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Five.
Narzissenkreuz has not been Rene for a long, long time, but he still has his dreams.
Stripped of his soul, his memories, and his persona, that old wish remains at the core of this thing that Rene became, floating there so peacefully one could think that it could wake up again.
The dream is childish in its simplicity, but it is something only an adult could know to wish for. In this dream, there is a dragon to be slain, a sword made to do the slaying, a hero to wield it.
Who is the hero of that story? Who is the villain? What is the sword?
Rene had these answers, once upon a time, but those had died with him in the Primordial Sea. All that is left of him is that wish for uncomplicated answers, a simple conflict, a happily ever after.
Narzissenkreuz has outgrown Rene, surpassed him and his petty guilts and childlike desires, but still it is that dream that sleeps in the center of him. Perhaps that is a testament to how deeply Rene wanted it. If Narzissenkreuz was to change again, evolve beyond whatever it is he is now, would that dream still pass on to whatever it is that comes next?
He is not Rene, but he is not surprised that The-Thing-that-Used-to-be-Mary-Ann and The-Thing-That-Used-to-be-Lyris recognizes him as such, calling him by that old name that, towards the end, not even Jakob would whisper in his sleep.
She calls him Rene and he thinks that little sleeping dream at the core of him might be opening its eyes.
“There it is,” The-Thing-that-Used-to-be-Mary-Ann smiles at him warmly with an unfamiliar face. He’s not surprised she recognizes him because he recognizes her too. After all, it is the dream of her too - of Alain, of Jakob, of Carter, of Rene - that dreams within his dream. “And there you are, same as ever!”
He cannot help himself. He laughs.
“I’m being serious,” ‘Mary-Ann’ steps forward, takes his face in his hands, and kneels down to the size of the child he is shaped like. She is not in the shape of the child that he once knew, but it’s her. Of course it’s her.
It’s someone else too.
“I’ve missed you,” they say.
Narzissenkreuz wishes he could say the same. He wishes it was Rene who was standing here instead of him. He wishes she was actually Mary-Ann.
“Did you find what you were looking for?”
What was he looking for? A sword? A dragon? A hero?
A way back, a way past, a way through that awful ending waiting for them at the end of this fairy tale.
But the tale has ended and he’s still here. The dream is over. He wasn’t the hero and he wasn’t even the dragon. The real hero found the sword and the dragon is long dead.
What now?
“It’s a long story,” Narzissenkreuz finally answers. “Mary-Ann, I -”
‘Mary-Ann’ laughs and skips away, taking his hand and leading him towards the cottage on top of the hill. Seymour follows dutifully behind her. The Caterpillar watches them from afar. “Well, come on then. You can tell me all about it over tea. You owe me the tale of your grand adventure.”
Four.
Jakob used to dream about the end of the world. In this dream, the skies were shattered by some great beast from beyond the stars. In this dream, he alone is left to watch the seas rise and choke the air out of the sky.
Jakob does not dream anymore because he has surpassed the need for sleep, but still he cannot escape the dreaming.
There is another dream that haunts him, nightmarish in its loveliness. One hundred years ago or two - he’s stopped counting the time - this dream was shared between Jakob and his closest friend before that friend destroyed himself to make that dream a reality.
The shape of the dream has changed over time, grown in scope and scale beyond their initial imaginations. The cost of that dream has soared higher and higher and with them, the rewards.
And the losses.
The latest version of this dream (and the last version of the dream) ends with blue skies and calm seas. Rene has returned to himself and they find the caterpillar and bring him back too. They go to the park that Alain had named in her honor and say goodbye to all that they have done and all they have lost to get here.
In this dream, the emerge from the apocalypse victorious and get to return home. That is the prize for heroes, is it not? The return of what was lost, stolen from them by the evil dragon who could be slain if only the hero could wield the right sword.
He chases this dream of the future because the truth of the future is too horrible to accept and so he runs. He chases this dream because it was promised to him.
He has lost too much to give up now when there was so much he could get back.
Three.
Alain has been building this machine his whole life.
After Seymour, Alain had taken a break from tinkering with thinking machines, believing he had created his magnum opus, and returned to the relative simplicity of his energy systems research and the intuitive rhythms of clockwork.
