"Well done, Amber," Jack was applauding as soon as she got to sleep.

"I feel a bit dizzy," she said, quite honestly, "I think the doctors gave me something to help me sleep. I'm not going to get in trouble am I, pretending to be injured?"

"You'll be fine," Mel shrugged, "You had a bit of a bruise already, and people's minds get messed up when there's something too terrifying to think about, so either way it's possible you could have been stunned or catatonic. I just figured it'd be easier this way, because the police have me down as the good samaritan who saved you from a monster, even if they would have found you a couple of minutes later anyway."

"So I'm lying to the police so that you can be a hero?"

"No. Just so you don't have to answer any questions about the monster. And also, if I'm the hero, that gives me a valid excuse for wanting to know how you're getting on. When we meet in those kinds of circumstances, that gives me a reason to be interested. Like, I want to see that you're recovering. That might just be a good enough reason for your mum to let me see you again, which will be really useful if we need to go find the Princess."

"Wow, you thought of all that in like, ten minutes?"

"I've been thinking about it for ten years. Things we could have done better ten years ago, and how things might have worked out. Everything's easier with hindsight, but it tells us what we could do better this time."

"So what does this teach us about the Enemy?" Jack cut in. "The monsters get mad when somebody challenges them?"

"I got away from one twice," Amber said, less certainly this time, "That can't be just by chance. I think he's coming after us first, because we might be able to stop him. Something like that. It can't be just by chance I've been there twice, when there's millions of people in the world who haven't seen a monster once."

"I was nearly there," Mel added, "It's a long shot us being so close together, too."

"Then maybe it's really time for us to find the Princess," Jack said, a trace of excitement entering his voice for once, "Maybe this generation is when we manage it, and destiny's starting to pull us together. The Enemy knows we're close, so it has to try to stop us, like it's a last try out of desperation?"

"It could be," Alex said, though it was clear from her tone that she didn't really think it was likely. "Or it could just be chance. If the Princess was so close, then why wouldn't the Enemy just be hiding? Or why didn't it try to destroy us while we couldn't have stopped it?"

"Maybe it did," Violet provided a more hopeful option, "Maybe we've been able to fight the Enemy in the past, we just didn't remember well enough. I mean, there's monsters in the news now, but there's been things like that before. Urban legends, or fairy stories, or myths, there's always been stories about monsters."

"We dismissed them as just stories," Mel was the first to catch on to what she meant, "But the Enemy could have caused trouble any number of times. We fought them in our previous forms, but it was a tough battle. We didn't survive well enough to remember, and all we could do was stall it for a couple of years."

"We must have remembered once, if that happened," Alex still wasn't certain. "There must be something, and we'd surely know if it was significant enough to be worth remembering."

"The Princess, then?" Amber spoke, almost cutting off the end of Alex's question. "She can't awaken without us. But maybe if she's in a half-powered form, like a larval stage, she could still fight off the Enemy. I mean like..." she thought for a long moment, trying to find words that didn't come from a current cartoon series. "If they both take time before they can evolve to their final form, then the Enemy could be trying to hurt her before she gets there. You said already that we might be drawn to the Princess, but what would it mean if we didn't notice that happening? We could be getting so close to her, just when the Enemy attacks, and we think it's after us instead. I don't think those attacks could be random, not two so close together. But if the Princess needs us, then maybe the Enemy is following her, attacking us when we get too close."

"She has a point," Mel nodded. "The Princess could be right under our noses, and we wouldn't even see her."

"Then we need to look," Alex said firmly, "All of us, doing everything we can. See if we can manage to bring a map of the area into this dream, and then mark all the monster sightings you can find mentioned in the news or anywhere. We don't care if it's proper reports or just rumours now, we need to record as many of them as we can."

"What if this is all a wild goose chase?" Jack asked.

"It isn't. We plot the monster sightings on a map, we're either finding clues to help us locate the Princess, or at least we're getting some better hints about the Enemy's movements. If the dots on the map make a pattern, then we've learned something either way."

Amber just nodded. It had been her idea in a way, and Violet's, and Mel's. But she didn't feel anywhere near as confident in it as Alex sounded. She could agree with one thing though, and that was that there didn't seem to be any other options right now. So as the first stage on this plan, they started trying to find how they could get a map into the dream.

* * *

Cyra opened his eyes, and stared into the darkness. Blank crystal walls, a million gemstones that spanned the whole spectrum, and he couldn't see a thing. All the decorations could take a single candle flame and reflect the light again and again until it felt like standing inside a rainbow, but there wasn't the faintest flicker here. His body hurt, and he knew he'd been defeated. For now. He'd come back, he was sure of that, because there were some things more powerful even than death. The power of love was the heart of the emotional spectrum, and Cyra was sure it would be enough to bring him back again.

Cyra wasn't the most powerful force in the universe, he was well aware of that. Every member of the court, every man in the royal guard, had their own powers, tied into the symbolism of the planet itself, and the emotions of the collective unconscious, and even the forbidden powers known as 'magic' if they would only admit it. If he had to rank them, Cyra would have admitted there were four or five who could outclass him in sheer power, or in natural talent. But he was the only one who truly understood how their powers worked, and that meant that he was the only one who could retain his full powers through the veil of death, and the only one who knew how to achieve true resurrection. It was a difficult task, spread over thousands of years, but it might work. He could set himself free, if the others just remembered enough of their destiny.

He didn't know for sure. He could only gamble that they would do their part. But hope was almost as strong as love, and he could already feel his connection to the mortal world growing. Soon, he would see his love again. No matter how much they had changed over the centuries, they would be united.