Zoe stared into the pitch-black shadows of the tunnel. Joel’s broken body lay against the tunnel wall opposite her. He wheezed as his lungs filled with blood. She could still hear the sounds of a spine and ribs shattering from when she threw against the rock. Her chains still gripped the arms she tore from his sockets. The air was warm with his blood.

Steaming.

He should be dead, she had thought he was dead, but still, he lived and the chuckling came from the creature riding his body.

“Don’t you want to know what your scared little friend wants to say?” asked the parasite inside Joel.

“We’re not friends…” Zoe mumbled.

“Oh, he agrees. After all, friends don’t let friends get corrupted by nightmares from beyond reality, do they? Though I must say, after tasting this man’s nightmares, I find the comparison unflattering at best.”

“What are you?”

“I hope you’re not being cruel to my dog!” Cassy called down the tunnel. “He needs his milk to grow big and strong,” her voice dissolved into laughter. “If I can’t get past these chains, you’ll have to feed him yourself!”

Lips smacked in the darkness.

“I’ve only tasted the mistress…” his voice contained immeasurable longing.

Zoe shuddered as she pushed herself to her feet. The smell of Joel’s drool was all over her face. She wiped at it with her palms, but it only spread the smell. It was starting to sting.

Her chains slithered across the dark. She found the bag of broken meat, somehow still living, and she lifted it from the ground.

Deep throbs of unreality ran through her mind. She couldn’t believe this was the man from the airplane. The one she slapped when he yelled at her. The one who grieved his love after the skeletons attacked.

So much happened since then.

“Tell me what he wants to say,” she said. “Tell me, Joel, and I’ll end this for you.”

Laughter shuddered through the meat.

“You’ve given him so much hope. Delicious! Alright, let me speak: he wants you to kill her, the creature wearing Cassy, and he wants you to kill him. He doesn’t care which order, but he wants you to let the children live. He birthed them, you see, and he knows that they can be good, so long as you show them the way.”

Cassy’s laughter came down the tunnel.

“Are you talking about me?”

“We are!” called the creature wearing Joel.

Zoe shuddered. Right, it wasn’t Cassy. They were both parasites. The same creatures whose power she wielded in [Mind’s Eye Incision]. What did that mean?

She activated her technique, and spectral blades blossomed at the tips of her chains. With a shake, she felt the trembling Skein inside Joel. it was so weak, only a few strands, but he had been such a low level when they…

When she abandoned him in the cemetery of the mirrorbell dungeon.

The pattern of Skein was easy to read, and lodged inside it, wrapped up, cocooned, she felt something stir and stare at her like a hairy eye.

“What are you —”

She sliced through the Skein with the blades of psychic energy. With a wet gasp, the meat in her chains sagged.

“... did it…” came Joel’s voice, weaker. “You did it…”

“Joel?”

“Kill us all,” Joel said. “It hurts so bad.”

Zoe set him down gently. She probed him with vibrations and her chains, trying to see the damage she did in the dark.

“I can help you,” she said. “I’m a surgeon, and with Vitality, we can save you.”

He coughed.

“My brain hurts… I don’t want…”

He stilled under her touch. Cold as her chains. Too much of his blood soaked into the tunnel floor. Silence reigned as death filled the air.

When had Not-Cassy stopped laughing?

A cold hand fell on her shoulder. The grip was comforting. Zoe shrugged it away with a start. She turned. A pale light glowed from Not-Cassy’s face as it distorted in sadness like drooping wax.

“What a shame to lose a pet, and I didn’t have him long. Do you know where I can find a replacement?”

The excitement in her voice like a child eager for a new arts and crafts project. The moonlight glow of Not-Cassy’s skin lined the wrinkled skin of the tunnel. Showed the smears of black upon the rugged grey where the gore from Joel’s abused body lay in puddles and piles. Zoe gagged… she did that to someone.

She had no choice, but still…

The inhumanity of violence struck her. If it wasn’t for the mop of dirty red hair, she might not recognize the naked, contorted figure as human.

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Not-Cassy crouched beside the body and stroked a finger through the exposed brain.

“Tragedy strikes when we least expect it,” she looked at Zoe with remorse. “We will discuss this.”

Zoe eyed the exit. She couldn’t hear the children, she only had to get past Cassy.

“I’m not discussing anything with you.”

She wanted to fight, but she needed to get somewhere open first. Her body tensed, and she prepared to sprint.

“Don’t be so sure of what you will and won’t do,” Not-Cassy said.

Zoe snarled, her fist clenched, but she couldn’t move. Her eyes widened in shock. She tried to speak, but her tongue was still in her mouth. A shocked moan escaped her sealed lips.

“Yes,” said Not-Cassy. “You should be feeling my pet’s neurotoxin now. The stink of it is all over his face. Be happy, and savor the flavor of his kisses, for they shall never again be bestowed upon another.”

Not-Cassy poked Zoe in the chest and sent her tipping backward. Zoe crashed hard against the wet floor. A warm puddle splashed against her skin. Not-Cassy bent down to grab the collar of the jumpsuit. Her glowing, moonlike face leered in close.

“Come, I have wonderful things to show you.”

###

As battles raged across the shattered earth, the Bloody Eye sat above in silent observation. The vast crystal orb continued to function — the crew performing the readings, repairs, and readjustments of equipment as they had every day since the incorporation began. Before, they had guidance, now, they were leaderless.

Rudderless.

Cut off from the Crimson Armada by an expanding heaven of pools and clouds and spears like reeds. Rue’s domain: the heart of his new system. Looking up from the dunes of shattered crystal on the surface of the Bloody Eye, one could see Earth below and the growing heaven above. They reflected each other, as the Heart Torn’s expanding domain rewrote the reality of Earth. For now, the Bloody Eye remained unchanged, fixed as it was to the Crimson Armada by almost a thousand souls.

