Soundless screaming reverberates through my head, echoing into forever, threatening to explode from my skull and shatter me into a shower of broken bones and feathery gore. I don’t even think that would make it stop – it’s scarred into me the way the Sun sears too-curious eyes. I want to rip myself apart just to let the noise go free, to claw my eyes out so they can never see what I’ve seen again. The only thing holding me back is that I know it wouldn’t make a difference. The sound has always been here, always will, and now I can never unhear it.

…Liadain…

The voice is far away, muffled, as if I’m hearing it underwater. Everything feels so fragile, so much like it’s only ever been a dream, as distant as the memories of last night’s nonsense visions. Like if I let go of my hold on things for just a second, I’d lose myself and never find it again.

Try to focus. We… we can’t let this take us. Not now. We have so much left to do.

There’s a strained, frightened edge in the other me’s unspoken words. But I reach out and cling to her, anchoring myself to the phantom sensation of her cold hand in mine, desperate for any way at all to pull my mind away from that. Slowly, excruciatingly, like watching as a wound scabs over, other sounds and sensations shove their way back into my world. 

“…Liadain? Liadain!” The whole world sways unsteadily, like a boat on a stormy sea. 

No, that’s not right, is it? It’s just a hand on my shoulder, trying to shake me back to myself.

“Mmh,” I mutter. 

“Hey. Good. Stay with us.” It’s Aisling’s voice, I realize just before she comes fuzzily back into view. The feeling of her arm wrapped around me, propping me up on one shoulder, quickly follows. The ground beneath me is rough and unsteady – no, it isn’t ground at all, just unmoving statues packed tightly together, their masks staring serenely up at us. One’s smile widens as its empty eyes meet my gaze, and I quickly turn away from it – to look up at a vast crowd of misshapen stone people like Isobel’s puppets, closing in on us from all sides…

…Aren’t they? They’re moving, advancing in a tangled mass of distorted limbs, but they aren’t coming any closer, just walking in place at a ten-foot distance from us. Between them and us, there’s a circle carved into the stone, crackling with invisible power that simply feels sharp, almost enough to cut you just by looking at it. No matter how they try, they never cross that line. Mary stands at the circle’s edge, holding her box cutter at the ready. It looks a little more dull and rusty than before.

Beyond the ring of shambling puppets, the Wound is a Sunless world lit by the faint white lamp-glow of the statues that make up its surfaces. It’s strewn with the broken remains of too many massive structures to count, all made from masses of statue-people fused together, all twisted or bent or collapsed and broken down into expanses of glowing debris. 

All except one. At the heart of the ruins stands a colossal construction of six towers woven into one, joined by spiraling staircases and walkway-arteries and points where the spires bend and wind together impossibly. The bodies composing it are slowly warping and crawling into new arrangements, creating the impression that this is less something built than a living mountain of smiling faces coaxed into an increasingly elaborate shape. They’re climbing each other, swirling ever up and up to support the central tower as it grows like a drill rising to bore through the sky.

And as my eyes follow it up… Centered on the tallest tower, there’s a jagged opening in the black sky, like a hole in a dome over the world. Countless brilliant stars scintillate through the breach, filling the Wound with wavy arcs of iridescent aurora.

Beneath that, dancing in the unearthly radiance, is Syancauri. A darker-than-dark silhouette too vast to see in full, but still small beneath the grandeur of its tower. Its limbs are obsidian tree branches and castle steeples mingled with too many thin arms to count, more every time my eyes move, as if they’re in the process of growing from some invisible superstructure. Their hands each bear six long fingers with strings and wires trailing down into the dark. Its body is partially clothed in those twisted humanoid statues, legions of them climbing up and along its extensions, grafting themselves to the tower’s surfaces as they touch down on it. The expression on its enormous marble-mask face, when it cranes down from on high to inspect its work, is bright with transcendent joy.

Whatever it hopes to find amongst the stars, it’s climbed as high as it’s ever been.

Aisling grimaces up at the tower and its creator. “So. Before we talk strategy, is there any way we can fix you, Roland?”

