In comparison to Every Train’s interior, ornate and solid with marble carved from the night sky, my interior—that of my thoughts and concerns—was simple, fluidly shifting between anxious conjurations in a cycle that churned my stomach. Would Mom recognize me with all my changes? If she did, would there be any love waiting for me—I’d shattered her gift, her smile, and isn’t that portent enough for how far I’d fallen from favor? If I had, is the end of my journey the reception of punishment?

  Finding the strength to tear away from these thoughts, I decided to seek out Every Train for company and confidence. Through the lobby’s exit, I entered a car—municipal, given the style of its seats—which was replete with phantoms, hazy projections of people and animals, whose appearance pointed to nowhere and everywhere in the world. Most of them were overlapping with one another; limbs pierced limbs, a child phantom could be seen beneath the haze of the larger adult inhabiting the same space, and despite the many languages moshing in my ears neither their speech nor expression denoted awareness of this fact.

  In the car after that, the phantoms were lesser than those in its municipal predecessor given the private compartments that strangled the wide pathway into a passage only a cat could feel comfortable passing through. It was in peeking into those compartments, the glass serving as porthole into the private dramas and comedies of their lives, that I witnessed the phantoms take on a fullness, both of color and solidity, as well as a silence, their compartment withholding any sound which might provide context or butcher security.

  It was from one of these compartments that a man, clad in stormy gray armor which shifted like an orrery built from razor blades, emerged. Over his shoulder was a sword, single edged and larger than even Sinaya’s old steel, whose usage and age could be read in the striations of bloodstains running from edge to spine. This man was a killer, a naked sword with empty eyes who’d wandered over a hundred battlefields—this man was my father.

  I didn’t know where he was going, but I’d pushed aside thoughts of finding Every Train for company to chase this vision instead. My dad had died, I was sure of it, but here he was, locking up his compartment and heading to an elevator—I followed. As the floors dinged past, their associated bulbs snapping to brief brilliance, tracking the elevator’s motion through the geometric spiral above the doors, I kept staring at my father’s face. How it could look so bereft of kindness or humanity when that was all I’d ever seen in his expressions—when I’d kicked a ball into his face he’d laughed, amused by how his bloodied nose stained his beard. This version of him lacked even hints of a beard.

  When we arrived at our floor, the doors opened to a ballroom whose splendor made every surface seem shaped with sunshine, conferring upon the dancers at its center in what was ultimately a pale attempt at their divine glory. Every Train and my mom were alone, yet the way they moved, flickering like candles between positions, killed any idea that the ballroom was “empty.” Using every inch of space, they twirled and dipped, threw each other, danced through each other in ways only entities could move. It was impossible for a human being to ever approach such elegance, and I wished for it to go forever.

  “Ishi, it’s time,” my father’s phantom barked.

  The two royals, my mother and Every Train, turned to regard him and his message. My mother took it calmly, curtsying to Every Train with the non-existent hem of a dress, before going off to join him. While Every Train, at least briefly, flashed an expression that traced the apocalyptic wrath a Sovereign, even one to a Court as peaceful as Wanderlust, could employ. When her eyes found me beside him, any vision of doomsday evaporated into a blush of shy guiltiness. She stepped forward, breaching the water-like surface of space, and hurried over.

  “I left you in the lobby,” Every Train said, pushing me through a separate pair of doors.

  “And I left,” I said. “Was searching for you.”

  “And you’ve found me,” she said, accessorizing with a scrawled-off smile. “Now let’s return to the lobby or the deck, and—”

  “Were you time traveling?” I asked.

  Every Train looked back toward me, relief in her face that I’d not asked a harder question of her—not that it was any question she was in love with Mom. You only look that mad at a man’s interruption when you loved a woman. Though as she walked swiftly down the hallway of a sleeper car filled with snoring phantoms, and me doing my best to keep pace, her relief evaporated into a hazy guardedness.

  “No,” she answered.

  “Then how were you dancing with Mom?” I asked, racing to cut her off.

  The pulsing glow of her tattoos quickened, she was nervous. As she tried to step past me I danced into her way, this went for four quick hops before she exhaled and let herself sink into the floor of the car. I hurried into the next car and the next, trying to locate the runaway entity, before remembering what she’d told me of her covenant.

  “You’re not being very accommodating!” I screamed.

  Immediately the train rattled, the screech of snarling winds and tearing metal painting fear onto every phantom’s face, and bringing Every Train running as she dropped from the ceiling of the library car. She stood before me, looming larger than I’d ever seen of her, with eyes that glowed the furious yellow of an artificial light at night as seen from the shadows beyond the window. It was an attempt at intimidation, but I was already dead and thus free from lethal consequences.

