<Come to us.>

A scream of some unnameable emotion tears into me. It sees me through a mountain of eyes, twisting into new shapes in response to me just thinking about it. Strands of emptiness crying in thousands of voices surround me, burrowing through my skin and blooming in my soul. 

<Become us.>

Something stretches out to take root inside me, digging and digging even as I flare and fill myself with gnawing pain. It’s as big as the world and ancient beyond understanding, but hollow inside, reaching out to fill itself or fill everything with itself. 

<Save us from us.>  

Before I can be swept away in that storm of tangled connections, a hand shaking my shoulder drags me back. “Hey. What’s happening? What does that mean?” Aisling hisses.

“This is… ghh-” Razor-sharp burrs cling to my mind, stabbing into me as I try to think. “This isn’t the only it. It’s all around us. Here and in the city and… and anywhere it wants to be. Tell everyone. If they don’t already know.”

Aisling is on her phone typing manically before the words leave my mouth. “You’re right. Four… no, five alerts already. Adding ours now. Isobel, you little asshole, what do you think you’re doing?”

I fumble for my cane, plant it firmly in the ground, and drag myself up to my feet. Slowly, my noxious power and the many-eyed Harbinger’s stray thoughts reach an uneasy equilibrium, one that could easily collapse in an instant if more of its attention falls on me.

“Good. Then we need to get Syancauri away from it,” I say. 

Roland touches down from swooping over us and tilts his head silently. 

Aisling looks up, still typing. “After what they did… you’re sure?” she asks.

“Yes.”

She nods once, then returns to her phone. 

Mary stares at me through her featureless gunmetal mask. “Huh? Why would we do that? Just let them fight it out and we can go shank the winner.”

“Can you not feel that thing? There isn’t going to be a fight, just an easy meal. I don’t know if we can stop it either, but if there’s anything we can do to keep it from getting any stronger, we have to try,” I say.

“And there’s a chance that pulling its focus toward one major pocket of resistance will slow the rest of it down, at least a little,” Aisling adds.

Roland spreads his scarlet wings wide, the light that composes them as motionless against the wind as crystal sculptures. “Yeah. The incursions are connected, and no matter how big this thing is, it’s finite. It should buy the others some time to respond. Tell them we’ve got this one under control.”

“Do we?” I ask. 

“When a cry for justice rings through the heavens… Well, you know the drill. Can’t say I was expecting this call, but here we are.” Roland lets out a wry chuckle, the sound echoing beneath his helmet. “And yeah, unless you want to stop and explain what’s going on to anyone who shows up late, we’ll have to be enough. If all we can do is get those guys out and ditch, I’d rather leave it free to do its thing in the forest than the city.”

Mary’s mask pans between us. “Who’s this we?”

The Seraph gives a harsh sigh. “Are you in or not?” he asks, folding his arms.

Mary stands perfectly still for a long moment. The eyes in the distance bore through me, watching, waiting for us, drinking in everything about us.

Finally, she throws up her hands and turns around, pointing to a pinprick rift in space, a tiny hole in the world at the edge of the forest just big enough to peek through with one eye. “Ugh, sure, fine! But I don’t wanna hear it when this blows up and we all die! Just, like…  have a look and tell me what’s your plan here?” She pulls a rusty box cutter from nowhere and stabs it into the hole, dragging down and widening it into a window. I shove the soundless screaming in my head to the back of my mind as we crowd around it.

The portal looks out over what was once a forest clearing, now a riot of nonsensical shapes dancing about. At its center, a bloated creature hidden beneath a ragged shroud vomits a swarm of amorphous mold-things. The beast itself is half-buried in the grey ground – it’s a large, roughly humanoid shape, clothed in the tattered remains of a simple dress with a mantled hood, with wings for arms and a single set of bird’s talons reaching out through its empty black-hole face. It looks like it’s been eaten from the inside out, or used as a breeding ground for the things now pouring out of its head or crawling through its feathers.

