"I feel like I'm in high school again and writing secret notes using The Unknown as the letters." I stared at the makeshift alphabet Pitch had whipped up that was closer to Japanese characters than the English alphabet. More than one vowel next to each other had a completely different character than the two that made it up and different sounds for the same letters had different ones as well. It was way more to figure out than I'd originally thought and I was so beyond frazzled.

"I don't know what that means." Pitch peered over my shoulder, scrutinizing my practice writing. "Your script is too sloppy, use more precision when you write."

I rolled my eyes, mumbling under my breath that I'd precision something. I'd been at this for a few hours now and I was still way too far away from understanding this that I'd wanted to be. "You know, I just asked to know how to read it, not how to write it."

He grinned evilly at me. "Then you're getting more out of this, aren't you."

I rolled my eyes again, burying my head as I painstakingly tried to copy the same character I'd been working on for ten minutes. "Yeah, keep fucking torturing me. Get your rocks off, asshole." I knew damn well that he was making this harder than it should be just so he'd enjoy watching me suffer. I'd figured that out pretty quickly. I'd originally intended to fly through this to tick him off, but the bastard had found the perfect way to make learning this cool language suck.

Not that I planned on giving up. "When I leave today can I take one of your maps with me to practice?" He scoffed at I looked up at him. "I mean, I need all the practice I can get, right?"

"If anything of mine leaves this place, no one sets eyes on it." He glowered, towering over me. "That is not permission, that is a threat." As he stared me down I thought I saw him wince, but it was so quick I probably just blinked.

"Yeah, yeah." I sifted through the pile until I found a map with almost no black at all. "Which constellation is this?"

"You'll know when you read it." He spun around and stalked off, hands clasped behind his back.

I rolled my eyes at him and carefully rolled up the map. I snatched up my cheat sheet and stuffed it in my bag as I stood up and stretched. "So does this mean I'm dismissed for the day?"

"Would you stay if I said you weren't?" He cocked a brow at me. I shot him a glance over my shoulder as I hauled my bag onto my shoulder. "I didn't think so. You must have been a nightmare to your teachers."

"Actually, I was a teacher's pet." I shrugged. "Not because I buddied up to them with my grades or anything, they just liked me." I grinned back at him. "I always have a comeback, never forget that." I slipped the maps I'd rolled up into my jacket as I turned to leave. "Bye, Pitch." He waved me off, one hand kneading his brow like he had a headache.

After I got out of the lair I flew home, carefully holding onto the maps I'd stolen - I mean borrowed from Pitch. I didn't want anything happening to them. In all honesty, I could have probably used them in my wings, but I didn't want to chance it. They were in better shape than they looked but they were still ancient and that made them delicate to me.

When I got to the Treehouse I went straight to the library and flattened the maps out on a table that Big Guy made bigger for me after a little prompting. I ripped my notes and cheat sheet out of my bag and laid them next to me, comparing letters and symbols. I called a piece of paper over and grabbed a pencil while I was at it and slowly and agonizingly tried to translate the map. Pitch's way of teaching was perfectly fine for someone that wasn't me. I was - by now - fluent in Hummingbird, almost so in Spanish - which is far more than I could say for my mortal self - and I was in the process of learning Russian through absorbing North's outbursts and mumbled phrases as well as from the people of Santoff Claussen who were bilingual. If I wanted to learn something, I did, and I damned well wanted to learn this.

"A - Alni... Alnam... " I squinted at the character. "Alnilam. And Betelgeuse, Rigel, and Bellatrix. Well, that's four done and..." I glanced at my thus far translated sheet. "Fifteen to go. Oh, and these little nebula's they so kindly decided to label." A growl followed my sarcasm. It had already taken me an hour to figure out those four and now I had eighteen left - and those were just the stars, not the planets. Why I had chosen this map, I still didn't know, but something had me wanting to decode it more than the others.

