While in an unbreakable chokehold by Queen Titania, Zeke was moving across the clouded, lightning-covered sky with her in what he believed to be close to Mach speed.

During the flight, he saw fairies flying around Akachi’s god face and attacking him. When he looked down, he saw Aida with a pair of bat wings she must’ve grown thanks to her powers. She tried to catch up to them, but the distance continued to increase. Aida became smaller and smaller in Zeke’s vision until she was nothing but a faraway dot that then disappeared out of existence.

Zeke guessed they were now somewhere between the Realm’s equivalent of the thermosphere and exosphere. The air got colder, and the sky grew darker as they continued to ascend. His eardrums were in a painful cycle of rupturing and healing. The nails that dug into his throat were starting to feel like hot needles administering mercury into his bloodstream.

“Allow me to ask you, Healer,” The Queen said upbeat; she was having too much with this. “Do you understand how all the Realms are connected to one another?”

As the Queen averted her eyes upward, Zeke’s eyes followed the same direction, and he was staring at the universe. A swirly, dreamy mix of colors sprinkled with tiny stars.

They were moving toward a stream of light. Once inside it, the speed of their flight doubled. The intense light was all around Zeke, and booming eerie sounds blasted into his ears.

The Queen managed to speak even louder than the stream they were in. "There are three ways to travel to other Realms. The conventional way is traveling by foot, transport, or flight. The mystical way you miscreants like to use is using the Transportation Sigils you all are so fond of. And the cosmic way is by using the universal stream, which is reserved for highly powered entities. If it weren't for that Healer's Garb of yours, you'd be dead by now, but no worries, that can be arranged."

Zeke gripped tightly onto her arm as the heat began to broil his skin. As she continued talking, he had some veins climb up her arm with the weakened strength he had left.

"If I push you out, you'll fall into a random Realm, but that crash isn't survivable, or even better, you fall in the space between Realms where not even Death can find you," The Queen's face twisted cruelly. She was too caught up in the moment to notice the vein climbing up her cheek. "Let's hope for the latter, shall we?"

The Queen maneuvered towards the beam's edge, pushing Zeke near it. Only Zeke's head passed through and what he saw was indescribable.

A Realm that wasn't meant for human eyes, not even the Tainted Generation. Zeke clenched his eyes shut before his Garb started screaming for him not to look any longer. Linger a second longer might've melted his brain.

Zeke pulled his head back, still gripping Titania's arm, and fought against her effort to push him out.

"Die, you Tainted Generation scum!" she screamed.

The last moment before she closed her mouth, Zeke's red veins went in just as the blue veins shot up into her nostrils. The Queen's eyes bugged out as she started to choke.

Zeke gripped the veins, feeling that they latched onto something inside her.

And he pulled.

Queen Titania yawped as loud as a rocket launch, and the two fell out of the beam.

The pair plunged through an orange-tinted sky, whirling rapidly as they were on their way to plummet onto unknown grounds. Despite the insane speeds they were moving at, it took—what felt like hours—to finally reach the ground.

It was solid sandstone, and the first crash launched them back into the air. A second impact into the ground had them bounce up just a little higher, and then came the tumbling. They rolled and rolled and rolled, making hoarse grunts as their bones released reverberating cracking sounds.

Their tumbling lasted almost as long as their fall, and then they slid across the sandstone for almost as long as the length of a football field. The cacophony of pain climaxed, and no sound came from the two as they stayed down, twisted in horribly crumpled positions.

Zeke had one side of his face pressed onto the ground while the other faced the triple suns in the orange sky. There was no skin on that side of his face. The fresh meat was fully displayed, with missing spots that showed the bone underneath. He moved his eye down to the Queen and couldn't see her face.

Her emaciated folded figure showed only the back of her head with the heel of her twisted foot touching it. Her once beautiful wings were now crushed and shriveled.

Zeke fought back the urge to call for her. He was too afraid to mess up his rearranged organs even further and allowed his Healer's Garb to do its work. Still, he could feel how low he was on Mana and was a bit worried about his purity levels.

And the cycle of deprecating thoughts commenced.

As he healed, he thought about how much he had been slacking off as Nananiel's spy. He had done absolutely nothing to uncover the other 3 members of the Tainted Generation who helped Isaac break the Seals.

The image of Yaalon's heroic face appeared in his mind. Once again, he was reminded of what he was doing while the Immunologist was killed.

Violet. Violet. Violet. Violet.

He let out a scoff.

This is what happens when I have fun. When I let myself slack off.

His self-torture ended early as Queen's body folded back into shape, and she rolled over to face Zeke.

Zeke was relieved she had an impressive healing factor and wondered what it would take to kill her.

He smiled. "Good," Zeke said feebly.

"What did you say?" the Queen rasped.

"I'm just glad you aren't dead," Zeke said feebly.

"Do not attempt to amuse me, boy."

She exerted her broken wings to fly up, but she wasn't going anywhere.

"Don't try to fly. Just stop and let your regeneration do its job—"

"Silence, worm!" Her jaw clenched tightly as she bared her teeth. Something was bothering her. "Why do you care?"

"Because I am a doctor," he proclaimed breathlessly.

