Jack, gruff and pragmatic, always simply called her Sal. Really, it was more protest than nickname. For no matter how close a friend he became, never would he know her real name, or anything about her past. Nobody at The End could know. But Sal wasn't merely a throwaway syllable spouted by an angry old man. The others deemed her Salvation in over one hundred languages, though she never denied or encouraged such honor. She carried it like a burden, and Jack, bless his heart, refused to add weight. So she was Sal, just another friend on the farm.

Sal spent several hours exploring Tammond Dale while Kyle foraged in Old Town for clues. The second she arrived, a looming vision of death enveloped her mind, and she swooned, feeling her age and inexplicable terror crack her will. A parade of disfigured horrors slid and scrabbled across her imagination, leaving bloody trails and addled flesh in their wake. And other things, neither demon nor dead, dark and empty, shambled in the background—progenitors of hell, all.

"What have you gotten yourself into, Old Man," she mumbled, shaking her head and concentrating a learned meditation.

It seemed she was susceptible here, just another person. Unlike the others, the ghastly evil forming the very air, swimming through souls and sundering dreams, was an obvious and perceptible detail. A good jeweler didn't need a ridiculous magnifying loop to know a stupendous gem or even gauge its value. Neither did Sal require a medium to sense the veritable soup of damned brazenly soiling Tammond Dale's every crevice.

In her reality, far removed from time or space, science or philosophy, Duality marked and predicted all. Mysticism was merely a complex series of interactions fueled by the Butterfly Effect, influenced through gluon manipulation. It was a bunch of technobabble that meant: magic is really complicated science. Demons, angels, and everything in between that could perform impossible feats against physics, did no such thing. Such creatures were attuned to sub-atomic particles, just as humanity claimed dominance over sentience. To such beings, magic was as natural as breathing.

And hundreds, even thousands of the darkest examples of nightmare and madness blanketed the town like a funeral shroud, twisting and destroying the unsuspecting townsfolk, or acting as opportunistic parasites, drinking deep the inevitable banality of rejection or nostalgia. Sal buffeted herself through only one fact: she could see them. She had their power, through training and concentration, and could drive them away, become effectively invisible to their searching or attempted calamity.

But Kyle couldn't. The boy was unprepared; a fetus ripe for slaughter, blood fresh and powerful. Duality showed the obvious, gave statistics and estimations. The essence here, consumed the unaware, uncaring as souls singed to ash like a spent candle. Every person in this town was fuel for some infernal contraption, awaiting a demise worse than death, relegated to neither heaven nor hell, lost to the universe for all eternity. No other fate awaited those blasted to absolute entropy—they may as well have never existed at all.

Now, Kyle was among the damned. Or had no demon realized the treasure-trove he represented? That one child, still a young teenager, had a power beyond even theirs, could control more than just interactions among quarks and gluons? What would they do if they truly understood his significance?

Nothing good, that was certain. Corrupting Kyle could lead to the destruction of the universe itself—or its unraveling—making it fit only for pain and sickness, anxiety and oblivion, torture and void. It would be any demon's ultimate paradise. She could feel it: Kyle was trapped already. In her urgency to protect him, she never thought to scan for demonic influence beyond whatever entity ruled Tammond Dale. Now, she had to find a way to extricate him, teach him his legacy, and hope he learns quickly. This was beyond her now, something she would have guessed impossible only days ago. Rue, that name again, had sampled his aura, and drank that sweet nectar of absolute dominion, making him stronger, more malevolent. Like it or not, Kyle was the ultimate wild card, and Rue had played him like a master.

She had no time to consider her own vulnerability; she came to see what Duality could not, feel with her senses, the oppression that threatened eternity. I'm too old for this, she thought. Even that statement flexed and snapped, spilling forth a morass of unreality, thick like syrup, cold as space. She understood then: a dream.

It had to be a dream. Every rock, every brick, blade of grass, animal, and person here, was a figment of Rue's imagination. Kyle's family had relocated from Detroit into an impossible caricature of reality. Even if that wasn't true, the situation was a direct parallel. It felt, smelled, and tasted of fabrication and betrayal; senses sent astray, minds befuddled and controlled. To think, Kyle had fallin into such dross...

She had to find him. Thankfully, his house was only a few blocks away, and so far, the misshapen blasphemies ignored her. But that wouldn't last long; she had to give Kyle a message and withdraw. Not back to The End, of course, but far enough that she would pierce the bubble encompassing the unlucky town, so she could plan her next move. Kyle was in danger somehow, and that was enough to inspire the old woman to quicken her pace, though her joints creaked and her knees ached with effort. There was precious little time.

When she arrived, his fate became clear. The house was shrouded in spinning clouds and imperceptible obliteration. Kyle had been marked, branded like a prize calf, or forever speared by the kiss of death. Rue was here, now, and Kyle was in mortal danger—his sanity at stake.

Sal swore and tore at the dimensional rifts, the pride of her trade, and phased into Kyle's room, just in time to witness Kyle collapse on the ground, cowering from a book in his closet. She couldn't see his addled visions, but understood something in that room was wrong, broken, shifted or otherwise splashed with crimson chaos. Anything within his gaze could be a gut-wrenching fiend, flush with gore, trailing entrails and chattering for his flesh. It didn't matter, for she'd trained her entire life to rewrite such deconstructions, make them tame, if not unmake them entirely.

So she weaved, and twisted, and spun, and whatever malfeasance menacing Kyle this night, vanished like smoke in a tornado. Rue, she knew, would instantly take offence, and possibly redouble his efforts, so she changed that too. Kyle needed more time, and she provided as much as she could manage, little as it was. He had a few days, if he was lucky, before Rue returned to finish consuming his being, or stranding him in the dream world from which none returned.

Sal withdrew then, dizzy with effort, barely conscious and reeling from exertion. Rue was truly deadly if repelling him reduced her to a sick and cowering mass barely capable of escape. She and Kyle had won, but at a cost: she could not return for several days. She had to recuperate, fill her old bones with energy for another attempt at teaching Kyle, when he was awake, the lessons he truly required. For now, that would have to wait.

She coughed and slid into infinity, content that Kyle was saved. Next time wouldn't be nearly so easy, so Kyle would require instruction. After that, only the gods held providence. She hoped every ethereal presence understood: even their lives were at stake.