Every so often, it occurred to Rynacel that she had not dreamt since she'd arrived here.

From the moment she had set foot on this land, when it was merely a seemingly endless expanse of grass and dirt bordered by the mountain and the forest and the river that this area of land was known for, she had not dreamt. Her sleep unfurled every night as nothing more than plain black velvet, but rather than soft and smooth and comforting, it was suffocating. Where she had heard some of her friends wake up gasping from nightmares that snuck in and squeezed their tendrils around their minds, she found herself awakening startled and blinking, looking for the nearest light to reassure herself that she had not gone blind in the waking world too. In the months while the main building had been built she'd almost been relieved to be dragged from her sleep and its emptiness by their cries, to have to crawl over from her tent to theirs and hold their hand and murmur things that sounded vaguely soothing. Now that they had the building in place and had started to set up their personal spaces within it, she missed that. Sure, she could go from room to room, listening out for distress and then step in to fix it but it wasn't the same. It just wasn't the same.

She missed her dreams. Even the ones that had been nightmares.

She thought of those dreams often, especially now as she walked around the school hanging up her latest paintings. Most of them were gentle landscape paintings but some depicted the events of the Great War too. Only the glorious ones, of course, of them standing resolute, with their chins tipped up and fire in their eyes, holding their weapons and aiming them at atrocities that lurked outside of the frame. Of some of them being blessed by the emperor on the day the war itself had ended. Of them in their tents, cleaning their weapons or grabbing stolen moments together. The one she was hanging up now, in a corridor of the West Wing, showed all of them walking through the street of Ichirinmachi to the admiration and applause of the residents, and indeed of the emperor and some of the Imperial Family. She had managed to draw them in such a way that all their faces were identifiable in the crowd. All of them, except for two-her own parents. After all, they had not been there. Their own daughter, a war hero, had come back home and yet they had not come even though they had not been injured themselves as many other members of the Family had been.

Then again, I didn't come home really, did I? After all, I am here.

She stepped back as she considered the painting's placement on the wall. Yet, she wasn't really seeing the painting. Instead, she imagined herself on that day. She had smiled and talked to admiring civilians, accepted gifts and rewards and done everything correctly. Yet, she had not really been engaged. Instead she had been looking around and around, searching for her parents as though she was still a little child. As if she had not once been one of the main potential candidates for the throne after Emperor Toshiaki, as if she had not been one of the Imperial Army's top strategists before she had been sent to work with Cher and Hades instead. She knew her own worth, had known it well back then too and yet all she'd been able to do was look for her parents. To seek their approval, and with the hopes that they would tell her come home with us, our dear Ryn. Come home and rest, let us look after you. Yet they had not.

"Have you been painting all morning?"

Startled out of her reverie, Rynacel jumped and looked over at Hades. She could not tell whether the woman had materialised, or if she had been standing there the entire time.

"Why do you ask that?"

"You haven't changed your clothes."

Rynacel looked down at her clothes. Rather than the fitted jackets and breeches she favoured most of the time, she was instead wearing one of her favourite spelled white dresses that she always put on when she painted. The colours that had dotted onto the dress now swirled in abstract patterns, never settling in any particular combination for long. Turbulent, restless. Just as she was, really.

"Yes, I have been. I just finished this one, but I'm running out of space so I thought I'd spell-dry this one, hang it up with the other finished ones and then go back."

"I see."

Hades raised an eyebrow, and Rynacel bristled. Quickly, she drew a mental shield around herself although really, it was pointless. She knew full well that Hades knew that the space in her room was not the real reason that she had been so eager to get this painting out and on the walls.

"Your misery is visceral, Rynacel, no matter how you try to hide it."

"I am not miserable," Rynacel snapped. "I am dreamless."

This made Hades blink and for one brief moment, Rynacel felt a flare of satisfaction before it dulled into pain once again.

"Is it really so bad," she asked. "That I want to go back?"

Hades crossed her arms, leaning against the wall.

"You didn't join the others when they left to sort out old affairs or say farewell to their families."

"You know that is not what I meant. I want to know why it is so bad that I want to go back. Why being bound means we have to stay in the same place, together?"