  “Take it back,” Every Train ordered.

  I snorted, “Tell me the full truth then.”

  “Fine, you obstinate child,” Every Train snapped.

  I said, “Thank you Every Train, you’re grand.”

  I held the feeling of gratitude and having my needs met in the atriums of my heart, so whatever magic ruled Every Train’s covenant could tell that she’d held up her side of the bargain appropriately. Then, the screaming and rattling ceased, as her covenant found her back in its good graces. Smirking, I extended my hand palm out, come on, tell me.

  “It is not ‘time travel,’” Every Train stated, holding up a hand to preempt my interruptions. “It would be better to refer to it as a sort of, chronological embodiment. I step into the scenes of my past not as an extra, but rather as an actor re-assuming an old role I’ve long outgrown.”

  She led me by the arm to another car, this one with a bar, red floors with the illusion of spider lilies, and stools alternating in gold and silver, where a phantom in a red suit sat drinking whiskey. Beside her, a girl—me—wore a nighty and sat in the stool next to her. The two of them leaned in as if sharing a conspiracy. Every Train pursed her lips, and raised her hand to cover my eyes—I stopped her. The memory tore as I walked around the two phantoms, re-assessing another happy memory—Amber knew we were on the wrong track, had all the answers, and looked even more like the moment was staged with me being the audience that fell under the tide of her charisma.

  “How do you have these?” I asked. “Why have them?”

  Every Train opened her arms, vulnerable but honest. “I’m every train, Nadia. Not just in the Underside, Earth, or the Moon, but in time as well. Everything that happens within me may as well be happening in a forever state of ‘right now.’”

  Taking my hand in hers, Every Train led me through another door out onto a deck, one of smooth wooden floors and silver railings that had the appearance of twisting track. She guided me to a chair, set me down, and then crouched beside…her hand never leaving mine as she guided her thumb over palm. Gentle probing moments of pressure that hunted down pockets of anxiety and popped them, eliciting from me dry, shuddering sobs.

  “As for why I keep them,” Every Train said, “they’re my memories…to put it in a fashion mortals might comprehend. To wander is more than eternally facing the next bend in a road; it’s the appreciation of where you are, where you came from, and sometimes doubling back to see the same sight with new eyes.”

  “But this is more than memory,” I muttered, “you’re entering the actual moment. You could change things, right?”

  She sighed, nodded, and let go of my hand. “It’s not worth going down that path, Nadia.”

  “Why not? Y-you love my mom,” I said, grasping for an example. “Couldn’t you do more than have one dance? You could tell her how you feel, and maybe—”

  “Yes, I could,” Every Train admitted, “and then I would lose everything I’ve built here. All the people who have come to love me, rely on me and my Court’s sorcery and entities, and every person who’s ridden me from a doomed situation to blessed salvation would be betrayed were I to attempt what you propose…despite knowing it’d never come to pass.”

  “Sanctions?” I asked, remembering that there were rules even for the Courts.

  “The Parliament of All That Is, is a strict and petty body, Nadia, and Time has already been sanctioned heavily for what should otherwise be their remit,” Every Train said. “Even if sanctions were evaded, I’d perhaps see my Court razed by foes and rivals…”

  Like Revelation suffered.

  I turned my head from her, staring out into the black of the Underside—we’d long passed anything so recognizable as to be called a domain, instead hurtling toward a horizon of some sort, rapidly growing but almost infinitely far. So similar to memory itself, how it could bloom to the point of obliterating all other concerns, but be untouchable by your fingertips. My own —fingertips that is—found my lips as tens of memories fluttered past my thoughts; other paths I should’ve taken were I to know now what I lacked then.

  “Sounds like torture to me,” I said, turning back toward Every Train. “Abandoning any hope of joy to safeguard a love that’d be revoked if you step beyond the frame they’d fixed you in.”

  She patted my hand like Melissa’s grandmother would do when her sister would complain of their troubles yet reject the wisdom garnered over years. It made my response, which I’d thought intelligent, feel so small, childish. Though nothing in her face actually said so, the masculine softness instead stretching like a blanket to hold me.

  “Maybe love then,” she said, musing with me, “lies somewhere between what we owe the self and owe one another. One can’t always precede the other, but that doesn’t mean they have to be enemies. It’s why, for me at least, I enjoy stepping into those memories even as I remain helpless to the passage of events.”

  “What’s the joy in that one?” I asked.

