The plan was simple, which Quinn had learned to treat as either a good sign or a warning depending on the circumstances.
They sat in Kai's room on the last evening before the Winter Solstice, the three of them arranged around the small table with a map of what they remembered about the Forgotten Shore spread between them — reconstructed from memory, annotated with the specific gaps in that memory, which was most of it. The core of the plan held regardless: find the castle as fast as possible, regroup, then begin the methodical work of locating ingredients for the Sequence 8 potions.
Weapons were distributed with the quiet practicality of people who had stopped pretending they were doing anything other than preparing for something dangerous. Hal had his stun gun, which was functional in the specific way that things are functional when they operate at the boundary of useless — capable of buying time, incapable of ending threats. Kai produced a spear he had traded from one of the Legacy students at the Academy, handing it across the table to Hal with the economy of someone who had decided the transaction required no commentary. Quinn kept the axe. Kai kept the daggers.
Then, before they left the room, the three of them sat down together on the floor. Back to back to back, a configuration that felt less deliberate than it was. The warmth of the contact was small and real and none of them mentioned it.
They spoke the horrific names quietly, in the language of Hermes, the syllables carrying the particular weight of things that had been chosen carefully.
Quinn's first:
The Mysterious Ruler above the Gray Mist;
The King of Space-Time who wields Great Change;
The Embodiment of Every Entrance and Every End.
Then Kai:
The Eternal Sovereign of the Burning Ruin;
The Weaver of Plagues and Shattered Destinies;
The Embodiment of All Destruction and Eternal Beauty.
Then Hal:
The Eye that Watches from the Abyss;
The Silent Mind that Dreams the World;
The Sea where Every Truth Drowns in Chaos.
They repeated each one twice. Not for ritual purposes — for memory. If Sequence 8 arrived and they were separated, the horrific names were the only contact method that didn't depend on proximity or luck. They committed them the way you commit things you cannot afford to forget.
Then they stood up, straightened their clothes, and went to meet the instructor.
Rock led them through the Academy's lower levels with the brisk purposefulness of someone who had done this enough times that the solemnity of the occasion no longer registered as solemnity. The soulless lined the walls of the chamber in their pods, still and pale and beyond whatever help the living could offer them. Quinn looked at them once and then stopped looking.
The three of them separated at the threshold of three different rooms without ceremony. Quinn thought about saying something, decided against it, and climbed into the pod.
The lid closed.
[Welcome to the Dream Realm, Quinn.]
He came back to himself lying on something wet.
The sky above him was the color of old bruises — grey and heavy and lit from somewhere behind the clouds by a sun that was present in the technical sense only, providing light without warmth, illumination without comfort. The sea was everywhere, vast and flat and carrying the particular silence of large bodies of water that have decided not to perform their usual sounds.
Quinn sat up and assessed.
He was on a strip of exposed shore, the kind that existed at low tide and would stop existing when the tide returned. The ground beneath him was wet sand and exposed rock, scattered with the debris that the sea deposits when it retreats — shells, tangles of dark vegetation, things that might once have been creatures and were now hard to categorize.
He pulled a handful of nearby seaweed and draped it over himself with the focused pragmatism of a man who had read enough to know that visibility was a resource to be managed and who had no other immediate options. Then he lay back down, closed his eyes, and waited for the situation to develop.
He didn't wait long.
The water continued to recede. As it pulled back, it left behind things that had been suspended in it — and some of those things were still alive, which attracted other things that were interested in what was still alive. The scavengers came from the rock crevices and the deeper shadows, emerging with the cautious efficiency of creatures who had learned that exposed shores were temporary opportunities and temporary opportunities required speed.
Quinn watched through slitted eyes.
The great winged ray was the size of a large car, its body pale and flat against the dark sand, its movements the labored contractions of something that understood it was dying and was continuing anyway out of the specific stubbornness of creatures that had survived by not stopping. Around it, smaller scavengers circled with the patient geometry of things that had learned to wait.
Quinn checked the status screen on instinct. Then he remembered the notation he had seen weeks ago in the Uniqueness of Door's hidden text — the part about ingredient substitution. The Uniqueness would translate the potion requirements into local equivalents, whatever organisms in the current Dream Realm carried the necessary biological components.
He opened the Sequence 8 formula.
Core Ingredients:
The Cerebral Crystal of a Phantom Stalker
— This replaces the Mist Jellyfish's pituitary gland.
