Fraschkit landed the warper in Pataklasa. Together, we found the mayor and delivered the warning to stay underground during an attack. Then Fraschkit continued onward to see her family in Torglasa.

I watched the warper shrink into the skyline. When it dipped out of sight behind a hill, I could no longer justify delaying the inevitable. With a deep breath, I trudged toward my father's home.

Pataklasa was the village where I had grown up, yet everything looked different now: each green field was surrounded by brown ones, and for each open shop, there was another boarded-up and broken down. Once upon a time, the town's biggest problem had been disputes over farmland and downtown real estate. Once, the humans had sometimes begged Guardians to settle such disagreements. Now, the Palace was siphoning human 'tributes' and hard-earned resources more quickly than they could be replaced, and the Guardians had all died or moved away.

All except my father.

Just outside town, I found his tiny shanty perched among rows of wilted crops in sandy soil. The roof sagged, and the paint was peeling. The crooked sign hanging from the door knocker read: VOSGAR THE GUARDIAN. Chained to the crumbling front steps was a terranean warper almost as large as the shack. The Guardians had allowed my father to keep it so he could visit me in the rebel base whenever he so chose.

He hadn't visited me once.

The door swung open, and my father's broad frame filled the doorway. In the year since I had last seen him, he had lost more hair, leaving only scraggly gray curls just above his ears. White film blurred his dark eyes, and his once impressive physique had whittled away like a rotten oak tree.

As he hobbled down the steps toward me, nerves tightened my chest. What if he didn't recognize me? Or worse—what if he recognized me and still told me to leave?

I tapped my shoulder and tipped my head in respect.

He pulled me into an embrace.

I blinked at him for several breathless seconds, torn between tentative hope and trepidation. What had happened in the last year to make him greet me like this?

"Hey, Dad," I said cautiously. "It's good to see you."

"I've missed you so much, Hefgar," he said.

Well, there it was. Hefgar.

A sigh deflated my chest, and I extricated myself from his embrace. "I'm not Hefgar, Dad. I'm Remgar."

My father cocked his head and squinted past me. "Then where is Hefgar?"

I swallowed and shook my head.

My father's mouth dropped open with a strangled croak. Then tears brightened his eyes. "Oh, First Guardian, it's true, isn't it? My nightmare—it all happened?" He blinked, and his tears trickled down his ruddy cheeks. "And your mother, too? She's..."

"It's just us now, Dad. It's been just us for a long time."

"I knew this would happen." He paced back and forth in front of me, and his voice dropped to an almost incoherent mumble. "I had a nightmare beforehand, didn't I? A premonition." He dug the heels of his hands into his temples. "Didn't I warn them what was coming?"

"Yes, you warned them, but they went anyway. They said true Guardians aren't ruled by fear."

He barked a grating laugh that deteriorated into a sob halfway through. "And look where their bravery got them! Thank the First Guardian at least you were smart enough not to follow them."

My jaw clenched.

His eyes focused on me, and his heavy eyebrows pulled close together. I could see him trying to sift through his memories and reassemble the jagged pieces of his mind. Any second now, he would remember what really happened: that his wife and older son had not died for their bravery.

They had died for my cowardice.

Before he could rediscover the truth, I cleared my throat. "May I come in?"

He blinked, and I watched his thoughts scatter. Then he nodded and swung an arm toward the door.

The inside of his home had deteriorated even more than the outside. Dirty dishes piled around the room, clothing lay in heaps, and book pages were stapled across the walls and marked up with slanted capital letters.

My father scanned the room and scratched his head, frowning.

I clapped a hand over his shoulder and forced a casual tone. "Hey, maybe we should hire someone to help you take care of this place. Or I could... I can visit more. I mean, if you'd want to..."

To see me.

"Nonsense! I'm fine." He spun toward the doorway on the right of the room. "Just sit here for a few minutes, and I'll make dinner."

"You don't need to make—" I started, but I stopped when he trundled through the doorway and disappeared from sight.

I lowered myself onto the sofa cushion carefully, so as not to disturb the pile of dishes on the other end.

For the next hour, I busied myself with the books stacked beside his couch. Each time a pot reached an alarming boil or something clattered on the counter, my fingers dug into the arm of the sofa. But then I heard my father's breathy whistle, and I knew my entrance would harm his pride more than his incompetence could harm his kitchen.

So I settled back into the couch and refocused on the book in my lap.

Unfortunately, the books proved equally distracting. For one, the topics were alarming at best, all authored by Guardians or humans rumored to be at least slightly deranged. Secondly, the all-caps notes penned into the margins articulated arguments even more bizarre than the ones the authors made. And third, some pages were missing entirely, messily ripped out of the book. In an unwilling game of treasure-hunt, my eyes found each missing page somewhere on the walls around me. Meanwhile, the windows darkened too early, leaving an ominous orange glow.

