Chương 303: epilogue - E.1

We woke to flesh — to electrical impulses crackling across the grey neurons inside the bones of our skull, to our heartbeat thudding and flexing behind the cage of our ribs, to muscles twitching and quivering against their anchors of sinew and tendon, to blood and bile and mucus and acid and chyme all pumping and flowing and gurgling through our innards — — and we inhaled a lungful of fluid. Warm, salty, thick as congealed jelly.

A mass of saline sludge slid past our lips and rushed down our throat, carrying a tide of silt and the taste of hot iron. I — me, us, we, nine-in-one and one-as-nine, as-yet-nameless in our vortex of stirring meat — was suspended in the centre of a bubble, surrounded on all sides by the pressure of this clinging jelly-mass against every inch of our skin.

Two arms, two legs, six tentacles, a torso; one head on one neck, two eyes and two ears, and all of it gripped in a liquid fist, at the core of a sphere made from glittering silver translucence. The light — argent brilliance so bright it burned my eyes even through the meter or more of thickly-pressing gel — fell from above in a radiant wave, trapped and twisted and turned by the refraction of the bubble.

Lower down came a smeared mess of other colours, blobs of pink, a mass of dark blue, copper and gold and distant rainbow shimmers, but those were pale before the silver tsunami. We thrashed our limbs, but the gel was so thick we could barely move. Our tentacles pressed outward and met a membrane, fleshy and taut, flaring with strange sensation where we touched, as if pressing against the inside of our own mouth with a wet tongue. We pushed and strained and stretched the membrane, but it did not break.

Our lungs were filling with salt and silt. We were drowning. This was somewhat metaphysically confusing, as one might imagine. The ocean depths of the abyss are only a metaphor, as I have gone to great lengths to stress, but those dark depths are my metaphor, and I clung to it even harder with these first stifled breaths of reality's open air.

Upon my first return from the abyss, after my first dive so very many months ago, my body had been engaged in reading a book, in the kitchen, at home, in the familiar surroundings of Number 12 Barnslow Drive; I had rejoined my physical vessel mid-sentence, shocked and dissociated and dysphoric beyond human knowledge, with lost time and lost connection and more than a little self-disgust at this ragged bag of meat drenched in chemicals and studded with bits of calcified mineral.

But this time the transition was smooth — from the waters of the abyss to the unimpeded atmosphere of reality. Except the 'open air' was full of salty gunk. My body and all nine of us within it — lesser or greater, as we were, coiled about each other in a protective ball, never to be parted again — attempted to breathe anyway, imposing the metaphors of the abyss onto atoms-and-light reality. This did not go well, as our lungs filled with gunk and the gills — (gills? We filed that away for later) — which lined our neck and our ribs failed to extract anything from the glittering gel which pressed us tight. Our trilobe bioreactor stuttered to life down in our belly, guttered briefly, then blazed like a miniature sun inside our flesh, assuming responsibility to keep us from asphyxiating. Panic was swift and terrible. All six of our tentacles sprouted barbed hooks and layers of serrated blade; we lashed out, slashing and tearing and hacking at the fleshy membrane.

"Mmmmmmm!" we screamed into the thick jelly of reality's womb, a choked and muffled noise, made with whatever pocket of air was left at the bottom of our lungs. Breaking that fleshy membrane hurt, like tearing through our own skin. But then we tore a slit, and the whole thing burst open. The spheroid bubble of salty fluid collapsed as the membrane parted under the assault of our tentacles.

We felt dozens of tiny fibres and feather-soft umbilicals rip away from all across our body, slithering out of orifices and peeling off our skin. We felt no sense of bodily invasion, no impression that we had been violated, only a parting from some cast-off piece of our own body. We felt our trilobe bioreactor ramp down an extra process it had been supporting, leaving behind this layer of ourselves as it fell away.

The bubble collapsed with a wet slap of fleshy membrane, like a dozen melons dropped onto a concrete floor; a wave of fluid fell after it, sluicing outward, steaming in the true air of reality, glittering and glinting in the blazing silver light. And there we were — naked, wild, covered in our own amniotic vitreous humour, lashing the air with half a dozen tentacles, vomiting up a wave of gunk, coughing and hacking as we cleared our lungs and flared our gills to unstick their surfaces. We were back.

We were embodied, as meat and mass. We were a chemical factory of dubious function and short life, filled with salt-water flows and stinking effluence, wrapped in flaking proteins, drooling and wet and slick and—"Heather!" Ah, our name? That was the only word I could pick out from the whirling chaos all around our senses — my name, clear and clean from a voice I knew so well, a voice that had called me back to flesh once before.

But the cacophony was too great; hooting apes all yapping over each other, alien paws and meat-clubs reaching for me, the glug and slosh and crackle of my own flesh, the shivering cold gel rapidly drying on my skin, the hiss and pop of fire and the creaking growth of plants, the dust in the air, the single silvered note of light pouring from the sky, all whirling and snapping and crying out with noises I could not interpret. Because I was fresh from the abyss, and flesh did not yet make much sense.

But still we remembered the first time we'd done this, as a distant echo, as if in a dream. We remembered the horrible hooting apes were our friends. We recalled the stinking chemical factory was our own body. We remembered with some embarrassment how close we had come to pulling out our own eyeballs, driven by the sheer wrongness of the kitchen of Number 12 Barnslow Drive. We remembered how alien it had all felt, and how so very wrong we were. This time we came a little better prepared.

We opened our mouth as wide as it would go — click-click-click went our jaw, unhinging as it went. And then we hissed at the top of our freshly cleared lungs. Hiiiiiiiisssssssssss! The apes stopped hooting. The fire eased down. The plants turned their petals away. We shivered amid a puddle of our own fluids on the slick, slippery, bone-cold floor. But the silver light did not abate. For one second, it was just me — and I and we and us — and our body.

