The Boy Who Found Fear At Last

by guardianofscrewingup

A maze of nightmares, a locket that won't open, and mysterious visions of a boy who glows like starlight - Jack is forced to contend with all of these things after a search for what happened to his sister goes horribly awry. The key to Jack's salvation may lie in the past of one Kozmotis Pitchiner, a past that Jack is forced to learn about whether he likes it or not.

3. Chapter 3

Author's Note: Sorry for the long delay, folks. This was a very busy summer. Things have finally died down for us a bit now that it's over.

Kate and I will be co-writing an original book together and are working on our own individual books and I just want to periodically make note of that and see if anyone would be interested in being on our mailing list to be notified when we self-publish. If you would be, just pop an email to kirajlane at gmail DOT com to be added to the list. We'll only contact you for major information in the future, like release dates. If you like our fic, our original stuff - which is in the vein of things like HTTYD, RoTG, and Discworld - will be right up your alley.

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The Boy Who Found Fear At Last

by Kira, Kate, and Kaylin

---

Chapter 3

"How many has he had so far?"

"I - I don't know."

"Torg's never going to win. Not against him. Why did he even agree to the contest anyhow?"

"He just came out of nowhere and challenged him. You know Torg, he doesn't ever back down from a challenge."

"Gotta give 'im credit for trying. I'll miss him when his livers kick out."

The bystanders in the Prancing Pegasus, one of the most popular bars in El Dorado, were well used to watching the occasional drinking contest, but this one was record-breaking - both in terms of how many drinks had been consumed and how legendary the drinkers were.

Rumor had it that Torg the troll hadn't lost a drinking contest in five hundred consecutive years, despite competing against thousands of worthy opponents, including, allegedly, Tezcatzontecatl, one of the four hundred drunken rabbits known as the Centzon Totochtin.

He had not, however, ever competed against the living legend that was Nicholas St. North.

Which mean he'd also certainly never competed against him when he was trying to get information that would allow him to find someone that he cared for greatly.

"Ha!" North laughed after he downed yet another shot, wobbling slightly in place. That would have been a sign to worry the Guardians, if Torg had not already been leaning heavily on the tabletop. "I am thinking - I am thinking that this may as well be water. This is what I'm thinking."

"Blugrhfsdsddfafa."

"What's that?" asked North, holding an unsteady hand to his ear. "Is that the sound of defeat coming out of your mouth?"

"Asafsdsadasafasdsa."

It sure wasn't the sound of coherent sentences. Torg was far beyond those now.

He still made a game attempt at downing his shot. It almost made it into his mouth instead of all over his shirt. Almost. Just like he almost flopped into his chair instead of landing heavily on the floor. Sandy peered over him thoughtfully, then gestured Anansi closer. The Spider prodded the downed troll with one dark leg, then nodded once to the Sandman. Both turned and gave the Cossack thumbs up.

"Ha!" North crowed. "A winner is me! Shostakovich -"

He wove so widely that Tooth jerked to the side, and Bunny braced to catch North if he collapsed. But his eyes stayed open, and he waved off his compatriots' worried looks as he wobbled back upright in his chair.

"The winner will have cocoa now," said North waving now to the barkeep. "The loser will have cocoa as well, but, shall we say, a special blend."

He briefly failed to dig into the pocket of his massive coat, but finally succeeded in extracting a little pouch. He held it out to the waiter, who made the error of taking a deep sniff from the pouch upon receipt. He nearly fell back himself, steadying himself against the bar as he handed it to the tender.

"Do you think it's the cocoa that gives him all that fortitude?" Cupcake whispered to Jamie. Jamie shook his head.

"He only has cocoa afterward," he said. "I think it's probably the milk. He drinks a lot of milk on Christmas."

"I guess," Cupcake answered as Sandy picked up one of the remaining filled shot glasses, sniffed it curiously, and took a sip.

He immediately passed the less-one-sip shot to Anansi, thumping his chest with a fist, coughing up a little cloud of dreamsand. Anansi, a little less curious than the golden man, grinned and held the glass out to Bunny.

"What do you say, old friend?" he asked, teeth flashing white against his dark skin. "I bet it would-"

"If you say 'put hair on your chest,' you'll be wearing it," Bunny answered. Jamie and Cupcake (and the rest of their audience) tittered, and still-grinning, Anansi set the shot back down on the table. North picked it up and wagged a finger at Jamie and Cupcake.

"I do not want to hear either of you trying this for ten years," he said sternly. "Naughty List. I am watching."

"Yes, North," said Jamie

"Yes, Santa," said Cupcake.

"Naughty List," the Cossack repeated, setting the glass down again firmly on the tabletop to punctuate his sentence. "Also, unsavory sorts may attempt to take advantage. Drink with friends, or with friends nearby. Yes?"

"Yes, North."

"Yes, Santa."

The waiter returned, placing a mug of hot cocoa in front of North and dispatching another to one of Torg's friends. It took three people in total to sit Torg up enough for the waiter to pour a little sip of the special cocoa into the troll's mouth.

A little bit went a long way apparently, because Torg's eyes popped open wide, his face turned red, and he sat up with a noise that sounded a little bit like:

"HHHHHWWWWOOOOOOOOARGH!"

"Glad to have you back with us," said North, genial and starting to sober. "Come, sit. Now that I've won your wager, we have much to talk about. "

Torg shook as he got to his feet, swaying a bit before slumping into his chair. Despite losing, he looked incredibly impressed. He even laughed a hearty laugh at the sight of North sitting there calmly drinking his cocoa.

"Well done, old man! No one's beat me in over five hundred years!" crowed Torg. "Fair's fair, you bested me. What exactly did you need to know?"

"There is someone I am looking for. I am told you have many friends, Torg - friends that might be able to tell me where this person is."

"Krampus," Torg ground out between jagged teeth. His tone of voice showed he had no love for the myth, but that hadn't been enough for Torg to roll on him. Information was something he only gave to those he respected and respect had to be earned. "I know someone who would know where he is, but it'll be dangerous for you to talk to her. I can tell you where to find her, though."

North sat forward in his chair. "Your help would be most appreciated."

---

Jack rounded a corner and found himself in space. He had only a second to recognize that he was floating among the stars before something bright gold streaked past his face and dragged him into its wake.

"Ahh!"

Jack flailed to right himself as he slipped along behind the - it looked like a comet, but less like the comets kids learned about in school, the frozen rocks with vaporizing ice tails, and more like a comet a kid might draw with their crayons - a gleaming golden pod with soft, rounded edges, trailing golden dust as it flew through space. The sight of the golden dust was heart-stoppingly familiar.

Jack twisted to see through one of the gold-dusted windows.

"...Sandy?"

The figure inside moved too frantically for Jack to see him clearly, but there was no mistaking that little sand-drop silhouette. Even though Jack knew he was only seeing an illusion, his heart still leapt hopefully at the sight of the Sandman.

Cruising through space. That was...unexpected.

And the spaceship wasn't following an easy, dreamy path like Jack might have expected, either. It hurtled along through the stars with Sandy moving with harried efficiency at the helm, pulling Jack along in a zigzag wake. Jack soon saw why - bursts of nothingness streaked past, blotting out the stars, narrowly glancing off the ship's gold-dust shield as Sandy dodged them.

One finally struck, cracking through the golden halo that surrounded the ship. It veered wildly, and bent its trajectory towards a mottled blue-and-white planet looming in the sky ahead.

The veering of the ship spun Jack around so that he got a full view of the formless blackness chasing Sandy's starship. Blobs of it lashed out at the ship, narrowly missing, and eerie blobs of dirty yellow light flashed in it, as if through thick smog.

Jack looked over his shoulder. The blue planet had loomed large into view, and he realized both the ship and the black mass - and he, as well - were going to crash into it.

"Ahh!" Jack flailed uselessly, which only sent him ping-ponging into the interior of the ship's shields and then back.

"Oof!"

He managed to hook a hand onto one of the fins of the ship and held on for dear life.

The starship skidded to a crunchy-sounding stop across the surface of the rugged planet, carving a long path through the dense trees where it landed, flinging Jack free so that he skidded to a stop and landed in a giant mud puddle. The blobby fear-mass didn't carve a path - it smashed a crater into the Earth, flattening the trees and almost burying Jack in a slurry of wood and mud. Clambering to safety himself, Jack caught sight of Sandy emerging from the broken ship, and the two of them both looked back towards the crater.

For all that his ship had crashed, Sandy looked only slightly alarmed as a tall figure raised itself from the smoke of the crater and stalked his way with his yellow-tinged eyes flashing. He glanced around the half-destroyed forest, bouncing slightly in place as he swept up a sand cloud to spirit himself away.

The shadowy figure jolted into pursuit, leaving traces of itself in its trail as if it were cutting the air open to bleed around it. The shifting nightmare smoke peeled off Pitch Black's skin as he pursued the Sandman across a vast and primeval forest. Jack found himself carried along after them through the air, as if tugged by an invisible rope, across the forest which was so large, there was something primordial about it. The air around him felt different, too - cleaner than any air he'd ever smelled, as if the forest - and the world - were still new.

Sandy looked over his shoulder, his cheery brow furrowed with consternation as he saw Pitch in pursuit. He picked up the pace, but so did Pitch, closing the distance between them. Mountains loomed in the distance, at the edge of the forest, and Sandy zipped up and over a fork between them. They dodged mountains like pinballs, trailing sand and pure fear through the range, until the ground beneath them opened up into a wide grassland. Sandy suddenly stopped running.