The Mirrored Retina of a Mimic Spawn
— This replaces the Six-horned Chameleon's eyeball.
Supplementary Ingredients:
80ml Blood of a Deep Sea Lurker
5g Ground Stone from the Crimson Spire
10 drops of Essence from the Soul-Devouring Tree
100ml Pure Water
Quinn read it twice. Then he looked at the great winged ray dying on the sand.
He picked up a rock from the ground beside him. He threw it hard in the opposite direction, away from the scavengers, into the dark water at the edge of the tide line. The sound it made when it hit was sufficient. The nearest cluster of scavengers turned and moved toward it with the focused attention of things that operated on stimulus and response.
Quinn was already moving.
He hit the water in three strides, pulled the axe, and put it through the ray's head with a single efficient blow before the creature had finished registering his presence. It stopped moving. The scavengers, alerted by the sound or the smell or some sense Quinn didn't have a name for, began turning back.
He reached for something to collect the blood in and found nothing. His pockets held the axe and the soul shard from his belt and exactly zero containers.
The notification arrived before he could finish being annoyed about it.
[You have slain an Awakened Beast: Great Winged Ray.]
[You have received a Memory: Shroud of the White Tide.]
The scavengers were close enough now that he could hear them. Quinn grabbed his saw, cut into the ray's body with the rapid, inelegant efficiency of someone working against a deadline, found the soul shard housed in the cartilage near the creature's central mass, pulled it free, and ran.
He ran for a considerable distance. The shore stretched in both directions with the unhelpful uniformity of places that don't care whether you find them navigable, and Quinn ran along it until the sounds behind him had faded to something he could no longer distinguish from the ambient noise of the shore.
He climbed a flat rock that gave him height and a clear sightline in three directions, sat down, and breathed.
He thought, for no particular reason, about Fang Yuan. The protagonist of a web novel he had read in his previous life — a man whose defining characteristic was that he was either running or fighting his way to a position from which he could run. The distinction between cowardice and strategic retreat, Quinn had always thought, was entirely a matter of whether the retreat worked.
He smiled at nothing, then lay back on the rock and let his heart rate normalize.
When it had, he took his torn shirt, fashioned it into a rough pouch, tucked the soul shard inside, and knotted it around his hip. Then he turned his attention to the Memory.
Memory: Shroud of the White Tide
Rank: Awakened
Tier: III
Type: Light Armor
In the blinding sea of white, the great rays glide like ghosts. They do not hide from the light; they become it. To wear their skin is to invite the silence of the abyss into your soul.
[Refractive Camouflage]: The surface of the armor vibrates at a frequency that bends light. When standing still in bright environments, the wearer becomes nearly invisible to the naked eye.
[Fluid Form]: Inspired by the ray's cartilaginous skeleton, this armor grants the wearer unnatural flexibility. It reduces the impact of crushing blows and allows for seamless movement in tight spaces or underwater.
Quinn summoned it.
The armor was nothing like he had expected, which meant his expectations had been wrong, which was fine. There were no heavy plates, no thick leather, no seams or buckles or any of the visible architecture of protection. It came up over his body like a second skin — smooth, seamless, biological in a way that was difficult to articulate and slightly unsettling to think about too directly. It fit perfectly, which made sense given that it had been constructed from something the Nightmare Spell considered his equivalent.
The color was the interesting part. In the shadow of the rock, it sat at a grey so dark it was almost not a color at all — practical, unobtrusive, the shade of something that had decided not to be noticed. When he turned and let the diffuse light of the covered sky touch it, the surface shifted, pulling pearlescent blues and silvers out of itself like the surface of deep water under moonlight.
Quinn tilted the fabric experimentally, watching the colors move.
He was still doing this when he noticed three figures in the distance, moving along the shore in the direction of the interior.
He watched them for a moment. Their trajectory was purposeful, their spacing deliberate. Not scavengers. Not creatures. People, moving like people who had a destination.
Something had changed. Their presence on the shore — three of them, arriving together, moving with the coordinated ease of a group rather than strangers — was a variable the original story hadn't contained.
Quinn filed the observation and began walking in the same general direction, at a distance that maintained the option of pretending he hadn't noticed them.
The Forgotten Shore stretched ahead, grey and wet and full of things that had decided not to die quietly.
He had work to do.