Straightening her rainbow cloak, Cece says, "You really came here swifter than I expected, though I knew you'd do it."

"You're Nyarlathotep," I say, stomach in knots. "The Crawling Chaos."

She stares unblinkingly. "Just call me Cece. Reduces the syllable count." Out of her sleeve, she produces something like a color-changing scarf and hands it to me. No, it's a handkerchief for the blood. Without thinking about it, I press it to my face. It's not the first time she's done this. For rare nosebleeds, for tears.

Nyarlathotep, Cecilia, Cece, my mom.

Cece looks over the rest of the group with a curl of her lips. Amusement. I bristle, but I need to be calm. "Eileen, let us speak alone."

The others look concerned. Pickman growls under his breath, eyes on Cece.

"It'll be okay," I tell them. But I'm not sure as I follow Cece. She glides across the marble, lined with golden drawings of lilies and orchids, like she owns everything. But I don't think she was in the sunset city and happened upon us.

I led her here.

She goes inside one of the beautifully carved manors on the waterside with a trellis of roses crawling to one open window with open, auburn shutters. I never remembered the sunset city being by the ocean.

I follow up carpeted gold stairs and meet her at the open window.

"Where are the Great Ones?" I ask her.

"I didn't think that'd be your first question."

"But where are they? I thought they lived in Kadath."

"Roaming as they do. From Leng to Dylath-Leen. Half of them anyway, the ones I didn't trap underground." I remember the tremor in the ground. "As punishment, you see. It can be so inconvenient when your charges are rebellious."

"Did you know I'd disobey you?" I ask her.

"Of course. I was hoping for it. It's a conundrum, this sunset city. Such a difficult place to conquer."

"Conquer?"

"Yes. I forced the Great Ones out of it when Carter eluded me. And as soon as it existed, this fever dream from a weary veteran, it disappeared. And now with you, as planned, it's back."

my weird dreams she asked me about.

She knew. From the beginning, she knew I was a dreamwalker.

I show her the amulet. "Did you do this from the start? Make the statue appear in the first place?"

"The MacGuffin, yes, that was me."

"What does it do?"

"It's nothing. What matters is the purpose others imbue into it. Or in this case, you." She looks out on the water. "Here, you're safe. As you've found out, there are far worse things the creatures of the Dreamlands can do to you." To Cece, her world is all equations and inventions. And yet, as linear as she can be, she's also abstract a lot of the times, an abstraction herself. "No one knows more than me the logic of disorder. That's the foundation of the universe. Of the Dreamlands themselves. All the laws and predictability came from unpredictability, and eventually everything will give into entropy."

"You don't know that," I say. Accusing a god who has lived since before the beginning of time of not knowing something might not be the best strategy. But it's what I have.

"Yes, I do. Have you ever built a sandcastle?"

"A long time ago."

"Our views of time see 'long ago' differently. Nevertheless, once you build a sandcastle, what happens to it?"

"The water hits it. Or the wind."

"And it scatters, organized differently, what some might call disarray or even say is the unintended disorganization. This is how most humans understand it, since they believe the cosmos 'should' be in order. As much as you try to remake it, it'll look new thousands of times, giving into disorder. Except, what if you come across a collapsed sandcastle and don't know how to rebuild it? That's our universe. It's the unknown, those tools that can never be picked up to 'fix' what is rearranged, so the entropy keeps growing."

"That's only true of closed systems. So, it's not always true of everything."

"How do you know that?" she asks.

I roll my eyes. "I might have trouble with mixing up numbers, but I know how to read."

"I was trying to simplify it with an analogy."

"That's not what I wanted to talk to you about."

"Then, what?"

Hundreds of questions roll through my mind. I don't understand her plan. Except that she needed me to get here. And she couldn't just make me come here. I arrived of my own will, ended up in this paradise. And now . . .

"Do you love me?"

Without missing a beat, Cece says, "I'm not sure the chemicals in me are capable of that. I don't have dopamine for love. Or serotonin, oxytocin, endorphins."

"Love is more than that."

"It can't be. I can't experience something that isn't in my chemical makeup. I am what I was made to be, and I merely exist in this plane like you do. Humans seem to think there's a vast difference between other creatures in the cosmos and them. Or even the gods. " I wonder if she's being evasive or if, because time feels differently to her, this is how she processes things. Constantly circling the drain.

We're not having a typical conversation between a mother and daughter. She's speaking to me as she would if I were five or fifteen or fifty-five. I'm another wire to inspect.

"I think you're lying," I say.

"Why would you think that?"

"You say you don't need anyone, but you stayed in Ulthar and did all these experiments you wanted to show others. You spent so much time with Keziah, and you brought me, a scared runaway, there when you could've left me alone to die. Apparently, you were obsessed with Carter for years." She narrows her eyes. "That makes me think you want people around. For your ego, maybe, and then you say you don't need anyone. But maybe there's something else."

