The Immortal of Hunger woke with a new resolve. It spread through her veins like a wildfire and sunk into her bones. It built and built until her bones couldn’t stand the strain and melted away.

Jian didn’t panic. She felt her soul swell and sweep her body away in its currents, but that was to be expected. She had grown too much, too quickly. Her mortal body could no longer contain the whole of who she is.

She watched her fingers darken into a deep red before they fell apart in droplets of blood. The tips of her fingers flowed over her palms, eroding knuckle by knuckle, and for a moment she thinks she can adjust, that she could build something new faster than she was disappearing.

Then the ghosts closed in, and she began to panic.

They have been with her since the days they died, just out of sight, caught in her orbit by the shadow of what she hadn’t yet become. With her heart replaced by an empty drain those souls were finally swept over the event horizon to join the deluge of qi flooding into her.

Duyi and Lin and Wei and Xue slipped into the space where her heart once was. She felt them dissolve, their souls breaking down to slot neatly into her own.

Were they destroyed? Assimilated? Did any part of what made them human remain?

She couldn’t tell, and a part of her is horrified. Souls should be inviolable, it is a rule that she had never thought to question.

She did not have long to consider the theological implications.

Her soul swelled with its new additions.

And her body popped like a balloon.

Jian splattered across the room in a fountain of blood. She tried to reach out, to grab something, to hold on to anything, but she had no hands and no grip.

The puddle of blood that used to be Jian buzzed and vibrated, individual droplets jumping from the puddle. It briefly took the shape of a grasping hand before gravity seized it and it pulled it back down. The blood left on the table flowed over the edges, dripping down into an ever widening pool. It was far more blood than a human body could hold, and the sea it formed quickly developed currents below and weather above.

The Woman in Red laughed, crouching by the puddle. The waves broke around her in a perfect circle, afraid to touch even the hem of her dress, and she whispered something into the blood.

Jian could hear her, she had no ears to hear with anymore, but she could still feel the sound brush across each individual droplet in her sea. She felt the sound like the texture of a cave wall beneath sensitive fingertips, and she pieced it together more easily than she would have guessed.

“Who are you?” The Woman in Red asked.

“I am Jian.” She thought back.

Somehow, that is enough to calm her. Her form had changed, but she had not, and that just means that it was time for a new one. She began to put herself back together, piece by piece.

For hard lines, she used murders in the dark, quick and violent.

For soft curves, she pulled on midnight trysts, quiet and passionate. More imagined than real.

Her skeleton was naked greed, clothed by the pretense of civility.

She had no heart, for her life was far too precious to carry with her.

Beneath it all, she is buoyed by a starless sea.

Above it all, she is graced by the light of a crimson moon.

She became more metaphor than woman.

Inside her soul, a pillar rose from the surf, the first structure raised in the world she has become. Inside that pillar rested her heart, forever enshrined as a monument to her ambition. Protected. Disconnected.

The shape of a woman began to emerge from the sea, but a human body was too small to hold a world.

The red sea sunk into her shadow, but even that proved to be too small. It pushed against its limits, the edges of her shadow warping into jagged shards. The rest continued to wash over the floor, raw materials to rebuild herself.

She was still only half formed, with most of a torso and a single arm stretching up from the floor. She was skinless, with exposed black muscles spun from corded night and surrounded by oozing red flesh. A ruby eye twinkled in the depths of her skull.

She could feel the gaping hole in her chest where her heart once sat, and knew she should be horrified, but all she could feel was savage vindication.

The Woman in Red looked down at her from where she crouched, a sloppy grin on her face and a single eyebrow raised in invitation.

Jian pulled a second arm out of the sea, but it fell apart at the wrist. She used the stump as leverage, hoisting herself higher and reaching out with her one good arm for help. She matched the Red Woman’s grin with her own. Unafraid.

Then there is pain.

Jian gasped. Her new body didn’t need to breathe, but it will take time to unlearn that reaction.

She scrambled at the jade blade skewering her chest, but when her fingers touched the edge they fell to pieces, cut off before she could get a grip. The Woman in Red’s grin grew, and Jian remembered where she was, remembered that she was still supposed to be afraid. Less than a minute and her Immortality had already made her careless.

She had forgotten that Immortality comes in degrees.

