Author's Note: As of June 27th, 2016, the entire fanfic has been rewritten. That means this chapter, all that came before it, and all that follow it now contain different content that they did previously. You are strongly encouraged to go back and reread the entire fanfic from the beginning, as the revised continuity may confuse you if you jump in part of the way through.

He existed. Nothing more, nothing less. He simply was. Surrounded by a void of all-consuming blackness. He felt the weight of the universe on is mind, on his soul. And something more. He felt connected. He existed as everything and in between everything. He was the void of eternity, the soul of the universe, and the outer thoughts of all creation. And then he saw a light.

This light felt warm. But it also felt wrong. Like it wasn't supposed to be there, a permutation on the perfect nothingness of the void. It wrenched at something deep within his soul and began to pull. He drifted toward the light, and as he left the void for this speck of terrible beauty, he saw flashes of time. A crumbling building, a crying woman, and a small white creature smiling as he met his demise. This creature seemed familiar to him. It was him. His… individual.

The light continued to pull at him as he drifted away from the cold of the void, and he began to remember. He remembered who he was, what had happened to him, and where he was going. Then he saw more flashes, more captured moments of time. But this time of things altogether unfamiliar to him. First he saw a white metallic giant, and behind it a vast army gazing up at the burning sun. Upon the giant's head stood a familiar personage, one he had known all his life, but could not quite place in his current state. Then he saw a blue light, and at its center a silhouette, jagged and angular, as if of stone, with a face that filled him with both crippling terror and repressive calm. The figure stretched out its hands and the earth shook and the sky darkened. Next he saw the Crown of Horns, cracked and shining a golden light from its core. The light formed a vague silhouette, almost like that of the one in the blue light, but less harsh, more inviting, more soothing. Lastly he saw himself, but not himself. This visage he saw spewed forth a honey-golden radiance that felt warm, like the light. But behind his eyes he could sense a cold malice, reminiscent of the void.

As he reached the light, he turned one last time to the void, as if the bid it farewell. And he saw something unfamiliar. The light, with its honey-golden sheen, had filled the void, and cracked it in two. The two halves split apart, condensing and forming shards of crystal. And these shards, desperately trying to reach each other, were cast apart by their light, and they disappeared through cracks in the space between spaces.

Confused, he turned back to the light and saw himself. But it was the same self that he had witnessed in the images. The self that was not self. It reached out to him, and he hesitated. For behind this false him he saw two forms. The first was a being jagged, angular, and vast: the terrible form of blue light and raw power from his visions. The other was a crystal, smooth, round, and small, colored a honey-gold, the same as the light. These shapes shimmered, and the air between them crackled like fire. And then the not-self smiled at him and spoke

"It's time to wake up. We both have a job to do, you know." Then it grabbed his hand, and in one swift, rushing movement dragged him through the light.

Fone took his first breath in months. He tried to sit up but his muscles refused to move. His spine ached and his limbs screamed, almost as if they had been used non-stop for a long period of time. As soon as his eyes started to see again, he guessed that was the case.

He was no longer buried, like he thought he would be. He was staring straight up at an open sky. Slowly mobility returned to his muscles, and he began the process of sitting up. As he looked himself over, he noticed that his hands, arms, and legs were covered in scratches and shallow scars, but he showed no signs of having his spine and lower body crushed by giant falling debris.

As his mind struggled to cope with the fact that he was still alive he surmised that he must have survived the debris and gone into a catatonic state much like the ones his ancestors used to induce to survive for weeks at a time in a desert with no food or water, and he hallucinated in a near death experience while his body slowly dragged itself out of the rubble. His theory still didn't explain how his spine magically realigned itself, or the fact that he was quite certain that, whatever had happened to him, he definitely wasn't alive for part of it, but he would have to figure all of that out later.

He found enough strength to stand up and looked around at the sight arrayed before him. Atheia lay in shambles. The palace was leveled, and as far as he could see the whole inner city was being used as the enemy's base camp. Equipment lay everywhere, jutting from buildings and sidewalks, tents lined the streets, and armor-clad bones walked around every inch on patrol. Just over the walls he thought he could see several sets of chain-link fence, and small figures milling about the town being watched by guards on the wall. It seemed a smart enough plan, keep the humans outside where they can't put a dagger in your throat but contained and near so you can use them as hostages. And if the town was encased in fence, then odds were they already found his car.

He stretched his limbs and tried to figure out the lay of the land. He needed to figure out where they put his car, and somehow needed to get up to the rat creature temple without them noticing him leaving the city. He decided that best method of searching for the car would be to blend in with the soldiers, though he didn't think that would help him much when it came time to leave. But before he could work out a plan in his head, he was hit with a wave of nausea. He stumbled and clutched his head, struggling to regain his balance. Then he was hit by a splitting headache as well.