I sat back a little, looking over the map again, trying to pick what I was gonna decode next. Might as well go for the planet by the big star, those are the capitols, right? I sort of shrugged in agreement. "Might as well." I sighed and bent down, looking at the characters. The first was an 'L', I'd already seen six of those and it was burned into my mind. That next one's... I scrolled through my sheet, looking for the character. It was definitely a vowel, but they all looked similar. All of them, circles with other circles inside of them with specific placements. 'U' it's 'U'. "Now that's an 'N' or an 'M'." Those two characters were just lines in a row with one crossing through them, which was a pain because the difference was the middle two lines on one of then had a bigger space between them.

"L. U. N... A." As I read the letters aloud I realized what I was quite probably trying to read. "Wait a minute... Lunaris?" I quickly finished up and confirmed my suspicions. "This was Manny's homeworld." I looked a the map again and followed the thin trail of black across the map, realizing that Pitch must have intercepted them and chased them all the way here. "Pitch never got to the Lunars' world." A small smile crept across my face.

As much as I cared about Pitch as a friend, his past deeds were often on my mind whenever I spent time with him, especially now that I'd seen just how far his terror had stretched. I never forgave the destruction he'd brought to more worlds than I knew, but I knew that the person he was now was different. I'd always sort of hoped that there was a way he could live in the light with the rest of us. Knowing that he'd left Manny's home alone made that feel possible.

I mean, I knew that Bunny and the others would never let that happen. There was too much prejudice there for them to ever breathe the same air. If Pitch ever did get that chance to live topside Bunny himself would stomp him back down his hole, weather Pitch instigated things or not. But still... I'd spent so long getting people to believe in him. I'd spent so long getting to know him and I'd seen him change as time went on - with my own eyes. I don't think it was all from me growing on him either. He had been this bitter and broken pantheon that was too proud to admit it. Now he was almost happy. Almost, I mean sarcasm was still his dominant personality trait. He wasn't bitter anymore and he definitely wasn't broken. He also didn't spend every waking moment trying to plot the Guardian's downfall either which was always good.

Of course, if I ever brought it up to anyone they'd say I was delusional. They'd think he was biding his time, up to something for certain. That is if I ever got up the nerve to tell anyone. Secrets can kill you, slowly but surely. "Thank you, Inner Voice, you're always so helpful." I shook my head, rolling my eyes at my sorry excuse for a conscience.

I was so engrossed in translating the map and my discovery that I hadn't noticed the golden light traveling past my windows. The person responsible for them was so quiet that I didn't hear him creep up on me until I caught a glimpse of Dream Sand out of the corner of my eye. I looked up so fast I heard my neck crack. I saw Sandy floating a few feet away before my eyes flew to the maps that I hastily covered with loose sheets of paper. "Hey, uh - what's up, Sandy?" I looked back over at him, trying to look nonchalant even though I knew damn well that he damn well knew that I was hiding something.

'It's almost time for the meeting. I wanted to offer the twins and you a ride if you wanted to come.' His eyes flicked to the table for a second before smiling at me. 'I didn't see them, though.'

"Oh, uh, they moved to Santoff Claussen."

'I thought they just spent an enormous amount of time there.' He chuckled soundlessly. 'Well, would you like a ride?'

I glanced down at the map, barely hidden. "Uh, sure... Yeah, I'd love to." I gave him a smile, moving away and hoping that he wouldn't mention it.

I'd forgotten all about the meeting. All year I'd been so swept up with trying to learn Tsarian and having dates with Jack - and of course, trying to keep quiet all the time I was spending at the Lair that I didn't even realize it was the end of July already. I'd missed last year's meeting because of the star watch, but I'd wanted to go. I wanted to get back into the immortal hunt, to find out where my peers were disappearing to. If Sandy hadn't shown up I'd have probably missed this one too.

