Happy Friday! Also, it's Ectober. I will be trying to do the whole week again this year. I've already got the first one up.

In less happy news, I am still sick. So. Yeah. This won't affect updates for Mortified, since I've got a nice big buffer that I was planning to use to carry me through NaNoWriMo anyway, but I won't be answering very many reviews until I feel better. Being sick destroys my social battery and willpower, and I need those for real life stuff.

I'm glad that you guys liked my portrayal of Dan. It took a lot of thought for me to figure out how to make Dan redeemable and stay true to Danny and Vlad's motivations, while still keeping Dan definitely evil with reprehensible actions. I finally hit on the 'angel of death' idea, because those kinds of killers tend to insist that they're helping their victims. Dan isn't quite like them, since he is aware that what he's doing is wrong, but that was the basic idea.

Purest of the Hearts: It's good to see you here again. :)

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Chapter 166: When One Door Opens

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Dan released Danny's core and pulled his hand from his chest. The younger ghost gasped. Dan wasn't sure if it was in pain, relief, or fear.

Dan didn't care, he felt-

He felt.

He felt, and it was too much. Danny, with his injured core, hadn't been able to project quite as much as Dan; Danny's memories and thoughts had been disjointed fragments, not a complete narrative, like Dan had fed to him. Even so, those thoughts had been powerful. Pointed.

True.

He felt sick.

Had he really let his need for control (he wasn't going to lie, he knew he had that need, that Obsession) overcome everything else? Had he let his other Obsessions starve while he fed that one, only that one? And imperfectly, at that, because there were always things he couldn't control, no matter how powerful he became.

He was sick. He was sick and wrong and-

He had done all that for nothing. He had killed all those people for nothing. He had betrayed his Obsession for nothing.

That was unforgivable. He was unforgivable.

Who could have forgiven something like this, anyway? Who could have forgiven something like him? God? Dan doubted he had a soul.

Danny wasn't even convinced that there was a better place for people to go, if they didn't become ghosts. Oh, he didn't outright think that there wasn't, but he didn't believe blindly. It had never been knowledge for Danny, not like it had been for Dan.

(But Dan had only wanted it to be true. He had never had any proof.)

Dan could never atone for this.

He wanted to end. At least then he couldn't do anything worse.

It took time for a ghost to tear itself apart for the sake of its Obsession. This was good. If Dan had destroyed himself right away, he wouldn't have seen the portal forming behind Danny, and then rushing forward, towards them.

He threw Danny to the side, out of the portal's path, but the portal changed direction, as if chasing Danny. It swallowed Danny, who was clearly disoriented and made no attempt to evade it. As soon as it had done so, it winked out of existence.

Dan stared, then his mouth twisted. He knew who had caused this, who had done this. There were only a few people who could even make portals, let alone manipulate portals like that. Clockwork wouldn't interfere. He would have seen Dan's intention. Lady Nephthys wouldn't know. She didn't have Clockwork's precognitive abilities. That left Issitoq.

(Issitoq, who had killed Dan's family once already.)

There was no question in Dan's mind that Issitoq had nothing but bad intentions towards Danny. Issitoq would want to destroy Danny, kill him.

That had been Dan's goal only seconds ago.

He narrowly dodged the spear thrown at him from below. He looked down. Pandora had almost reached him, and she was the first of many. Some part of him wanted to continue the fight, to lose himself in battle-frenzy and be destroyed by the hand of another. But he hadn't come here to fight Pandora.

It was time to go. He warped space around himself, and reappeared, even farther from Mattingly than before. His aura flickered as he scanned his immediate surroundings. He had managed to go where he wanted, but wouldn't be able to teleport again for a while.

Pandora had already spotted him. As undignified as it was, it was time to run. He wouldn't be able to outpace her, but there were places he could shake her, if he maintained a lead.

Maybe he'd even be able to figure out what he wanted to do, what he should do, on the way.

