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The narrator finishes the explanation. The spirit Connected Yumi and Painter only to protect her — in spirit form she was untouchable by the machine — and the swap was an unplanned side effect of meddling with Spiritual Connection. The machine, unable to wipe her directly, kept the narrative going: evaporate her town each night and rebuild it from old shroud-imprints in the morning so she could *travel*. When she refused, the machine dispatched the scholars — its original creators, kept aside from the shroud soup with wills dominated and minds partially free for exactly this contingency — as agents with a mandate to fix the problem no matter what was required.

On the chained tree out of her prison, Yumi learns what the shroud is. The tree begins to warp under her fingers and trail smoke — it was shroud-stuff like everything in the town, and the machine is starting to unmake it. She hits the invisible wall that paints her town a never-ending landscape; it warps and lets her through. For the first time in nearly two thousand years she physically leaves her prison. The darkness is strangely transparent to her — she is made of its substance — and beneath her she sees a ruined sunless landscape of dark stone, and behind her, her own town shrinking into a column with a dome on top. A piece of her breaks at the realisation that even the sunlight she has loved her whole life was part of the lie. The tree fails. She prays. The tree hardens. She falls again, then catches herself by deciding — *my world, my rules* — that the tree is still a tree and that the wind is, conveniently, blowing the way she needs. The tree holds. The wind shifts. She turns it toward the bright dome at the heart of the dark, the one she takes for Torio City.

At the western edge of Kilahito, thirty-seven painters gather — perhaps ten to fifteen percent of the city's total, pulled in by favours from Tojin and Akane, none but Painter with experience of a stable nightmare. An anxious hour passes. Akane floats, gently, the alternative — that he imagined it, that there is no shame in needing help. He forces himself to consider it and promises he will seek help if nothing comes of this. She embraces him. Then Masaka hurries over: the shroud is undulating, frothing. *Grab your things.*

Yumi lands at Torio City and the four scholar-nightmares block her way. They slam their claws into her, trying to drain her, and her strength simply refuses to leave. *I am the one the spirits chose*, she says. *I am the thing you had to lock up. I am the one that nightmares fear. You shall bow to me.* She forces them back into human shape; colour floods them and they fall. She sits before the lead scholar in a meditation pose and asks how to destroy the machine. He weeps. It cannot be done. The thing is shielded by its own original Commands and fuelled by thousands of bound spirits; there is no plug to remove and no hion line to cut. *It uses our souls*, she says. *Originally it did. Now it uses the spirits.* The other scholars weep with him: *our shame. Our sorrow. Powered perpetually by the spirits now, the machine will never run out, never shut down on its own.*

*My world*, Yumi says, *my rules.* She commands her ritual gown to change and the dress Akane bought her swirls out of the black smoke. She walks past the scholars and at long last — seventeen hundred years after she first asked Liyun for the privilege — enters Torio City. She finds rubble. The beautiful skyline was a veneer painted on the outside of the wall. Roofs decayed away centuries ago. Only the great hall at the centre still stands. Inside it, the real machine — thirty feet tall, hundreds of legs, eternally piling stones for other legs to knock down, its joints repaired with raw Investiture, encircled by thousands of spirits like an audience at a sermon. She steps forward and walks face-first into an invisible barrier in the doorway. Trapped outside. All this way, for nothing.

On the western edge of Kilahito, the nightmares arrive. They are bigger, terrible, stable. Painted, they shrink but do not vanish; they smoulder and grow back the second attention slips. The line holds only because the machine is distracted by Yumi in the west and because the nightmares are temporarily confused by the resistance. Painter runs the circle holding his terrified colleagues together, painting bird and lotus and bamboo to freeze monsters his comrades cannot reach in time. One painter dies. Several are wounded. They are out of canvas and standing in spilled ink. Tojin grabs his arm — *we can't hold these. They recover after we paint them.* *We paint*, Painter shouts. *Because if we do not, they get into the city. We are the Dreamwatch now.* *We are the Dreamwatch now*, Tojin says, brush rising. The cry takes the circle.

Then Liyun arrives at the head of the next wave — fifteen feet of jagged dark, lupine, terribly familiar. Painter looks at her and *sees the answer.*

Inside the city, Yumi kneels at the barrier, defeated. Pain stabs at her — not her own. The Connection has not been entirely severed. *Painter*, she thinks. He is frantic, fighting; nightmares will come endlessly until Kilahito is rubble. She turns away from the shielded door, walks down the steps of the hall, and at the courtyard in front — once magnificent, now broken — she kneels.

And starts to stack.

Painter does not try to make Liyun's nightmare into a bird, or a cat, or even bamboo. He does not need the crutch. He knows what she is. Stern and unyielding, deep down just wanting to help. Those frown lines, those twin blades of hair, that bell-shaped dress. Other painters mutter — *you don't paint a nightmare as a person; a person can still kill you* — but he keeps going, and when his canvas is finished Liyun does not revert. She kneels outside the ring of painters, hands stained by spilled ink, gasping. The nightmares are people. He needs to treat them as such.

He starts with the town mayor, whose face he half-remembers from his meditations. Out among the sea of monsters, one changes. The mayor — *eager to be himself again* — feeds him the details. The painters around him take heart, shrink and hold the others between, give him room. One after another he paints them back into the people they used to be. Tojin and Akane keep the line. Until at last he finishes Hwanji's hair and drops her to the ground, and the street outside the city is quiet around the wounded painters and a hundred shivering, confused Torish villagers — speaking a language modern ears cannot follow, swaddled in blankets handed out by arriving nurses, but themselves. Painter lets the brush fall and looks west, through the shroud, toward someone he can feel out there — concentrating with incredible focus.