Refresher for The Between

This summary is meant for readers who have picked up The Garden of Before but need a refresher for The Between before they begin. It is not a substitute for reading the first book. The Garden of Before is a sequel that picks up immediately where the first book ended. If you haven’t read The Between, please read no further. If you’re in the right place, scroll down…

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Main Characters

Paul Prentice

Jay Lightsey

Julie Prentice

Min-woo Kim

Corinne Pelletier

Supriya Reddy

The Between’s Worlds

The Outworlds

The Patchwork World (The First World)

The Gray Waste (The Second World)

The City Above (The Third World)

The Garden of Before (The Fourth World)

The World in Pieces (The Fifth World)

The Skytower (The Sixth World)

The Kiln (The Seventh World)

The Underworld (The Eighth World)

The Setup

While Paul is landscaping his backyard, he finds a strange iron door buried in the ground. His buddy, Jay, comes over to investigate. They go down into what appears to be a library of rare books (a dream come true for Paul), but the books are blank inside. When they try to leave, the door has vanished, trapping them. This triggers post-traumatic responses from Paul, who had been trapped in an abandoned well when he was young.

The two find a passageway into a strange maze of identical repeating “sitting rooms.” They find a room with an altar with a corpse stuck through the heart with the Knife of Undoing. Jay grabs the knife to fight off ash dogs who have been hunting them. Possessing the knife turns Jay into the stelisto, a chaos role who steals lives.

In a room with a ladder, they meet Corinne Pelletier, a.k.a. Skull Girl, whose face is painted Dia de los Muertos style. Corinne explains that they are in the Between and gives them warnings before leaving. Paul chases after her. When he finds her, the Koŝmaro is near. Corinne takes them to the field with the broken colossus, where they hide from it. Paul recognizes Corinne as his high school girlfriend, but this seems to be an alternate version of her. Corinne tells Paul to look for the gardistaro, an order role who helps new arrivals. She gives him a revolver to help him protect himself and sends him on his way. Paul finds the gardistaro and is led back to the door in his backyard, which is now open.

Left alone, Jay goes up the ladder and finds himself in a cavern with a graveyard and a strange mansion. Here, he sees Supriya Reddy and a friend emerge from an elevator. They are attacked by junklings. Supriya’s friend is killed. Jay and Supriya run to the mansion where they encounter the masinisto, an order role who builds arcane machines. In the process of defeating the masinisto, Supriya becomes the masinisto herself, gaining control of the junklings and the mansion.

Jay and Supriya spend several weeks in the mansion, growing closer but also falling deeper into their roles. Supriya learns that atop the mansion is the World Engine, which the masinisto uses to lure people to the Between. These lures focus on their unique fears, weaknesses, and desires. They decide to try to leave. Jay kills the gardistaro, thinking she is a threat and not realizing she is there to help. Supriya puts on the gardistaro’s dress and becomes the gardistaro. The two make it back to the exit in Paul’s backyard.

The Return

Back at Paul’s house, almost no time has passed. Min-woo Kim is at Paul’s house to watch a boxing match. Jay and Supriya show up, both looking strange from their adventures. After the match, Paul is walking Min-woo home and learns that Min-woo is familiar with the Between. Min-woo promises to share more the next day.

That night, Jay calls Paul panicked. They have discovered that there is another Supriya in this world. Jay and Supriya decide to go back to the Between to help Supriya get to her home.

The next day, Paul shows Min-woo the iron door. Min-woo explains that he was talking about the Between computer game and not something real. They go in using Min-woo’s computer game FAQ notebook to guide them. Min-woo demonstrates how his encyclopedic computer game knowledge translates to the real Between and finds two golden obols, giving one to Paul. In the graveyard cavern by the mansion, Min-woo overestimates the advantage they have with his knowledge and gets killed by a junkling. Paul escapes before the Koŝmaro harvests Min-woo’s soul.

Paul, lost, seeks out Corinne and finds her in the field in the middle of a battle with Jay and Supriya. Paul realizes Corinne is going to lose and die and tries to stop the fighting by wounding Supriya but accidentally shoots her in the chest. Corinne and Paul tie up Jay. Paul uses the obols to bring Supriya back to life, but the great bell rings, letting them know the Koŝmaro is still coming for her soul. In Min-woo’s notebook, Paul reads about an exit atop a cathedral in the 3rd world. They send Jay first to slow down the Koŝmaro. Then, Paul and Corinne take Supriya’s unconscious body down to the Great Staircase.