He was unable to avoid the portal that opened in front of him.

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Clockwork leaned away from the viewing lens, shaking. He had seen it, just for a second, the choice Dan had made, and its result. He had seen, with tortured clarity, the ghost born of paradox tear himself apart, disintegrate, fade and end as his Obsessions rebelled against his existence.

It wouldn't have been a pleasant end, a slow and quiet fading from being, but a paroxysm, violent and painful. Such a thing wasn't a fate ghosts wished on each other, but Clockwork knew it would have been the closest to peaceful Dan could get.

Clockwork couldn't know for sure what Dan and Daniel had exchanged, not now, not yet, with timelines fraying into timelines, into timelines, into timelines with every choice and chance, but from that future he could guess. He could understand. Dan had seen himself from Daniel's perspective, had seen his mistakes and his sins, and his moral compass had lurched into motion once again.

Dan had seen, and he had made a choice, a decision, to trouble the world no more. It was, perhaps, not the very best choice Dan could have made, but it was far from the worst, and it was his choice, to exist or not. Even if he could, Clockwork would not have interfered.

But Issitoq did.

His portal, made by the hourglass, sped at Daniel and Dan. Dan threw Daniel away, out of its path- another choice, another step towards good- but the portal veered towards Danny, its true target, and Daniel was gone.

Daniel was gone.

Clockwork pushed himself up, intending to fly around the room (the ghostly equivalent of pacing), but something in him gave out, and he collapsed to the floor. He was having trouble pulling in ectoplasm and energy, which was ridiculous. He was in his lair.

Clockwork hadn't seen this.

Clockwork hadn't seen this?

Clockwork had... seen... this?

Daniel was gone.

(Everything was the way it was meant to be.)

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The abomination was gone. One of them, anyway. The more important one. The other, Issitoq could order Clockwork to deal with. It was a paradox, after all. Clockwork was supposed to get rid of those. He would have to be watched closely, of course, treasonous wraith that he was, but that was what the Observants were best at. They had given him too much freedom, honestly. That was what had set this whole catastrophe off in the first place. It was a good thing Issitoq had been able to stop it.

The hourglass was empty.

Issitoq had known that would happen. It wasn't a trivial thing, to open a portal to so many years in the past. Still, it was a great loss to his order.

He tucked the empty hourglass back into his robes. It may no longer have the power to warp time and space, but it had contained the dried ectoplasm and power of an Ancient. That was a power in and of itself.

Issitoq turned to Long Now. He would not be able to rest until the other monster was undone.

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Dan wasn't able to pull up in time to avoid the ground the portal deposited him inches from. He ate dirt, literally.

Sam would be pleased.

(She hadn't crossed his mind like that in years.)

He dragged himself from his self-created crater, fully prepared to do battle with Issitoq, and- And something. Probably not save Danny. That couldn't possibly be what he was about to think. Beating up Issitoq was enough. The murderer had it coming. Dan could feel him, waiting, just beyond the edge of the crater.

But what he saw, once he cleared the rim of the crater, wasn't the bottom of an Observant's robe and a sickly green tail. What he saw was a pair of bare, dark-skinned feet, and the hem of a butterfly-patterned robe.

He looked up at the woman they belonged to, and she looked down at him, arms crossed. He had never met her, even in the other timeline, but there was only one person she could be.

"I am Nephthys," she said, as if she could read his mind, "Ancient Master of Death and Change."

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Danny groaned. That had been a bad portal, one of, if not the worst he had ever been through. He didn't think he had ever passed out from just going through a portal before.

Unless he counted the one he had made when hit by the Mortifier. He didn't. That wasn't just the portal.

Maybe this wasn't, either. Maybe it was his earlier injuries and whatever Dan had done to him combined with a turbulent portal.

Either way, that didn't really matter right now. What mattered was that Clockwork had taught him that one of the main contributors to how bad a transient natural portal felt was how far it traveled through space and time. If the portal really had been that bad, and it wasn't just Danny, he was probably far from home.