A tug on the blade hauled her from the sea of herself like a speared fish. A swell of blood clung to her half-formed legs, a pillar of red keeping her connected to the rest. She does not think she will die if the parts of herself are separated, but she also does not think it will be pleasant.

Jian feels, more than sees, the Deicide standing behind her with a spike of jade sprouting from the base of her palm like a sword. Where the Woman in Red had parted the sea, the Woman in Jade stood directly on top of it. Jian was being trampled on.

The Deicide had killed Immortals far older than herself, and Jian did not wish to join their ranks.

She reached for the spark of Life inside her and pulled on the sea below her. She forced skin to grow from her face and hair to sprout from her head. For a moment, seven different eyes sprouted from the shadows of her face. She wiped them away and started over, struggling to overlap the person she remembered being with the person she wished to become. She was filled with power, but it was still up to her to channel it, to shape it deliberately as she built a temple to herself, brick by brick.

She made herself look as human as she could, an angelic face lifting towards the Woman in Red.

“Mercy.” She pleaded.

“Oh honey,” the Woman sighed, “what do you think this is, if not a mercy?”

She cupped Jian’s face warmly, but as she brushed her thumb down Jian’s cheek, it tore open the freshly grown skin to paint a line of oozing red.

Jian flinched and found herself sitting on the golden table.

She did not remember moving.

The sword had been removed from her chest and The Deicide was turned away from her, facing a blank scroll twice as wide as she was. She held a brush in one hand and the pressure coming off of it made Jian’s mouth run dry. She didn’t know what beast provided the fibers for that brush, and she didn’t want to.

The Deicide dipped her brush into the layer of Jian’s blood coating her blade and, from her very first stroke of ink on paper, she eclipsed Jian’s understanding. The brush glided across the page faster than she could track, images seeming to bloom fully formed as if they were coaxed into position rather than painted. Jian couldn’t point out where it happened, but at some point chaos snapped into place and the painting was complete.

Jian stared at a depiction of herself.

She stood in stark relief, rendered in her own blood. There was a defiance in the way she stood, her heel pressing down on an undefined shape and her robes dripping a black liquid. Above and behind her the sky was shattered, the individual shards falling into a featureless black pit. Behind it all, the heavens shone; constellations and stardust peeking from between every shattered panel of firmament. It depicted a sight the world hadn’t seen in the sky in over three decades, and thus one that Jian had still never seen with her own eyes. The only constellations she’d seen had been through a window into a foreign sky, with different stars than these.

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“Remarkable.” The Deicide muttered.

Jian couldn't decide whether to feel proud or scared. She wasn’t even sure which part the god-killer found remarkable. Was it supposed to be prophetic? Metaphorical? Literal? Was she breaking the firmament, or the world itself? Was the shape beneath her heel a body? The art was just abstract enough that she doubted there was much point in trying to decipher it herself, but if the Deicide believed it was significant, then it was.

And that terrified her.

Jian looked down at the holes in her chest. The smaller one, dealt by the jade sword, had carved all the way through her. The other was centered above and between where her breasts would eventually go, the place where she’d dug out her own heart, smoothed out into an uncannily perfect circle. It hungrily sucked the ambient qi from the air until it disappeared halfway through her body, going somewhere deeper than physical space. As she touched the edges of the mundane wound it began to close, knitting itself shut in a single second. The second hole would never close.

She was tired of being afraid, but perhaps she no longer had to be.

She was used to working around people stronger than her, despite her best efforts to avoid it. Even if the scale is different, the concept was not. She had not forgotten the conversation between the two women when she was strapped to the table. They had been looking for something, and it seemed clear that they'd found it.

When the Deicide turns her attention back to her, she does not flinch.

“So what now? I’m too valuable to kill.”

Jian tried to say it assertively, to use the statement as a shield she could use to negotiate, but she could hear the fear still simmering beneath the surface. The Deicide likely could too.

Empty eyes slowly blinked.

“That’s not quite true, but it is close enough.”

If Jian still had a heart, it would’ve stopped beating in the middle of that sentence. Instead, her pulse didn’t change. It circulated slowly and evenly, untethered from any driving force. Perhaps lacking a heart had advantages.