The Escape and Aftermath

In the underworld, Min-woo awakens as a revenant trapped in an iron statue prison. Thousands such trapped souls power the Great World Engine, the machine that makes the Between function. Min-woo’s obol allows him to escape. Before leaving the underworld, he witnesses the malespiro kill the sercilo. He picks up the sercilo’s Silver Spiral artifact, which he intends to give to Paul. Min-woo then follows the Koŝmaro into the World Tunnel, which is the means by which the Koŝmaro travels between worlds within the Between.

Jay survives the Gray Waste desert in the 2nd world. In the 3rd world (a city floating in the sky), Jay is chased by ganglions and escapes into a tunnel, which he doesn’t realize is the Koŝmaro’s World Tunnel. Jay becomes chased by the Koŝmaro, and he follow’s Min-woo’s revenant back to the cathedral where the exit is.

Paul and Corinne encounter the Koŝmaro before they can get into the cathedral, but Jay distracts it, appearing to be killed in the process. Atop the cathedral, Min-woo places the serĉilo’s artifact on Paul’s arm, which gives him the strength to overcome a final encounter with the Koŝmaro and activate the portal home.

Back home, Paul, Corinne, Supriya, and Julie are awakened by the Koŝmaro which has come through the iron door into Paul’s world. Paul faces his childhood trauma while fighting the Koŝmaro and manages to wound it, making it lose its reality-warping aura. However, they are still going to lose the fight until Jay arrives as the masinisto with a horde of junklings, who all finish off the Koŝmaro.

In the aftermath, Jay and Supriya return. Paul struggles with the pull from his roles as sercilo. Corinne feels out of place in the wrong world. Julie, while visiting the wreckage of their old home finds her missing engagement ring and a strange black ring. She puts them both on, not realizing the black ring is the artifact of the Koŝmaro.

Key Items and Elements

First Mother – A carved statue in the Prentice living room depicting a pregnant female minotaur. It had been an ill-considered gift from Paul to Julie, and it was destroyed at the end of the book.

FAQ Notebook – The translated and printed FAQ for the computer game version of the Between annotated by Min-woo with extra hints.

Artifacts – Items in the Between that turn individuals into canonical roles and give them special abilities.

World Engine – The machine atop the graveyard mansion that allows the masinisto to pull people to the Between.

Great World Engine – The bigger version of the World Engine that sits in the Between’s underworld and makes the machine function.

The Great Bell of the Underworld – An iron bell atop a tower in the underworld. It rings upon the death of a human, summoning forth the Kosmaro to retrieve the soul.

Golden Obols – Payment for the Charon-figure who allows travel across the Black River to the underworld’s isle of iron statues and the bell tower. An obol can also bring back the dead if the soul is still in the body.

Red and Silver Wands – Items used by Corinne to blast foes with fire and force waves, respectively. Hinted that they may have been taken from a past masinisto.

The Canonical Roles of the Between

The roles are Esperanto words. Capitalized roles are demi-god or god-level.

Order

Dio Order – god of order; not seen in this book

Koŝmaro – demigod; collector of souls, has a reality-warping aura around it that protects it; its gaze puts humans into a trance; artifact is a black ring

serĉilo – searcher of knowledge; can pull-in parallel copies and multiply strength; artifact is the Silver Spiral

masinisto – builder of machines; artifact is a crown allowing control over the machines the masinisto creates

gardistaro – the guardian of new arrivals; can create portals between doorways; artifact is a white dress

klaro – not seen in this book

Chaos

Dio Kaoso – god of chaos; not seen in this book

Malluma Sinjoro – demigod; not seen in this book

malespero – warlord of chaos; can radiate shockwaves; artifact is a spiked collar

stelisto – thief of lives; can hide in shadows and is exceptional with a knife; artifact is the Knife of Undoing

nenio – acolyte of chaos; artifact is the Twilight Scepter which sends out lightning bolts

songo – not seen in this book

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