The black ring of sky tentacles curled in and out of existence around the breach, while the swelling light of the mid-morning of Christmas Eve shown through to illuminate the Hakrom Empire. Far below the sky's mysteries, Dipper and Wendy sat beneath a tree on a high rocky outcrop, pointing an improvised wooden sextant upward, to measure the breach's position. A wind haunted the air, and their conversation was almost as quiet.

"60 degrees." He rubbed his eye. "Or thereabouts. That confirms it."

The closer they got to the center of the pocket dimension, the lower the breach appeared to hang in the sky. Back when they first entered it had appeared as a star, nearly straight above. But as they approached, it seemed to sink. Right at the shore of the lake it looked lower than it ever had, about 50 degrees above horizontal. Here, about a mile from the shore, it was around 60. The precision of their measurements were dubious at best, and the trigonometry to make sense of it was nonsense to be generous, but if it all worked out, it seems that if they could get right below the breach, it might just be in reach of the ground.

It was anyone's guess as to how the complexities of spatial warping really functioned around here, but it wouldn't be the first thing to fly in the face of logic down here, so there existed the lingering hope that somehow, if they could reach it, they could just walk through.

It was their best bet.

"It's still impossible to get out of here." He knew.

"It's not impossible." Wendy elbowed him. "Reason it through with me. You know it's not impossible."

"And how would I know that?" He asked.

"Well..." She shrugged. "You know. I mean. We HAVE to get out of here one way or the other."

"Do we? How would I know a thing like that? What if we never do? What if we get crushed by a robot or eaten by zombies or caught in a death light, what if the same fate takes us as took the entire Hakrom Empire... If this winter lasts until we're no longer left alive to see the spring, what does that concern us?"

"What do you mean what does it concern us? We're us, you bozo."

"I...!" He felt something very much too large and nihilistic welling up in himself, and stopped it before it came out his mouth. "I don't know anything." He said.

"Yeah, well... Little steps then." She gestured to the island empire in the middle of the lake. "How do we get across the water, then?"

"To what end?"

"To wha-? To escape!" She threw up her hands. "To get through the breach! Back to the real world!"

"History forgot the Hakrom empire." He reminded her. "And everything we've seen was built after they were banished. Which means a whole city-state, thousands upon thousands of people, engineers and scientists and tyrants and armies and whatever they had back then, none of it helped them, and all of them died here. So there has to be something between us and that breach, something impassable, and if it stopped them, what chance do we have?"

"Okay, fine, well, what else is there in the city? We could find out what happened to all of them? Maybe we could find out who built the second faction of robots? Maybe we'll find some more food? Or weapons? Or something, I dunno!"

"Yeah." He barely looked up.

"...Are you okay, man?" She knew he wasn't.

"I'm fine."

She let the lie lie, and returned her attention to the lake they had to cross. "...Well, it can't be frozen very thick. There's even a few clear spots."

"I can see that." He agreed.

"We can't swim it." She assessed. "It's too cold, and we aren't equipped to fight aquatic monsters if there's those."

"I agree." He agreed.

"So we need a boat?"

"Need something."

"A boat won't work?"

"That ice is too thin to stand on, but too thick to push a boat through."

"We're strong. We could get a boat through."

"And we don't have a boat."

"Okay then... Bridge?"

"There are no bridges."

"Build a bridge?" She was grasping at straws.

"Out of what?"

"Come on man, give me something to work with here. What's your problem?" She rapped a knuckle against his skull. "Are you astral projecting? Left a brick wall to screen your calls? Anyone home? Gereeeet-tings Earrrrth-leng tek mee too yoor leeead-der." She thought she saw the tiniest hint of a smile on his lips, but it disappeared again just as quickly. Something was really hurting him inside, and she wasn't exactly sure what it was. All she knew was that he didn't want to talk about it, and that it was hurting her too. "Come on, Dipper..." She shivered in the cold. "Where is he?"

"...Where's who?"

"You."

"Me? He's right here."

"Then why do I feel like I lost him somewhere along the way?"

"Maybe he lost himself... Or maybe you finally found him."

"But I know him."

"How? When he's only just now learning to know himself?"

"I can't with this." She ran her face through her hands. "I can't I can't with these dog-chasing-tail mind games and this.. You know I'm an idiot, right?"