Even as she said this she raised her hand, examining it. Some of the other saw the bindings as ribbons, she knew but to her it was thread. Thread, like fate itself, shimmering in all shades of red not just to signify that fate but the blood that they had forged it in. She murmured the spell that made the threads properly visible and watched them appear all around the two of them, criss-crossing and weaving into intricate patterns just like the web of a spider. Just as tangling, too. Hades sucked in a breath and stared, reaching out to touch them but just as quickly Rynacel broke the spell and the threads became invisible again. Not that the invisibility made a difference to her, either way.

"You have answered your own question, really, haven't you?" Hades commented evenly.

"I suppose I have, but…" Rynacel sighed. "I would still be loyal to you, even as Empress. Or even returning to my old post. This bond we have doesn't need to have us in the same place. "

"Well, it does now." Hades pointed out. "Besides, who is to guarantee that you would become Empress after Emperor Toshiaki?"

"I could, though. I still could, if I could go back to there."

To go back, go back, go back. It was not that she wanted to leave Hades and Cher and everyone else, not really. It wasn't just their pact, either, she really did treasure them. The days they had spent together, fighting with each other and for each other. Laughing together, crying together, bandaging up each other's injuries and leaning against each other's shoulders to look at the stars and talk of all their dreams together. What precious things those moments were, how they had brightened her, too. She walked taller and better for having met them, she'd come out of the hellfire they'd walked through stronger for having done so with all of them.

Yet, as much as she felt the sparkles of pride from each painting that she completed and hung here, as much comfort she got from seeing the central courtyard tiles glow with Lowen's ashes, the river gleam with Eita's and of course the beauty of the tree that was Rielle, the truth was she wasn't sure that this was what she wanted. In truth, she wasn't even sure that she wanted the life she had had before them. Sometimes she thought, I want to go back, but she was not even sure of that.

What she really wanted was her ability to dream. Not just the dreams that she should have had while sleeping, but the dreams for the future she'd once thought she'd had. She wasn't even sure if she could find them by going back, but where else could she go for them?

Hades studied her for a long time, then pushed herself off the wall slightly so as to look at the painting that Rynacel had just hung up. She studied the faces of the crowd, and then with a smile that curved sword-sharp she looked back.

"You think so, huh? Then, tell me," she asked slowly. "When is it that you think you will die?"

And Rynacel went cold. Because Hades knew as well as she did that of the many requirements that a potential candidate for ruling had to meet, mortality was one of them. An emperor or empress could not be immortal. Until now, that had never been something that mattered, for the times they lived in had never required the drastic, disastrous measure that becoming immortal was considered to be. Until now, there had never been a possibility that anybody close to the throne would throw away their mortality.

She had, though.

She'd known what it would have meant for her future even then, but it had not been a choice. What sort of future ruler would she have been if she had not put her very life on the line in order to help purge the heresy? What sort of comrade would she have been if she had left them all alone in such a momentous change? One that was just as unworthy as a ruler without mortality and yet, by doing so, she had thrown away her own dreams and her ability to dream. She'd known this. She knew it now.

And yet, she was still that person who'd searched the faces of an adoring crowd, just wanting to see her parents approving faces. For them to show her that they had understood and were proud of her anyway, for them to give her a proper farewell and yet they hadn't. They hadn't and now here she was in a still-empty school and she just wanted to dream again.

And she knew that Hades knew that, too.

A part of her wanted to knock that painting down to the floor, to stamp on it and rip it apart, but she could not and would not give Hades the satisfaction. Instead, she deliberately turned her back to her and used a transportation spell to get back to her room.

…

She painted furiously for the rest of the afternoon, ignoring a number of knocks to her room door. The scenes she painted, however, were not those of glorious triumphs or pleasing landscapes but of dreams. Of fire, burning Rielle and of how Minna had stood there with her hands glowing with flames and eyes glowing with the evil that had been concealed. Of Keno almost ripped to pieces as Mshrupo staggered under his weight in order to drag him to safety. Of Shippa and Fiachra each kneeling by Lowen's bedroll, each holding one of his hands as he succumbed to his own injuries. Of Snow after they'd found her in the storms during the final year, how they'd only realised she'd been cursed when she looked right through them without recognition. Of all of them gathered together with the lotus, in a place that she now realised was not actually that far from this place-and that realisation made her angrier. She painted and painted. Even when her hands ached and she could barely hold her brushes she painted every memory she could think of. She painted without really seeing what she was putting on the canvas, only seeing the memory as it played in her head.

