"Last night," Indy says, cheerfully. "They'll finally let you go back out and everything will be back to normal."

"Last night's the worst night," I parrot Rain, who was trying to be helpful, I think, even if she wasn't even remotely helpful.

"You can't think of it that way." argues Indy. "That's giving up. You're not a defeatist, Rena. Plus, think about how fun tonight's going to be! Avery's been hard at work making presents for the whole group, we finally got Sukoma to help us out, and there've been magical protections set up around the city... essentially, we're going to have a night off for once in our lives. Everyone's worked so, so hard to make this happen."

"Sukoma agreed to help us?" I say, my voice hoarse.

"Avery got the entire force to come over. In fact, I'm pretty sure we've got Defenders from around the area lined up to help us out, so there's no need for us to worry at all, got it?" Indy's voice shakes slightly at the end, and the air between us freezes over.

"That's not right." I say. "Why would they ever..."

"Don't worry about it." Fyera says. "Indy, can you talk briefly?"

"No, I've been told I have an incurable tendency to ramble." Indy responds.

Fyera's gaze dulls. "Come with me, Indy."

"If you insist, Fyera." Indy gets to his paws, leaving me almost alone again. Of course, the room is almost full (of course) but they all look restless without something to put their energy into, like the wandering souls at the edge of the city. Rain looks up at the passive, soundless kinegraphs in the room, all of them put up for the final night. They depict figures of old, moving versions of the tapestries that adorned the meeting hall in the Glade, but there in the back of the room are the unmoving likenesses of the Auspicia and her first companion, just as they were in the kinegraph. I feel their age radiating from them, as well as the slightest undercurrent of magic, something detected more by the heart than the nose but known by both.

I feel like something pinned up against the wall. As the preparations go on around me, I assist wherever I can just to shake the feeling of being ornamental, and Glaze eventually offers to let me help with cooking. "We'll help anyone who gets injured from Sukoma, won't we? Since they're risking their lives to help us?" (Doesn't seem fair. Doesn't seem fair at all. We're protecting this city and they're on our land but why and why do you all need to be here tonight.)

"They have better healers than me, and there's a hospital set up on the edge of town. Security's really cracking down tonight." Glaze explains.

"Why?"

"It's a special night." Glaze responds, wistfully, without ever answering my question.

The heating crystals whir to life and we bathe in the scent of the cooking pastries, which are stuffed with meat and fruit. Glaze also prepares a spiked milk drink known as 'egg nog', which I have to restrain myself from putting my face in, and a dish that seems to be entirely made out of spices piled atop the smallest leg of rabbit I have ever seen.

"Do you have anything with syrup?" I ask.

"Do I ever," Glaze says, getting fiercely to work. "I know a thousand ways to use sugar. Just watch me."

Glaze gets to work on a second round of pastries, kneading the dough, and then pours sugar onto a pan and throws the dough a top of it. "Caramels," she explains, as if this suddenly will bring everything that has occurred thus far to light. She performs an advanced set of maneuvers following this that should hardly be possible without telekinesis, accomplished in part thanks to an elaborate set up of various kitchen machinations designed to help her, most of which work as more sanitary extensions of her mouth. She looks back to me when she's close to done. "It's usually easier, since I get help from Mis," she pauses. Her eyes fog up. "It's going to be a hard year, Rena."

I nod. Blossom, Indy, and Surra crowd us as Rain places the finishing touches on her dishes, placing out syrup and drinks on the table before descending with several covered dishes. Her tail waves as she looks to the others--at this point, everyone else is there, and they look famished, even though we've done nothing all day.

"Have you all been eating?" I ask.

"Before this? It would be an injustice to Glaze's cooking to do so." Auma says.

Glaze's face lights up in a toothy smile. "Oh, you're all way too kind to me and my cooking."

"What did we do without you?" muses Indy, situating himself at a table and eying a single dish put out at a specific seat--the one he usually inhabits--which appears to be some kind of strange, many-legged animal, curled up in a shell. "I have no idea how you got your paws on this."

"What we did without her was eat burned bacon," responds Fyera, pressing against Ignis's fur. She looks like Ignis's shadow, given that Ignis is practically blazing with energy under the fur and her eyes are illuminated from behind, but they also look like a perfect pair. "Ignis, I love you. I would slice my own tail blade off for you. For the record, though, you are a terrible cook."

"I am not going to deny this." Ignis says. She licks her chops. "Are we going to begin?"

Auma looks to Avery, who nods. "As you'd like. We've all done a good job this Dog Days, and I think all of you deserve to be proud of what you've accomplished. These are easily our most trying missions, our most perilous times, and yet you've all managed them with grace and courage. That, in and of itself, is worthy of celebration."