"...Only kinda."

"You know I can't figure this out on my own. You're the leader here. And my ticket home. You're all of our ticket home. You know that, right? Tell me what to kill with an axe or shoot with a gun and I'll do it, I'll be right behind you, you know that, but I need Dipper back... Where did you go?"

"Maybe the same place you went... The woman I was in love with twice and three times, whose smile held peace and war, whose hands could take my whole life to save and lift up, whose eyes saw visions of everything I could ever hope to be and to do, pure of heart and strong in spirit and gentle in word... Why can I only ever come up with these great lines when they don't seem to fit? Why isn't she around to hear them?"

"I am here... Maybe the only difference is that you know I'm a brute idiot now. Just like my dad and all of my whole family, right back though the generations up to Great Grandpa Berny, who married a sasquach... Don't know that one of us has ever been to college or seen a city or ever amounted to anything great. Bunch of hillbilly thug nobodies."

"And you know me." He agreed. "A fool little boy. I'm sorry Wendy. I'm sorry for everything."

"I love you, you know."

"I love you too."

She took his chin to look him in the eyes, then pulled him close and kissed him. This would be about the 5th or 6th kiss he'd ever had in his life, and it was far and away the briefest and most horrible. Their lips were cold, dry, cracked, and nearly numb besides. And the dry, cold motion was all that there was to feel, for the love between them was faint and far away. It was a dishonest thing, to kiss now. They pulled away and sat in silence, mouths filled with a bad taste.

"I'm sorry." She said.

"We have to get out of here." He told her.

She nodded.

From somewhere in the city, three trails of black smoke rose into the sky. From the trees behind them came the wooden clicking of needles and boughs, and above, the hoarse crowing of birds. A long ways down the shore, a few ancient robots were moving about. Wendy yawned and shivered again. Dipper's stomach rumbled, but he didn't want to eat any more venison. From all the way back at the bunker, they could hear Dan splitting firewood.

One of the ancient robots was going down the hill toward the lake, and Dipper watched it as it went.

It was an Earth Eater, one of the largest machines they'd seen down here. The behemoth was shaped something like a square metal caterpillar, some 50 feet long, and crawled forward on a long line of tank treads. On top of its head were mounted two antennae, which glowed in a brilliant blue light. As the machine rolled past trees and leaves and shrubbery, every ounce of organic matter the light touched instantly dissolved into a horrid black slime, which stained the snow. A tree toppled as he watched. On the front of the Eater's head was a mouth full of toothed shovels, which dug and scratched at the earth in front of it, pulling in dirt and rocks and snow and slime, everything it saw, everything it could reach, it just stuffed inside itself.

Dipper never saw any material come out of the machine. It didn't seem to be using any of it to create or manufacture anything, it didn't seem to be collecting any particular ores or resources, it didn't seem to be serving any grander purpose at all really, it was just eating. Eating, eating, endlessly eating. Its path was a hideous black-stained trench across the hillside. When the wind changed direction briefly, he thought he caught a whiff of the awful death smell of the black goo.

And every few minutes, the Earth Eater would turn off. It would stay still for a moment or two, then turn back on again, and continue its business. On a hunch, he decided to time this behavior on his watch. Turns out, it was very regular; 90 seconds of activity, then 40 of dormancy. And the same numbers every time.

As they watched, the Earth Eater reached the lake, pushed a hole through the ice, and continued down into the water until it disappeared.

Dipper got half an idea.

He stood up, and looked around the whole valley to see what else he could. Here and there around the panorama he thought he spied a few other black trenches. And not so very far to the North, he saw one that looked like it was snaking toward the lake. Despite the distance, he could make out its blue light, and was able to time it. 90 seconds of activity, same as the first one, but this one's dormant period was a whole two and a half minutes. He got the other half of the idea. "I've got an idea."

Wendy stood up too. "Worth the wait."


"Alright. Three, two, one, any second now."

In the creekbed twenty feet below them, the Earth Eater ground to a stop with a creak and a groan and a tapering clunk. Its death lights turned off. They had 148 seconds.