When we got outside I could see the northern lights splashed across the sky, strands of Dreamsand twisting through them like thread. Sandy already had a cloud waiting for us and I hopped onto it, the whole thing bouncing a little as I did. We took off, heading north towards the Rockies.

"Thanks for stopping by. I didn't realize what day it was." I gave him a smile. "I'd have missed the meeting if you hadn't shown up."

'I'm sure Jack would have brought you if I hadn't popped my head in.' He grinned at me all jolly, reminding me of Tinkerbell from the first Disney version where she couldn't talk and you could hear this twinkling every time she did anything. 'Speaking of popping my head in...'

Shit. "I'm just working on something is all." I waved it off. "It's a surprise and I don't want word to get out."

'You don't think I can keep a secret?' I couldn't decide if the offense on his face was fake or real.

"Of course I do, I just know that the past few years, before the twins showed up and broke up the monotony, I was being a real downer and that you guys probably talked about it while I was gone. Jack's already had one scare back when I had that shitty hangover about me disappearing - I don't like gossip about me going around anymore I guess." I glanced down at the passing landscape. It wasn't a lie. I really did hate gossip about me now, more so from the fact that I had a complete breakdown than from how it might look to my friends, but still.

'Have I ever been known to gossip?' He shrugged, giggling as he did. 'You're one of the few people I can speak with well enough to spread hearsay, for one thing. For another, that is more of a job for the winds.'

I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye. "I don't think I've ever heard a snarky comment from you, Sandy."

'To be fair, you've never heard anything from me.' He chuckled again, a little more heartily this time.

"Well, aren't you witty today? I never thought I'd see the day that you cross the sarcastic divide." I studied him for a second before nodding. "I like it."

He laughed again, covering his mouth with his hand more out of old habit than to stifle noise. 'I never thought I'd see the day that you hide artifacts of the golden age from the rest of us.' When he lowered his hand his face was stern and faintly angry.

I felt my stomach fall - almost literally. For a few seconds I couldn't respond, then my mouth was gaping as I tried to think of something to say to defend myself. "I-I wasn't - I mean, I didn't..." I could see in his expression that if I didn't come up with a damn good story then he'd tell the others and me and Pitch would be ousted. "It's just a map - probably old and outdated by now."

'Where did you get it? Bunny keeps all of his somewhere I haven't even seen and mine were destroyed when I got to Earth. Ain's ship didn't have any in the wreckage. As far as I know, there are only four Tsarian maps on Earth total, how did you find one?'

My mouth gaped again. Four? Pitch had around twenty, a third of which were more or less rendered useless by the destruction that his crew had caused. Those really are one of his best-kept secrets then. "I- "

'Do you realize how precious that map is?' His anger had become disappointment.

I nodded. "Yeah, I do. I just... I can't tell you where I got it. Look, I'm not going to damage it, It's gonna go back where it came from when I'm done with it, no one's gonna touch it again." The suspicion on his face prompted more from me. "I promise."

'What are you even doing with it? You can't read Tsarian, surely. Compared to the languages on Earth, it is extremely difficult to learn. The only language from this planet that is more difficult to learn to read and write is Thai with Chinese around the same amount.'

"Actually, I'm trying to learn Tsarian." I smiled sheepishly. "That's why I have it. I don't care about writing with it, exactly, but I want to be able to read it."

He blinked in surprise. 'How did you even learn about Tsarian?'

"Sel told me about it. I asked her to teach me in case I ever came across the non-Earthling way of writing it, and she agreed." At the last second, I remembered that Sel would rightly know how to read Tsarian. I felt bad about using her as a scapegoat, but it was better than the alternative. "I just found the map last night and I found it somewhere that I shouldn't have been so when I'm done using it for practice, I'm putting it back."

'You know, not speaking all of these years has made me extremely observant to how others phrase their words. Don't think that I don't recognize you dancing around my questions.' I felt like a kid that had been found sneaking a cookie before dinner. If I didn't think of a way out of this fast, then I'd be in deep shit. 'Where did you find it?' I looked down at the ground, hoping that he'd drop it. After a moment, he floated around in front of me, arms crossed, and locked eyes with me, repeating his question.

