Devon had her hands tied. The hundreds of bulging black tendrils moved around her like clouds orbiting a planet. Adam clung to her hand like a bad thought. His sharp side was piercing a bit. She was bleeding a bit. She was of the opinion she should always be bleeding a bit.

With a laugh Clive flicked his wrists and Devon was lifted. Karol punched the ground in front of her. She scrunched up her face, protecting her eyes from the sudden onslaught of debris.

”And now the question is… who gets first dibs?” Clive said.

In her mind she thought of freedom.

Liberation in all its forms spin cycled in her brain and she hoped, she hoped, that Adam would have more of a plan than she did. All she had was her anger. But they could plan, they had the hidden room that was her brain, and Adam could tell her what she needed to do.

But Adam had gone silent, just his default steady rhythm. His mental heartbeat. Why was that?

“Adam?” She risked saying his name.

The three former Constants all shared a hearty laugh.

”Should I tell her?” Clive said, “I think I should tell her.”

”I know who we should ask.” Jeavell said.

Jeavell’s head got really big. Not meaning that he got up in Devon’s face, or in a metaphorical ego way, just that her head got physically bigger, clipping the edges of the room and vibrating like a balloon about to burst.

“Hey Adam,” it was Jeavell’s voice, echoing inside Devon’s head, “Should we tell your ward that we’ve been able to hear you and her this whole time?”

Adam remained silent. Devon had nothing to say, she felt her tongue in her throat and it felt like a nasty drip slug. Everything felt awful.

Clive raised his shoulders, an abstract shrug “Once again, it’s the needle. It allows us to hear Adam.”

”That cutting Remark sure has some cutting remarks!” Clive put an arm around Karol and the two grotesques doubled over in laughter.

A gunshot of teeth as Jeavell was reflected on every square surface and every spare thought, “Enough of this mockery, drop her!”

The restraints were removed quick enough to cause rope burns. She fell through the hole and braced for impact.

…

Karol, The Brute. Jeavell, The Lover. Clive, The Fool.

The three archetypes (of the thirty five that repeat throughout history) were standing above the hole the Brute made, looking down at their quarry.

They couldn’t see her. She had fallen into a pinprick of light and fled as soon as she had hit the ground. They could hear the tin noise of the Placebos from below, the music they had played for millennia, the music that would be halted within minutes.

They kept their forms, but they adjusted their voices. No need to speak in tones that could shatter eardrums when you had no one to impress.

“Oh, this will be a fun, some sort of all-you-can move dance extravaganza. Bet it’s been going on for years,” The Fool leaned down to get a better look. Dancers in groups of three twirled through the light, the passage of a new trio so uniform it was like clockwork, you could time it. “I’m calling this one. This is my fight.”

“We agreed to draw straws.” The Brute sauntered forward, his bulk threatening to bring the whole bar down.

“Not necessarily.” The Lover held out his palm. It fanned and folded until the number of fingers were uncountable. “Majority rules, and I rule he should go first.”

The Fool chuckled, “Seconding that.”

The Brute blustered and bristled, his face growing red. “The Wyrm’s number one rule, don't go back on deals made.”

“Well the Wyrm’s now a moldering old man being babysat by a sociopath, so I say we follow his Second; Do as you like.” The Lover touched The Fool on the shoulder, which made the ashen figure wince. “Don’t keep us waiting.”

Feeling vaguely like he had been tricked, but without a notion as to how, The Fool sliced himself into thousands of strands of black silk, and then flowed like leaking drainage through the hole. Out of sight.

“He’s going to ruin it. He’s going to ruin it for both of us.” The Brute said.

“No he won’t.” The Lover said, “He’ll do what he needs to do, die spectacularly. It will make our fight with her all the more interesting.”

All the while, unseen, a pest that none of them would have liked to see scampered unseen into the bar, through the hole, and into the darkness.

…

It was Adam taking over, shielding her from the brunt of the impact by bracing. Adrenaline flowed through her freely, numbing the already dull pain as she got up, the hole above creating a spotlight in the otherwise pitch black room.

She got up slowly. “Are you still giving me the silent treatment?”

”I don’t think they can hear us at this range. So I have no need to.”

”Sorry, by the way.” Devon felt he meant it, but he said it like an afterthought.

There was the faint sound of music, something lush and mournful. The spotlight suddenly left her.

