The morning passed over them without their knowledge.
They lay where they had landed, on the grass of the cliff top at the edge of the first Unitedverse, unconscious and still.
The sun moved through its arc above them and the light changed across their faces from pale gold to white to the long amber of afternoon, and none of them felt any of it.
The ocean below the cliff sent its waves up against the rock face in a rhythm that had already forgotten the surge that had made it, each wave arriving and receding with the ordinary patience of water that had always been there and intended to remain.
Behind them the world they had come from was gone.
Not distant. Not flooded. Gone. The ocean stretched in every direction they had traveled, flat and grey-blue and indifferent, the mountains of Mahi-Parr and the desert of Wakhan and the roads and the empty cities and the house with the light above the door were all beneath it now, pressed into a silence even water could not break.
The recast was complete.
The merge was complete.
Noon came. Afternoon came. The shadows of the trees behind them lengthened across the cliff top and reached the place where they all lay and moved past them, and the sky overhead shifted from blue to the orange of early evening and then to the deep purple of a night arriving without hurry.
Stars came out. More of them than any sky they had ever slept under, so many that the darkness between them seemed like the exception rather than the rule.
The three moons rose, the large central one pulling the two smaller ones in their slow orbit, and their combined light fell across the cliff top and across the ocean and across six people who had used everything they had to get here and were now somewhere on the other side of that.
Then Mayo's eyes opened.
He lay still for a moment, looking at the stars, his mind arriving in stages. His hand came up to his head slowly.
He pressed his palm against his temple and held it there while the world resolved itself around him.
Then he sat up.
His eyes moved left, taking in Toviro on his back, staff across his chest. Mina beside him, curled on her side, breathing steadily. He looked right. Ozair lay face down in the grass with one arm extended. Elina and Aryan beyond him, close but not touching, both still.
"Guys," he said.
His voice came out rough, stripped by hours of wind and speed and shouting.
He moved to Toviro first and put a hand on his shoulder and shook him gently. "Toviro. Hey. Are you—"
The last word came out slowly as his eyes went past Toviro and found the ocean.
He sat there for a moment with the word unfinished in his mouth.
He had known, logically, from the moment the white light cleared and he had looked out from the cliff edge.
Knowing a thing and seeing it again after sleep are different experiences, and the ocean in the moonlight was vast in a way it hadn't been in that first moment of shock.
Everything behind them was water.
Not a horizon with something beyond it. Just water, in every direction that home had been, reflecting the three moons in long trembling columns of light that stretched all the way to the cliff below his feet.
Toviro stirred.
He opened his eyes and found Mayo's face first. "Mayo," he said, the word quiet and certain, the first word of someone whose mind comes back intact.
Then Toviro followed Mayo's gaze and saw the ocean, and for a moment his expression did something it rarely did. It held still and showed what was in it.
Mayo said, almost a whisper, "Toviro. Is this real?"
A pause. The waves below moved against the cliff.
"Real or not," Toviro said, "this is what the world has done to itself." He looked at the water for another moment. "And we have to accept it." His voice was quiet. "Even when it's hard to accept."
They woke the others together. Gently, one by one, a hand on a shoulder, a name said softly, giving each person the few seconds they needed to arrive before the weight of it arrived with them. And it did arrive, for each of them, in the moment their eyes found the ocean and understood what was not behind it anymore.
They stood eventually. All six of them, side by side at the cliff's edge, facing the water.
No one spoke.
They didn't need to. The silence between them was not empty. It carried everything that words would have done badly, and they stood inside it together and let it be what it was.
Then Toviro looked down.
At the very edge of the cliff, growing from a crack in the rock where the grass ended, was a flower.
He had never seen its kind before. Its petals were deep violet, almost black at the center, and they caught the moonlight along their edges in a way that made them look lit from within. Smaller than most flowers. More deliberate somehow.
He crouched and snapped the stem carefully.
He stood and moved forward, stepping to the very edge of the cliff, the ocean moving below him.
He held the flower out over the water in his open palm and looked at it for a moment. Then he opened his fingers.
The updraft from the cliff face caught it immediately, lifting it, carrying it forward over the water in a slow arc, and the three moons lit it from above as it went, a small dark violet thing moving out over the ocean that had swallowed a world.
"Farewell," Toviro said. "Old world."
They watched it until it was gone.
Then, together, they turned around.
The jungle, or something close enough to be called one, stood before them in the moonlight.
Trees they had no words for, their trunks wider than the car that was now somewhere on the ocean floor, their canopies meeting overhead in a continuous ceiling of leaves through which the moonlight fell in broken silver columns.
Between the trunks, undergrowth of every kind, flowers in colors that didn't exist in the world they had left, plants with leaves that moved without wind, ground cover that was soft and dense and deeply, completely alive.
No roads. No structures. No sound of engines or distant traffic or anything human.
Just this.
"Let's go," Toviro said.
He stepped forward and the grass became the forest floor beneath his feet and the others followed, and like that they entered the first Unitedverse for the first time.
