I wake up in a field and think I might be dreaming. The flowers are all gone, but I see the rounded remains, petals still clinging to the edges, folded back in on themselves. They no longer glow, leaving the land dark save for the beams cast by the distant moons and the static stars. Both are all white, with none of the texture Procyon and Sirius usually hold, and the stars seem flat.

The land stirs beneath me, wind passing from behind me and stirring the grass beneath my paws. I follow it as the ripple, contained to a thin strip, surges forwards. It's bringing me through the forest, but in our shared dreaming landscape, all the trees have been cut down. Not only that, but plants grow around and through the trunks, so that the world as it once was has all but disappeared. Nothing lives here but me, my adrenaline, and the unseeing plants. As for Iris? We start at a greater distance every time we dream, but I know where to find her tonight.

The wind is taking me to the willow.

Darkness spreads out behind me, devouring the entire field, and I set myself ablaze and run faster. Activating my flames sends another surge of energy through my body, though it won't last long, and I look back once to find that even the sky is being consumed by the portal-like darkness. Wind at my paws, shadow at my back, I leap up the inclining land to find where the willow's cliff lies.

The tree is gone. Standing overhead, perched upon a dark carcass, is a ragged shape whose wings, when opened, are as black as death. I look behind me, seeing that the wall of nothingness has stopped, and step forwards. Ice blue eyes judge me in the moonlight. A figure lopes down from the body of the Auspicia. I trip over the root of a long gone tree and sprawl out at her paws, scenting rot on her breath. The figure reveals teeth bright as the moon and licks her chops, wiping off holy blood.

Iris is standing over me, face covered in gore.

"We're just dreaming." I say. "It's just a nightmare. We can wake up. We can wake up together right now, and everything will be fine."

Her whole body collapses when she takes the next step. She mutters, "You have to help me, Torch. I can't do this alone."

"I can't."

"You need to get out." Her eyes are vacant, unknowable.

The flames cease around me, leaving me fatigued, and I begin to blink as fast as I can, hoping to pull my eyes open. How do you get out of a dream? I run past her, past the Auspicia's body, and look at Heilin's eyes. They flicker a hundred colors, like the forms of the Sentients touched by the Dog Days. I nudge her, praying for strength, and approach the edge. "Here's to falling upwards, right?" I say back to Iris, who does not answer.

"You are taking too long." she says. "Please hurry. I can't control her."

"I..." I want to say so much, ask so many questions, but I heed her urgency. "We'll be okay. I love you."

I jump.

Like our first dream, first I fall, but then my position is reversed. I find myself rising into the sky at the same velocity, as if the sky was a sea at the bottom of the cliff, and as I pass through the uncaring eyes of the twin moons I bolt to my paws. Iris is gone, and I am alone in the darkness of the hallway where we decided to settle for the night. I look across the hall, to the other Defender barracks, and feel my heart twinge. This is nothing my new friends can settle.

My paws click down the halls as I break into a sprint. Unlike my dreams, there is no fire when I make this run, not just because of the wood of the castle but because I can't trust myself to control my own powers right now.

Iris is at the door of the throne room. Several guards are slumped against the ground, and a thin whine runs through crystals overhead as Iris busts the doors open with a blast of white energy generated from her jaw. The Auspicia is lying suspended over her chair, all six wings spread out, her mouth moving in her sleep. Her crown rests upon her head and Iris looks to her with the same swish of her tongue across her lips.

I tackle her to the ground, and find that her face is hardly even hers, completely overtaken by the miasma of the Dog Days- half is framed in that golden halo, tinged with Lotus's white hairs, while the other half is that of the devilish version of her that haunts my dreams, her own worst perception of herself. I taste lilies and rotting flesh as I wrestle her to the ground, hear the clatter of far more wings than she has, and she blasts me back with a flood of gray light. Her body, now a chimera of the two dueling aspects, limps forwards, as if being dragged by an invisible thread. "Don't get in the way." she says, and there is nothing left of her at all.

I let out a high cry as she turns to the Auspicia, jaw open, and she blasts me right in the gut. Pain ripples through me, fur singed away, but Iris is panting now.

"You're more than that." I promise. "More than them. Either of them."

Iris breaks down wailing. I get up and cut to her side, pressing against her side, and she is more ragged than the Factory could ever make her. Her claws prick my skin as she presses a paw atop mine, unable to meet me in the eye, and her tongue lolls out of her mouth. She coughs up blood, "I can't. I can't. I can't."

The Auspicia raises her head. "Be still." she says, and time freezes around us. I find myself unable to move or even avert my eyes, and she steps forwards, light flaring around her head and at the crux of her six lowered wings. It is not a flame, but rather crackling voltage that races from wing to wing. She lowers her head, peering into the darkness. "This is the time when nothing moves. What hell of other worlds has broken loose in my chambers?"

Another voice rips through her, "Lotus."

"No. This is no dream, and we never found- we never found Lotus's heartline. We would know-" contradicts Heilin.

"A spectre, her bones back for revenge. A being carved from the wood of the willow where her body rests."

The light intensifies, and Heilin's eyes fall on us at last, paralyzed across the floor of her room. A fourth voice echoes, "We were not wrong." Heilin stands over us, all the vengeance of an old goddess rising in her growl. "Nethera stares out through your eyes."

Iris drops from her paralysis, shivering, head inclined so she is staring at the floor. I pull free, surging with flames, and the Auspicia's eyes widen. "She didn't mean to! The Obsidians made her to do bad things, but she's my friend, and I know she was trying to fight it! She told me so, in a dream..." I lower my head, and tears well in my eyes as I drop to her side. "P-please don't kill us."

The Auspicia lowers herself to my side and brushes a wing down Iris's side. "I knew there was no way the Obsidians overlooked something this crucial. Sending you two here was a deliberate act, meant to destroy us, and she was made with the full intent of being a weapon against me."

Iris looks up. Her eyes are filled with tears, but there is no emotion on her face. She can't even convey anything through speech, though I see her tongue slide in her mouth, looking for the right words to amend the situation.

"Natrina wept when she heard you had come to this world," Heilin says. "She had no clue what to make of you. Was this a second chance? The universe's way of mocking her for the fate of her sister? A means of punishment for everything we had done and failed to do? Regardless, one thing was obvious- you were the last piece of a puzzle that has been in process for generations, and even if you were built as a false positive, whatever you are, you are the Hope and Determination Virtues of the Factory, designed by destiny to herald in an era of great change.

Iris squints.

"I will tell no one of this night, as long as this change remains in our favor. We need you for this war."

The force of destiny surges through me, but it doesn't work for or against the decision. Before us is death, in the wake of our paws and the paws of our forebears is more death, and this world was made to be shaped by us, but never to be ours. There was never anywhere to run. I look to Iris again, begging for a sign, but all I can focus on are her empty eyes and heaving stomach as she fights off Nethera's instructions. Her will steadies me.

I open my mouth, feeling the dryness of my own tongue, and give her the only answer we ever had. "We'll do it."