Eventually, though, the paintbrush kept slipping from her hand, and when it finally fell to the floor she left it there. Feeling as if she had run across multiple battlefields, she breathed heavily as she turned around on her stool and stared at all the canvases she had painted already. Hands shaking and aching, she reached up to brush away tears with each painting she looked at, her chest clogging up as her shoulders shook.

I suppose she was right, Rynacel thought to herself, I am miserable. I'm miserable because I'm dreamless, not instead of, but…

She was just about to make herself look at the canvas still on the easel when there was another knock at her door. She startled, but then bit her lip, determined to ignore it when Cher's voice called:

"Ryn?"

Oh, great. She couldn't refuse him, could she? Though she very much wanted to.

"Come in."

Cher did just that. Though he smiled softly, his overall expression was unreadable to her. The first thing he did once he'd stepped through the door and closed it behind him was to go right over to her easel, bend down, and pick up the paintbrush she had dropped. He held it up, the bristles pointing towards the ceiling as he frowned at the red and orange and purple on the brush for a moment. Then, he handed it back to her. Warily, she reached out and curled her fingers around it before setting it back down on the easel, though still without looking at the painting sitting there.

"May I sit?" he asked.

Rynacel just nodded and waited as he grabbed a stool and dragged it over, settling himself down on it.

"Look, I won't pretend that Hades didn't mean what she said." Cher started.

Still, she waited, staring right at him. He gazed back at her and then sighed. He spread out his hands in an appeasing gesture and gave her a brighter smile, one of the ones that she'd seen him use on so many people. Charming and beguiling them, while Hades taunted and provoked, in perfect tandem. It had always been their way, their strategy. It felt awfully as if they were now using that strategy on her, as though she was just some other person. Not one of those who had been through hellfire with them.

When the silence stretched, Cher sighed again.

"I can't pretend, so I won't apologise for it as such. But I didn't realise that you wanted to be in line to the throne that much, that it would upset you to have to be with us instead."

"It's not like that…"

"Oh?" Cher tilted his head. "Then, what is it like?"

Now it was her turn to spread out her hands, and she winced at how stiff they were. Immediately, Cher leant over and grabbed them and after a moment of concentration, pale tendrils of magic snaked around her hands, softening the ache in them. When he let go, she cautiously drew them back to her chest and just looked at him. She didn't know what to say, how to explain it. She wasn't sure that she understood what she was feeling, herself.

Cher frowned at her for a moment, and then his expression softened out into a smile.

"You know, we used the leftover materials from this building to build a cottage."

Rynacel blinked.

"Up in the Floating Gardens," he added. "Hades and I, we built a little cottage. The views from it are beautiful, especially up there."

She blinked again and asked slowly.

"Why….? You have your own rooms here too, don't you?"

"And our so-called 'staffroom' too, even if that is technically only for school matters but I suppose…"

Cher paused, and his eyes travelled across the paintings.

"I have a feeling that the reason you are painting all of these is the same reason we built that cottage."

Rynacel narrowed her eyes. Both Cher and Hades had the frustrating habit of entrusting the rest of them with a secret without actually explaining what the secret was. She suspected that this was exactly what was happening here.

"You can't dream, either?"

Cher seemed to consider this:

"It's more that there are certain dreams we cannot have. And it is the same with you, isn't it?"

She nodded at that, not wanting to rehash it again. Cher looked at the paintings again, and she watched him looking, wondering what he made of them.

"We've all lost a lot, haven't we?"

"Yes, and I don't mean to be self-indulgent, Cher-"

He held a hand out to stop her:

"You're not. We've all lost a lot, dreams included. And I don't know how to help you be able to dream again but…you know that you'll be alright, don't you? You'll find new things to dream about and maybe even new ways to dream. In a way, the two of us have had to as well. Once upon a time there was a possibility that our life would be…not this life. Yet, here we are, in this school. So you must know that."

"Do I?"

Cher gestured to the canvas on her easel, and she turned and looked at it properly for the first time. In comparison to her other paintings, it was really rather simple, just showing a sunset and a group of people standing and watching it. The painting was incomplete, so most of the people were merely outlines, but she had filled a few in already as silhouettes. Even so, it was clear who all those people were meant to be-her, Cher, Hades and everybody else including Eita and Lowen and Rielle.