  Every Train rose, stretching though they had no need—the horizon had expanded into something akin to a smile of teeth, though the white that it’d been when so far away had broken down into a waterfall of psychedelic hues that budded within one another like a cancer, colonizing with furious malignance the surrounding chroma before ultimately being consumed by a new upstart color. She held her chin between her middle fingers, this time with the pleasant smile found in the appreciation of a good tea, and drank in the memory.

  She said, “It was my last dance with your mother. Her and Kareem were getting off at the—up until then—secret stop at the Cradle.”

  “Where the Black Wombs hid?” I asked, despite already knowing.

  “The very same,” she said.

  “Is that it then,” I asked, “the joy was one last dance?”

  “It was a good dance,” she said, “but no. The joy comes from when I saw them next, my lovely Ishi carrying a little life within a womb she’d crafted inside herself. A little life that she was adamant on keeping safe, so much so that we couldn’t dance like we used to, so much so that Ishi, proudest Sovereign I know, got on her knees and begged me to keep that little life in mind if anything happened to her. In that one request, the first she’d ever made of me, I received confirmation that I was more than an occasional dance partner, I was someone she trusted—more than any other incarnate Sovereign—to look over and defend her child.”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  The pulses of light along her rails quickened, making lanterns of her eyes, and shaping heroic shadows across her face. There was a quiet happiness in how Every Train spoke of her responsibilities to the world and her Court, but in the service she promised to Mom…to me, was a look of transcendent fulfillment. The sort that many sought their whole life never to find, easily outstripping whatever meager joy could be gained from confessing one’s love; Mom had seen all that Every Train was, her measured nature, her bent toward service, and dedication to her responsibilities and awarded her with a station no one—not even in my hometown—had received, capable only because of the way she lived every day of her infinite life.

  “Every Train—” I began, on the cusp of saying whatever unconsidered and ill-fit words would plop from the heavens of random thought in my mind. Saved only by the fortunate and sublime terror of ego-obliterating darkness overtaking us and the train the moment we speared through the prismatic wall that I took to be Causality’s Rim.

  There was no pressure to this darkness, save that which I made for myself as primate terror—a sign that I was still something of a human, a person—rattled the cage of my skull. It brought up every other terror of the dark, especially my time in The Lightless World where I’d lost everything, everyone, and…then there was a light, almost autumnal, yet so very stalwart. Twin lanterns, headlights, unblinking and unfearing of the ebon hold that surrounded us, challenged us to prove that we were greater than Real. Those golden lights, eyes as I remembered that I wasn’t challenging this dark by myself, were connected to pulsing tracks of light, so fast that they blurred into unbreaking lines of resplendence.

  “I’m right here, Nadia,” Every Train said, her voice thick as her arms and just as firm.

  I groped out into the dark, finding her shirt, clutching it, then pulling toward me—my lighthouse—where I wrapped my arms around her waist. She didn’t laugh at me nor smirk at the sight of me reduced to a child—Every Train knew how hard it was to pass Causality’s Rim, to have the whole of your being fanned out like a deck of cards, each piece lifted out and examined to confirm that you were meant to cross a line intended for only the eternal, the divine. I’m not going to say how it felt to have every piece of me lifted up like that, how I could almost see without seeing the hand that held me as I was investigated, the lidless eye from which nothing of my nature was hidden…I’ll be trying to forget that experience, mask it with the sheer fixation on how it felt to die—that was easier, and briefer.

  “We’re here, Nadia,” Every Train whispered.

  At some point in the process, I’d buried my head into Every Train’s shirt, the firm plushness of her stomach, and like a sleeping child, needed to be gently roused once we’d arrived. With the nails of her fingers, Every Train gently scratched my scalp, teasing me into a building alertness in much the same way as she’d popped my anxiety from just holding my hand. Lifting my head from her stomach, I noticed a thin line of drool to a spot on her shirt and felt my face flush.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “can I—”

  “It’s okay, you’re young,” Every Train said. “The fact you approached a state peaceful enough to drool on me is a good sign…Causality’s Rim is not a gentle thing to face.”

  “You face it all the time,” I said.

  She winked and wobbled her hand. “All the time is a bit of an exaggeration, but I’ve lived for a long time, Nadia. The scary things, the horridly impossible things, you find get more approachable in time. Always a bit scary, but not so much that you can’t chew them out for taking too long to wave through your niece.”

  I nodded, happy that she was my aunt. Turning away from her I discovered that we were in something like a forest. There was a path, not paved or blazed down to the dirt, but a vague depression that the grasses and mosses of the floor hadn’t returned in force. A concept that seemed rather possible, going off of the many trees that abounded and cast shadows across the forest floor, broken up by a kintsugi of sunlight. Despite the ever-present overcast, there wasn’t the kind of darkness I’d expected from a forest, especially one so quiet as this.

