I grip it tight and Luc steadies, ready to fight me. In this moment understanding pierces my mind—like the sword has its own thoughts, its own instructions, and I know them implicitly.

Pierce to bone and marrow. To spirit and soul.

I lunge. Luc throws his blade up to block, but he’s not fast enough. My blade impales his skull. There is no resistance. It’s like cutting into butter. He crumples to the ground, and I wrench the blade free.

There is no blood. In the place where a wound should be is a slit of light and darkness, writhing like two snakes.

I hear shouts from people with Stranna, but Luc’s not dead. I didn’t kill him. I did whatever the sword told me to do, and now . . . I watch.

His skin withers.

At first I think he’s disintegrating, but then his skull morphs, and for a wild moment I think he’s turning into a rhinoceros like mine.

Instead, his wiggling and morphing body goes still, and when I take a step back I take in the full sight.

Luc is gone.

And in his place is Hex Galilei.

Except now, with a shock, I realize it was never his father. This old bald man with the diamond-stud earring whom I saved was Luc himself. My Adelphoi sword cut through the farce and the fog and revealed truth. And the truth is that Luc was never young.

Luc created this Nightmare world.

In doing so, Luc gave himself a new body. A new life.

Luc drew me in with his story about his father, and all that time I was risking my life to save him. To give him more power to run this world.

I should have seen it—should have connected the dots of his weakening body with his “father’s” dead LifeSuPod. But I was still blocked by my limited knowledge of dreamscapes and Draftmanship. No one had ever created or changed their own avatar. Of course Luc would be the one to do it.

He must have used his device to come into the Real World to defend his body. To kill Crixus . . . and me.

Luc groans and gingerly pushes himself onto all fours.

My sword returns to my side.

Luc gets shakily to his feet. He totters a moment and reaches a frail hand out to me to steady himself before he realizes what he’s doing and quickly withdraws it. As he does this, he glimpses his own skin. Wrinkled and spotted and weak.

Horror crosses his face. “What have you done?”

“Nothing more than reveal the truth.”

“I write the truth here, not you!” he screeches. It strikes me that his suit and tie look absurdly out of place in the Roman world.

“Clearly there’s a power beyond you—even in your own created world.” My words come out sad. This man before me desired a new life and new power so badly that he entrapped the world to get it.

“You can’t out-create the Creator,” I say.

No matter how much Luc creates in this place, God is going to interfere and add His own creations. And His will always be unmatched. He’s not bound by science or ImagiSerum.

“Get away from me,” Luc growls, feral. But he’s the one who staggers in the opposite direction—headed back toward the coliseum. Toward his tower. He waves a weak hand in the air. Nightmist forms the stingray, but the nightbeast shies away like it doesn’t recognize him.

“No one in your kingdom knows you anymore, Luc. Not even your own creation.”

He climbs on the stingray’s back, but it bucks him off. He stabs the thing through the head with one of his daggers, then strides off as if he doesn’t even care whether he’s attacked from behind or not.

I let him go, wondering if he’ll make it to the coliseum. There are plenty of nightbeasts out there to attack him. But even if he gets back to his atrium, he has no Crixus to vouch for him. The people won’t know him. They know only the mirage-Luc. The young face of confidence and control. This Luc created a Roman world where the citizens eat their own, trying to survive.

And they will devour him. This frail old man claiming to be their leader.

His time is over.

I turn toward our wounded Castle Ithebego and walk through the veil. It parts to let me through, and Stranna comes up to me. I take her hand. We look at each other but say nothing. In this moment our silence speaks more than words. I’m not sure what it’s saying . . . only that it’s comforting.

It’s just us out here. The parents and children tend to wounds or haul the carcasses of dead nightbeasts out of the castle.

“You defeated him,” she declares. “You defeated the Draftsman.” Not Luc. Not the Emperor. The Draftsman. The creator who wanted to think of himself as the Creator.

“The sword defeated him, not me.”

“You had the choice of whether or not to wield it,” she replies, “whether or not to obey.”

I didn’t think of it that way, but now that she says it, I know she’s right. I start to tug her toward the castle, but she doesn’t move.

“Do you think it’s over? Will this world fade? Will we all go back home?”

I shake my head, wishing I could give her a different answer. “This virus is here to stay. Luc was right about that. This is our new world. Even the death of Luc wouldn’t have changed that.”

“So what now?”

I lift a shoulder. “Another Emperor will rise. Or maybe we’ll call him president or king or whatever. But we have the power to make a new life for ourselves—to build things of life and light.”

We have a sun and a wheat field to plant. A fortress to mend and forest to nurture. I lead Stranna toward Castle Ithebego, walking in sweet stillness, hand in hand. The castle is a silhouette against a beaming horizon that I expect we’ll explore some day—the bits of the dreamscape that no man made, the new landscape that God laid out in this intricate, imagined new world.

Who can predict what we’ll find when we dare such an adventure?

“We have a home, Stranna.” For the first time, I see this place as truly beautiful. Coated in potential and adventure.

“We have something even more than that,” Stranna comments quietly as the new sun sets for the first time in our new world. We both take it in—the warmth, the beams, the miracle. “We have the eternal cure.”

The night is far gone; the day is at hand.

So then let us cast off the works of darkness

and put on the armor of light.

Romans 13:12 ESV