Quinn stepped over the carcass and crouched beside it, pulling the axe from his belt.
Sunny and Nephis stopped walking and watched.
He worked with the focused efficiency of someone who had a specific destination in mind and intended to reach it without unnecessary steps. The carapace was dense — not impossible, but the kind of dense that required intention rather than force. He found the seams where the plates met, worked the axe blade into the gaps, and applied leverage rather than impact. In a few minutes the section he needed had separated enough to give him access to the interior.
He reached in with his hand.
The thing he extracted looked like a retina — the specific translucent, layered structure of optical tissue, larger than it should have been, carrying a faint iridescence that shifted as he turned it in the grey light. Mirrored Retina, or something close enough to it that the Uniqueness of Door would recognize the match. Whether the creature it had come from was technically a Mimic Spawn was a question Quinn filed in the category of things he would think about later when the answer had a practical application.
He tore a strip from the cloth of his makeshift pouch, wrapped the retina carefully, and tucked it back into the pouch against his hip.
Then he stood, nodded once at Sunny and Nephis, and started walking.
Sunny gathered the rope and touched Cassie's shoulder lightly, and she fell into step beside him. The shadow that Sunny had sent after the larger creature drifted back to him as they moved — the report arriving in the way his shadow communicated, spatial and directional rather than verbal. West. The creature had gone west, consistent with everything else on the shore that seemed to have an opinion about direction.
They found a sheltered formation of rock and coral where the wind came from only one angle and settled in for the midday rest with the comfortable efficiency of people who had been doing this long enough that the routine had formed itself.
Nephis found a flat section of stone facing the water, sat, and went still in the specific way that she went still when she was meditating — present in the body and somewhere else in the mind, her sword across her knees, her breathing slow and deliberate.
Quinn settled against a coral formation on the opposite side of the space, found a stick on the ground beside him, and began drawing in the dirt. Not the Door symbol this time. Something more technical — diagrams, measurements, the spatial relationships between ingredients and their interactions, working through the potion formula in the way that people work through complex problems when they need their hands to be doing something in order for their minds to function properly.
Cassie and Sunny sat between the two of them, close enough to share warmth.
Sunny lay back and looked at the sky. The sky offered its usual grey nothing in return.
After a while, Cassie spoke.
"Do you think we'll be able to return home?"
Sunny turned his head to look at her. She was sitting with her knees drawn up, her face angled slightly away from the direction his voice came from, a posture that had the quality of someone asking a question they have been carrying for a while and have finally decided the weight of carrying it is worse than the answer might be.
"Sure," Sunny said.
Cassie smiled — not a large smile, but a real one. "You really think so? Why?"
Sunny exhaled, the sound somewhere between a sigh and something more considered. He tilted his head in the direction of Nephis, a gesture that was instinctive and immediately useless given the circumstances. "Because of her," he said anyway. Then, after a moment: "Also, there's a man over there whose religion is an unknown god that can apparently turn people into some kind of worm. And then there's me." He paused. "I'm not someone who dies easily. I'd bet that you couldn't have found a better trio of Sleepers to escort you across the Dream Realm. If anyone can make it back, it's us. So yeah. I think our chances are pretty high."
Cassie giggled. The sound was startling in the specific way that unexpected warmth is startling — not alarming, just unanticipated against the grey backdrop of the shore.
"Aren't you a little full of yourself? You were second to last on the leaderboard."
Sunny shrugged with the practiced ease of someone who has considered this criticism and decided it doesn't apply. "Only because someone smart told me to keep a low profile. Otherwise I would have ranked higher."
He let a beat pass, then added: "Much higher. Six from last, at least."
The laughter that followed was genuine — clear and bright and entirely out of place on the Forgotten Shore, which was probably why it worked as well as it did. Sunny lay there and listened to it and felt something he hadn't felt since entering the Dream Realm, something small and warm and difficult to name precisely.
He realized, as it faded, that this was the first time he had heard Cassie laugh. At the Academy she had been quiet in the specific way of people who have learned that visibility has costs, her presence muted and careful. This was different. This was what she sounded like when she forgot to be careful for a moment.
It was worth noting.
Cassie's expression settled into something more wistful as the laughter faded. She turned her face slightly toward where Quinn sat, still drawing in the dirt, still working through whatever calculation occupied him.
"Do you think what Quinn said is real?" she asked quietly. "The Outer God. All of it. Because — none of it sounds like anything I've heard before. It sounds almost too large to be real."
Sunny said nothing.
He was thinking about the specific weight of the question, and also about the specific risk of engaging with it directly. Quinn had described a thing that could hear its own Honorific Name spoken aloud. Quinn had implied — without quite stating — that the mechanism worked across distances. Sunny was not a person who took unnecessary risks with information, and the possibility that speaking too freely about a divine entity within audible range of whatever medium it operated on was a risk he had absolutely no interest in accepting.
He stayed quiet, and Cassie, perceptive in the ways that mattered, let it go and moved on to ask about family instead, and Sunny talked about that, and the conversation found safer ground, and the afternoon passed.
When the light changed, Nephis rose from her meditation and looked at Sunny with the expectation of someone who had not forgotten what she had agreed to.
Sunny picked up the practice sword.
A thousand strikes. He performed them with the focused grimness of someone who understood that this was an investment and investments required consistent deposits. Nephis watched and corrected in her particular way — not constantly, but precisely, the adjustments arriving at exactly the moments when they would have the most structural impact.
When Sunny finished, Nephis turned to Quinn.
Quinn set down the stick, stood, and picked up the axe.
They practiced in the fading light — not the formal exercise of teacher and student but the rougher, more honest work of two people giving each other real resistance. Nephis tested the axe's range and timing against her sword with the methodical interest of someone learning a new variable. Quinn tested his footwork and his timing against the specific quality of her pressure, which was the kind of pressure that had opinions about whether you were taking it seriously.
He was hit several times in ways that were instructive.
Afterward they ate the last of the dried meat — the strips that had been rationed carefully over the past days, now reduced to the final portion — and passed the water bottle and settled into the watch rotation.
The night on the Forgotten Shore passed without incident. Cassie slept without waking in terror, which everyone silently noted and no one mentioned.
It was enough.