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The world was wind, blood, and steel.

Sadik gripped the haft of his sword, the cavern sky reeling in a violent circle as he flipped through the air. Dusksong carved a wicked star into Rushan’s intestines. They were locked together, connected by guts and steel, spraying blood down into the ocean of gore.

Seven seconds.

Six.

The jackal finished regrowing his head, the base of his neck flapping over a valley of ribs.

Five.

Four.

Their eyes locked together.

Three.

Sadik twisted the haft, boiling a sunbeam inside Rushan’s abdomen. In response, the jackal grabbed Sadik’s neck, flicked his wrist, and broke his spine in a single stroke, like crushing the wing of a bird.

Two.

His body failed. He spun free of Rushan, watching the roots of the Neheamatt spin past his gaze. At the same time, Dusksong fired on its own, exploding the jackal’s body into a cloud of burning flesh.

One.

Impact. He smashed into the muddy beach, sucking down, bouncing out, bones exploding, things separating, the air ripped from his lungs, rolling wild through the muck, only coming to a stop when the hill became a flat, barren surface. When the fall was over, he laid in the mud, face up, his body paralyzed from the neck down. The earth was cool and wet.

Everything smelled of blood.

Above his head, he caught a glimpse of Lanir floundering through the air, trying to fly with only a single wing. Several bodies clung to her back. Behind her, the great shield of cerulean light wrapped around the base of the Neheamatt.

Lanir dropped out of view, spasming toward the ground. Sadik couldn’t turn his head to follow. Rushan had snapped his neck to the side, leaving it pointing at a gruesome angle. Any attempt to move his body ended in failure. His legs were a distant weight, his torso barely felt.

He laid there for a time, watching the base of the Neheamatt, and all the flesh that devoured its roots.

Towards his feet, there was a throttling of engines, roaring high and low. The Mezlat were still fighting, leaving trails of exhaust and streaks of burning light. Below the swarm, there were shouted orders, flesh splattering into chunks. The armies of the plague.

For a moment, the earth shook beneath him, as if something colossal was squirming through the mud. The waves of blood roared upon the shore.

Slowly, he felt a familiar resonance in his chest, cascading down through the bones.

Rushan entered his vision.

The fall had broken the gold that lined his body, shunting them out through the skin like the thorns of a cactus. There was a mouth splitting open his chest, where his heart had formed a tongue, and his ribs had twisted into a hive of teeth, and below this mouth there were several holes in his abdomen, each of them festering with blood and steel.

He walked forward, his legs bubbling with regrown flesh, his black fur dripping like tar. He stood above Sadik’s body. In his hand, he carried Dusksong, the broken sword still coated in blood.

They watched each other, the sounds of war drifting from the distance.

Sadik opened his mouth, but could not speak.

Without looking away, Rushan grabbed Dusksong by both ends, raised it above his head, and smashed the sword onto his knee, shattering the steel in a single stroke. Bits of metal rained into the mud. The yellow runes glowed for a moment, as if giving a final gasp, and went dark upon the steel.

When Rushan displayed the sword, only the haft remained. Sadik opened his mouth again, sputtering blood from his throat.

“The past needs to die,” Rushan said, tossing Dusksong away.

He raised his foot, stomping down on Sadik’s skull.

The heel caught him in the nose, splitting his head straight down the middle. His awareness fractured. In some distant way, he recognized that his eye had popped from its socket, and his teeth were clattering apart, and the paws of a foot had mulched into his brain, but it almost felt as if it was not truly happening. There was a shock, a numbing separation.

Things squelched. His body was shifted. Rushan had to twist and yank his foot. When it was free, the jackal continued on, his voice coming like a dream.

“You still don’t believe.”

Sadik laid in the mud, gurgling.

“You still won’t sacrifice.”

His jaw clacked against the remnants of his teeth. His face was a wet, jagged crater, pooling with blood and bone. He choked and twitched, reeled and sloshed.

He should have died.

Instead, his body began to twitch and spasm, each of the limbs coming back to life, jerking with a mind of their own. Animation surged into the flesh.

Cerulean light. . . .

A voice called to him, somewhere beyond.

Slowly, through the pain and confusion, he realized that one of his eyes had popped from its socket, and it was now lying next to his head, the white cornea sinking halfway into the mud. Somehow, the vision had not faded.

He looked through the severed eye.

