Mae found herself suspended in the air above her futon, her whole body glowing in the same way it always did during one of her more significant dreams. With a startled gasp she shook in the air, gravity returning to her suddenly as she bounced and stumbled to her feet. Having been in that odd state was shocking enough, but what was moreso was her nudity and the youth of her body. She'd never been without clothes in these dreams, and she'd never been this young either. When she'd been so young her grandfather had still been alive, reading her ghost stories at night. "So, what do you think it means?" Suddenly she was wearing the nightgown he'd bought her for her tenth birthday, and she looked up to find him standing there, his reading glasses on his face and a book in his hands.
"I don't understand the point," she admitted, fidgeting nervously. "Bea says stories are supposed to have happy endings. When I watch movies with her the good guys always win in the end, but I don't even feel good, and there's never really an end. Your stories never end, they just stop being told. What happened to Adina? Where did she disappear to?"
"What happened to you, in that mine? Do you remember?" Mae started to slowly circle around him toward the door, and with every step she took she was another year older, wearing something else, and he was changing too. She stepped to the year when he died, but he was still standing there. "Did he sing to you?" She took another step. He wasn't wearing his glasses anymore. She kept moving. His face grew colder, unkempt. His fur was longer, wilder like his eyes. His grimace was beyond angry, filled with righteous fury. "Do you have ANY idea what He wants for you!? You're throwing away your future!"
"No..." That face, that voice, it was too familiar. She had recognized something ghostly in him long ago, but she tried to suppress it. She knew he was a ghost, but she didn't want to believe the reason why she knew. "You died."
"And by the grace of a God I live again." She took a step back toward the door and he was missing an arm, the one he lost to the falling elevator. After another step the stump was wrapped and healing. "You think there is only one God? You think their power comes from nothing? Gods have to eat too, and useless people are their food." Mae couldn't listen to him say that, throwing a fist at his face, but he caught her arm with his remaining hand, sneering at her. "I thought I'd prepared you better for this, but here you are, rejecting your birthright." She desperately bit his arm, forcing him to let go and growl in pain as she stumbled back and closed the door.
A half-second later and he had stepped through it as if it wasn't even there, his glimmering robe blowing in an unseen wind. "Shit!" she yelled, turning and running down the two flights of stairs and rushing out into the street. He was chasing her as he had many times before, but this time he wasn't wearing his mask nor his helmet, the anger and frustration in his face on full display. "I loved you! I thought you were a good person!"
"You understand nothing! Look around you at this vastness, at the beauty you see in your dreams. This is but one of the many gifts he has already granted you." She did look around, seeing ethereal fish gliding through the landscape, ghostly trains passing over the street, constellations she recognized shining brighter than the other stars, muffled explosions from a distant war lighting the horizon. "His hole is infinitely deep. We will not run out of air. We will return and you will have a decision to make."
"Eff off, asshole!" The world was bent and twisted around her, such that already she was approaching Casey's house. She could see more of the shadow people, the remnants of the people The Black Goat had consumed over the millennia. There were so many, she couldn't hope to count and keep track of them all. It no longer surprised her that the Deep Hollow Hollerers looked more whole and glowed like she did. They weren't consumed sacrifices, but were actively serving the Gods, playing music for them to sing to. She saw them in the windows of Casey's house, playing a fast and haunting tune that matched her fast heartbeat during this chase. She wouldn't let her grandfather reach that house, skidding to a halt and defiantly turning around to face him. "Whatever your master is offering I'm refusing! I'll kill you myself if I have to!" It brought tears to her eyes to say it, looking into his eyes she could see the ghost of the man she thought he was, and what she said next burned in her throat. "Get back in the dirt where you belong, murderer!"
Eide pulled a Luger pistol from his coat pocket and aimed at Mae, casually pulling the trigger, but the bullet was slower than it should have been, just like the way Mae always fell from the apex of a jump more slowly in the dreamscape, and she was able to leap out of the way as it zipped past the hem of her shirt. He fired again and again and Mae jumped or rolled or twisted out of the way every time until Eide was out of bullets, tossing the gun aside. "Do you see how fast he has made you here? Imagine taking that power into the physical world. That is what he offers you, the first of many very real advantages over those who are unworthy of his gifts. He can feel the future. He grants you so much because He knows that you will serve Him one day."
"Well then dipshit McGoatfuck is wrong." Mae said with a smirk, crossing her arms over her chest. "I'll never forgive either of you for what you did to Casey."
Then Eide lowered himself to his knees and the Hollerers stopped playing their song. He closed his eyes and spoke while cutting three glowing red pentagrams into the air with his claws, one above the other two and between them like a third eye. "Oh terrible blackness between the stars, grant to me the strength to show this child the error of her ways."
"You're actually praying to it now. Here I thought you couldn't get any more pathetic." She swallowed hard as the wind increased in intensity around them, the improvised bandages on the stump of Eide's arm falling away and brightly glimmering dust swirling around the wound unnaturally. "Uhm.. that's not fair at all." First the bones began to materialize from the stump, then the muscles, and finally the skin. "S-see, when people pray usually nothing happens at all." Eide grit his teeth as the warped gray skin slowly smoothed out, his hand clenching as he flexed the new limb and black fur slowly grew from it, several shades darker than his natural fur color that Mae could see on the rest of him. "Oh my God."
"Now you are going to start listening." As Eide stood and the pentagrams faded from the air the world around her came into finer focus and she began to see clearly that which had always been hidden at the edge of her perception. Large, buzzing insect-like creatures were all along the edges of the twisted world, gnawing at the cracks where one environment met another. Incomprehensively massive tentacles stretched through the sky as if they were both far off in space and near at the same time, and several strange shapes that she somehow knew where eyes blinked down at her, black shapes flitting speedily through the air, and echoes of death carrying on the wind. She thought she heard someone say Anselm's name and rank in a panicked voice.
Her grandfather was on top of her before she knew what was happening, his newly grown fingers gripping her neck as he held her against the ground. "I might be wrong about you. Maybe you get your power from somewhere else. Maybe you'll never help us. But that choice is going to determine whether you live or die. Everyone you care about only matters because you care about them. If you refuse us again, you aren't the only one who will suffer. Do you understand?"
When his grip loosened so she could answer she glared up at him, her eyes burning like two angry suns. "My granddad is dead." She spat at him and dug her claws into his new arm. "Go to Hell, Eide!" He growled and swiped at her with his natural paw, his claws cutting into her skin and extracting blood that glowed the same fluorescent lavender as her eyes.
"Mae!?" When Eide looked toward the voice all he saw was the bottom of a skateboard heading in his direction. The cheap wood cracked apart from the force of the impact, smashing Eide's face and forcing him to let Mae go as he glided backwards. In the next second his own blood was extracted from an injury that matched Mae's, glowing the same way hers did. Before the third cat on the scene could do anything more to him Eide was fleeing into the distance, his form slowly fading into ever more sparse pinpricks of light until he was back in the waking world.
"Mae, are you alright?" His shining emerald eyes and fiery orange fur made him stand out like a radiant angel, and Mae was too shocked to answer, letting him drag her back to her feet and staring in stupefied joy. It was him.
It was Casey Hartley.