They walked without speaking much, moving between the trees, their eyes adjusting to the particular quality of light inside the canopy.
The sounds around them were layered and constant, insects or things like insects, the movement of branches, water somewhere, and things calling to each other in voices that had never needed to account for human ears.
Then Ozair stopped.
"Look at that," he said.
On a root to their left, sitting absolutely still, was a rabbit. Ordinary in most respects. Except from the top of its head grew two small spiralling horns, pale and smooth, catching the light like polished bone. It watched them with one amber eye, unbothered.
"That rabbit," Ozair said carefully, "has horns."
Mayo was already looking at something else. A cat, moving between two roots across the path ahead of them. Black fur but with silver lines running through it in geometric patterns, and around its paws as it moved, small flickers of something that looked like flame but left no mark on the ground.
It moved through the undergrowth and was gone without acknowledging them at all.
"That," Ozair said, watching it go, "is beautiful."
His stomach made a sound.
A loud, sustained, deeply committed sound.
Everyone heard it. No one said anything for a moment.
"Okay," Ozair said. "So… those rabbit things. They looked fairly edible."
Mayo grinned. "The horned one? Yeah. Probably delicious."
"Right? I was thinking the same—"
"No," Toviro said.
They both looked at him.
"We don't eat things we cannot identify in a world we arrived at just today. We don't know what those animals are. We don't know what they carry. We don't even know if the meat is safe." He looked at Ozair. "Control it."
Ozair turned to Aryan with an expression of deep suffering. Aryan said, "Control it," without looking at him.
Ozair made a face that contained a significant amount of silent commentary.
Then they all heard it.
Water. Moving water, close, with the particular resonance of something falling from a height.
They stopped collectively, and in the same instant every body turned toward the direction they had come from with the instinct of people who had spent the last several hours being chased by water.
Nothing. Just trees.
Elina exhaled. "I just frightened myself completely."
"Same," Mayo said.
"Where is it coming from?" Mina asked.
Aryan moved left, following the sound, pushing through the undergrowth between two large roots until he reached a wall of dense bush that blocked whatever was beyond it.
He reached forward and spread his hands and the branches parted.
Beyond the bush, lit by moonlight and the glow of its own movement, was a waterfall.
Not enormous. Not the dramatic kind that announces itself from a distance. Just the right size, falling from a green rock face above, the water catching the light as it dropped, landing in a pool at the base that fed a river moving forward through the trees.
The pool was clear enough to see the bottom in the shallows. The sound of it was clean and constant.
The moonlight lay across the surface of the river in three separate columns, one for each moon.
Ozair stepped through the bush and stood at the river's edge and looked at it. "Wow. So clean," he said simply.
Mayo followed, then Mina, then Elina. Mina looked at the water and then at all of them, at the dried blood on Ozair's jaw and on Elina's chin and on Aryan's hands, and said, "Wash your faces. All of you."
They didn't need to be told twice.
Ozair and Aryan crouched at the bank and cupped the water and it was cold and real and the dried blood came away and the exhaustion in their faces didn't leave but it retreated slightly, giving something cleaner a chance to be there.
Elina washed her hands and her face and sat back on her heels and closed her eyes for a moment.
Toviro drank directly from his cupped palm, considered the water, drank again.
Mina washed her face and stayed crouched at the bank, letting the cool of the water settle through her hands.
Mayo put his head in completely. Lifted it out, then put it in again. The water ran down his face and neck and he stayed like that for a moment, eyes closed, the sound of the waterfall constant around him.
He lifted his head out again, and when he opened his eyes Elina had gone very still.
She was crouched at the water's edge where she had been, but she wasn't moving, and her color had changed in the way of someone whose body has registered something before the mind has caught up.
Her hand had stopped where it was.
Aryan noticed. He was rinsing his hands beside her. "Elina. What's wrong?"
She didn't answer. Her hand came up slowly, and she pointed across the river.
Aryan looked.
He went still too.
Mayo turned to see what they were looking at.
He saw it.
On the far bank of the river, standing between two trees in the shadow of the canopy, it was drinking water. Enormous. Its scales caught the moonlight in deep iridescent shifts, white and silver and something between them that had no name in any color language they knew.
Its eyes were open and they were gold, not glowing, just gold, the way certain things are gold that have never needed to explain it.
Its wings were folded against its body, each one longer than the car they had lost. Its tail moved once behind it, slow and deliberate, and the undergrowth bent where it moved.
Mayo scrambled backward on his hands and hit the bank behind him and shouted before he could choose not to.
"Dragon. It's a DRAGON—"
His voice went up the canopy and into the night sky and scattered every bird-like thing in the trees above them into flight, and the sound of wings was everywhere for three seconds before it settled again.
With Mayo's voice, the dragon raised its head and looked directly at them.
The dragon didn't move.
It watched them with its gold eyes across the river, patient as the trees around it, as if it had been here long before they arrived and was simply deciding what they were.
None of them moved.