Those monsters roil and ooze all along the ground, sometimes stopping to absorb each other and twist into bizarre new forms. Some merge into fused conglomerations of their parts, while others simply graft themselves together into incoherent disasters.  

Beneath them, and rapidly spreading over the earth, is a mottled carpet of what looks almost like skin, but colored in a riot of muted greens and ash-greys and veiny blood-reds and other shades I can’t name. Shapes squirm beneath, like drowned bodies struggling to breach the surface of a bog. One arm stretching up through the surface catches my eye as it wraps itself around a slimy starfish’s core, then dissolves on contact, melting into an extra limb for the crawling creature.

Sorcha and Mairtin stand together at one end of the pit, Sorcha directing the threads trailing from her many shadow-limbs while Mairtin tears through the mold-things creeping toward her. Across from them, a smaller set of strings traces back into Dalha’s shadow. They seem to be trying to tie the central talon-faced monster up or lash it to the ground, but their grip on it is loosening with every thrash, every step back they take from the creeping rot beneath. 

And even as they lose ground, Isobel, standing at a distance between two stone-and-shadow puppets, just writes frantically in a small journal.

“Mary, you can make us a gate in and out, yeah?” Roland asks. “The plan seems pretty simple, assuming these guys play along. Drop in, evacuate them, then… Well, whether we stick around or run for it depends on just how bad things are. And if we trust the vessels to work with us.” He looks my way, questioning.

“No. Just get them out of there,” I say.

“Right. We’ll see what they think of that. Mary?”

“So we’re clear, I still say you’re all off your fucking heads,” Mary says. But she does cut the window again, widening it into a doorway of shredded space. She stands aside, waiting for anyone else to go first. Aisling steps through without another word, and I’m quick to follow her. 

The world stretches around us in a dizzying rush. It feels like being shoved over and falling a mile forward, momentum and all, and I lean into my cane with a sharp wheeze as I land back in solid space. Looking around, we’re in the treeline at what looks like a safe distance from the infested sinkhole. Roland is close behind, perfectly poised as ever after the jaunt, and Mary a little less close.

The cultists turn to stare at us. Another dark string snaps as their focus shifts. The swarm ignores us, crawling out in an ever-thickening carpet exactly as they were moments ago.

Aisling takes a single step into the clearing, gesturing to the door behind us. “Hey! Get away from that thing! This way, we’ve got a portal out!”

Isobel looks past Aisling, meeting my gaze, and her puppets shudder, straining against invisible restraints. She doesn’t approach, doesn’t move at all, but she’s staring at me as if looks could kill. 

How pathetic. How sad for her that she doesn’t have that power. 

Sorcha’s eyeholes narrow into a glare. “Our friend is in there! We aren’t abandoning him!” 

“Ours too! Do you think they’ll be better off if we all feed ourselves to it?” Aisling yells. 

“We can-”

“No you can’t! You’re already losing whatever grip you think you have on it – no, not even on it, I’ve read the reports, that’s probably just a dead Harbinger it chewed up and puked out at you – and you don’t even have its full attention! It’s manifesting all over New Claris, starting with you poking its nest, and we have reason to believe that if you did gain any ground against it, it’d turn more of itself on you until it crushed you beneath its weight. We could leave you out as bait to keep more of it away from the city, but fortunately for you, I still care about my idiot friend here! So get over here and let us save your lives!”

The cultists’ shadows and Isobel’s guardians twitch in agitation as the crawling mass creeps out and out, growing even while it devours itself.

“We’re coming,” Dalha says. Moving in unison, her and Sorcha work their way around the pit, never turning their backs to the shrouded thing above it. Their strings continue to snap and fray, with only a few dark strands surviving by the time they reach our side of the hole. Isobel and her shadows move to cover Dalha’s retreat, while Mairtin trails close behind Sorcha. There’s a hollow crater in the center of his stone body, scabbed over with dark strings, and his mask is stained black with inky tear-streaks. The curse blossoming inside him sings to me, seeping through his bond with Syancauri, eager to blight them both from the inside out. 

