24th of Human October, Year of the Oversteeped Leaves (2025 by Earth reckoning).
Have been thinking lately that I wouldn’t mind incurring the consequences that might come if I desecrated my uncle’s final resting place under the Seasmoke Tower back home. Anchi Morningstar swore on his life and honor that liquor would provide aid for disturbed sleep. Not his fault that I listened, fair enough, nor that I kept waiting for his advice to work, well beyond the point when I ought to have considered that he hadn’t told me true. But he told me that before anyone else and throwing his remains into disarray might offer me some peace.

Had that old dream again. I stumble into the castle’s first courtyard, the one still on the mainland. I’m coming in from ********. Pyrrhus and Troilus are with me. Pergamon too, this time. And Tyndareus, but his face keeps changing. Shifts back and forth between the REAL Tyndareus and the shitty, Chaos-tainted knockoff who’s running around Destiny City as if he has any right to call himself a senshi when he has those cracks in his chest and forehead. Worst is when he gets stuck looking like Bernard but with the new idiot’s Negaverse cracks and hair to the ******** floor.

(Stupidest part is honestly that the castle never looked like this after everyone had gone. I know what that place really looked like. I know how the emptiness ached in between those old stones, how the courtyard actually felt when everyone had returned to the water that birthed our ancestors.

Wonder if I could still get to the Isle of the Dead. Or did the Chaos take that place from me, too?)

Nobody else is in the courtyard, though. No people. None of the animals, either. That ugly little sheep with the bad-texture hair for fabric, the one Imnolu insisted on simpering over until I told him we wouldn’t turn it into lamb stew—I go looking for it, but I can’t find it. None of the horses, none of the dogs in the kennels, none of the cats hunting rats. No sounds of steel clattering at steel in the training yard. The shrine dedicated to the Loving Mother looks as if somebody abandoned it in the middle of making an offering. Bones still out on the altar. Fires dying, but still technically lit.

Turning around, I look for Imnolu. He’s always been the softest out of all of us, and this place isn’t completely new to him, the way it is for Pergamon. Imnolu has memories associated with this place. Castle staff liked him, some of my cousins liked him, Yuanhan never liked him but Yuanhan hated everyone who meant anything to me so it’s not as if that’s news. And Imnolu is what these humans call “a people person,” so of course he’s probably upset, right? Or so I think. Because it makes sense to me that the soft-hearted “people person” is especially upset about everyone in the castle turning up gone, as if they just disappeared. Simple rule: Pyrrhus and Pergamon can handle themselves, so before anything else, check up on Imnolu.

Except Imnolu isn’t there anymore.