The floor was moving slowly, this structure some sort of circular platform spinning endlessly. It reminded her of the metal plates they put hot meals on.

She saw three dancers, moving in time to the music in a triangular formation. They crested the spotlight, did a full rotation, and then were gone. A few moments later, another trio appeared, and repeated the same motion.

“Placebos,” Devon muttered, “idiot fuckers are dancing.”

“But who's it for?” Adam said, “They must have some sort of purpose.”

Devon breathed deep, and lowered herself to the ground, until her knees were scraping the slow moving metal.

”Idiot fuckers,” she said again.

The proportions of the room were hard to make out, but judging by the hole, the room was massive. It had already been a minute, and they were still moving away from the spotlight.

As her eyes adjusted, she could make out a figure in the center, some massive humanoid shape, holding something long and sharp to their chest. It was rotating with the room. To her right was the closest dancing trio, they did their steps without any trouble, like they had been made for this. None of them had eyes.

She took a step forward, steadying herself and trying not to fall. It was difficult, but months of training had improved her balance. She walked against the rotation, every step a challenge, but it felt far better than the alternative of sitting and waiting to get back to the spotlight. She didn’t trust things that came easily.

She bumped into one of the trios. Kind of accidentally, but sorta on purpose. They fell over like windup toys, still doing their steps even while on the floor.

Only one was left standing, and they continued the dance, the sudden lack of their partners not affecting them at all.

Adam let out a strange gurgle. It was an unpleasant feeling in her brain.

“What was that?” She was moving to the left, trying to find the outermost wall of the room. She kept one eye on the spotlight, concerned that any minute now the three Constants would strike.

“Did you hear them cry out? It was awful.”

The dancers had remained silent, even as they fell. “No, they’re not- they’re not people, Adam.”

“I heard them cry, maybe it wasn’t verbal, but they did cry out.”

Their task of dancing for eternity, in a pitch black room for an audience of none. Yeah, she felt real bad for them. Her hands finally met concrete.

There was a small outcropping jutting out of the wall, thankfully not moving, and she quickly climbed up it. She scraped her knees in the process, but it felt a small price to pay to finally be standing on something that wasn’t moving from under.

“These aren’t people like you and me. They’re Placebos, I don’t think they can feel pain.”

“What makes me a person and them objects?”

Devon didn’t have time for this, though her growing frustration wasn’t wrapping up the conversation. “Because I can talk to you I guess. I met you as a person so that's what I view you as, a person.”

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

“But what if I’m not” Adam said, “What if I’m just a hyper advanced series of responses preprogrammed to respond to certain stimuli. I could not be sentient, I could simply be a machine very proficient at making you think I’m sentient. While you saw me as a human, I wasn’t born a human, I was born a Remark, I feel more allegiance to these Placebos than you, there’s nothing about my thought process, even my status as a conscious being, that you can take for granted.”

Devon frowned, not understanding or enjoying the convo, she could tell from the way Adam vibrated in her hand that the feeling was mutual. “Whats gotten into you?”

“Just something to think about,” Adam said. “There’s movement at the hole.”

Fuck, her attention snapped back to the spotlight. Hundreds of black strands fell into the room, and then dispersed in every direction. She slowed her breathing, and raised Adam up defensively.

“Okay” she said, speaking slowly, “He can- he can hear us, but that's okay, he doesn’t know where we are, we just keep quiet, and hope he doesn’t realize that we’ve already left the room.”

The strands started moving lazily to the edges of the room and slipping underneath the cracks.

“But we haven’t left the room” A high pitched nasal voice said, “We’re on the wall, trying to keep hidden.”

“There’s someone right besides you as well.”

“Fuck” she yelled, and tumbled back, landing on the floor with one hand catching her fall. She hoisted herself up and got into a combat stance quickly.

In the dark she could only make out the form. It’s body seemed a shade lighter than the room, made out of some slick viscous substance, there were spikes protruding from it’s back, like some sort of mutated piercesquirrel. Its pitch black teeth and rubbery mouth contorted into a smile, it’s throat was the color of the world ending.

Devon recognized that smile, that shit eating grin. She thought she was dead.

“Tremble?”

She nodded excitedly, putting a hand to her lips. As if on cue, the closest trio to them was attacked. Six razor wires sliced them into shuddering pieces, before retreating again into the darkness.

