Days, nights, weeks, until time had blurred for me there as it had when I was among the idiots of Ulster. I can't remember when her visions shifted into words, but each word she spoke brought a new tickle to my ear that drifted slowly down my spine, and at the end of each sentence I'd thought I'd seen enough signs to believe that her love and lust were within my grasp. Each new sentence began with the dashing of those hopes, and a new one kindled in its place. If she wanted to , she could have made me her slave.

Our first real talk took place after we offered Tythus to the Winds. I can't say for sure when we gave up on him; it could have any amount of time, but there were efforts to revive him, though it seemed to me like they were a token for my sake. Drifting through memory and painful sleep, we were carried to a place I pointed to in fitful dreams. It was where he and I would sit and talk, and look at the sky while I told him truths that I'm not sure he wholly disbelieved. There he was burned, and his ashes were scattered by a sudden gust. Most of them fell downwards when the wind had faded.

She then carried to me to a private place where we could see in every direction, and still there was no view beyond the many twisted and melted towers of that once proud magnacity.

"You know there are places outside this one, right?" I was afraid she might not, and that I would soon go insane if I did not meet another person who'd seen the Tarthas outside.

She laughed, her lips parting in every which way until one pair lingered, tempting me with a partial bite to say something foolish.

"I've been to places you've never heard of, Man of the Batch."

"Man? To you I'm but an embryo."

"You're a man to me now. In my halcyon days, you'd have been a fleck of dust. I'm glad I've met you now."

I laughed. I wanted to ask her to take me somewhere where I could see the world outside. Knowing my desires, as she so clearly did (assuming, of course, she did not determine them), she lifted me higher. She called me a fleck of dust, and I call her a draft of air. We were perched on a circular platform ringing tower of lights that glowed like the moon, though blood red, stabbing into the gloom. Where I expected to see a grey and brown sky of swirling grime, I saw a dark blue haze that hurt my eyes when I tried to peer through it. Instead of the warscape, it seemed the space beyond the city walls was merely a void of that same blue emptiness. I looked around and saw other towers. One was nearby, and the platform was so wide there was a cluster of villages built on it. I saw in my unique way, hoping to pierce the blue lie, but that void turned into a thin but densely fibered wall.

"You know them?" she asked.

I I squinted, and the tower grew in size, pursuing me head on like a missile, the stopping suddenly. The huts and bazaars of the villagers were still small, and the people smaller. Two glowed with warm, lingering yellow light. A marker perhaps? I felt I'd seen them before. Zook!

"Targs," I said. "A father and a daughter."

"Belial never came here. They've found freedom."

They seemed to be hiding, and I felt a strange desire for them to succeed at whatever endeavour they were engaged in.

"None of the Belial's ever came here?". I looked at her with my true sight, and what I saw was... different. A child, pure blue light, no features but soft, disappointed eyes, and light, an aura, of something embryonic and strong enough to break the world. She was made of the power of sound. "What is this place?"

"This is where it ended," she sang.

She turned, looking down from above, where she wanted me to see her, and I realized suddenly how strange it was to see the body of a woman with her aura about her, and I knew that she hadn't truly left her chamber. What I saw was tall, inhuman, but shaped like all of us with a shifting aura. Her handmaids were with there as well. One of them, Eno, carried an object covered in a woven cloth. The girls, they were pretty, but not like Eris or Victor Zero's Kendra, but like porcelain dolls are pretty in their smoothness and sheen. In contemplating their beauty I woke in her lap, in her bedchamber which they called the Rose.

"You brought me back here," I said. I was glad. I didn't ask if we ever actually left, but she did confirm that Tythus had been attended to.

"We tried to revive him," said Eno. Eno was bald.

"You have that power?"

"Our Lady has power. We have skill."

Eno and I were alone. I lay in a bronze vessel filled with hot water, and Eno was dabbing my brow with a cold sponge.

"How could you have revived Tythus?"

"By giving what was taken."

"What was taken? Is it some common thing here? What is this place? Why don't more people have the creatures coiled around their spines, cheating them from death and peace? Why not spread the curse to all? Why should the curse be hoarded by the Batch? And why was it inflicted on us to begin with? Does it not make us poor soldiers? What reason have I to fight if I can't be unmade? Could I not simply wait until the world collapses and takes new shape, to see the new era and observe it dispassionately for eons, mastering the many forms of physical pain until I achieve a state of post traumatized mania that reenvisions the very meaning of humanity, rather than shuffle about like a hollow corpse on strings until I stand at the brink with the lifeless limbs and eyes and throats and digits of Clarion's executive branch in my hands, wondering what to do with these severed remains and mourning their loved ones who watched me cleave apart their kin so I could offer them to some soulless copper godhead whose voice is mighty enough to pierce the veil and call forth the anger of the Sun, whose piercing eye will seer away the sullied lid over our tombworld as the Four Winds scream?"

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"These are questions for Our Lady," said Eno, dabbing my brow. "But I think you may have some of the events out of order. I believe the Winds will need to be summoned first, or else the Sun will never hear your prayer."