The look in his eyes made Pitch skid to a halt in mid-air, even before his first lash from the sandwhip.

The king of nightmares tried to fight back with his mass of fearful smoke, but it was blowing away in the wind that shook the grass, while Sandy's mass of dreamsand maintained its volume. The boiling essence of fear around Pitch took rudimentary shapes, but only with extreme effort on Pitch's part, and not even fast enough to fully form before Sandy struck them down. Pitch hadn't mastered his powers, yet - and he didn't have the nightmare sand to call on. Even Sandy's sandforms seemed strangely loose, compared to the shapes Jack knew him for creating with them - as if this fight had taken place so long ago that even Sandy was still a few tricks shy of mastering his sand.

But he was more than a master enough for Pitch. His final lash threw the not-yet-Nightmare-king against the side of the mountain, then, for good measure, he threw Pitch into the air and yanked him back down on a strand of glittering sand. Pitch's impact left another crater, and the last of the fear essence blew away on the wind as he lay, dazed.

And just like that, the battle was over. Jack wondered why Sandy had even been running from Pitch at all.

The little sandman dusted his hands off as he landed at the side of the crater. He looked at Pitch, shaking his head with an expression that said the Nightmare King should have known better.

"He really should have," Jack agreed, with a short laugh, but Sandy didn't hear him.

Sandy lifted his finger to as if address Pitch, a very measured, calm gesture. The Nightmare King groaned, stirred, then stilled again. Sandy waited until he opened his eyes again and, when he was sure he had Pitch's attention, he opened his mouth and shocked Jack nearly out of his skin.

"Stop following me," he said in a voice that was calm and sonorous and strangely deep.

It was all he said before nodding and floating away from the stunned Pitch, back toward the wreckage of his ship.

Jack had been crouching on a tree branch nearby as he watched the fight, but the sound of Sandy's voice had him slipping off in surprise, clinging to it again only just before he fell. It felt almost...sacrilegious. Whatever reasons had driven Sandy to endless silence had to have been personal and meaningful and it felt wrong for Jack to hear his voice without his permission.

Pitch, bewildered, waited until Sandy was gone to rise from his crater and put a spindly hand to his head. Jack watched him crawl out, following Sandy's golden trail back to the wreckage of the spaceship. Sandy was picking through the ship when Pitch arrived, tossing parts aside, the concern on his face still mild, even though he clearly was not salvaging anything from the wreck. Pitch slunk through the shadows, his yellowed eyes glittering with malice, his ragged-nailed fingers curved into grasping claws as he slipped down a long shadow cast by a tree behind Sandy -

At the very last minute, the Sandman turned around and walloped his would-be throttler in the gut with a sandblast that glittered in the light of the setting sun. Pitch slammed against a treetrunk and sank to the ground with a groan. Sandy hovered in front of him, a little more frustrated.

"What did I say?" he asked. His hands were spread, his eyebrows raised in an expression of disbelief at Pitch's raw determination to get his butt kicked. It was all he said before going back to his salvage.

The vision went on, through scene after scene of Pitch and Sandy cohabitating on the strangely empty Earth, Sandy salvaging from materials in his spaceship a little home in the clouds, while Pitch ever slunk at the edges of the light.

"This is about fear, isn't it," Jack said, finally. He said it mostly to himself, but maybe partly to the ice skates.

"Well I mean, obviously the whole maze is - but this isn't my fear." He gestured to the vision - where Pitch had provoked an almost exasperated Sandy into yet another curbstomping. "I don't know how Pitch's memories are in here, but this is somehow about his fear, too."

Maybe the key to his salvation was figuring out why.

---

Sometimes, a door would slam shut behind Jack.

This was curious, because there were no doors on any of the openings when he walked through them. Nevertheless, sometimes he would walk through an opening, and hear a door slam shut behind him before he'd even had time to turn around and see it appear.

The room was always the same. It massed with colored lights, like rainbow fireflies buzzing in place. At first, Jack had been wary of them, remembering the room of razor glass flowers, but the lights never harmed him. They never did anything but be beautiful.

Jack had realized this by the time he'd reached the room a third time, after witnessing Sandy and Pitch's crash-landing on Earth. Now, the sound of the door slamming shut behind him was almost a comfort - it meant, if he was right, something pretty that didn't want to hurt him. The ice skates spun over his head as he slid down the door, resting for a moment as the lights gleamed above him.

He reached out to touch one, and it vibrated softly and floated away, powered along by his touch, like it was floating through airless space. It bounced against another light, and the motion transferred, the first rebounding off the second, sending it spinning slowly through the room. If Jack stayed, perhaps soon the whole room would be alive with gentle motion.

He was tired. Tired of walking, of seeing things he knew were not his to see, tired of seeing nothing that was beautiful. So he did stay until then - just waiting, getting his strength back, as the lights danced.

The door always slammed behind him when he entered the room and he knew it would slam behind him again when he left. But somehow, he always found it again.

He didn't know which to care about more - this sign that he was going in circles, or this reassurance that there was still something, even if it was just one thing, in the maze that wouldn't do anything but soothe him.

When he couldn't justify sitting and enjoying the lights any longer (sitting peacefully was a relief, but it also wasn't going to get him out of the maze), he finally moved on through the room, sighing as the door slammed shut behind him. The clang of its closing was loud, and it echoed off the scene laid before Jack.

He stood in a desert, stretching out as far as the eye could see. The flat plain around him was spiked thickly with dead trees, but in the distance, the sands rose up into endless dunes, as bright and pale as snow banks. The dead trees looked like they'd been scorched by fire, but Jack couldn't see how they'd still be standing if they'd been burned by anything fiercer than the light of the sun.

Jack turned around to look for the door only to find that it was gone. All he saw behind him were more dunes. He turned back to the macabre grove in front of him.

"This isn't ominous at all," he said to Huey and Louie, who looked almost timid as they floated overhead.

Jack took a few cautious steps towards the trees, stopping as a crackling noise and a rush of hot air hit him. The trees were suddenly all on fire.

Jack stopped, his jaw hanging open for a moment. "Oh, no thank you," he said, turning problem to walk across the sand dunes directly behind him. He was going around this big creepy flaming forest of dead trees, thanks.

Jack trudged unsteadily over several dunes before climbing over the last to find...

The flaming forest spread out in front of him again. He rolled his eyes skyward and without a word, trudged off to the right this time, hoping to go around the dunes, but after climbing over a particularly steep one -

The flaming forest was there again, waiting for him down below in all its sinister glory.

Jack pressed his fingertips to the bridge of his nose.

"Of course I have to walk through the sinister, flaming forest of dead trees. Why did I expect anything different?" he asked the skates.

They both bobbed in the air in a movement that resembled a shrug.

Jack tilted his shoulders back, took a deep breath and walked towards the flaming forest. Even though every instinct told him to run, he didn't. He'd learned through experience that running wasn't always the best move in the maze. Sometimes the movement only caught the attention of things that liked the chase.

He took his steps slowly, his toes sinking into the hot sand, watching the flaming trees closely. They did nothing but burn, making odd, groaning sounds as he walked. That didn't reassure him. He wasn't going to be reassured until he was through the flaming forest.

Actually, he probably wasn't going to be reassured until he was out of the maze altogether.

The trees groaned even louder as they burned and suddenly, one exploded. Bright fragments of wood shot in all directions, just barely missing Jack. The rest of the trees began to groan louder as Jack yelped and cowered.

Okay, so this wasn't one of the situations where running was bad. Running was good here, running was definitely good.

Jack broke into a sprint, hopping over the flaming remains of the tree in the sand. All around him, the trees started exploding, sending flaming splinters and bits of wood in every direction. For the most part, the explosions caused a bunch of narrow misses, but one of them sent a huge chunk of flaming wood right at his head. Before he could even think about dodging, the skates darted in and knocked it out of the air.

Finally, he was through. After climbing over the dunes on the other side of the flaming forest, he saw a tunnel that led down into a place that seemed filled with the same kind of stone of the rest of the maze and he bolted down out of the heat, away from the terrifying, flaming explosions.

Jack sank down to sit with his back against a stone wall, taking respite in the blissful cool. The skates were still with him, though now they were smudged with soot and looking just a little scorched.

"Thanks, guys," Jack panted out, looking up at them gratefully.

There was no reason for them to have done that. If they were just enchanted things meant to be pretty, why would they have the means to act on his behalf? Maybe they were sentient somehow. Maybe there was some invisible spirit guiding them along.

Whatever the case, one thing Jack knew for sure was that if - when he got out of here, he was making sure Huey and Louie got out, too.

---

Another number on the maze wall, another fingerprint in the book. The walk through the maze had been dark and quiet for a while. No rooms with menacing things, nothing exploding in his face, not even the room of glowing lights.

Jack was glad to have not run into anything menacing in a while, but the quiet was still unnerving. He was that much more relieved when he turned a corner and saw a now-familiar glowing figure ahead.

The strange starlit boy was there again, balancing on the handle of his spear. The point was stuck in the cracks between two stone tiles on the floor. It was strange to see the boy balancing, looking almost happy as he wobbled there on one foot. It was the same sort of thing Jack did with his staff during periods of boredom.

Jack approached quietly, hoping that he'd manage to keep the boy still long enough to talk to him. He was willing to grab him this time if he had to, but the boy shook his head as if to say, 'I know what you're thinking, and don't even think about it.' His eyes were filled with something that might have been pity.

Pity for who? Him, in the maze? Or pity for what he was about to show Jack next?