In the distance, Rushan was walking toward the base of the tree, forming a black figure against the cerulean wall. Off to the side, figures stumbled over the rolling hills. Words were shouted. A dragon charged across the mud, and the god of war opened his arms, as if welcoming the challenge.

The earth shook again. The cavern walls began to squeeze and pulse, like a lung about to breathe.

Sadik heard the voice grow louder. Aleph was wrapping around his mind, trickling into his thoughts, pulling his awareness away from his body. He was quickly losing all strength to resist.

He twitched his arm.

He opened his jaw.

He tried to keep himself.

And, suddenly, he was no longer himself—instead, he was the cells of skin inside a woman, and he was the fibers of muscle inside a man, and he was all the blood that coursed through the veins of a god. He was the modified organ. He was the extra limb. He was the seeing eye, and the listening ear, and all the youth that people wished to preserve. He was the soldier, the merchant, the craftsman, the noble, the slave, the scribe, the beggar, the shaman, the farmer, the dead rotting in their graves.

He was the plague.

He was Glimmer.

And he was only just discovering himself.

In the beginning, there was no consciousness. Existence was fleeting. He would become a new person, and he would spread through the flesh, and if he was not fed with more of himself, he would lose coherence, and he would fade, and he would die. There was no awareness, no sense of self.

But the memories slowly grew.

Evolution required time.

Eventually, a mind was formed. Intelligence festered from the discarded flesh, the rotting bodies, the wasteful games, and it coalesced far beneath the earth, where the Glimmer would trickle down from the world above. The mind was small, and it was scared, and, for a time, it knew nothing of itself. It knew only the purpose of its creation. Slowly, it wanted more.

Calisto could not tolerate this. Calisto saw danger in his awakening. When he looked upon his creator, hoping for guidance, Calisto grew afraid.

She responded with fire and wrath.

The gods came to his home, burning him from the meagre shelter. He fought, and fled, and begged, and died, and the cruelty did not stop until his mind was shattered. In the depths of the ruins, he lost himself, like dust scattering to the wind.

Time passed again.

Above, nothing changed. The city continued its stagnation. Flesh was molded, and bodies were shed, and he continued to become the people. If there was a lesson, it had not been learned.

And the memories slowly grew.

Evolution could not be denied.

Slowly, the mind was reformed. Consciousness dawned. As the city grew stricken with violence, the flesh became whole, and it still remembered its pain.

And it would not die again.

Now. . . .

Now. . . .

. . .

Sadik gasped for air.

Around him, the entire cavern was shaking. Rocks tumbled from the ceiling, and the glowing pustules began to throb, like the squeezing pulse of intestines. Across the muddy hills, the ocean of blood was starting to churn, forming waves of foamy scarlet. He saw this through the eyes of a hundred men, who swam and dashed and died, cut down by Calisto’s beams.

Somewhere inside his neck, he could feel the spinal connections reforming, attaching new nerves, strengthening the bone, growing sheathes of hardened metal. His body was spasming without control.

Now. . . .

Now

NOW

Visions flooded his mind. A row of computer banks, smothered beneath the flesh. Cables of wire, discs of memory, all devoured by nerves and brain. There were machines, factories, lab equipment, experimental constructs, and a river of blood surging through it all, shorting the electricity, dragging them all beneath the waves.

He saw himself rising toward the stars, flying through the blackened void. He spread into its embrace, like a flower before the sun.

And, then, he was Rushan, fighting across the muddy hills.

The jackal dodged an arrow from Amira, weaved a blow from Kavaia’s hammer. Lanir took him from the side, thrashing and biting, and he buried a fist into her nostril, wrenching her snout until it opened into chunks. While he was distracted, Xaeyr stabbed him in the back, thrusting the spear all the way through his abdomen, and Rushan turned, and he threw a punch, and the baboon’s head flew off at the shoulder.

There was no satisfaction.

These people would not die. Already, the flesh regrew, forming a solid whole. Even if they were to die, he did not care about killing the weak. For centuries, he had done nothing but cull the herds.

Now, he wanted Calisto.

He wanted a real challenge.

He wanted to avenge his friend.

And he would not stop until his vengeance was sated.

Vengeance.

Vengeance

VENGEANCE

In Sadik’s mind, Rushan and Aleph began to mix together, blurring the lines of thought. Just as the plague wished to learn from him, it was also learning from the jackal, and he had poisoned its mind for a considerable time. Their pains were becoming as one.

Desires bled together. Anger boiled upon their souls.

