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Chapter 1229: The Red Mist

Garcia fell asleep around four in the morning.

In the months since they had first met, she had never spoken this many words to Roland at a stretch. Most of it wasn’t conversation — it was a monologue, fragments surfacing from a place too tired for order. How she had cut ties with her family. How she had found Lan afterward, and what that had meant. Roland kept her glass full and said nothing, because there was nothing useful to say.

He understood something he hadn’t before: Garcia’s determination to protect this world was not abstract principle. It was Lan’s instruction, absorbed over years until it had become her own. Lan had been hard on her. Garcia had looked up to that hardness the way people look up to a mountain — measuring themselves against it, wanting to be equal to it someday.

From everything Roland had seen, Lan had genuinely loved the Dream World.

Whether her plan could have worked was another question. One he couldn’t answer.

Room 0825 had two bedrooms, one of them Zero’s. Roland considered for a moment, then put Garcia in the master bedroom and settled himself on the living room couch. Searching a sleeping woman’s pockets for her own apartment key struck him as the kind of thing that produced misunderstandings he had no interest in producing.

He had navigated enough of these situations to know when he was right.

While he arranged the blanket over Garcia, it came to him clearly: he needed to go back to the real world. Now.

He crossed to the window and looked out at the city night, one hand resting on the glass. Lights scattered across the skyline, bright enough to drown the stars — they pulsed and winked, almost cheerful, completely indifferent to everything that had happened today. It looked peaceful. It was not. The Bloody Moon in the real world hung in the sky; its counterpart here lived underground. The same appetite, different disguises.

He drew the curtains and left the Dream World.

The ceiling. He waited for it to come into focus.

Instead he found two eyes.

Large. Close. Staring directly into his.

Neither of them moved for a moment. Then someone above him screamed — a short, startled sound — and the presence vanished as though it had never been there.

Nightingale reappeared from behind the desk, pulling her invisibility back with the unhurried dignity of someone who was absolutely not embarrassed.

“I was checking whether you had woken up, since you had been asleep for quite a long time and I was a little concerned,” she said. “And you shouldn’t simply open your eyes like that. You startled me.”

Roland had no response to this. How precisely was he meant to warn her before waking up?

“Anyway, you’re awake, so I’m going to bed,” Nightingale said, yawning with theatrical completeness. “Anna came at ten to see you, but you were still asleep, so she left. She said to tell you not to push yourself.”

“Wait — what time is it?”

“Just past midnight.” She was already moving toward the door. “Good night.”

As soon as she was gone, exhaustion settled over Roland like a physical weight. Two worlds, two days, almost no sleep. He stretched, turned toward the bed.

Then something at the window caught the corner of his eye.

He raised his head slowly.

Two pale faces pressed flat against the glass, noses distorted, four wide eyes staring in at him. His heart lurched — he was on his feet before he had decided to move.

He squinted.

He recognized them. He almost laughed.

Lightning. Maggie. At his window in the middle of the night.

They dropped from the roof when they realized he had seen them. Both were unkempt in the specific way of people who have been traveling hard for a long time — mud dried in their clothes, hair wild, the look of those returning from somewhere that doesn’t have baths.

“When did you get here?” Roland asked, holding his expression flat. “Why didn’t you send word first?”

“Your Majesty, we arrived about an hour ago, coo,” Maggie began, but Lightning’s hand landed on her arm.

“No,” Lightning said firmly. “We just arrived. We didn’t see anything.” She looked at Maggie. “Did we?”

Maggie nodded with great feeling. “Coo… yes. I had it wrong.”

Roland pressed his lips together. Even Nana would not have bought that performance. He didn’t actually mind — he only minded the performance. But he had more urgent things to care about, so he let it go.

“Did you travel at night? Why not use the Animal Messenger? Did—”

His stomach dropped.

“Your Majesty,” Lightning said, her voice shifting into something else entirely — measured, grave, the voice she used when she was choosing her words because the words mattered. “About half a month ago. We found traces of demons at the ridge of the continent.”

He was completely awake now. “And then? Outposts?”

“None yet.” She shook her head, dug a rumpled map from her coat, and spread it on the desk. “We couldn’t push very deep into the area. We met up with the Taquila witches at the Snow Ridge — it took them some time to get the magic core in position — but we were eventually able to confirm what we were seeing.” She placed her finger on the rupture marked at the map’s center. “God’s Stone mines. Almost as large as the ones beneath the Holy City of Taquila itself.”

What the demons intended was plain enough.

Roland’s brows drew together. Edith had been right. A plan B — always a plan B. Even if Taquila fell, even if the primary invasion route collapsed, the Impassable Mountain Range was treacherous enough to discourage pursuit and open enough to support an advance. Risky, but preferable to waiting four hundred years.

Fortunately, they had learned of it now. According to Agatha’s intelligence, growing an Obelisk took time. The demons could only produce a small volume of Red Mist before it matured.

“We also picked up another piece of news when we left the Snow Ridge,” Lightning said, hesitating. “But Maggie and I had already passed the Kingdom of Everwinter by then, so we only caught part of it through the Sigil of Listening.”

“What did you hear?”

Maggie pressed both hands to her ears, cupping them like a telephone receiver. “The liaison witch said they found Red Mist in the north of the mountain range, coo!”

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