Gale lopes up to my side, late, and almost hits the table. He walks as if possessed, eyes thick with fog, and then shakes himself awake. He sits on my right, Indy on my left, and does not touch his food for a long time while the others begin. I, myself, am not hungry, despite not having eaten all day, and this brings an old conversation to mind.

"Can we be hungry, Gale?" I ask him.

"Are you?" he asks.

I shake my head.

He shrugs. "I don't know what's wrong with us."

The room seems to darken around him. I hadn't realized that I was in any way not looking forwards to this, because the idea seems so foreign, but seeing him hear truly fills me with a great trepidation. We are like Axel's twin metal disks, pulling apart, and it is such a foreign situation that it is more terrifying than even that latent image of him in the dark, coughing back something, or the current long slit across his paw, coated in black. I can see the shadows rising from the cut, forming into skeletal limbs, reaching, and he draws it back.

"You're not supposed to see that."

"I know, but that won't stop me." I insist. We look each other dead in the eyes. The party around us is loud, and Indy hits me in the back by accident.

"Rena! Isn't this amazing?" asks Indy, his face full of shell and meat juice. He looks, in the most endearing sense of the word, like a mess. "Rena?"

My face lights up. I can see myself changing in the yellows of Gale's eyes. "What's going on now?"

"We're going to pass around the year-old cider." Indy explains. His eyes glint with delight, and I crane my neck around him to see a large, wooden pitcher being passed around, moving from Auma at the head of the table to Fyera and Ignis down the line. Indy sips for an excessive period of time, each slow chug accentuated as he chokes it down, licking the froth from his mouth. With a shake of his head, he tentatively nudges it over with his paw, his eyes flickering with mischievous light.

I grab the pitcher with my telekinesis, savoring the ease, and peer down into the throat of the drink, where the fizz still disperses on the surface. Even the wood is richly scented, but when I get the taste of the drink on my tongue, it is an overwhelming sense of returning home. The drink is forests, fermented berries, and the taste of the scent of trees rubbed raw. It is all the last of the year, still lingering in my mouth, and I feel myself shake like I might cry when I place it down.

"That's all I can have?" I ask.

The others nod.
I pull myself back up to my paws. "Okay." I sniff. "Okay."

Gale takes a sip, sticking his entire snout in before he finally gets his mouth into it properly, and he darts back just as quickly. He sputters as he withdraws his snout, passing it on, and I sit and watch the others go around. When this subsides, we return to eating, and I ask Indy, "What was that?"

"It's cider from exactly one year ago. It's an old tradition. Everyone takes one sip and we pour the rest out onto the trees."

"Can I take it up?" I peep.

"No," barks Avery from across the table, and I flinch. "We'll need to take it down to Twitch and Thistle, anyways."

"He's probably going to be downstairs for most of the night." Fyera says. "Well, that's my fill. If anyone wants to join me in some sparring, feel free to."

"That's not very festive, Fyera." complains Ignis, but she still follows her into the dark, the two of them touching at the flank. Bitterness crawls through me, causing my snout to twitch slightly. I look to Gale, but like a shadow, he has silently disappeared.

I feel dizzy, the drink beginning to burn like acid. Indy passes me some of the milky drink Glaze was working at earlier. "Drink," he suggests. "It's eggnog." I roll my eyes in his direction, but as soon as I get a sip, I'm addicted. It's not quite full as the other drink, nor does it make my throat burn, but it's enough to pass the night away. Indy grins. "Bet I could stomach more than you."

I rise. "I bet--" I gasp. "I could drink all the eggnog-- in the entire world. Try me, Indigo Odd Shwit."

"Shwit." Indy says, sternly.

"Indigo. Stop." Auma suggests.

He turns to me. "You're on."

I don't know how long passes that night, or how many bowls of the stuff I drink, but by the end my stomach burns and my body hurts even more. I can feel my brain filled with liquid, which knocks around in my head and licks hungrily at the walls. Indy says something I can barely hear and I answer something akin to "A'ight," and suddenly we're walking back down the halls, fear drawing me back up towards lucidity... not of him, but the figures behind him, lurking in the shadows, thousands of eyes looking in on both of us.

Indy shuts the meat closet door. "Okay. I need to tell you something."

"But Indy..." I complain.

"What's wrong?" he asks.

"Indy. Am I real?" I ask. "I can feel myself floating above my body right now."

"That might be the eggnog."

"No, no, it happens all the time. I'm still there, but I'm a ghost of myself, and everything happens around me. It's so scary, Indy. I need to belong somewhere. I want some proof I exist." The words keep rushing out, sounding more and more right as all of my pain sloshes out of my mouth in a tremendous wave of agony. "Is that so bad?"

