“You’re probably going to want to sit down for this,” Dust said. Cotton decided to take his advice. “Everything has its price. When I first learned I had the ability to turn my body into grains of sand, I thought it was the greatest thing in the world. I was five years old and my parents didn’t find me until the next day, and I was in the backyard, in my sandbox the whole time, sitting there. I didn’t even shift around, I just sat there, reveling in the sensation of this new form. The next day, when I appeared at the dinner table, waiting for my parents to return, I assumed that it had been a dream, and wondered why they were so concerned, why there was a policeman, why there were reporters, why there were so many people with them. I thought it was a good joke. I laughed, and so did my parents. I didn’t understand why they looked so nervous, why they were so uneasy that night, tucking me into bed. Later, I would discover that my father had once been involved in a super-power play between Mindbender and Flower Child, a victim. He had feared my disappearance might have been a product of that experience, which haunted him until the day he died.
“And maybe it was. I never found an adequate explanation for my powers. The next time they manifested, I was twelve, seven years removed from the last time, and so when the dream became reality, I let it get out of control. I was at school, attempting to swing across monkey bars in gym class. My arms began to disintegrate. I fell, but I fell into myself. The class was horrified, until someone jumped into me and started throwing me around. At first everyone thought I was the coolest thing they’d ever seen, but then the fear crept in. They couldn’t understand me. Within a month, my disruptions had gotten me dispelled, and no school in the area would take me again. Within a year, my parents had disowned me as well.
“On my own, I took to self-education, using my talent to earn money at carnivals while reading voraciously, about every subject imaginable. No one had an explanation for the unusual properties of my molecules, how they could transform, eventually at will (and it had been most fun, for myself and others, when it happened randomly), into sand while still leaving my consciousness in there. I had no form at first, while I was sand, and that was what had disturbed my classmates, and had originally thrilled them. In the carnivals, I learned to reclaim the shape of man, having begun to master myself again. I began to wonder if there were more practical uses of my talents, which alone had awakened my curiosity, even at the age of five. So much curiosity, so much to consider. I saw the world as no one else did. And I did not like what I saw.
“Silt was born at the age of twenty-three. The so-called Sand Man, as I had called myself in performances, now dedicated himself to the fight of injustice, using his unique abilities to thwart the criminal element in ways they would never expected, emerging from spaces they would never have conceived. I unlocked possibilities of architecture that the original creators could never have considered, could only have assumed were not there. I found the holes in the wall, because I alone could access them.
“For a time, I was glorious, and I reveled in it. Time went on, the novelty of it wore on. Silt’s adventures seemed hollow, of little more substance than the man himself. He no longer thought of himself as a man. Nick Sanders, though he possessed the ability to do so, ceased living as an ordinary man and instead existed solely in sand form. He had discovered that each transformation had taken something away from him, a part of his ability to identify with humanity, both physically and emotionally. He became withdrawn. Silt’s heroic days were numbered.
“Cotton, Silt no longer cared. He had lost himself. He no longer believed his own hype, no longer cared about it. He withdrew himself. He no longer knew what he was fighting for. He didn’t see the point.
“And then he died. You didn’t realize you were seeing me in my darkest hour that day, did you? Well, let me tell you, dark hours can last for a long time. Mine lasted for fifteen years. You never knew me but by reputation. It wasn’t because I wanted to snub you, but rather because I had lost my motivation. I had heard about you, Cotton. You inspired me. That’s why I told Calypso I wanted to help you, and in more ways than one. Things just didn’t turn out so well for me. I spent months thinking I was dead, in facts, for stretches I couldn’t think at all. I really was gone. Then I came back, and I brought with me a renewed determination, a new resolve. And a new understanding.
“I’m glad you’re seated, Cotton. When I found you in the parking garage, I found you trapped in your own mind. Don’t you see, Cotton? You were Balthazar Romero. You had convinced yourself that you were one of your old aliases, one of your more established ones. The trauma of murdering Rodrigo Ramirez must have caused it. You couldn’t deal with it, so you became someone else, someone who hadn’t murdered the Cad, someone who liked to tell himself that he wasn’t a murderer at all. You lost your mind, but you had another to fall back on. You had a whole other life ready to assume. You even had a wife.