We knew that if we turned our eyes down and looked at our hands, we risked that same dislocation and dysphoria as the first time we had returned from the absolute clarity of the abyss. We knew that to examine ourselves was to go through the horror of physical imperfection all over again. We knew the price, and the truth, and the result. But we had chosen to return. We had chosen to come back. We wanted to be a person again, not just a memory of somewhere else.

We had to embrace our body, not merely inhabit this sheath of flesh. We picked a direction, the first one which came to our blurred and tear-streaked sight, one free of apes and animals. We picked up our feet, skidding and slipping and sliding on the hard white ground. We broke into a wild, headlong, surging sprint.

My legs almost didn't make it, launching me the first few unsteady steps across the hard white surface, with claws clicking as if on concrete; but then we passed the edge of that artificial floor and shot out onto soft soil and the sensation of grass beneath our feet. Free and clear, we ran like we were made of springs and pistons. We sprinted with eyes wide, streaming with tears.

The wind chilled our flesh beneath the coating of sticky gel, dragging air across the gasping flaps of our gills, billowing the thick, wing-like membrane which hung from our shoulders and upper back. We turned our head to spit out the last of the amniotic gel, then filled our lungs with a ripping breath of fresh air, cool and crisp and real, purging the remnants of our birth shell.

All six tentacles gathered behind to throw us forward, slamming the ground and kicking us upward; we soared through the air, weightless for a second, before crashing to the soil once again, legs whirling as we ran, and ran, and ran, and ran.

We sprinted until our legs were screaming and our throat was sore, until our vision was clear and our body sang, lungs heaving for breath, muscles quivering with effort, the flaky remnants of amniotic gel purged by sweat and steam rising off our skin beneath the silver sunlight. When we could go no further, we stumbled to a halt. And only then — half-bent with clawed hands clutching my scaly knees, with tentacles reaching down to brace my shaking frame against the ground — only then did I realise who was watching.

Because I looked up, into a sea of silver." … Eileen?" I croaked. My voice did not sound remotely human, a scratchy warble well suited to something dredged up off the ocean floor. But it didn't matter, because I wasn't speaking to a human. The Eye was open. Not by a crack, not just a sliver of sight between two mountain-range ridges of furrowed black, but wide open. The mountains of her lid-lip had retreated all the way to the rim of the sky, to form a narrow margin of wrinkled black at the edge of the firmament.

The sky was the Eye and the Eye was the sky, from horizon to horizon — a sea of churning silver light, like the surface of a star made from mercury and moon dust. Little eddies and swirls crossed her unthinkable depths, each larger than a dozen Earths, tides and troughs and swells and surges carried on currents of argent fluid. Illumination poured from the revelation of her innards, falling upon the world beneath in languid waves of bone-deep warmth. I reached up toward her.

That silver light caressed the back of my own scaled and furred hand, glinting on the sharp black of my claws, soaking into my skin. And I did not burn. Several full minutes passed before I could master my own awe and lower my hand. I cradled the clawed paw against my chest, amazed it was not reduced to subatomic particles. Was this still the dream? Had we somehow come full circle, and exited the abyss right back into the dream-realm of Cygnet Asylum, all over again?

I lowered my eyes along with my hand, and discovered that I was sorely mistaken. We were in Wonderland, as it had never been before. A flat plane stretched off in all directions — the inner surface of a bowl, cupped by a distant ring of gargantuan mountains. The mountain tips were dusted with snow — bright and gleaming with a rainbow sheen of prismatic colours, as if made of oil rather than frozen water.

The slopes of the mountains were marked with deep ruts, roads and tracks leading over their edges and down the other side, into a beyond that had not existed before, when this dimension had been folded into a crushed ball by the weight and heat and pressure of Eileen's observation. At the foot of the mountains, the great ring of watching titans had been broken.

Where once had stood a shoulder-to-shoulder phalanx of leviathan gazes drawn upward toward the magnetic power of the closed Eye, now less than a third of those bound giants remained, and those few were uncaged from their eternity of enforced rapture.

A few still gazed upward into the sea of revealed silver, but no longer in poses of rapt attention; the ones who had chosen to stay lay upon the valley floor in easy repose, or slept with their own eyes closed, dozing upon their forepaws like giant cats, or closed up inside turtle-shells the size of continents, or floated in the air, paying attention to nothing.

Some of them had moved — a few sat among the mountains themselves now, but most had simply left, perhaps gone past the mountain-border of Wonderland, heading for other places, for other dimensions, for the sockets of reality from which they had once been torn. They had been the patients, the ones we had liberated in Cygnet. Among the titans and upon the lower slopes of the mountains, I was surprised to see a few familiar white grub-shapes, so far away they were like grains of rice to even my inhuman eyes.

Caterpillars! Lozzie's Caterpillars, exploring the contours of the transformed landscape, just as they had explored the quiet plains of Camelot. Most of them were up on the mountains themselves, but a few were trundling across the backs and hides of the resting titans, like smaller creatures exploring the fur and shells of larger friends. A smaller number of Caterpillars were exploring the floor of the basin, among the blossoming ruins of Wonderland.

Where once had stood only the scorched and scarred stubs of so many walls, those same remnants of a long-burned world were now covered with the beginnings of vegetation. Creeping vines blanketed the surfaces, while fluffy mosses and spiralled lichens sprouted in the gaps between; clusters of bulbous stalks like flowering fungi reached toward the sky, rooted atop the highest points of the ruins, while fuzzy mats of thickened bulbs spread in the shadowed hollows beneath.