On the other hand, that was a really convenient time for a portal to show up. He wasn't convinced that it was natural, in which case the turbulence was just because whoever made it was bad at making portals.

Thing was, Danny didn't know anyone who was bad at making portals. He knew people who couldn't do portals, and people who were really, really good at them. There was no middle ground. Except maybe Cujo. Had Cujo saved him?

Probably not. If Cujo had saved him, the dog would be with him right now, or he'd be in a bed, with his friends fussing over his injuries. He wouldn't be lying on rock, listening to the whistle of a particularly angry ectoplasmic wind.

Speaking of which, he should probably open his eyes and get up.

Every muscle and bone in his body protested at the move. He felt like he had been dropped into a barrel with a boulder, and rolled down hills until the boulder was pounded into powder. In other words: bad.

Danny forced his eyes to open and immediately shut them again. Even the dim light here was enough to give him a pounding headache.

He would just take another couple of minutes to review his situation, before opening his eyes. Yeah. That sounded like a good idea, and not at all like stalling. Dan hadn't been as strong as he had been when Danny first fought him, so his friends probably weren't in immediate danger. Dan would want to find Danny first, anyway, and so he could make Danny watch as he killed them, because that was what Dan did. Because he was an evil jerk.

It was what he had tried to do before. Except, Dan had seemed different.

Danny shifted, and opened his eyes for real this time, his hand pressing on his chest above his core. It fluttered in response. Dan had been different, this time. The memories and thoughts he had pushed into Danny were different. There was just something off about the whole encounter.

Dan was still an evil jerk, though. Ancients, trying to make Danny think Dan had done everything because he believed in heaven... What a joke.

(Danny would never admit he understood Dan entirely, that he empathized, that he pitied the ghost. He would never dare to understand. It was too dangerous. Even recognizing the reasoning was dancing too close to the precipice of madness. Danny would not, could not, let himself have thoughts that would put his people, put both worlds, in so much danger, even if his human side and thought processes stabilized him and held him back.)

But back to more pressing problems. Even if Danny's family, friends, frenemies, and various acquaintances weren't in immediate danger, they were still in danger. If not from Dan, then from Issitoq, because the Observant didn't have any more scruples than his jerky future self. In fact, Danny would bet that Issitoq had something to do with Dan getting released in the first place. Heck, Danny's understanding was that Issitoq was, like, twenty percent responsible for Dan existing in the first place.

Danny needed to get back to his friends.

Yes, they might be in danger partly because of Danny, but Danny didn't think that danger would go away just because Danny wasn't with them anymore. Especially for Ellie, Jazz, and his classmates who had picked up enough liminality to gain powers, considering Issitoq's prejudice against liminal spirits. He couldn't forget Harmony, either. Everyone living (or unliving, whichever) in Danny's lair would be killed (or ended) if he was.

Well. If he and Ellie were, since it was her lair, too. Still, his death couldn't possibly have a positive effect on his lair.

His friends would probably be pretty upset if he died, too.

Wow. Jazz would be proud of him. This was the most rational he'd been about himself and his relationships with other people for, well, a while. Probably because it was really easy to shove all of his self-hate and negativity off onto Dan, but, hey, it was better than using Dan as another reason to hate himself, right?

Another reason to get back: He needed a nice, long talk with Jazz. He'd never take one of her nosy psych questions for granted again.

So. First things first. Where was he?

He pulled himself the rest of the way into a sitting position. He was sitting on, not a rock, but some kind of brick. Stone? Or clay? He rubbed his hand on one of them. He couldn't tell. It was worked, in any case, not natural.

On Earth, that might suggest the present or past presence of civilization in the area. In the Zone, however, it might just be the result of something falling through a portal, so it wasn't nearly so helpful.

Danny looked around more, and breathed deeply, trying to gauge the energy levels and ectoplasm density of the area. He might be able to rule some places out, if he knew that, and his core needed all the advantages in reading that it could get, considering the beating it had taken over the past weeks.