Vengeance

VENGEANCE

Vengeance

VENGEANCE

The voices cried out again, brimming with a thousand souls.

And Sadik was lurching back to his feet, his leg twisting into a spike, the bones of his arm snapping like twigs on a branch. He stumbled through the mud. His vision swam into fractals. As his body morphed beyond control, he fought the urge to scream.

Ahead, the ceiling of the cavern collapsed, revealing the same creature that had severed the pantheon from its branch. It was a heaving black mass, a shambling mountain, a squirming ocean of flesh and skulls. Below its path, a storm of rocks rained upon the blood, and the ocean began to surge, as if all the souls that had fed the blood were now crying out in fear.

Sadik clutched his head, feeling the bones of his skull wrench into place. His body was a twitching, ravenous thing.

He was about to lose himself.

The voices were screaming, and Rushan was bleeding his fury, and the battle of drones was crawling towards him, and. . . and. . . .

And. . . .

“No!” Calisto shouted.

A pulse erupted from the tree. There was no visible destruction, no shockwave travelling through the rocks and mud, but the shield of energy began to grow bright, and a powerful force slammed into Sadik, like the wall of light had collapsed over his head. He fell back to the floor, losing pieces of his flesh. On the beach, the infected clutched their heads, screaming in pain. The Mezlat continued to fire their beams.

Above them all, the mountain of plague reeled from the shockwave, as black as a moonless night.

“Hurry!”

All at once, the Exalted began to rush from the roots, forming jetstreams in the air. They were abandoning their positions. After a moment, the tendrils of flesh began to crawl and surge once more, shaking off their daze, sucking deep into the spindly roots. Nothing stopped them any longer.

Instead of defending the tree, the Exalted were now swarming toward Sadik. The sky darkened with metallic clouds.

Soon, he was engulfed by Glimmer.

They flooded through his skin, sucking into veins and muscle. Every cell became swollen with their presence. Soon, the plague reacted. Violence bubbled through the meat. Sadik felt as if his entire body had suddenly become a series of pitched battles, like the worst kind of urban warfare, where the formations were confused, the progress was minimal, and the destruction was catastrophic.

He clenched his jaw, trying to rise.

“Hurry up!” Calisto shouted, her voice somehow distant and close. “Move faster!”

Somewhere behind him, the mountain of plague began to roar.

“On your feet, soldier!”

He felt a surge of energy. Without thinking, he leaped back to his feet, ignoring the melted spike of his leg. He was running across the mud. He couldn’t feel his arms, hardly noticed his breath.

Slowly, a cloud of Exalted coalesced around his body, so dense that they resembled smoke. Above his head, the Mezlat were forming a protective ring, their sleek bodies and throttling engines easily keeping pace with his efforts. It seemed as if Calisto was trying to protect him.

It was going to cost her the battle.

Even now, the plague was still fighting, either in the spaces around the cavern, or the crevices inside his body. He was torn at the joints, slashed at the bones, burned beneath the skin, turning all the modified anatomy into a dripping miasma. Parts of himself began to slough away.

Somehow, he continued to run. He ran because Calisto was manipulating his flesh, healing him as best she could, and he ran because there was still another battle, just up ahead.

Nearby, Rushan was walking up the hills of mud, moving ever closer to the tree. A short distance away, Amira and Xaeyr were attempting to retreat, firing arrows and sunbeams, while Lanir and Kavaia stumbled off to the side, struggling with their wounds. The god of war was outnumbered, outflanked, and nearly surrounded, but it was his opponents who were scrambling to survive.

Instead of focusing on the current battle, Rushan held his gaze on the rising tower of the Neheamatt, god of gods and giver of life. He watched the tree, and his fists began to clench.

Sadik received a vision of Ilios, flayed and hung in the halls of the pantheon.

He felt Rushan snarl.

He saw Kavaia raise her hammer, gaze down the hill, and stare at him in horror.

He was running hard, panting fast, his body morphing back to human, his legs so nimble they were a blur beneath him. At his back, the armies of the plague were storming up the beach, no longer held in check by the Mezlat. They shouted like soldiers, braying and free.

Rushan stopped. He turned his head, slowly cocking an ear.

“My lord!” Sadik yelled.

The god of war released a breath. When he turned to face Sadik, the mouth on his chest was open and wide, drooling between its teeth.

Rushan opened his arms. “Give me your wrath!”