Roland, floating high above us, touches down, sighing through his helmet. “We can’t. It’s the heart of a Harbinger I should have just crushed. Nilamai could rip it out of me, but of us here, unless Liadain’s done a lot of soul surgery I don’t know about…”

“…I could try?” I offer, not that I think I can do much. Even speaking still feels like an exertion, like I’m at the same kind of distance from myself as when I’m controlling a copy.

“No. If you aren’t sure you can do it, you’d make it worse. Nilamai’s been healing for longer than we’ve been alive, and she still says this kind of thing is complicated.”

“I figured as much. Rules out you carrying us up the tower, then,” Aisling sighs. “Wound logic says whatever matters most here, it’s happening either up there or deep inside. Looking at the sky, I’d bet on the top.”

“That wouldn’t be a good idea either way. Moving four of us at once wouldn’t be especially graceful, and it’s not going to sit there and let us all fly free unless it wants us to get somewhere,” Roland says.

“Ah. Right. What about you, Mary?”

“I can make portals in Wounds, yeah. But they get weirder the farther I try to jump at a time.”

“What does ‘weirder’ mean here?” Aisling presses.

“It means weirder, okay? Goes the wrong way, drops people off in different places, splices spots together, once I went through one that stuck me half inside a wall made of organs and fetuses and shit, that really sucked…”

“Do you have an idea of how far you can take us before that’ll be a problem?” 

“I mean, sure, probably? Can’t show you without letting these creepy fucks in,” Mary says, pointing out at the crowd of puppets still ambling uselessly around us, “but, uhhh…” She throws her arms wide, then brings them together, leaving about two feet between her hands. “Like that much. Maybe this much if you wanna be really safe,” she says, shrinking to half that distance. “Don’t have to stay there for long, though. Just a bit to find where I’m going next and a couple more bits to recharge.”

“Mm. Right,” Aisling says again. “That does seem like a way to get where we need to go while playing along as little as possible. Roland, what are you thinking?”

“I can fly up there. This thing I’ve got might even help, if I use it where I’m not worried about hurting any of you. Once I take off, well, we’ll see what the Harbinger does. Maybe I hold it back, maybe I clear the way for you three at a distance. There’s plenty I can do without putting you at risk – just let me run interference.”

“Okay. I’m not sure how much the rest of us can help if it goes after you, so take care of yourself.”

“I know this isn’t what your magic is for, but is there anything you can do here?” I ask Aisling.

“Maybe. My contribution in an actual fight is limited to however long my bullets hold up, so don’t count on me to handle anything less-than-critical. But if I can put together enough of the shape of things, of what it’s doing here… Well, I’ll do it if I can. Just make things hard for it – make it play its hand if it wants to keep us away – and watch for anything we can learn from it.” 

She draws what looks like an ordinary pistol from a holster on her coat, but Roland eyes it curiously. “Is that still enchanted?”

“Yeah. Tell Nilamai I’ll need a refresh after this.”

Roland nods and looks to the sky. “Ready when you are, then.”

“Wait,” I say.

The others look my way expectantly as I raise a hand and summon a spread of three cards, giving shape to the curse I laid on Mairtin before he fled the hospital. The shard of my power lodged in him calls to me from deep within the Wound, hungering to be used, and I’m all too eager to set it free. 

If you’re hungry, then eat, I whisper to it. Turn everything that makes them smile to rot. 

The cards burn in misty green flames. Somewhere deep in the Wound, all too eager to answer my urging, my curse flares to life, crawling out from its host and into the stolen souls that comprise the spire. I feel it in the distance as Mairtin desperately tears himself away from the greater mass of gathered power. He’s too late. It’s a blessing that he didn’t cut himself off from his comrades. Now, he’s patient zero of a blight on his world and everyone in it. The infection might not savage the entire Wound the way it will him, but it’s already found purchase in the mad megastructure.

“There. Now we can go.”

Mary stares at me for a beat. I’m glad her mask isn’t reflective – I don’t want to see what I look like right now. I don’t know if I’d recognize myself.

“Uh. What was that for?” she asks.

I smile behind my mask. “You’ll see.”

“Disease magic in a cult hideout packed to bursting with souls. Use your imagination,” Aisling says, voice clipped. “Please don’t kill Isobel.”

