Arsten trudged through the white gravel ringing the Ziggurat's base, his nose crinkling at the verse's stench. He whistled as he marched, glancing back at the steel-clad female Feral following behind him.

"Care for a final fling before you present me to the Empress?" he said, grinning. "They sealed your lips with that mask, but I've always wondered if..."

She directed a smoldering look his way. He winked back and returned to whistling. When they reached the first of the steep stairs running up the Ziggurat's broad stone tiers, he stopped to fish a bit of gravel out of his sandal. No, not gravel. It was a tooth. Human tooth. He glanced down briefly at the swath of similar 'gravel' ringing the Ziggurat.

"Grim," he said, tossing it up and catching as he began the ascent. Tarnishing bronze breastplates and helms, broken spears, and bent swords littered the Ziggurat as though some great battle transpired here and no one ever bothered to clean up after.

"Angry woman our Empress, First and Last," he muttered. "Guess getting everything you ever wanted and realizing it's all worthless makes one a bit upset."

By the time they reached the top, Arsten could barely breathe much less whistle. He'd dropped the tooth somewhere on the way up.

The Empress' throne thrummed with power, enough that his teeth vibrated against one another just looking at it from this close. Through a haze of evaporating watter, he barely made out the Empress, but everyone already knew everything about her so what did getting a look at her matter now?

A massive, sad-sounding, deep-bass bellow echoed from the wastes, strong enough to shake his bones. He squinted into the ashy distance to see a mountain take a huge step.

"Thought all the gods were dead. Manage to save one as a pet?" he said. Seeing one still moving after so long gave him a tiny flicker of comfort amid the bleakness. Remembering where he was, who he was with, and why he was here smothered that flicker instantly.

He bowed with an exaggerated flourish.

"Your Empressness," he said brightly. "I believe you summoned me."

Silence from the Throne as she scrutinized him.

"You are the Seericide." Her words hurt, physically hurt as though they pierced through to his bones.

"More's the pity," he said, pulling his collar down so his eye tattoo became visible at the base of his throat. "Can't say I'm very good at it though, at least as far as I know. Never had the opportunity to find out, alas."

"Now is your chance," she said, dryly. Amplified by the strings, her voice nearly knocked him backwards.

"Ah, yes, well, there is a slight problem," he said, rubbing his foot against the other and giving her a sheepish look. "I seem to have lost my Serum. I'm sure you know how this works, you being in charge of everything that's left and all, but no poison means no visions or whatever happens when you drink it. Your Feral could kill me regular-like in a dozen interesting ways, I'm sure, but you won't get Truth, you'll just get a corpse."

After a moment, the woman rose from the Throne and thrust her hand through the haze. Pure white against the darkness of her skin, a tiny crystal vial sat in her open palm. "I will have both."

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Arsten's heart skipped. His throat constricted. Merely breathing became a struggle, much less vocalizing a reply. The Feral shoved him forward and he reached out sluggishly, hesitant to take it from her. Just barely brushing his fingers against her skin as he collected the vial sent a shiver of power trembling through him. He couldn't imagine what sitting directly atop a throne of currence felt.

Clenching his fist tight as though he might crush the toxin in his hand, his mind blanked.

After an indeterminate pause, he surprised himself by laughing long, loud, and hard. Harder than he'd laughed in the months of deprivation, danger, and hunger since he'd fled the burning ruins of Jadeye on the coattails of a last fleeing Dynast when even that mighty verse succumbed and was overrun.

"Of course you'd have some Serum," he said, chuckling. "Here at the end of everything when I thought I'd finally escaped my doom, it manages to track me down and catch up to me."

A quick fingernail scrape took the layered wax off the vial's end. He raised the tiny vial towards the Empress as though it were a goblet. "To the Mother of Exiles, may she rot in Paradise."

The liquid ran down his throat like molten metal. Almost instantly the world began to unravel, everything he looked at peeling apart as though desperate to reveal its secrets to him. Answers to every question he'd ever asked rushed forward, eager to be revealed and spoken. Answers to questions he'd never have imagined to ask rode in waves behind them. Answers to questions his mortal mind couldn't begin to fathom pressed in beyond them, stretching his mind to the point of breaking. If the Ascen were real, this had to be how The All looked to them.

When he wondered, he saw. The Ascen were real. He saw their near-omnipresence contrasting their epic impotence, hovering beyond the shells of the verses watching as their mighty, doomed creation came apart before them.

"By the foolhardy Ascen," he breathed, marveling at his dying omniscience. "I'll be dead within the day but if I'd known it was like this I'd have drunk my Serum as soon as I got it!"

"Focus, fool," the Empress voice demanded. Once the power of her voice may have been dominating, but when he looked at her, he Saw the Blood flowing in her veins gradually devouring everything human in her and replacing it with something similar yet different. He Saw the strings at her throat vibrating in sync to the webs of Logos churning through the Construct overlapping with the physical reality of the verse. Saw her humanness buried deep beneath layers of projected identity. Saw her deepest fears and desires, even those she would never admit to herself. In that moment, he felt something he never would have imagined: he pitied the Empress of Everything.

"You're afraid," he said, clapping his hands. "The mighty Empress at the heart of Throne, ruler of All That's Left is afraid."

"Idiot," she hissed, leaning forward on her gleaming, luminescent throne, a sliver of the immense trove buried at the heart of the Ziggurat. Among the last currence left in any verse. The parasite would be here before long to devour it and then die away along with everything else when the last of The All's time ran out.

"Of course I fear, the Book is undone and with all my power nothing I attempt even slows it!"

"And your last hope is that us Seericides might trace the threads unraveled by the Mother of Exiles' coming. You hope to glean what you might do to save the Book."

"Yes!" the Empress said, desperation tinging the voice. "You must know where the last Seericide left off. Continue."

"You could have just asked Hanyon what the answer is but after your Imminent deceived you, you don't trust anyone's advice." He meant to ask her as a question, but found the answers spilling from his lips instead. "You must hear the Truth from our lips and so find the path yourself."

"And quickly, while there still remains some time to walk that path."

"Only one path remains. Or perhaps there only ever was one path: a loop so immense it seems straight and no mortal or immortal able to see far enough back or forward to see that everything is the same. But if so, lets take these last few steps." He closed his eyes, swelling with the unbelievable rush of Knowing All.

His consciousness dissolved into Knowing, a tiny sliver of mind piercing through everything to find the thread the Empress sought to follow.

There. Then. He didn't know what happened, he Became what happened. No faded memory rising, but instead a reliving.

He became the Mother of Exiles. Saw through her eyes. Breathed her breath. Felt her emotions.

As he/she/they took a long deep breath, Arsten screamed at the top of his lungs.