“All this was inside your mind, but you hid yourself from it, from yourself. Cotton Colinaude lay dormant for months, while Balthazar Romero lived his life as normal, until the encounter with Lotus, whose unique abilities included the tampering with memories, which usually meant he would absorb them, but in your case, he couldn’t, because there were two competing sets of memories within you, Cotton. They were fighting. You didn’t surrender to a fantasy, Cotton. You finally allowed yourself to fight a battle you had long ago surrendered to. This was the only way you could.
“In the form I had now found myself, a cloud, and as such I now called myself Dust, I was able to manipulate your mind, to free yourself, but Balthazar remained, so the both of you commenced to pitch your cases, until one finally took back control. Lotus had already assured the victor. Balthazar could not remain, but he would not become the property of Lotus. I had been watching you, Cotton. In a strange way, we had been linked. A part of my had been in you, too, from the instant of my demise in the museum. I knew everything you knew, and took it back in the garage. And I have been watching you since.
“In the time you have been having your reckoning, I have mastered myself, at least to a greater degree than I have in the past, and I have had my own reckoning. I had never accepted what I had become, not on anything greater than a superficial level. I never understood what I should do, and why. I regained the form of a man with great trouble, and made myself Nick Sanders again, too, with great pain. I cannot do that again, at least not soon. I will have to work on that. But I have control of my body again, and now understand the cost. I have centered myself, Cotton.
“And I have found peace, too, because I know it is an illusion. You can keep order, Cotton, but you can’t keep peace. It’s human nature, this struggle we are forced to endure, because we are imperfect, and can only proceed in life imperfectly. To expect peace to eventually come is to wait in vain. We can only hope for order, because order is the closest thing we will ever have to peace. This has always been known, but it has never been understood. We have civilization and rules to live by because we know it. But each of us has our own motivations, our own interests, and these motivations, these interests clash, and will always clash. We call it arrogance, to not care for our fellow man, but it is really individuality asserted, and that’s all there can be.
“You can find your own peace, but you can’t expect to keep it forever, not without a price, or expect you can grant it to everyone. I think that’s what Tekamthi realized, Cotton. He’d found his peace. Denny Hay had found his peace, too. Even Ratbeard.
“You’ve threatened to abandon the Eidolon once already. You can’t. You found your peace. You’ve found that even an attempt at maintaining order is worth it, because the effort is what sustains you. That’s what bothered you, all those years ago, when you couldn’t remember saving Denny Hay. You couldn’t find peace because you couldn’t find order. You became the Eidolon to find order, and then find peace. Eventually you realized you could have no peace, because all you really cared about was order. The Eidolon exists for this sole purpose, not because of guilt or to carry a burden, but to ease a mind that wants to see things as they should be rather than as they are, a mind that sees through the veneer of chaos and understands that what anyone really wants is for things to make sense. There are so many ways to make that happen. Some people make the wrong choices. You’ve decided that it’s your mission to set them straight.”
“All I want is things done right,” Cotton said, “not things simply done.” He spoke in a whisper, as if he didn’t want anyone to hear, not even Dust. “That has never been too much to ask.”
“But it has,” Dust said. “You can’t ask more of people than they’re capable of, more than they’re willing to do. But you can try. All you can do is try.”
“And watch as peace slips away,” Cotton said.
“Because you are busy maintaining order,” Dust said. “It’s hard to accept, that there’s no choice, that one simply isn’t possible. You become willing to tell yourself anything. You become willing to betray yourself. The hard part is accepting that you will have to, because that’s what everyone does, every day. It’s called compromise. If you find that you are incapable of compromising, then you are lost, but you have to understand when it is acceptable, when you will have to take the hit and pay for it later. Cotton, everything we do has consequences. You can’t avoid them, no matter how clever you think you are. If you intend to abandon your life as the Eidolon because Peter Cooley turned out to be Viper, turned out to be your archenemy because he wanted to destroy you, you will have done his job for him. You will have fulfilled your fantasy of following in the footsteps of your hero. There is no retirement in this line. There is always failure, but giving in is the greatest of them.
“You brought the Eidolon back because you thought he was necessary, because of the looming war. The Eidolon is always necessary, necessary for you, and necessary for everyone else. Heroes are a part of the natural order. They’ve always been present, in one form or another. In these times, we’ve just made them more obvious, because we think there’s a more obvious need for them. The need is the same as it’s always been. Don’t romanticize. You will be hurt, you will lose, you will make mistakes, you will not be embraced by all. But you will do what you set out to, and that’s all that matters. Yes, Traverse will burn, but the Eidolon will be there to soften its blow. There is no such thing as an end. Humanity does more than survive. It lives.”
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