The Angel twisted in the air as it fell. Sharp curved bones reached for it’s flesh. The Angel spun away, wings flapping, but its momentum remained inexorable, and it crashed down like a meteor onto the shattered island. A great spire of a rib bone thrust up through the Angel’s back. Colossal weight sank it down until the bone erupted through the Angel’s chest. Blood erupted as spikes like pale trees carved into stakes punched up through legs, thighs and groin. A bone penetrated the throat. Boiling blood vomited from the Angel’s mouth and poured from its wounds. Even at a distance, the heat stung Zoe’s skin.

The Angel twitched and pulled, but the unbroken bones sliced through its tendons and pinned it in place. Its lips parted and a warbling song, broken, pained, filled the air. It didn’t carry the same ear bleeding intensity as before. For all its power, it was only flesh, and the damage done prevented it from removing or expressing itself.

One of Anton’s silver eyes zipped over to her. Others dotted the landscape glowing with their ethereal light.

“That was incredible!”

Zoe coughed blood in response.

“We’re still falling, boss,” Anton said. “Bella says there’s no end to the well.”

She couldn’t nod, so Moth did for her, and agony branched through her neck.

“I think you should join us,” Anton continued.

The Angel’s blood seeped across the landscape of shattered rock. A boiling lake that drained into cracks and fissures but kept flowing. Zoe’s hounds ran toward her, but the tide overwhelmed them. With twin bursts of Skein, they vanished, and Zoe felt pangs across her heart. An absence filled her, and she knew they were gone… for now.

There was no end to the viscous, molten, fluid. The Black Star chains hoisted Zoe up onto a bone and out of reach of the rising lake.

It was getting difficult to hold herself together, to hold herself conscious, and Moth kept slipping away an arm to comfort her, or just slipping, and Zoe groaned as burning air swept over her wounded body. The scalding heat blistered her skin.

ding!

Time to go.

The chains extended out and slung her from bone to bone toward the well.

“No…” Zoe murmured. “Angel.”

Are you sure?

I think we should…

Zoe reached for her chains and groaned at the agony. She wobbled mid-swing as the Black Star gave up control but landed on a curved bone. The impact made her scream. Her chains slackened, and she slid down. Awkwardly, and with some help from the Black Star and Moth, she launched herself closer and then onto the cheek of the impaled Angel.

She crawled across its face until she stood atop its nose and gazed down at the huge judging eyes. The fevered dream returned to her in the wavering heat of the air. Was it prophecy or merely chance? She had spent so long climbing away from Sorrow, but now she stood above it. Each eye was taller than her. She couldn’t tell the color. Could hardly understand the shape. Even through the layer of Mirror, it hurt to look upon.

But Zoe was in such a state that a little more pain didn’t bother her.

She felt insane as she knelt there and raised her head.

“You…” blood filled her mouth and she spat. A tiny red mar upon the Angel’s perfect skin. “You judged me and now you lay here dying.”

The Angel gurgled something, and the flesh shook beneath Zoe’s unsteady knees. Zoe smiled with scarred lips.

“You can say nothing without your puppets. Do nothing, impaled on your own bones.”

She pulled herself to her feet. Around her, Anton’s lights winked out one by one.

“Boss… losing… range…”

“I’ll join you soon.”

“Take… Zoe…”

The last silver eye vanished and Zoe stood alone atop the bleeding Angel. Would it ever bleed out? It hadn’t for a thousand years, and Zoe doubted that even these monstrous wounds would be enough.

“You’re like a cockroach,” she said. “No brain, no intelligence, just your instincts pulling you forward like a machine. What will it take for you to die?”

Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

ding!

Zoe…

Yes?

Do it.

Zoe’s flesh, Moth’s mirror, Black Star’s chains — the three of them raised an arm and formed a fist.

[Mind’s Eye Incision]

Ghostly blades wrapped around her chained fingers like razor wire knuckledusters. Her Might flexed and lifted her upright. Mirror held her, chain supported her, flesh empowered her. Three heartbeats pounded in her chest. Three voices shouted as she leaped down. Her fist carried gravity’s hammer as the world curved around her body path. She was the clapper, and the world was her bell.

She struck between the Angel’s eyes.

[Bell at the Center of the World]

A shockwave tolled out across the Angel’s flesh. Blood hissed away in streams. Sorrow thrashed, but Zoe’s chains dug into the cracked skin. The mirrored blast from her knuckles struck again. A double tap against the bell. The Black Star hissed static inside her mind at the molten heat but still helped Zoe raise another fist.

She heard the aftershocks of vibrations and brought her fist down to toll the bell once more. And again. Her fist of chains creaked, but still, she struck. Repetition, the solution to impossible. With each blow, she fell deeper into her body path. She might be an insect against a giant, but even ants could devour a human if staked over a nest.