“No one here can kill anyone, Aisling. Don’t you remember? We can put her back together after as long as Syancauri doesn’t mulch her up too much,” I say.

The gazes on me intensify. Aisling’s eyes narrow into a scowl.

“Fuck is she saying? I can’t even hear her, can someone translate that?” Mary asks.

“I don’t think hearing her is your problem,” Roland says. “Liadain… you okay?”

Okay? 

“Of course not. What did you expect? Yes, I’m loving life, excited for a fun time with all of my friends? That’s how Shona did things, and I really don’t want to end up where she is.”

There’s a long silence that gets heavier by the second, two masked stares and Aisling’s glare pinning me down.

“Anyway, if you’re asking if I’m okay to do this, I’m fine. I’m the strongest I’ve ever been. Even if I wasn’t, that thing on the tower is mine,” I say.

Aisling steps between Roland and I. “What she’s referring to involves tests we need to run with her magic. No time to explain, so please trust me when I say that it is not important right now,” she hisses.

Roland looks me over for another uneasily long moment, then does something I don’t expect.  He chuckles – lightly, airily, his voice chiming in a way at odds with our situation. The other two don’t seem to expect it either, as their gazes shift from me to him. “Alright. Sounds good,” he answers, nodding in approval I can’t even fathom how I’ve earned.  “Let’s go, then. On your mark, Mary.” Without a sound, his crystalline wings materialize and he launches up toward the tower, dyeing Syancauri’s black sky the blood-red color of his light.

As she watches Roland take off, Mary groans, putting her free hand to her mask. “Hey, squirt?” she says, glancing over her shoulder at me. “Just so you know, I’m not here to babysit. Keep your head on your fucking shoulders or else something’ll cut it off for you.” 

Before I can say anything, she turns and raises her box cutter. “Follow me. Fast, if you don’t wanna deal with these guys.” She slices open a gash in the air and rushes through. The space-twisting ring around us falls, freeing the puppets to surge at us in a wave of marble. Aisling grabs my hand and drags me through the portal, bringing up a fresh surge of nausea as our single step stretches into hundreds.

Our first jaunt drops us above ground level in the closest set of ruins to our entry point, a broken tower with a wide view of the white stone plains. We’re on a ledge overlooking the center of the structure, where there’s a circle of smoothish rocks around a camping stove, with boxes of food packed into one corner. Bedrolls are scattered around in secluded corners of the wreckage. 

People lived here. I’d wonder what happened to them, but there’s only one place they could have gone. The only question is whether whatever’s left of them is still them, not that what I’m here to do changes either way. I hope they won’t be as noisy as my other passengers.

While I’m still finding my bearings, the world flashes crimson. A wall of noise follows as thunder follows lightning – the grinding, thudding sound of rocks being crushed. Glancing back the way we came from, as soon as we left our entry point, Roland rained a hail of feather-bolts down on the swarm set to welcome us. Many of the puppets stand impaled on his arrows and javelins, and many more have been shattered into unrecognizable messes of parts that are still alive and squirming. The ones that aren’t too broken to move look as good as dead, doing their feeble best to crawl away or gather themselves back up.  

At the same time, though, the inky darkness leaking from them like blood first pools together, then launches into the sky as sinuous tendril-limbs terminating in single razor-hooked claws. They’re quickly joined by several of Syancauri’s wire-hands, extensions of it spanning the whole sky to strike at him from across the Wound. The Seraph soars and slices his way through the assault, his wings cutting at shadows like blades as he darts out of reach of lash after lash. It doesn’t seem like he actually uses his wings to fly – his movement follows no natural arc or rules of momentum, he simply chooses to ‘fall’ in any direction he wants.

Mary shoves my shoulder, then points to a new portal. “You good, squirt?” 