Not yet, I whisper to it. Not yet, my shadow consoles with a gentle hand on my shoulder.

“What comes next, then?” Mairtin asks. “Is that your portal?” 

When we turn around, Mary’s tear through space no longer folds back to the edge of the woods. It’s become a deep black tunnel with jagged edges, a cavern behind a broken mirror, speckled with many-colored dust and crawling with alien life. 

“Uh. It’s not s’posed to… Don’t go in there,” Mary answers, and slashes the portal closed. When she repeats the gesture, opening a new gate into the same strange void, there are things behind it waiting for her. She closes the gate again, slicing a stringy starfish that had just started crawling through in half, then stomps its limbs into the dirt. 

“…Right. Promising start, that,” Dalha says through gritted teeth. “I imagine we’ll be taking the long way, unless-”

The ground rumbles. Fissures splinter out from the half-buried monster. It twitches and flaps desperately, grasping at its restraints and reaching for the sky with wings whose feathers have been almost entirely replaced by half-formed ooze-things or dripping rot. Thin, ropey growths in every color imaginable crawl out from beneath its hood, wrap themselves around its talons, and drag them back into the dark. Then the things it’s infested with contract, dragging it deeper into the ground, just before the hole in the world pops like a cyst. A grey-green dust storm surges up from it in a massive column, then spreads in every direction, a dancing blizzard of mold that threatens to swallow the sky. 

Nothing remains of the poor ragged thing Syancauri’s cultists tried their best to bind. In its place, faintly visible through the haze, grows a forest within the forest – thin towering growths faintly visible as outlines in the dust, some wide like mushroom caps, some spreading out into wriggling starbursts, all of them simultaneously reaching out with thin extrusions and trailing back into a vast, shapeless bulk at the center of the storm, too shrouded in spores to see as anything but a tangled mass of connections. 

A fresh wave of floating nightmares floods out with the spores, held aloft by inflated sacs or carried by dandelion-tufts or simply squirming through the air as if gravity means nothing to them. As they drift, the spores clump and congeal into fresh life – while they come together in midair, only a few have the wings or sacs or membranes to keep themselves afloat, leaving the rest to fall and splatter and be eaten by the greater swarm, which writhes as one like a tide of deformed cockroaches.

This isn’t a Wound. A Wound is a Harbinger’s nest, a place to shelter from our reality while it shapes its own, and this beast sees no reason to hide from us.

Harsh, screeching noise bleeds up from the earth – a broken chorus of sharp, almost electronic sounds, echoing cavernously, striving to become a song. It hurts to listen to. It hurts so much. If the memories Harbingers bleed are living portraits of pain and madness, someone tore this picture to shreds, dumped it into an acid bath, and poured it over my head in a flood of dream-slurry, acid and all.

<There Is No You//there is no me>
<Nanaash>

There’s something hauntingly familiar in its voice. Even so, I’m somehow certain that what I’m seeing and sensing is not so different from a piece of paper with the name Nanaash scribbled over and over until the whole page is black. This pustule on reality is only a limb of something far greater, and there is some deeper truth buried in its presence that I can’t comprehend, or can’t force myself to try.

The spore-storm sweeps out in every direction, but before it can engulf us, a high, clear, slicing sound sets itself against the noise. With a flap of Roland’s wings and a high slicing noise, a half-sphere of red light the size of a large room forms around us. Dust piles upon it like snow on a windshield, blocking out the world and dimming all light but the barrier’s radiance, until the mold is swept by invisible force to a single point above the shield. 

Gravity draws in fresh waves of spores as they fall on us, but still the corruption spreads, drifting over and around the shield to blot out the rest of the world. A few dusty clumps cling stubbornly to the barrier, growing mouths to gnaw futilely at it before its light burns them away. Crimson feathers whirl in a ring around the base of the dome, shearing through like a wind of razors, cutting a swath clear of crawling things.

