Glancing downward, Dr. Marteneiss shook her head, and then uncharacteristically muttered: “If we start talking about that now, I’m worried we won’t be able to stop anytime soon.” She glanced at Vernon. “Let’s put it off for now. We can discuss it later.”

Vernon nodded. “You heard my sister,” he said, “get to work.” He coughed horridly.

“Right now,” Heggy said, glancing at some of the overgrown bodies, “our priority is to cut down this fungus and get these people out of here.”

The soldiers stared at some of the bodies. “How the hell are we supposed to do that?” one asked.

“Get some bone saws, I guess,” one of the doctors suggested.

“And where would they be?” the soldier asked.

The doctor waved his hand. “Follow me, we’ll bring some back.”

The two left, leaving four behind.

“You should go out, too,” Heggy said. “Bring in some beds.” She glanced at the rest of the room. “We’ll need them.”

They nodded as they departed.

Heggy came close to Suisei and me once the six were out of earshot. “I don’t think our colleagues are aware of what happened to them, or us,” she said, “and I think we oughta keep it that way until we get these bodies out of here.”

“What do we do now?” I asked.

Heggy sighed. “Give them the mycophage, and hope it will slow the fungus down…” She stared at the fungus tree growing from the corpse in the middle of the room. “…or, at the very least, make it easier to cut through.”

I had a feeling things were about to get rather macabre.

“C’mon,” she said, “let’s get to work.”

Opening the messenger bag slung over her shoulder, Heggy pulled out the portable refrigerator inside it. Wisps of water vapor hovered over the cold air as she removed a mycophage vial and began to use it to fill syringes.

We walked over to the Arakkan male. We figured we might as well help him first.

“If you do not mind me asking,” Suisei said to him, “how long has it been since the lockdown began?”

The man wobbled his head from side to side. “Hours? Days? I don’t know. Nothing makes sense anymore. I…” he coughed, “I can’t even remember how I got here.”

“Where is everyone?” I asked.

He coughed again, splattering green sputum onto my hazmat suit.

“Hiding, dying, or dead,” he answered. “The healthiest ones barricaded themselves in rooms.”

“Sir,” Heggy said, brandishing the syringe, “we need to give you the mycophage, to keep you from—”

“—Do whatever you want,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.” He coughed. “We’re all going to die.”

“The strangest things can happen when you least expect them,” Suisei said.

Bunching up the sleeve of the man’s blazer and the dress shirt underneath, Heggy injected the syringe’s contents into the nook of his elbow. His veins were dark roots bulging beneath his skin. Black ooze welled up from the injection site as Heggy pulled out the syringe and pressed down the gauze.

Suisei looked me in the eyes. “We need to move him.”

“A bed would be best,” Heggy said.

“Speak of the Norm,” I said, pointing to the double doors.

The group of six had returned, and they’d brought company—a couple of nurses to help. They wheeled beds in through the airlock tunnel one at a time. The last bed to enter was covered in a pile of a dozen or so bone saws, none of which were even the slightest bit clean.

Suisei and Heggy nodded. The three of us helped the gentleman to his feet. His legs dangled beneath him like a marionette’s. It took us a moment to notice the open fracture on his left leg. The broken bone extruded from the skin, pressing up against the man’s slacks.

“He’s got a broken leg!” I said.

“I can’t feel my legs,” he groaned.

“All the more reason to get him to a room or an operating table,” Heggy said. “Let’s go.”

“Now what?” one of the soldiers asked.

Heggy glanced back at the soldier, and then at the fungal growths from the people all around us—both the living and the dead. “Now, it’s time to fulfill your lifelong dream of bein’ a lumberjack.” She turned to us and placed the messenger bag on the bed, beside the patient. “Boys, you two can handle the mycophage, my combat medic services are required.”

I stared at Dr. Marteneiss. “Do you know what you’re doing?” I asked. “What if something goes wrong?”

“I’ll figure it out,” she replied, with a cough.

Back in my mind, Mr. Himichi, Andalon, and I found ourselves in a starry void once more. A smoky orb of black and red glowed down below.

“I’ve seen this,” Himichi said. “I remember it. I saw it in my dream—the one that inspired Cat.”

“This is the world we were just on,” I said. “The… planet.”

Mr. Himichi nodded. “Yes… you’re right.”