"I can't tell you." After a few more moments of seeing the chastised look on his face, I sighed deeply and dropped my head into my hands. This lie was eating away at me any time the conversations with my friends encroached too close to its territory. I can't tell you because I got it from Pitch. I especially can't tell you because my tutor almost killed you less than a century ago. I wonder how any of my friends would take it if they really knew.

Small hands gently pulled mine away from my face. Sandy now seemed concerned as opposed to angry, so I guess that was a plus. 'I just want to know for myself. I won't tell the others, I swear.' I think he could see how much it was tearing me apart from the inside out. 'If there is anything else from the Golden age left on Earth I need to know.' He watched me for another second, squeezing my hand a little. 'Please.'

Don't tell him. I really, really wanted to though. I searched his face, trying to figure out what to do. I could see that this was important to him, I mean it was his home, his world. He probably left family behind when he chased down Seraphina's star. Ain and Aldebaran definitely did. Sandy's face, when he saw Ain for the first time in millennia, was something I could never understand. More than that, Sandy's was hurt by Pitch in ways the other's had never been. What do I do?

'Story...' He winced a little and squeezed my hand again. 'I'll keep whatever secret you don't want the others to know... but Ineed to know this.' He closed his eyes, letting go of me. He worried his hands as he said the last hurrah of his plea.'You can trust me.'

I mumbled the words before I realized that I said them. His ears twitched like he heard me but he was confused when he looked toward me, asking me to repeat what I'd just whispered. I swallowed and held my breath for a second, letting it out before I mustered the nerve to say it again. "I got it from Pitch."

He didn't say anything, but from his face, I could tell that he was thinking something along the lines of '... what?' He froze and so did the cloud. Actually, he was so stunned that all the dream sand halted its procession. On my end, part of me was terrified now that I'd told someone the secret that I'd held for so long and that the longer I'd kept it the more incriminating it became. But on the other hand... I was so relieved. I felt calm and for the first time in a long time, there wasn't an underlying sense of ants crawling all over me.

After a few moments of confused and awkward silence, Sandy wiped his expression away and what was left had me feeling like shit all over again. 'Pitch?' He squinted a little and even without sound I could hear the creeping anger in his tone. I barely kept myself from wincing in response and nodded instead, steeling myself for the wrath of a Guardian. 'When did he come after you?'

For a few moments I didn't understand what he meant, but then I noticed the concern under his anger and realized that he thought Pitch had started back up on his dastardly deeds. "No... no, he didn't -" I shook my head. "I asked if I could borrow it and he let me under the condition that no one else see the map." Yeah, I could have let Sandy believe that Pitch was back in the game, but I'd promised him that I'd keep him from being everyone's scapegoat. He needed someone on his side, especially in a situation like this.

Sandy's eyebrows squished towards each other and he cocked his head. 'What? Then... what were you doing there?'

I hesitated a second, taking a breath to steel myself. "He's been teaching me Tsarian. I asked him around a month ago when I let him know about the twins. By how they reacted to him being here I knew I had to tell him to lay low." I almost mentioned what had happened with his memories and his frantic shuffling through the maps but I cut myself off at the last second. "A long time ago I promised him that I'd be the buffer between him and what everyone else thought of him. I'd keep him from being the scapegoat for something, however, I could." I watched Sandy's reactions for a moment. "He's my friend. I've known him for decades. That's why I reacted the way I did when Aldebaran was acting all snippy about his past."

I glanced down, past my feet and the cloud all the way to the ground. I really hoped that Sandy kept his promise and didn't tell the others, but considering who we were talking about, I couldn't guarantee it. I tried to prepare myself for the other's collective anger once they found out. I wasn't worried as much about how they'd react as I was about what they'd do to me. I'd been dining with the enemy for decades after all. Hell, Sandy probably thought I was a turncoat anyway. They may very well turn their backs on me.