"These things you've shown me...about Pitch," Jack asked quietly. "What do they mean? Why are they here? And who are you?"

The boy shook his head again, as if in great sadness. The pity must have been for Jack, he realized. He had to be a sight just then, his clothes ragged and torn by the exploding trees, face smudged with dust and dirt.

"Are you lost like I am?" Jack asked. The boy simply shook his head, flipped off of the end of his spear, and landed lightly on his feet. He pulled it out of the floor and ran, looking back as if he wanted Jack to follow.

Jack ran like he always did, wondering why, despite not knowing who the boy was, despite not knowing if he was a threat or lost like he was, it always seemed to feel like they were playing a game of tag together. He turned a corner and found himself under a beautiful night sky. The boy wasn't there anymore.

Jack knew somehow that the sky he was looking at wasn't Earth's sky. It was tinged purple and the stars were thicker. They glowed brighter than Jack had ever seen them anywhere in the world, even before electric light had polluted the sky.

Looking around him only confirmed the other-ness of this place. The trees were a strange blue color, and they twisted in looping shapes that no Earth trees ever had. The grass was tinged with a pink so bright it was visible in the starlight and in the light of the strange glowing lanterns that had been set around the camp.

Jack was fairly certain it was a camp, at least. A military camp, maybe - there were tents and guards and people in uniforms nearly the same as the ones General Kozmotis and his friend had worn. Filled with curiosity that burned in a way that was nearly physical, Jack moved around the camp, searching for...

"Koz! Hey, Koz! How's the kid?"

Jack saw the soldier from before, Kozmotis Pitchiner's friend. He was younger now, and his gold-toned face was a lot less cheerful in this memory.

Kozmotis was younger, too. Eerily so - he couldn't have been ten years older than Jack. Jack didn't know what to make of his expression, weary in a way that rang deeply familiar to him. There had been times growing up, he remembered, when his mother's face had been lined with such deep concern, usually when she was worried about keeping him and his sister fed. It was the expression adults got when they worried deeply about children.

"Not...well," Kozmotis said ruefully. "Jem, he's not talking. They brought him in, fixed him up, and he hasn't said a word."

"Well, you know the Star Herders. Their vocal cords have a bit of trouble with Common. He can probably understand it."

"That's not it," said Kozmotis. This time he seemed far less concerned with formality, though that may have had to do with the fact that he had fewer little pins in his collar and bars on his chest. "After everything he saw... I can certainly imagine what it must have been like - we've been in the thick of it ourselves, but he's hardly more than a child, even by Star Herder standards. I'm not sure he's entirely...there."

The tone of Kozmotis' voice sounded absolutely mismatched with Pitch's. It rang with deep compassion and concern, a tone like North might use when talking about a child in need.

"Maybe you should try to talk to him," Jem suggested.

"Me?"

"You're the one who already has a kid."

Jack sucked in a breath so suddenly he choked on his own spit. He coughed so much he almost missed Kozmotis' response.

"Yes, but Rashena is Rashena. I don't have to know how to talk to her. She'll talk at me no matter the situation. Pretty much incessantly. About every possible subject, from why the sky is indigo to whether or not moondogs can look up." Though his words were wry, they were filled with a great deal of affection. "It's really rather easy - I just have to sit there. This is a very different. What he needs is a counselor or a grief specialist -"

"And we don't have one currently detached with us," Jem pointed out. "C'mon, Koz, the kid needs somebody to talk to him. It needs to be someone patient and kind, someone that can pull off parental."

Kozmotis sighed and looked towards the opening of one of the tents. "I suppose he does."

He stepped into the tent. Jack followed close behind him. It was a large tent, clearly meant to be used for medical purposes or for refugees of some kind. There were cots and blankets and little lanterns like the ones outside.

There was only one figure in the room, though, sitting alone on a cot, a blanket wrapped haphazardly around his shoulders. His spear leaned against the side of the cot.

Jack inhaled sharply, but managed not to choke this time.

It was the boy who glowed like starlight. His eyes were blank and distant, and though the blanket had slid down his shoulders, he didn't seem to notice.

Kozmotis stepped towards him slowly, trying to act non-threatening. His hands clenched and unclenched awkwardly at his sides. He was silent for a while, as if considering several things he might say.

Finally, when Kozmotis spoke, it was with a simple, "I can't imagine what you're going through right now, so I'm not going to pretend that I understand. I've lost loved ones and friends to the fearlings, but not -"

He broke off.

"I just want you to know that despite how it may feel at the moment, you're not alone." He took a seat on the cot opposite the glowing boy. "We came here to help you and your people and we're going to make sure that you're taken care of."

The glowing boy still stared into the distance, completely unresponsive.

"My name is Kozmotis. Kozmotis Pitchiner," Koz went on. "What's yours?"

The boy sat in silence. It seemed it would continue on, but he finally looked over at Kozmotis.

Then he spoke, presumably saying his name. Jack couldn't understand it at all, it sounded as if it had a few hard consonants in it that were familiar, but otherwise, the noises that came from star-boy's mouth were too resonate and musical to sound like spoken language. If the stars could laugh, that beautiful noise would have sounded like the boy's name.

"...I'm afraid I'm going to have a bit of difficulty pronouncing that," Kozmotis said awkwardly. "I hope you understand."

Koz's befuddled apology made star-boy's mouth twitch just slightly in amusement, but the expression quickly faded.

Kozmotis reached inside a pouch in his belt and pulled out a very space-age, magical...pen and paper. Jack had been expecting something slightly more sci fi. "You can understand Common, yes? Can you write it?"

The boy nodded and took the pen and paper and scribbled something on the page.

You Coreworlders can't enunciate to save your lives.

Kozmotis moved over to sit next to the boy so he could read what he was writing more easily. Jack followed, looking over both their shoulders. When Kozmotis saw what the boy wrote, he laughed.

"I suppose in comparison to you, everything I say sounds like mush."

The boy nodded once then resumed staring off into space again.

Kozmotis sat in silence for just a little while, and then finally said, "You are a remarkable young man, you know. When we found you, the spirit you showed, after everything -"

The boy started scribbling words frantically.

Not special. Lucky. I was lucky, that's all. I got to the light caves, no one else managed to.

"I didn't mean -" Kozmotis inhaled deeply, trying to figure out what he meant. "What I mean to say is that I've known of people that faced that kind of darkness and simply waited to die. We saw the dead fearlings on the way to the caves. We saw that there'd been a fight. If that was you..."

The boy scrawled out: Some of us were outside the village when they came. We saw that the village was surrounded. I was the oldest. I tried to get the younger ones to the caves.

The next words were almost carved into the paper.

I failed.

"I've failed before, you know. I'm a captain of the Great Golden Army and I've failed many people before. No one is perfect, no one can win every battle."

The boy scribbled: I couldn't protect my sister.

Jack's heart clenched in his chest and memories of the sound of ice cracking under a little girl's feet almost drowned out Kozmotis' response.

"And I couldn't protect my wife," the captain said quietly, looking at the boy. "What matters is that you did all that you could. That's all anyone could have asked of you. That's all you could have asked of yourself."

What good is that? I tried to save them, I tried to lead them, but I made a mess of everything. I did everything wrong.

"All we can do is try our best and if we fail, hope against hope that the people who were lost were at least comforted by the knowledge that someone cared enough to try to help them. I know that sounds like a very thin comfort, but one the other things we have are those who are still living. In dark times like these, we still have each other, all of us that stand opposed to them, all of those who try to protect one another. I know your people put a lot of stock in that, in interconnectedness, and - and community and the rest of us don't feel any differently. There are so many people that are here for you now and we are going to take care of you."

The boy's shoulders started to shake and the noises he made that were his version of sobs made Jack feel as if he was being stabbed right between the ribs. The sound of the sobs obliterated every other idea in his head and left him with a single, nearly nonsensical thought:

That stars shouldn't weep.

The boy scribbled onto the paper and his words were blurred by the tears that fell on the page.

What's going to happen to me now?

"I'm not sure where you'll go, but if you're willing to come with us, I promise you we'll find someplace where you're cared for. We won't leave you here alone."

The boy leaned into Kozmotis, sobbing piteously, and the man turned and wrapped his arms around him, holding him tightly.

"My dear boy - my dear, brave boy - I swear that we won't leave you alone."

The room suddenly shifted, blurring with the passage of time. The starlit boy was now asleep in his cot, the blanket pulled up over his shoulders. He had his spear still in hand as he slept.

Kozmotis stood off to the side, talking in a hushed voice with Jem Breen and someone else, a woman that looked familiar - the guard maybe, that Kozmotis had relieved in the first vision? She had no scar on her face in this vision but she looked mostly the same otherwise. Captain Helias? Captain Jelias? It was something like that.

"Lal, what do you think?" Jem asked of Jelias. Apparently, that was her first name.

"What do I think of what?" she asked.

"About what should be done with the kid."

"What is there to do? We can't leave him here. Even if the fearlings don't come back to finish the job, what kind of life is that, leaving him here in a veritable graveyard all by himself?" she said, crossing her arms.

"Yeah, but we have to factor in what'll happen if he's brought back with us. Not that it'll be the worst, but with our luck, those astropologist muckity-mucks all fascinated with Star Herder culture will want to make a study of him. We take him back and we'll have no way of making sure he's placed with a family that'll do right by him. Not that anyone'd do wrong, but this is a delicate situation. The kid deserves people that'll help him deal with all this."

"Again, what else is there? I'm sure we can make it clear the kid's going to need some kind of special accommodations - to be placed with a family that respects his culture. That's all we can do - am I right, Koz?"

