Sunny's nightmare had started simply enough, which in his experience meant it was saving something for later.
He had barely gotten his bearings on the grey expanse of the shore before he found them — Cassie first, recognizing him before he recognized her, her voice carrying the particular calm of someone whose relationship with uncertainty had been thoroughly renegotiated by whatever she could see that others couldn't. Nephis arrived shortly after, moving with the focused efficiency of someone who had already begun assessing the environment and cataloging its threats.
The scavenger that found them first was large enough to be inconvenient and aggressive enough to be interesting. They killed it together with the improvised coordination of three people who had just met and were rapidly updating their assessments of each other. Sunny collected the Azure Blade from the remains — familiar weight, familiar edge, the specific comfort of a tool he knew how to use.
They were closer after that. Not friends exactly, not yet, but something in the direction of it. The shared violence had done what shared violence usually does.
They decided to travel together. Sunny's shadow would go ahead, scouting, a quiet extension of his perception moving through the terrain before they committed to it. Nephis would take the primary combat role, which fit her the way purpose fits people who have been shaped by it for long enough. Cassie would be Cassie, which Sunny was already learning meant something specific and useful that he didn't yet have the vocabulary to describe precisely.
They had been moving for perhaps twenty minutes when Sunny's shadow caught a figure approaching from the south.
He signaled immediately, and the group responded with the efficiency that danger produces — weapons out, Cassie stepping back and finding cover, Nephis and Sunny positioning with the instinctive geometry of people whose bodies had started doing tactics before their minds caught up.
Then they saw who it was.
The wariness didn't disappear. It reorganized.
Sunny recognized the face from the Academy's cafeteria — one of the three, the one who walked behind the other two, the one who had stepped through a wall on his first day. Nephis recognized the name a half-second before Sunny did, surfacing it from memory with the particular precision of someone who catalogued information the way other people catalogued debts.
"Quinn," she said.
Quinn walked toward them at a pace that communicated he understood the weapons were still technically raised and had made a calculated decision to find this manageable. He stopped at a distance that was close enough to talk and far enough to be polite about the tension.
"Just saw the three of you from over there," he said. "Came to say hi."
Sunny studied him. "Now you've said it. What next?"
"Woah, chill." Quinn's tone was easy in the way that tone is easy when the person using it has decided that ease is the appropriate tool for the situation. "I want to ask if I could go with you. Staying alone on this place is not a great idea, and more people traveling together isn't bad for anyone."
The silence that followed had a specific quality. Sunny and Cassie both turned, almost simultaneously, toward Nephis.
Nephis looked at Quinn for a moment. Then she lowered her sword a fraction — not all the way, but enough to mean something.
"You can come with us," she said.
Sunny lowered his. Cassie stepped out from her cover. Quinn smiled with the genuine warmth of someone who had genuinely not been certain of the outcome.
"Thank you for your hospitality," he said.
They moved through the afternoon in a loose formation that hadn't been formally agreed upon but had emerged from the group's collective instincts — Sunny's shadow ahead, Nephis and Quinn in the middle, Cassie slightly behind and to the side, her eyes tracking things the rest of them couldn't see.
The shore gave way to rougher terrain as the interior asserted itself, the flat grey of the tide-line replaced by broken rock and the skeletal remnants of structures that might once have been something. The sky stayed the same — bruised, heavy, committed to providing light without comfort.
When the darkness began to gather properly, they found a broad, flat-topped rock formation that offered height and a defensible perimeter. They climbed it together and settled in for the night with the practiced wordlessness of people who had already stopped wasting energy on unnecessary communication.
After a while, Sunny spoke.
"So. What exactly is your relationship with the other two?"
Nephis and Cassie both stilled slightly — not visibly, but in the way that people still when they've been waiting for a question to be asked.
Quinn considered this for approximately the amount of time it takes to decide how much of the truth to offer. "Kai and Hal," he said. "We're friends. Close ones."
He didn't add anything. Sunny waited for the rest of it and the rest of it didn't come.
Quinn stood after a moment and moved to a different section of the rock, settling at the far edge with his back to them and his face toward the dark interior of the shore.
Sunny watched him go. Then he looked at Cassie, because Cassie's face was doing something.
"You know," Cassie said quietly, to the space between him and Nephis rather than to either of them specifically, "I told you about my ability. That I can see people's attributes."
"Yes," Nephis said.
Cassie paused. "I can't see Kai's attributes. Or Hal's." Another pause. "And now I can't see Quinn's either."
Neither Sunny nor Nephis responded. There wasn't a response that would have been more useful than silence. Sunny looked at the figure sitting at the far edge of the rock, his silhouette still against the dark sky, and filed the information in the part of his mind that tracked things that were dangerous without yet being hostile.
He went back to sharpening the Azure Blade.
Quinn found an empty section of shadow behind a rock outcropping that jutted up from the main formation, far enough from the group that quiet speech wouldn't carry. He stood still for a moment, checking the angles, making sure no shadows were pointed in his direction that shouldn't be.
Then he closed his eyes and spoke.
Hal's horrific name first, the syllables forming in the language of Hermes, carrying their weight quietly through whatever medium the Nightmare Spell used to conduct such things.
The Eye that Watches from the Abyss;
The Silent Mind that Dreams the World;
The Sea where Every Truth Drowns in Chaos.
A response came back — faint but definite, like the specific vibration of a string being plucked from a distance. Directional. North.
Then Kai's:
The Eternal Sovereign of the Burning Ruin;
The Weaver of Plagues and Shattered Destinies;
The Embodiment of All Destruction and Eternal Beauty.
The same quality of response. The same direction. North, both of them, which meant they were together or close enough that the difference didn't matter yet.
Quinn exhaled, quietly, and let his shoulders settle.
He had a direction. He had a group moving roughly toward it. He had a list of ingredients that he needed to collect along the way, and he had, for the moment, the specific advantage of being the least interesting person in a group that contained Nephis of the Immortal Flame and Cassie the Oracle. That advantage was worth maintaining for as long as possible.
He walked back to the group.
Sunny was already watching him when he returned, which Sunny seemed to do by default, and Quinn found it difficult to tell whether this was the shadow ability operating at low intensity or simply a habit of someone who had learned that watching carefully was cheaper than being surprised.
"Since we're traveling together," Sunny said, "should we share what abilities and Memories we have at our disposal?"
Quinn sat down. "Sure."
Sunny went first — brief, functional, enough to establish a working picture without offering more than necessary. He was doing the same thing Quinn was doing, which Quinn respected.
Then Sunny looked at him.
Quinn thought about how much to say. He thought about Cassie's ability, which he knew about from the source material, and about the fact that she had apparently already tried to read him and come up empty. He thought about the specific value of being underestimated in a group that was going to become very important very soon.
"My abilities," Quinn said, "are great for running away. And picking locks." He paused. "That's all."
Cassie described her foresight next — careful, qualified, honest about its limits in the way that people are honest about the limits of things they've learned not to rely on too heavily. Nephis described hers with the economy of someone whose abilities were self-evident to anyone who had seen her fight.
Quinn listened to all of it with the attentiveness of someone hearing it for the first time.
After that, they divided the watch into shifts with minimal discussion. The Forgotten Shore extended in every direction, dark and patient, full of things that moved in the hours between tides.
Quinn took the middle watch and spent most of it looking north.