Tasìa and Alex lay the hound down as soon as they emerged from the stairwell shack. With her abdominal wound throbbing in pain, Tasìa bent down on her knees.

Facing a lamp to the side of the shack door, she peeled her shirt up. The wound was traced in blood. Just beneath, her pelvis felt unusually numb. Even her urethra burned with a wicked sting.

It was going to hurt like hell the next time she pissed. With most lady-like vigor, Tasìa smiled through the current unpleasantness as she spoke.

"Alex, do you have any antibiotics in your medical bag, perhaps? I believe I've caught an infection."

As he nodded, sitting upright against the shack walls, each breath he suspired was done with a great deal of difficulty.

His medical bag, the size of a fanny pack, hung low on his belt. He unzipped a side pocket on its outer surface. His hand fidgeted back out with two pills, one green and one orange. They lay together inside a plastic wrapper.

He passed her the pills.

"These pills only work in conjunction with one another, but they are very effective."

She thanked him as she tore open the wrap with her fingernails. The nails were, in daga chica propriety, shaped like little keen-edged blades.

As she dry-swallowed the two pills, Tasìa began to notice a sound in the air. It did not ring in oscillation, but repeated a singular pitch.

Though curious to this oddity, she put it out of mind as Alex asked in a solicitous tone about her condition.

"What happened," he asked with the studied soft-press questioning of a medical practitioner.

A grin lit-up Tasìa's face.

"Oh, you are going to love this," she said as she unbuttoned her trousers. She pulled them down far enough to give him a good look at the two wounds. "I was escaping from a Salvage prison and being chased by a drone when it slammed in the cement behind me. A thin sliver of a rod, four and a half inches long, pierced straight through, from this wound to that one."

Alex grimaced.

"The skin beneath the abdominal wound... .," he stated as an open-ended question.

Tasìa peeled her panties down. She had to comb through black pubes where they matted thick to see the skin beneath. It wasn't her normal coppery tan but purple like a bruise.

It also felt numb to her touch.

"What is that," she asked. She stood up, turned to the light, and gave him a better view.

The purple coloration only turned back to its normal hue right at her vulva mound.

That gave her a little comfort. The injury was at least isolated to the organs in her immediate abdomen.

Alex shook his head.

"Not good. Likely that piercing through you pinched together a set of nerves just above and to the right of your fallopian tube. It is restricting blood flow. So long as infection doesn't interfere, it can heal itself with a simple treatment regimen. But, of course, infection is interfering. That results in eventual organ damage."

"Ouch," Tasìa responded as she pulled her garments back up and buttoned her trousers.

A weird breeze grazed her brow. It felt oddly clammy, like the hands of an elderly person with poor blood circulation.

"Did you feel that," Tasìa asked.

"That breeze? Yes."

The air smelled ripe with ionization. The low sounding note was still faint but constant.

It was time to investigate their immediate surroundings.

Being now in the realm of the Silent Dragon, she had relaxed her guard. But things were not as they were before. Something most fundamental had changed.

Tasìa stood up and helped Alex to his feet.

She quickly realized that the three matters of breeze, aroma, and sound, were aspects of reality seeping through a veil of illusion that hid even the stars.

Tasìa stopped in her tracks as she realized what was occurring. Egilona's trap.

Tasìa grabbed Alex's hands into her own before she led him out in the open. She glanced at a far wall towards the courtyard. Slowly, the darkness gave way to a vision of dense fungal growth manicured in baroque palatial design.

El densidad. She thought, and then wondered. How thick did the nanospores need to be to replace the brick and mortar with an actual mushroom palace?

An oddity hovered in the air above that she dismissed at first given its resemblance to the streamer effect common to LSD hallucination. On a previous trip, she had once seen the flash of a lightning bug as it spread out, appearing like fractual neon. It appeared quite similar to what she now witnessed.

However, this one did not fade away in slowly dissipated beauty as the bug-light did on Isabella's patio so many years ago. It, a long scarlet-accented purple ribbon, remained in place in a near unmoving hover.

Tasìa studied the twists and turns and she soon realized, embedded within were contorted versions of eyes, scales, a mouth, and wings.

When the Silent Dragon blinked, she gasped.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

Oh, shit.

Alex leaned on her shoulder to get her attention. He nodded in the direction of a dark rooftop corner. Two grey statues stood on the ledge.

"Can we make an educated guess who they are," Tasìa asked him.

The demi-ghoul and the diminutive thief walked up to the frozen figures of Geminiäs and Geminetta. Fear etched upon the brother's face. It appeared he was in mid-dash when the condition overtook him.

Geminetta though smiled ever so slightly. Her shoulders raised up, pretty, proud, and haughty. Her face with browline arched and eyelids low gave a clearly stated 'fuck you' to the one who decided their fate.

Without even a hint of warning, a voice spoke from behind them.

"Senor Rosada, these two devils killed your mentor and friend," Egilona said as she sauntered close to them. "You should push them off the edge. See if they will shatter. Are you as curious as I?"

He turned towards the Infernal Madré. The light of her Mesmer now flickered in his eyes. Tasìa still held Alex's hands. They suddenly felt flush with heat.

He struggled against her grip.

"No. My little friend, Tasìa. Let me go and test this hypothesis. They are most deserving."

In Alex's current condition, she was the stronger of the two.

Egilona spoke once more.

"They tried to kill you as well. They sicced the hellhounds on you, Alex Rosada. You as well, Tasìa del Alma-Gris."