"These mind games won't work on me—"

"I'm not trying to trick you or anything like that. I get it… you hate us!" Zeke thought back to Isaac wanting to restructure Heaven and what he did just to meet him. He thought about Kian unleashing a plague. The Tainted Generation was scum. "And you know what? I don't blame you! We are the worst! One of us started the plague, and he isn't even the one who murdered Yaalon! The murderer could be any one of us, and I have no idea who it could be, but yeah, we are scum. And there's even a chance that the murderer isn't one of the members who helped break the Seals! How crazy is that? We are the worst. Just like how most of my family is scum. You're right to hate us, okay? You're right!" Zeke paused for a moment to wheeze in pain. "I didn't choose to be one of the Tainted Generation, but I'm doing the best I can. I want to end the conflict between the angels and Healers although, I am starting to believe that if the only way to put an end to that is by putting an end to all of us then…" he was afraid to let himself finish the sentence and whimpered quietly.

The Queen sat up with her mangled hands folded on her lap. "How much knowledge do you have of what the Tainted have done to us?"

"Nobody specified the details."

The Queen enlightened him. “We are what they called a Special Conduit for Mana. The Mana that goes into our system can be extracted into a much more powerful version of it. Filling Mana Limits much quicker than direct means. Hundreds, thousands of us were abducted from our realm and taken to strange dark labs where they poked us with strange instruments, force fed us disgusting morsels, performed painful spells on us and when a fairy died... they’d throw them away like unwanted leftovers and continued their research on another one.

"Sometimes they'd do something to our bodies to keep us from growing to our full size and trap us in jars they'd carry around. They'd pump us with Mana and let it marinate within us, and then they would pluck us out of the jars and physically wring the Mana out of our bodies and into new Mana jars."

Zeke pulled himself up and folded his legs as he continued to listen.

"They put us through all kinds of experiments…." Queen Titania continued. Her voice grew increasingly brittle with each painstaking word. "Cross-breeding included. They would force-feed us aphrodisiacs. Leaving us unable to control our arousal, or if they were lazy, they'd let creatures have their way with us. The worst was that the children we gave birth to… we were repulsed by them because we believed them to be abominations… but they were our kin!" She shook and buried her face into her hands. "When the Tainted killed our offspring or took them away, we were… relieved."

Zeke watched the Queen sob heavily and controlled himself from saying something stupid like: "I understand what you're going through" because he didn't. There wasn't a single injustice in his life that compared to seeing hundreds of loved ones being tortured and killed.

The best action he could do as a Healer was silently sitting with the Queen in solidarity.

"If it weren't for the angels, the torture would've gone on for much longer," the Queen said, lifting her head from her hands.

"The angels?"

"Whenever the next collection of Healers would show up. The cycle of fairies being kidnapped and experimented on would begin once again. The angels fought against many versions of the Tainted and worked day after day to return as many as they could to Fairyland," she explained. “It was the Power Chief’s Vanguard to whom we owe our thanks to. Irin, of the Second Sphere.”

Zeke’s face fell. “I-I-I-Irin?” He remembered the armored angel with cruel beauty descending from a flaming sky. Spouting awful things about Naomi and humanity. Attacking him and his friends.

That Irin. She was the reason fairies were safe and sound today.

“Irin and her Vanguard worked tirelessly. The most gruesome battles were when the Thirteenth showed up, but eventually, they left us alone. Still, Irin made sure to keep some soldiers in the Realm for a few centuries to protect us. She’s our hero.”

As much as Zeke fought against it, he started to understand Irin’s repugnance towards humanity. The conflicting thoughts had him lower his head and push his brows together. As the saying goes, it takes walking a mile in someone else’s shoes before judging them.

What they did to fairies was only a microcosm in the galaxy of atrocities 13 different versions of Healers have done.

Hell, I’d hate humanity, too.

The thinking made Zeke dizzy. He fell back and stared at the strange sky. His eyes closed, and he drifted off without realizing it.

Zeke woke up in a panic, releasing a loud gasp as he sat up. He didn’t need to look long to find the Queen. She was sitting on her knees, mostly healed (like him), and her wings were folded but looked to be in good condition.

“How long was I out?” Zeke asked.

The Queen didn’t answer and continued her unfocused gaze. Zeke began to wonder why she didn’t book it and left him for dead. He looked around and couldn’t see anything else but sandstone plains for miles and miles.

He grunted as he forced himself to his feet and studied the Queen. “Why didn’t you leave me?”

“Just finish me off if you want,” she said without turning her head to him.

Zeke slowly circled around Titania. Her head followed his movement but not her eyes. He stopped halfway and noticed the milkiness in them. His instincts were telling him it was time to get to work.

He raised his hands and looked down at them. His bones were straightened, and most of the flesh had returned. Zeke closed his eyes and pictured his grandmother.

Esther Rosario was a small Columbian lady with a round, sweet wrinkled face. The night she gave him the bag was during another one of her supernatural teachings.

She sat beside him on the edge of his bed with an old book in her creased hands. He was indeed too old for a bedtime story, but he wasn’t like most 11-year-olds anyway, and it wasn’t a normal bedtime story.

