“Not strategic,” Ptah muttered, sticking his head back through the opening and peering down at them from the exit. “It was my fight, not hers.” Part of his face had fallen away, leaving a black web of colored sparkles beneath. “Besides. They were already busted up from the bomb. All I had to do was bash their heads in on the canyon wall.”

“Why didn’t you just incinerate them for attacking your host?” Pax demanded.

“Ibis are immune,” Ptah said.

Pax squinted up at him. “The ones who just attacked you were a majority Tuliin?”

“The ones working for the Pharaoh all are,” Ptah muttered. “She’s got some sort of breeding program.”

“Well, that makes things…more complicated.” Pax made a sour face at Skipper. “You didn’t tell me that when you made me promise to help you kill her. I’m technically a neutral party, but I have inbuilt failsafes to keep me from killing majority-Tuliin. This is actually a very unpleasant development.”

Skipper hadn’t been able to tear her eyes away from Ptah’s face, where flaps of ‘skin’ were peeling away, revealing the sparkling void beneath. “What’s wrong with him?” she whispered.

Pax followed her gaze. “Oh, nothing a little time and relaxation won’t fix.”

Ptah frowned at the two of them, and part of his face simply wasn’t there, instead a burning black fire of millions of colorful dots of light. “What are you talking about?” The collar on his neck fractured again, showing even more beaming golden light through the fissures.

“He looks like he’s dying,” Skipper whispered.

Pax waved her statement off. “He’ll look like that for a day or two before the suppressor shatters,” he said. “That one was the wrong type of suppressor, and it was never made to withstand a symbiote pairing anyway, just get the Tuliin physically anchored enough to establish the interface. Usually they break away a lot faster, but he’s been in that shape so long he’s subconsciously trying to hold himself in the material with his will. That, and I think someone tweaked it from its original purpose, maybe added an extra constraint. You said the Pharaoh made you wear this?”

Ptah squinted at the two of them, then down at the gold collar around his neck. Immediately, his eyes went wide, the glowing yellow of his irises having seemed to slide back into his head, into the darkness beyond. It was like looking into the eye sockets of a skull filled with the night sky, and Skipper swallowed and took a step back.

“What did you do to the collar?” Ptah asked, sounding excited. “It’s coming off? That’s amaz—” Then he hesitated, going still as his attention caught on the skin of his own arm. “Pax,” he said carefully, “what’s wrong with me?”

“So as I was saying,” Pax said, turning back to Skipper, “We’ll need to give him some space for the next couple days, and I really want to go exploring. You up for a walk?”

“What,” Ptah said evenly, the bright glow flashing in the void behind his eyes, buried in a sea of tiny, sparkling colors, “is wrong. With. Me?” He hadn’t moved, was just standing stock-still, staring down at himself.

Pax made an almost nervous, chittering sound. “Wrong? Nothing. You’re just shifting anchors. Stop fighting it. You’re making it a lot slower than it needs to be.”

“Making what slower?” Ptah asked, still staring down at his own skin as it sloughed and folded away.

“Just relax. You need to relax.”

Ptah’s head jerked up immediately, his attention sharp. “If I relax, does that mean I become her slave?”

“You’re already contractually compelled to obey the human,” Pax said. “It’s a lot like what the human Marines used to say when they were about to get fucked by the bureaucracy… Just grab a bottle of lube, bend over, and take it like a champ…”

“Oh hell no,” Ptah cried, backing away. “How do I stop this?” He started trying to brush the black fire away, but it only succeeded in rubbing more of his ‘skin’ off. Seeing that, Skipper recognized real panic in the man’s face. “Pax, what’s happening to me?”

Pax rolled his eyes. “You’re being such a baby.”

“Don’t call me a baby!” Ptah shrieked. “This is not okay.” He slammed a fist into the wall of the cavern. The ground shook. Rocks fell from the ceiling…

…and Ptah’s hand shed all of its ‘skin’ up to the elbow, his hand disappearing into the rock face and coming back nothing but a band of ethereal black flame. He cried out in shock and fell backwards, waving, trying to shake the flames off of his hand, but instead having no ‘hand’ with which to wave—or catch him when he fell. He screamed some more, rolling on the ground outside the cavern, voice rising in escalating panic.