"They're not here, but the rest of us are, aren't we?" Cher asked. "Every day, we're glad for that, you know."

"I am, too." She said, meaning it.

They sat there for a moment, neither seeming to know quite what to say next. She thought again of that celebration day, and of searching and searching for her parents' faces and the cold hollow sensation that had followed when she'd realised that she would never see them. The bitter sensation that had risen into her throat days ago as others had gone back to their homes to say farewell to friends and family or sort out affairs, knowing that she couldn't do the same. She wondered what it was that made Cher feel that same bitter feeling, because something did. That much she had gleaned from the admission about the cottage. But he had also called it beautiful up there, despite that. As far as secrets whose nature she did not actually know went, this one felt particularly special to be privy to.

"Could you tell me," she started slowly. "What it's like up there? The Floating Gardens, I mean?"

Cher's eyes widened, but he did just that. And Rynacel listened very carefully, committing each word to memory. Once he had left, she put aside the canvas she had been working on and set up a clean one. She then considered her dress, and changed into a new one.

Then, she began to paint.

…

It took her a couple of days to complete the painting, especially as some of the others started to come back. Bin and Hiromi came back with bags overflowing with gifts and unusual items, while Ceiraii and Mshrupo had taken the opportunity to acquire slightly more practical items for the classrooms and school offices. Arianna was slightly melancholy, as her trip had required her going back to sort out all of her family's personal belongings and make sure the farm was sold. Yanovi had been to help her, and the place had gone to a good person but it was naturally hard on her. As somebody who could never go back to her own family again, Rynacel felt an odd empathy to her but made sure to keep quiet about it. Parents who refused to acknowledge their daughter was nothing compared to parents and a sister who were dead. Of course, she couldn't not comfort her and Arianna picked up on her thoughts easily, so hiding wasn't quite the straightforward matter she would have wanted to be. It was, however, oddly more straightforward with Reoni and Lucifel, who came bearing news of her parents.

"They are well. They did not ask after you, but we told them you were well too."

It was that simple, nothing more to say. And it stung, just as it stung to discover that the bag of personal effects they'd bought along with them had been packed by a maid and snuck out to them. Yet, as much as she still yearned for them she found she did not want to know more. And so she concentrated on other people's dreams instead, and completed the painting.

The day she was done, she changed into her smarter clothes and made sure the painting was wrapped, and begun to wander the corridors looking for Cher. She soon sensed him and Hades inside the classroom that was to be Shippa's, and she hesitated at the doorway for a moment. But then she took in a deep breath and stepped in, only to stare in confusion when the classroom turned out to be empty.

"In here!" Shippa's voice called out.

It was at that moment a door materialised in one of the walls, and Rynacel went straight to it, struggling to open it. Just as she put the painting down to try again, however, someone opened it.

"Ryn."

"Cher."

"Let her in, Cher." Hades said from somewhere behind.

Cher stepped aside and Rynacel entered the room, turning in a slow circle to regard what could only be described as a warm, cosy library.

"You have a library in your classroom?" she asked Shippa after a few moments.

"A personal library," Shippa said. "Though I may allow students access to it on a restricted basis. All the things that I am keeping here, they are our histories. Or rather, all the things that I hope to keep here, since I haven't really gathered any records from anyone yet."

"Records…"

"Like your paintings, maybe."

Shippa pointed to the wrapped painting that Rynacel was holding and she blinked at him, before awkwardly pointing at Cher.

"Actually, this is for…"

"Well, let's all have a look at it then." Cher said. "Shippa, may we use your desk?"

Shippa nodded, and Rynacel put the painting on the desk, carefully unwrapping it and then folding up the paper, which she then put a disappearing spell on. She then stepped back to let Cher, Hades and Shippa look at the painting. She watched them gaze at the sunset-pink sky and the soft clouds, the stars everywhere as though the sky were an ocean. She watched Hades reach out and tap one of the blue-blossom trees and then look over to Cher, the air humming as it did whenever they communicated silently. When Cher looked back at her, his green eyes were very slightly wet.

"You have painted a dream." He said, softly.

"I…" Rynacel was not sure what to say.

"This is…this is beautiful, this is. Don't you think, Hades?"

Hades simply nodded, before turning around. Her dress had pockets today, and she stuck her hands in them as she looked all around the room before finally also resting her gaze on Rynacel too. She said nothing, but her expression was unusually soft. Rynacel gazed back at her, wondering what she should say, if anything at all.