It was a lesson on apotropaic symbols. She enthusiastically explained their functions in warding out evil as Zeke examined each of the 70-year-old’s alluring jewelry: talisman earrings, ancient gold rings that pillared some of her fingers, charm bracelets clamped together, covering her wrists, and a multi-strand red coral bead necklace. All marked with nightmare-inducing sigils—apotropaic symbols themselves.

Ugo, at the time, was lying back on his bed, mesmerized by the flashing screen of a GameGuy and punching the buttons like an addict and making his pervy giggles.

Esther snuck a glance at Ugo and let out a groan as her expression crinkled. “That child is beyond salvation.”

It was another regular night with his grandmother, but a precious memory of when she was free.

Then it happened quickly, like a master incision, to remove the cyst from his life that was his grandmother. One second, his grandmother was speaking to him in an enthusiastic but measured tone, and the next, a patrol of bulky men in white barged in and dragged her out the door. While she was screaming and crying, Zeke could see his mother in the doorway, watching with no expression at all.

Zeke visited his grandmother in the ward every week without fail. Aside from the setting, their conversations seemed like everything was normal. Zeke had hoped, which he admitted was childish, that maybe one day she’d be allowed to leave. Hoping for that day didn’t matter anymore. She was gone. Gone forever.

In her memory, he had her book and the doctor’s bag.

He opened his tear-filled eyes and saw the bag materializing in the air. It fell out of the sky, and Zeke dove forward with his arm sticking out. After catching the item, hugging it, and then checking if everything was inside (it was), he took out a small medical flashlight from the bag and approached the Queen.

For the examination, he turned on the light and checked her eyes. Her pupils didn’t react. “That’s why you didn’t fly away. You’re blind. How were you able to fight us, then?” Zeke lowered the flashlight. “Mana detection… right? Maybe, you have some way to see as long as you have Mana in your system, but now you’re all out.” Zeke said and then studied her emaciated figure. “When we arrived we met a fairy. She said you were sick. How long have you been feeling ill?”

“What is this?”

“I’m trying to help you. Did you eat anything strange? Have any accidents? Anything note-worthy you can tell me? Because what you have is obviously related to your emaciated figure.”

“Do not talk about my body, Tainted.”

“Are you having trouble sleeping? Abdominal pain? Nausea? Diarrhea?”

“How dare you?” The Queen spat at Zeke.

He backed up, raising his hands. “I’m sorry. I am just trying to help. Have you been having trouble eating?”

Maybe it was the pathetic look on Zeke’s face or his wimpy voice. Perhaps she was tired of being sick, but something got through to the Queen. She paused and then quivered “... yes. I’ve had… quite the loss of appetite.”

Zeke nodded. “Okay, let me check something. Lay down on your back for me… please.”

The Queen’s silent stare lasted for a while, and then she followed the doctor’s request.

Zeke pressed his hands together and focused. He made the hand signs for his scanning spell. As he pulled his hands apart, a stream of green energy formed between his hands, and he hovered the stream over the Queen gut. The stream showed him fresh live, colored footage of a lengthy, thick purple worm marked with symbols swimming around her deep red intestines, and then he moved up to her head. The front of her brain showed him nothing. “Sit up, please,” he asked.

As the Queen sat up, Zeke circled her until he reached the back of her head. The occipital lobe had symbols identical to the ones on the worm stamped all over it.

Zeke canceled the spell. “You have a tapeworm. I don’t know how you got it, but it is stealing your nutrition and affecting your brain. There’s one in your intestines right now, and somehow it is affecting your brain with symbols it left all over it. Maybe it migrated to your brain for a while before returning to your gut. We need to get it out.”

“How so?”

Ugo’s magic would’ve been perfect since his cuts are precise, and he can stitch up stuff back to its original condition, which differs from regular healing. Zeke needed to take action.

“Sorry about this.” He summoned his veins from the ground around the Queen and had them wrap around her. Zeke crouched to her as he reached out his hand. The veins slowly snaked out of his sleeve.

The Queen struggled to break free from her constraints. “No! Stop! No!”

“I have to get them out. It’s the only way!”

“No, stop! Stop!” The Queen turned her head away as Zeke got closer

Zeke used some threads to forcefully turn her head to face him. “Stay still!” he shouted, and then he froze as he looked at the Queen’s distraught face. He pulled back and undid the spell. “I’m sorry. That… that’s not how a doctor should do things.” he stood up. “I’m sorry. I want to save lives, but I won’t treat somebody against their will. That makes me no better than the Thirteenth. I’m sorry.” He turned around and had a massive, veiny hand erupt from the ground, blasting many sandstone rocks into the air. Using his creativity, Zeke had the veins connect the pieces of stone together and fuse into the shape of a door.

He took out a syringe from his bag and stabbed the needle into his arm. Then, Zeke pushed the blood from the syringe onto his hand. With his clean hand, he dropped the bloody syringe into the bag and dug his grandmother’s book out of the bag. He skipped to the page with the Fairyland’s symbol and drew it on the door with his bloody hand.

Zeke turned back to the Queen. “Let me take you back home, Queen Titania.”