  “One Sovereign is enough of a threat to make any present fall still and silent,” Every Train explained when I looked back toward her. “Two, as it is with me around, likely caused everyone to run to the hills.”

  “I’m more surprised everything looks so…”

  “Normal?” Every Train asked. “This is likely the best interpretation your mind had for you. Most humans can’t really pass into this place until they find themselves in the role of godtender. You’re a special case, enough of an entity now to pass but still enough of a mortal to require mediation.”

  “So you’re telling me that you aren’t actually just a tall soft butch of an aunt,” I said, the sarcasm dripping from the mask of mock surprise I wore.

  Every Train rolled her eyes.. “Faster you climb, the faster you’ll get to see my actual appearance. Now, stop stalling, go see your mom.”

  I let a nervous chuckle fly out the side of my mouth. Stalling, I was…I was, stalling. The anxieties and fears that were pressed down by the distractions on the train or just being held by Every Train had reared up in my head, their claws and hooves lashing out at every structure of my confidence. What remained of it after I’d discovered basically everything I thought I knew was outright wrong or twisted until the light made it seem so.

  “Are you going to come with me?” I asked. “I know you don’t want to mess with the past, but this is the present and—”

  “I’d be very long distance with your mother at that point,” Every Train said. “Besides, she has eyes elsewhere and I’m…busy with the responsibilities I have for myself.”

  “Now who’s stalling,” I said.

  We shared a smile, our anxieties, while different, still recognized the other—to think that even deities could suffer from nerves of the heart. Every Train stepped backward between the doors of herself, a rectangular window into her interior overlaying the space of what should’ve been unbroken forest. I almost ran back to hug her, try to steal a bit more of that light for facing the dark, but the only dark at this point lurked in a place no light could touch.

  “Good bye, Nadia,” Every Train said, really meaning, Good luck, and I’ll see you again.

  “Bye, Auntie,” I said, shocking her with the casual designation she’d more than earned. Myself meaning, Thank you, and you will, and I’ll be so annoying next time.

  Her doors shut, and her departure was marked by the rush of a breeze that tousled my hair. I sighed, feeling the weight of my worries clamber up onto my shoulders once more, but I turned to face the path and set forth to meet my mother.

  * * *

  I finish telling her—Ishisaga-no-Maturama, or Ishi as she said I could refer to her—the story. We’d caught up to the present, as much as that meant anything in a timeless place like this, and in concluding she smiles at me, proud that I got through the entire telling. I’d been honest about every piece of the journey whether it was hard, made me look…less than noble, or would make her sad. There were a lot of pieces that made her sad. I tried to add some levity, but my life, my story, had been a sad one up until now. At that moment, waiting for her, I couldn’t see a way in which it stopped being so, and while Ishi chose to putter, busying her hands with an attempt at hot chocolate to take advantage of our sweet tooth, I curl up on my chair. Toes curling beneath the wooden seat, again not like it was actually wood.

  Knock. Knock. Knock.

  I don’t know how she does it, rapping her knuckles against the door in time to our beating heart. It’s unnerving. I’m not ready for this. Sitting there was the wrong choice, I want to run and hide somewhere else—the bed maybe, beneath the blanket where I can pop out when it seems appropriate.

  Ishi yells, “It’s unlocked.”

  I should’ve locked it. Not that it would’ve done anything, we both were masters of this place, and, if we felt need of it, it would unlock the moment we desired. All that is to say, the knob turns, the door opens, and while I snap the handle on my mug—the hot chocolate very much emptied from the stress and difficulty of storytelling—she’s relieved, somehow. Her eyes don’t land on me yet, maybe a result from practicing not to look into the mirror, and instead she sights Ishi first. Races to her, nearly knocking the mug of hot chocolate from her grasp, and squeezes her tight.

  “Mom, I can’t believe it’s you,” she says—what a moron.

  Ishi hugs her back, trying to be accommodating, unable to break the news as is needed. It’s a stiff hug though, and Mom never gave stiff hugs. Hers were like a tornado, sweeping you up to spin you around, even if the gap between when she saw you last and saw you then had been a momentary break to get an item from another room. It gives things away more than any words could’ve, which is probably for the best when it comes to her…she’s so “physical.”

  She asks, “What’s wrong?”

  “Nadia, I…” she tries to say the words, they’re hard because it's complicated. I make it easier.

  By saying, “She’s not our mom.”

  That’s when she finally looks at me. She blinks a few times, as if this were the Underside, and staring too long at the truth would usher in a madness that’d squat in her mind. While she processes, squinting and tensing every muscle in her body—likely deciding if she could kill me or not…if she should still try—I keep explaining.

