Let no one ever say that it was easy to stay silent.

It had taken all of Pel’s strength to quiet her terror and keep from yelling at Rayph and Jules to run like wind.

If only escaping the Last Church’s clutches was that simple.

Pel looked up from her PortaCon and stared out through the Pirouette’s windows. The Norms and their eager cultists were watching their every move.

And now we’re about to walk into the belly of the beast, she thought, as her gaze wandered up the looming flank of the Melted Palace.

“Mom…?” Rayph asked, undoing his seatbelt.

Pel undid her own with a click, and then looked over her shoulder at our son.

“Just… stay calm, honey, okay?” She tried her best to smile, and then reached out and pressed her fingers on Rayph’s trembling knee. “Stay. Calm.”

Pel saw Jules’ lips stir out of the corner of her eye. She glared at our daughter. Jules responded with a shake of her head, an eye-roll and a bitten lip, her gaze drifting over to the Melted Palace.

“Mom, we’re never going to make it out of there alive,” she whispered.

Pel glanced at the half-wyrm standing guard on the street, not far from the short flight of stairs up to the Melted Palace’s side entrance.

He was staring at her, licking his lips with a rotting tongue covered in green slime.

“I think that ship has already sailed,” Pel muttered, with quivering lips.

With a sigh, Pel stuffed her PortaCon into her purse, slung her purse over her shoulder, stepped out of the Pirouette, and opened the backseat door to let Rayph out of the car. Jules opened the passenger-side door and stepped out on her own. Pel made sure to link the car alarm to her console, so that if and when something decided to eat and/or grow inside the Pirouette, the car alarm would just go off on her console, rather than shriek out in the streets and lure all sorts of awful things with its noise.

As Pel walked up to the curb, out of sheer habit—and probably a bit of disassociation, too—she passed her hand across the parking meter, letting the scanner read her hand-chip along the sensor to charge her for the cost of the parking space.

The parking meter beeped in acknowledgement, ready to do its duty.

“What are you doing?” Jules asked, as she closed the car door.

Pel stopped, her finger hovering over the buttons on the parking meter. The machine was asking for the length of time she intended to use the spot.

“Uh…” Pel backed away from the meter. “Right…” she said.

“Dad says it’s bad not to pay for parking,” Rayph said.

Jules almost laughed at that.

One of the two gun-toting Last Church cultists over by the side entrance called out to them. “Hey, get a move on! It’s dangerous out here!”

Says the man working with the demons, Pel thought.

Pel surveyed her surroundings once more, feeling even more vulnerable now that she and the kids were out in the open. Dark red stone walls rose high on either side of the street, their nooks and crannies looking more like the grooves of gums and fangs than ever before. At her back was the flank of the Melted Palace; ahead were ecclesiastical dormitories—old new townhouses, built in the Second Empire style. The clergy’s residences were riddled with narrow streets and even narrower alleys that were filled with—

—She didn’t want to think about that.

In desperation, she wondered, maybe it’s worth the risk, but then scratched that thought away with prejudice. Even if she could let the kids get to safety by taking the bullets the cultists would fire at them should they flee, that would mean leaving them alone as they faced the wyrm, and whatever dangers were lurking in the dormitories.

Once a place of life, the holy city of Elpeck was now little more than a hopper for the corpses the Green Death left in its wake.

“Mom?” Jules asked.

Pel tugged her coat closed around her with one hand, grabbing her purse’s strap in the other. She didn’t regret being their mother. Not ever.

But mothers didn’t get to choose the worlds their children would grow up to know.

“Alright,” she said, “let’s go.”

Pel led the kids toward the steps. She bent forward and coughed, though she managed to cover her mouth with the sleeve of her coat.

The kids didn’t say anything, and neither did she.

What was there to be said?

Pel was exhausted and terrified and achy and miserable—and probably infected, because who wasn’t?

Pel made sure to keep her breaths pointed away from Jules and Rayph. Even if it was only a matter of time until they caught the plague, too, Pel did not want to die knowing they’d gotten it from her.