The area, as Danny had noted before, was fairly dark, though that didn't prevent him from seeing. There was a nasty-looking forest hanging upside-down above him (or maybe Danny was hanging upside-down above it). To one side, there was a collection of dark, floating blobs. Danny couldn't tell how big, or how far away they were. To the other, there was something that might have been a town of some kind. If Danny had been on Earth, he would have said it was too geometric to be natural, but then he had also encountered predatory buildings that were actually carnivorous plant things in the Ghost Zone, so that wasn't a given. Also, it was far enough away that he could have covered it with his thumb. The ectoplasm on the air was sweet and thick, so he was probably relatively close to the Core. There probably were other places near which the atmosphere was like this, but he couldn't recall them at the moment.

(There was something else. Something that triggered a sense Danny rarely used, but he couldn't identify it. It just niggled the back of his mind.)

He didn't recognize anything.

Well, if he was right, and he was near the Core, then at least he was still in Earth-equivalent space, and not floating through the flip side of the Andromeda Galaxy or something.

(Even if that would be kind of cool.)

The little town would probably be his best bet (again assuming that it wasn't some kind of sham, or a ruin), even if it was far away.

Then again, there was always below... Or whatever he was sitting on. He floated up, and away, towards the town, then turned. He frowned, tilted his head, and flew around the object. It was a partly enclosed portal; natural, but stable, and built around. The Architect's Gate wasn't the only travel route to take advantage of portals. There were a lot of them, and, usually, the stuff built around them was used to mark them, since they did tend to move around, and often had independent paths.

Danny squinted.

If he looked at it like this, it looked like one of the Tantric Gates. A lot like one of the Tantric Gates. The violet Tantric Gate, in particular. Except, almost all of the decorations were gone, and so were the ceremonial doors. He frowned, and moved again. The purple stone set in the lintel was still there, at least.

He crossed his arms, earlier plan of going to the town forgotten. The gate's state was... disturbing. He didn't know much about the Tantric Gates, Clockwork had shown them to him once, and the Ghost Writer had talked about them a bit, during one of his culture lessons. The Tantric Gates were the focus of a religious pilgrimage thing some groups did. The pilgrimage had something to do with symbolically going through 'chakras,' or spiritual states. Danny hadn't really been paying attention at the time, but he had gotten the impression that it was quite important to those groups.

What else did he know about them? There were seven Tantric Gates (if you counted both sides of the gate as one, fourteen if you didn't). They more or less hung out around the Core. Except for the ends, they came out pretty close to one another, so you could do them all in a day. They had really long subjective 'travel times' compared to other stable portals, and were kind of rough, so there wasn't a lot of fighting between the religious people and people who wanted to move them to use as trade routes (Danny had gotten involved with a dispute about something like that, once. It was how he met the Feathers of Ma'at.). Oh! And they were probably the gates Neti used to confuse and delay Inanna, when she tried to invade the Zone. At least, that's what Ghost Writer had said. Clockwork had done his whole 'I will neither confirm nor deny' act.

They sadly didn't go anywhere Danny wanted to be. Not this one, and not the ones this one led to.

On the other hand, Danny knew the general location they were in (thanks, Clockwork!). Sure, he hadn't thought there was a town, or any ghostly community, this close to them, or a giant, creepy, upside-down forest, but it wasn't like he was an expert on the geography of these parts of the Zone.

It didn't matter, anyway. Between his general location, and knowing which direction was which, he could get to somewhere he knew.

Problem: He didn't know what direction was which. Other than the sadly defaced gate (and, Ancients, was someone going to get in trouble for that), there weren't any landmarks that he recognized.

Whatever, he could just orient himself with his ghost homing sense...

… which he really needed to find a better name for...

… which wasn't working.

He couldn't feel Amity Park. He couldn't feel home.

Amity Park was gone.