  “Ishi isn’t Mom,” I say. “In fact, it’s better to say that Mom was Ishi, before she spent enough time just being Mom. Amber got that part right at least.”

  She stalks away from Ishi, strafes around the table, and stands opposite me. Her feet spaced equal to her shoulders, one foot just a bit ahead of the other, readying for a burst of violence depending on however I answer the question she’s going to ask…

  “Why’s your scar over the wrong eye?” she asks.

  “What?” I ask.

  She points to her left eye. “This is where the shard went through our eye and where Nemesis’s axe struck. Yours is wrong.”

  How anyone with my face could say something so dumb, was beyond me. It actually made me start laughing, loosening every knot of worry in my back and stomach. She was so dumb. So, to help her get it, I stand up and pace toward her, the smile on my face just gently showing off my fangs, and I reach out to her face, my fingers feather-light as I stroke her cheek.

  “Not wrong,” I say, “just mirrored—though you have been avoiding those for awhile.”

  She slaps my hand away—the hard to my soft—whispering, “My sister-self.”

  I shake out my wrist. Give her a shallow bow, and say, “That’s too many words. Call me Nadia.”

  Her eyes quiver like a bowstring drawn back but withholding fire. I shouldn’t rile her up, but seeing her there implying that I was the copy…it settled poorly in me. Still, she retained most of the violent impulses between us—beast that she was and would likely always be—so I took a few steps back to return to her some kind of personal…bubble in an attempt to engender a calm over her.

  “I’m Nadia,” she stated—a copy copying, what a surprise.

  “Mmm, no,” I said, “you’re better off being called Orchard, I think. That is the name you preferred Sinaya call you after all.”

  “That’s because—”

  “—I didn’t want to be the Nadia that fought him as the Angler Knight,” I say, melding my voice with hers. I knew my story as she portrayed it, the actor wearing my corpus as a costume. My trick didn’t earn me any points with her. Fine, I didn’t want them from her anyways.

  I lean against the table—Ishi’s already set the mug down, retaken her seat, and likely wanted us to do the same, but Orchard, as I refuse to call her Nadia, had other thoughts. Choosing to stalk toward me in pursuit, a new—likely stupid—question on her lips.

  “How are you already here then?” she asks, surprisingly not the stupidest question possible. “I only died a few hours ago.”

  Gifting her another smile, in some attempt at magnanimity, I answer, “Well, when you cut me out and evicted me from my body, you left me in a more Conceptual state. Surviving in the wasteland of mirrors and reflection, until you named the Court. At which point I was slingshot beyond Causality’s Rim, and voila. Arrived before you, and given that we are beyond simple causality—it’s in the name—time doesn’t work the same here.”

  “Does it work at all?” Orchard asks.

  “Maybe in the places where Time rules, or maybe it’s worse there than here,” I say, shrugging.

  She turns to Ishi. “Where do you come in?”

  “I found you—her—while she was alone, and I took her in,” she says. “When I—your Mom—discorporated and gifted me the memories of her incarnation, I felt a certain maternalness come over me. Memories of raising you, protecting you, swept through me. It was a very impactful incarnation for me, but an incarnation is like being shown a photo album where every picture is a memory of you but you know you were never there. Though the feeling of seeing yourself transmits so much, and—”

  “So you’re not Mom,” Orchard says, more statement than question, as it finally sets in.

  Ishi says, “If you want, you can call me—”

  I applaud, which shocks Ishi and causes Orchard to whip her head in my direction. Her eye hot with rage that I was mocking this little moment of hers. As if it wasn’t predictable, we knew the entities that incarnate are not necessarily the same that exist beyond.

  “Nadia,” she snaps, pulling off the whip-crack tone every mom seems to know.

  “I’m sorry,” we both say at once, then glare at the other.

  Orchard asks, “What did you do while you waited for me?”

  “Well, seeing as a lot happened to me post her ‘death’,” I say, “she wanted to know who was. Asked me to tell a story of myself, to see who I’d become in the first month of her absence.”

  Orchard’s eyes narrowed. “And what did you say?”

  “My truth,” I said, “the story of how I was born in the wake of their death, and concluding with my trip with Every Train where she deposited me here.”

  She shook her head, unable to accept what I’d done, the fucking baby. As I roll my eyes at the tantrum I know is coming, Orchard, admittedly, shocks me—running on me in a second, punch firing with the full force of her brief sprint. It smashes into my face, breaks my nose, and sends me tumbling into the chair from which I’d narrated my life story.