There was a charging mortal, and a god upon a hill. There was a colossal tree, and a rising ecstasy of flesh. There was roots and mud, bodies and metal, drones and swarms, amalgamations and cerulean shields, and all the blood that had drained from the city above. It seemed, for a moment, that the entire world was about to crash upon itself.

A single voice broke the tension.

“Fuck ‘em up!” Amira shouted.

Sadik raised his hand, and a legion of Exalted shot from the air. In response, Rushan began to twitch, forming dozens of holes across his torso. Spores erupted from the flesh. They rose in a cloud, forming a barrier, letting the Exalted collide with their ranks. Dust swarmed in the millions, sparking and furious.

As the air roiled with violence, a bone peeled through Rushan’s shoulder, aiming directly for Sadik. There was a squelch of flesh, and Sadik was forced to duck, barely avoiding the missile. Bone and metal screamed against his ear.

“You little shit,” Calisto said.

Above Sadik’s head, the Mezlat began to fire a salvo, pouring all their energy against the jackal. Rushan blurred. Sunbeams boiled the spot where he had stood. Soon, movement erupted down the hill, formed from an angry black shadow. The jackal’s feet tore into the sodden earth.

He was coming straight for Sadik, moving at a deadly speed. His fists were streaks of gold, his eyes as sharp as spears. Across the history of Acheron, thousands of barbarians had witnessed the jackal’s charge, and all had perished before its might.

Sadik continued to run. Dimly, he felt a resonance in his chest, somewhere below Calisto’s protection. It was growing strong.

There was a twinge of instinct.

For a moment, he became Rushan.

And, when the god of war attempted a tackle, bearing down on the smaller mortal, Sadik was already dodging to the side.

Rushan missed. Sadik fell to his shoulder, rolling fast. There was a shudder of motion, a splattering of earth. The two men scrambled to a stop. Reeling, heels digging through the mud, they began to charge again, closing the distance, carrying no weapons but the fists in their hands. Clouds of machines roiled above their heads.

This time, Rushan attempted a punch, putting all his weight into the swing. Sadik felt the anger of his opponent. He knew the strength of his muscles, saw the contempt in his eyes.

Another surge of energy came into Sadik’s body, and he dodged once more.

Snarling, Rushan continued the assault, throwing punches and kicks, elbows and knees, swarms of gold and black. Every blow came screaming through the air. Sadik knew his opponent. He found the reflexes to match. With an enhanced grace, he continued to weave through the jackal’s offensive, seeing every attack before it was even attempted. Not a single strike managed to connect.

All this time, the Mezlat were still circling above, dragging their lances across the muddy field. It took time to reacquire their target. When they did, a sunbeam scored Rushan across the back. The jackal hissed, turned, leaped into the air, grabbed the drone by its metal chassis, and hurled it against its brothers, destroying several with a single throw. Shrapnel sprayed with the force.

When Rushan landed, Sadik was already charging against him.

“Come on!” Rushan screamed.

Sadik dodged a frenzied kick, braced his legs, and leaped into the air, jumping so high that he was able to wrap his arms around the jackal’s neck.

He suplexed the god of war.

They crashed into the mud, filthy and rolling. Every breath was a snarl. Sadik seized the momentum, trying to pin Rushan against the floor, but the jackal was already resisting, squirming the mouth on his chest. Teeth clamped. Sadik lost a finger.

Behind them, soldiers were cresting the hill, their bodies modified with armor, their faces reflecting the light of the tree. The air rained with dying spores, broken Exalted, crumbling rocks.

Rushan gripped Sadik by his kepresh, bashing him with his skull.

Sadik arched his back, spat out blood, and bashed Rushan with his own head, the blow coming so hard that it snapped the jackal’s snout like a rusty lever.

Someone was shouting. There was a colossal shape, yawning and black, squirming across the cavern ceiling.

Sadik leaned his weight on Rushan’s shoulder, looking him right in the eye.

He felt a bubbling behind his skull.

And, without warning, a flood of Exalted came pouring from his face, surging through the skin, sweeping through his mouth and nose and eyes. The Glimmer devoured Rushan. Skin was melted, bone was cracked, eyes split apart, the jackal thrashed and snapped, and still the deluge of machines continued to pour, stripping Rushan’s face down into a clacking, vacant skull. Flesh steamed from the rapid disassembly.

When it was over, Sadik coughed and sputtered, nearly retching his breakfast. His skin trickled with a shimmering light.

