Something will go wrong again. He knows this, thinks it tiredly. There's too many things around them for any of this to be safe, he can already see a hundred ways where the dream might crumple in on itself, turn into something that is horrifying less because of its absurdity — it's in the nature of dreams to be absurd — than because of the way it feels like an intruder. Like the only real thing here.

The great sparkling figure that is simultaneously just behind the ship but also miles and miles away — the figure that is vaguely fish-shaped, but massive, the size of an aircraft carrier — that, for instance, would be easy to give teeth. For now, it's just drifting by, but he's waiting every time he sees anything with any form, breath held. There are nightmares here worse than he could summon in any physical plane.

It's a long time before there's any answer for that reason. He doesn't want to start something and have to flee in the middle of it. When he finally actually appears — and it is him, not a him from another life, the only connection that colourless echo and a certain sadness in the eyes — it's far away, separated by an entire not-ocean which appears to be composed of velvety nothingness and teeming with littler starfish (actual stars, actual fish), but space is so meaningless here, he might as well be a foot away.

He's four. Maybe younger. It's not the form he remembers most clearly or feels safest in, it's just the first one that comes to mind. Sitting on an island he made for himself out of more nothing, knees up to his chest, arms wrapped around them, impossibly small compared to the vastness of the astral reaches. "I told you to go away," he says with an adult's voice. What he means is warned you.

These things tend to happen in threes; maybe this is the last one.