None of it was green, not like Earth's vegetation; the plants of Wonderland were a riot of burnished brass and shiny copper, deep-sea blues and glimmering blacks, all suited to soak up energy from that omnipresent silver light pouring from Eileen's open lid.

Great jellyfish creatures bobbed and floated in the air — the very same floaters that I had witnessed in Wonderland before, no longer mist-wreathed specks of wrinkled flesh, but bloated masses the same colours as the plant life, coruscating orbs of metallic gold and bronze, highlighted in black and blue, swimming through the thickened upper air. Smaller forms scurried and scuttled among the lower ruins, the resurrected forms of the sad, burned-out remains I had spotted in the past.

Glimmering compound eyes peered out at me from around a dozen ruined walls, as mandible jaws chewed on scraps of dead vine, their skin all the colours of the deep sea and the black of space, highlighted with gold and bronze, soaking in that silver radiance. There was even grass beneath my feet, coloured a deep, dark, twilight blue, with patches of bright copper here and there among the billions of blades.

Holding my breath as if my intrusion might burst this bubble-dream, I crouched down and sank my fingers into the grass. It was real. Soft and light and feathery against my palm. The grass was sprouting directly up from the bed of ancient ash which coated Wonderland's surface. I curled my black claws into the ash itself, careful not to dig up any blades of grass. The silver light caught the flakes and motes of dust as they trickled through my fingers. This world, Wonderland, had died a long time ago.

Eileen's arrival had burned it beyond recovery. But now it might grow again, into something new. Footsteps approached my rear, but not with any stealth. We carefully dusted the ashes off our hand, then stood up and turned around. We expected to see one of the apes — one of our friends, we reminded ourselves — but instead a phantasm of fire and curled horns and cloven hooves was striding toward us across the deep blue grass.

We blinked several times, trying to reconcile reality with the lingering truth of our abyssal perceptions. Bright red hair, the colour of living flame, falling in a wave. Strong, sleek, athletic muscle, wrapped in a pair of jeans and a plain white t-shirt, arms loose and free at her sides. Eyes with horizontal pupils, backlit by firelight glow. Angular face. Easy smile. Confident gait. The figure didn't have horns or cloven hooves, of course, not literally. But that was what I saw.

She drew to a halt about fifteen feet away. The short walk had dirtied her perfect white trainers with ash from beneath Wonderland's bed of grass. She raised a fire-red eyebrow — and also raised a bag of lemons in one hand." … Taika," I croaked. Taika nodded.

"The one and only, and making a hell of a house call. Hey there, calamari. You've been down there a long time." Taika's words didn't match the motion of her lips. Her voice was like the crackling of logs in a bonfire, just as heavily accented as I expected, a mixture smeared across Eastern Europe and beyond, but it was also not her actual voice. My ears heard the flapping of meat and the whistle of air, but Taika could speak truth, directly into my head, as a fellow returnee from the abyss.

"Yes," I said.

"But I'm back now." Taika raised her eyebrows.

"You sure about that? You wanna try telling me your own name?" I let out a low, soft hiss, halfway to a warning.

"I'm not stupid. I know I'm disoriented. It's taking all my willpower to hold myself together like this. Why do you think I ran off? I had to … embrace my body. Be my body." Taika shrugged.

"Squids get spooked so easy. Come on, calamari. Say your own name."

"I'm not going to perform for you. I'll recover in my own … time …" Taika reached into the bag of lemons. It wasn't anything special, just a mesh fruit bag from Tesco; the sight of that familiar supermarket name against the backdrop of Wonderland in bloom, held in Taika's fire-wreathed paw, sent my mind whirling with fresh alienation. What was real, England or Wonderland? Then Taika pulled out a lemon, tossed it into the air, and caught it again.

"Say your own name and you get a lemon," she said. My mouth watered, saliva glands tingling in the back of my throat. We felt every barbed hook and little spike on all six of our tentacles flex with sudden tension. The gill slits on our neck and down the sides of our chest flared and quivered. Our stomach rumbled. Our bioreactor ached for the sour taste of lemon juice. We were very, very, very hungry. We hissed through a mouth full of drool.

Several loops of sticky saliva slipped through our razor-sharp teeth and dripped onto the dark grass at our feet.

"Say your own name," Taika repeated.

"Come on, calamari. Work with me here, girl. Stop drooling and say your name." We wiped the saliva from our chin, slurping back the rest. We opened our mouth and hesitated; the name was like a handhold we could not quite grasp, slippery and slick beneath our grip. We scrabbled, bringing together disparate parts of ourselves. Six Abyssals and three Others all lifted together, all at once.

"He— hea … Heath— Heather," I forced the sounds out of my throat — then let out a great shuddering sigh as identity fell across me like a weighted blanket.

"Heather. Heather. Heather Lavinia Morell. Heather. That's us." Taika grinned.

"Well done, calamari. Or 'calamaris'? Is that how you English pluralise that word?"

"My lemon, please?" I held out a clawed hand, grasping at the air.

"Catch." Taika tossed me the lemon. I snatched it out of the air with both hands and couldn't wait long enough to rip through the peel; I bit directly into the waxy outer layer, teeth sinking into the sour flesh beneath. The tang of lemon juice exploded into my mouth, sharp and clean and clear, slipping down my throat like liquid sunlight. I sucked at the fruit, tearing it open, pulling the flesh out, gnawing and chewing and swallowing. I ate the whole thing, skin and all. I stuck both hands out.

"Another. Please." Taika was laughing.

"Hooooooly shit, calamari. I don't think I've ever seen anybody eat a lemon with the peel on before. And I've seen some weird eating habits in the dark corners of the Earth, trust me on that one."

"Just give me another lemon," I croaked, flexing my claws.

"I need— I want— it feels—""Bringing you back around, right," Taika said.

