Caspar floors it down the darkened roadway. The trees are caught in the lambent glow of his headlights, like spars of some monstrous undercarriage, as he fights to hold his rickety consciousness together. One of his arms, the one covered in the drying gore of his neighbors, is laced through the driver-side window to keep his broken door from flapping. I’ve retracted his killing claw, but the ragged rents it tore in his sleeve remain. The amber streetlights oscillate across the shining blood as he passes, like the ripples of a stone cast into water.

He’s fast, but the nausea of what he’s done catches up with him anyway, and he grapples with the dash as he slows down and pulls over. He throws the handbrake on the shoulder and stumbles out of the sedan, the busted door see-sawing in his wake. He makes it onto the grass and remembers he’s got this fucked-up helmet on. He fumbles with its seal; I evaporate it for him, peeling the chitin back into wispy black vapor.

So removed from his enclosure, Caspar is free to puke his guts out, which he does. He drops to one knee as if in prayer and lets the horror of his evening empty him out.

This morning, Caspar was sipping a rooibos tea in his clinic and chatting on the phone with his cousin in Marteshe. Now he’s murdered five men. And not in service to his god and his kingdom, not like the first one. These he killed for the Adversary.

Oops, turns out he wasn’t as empty as all that. He doubles over again.

“Oh, ew,” gasps Bina, in scandalized delight. “I didn’t know they could just do that.” Of all my sisters, Bina pays the least attention to humanity. The rest of us devote at least part of our attention to keeping abreast on terrestrial matters. Bina spends her time charting the ruined Heaven, excitedly telling us about the latest obelisk she’s discovered or relict she met and/or ate.

“It’s the trauma,” I say. “Fella’s going through it.”

“Is he coming back here soon, d’you think?”

“As soon as he sleeps, and he’ll need sleep soon.” I stagger with Caspar back to the car. He finds the supplies brought by his murderers. Trail mix, canteens, workwear. A couple copies of the Father’s Precepts. I feel a stab of annoyance as he takes one. But old habits die hard, I guess. Maybe I should write a book.

“Can I meet him?”

I glance at the twisted frame of my sister. What the hell, he’ll have to meet the family at some point. Bina’s hardly the worst place to start. “Sure. But be nice.”

“I’m always nice.”

Caspar takes a deep glug of metallic water, washes his mouth out and spits dismally into the grass. He soothes his parched throat with the rest of one canteen and then tears open the plastic seal on the trail mix. He considers opening another canteen and spending some water on his hands, which are caked with grave dirt and dried blood. No; best to conserve. It’ll take much more than water to clean these hands, anyway, he reflects.

(This strikes me as a thought with poetical potential, but Cas is a matter-of-fact man. He’s thinking about hand soap.)

He tilts his head back and tips the salted seeds and chocolate nibs into his mouth. Halfway through the bag, he realizes just how hungry he is, as his parm-sated mind catches up to his deprived body. He has quite the sweet tooth, my warlock. He used to tease his fiancée by plucking the chocolates out of mixes, back when he had a fiancée.

The fatigue is really pressing his brain smooth now. He climbs back into the car and steers further off the shoulder, maneuvering as carefully as he can into the brush and treeline. A few scrapes, a few dings. Ah, well. This is a loaner, after all.

He slumps in the driver’s seat and looks at himself in the rearview mirror. The dirt, the blood, the dried ichor. The pale scar of the rope around his neck. The sting of his grazed wound like a spear in his side. He will never sleep in his own bed again. The pound cake his last client brought him, after he cured her son’s fever, will harden and decompose in his icebox. The hydrangeas in his window will dry and wilt. His god is dead. His heaven is hell. His world has ended.

He lays his cheek against the steering wheel and weeps uncontrollably.

Then he goes to sleep.

He awakens on his bier, in the depths of his new deity.

“Welcome back, warlock mine.”

He tilts his head to one side, sees Bina and I lounging on the couch before the vertical well. I’ve relocated his little friends. They were ruining the ambience.

He sits up and looks down at himself. He’s clean and dressed in his favorite outfit, the tweed suit his father mended and passed down. He wore this every Friday for services. Consternation crosses his brow when he realizes it’s purple now. I am what I am.

He stands and approaches my sister and I. For his sake, perhaps, I’ve added a few planters of hydrangeas around the lounge. Such charming little blossoms.

