Note: Soon I will be adding a new companion novella to my list, called The Music Box. Since Logan's role in this story is so monumental, I thought he deserved his own narrative, detailing things from his POV. It can be (and should be!) read right alongside A Perfect World for full effect. LOTS of stuff is going down, and there simply isn't room enough to include it all in this work! I hope to have it up within the next few days! Thank you all once again for your kind patience!

I contemplated the thunderclouds below, breathing the scent of raw power—the scent of the storm. Lightning, Ernest Faraday had once told me, was once widely believed to be the closest the heavens ever came to the earth. One could not trifle with such a thing lightly. To do so was to invite death.

But this is a dream, I thought. It is my dream, and I will make the rules.

I arched my back and spread my wings. The peculiar feeling of being transformed, of trading a small part of my humanity for something unnamable, filled me like a bubble of swallowed laughter. It made my stomach flutter. I was no longer acting according to the laws of my environment; I was creating them. The power flowing through me and into my surroundings, shaping them as I saw fit, bending and breaking and twisting them, felt sickeningly wrong, but the situation seemed to call for it just now. I needed answers.

And it was only a dream.

I glanced at the Red Rose, who had made no effort to transmute herself, and gave her a reassuring nod. "We can't fly, I know. Not in the real world. But in dreams, the sky belongs to us if we want it to."

"It isn't my dream," she shouted over the rising wind. "You have to believe that I can go where you go."

"You can," I said firmly, squeezing her hand. I felt a thrill of victory in her mind for a moment, and took it for a sign of faith.

I could see her hand through my own skin—my body had gone translucent, and still she did not transform. "Are you quite sure I'm solid enough to hold you?"

"Only if you are. You must be, Rose! Whatever you might think, this is real for both of us. If you drop me, I'll never wake up."

I nodded, considering her words. I must at the very least make myself believe. This reality will not operate correctly unless I bind it to a set of laws. Very well. In this world, I can fly. If she is real, I cannot risk dropping her. Therefore…

I closed my eyes and sent a trickle of Will into her body, along with a single thought:

You, too.

She cried out and fell to her knees as her own spectral wings erupted from her back. I stumbled backward, raising an arm to cover my face, but it was no use: I could see right through myself. What I saw made my blood run cold.

The Red Rose was panting on the ground, laboring beneath the weight of two very large, very substantial wings, scorched black by the magical fire that crowned them.

I had seen this in my nightmares. Before Ravenscar Keep had been humanely renovated, emptied of all but its most dangerous and demented denizens, and given its proper name again, it had been called Traitor's Keep. It was an ugly secret, much-abused by Logan during his reign to contain those who might threaten his power, and it was there that I had temporarily become incarcerated, myself, after placing my trust poorly—operating on faith rather than on logic. It was there that I had become intimately acquainted with the closest manifestations of heaven on earth—hellishly employed by a tragic man with a broken vision. He had stolen my essence and, in effect, become me. But not entirely…he had not been able to hide his nature, and the wings were his greatest tell. He did not know, as I did, that a Hero can hide his name, but he cannot hide his nature.

Oh, pitiful creature… What did you do to earn those wings?

The Red Queen before me tossed her head back with a gasp of pain. Rain fell into her upturned face and hissed in the damning flames that marred her absolute form. For wasn't that what this was? Why else should we have flightless wings? This was a manifestation of what lay inside an Archon.

"What did you do to me?" she shrieked.

"No," I said softly. "What did you do to your Albion?"

She gritted her teeth and shook her head.

"What," I repeated, walking toward her, "did you do to your Albion?"

She shot me a look of pure loathing. "The very same thing as you—I loved a man! The same man!"

I stopped, shaken.

"Look at me, Rose," she hissed. "See how easily our lives could have been exchanged. These wings could have belonged to you. In fact, I cannot fathom how you managed to avoid them. In my experience, nearly every Archon who has chanced to link his or her life with Reaver's has committed a grave atrocity in the process. They allow him to make pacts with the Shadow Court—sometimes they even make them without his knowledge. They go along with his wishes regarding the running of the Kingdom. They wear beautiful trinkets and clothing for which he did not pay fair prices. All the while, their people suffer silently, and the Archons' hearts blacken. Sometimes they notice, but by that time, it is too late."

I gazed levelly at her for a moment, then extended a hand. "It is never too late."

"Tell that to our mothers and fathers. Tell that to the first Roses, the children who were murdered by Lucien Fairfax! Tell them it is never too late!"