“Yes. Let’s go.” I’ve already done my part, and he looks like he can take care of himself.

~~~

So on we go. I never get used to Mary’s method of transportation, but a little motion sickness is nothing next to the raw sense of brokenness clinging to me. Something in me still feels like reality could pop like a soap bubble at any moment. At least for now, though, things are strangely calm, as long as I don’t look up. Flashes of crimson bloom above like fireworks, casting everything in bursts of flickering red light. Roland’s thoroughly drawn Syancauri’s ire, and after every jump, he jets after us to stand guard in the sky, warring alone against a too-black-to-see tangle of uncountable extrusions.

This leaves the way ahead clear for us, save for a few stray sculptures still making their way toward the tower. Just in case, Mary and I greet everyone we encounter with barrages of space-twisting slashes and banks of death-mist, while Aisling spends her spare seconds between jumps scanning the wreckage for anything of interest. There are a few more signs of habitation, but no one we could call a survivor. The ruins themselves grow denser as we approach the heart of the Wound. They’re actually moving that way, Aisling points out as we pass through them – creeping like living glaciers over the plain of faces, on their way to graft themselves to the great spire.

Until… as we approach the base of the construction, an enormous staircase winding up and around one of the satellite towers, the whole Wound shrieks. The sky twists and breaks. A segment of one outer tower seems to strike out against the world itself without moving at all. When the distortion passes, the battle above has vanished.

“Shit. Shit. He’s gone,” Aisling says.

“What? Gone where? He didn’t die…” 

If he died, he wouldn’t be gone. I’d hear him screaming all the way down Syancauri’s gullet, feel him warping in its depths. But right now, it feels like he was never here at all.

“I don’t know! Just gone!”

The swarm of limbs Roland was locked in battle with descends to welcome us.

“I really wish you could’ve stayed out of this. Sorry, Ash.”

~~~

Mairtin swims through a stream of stone and souls, winding and weaving. Until he stepped into the great current, he’d never realized how far back their legacy stretched, how many cycles made up the endless ruins of Syancauri’s world. It had risen and fallen time and again before it bonded with Ciaran, before it found in him – and in Isobel, despite everything lacking about her – what it was missing all along. Still it carried the forlorn faithful who gave up everything to help it build its towers, holding them close and promising them places in the better, truer world they strove for. Mairtin shepherds the tower’s constituents as he moves, communing, sharing his dreams with them, gently guiding them higher, ever higher.

Until, as he shifts his presence from one river of minds to the next, his chest churns, his insides freeze, and a flood of nausea slams into him like a tidal wave – the worst attack of his miserable sickness since he caught it at the hospital. It feels like ice-cold acid chewing through the stomach he doesn’t have, spilling out to splash through his guts, freezing and burning them away at the same time. Still, the pain hurts less than the memories. Every time the thing inside him flares up, he feels his body jerking uncontrollably, the muscles he also doesn’t have stiffening and spasming, leaving him as broken and worthless as he was before Ciaran saved him. 

Sensing the curse as it reaches out through him, Mairtin rushes to surface from the Wound’s abstract depths, severing himself from Syancauri’s flow. The river spits him out on the edge of a half-finished overlook, gazing down at the invading Keepers as they blink through the surrounding ruins, easily dispatching the lesser defenders. 

And the Stardust Seraph, the perfect, precious little hero of New Claris, is holding his own against Syancauri, dragging its focus away from the final steps of their great work. How can a will so ancient and pure be pressed by this nasty little brat, garbed in bogus honors and false promises? It’s a revolting farce. The sheer wrongness of it makes him tear at his own scalp.

An insane, desperate idea bubbles up inside him. No… no, the more he thinks about it, the more it seems like the only rational thing to do.

<Can you push him out of the Wound?> Mairtin entreats his god.

Syancauri replies with wordless uncertainty, which slowly shifts to affirmation. <If he were tethered to me.>

<Help me tag him, send us both out, then close the way behind me. Do it right now.>

A hand rises from the ground, interlacing its fingers with his.

<Yes. I’m sure. Trust me.>

Whatever that girl did, he won’t let her hurt the others through him. He’ll just have to rely on Sorcha and Isobel to hold the other three off until Ciaran’s work is done.

Syancauri’s hand slips from his grip, climbing serpentine around his arm to settle on his shoulder, guiding him gently toward the ledge.

How far he’s come. In his old life, he couldn’t have thrown himself off a cliff if he’d wanted to, and oh had he wanted to. Now that he can… well, it might still get him killed in the end, but if he dies, he’ll die for a cause.