She waves a hand. "You're hurt, but it isn't that you don't understand because you're a child. Few do. Even Keziah, Lavinia, even those who know the Dreamlands and have encountered beings beyond their ken and have gained knowledge don't truly, fully understand. When the brain is hurt, it finds ways to make connections and operate; it molds itself into a new form."

"Plasticity," I say.

"It's the same with new realities, which to you are horrors. Horrors in the woods, in the sea, in every dream. Those things others choose not to see or to obscure in a form that won't break them. I'm sparing you. And, though I can't say I've ever felt parental affection or concern, the idea of you succumbing to those horror is unpleasant to me."

A bitter taste fills my mouth. "How, if you don't care? You came all this way, and you don't care. That's bull."

"It matters not. At least, it shouldn't, so long as your basic needs are cared for. Which, as far as I know, they are. Shelter. Food. Regular pleasant interactions with others."

"You can't understand how difficult it is to know so much but feel as if you always fumble in things such as these. Things that should be insignificant anyway."

"Such as these? Such as what?"

She says, "I don't have a gender, though it might be better to say I have them all. I've sired children, and then I've given birth to them. The second one was strange, and less often."

"What happened to any of your children?" I ask her, crossing my arms over my chest.

"They came into existence, and I went on."

"Until me," I say.

She nods once, curt. "Until you."

"Am I related to you?"

"No, you were a dreamwalker. I received a call to help a girl with strange dreams and night terrors. That was my specialty, after all. Reproduction is quite mundane when you think about it. My father dreamed me into existence, but he also dreams the entire universe into being. In that regard, though I am called Azathoth's son, I'm no more important to him than the entire cosmos."

I don't know who I am. I'm not sure if I even feel comfortable as only a girl. I feel like parts of me are changing, constant but inconstant. Even when I was little, I never felt good confined to one role.

Me, Moongirl. Even Caramel and Moggy. We are too young to be here. To have been asked to do what has been forced on us.

The way I was treated in school, what some of my foster parents did to me until I was taken away and churned into the mill again. Every now and again, I'd have the concerned teacher or the counselor I was assigned to, so I could "deal with my trauma and move on." Become easier for everyone to handle. Too quiet, too sad, too angry, too unpredictable. Always going to meek and stuttering to flying into a rage at some boy, nine like me, who tried to lift up my shirt.

Only now do I have any control over my body, instead of being told it was parents' place to decide what I'm worth.

Us, at least me and Moongirl, we're kids. But then again, there's nothing the world puts on adults that it won't put on kids if it's allowed. Even if it's not allowed, it finds ways to get away with it.

I ask Cece, "Who are your kids? Do you know any of them?"

"There's Brown Jenkin."

"He's your son?" I ask in surprise, remembering the stories.

"I suppose. In a way. He's the familiar of a woman I saved, who was going to be hanged after her sixth stillborn."

"Keziah," I say, remembering how often she visited the cottage.

"Yes. The good people of Salem, Massachusetts seemed to think her inability to give birth to a live child meant she served Satan, so she was put in a cell to rot until her 'trial' and inevitable execution. So, I gave her what power she could have."

"But so she could serve you." I might be young, but even I know that the gods don't do things out of the kindness of their hearts. They don't care about humans, except when the worship might benefit them. Even then, we have so little to offer. "Brown Jenkin. Isn't he a giant rat with a human face?"

A beat. "He's adopted."

"Am I secretly related to anyone important? Any dreamwalker? Like Carter or Lovecraft?"

"No. You're not related to any dreamwalker, known or not."

I feel deflated.

Cece prompts, "Why would you need to be?"

I shake my head. "I don't know."

"Randolph Carter was a disillusioned veteran from Boston who struggled to dream until he found a silver key he thought had been long-lost. Before he traveled the Dreamlands, he was a sad, lost, and lonely man."

I shake my head. "But why him, why me? Why are you doing this?"

She fully faces me. "I can enter the waking world, but my power is a pale shade of what it used to be. After all the tedium, what I need is a new place, a new world to inhabit and alter. But once Carter left, and I forced the Great Ones out, the sunset city disappeared. And now with you, it's back. I'm grateful, and we can forge this world to our liking."

"What if I don't want to stay here?"

"Why wouldn't you? You came all this way."

"The choice is yours. I will leave you alone to decide."

Leave me alone. Give me a choice. But I know better. The gods might play at chaos and randomness, but Cece has proven she won't let anything fall out of her grasp.

As Cece turns to leave, I croak, "You know . . ." She stops to look at me. "I'm pretty sure I loved you like a mom." My eyes sting, and when I watch her expression, I swear it softens for a second. Wishful thinking, maybe. With my options rolling around in my head, I walk over to her, and throw my hands around her, my head on her collarbone. She stiffens and, slowly, settles a hand on my back. Not for long, and then she steps away. Her tunic smells of flowers and salt and ozone.

With one last glance at me, she strolls out.