"You misunderstand me," I said more gently, pulling her to her feet. "I mean that it is never too late to change. Even if you wait until the last moments of your life to do so, even if your change is never acknowledged, even if you never get the chance to use what you have become, it does not alter the fact that the change has occurred. How we die is very nearly as important as how we live, don't you think? The two go hand in hand." I shook hers for emphasis. "Now, show me what you wanted me to see. I will look."

The Red Rose blinked slowly, staring at our joined hands. Heavy drops of rain made black ropes of her hair and trickled over her high cheekbones like tears. "How is it that you can trust me when I look like—like this?"

"Let me worry about that."

"Theresa was right about you," she murmured. "You are needed. I…need you. Come, if you really do trust me, and I will show you why."

We stood at the edge of the cliff again, gazing down into the fathomless darkness below. Thunder boomed like a great crumbling drum and the sky cracked in half, divided by a streak of lightning, a streak of heaven.

We jumped.

Instinct drove me to seek the warmer pockets of air within the angry storm. I had to work very hard to fly in the cold, but wherever the air was hot, I found that I could simply glide and rise. The flames streaming from my twin's back helped immensely with this. She was a falling star, swathed in red silk and hellfire. I was merely her ghost; I followed her bright course through the clouds without leaving any evidence of my own passage behind. Now the scent of electricity was all around me once more, and memories of unspeakable physical agony stabbed at the edges of my mind. I wondered, not for the first time, if I had ever gotten back what the man in the Keep had taken from me: that single drop of my Heroic essence, which had been enough to transform him into a dark doppelganger. Was it lost forever?

Was anything?

I began to hear strange whispers as we flew. Most of it was hopelessly unintelligible, but as I reached out with as much thought as I could spare, some of it sharpened enough to approach clarity.

They were names.

Victoria…

Rayla…

Linnea…

Lorelai…

Rosalie…

And more and more and more… They went on forever. I seized the small list I had managed to sort out from the others and examined them closely, turning them over in my mind. If I concentrated hard enough, I could almost see them…

Victoria in purple satin she did not wish to wear…

"I realize that what I've done has labeled me a threat, but I'm not a fool, brother. You've taken everything I ever cared for from me. Ben's life depends on my compliance. Do you really think I'll give him up, too? I'll do what you want, Logan. I'll play your games and pretend my brother isn't a bully that must hide behind threats and harsh judgments. And, if I continue to do so, what more can you possibly do to me?"

Rayla in bed…

"I am beyond tired and sick of everyone. Stay if you must, then, but if you touch me even once tonight, Reaver, I will stab you in your sleep. Do we understand each other?"

Linnea, eight years old and trembling…

"Dad, you're scaring me."

Lorelai screaming, choking…

Rosalie…

I jerked backward so forcefully that I nearly fell out of the air. Rosalie was gone. Her entire world was gone. I felt the empty space where it had been and knew with unbearable loneliness that I was the only one who would remember that she had lived, that she had loved two men...a sterile, frustrated husband and a virile, loyal soldier. She had needed a child so desperately, but she had needed Ben Finn even more.

But they were gone. They were lost to me, and not even the demon doors could change that. Something had happened to their world. The Red Queen's warning replayed itself in my mind as I followed her through the darkness: Hundreds of realities have already been displaced with only a thought. They are beyond our aid; we cannot enter those worlds.

"Can you hear them?" she shouted above the roaring wind. "Can you feel them?"

"Yes! And I've found a dislocated world!"

She cursed and wheeled around to face me, wreathed in flame. "I told you! The Empress has to be stopped, Rose. You must believe me. You can see that now, can't you?"

Her almond-shaped eyes shone like amber in the blackness, hot and very sharp at the corners…just like mine. It was disconcerting. All of this was. How much of me did she take when our minds first touched? How much of herself did she cast away? What was left? What was the true difference between the two of us, now?

Power. She needed power, and for whatever reason, I had it. It could be as simple as that…as simple and as awful. But there was no proof! There was no concrete evidence that the entity she spoke of truly existed, or was responsible for this bizarre phenomenon. In fact, none of this made any sense. It was a dream—I was inside my own subconscious with a woman who might merely be a dream, herself, an aspect of my own divided heart. And she was asking me for faith.

I struggled to speak but found that I could not. Sweet Avo, it's like going mad! Logan's warning about the Time Spell and its effect on our mother's mind resurfaced for a moment and I swallowed hard. If I was indeed approaching some form of madness, faith would be the end of me. It was to logic, and logic alone, that I must cleave. I therefore nodded dumbly. She could make of that whatever she wished. If she was real, I would help her. If she was not, helping myself would help her. It was as simplicity itself, and I finally began to relax.