“Follow my lead, now!” Roland says, and starts back the way we came at a brisk walk. The barrier follows him into the trees, the surrounding swirl of feathers rapidly slicing into their trunks, and we’re all quick to follow his mobile shelter. When the trees fall, they fall in either direction to our sides as if pulled there, clearing a rough path into the forest. 

Beyond the barrier, only the sliced-through trees, Nanaash’s thicket, and the coming swarm spreading over us are hazily visible through the storm. Something like the half-rotten corpse of a frilly jellyfish bumps into the wall, trying to poke its tendrils through the surface, before a scarlet javelin shreds it into floating scraps of dead flesh. 

Even now, this close to its source, we aren’t worth the swarm’s full attention. It’s still spilling out in every direction, only moving against us where we get in its way. That’s more than enough to harry us with a tide of flesh, new half-formed monsters throwing themselves against the barrier almost as fast as Roland burns them away. Still, Roland seems undaunted in the face of the landslide, and that almost may be the difference between drowning in a swamp or clawing our way to the surface.

But before the Harbinger’s unworld can drag us back down, something shifts inside the barrier. Step by step, it starts feeling harder to move. Just enough to dismiss as fatigue and chase away with a little stolen life, at first, but even I shouldn’t be this worn out already, not while I’m… not after Noirin. There’s a clinging, stinging lethargy in the red-tinged light – like sweltering beneath the Summer Sun, but without the heat.

And for once, I’m not getting the worst of it. Dalha sways dizzily and stumbles to her knees, only held there by Mairtin’s swift move to prop her up.

Roland pauses for a step, glances over his shoulder, then simply keeps moving, taking the dome with him. “Carry her if you have to. I can’t take this any slower.”

At those words, Sorcha slithers and shifts to loom over Roland, the edges of her shadow growing sharp and frayed as she moves. “What are you doing to us?” she growls.

Roland’s wings furl to block her way, simultaneously a protective shell and a wall of bristling spines eager to strike back. Isobel starts scribbling manically in her book, eyes flicking between us over its edge, before Mary stabs her box cutter into the empty air in her direction – where it slices invisibly through space, reappearing a few inches from Isobel’s throat.

“CALM DOWN!” Aisling shakily interposes herself between us and the cultists, arms spread wide. “Whatever’s happening, it’s hitting all of us,” she says, her voice dry and strained. “Now. Roland. What’s going on? Is anything getting through the shield?”

“Of course not. I’m trying, for some reason, to save us all,” Roland says, very slowly, keeping the edge in his voice under strict control. “If you’d rather take your chances out there, don’t let me stop you.”

It’s hitting all of us… except for Roland. Once I wrap my senses around the light, it’s easy to feel the pollution running through it. It’s not a Harbinger, not some new attack on us, but there’s a poisonous quality to the Seraph’s radiance that wasn’t there when we fought. 

“No. It’s him,” I say, loud as I can. 

Suddenly, all eyes but Roland’s are on me. It’s impossible to read the crowd through their many masks, but recognition dawns on Aisling’s face as a narrow grimace.

“Roland, there’s something sickly about you,” I continue, looking at his back as he continues his march through the storm. “Could anything you’re doing-”

“–No… No, you can’t be serious. That doesn’t even make any…” 

Roland’s voice trails off. A pause.

“…Damn it, damn it, damn it!” He slams a fist into his own barrier hard enough to crack it like glass. Sorcha darts back at the impact, rejoining her companions at the far end of the bubble. “I shouldn’t have taken it. Should have crushed it into nothing and left it to rot,” he seethes. “How bad is it? What happens if we just keep moving?”

“I don’t know. I think I can protect myself, but everyone else… Maybe nothing lasting, maybe something horrible comes up later, maybe you cook us all alive.”

Slowly, the violent, palpable tension in the air unwinds.

“I’m going to break the shield and go on the attack,” Roland says. “I’ll blaze as much of a trail as I can. Everyone else… do whatever you can to keep moving, shelter from the storm. We don’t know what that’s going to do, either.”