Kozmotis didn't answer. He was staring over at where the boy slept.

"Koz?" Lal nudged him now and he started.

"What? Oh. Yes. Yes, of course. What else can we do?" he said, and he looked back over at the boy, looking sad even in sleep. "I mean, the only other option, the only way to really ensure he's truly cared for would be for - for..." He looked back over to them. "For one of us to volunteer to take him in as a ward. With how often we've been decorated, the Community Health Offices wouldn't dare say no."

He paused and seemed to come to a decision, one that was a little wild but seemed to make perfect sense to him. "I could volunteer for it. I'm due for a good deal of shore leave anyway - I'd have time to get him acquainted with Rashena, get him comfortable and settled in, arrange for his schooling..."

Jem raised his eyebrows. "You sure about that, Koz?"

"Yes. Yes, of course. Why not?"

At that, Lal's face broke into a crooked grin. "Because you're a single father and one kid's responsibility enough?"

"Have I ever struck you as someone that shies away from responsibility?" he said dryly.

Both Jem and Lal could only snort at that.

"Not in the least," said Lal.

"Then, as long as he's amenable to it, I'll take him home with me. The matter's settled."

The world blurred again and now Jack was somewhere else entirely. He was now in the main foyer of rather spacious house and the starlit boy was being led in through the front door by Kozmotis, who was carrying two large bags with him.

"It's a bit of a maze, but you'll get used to it soon enough. It's been in the family for generations - my grandfather was one of the advisors to Queen Kila during the Reformation. I'd honestly prefer something smaller and bit more humble but nostalgia keeps getting in the way of house-hunting, to be perfectly honest."

The boy clung tightly to his spear as he walked into the foyer, and stood there awkwardly, wringing his hands on the handle. The size of the place seemed to leave him deeply discomfited.

"Now, my daughter and Nanny Gliggs should be in. Let's see if we can hunt them down to introduce you all to each -"

"EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!"

"Ah, that'd be Rashena right now," Kozmotis said mildly. "Either that or Nanny Gliggs is practicing her dog whistling for the next moondog show. She raises thoroughbreds."

The source of the noise turned out to be a blur of movement and sound that might have once been a six-year-old child. Jack finally got a good look at her when she stopped moving, which was only when she'd jumped at Kozmotis in a hug that nearly bowled him over to the floor. Her skin was a dark bronze color that looked nothing like her father's paler skintone, but her facial features were undeniably like Koz's - she had the same facial structure, the sharp cheekbones and wide-set eyes. Even her nose protruded like his, though her mothers' features seemed to have softened it a little.

Laughing, he dropped his bags and swept her up in a massive hug, kneeling on the floor to make it easier.

"Daddy daddy daddy daddy!" she babbled enthusiastically, the silver tips of her dreadlocks bobbing like little stars that were threatening to fall out of the sky because of the gravitational forces of her excitement.

"Rashena Rashena Rashena Rashena!" he answered back and she laughed delightedly.

"Daddy, you're silly."

"Well, that's your fault, isn't it? I learned it from you."

The hugging went on for quite some time, before they finally pulled apart to deal with the boy standing there awkwardly with his spear.

"Rashena, I'd like to introduce you to someone."

"This is him? This is the star-boy?"

Kozmotis nodded and turned to the boy, gesturing at his daughter with his hand. "This is my daughter Rashena."

The girl walked over to him, cautiously at first, looking at the boy with wonder, but then she said, "If you're going to be my brother, you need a name other than 'star-boy.' There are lots of stars and lots of boys, but only one you, so you need a name. That's only fair."

The boy looked oddly touched at that announcement, looking over at Kozmotis questioningly, as if asking, 'I'm her brother already - It's just that easy, huh?'

"Daddy couldn't pronounce your name for me. Can you say it so I can hear what it sounds like?"

The boy said his name and just like before, it jingled all the way out of his mouth.

"There's kind of word sounds in it. Like a 'nuh' sound and a 'luh' sound and a 'tuh' sound. Maybe we can just try to do the sounds as best as we can in Common. Nuhtuhluhtuh. Natalata. Nuuuhtalatatuh. Natlat." Her mouth opened in a little 'o' of delight. "What if we call you Nightlight? You glow just like a nightlight and your name kinda sounds like that."

"Darling, we can't name him after a bedroom fixture," was Koz's dry answer to the idea.

Nightlight raised a hand at Pitch, as if to say 'Hold on a second' and then took out the little pad of paper he kept tucked in his armor and the pencil and wrote on the paper. Jack angled his head and move closer to read the writing as he held it up.

What's a night-light? I know what the words mean by themselves in Common but not what they mean together.

"Daddy, what's it say? I gotta learn to read better so I can talk to him."

"He's asking what a night-light is," Koz explained. "He knows the words but not what they mean together."

"A night-light is a light that you put on when you go to bed," Rashena explained, "before you go to sleep but after Nanny tucks you in and tells you bedtime stories, and it makes the night less scary and helps keep the fearlings away. A night-light lets you know you're safe. Daddy says you tried to keep people safe back at your home, so -"

"Rashena, that's a sad subject for him," Koz said gently. "It's not very nice to bring it up."

The boy shook his head again at Kozmotis and knelt down in front of the girl. He tried a few times to say the word and every time, it came out just a little too jingly, but the last time, he managed it, even if it still rang like little bells.

"Nightlight," he said, holding a hand to his chest, looking touched that she'd choose a name like that for him, a name that implied he protected people and held back the dark. It seemed as if it was a comfort.

"Nightlight, you're my brother now," Rashena declared, like the idea was wrought in steel. She reached out and took him by the hand that wasn't holding his spear. "So I'm gonna show you around and you can meet Nanny Gliggs and my pet glow-worm and then we can have dinner with daddy and then we can play outside, and then maybe we can read from my picture books because if you have to write on paper to talk, I need to read better so I can talk to you - and then we can go talk to Mr. Carmichal's cat - he doesn't talk back or write but I think he understands people words..."

Kozmotis could only look on as his daughter dragged Nightlight away by the hand to explore the house. The boy followed behind happily, actually smiling, seeming incredibly amused at the girl's...effervescence.

"Oh, Ahava, what have I gotten myself into?" he asked to seemingly no one, and then the vision faded.

Jack was in an empty room with the skates once again staring at empty walls. For a good while, he could only stand there in silence, trying to make sense of everything he'd just seen.

"He had a kid," he finally said to himself. "He had a kid. He had a wife. And a kid."

Jack's nose suddenly wrinkled in disgust as he realized the implications of that. .

"Pitch had a kid," Jack said, shuddering. "Gross."

---

Back in the Siberian forest, the Guardians (and Jamie and Cupcake) gathered around as Bunny inspected tracks in the dirt, and after a moment, nodded.

"Yep, chicken feet," he said. "Torg's sent us after Baba Yaga."

"I haven't seen her since Sandy and I convinced her to take the Enkidu Oath," Tooth murmured, thoughtfully. She and Sandy exchanged small shrugs. "She might not be exactly pleased to see us."

"Babboo who?" Cupcake echoed.

"You might think of Baba Yaga as the wicked witch, who does you just enough wickedness to prepare you for those who are wicked without reservation," Anansi said, rolling his eyes thoughtfully to the sky as he often did when seeking through his own head for a story. "Sometimes, the old woman who threatens to eat a child up has not eaten a child in centuries."

Jamie looked with skepticism at the deep - very deep - chicken footprints in the dirt. "And she has chicken feet?"

Anansi barked out a laugh. "Don't be silly! Of course she has no chicken feet." He added, as if it made perfect sense, "Her house does."

"And she's coming back this way, by the sound of it," said Bunny, his ears flicking westward, as Jamie and Cupcake exchanged looks that said volumes about the silliness of houses with chicken feet.

"Baba Yaga has no quarrel with us," said North, as the groaning of trees suddenly reached their ears, and the wind that had sent the trees groaning swept over them.

"She didn't have quarrels with many who went into her hut and still they never came out," Anansi reminded him, but North just grinned.

"Many stories you have yet to tell me, Anansi, but this one? This one, I am knowing since I was a boy smaller than Jamie. Hah!" North laughed at the memory. "Is one thing to hear story of the wise witch who lives in the dark woods, with her chicken-footed hut and her teeth of iron, when you are warm on the savannah - but I tell you, it is thing entirely different to hear the same story at the edge of that dark forest yourself."

He stood in front of the party as the wind rose to a screech, and a small hut on chicken feet crashed through the trees. North looked it over with the same, unflapped smile.

"I have often wondered when fate would lead me to Baba Yaga's door."

The children stepped closer together, backing towards Tooth as they realized the wind wasn't screeching, the house was.

North held his ground as the screeching stopped. The chicken-footed hut dropped to the ground, and the sound of many locks unclicking filled the air before the door flew open.

The children jumped, but North only smiled. A wizened, skinny old woman with a nose so long, it seemed to lead her whole face past the door frame leaned on her broom in the doorway, glaring at the scene before her. Baba Yaga's eyes alighted on the husky Cossack standing tall before her door, and she bared her black iron teeth in an enormous grin.

Her cackle rattled the leaves around them. "Babushka eats well tonight! What are you waiting for, you slow fool?!"

North, undaunted, strode up the steps and into the hut. The door slammed like a punch behind him, and the locks clicked back into place.

"...Were...Were we supposed to go with him?" Jamie asked, each syllable as slow as anything hauled out of a bog.