As they scrambled down the slope, Wendy tossed a pinecone toward one of the antenna, just to make sure it was off. It was. They jumped off one last boulder, and landed hard on the Eater's deck. (Deck? Hull? Roof? What's the correct nautical term for the parts of a mining serpent?) Dipper glanced around for a way to get inside, while Wendy retrieved her axe and a fair-sized rock from her jacket, and went to town on the cowling on the antenna's shoulder joint.

He spied a hatch about a third of the way down the machine's length, but didn't want to try his luck at it within the next (glanced at watch) 120 seconds, so he turned back to help Wendy with the disarming. He held the axe into a crack like a wedge while she pounded it in, and the cowling cracked and bent. Some old rivet popped. She pushed it in further until a second pop. They hooked their fingers into the crack and pulled, and with a third pop the cowling came loose with enough force that they nearly stumbled off the side of the vehicle.

"Good!" He nodded, and glanced down at the contents of the cowling. 45 seconds. "Short time! Get clear!"

They'd scaled the rocks back to a safe distance by the time the machine reactivated. There was no rumbling or vibration like would come from a gas engine starting, no noise at all really, it just started moving.

"It's all electric!" Dipper said.

"Yeah?" She took his hand and hauled him up the last rock.

"Or at least the death lights are. They've got wires running to 'em."

"Alright."

"And there were only two wires. Like an ordinary lightbulb."

"It's not a normal lightbulb though."

"No."

"Must be magic."

"Or science advanced enough to be indistinguishable from magic... But yeah, some kinda magic, yeah."

"So we can just cut the wires then?"

The machine moved at about 5 miles per hour. They began running along the ridge to keep up with it. 60 more seconds until it turned off. They were barely keeping even with it, as it had much less trouble over terrain than they did.

"I don't know?" Dipper shrugged. "Or maybe the electricity is just to suppress the magic, so cutting the wires would turn it back on?"

"Idea." Wendy snapped her fingers. "I'll fold my pocket knife half-closed around the wires, and jam it in the gears, so it cuts them itself as soon as it starts waving the light around."

"Good idea."

The machine stopped. They landed back on top. Wendy did the thing with the knife, while Dipper took another look at the hatch. It was almost as long as he was tall, and lay flush with the deck. There was a handle on it that looked distinctly like it ought to be twisted, but when he tried to twist it, the twisting did not seem to occur in quite the implied way. Must be jammed. Or locked. He began scrubbing dirt away, looking for any sort of cover or keyhole or number pad or other puzzle element. Wendy began prying open the second cover.

He glanced past her, off the Eater's prow. They were only about a half mile from the lake. Which meant about 6 more cycles, max, before it reached the water. They would have to be quick.

The machine reactivated a minute later with them on the rocks, and they watched the wires spark and break, and the light go dark. 90 seconds later, and 5 cycles left, and they were back on top of it. Wendy cut the second light's wires by hand, and Dipper found he could get enough leverage with an axe to finally convince the handle to turn. It creaked, and groaned, and complained, but it moved. He bounced on it a little and it moved further. Finally it had spun a full 90 degrees, and there was a tremendous clunking noise. The door sprung upwards by a couple inches, revealing a gap that glowed a dull and distant blue.

"You got it?" Wendy called back.

"Yeah, I got it."

"Weird blue light in there." She noticed.

"Weird blue light in there." He agreed.

"Not a death light?"

He got out a pinecone, and nudged it closer with his foot. It didn't melt to goo. In fact it just dropped down the crack. He heard it clatter to a stop on a floor some distance below, still solid. "Not a death light, no."

"Well, open it up."

He put his fingers under it. It was so thick he could barely grip it. "Gimme a hand, it's stupid heavy."

They got it open together, barely.

The inside of the Earth Eater was quite a bit larger than the outside, which would be odd under normal circumstances, but they'd spent most of this week in a cursed pocket dimension already, so this was really just more of the same, and in retrospect, the sheer amount of dirt they'd seen it eating should've been some kind of hint.

The room beneath was maybe 20 feet wide and more than that long; clean, and filled with pipes and machinery. There was a ladder leading down, and a low electrical hum, and the blue light was shining from somewhere astern.

More strikingly, it appeared that all the walls, and the bottom of the hatch, were made of gold.

"Cool cool." Wendy craned her neck to try and see how big the room was. "Need my help down there?"

"I was gonna send you down first." He half-joked.