“Oh. Good. That’s good.” She said it like a prayer and the Deicide ignored it like one. Instead, she reached through the world, pawing at nothing without looking until she pulled back her hand and brought her cloak of souls out with it.

And Jian learned that taking her first step into the Emergent Realm did not protect her from a God's corpse.

She burned with shame even as her new eyes burned in their sockets. She had come so far, and still, still, it was not enough to be free. So long as there were creatures that could smite her with a glance, she would never be free. Blood dripped down her cheeks, but she was too angry to look away.

The Deicide smiled at Jian’s fury and plucked a single soul from the cloak. She held it up, examining it.

“When I killed Enma, I thought it would finally give me the power I sought,” she said, a memory caught in her eyes, “but it didn’t. Even the King of the Underworld could not violate a human soul; all he could do was guide their flow. He could send back his Heroes and line his cloak with the unworthy, so long as he still met his quota to avoid the Warden’s scrutiny, but his power ended at holding and hoarding.”

She paused, gesturing at the skull overlaid with her face.

“His corpse could do no better.”

The fog lifted from jade eyes and, for the first time, Jian saw the Deicide smile.

“Let’s see if you can.”

Faster than Jian could flinch, she shoved the soul into the hole in Jian’s chest.

A hundred thousand moments flashed before Jian’s eyes. Dripping wax and corded wicks, rice and red peppers, a bed and a worn book, a smile and a hundred different fragrances rushed past her in a moment. The life of a candle-maker slipped through her hands faster than she could parse it.

And then it shattered.

It dissolved and Jian’s soul sucked it up, ravenous. She stripped the soul for parts and converted everything into raw power. A mortal’s soul was a pittance compared to her own, but it was still a soul. The addition made her own soul swell past its banks again, but this time she knew what to do with it.

Skin bloomed across exposed muscle as her limbs finally finished forming. The umbilical cord of blood tying her to her sea disappeared as the last drops of red sank into her shadow.

Jian breathed deep and looked down at herself.

She had been perfected, for her own definition of perfect. Her skin was still the same slightly pale tone of a girl who grew up in the dark, but now it was flawless and unblemished across her whole body.

The tips of her fingers were as black as her nails and, as she brushed their tips against the table’s shadow they caught and dragged it into three dimensions. She shaped it quickly, weaving it through itself, and draped it over herself like a cloak, suddenly more embarrassed of her nudity than she had been before she had skin.

She licked her lips, fuller than they had been before, and noticed her teeth had sprouted a pair of fangs in place of canines, just long enough to be noticeable. Despite eating the soul through the hole in her chest, she could taste it on her tongue.

It was delicious.

Jian stared hungrily at the cloak of countless souls that wrapped around the Deicide and disappeared into a distant elsewhere.

Then the Deicide laughed, a sound both haunting and broken, and she was dragged back into terrifying reality. Had she truly been considering stealing from a living god?

“Finally!” The Deicide yelled, her laugh descending into a mad cackle. “The Tyranny of the Heavens, replicated by man!” She grabbed the Woman in Red by the waist and hauled her into the air, spinning in a circle. “You were right, damn you! How dare you be right!”

The Woman in Red laughed back, more genuine than any before it.

Jian grimaced and ignored them. She could already feel her Hunger building again, insatiable after only a few seconds, but stealing from a walking horror story was too stupid to be worth the risk. Even if she was happy now, she’d seen how fast the creature’s mood could change.

She couldn’t waste time trying to steal from the Godkiller. She had something more important to focus on. The Deicide's war with the Warden 20 years ago has clearly driven her mad, and being valuable to a madwoman did not make her safe. She had already shown the ability to use a Titan’s abilities after its death, it wasn’t a stretch to assume she could do the same with Jian’s corpse.

Jian began to plan her escape.

She considered biding her time, allowing the Deicide to fatten her up on souls like a prized hen, but she knew that is the hunger talking, tempting her into dangerous choices. She ignored the taste of the candle-maker’s soul still running over her tongue. She couldn’t afford that level of risk. She needed to leave.

She looked at the painting again.

Twice now she had seen the Deicide turn to the stars. In the depths of the Nascent Nightmare, her Echo of Longing had been obsessed with completing its mural of Heaven. Now, she painted a prophecy with Jian’s own blood and the subject returned.