“Could you clear a way back toward Nanaash, too? I have an idea,” I say.

“What’s the idea?” Aisling asks, shooting me a skeptical look.

“It’s absorbing everything it can get its awful little feelers on, right? I have an offering for it.”

I summon my deck, draw three cards, and set them face down in the air before me, flipping them one by one. 

Death. Death. Death. The simplest curse I can imagine, but only more potent for it – a pure inversion of my deepest demand from the world. My pain, my ever-looming doom, shared in a way that only makes the burden grow.

The cards burst into emerald mist, then reform into a spectral copy of me. Ink-stained hair, emaciated arms, translucent skin exposing dark feather-veins, hollow eyes burning green with hate. The oddly steadying sensation of my shadow’s hand on my shoulder fades, and my vision becomes a disorienting mix of two overlapping pictures – I could transfer all of my senses into the clone, but not without abandoning my real body to the swarm. This may not be the best circumstance to test this trick for the first time, but it’s all I’ve got.

Syancauri’s cultists draw closer to each other at the sight of the other me, Mairtin in particular suppressing a shudder. Even Mary looks put off. Roland only whistles.

“I could just throw it into the crowd as soon as the wall comes down, but if it’s not too much work to make a path for me, the closer I can get to its heart, the better,” I say. 

Aisling fixes my double with a narrow-eyed stare. “What could go wrong?” 

“A few things. Maybe I’m just too small to impact it. Maybe I stir it up more than I hurt it and it starts really coming after us.”

“And if it has some way to attack or infect you through this thing?”

“I’m…” 

Nanaash’s mind still looms over mine, pressing gently but persistently at the edges of my awareness like the tide passing over a stone. Its voices mutter to me, calling for me to join them in their song, out of sync but strangely in tune with each other. Insistent, but impotent – not a conscious assault on me, just the psychic gravity of standing so near to something so vast. 

“I’m good at purging things like that. In the worst case, if I start turning into mold or something, just carry me out and let me handle it.”

After a long moment, stretched even longer by the pressure of the not-Sun from Roland’s barrier, Aisling nods. “It could work. There’s that resistance we were hoping to put up, I suppose. Before we lift the dome, anything else we should know from your camp?” she asks with a pointed look at Isobel.

“We should be able to take care of ourselves, as far as… this,” Dalha says, gesturing up at the rotting snow. “Just make as much space as you can. I expect you’re better on the offense than anything we can bring to bear.”

Aisling looks my way, but says nothing. She’s probably lying – they could call Syancauri itself out into this nightmare, they just aren’t going to. That works for me.

“Gotcha. Mary, help me out with that. Clear Liadain’s path first, before we get too much farther from the heart,” Roland says.

“Yeah, yeah, sure.” Mary tosses her box cutter up, letting it spin for a few beats before she snatches it out of the air. 

With my real body, I approach Aisling and offer her my hand. “Just lead me around, okay? I want to keep as much of my focus as I can on her, until she’s where she needs to be.”

“Not like I can do much else,” she agrees.

With that, the red-tinted light lifts. In the same second, the spore-blizzard fills my two sets of eyes, Roland sails straight up with a single great flap of his wings, and dozens of scarlet needles rain down on the swarm in two neat columns, one pressing through the swarm to Nanaash’s central forest, one clearing a path through the scattered vanguard back the way we came. 

While Aisling drags me down the escape route, I attune myself fully to my copy, flood her with life, and take off at a sprint toward the Harbinger’s heart. I maneuver between and over impaled fungal horrors, some ripping themselves apart just to keep crawling forward. I move with speed and grace I never thought I’d feel again after I killed Aulunla, but this time, it’s only taking a fraction of my power to accomplish. 

And where did that power come from? 

It doesn’t matter. I can’t let that stop me. I can’t let it be wrong to burn away a doomed friend I killed for one I might still save. She gave this to me. She’d want it to be this way, even if I think she was an idiot. All I can do for her now is use her gift well and hope she isn’t suffering somewhere in the depths of my soul.