"Food's always a good trick for that. At least in the cases I've known. Here." She pulled out another lemon.

"But first, tell me where we are—""Wonderland. Lemon. Now!" Taika threw me a second lemon. That time I had enough self-control to shred the peel with my tentacles, dropping it to the ground; I figured that the newborn plant life of Wonderland could use all the help it could get, a little extra fertiliser would go a long way. I ate the flesh itself in three quick bites, down the hatch and no leftovers.

Taika didn't need prompting for the third, or forth, or fifth lemons, she fed me like a beast on the other side of a zoo barrier. When she moved to toss me a sixth, I waved a tentacle, shaking my head.

"All done?" she asked.

"You full?"

"Fish," I grunted.

"I need … fish? Soy sauce? Or meat, maybe. Or just …

""No can do, calamari. We ain't going camping out here. You want a meal, you're gonna have to dial this down a bit, and come on back."

"Excuse me? Dial what down?" Taika gestured at my body.

"Don't get me wrong, you're a hell of a sight, I'm impressed. But you'll bite right through your cutlery and put half a dozen holes through any kitchen table. Ease down, girl." The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. We knew what we would see when we looked down at ourselves, but we did it anyway, because we needed to feel it. Homo abyssus, in the flesh. Our flesh.

My skin was a flowing riot of peach-pink blush and void-dark shadow, backed by subtle layers of chromatophore light, clothed in patches of elegant scale and bands of thick fur. My muscles were like butter, shifting beneath my skin in a way I had never experienced before. My fingertips were claws, black and sharp and curled; my feet were the same, clawed and elegant, digging into the soil with every step.

My tentacles were as they had always been, strong and flexible and strobing with rainbow bioluminescence, currently studded with rows of spikes and little hooks and barbed swivel-joints. A long tail lashed behind me, pointed at the tip, thick at the base. A familiar yellow membrane hung from my shoulders, attached down my back, halfway between wings and a cloak. I felt teeth sharp as razors in my mouth, and the flesh somehow immune to being bitten.

My tongue unrolled from my head, almost twelve inches long before I whipped it back in. My hair was floating like seaweed in slow currents. Oddly enough, the lines of the Fractal were still visible on my left forearm. Some things never changed.

"But I'm … I'm supposed to be like this," I said to Taika.

"I feel like … me." The flame goat from the pits of hell laughed again, but her smile was genuine.

"Sure you are, calamari. But you need to learn to put the claws away. And everything else, if you're going to set foot back on Earth ever again." A pang of horror and rejection flared in my chest. I was finally what I was supposed to have been born as, all along; I had been this way for all of a few minutes, and Taika was telling me to go back? My lips peeled away from my teeth in a rising hiss.

"Ah!" Taika held a hand out.

"Come on, calamari. You think I stay lit all the time?" My hiss died away.

"Huh? S-sorry?" Taika sighed and clicked her fingers; the impression of flame and hooves and big black curling horns died away, like a fire going out. A moment later Taika was just Taika, a rather tall woman with striking red hair and impossible eyes.

"I don't stay lit all the time, calamari," she repeated.

"If I did, no more Earthly pleasures for me, hey. Couldn't set foot in a building without burning it down. Couldn't get all up in some nice friend without causing some very nasty third-degree cooch—""Yes, yes! Fine!" I hissed softly.

"I … I get it."

"Do you?" Taika waited, eyebrows raised.

"I …" I looked at my claws, at my fur, my scales, my everything. Me. My friends were waiting for me. I couldn't hug them with spikes and toxins. I had to put my claws away."'Cos this is the moment you make the decision," Taika was blathering on.

"You can accept that sometimes you have to turn it on and off, or you can walk out there, beyond those mountains." She nodded past my shoulders.

"And—""I made that decision a long time ago, thank you very much. Save me the preaching. That's not what I need." And with that — and a huff and a tut and a little glare at Taika for being so wise and right and so very annoying — I ramped down my bioreactor and folded away the dangerous parts of my abyssal blessings. I smoothed out my tentacles, reabsorbing the barbs and spikes, so they were simple lengths of strong muscle once again. I withdrew the claws on my fingers and reshaped my feet back into human form.

I tidied up the mess of biotoxins and paralytics and everything else which shouldn't have been on the surface of my skin. I clacked my teeth until they withdrew into my gums; hard to kiss anybody when you might bite through somebody else's tongue. I kept the gently strobing chromatophores, most of the scales and the fur, the peach-bright sunrise and night-dark bloom on my flesh. That couldn't hurt anybody, unlike the spikes and barbs. The rest of it lurked just beneath my skin, hidden for now, but not gone.

Never gone, never again. Taika nodded.

"There you are, calamari. Well done. You'd probably still turn heads on a Sharrowford street — I know what you English are like, you stare at anything and everything as if it's grown wings. But you'd probably not get a second glance at an anime convention." I sighed at her.

"That's not a compliment. At least, I don't think it is?" Taika smirked.

"It's totally a compliment. You should get your ass to Comiket one year. You'd probably get a dozen people asking to take your photo. Squid-monster girl, caught on tape. You'd be a real hit online."

"No thank you," I muttered. I had only the vaguest idea what Taika was going on about — and no idea what 'Comiket' was; I would learn the answer to that one later, from a rather reluctant Evelyn. Instead I straightened up, flexed my tentacles, and looked Taika right in the eyes.

"My friends sent you after me when I ran, didn't they?" Taika nodded. When she spoke again, the teasing amusement had left her voice.

"Sure did."

"Because we're alike, aren't we? Both back from the abyss." Taika smiled gently.

"Because I know what it's like, yeah. And they don't, even if they try." Then she raised her eyebrows and glanced back over her shoulder.