"Naaaah, I'm gonna see if I can unbolt one of the death lights." She gestured a thumb over her shoulder. "We're running low on actual gun ammo, and one of those would be awesome to have, just in case... Maybe see if you can find some batteries and wires down there, so we can use it back at camp?"

"Alright... Yeah. Sure." He hesitated. The golden engine room mostly dark. Some dread crept up his spine as he stared down into it. The pinecone sat unharmed, but he knew there are many things in the world that would harm a human, and not a pinecone.

The machine lurched beneath him as it reactivated and continued its march toward the water. They didn't have much time left. 4 cycles. 16 minutes. He almost fell in. The pinecone was still fine.

They needed to get across the lake, so they needed to commit grand-theft-worm to do it, and he needed to climb down into the spooky room to do that. While his girlfriend stole a weapon as terrible as a death light, so that they could instantly kill anything that would threaten them again.

"Is this the right thing to do?" He asked.

She'd already climbed part of the way out onto the antenna, and paused. "Maybe we ask that later?" She suggested.

"No."

"...Okay, well why wouldn't it be right?"

"It feels wrong."

"What about it?"

"I don't know!"

"Not everything that feels wrong is wrong."

"Isn't it?"

"Look, are we doing this or not? We wasted the whole morning hiking over here."

"...Yeah. Okay. Yeah, we're doing it."

"We can't be afraid." She said, as she scooted a little further down the antenna. Now that the machine was moving, the limb was waving around, so she had to cling to the bottom like Indiana Jones, or perhaps a sloth. What she was doing looked a lot more dangerous than what he was about to do, so he took courage from her, as he often did, and began to descend the ladder. Though he had to wonder whether bravery was the issue here, for they were brave already; wasn't the issue that they were thoughtless?

The noise and light of the outside world faded away above him. The ladder was steel and cold, the pipes were steel and warm. Somewhere below could be heard the rumbling of conveyors, and somewhere astern the whirring of fluid pumps. He didn't see any gears or spinning shafts or moving parts anywhere, just tons of pipes and wires weaving through the space in a complex geometric tangle. The air was dry and warm and deathly still.

He wasn't sure which direction to go looking for the machine's controls, but the engine room seemed to extend a much shorter distance forward, so he followed a bundle of large electrical lines in that direction first. They led him to a wall covered in what looked like batteries. The years hadn't been kind to them; half were burst and leaking, most marred by fire damage. Anyway, it was a dead end. He retrieved one intact battery and a bundle of wires for Wendy, and turned around to continue aft.

As he doubled back, he noticed that he'd been leaving footprints on the gold floor, and handprints on the wall. Wherever the gold was touched, the shiny surface got disturbed, like dust or an infinitely-thin layer of paint, revealing a matte grey beneath. The grey felt the same as gold would: cold metallic, and soft enough to scratch with a fingernail. Maybe lead?

Further back the whirring of pumps grew louder, and the air grew warmer, and the blue light brighter; he kicked the pinecone before him as he went. He passed by steam boilers, water tanks, and radiators, and ever more wires and pipes and valves connecting them, until it became hard to see the gold walls. Many of the pipes between the boilers and the back of the vehicle were wrapped in insulation, and most of the insulation was partially burned and melted. He spied an enclosure in a corner that looked like a computer with some buttons on it, which was exactly what he was looking for, but he continued onward for a moment, supposing that he might run into an actual bridge or cockpit of some kind.

He didn't. At the back of the engine room, there was nothing but two massive pillar-shaped mechanisms, with dozens of insulated pipes leading into and out of both of them. The pillar on the left looked intact, but the one on the right was all warped and cracked and half-melted on the side, and there was something spilling out. Well, not currently spilling out, it was all cooled and hardened now: a fat, lumpy, wrinkly blob of silvery-grey ooze. All around the pillars, the air shimmered blue.

It was about then it all clicked in his head and he realized: how the surface layers of a lead wall could be transmuted into gold, what could ionize air hard enough to make aurora borealis indoors, what could release enough heat to damage pipes and the batteries without leaving ash, what kind of stuff could power a machine this old for so long, and what leaves a blob like that when it breaks.

He turned and bolted out of the room in a dead panic, back toward the ladder. The rungs were a lot more slippery this time, which was probably the sweat and gold dust on his palms, but he made it up in record time, and stumbled back up on to the deck. He almost crashed into Wendy, who was coming back to check on him.

