Before she left again, Margo stood over Lindsay's hospital bed, trembling like a leaf bent by a quiet storm. The monitors beeped softly. Tubes hung from her sister's arms like vines from a dying tree.
Margo leaned down and pressed her lips gently to Lindsay's forehead, a whisper of warmth on cold skin. "I'll be back soon," she murmured. "I promise this time."
Then she turned around. Gabriel stood in the doorway. His outline relaxed a little under the fluorescent light, as though he didn't quite fit.
They departed the hospital and walked off into darkness together.
The streets blurred out around them. Streetlights strobed like flashing fireflies. The trees whispered by. Wind was intentional. All sound had breath in it.
They walked into the forest.
It enveloped them like a lung exhaling.
Gabriel stopped in front of a huge stone. Moss was growing on it in cursive script. The rock had a hollowed-out bottom, large enough to crawl inside. Its entrance was a boxy, narrow tunnel—stone and shadow and the sort of darkness that watches back.
"There," he said.
Margo backed away. "I have to go in there?"
Gabriel nodded. "It's safe. Trust me."
"I don't trust you," she snarled, but knelt down nonetheless.
The stone walls glittered, like a breath on glass, as she crept. Her skin crawled. Something laughed in the darkness behind her—but it wasn't Gabriel.
Then, she fell.
Slid, rather—like water down a throat.
She entered into the corner of a rusty, weathered slide at what appeared to be an old, time-worn playground. Purple-bruised sky stretched out above. Lightning crawled at glacial speed at the horizon. The swing set groaned with no breeze. A seesaw moved as if recalling happiness.
Gabriel appeared behind her, smiling.
Margo took a gasp of breath. "What the—?"
"Cool, huh?" he smiled. "This was one of my default worlds."
"It's spooky."
He shrugged. \"Perhaps. But it's got character.\"
She glanced around. The carousel had peeling paint in the form of mouths screaming. The sandbox contained bones. But something, the fear was trumped by awe.
Gabriel took off running back to the slide. "Come on!"
He slid down victorious. "Woooo!"
Margo laughed in spite of herself.
She slid on. The slide curved nicely at first—then quicker. The wind roared in her ears. She screamed with joy, landing on the ground below in a whirl of dust.
"Again!" Gabriel shouted.
They climbed the coiled ladder and slid again.
But the third time—everything was different.
Margo sensed it the instant she started to slide. The slide elongated. Curved. Twisted. Took too long.
Her smile faded.
The tunnel was blacker this time. The walls throbbed like veins. Her pace quickened. Too quickly. Her cries became clearer.
Then--light.
She slid out from the slide and fell, harshly, on a slick floor.
It was no longer the playground.
It was the pinnacle of a pyramid.
High, impossibly high over a broad flat area of black sand and silver-water.
Gabriel hit beside her, grunting. "Okay. That wasn't supposed to occur."
A bolt of lightning cut the sky overhead.
Then another.
The pyramid shook. A seam creaked open under them like a yawn.
They fell again.
Rolling down a slope to the heart of the pyramid.
They crashed hard, panting. Golden walls around them glimmered with shifting drawings—figures with many arms, bird heads and wolf heads, eyes cut from rubies that stared at them blinklessly.
A lullaby was being sung. It seemed to be coming from everywhere—soft, but never-ending. As though a mother were singing to her children's skeletons.
Margo lifted a shaking hand. "Where… are we?"
Gabriel reached out to place his hand on a gold wall. "This is one of the inner worlds."
The room was a circle. Eight tunnels curled outward. Eight tunnels exhaled mist. Eight tunnels appeared to lead to various types of deaths.
Then she looked down.
In the middle of the floor: a sentence inscribed on the stone.
"CHOOSE ONE TO ESCAPE."
"Listen, if I make a mistake?" Margo's voice trembled.
"You won't come back," Gabriel replied.
She glared at him. "You're joking."
"I don't make the rules here. The pyramid demands something."
Thunder boomed outside the pyramid.
Then—rain.
It drizzled through holes in the ceiling. Icy water cascading down gold. The lullaby swelled.
She walked around the ring, looking into every tunnel.
One was full of bones.
Another: a mirror reflecting her as an old woman.
Another: blinding eyes in complete darkness.
Another: laughter but no sound.
"I can't," she panted. "I don't know which one…"
Gabriel rested a hand on her shoulder. "You have to try."
She approached the fifth tunnel. Something drew her to it—though she had no clue why.
Margo glanced over her shoulder. "Stay close."
"I always do."
She drifted in.
The tunnel was slippery. Warm. Breathing.
As she crawled further, the floor became steep. Then—horror of horrors.
A growl. Hungry and wet.
A mouth opened before her—enormous, rimmed with white, cutting teeth. It flowered open like a blossom of hate and flesh.
She screamed.
A tongue slapped out. She hung from the lip of the tunnel, her feet dangling in mid-air.
"Gabriel!" she shrieked.
He crept up behind her. He kicked the mouth without thinking. It screamed. Recoiled.
He dragged her back up again by the arms. They scrambled, scrambled—
—and reappeared in the playground.
Where they'd started.
Margo fell onto the grass, panting.
The air hung still. The lightning was exhausted.
Gabriel took her to a bench that hadn't existed before. Wooden. Ornate. Waiting.
"Sit," he whispered.
She did, hardly breathing.
He sat next to her. Held her hand.
She stared at him. "Why did you save me?"
His eyes glowed like twilight on water. "Because I want you to stay."
She didn't speak.
Gabriel leaned in.
Their mouths touched.
It was a gentle kiss at first. Soft.
Then it grew.
Long.
Heavy with the weight of a thousand shattered timelines.
Her lips reddened.
Marked.
In a place far beyond the eye of man, a man named Gerald sat alone in a hall of clouds and roots, stars knotted in his hair. He winced.
His lips blazed.
He stroked them.
"No," he panted. "Not again."
His son—Gabriel—had violated the oath. The holy law of their people.
Not once.
But now twice.
His lover, Sally, walked into the room. Her eyes—crystal clear like river water—smiled with knowing.
"You felt it too?" she asked.
Gerald nodded. "He kissed her."
Tears glistened Sally's eyes. "He swore he would never love again. Not after what happened the last time."
"He is like me," Gerald had growled with rage. "Always attracted to human tragedy. Always breaking."
Sally dried her tears. "Then we find him. Before he breaks completely."
And she enveloped herself in a cloak of wind and light, stepping through the doorway between worlds.
Far beneath them, on a bench under a bruised sky, Gabriel rested his head on Margo's shoulder.
Neither of them said a word.
But above them, the sky had started to crack.