“What a lovely place!” Semyon said in delight, gazing around. “Ooh…So this is where…”

He spotted the golem and stopped. Then he walked across and gave it a cautious kick. He shook his head. “Ooh…what a massive beast… Did you bring it down, Anton?”

“I’m afraid it’s not that simple to bring down,” I said, pointing to the Rune. Then, turning to Foma, I said, “Shall we move on?”

“Can you manage it?”

“I’ll give it a try.”

Lermont shook his head doubtfully. He glanced at his subordinate and said, “You can’t go any further. I brought you along because of this…ugly brute. But there’s no way you can go on. Wait for as long as you can and then go back.” Lermont heaved a deep sigh-and dissolved into thin air.

I took a step forward.

Nothing.

Another step. And another, and another.

“It’s not working, then?” Semyon asked sympathetically.

What was this? I’d broken through to the fifth level, and it was absolutely calm here, but I couldn’t get any lower!

A step. Another step. Where’s that shadow?

“Anton…,” said Semyon, shaking me by the shoulder. “Anton, stop. You’re just wasting your strength.”

“I’ll get through,” I whispered. “I have to…”

“You don’t have to do anything. Lermont’s got the experience. He’ll handle everything.”

I shook my head from side to side, trying to relax. I’d gotten to this level using my anger…maybe I could get to the next one if I was calm, peaceful? All I was facing was a kind of watershed: a thin film of surface tension between worlds, a borderline beyond which the vital Power began to increase. The first level was practically dead, dried out, sterile. The second was a little more alive. The third and fourth already began to resemble our world. The fifth…the fifth was almost fit to live in. There were already colors here and although it was cold, it wasn’t so cold that you would freeze. Grass grew here, there was rain and strange, violent storms. What would there be on the sixth level? I had to understand the place I was trying to break into. Was it a glacial world, a dying world? A place where it would be hard to breathe, difficult to walk or talk?

No. The sixth level wouldn’t be like that. It would be even more colorful than the fifth. Even more alive. Even closer to the real world.

I nodded along with my thoughts…

And stepped from the fifth level to the sixth.

It was night there. Perhaps not a summer night, but it was still warm. I couldn’t see a single star in the sky above my head, but there was a moon. Not a strip of gray dust in the sky, like on the first level. Not the three tiny colored moons that shone on the second level. An absolutely normal moon, perfectly familiar to the human eye.

But not a single star. The stars are not for Others.

Under the white spotlight of the moon, the world seemed completely real. The trees were real, alive, with leaves that rustled in the wind. There was a smell of grass and burning… I suddenly realized that this was the first time I had ever smelled anything in the Twilight. No doubt, if I chewed on a grass stalk, I would actually taste the bitter juice…

But what was burning?

I turned around and saw Lermont. But I didn’t see him as a stout, middle-aged gentleman. I saw him in his Twilight form.

Thomas the Rhymer had become a white-haired giant almost three meters tall. His skin radiated a murky white light. He was grabbing bunches of white and blue light out of the air, mixing them together in his gigantic hands as if he was making snowballs, and throwing them off into the far distance. I followed the trajectory: The hissing bundles of flame went flying over the flat plain, sweeping aside the rare trees in their path, and fizzled out in a dark cloud that was moving rapidly away. Burning trees marked the shots that had missed.

“Foma!” I shouted. “I’m here!”

The giant mixed up a truly immense sphere in his hands and grunted as he hurled it after the dark cloud. He turned around.

He had an amazing face. Kind and harsh, beautiful and frightening, all at the same time.

“The young magician has passed the barriers,” Thomas rumbled. “The young magician has hastened to come to our aid…”

He was a little bit crazy just at that moment-like all Others who take on their deep Twilight forms in the heat of battle.

Thomas covered the distance between us in just a few steps. It seemed to me that the very ground shook under his feet.

“They didn’t manage it, my friend…” The ancient bard lowered a hand as big as a shovel onto my shoulder and spoke in the third person as if he meant someone else. “They only got as far as the sixth level. Thomas drove them away, he did. Thomas drove them away, like cowardly little puppy dogs.”

Lermont leaned his face down to me and whispered confidentially, “But only because his enemies didn’t fight. They’d been here long enough to realize that they couldn’t get to the seventh level of the Twilight.”

“How many of them were there, Thomas?”

“Three, my friend, three. The right number.”

“Did you get a look at them?”

“Only a short one,” Thomas said with a shake of his head. “You can’t read an aura properly here, but Thomas managed. A Dark Other-an undead vampire. A Light Other-a sorcerer-healer. An Inquisitor Other-a Battle Magician. Three came together for the legacy of Merlin. Three almost got through. Three Higher Others. But even Higher Ones cannot get through to the seventh level of the Twilight.”

“A Dark One, a Light One, and an Inquisitor,” I asked in amazement, “all together?”

“The legacy of Merlin is enticing to all. Even Light Ones. Why else do you think, young magician, that Thomas wished to keep your arrival secret from his Watch?”

“Are they all men?” I asked.

“All men. All women. How should Thomas know? Thomas didn’t touch them. Thomas just saw a little bit of their auras.”

“Thomas, we have to go,” I said, looking into the giant’s eyes. “Thomas, it’s time to go back. Time to go home.”

“Why?” the giant asked in surprise. “It’s good here, young magician. You can live here. A magical land, a kingdom of fairies and magicians… Thomas can settle here, Thomas can find his haven-”

“Thomas Lermont, you are the head of a Night Watch! The whole of Scotland is under your protection! Witches, vampires, ghouls…you’re not going to let them all run riot, are you?”

Thomas said nothing, and for a moment I thought he would refuse to go, that he really had found the fairy kingdom to which, legend said, Thomas the Rhymer had withdrawn seven hundred years earlier.

Of course, the Dark Ones wouldn’t have run riot. Help would have come-from England, from Ireland, from Wales. And Light Ones would have been found in Europe and America to come to the aid of the orphaned Scottish Watch.

But would Lermont’s disappearance be the final drop that triggered Egor’s transformation into a Mirror Magician?

“Let’s go, my young friend,” Lermont said. “You’re right, you’re right, and I am in too much of a hurry…it is not yet time… But listen, young magician! Listen to the ringing of the silence, to the singing of the crickets in the grass, to the night birds beating the air with their wings…”

Either he made me hear it or it was all real, but through the giant’s noisy breathing I heard the silence and the sounds.

“See how hotly the fire blazes, how the silvery leaves catch the moonlight, how dark the grass is beneath our feet…,” Lermont whispered. “You could live here…”

And I saw.

“Not many Others have been here when they were still alive,” Lermont said, and sighed. “We only come here after we die, do you understand? We come here forever…”

I felt a cold shiver run down my spine. I remembered the members of our Watch who had died: Igor, Tiger Cub, Andrei…

“Did you know that? Did you know that earlier?”

“All Higher Ones who have managed to reach the fifth level know it,” Thomas said in a sad voice. “But this knowledge is too dangerous, young magician.”