Perhaps she understood the Deicide better than she realized. To someone with godlike power, the Firmament itself must seem like a cage.

So how would she react to something from outside that cage?

Melancholy strikes her, but Jian knows herself too well now to hesitate.

She is not surprised that her first act as an Immortal would be betrayal. She only wished it had taken longer for her to resort to.

She took a moment to convince herself that it was only a minor betrayal. Elijah’s death is only the worst case scenario. If he’s lucky, he’ll be long gone and too difficult for the Deicide to find. She doesn't actually believe that will happen, but even if he’s caught she assumes the Deicide will decide he’s too valuable to kill. His death is the worst case scenario, but in the best case scenario they both escape, and somewhere in the middle is the chance they’d be reunited under the Deicide’s thumb.

That was good enough for her.

“Well,” Jian said, hopping down from the table, “if I’m going to be here a while, I’d like to put on some real clothes.”

She didn’t wait for permission, she knew the Deicide won’t react or care. She opened her shadow, as if to pull out clothes more substantial than the woven shadows she was wearing, and thus made her mistake. She’d always found it easier to sell a deliberate mistake than a straight lie.

Her shadow exploded.

Her growth had pushed so much of herself into her shadow that it formed a pressure, and when she removed the lid it escaped all at once. Her sword and her spare clothes, her knives and her boots, a romance novel and a meter long stretch of a brick wall she once used as a shield, her nugget of shadow jade and the tent she rarely used; everything came spilling out like a fountain.

The detritus of Jian’s travels covered the abandoned paintings and the floor alike. Even though she considered it necessary, it is still embarrassing.

“Sorry, sorry.” Jian muttered, quickly wrapping her stuff in threads of shadows and forcing them to sink back down. She didn’t bother waiting. It didn’t matter how fast she was, she knew the Deicide had seen what she needed to.

The Woman in Red laughed as a book bounced off her shoulder, and the sound almost ruptured Jian’s new ears. She scowled and destroyed the rest of her ears, wiping them away and rebuilding them from scratch. The hypersensitivity didn’t disorient her the way it had before her Descension, but finding a balance between useful and bearable would take some trial and error.

Her hearing was still dull and watery when she heard a voice say.

“What is that?”

The sleeve of Elijah’s jacket poked out from a pool of shadow. Jian quickly pulled it deeper, committing to the charade. She expected the Deicide to catch it before it disappeared, but is still surprised when the Deicide shoves an entire hand into her shadow after it. The casual and complete disregard for her claim over the shadow filled her with an intense revulsion, like teeth scraping against metal or nails being dragged over her eyes.

Jian shuddered, but shoved the feeling aside. This was what she wanted to happen.

The Deicide ran her hands over the jacket, stretching and deforming the rigid fabric and tracing the alien characters that spiraled down its lining. She reads the text written across the back of the jacket twice. Jian is not surprised when the god comes to the same conclusion she had.

“This should not exist.”

She flicked her nail along a sleeve, easily tearing a hole in the flexible plastic, and Jian felt the world flex as the hole sewed itself shut afterward.

Jian blinked at the odd sensation. Had that been Divine Authority? Used for something so frivolous? She focused on the Golden manacles, still locked on the Golden table behind her. She found the same feeling running through them.

She bit her lip. She could see what had once been invisible to her, but touching it was still beyond her. It was a start.

“The material is improbable, but not impossible.” The Deicide muttered, pulling Jian back to what was important. “An immortal with an interest in material sciences could easily figure it out, it’s only a strange alignment of various molecules, but what would be the point when they could simply alter the properties of a more thematically resonant material instead.”

That was well beyond Jian’s observations, but the core of the matter was clear. The jacket was mortal technology. Technology that the world hadn’t invented yet.

“No,” the Deicide continued, her voice barely audible as she chewed on a jade nail, “the thing that is truly impossible is the script. I can feel the meaning of it, something to do with heat and cold and humidity, but there is no nation in this world that uses this script.”

Her head whips around to face Jian’s direction, and Jian does not need to feign fear at the sudden and undivided attention.

“Where did you get this?”

“I’m not-”

“Nevermind.” The Deicide interrupted, abruptly standing in front of her. “This will be faster.”

Her hand covered Jian’s eyes and-