"It's NUCLEAR!" He yelped. "That's not gold that's lead a-a-and one of the reactors had a meltdown there's uranium lava on the floor, I-I-I was down there for like five minutes I don't know what dosage I got, I... I... Oh jeez, oh jeez. It's like friggin' Chernobyl in there..."

"What? ...Oh." She frowned in concern. "Dude, I'm sorry."

It was then he noticed what was in her hand.

It was the bulb of the death light. It looked like a normal vacuum tube, but instead of a coil or a filament inside it, there was something so horrible and strangely shaped that he couldn't recognize it at first. But on the third second of him staring at it, it resolved in his mind and he realized what he was looking at: the shriveled, charred corpses of two fairies, locked in embrace. A look of terror was frozen on their mummified faces.

Black magic.

Black magic and radiation. Two sides of the same coin, dangerous tools forbidden by nature, both of which the Hakrom Empire had used with abandon, then turned loose on the world to aimlessly wander; was it any mystery why the spirits hated mankind? Why they'd been branded an enemy by the Earth? Why they were all locked down here to pass away into eternity?

And now he and Wendy were intending to make use of these same tools. Such a thing must not be.

The machine lurched forward again. 3 more cycles before it reached the water. 12 minutes. "We've got to close this hatch." Dipper said.

"Look, hold on, are you feeling alright? You got any burns? I mean, like, or cancer? Are you sterile? How much-?"

"I don't know, I don't exactly carry a dosimeter in my pocket!" He wrapped his fingers around the lid, to try and flip it back over. "Maybe I'll be dead in a day, maybe it was nothing, who knows! Help me close this!"

"Wait, but, but we still have some time! Did you find any controls down there?"

"I! Maybe? So what?"

" 'So what?' So this stupid thing is still our only way across the water!"

"If the engine room floods, it could contaminate the whole lake!"

"Priorities!"

"Yeah, priorities!"

"Aren't we more important than a lake?" She demanded.

That stumped him.

"Aren't I more important than a lake?" She asked.

That really did stump him.

"...Okay." She shrugged. "So yes there's radiation, but we can just pull the lead off the hatch, and use it as a shield." She jammed her axe into a gap between the lead and its steel backing, and began to pry them apart. "We'll walk up to the reactors holding it in front of us, and lay it over the elephant's foot like a big blanket, then we'll be fine. Easy."

"Alright." He nodded.

They had to get across the lake.

They had 11 minutes to contain the reactor leak, decipher the controls, and stop the machine.


Fourteen minutes later, water was pouring down the hatch. It was ice cold, painfully cold, and beat down on them like rain from a firehouse as they struggled up the ladder, hand over numb hand, eyes squinted against the cold and the pain and the panic. Their soaked clothes tightened against them like shackles.

The water level in the engine room slowly rose. They had minutes before it reached the boilers. Minutes? Maybe seconds. Wendy yelled something to him that he couldn't make out. He yelled something back that she couldn't either. She made it out of the hatch first, and for a second the current threatened to suck her feet back in. The hatch was a foot and a half below the lake's surface already, and as he took her hand to be hauled up, he saw it was forming a whirlpool. Water and chunks of ice churned into foam around the Eater's hull as it dived. He briefly tried to close the hatch, but his limp fingers slipped right off, and he knew it was impossible.

One or both of them told the other to run, and they tried their best to do so, back towards the machine's tail which was just now snaking down off the shore. The water was deep and fast moving around their shins as they struggled forward, and the soaking grip of their pants didn't help, and neither did the numbness. Their legs felt like three times their proper weight.

The end of the machine was passing beneath the water now, and they were still 40 feet from the shore. Behind them, the sound of the rushing whirlpool around the hatch turned to the sound of foaming bubbles, as the front of the machine was now too deep to maintain a stable vortex. They had no way of knowing how high the water in the engine room was.

They reached the tail. One or both of them told the other to jump, so they jumped. The Earth Eater disappeared beneath the waves behind them, and they disappeared beneath the waves behind it. Dipper and Wendy remembered too late that they were too heavy to swim.

