How it crept up on her, Straxi had no notion. How anything so immense could not be seen on the approach, how it could blend so seamlessly into land and sky, not even shimmering in spite of its heat… It was utterly bewitching.

She bounded right into it, loping along at her customary furious pace; she left a red mark at head-height where her face impacted the invisible barrier, splitting the left eye-socket.

As she watched, the smear of blood that seemed to hang there in thin air began to disappear, perhaps being absorbed… She put out her bony claw, marvelling at the hot surface, but before she could touch her blood it was all whisked away, transported perhaps to some imp’s work-station, to be counted drop by drop, to be meted out drip by drip, to the worthy. The faithful.

Perhaps I’ll get some back, someday, she thought, and tittered.

It couldn’t have been a mirror, exactly; she cast no reflection in the surface before her. But it couldn’t be made of glass, either. The red fields just went on, and on, and on… If it was glass, this couldn’t be the Citadel, the place she’d sought, longed for for so long she could no longer recall a before-time, a pre-longing.

And this had to be the Citadel… didn’t it?

Unless the innards of the Sunset Citadel were being hidden from her by some witchery. There had to be something other than more fields, more bloody prairies, didn’t there?

Like the Citadel even exists. C’mon, Straxi.

Giggling, she placed her left hand on the warm, mirror-like wall, and then started walking to her right.

“I know!” she cried aloud in defiance to the red universe watching over her, casting her gaze up at the broiling blood-clouds, their constant swirling conflicts. “I know I don’t know! Ah-ha-haaaaa!”

The universe laughed back in response. Soon she was leaping along again, following the wall with her arm outstretched to maintain contact.

I’m less, now, I think. I think I’m Straxi.

She laughed again. It was funny. So funny, what they’d done. When she closed her eyes she pictured the things she’d always pictured, so nakedly real before the imagination that she could’ve been mistaken for thinking they were things she’d really seen.

Her legs becoming swords, her head caving in until only an hourglass span in its place.

Sprouting nests of thorny limbs until she was those thorns, multiplied eyes left atop her shoulders.

The laughter taking over, consuming her with such force that as she ran the entrails shuddered free of her belly.

She was ready.

I am ready.

There was no half-remembered sea by which to orient herself; every infinite horizon looked like dusk no matter which way she turned her head, as though a million or more suns perished just out of view on this fateful eve. She travelled swiftly, and after the first hours or days she became uncertain as to the shape she traced across the fields. Was this a straight wall, or had it curved subtly, bringing her back to her starting position? It was impossible to say for sure; over the course of hundreds of miles, a gentle arc would’ve been impossible to discern, and there were no landmarks to help guide her.

She didn’t feel like she was going in circles, though. The grasslands ahead of her appeared untrodden, unlike the pockmarked track she left in her wake, ditches and grooves marking the points at which she landed, leapt off again… These fields of crimson corn looked new. Different.

Then she saw another, like herself, coming the wrong way. Heading towards her, his right hand touching the wall, his course opposite her own.

For it was a male, going off the hulking frame. There were remnants of a big square chin hiding beneath the folds of torn lips, where the lower jaw had been vertically split – never mind the lack of breasts on his open chest. His scalp hung off his bare yellow skull in a great dry curl, flapping against the earless side of his head as he cantered.

He didn’t leap. Instead of lengthening in response to their punishment as hers had done, his legs had divided. Three extra limbs had sprouted from his pelvis; the one by his navel looked like a useless, abortive mutation, swinging around and slapping into him as he moved. Yet the other legs were doing a fine job of propelling him towards her. The nails or knuckles of each toe had closed in, forming hooves.

“Nooooo!” he squealed when he saw her, slowing somewhat. “Wrong way! Wrong waaay!”

She reduced her own pace, trying a contemptuous grin.

“Wrong way to you!” she cried back.

The landscape hailed her response by laughing uproariously. Hell clearly sided with her here.