"Nope," Anansi said, staring at the door as though he could see through it if he just tried hard enough. He heaved a sigh. "He'd better tell me what happened when he comes out. I only like secrets when I'm in on them."

---

Inside, sealed away from the Guardians, North crouched beneath Baba Yaga's roof as she whirled on him, studying him more closely. The Cossack stood silently as Baba Yaga scrutinized him, her features wrinkling deeper and deeper into disappointment at what she saw.

"You do not have time to buy my help, you young fool," she spat. "I don't have time to test you now - and don't believe for a moment I won't." she shook her long, bony finger in North's face, so fiercely that North even stepped back, pressed against the water tank "When the time comes, oh the things I have to do about the house - ! But no, you've come to me with not a moment to spare, and the boy's reputation is good -" she rolled her eyes. "And your reputation is good. Not that I abide by reputations."

She sniffed her long nose. "Tools, and nothing more! But if you stay to play my games of truth, the boy's reputation won't even be that anymore. So you will have to be in my debt."

North's face had been flickering in concern as the old witch mentioned Jack, but it cleared as she came to the topic of debt. He stuck his hand out without a moment's hesitation. "Deal, Babushka! I will do your impossible tasks, when we've rescued Jack."

Baba Yaga curled her fleshless hand around North's, squeezing it with surprising strength. "And if you do not succeed at them, why then," her eyes glittered. "I will feast after all!" she reached out quickly and pinched North's thick forearm, testing his flesh. Her iron teeth were bared in a horrible grin. "As I have not feasted, oh, in centuries. You will not be so tender as a child or a young maid, but -" she released his hand, shrugging. "We who have taken the Enkidu Oath don't have much in the way of choice, now do we?"

She eyed North fiercely. He beamed under her assailing gaze.

"Now," he said. "As to Jack -"

"Yes, your little snowflake." Baba Yaga turned away from North, rummaging through the cabinets lining her little hut. When she turned back to him, she held a handkerchief, a comb, and a mirror. She handed them to North, in that order. "When you leave my hut, drop the first of these. When you can no longer follow it, drop the next, and then again after that. When you have reached the end of how far my spells can take you, you will have found the one you must find next, to find the one you truly seek."

North took them, pocketing them carefully. "Babushka, you have my thanks. And the thanks of the Guardians as well."

"Thanks!" Baba Yaga spat into the sink. "Did thanks ever fill my water tank? Or make the soup for my dinner? It's not your thanks I want! When you come back, you will work for me as you would if I had time to test you, and if you do not, Guardian or no, such a curse I will place upon you!" she shook her finger again, backing North against the door. "Now go! You do not have time to be threatened! Locks, unlock!"

The door unlocked of its own accord, and fell open behind North. He sprawled on the forest path with a thud, looking up just in time to see the door shut and the chicken-footed hut whirl and stomp off through the suddenly windy forest.

---

Jack rounded a corner and heard another door slam behind him. He blinked, surprised to see the room of floating colors again. It seemed he'd barely left the same room five minutes ago.

Except -

Something was off. The last time he'd been in this place, the walls of the maze had been made of something else. The rough black granite had scraped threads loose in his hoodie when he leaned against it. The walls here were a pale, smooth substance, the a dull color unsettlingly like age-stained bone.

The last times he'd been surrounded by the lights, too, it seemed like every color across the spectrum had been present. Now there wasn't a single glimmer of blue. The absence left the still-full room seeming, in comparison, a little empty.

"Well," Jack said, as the skates stood in place. "At least this means we're not walking in circles, right, Footwear Friends?"

When he looked down, the image of the boy - of Nightlight - stood at the other side of the colored lights, looking straight at him.

"So, no time to enjoy the lights?" Jack asked, not expecting an answer. He didn't get one. Nightlight spun on his heel and ran, and Jack darted after him. The hall before him went dark as the door slammed behind and then lit up again.

Soldiers moved through the hallways of what looked like some kind of ship, passing through Jack like people once always had. The feeling instinctually made him clutch at his chest. Jack thought his surroundings looked all very naval as he looked around, all metal grating and narrow hallways and endless metal pipes, but a glance through a window made it clear that this ship wasn't one that went anywhere near water.

Through the porthole he saw a sun, taking up most of his view of space. The ship was floating around it, dipping in and out of the great halo of light that circled it like a whale occasionally surfacing for air.

"Whoa," he said quietly, hands pressed against the glass.

He'd been many places in his long life, but short of stowing away on Apollo 11, he'd never really had a way of getting up into space.

This wasn't space as anyone on Earth knew it, though. The way jets of plasma curled out in beautiful patterns from the nearby star made this look far more like the skies that might be illustrated in a children's book.

"I love refueling days," said a familiar voice and Jack turned to see Jem Breen yet again, though he looked a bit younger this time.

"They drive me mad," said Kozmotis, who was walking side by side with him once more. "All this sitting around with nothing to do."

"It must be devastating to you, having to miss out on opportunities for promotions."

Kozmotis, now the most casual Jack had seen him, simply whapped Breen in the ribs, making him laugh. "When I sit around, I prefer to be sitting around at home. And these Luna class ships take ages to refuel."

"Well, you can thank Tsar Lunar personally for that. Last class he designed before his son was born and he made that monstrosity that was in the news."

"It was a monstrosity, I saw a picture, it was enormous. All to run off and explore the universe with his family - which is insane, really."

"Well, if you were going out there in the big, bad universe to see all the wonders in it and had your family with you, you wouldn't be taking them in an economy-sized ship, would you? Not with the fearlings out there," Jem pointed out logically. "It's supposed to be impossible to break into."

"Let's hope it doesn't break down near a planet or the poor sods living on it will mistake it for a moon."

Jem laughed at that.

Jack perked up, his interest piqued, but the two steered the conversation elsewhere and he had to trot to keep up with their long solders' strides.

"Anyway," Koz went on. "I'll see you in the mess later. Like I said, if I'm going to be sitting still I'd rather be sitting still at home and since I can't be at home, stellargraph messaging is the next best thing."

"Give my regards to the missus and the little lady."

Kozmotis smiled at that as he slipped into his quarters and Jack slipped in behind just before the door slid shut. The room was rather spartan and very, very cramped. Clearly, Kozmotis had rank enough to have a room of his own but this was apparently long before he got those shiny general pips on his collar.

He sat down in front of a strange device that looked like the communications devices that had always showed up in those old sci fi movies, except its design was a bit more mechanical-looking in nature. Golden gears were visible, chugging away as Kozmotis sat down, relaxed in his chair, and dialed home.

It made strange little blipping sounds until an image flashed on the screen of an older woman, maybe in her forties, with silver skin and white hair. Jack supposed this might be the nanny - Nanny Gliggs, wasn't it? - that Kozmotis had spoken of in one of the other visions.

"Hello, sir, lovely to see you this morning. Shore leave, I take it?"

"Good morning, Nanny. Pit stop. We're refueling so we've got some free time even though it's on ship. Is Rashena awake?"

A loud squealing noise came from somewhere else in the house. It was delighted squealing, the kind of squealing a small child made when they were entertaining themselves.

Kozmotis laughed. "I'll take that as a yes."

"I'll go get her, sir," said the woman, looking equal parts fond and wry, as if she was thinking 'It's not so funny when you're the one dealing with it every day.'

"Rashena, dear, your father's on the stellargraph."

The pitter-patter of little running feet reached the speakers before Rashena reached the viewing screen. Her starry-haired, bronzed face image filled the screen as she brought her face close to the camera. She looked just a bit younger than she'd been when Jack saw her last, like this had taken place a year or two before Pitch brought home Nightlight. "Daddy!"

Koz cracked a smile at her delight. "Rashena," he said. He spoke her name like he was keeping it safe for her.

"Daddy, did you get my message?"

Koz looked for a moment at a loss. "Your - message?"

Rashena's beaming smile dropped into a disappointed frown. "You didn't watch my message."

"I'm sorry, Darling," Koz said. "Things get so busy out here in the field."

"You need to check your messages more," Rashena admonished. "What if I left you one and I said something important and you missed it?"

"Did you say something important in your message?"

"Oh yes," Rashena nodded emphatically. "Lots of important things. You should go watch my message so you know what they are."

"Rashena, that's not practical. I can't listen to your message while I'm talking to you."

Rashena huffed her disappointment, fixing her father with a pouty expression that said, without speaking, 'Did I ask you what was practical?'

"Do you -" Koz paused. "Do you want me to hang up, watch your message, then call you again?"

Rashena nodded emphatically. "Yeah, go do that."

Kozmotis looked halfway between charmed and consternated. "All right, then, I'll do that."

"Call back right after you watch it!" Rashena insisted.

"Right after," Kozmotis agreed.

"Love you," Rashena said, matter-of-fact, as she reached across the screen to awkwardly turn off the conversation from her end.

Koz's smile as he fiddled with the dials to call up his messages was small, but almost like the smile of someone dreaming. It was helpless and unconscious and Jack almost felt the same guilt at seeing it that he had at hearing Sandy's voice.

If all this was real, if this wasn't the maze just messing with his head and it had actually happened, and if this man seemed to be Pitch before he'd become Pitch, then what had happened to him? What horrific thing had turned him into the kind of monster that would back a child into an alley and threaten to snuff them out like a candle?

And, Jack wondered with a twist of his gut, what had happened to the little girl who clearly meant so much to him?

Rashena's message, while important to her, was fairly mundane. She hmm'd and dawdled on the screen, recounting her day at the park - until Nanny Gliggs' voice offscreen prompted her to remember why she'd called.

