister and Grace,” Terenei said. “We can’t be. But we’re here, for whatever help that is. You aren’t alone.”

  I felt a small increase in Serru’s weight, and then a furry whiskery little face sniffed at mine, a rough tongue licking away a tear.

  The horrible thing was, a part of me was relieved. Not relieved to lose them; that just hurt, a huge searing pain that was just more than I could even process. The relief was because now I knew. The relief was the end of the anxiety and uncertainty, of the guilt about the temptation to just stay here and the fear of what I might have started here for others to deal with.

  Coping with that pain wasn’t going to happen overnight.

  For right now, about all I could do was cry.