Tecahapoatl screamed with glee; a hideous, soul-rending sound which echoed across the nightmare landscape like the Trump of Doom. Clenching its malformed, grotesque fist, it savored the crunching and snapping noises coming from within like delectable morsels.

Eventually, however, no more sounds came forth when it squeezed; and like a child tiring of a broken toy, it discarded the crumpled wad of flesh and cloth to cast about for something else to occupy its attention. Enna clapped a hand over her mouth, stifling a scream.

Then, unexpectedly, the corpse moved.

It twitched, shook minutely; shuddered in a decidedly unnatural way. Then, with graceful suddenness, it unfolded itself; bone shard by bone shard, tendon by tendon, it unfurled and expanded. A bag of powder within a fleshy ball swirled, crackled, and reformed into a skull; a tangle of wet hair resolved itself into a beard once more. And Jiann, chuckling, struggled to his feet. "That all you got, you ugly piece o' prehistoric shit?" he spat, a wide grin full of broken teeth crossing his face. "I done had tougher fights on the toilet."

Tecahapoatl screamed; the sound drove Enna to her knees, but Jiann didn't even flinch. A giant fist smashed him back down into the surf; he sprang back up like a blade of grass, reforming himself with greater skill and speed the second time, as he began to walk slowly across the surface of the water towards the ziggurat. The vestige howled, battering and smashing him, but could not do him harm any more permanent than he had it; as his physical form was deformed and savaged, each reconstitution became slightly different, and a suggestion of change began to emerge. At first, it was broken and jagged, but with each mending, it approached some new form; Enna stared, unable to believe what she was seeing. It looks like his dream self, she thought wonderingly. The observation shocked her back to herself; shaking her head, she turned her back on the battle and began racing up the stairs. I need to finish this. He won't last much longer.

Bursting through the last trapdoor, she turned; she didn't know what she expected to find. A regular-sized Orton in a cage, maybe, or a glowing wisp of innermost essence inside a glass jar. What she beheld, however, was nothing like she had anticipated.

In the center of the room, a black and charred space like an altar arose; and huddled on the altar, shivering, was a small boy. He looked young, she thought; no more than eight or nine. Tentatively, she approached him, keeping an eye through the open columns of the walls on the battle between Jiann and the creature above her.

Jiann was broken and remade dozens, then hundreds of times; with each blow, he felt less and less of his body return to his control, but more and more of his spiritual power take form to replace the loss. Within seconds, he was only a quarter flesh; by the time he had crossed half the distance to his enemy, he inhabited only a handful of powdery dust, his broken corpse left behind in his footprints on the sand. But as he became less tethered to physical existence, the differences between him and the vestige became less pronounced; size, after all, was an abstraction in the spiritual plane. Eventually, Tecahapoatl's blows slowed, then stopped; and he faced Jiann, now his equal in height and power, with something approaching trepidation.

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"Ain't so tough now, are ya, you plug-ugly fucker," crowed Jiann, now a hundred feet tall and sporting a magnificent third eye. "Still think you gonna rule this universe?"

"You are nothing!" shrieked the dead god, though it made no move to attack. "I am immortal! Undying! I will outlast your petty and pathetic posturing!"

"Mebbe," mused Jiann ponderously. "But you ain't gonna bother anybody in this world no more." He strode closer to the ziggurat, and the vestige flinched back, then sneered.

"What can you do?" Tecahapoatl taunted. "For all your tricks, you are only mortal -- and fading, besides. You perish soon." It raised its hands to the skies, exulting. "You cannot harm me! You cannot kill an idea!" Its deranged cackle echoed across the landscape. "You may as well try to kill words upon a page."

Jiann paused. A long, cold wind blew across the domain, stirring the blood-red sea and rustling the leaves of the corpse-adorned trees.

"Well, I cain't kill no words," he responded at last, serenely. "But I can burn the book."

Reaching a massive hand out towards the ziggurat's peak, he gestured cumbrously; Enna jumped as something dimmed, then went out, in the room where she was standing. Jolted out of her inaction, she hurried over to the boy.

Turning him over, she flinched; his face was bruised and scraped, and cigarette burns dotted his arms and chest. His fingernails were bloody and torn, and something within her shuddered and clenched to see such violence visited upon a child. Gently, she stroked his hair, but the boy flinched away and hid his face. "It's all right," she promised softly. "I'm not going to hurt you."

Slowly, by degrees, he turned; she barely recognized him so young, but the signs were there nevertheless. A knotted, too-serious brow; a snub nose that had always reminded her, somehow, of a golden retriever's. And loamy brown eyes, like milk chocolate, which would someday see the rise and fall of decades, watch the moon plunge down upon the earth, and stare inscrutably at her across tables and bedrooms and the expanse of years apart. He was clutching something small and toylike to his chest, she noticed, as if to protect it, but she made no move towards it; instead, she simply reached out and beckoned him towards her.

Above, the vestige howled, but it had no power over Orton any longer; Jiann had sent his will into Orton's mind, navigating its twists and turns with the familiarity of twenty-two years, and taken his memory of Tecahapoatl into himself. The dead god raged, turning back towards its foe. "I will devour your world, mageling! This is only a setback! A momentary breath before my victory!"

Jiann's form began to glow; at first, it was a nacreous luminescence of no particular color. But as the light strengthened, it separated into a prismatic array; red at the base, then lightening into orange, yellow, and green as the bands of shimmering hues cascaded up his torso. At his throat, the color darkened again into blue, then indigo around his eyes; and above his head, a violet eruption of light diffracted infinitely into transparency. "Funny thing about breath, crap-face. In the Vedas, they call it prana. And the only way to find nirvana is to make it still." Jiann's form, now so incandescent Enna couldn't even look upon it, rose up from the surface of the water.

He expanded in every direction; Tecahapoatl screamed, shielding itself with its arms, but could make no defense. In Enna's arms, the child-form of Orton handed her something unexpectedly; she touched a hard surface, like plastic or ceramic, and looked down in surprise. She only got a brief glimpse of it before Jiann's radiance washed everything away; a triumphant figure of a woman, wielding a bright spear against the sun.