He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead.

Dumas could feel the earth shake underneath him. He looked around at Spectral, everyone else was walking fine. So, he was imagining this. What he wasn’t entirely imagining were the faint trickles of blood escaping with his sweat and tears, the rashes erupting like tiny poisonous flowers along his arms and legs, the bloating in his legs and hands.

He had gone to the control tower to find out exactly what happened, and found Meta in the sack where E.H. was supposed to be. The poor boy was sobbing. They took him, he said.

Those little bastards. Dumas wanted to kill those little bastards again. E.H. would not have gone to the raid, he promised Dumas earlier. What was a kid’s word worth these days?

“Dumas, my wrist hurts,” Meta said, over his tears. Dumas had told him how he found E.H. and that he was never coming back. They were walking towards the friar’s. Dumas was gripping the boy’s wrist like a suitcase handle.

“Is that why you’re crying?”

Meta shook his head. “I won’t see him anymore.”

Dumas struggled to ruffle Meta’s hair. But his hands shook so terribly and he tried so hard to hold it steady he inadvertently gave Meta a hard smack on the head.

Meta, too weak to retaliate or protest, resumed crying.

Dumas walked faster.

“Dumas.”

“What?”

“You said we were energies. You said we never die.”

“I lied. The you that you think you are ceases to exist.”

Meta cried harder. Dumas grabbed his hand again and started walking.

“But then we become something else. Something…large.”

Meta sniffled. “Why do we miss people when they die?”

“Because once we find our anchors sometimes we think we’re nothing without them.”

Anchors. It’s always been about anchors. Suddenly Dumas was struck by why everything was so different when he came back into town. Why everything mattered to him. Why these people mattered to him.

To him. He was a point of reference. He himself was a bloody rusty anchor. Somehow in the middle of these crazy affairs he had forgotten to be an anchor himself.

That’s not entirely true. I did try to stop getting E.H. killed. But even that wasn’t entirely true. It was the reaction of an angry man, and he wasn’t an angry man, not really. He was just this, Dumas Chang, seer of things, speaker of stuff. He realized he shouldn’t try to be anybody else, not a hero, not a vigilante, not a flag-wielding protester against the acts of the universe.

It freed him.

Moments later, for the first time in six hundred forty-seven chess games with the Friar, Dumas won. He knew what he had to do then. He was not going to stop anything. He was going to fully focus on what he can do at that moment.

And what do you know, as he was walking in the general direction of XT-452, he stumbled upon the axe that will change all their lives forever.

(Thanks Paul for supplying the English equivalent of ‘binatukan.’)