As the Keepers approach the tower and the Seraph’s duel with Syancauri draws closer, Mairtin tenses like a cat preparing to pounce. Finally, between one shadowy barrage and the next… 

<Now!> Mairtin cries, and dives into the void, throwing himself as hard as he can at the invading Seraph. The push he was expecting doesn’t come – instead, the world bends around him, as if he and Roland were on opposite ends of a sheet of paper and Syancauri folded them together. As the unnatural motion brings him crashing into the Seraph, he latches on with all his strength. Behind him, the tower’s surface reaches up to claim them, dragging them together through the marble maze around the Wound…

…and spits them out somewhere inside, where daylight filters through blue-green sea-glass windows. Panicked screams and frantic footsteps fill the air as the angel and the shadow crash through carved wooden pews, smashing them to splinters. 

Mairtin ignores it all, reaching instead to pin the Seraph down while Syancauri’s strings lash out and find purchase in his enemy’s robes. A wing of crystallized light spreads out, wraps around Mairtin, and divides itself into its constituent feathers behind him, but he throws himself into a violent roll, pulling the Seraph with him just before the Keeper orders his execution. Like a maw snapping shut, the spears that form from the feathers jab downwards into empty air at inconceivable speed, halting before they crash into the cold ceramic floor where their wielder once laid, then burst and scatter into quickly fading embers. The second barrage comes from both sides, so Mairtin compresses himself nearly out of existence, hiding from the crossfire in the Seraph’s very shadow.

Freed from his grip, though, the Seraph has a chance to right himself, cut the Harbinger’s tethers away, and shield himself in a cage of crimson feathers. Mairtin works himself away before the strings snap, reemerging from the dark on the opposite end of the pews filling the suddenly-ravaged wide room they’ve found themselves in.

He knows where they are – the chancel closest to his family’s house. Why here of all places? No, of course it would be here. With this curse dragging him back into the depths Ciaran pulled him up from, this is exactly where he belongs.

The Seraph’s wings fan out behind him. “You again. We already did this, what, an hour ago? Didn’t end well for you.”

“Maybe not. But I’m not alone anymore,” Mairtin says. He is less than he could be, but the shared reverence of so many lost generations still flows through him. It’s like fresh air in lungs that have never breathed before. So many friends have joined with Syancauri, now, and so joined with him, too. He carries their wishes, their dreams. He fights with and for them against a world that wants so badly to crush them into the dirt. Their strength, their belief in him… it’s enough, at least for now, to hold back the sickness and throw everything he has into this. One last battle before the end of everything and the beginning of something better.

No matter how it ends, this is for the best. Everyone else is safe from the Seraph, now, and from Ill Wind’s curse. And if Mairtin has to give his life to pave the road to the stars for them, he’ll die happy. 

Especially since this gives him a perfect chance to shed the last of his former self like snakeskin. 

Mairtin gathers up all of his worst memories. It helps that so many of them took place in this very chancel, listening to some priest or another spew useless poison while he wished with all his might to speak for himself with the voice he didn’t have – and pours them into his bond with Syancauri, feeding it his pain and filling the empty spaces back up with its power. With a wistful pang, he lets the body Ciaran carved for him fade into the darkness. Everything he is melts away, and he becomes something more like Sorcha: a vast living shapelessness dwelling in the nave’s shadows. Finally, he reaches out with his own soul’s tethers, puppeteering his lifetime of misery into a swarm of manic, twitching shadows. And out they go, rushing forth to spread and claim and inflict his suffering on a world he has always hated. 

Roland’s glaring, poisonous light can’t reach him anymore, not as he is – there’s no concrete nexus of him, no body for those javelins to impale. Instead of looking for a center to strike at, the Seraph scatters his wings, surrounding himself with a tight cage of crystal feathers. Mairtin’s children dart through the gaps in the cage, but those free spaces are shrinking with every spectral maw the Seraph skewers to the ground. They do their best to tear themselves free, and some of their mangled halves even congeal back into useful shapes. 