Seymour was lost now, as are most things that once belonged to Alain. What is left of the meka is somewhere in Elynas and if he wasn’t too damaged from that final battle, he’s probably wandering through that wasteland looking for -
Looking for a way to complete his objective - the command that Alain had made the core of that machine. In a way, he was a little like Director Lyris, who could only look for her children and bring them home.
Alain would occasionally consider looking for him, if only to recover the machine parts and see what he could salvage of his final memories, but the situation in Elynas is still too delicate for him to go there and also -
(There’s some small, small part of him - soft and sentimental and so desperately -
He likes the idea that somewhere out there, something in the world is still turning like she is someone he can protect. He likes the idea that she is just waiting for Seymour to come find her and bring her back home to him like the past few years were all just some terrible dream he could wake up from at any moment. He likes the idea that when he wakes up, she’s there to see the park he had named in her honor and to laugh and laugh at him and tell him that he should have named a ship after her, or a sword.
If only, if only.)
If he could go back to the beginning, he wouldn’t. That line of thinking is a fruitless thought experiment that Rene would torment himself with when the reality of his actions became too difficult for him to bear. A terrible habit they had fought over countless times.
But if he could take a step back - further and further back until the mechanisms of the universe were laid out clearly before him - he’d take it all apart. Not to destroy them, not to undo them, but so he could understand the ticks and tocks. What gears and clockwork did some great, primordial engineer put in place that led them all to this conclusion, the only one they could ever see?
(A little like destiny. A little like prophecy.)
This question has lingered in the back of Alain’s mind for years and years now. The question has outlived all that he cares for and will outlive him too, but in his twilight years, he can no longer outrun the curiosity nipping at his heels.
So he starts building a machine, the one that will be his true magnum opus.
He could create the machine that eventually grew into Seymour a dozen more times, a hundred, but that would not be enough. His loyal companion was a proof of concept that could not surpass himself to become the machine that Alain needed. It could only ever become something a little like Lyris - beloved, with a wisdom and intelligence that was quiet and underappreciated, but simple and uncomplicated.
Alain’s machine - the culmination of all of his research and all of his work and all of his life - must be more than that. Alain’s machine is a thing of gears and clockwork, yes, but it had to be one that could surpass its destiny and outgrow the prophecy. It needed to be complex. Clever. Illogical.
Alive.
Alive, but something he could take apart and see how it ticks and tocks and maybe then, maybe in seeing it with his own two eyes, he can finally understand why -
Maybe he can finally understand.
Two.
Mary-Ann is telling a story, but more than that, she is telling the story. She is telling the dream that has occupied their waking and dreaming world for ages now and so the telling needs to be perfect.
Writing a storybook was Miss Basil’s suggestion. She walked into Mary-Ann’s room one night to hear her telling Director Lyris their nightly bedtime story as she was tucking Mary-Ann into bed.
At the end of this latest chapter of the Narzissenkreuz adventure team, the heroes had fallen into a secret trap set by the evil villain just as it seemed they would achieve victory. Their happily ever after was snatched away once again, the story had to be left on a cliffhanger when the Director called them all back inside for supper. All throughout the meal, Mary-Ann could see the gears turning in Alain’s mind as he tried to figure out an even cleverer way to escape from Ney’s clever trap.
Miss Basil could see how the Director was getting overwhelmed by all the clever plots and characters so she suggested writing it all down so she wouldn’t get mixed up anymore. The Director has already tried to sit down Rene and Alain to get them to sort out their differences twice.
(“Wait, Alain and Rene are fighting in the forest. Oh no, oh no, that will not do at all. I must go bring them home!”
“No, no, it’s alright, Miss Lyris. Alain and Rene are safe in bed, don’t worry. Al and Ney are fighting in the story.”
“Miss Mary-Ann, I - I don’t understand -” )
One afternoon, Miss Basil pulled down a copy of The Boar Princess for the shelves of the library and set it in front of Mary-Ann. It was the special copy of the tale, only brought out for special occasions for them to ooh and ahh over the lush illustrations.
For inspiration, she had said.
(It was miles beyond the old, worn copy that Rene would read every single night until Alain accidentally dropped it in the mud.
