Sleep did not come to Thanatos gently as she dreamt of a hand on a windowsill warmed by afternoon sun, the smell of detergent drying in summer air, a convenience store chime somewhere in the evening, a friend leaning too far back in a chair and grinning as if nothing in the world had yet discovered cruelty, a bowl of instant noodles at midnight, and a younger version of her own voice calling from another room, still belonging to a girl whose future had not yet been torn open and infected by something vast enough to rewrite the definition of survival.
Then the dream shifted to an apartment door that stood open though no one had touched it. Beyond it was a corridor of black-veined flesh pulsing in place of walls. The floor dipped as if it was breathing. Somewhere deeper inside the dream, something wet dragged itself across tile with deliberate patience.
Thanatos turned in the dream and saw herself reflected in cracked glass.
Not silver-haired. Not gold-eyed. She was just a girl who was Human and afraid. Then a drop of black-gold liquid fell from above and struck the reflection between the eyes. Cracks raced through it. The face in the glass split open from the inside. Veins of luminous infection crawled through skin that had not been infected yet.
The girl in the reflection smiled before she ever had reason to. Then the dream changed again.
A train platform. Winter. Breath in the air. Gloves too thin for the cold. She was standing beside someone whose face she could never fully keep. Every time she tried to look directly at it, the features blurred, softened, vanished beneath a white static hiss. Yet the feeling remained: warmth beside her, easy and unearned, the kind of ordinary closeness that never knows how precious it is until time is finished with it.
The speaker overhead announced delays as snow gathered on the yellow line. The person beside her said something that made her laugh. But she could not hear the words anymore. Only the shape of the laughter that remained.
Then the station lights went out and the tracks below began to glow. The rails split down the middle like skin opening under a knife, and from the impossible depth beneath rose the first whisper of the zombie death strain. The station emptied in a blink. The person at her side was gone. Snow fell upward. The dark beneath the tracks widened into a mouth of lightless matter. She knew, with the blind conviction only dreams and prophecy possess, that if she looked down into it, she would never again belong entirely to one side of existence.
She looked anyway and awoke.
Thanatos surged upright on a rotting mattress laid over cracked concrete, breath tearing hard from her lungs. Cold sweat soaked the back of her shirt. Her pulse did not race like a human pulse did; it struck harder than that, slower and heavier, as if something inside her had to re-decide every beat. Her silver-white hair clung damply to her temples. For one raw second her hand shot toward her chest, checking not for injury but for absence for the impossible certainty of a blade, a wound, an opening that might still be there if dreams had enough authority.
There was nothing. Only the room and the cold.
The building around them had once been an apartment complex, or perhaps an office block, or perhaps several structures occupying the same coordinates without ever agreeing on what they had originally been. In this world, physics had been violated so comprehensively that architecture had begun imitating hallucination. Walls met at angles that could not be measured. Water crept upward along broken pillars and pooled on the ceiling like reflective mold. One window framed a dead gray sky. Another window in the same wall looked out beneath the building, showing an inverted street hanging under them like a city built on the underside of thought. Somewhere far below or above, a stairwell folded through itself every few seconds with a sound like paper bending underwater.
A lantern sat on an overturned crate nearby, its flame burning blue and casting light that moved in the wrong direction as the Founder was seated a short distance away on a chair missing one leg, held level only because the room had apparently chosen to spare that particular object from gravity's broader collapse. He had not moved toward her when she woke. He merely watched with one hand gripping the Spear of Destiny that rested as if he was standing guard for a door.
"You're finally awake," he said.
Thanatos dragged a hand down her face and let out a breath that almost became a laugh but failed somewhere in the middle.
"I have always been efficient with suffering."
The Founder said nothing to that. His gaze shifted briefly to the sweat on her brow, the tension still held in her shoulders, the minute instability in the fingers of the hand now resting across her knee.
Something in his expression sharpened by a degree.
"What did you dream of?"
Thanatos looked away from him and toward the slanted window where rain or what imitated rain in this place, was drifting upward from the street and vanishing into the clouds beneath the earth. For a moment she did not answer. When she did, her voice had lost its earlier edge.
"I dreamt of my past life. Or at least, herlife."
The room remained quiet around the words. Outside, an abandoned traffic signal flickered green into a sky that had no road. The Founder regarded her without interruption. Thanatos leaned back slightly, bracing one hand behind her on the mattress. There was an unusual stillness to her now.
"I dreamt of stupid things," she said. "A kitchen. Train platforms. Rain. And someone laughing near me. It was the kind of small life that never thinks of itself as precious until it's already been taken apart."
The Founder's expression did not soften, but it altered as she gave a short, humorless smile. He then spoke.
"Memory is cruel. It never bothers preserving the important explanations. It keeps the temperature of a room. The sound a spoon made against ceramic. The angle of sunlight on a table. It keeps enough to hurt, and not enough to return."
For several seconds neither of them spoke. Then Thanatos looked at him fully.
"If you could go back," she asked, "to the point where you were most happy... would you?"
The question sat in the room like something fragile and forbidden. The Founder lowered his eyes once, briefly, not in avoidance but in the manner of a man verifying the weight of an object before lifting it. He remembered his past of a warrior and husband and replied.