There was an implied taunt in Egilona's voice. A challenge to look the Infernal Madré in the eye.

If Tasìa did so, she would be caught in Egilona's Mesmer as well.

She pleaded to the demi-ghoul.

"Alex. If they are destroyed, the Infernal Madré is closer to becoming an all encompassing singularity. What she really is, she is a danger to all living things."

The Infernal Madré chortle rang deep and loud.

"What could you in your little bubble of ignorance possibly know of my agenda?"

Angry from the belittlement, her adrenaline now engaged, Tasìa breathed in deeply. The ionization she had sensed in the air earlier swelled in volume. The densely charged electrons absorbed through her pores.

What was this? Tasìa wondered. She had felt it before when the spiderbot tried to electrocute her.

It was a powerful feeling in which she could bask forever if so allowed.

Tasìa smiled and she met Egilona's gaze without fear. Her perceptions became fine-tuned. She could see the way the Infernal Madré's movement was calculated through mathematical phase space before a position in actual space shifted.

The Infernal Madré was not actually standing there. She was but a mere projection formed of nanospore electromagnetic frequency and biochemical energy.

Tasìa's tone of voice dripped of derision.

"What could I possibly know? You have no agenda, Egilona. It is not possible for you to have one. You were created honestly enough I suppose to counter the Cull Spore invasion. But something went wrong. Overambition on the part of your secret creators, perhaps?

"You are the disaster that resulted. You are now merely the mess of that hidden agenda being put into execution.

"You have no agency. Much less so than the Black Eyed Ones, the Wise One, and the Incubus. You are a poorly constructed facsimile of the historical Egilona."

Egilona's head fretted jerkily and her ivory skin grew pink then red as Tasìa laid out her argument.

When Tasìa finished speaking, the Infernal Madré let out a long sustained shout. The sky grew white with black holes for stars. Tasìa heard a sizzling noise whip about the rooftop unchallenged.

She felt plasmid heat from the surrounding nanospores dig deep into her skin.

Ascospores rose from all sides of the building.

It was time to react.

Tasìa let go of Alex's hands. He immediately made a lunge for Geminiäs. Tasìa threw herself on him in a tight hug before he could reach the frozen-in-place spore entity. She swung him around in a counter lever.

As she forced him to the ground, the shadows of the ascospores crowded her. Peering up, she saw the spores oozed in a malignant green.

They were ready to burst. A wave of pneumatic hisses sang shrill from within them.

The Infernal Madré's smile upturned in a triumphant sneer. It was not the face of a real actor in this drama, Tasìa reminded herself. Several generations of emojis propagated first by online bots led up to that reactive, designed to demoralize, sneer.

Tasìa's hands were now free. She reached into the fanny-pack and found the gift that the Incubus gave her, the soltera audio device containing the Spanish grindcore metal.

On its lattice engraved front, she found a button of sharp-edgéd jade shaped as a skull centered in a thicket of rose thorns. Tasìa flicked it on. The button was designed to extract a small blood sacrifice by nicking the thumb. It would not even turn on without sensing the drip of blood.

Tasìa obliged happily.

Though quite compact, the acoustics of the soltera were phenomenal. Born of post-Invasion design, it took advantage of the nanospores in the surrounding air to boost the sound frequency.

What swelled up was an angry, rhythmic dissonance in the full-throttled drone of several guitars flailing in counter to a pounding but oddly melodic percussion.

Then the words of the song overwhelmed all else.

Tanto el veneno como la espada desdeñaron

Mi cobardía, y parecía decir

"No eres apto para ser desencadenado

De tu condenada servidumbre. Lejos,

¡Eres un imbécil!

Both the poison and the sword disdained

My cowardice, and seemed to say

"You are not fit to be undone

Of your damned servitude.

Away, far away (with you), imbecile!

Above her, the converging ascospores tilted before they sprung far away as if god-smacked. Lopsided, they burst into yellow goo that splattered across the palatial fungi structures.

The ornate-heavy edifices burned away to the touch.

Egilona kneeled helplessly with her head bowed low. Her smooth, pale flesh writhed and shivered. Pentagon shaped scales glowed across her flesh where phase space calculation was no longer concealed.

To Tasìa's eyes, now the LSD had taken root, Egilona's body slowly disappeared in a pink haze of lovely streamers.

Tasìa glanced at the soltera's retro-stylish LED readout. She laughed as she read the song title.

El Vampiro.

Tasìa closed her eyes.

Behind her, she heard the voice of the Silent Dragon.

"Did you bring the hellhound up on this rooftop in the hope that I would make you Golden?"

"That was indeed the plan," Alex confirmed.

There was a long pause. She peaked at the two of them. The Silent Dragon peered up, staring into Alex's eyes. A judge and arbiter of what should and should not be.

"Your life still possesses much value," the Silent Dragon proclaimed as he took Alex by the arm. "Follow me. We will make it so."

The two shuffled off. Tasìa noticed that the Black Eyed Ones had already disappeared.

She closed her eyes once more. With the LSD coursing through her head sleep would not be possible for a while.

Tasìa stood back up. It would not matter if she could. There was still too much shit on her agenda left to be done to indulge in sleep anyway.

But she smiled even still as she watched the stars above pulse and stream off as they merged with the hazy lights of the streets below them.

And what of it? When the world itself was a beautiful hellish dream set upon you, what was sleep, anyway?