He kneels uncertainly.

I tsk. “That’s very kind, Cas, but unnecessary. This is Bina, my sister.” I gesture to the monstrosity at the foot of the couch. “Bean, Cas.”

“Hello, Caspar!” Bina sits up, segmented tail unwrapping from her too-many legs. “A friend of Irene's is a friend of mine.”

Caspar hasn’t decided what he is to me. But the horror-women who now own his soul keep insisting he’s a friend, and he doesn’t correct us. He briefly considers extending a hand to shake, but can’t figure out what piece of her anatomy would be best to grasp.

“Charmed,” he says.

“Please do not call me Bean, by the way,” Bean says.

Caspar blinks at her unearthly form, her drooling teeth and her furry thorax. “Understood, Miss Bina.”

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

I step daintily to my feet. “Bina and I are exploring a cavern that used to be a library. I’ve never been, but she loves the place. Do you want to look?”

He remembers the lance of existential agony from last time. “Are you sure I’m able?”

“It’s pretty subterranean so far,” I say. “If I refract it for you just slightly into shapes your hardware can take, I think you can handle it.”

“That’s uh.” His hands find his pockets. The reassuring scratch of the material. “That’s very kind.”

The chasm Bina takes me to is framed by a many-limbed statue, snapped in half at the waist and folded into a yawning triangle. So titanic is the canyoned interior that my sister and I can drift through it side-by side. She reaches out and entwines one skyscraper pseudopod with mine. Her spiracles flower with excitement; she’s been trying to drag me out here forever. Clouds of our minuscule scout-forms flap through the tributaries and recesses, intermingling in bleached skulls and splintering shelves.

The view from our primary perspectives is of a library tunneled like an ant farm into a pair of cliffs. Scores of wings, hundreds of chambers, millions of books. Billions, perhaps, if this winding way continues as long as it seems to. Along the canyon floor is an ocean of torn pages and broken spines, nestled like autumn leaves atop a disarray of furniture—desks, reading nooks, moldering couches.

In places, the physical laws of the dimension have unraveled severely enough that the air has solidified into glistening ribbons, catching frozen geysers of books like flies in amber and blooming them across the canyon. They bump along our flanks as we float through, nudging them from the rents they’re caught in and cascading them to the distant floor.

Those wounds in gravity look like Milinoe’s handiwork. She’s always been one for smacking physics upside the head. I remember she told me about a fight she had with one of the Father’s warships in a canyon. Maybe that was here.

I open a little window for Caspar in my bulkhead. No foaming at the mouth, no seizing. I expand the porthole into a wide picture window. Constellated pillar candles, nestled in the sunken alcoves and collapsed byways, shine cherry lights across our faces.

Bina sighs. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

Caspar licks his dry lips as we gaze through the window. “It’s ruined.”

“I know. It’s still beautiful. More beautiful, maybe, than it was.” Bina’s tail swishes across the mosaic floor. “The works of divine and human hands, in a dance with entropy and chance. The sum of order and chaos. A collaboration.”

He looks out and cocks his head. “I never thought of it that way. Suppose entropy is something to be fought for my kind.”

“Mhmm.” I stand next to him, watching his breath fog the glass. “Fought, but never defeated. Create, construct, consume, corrode. The way of the mortal.”

“But fought anyway,” he says, and meets my gaze.

“You’re the chiefest servant of an Old One now, y’know,” I say. “It’s about time you found a taste for decomposition. Zoom out a little.”

“An Old One.” Caspar glances between us. “That’s what you call yourselves?”

“It’s what I am. Me and Bina. So called on account of we’re old as shit, though Bean’s only around a thousand.”

Bina hisses. “Irene, don’t tell him that!”

“Bina, it’s fine. He’s like thirty.”

“Thirty whats?”

“Thirty years old.”

“Oh, my goodness.”

“The Father was an Old One, too,” I say. “Perhaps the Oldest. I imagine that’s heresy to mention.”

A furrow in his brow as he tries to understand. “So you’re gods. You’re a goddess.”

“My my, Caspar.” I push out a hip. “You really can flatter a girl. That’s not exactly how I see myself, but if it’ll help you orient, knock yourself out. Just don’t mistake me for your old God. My benediction is much more personalized.”