"When I was younger," he said at last, "I might have answered yes."
Thanatos waited as he continued.
"But happiness is rarely visible while one is inside it. We name it properly only after it is gone. To return would require not merely revisiting a time, but becoming again the version of oneself who had not yet been altered by what followed."
He glanced toward the window where the upside-down city drifted in silence.
"I do not believe I could do that honestly. Nor do I believe that man would recognize me as an improvement. Especially after the things I have done in my lifetime."
Thanatos watched him for a moment, then let out a small breath through her nose.
"That's a very Founder answer."
"Yet, a true one."
She tilted her head back, looking at the cracked ceiling where water pooled in a black mirror over exposed beams. For a moment the reflection above her showed not the room, but a starless ocean under winter sky. Then it was only water again.
"Maybe I'd still do it," she said. "Even knowing it would be dishonest. Just once. Just to stand there before everything became..."
She flexed her fingers, watching the tendons move beneath skin that had healed from far worse things than memory.
"...This..."
The Founder studied her, but he did not offer consolation. That was not his nature, and she would not have trusted it from him if he had. Instead, he asked.
"Would you remain there?"
Thanatos thought about that, but the answer came slower than most things did for her.
"No," she said finally. "I don't think I could."
The blue lantern crackled softly as somewhere in the building, a door on the ceiling opened and shut three times in a row. Thanatos rubbed the back of her neck and looked around the room properly, as though only now remembering where they were.
"Where is Moña?"
The Founder turned his head slightly toward the corridor beyond the half-collapsed wall. That corridor was longer than the building physically allowed. It bent left, then upward, then into a darkness threaded with floating shards of glass that never fell.
"She is ensuring there is no immediate threat in the surrounding area."
Then, after the faintest pause.
"...Anymore, that is."
Thanatos's brows lifted.
"That phrasing suggests there was one."
"Actually, there were several."
"How unfortunate for them."
"Profoundly."
Thanatos almost smiled at that. Then a new smell entered the room. It was a mixture of copper and salt.
Footsteps followed a second as the floating glass in the corridor shifted aside before the approaching presence without being told to. The darkness there seemed to thin, not because it feared what came through it, but because it had already lost the argument over whether it was allowed to remain.
There, Moña stepped through the opening in the wall.
She looked as she often did at first glance with her black hoodie, pale iridescent hair, bare legs beneath denim shorts, and a face too young for the age standing behind the eyes. But there was blood on her. It streaked one sleeve, marked the side of her neck, and darkened two fingers of the hand resting lightly against her hip.
It was not human blood, nor did it seem to belong to any beastly entity.
It carried a sheen that changed color when the blue lantern touched it turned black, then green, then colorless, then briefly the exact silver of moonlight seen at the bottom of deep water. One drop slid from her knuckle to the floor and when it struck the concrete, the stone beneath it forgot its texture and turned smooth as glass.
Thanatos looked at the blood and smiled faintly.
"That doesn't look normal."
"What the blood came from, wasn't," said Moña.
She stepped fully into the room as the air adjusted around her. There was a thin cut across her cheek already closing. Something like frost clung to the edge of her sleeve where the blood had touched it.
The Founder regarded her calmly.
"And?"
Moña wiped two fingers against a ragged section of wall. The blood there hissed once, then vanished into nothing as if erased by authority rather than absorbed by matter.
"Any potential threats," she said, "have been rendered nonexistent."
The phrase fell with such casual finality that the room seemed to accept it as a completed administrative detail. Thanatos let out a low whistle.
"Rendered nonexistent," she repeated. "You do have a gift for phrasing."
Moña looked at her.
"I am trying to be polite."
"That's you being polite?"
"Yes."
Thanatos smiled wider despite the remnants of the dream still cold in her skin.
"Good. I continue to approve of you."
Moña's eyes shifted to her more carefully then, catching the sweat still drying at her temple, the odd stillness she had not fully shed.
"It seems you were dreaming," Moña said.
Thanatos tilted her head.
"And you know that how?"
"There is a difference," Moña replied, "between the smell of fear and the smell of memory."
That shut the room quiet for a beat. Then Moña stepped closer as her gaze moved from Thanatos to the Founder and back again.
"Was it useful?" she asked.
Thanatos looked at her for a moment, then out the window at the broken city hanging under a lawless sky.
"No," she said. "Not remotely."
She leaned back on her hands and added, with the faintest trace of her usual sharpness returning,
"But it was mine."
Moña considered that, then gave one small nod as if recognizing the shape of a boundary she would not cross without invitation. The Founder rose from the unstable chair in a single smooth motion.
"Then we move soon," he said. "If Moña has cleared the area, there is no strategic value in remaining inside a compromised structure."
Thanatos exhaled slowly and swung her legs over the edge of the mattress.
"Fine," she said. "But next time we stop in a world where geometry has been strangled to death, I'd prefer one with less introspection."
Moña glanced once at the impossible windows, the inverted streets, the ceiling-water that held the wrong reflection of stars.
"I thought it had atmosphere."