After the sensations passed and Fone regained his balance, he felt a strong pull toward the eastern gate. Without really thinking, he began to walk to it. Though when he left the palace gates, he realized that he would need to keep to the shadows to avoid the patrols. So he stuck to the alleyways and backstreets that crisscrossed their way around the city that the conquerors hadn't had time to fully explore. Eventually found himself staring at the eastern gate, and the camp outside it which seemed to be harboring a large amount of vehicles. He noticed that no one was watching the inside of the gate, so he approached it in between patrols with ease.

Realizing that it would look suspicious if a bone not wearing any identifiable markings were to be seen just casually walking up to a vehicle without permission, he refrained from going through the gate. But then he spotted a large tent that sat perpendicular to and touching the right side of the wall and that continued on to meet with the makeshift vehicle storage area, and got an idea.

He crawled on the ground through the gate, hugging the wall, until he reached the tent. Then, watching the sentries he could see at the top of the wall to make sure none of them looked at him, he rolled under the lip of the tent into the inside. To his relief, it was not occupied. It was a storage tent, storing, as best as he could tell, spare parts or overflow from the storage inside the walls. He stopped for a moment to marvel at the logistics of forming an army, overthrowing a government, and then moving that entire operation across a desert and into an occupied city, all without a clearly visible command structure.

He walked over to the other side of the tent and rolled under the lip into the lot they had fenced off and stored their ground vehicles in. He lay against the tent out of sight and sized up his options. Several tanks, some mobile Surface to Air Missile batteries, and lots of Armored Personnel Carriers. He decided to go for one of the APC's. He spotted a tent at the edge of the lot and surmised that it was the place they kept all of the keys. After making sure none of the sentries were looking at him, he dashed over to it and slid under the tent flap. This time, however, he was not so lucky.

Standing over him was one of the taller bones pointing a gun at his head. Fone recognized him as the one who had tried to take Thorn captive.

"I know you." He said. "You're that author who wrote the books about this place. What are you doing here?" Fone didn't really have an answer, but before he could think of one, some primal fight or flight response took over. He kicked up at the man's hand, knocking the gun to the ground, and with his other leg swept him to the ground as well. He hit the ground so hard it knocked him out cold. Fone scurried up and stared at his handiwork. He had no idea that he knew how to fight, much less to fight like that. He added his miraculous new skills to the list of things to think about later, and looked around for some keys. He found a box locked with a secure looking heavy duty padlock. He rummaged around the cloths of the unconscious bone until he found the key.

Opening the box he discovered several trays stacked on top of one another, all containing compartmentalized boxes that held a large number of keys each. He picked out one of the ones on the top labeled APC 2A13 and closed the box again. He walked back outside, crouching to stay out of sight, and found an APC with 2A13, among other tags and information, stenciled onto one of the side panels. He tried the key, and sure enough it worked. He also discovered that rudimentary cloaking technology came standard in all of Glaian's vehicles, and soon he activated it and had driven off the lot and off in the direction of the Northern part of the Valley.

He drove for several hours, through the Great Stone Basin and Upper Pawa to avoid the gorge system that Tanen Guard was a part of, before cutting back through some abandoned farmland. As he did, he spotted the Eastern Mountains in the distance. Eventually he came upon a small farmstead. There was no one around, and the whole place seemed eerily quiet. Against his better judgement, he got out of the vehicle and entered the farmhouse. It looked deserted at first glance, but he decided to have a look around. It wasn't a big house, only a kitchen and a couple of bedrooms on the second floor. It reminded him a bit of Gran'ma Ben's old farmhouse. He was just about to leave when he noticed a cellar door sticking out from the side of the house. It also had what looked like a relatively high tech padlock on it, obviously placed there by the soldiers that raided this farm. He grabbed the hook off of the front of his vehicle and looped it and the padlock together. Then he backed up the vehicle until the doors on the cellar broke off.

He walked over to see what he had uncovered to discover about twelve frightened children all huddled in a corner, with a frightened teenage boy standing in between them and the cellar's entrance brandishing a knife.

"Hello. My name is-" Fone began. The boy cut him off.

"Stay back!" He shouted, his hands and voice shaking as he pointed the knife in Fone's direction.

"Whoa, calm down, I'm here to help." Fone said as reassuringly as he could. He put his hands out in front of him and advanced down the cellar steps slowly.

"I'm warning you!" The boy shouted at him. One of the children began to cry. Another just started whimpering. "Get back!"