BAM! A large section of the ceiling came tumbling down, the section of concrete roughly falling with a bounce, before lodging itself into the rotating floor. With it came light, and the room was just a tad more illuminated. As the string swarmed the new light source like a school of fish, a blue black bolt of energy crossed through the crowd, destroying a few of the strands outright.

It was not aimed at the strands, but the ceiling, and it hit its target. Once it hit, the bolt seemed to melt, sticking and bubbling to the ceiling, reversing the color, before exploding. Another chunk fell to the floor.

“Your friend is throwing those” Adam tugged in her hand, urging her to look behind her, she knew Tremble would be there, with another bolt in hand.

She did not know what the girl's strategy was, but right now it was a good distraction. Once again the strands attacked the spotlight, and once again they found nothing.

This time Devon was prepared, and she sent Adam off on a search and destroy mission. He tore through the strands like a hammer demolishing a wicker basket. Before they could regroup he was already back in her hand. She was walking backwards at the same speed as the rotation, keeping her in place.

And all the while the music played. That mournful meaningless music that seemed to only get louder the less one cared for it.

A shrill high note when a large string lashed against her hand, answered by a refrain of the main melody and a slice of Devon’s own. A sudden shift in tempo when a group of string coalesced into a clawed hand, a violin suddenly taking prominence as the hand reached for her throat. Her cut through it coincided with the cut of the orchestra, leaving only the violin to solo its mournful melody.

Was it her own imagination, or was the music reacting to her?

Tremble was going crazy. Launching arrow after arrow aimed at the heavens, her mission seemed to be to illuminate the room at all costs, through the bluntest instrument available. She was succeeding.

A rather massive oblong piece of the ceiling fell through, bringing with it the furniture of the bar, and the corpse of the Basset Hound as well. The room now coated in a eerie blue, better to highlight the strange red marks of mold that striped the concrete walls.

Devon could finally make out the figure in the center of the room, the thing that the room literally revolved around.

It was a headless corpse, skin like alabaster, impaled by a spoke at the center of the room. It was the axis the room rotated on. The body moved with it, like some perverse shop display, allowing her to make out the muscles and curves, the gender of the body was ambiguous, and it was beautiful.

It towered over her, a good twenty feet, and its hands clutched the spike. Its last moments must have been a desperate attempt to pull itself up from the spike. How terrible.

The strange thing though, was that its neck did not have a wound. It was smooth like stone, as if the head had been sanded down rather than decapitated. The assumption was that this was not a body, but some morbid piece of art. And yet, for some strange reason Devon couldn’t grapple with, she refused to consider that this thing was a statue and not a corpse. For her to feel awe, to feel sympathy, it had to have once been alive.

For what’s the tragedy in a sculpture?

“Devon, watch out”

A string like an arrow whizzed past her, skimming her ear. A bolt was tossed right behind her, her neck hairs stood on end and singed with a sharp fizzle. Oh yeah, the fight.

Tremble, realizing there was no ceiling left to destroy, turned to helping in a far more beneficial manner, attacking the strands directly. Through her attacks, a combination of her quills and claws were used recklessly, the placebo dancers just as much of a target as the strands. Devon kept a wide berth from her accordingly, still not sure what to make of her sudden appearance.

Suddenly, dozens of strands attacked her at once. Wrapping around her torso and trying in a desperate attempt to squeeze the life out of her.

“Heads up”

“I got it”

Inhaling from her lower belly, she calmly raised Adam and cut through.

Half of the strands burst into flames at once.

Wincing from the singe, she breathed out, and broke the rest of the strings from the sheer strength of her abdominals. That was not something she could have done before all this. Then again, she’d never have needed strong abs if she had continued being a short order cook.

“Please stop thinking about your abs, he’s reforming.”

Screaming would have been a more accurate term. From the top of the pierced body, the remaining strands coalesced, colliding into each other and grinding harshly until they merged.

As the swarm became one distant shape, the screaming grew louder. It reached it’s climax when the top of the black pile became the twisted mouth of Clive.

Two arms and a leg formed below, hovering slightly above the smooth neck, but there wasn't enough mass left to recreate the rest of his body. So he was a half made thing hovering over a decapitated corpse, remaining inert as the corpse below moved. His teeth grinded, and his voice boomed throughout the room.

“Tremble, you had one job for me, and you accomplished it.”