He slowed even more, looking to stop; his head swivelled about as he tried to determine the source of the laughing sound, and the earless side of his head received a good slap from the loose, hanging scalp.

She giggled, still grinning as she came to a halt near him, and the universe giggled along with her.

“How – how are you doing that?” he growled. Suddenly his dark eyes were narrowed in rage; he retracted his heavy, muscle-knotted arms, seeming to take up a boxer’s stance.

She needed no more provocation.

Straxi’s arms thrust forward, and she sank her talons into the man’s eye-sockets, instantly ruining the only part of his anatomy as-yet unmarred. He was certainly the stronger; he batted her hands aside in a second, thumping her in each forearm to move her limbs out of the way as he pressed hooves to his dripping brows.

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The moan that rose from his distended mouth was hypnotic.

He had nothing. He was nothing. Just a bag of blood, waiting to be drunk.

He had no voice here. No patron. He belonged to no one.

He belonged to her. That was why he was placed here. Just a test of how thirsty she was. How deeply she could slake the needs of her parched parts in him, in his sloshing contents.

It was her turn to kneel at the ocean’s edge and sup the surf. Her turn to take up a fistful of red wheat and grind its grains between her fangs.

His responses were slow. Her first action was to blind him, and his first response was not to take her immediately in his powerful arms, break her, crush her, feed off of her and in her hidden reserves of vigour find his own healing, the regeneration he so needed. No. His first response was to wail like a child, cover the eyes that were already without sight, as though doubling his blindness were his only concern.

She darted back, amazed at the uselessness of his reflexes, and struck again, at the throat this time. She moved her hand in between his wide-flung elbows, snicking at the front of his neck with her thumb and fingers arrayed like scissor-blades, and was welcomed by a spray of warm blood that splashed right over her face.

The centre-leg snapped out at her, a crude and instinctive blow, but a good one. He kicked her in the midriff, pulverising whatever she’d had inside and filling her with a delicious nausea.

It was almost tempting – to stand there and trade blows. Inflict and enjoy agonies, one for one. Perhaps this was why the horse-man’s killer-instincts had atrophied, if he’d even had them in the first place. He hadn’t yet realised what it would mean, how horrific it would be to die again, in this place… in this state…

What it might mean for eternity, to be drained by one such as she? She whose ministrations might take every last shred and sliver of the self he’d possessed and burn it for fuel…

She wrapped her claws about the leg he used to strike at her, digging in deep near the base. He finally attempted to grapple her, big hands fumbling at her shoulders and throat, but it was too little too late. Her skin was a scabrous fabric, shiny and sleek, and a simple twist of her upper body was enough to slip his grasp.

She used the same twist to gain purchase with her talons, and a satisfying ripping sound followed her as she danced away.

He howled, clutching the exposed bone of his extra leg, the tube of pulled-away skin dangling over the hoof.

He’d given up, but she’d only just started. She circled him delicately, trimming him, even darting in and drinking from the lacerations she scored before he had chance to swing about, lunge clumsily at her. She undid his tendons, untied ligaments, stripped away sinews thread by thread. Soon he could lunge no more, collapsing where he stood, sucking in air through his ravaged throat-opening.

The encounter was over all too quickly, and she settled in for a nice bit of torture. She’d gone out of her way to be merciful, delivering several killing-blows, yet that had only incapacitated him – not one of the fatal strikes seemed to do the trick of actually ending his existence.

She found herself re-examining her assumptions. The entities born of this plane, amongst whom she had to count herself, were far more durable here than they first appeared, far more durable than she had ever anticipated. It wasn’t just the outer layers, the fabrics of flesh, that were expendable. When she took of his innards, she found she was chomping and slurping on them indefinitely; they replaced themselves, again and again, as if purely for her amusement, and sustenance.

Am I doing it? Or is he…?

