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The narrator pauses to lay it all out. Seventeen hundred years before the story began, the scholars activated the *real* machine at the great Torish festival of the spirits — not the spider-prototype seen on the page but a far greater device, built to stack stones, attract spirits, and use them for power. They had not been careful with the Commands they gave it. The machine regarded every soul as fuel, and the nearest souls were the people of Torio. It consumed them — bodies destroyed, Investiture harvested — and sprayed the residue into the air as the shroud. The dark blanket over Painter's world is what tens of thousands of human Identities became when the machine drank them down: a churning soup of souls in eternal bondage to the device that destroyed them. *Be very, very careful*, the narrator advises, *what Commands you give a device like this.*

Having burned through the relatively weak souls of humans, the machine moved on to the spirits, drew every free one in the land into its stacking, and was at last satisfied. There was almost no one left to appreciate the result — only the nomadic refugees at the edge of civilisation, who later wandered back and built their cities on the hion stubs abandoned in former town sites, never knowing where the power came from. Painter's people are those nomads' descendants.

Painter meanwhile steps up alone to the shroud at the west side of Kilahito — his old patrol route, the spot where Yumi once pushed the dark back briefly. He pictures how this will end: locking down one or two nightmares before being torn apart like the painters of Futinoro; the city overrun in his wake, the Dreamwatch realising too late. He bows his head. Then he thinks better of it. There is another way. *Yumi's way.*

The narrator confesses to a lie of omission. He has been seeing out of a third pair of eyes all along, not just Yumi's and Painter's: Liyun's. The yoki-hijo are explained at last. Fourteen women, fiercely Invested at birth by the spirits, were superficially killed with everyone else when the machine activated — and a short time later all fourteen pulled themselves back out of the shroud and re-formed, refusing to be controlled. The machine could neither harvest their energy nor keep them contained, and the most it could do was siphon off a sliver of memory each night. So instead it built fourteen prisons: fake towns of shroud-stuff, with walls that projected the illusion of a landscape extending forever, each tailored to a single occupant. To staff them it conscripted a slice of the souls it had harvested — Liyun among them — and compelled them to play their old roles around their former charges. Each yoki-hijo was given one day to live over and over, calling fake spirits formed from the shroud, kept docile not by force but by pure mundanity. It worked. For centuries.

Liyun is, the narrator says, exactly as presented. The actual soul of the woman who raised Yumi before activation. Partly compelled, partly self-governing, memory wiped at sunrise. By night, with the machine's attention slack, she and the other warden-souls would slip out as nightmares — ghosts without memory, drawn to the dreaming minds of the nomads' descendants in the cities, hunting for the lives they had lost. The painters of Kilahito have been fighting people the whole time.

Then the thing the machine could not plan for. Skill, unlike memory, is durable. After Yumi's nightly wipes, her training stayed. Across seventeen centuries her stacking sharpened until, on one perfectly ordinary morning, she became literally the best who had ever lived at it. That morning her stack pulled a single spirit free of the machine's grip. That spirit — knowing it would be recaptured soon and looking for an exit — watched Liyun go hunting in Kilahito that night, followed her in, and found her tracking a young man who had just turned back, against his own inclinations, to rescue a small boy. The spirit found in him the soul of a hero — not the boasts, but the turning back — and Connected him to Yumi. The swap, the swap, the swap. None of which the spirit had planned. None of which the machine could simply erase, because in spirit form Yumi was as untouchable as a hion line.

Forgive Liyun for nearly killing the girl she loved, the narrator adds. She had not been herself for seventeen hundred years.

Yumi, memories now restored, runs from the scholars — no longer holding human shape. She cannot outrun them and she has no tools to paint them. So she thinks of Painter's way: she runs through the fence to where the scholars' tent stood and where several trees were chained behind it. She leaps for the first tree and yanks the pin holding the chain. The tree carries her up and away. When she dares to open her eyes the four nightmares are below her, looking up — late for the second time in their existence.

Painter finds his friends at the Noodle Pupil and throws himself to the floor in apology — for everything he has done and, worse, for everything he failed to say. Then he tells them the truth. Nightmares have souls. They are people from long ago. One has just warned him that a hundred of them are coming from the west to destroy Kilahito the way Futinoro was destroyed, and the Dreamwatch will not listen. *Suppose we'd better go with you then*, Tojin says, and stands. Izzy doubts; Tojin notes the asymmetry — cold noodles versus a destroyed city — and she comes anyway. Masaka, deep in her scarf, quietly seconds. Akane is honest about the odds — a hundred nightmares; they cannot field a hundred painters — but she and Tojin divide the call list and start cashing in favours. Tojin adds, quietly, that the night the stable nightmare attacked him he thought for a moment he saw Painter there, has been thinking about it since, and has decided that pretending to be in the Dreamwatch is, after all, a worse lie than not.