She struck again.

With every blow, her body ached. With every blow, she sank deeper into the bell. The world curved around her. Walls of the Angel’s gleaming flesh — now fractured and leaking blood like a haunted house — swept until they hung high above her head. Did the angel feel the formation of the bell? She struck again, and the sound rang out clear and crystal as the dawn of time. What did it mean to be the [Bell at the Center of the World]? She struck, deeper, louder, she ached, but continued, mirror and chain making up for the failing flesh.

For the spirit was willing.

Her fist hit bone, and the clanging reverberated up her entire body. She ached and screamed and bit down on her teeth so hard her jaw cracked. Some mechanical force raised her arm. She wasn’t thinking anymore.

Rage.

Gluttony.

Obsession.

The Angel thrashed, but it only grew weaker. Perhaps it would drown in its blood before it exsanguinated, but such thoughts were far from Zoe’s mind. She only focused on the next blow, on the next toll, the next beat — like any good musician.

Beat after beat until the bone cracked.

Shattered.

If she looked up — if she could have turned her neck — she would have seen that the walls of the bell encompassed her completely. The smallest speck of light at the top to prove this was a bell and not a sphere.

The boiling blood welled up under her fists. If she struck any deeper, she would drown. No thoughts, only the tolling echoing out, and so she reached for the ruddy chain and it came to her. The heavy links slithered down into the wound, resisting the heat as they had for a thousand years, and sought the brain.

No thoughts of horror, of heresy, only hunger.

Echoes filled her head as the chain went taught. Zoe, Moth, Black Star, all gripped that red gleaming chain as it anchored itself on the Angel’s brain. They turned, the chain slung over their shoulder, and they marched. The Black Star pulled Zoe’s chains forward as she crept away.

The Angel screamed.

Even with its impaled throat, the sound sickened the air, twisted space, and broke time. Zoe —

Couldn’t think she —

Never knew her mother’s love for she was —

Born in the darkness again and again with the dawn passing over the forest and the howling of —

Pain under her knife as her patients woke one by one from the —

Sweet sleep of ignorance as her boyfriend stole —

Her friends, her future, her power all vanished as she fell into —

The well of greed she flung coin after coin until there was only herself and —

The bottom was dry and waiting to shatter her bones for only a fate so miserable could lie at the end of the —

Screaming.

The Angel’s pain echoed through her throat and she didn’t realize how long she had been screaming, only that the sound was hoarse and sourceless, so she stopped, and collapsed on Sorrow’s chest. Boiling blood lapped at the ribs. Only the tips of the curved bones around her emerged from the bubbling flow, like some ghastly forest in… Hell.

Zoe cackled, and fell to her knees, to her side, laughing through the pain. She did it. Driven by rage, by pride, by… she did it.

She killed an Angel.

Blinking, she looked around. Her friends were long gone. The only trace of the well was a spinning funnel in the blood.

Oh…

She had to get there. Had to reach her friends.

ding!

Zoe, I’m tired.

So am I. How are you Moth?

Her mirrored skin flickered and vanished. Zoe reached for [Empress in Time] but only felt emptiness. It would return, like her hounds, but for now, it was just her body alone.

And me.

I know.

I’ll always be here.

I know.

Thank you for avenging me, Zoe. I will repay you.

Huh?

Her chains lifted her. She sagged in the center of them. Before, they had scampered, but now the chains moved methodically. They were not as long, merely a couple feet above the ground. Zoe felt as though she were being borne along on an elastic stretcher.

Her eyes focused on the sky above. An empty light of cloudy steam. Why didn’t it rain here? So much vapor rising but it never —

Droplets fell onto her face. A soft patter that struck the steaming blood. Cool little kisses from the sky. The Black Star launched itself toward a bone. It landed and hugged the bone fiercely as the blood rose.

But the boiling bubbles were sporadic.

Black Star leaped again and again from bone to bone and brought Zoe closer to the funnel. The rain cooled the blood until the Black Star landed atop a floating scab the size of a picnic blanket.

ding!

This was us, Zoe. Together we changed this place. The Crimson Armada is not immutable.

No…

We can do it.

The Black Star leaped into the air. It wrapped chains around Zoe and tucked her body as she sailed over the blood spiraling the well like a drain. Tired wonder filled her, but also confusion.

Do what? She asked inside her mind.

We can kill it.

It?

The system. We can annihilate it.

The dark well swallowed them. Zoe fell into the center of the pouring blood, into the whirlpool's eye. Her chains reached out to grab the walls and propelled her down. Faster than gravity, Zoe’s broken body raced toward her friends, and down the path she had made for herself.

Down into the darkness, toward the center of the world.