The Red Rose felt it. She gripped my shoulders tightly, bobbing up and down with me as we struggled to stay aloft. She fixed me with a piercing, exacting look. "You have to keep reaching, Rose. If you keep reaching, you will find the Empress. I can't do it. I don't have the Mother Spire; you do. Use it. You've felt the agonies of the other Archons in this place, and you will continue to feel them for the rest of your life. This is your mind. I'm merely showing you how deeply you can delve...and what lurks at the bottom. You can, in fact, do more than simply look into these lives. You can save Linnea from her cruel parents and give her a mother's love. You can carry Lorelai out of the sea. You can be a friend to Victoria. I feel them, too, you know. They need you."

"No," I said sharply. "No, that is where you are mistaken. They have what they need already. We all have the right to own our pain and suffering and to choose what to do with it. We need our pain in order to grow. I haven't the right to alter the course of their lives and I will not do it."

Her eyes narrowed. "I hadn't thought you so callous, Rose," she said softly. "They are crying out! You alone can feel their agony—you have the means to end it—and you will do nothing?"

"You can feel them, too. You said so, yourself."

"Because I am trapped in your head!" she cried. "Do you have any idea what this is like for me? To hear them all, to feel them all…and to be absolutely helpless?"

"More than you know," I whispered. "Please believe me. I would help them if I did not know in my heart that to do so would be the beginning of something monstrous. It is wrong."

We began to sink slowly, but though the blackness pressed in against us, the brightness of her amber eyes never diminished. I lost myself in them. "I assure you," she said carefully, "that there is one who needs you very much. She isn't like these others. She is lost. She will never reach her full potential without your aid, and you will die without hers. You don't have a choice."

"So you say. Forgive me, please, but I still do not know if you are real anywhere but inside my own mind."

"Believe me or do not; in this case, it makes no difference. I have already Seen it. It has already happened. Your course is set and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it, now."

"Why haven't I Seen it?"

She tossed her head impatiently. "When was the last time you looked into your own door, Rose? The Spire offers many possible futures, but the demon doors show the absolute truth. Tell me the truth. You've been afraid to go back there, haven't you?"

The storms were quieting now, along with the cries of pain from the countless Archons whose minds and hearts brushed my own in this strange place.

"Yes," I murmured. "Yes, I have been afraid."

"Then you have one recourse, logically." She tossed the word at me like an expletive and arched a fine eyebrow. "You know what that is, don't you?"

"Garth," I whispered. "I have to find Garth."

She nodded. "That's right. Confront that which is frightening you however you must, but do it quickly. Time was not meant to be saved. It can only be spent, traded for life. You don't want to regret what you have traded, Rose. Please hurry."

"Meet me there."

"What?"

"In the focal point," I said feverishly. My heart was beginning to race. The riddle of her reality could be solved so easily if I could only meet her in a place of light. "Meet me within the Mistpeak demon door."

She shook her head ruefully. "I can't. I am the last Hero in Albion, Rose. That door will never open for me."

"But…Reaver…Hammer, Garth, even Logan, if he has the Music Box—"

"I am the last," she ground out, her eyes burning with tears. "There are no others. You are all I have, now. You are my last hope. The only reason I still live is because I was charged with a duty…a duty to you. Please try to understand."

"The Crawler?" I breathed.

"And more. Sacrifice. I gave everything to be with Reaver, but I did it all wrong. He…he died. The Shadow Court tossed him aside when they were presented with the choice to claim my soul. I wanted to be with him forever, you see, so I struck a bargain with them. When they betrayed me, I slew them, and Reaver died with them. Logan was executed. Garth was killed by Reaver a long time ago and Hammer died in the Battle for Albion. She came back to stand with me, even after all I had done. She tried to right my wrongs, but in the end, it came to nothing. The Crawler decimated my land, and the 6,500,000 people in it. My Albion is dead. I only have yours to live for, now. Touch me, Rose. Tell me I'm lying."

Slowly, hesitantly, I brushed my knuckles over her damp cheek. She closed her eyes…and somewhere deep within, mine opened.

I screamed.

Note (again): Thanks to everyone who has supported me so far (and everyone who continues to do so!). Without your encouragement, I could not have gone on with my writing, and I am more grateful than I can possibly say. Special thanks go to angelacm and deathofaraven for extra moral support! Also, each Queen (and excerpt) referenced belongs to an actual story (which you should read!). I will list them here, with their authors' names:

Victoria – A Marriage of Inconvenience (deathofaraven)

Rayla – The Tarnished Throne (AlexaStormborn)

Linnea – Firedance (me)

Lorelai – Beneath the Surface (angelacm)

Rosalie – [removed but good!] (Fallon-Idalia)

Thank you all so very much!