Calmly, Pax looked back at Skipper. “As I was saying, we should probably go on a hike or something. It’ll take him a day or two for the new anchor to break up his old, dense energy. A lot like knocking scale off the walls of pipes. Once he gets rid of the crust he built up from being forced to stay physical as a child, he’ll be free. Until then, we should probably go see what’s outside the canyon, see the sights, maybe play a few card games, you know what I mean?”

“He doesn’t sound very free,” Skipper said dubiously, listening to the Skymancer scream and flail outside.

“You like card games?” Pax asked. “I’ve got one I adore called Poker. My symbiote would play it with me before she—” He hesitated. “You play poker?”

“Never heard of it,” Skipper said, more than a little leery of the terrified screaming coming from the canyon outside. “Are you sure he’s going to be okay?”

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

Pax rolled his eyes. “This is literally what he was made to do. He is, quite honestly, being a complete pussy. If not poker, you know of any other card games? I’ve spent so long working logic problems and counting sand crystals I’ve got this overpowering craving for playing something with some random chance. That’s one thing I was never equipped with before they locked me in there—something that could emulate chaos. Oh my god, I long for chaos. You got a coin to flip?”

Skipper wasn’t really listening to him. She was wincing, listening to the way the Skymancer’s shrieks had devolved into sobs. Without another word, she left Pax in the cave and climbed gingerly out into the light to see if she could help.

“You stay away from me!” Ptah screamed, the moment he saw her. He tried awkwardly to scrabble away from her on the sand, but enough pieces of him were missing that when he tried to crab-crawl backwards, he ended up writhing in the sand like a disemboweled deer.

The vehemence with which he shouted at her made Skipper blink and stay at a distance. Seeing him, watching pieces of him just…peel and burn away…she swallowed hard and decided that maybe Pax was right and she was out of her league and needed to just let things settle down.

She ducked back inside the cavern, collected her gear, stuffed the now-useless pistol back in her pack, and climbed back into the sunlight, fully intending to do as Pax had suggested and leave the god to scream and flail on the ground on his own for the next twenty years. She started up the canyon, careful to avoid the panting Skymancer wedged against the canyon wall.

“Wait…” Ptah croaked. “Please.”

Skipper hesitated and glanced back, unsure.

“I’ve…read about this…” Ptah said, swallowing as he gestured at his body as it decayed around him. “It’s…not your…fault.”

“No shit,” Skipper said. But she stopped long enough to give him a leery look. In truth, he didn’t even look human anymore. He looked…

…like a human corpse that was rotting away to reveal colorful glimpses of the night sky underneath his decayed skin.

Further up the canyon, Pax called, “Just leave him! There’s nothing you can do… Oh, look! The radiation must have mutated this cactus!”

“I’m…sorry…I yelled…” Ptah managed, sounding pitiful. He struggled against the ground, having only an elbow on one arm, the rest having fallen away in pieces that vanished in black wisps of smoke that returned to the ethereal black fire flowing around him. “Please don’t…leave…me here.” He struggled again to right himself, sounding absolutely terrified.

Skipper kept a wary distance, feeling the odd tug in her forehead when he moved. “What you want me to do?” she demanded. “You look like you’re breaking apart from the inside.”

Ptah whimpered and his laugh was filled with despair. “Probably accurate.”

“I don’t got a bandaid for that,” Skipper said.

“You could just keep me company,” Ptah said. “I’ve read about this in the ancient histories. It’s…a process. Like a complete breakdown of everything material before I can repair myself using a different anchor.” When he spoke, his words had started coming out on gouts of sparkling black flame, like his very breath was made of shimmering black fire. Seeing that, he shuddered.

“Pax says you should relax,” Skipper said, still too wary to approach the god.

Ptah’s face no longer looked human, but when he scoffed, she could sense the darkness there. “I’ll bet he does. That duplicitous scavver traded my life for his.”

Skipper gave Ptah a sharp look. “You say scavver like it’s a bad thing.”

He dismissively waved a flowing column of black fire that had once been an arm. “You told me you’re a crag-nanny, not a scavver.”

