Moth glowed as her skin of Mirror trickled away like meltwater and left nothing behind. A hollow woman coated in smiles, and she cast one at Zoe’s friends.

“It’s nice to see you again, Oriz,” she said. “And hello, Bella, thank you for all you have done…”

Her last thread vanished into Zoe’s glowing chest, and the bright light faded. Once more the dull, burning of the desert surrounded them.

Oriz picked up Anton and tossed him to Bella. The young woman tucked away her sword in time to catch him.

“What do we do?” Bella asked.

“Run.”

Oriz picked up Zoe over her shoulders and sprinted toward the tunnel. It held for now, but for how long?

And what was that technique? The intricacy and scale of power involved… no wonder Zoe collapsed. Hells, Oriz wouldn’t be surprised if Zoe never woke up. Devastated, of course, but not surprised.

Her feet pounded the desert, toes barely dipping into the sand as she sprung herself forward. Too much like being back in the Black Star’s world. She glanced back. Bella kept pace, but barely. What was effortless for Oriz left the human red-faced and panting.

Oriz could sprint ahead and reach the tunnel, but she would not abandon love for survival.

Not again.

Her pace ate away at the distance. In a matter of minutes, she reached the tunnel. It sank into the center of the hourglass and the angle blocked off the light. Sand crumbled from the lip as the weight of the desert wore away at the hold of frozen time.

Oriz waited for Bella to catch up.

“How long did your Title work for?” she asked.

“Five…” Bella panted as she shifted Anton to her other shoulder like a sack of potatoes. “Minutes…”

“We have two left then.”

For a second they stood on the edge.

“I love you,” Oriz said.

“I love you too.”

And they jumped, bearing their burdens, into the shaft of captured desert, down toward the unknown darkness, racing against time.

###

Though angled, the shaft was straight. They plummeted in free fall, hand in hand, with Oriz reaching out and kicking off the walls to send them faster toward their goal. In seconds they crashed into a gelatinous layer. Oriz bent her knees to absorb the shock of landing — easily carrying the weight of the four of them — and she peered down at the substance they stood on.

“What is it?” Bella asked.

“Some kind of worm sac,” Oriz responded. “Get your sword ready —”

A clump of sand landed on her shoulder. She looked up. More fell.

“Cut!”

Bella’s sword howled through the layer of congealed mucus and the two women fell into the chamber below as the desert crashed down on top of them.

The ceiling wobbled and bent and cracked, but remained intact — sealing after they entered — for now. But the sudden weight caused a bowing in the otherwise arched roof, as though the desert might burst through at any moment and crush them.

They set Anton and Zoe down and breathed. The chamber was large, but empty save for two vague white lumps. Bella approached them with her sword ready before she stopped and let out a snicker.

Skidmark and the Four-Hearted Wasp lay wrapped in a sticky substance like a spider’s leftovers. The sound of muffled snoring filled the room. Bella grinned, despite the situation.

“She’s kind of cute when she’s asleep,” she said.

“Should I be jealous?”

“Of course not, babe,” Bella’s smile widened as she remembered their words before the leap. “I’ll cut their gags.”

With care, she sliced through the bindings across their mouths with the tip of her blade.

Skidmark sputtered as she woke, and her eyes widened.

“Oh, snap! You actually saved me!”

“Yeah, what are mates for?”

Skidmark’s eyes watered.

“You, you…”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Bella cut Skidmark’s restraints but left the demon bound. She eyed the descending ceiling.

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“This snot bubble is going to pop.”

“Astute observation,” the demon said as it rolled itself over and sat up. “The sand erodes the structural integrity, and the No-Legged Worm isn’t here to replenish the slime. What happened to her, by the way?”

“Deader than dead,” Bella responded.

“Marvelous. Am I to assume you won’t be removing my bonds.”

“Correct,” said Oriz. “You are untrustworthy.”

“And what of our deal?”

“You’re no longer in the cage.”

The ceiling trembled as the weight of sand bowed it down toward their heads.

“And what of the spirit of our deal?” the Four-Hearted Wasp asked as it struggled against the bindings. “I hardly call this freedom.”

“Since when do demons care about anything more than words and twisting them?”

“I am more than sophistry and sophistication,” the demon chittered and snarled. “I have a soul.”

Oriz scoffed, but Bella stepped between the alien and the demon.

“The ceiling is collapsing. Finish this argument later.” She pointed at the demon. “You said I could cut a portal under the hourglass that would take us straight to the Angel. If you guide us, I will remove your restraints.”

Fingers poked through the tacky webbing around the demon’s emaciated ribcage. They wiggled like worms above the dirt.

“Do you propose a new deal?”

“No! But I give my word.”

The demon’s flickering tongue tasted the air.

“Fine.”

It coughed and spat and an enormous bulge crawled up its throat. A buzzing came from behind stretched lips as a fat yellow jacket the size of a chihuahua flew from its mouth and landed on the ground at the far end of the chamber.

“Slice through there,” said the demon. “And fall straight down. Exactly straight down.”

Oriz picked up Anton and Zoe and nodded at Bella.

“I’m ready.”

“You’re really cutting through the floor?” Skidmark asked.

“Of course.”

Skidmark appeared stricken.