Tremble beamed and stood straighter. A wayward strand was still trying to attack her neck, she picked it up casually and crushed it. Clive shuddered.

“But you fucked it up. Why did you fuck it up?”

She didn’t know how to answer. Looking at her now, when she wasn’t flinging bolts or a blur of violence, she was terrifying, six feet tall, muscular in a wiry feral way, with red skin and blue false eyes above her smaller beedier ones. If it wasn’t for her skewed smile and crooked nose, Devon never would have recognized her.

But this monstrous form of Tremble had something else in common with the one she and Adam knew, she was pathetic. As soon as he admonish her, she slumped down and looked at the rotating floor, “I didn’t fuck it up.” She said, after a moment of silence.

“You are interfering in her execution, why the Grand are you doing that.”

“Yeah, why are you doing that?” Devon asked, power walking.

“She doesn’t need a reason, it’s arbitrary” Adam said, everything about his voice screaming dismissive, “She helped me, only to betray me, she tried to kill you, only to help you.” Tremble’s monsterous head turned towards them. “And look, now she’s turning her head towards us, as if she can hear us. Completely arbitrary.

It was more than just the fact that she looked at her, it was the way her eyes narrowed as Adam talked, the way her claws closed into fists as he insulted her. Devon knew at that moment that Tremble could hear Adam as well.

Luckily, instead of mauling her, Tremble turned to face Clyde. “It’s because you don’t deserve to kill her, you coward!”

“COWARD? COWARD?!? ME?!?” And with that his left hand and arm burst into wiggling string, and went spinning in two different trajectories, one aimed at Devon, the other aimed at Tremble.

She had been ready this whole time for a second round, she waited until the last possible second to move. Running in the direction of the rotating floor, two thirds of the strands weren’t able to correct in time and burst into flames on impact with the floor. To their credit, the surviving strands were keeping pace with Devon and biting her as she ran. She dealt with them one by one, bearing the stings and cuts until all of them were destroyed, moving past the few remaining Placebos, continuing with their dance as best as they could.

For the last one Devon shifted into a tumble and pierced the string with Adam, propelling it to the ground as she fell, and pinning the fiery remains to the floor. Clive made a noise, like something trying to shout while keeping their teeth clenched. She looked up, she was back where she started, right besides Tremble, smiling over the burning remains of two dozen strands.

“I’m not a coward. Unlike you, Devon!” His voice was ragged and hoarse, it seemed far more appropriate than the casual attitude he first had when they had met earlier. “You flee from us, kill one of our own, and then what, hide out in a ship because you can’t deal with the consequences? Did you know I was there with you, for almost all that time? I cut off my own finger so I could be there, in a weakened version of my Remark. I heard you DEVON, I heard you clashing remarks with that traitor 37” Her face simmered, he interrupted himself to laugh. “You were so scared to face any of us, you’d rather hide in a ship and pra-“

With only the slight jolt of her left hand, Adam rushed from her, spinning rapidly, and tunneled through the head of Clive, leaving a massive stringy hole on his left side, right above his exposed teeth, which were now grinding harder and harder, till-

WHAM! He was hit again from behind, a second hole from the right, overlapping enough with the left to dissipate what remained of the upper half of his string composed head. There was nothing but a thin layer of skin above his teeth.

Devon caught Adam, blushing a bit from pride. “I was training, and it fucking paid off!”

She grinned. If she wasn’t preparing to throw Adam again, she would have done a bow.

Clive sighed, a sound like steam hissing through a grate. “I see.”

What remained of his body became five large ropy strings which reached up forever, far beyond where the roof once was. “THE FUN ENDS HERE!”

Devon threw Adam again, but he was far more nimble in this form, carefully dodging and thinning when necessary until they got to their targets, the limbs of the giant corpse. They wrapped themselves around their chosen appendage, and then the ropes disappeared, as if they were never there.

The ground rumbled.

Small cracks became large ones as legs moved experimentally, while arms patted down the spire their stomach was caught in, ready to finish a job on hold for centuries. The neck craned itself up as the hands and legs worked in tandem to slowly move the torso out of the spires grasp.It became easier the farther they went up, the last feet or so was much smaller, so at that point the legs could focus on more immediate pursuits, like making the cracks even bigger.

“Hold onto something!” Devon screamed, before the now freed giant ripped the spire that had imprisoned it for so long, out of the ground. The ground reared up from under them, and then they were falling.