"Didn't you get a surprise today?" the nanny asked. Rashena's wide grey eyes widened a little more as she remembered.

"Yes!" the little girl ducked out of view, returning with a gold-wrapped package. "I got a present from Daddy! I got your surprise!"

She held the package up to the screen. The gold wrapping glittered, even through the view of the camera. "But I'm not going to open it," Rashena declared, pulling the present back, "until you can watch me open it. So hurry up and call because I'm waiting to be fair, so you should call soon to be fair!"

"Too much longer a message, and your father won't have time to call, dear," her nanny chided gently. Rashena nodded urgently.

"Bye, Daddy! Call soon!" As Nanny Gliggs reached in front of her to turn off the device, she leaned around the matron's arm. "I really wanna open it!"

Rashena was bouncing in her seat when Koz called her a second time.

"Did you see it?" she squealed.

Koz had repressed his smile somewhat. He nodded. "I did, but darling, it's not practical to ask me to call twice. You could have told me all that in my last call."

Rashena's enthusiasm diminished. "I wanted you to see my message." She didn't sound upset yet. In fact, oddly for a little child, she sounded matter-of-fact, as if she were defending her position, more than justifying herself.

"These calls use valuable energy that could be used to keep the starship moving so that we can help protect people from fearlings."

Rashena started to pout slightly, her defense starting to wilt under her father's stern practicality.

Kozmotis sighed. "Don't you still have a surprise to open?"

Rashena brightened slightly at the distraction. "Yes. It's been sitting right here, all week. I didn't open it!" she pulled the golden box into view, shoving it up to the camera, showing her father the unbroken seams. "I didn't even peek!"

Kozmotis' smile flickered back. "Very patient," he said, approval in his voice. "Go ahead."

Rashena tore into the package with all the enthusiasm of a child at Christmas. The golden paper fluttered away in child-sized scraps to reveal a silver box almost beautiful enough to be a gift itself. Rashena paused, gasping with delight at the elegant traceries on the box.

"That's not the surprise," Kozmotis urged. "Open it."

Rashena pulled the lid off the box. Jack's eyes widened as she pulled out another box - the same music box he'd toyed with earlier in the maze. It glinted gold in the light, designs of stars and galaxies splayed across the lid, carved so intricately that every time she moved her hand it seemed that they were swirling.

"Keep going," Kozmotis urged. She flipped the lid open. Music slightly, but not entirely, like that Jack had heard before poured out from the box, and Rashena pulled out a gleaming golden pendant.

No - she flipped it open. It was a locket.

"That's us!" she squealed, pointing at the picture inside. Jack craned his neck to see, but couldn't get a glimpse of the portrait.

"Yes," Kozmotis agreed. "Your mother thought it would be nice to always have us close to your heart."

"Do you think that too?" Rashena asked, as she fiddled with the clasp.

"Of course," said the stoic soldier.

The little star-haired girl clutched the locket close to her heart, her smile suddenly subdued.

"Then how come you won't come home?"

"I'm sorry, dear, but it's less that I won't and more that I can't. I have a duty to uphold. When you're older you'll understand."

"I don't want to be older then."

"Well, someday you're going to be. I'm sorry, but I can't come home right now. I have shore leave coming up soon, though, and both your mother and I will be home to see you."

"You're being a poophead."

"Rashena -"

"Only poopheads won't come home."

"Rashena, darling, I know it's difficult sometimes, but -"

"Poophead!"

"Rashena -"

There were tears in her eyes now. "I'm going to play with my glow-worm," she said and she ran off before Koz could get in another word.

He sighed and after a moment of waiting to see if she'd come back, he hit a button that cut off the message.

After a minute of sitting there, he dialed someone new. Another minute or two, and a woman appeared on the screen, smiling. Her face was freckled like a night with stars - literally. Her skin was the endless blackness of deep space, and silver flecks gleamed across her high cheekbones like flakes of mica. Her hair was a stunning silver web of ornate braids. She was wearing some kind of uniform, also in shades of red, black, and gold like all the soldiers wore, but it looked far less like a military uniform and more like something off of a show like Star Trek.

"Hello there, handsome."

Kozmotis sighed like a smitten schoolboy. "There are the stars of my night."

"Ew," Jack interjected from behind him, even though neither could hear.

"My ray of morning sun," the woman responded, her smile no less affected. "I miss you."

"I miss you too, Ahava," said Kozmotis. That name - he'd spoken it in another memory, when he'd brought Nightlight home to meet Rashena. It was clear to see, now that Jack thought of Rashena, exactly how her mother's features had softened her father's harsh ones in their little girl's face.

So Ahava was Pitch Black's 5. "Still ew."

"How long since we were even on the same ship?"

"So long I'm beginning to forget what warmth is," Ahava crooned, her voice touched with real longing.

"This is the worst part of the whole maze," Jack interjected, his face twisting as he gagged. He considered plugging his ears and humming his way through the rest of this memory. "Worse than the giant spiders."

"I don't suppose you're watching this message somewhere private?" Kozmotis asked with the barest edge of hope in his voice.

"Oh, please no," Jack said despondently, hoping desperately that this part of the maze would let him go if this got anymore intense. Ew ew ew.

"I'm afraid not."

"Thank you, sweet spirit of mercy."

"Well then I look forward more than ever to our upcoming shore leave," Kozmotis said. "How's the mission going? That commander still giving you hell?"

"He's finally gotten off my back. I had to prove him wrong about the gravitational flux of the binary system first, which, by the way, took a very detailed presentation and the entire crew attended."

Kozmotis laughed at this, a laugh so deep and hearty - and delighted - that Jack was surprised he was even capable of feeling that kind of joy.

"Let me get this straight, after all that, the months of doubting your calculations and trying to undermine your work, you took him to school in front of the captain and the entire crew. Via slideshow."

Ahava just grinned. "You would not believe the proofs I laid out. I haven't shown my work this much since school. By the end of it, he looked as if he'd chew off his own leg to escape."

"That's my girl."

"And what about you, Mister Promotion?"

Koz looked surprised and then somewhat disappointed. "What ruined the surprise? I've been dying to tell you all week."

"I do keep an eye out for the military news."

"I did get promoted, yes. Captain now," he said, preening slightly.

"Ooh la la! Captain Kozmotis Pitchiner, there's a name," Ahava purred, cradling her chin in her hands. "He certainly sounds like a man whose wife owns small, silky things that may or may not get stuck in his teeth."

Jack promptly curled up on the floor in abject misery with his hands over his ears, and loudly sang several verses of The Bird Song, fervently wishing that he was not listening to any of this. When he, suspiciously, pulled a hand away from his ear, the two of them seemed to have left that horrifying visual far behind in favor of…

"She called me a poophead," Kozmotis said miserably, which changed to an expression of mild reproach when his wife made a noise that sounded more like laughter than sympathy.

"She has keen observational skills, if not the most impressive vocabulary," Ahava answered. "Oh don't make that face, I'm only teasing! Why are you a poophead today, dear heart?"

"I told her I couldn't come home until I had shore leave," Kozmotis said. This time Ahava's face did take a turn for the sympathetic.

"She misses you," she said softly. "It's hard for all of us - hard for you to be out there without us, and hard for us to be where we are without you."

"But she should know how important it is that I be out here - for you and for her. She should know that eventually, I'll always make it home -"

"Darling, she's a little girl," Ahava pointed out. "Everything is still new to her. She's too busy experiencing things to know."

Koz rested his chin on his hand, a rare informal stance. "Now how does a mathematician know the poetry of child psychology?"

"I read more than military news," Ahava chuckled. "Enjoy our little flower while we have her, honey. She's not going to be a little girl forever."

"I know, that's what I told her."

"Do you know?" Ahava asked, raising her silver eyebrows. Koz's serious expression suggested that he hadn't really thought about it - not deeply - but now he was.

"You think I'm too stiff with her at times, don't you?"

"You can be a bit dour, you know. And she's a child. You are out there protecting children like her, yes, but you're not just protecting their lives, you're protecting them from having to live in fear. You're making it so they can spend their time as children feeling joy. You all may be soldiers, but you're guardians of much more than their lives. A little more silliness and a little less austereness now and again wouldn't be remiss. "

Jack's brows furrowed as he listened to her speak and then he looked over at Pitch's face to see what his reaction would be to that.

It turned out to be a sigh and grudging acknowledgement. "You do have a point. I suppose there are ways I can make it clear I have my responsibilities that are a little less...stern."

Jack could only stare at Kozmotis' face, full of love and concession - the face of a man who could compromise, who had empathy. Who loved a child, and protected her chance to have a childhood.

"What happened to you?" Jack asked, softly. If there was a point to these memories, now he wanted to know it.

Then just like that, the moment before him was gone and he was suddenly in the middle of a battlefield. Soldiers were fighting viciously around him and what they fought against was like nothing he'd ever seen. The creatures they were slashing at with their swords were monstrous, their bodies an inky black, limbs stretched out and grossly disproportionate. They slashed at the soldiers with massive claws and bit them with razor sharp teeth, and their chittering, childlike laughter and screeches were something that was going to haunt Jack's nightmares.

He weaved and ducked through the battle instinctually, even though he knew that nothing in it could touch him. That led to him almost running through Kozmotis who was leading a squad of men as they cut the things down. Jack saw a sword gleaming in his hand and as it raised into the air on an upstroke, he realized it was the same sword he'd picked up and had heard whispering to him in the room where he'd found Rashena's music box.