I mean, it's not like I wasn't used to it. These past few lifetimes I thought that I'd finally found the way to actually keep friends, but in the end, my choices always bit me in the ass. I didn't think I'd lose Jack or Sam over this but the other Guardians? I'd be lucky if they even looked my way anymore.

When I finally looked up at Sandy again there was one thing that accompanied the confusion on his face. 'You're his... friend?' I just stared at him, deadpan. I didn't want to get my hopes up so I was trying to be numb already. 'How?'

I swallowed. "I was in Burgess with Jack one day and while I was exploring the woods a little I... found the entrance to the lair. I didn't think, I just dropped down into the hole and introduced myself. Almost a year later I went back... and I went back again, and again... and again... " I looked off into space. "I liked him. He was sarcastic and funny and the fearlings and Nightmares didn't bother me nearly as much as I thought they would have. He kept trying to get rid of me but it was fun annoying him so I kept coming back." I shrugged. "Part of me thought that I could try to find a way to separate him and Kozmotis, or at least keep an eye on him but the longer I kept up the routine, the more I started to like him as a person."

I was remembering how he was before I got believers for him. "Eventually he stopped trying to make me leave. He still wasn't nice to me, but he accepted that my annoying self was going to do whatever the hell I wanted to and the fearlings were almost acting like they were the neighbor's barn cats so it felt comfortable to be there." And now we're friends even if he won't admit it. "I haven't seen him a lot in the past few years after Caeden died... The first time I'd seen him since was right after Jamie died. I stopped at Burgess to get a copy of his obituary so we could know when the funeral was... I dropped in and warned him to stay away from Jack. Told him that if I saw a fearling near him that they'd be a mural by the time I was done with them." I was passively looking at a highway almost too far away to see. "I never told anyone because you guys would think he brainwashed me or something... " After a moment I took a breath and sort of broke myself out of the trance I was in. "I'm tired of keeping it a secret though."

It took a few minutes before Sandy really reacted. He was probably thinking it over. 'It... It just doesn't sound like the Pitch I'm familiar with. It is hard to accept that the person you're talking about is the same creature that destroyed the Alliance.' He shook his head, sitting back down on the cloud.

"He was a lot different when I first met him. It was about a decade since the movie had come out but he wasn't anything close to what I was expecting. I thought he was gonna have the nightmares swarm me or something, but he just sort of stared at me and not so politely told me to get out. He looked more defeated than anything else. I think he had sort of given up." I shrugged. "I took almost ten years but he eventually stopped telling me to leave and sort of sarcastically ignored me."

'How did you just walk inside and leave without being harmed?' He looked at me incredulously. 'Surely he must have sent the fearlings after you. He wouldn't have just let you walk away. He latches onto your fears and leaches off of them to get stronger.'

"That's the thing... back then, I didn't have a fear he could exploit. I'd recently become immortal and the only real fear I'd ever had was void by that fact alone. His flunkies came at me once but after I smacked one of the Nightmares on the face they backed off... By the time I had something that scared me that he could use against me, well... I don't think he cared anymore." I shrugged again. "He got all excited when he noticed it but he didn't do anything about it. Besides, there's nothing he could do to make it come true - short of going after the people I care about - but, even then I'd stop it from happening."

'Why would you have gone there in the first place? You were a young Immortal you barely had any believers, he could have killed you!' Sandy's concern was the farthest thing from what I'd imagined whenever I thought about telling anyone the Pitch secret.

