Cori held up the Passus to Cornelia. 

“We found it among the flotsam in the Lion’s Head Galaxy.”

Cornelia took the device, pressing her finger into it’s needle point. 

“Such a troublesome thing,” she sighed. “If only they knew, it would do them no good to posses anyway.” Regardless she closed her hand around it and with a passing thought, it vanished again.

Cori gasped. “Wait!”

The hunt would go on. 

Tom could never get past the grandeur of the Palace after he had been to it. It was as if everytime he visited he noticed a new marvel. 

But as time pasted and he learned more about the Princess and Xyacotal, the way he looked at it changed. He used to be impressed, even envious of the gilded walls and rich decor. Now as he walked past jewel encrusted decorations he wondered, how many could this have fed? He pictured The Sticks and how the Palace could have easily housed everyone, kept them warm and fed, but was reserved for only a few. 

A/N: This is very much a in-joke, just for me.

Khark rested his chin on his staff and sighed. 

“You know what I miss the most about earth?” He asked idly. Tess was flipping through a newly acquired book, it’s pages crumbling even as she coughed at the dust.

“What?”

“Memes.”

Tess and Ber both stopped to look at him.

“Really?” Ber drawled. “Not the sun on the bay, or the sounds of birds in the forest, Sebith forbid!” He raised his hands, grinning.

Khark flipped his heels over his head and balanced on the stop of his staff. “No. I have all of that here. But trying to translate the delicate cross platforming of mutating a phrase or image until it’s a dadsist mess is goddamn impossible.”

Tess and Ber glanced at one another. “That’s… a fair point.”

Far below them Destiny thought she cold make out the distant sound of water running, but the hole in the world was so big and dark that she could not see any farther than a few feet below the sudden drop off the cliff.

She looked at Aku. “Has anyone ever been down it before?”

He shook his head. “Not to my knowledge.”

A powerful wind punched up through the hole and Desinty leaned back as her hair was tangled by it’s grasping fingers. She tightened her hold on her walking stick.

“But that’s where we need to go?” She asked. 

Aku nodded. 

Destiny sighed and stepped forward. “No need to wait then.” She stepped into the darkness.

“Halfway there,” Tom muttered through his gritted teeth. “Halfway.”

This did not make him feel much better. His laborious day stretched infront of him, like a mountain cliff, rising straight into the sky and demanding that he find the strength within himself to climb it.

He leaned back slightly, shivering as his back made contacts with the tomb like wall of the building behind him. He was cold down to the bone, the wind stabbing through his patched coat like a driven nail.

He longed for a cigarette, if nothing else to keep his chest warm from the smoke.

Tom straightened back up with a hiss as he was appracohed by a patron. 

“Halfway. Halfway.”

Physically, Kara was lying on her roof, starlight beaming down on her, eyes half lidded and body sprawled like a tossed rag doll. But really she was buried deep in her own mind.

“Do you remember what made you happiest, when you were alive?” She asked Raven. In the shared space of their minds, they were having tea. 

Raven frowned for a moment. 

“I can’t really remember what was real and what I dreamed when I was in that box,” she said slowly. “But I think I really enjoyed flying.”

Kara starred. “You could fly?”

Raven flashed her familiar smirk. “Like the clouds, darling.”

Coin

A/N: Sorry for the gap, everyone. We shall now resume.

Jov was carefully balancing a coin on the tip of his finger. As Cori watch, he flicked it off and caught it, the magic flowing from his hands to surround the coin. 

“How do you do that?” She asked. The space in front of them was cool and calm as the surface of a mirror. 

Jov passed it to her and Cori focused on holding it up. 

<If you learn how to spin it, I’ll give you a kiss.> Jov’s fingers flashed through the air. Cori turned her head away to hide her blush. The coin wobbled and fell. 

“I’ll remember that,” she muttered. 

“Have you ever noticed that every snowflake is the same?” Ade remarked to Ekkule. He held out his hand, red and chapped from the cold and wind. Ekkule leaned over it and watched as two of the flakes they’d been struggling to clear away from the squash patch landed on the back.

Both were exactly the same. A delicate five pointed star that quickly melted with into Ade’s skin.

“Curious that,” Ekkule said. He paused in his brushing. “Didn’t the Faith say that everyone is made different, though?” He looked up.

Ade was gone. 

Jude held her phone up and scowled.

“No fucking service, are you kidding me?” She sat down on one of the rough brown stones that littered that mountain side.

“Camera still works,” remarked her new photographer. Jude didn’t bother with his name and simply thought of him as ‘Scruffy-Man’. “That’s all that matters, right?” He added timidly when she shot him a glare.

She pulled out her pipe and began to pack it. “I’ll be happier when we’re out of the mountains,” she scoffed. She realized he was staring. “What?”

He shuffled. “I’ve never seen an Elf smoke before,” he mumbled. 

Jude rolled her eyes. “Then get used to it.”

Spectra remarked that she thought she’d met one of the Five, once.

“I’m not sure. It’s not like they wear signs around their necks. And obviously they all have about a billion representatives at any time. I mean,” she waved her paw at Clio and Monaco, “look at us.”

“But I think that it was someone who worked closely with Air, or maybe Air themselves.” She was quiet for a moment. “They were tall. Long hair. Just standing on one of the beaches, looking at the stars. It must have been over a thousand years now. I just remember thinking it was strange and asking who they were.”

Spectra barked a laugh. “They never did tell me.”

The Wandering Planet was passing through a space cloud. Every morning Salai woke to a horizon bathed in a shadowed rainbow, studded with distant stars.

He and Monaco would walk through the forests of thought, just staring through the crystalline treetops at the sky above. The shadows would refact the colors around them, making it like walking through a kaleidoscope.

“I suppose you haven’t seen the like,” Spectra remarked. She barked-laughed. “You and Monaco are still so young. And cute. And small.”

Even Eleonore seemed to find it beautiful, as Salai kept catching her on the roof, staring upwards.

“It feels as if I could fall into it.”

A/N: Tom is from a novel I hope to publish later this year.

When Tom was still a kitten, his favorite place was in the house library.

He would spend hours curled up in the chair next to the fire, looking through the books, at pictures and maps of faraway places. He’d read through the collection of scripts that his mother and father collected from the theater. He’d look through the window, dreaming about what his life would become.

After the theater had been bought and Tom’s life was changed, one of the first things to go were the books. In small stacks at first but by the end, the whole library was empty.

Now, while he was teaching Clyde to read, Tom couldn’t help but think back to that sheltered room and miss his books.