Alain had apologized in the only way he could. For over a month, Alain had painstakingly restored the book in secret using what supplies he could steal away after their art lessons. The end result was clumsy but sincere and, by every technical measure at least, fixed.
But still, Rene refused to take it back, saying he was getting too old for fairy tales anyway.)
Mary-Ann’s excitement for the project was quickly dimmed, though, once the boys learned about what she was doing and subsequently refused to agree on a single thing about the story.
"The Holy Sword fell out of the sky and landed in a lake!" Jakob says. "The Adventure Crew had to go on a quest for the Lake Fairy to convince them to give us the sword."
"No, no, that wasn't it at all. The Adventuring Brigade forged it themselves," Rene yells back. "The quest was to gather the four treasures to forge them into the sword."
"Lyris is a princess," Mary-Ann shrieks, covering the book with her body so the boys couldn't reach it to taint it with their idiocy and their - their wrongness . "She's called 'Your Highness' not 'Your Grace'!"
"What's the difference?"
"You don't know anything!"
"There should be a dog," Alain insists.
This is the only thing Alain insists and therefore he is the only one Mary-Ann trusts to help her write the book without any fuss. Also, he has the best handwriting out of all of them, even Rene who was the oldest.
For all that he plays the hero, he’s surprisingly uninterested in telling the story. All he cares about is sneaking pictures of a mechanical dog, Seymour, into the illustrations next to Al. “Marionette, look, he can hold the Holy Sword in his tail.”
Eventually, the project was abandoned over the most ridiculous argument Mary-Ann had heard up to that point in her life. Even Jakob, who would be content if one day he awoke as Rene’s shadow, looked confused. From underneath the tree by the riverbank, Alain had spared the argument a precious few seconds of his attention before returning to the story book to pencil in another drawing of Seymour between Al and Petit Chou. This version of Seymour could breathe fire.
“What do you mean the evil villain is too evil? Are you hearing yourself? What does that even mean?”
“You’re the one not hearing me,” Rene shouts back. “I just want the story to show why he’s evil.”
“‘Why he’s evil’? It’s because he’s the bad guy! He’s evil because he’s a bad person who wants to hurt people!”
“But why? Miss Basil always says people do things because they have their reasons. Maybe he’s doing this stuff because he’s scared. Or maybe he’s trying to do the right thing but he’s doing it the wrong way!”
“If he wanted to do the right thing, he’d be the good guy, but he’s not. You’re saying that he kidnapped princesses and killed people because he was trying to do the right thing? That doesn’t make any sense!”
“What doesn’t make sense is someone doing something for no reason.”
“Then his reason for being evil is because he wants to kill things!”
“But why?” There’s something desperate in Rene’s voice in that moment. Maybe it was desperate or maybe it was lost. Whatever it was, Mary-Ann couldn’t hear it, too incensed by the whole situation.
“Why isn’t that good enough for you?”
“You’re the one that wanted to tell the whole story.” And this was the straw that finally broke the camel’s back. “So stop being lazy and tell the whole story.”
“Lazy!” Mary-Ann shrieks. “Lazy? I’m the one that’s been writing and rewriting and drawing and redrawing this stupid book for weeks now because of all the stuff you wanted to change.”
She marches over to Alain and snatches the book out of his hands. “If you want the bad guys to be good guys and the good guys to be bad guys so much, you can write the story yourself. I’m done!”
With that, she chucks the book into the river. The wet inks and paints leech into the water and swirl downstream, but Mary-Ann doesn’t see any of that. She’s already grabbed Alain by the wrist and marches them back towards the house.
(The next day Rene apologizes in the only way he knows how: by moving forward and not looking back. He proposes another game, a break from the adventures of the Narzissenkreuz Adventuring Team, and after a second of hesitation, Mary-Ann smiles and accepts.
Rene reaches up to cover his eyes. Behind him, he can hear the sounds of his friends running away and hiding from him, their laughter being carried by the soft breeze. He can feel the warm sun on the back of his neck.
One day, he will look back on this moment and wish it had lasted forever.
Today, he rushes through the countdown, eager for the next part.
“Five, four, three, two -” )
One.
The bell has rung, my loves. It’s time to wake up.