"Yeah... I know. I didn't think about it at the time but when the movie first came out - I did so much research on everyone and I already liked him. I understood where he was coming from and I admired that he didn't have some convoluted plan - which I now realize makes me seem to lean more towards the bad end of the moral compass - but I genuinely thought he wasn't that bad." Sandy started moving the cloud again while I spoke. "When I found out what he had done it seemed like he was grasping at his last straw, trying to stay alive in your world, but still too evil for comfort." I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye. "Eventually I learned about Kozmotis and realized how horrible it must be to be trapped inside your own body... but even more I understood the fearlings."

His eyes swung towards me, aghast. "They were just doing what they knew how to do, feed on fear. They were imprisoned for existing. Like mosquitos or stink bugs. They were starving so they fought their way out... I can't blame them for that, I'd have done the same thing. I blame them for everything else they've done but not for trying to survive." I met his eyes that were stubbornly holding onto the distaste for Pitch. "They're smart, they know when to back off or dive in... I've been watching them for all these years that I've been there and seeing how they've changed in the time I've been there is surreal. Pitch has changed. All the fearlings under his command are changing too. It's like they're becoming more complacent. The first day I walked in actually afraid all they did was crawl around my feet."

'You sound like you trust him.' He grudgingly stared forward.

"I do." We sat in silence for a while. I decided I would let him mull it over for a while and I didn't want to interrupt him lest he think even worse of me. Well, me giving him space to think, ended up turning into me getting the silent treatment until we got to the meeting... and beyond.

The entire meeting Sandy didn't shoot a word my way. As soon as he noticed I was paying attention, he stopped talking. Aside from being ignored, the rest of the meeting went swimmingly. Jack was trying to not openly flirt with me since Tooth was there, and it was going great. Bunny and Jack didn't even argue - yeah they were sarcastic as hell, but that's how they are together. Also, there was no debate about Christmas vs Easter.

No, most of the talk this time was about the disappearances or the twins. Two more Immortals had come up missing in the past year - within six months of each other. They were both small-time Immortals, their circle of believers less than fifty, but the fact remained that they had vanished off the face of the Earth.

North brought up my idea of keeping the news from the offworlders. After a brief discussion, the others agreed that it was as good a plan as any. Surprisingly, Jack was the only one that spoke out against it. The more I thought about it though, the more I understood - if anyone was gonna warn against keeping a person in the dark, it'd be him. I had a few minutes where I was worried that - when North had mentioned my reasoning - Sandy would spill the beans on why I was trying to keep Pitch off of their radar. But he never said a thing.

When the meeting dissolved, everyone went their separate ways, Tooth had a big day to get back to and Bunny North was working on figuring out the newest gadget everyone had been asking for. Bunny and Jack walked off, Jack having asked about his past with the twins. When the room cleared... I was left alone with Sandy.

I waited to talk to him until he deigned to give me a glance. It was about ten minutes. I walked over to him and sat on the arm of a chair near him. "So?"

He hesitated for a good minute before he answered me. 'If your goal is to still separate Pitch from Kozmotis, then Mother Nature should know.' He blinked and looked up at me. 'I won't tell the others... but you should tell her.'

After a moment I nodded. On one hand, I was close enough to her that I could stop by and tell her if I wanted to... but on the other hand, I didn't know if it was ever going to really happen. It was obvious to me by now that Pitch wasn't going to be annoyed away - why I ever thought that would work is beyond me, but hey, I'd tried it. I didn't want to get her hopes up if it really was for nothing. But I still said yes to Sandy. Not just because I didn't want him to go and let slip my dirty little secret to everyone else, but because I wanted it to happen too. She might as well know in advance if it would ever come to fruition.

'Have you told Jack?' He eyed me from where he floated.

I swallowed nervously. "No, I haven't." I glanced towards where he and Bunny had disappeared a while ago. "I will, when the time's right." I looked back at Sandy. "I'm not actively keeping it a secret from him, but I'm more trying to keep him from ruining my hard work by bursting in and sending Pitch into hiding again and ruining the trust I've built in him." He gave me a half-hearted side nod/shrug that was his way of saying, 'yeah, good point.'