At the same time, there’s a chorus of familiar helpless groans from a corner where a group of trapped churchgoers are huddled, now folded over one another in a pile as their bodies writhe uselessly. Good. Within moments, they’re vomiting forth their own jagged-shadow puppets.

The Seraph glances at the sight of Mairtin’s blessing taking hold between volleys of darting shadows crawling up the walls, hurling themselves bodily at him and being shot down, and snarls. Every crimson needle he throws remains in place, their glow mixing with the chancel’s soft sea-colored light to make a strange bloody violet. As the swarm spreads, he brings his hands together and unleashes a hazy field of pure weight, making everything in the chancel just a little bit sluggish, a little bit heavier.

Slowly, holding his wings tightly around himself and striking down attackers from every angle, he works his way around the chancel’s far wall, making for the victims. A few sets of snapping jaws find purchase as he leaves his protective cage, vanishing as they sink into him, and Mairtin smiles at the Seraph’s first stumbling spasms. Scenting blood, his swarm charges, slowly finding more purchase in Roland’s fleeting moments of weakness.

But while Mairtin can’t be struck at directly… that awful light is making him weaker. Giving the sickness inside him more ground. Something in his core churns queasily.

Once he reaches the far corner, the Seraph strikes out with enough pinion needles to form a fresh protective cage, then conjures a pinprick black dot above the convulsing bystanders. Even Mairtin faintly feels the pull as its gravity slowly, painfully drags the corruption out of his victims, at the same time crushing a clutch of pitiful shadows in their struggle to dart away.

And as he loses his strongest point of purchase on the world and that wretched glow seeps into him, Mairtin… 

Coughs? How? It’s impossible, but there it is. It feels like the body he no longer has is trying to turn itself inside out. Finally, something forces him out from the shadows as if he were vomiting himself up. Back in his shell, he collapses into a useless mess of twitching limbs, wailing involuntarily in a way he was sure he’d never do again, interrupted only when he hacks up a gout of black-and-green ichor mixed with… 

What are those? Were those part of me? How could that be? That’s not what I am anymore. I haven’t had those for a long time now. 

But there his organs, his innards, his bowels, his lungs, his heart, his veins, everything sits in open defiance of his truth, forlorn clumps of gore slowly disintegrating into inky pus.

The pressure in the air shifts suddenly, and Mairtin stops moving. Because he can’t. He’s pinned completely to the ground, held in place by the unnatural gravity like a boot on his neck. 

The Seraph cuts through his surviving shadows, leaving him to feel their pain as they expire, then moves to stand above him, stumbling footsteps echoing through the ruined chancel.

“If there’s anything you have to say for yourself, any reason why I shouldn’t kill you on the spot, here’s your chance.”

Disgusting. Pathetic. To think that he’d done everything he had, given up everything he could, just to beg for his life to some self-appointed hero? Never. Not a chance. If he can’t die on his feet, he can at least do it with his head held high.

“Oh, now it makes a difference why we did what we did? None of you cared enough to ask that before you came rushing to kill our god,” Mairtin spits, his voice guttural and wavering as it echoes through the chancel. “I guess… ngh- it doesn’t matter now. I’ve done what I had to do. But if you really want to know, what you’re feeling right now? That’s… it’s the littlest shadow of the way I lived my whole life.”

The Seraph stares down at him silently, unreadable through the crimson glare of his visor. 

“Our brains are where our souls live, right? The controls we use to puppet our bodies. Well, my controls were broken from the start – I didn’t cook right and came out worthless! Simple as that! I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. I lived trapped in a cage of neurons no one could free me from, not the doctors and apparently not any of the Keepers who can pull wonderful healing miracles out of their frilly hats at will!” Mairtin coughs out a dry laugh, spitting up a fresh burst of black innards. It’s taking all his strength to speak, to maintain some flimsy control over his own voice, but that’s fine. There’s no way out of this for him.

“You know what… what they could do, though? Make it extra clear to me that my ‘emotional health’ was everyone else’s problem. It’s a human’s first right and duty to live happily, that’s what they made sure to remind me every time my family dragged me to church in my wheelchair. Which sounds all nice and good, except for what they mean by it – that people like you are tasty bait for Harbingers… and if you don’t find some way to be grateful for your miserable life, you’ll sprout teeth from your eyes and summon a monster to eat up everyone you love.