Either way, his death was finally accomplished when she fully removed the heart from his quivering body. She lifted the prize to her face, luxuriating in its sweet aroma before pressing her lips against its warmth, sinking in her teeth, flooding her mouth with its hallowed juices.

When she looked back down, the horse-man beneath her had already decomposed; she no longer straddled a humanoid figure, but a pile of tiny dry flakes, like ground-up leaves. All that remained of him was the skull with its blasted-apart jawbone, the shattered ear-holes where she’d pressed fingers into his brain.

She got to her dagger-feet, carefully stepped on the skull to smash it, and put out her left hand to touch the invisible wall once more.

And the wall –

It was gone.

She approached closer, certain that she was mistaken, she had to be mistaken… during the fight she’d simply moved farther from the unseen barrier than she’d estimated, surely…

Yet, no. She moved fifty yards from the horse-man’s remnants, and…

What if I got turned about?

She whirled on the spot, racing around the swiftly-vanishing corpse, moving fifty yards in every direction.

No wall. No Citadel.

And there’d been part of her that was certain – so certain…

She didn’t sigh. She laughed at herself instead, and, as if to reassure her, the world laughed along with her.

Straxi resumed what she thought to be her former course, not knowing, not really caring anymore, whether she was going the right direction.

Direction’s meaningless now. I’ve got all the direction I need.

Keep walking.

* * *

The former woman came by the long road to the door of the tower. It stood in the centre of a plane of red glass, and from its elevated floors storm-arms emanated, the crimson clouds that shadowed entire worlds here hiding the Citadel’s lofty infinitude from the sight of those who might grasp some miniscule fraction of its height, and thereby be driven insane.

As what had once come before gave way to the vast grassland, so now did grass give way to bitter, brittle ruby stalks. And this time Straxi espied it on the approach. From months away. Years away.

Gargantuan could not encapsulate its size. When at last distances began to fall away, permitting her sorry eyes to resolve detail, resolve understanding, she realised the paltriness of her previous assumptions. She had thought that after all she had seen, that she had some comprehension of the scope of things, some ability to recognise the limitations of the possible.

Not so. Not so at all.

It could not be plainer that this place was not just the centre of the local domains, the scarlet glinting landscape through which she loped, but the centre of Everything. The clouds that went out of here hung invisible behind every blue sky. The edicts of this tower’s dreadful King were heard and obeyed in every land.

To encircle the Sunset Citadel by bounding along, her hand touching its wall, would take not years but centuries. Millennia. With the way it seemed to swell up to meet her, growing more with each step closer than the rules of perspective ought to allow… it was entirely likely the very prospect of circling it was impossible.

Closer. Closer, day by day.

One day’s travel from the featureless red walls, the door materialised before her. It was a door for her. The circumference of the tower was a million miles, yet she approached from just the right direction, this edifice at the heart of the World? No.

No.

It was hers.

And the moment she saw the door from afar, the knowledge and the need combined in her mind –

She covered a hundred thousand steps in a single bound, a trick she’d picked up somewhere along the way. In the one instant she was tilting her hourglass, six thousand grains of sand straining to perceive the distant wooden arch; then she was standing before it, the dark-oak door looming up above her, tall enough to accommodate giants.

She beat at its scratched surface with the flat of one of her blades, leaving her own marks in the ancient timber.

“I am here,” she grated. She had no mouth, and though she still remembered what it was to have one, it wasn’t strange to feel her hidden metal parts move, produce sounds. This was how she’d always been meant to be – of that much she was certain.

“I am here,” she repeated, and beat on the door once more. “O Almighty King! I am thine!”

Nothing. No wind. No change, of any kind. Not even a feeling.

It was beyond her to feel anger or hate. She knew what she had to do.

She backed away a few paces, then folded herself, kneeling, prostrating herself before the great arched door.

“I am here, and here will I wait,” she clicked, speaking only to herself. “When they need me, they will take me in. But I did it. I am here.

“I am here.”

* * *