"Left flank, forward march!" he cried out.

The beings they were fighting were getting beaten rather soundly, but the soldiers were still taking casualties. Jack scurried away in horror as a soldier fell down dead in front of him, his throat slashed open.

Yet there was Kozmotis, leading his men forward into the fray, utterly fearless as he fought the horrible creatures. Jack couldn't help admire it, which was a very strange feeling to have to wrestle with. A guardian indeed. Ahava had been right about that. All of these soldiers were guardians of a sort.

Up in the sky, ships circled and it looked as if they were blasting at the beings with light up in the atmosphere or sucking them into massive traps. Before long, the last of the creatures were retreating, only to be annihilated or captured as they tried to escape and as soon as the last of them fell, the soldiers let out a cheer.

"Quickly, we have to tend to the survivors. Last sweeps and then open the shelters, have the medics at the ready. It looks like several ships are docked at the colony right now and -"

Kozmotis trailed off as he looked over at the docking port and finally saw the name of one of the ships there, his face going a pale tone that Jack was much more familiar with.

"Lieutenant Breen, I need you to take over command," he said distantly.

"Sir?" Breen asked next to him.

"I may be...compromised. I need you to take over command," Kozmotis said. Jem turned and looked at the spaceport.

"Oh, stars," he said breathlessly when he saw the ship, the name 'Aurora' emblazoned on the side.

"Sir?" questioned another officer as he saw their captain standing there in shock.

"That's his wife's research vessel. They must have stopped to try to help the colonists -" Breen explained but Kozmotis didn't stay to listen. He broke rank and started canvassing the area, looking at the bodies laying on the ground. Jack ran after him, not even needing the pull of the invisible tether, a pit of horror cracking open in his stomach.

Kozmotis had said something about not being able to protect his wife in later memories, had spoken of her like she hadn't been there anymore, like she'd been -

"NO!" the cry was plaintive and horrified and Kozmotis surged forward, dropping to knees next to the entrance of some kind of shelter, where other soldiers were releasing the people hiding inside.

Right next to the entrance was a body, laying ragged and bloodied on the ground.

And there she was, her once bright eyes open and staring at nothing, her body carved up by countless cuts and gashes, some kind of blaster still held loosely in her hand. Her blood had made mud of the torn dirt around her.

Kozmotis gathered her up into his arms, letting out a wrenching cry that tore into Jack's heart with hooks. Even though this was his enemy, this pain was real, this grief was sincere and it wasn't any less so because this man, Kozmotis Pitchiner, had somehow eventually been destroyed to make way for the nightmare known as Pitch Black.

Kozmotis wept uncontrollably as he held her, as the other soldiers and refugees could only look on in pity. Eventually, after what seemed like ages, when the flash flood of his grief had subsided to the low flow of floodwaters over the barricades, a young woman that had come out of the shelter stepped forward and knelt next to him.

"She saved us," the girl said quietly. "She held them at the entrance so we could all get in and when they grabbed her, she kicked the button to seal the door so they couldn't come after us. I just - I just thought you should know. I'm so, so sorry."

The world shifted away from the tear-stained face of a man facing down the worst agony he'd known in his life and shifted to a scene in the foyer of Pitch's house. His face was blank now and lined with wrinkles that hadn't been there before. He was kneeling in front of his daughter, tears trickling down his face, hands on her shoulders as tears poured down hers.

"I'm so sorry."

"I want mommy! Where's mommy?! I want mommy!"

"I'm so sorry, darling. I'm sorry."

"I want moooommy," the girl sobbed. "I want moooommmy."

They wept together, clinging to each other, and seeing the little girl's pain caused tears to brim in Jack's eyes. If he was honest with himself, seeing Kozmotis' pain was causing it, too.

Had this been the start? Had it started something that later propelled Kozmotis into being Pitch? But if it had, wouldn't he have been less compassionate later, when he'd taken in Nightlight? If this had started it all, would he have still been out there fighting, trying to protect people from the things that were hiding in the dark?

The memory faded away and Jack was left alone in the maze to stare at the stone walls surrounding him. The skates flew up next to him and he looked up at them and then shook his head in confusion.

"How? How could someone like that -" Someone who loved others and fought for people's lives and the innocence of children, someone that fought to put an end to fear… "- have turned into Pitch?"

Why was the maze showing him this? What did it all mean?

---

The children had been left with Sandy and the sleigh quite some distance away. They were a boon in a fight against Pitch and nearly untouchable by the Bogeyman because of their lack of fear when dealing with him, but the Guardians were already anxious about having brought children along with them. There was no way they were letting them get remotely near Krampus, even despite the fact that he'd taken the Enkidu Oath decades before.

North still wanted to kill him. He was not, by his nature, a particularly murderous man. Even back in his days of being a thief and vagabond, he had not killed unless he'd had to for the sake of his own survival. But the existence of the goat-man had always chafed at him and it had always taken a great deal of willpower to keep himself from solving his problems with the other spirit permanently.

"You gonna be calm about this, mate?" Bunny asked, pausing again to sniff the wind and make sure they were still on the scent. North grunted. "Because we can swap you out for Sandy otherwise."

"I am calm," North answered. After all those years of making his holiday one of wonder and joy, of happiness and togetherness and delight, Krampus had come along and tried to drag himself out of the shadow of disbelief by latching onto Christmas like a parasite. North had sympathy enough for the myths who the times left behind. There were myths who had died, and the world had lost their names, and others whose names had simply slipped out of human memory, who'd faded with them. It was a sorrow, and for many, a deep terror - one the Guardians had been sobered to remember not so long ago.

But Krampus had chosen pain and fear as his way of gaining a new foothold in the world, and had caused an association between such things and Christmas, no less.

It was only the fact that Pitch could have taken over Krampus's bogeymannish role that had stayed North's hand when he'd faced the monstrous being last, around the turn of the 20th century. Pitch had long since been defeated but North had always been the most vigilant of the Guardians when it came to Pitch and he'd not wanted to leave a power vacuum that the Nightmare King would have filled all too eagerly.

So it had been the Enkidu Oath for Krampus, a vow to never again harm another child - or anyone else, for that matter. And he had languished in the dark, becoming just a scary tale told to children on Krampusnacht, one that vanished in the light of morning when they raced down to their gifts the next day. Before long, the fearsome creature had become a furry cherub on holiday cards, and children feared him more like they might fear the exhilarating drop of a roller coaster than something they felt would come for them in the dark.

Still, even though he had fallen, while North preferred that myths choose to stop causing harm rather than force the hands of the Guardians, it was one of the only times North had regretted offering the Oath to a defeated enemy.

North stared at the abandoned building that lay before them.

"There will be traps," he said to Bunny, Tooth, and Anansi. "He has always had a gift with machines and devices like I have."

It had been in imitation of North, born of his desire supplant him. If Krampus had gotten his way, there would have still been a Christmas, one in which the good children still got their toys, but the naughty would have been punished by a fate far worse than receiving coal.

"We must not let him get away," North told the others. "This could be our only chance to find Jack."

Next to him, he saw Tooth's feather flare out in a sign of aggression, holding out her hands as if her nails were talons. Bunny was holding his boomerangs in a way that suggested he was planning on seeing how easily they might break Krampus's head. Anansi's armored exoskeleton suddenly appeared over his skin as he brought himself up on his spider's legs.

The sight of it suddenly made North laugh.

"What am I saying? Of course he will not get away."

With that Bunny opened a hole in the Earth and after a quick slide through his tunnels they suddenly appeared inside the building.

It was very, very old and nearly falling apart. If not for the magical influence of Krampus, it probably would have fallen apart many, many years before. As they moved cautiously past abandoned bedrooms and a long hall that may have served as a dining area, it became clear that once upon a time, very long ago, this had possibly been an orphanage.

It was still decorated for a Christmas that had long since past, shriveled wreaths hanging on doors, dead garlands threaded around the railing of the stairwell. In one room, broken ornaments gray with a coating of dust hung on the skeleton of a long-dead Christmas tree.

"I smell blood," Bunny said, sniffing. "Old, though. Very, very old."

North gritted his teeth. "It must have been not long before I defeated him and made him take the oath. Pah, some days I still wonder why I gave him the choice at all."

"Beating him shapeless again should make you feel better," Bunny pointed out.

The sudden sound of a tensing wire caught their attention. Bunny's ears whipped to the left, and the others' eyes followed. "Anansi! Look ou-"

But the warning came too late. A wire snapped against Anansi's chitinous black-shelled leg, and the ceiling above him opened up, showering him with a flood of spiders. Anansi's shriek flooded the hall.

"OH MY ME! THEY'RE SO CUTE!"

His eyes glittered as he cupped his hands, hairy brown bodies spilling over his fingers. "Look at you! Look at all your shining little eyes, you hairy little jewels!" he scritched at one with a careful finger as the spider, along with most of the others, bit him. "Your venom is so POTENT! Your mother must be so proud!"

As one, the rest of the Guardians took several steps away from the spider-coated Spider, still cooing over the trap he'd tripped.

As they moved forward, a net shot out from a wall and was immediately shredded to bits by Tooth's razor sharp wings. She rolled her eyes.

"This is pretty pitiful," she said, looking unimpressed.

Something else fwapinged as they started moving up the stairs and a massive ball covered in spikes started rolling down the stairs. Now it was Bunny's turn to roll his eyes, as he tapped his foot and the ball disappeared into one of his tunnels.

"Too right. How was this clown ever a threat?" he asked.

"Do not underestimate him," said North. "This is merely distraction."