He coughs. “Begging your pardon, ma’am, but I don’t imagine I could ever mistake you for anything.”

“My funny little human. Was that something approaching a joke?” I smile as I look past Caspar’s shoulder at my sister. “Do you mind if I leave you alone for a while, Bina?”

She blinks. “I’m inside you.” I give her a meaningful look. It dawns on her I’m sparing my warlock some serious questions about this reality. “Oh! Okay. Sure. Good to meet you, Caspar! I’ll see you around!”

He gives an awkward wave. “See you soon, Bina.”

I hook my arm through Caspar’s promenade-style. At the height I’ve made myself, the top of my head barely clears his shoulder. It’s funny to me, being so much smaller than him. “Come on.”

As we depart from the lounge, a hexagon of glass breaks off from the picture window and slides with us, lighting our way. Caspar watches it warily. “It’s all Heaven out there?”

“That’s right. It’s without end, as far as we can tell. When you die, and your capacity for the eldritch expands, I’m going to have such fun sights to show you.”

“I thought you were locked out,” he says. “That’s why you need the key, ain’t it?”

“We are. Just not spatially. Not in the third dimension. But to a being like me, that’s basically the foyer.” I twist my wrist and another hydrangea appears in my hand. I scoot it into his jacket lapel. “I can’t do that, for example, beyond my demesne. If we’re going to fix heaven on anything like the scale required, we need root access. That means the key.”

“I see.” He reconsiders. “Well, I get the concept, anyway.” He straightens his lapel and gives the hydrangea a brief sniff. Judging by his reaction, I assume I got the scent right. “Where are we going?”

“You wanted to say hi to those friends you whacked, right? And I want to prove my word is good. Let’s go meet the meatheads.”

I open a door to an autumn evening. He stumbles as I pull him across the threshold. We stand now in a field fretted by the lengthening shadows of a nearby forest, its leaves changing to gold and scarlet and umber.

A clutch of tents is erected in their shade, with camper lanterns glowing within. Five in total. The men who occupy them are all outside in a circle around one of their fellows, having some sort of fraught conversation. Well, most of them are.

Shoot. I got so wrapped up in things I forgot to return that screamy one’s mouth.

Before Caspar can realize my mistake, I’ve flicked it back across his face. A strangled cry of alarm and relief. Casper’s ears perk up.

“There they are, my guy.” I sweep an arm toward them. “They won’t see us until you wish it. Do you wish it?”

He paces over to them, watches the steam rise from their cowboy coffee and listens to them debate what’s to be done.

“When we see her next, we rush her,” Edgar says. “That’s all we can do.”

“You want to die again, you dumbshit?” Sam shakes his head. “You were in charge the first time. Look what happened.”

“She’s a devil. You want to negotiate with the devil?”

“What do you think, Caspar?” I come up beside him. “Wanna say hi?”

He looks at Aaron, who’s sitting before his tent and plucking the membrane away from a fallen leaf until its skeletonized veins remain. “Not yet,” he says. “I wouldn’t know what to say yet. Does that make me a coward?”

“It makes you careful. That’s different.” I offer my hand. “What do you say we get something to drink, and you and I can work on a plan for what’s next?”

He haltingly lets me take his hand again. And I feel the glow expanding. His faith in me. And oh, the warmth of it. The fireplace-in-winter warmth. It melts the annoyance of housing these gnats. I’d have saved a hundred of them to feel this. No wonder that old windbag the Father was so addicted to it.

“Thank you,” he says, and it’s the gentleness in his voice that does it. I do something I’ve been considering for some time now. Something that might be unwise. Honestly, scratch the “might.” But I want to understand these little humans, what drives them, and how it feels.

So I take the little fragment of me that is Irene, and I loosen my grip on it, like twisting off a piece of clay. I limit her ever so slightly from the rest of myself. She is still my demesne, still in command of my power and an extension of my self, but I unshackle her from my core processes.

It’s not so easy to describe this to you if you’ve never done it. I guess the most straightforward explanation is that I make her just a bit more human. And trust me, I know. I know it’s a silly idea. If it ends up too much of a burden, I can always recycle her back into myself. It’s fine.

(Though it would be a shame. I did spend a lot of time on this ass.)

“You’re welcome, Caspar Cartwright,” I say, and I lead him through the door, back into the dark maze of me.