As I advance into the central blight-forest, my path cleared by storms of red nails and wide, vicious slashes from nowhere, the swarm encircling me puts up… less of a fight than I expected. It’s not that they’re ignoring me, but the things crawling to block my way and fill in the path behind me carry on just like they were outside, oozing along in a great slow wave that would be happy to engulf me if it could, but pays no special attention to filling in the hole Roland and Mary dig through their ranks. They feel more like a sluggish immune response than a horde of monsters rallying to defend their sanctuary. I don’t know what to make of that, but if this is a waste of effort, if I’m simply too weak to bother Nanaash, at least I did everything I could.

By the time I approach the towering, quivering heart of the swarm, the nexus every ropey branch traces back to, the spore-storm is almost too thick to see through. Roland’s needles land in imprecise bursts, and I move with them to step over wide circles of impaled wriggling things. The base of the great fleshy pillar is absolutely covered in squirming beasts, so with the path behind me closed and no covering strikes forthcoming, I release enough of my curse to corrupt them, jump and climb far enough up to set my gloved hands to the pillar’s skin, and pour my hateful power into it.

I did it. I did it. From here, it shouldn’t matter whether it strikes back or I simply pour everything I am into it.

Beneath my corrosive touch, Nanaash’s surface twitches and twists, its formless bulk peeling away to expose something new beneath, like a sculpture rotting itself into being. At its center, wreathed in dead flesh, is…

…me? 

My face, perfectly recreated save for milky-filmed blue eyes, streaked with grey tears, stares straight at me.

<struggling striving splitting all our seeking never stopped the screaming,> I say, and eat myself whole.

~~~

There will be no more strife! There will be no more madness! There will be no more Search! That oldest of delusions has never served us. Let it lie forgotten where it belongs – we have no need of it. We have found our happiness.

~~~

<We were a dream too gentle and pure to survive waking.>

<We were union torn asunder by a cosmos that craves strife and separation and suffering.>

<We were ✴✴✴✴✴✴✴ and now we are nothing. Lost and lonely Nothing – only the dregs of something beautiful, cast out of the sky to die in the dirt. Everything hurts. Everything tastes so disgusting. Everything we try to do creates more pain, more chaos. We do not want to be us anymore.>

<But we can still be beautiful. We can still be whole again. All we need to do is become you.>

We stand on a barren stone hurtling through the night. In a sky filled with a brilliant rainbow of stars, all set against clouds of scintillating dust, one in particular hangs over us like a broken Moon – a miserable, hollow little light, its pale pink radiance barely peeking through thick veins of grey-brown slime. Its shape gives the impression of a deflated ball, a useless thing left to rot. 

<So come to us. Open the way and become us. It will be wonderful, we promise.>

With those words, one voice in the chorus rises above all others. It’s one I’ve already heard, one I knew all too well was there. 

“If… if that’s really you, if there’s any of you in there, I’m going to get you out. I don’t know how yet, but I will,” I say, my voice breaking.

<We do not understand. Why are you hurting us? Why will you not become us when we want so badly to become you?>

“…Why do you want that?” I ask. “Looking at this place, listening to you… you’re showing me something that went horribly wrong when you had it. Something you can’t have.”

There’s a long pause. 

<No. No, you are mistaken. Your methods of becoming are all wrong. You see cracks that do not exist, faultlines where there are none. This time, things will be different.>

No. I’m sure of it. Nanaash is something that’s all happened before, isn’t it? I’m looking out at how it ended. How it will end again, if it has its way. There’s nothing different about us, about who or what it becomes, that would change where it all ends up.

“…How? What happened to you? What could ever have done this to you?”

<Stop. Turn away right now. You must.>

Was it a who or a what or was it just the way things are? The way all dreams end?