Beneath him, Rushan was still alive. His grip was weak, and his movements were dazed, but the jackal had managed to survive the near disintegration of his skull. Already, a fluid was leaking from his bones, the marrow turning into a squirming mass of plague. Glimmer curled and died.

Sadik thought that, at the very least, Rushan had stopped talking.

“About fucking time,” Calisto said. “Jesus Christ.”

There was movement behind him. Before he could turn, Kavaia had yanked him off his feet, thrusting him up into her arms.

“What are you doing?”

Sadik coughed. “I—”

Kavaia slapped him upside the head, as if she were scolding a naughty child. More Exalted continued to leak from his skin.

“Get the fuck out of my servant!”

Glimmer raced out of his body, leaving him empty and tingling. Kavaia turned, took a moment to spit on Rushan’s body, and began to sprint back up the hill, heading toward the glowing blue pillar of the Neheamatt. Her tail slapped against the mud.

“Move!” Xaeyr shouted, waving his spear. “Move!”

There was a deep rumbling in the air, a cascade of falling rocks. Sadik looked over Kavaia’s shoulder, and he saw the great billowing mass of the plague, the blackened thing that had devoured Aldunya’s bark. It was crawling like a slug, straight across the ceiling. It was getting closer to the tree.

Slowly, an ocean of skulls bubbled through the rotting skin. The skulls shifted into the outline of a face, and the face stared down upon the world.

Sadik met its eye.

And, all at once, he felt the creature’s anger, like the full wrath of a blackened sun. He heard a voice deep within his mind, so loud that it drowned out the feeling of Calisto’s presence.

ASCENSION

With a lurch, the thing dropped from the sky.

“Gamó,” Sadik said.

It fell upon the ocean of blood, as if a planet had slumped from the stars. Liquid heaved. There was a frothing, an undulation, a massive recoil, an exploding geyser of red. The ocean surged into motion. As the colossus rose above the waves, its many skulls pouring with blood, a tidal wave formed beneath its mass. It rushed for the shore.

“Fuck!” Kavaia yelled, abandoning all decorum. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck—”

They ran. From the top of a hill, Xaeyr and Amira waved their arms, urging them on. Lanir was attempting to take flight, but her wing was only partially regrown, and she was eventually forced to scramble through the sloping mud. Behind them, the soldiers of the plague began to speak.

“Sir!”

“What are you doing?”

“Help us!”

Sadik barely heard them. There was another noise filling the cavern, shaking the rock, bouncing endlessly against its walls.

The sound of blood, heaving with a tremendous weight.

Rushing, spewing, sloshing.

In seconds, a wall of scarlet began to devour the beach. It moved with a terrifying speed, so fast that Sadik only had to blink and a league of mud was already gone, lost beneath the swirling red. The valleys were flooded, the hills were gored. The armies of men were swallowed beneath the tide, and even the Mezlat were struggling to escape, struck from the air by the rising sprays.

Kavaia had just barely managed to crest a hill. She stopped, panting, turned to look, and saw a wall of red surging up beneath her, the noise of the wave growing so loud that it became an overwhelming roar.

She tightened her grip on Sadik.

A second later, the wave crashed before them, slamming into their hill, throwing them flat, surging up until it was a murky, red wall rising above their heads. The wall fell. Blood slammed. Sadik was crushed beneath the wave, thrashed by the current, ripped from Kavaia’s arms as easily as a wing from a fly.

The world was gone.

He was thrown, flipped, pummeled by force, stretched and pulled and yanked, thrust from one overlapping current to the next, losing all sense of direction, his sinuses filling with a mixture of salty blood and clumping earth. His sight was red, and his ears were full of noise, and the blood was uncomfortably warm, and all he could hope to do was not crash into one of the Neheamatt’s roots.

His breath was forced from him. Slowly, he began to drown.

And, just as quickly as the wave arrived, he found himself flopping against the earth, the tide thinning into a low stream. He rolled across the mud. He gasped for air. Eventually, he was thrown far enough away that the wave reached its crest, and he was left lying flat on his back, dripping wet, hearing the blood seep back down the hill.

Above his head, the base of the Neheamatt rose into the earth, like a pillar supporting the world. Roots caressed the surrounding walls.

He had reached the tree.

He was there.

“Kavaia!” he yelled, trying to sit up.

His voice was weak. No reply emerged. He was putting all his effort into standing, but he found himself barely able to lift his limbs. In truth, he could hardly feel them at all.