Such a drop in the ocean, and soon they would be swept away.

Morn walked between the dunes. He leaned on a gnarled and paper-white staff and felt every ache in his millennia-old bones. Despite his age and countless battles and the masteries of his Mountains, he still feared death. The wind whipped ruby dust against him that would shred the flesh of mortals. The whizzing slivers moaned with despair as they bounced off his withered skin. A sound like the instruments from his home, the dried gourds shaking hardened seeds, a continent, and a planet long dried and dusted on the solar wind.

Why was he walking? What did he hope to find? His eyes gazed up again to the expanding pools of the heaven above him. Once full of blood, now they were crystalline. A blue so clear it made his heart stop. The color of mountain peak ice. Such deep pools, with marble platforms stretching out and growing. Had this lain in Rue’s heart all this time? Morn would have thought that silver-skinned brute incapable of anything but bloodshed… perhaps he gazed at Lorilla’s dream, the last drops of her legacy squeezed out by a heartbroken soul…

Glassik appeared beside him in between steps as the wind twisted around distorted space. Her hands were deep in her pockets. Spiky hair disturbed and disarrayed. All this time, Morn thought a technique kept her looking the way she did, but the last weeks saw her gauntness increase, and her looks grow disheveled. Was someone at the fifth mountain putting in so much energy into their appearance? Though he supposed all their bodies were little more than techniques at this point. Skein looped into patterns, preparing for a test none of them dared take. That dreaded step off the mountaintop…

He glanced up again.

No, some of them took the step…

“Have you seen Unren?” Glassik asked him.

Morn shook his deathly head.

“No, not since he returned from the Gambler’s game.”

“I wasn’t there. What did he say again?”

How many times would they repeat this conversation? Morn sighed. How many times would he walk around this ruby desert?

“He didn’t speak, he raved. The end of everything, he called it. The collapse of the trinity. Lorrilla dead by his hand and Rue’s ascension… he said Rue was coming for him, but we have seen no indication of that.”

They both gazed at the expanding waters of Rue’s heaven.

“Do you doubt Rue’s capacity for vengeance?” Glassik asked after a moment.

Morn laughed, that same dry rattle of seeds in gourds.

“No, I do not.”

“Unren is holed up in his chambers. He’s working on a weapon or armor, or I don’t know. He always thinks tools can save him.”

“He is an engineer.”

“Skein makes us the greatest tools we can. Lorilla understood that.”

“Lorilla wore armor all the same.”

Glassik scoffed.

“That gaudy jeweled stuff?”

“Jealousy doesn’t become you, Glassik.”

They walked in silence together, feet crunching the blood-red sands.

“Why didn’t you ascend?” she asked him.

Steps crunched, monotonous as the wind howled around the small red globe, and the conversation repeated.

“Nobody ascends,” Morn said. “The Mubilashi… that fate is too terrible for all but the most desperate or mad to even contemplate.”

“You think you would fail.”

“I know I would… there was a time once…” and he paused, because he never opened up this far, never let the young one with the heart of glass truly understand what he felt and feared… but repetitions must end, even if what comes next, what comes new, is worse than anything before. “I was a young man with four mountains and the love of my life under the stars. Barely a hundred years old. A prodigy, yes I know we’re all prodigies, but this was a simpler time. I loved her, and she wanted to ascend. She only had one mountain, and she said that together we could do it. It was all theoretical, mostly it was in her head, but she figured that together we had five mountains and more than enough levels, so why wouldn’t it work?”

Glassik stared at him.

“Did it work?” she whispered.

Morn stopped to meet her gaze.

“It would have,” he whispered, as the moaning wind shredded his words, only their Insight revealing the overflowing gutters of loss in his voice. “If I had been braver. If I had committed as she did… I know it would have worked.”

“What happened?”

He traced a line down his throat, a scar amongst a sea of wrinkles.

“I have told you many times, have I not, about the first Mubilashi I killed?”

Glassik stuck her hands deeper in her pockets and started walking again. Morn followed her. The dunes slowly moved on the rolling wind.

“That is why I don’t like cowards,” Glassik said.

“Understandable.”

“I don’t know why Rue is afraid to approach us.”

“You think he’s afraid?”

“He offered the mortals on that wretched scattering of dirt and weeds a chance at his system, why not us? We’re his cohort. We’re his blood!”

Morn shrugged, his heart aching as he affected nonchalance.

“I’m sure he has his —”

[I did not know if you wanted me]

Morn and Glassik stumbled at the sound of Rue’s voice. Older than civilizations, and more powerful than planetary armies, both cohort members were caught off guard by the intrusion in their minds.

Glassik stared around, eyes wide, but the shifting sands hid nothing.

“You’ve been listening?”

[Sometimes…]

“You know I want to join you!” she fell to her knees and pleaded. “Please, Rue, I just want to be by your side! Lorilla stood between us, but now she’s finally gone, and I —”

Morn stepped back in shock. His heart thundered in his chest. Nothing dry and withered about the fear flooding him. He hadn’t detected the blade that appeared inside Glassik. He still couldn’t detect it.

Taller than her. Paper thin. The blade bisected Glassik completely.

Her eyes twitched as they focused inward on the severing metal between them. Blood drooled from the corner of her pointed smile. Her fingers curled, but there was no Skein left inside them. Whatever knotted techniques she had spent centuries perfecting were now sundered and frayed.

Her body slid apart and fell into the dust. A pool of offal and an offering to the Bloody Eye. The blade remained standing as the wind keened around the edge. In the ringing note that followed, Rue’s terrible presence loomed.