“You feel it, too?” I asked.

He nodded again. “Yes.”

Andalon looked at the both of us. “Feel what?”

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“It’s Kléothag’s memories,” I said. “They’re filling in the details.”

I didn’t feel any words, though. The thoughts were getting directly beamed into my head, such as the fact that the orb down below was the world of dust and red skies we’d just been standing on, as seen from high above.

I turned. “Look…”

A Sun that was not our own shone in the distance. It looked very much like our own Sun. And yet, it was but a candle to the Hallowed Beast’s glory.

We knew what He knew.

He, not It.

The knowledge came in a storm of many pieces. Concepts winked in and out of my awareness, solid one moment, dissolving like sand in the next.

The starry night teemed with life and magic. Distant worlds twinkled in the light of their suns. Kléothag traveled through the vacuum on waves of ensorcelled gravity. The magic insulated his surroundings from the influence of his body’s gravity, preserving the delicate orbits of planets and suns.

We felt Kléothag’s pride. It was a sovereign’s pride; a warrior’s pride. He had raised a mighty host. He had clashed with the God-King of Iklakanza, and the Golden Colossus, and the Fifth Wind.

Godspawn. Sowers of chaos.

The Endenen’s theaters spread far and wide.

I watched with bated breath as Heggy and two soldiers walked to the sapling of a fungal tree that grew in the middle of the lobby.

“Start sawing from the base,” she said. “If you see anything that looks like it might be hollow, or contain spores, leave it the fuck alone.”

Metal screeched as they rasped the bone saws against the fungus’ trunk—a vertical growth about as thick as a forearm. Unlike wyrmflesh, they actually managed to cut through the trunk, though it was a slow, laborious process.

Suisei and I helped lift corpses onto beds so that they could be wheeled out and disposed of in Garden Court. I used my powers to enhance my strength. In my psychokinetically boosted grip, the bodies were as light as balloons.

Within, Kléothag’s thoughts were thunder and wrathful lightning.

The battle spanned the most distal potentialities. Its ravages continued without end.

You cannot defeat an idea.

With the Forgemaster’s Spears, we sealed away what we could not destroy. Endenen Unadyne; the Battle of the Barrier. Many of the Mwill were trapped within, their baleful influence finally contained.

Victory was ours.

All that remained was to deal with the stragglers.

Kléothag moved, taking us around to the other side of the planet, bringing the great construct into view: the all-seeing rings.

Xuyux, the Mirror, Kléothag said, soon to die by my hand.

The concentric rings floated in the void, as of yet undefeated. And yet… Xuyux’s golden substance had dulled, and the many eyes were falling into slumber. The rings themselves spun slowly, wobbling in place.

“What’s wrong with it?” Andalon asked.

After the Endenen, those Godspawn not caught in the seal were reduced to mere echoes of their former might. It was easy enough to dispose of them now—though not without some risk.

There was no sound, and yet, we heard the Hallowed Beast’s roar. Kléothag’s mane inflamed, growing long and burning bright as white fire spewed from his mouth, pouring onto Xuyux.

One of Xuyux’s rings responded by whirling with sudden speed, its eyes brightly aglow.

After all, a weakened god is still a god.

Suddenly, the ring-being duplicated itself. Copies of itself winked into being, left and right and above and below. Some of the duplicates cracked the instant they’d formed, as if they’d malfunctioned, chunks of their rings falling away. One of the duplicates fell apart altogether, its eyes fading as its rings plummeted to the planet below.

Behold Xuyux, Kléothag said. The once-Lord of Symmetries, now a mere thimblerigger.

The surviving duplicates spun their rings at blistering speed. Lightning cracked along their golden mass as the rings were launched at Kléothag. The Hallowed Beast dodge effortlessly, skirting upwards with a flick of his wings.

But the rings followed.

Snarling, Kléothag folded his wings and turned in a corkscrew, flicking off strands of fire from his mane. They strands began to move on their own, solidifying into long forms—opalescent and serpentine. Jets of flame blasted out from their sides, forming wings.

And their eyes gleamed bright.

My pets, Kléothag said. The urubi.

“The wyrms!” Himichi yelled. “Those are the wyrms, from my dream!”