The Eater's tail stood about 7 feet tall above the lake bed, so they found themselves about 8 feet underwater when their feet touched the ground. The cold crushed them in an instant, greater cold than they had ever felt, greater cold than humans had ever been designed to feel. Their arms and their legs and their eyelids and faces, even their hearts it felt like, seized up instantly, and would not move for several seconds. The shock faded more gradually than would have been appreciated, and they began to walk, struggling against the mass of the water.

They may be too heavy to swim, but they weren't heavy enough to get any real traction on the mud, so they had to do the breaststroke with their arms. The water was filled with the debris that the Eater's treads had kicked up, and thus too dark and murky for them to see the way forward, or see each other. She was about five feet to his left, and he the same to her right, but they could not know this, and they felt alone.

His lungs let out the last of their air without his permission, so on instinct he tried to swim upwards to get his head above the surface, but he could not. There did not exist any easy and convenient escape from this trial, no method to pause the suffering or prolong the time limit, no way out besides the long and hard way, so he took it, and he walked. She tripped over a submerged root and fell to her knees, but this trial did not give consideration for failure and misfortune, and sometimes there is nobody by your side to help you up, so she got up herself, and continued on, lungs empty and head light.

The longest 30 seconds later, their heads broke the surface and they greedily sucked air into their lungs. Ten seconds after that and they stumbled up onto the snowy shore. The shock had passed and their skin had dropped several degrees, and they were shivering like uncontrollable, inhuman things.

150 feet from shore, the water reached the Earth Eater's boilers. The steam explosion ruptured open the top of the engine room, propelling a huge geyser of all three phases of water into the air. As it rained down on the lake, the stress of the damage propagated into the brackets that held stable the Eater's internal pocket dimension. As Dipper and Wendy watched, five dimensions of bigger-on-the-inside machinery, and fifteen thousand cubic yards of soil and rocks, were suddenly allowed to be exactly-the-same-size-on-the-outside, and vomitted back out into 3-space in a blackish secondary geyser of debris, coming with the sound of cracking and crumbling and sucking and the great ear-splitting 'THOOM' of timespace returning to its proper shape. Like thunder. Like the pounding of a gavel in the court of the heavens, as judgment was pronounced:

"We failed." The words were hardly audible on Dipper's shaking lips. "It's over."

That black goo from the death lights must be partly oil, because all of it from the machine's hold was bubbling up to the surface of the lake, and had all caught fire. The last of the debris was falling out of the air to disappear beneath the ice and flame.

Dipper's eyes followed the rippling air up past the lake, and his eyes landed back on the city. The breach hung low in the sky. And through a gap in the buildings, he thought he saw a large, strange figure watching them. It was much too far away to see clearly, but something about it told his mind that he was seeing their journey's end, and it terrified him. And it may have been his imagination or it may have been the ringing in his ears, but he thought he heard laughing, carried by the wind.

"W-w-we'll b-b-be d-dead in a-a uh-uh-hour." Wendy's chattering teeth drug him back to the present.

"Y-y-yeah." He managed to agree.

Their clothes and hair were turning pale and stiff as they froze solid in the chill air, even in the short time it took them to climb up the bank toward the treeline. They'd never make it back to camp like this.

They found a little half-standing stone house with a small tree standing outside. They rigged up the death light to the battery he'd yanked, melted half the tree, and drug the rest inside, still covered in the oil. Cross-wiring the battery yielded a spark, and it burst into flame. And so, at the sacrifice of a tree and perhaps all the life in the lake, they would live another day.

He broke.


Author's Note:

This story was always quite ambitious, with the density of the worldbuilding, the variety of ideas, and the shear number of thematic elements. This chapter had a lot of writing block associated with it, and did right up to the very end, as I tried to simplify and clarify the main themes, the stakes, and the direction the story must move going forward. In the end I had to split this chapter in half, into both 11 and 12, since the two halves dealt with slightly different narrative themes, and besides the failure aboard the Earth-Eater makes for a satisfying conclusion, and besides I needed to ship chapter 11 so I wouldn't be tempted to keep editing it, to focus on chapter 12.

This Chapter is Christmas Eve, which signifies that the plot is near its conclusion, for the finale must take place on Christmas Day.

I meant to release this Chapter on IRL Christmas Eve, but little did I realize how much writer's block I had, and how busy IRL Christmas actually was. Thanks for patience!