"Who's there?"
Amamiya Rin's head snapped up. The Giant of Light's golden eyes swept across the whole stretch of void, scoured pale and blank by his own radiance — and found nothing. Not a trace of anything foreign.
His battle with the Haunter of the Dark had bleached the surrounding void to a featureless white. Anything that intruded on it, he would have sensed at once.
But there was nothing. Nothing at all. As if whatever had spoken was woven into this space and time itself, into the turning of the stars.
"An Elder God?"
Amamiya Rin dimly recalled that Randolph Carter, the old master's avatar, had been lured by Nyarlathotep to the very gates of Azathoth's palace, and was saved there by the Elder God Nodens.
So had he, too, drawn the attention of one of Nyarlathotep's enemies?
But the tone of it… did not quite fit.
"We will meet. But not now."
The voice came again, carrying a composure that had crossed hundreds of millions of light-years, and gathering, little by little, a weight and depth of meaning.
"When your star-path reaches its appointed node. When the night of the mortal world is lit by the radiance ordained at the dawn of creation. When you stand face to face with the end of all things and your will does not bend. When you arrive at the hour that demands you contend with that primordial Chaos — then we shall meet again."
In that instant, Amamiya Rin seemed to see, far off in the depths of the sea of stars, three points of starlight strung along a single line blazing out in unbearable brilliance.
That light pierced across countless light-years and enveloped the body of the Giant of Light. Its immense power lifted him with a force that brooked no refusal, bearing him upward out of the endless void.
The warped space began slowly to smooth itself out. The raving aether winds sank into stillness. The whispers of Chaos scattered and withdrew, and those stars that had jittered with omens of ruin settled back onto their appointed courses.
Weightlessness swept over him once more — but no longer the sick vertigo of falling toward the final Chaos. This time something gentle drew him along, guiding him back toward the mortal world in a smooth, steady return.
Wrapped in stardust, the towering frame of the Giant of Light gradually drew inward, and that pure radiance that had torn the darkness apart sank slowly back into Amamiya Rin's body.
The void and the blackness around him rushed backward. That barren waste of gray-white gravel, and the outline of the city his own subconscious had built — both sharpened before his eyes at a speed he could actually watch.
By the time Amamiya Rin found his footing again, what was underfoot was asphalt, faintly cool and damp with the night.
Behind him the lamps of the alleys still swayed. The sign of the convenience store on the corner still flickered its warm yellow. The evening wind carried the particular smoky, lived-in scent of the city — as though that ferocious clash on the border between light and Chaos had been nothing but a dream too vivid for comfort.
Blankness and bewilderment crossed Amamiya Rin's face.
But he did not stay bewildered for long.
He was simply too tired.
Only this evening he had fought Kayako, and fighting in the form of Ultraseven had all but overdrawn his soul. Less than a day after that — no, less than five hours — he had fought the Haunter of the Dark in the Illusory Dream Realm.
His arms and legs had gone soft. Darkness crowded the edges of his vision, his fingertips trembled, the ground felt like cotton beneath him, and a droning filled his ears so that every sound arrived through a layer of gauze.
He tried to hold himself upright, but his eyelids grew heavier and heavier and his thoughts turned sluggish. Then his knees folded and he pitched forward.
After that, he knew nothing at all.
How long passed, he could not say. Slowly, Amamiya Rin's awareness floated back up.
Touch returned first. Beneath him was a familiar mattress, neither too soft nor too firm, warm from a body. Something lay across his left leg, heavy.
Then the ache crashed through him — savage, everywhere at once, the kind of pain you would get from being run over by a truck and then reassembled. His head worst of all: his temples throbbed, and each pulse dragged at his cranial nerves.
Amamiya Rin opened his eyes.
"A familiar ceiling…"
What lay before him was an environment he knew intimately: the bedroom of the apartment where Tomie lived. The curtains hadn't been drawn all the way, and sunlight leaked through the gap to stretch a bright band across the floorboards, dust drifting slowly through it.
From outside came the faint sound of distant traffic — far enough away that it only made the room feel quieter — with a few birdcalls threaded through it.
A woman lay on her side beside him, one hand resting on his chest, her face buried in the hollow of his shoulder. Long black hair spilled across the pillow, a few strands falling against his cheek. Her skin was so pale that the fine vessels beneath her eyelids seemed visible. Her red lips were slightly parted, and the corners still held the ghost of a curve, as if she were in the middle of a pleasant dream — an uncanny, magnetic pull that made a man want to kiss those red petals shut.
"This place… is it still the Dream World? No — the Illusory Dream Realm? It's different from before."
Amamiya Rin's gaze traced Tomie's cherry lips as he murmured to himself, thinking it through.
Yesterday — the timing should be yesterday — that encounter had sharpened his sense of dream and reality. Or more precisely, he really had come away from the Haunter of the Dark with knowledge of the Illusory Dream Realm, and a measure of control over it.
For that being, summoned out of the black abyss of Chaos, could show a man other worlds, other galaxies, and the mysterious, contradictory secrets of arcane knowledge.
Which was precisely why Amamiya Rin could tell that although he had woken exactly as he might on any ordinary day, he had not left the dream and returned to reality.
This was still a dream — a corner of the Illusory Dream Realm. Like Carter's Sunset City, this was a dream-city built from the subconscious minds of himself and the Tomies.
Yet it was not the same as the Dream World of before. The Dream World now was far more… real?
"Still thinking? Rest a while longer. There's plenty of time."
Tomie opened her eyes, fingers brushing Amamiya Rin's cheek, her gaze full of concern and love.
"I'm in no mood to rest. I suppose I was just born unable to sit still," Amamiya Rin said with a rueful smile, taking Mara Tomie's hand and gently lifting it away. Then he braced himself against the bed, put his weight on his arms, and pushed himself upright.
"Ngh…"
The moment he sat up, exhaustion and pain surged through him together — the sort of ache you got from pressure training at the gym, only worse, as though a mountain were pressing down on him. If he hadn't long since grown used to that weight, ordinary willpower really would not have been enough to get him out of bed.
"Hah!"
Amamiya Rin let out a tight, suppressed breath, raised one heavy arm, and rubbed at the space between his brows.
"The second my head clears, I start turning over the trouble I'm in and the trouble that's coming. This world never lets me stop walking."
He sighed, resigned, and a smile surfaced on his face — the kind you find in bitterness for lack of anything better.
"Still, we finally have a… safe place? A harbor and a place to rest, safe enough, anyway. With the power I got from the Haunter of the Dark, the Long Dream is no longer a death sentence hanging over us. We have more time now."
____
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