They kept moving. Up on the second floor, a trap door opened under Anansi, one he easily traversed with his massive spider's legs.

"Don't look, little ones, that seems like a very scary drop," he cooed to the little spiders.

Some strange kind of clockwork machine, swords clasped in its hands, exited from a room, and North casually sliced it to bits. Ahead of them was a room that had the doors locked and bolted - and magically warded.

"This looks like it will take some time to get through," North said, which was why instead of trying to get through it, he looked out the nearest window, only to see a brown-furred figure running towards the treeline down below.

Bunny crowded in at the window. "Looks like he's done a runner."

"I told you, do not underestimate him. He meant to keep us distracted getting into room, thinking him there, while he escaped," North said, jumping out the window. Bunny and Anansi followed, and Tooth zipped out and flew ahead of them. Faster than even Bunny could catch up to Krampus, she tackled him to the ground near the treeline. Initially he tried to fight back and claw at her, but she punched him until he stopped struggling. Then she hovered over him as the others caught up, teeth bared, head crest flaring, letting out a strange hissing sound the other Guardians had only ever heard her make a rare few times in their time fighting at her side.

The rest of the Guardians caught up and looked down on him, sitting there pitiful and bloodied in the snow, one of his jagged horns broken by the Tooth Fariy's barrage.

"You are going to tell us what we want to know," North said, pointing one of his sabers at the snaggle-toothed creature. "Or you will die."

Krampus sat up in the grass and laughed. "You're not going to kill me, North, or you'd have done it ages ago."

"You have some value alive, yes. But perhaps you have more value to me without limbs?" North's blade plunged down into the meat of Krampus' shoulder, pinning the half-goat monster down into the ground, then planted a heavy boot in Krampus' mouth when he opened it to scream. "Hush. There are children not far from here, they do not need to hear screaming." He twisted his blade, just a little. "Screaming is distressing."

He crouched down, keeping his boot in Krampus' mouth and his saber in his shoulder. "I am very fond of Jack Frost, you know," he said, and it almost sounded conversational, if a conversation sounded like a sharp knife wrapped in silk. "He is endearing, and he opens eyes and brings joy, and he is a child. I can tell by the shape of your chest that your body remembers what happened the last time I found you harming children, even if your mind has somehow forgotten."

He shifted his weight, tapping a strangely concave spot on Krampus' chest with the tip of his other sword, and the creature made a strangled gagging noise. "Ah, you do remember? Wonderful."

North went on, "I like to think of myself as a good man, with morals. But there is very, very little I would not do to protect a child. You do not want to test those limits, Krampus. Not when they are so strained in regard to you as they are already."

He sheathed the saber not in Krampus' shoulder, and yanked the other free as well before extracting his tooth-scored boot from the creature's mouth. He stooped and lifted the goat-man out of the snow by a handful of the thick fur covering his throat.

"Unlike you, who only imitate," he said, so softly that the other three Guardians could barely hear him, "I am a creative man. I would suggest you tell us who you built that trap for and where we can find them before I turn that creativity on you. If you do not, well…" His next words were a whisper in Krampus' ear alone, whisked away from the other three by the wind.

"Alright!" Krampus protested in a strangled voice. "I'll talk, I'll talk!"

"Quickly," North said sharply.

"I made the puzzle box for Pitch," Krampus growled, beady red eyes narrowed as he started hatefully at the Guardian. "I didn't know which of you he was going to use it on or what he was going to use it for. All he wanted was something he could use to bring a Guardian the places he wanted to bring them. I asked if he'd harm them and he said no." Very conveniently, so that Krampus' oath hadn't kicked in. "So I was free to deliver as asked - after all, how was I to know he didn't just want to have a little chat, no?"

"Where?" North said, slamming the goat-man into a nearby tree. "Where did it take him in the end? Where would he be now?"

"Camelot. Pitch found Camelot and he wanted it to be the last place it led to. There's an entrance under the London subway. Notting Hill Gate. It leads to the crossroads that goes to where Merlin hid Camelot before he disappeared. I don't know what he wanted with the boy." His crooked teeth were bared in a grin. "But I sure hope it was something terrible."

North snorted with disgust and dropped Krampus in a heap before turning to the other three. "There is no time to waste. Back to the sleigh, then to Camelot."

"What did you say to that yobbo?" Bunny asked as he turned to lope back toward the sleigh. North shrugged.

"I tell him that I will bargain to leave him on the Small Planet ride," he said. "For what feels like lifetimes."

Anansi whistled, sounding impressed. "Making deals with Baba Yaga and the Mouse in one day? That's a mark of a brave man if I ever heard one."

Behind them, laughter started, like the slow slide of the face of a mountain at the beginning of an avalanche and then it rumbled behind them as Krampus cut loose. The Guardians all turned to face him and he just grinned a bloody grin at them as he brayed his goat-like laugh.

"You really think it's that easy, don't you, you old blowhard?" Krampus said to North. "That you're going to just whisk off to save him, no harm done."

The laughter stopped but the malicious expression on Krampus's face didn't hold any less glee.

"No matter what it takes," said North. "We will find him."

"I don't doubt you will," the goat-man's lips curled into an even bigger smile. "But there's no way you'll find him soon enough to save him, not if I'm right about where Pitch sent him. But that was always your greatest weakness, wasn't it, North? Always so self-assured, even when it wasn't warranted."

North cocked his head to the side. "What do you mean by this? What has been done to Jack?"

"Oh, you'll see. Some things are better left as a surprise, aren't they, North? And there are even more surprises left to come, you know. I'm not the only one that despises the Guardians and we're all a little tired of hiding in the dark. Luckily, we've met a new friend that wants to help us come out and play - and when that happens, everything you believe in, everything you stand for will crumble into dust."

North started marching back towards the other spirit but he simply waved a hand, as a light suddenly appeared around him, and there was a noise like the universe tearing. Pulled out of the place where it was hidden in his matted fur, a little device was whirring in his hand.

"After all, when it comes down to it...who guards the Guardians?"

Krampus disappeared right before North reached him again.

"Bah!" North said loudly, turning away again. "Next time, he would be more useful with less arms!"

Bunny and Anansi continued back toward the sleigh, but Tooth hovered in place until North caught up. She patted the other myth on the shoulder.

"More limbs than I'd leave him with," she said. North made a noise like a laugh and she smiled at him. "You're a good man, Nicholas St. North."

North paused for a moment. "'Good', perhaps," he said slowly. " 'Nice'..."

It took him a moment, but he found the words. "Nice is not part of job description."

Tooth nodded sharply, and the two of them moved to catch up with the others.

"Anansi, only one spider in sleigh at a time!"

"But it's too cold here for these precious creatures!"

---

The next room of lights was walled in splintered wood, and the lights hovered with greater space between them.

"All right, I get it, no more pretty lights for me," Jack grumbled. "Eventually."

The rooms were still huge, the lights still floating in lovely, heart-warming masses. At the rate they diminished, Jack could expect to wander for years through the maze and still have light in his life.

And the Guardians would certainly find him before years had passed. Jack strode through the lights at a defiant pace, admiring them like a tourist on a casual stroll, not a prisoner clinging to his last comforts.

The door slammed behind him, and the smell of rot slammed into Jack's senses.

He gagged on nothing, his empty stomach twisting at the wet stench and the feel of chilly mud beneath his bare feet. His eyes adjusted to the dimness of the unlit room and he backed against the door, waiting to see the body that was rotting into the smell.

It wasn't a room and there wasn't a body. It was a field, and there were hundreds of bodies. Hundreds of dead rabbits, some encased in ice, some half-frozen and decomposing in the still air. A few of the dead rabbits stared at him with too-human eyes locked open by the ice.

Jack's stomach twisted again and he leaned against the door for support.

He saw another door at the far side of the field and bolted for it. The melting ice had pooled on the dirt and grass in a muddy, cold slick, and he struggled not to slip - and not to step on any bodies as he went.

It had to be an illusion. It had to be - Anansi had been very clear when he'd told Jack the story of what had happened to the pookas, and Bunny had confirmed it. He'd buried them in the warren himself. From them had grown flowers, and trees, and the light and life had come back to that place in time. This was no more than a horrific reconstruction. These were not actually the bodies of his friend's long-dead family that he was narrowly avoiding stepping on.

Yet even running through the memory felt like a desecration.

Jack reached the door opposite the field and threw himself through it, pulling it shut behind him. He leaned against the wall, breathing in the stale, but scentless, air.

The maze was built on fear. Jack had experienced his own fears and had stumbled onto Pitch's, who he knew was there in the maze - or had been, at one point.

Anansi had traumatized Jack with the story of the aftermath of Old Man Winter's attack on the Bunny's home, but the field of frozen pookas wasn't his fear. Perhaps that meant the Guardians had found the maze but gotten caught in it themselves, and were looking for him. For a moment, that thought lifted his spirits, but then he nearly heaved his empty stomach as he thought of Bunny stumbling, unwary, onto that frozen field.

If the others were lost in the maze, he had to hope they would find him - that they would all find each other - soon. They could face their fears together, if not without being hurt by them, at least better than they could alone.

The Guardians would save him soon, he thought, as he came upon another crossroads and bit his finger to mark the wall with another number in blood.

They'd find him before he saw anything so awful that he couldn't forget it, before anything in here scarred him for life.

They'd find him.

They would.

They'd find him.

That was when the unending litany started, going on in the back of his head, the background noise of his new existence:

Please find me. Please find me. Please find me. Please find me. Please find me...