The beastmen sent word the next day: come to our camp. All of you. Be our guests.
And for the first time since the world ended, my whole family went somewhere together.
I want to mark that, because the first cycle never gave it to me. Mom up front. Dad driving, one eye on every shadow out of old habit. My sisters, Seojin, Lisa and little Jihoon, and Miyoung with a baby caterpillar she'd smuggled into her pocket because she "didn't trust the others to feed it right." All of us, in the gold-dead morning, off to visit allies — like a family on an outing, if the outing were across a remade universe to meet a tribe of tiger-people.
Dad accepted the invitation without much argument, which told me something. Even he was starting to understand: a house, however well-armed, is not a future. People are a future.
The beastman camp wasn't a camp. That was the first surprise.
It was a city — or near enough. Where the human world had gone silent and empty, these people had built. Hide and timber and something that glowed soft along the walkways, lodges rising in tiers up the side of the new land, and everywhere, beastmen. Hundreds. Thousands, maybe. A whole thriving people who'd woken on the board and decided, at once and together, to live.
After two days walking through the bones of my own dead world, it did something to me to see that. Somewhere out there the end of everything had landed — and someone had answered it by lighting fires and raising roofs and going on anyway.
They knew us on sight. Word travels fast among people just pulled out of cages. We were welcomed in like heroes, and I'll admit I didn't hate it.
Then they made a request: the leaders of our people should meet the leader of theirs. So Junha, Seojin and I were taken up toward the heart of the city — while the rest of the family was swept off in a dozen friendly directions to see the place. Miyoung was gone in seconds. Jiyeon was already deep in talk with one of their healers. Jihoon was riding the shoulders of a wolf-man twice his height, shrieking with joy.
I learned, on the walk up, what we were actually looking at.
The tribe wasn't one people. It was five, bound into one: the Tiger clan, the Fox clan, the Wolf clan, the Rabbit clan, the Snake clan — five species, five temperaments, one banner. Tigers for strength. Foxes for cunning. Wolves for the hunt. Snakes for patience. And the rabbit-folk — don't laugh — for numbers, and a ferocity that surprised everyone who underestimated them, which was everyone, once.
And over all five of them sat the Tigers. And over the Tigers sat one man.
His name was Taetigkon.
He was the largest living thing I'd seen since I came back — and I'd come back to a world with monsters in it. A tiger of a man, head and shoulders over his own warriors, striped and scarred and built like the architecture was an afterthought wrapped around him. He didn't perform his authority. He didn't have to. He simply was the most dangerous thing in any room, and the room arranged itself around the fact.
A thousand years had introduced me to a great many powerful things. Very few of them made me recalculate on sight. He did.
He thanked us — for his people, for the cages we'd opened — in a voice like a landslide deciding to be gentle. And then he gave us gifts: weapons, beastman-forged, the kind of craft that made even the merchant kit I'd bought look like factory work. Blades with weight and meaning to them. He gave them the way a king gives, which is to say without ever letting us feel we owed him for it.
I accepted for us. You learn, in any world, how to take a gift gracefully from a powerful man — and we folded every piece of it into Miyoung's subspace for safekeeping, which earned a low, impressed rumble from the warriors watching. They had not, it seemed, seen a pocket of space used as a coin purse before.
Then he fed us.
The whole hall sat to lunch — us and a hundred beastmen, long tables, food I didn't recognize and didn't need to, the easy roar of a people who genuinely liked one another. For an hour there was nothing strategic about any of it. Just warmth, and meat, and Seojin somehow already telling jokes that landed clean across a language barrier.
But I hadn't come for lunch.
I leaned to Junha, low, under the noise. "We need this," I told him. "Not the food. Them. A people like this, allied to us — that's the difference between surviving what's coming and not. I've seen what's coming. We don't get through it with one house and a dozen guns."
Junha nodded slowly. He'd learned by now to take me seriously when I said what's coming in that voice.
"So we ask," he said.
"So we ask."
He asked. Plainly, the way Junha does things — straight across the table to Taetigkon: would the beastmen stand with us. An alliance. Two peoples, one side.
The hall didn't go quiet, exactly. But it leaned in.
Taetigkon set down what he was eating and looked at my brother for a long, weighing moment. And when he answered, it wasn't a no. It was something more interesting.
"You opened our cages," he said. "For that you have our thanks, our table, and our gifts. But thanks are not an alliance. My people do not bind ourselves to the kind. We bind ourselves to the strong — because when the sky tears open again, and it will, kindness will not hold the line. Strength will."
He stood. The whole hall stood with him, and the air changed.
"If you would have us at your side," Taetigkon said, "then earn it. Best my champions — the finest fighters of all five clans. And when they have fallen—"
He smiled, every tooth of it, and I swear the temperature dropped a degree.
"—then you face me."
Beside me, Junha let out a breath that was almost a laugh. I knew that breath. That was the Dreamwalker waking up — the part of my brother those years of dreams had been quietly sharpening for exactly this.
And me — a thousand years of fighting things far worse than honorable tiger-men, my whole impossible past balled up tight behind my teeth — I looked up at the largest creature I'd seen since I crawled back into this life, and I thought:
Good.
This one was a language I spoke fluently.
"When do we start?" I said.
— To be continued.