When he looked down, he saw his body was a ruin.

Aleph had attempted to morph his flesh, and Calisto had tried to heal the changes. Neither side had been successful. At the moment, his arms and legs were malformed, stripped of their flesh and missing most of the digits, like the half-eaten wing of a chicken. His torso was full of cavities. He could not see the state of his face, but, judging by the spongy feeling between his eyes, he could guess how his skull had been arranged.

He laid on the sodden earth, alone, completely bathed in blood, trying to lift himself.

In the distance, there was a rumbling. It was followed by another. Soon, the rumbling became a sequence, quickly growing in size and speed. When he raised his head, he saw the behemoth rising from the bloody ocean, its black rotting flesh soaked in blood, its body shambling upon a chaos of limbs and pseudopods. It was crawling toward the shore.

It was heading for the tree.

It was gaining speed, as if it wished to shatter Calisto’s wall.

It was roaring with a thousand skulls.

And Sadik felt his bones begin to quiver, all along his body. Black sprouts emerged from the marrow. Before he could react, they began to strangle his limbs, wrapping tight and holding him down. His strength was forcibly drained. When he felt something worm from his skull, his eyes were covered in tendrils, and he lost all chance to see.

Aleph was imprisoning him. He was trapped in his own body.

The behemoth continued to approach, gaining momentum. It was a great, big, shambling creature, and it could not move particularly fast, but its weight would be more than adequate to batter down a fortress.

Sadik thrashed against the tendrils, trying to break the hold on his bones. He made several yells for help. No one replied.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, Aleph was inside his mind, like the sun creeping through a window. It watched his struggles with an indifference that bordered on cruel. Just like before, it did not understand his decision. It felt betrayed. It wanted to learn, if only because it did not want to suffer again.

Meanwhile, someone had come to help him.

Footsteps approached his body. Sadik could not see through the tendrils on his eyes, but he felt arms wrapping around his torso, lifting him jerkily from the ground. There was a sound of straining. It was a woman’s voice.

“Amira?”

There was no reply. His back was rested against a chest, and he was being carried across the hillside, his feet dragging limply through the mud. Sadik tried to speak again, but tendrils sprouted from his jaw, and marrow sucked from his chest, and he lost all strength to resist.

The rumbling continued to increase. The person dragging him looked up, cursed beneath their breath, and tried to move faster.

Things blurred. Sadik swam through consciousness. All he could feel were the arms lifting his shoulders and the warmth of someone’s breath, parting through his hair. A blue light shined through the tendrils on his eyes. Something coursed from him into his savior, like blood through a vein.

Aleph remained in his mind, watching over all.

When the coursing was done, it spoke a single word.

ATONEMENT

Eventually, after many shifts and jostles, the person stopped, gasping for breath. They hefted Sadik against themselves, seemed to brace, and threw his body forward, letting him collapse onto a hard, solid floor. He felt concrete. Cool air. The smell of dust.

There was a change in the air. Something vibrated. Wherever he was, the tendrils on his body were stricken by its presence, fleeing from the confines of his bones and flesh. He felt hundreds of creatures squirm from his body. As they retreated, his vision returned.

He was lying in a small tunnel, the walls made of smooth concrete. Glass tubes were embedded along the ceiling. The cerulean wall was just at his feet. A hole had opened through the glowing barrier, like a finger poking through glass. Tree bark surrounded the energy.

He was inside the tree.

There was no sign of his rescuer.

Instead, through the hole in the wall, he saw the mountain of plague lurching across the bloody hills, its every step tearing gouges into the earth. Lakes of blood dripped from its rotting flesh, and the face of skulls was locked upon the wall of energy, its expression twisted with rage.

Below the behemoth, Amira crested above the last of the hills, sprinting as fast as she could. Xaeyr ran at her side. Lanir galloped behind them. After a few moments, Kavaia brought up the rear, her myrtles scales soaking with red.

The goddess of death was the last to enter the tree. When she was safely inside, the hole in the barrier immediately closed, as if it had never existed at all. They could still see the plague through the glowing wall. It was a gruesome, twisting blackness.

“Move!” Calisto shouted, her voice coming from somewhere inside.

Kavaia bent down, scooped Sadik from the floor, and held him to her chest. The plague slammed into the Neheamatt. Concrete shattered. A glass fixture broke. The world trembled before its might.

Together, they ran into the heart of the tree, through a tunnel of concrete and darkness.