"You are talented, as always, Ryn," Shippa said. "I take it these are the Floating Gardens?"

"They are." Cher confirmed.

Cher looked to Hades, and Hades to Cher. Then, Cher nodded before saying:

"Rynacel, I know this was supposed to be a gift to us, but I think it should go here."

He gestured to the walls, and Rynacel frowned at him.

"It is your gift to do with as you please but…why?"

"It's the closest thing we have to giving this place to you."

Cher's fingers trailed across the painting, meeting Hades', though they did not quite touch. Neither did they look at each other, but the air hummed once again, warm. Is that what your dream is, Rynacel wondered, to take us to this place? Is that the dream you cannot have?

"Part of it." Hades answered, without looking up.

"Part…of it?" Rynacel echoed.

Cher was the one to nod at this, and broke away, looking around him before eventually finding an bit of pink paper and a pen. Rynacel and Shippa exchanged confused looks as Cher scribbled furiously and then ripped that section away from the rest of the paper. He walked over to Rynacel, then pointed at the frame of the painting. She understood immediately, and accepted the paper, before then tucking it carefully into the frame, just in the corner of the painting. As she did so, Shippa read out what had been written:

"Here, the moon is always full and the sun is always somewhere in reach. It could be said, also, that the sky is our sea here instead, the stars simply particles of water. If the world had ended up like this instead, I wonder if things would have been different.

Ryn has done it justice in this painting, but that is still not enough, I know. We wish you could all see it for yourselves, because while we know Goddess Akari loved it here, she was still alone in the end, wasn't she?"

"What do you mean?" Shippa asked. "By that last bit specifically?"

"We all have dreams we cannot have, in all sorts of ways." Cher said, rather than answer. "Don't we?"

Rynacel blinked, but did not say anything. She looked to Shippa, who just gave her a thoughtful look, before looking back at Cher, who continued:

"And I don't think that any of us will ever be able to reclaim them but…we have this place. We will lead it and guard it, Shippa will preserve our memories and our testimonies and Ryn…Ryn, paint for us. But more than that, paint for you."

There was another silence, and then Cher cleared his throat:

"Come, Shippa, we'll help you put that up."

So they did just that, and then Shippa made them tea and they all sat and had it with biscuits as they talked about further plans for the school. Then, as she, Cher and Hades left Shippa said:

"You know, Ryn, you would have made a good ruler…but it would have been strange to have to call you by your first name instead."

Rynacel blinked, but although the mention of what she had lost hurt, it did not quite hurt in the same way. And to her surprise, she found herself not lashing out or trying to get away, but instead laughing.

…

The weeks went by and Rynacel threw herself into helping with the school, as slowly the classrooms began to seem more like classrooms and the other rooms were fitted out with all the equipment and furniture needed. And, of course, she continued to paint, and to hang those paintings up around the room. She did not put up any of the paintings she had done in her fit of anger-indeed, she did not frame them. Indeed, she rolled them up and gave them to Shippa for safekeeping.

Well, almost all of them.

The last one took a while to get just right, but when she was done with it, she decided to frame it. Still wearing her spelled painted dress, she held it up to her bedroom window, thinking to hang it in her room, but then she changed her mind and went outside her room instead. She hammered a nail into the door, and then hung the frame from it and stepped back to admire the picture of all of them standing facing the sunset. But it was not just the sunset that they were facing, but Kawaakari Academy in the distance. At the top, she had added trails of sparkling dust, to suggest the existence of the floating gardens.

In these weeks, she had not regained her ability to dream. Her sleep still unfurled as plain black velvet, but rather than wander and listen for the sounds of her friends' distress, she painted. All the things she should have dreamt, she painted instead, and that was what she would always do. That was what this image was, her painted dream. It erased none of the hurt of what she had lost, just as nothing would erase the hurts that the others had, just as it would not reinstate all their lost dreams. But nonetheless, it was precious.

And this dream, she would cherish it with all she had.

Rynacel felt as if the painting hung a little crooked so she readjusted it, then regarded it again. Then, she smiled at it and walked away, going to look for her friends to spend time with them. And as she did, the skirts of her dress swirled around her, the sunset colours streaked with glitter spiralling out, but remaining calm, still.

At peace, just as she would be one day.