"Well, except those cactus girls, or whatever they are. But they ain't human. Different frame of reference." She turned back to me and shook her head.

"You've made some strange friends, calamari."

"The … Twins? Zalu and Xiyu? You've met them?"

"In passing. Your little friend in the fancy poncho has to do all the translating, though. Don't worry about that right now, calamari. You focus on you. You're still raw."

"I'm fine," I said. Taika laughed.

"No you ain't. I can see you ain't." I sighed.

"Yes, but I'm trying to keep a handle on it, thank you. I'm …

'keeping my shit together', as Raine might say. Pardon my language." Taika raised an eyebrow.

"That counts as bad language for you? Shit?"

"Shush." She waved the concern away.

"Whatever. Anyway, you can stand here and stretch for as long as you need. Walk in circles, take a squat piss, anything you like. I'll turn away if you want. Your friends are waiting." She nodded back behind her.

"But they're not going anywhere. Can't say I want to hang out beyond reality for much longer either, but I'll keep. Take a moment to really come back, okay? And don't try to bullshit me again. I know what it's like, remember?" The mention of my friends — my family, my anchors — stirred something tense and knotted within my chest, like a muscle gone sore and hard from clenching for far too long. The sensation began to uncurl, filling me with need.

"No," I said.

"No, I … I don't want to wait. I want to see them. As soon as possible. I can walk, I can move, I'm fine." I took a step forward.

"Let's go." Taika shrugged.

"Sure thing, calamari. Let's get you back where you belong." Taika turned and led the way back across the blue-and-copper grasses of this new and verdant Wonderland, back the way I'd sprinted. I was a little surprised to see how far I'd run — hundreds of meters in what had felt like only a few moments. Time had not yet completely resumed normal function for me, upon my exit from the abyss.

In truth I was far from 'okay'; I knew I would be fine, given time and rest and familiar surroundings, but as I followed Taika's heels across Wonderland, I still felt dislocated and disoriented. Was this really our body, or merely a vessel we might leave behind at any moment? Was this transformed landscape a real place, or just another expression of abyssal perfection, warped by the lenses of my own eyes? Were we — us nine in one body — truly reunited?

We had so much to discuss internally, and no time in which to do so, not right then. Instead I focused on the brush and tickle of grass against my bare feet, on the sensation of my hair — now lying flat again — as I ran a hand through it and raked it back out of my face. I tried to concentrate on the gentle breeze against my front, on the strangely familiar scent of citrus in the air, on the glint of silver light from up ahead.

Anchoring myself in the physical was easier than upon my first return from the abyss, but I still had to exert conscious effort to stop my mind wandering in fixation; if left unattended, my eyes would follow a single dust mote, counting every sister and twin to that one, knowing that the whole world was nothing but these motes of atomic definition and I was trapped within the same net, forced into a shape and a single form and I should be swimming free and— And when that happened, I glanced down at myself again.

Homo abyssus was better than anything else I had ever been, no matter how much of it lay tucked away beneath my surface.

"Ah! Oh, um …" But then I realised, as we came to inhabit my body more and more firmly — I was stark naked. Nudity had not mattered a few moments earlier. It barely mattered now; I had spent a second eternity in the abyss, what did a little full-frontal flash matter to us? But a light blush rose to my cheeks. That was more like it, more ourselves again. The fact that Taika had been getting the full unintended Heather experience made us squirm with mortified self-consciousness.

We gently tugged the edges of our yellow membrane around our front, like a well-fitting cloak, so we weren't giving the whole of Wonderland front-row seats to our unmentionable parts.

"Wondered when you were gonna put some clothes on," Taika muttered as she led me onward.

"Oh, do shut up," I hissed back.

"But, um. Thank you, Taika. I was rude before. Thank you."

"Hm? What for?"

"For coming back for me. This time." Taika pulled an awkward smile and wiggled her eyebrows, but she didn't look at me; was she incapable of admitting when she'd done some good? Instead she raised a hand and waved at what waited ahead of us. Spread out across what was once the topographical dead centre point of Wonderland, directly beneath the heart of Eileen's gaze, was the massive plate of shaped and fused Caterpillar carapace which had formed the canvas for the Invisus Oculus.

The plate had been broken into four neat quarters, the edges of the quarters burned and melted as if by a cutting torch, perhaps provided by one of the Caterpillars themselves. On one of the far quarters stood the gateway back to Camelot — still open, the gateway surface shimmering with Camelot's purple light upon a background of additional Caterpillar carapace. I could just about spot a sliver of wall from Camelot castle, and a hint of Camelot's yellow grasses, on the far side of that portal.

On the closest quarter of what had once been the Invisus Oculus, a small group of familiar faces and figures were gathered at the edge of the plate. To their collective right, a long shallow pit had been cut into the ashen earth of Wonderland itself, filled with shining silver liquid, still and placid as a mirror, currently reflecting the silver light which poured from the Eye. A few hands rose and waved to us. A strange knot twisted and turned inside my chest. My throat threatened to close up.

My feet twitched against the grass.

"Run if you gotta, calamari," Taika murmured.

"I'll catch you up." I didn't need permission. I picked up my feet and sprinted back to my friends, my family, my pack. One familiar figure ran forward to meet me — wispy blonde hair flying out behind her, pentacolour poncho in pastel pink and blue whipping at her sides, a huge grin spread across her goofy face.

"Heathy!" Lozzie slammed into me like a little wrecking ball; without my tentacles to brace her, I would have gone flying. I caught her in a hug, holding on hard, spinning around in dizzying circles for a moment. My fingers dug into her back, my front pressed against her, my nose filled with the familiar scent of another person, another monkey, another earthly ape of flesh and blood and bone. We broke the hug after what seemed like an eternity.