While I was studying a particularly confounding series of circles and scribbles, my father's voice jerked my focus toward the door.

"Food's ready!" he said brightly, plopping a plate down on my lap.

With a grateful smile, I dug in. The food was seasoned as little as the packets we ate in the base, and I struggled to swallow the burnt patches. The blackened veggies tasted even more bitter in contrast to my memories.

My father had once been the best cook in our family.

Still, each time his gaze flitted in my direction, I managed a smile. And although I caught the involuntary contortion of his own expression each time he encountered a particularly burnt portion of food, he somehow matched each smile I offered him.

Each shared smile cracked his tight expression open a little further. When we simultaneously bit into a particularly burnt patch, we exchanged an expression of equal grimace and trembling smile. And upon recognizing our own expression on each other's faces, we both suddenly dissolved into a fit of laughter.

In unison, we spit partially-chewed blackened food onto our plates—which just made us both laugh harder.

The food and laughter brought some lucidity to his eyes. He set his plate on the floor beside him and leaned toward me, elbows on his knees. "So, what is the news from the Guardian base?"

I drew a breath. "Well, things are not looking good. Rakimar says her connection to the First Guardian is weakening."

I heard more than saw the wet cluck of his tongue pushing up against his teeth. "That sounds bad, Remgar. We need to find and destroy the High Demon Prince fast."

"We know," I said. "We had a plan to capture him, but instead we got..." Instead, we got Isalio, a submissive, confounding Demon who made my heart beat too fast and incinerated my logic. "We got his younger brother."

"Hmm." He scratched the few prickly hairs left on his chin. "And have you found anyone of interest?"

"I... what do you mean?"

He shrugged. "You're getting to that age when you should start settling down. What about that friend you brought here a few years ago? Fraschkit, was it? She seemed like a strong warrior, and if I'm not mistaken, she was quite interested in you."

I rolled my eyes. "If you can remember Fraschkit, you must also remember I am only interested in men."

"And you must remember that Guardians are losing power. This is not a time for selfish preferences, Remgar. There are... what? Maybe fifty of you left at the base? And less than five hundred Guardians across the world."

"Unfortunately," I said dryly, "I can't change who I am to fit the needs of the times."

He clucked his tongue. "Well, that's simply—"

Thunder rumbled in the distance, and my father cut off, wide eyes fixed on the window. The oak-striped glass revealed the setting-sun, a blood-orange globe sinking into a horizon of violet streaked by electric-blue. Black clouds hung heavy overhead, all the more ominous for the lack of accompanying rain. I tensed at the sight. A thunderstorm was not ominous—necessarily.

But whenever Demons struck, so did lightning.

My father's eyes glazed, and he began slowly rocking back and forth.

I laid a hand on his knee. "Dad? Are you ok?"

"Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no, no." His eyes were no longer fixed on the window but on some spot on the wall. "This can't be happening."

"What can't be happening?"

His eyes flicked my direction, but they remained glazed. "Hefgar? Is that you? Are you here?"

My throat swelled. Gritting my teeth, I said, "Yes, Dad. I'm here."

"You need to protect your brother, Hefgar. Something terrible is about to happen to him."

An icy chill swept through me. "My brother?"

His hand clamped down on mine over his knee, squeezing painfully. "Please protect Remgar. He's too sweet, too gentle, and he's not ready for..." He shook his head and whimpered. "Something terrible is about to happen at the base."

His voice dropped to inaudible as he continued to mutter. He didn't even seem to notice as I pried his fingers off of mine and sprang to my feet.

I darted toward the door and shoved it open hard enough the hinges creaked. My feet pounded sandy soil, and my breaths rasped in my lungs.

At the top of the nearest hill, I saw it.

Way off in the distance, beyond the sandy crops of Pataklasa and the rolling green hills of Anyalasa, lightning struck once—twice—thrice—in the same spot in the middle of the desert. A rumble too loud to be thunder followed the flashes of lightning, and a black spot formed in the middle of endless tan.

The earth was tearing apart.

For a moment, I hesitated, heart caught in my throat. Was the High Prince rescuing his brother? Or had the Demons decided to demolish the Guardian resistance once and for all?

Whatever the case, if I returned to the base now, I would probably die along with everyone else. The rest of the Council had reasoned that the top priority for Guardians should be to stay alive.

But my mother claimed true Guardians were not ruled by fear.

In the end, it was neither bravery nor fear that ruled my reaction—just deeply-ingrained instinct. As the sky dumped rain, I turned back toward my father's home. And as lightning lit the sky, my eyes fixed on the silver flash of my family's terranean warper.