Mothers didn’t make themselves accomplices in a plagues’ murder of their children.

The three of them walked up the steps and headed into the building, with the cult’s guards following behind.

None of this felt real.

Lassedite Bishop was dead. And Lassedite Verune…—no, he wasn’t a Lassedite anymore. He wasn’t even human anymore.

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Quite a few people had been less than thrilled by the thought of an inhuman monster laying claim to the seat of Lassedicy, though Verune’s Norms had quickly disabused them of their misgivings. All that remained of the unpopular opinions were the shallow, tart troughs two Norms’ streams of spore breath had left in the basilica’s pavement. The sight and the smell of it lived rent-free in Pel’s mind. Alive with wisps and plumes like alien fire, the green torrent had burned away all that it touched, reducing the dissenters’ remains to hissing, fizzing dregs. Horrified bystanders who stood too close to the death-cloud dropped like flies as the Norms’ spore-breath made the plague run wild through their bodies.

And the smell…

Even from inside the Pirouette, dozens of yards away from the scene of the crime, Pel had been able to smell its sickly, rancid, overpowering sweetness.

Oddly enough, it made her think of me. I had a sweet tooth, after all—especially when it came to pastries and Pel’s cooking.

After causing a near riot by revealing himself to the crowd—and the world—Verune had been in need of a place for his followers to park their vehicles. After all, you didn’t need to be human to have a need for parking spaces. As with most things, this turned out to be easier said than done. Pel’s fears of parking her car in the Melted Palace’s underground lot were borne out by the horrible, unearthly roars that emanated out from the entrance ramp mere seconds after Verune’s convoy had starting driving their trucks in. Verune sent his Norms slithering in to deal with it; one even floated her way down the ramp. A few minutes later, they’d come back out again, significantly advanced in their changes, gazing on the world with three pairs of gleaming gold eyes each.

Whether the other cultists were still alive, she didn’t know.

Pel put her hands on our children’s shoulders and whispered. “Whatever you do, don’t get close to the Norms.”

“You don’t need to tell me twice,” Jules muttered.

“Mom, look!” Rayph pointed.

His words knocked Pel out of her daze.

Over in an arched niche by the wall of a corridor, someone had set up a F-99 mask dispenser. It was about half full. Pel didn’t waste any time rushing up to it and pulling out masks for herself and her children.

Once upon a time, it seemed, the Melted Palace had had at least one reasonable mind.

One of the guards stepped forward and grabbed Pel by the shoulder. “What are you doing?” he demanded, in between coughs.

“Staying safe,” Pel replied, after she finished putting on her mask. Seeing Rayph was having trouble with his, she set her purse on the carpeted floor and got down to one knee to help him put it on.

“Hmph.” The guard turned away. “Get moving, Margaret is expecting you. His Holiness will be speaking soon. Mrs. Revenel wants you there.”

Up ahead, an arched opening led out into the Great Nave. Pel could hear the Norms that were out there. And she could smell them—like lemon-scented gangrene, and rotting wedding cake

It made the hair on the back of her neck stand on end.

“Is it okay if we watch from the upper floors?” Pel asked the guard.

“That’s fine. Just follow me.”

They walked past the entrance to the Great Nave, up to where the corridor turned onto a sumptuous marble staircase, mottled in dark shades and intricate sculpting.

Behind her, Rayph let out a yelp.

Flinging her head back, Pel turned around to see the half-changed Norm from out on the street slither through the side entrance and toward the Great Nave. Spines tipped in glowing green bulbs stuck up from his human torso, while his lower body was all serpent—long and thick.

One of the guards brought his hand to his earpiece. “Understood,” he said. He tapped his companion on the shoulder. “Let’s go.”

Pel gripped the staircase’s balustrade. “Where are you going?”

“There are some holdouts holed up in the clerics’ quarters,” the guard said. “They’re not keen on listening to changelings.”

“You can watch the proceedings from above,” the other guard said. “Once they’re finished, someone will come to escort you to your lodgings.”

“We get… lodgings?” Jules asked.