“Turned out they weren’t wrong. But when our god did find me, it cared more about me and what I wanted than anyone else ever had. Everything I did… I did it for the first people to tell me it was okay to rage against a world that hated me and tortured me and offered me nothing but demands that I suffer in a way that didn’t make trouble for anyone else. I’d do it all and more again.

“So go ahead. Turn up your nose at where my power came from. Things sure are easy when you get to save yourself the right way. Even now, I can only imagine how nice it must be to do and be and feel whatever you want, safe in the knowledge that the Goddess chose you just for being yourself! To know you’re right to be whatever you are, to never have to build a prison in your own mind, reminding yourself at every moment that happiness is your sacred burden when YOU CAN’T EVER BE HAPPY!”

Roland is silent. He simply stands, staring down at Mairtin through the mask which renders his expression unknowable. The seconds grow long, stretching seemingly without end into the emptiness left by the Keeper’s silence, and with each that passes, the burning inside Mairtin sears a little bit more of him away. He can feel the judgment, the disgust radiating off his enemy. He thinks to lash out somehow, to force everything he has left into one final attack, however pointless, if only to end this unbearable silence, to force something out of his enemy… but the idea that it might truly be the last thing he ever does pins him down as surely as the Seraph’s feathers.

But just as Mairtin reaches the limit of his nerves, the Seraph finally replies.

“I don’t know why any of this is the way it is. I have no idea why we were chosen and you weren’t. It’s too bad, though. If we’d all met before you had your soul hollowed out, you and Liadain probably could’ve been friends.”

“Friends? What are you talking about? You… you can’t do that. You can’t,” Mairtin growls. “You have no right to look down at me, wielding Claiasya’s love like a sword, and pretend like you understand anything about us! If any of you understood, you wouldn’t have pushed us this far! It never had to be this way!” Mairtin’s sobs repeat like a broken record, layering on top of each other in a sickening rhythm, until they coil in on themselves into something like laughter. “…Or maybe, maybe you DO understand. You’ll just say any bullshit to pretend you’re the hero, right? Or maybe, just MAYBE, you stood there picking out the words you thought might hurt the most!”

“…No. You were right the first time. I don’t understand.” The Seraph answers vacantly, distantly, as if he wasn’t even there, as if talking about someone else. “I don’t see what kind of paradise can only be built on pain, I don’t believe that anyone pushed you into what you did to all the people you’ve hurt outside your little group, and I know perfectly well what it means to be a vessel.”

The force pinning Mairtin to the ground intensifies, shifting to envelop him from every direction, leaving him feeling simultaneously weightless and trapped beneath a landslide.

“Whatever you hoped to get out of your bargain, there isn’t enough of you left to enjoy it. So this is the best thing I can do for you.”

I hope the world above the world is everything we dreamed of and more. I wish I’d gotten to see it with you.

“Goodbye.”