"Okay, okay, I can see that you're serious." Fone said as he backed up the steps. "So I'm just going to sit right here until you calm down a bit. Does that sound good to you?" Fone sat down on the first step. The boy continued staring at him with the knife. The children, noticing the lack of movement or action of any kind, stopped crying, and instead just stared at Fone in terrified silence. The boy took a step toward Fone, who didn't move or react. The boy took another step, and eventually he was close enough to touch Fone.

"I could stab you right now." He said. "End it right here on these steps." He brought the knife closer to Fone's face.

"But you won't." He retorted. Though he stared the boy in the eyes, showing his passive but firm determination, he didn't move.

"You don't know that." Said the boy, his voice on the edge of panic. He pressed the knife into Fone's flesh.

"I do." He said, gently moving the knife away from him with the tip of a finger. "For two reasons: You aren't a killer, and I'm not the bad guy. My name is Fone Bone, and I'm a great friend of the Queen's. More importantly I'm here to help you. So why don't you put the knife down and tell me what happened?" The boy looked into his eyes and saw the truth of Fone's words. He lowered the knife and slumped onto the floor. He cupped his head in his hands and regained his composure. After a few moments he raised his head and spoke.

"Are you really him? The one who killed the Locust?" He asked.

"Last time I checked, yeah."

"Thank the stars. I thought we were done for. My name is Tom Elm. My family runs this small turnip farm. It's not the most comfortable lifestyle, but after what I saw with the Nacht, a life of nice, quiet farming didn't seem so bad."

"You're the one that stopped the Nacht?" Asked Fone. He sized Tom up for a second. "Pretty good for a kid."

"Mostly it was the power of the Spark that stopped him. And I'm not a kid, I'm fourteen. Well I was twelve when we stopped the Nacht, but that's beside the point. Two months ago Atheia fell to the Bones and their machines. There were a lot of scared people with children running from the destruction. And so, to protect their families, a lot of people showed up at our doorsteps with children in tow, saying this was the most out of the way place they could think of to hide. We accommodated them as best we could, but the Bones found the farm eventually. I took all the kids and hid in the basement. Unfortunately for us though, they found us. But instead of killing us or dragging us into their big camp in the city, they decided to lock us down here to break our parent's spirits or something. That was almost two days ago."

"Two months… It's been that long…" Muttered Fone. "Well, seeing as you guys have nowhere else to go, how about you come with me? I'm heading up to the old rat creature temple where some of my friends, including the Queen, are supposed to be hold up. It should be safe there. It'll be safer there than here anyway." Tom jumped at the chance to get his charges to safety.

"Yes, we'll go." He turned to the children to try to coerce them into leaving the cellar. "Come on kids, Fone here's going to take us to meet the Queen." One of the children recognized his name. An older girl, around ten or so.

"It's him!" She shouted pointing at Fone with excitement. "I've seen his statue in the Queen's square! He's the one who chased the ghost circles away!"

"But he's one of them." Said a small seven year old boy glumly. "One of the bad things that took our parents away. We can't trust him. He's probably a bad thing too." This words confused the children on who to believe. Tom pulled that boy aside.

"Adison, did your parents ever tell you that there are good people and bad people in the world?"

"Yes." Said the child. "I'm not stupid, I know that people can do bad things. But he isn't a person."

"Adison, just because he's different from you and me doesn't mean he isn't a person. He's good and wants to help us. I'm sure, just like not all of us here in the Valley are bad, not everyone where he comes from is a bad person either." Adison thought about this for a moment.

"Alright." He said reluctantly. "I'll trust him. But only because you do too." With that the children were eased, and they began their journey up the steps to the APC. Fone ran on ahead and opened the door, ushering them all into the back. When all of the children were loaded, He motioned for Tom to sit on the passenger's side while he went around to the driver's side. Right as Tom was about to close his door, he heard a voice.

"Tom!" It shouted, small and barely audible, but getting closer. "Tom! Where are you? Are you still here Tom?!" It was Roderick, Tom's and Fone's raccoon friend. Tom spotted him, and ran out of the APC to meet him.

"Roderick!" He shouted. The name sparked Fone's memory, and he ran around the vehicle to see what was going on. Tom and Roderick collided and collapsed in a pile of laughter half way between the farmhouse and the APC.

"I thought you were dead!" Roderick shouted in between elated gasps.

"No." replied Tom. "They locked us in the cellar. We thought we were going to die, but then he happened along and freed us." Tom pointed over at Fone, who was slowly approaching the scene.

"Him? A Bone? Why would he do that?" Asked Roderick, not really remembering Fone's face from when they met during Fone's excursion into the Eastern Mountains five years ago. As Fone approached, they began to recognize each other.

"Well I'll be damned." Said Fone as he finally realized who Roderick was. "The Possum Kid's Raccoon friend from the mountains. What brings you all the way out here?"