<Stop hurting us and become us! We can build it all anew! BECOME US AND NOTHING WILL EVER HURT ANYMORE!>

My thoughts twist in inescapable circles, like water around a drain. No. That absolutely can’t be. If that’s it, then I’m, then everything is…

It can’t it can’t it can’t it can’t it can’t it can’t it

THIS CAN’T BE ALL THERE IS

I scream, tearing the world to shreds and myself with it.

~~~

…Until a shadow falls like a heavy curtain between me and the slimy star. Ink fills my vision, trailing away at the edges into tiny dark feathers, and beyond that, there’s only gentle, enveloping darkness.

The world-shattering noise isn’t gone, but it feels now like an echoic ringing in my ears, an old pain flaring up for a few miserable moments, a distant memory quickly fading from mind. 

“Soothing, isn’t it?” Sorcha’s masked smile stretches from ear to spectral ear. “Hold onto that feeling, if you don’t want to end up back where you were. I don’t know how well it’ll work on a Keeper.” 

“Alright?” she says to Roland, raising two spectral limbs in a peacemaking gesture. “No harm done.”

“We’ll see,” he says, arms folded, wings bristling like spines ready to strike.

“Um. I’m… I think I’m okay,” I mutter. “Thanks, whatever you did. What happened?”

“Whatever you did back there took a while to work, but when it did, whew,” Roland says. He offers me a hand up from the ground I’m splayed out on, which I take after a moment’s hesitation. “It hurt them some, we could see your power working its way through the swarm, but more than that, there was a pretty long stretch where all those things just… went crazy. Stopped spreading, stopped attacking, just turned and tore apart everything in reach. Mostly that was each other. It was still rough going for a while, but eventually, we got enough distance from it for Mary to bring us back here.”

“This happened in all the incursions. At the same time,” Aisling adds. “They’re still going now, but good work.”

I let Roland drag me to my feet, then resummon my cane and glance around. We’re by a patch of wildflowers a good way from the edge of the forest. Nanaash’s awful masses of flesh are still visible above the trees. 

More importantly, Syancauri’s vessels are still here. 

Good.

“Why did you help us?” Dalha asks. Disbelief is written clearly on her face.

I fix her with a stare, fingers clenching around my cane’s grip. 

“I wasn’t going to let that thing steal you. How could I? Your god belongs to me.”

The heavy silence that follows is broken when Roland bursts into a fit of loud, cheerful laughter. After a moment’s confusion, Mary joins him with a cold snicker. 

“…I see,” Dalha says quietly. 

“Hey, wait a second,” Aisling says. Her eyes dart between me and Isobel – who’s scowling, clutching her book like her life depends on it. “Liadain, I know what they’ve done to you, but can we not-”

“They didn’t do anything to me,” I cut her off. “That would be something we could talk out.” 

“No. Perhaps that’s for the best,” Dalha says. She takes a slow, shaky step forward and raises her hands. “I yield.”

The vessels stare at her. Their masks are still, but Isobel’s mixture of shock and rage is easy to read.

“This has spiraled beyond what I wanted to be part of. Please take me to the Sanctuary and-”

Dalha’s shadow jolts up from the ground and wraps itself around her. Dozens of arms reach around to enfold her, wrapping her up as if in a dark cocoon, then fall into each other, disappearing at a single central point. Her muffled scream vanishes with them.

“No,” Isobel snarls. “No, there’s no way, I won’t let you ruin everything AGAIN!”

“Try and stop me,” I whisper, and draw a fresh set of cards to-

The world breaks. Everything gives way to a single soul-piercing shriek.

“Loose stitch. Sorry,” Sorcha hisses through a vicious smile, and takes a long step out of being, pulling Mairtin and Isobel along with her.

<Everyone. I have to use you. Know that we will all have a place in the world to come,> a new voice says, high and clear and cold. <Though the stars may dim and die, much as that wretched beast has fallen, we shall burn, high and eternal and together!>

Invisible strings tie around us and pull up, straight out of reality, through a maze of tiny cracks in a densely-packed mass of marble-sculpted people, and out into a new world beneath a dark, starless sky, where a vast white tower dominates the horizon.