Lozzie smiled back at me, breathless and biting her lip, a strangely manic light in her eyes, as if she had retained something from the depths of Cygnet.

"Heathy! You're home!"

"Home … y-yeah …" My voice emerged with some difficulty — because now I wasn't talking to another abyssal returnee. I had to use human words and human sounds. I cleared my throat several times, unknotting the inhuman mass inside my neck. When I spoke again, the words were clear.

"I'm … I'm back." A second voice called out, grumpy with exhaustion and stress: "Lozzie? Lozzie, is she lucid? Is she there? For pity's sake, is she—""The swimmer awakes," sounded a voice like a little silver bell.

"Surfaced," said another, a little stiff.

"Hm. No. I will need to work on that one. A poor pun."

"A sterling effort, though," said yet another voice.

"Keep trying, I suggest."

"Hey. Hey! Squid-girl! Heather!" I pulled myself together and cast my eyes toward the rest of my welcome party. Raine stood at the very edge of the carapace plate, almost within arm's length. She was dressed in jeans and boots and a leather jacket, as if we were on the streets of Sharrowford, back in England, rather than out beyond the walls of reality. Her chestnut brown hair was swept back from her forehead, her lips curled into a beaming grin, the same grin that had won my heart.

She had a machete strapped to her right thigh, and a hand outstretched toward me. Behind Raine was quite a scene. There was Evelyn — my Evee, no longer beset by the horrific malnutrition of the Cygnet nightmare, restored to her plump health and hearty looks, though she wore a most thunderous frown. She was propped up in an armchair, a full-blown cushions-and-footrest thing, with both legs very much present beneath a long skirt.

Her hair was tied up in a ponytail, her body was wrapped in a pale ribbed sweater, and she looked about ready to either scream at me or sleep for twelve hours — exhausted beyond words. Praem was at Evee's side — restored to her maid uniform, prim and proper, straight-backed and serious, milk-white eyes greeting me in knowing silence. She stood ready with a bottle of water, a thermos of something stronger, and presumably even more than that, carried in the bag which hung from her arm.

Seven-Shades-of-Sunlight was also perched on the arm of Evee's chair, in the mask of the Yellow Princess, with a gentle hand on Evee's back, as if to support her; that surprised and delighted me. In front of Evee was a massive magic circle, cut into the soil of Wonderland itself, encompassing the shallow silver pool which lay beyond the lip of the carapace-plate.

The circle was like no magical construct I'd witnessed before — it was not merely a flat design, but served as a foundation for a framework made of wood, a pyramid shape of old beams. I had no idea what to make of that. Behind Evee — opposite the magical circle — was a big mess of pink flesh and amniotic fluids, still steaming. I knew exactly what to make of that. The mess was mine, the layers of bubble-womb I had extruded for my transition back into my own flesh. My own placental leftovers.

Further back was a sight I had not expected to see again, at least not so soon after the nightmare of Cygnet. Standing (or 'sitting'?) at a polite distance from the magic circle and the pool of silver were a pair of what could have been mistaken for alien barrel-cacti, if cacti came in a mass of colours other than green and were tipped with fractal arms and starfish heads.

The Twins — Zalu and Xiyu, in their real bodies, as they had briefly appeared during the Cygnet dream — were stood upright, side-by-side, which I assume was their biological equivalent of sitting down. A pair of their tentacle-limbs were entwined, which I think meant they were holding hands. They were both very still and completely quiet, moving only the little globular eyes on stalks at the tips of their starfish-shaped heads. Probably trying not to spook the apes.

Standing on the other side of my afterbirth mess was a figure even more shocking, one I had half-accepted I would never see again. Dark blonde hair fell in a long mane down the back of a laboratory coat. Bright pink eyes the colour of sunlight on coral peered out from an uncreased face, skin a light and dusky brown. Hands in her pockets, dressed in jeans and a coffee-coloured ribbed sweater, she looked at me as if no time had passed at all. Eileen. In the flesh. How? I couldn't even voice the question.

Hiding half behind Eileen was a figure I'd never seen before — a young teenage girl with more than a passing resemblance to Eileen herself, with the same burning pink eyes and blonde hair and light brown skin. Unlike Eileen she looked wide-eyed with anxiety, peering out at me as if I was very scary indeed. I didn't have the sense of mind to ask who that was, because I couldn't help but notice that not everybody was present. My mouth opened with a wet click, panic ratcheting upward in my chest.

"Where's—""Everybody's fine," Raine said before we could even ask the question.

"Heather. Heather, hey, sweetheart, love. Look at me. Look at my eyes. There you go. You see me, yeah? You see me now? Just breathe, Heather. Just breathe."

"I … yes, Raine. But where—""Everybody is fine," Raine repeated, almost laughing.

"It's just that everybody isn't here right now. I promise you, Heather. Everyone who came with us, they all got out. Everything's okay. Just focus on you right now. I promise you. It's okay." I nodded, trying to swallow the dozens of questions swirling in my mind. As if being passed from hand to hand, Lozzie let go of me and Raine reached out. I fell into Raine's embrace, hungry for her touch in a way I hadn't realised until we'd completed the circuit of our bodies.

I clung to Raine for far too long, digging fingers into her back, almost gnawing on her shoulder, inhaling the hot scent of her skin and the familiar smell of her hair. She rubbed my back, cooing and purring and calling me all sorts of things — her squid-girl, her good girl, her sweet thing from the other side of reality. She told me 'well done' for coming home, she told me she loved me, she told me how good it was to see me.

I leaned into her until my thoughts began to coalesce, and only straightened back up when Raine herself loosened her grip.

"I love you too, Raine," I said, speaking to myself as much as to everyone else.