"Fone Bone. You know a lot of people were shocked to see you leave so abruptly all those years ago. The Possum kids were really broken up about it for a while. Why're you back now, of all times?"

"Just visiting old friends, I guess. Bad timing really. Or good timing, depending on how you look at it. Speaking of which how are the kids and the orphans doing?"

"Last I checked, the enemy wasn't paying much attention to us normal animals, so they should be fine. The orphans all got adopted by various families, but we didn't keep up with each other. Friendships of necessity, I suppose. And the Possums aren't kids anymore. Ever since their mom died a couple of winters ago, they all went their separate ways, and I haven't seen them since. Tom here has been my only real friend for the last three years."

"Well, at least we've found you. Want a lift? We're taking some kids up to the Old Rat Creature Temple."

"Why go there?" Roderick asked as both he and Tom got up off the ground and walked back with Fone to the APC.

"Well, it was supposed to be the meetup point for our horribly failed evacuation attempt the first day of the invasion. If anyone is still fighting, that's where they'll be. Including my cousin. And the Queen." They all loaded back up into the APC, with Roderick sitting on Tom's lap, and Fone drove off in the direction he was originally going.

"I heard there were some resistance fighters based out of somewhere in the mountains, but won't going to the temple require getting past Rock Jaw?"

"With any luck, he's already on our side. He helped Thorn and I… No, not helped. It was more like he let us live when we crossed his path on our way to the Crown of Horns. I think, when push comes to shove, he'll defend this valley in order to defend himself."

"Let's hope so. Because if he gets even the slightest inkling that he can survive on the enemy's side, you can be sure as hell that's where he's going to end up." They drove in silence from that point on, traveling in silence under the shadow of the great cat's domain. And from that shadow, feline eyes watched them with close curiosity.

"My broadcast today stretched our public relations to the limit, so they need results. They need to be shown that Admiral Satranik is a failure and will not be able to fight against our totality. They need to know that the previous government is dead. And so long as she lives, that cannot happen." Glaian was sitting in his war room, using the old stone altar of the temple they were based in as a table for his war council. He had gathered the most promising leaders of his group to assign them new ranks and a new task.

"The three of you." He said, "Are to be my new generals. I am assigning you the home front, to combating the forces of Admiral Satranik Haenkos, the last holdout of the Republic's armies, on the Western Coast, and to repel any invasion attempt made by human forces." He began pacing the room, looking each new general in the eye to measure their resolve.

"I've looked over each of your files, and your unique skill sets are wasted here. They will prove much more useful fighting challenging, conventional enemies rather than rag-tag gruella resistances. And I trust each of you enough that during tomorrow's broadcast, I'll be…" He was interrupted when Nibet Trenya burst through the doors at the end of the hall.

"Lord Glaian, sir! A patrol has found an unconscious soldier in the key tent of the eastern ground lot. And APC 2A13 has gone missing!" Nibet stopped in the doorway and caught her breath.

"Do we know who it was that took the APC? Did the guards or the sentries see anything?"

"No, Lord Glaian. But the patrol did manage to wake the soldier. He claims that the author Fone Bone rolled underneath the tent's lip and took him down with a single blow. He doesn't remember anything past that." Glaian sat down and considered the ramifications.

"And none of the guards saw anything? At all?"

"No, sir."

"Interesting… Phoncible's cousin manages to sneak into our camp, knock out a guard, and steal an APC from the middle of the lot without being seen? Either we have a major flaw in our security perimeter or a mole in our forces. Round up all of the guards on the eastern wall, as well as every patrol in the district next to the gate, including the one that found the soldier. Have an interrogation room set up in the palace courtyard and question them all thoroughly. Then have the engineers do a double, no, a triple check of the designs of our security systems. Make sure nothing isn't covered."

"Right away, Lord Glaian." Nibet exited the chamber, and Glaian resumed his speech to the new generals.

"Now where was I? Oh yes. Tomorrow, on the broadcast, I will…" Glaian continued speaking to them, as Nibet Trenya walked on to deliver his orders to the necessary people. As she passed an alleyway, a voice spoke to her from within the shadows.

"Nibet Trenya. You are a hard woman to find. And a much harder one to speak to."

"Who's there?" She asked. She stopped, and placed her hand at her hip, on the hilt of her blade.

"There's no need for violence here. I'm a friend. I come on behalf of Daniel Deyavara. It appears that you've not been following orders as planned."

"I don't know what you're talking about." She said, tensing up as she prepared to fight.

"No, of course you don't. They must've gotten to you after they got to Daniel. Well, don't worry about that." Out of the alleyway came a tranquillizer dart that hit Nibet square in the neck before she could react. As she collapsed to the ground, an arm came out of the alleyway, grabbed her, and dragged her inside. "We'll get you straightened out soon enough."