Then the Seraph’s will presses in on all sides at once and crushes him into nothing, body and soul. All that remains is a wisp of pain – endless, crushing pain, like being buried at the bottom of the sea, alone in the dark, forever.

~~~

As Roland’s magic compacts the vessel out of existence, erasing all traces of Syancauri’s influence with him, he heaves out a sigh as the tension leaves his body. Taking his promised revenge didn’t bring back the kid he left to die, and there’s no righteous satisfaction in putting down some cripple broken by a Harbinger’s lies. This was only ever a pointless diversion. All of it, pointless. A waste. Meaningless. Disgusting.

Shoving that useless feeling away and expelling the last traces of the vessel’s power, Roland extends his senses over the city. He searches for any traces of Syancauri, any way to reopen the path it shoved him out through, but with the vessel gone, it’s as though it was never there. All he detects are other Keepers flaring desperately around loci of Nanaash’s presence. Next, he checks Lighthouse for any new information that might lead him back to his quarry, but there, too, the whole city is on fire with Nanaash’s incursions. There are nine now, and the only one that’s even marked as “handled, no backup needed” is in the Weald, where Iona has reportedly taken the field alone.

But he can’t let that distract him, not now. Nanaash is facing down everyone in the city, except for the three he left behind in Syancauri’s Wound. Of them, Aisling isn’t a fighter and Liadain is out of her depth. Mary might be able to hold her own, but not alone against something on Syancauri’s scale. Help isn’t coming for them – he’s all they have.

So where did they all go? He can’t feel any of them anywhere nearby. Judging from the hospital attack and the way it can drag people into or shove them out of its world in the middle of nowhere, the Harbinger has some method of teleportation or colocation, but he has no idea how it works. If there was a way back into the Wound where the vessel shoved him out, it’s already closed. Lacking a better plan, he attunes himself to Syancauri’s aura and takes flight over the central city, shoving the still-growing blooms of corruption running through it out of mind. Eventually, he hones in on a faint tugging on his feathers and takes off in its direction, tracing its path back to…

The Fianata Tower? 

How? Why? Sure, heights and climbing seem important to Syancauri. There might be some ritual relevance to acting from the tallest building on the island. Still, its vessels must know that they were choosing a somehow worse place to set themselves up than Iona’s backyard. The Frozen Sun’s existence is all the security her estate needs. The nerve center of the Clarish government isn’t quite as warded against corruption as the Soul Sanctuary, which doesn’t need to make allowances for constant traffic in and out, but if it weren’t for the flares in every direction, he’d have noticed the tower’s inbuilt alarm cry before he sensed Syancauri at all. On any other day, a Harbinger setting foot in there would be suicidally stupid.

Did they plan for this? No, that doesn’t make any sense. The cult clearly bit off more than they could chew with Nanaash, then found themselves on the wrong end of four Keepers. They’re probably just doing what they can to salvage the wreckage of their plans. He should still have a chance to interrupt whatever they’re pivoting to.

Roland jets over the northern Peaks, a district of immaculately-kept parks winding around skyscrapers and business headquarters – and an awful fungal bloom growing through one stretch of artificial forest, where he senses Irida’s army clashing with Nanaash. 

She can take care of herself if anyone can. He presses on and eventually comes to his destination. He touches down on the tower’s observation deck, an outcrop connected to its highest open-to-the-public space, and as he peers in through the glass window-wall, only his reflection on a backdrop of cloudy darkness looks back.

No sense in holding back now. He draws his wings protectively around himself and crashes through the door.

Inside, the fog clinging to the edges of the room quickly gives way. It opens into a familiar wide circular chamber with a high domed ceiling, patterned like the surface of the sea as seen from beneath the waves.

And at the center of the space is a groaning, weeping mass of once-human bodies in white masks, stretched and twisted beyond all recognizability, then knotted together to form a pillar that reaches almost to the ceiling. Many more are splayed along the floor around the tower, their limbs arranged into elaborate looping patterns dizzying to follow, but inexplicably, nauseatingly eye-catching all the same.

“Figured you’d make your way back here, Seraph. Guess it was too much to hope Mairtin could keep you off our backs forever. I’ll just have to make you pay for what you did to him.” 

In the shadow of the awful spectacle stands… it takes some focus to really see him through the thick, roiling corruption emanating from the tower, but it’s unmistakably him, not it, at the heart of the distortion. A short, reedy ash-blonde boy in a ragged grey hoodie, one hand raised in greeting. Dozens of spectral limbs dance around him, their six-fingered hands rapidly rearranging the web of twisted bodies, pausing in places to trace abstract patterns in black ash over and between them. The empty spaces between the design are scattered with sheets of paper, each covered in illegible glyphic scrawling.

“Oh, so you know, they’re all still alive,” the vessel says, turning to look up at his perverse working. He sounds strangely tired, but there’s something like pride written on his translucent mask’s face. “If you stop us, I bet the Sanctuary could sort most of them out. So tread lightly, if you don’t want to poison them or cook them or whatever it is your latest victim has you worried about.”

Behind his half-real mask’s vicious smile, the boy’s ice-blue eyes look all at once wider and darker and wearier than when Roland last saw them.

Yes, Roland recognizes that face. Exactly what purpose brought Ciaran Fianata here, he can’t be sure, but it’s only natural for someone to return to their own home.