The head split open.
Something inside the mask screamed.
"HOW DARE YOU SAY THAT TO MASTER AEMON!"
The figure tore free with explosive force, shadow pouring off it in waves. The white floor of the Plain cracked beneath it. Aemon stumbled backward, heart hammering.
What have I done?
Fear hit him in the chest — raw, physical, the oldest feeling he had.
The black shape roared.
Then paused.
Something pushed from inside it — a second face forcing its way through from the side, stretching shadow as it came. Sky blue. Calm. Patient.
"Don't be afraid," it said gently. "It's okay."
Aemon stood very still.
The terror didn't vanish. But it fractured into something less than absolute.
Then laughter — bright and startling — and a pale figure spilled free, arms wide, spinning once like someone who had been waiting a long time for a door to open.
"Joooy!"
Aemon stared.
More followed. Red. Black. Blue. White. Purple. Each one wore his face, filtered down to one thing, the way a colour filtered down to one frequency. They gathered in the Plain like witnesses.
Fear stayed in the chair. He didn't run. He didn't fight. He pulled his knees up and gripped the armrests and made himself very small. He chose stillness.
Rage chose differently.
He launched himself at Grillet with a sound that shook the walls, his fists driving Grillet back step by step. Trust moved alongside him, cutting off angles, closing exits. Joy darted in and out, striking fast, laughing even when he barely dodged the counters.
For a moment, Grillet was losing.
Then he pushed back.
The Plain bent beneath his will — the floor softening just enough to throw Rage off balance, the walls leaning inward, distance stretching where it shouldn't. He'd had years to learn this terrain. He knew every seam.
Rage took a heavy hit. Staggered, but didn't fall.
Love didn't join the fight.
He knelt in front of Aemon.
"I'm sorry," Love said, and his voice was shaking. "I'm so sorry you went through all of this alone."
Aemon couldn't find words.
"After Andzani destroyed our clan," Love said, "and you were at the very bottom of it — that's when we came. Your emotions, given form. All your memories. All your pain. Appearing inside your mind with no idea what to do."
Behind them, Rage slammed Grillet into the ground.
"Fear wanted to hide," Love said. "Joy wanted to keep you alive no matter what. Trust wanted to believe the world hadn't ended." He swallowed. "And I wanted you to feel loved again."
His expression hardened.
"But Grillet told us he was Empathy. That if we all appeared at once, the overload would break you. He said to let him handle it — and we were glad. Because you were okay."
Grillet caught Trust with a savage elbow and sent him skidding across the Plain. "And you were," he said, almost warmly. "I did handle it."
"He took a form you'd recognise," Love said. "Your imaginary friend, made real. He comforted you. And we let him — because you were smiling."
He clenched his fists.
"We didn't know what he actually was."
The fight shifted. Grillet found a rhythm — hammering Trust aside, knocking Rage across the space, his control of the terrain giving him advantages that shouldn't have been possible.
"As you grew closer to him," Love continued, "he became your Vice. Your favourite. Second only to you." Love's voice was very steady now. "And that made him stronger than all of us combined. It gave him command over this whole Plane."
Aemon's head throbbed.
"The truth," Love said, "is that he is Envy."
Grillet's eyes burned.
"He envied every relationship you had. Every person who took any part of you that wasn't directed at him. He wanted you entirely to himself." Love paused. "So he made sure of it."
The memories came.
His singing, sabotaged — sounds wrong, people pulling back. People driven away before they could get close. Waking to destruction he didn't remember causing. Zen turning against him and never understanding why.
Moto's face. Grillet's voice shaping every doubt Aemon had felt since the truck ride out of Zen.
Tanaka's Grace Inversion. That surge of hatred — he'd assumed it came from the restrained figure.
It hadn't.
Grillet urging him to kill Andzani.
And then, very clearly: the truck. Wind through the window. Sheu's voice, patient, trying to reach him. Moto glancing back without judgment.
There is only one person who can be your friend.
And I'm not sharing him.
Aemon gasped.
Love was crying. "He made sure you never had anyone," Love said softly. "Not because you couldn't. Because he wouldn't let you."