The first guard nodded. “Yes. Only the best for Margaret’s brood. She’s been expecting you, you know.”

Pel and the kids looked at each other for a moment before continuing up the stairs to the second floor and walking up to the edge of the cloistered walkway, coming to a stop between two of its arches. Leaning over the low wall gave Pel a full view of the Great Nave below, in all its splendor. The stained glass windows shined their many colors, while the full glory of the afternoon sun poured out through the Nave’s ceiling Eye in a luminous cone. Currents of spores bobbed in the air, twinkling in the sunlight. They shined like grains of fire, green and gold.

Pel felt like she was going to vomit, and not just because she was sick.

Verune and his Norms were making the Great Nave into a serpents’ nest. It was like the dive bar back at her mother’s place, only a thousand times worse. The Norms were everywhere, and they were making a mockery of the Great Nave. The pews were being torn out and ripped apart by tooth and claw and unholy magic. The Norms broke the wood into bits and pieces better fit to be piled into mounds to lay upon and coil on and around.

It wasn’t enough that the world had ended; they had to go and debase the ruins.

And yet… from where she stood, Pel could just barely make out the lower edge of the Sun Door at the back of the Nave.

Pel didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Years ago, she would have said that no evil could get within a stone’s throw of that holy place. Even if the Angel’s Sword had been lost, the rock where it had once rested would remain hallowed ground. The power of God was as real to her as the air she breathed or the faces of her children.

But now…?

She wanted to scream.

These monsters hadn’t just destroyed her world. They’d destroyed her hope.

“Look,” Jules said, pointing across the nave.

At the back of the walkway around the Nave, one floor above the Sun Door, Pel could see the Moon Doors had been thrown wide open. Though she couldn’t see inside the Lassedite’s Audience Chamber from where she stood, she had little doubt Verune was there, planning Angel-knows-what. After finishing his speech from the basilica’s balcony, Verune had floated down to the pavement and flung open the Melted Palace’s sculpted bronze doors with his supernatural power. The other Norms slithered behind him as he entered, holding their heads low in reverence.

There wasn’t any sign of the armored templars that were supposed to guard the Moon and Sun Doors.

She didn’t want to think about what might have happened to them.

Jules looked left and right in furtive, nervous gestures. “Alright,” she said, seemingly satisfied, “I don’t think anyone’s watching us.”

“Is there something you’re planning on doing?” Pel asked.

Jules nodded. “We need to get out of here. ASAP.”

“How? What do you think Verune and his cultists will do to us if they find us trying to leave. What do you think your grandmother will do?” She shook her head. “Not to mention, all of the exits are probably guarded, too.”

“You never know,” Jules rebutted. “This place is filled with secret corridors and shit.”

Pel wanted to sob. “Honey, you’ve been watching too many episodes of Guardians of Time with your father. R-real life doesn’t work like that.” She shook her head. “Verune’s men are getting the priests to join their cause. And even if we could make it to the car and drive away, the Norms would take us before we’re even halfway free, and the zombies would claim whatever’s left.”

“So what are we supposed to do, Mom,” Jules said, terror in her voice, “just sit down and die? This isn’t like you.”

Pel wanted to say something comforting and wise, but she came up empty and sighed. “I know,” she said, softly.

“Uh… maybe one of the sneople can help uh… keep us safe?” Rayph suggested. “It could be like an escort mission!” He tried to be perky.

Jules narrowed her eyes at her brother. “Sneople?”

“Snake people,” he replied, with a serious nod.

Jules chortled. “Does that mean we’re at snurch now?”

“Rayph,” Pel said, “you want us to get one of the Norms to help us?”

He nodded. “Uh-huh.”

Pel wanted to point out that expecting a demon to help you would only lead to disaster, but she’d been doing that very thing herself; she’d gotten the Norms’ help in making it safely to the Melted Palace— after a fashion.

“Who would we even ask?” she said.

“We can look around,” Jules said.

“What can I do?” Rayph asked, with a level of excitement his mother found genuinely discomfiting.

“Stay close to me,” Pel said, “that’s what.”