"But why isn't everyone—" Evelyn snapped: "Because it's four o'clock in the fucking morning, Heather! Because—" She paused and flinched, eyes going wide, flailing for Praem with one hand.

"Oh fuck me, I'm going to be sick again. Praem, Praem—" Praem was there with a bucket. Sevens resumed rubbing Evelyn's back. Evee did not vomit, but she did retch and heave for breath, then sigh heavily before she resumed speaking.

"Because it's four in the morning, Heather. Stop freaking out about that." Lozzie chirped, "Yeah, Tenns was here, but she's sleeping now!" Taika finally caught up and joined the edge of our group. She said, "And Miss January Martense won't share a dimension with me, let alone a room. Can't imagine why." Lozzie shot her a naughty grin. Raine filled in the rest: "Twil's at home. She did three days vigil non-stop, wanted to be here, but Evee forced her to take a break.

We didn't know how much longer you'd be, on your way back. Zheng's doing the same thing she always does when you're not here — running around in the woods, with Grinny too, now. She said she has perfect confidence in you and we're all worrying over nothing. The Knights are back in Camelot. Evee's grandmother, the fox, I mean, she slipped off as soon as everything ended, back into the streets. Everyone is in one piece, Heather. I promise." I blinked, overwhelmed. That couldn't possibly be everyone, could it?

I felt as if something was missing. What about all the patients? What about the nurses? What about Horror? And Cygnet, and—"Professor Stout?" I croaked, settling on one.

"And— and the others, everybody! Horror!" Raine raised her eyebrows.

"Horror was part of you, Heather."

"Yes, maybe not her then, but …

""As for the old professor we met, well." Raine nodded toward the impossible figure of Eileen.

"Better ask her." I turned my gaze to Eileen, still speechless at her mere presence.

"Stout?" Eileen echoed. She looked upward for a moment, into the sky-spanning silver sea of her own gaze.

"He is hardly that short. But he is swimming, within. He has let me know that he will be some time yet, while he decides the way to go. Up or down." Her pink eyes returned to me.

"As for the others, most have departed for parts better known." Eileen raised a hand and gestured out at the ragged ring of watching titans.

"Some have chosen to remain. All are free."

"The patients, from … Cygnet, I don't …

""The hospital still exists," Eileen said, and pointed upward.

"Within. But it is no longer a hospital. Which raises a question. What will it be now? Those who were once patients are now forced to show a little patience, while it is built, here. I predict the project may take me some time. I'm … rusted." I almost laughed. Raine let me go and I tottered over to Eileen, almost bashing her with my head as I hugged her, hard and tight, to prove to myself that she was really here. She hugged me back, like the mother she always should have been.

"How are you even here?" I said as I pulled away.

"How are you … real?" Then I noticed the mini-Eileen, hiding behind her, scowling at me with a cocktail of curiosity and fear. Eileen said, "I am, despite my loss of a job, still a very skilled mathematician." She raised a hand and flexed her fingers.

"This was simple. She was harder." She indicated the nervous girl behind her. I stepped back to give the child some room. After a moment, she peered out around Eileen's side again.

"Who …?"

"I promised I would take the puppet and make her a real person," said Eileen.

"I have committed this promise to flesh. Say hello to my biological daughter." I couldn't believe my eyes, staring at—"Another sister?" I said, almost coughing. Raine cleared her throat gently.

"She's a bit shy." Lozzie chirped: "Not to me! She's lovely! Rainey is tooooooo scary." I crouched down, to bring myself to eye-level with this strangely familiar girl. She resembled Eileen, like daughter to mother. She had her mother's face and eyes. Somebody — Eileen? — had dressed her in a long skirt and a thick, comfy, baggy sweater. She looked perhaps twelve or thirteen years old, but was that literal, or merely a representation of an abstract process?

"Hello," I said.

"I'm Heather. What's your name?"

"She has not chosen a name yet," said Eileen.

"This is vexing, and yet also, delight. Perhaps you can help her." Mini-Eileen stared at me, with big bright eyes, round and pink.

"Heather," she said.

"I could have that name?" She sounded just like her mother. I almost laughed.

"Well, that's my name too, so that would be a little confusing. But if that's what you really want. Think about it some more, yes? I … I …" I straightened up and turned away, my mind still reeling. If there was a child, then— "How long was I … gone? I … I didn't think—" Evelyn answered, spitting with even more fury than before.

"Seventeen days, Heather! Seventeen days!"" … Seventeen days?" I echoed. Both longer than I wanted, but shorter than I feared. Seventeen days in the abyss had felt like a million years.

"Yes!" Evelyn was raging from within her armchair.

"Seventeen fucking days! And then you started growing that bloody fluid sac around you, and I thought you were going to bloody well drown, you moron! You wouldn't come home, you wouldn't walk through the gates, you wouldn't even lie down! You just wandered in circles like a bloody insect or something, following anybody who happened to be nearby. You wouldn't read books put in front of you, you wouldn't eat. You wouldn't fucking eat!

You—" I silenced Evelyn's protests by staggering over to her and falling to my knees beside her armchair. I reached out with a tentacle, found her hand, and held it as gently as I could. She shut her mouth, staring back into my eyes.

"I love you, Evelyn. Thank you, thank you for coming to get me." Evelyn cleared her throat and looked away.

"Well. Yes. Well!" I looked up at Sevens.

"I love you too, by the way. I'm sorry I was gone so long."

"Welcome back, kitten," Seven-Shades-of-Safe-and-Sound purred for me.

"Well done."

"Welcome," said Praem. Evelyn cleared her throat again.

"I can hardly take credit for retrieving you, Heather. From what I could tell, you didn't seem to need much help at all, not with all the company you had down there." She flashed her eyes at me, almost angry again.