Aemon looked at the Plain — the cracked floor, the scattered forms of his own emotions, Grillet standing in the middle of it all with borrowed authority.
And when he met Love's eyes, something happened that he hadn't felt in a long time. Not the performance of it, not the reaching for it — just the thing itself, arriving without permission.
Love for himself. The first condition of all the others.
Grillet hurled Rage and Trust bodily across the space. They crashed at Aemon's feet.
"So what?!" Grillet's voice cracked. "I tried to play nice. I kept the worst of you contained. I protected you. And this is what I get — your pathetic little emotions ganging up on me because you'd rather have them than me?!" His eyes were wild now, unstable. "Then maybe we should all just die here."
Something in Aemon went quiet.
Not empty. Quiet. The way a space goes quiet when it finally belongs to someone.
He stood up.
Love rose beside him. "This is your mind," Love said. "You made us. And you can beat him."
Rage pushed himself up, shadow still bleeding from his knuckles. "Why'd you give him all that power anyway?"
Trust found his footing. "It's okay," he said, and meant it. "We just need to believe in him now."
Joy grinned through a split lip. "Envy. You are going down."
Aemon looked at Grillet.
"I'm done listening," he said.
Grillet came first.
He hit the Plain — tilting the floor, crowding the walls, blurring the distances between things.
Aemon felt it.
"No," he said.
The floor hardened. The walls snapped straight. The space locked — simple, white, his.
Grillet hissed. "You think you control this?"
"I hold it together," Aemon said.
Rage crashed into Grillet. Trust closed off the exits. Joy struck and retreated, struck and retreated. Grillet fought back, trying again and again to reshape the space — tilting, warping, stretching —
Each time, Aemon stopped it. A raised hand. A planted foot. A refusal. Each time, quiet and absolute.
Grillet broke free and drove straight at Aemon.
Aemon didn't move.
They met in the middle.
Grillet's face was inches from his, all of it stripped away — the smirk, the ease, the performance of someone who doesn't care. What was left underneath was just the oldest, ugliest feeling there is.
"You think this is winning?" Grillet snarled.
The fire of Andzani came. The screaming. The faces.
"No," Aemon said quietly. "Killing isn't victory to me."
He stepped closer.
"You'll live with your regrets."
Grillet opened his mouth—
The walls came up.
Not slamming. Not crashing. Just — rising. White and clean and specific, surrounding Grillet without violence. A room. Another room around the first. Another around that. Each layer sealing with a sound like a key turning, clear and final.
Grillet's voice faded with each one, growing smaller, growing distant, until the outermost wall closed and the Plain was silent.
Rage exhaled. Trust put his hands in his pockets. Joy stretched both arms above his head, bruised and grinning. Love watched Aemon with an expression that asked nothing and offered everything.
Fear unclenched his hands from the armrests. He didn't speak. But he looked up, for the first time.
Aemon stood in the silence of his own mind. Yellow against white.
For the first time, the space felt like it had always been waiting for him to arrive.
The smoke thinned on the riverbank.
Something burst outward — white, bright, arms flung wide—
"JOO—"
Moto's fist connected on pure reflex. The figure sailed backward and hit the ground.
Moto froze. His fist was still raised.
Joy blinked up at him, stunned, then let out a dazed laugh before fading gently back inward.
Aemon gasped awake, rolling onto his side, coughing up river water. "Moto — wait — he's not—"
"I know." Moto lowered his fist. "I know. I just—" He looked at his hand. "I thought it was him."
Aemon coughed again, then laughed — a real one, surprised out of him. "Fair."
Silence for a moment. The river ran past them. The rain had not stopped.
Moto looked at him carefully. Something in Aemon's face was different — still tired, still wet, still shivering. But lighter. Like something had been set down.
He reached over and put Aemon's yellow bucket hat back on his head.
Aemon looked at him.
"Thank you, Moto," he said.
Moto studied him for a moment, not quite sure what he was being thanked for, and then smiled because it didn't matter.
"Glad you're okay." He stood and offered his hand. "Now we've got to get back up to the others."
Aemon took it, got to his feet, and looked up at the cliff face above them.
"Let's go," he said.
And the two of them started climbing.