Spreading their blazing wings, the urubi slithered through space, chasing after Xuyux’s rings. They sliced their wings through Xuyux’s copies. Eyes burst into nothingness with great flashes of light. Whole sections of rings lost their golden gleam as they broke apart and fell to the world below.

The dark skies lit up as the rings burned.

Walking back to the bed with the bone saws, Heggy took a couple more saws from the pile and handed them off to the nurses, whom she joined a moment later. Their task was a gruesome one: sawing off the limbs of dead or the near-dead, to free them from the masses of fungal growth. Though many of the still-living victims had lost their memories, they still had enough awareness leftover to scream in agony as Heggy and the others separated them from their overgrown limbs.

More staff filtered into the lobby. Jonan and Ani walked in together, both wearing hazmat suits. Like many of the newcomers, they were disturbed by what they saw.

I took the liberty of walking over to them to explain what was going on.

“Clean-up, mycophage injection, and dismemberment,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s not a pretty picture.”

I don’t know how much you can do to slow the fungus’ progress, Andalon, I thought-said, but, please, do whatever you can. Do your best, okay?

“I’ll try,” her voice replied.

We just needed a little more time.

Progress was slow.

Dr. Horosha walked past me, and, noticing I was busy administering the mycophage to patients before they were wheeled away, he came up to me and whispered, “You could help with separating the infected from fungus’ overgrowth, you know.”

I shook my head. “I can’t, Suisei,” I muttered. I glanced at one of the bodies Heggy and Ani were working to pry out of the wall.

It looked like they were going to cut through the neck…

I looked back at Suisei. “Getting near the stuff makes me hungry,” I whispered.

He nodded in understanding.

Spreading his wings, Kléothag turned so that his back faced the starry void. His mane flared, its red flame turning blinding white as he breathed out more white, holy fire.

Xuyux’s rings spun. The construct rattled in the soundless void, seemingly trembling.

Kléothag’s flames spun around it, drawn into an orbit, but then the rings stopped spinning, and, suddenly, the fire vanished.

The rings’ dull gold faded to a sickly brown. Sparks leapt across its architecture.

Eyes narrowing in suspicion, Kléothag glanced around, until he peered over his forearm at the sun far behind him.

The Hallowed Beast’s white flames were now engulfing the sun!

Xuyux would use my power to murder a star in order to spare himself. It was a coward’s move.

Kléothag grinned. A faint aura quivered all around his body.

But I was prepared.

The next thing I knew, the planet below us began to get… smaller. At first, I thought this was because the planet itself was literally shrinking, but then I realized that it was actually moving away from us, because Kléothag was growing.

Soon, the shadow of the Hallowed Beast’s wings eclipsed the light from the orange sun, casting the dark red world in shade.

Xuyux responded to the challenge and grew in turn, but more slowly, and in unsteady spurts. A moment later, the ring-being’s growth stopped altogether. Meanwhile, Kléothag had grown so large, he was able to hold the sun in his paw-hand. Strangely, the two beings’ bodies seemed to be out of sync with themselves; Kléothag’s, most of all. The portions of Kléothag’s body further away from us lagged as they moved.

Kléothag’s memory told me that this had something to do with the speed of light, though I couldn’t fully parse the explanation.

The next thing I knew, the nearer part of Kléothag’s arm moved, followed by the mid-part and the paw-like hand at the end.

He threw the sun at Xuyux!

Mr. Himichi muttered in shock. “Did he just…”

Kléothag’s shoulder had finished the motion while his hand was still just halfway through the swing. The sun exploded into white flame as it hit Xuyux. It wasn’t until several seconds later when the light finally reached us that I actually saw Kléothag’s arm throw the sun. It was a moment of the past arriving to us after the fact. The star grew brighter and brighter in the Hallowed Beast’s hand as his white flame destabilized it, right up to the moment where the sun burst as it collided with the Lord of Symmetries.

The explosion blasted the ring-being apart, shrinking it down to size. Soaring toward the blast, Kléothag came to a stop right in front of the clouds of color and light streaming off the exploding star. He closed his wings around the expanding blast wave, holding the explosion against his chest, stardust trickling through the gaps between his wing’s feathers.

He was shielding the red world from the star’s demise, even as Xuyux’s ruined body plummeted into the planet’s atmosphere.

The sight was awe-inspiring.