"If you need something to hold onto, I can give you my name." he promises. "You know, Rena, this is going to sound strange, but ever since I met you, I felt as if I knew you from somewhere. It was as if we were..."

"Siblings." I say.

He nods affirmatively.

A knife raises from the corner and my head spins. Slowly, Indy turns his paw to the side and makes a long incision down one pad. My vision goes gold, my thoughts slurring into nothingness, and a few stray droplets of blood dot the floor. My own slit paw stings with pain and strength.

"Now we're siblings." he says. "Rena Swift."

I nod again, heart pulsing. "But we were, once."

His eyes trail to the side. "We weren't blood siblings then, either."

"But you remember?" I ask. Whatever madness was stirring in my head earlier is there now in earnest, and Indy just nods. "What... what did you have to tell me?"

"I don't want to keep hiding things from you anymore." he says. "Do you want to come upstairs with me?" Dozens of voices are layered under his own, and I catch traces of a halo around his face, superimposed so that he is the sun.

My eyes burn with divine light, and I nod. "We're not supposed to go here."

"No. We're not. There's not much time."

Indy turns the corner out and back onto the main hall, and sure enough, Fyera is there, trying to look as inconspicuous as possible. "What are you two up to?" she asks, in a voice far too sharp to be casual. It is like hearing a knife being drawn.

"Nothing." Indy says. My paws burn. We've become strangers even to ourselves now but there is no time to turn back. In fact, I can feel the world winding forwards around of us, as if all the universe is a tunnel, and every fractured part of me begs to go upwards, as if wings are drawing me upwards towards the roof. I feel my heart thrum with it, its every chaotic motion making me more sure, and Indy's heart is pulsing still, and Gale, and us, and this moment, and everyone in this city, illuminated, we've all been waiting for this.

Fyera ghosts us down the way until it's clear where we're going. "Indy."

"It's still early enough." Indy begs.

"We're waiting a year for a reason, Indy!" cries Fyera.

"There's no 'we'. You're following orders." retorts Indy. Surra pokes her head around, accompanied by Kairu and Glaze, and then the more aggressive fighters seem to emerge from all corners--I hear thundering out of the basement, and Arazel finally steps out, looking so much like her sister, but where Mistral's shy expression once hid is a paragon of intense disapproval. Indy steps in front of me, kicking me up towards the stairs. "Seriously. I don't think any of us want to fight."

"You're right, we don't." Fyera continues.

"Indy, you're being unreasonable--" Rain calls.

"Go, Rena." Indy says, and my eyes wide, I stumble up the steps. My left paw is still burning from the blood pact, as if stung by a thorn, but I want to hold it close to me as possible. It is blessed in a way the rest of my errant body could not be. As I emerge onto the roof, the trees whistling around me, a sense of calm overwhelms me. It's just another day, with the sun setting far in the distance and the stars beginning to dot the sky, peeking through the azure to show their white faces.

Lines slit between them, as if the entire sky is joining, and the sky lights up as my gaze follows the new motion back to the sun, which flares with intense heat. I feel something being peeled away as the universe bears down on me in a full inferno, wiping me clean, and something blossoms out of my back where my wings are. A second pair of spectral wings, not materialized but rather like the hazy glowings of the Dog Days, and an even fainter pair following that both sway in the wind. I recognize it from one of the posters immediately, but even that comes not with comfort but a different, grinding sensation, and the thing in my throat bursts out, violently coloring all of my memories. I expect the past to open up to me, but instead, all the time before it comes forth, years upon years of conversations fanning out around me like individual snowflakes in a blizzard. Had I a million years in this second alone, I could not begin to process them, so I stand still and let them sweep over me, waiting for the endless shrill noise of everyone I have ever known to be over. I find myself working back from life to life, seeing myself in gilded rooms, speaking with dragons on terrains alien to our own, and past that, in the dawn, wandering with a chosen three Canii. They are green, white, and red, each of them intimately familiar, and the green Canis slowly puts her head to mine, again and again, and I feel the most profound, ripping guilt, so intense that I keel over in pain immediately.

"What am I?" I ask.

"Half," Avery stands behind me, and I am not sure from her tone if she is elated or sad. "Of the sixty-third Auspicia of Dreamland."

All the voices in my head bay in recognition, and overwhelming sound chorusing like a thousand bells within my mind. Hello, they call, and I slam sideways into unconsciousness.

(A/N: And thus the fun begins. Remember to comment or vote if you're enjoying the story :P Your feedback means the world to me.)