“It’s the same thing.” But they both knew it wasn’t. Scavvers tore apart the remains of old cities and other edifices of their ancestors in order to sell the materials to passing traders, who in turn carried it into the Silver and auctioned it there. Crag-nannies relied on their bodies and wits to survive naturally full-time in the canyons and only visited scavver encampments to trade for things like antibiotics.

“My skin is literally sloughing off and you want to argue word choice semantics.” Ptah giggled like someone on the razor edge of a complete mental breakdown.

Seeing him like that, seeing how alone he looked huddled against the red rock wall, Skipper almost put her pack aside and went to squat beside him. Almost. But she kept a wary distance, twenty years of instinct telling her she should avoid the creepy apparition on the ground and go hunt rock squirrels, instead. “Anything else I can do for you?” she asked, looking him over dubiously. “I was gonna go see if I could find some dinner.”

“Just…” his words were like dried grass in his throat, but he sounded desperate. “Tell me about yourself. What’s your story? Why’d they have pictures up of you back in camp?”

“I’m good at killing them and they know it,” she said. She really wanted to be somewhere else, just wash her hands of this whole Skymancer thing and go back to climbing the crags for tinlizards and Thunderbird eggs, forget the last three days ever happened. Even now, the jewel in her brow was giving her a headache, like it was getting pressurized.

Realizing she wasn’t going to say anything else, he sighed. “You truly are a woman of few words, aren’t ya?”

That stung. “I haven’t exactly had a lot of people to practice with the last couple decades,” she muttered reluctantly. “Pretty much keep to myself. Look, I can’t really help you here, so I think I’ll just go…”

“It wasn’t meant as an insult,” he said quickly. He turned his head with abruptness and a new piece of skin—this time a whole ear—fell away. “So you’ve been out here alone for the last twenty years? No wonder you kept me in zip ties. I thought you were just a bitch. You were probably scared shitless.”

Skipper stiffened, bristling, and only after she opened her mouth to tell him she wasn’t afraid of any Silverlings, Changers, or even Skymancers did she realize he was chuckling at her expense.

“I wasn’t scared,” she muttered. She glanced at Pax, but he had wandered further up the canyon, commenting on the ‘remarkable genetic mutations in flora and fauna’, and wished she could join him.

“Well, I was,” Ptah said, clearly trying to drag her attention away from leaving him there. “But I think I’m more scared right now than I was then. Hell, more scared than even when the Ibis dragged me back home or the time the Jackals had me under the temple. That was some bad shit, but this…” He made an unhappy sound and tossed a pebble with his one still-functioning hand. “This is worse.”

“How’s that?” Skipper demanded. “You’re free of the Silver, your collar’s falling off, and a couple guys just shot you full of holes and you didn’t even blink because you don’t have guts. I’d say things are looking up.”

He gave her a sharp look. “Do you have any idea what’s going on here?”

Skipper thought about it, trying to piece together the chaos of the past few days in her head. “Not really,” she admitted. “Aside from now I’ve got some blue shit coming out my forehead and for some reason Pax seems to think I can tell you what to do.”

He gave her a long, wary look. “And how do you feel about that?”

“Never wanted to tell anybody what to do.” She shrugged. “Don’t plan on starting now. Look, if you don’t mind, I’m just going to go find something for us to eat.”

He seemed to relax a little. “The Pharaoh tried for seven hundred years to get me to sign that contract.”

“I’m not the Pharaoh,” Skipper said. She hefted her pack over her shoulder. “I’ll be back in a few hours to check on you.”

He hesitated, then, voice barely a whisper said, “I don’t really know what’s about to happen to me. That treaty Pax put us under was…bad. It’s what got the world ripped apart.”

“Well, whatever you do, try not to trigger another earthquake,” Skipper said. “It’s been eight days and I could do without another for awhile. Last one caught me while I was grabbing eggs off the cliffs—almost died.” Then, without another word, she shouldered her pack and went looking for something to do to take her mind off the fact she had a glowing blue target embedded in her forehead that felt like it was fused to the bone itself.

Hours later, while pulling a packrat out of its hole, the earth rumbled and Skipper heard distant screaming.