"E-Evee?"

"You haven't brought any passengers back, have you? Any plus ones? Any new 'special' girlfriends?"

"Um," I faltered.

"No, I … no. Not yet, I suppose." Evelyn sighed and pressed her lips tight. I wobbled back to my feet and cast my eyes over the magic circle cut into the soil of Wonderland; it was shaped unlike every other magic circle I'd seen Evelyn develop before, even the grand majesty of the Invisus Oculus. It wasn't particularly large — perhaps fifteen feet across, just wide enough to contain the pool of shimmering silver liquid, which I assumed had acted as a scrying pool for Evelyn to peer into the abyss.

But the shape of the circle itself was strangely alien, making my eyesight blur as I tried to follow the outline; it was both circular and pointed at the same time, both a ring and five-pointed star in the same shape. The lettering cut into the soil was not a human language; I could tell because trying to make out the lines made my head throb with sudden nausea. The pyramidal framework inside the circle was much more familiar — but I couldn't fathom why.

It looked like a bunch of old beams, the wood aged and pitted, but strong and solid. The beams had not been cut to the shape of the pyramid, but lashed together with masses of tape and rope, braced with vast quantities of bubble-wrap and foam padding, as if they had been handled with the utmost gentle care.

"What did you see?" I murmured, staring down into the silver pool. Evelyn didn't answer for a moment. Then she swallowed.

"I'm not sure how to explain it. I'd rather not try. Maybe I'll write it down." I squeezed her hand, gently, in my tentacle. Even for those who had not visited, the abyss was an experience like nothing else.

"Thank you for coming for me." Evelyn took a deep breath.

"As I said, I can't take credit for any of this. I may have done the channelling and performed the procedure, but very little of this is my work." She nodded at the circle before us.

"This is the product of a trans-dimensional collaboration which would probably make most mages soil themselves with envy."

"Ah?" A nasty little smile crossed Evelyn's face.

"The fluid in that pool is from up there." She waved a hand upward, at Eileen's true surface, up in the sky.

"The spell work is hers." She pointed at Taika.

"The beams are ours, but—""Wait," I interrupted.

"The beams, are you saying they're from …" Evelyn chuckled.

"Home. Number 12 Barnslow Drive. You love that house so much, Heather. It was the best theory we had to reel you in." I gaped at the beams.

"You are going to put them back, yes? D-did this do any damage, did—" Evelyn snorted.

"Of course we're going to put them back! Most of them are from the cellar and the attic. Mostly the attic. God knows the roof needs the work. But yes, of course they're going back." She pulled herself straighter in her chair.

"I contributed that part of the spell. All the real underlying theory was … those two." Her eyes flicked to one side.

"Thank them, Heather. Not that you'll be able to understand the response." Gently, carefully, I let go of Evelyn's hand, and turned to the two she had indicated — the Twins. Before I crossed the few paces of carapace plate to address them, I paused to hug Sevens — "Love you, kitten," — and Praem, who said nothing, but patted me on the back exactly three times. Then I stepped over to address the Twins, Zalu and Xiyu.

For a moment I didn't know exactly where to look, other than up, because they certainly were both very tall. What with all the shocks and dislocation of abyssal return, I wasn't able to fully appreciate the sheer beauty of their alien bodies, the bright colours of their hides, the muscularity of their starfish-foot tips and tails. In the end I settled on looking back into the eyeballs at the end of the stalks attached to the five tips of their 'heads'.

"Thank you, both of you," I said.

"You barely know me. To put in all this work, just to help my friends dredge me from the abyss, it's just—" One of the plant-girl twins let out a high-pitched clicking, ticking, buzzing noise, like a cicada trying to speak language, filled with tone and meaning, and completely incomprehensible to our ears, even with the benefit of abyssal experience and nine of me all working together. This went on for a while, then fell silent. Both twins peered down, waiting for a reply.

"Um …" Lozzie bounced up beside me.

"Zalu says you're very welcome, but please spare her the sappy talk! And she also also also points out that she's wanted to test this theory for a while, you were just a very good candidate, so don't think it was special or anything!" Behind me, Evelyn sighed heavily.

"Absolute nonsense."

"Thank you for translating, Lozzie." I focused on the Twins again.

"Will we, um, see you again?" Lozzie answered first.

"They left a forwarding address! For meeeee!" I nodded, numb with more questions than I could express. I turned away from the Twins, looking at everybody, or at least the portion of 'everybody' who was gathered here.

"Thank you," I said.

"You too, Taika. You didn't have to do this. Thank you all, I—" And then I stopped, a cold knot in my belly.

"Heather?" Somebody voiced my name, urgent with concern. Somebody else said I was probably still hungry, and liable to collapse. Somebody else moved forward to support me, but I waved all that away.

"Where is she?" I said. I blinked and stared around, at the faces of our friends.

"Where is she?" Evelyn sighed and rolled her eyes.

"We told you a thousand times! Through that!" She pointed at the scrying pool, made of Eileen's silver sea.

"You asked and asked and—""Well I'm asking again right now," I said. Ironically enough, Evelyn's habitual irritation kept me from panicking; if she had shown anything other than total normality, I would have guessed the worst had happened. But I already knew it had not. The absurdity of the moment almost made me laugh; instead, I hiccuped.

"Heather—""Where's Maisie?" we said.

"Where's my twin sister?" Raine stepped forward, beaming with endless soft confidence. She took me by the shoulders.

"Maisie's right where she should be, Heather. She's at home."

"You mean—""Number 12 Barnslow Drive. Alive and well, in one piece. She's just taking time to adapt." Raine nodded sideways, at the gateway to Camelot, at the road back home.

"Let's go see your sister."