“There’s nothing down there! Just an empty abyss and mountains of broken glass. We can’t —”

Bella placed a hand on her shoulder.

“We can’t stay here.”

Skidmark’s eyes flicked up. The bowing ceiling was within her grasp, and the faint luminescence glowed upon their faces. She shivered.

“I hate this. I hate this so damned much.”

Bella grinned.

“Welcome to Hell.”

They stood in a tight circle. Oriz pressed Zoe and Anton against the demon’s sticky bindings, she grabbed one of Zoe’s chains and, pulling gently, looped it around the bundle of bodies. She lifted them up with one arm. Though the load was awkward, she lifted it easily. Her other hand, she held out to Skidmark who took it gratefully. Not a trace of her earlier lewdness remained on Skidmark’s face, overwhelmed by the terror of the moment.

Bella took Skidmark’s other hand as the sand-loaded ceiling brushed against her head. She stooped slightly and pointed her sword at the wasp on the ground.

“Here?”

“Exactly,” said the demon as the wasp buzzed up to perch on Bella’s shoulder. “You won’t hear me in the abyss, but when my wasp stings you, slice with everything you have.”

Bella gritted her teeth as the wasp cuddled up against her ear.

“Let’s do this.”

She sliced a gash in the slime. The split spread between their feet, and the ground sagged as the sac’s elastic tension bled away.

“Wait,” Skidmark said. “When we go through the portal, will we maintain our momentum because that could —”

Her words whipped away as they fell through the bottom of the chamber and into the abyss.

Skidmark screamed, but there was no sound.

Only endless darkness.

Fear settled deep in Skidmark’s stomach. A childhood nightmare of falling through starless space, untethered from Earth, never to return to the warmth, the light, or her loved ones. Tears spilled.

Beside her, Oriz grinned like a madwoman, while Bella only focused on her sword. Runes blazed with light like brilliant magnesium flares and a sound rose above the wind.

Howling.

Her punk friend used the spear as often as she could but Skidmark never grew used to the bloodthirsty sound. Now, it was worse. She wasn’t listening to a thirsty speartip, but a blade ecstatic for the end of all things.

Heat whipped through her.

Bella thrust her long handled runeblade ahead, and they fell like a spear from god toward the depths of darkness.

But the darkness did not remain so.

As they plunged past the first peak of broken glass, like a mote of dust drifting past a shattered bottle, the darkness opened. Pinpricks of light scattered about. At first, Skidmark thought they were stars, perhaps reflections of light on glass, but then her eyes adjusted to the distance, and she screamed once more without sound as her voice caught in her throat.

They were eyes.

Bulging, staring, eyes.

Oriz’s voice rose above the howling sword and the shrieking wind.

“Mubilashi!”

A mouth the size of an ocean split beneath them. Blinding white fangs the size of countries reached up toward the falling mortals. Skidmark’s entire body froze. No room in her mind for thoughts in the face of such scale.

The abyss prepared to swallow them.

Bella swung. Her eyes closed as the wasp dug its stinger into her shoulder. Runes burned. The blade passed through nothing and cut it apart. An arcing wound between them and the waiting mouth.

Green water poured out of the hole. Steaming and full of vegetation. Skidmark barely had time to close her mouth before she fell into the spray. Though the droplets and into the gaping wound in reality. Warmth. Drowning. A feeling of a frayed tapestry brushing against her skin. And then up into the air.

Spinning.

They flew high. Carried on their falling momentum high into the air over a marsh of jade-green water, glassy reeds, and dumpy islands of mud. Steam floated in curtains and clouds. They reached the zenith of the arc. Skidmark flipped, and all she could think about — all she could fear with her frozen mind — was that the wound in reality remained and she would fall back into the abyss.

Back into the waiting maw of the Mubilashi.

She splashed into the water and slowly sank.

It was only a few feet deep, and as Skidmark knelt in the mud beside a small island, she wept with joy, with spent fear, with the dump of adrenaline that comes from knowing you are alive.

Alive!

Oriz strode out of the water, carrying the three passengers on her shoulder like a partygoer bringing a case of beer.

Skidmark leaned forward and coughed up water and flecks of plant matter. It tasted like somebody made a soup out of a garden and left out the salt.

Bella rubbed her back.

“See, mate?” she said with a grin. “Not that bad.”

Skidmark puked again.

###

The marsh stretched out around them as far as the eye could see, which wasn’t very far. Bella breathed in thick mist rising off the warm, vegetation-rich waters. What should have been, might have been, foul, was heartwarming.

There was a smell of life here that was at odds with the general state of death and destruction and cold-hearted annihilation in the other Hells she had experienced. Though decomposition and rot might be considered an extension of death, she disagreed. Compost was life, and this marsh had that faint smell. Life grew here, swam here in the waters, despite the desolate islands rising here and there like the humps of some great sunbathing leviathan.

For there was a sun here, in the distant sky, a pinprick marble of some golden color hidden by veil upon veil of rising vapor. Its rays slanted through the mists like iridescent spears. Bella let the warmth sink through her skin, an entirely different, and entirely more pleasant feeling than the abrasive heat of the desert.

But still…

She turned to the demon who sat bound and tied beside the unconscious bodies of Zoe and Anton.

“You said you would take us straight to the Angel.”

“Did I say that?” the demon grinned.