I reached out of the water and held her wrist. She made no protest, though I felt some strength in her arm. I sat there, unable to put my fearful question to words, and we waited for the water to cool before I rose. She dried me with a wand that emanated heat, then dressed me in a purple robe. Outside the steam filled bathing room, an old handmaid named Picayune waited with a pot of pungent tea. I took the cup she offered and found my way to a plush divan, then sipped at Picayune's healing brew.

I slept, uncertain when I closed my eyes, and so tired must I have been that I never even bothered to lay down, but sat unconscious with my teacup and saucer on my lap. In my dreams I saw myself conversing with the Painted Lady. A women lay in an ashen heap with her back against a tree. Her face was twisted with such pain, and her husband urged her to battle on to bring their child to life. I sat down across from My Lady at a table lit white from within. My fingers seemed to disappear when I placed them on its surface. She was whole, summoning much of her remaining power, which was of that special sort that is an almost living light, not yet the invincible ohr of stars given breath. She told me some time in this period, when I convalesced and learned of the trials that waited for me both above and below, that her kindred made houses within the tesseracts, and drank from the pillars of creation, but there was still another, higher stage.

I saw a woman in a bed of hard linens, beneath hard light, whispering hard truths. It must be Neophilus. It cannot be his seed. It must be Neophilus. It cannot be our fruit. And the Painted lady offered me food, which I refused.

"I know you've been eating," she says.

I don't deny it.

I saw a woman on the shore, her grey cloak hoarding starlight. I made my way down the path on my high bluff, lantern aloft, and I thought of things to say, but she wanted to be alone, and the sand burned hot between my toes, turning me away.

"Have we grown so far apart, that you no longer trust my garden?"

I look at her and say nothing. She is not serpentine in my dream. She is long, and beautiful, colored like many foreign Suns, and winged like a butterfly holding fire. And I am a cold moon on a path to doom. Together we cannot exist, and so we sit across at her table, and the light is a pool to soothe our bleeding fingertips. The woman under hard linens wails, and her child is drawn on the tip of a needle.

"Why did you kill the boy?"

"I did not."

"He would have lived, if not for you."

"He would have died, if not for me."

"Is that our fate? To live and die by your whim?"

"You've survived me this long."

And then I spoke of the segmented familiar dwelling inside me. I pulled back my hood, and felt the silken texture of my long hair brush against my hands.

"The Dolomites brought this on him."

"You can't blame them for everything, Victor."

I winced at the sound of my name. "You need not remind me. They are dead now, after all."

"Am I supposed to feel threatened? You didn't kill them. You couldn't kill them."

"Fell on their own spears then, as it was always known they would."

"And the boy?"

"I am not responsible for him. But the man I will take into my care. I am sure I can offer him much of what he seeks."

I brave the burning sand, and find that the heat poses no more danger to me than hunger. I can feel my skin reweaving itself as the shore tries to thwart me. Sand the color of cream, its grains as sharp as needles. I know of the presence of the eye above the waters, and that there is a twin below them, searching for a light and the toll of a bell. When I was submersed, I saw two, and heard the sound of my own end.

"Amusing," I say to the Painted Lady, "how you vex me over death, considering the end you would send me to. No, queen antediluvian, I won't let you take him. You'll send him to me, or I will bring the towers down, one by one, and show you visions of your great grandchildren impaled on the fields of rebar below."

"Kill them, or don't."

"You can't fool me. You love those rats, more than you love this beautiful boy. You'd send this perfect child to his death to save those sky kissing ingrates. You'd even put fomorian lives ahead of his, you degenerate witch."

"I am a witch. Don't you forget, Victor."

It hurt to hear her say my name. Our conversation had me dearly missing Tythus. I'd grown so fond of the lad. Such a shame to see him go. I'd hoped to free him from the bonds of this place. That place. The walls here are very thick, but still I hear the wind howling.

"He will come to me. He will heed my call, and he will never return to you."

My teacup was empty, and the Lady was splintered again when I woke. She wafted about, her many shades darting in different directions and pulling on each other so that she stood in motion still. I rose and thanked Picayune for the tea, but she had left the room, or so I thought, and I saw the ripple of light that the djinn make when they are suddenly disturbed.

"Are all your handmaids djinn?"

"I am no sprite!" Picayune protested.

One of the Lady's gorgeous, no, sumptuous facades turned my way. "I call them zoai. They came from me, and I've harnessed them. They're sweet creatures. A much purer light than that of the aeyai."

I complimented the Lady on her use of arcane prose, and asked how light could hold a tray, to which she responded with the query: "Haven't you seen them training? Life is life, young Victor, and where there is a will there is a way. If you're truly curious, though, I'll tell you this. They become solid with fear, so I send them where they fear their own burgeoning selves, and that loop of causality gives them new dimensions over time."

I remember smiling widely and tilting my head. "I slaved at the Bibliotheca, and was made a rich man by the knowledge I gained, having passed a copious amount of time subsumed in its vibrant codices. Thank you, Painted Lady, for bringing those cuniform fancies to life." And I chose not to elaborate, assuming that nothing I left unsaid would not be heard by her sub cosmic ears. But I would have felt cheated if, having fallen into the company of an ancient seeress, she were to have not spoken in riddles.