It took but a thought. Then a dam burst, and out spilled muscle and bone. The changes came briskly, just three breaths long. A new pair of forelimbs flowed out from Finn’s belly. His body grew long, pelted with fur as his perspective tilted side to side from his efforts to balance himself as all four of his feet popped into padded paws. Gravity won out, however, when Finn’s center of mass lurched forward, pulling onto all fours. While Finn’s tail thickened behind him, thrashing with growth, his torso shot up, doubling in height to make room for the new pair of arms erupting beneath his shoulders, all of his limbs thickening from the tides of muscle that billowed across every inch of his body. Finn’s ears tingled as they crept upward. He sucked in breath with his doubled lungs, catching screams and crashing waves with his feline hearing.

No amount of familiarity with the tickle of wings unfurling from his forelegs’ shoulders would ever be enough to keep Finn from shivering at the sensation. The knight shook out his wings; colored like the midday sky, their feathers quivered in the breeze, iridescent. Turning his gaze back toward the walls of Bazkatla played a trick on Finn’s mind. It seemed to have shrunk. But that was only because of how much Finn had grown. Two men standing on top of one another would have just barely reached the point where Finn’s still-humanoid torso merged with his four-legged, leonine lower body. A third man on top of them might have just managed to touch the nose of Finn’s burgeoning snout.

Gobs of black fire dribbled out over his lips, fangs, and tusks, hungry to burn.

Out of the corners of his eyes, Finn saw Jak and Lorn’s bodies swell and reshape. The three brothers-in-arms stepped away from one another to make room as their bodies grew. Their appearances converged to one another, though traces of their individual humanity still clung to them, like memories.

Finn’s daggers had grown along with him, each now nearly as long as his legs had become, and, like the tip of his tail, all of them were swathed in black fire. Flexing all twenty of his fingers, Finn let two of the four blades drop and instantly grabbed them with his lower arms.

“Let’s go,” Lorn growled.

Beneath his horns, Finn’s ears twitched at a rapidly approaching roar.

He looked up.

Pale blue wings glistened against the dome of twilight. Motes of light streamed off from a blade of twining silver clasped in one of the beast’s four hands, disappearing as they passed behind his tail.

Eadric!

The monstrous Lassedite roared once more.

The three knights set off in a gallop, their long lower spines flexing like springs. The speed was effortless.

Speed before flight.

Jak veered to the left and Lorn to the right.

Jak yelled over the wind. “We’ll flank him!” He veered to the right.

With a roar, Lorn moved off to the left, mirroring Jak.

In the middle, Finn pushed off the ground mid-stride with all four of his feet. He cast his wings wide open and struck a hard downbeat. Sky rushed through his fur as he soared, tail whipping behind him.

Bazkatla and its grid of streets, adobe, and painted tile sunk toward the sea as Finn rose. A ziggurat—an altarpiece of sandstone and marble—stood at the city center, looming over Bazkatla and its storied towers. Beyond the city walls, the swarm of revenants poured across the land chasing the shadow of the Angel’s Sword. They would reach the city walls in mere moments. Bazkatla would be overrun. It had no hope.

Except us.

Finn raged his wings, flapping as fast as he could, closing in on Eadric up ahead.

He breathed a blast of black flame at Lassedite Athelmarch. Eadric dodged, twirling upward and drawing in his wings.

“Eadric!” Finn bellowed.

The Lassedite flashed a glowering roar at his once-favorite knight. Jak and Lorn swooped in from either side, seizing the momentary distraction, slicing their weapons through the air.

“Fools!” Eadric snarled.

Glancing upward, Eadric made a gyre of his limbs. He twisted his body, sweeping the Sword around in a full circle, sending a wave of energy like a wake of sharpened dawn. The shockwave tossed Jak aside like a broken crossbow. Lorn pushed up off the air with a massive downbeat that sent him soaring.

Finn’s hearts raced. His whole body went tense.

Swishing his wings, Eadric somersaulted in mid-air. With two flicks of his upper body—one up, one down—he breathed out darkness in an arc and two columns. Finn swerved around the column, but the flames lingered in the air, sinking slowly. Finn snarled as Eadric plummeted downward with a kick of his hind legs and a beat of his wings.

With a snarl, Finn angled his wings to bank him around the inferno, dodging the blast, but at the cost of precious time. The air streaming over Finn’s arms slowed his descent even more.

Below, Eadric spread his wings wide, pulling out of his dive at great speed. In his grasp, the Sword of the Angel glinted with the sunset’s light.

Finn thrusted all four of his arms forward, pointing the tips of his four swords straight ahead, piercing the winds with his blades. His descent quickened. The rooftops below grew larger and larger. Beyond, Eadric raced over Bazkatla’s rooftops.

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Finn gritted his teeth—fangs and all. He had to pull out of the dive at the last possible moment to get enough speed to catch up with Eadric.

Closer… closer…

The wind tore through Finn’s mane.

Now!

He spread his wings wide and leveled out his flight.

From out of nowhere, something sharp and serrated smashed into Finn’s flanks, first once, then twice. Claws caught him and yanked him down and back. Finn’s wings kept moving, pulled forward by their momentum until they overextending themselves. Air rushed up at the undersides of his wings, striking them like brick walls and enough force to make him feel like his wings were being pried out of his forelegs’ shoulders.

Flailing, Finn fell into a corkscrew spiral, tumbling to the ground, but he rebounded with feline grace, his scraping claws screeching sparks along the tile-paved street.

Revenants!

In between breaths, he readied his swords.

Time seemed to slow. Finn glanced about.

So that’s where they were!

The creatures had leapt from the upper stories of Bazkatla’s adobe buildings, throwing themselves at the beast Finn had become. Still more revenants were in the process of leaping off the rooftops.

The swarm had set its sights on him.

Time sped back up. All across the Jade City’s rooftops and trellises, revenants bounded from hanging garden to hanging garden with their ever-cracking, ever-shifting limbs. Arm bones erupted through their hands, sweeping out into deadly scythes. Fang-filled jaws made sleeves of the mouths of the dead, swelled out from their face with bursts and snaps.

They pounced at the knight.

Finn swung his four blades in rapid succession. For split seconds, the bodies of the undead crumpled against the blades’ burning razor edges before bursting in two as they were sliced in half. The weapons’ black flames set fire to the revenants, burning rotting skin like so many ratty linens. Clumps of clotted blood burst into dark embers.

The attack felled a dozen revenants, but two dozen—three dozen—more leapt out of the woodwork. The rabid revenants flung themselves at Finn, who roared, bellowing fire, to create a front of persistent flame to keep them at bay, and burn them to a crisp if they dared come closer. But the dark fire was indiscriminate—it burned all that it touched. Even stone and sanded adobe caught flame.

Still, the revenants kept on coming. They leapt through the flames, indifferent to the pain. Finn slashed and slashed again, cutting corpse after corpse to carbonized shreds, but it barely made a difference.

Finn roared again, this time in agony. Claws had sunk into his horizontal back and underbelly.

Not even four arms and a gullet full of magic fire were enough to stem the tide.

Time was running out.

An explosion tore through the air, jabbing projectiles into Finn’s backs. Gibbs of things swished through his wings.

What now!?

Finn glanced over his topmost shoulders.

The revenants were detonating themselves. They exploded like powder barrels, sprayed osseous shrapnel in every direction.

Fuck!

Bucking his lower body to kick off some of the creatures, Finn set off in a sprint. In a single motion, he clambered onto a spilled wagon and spread his wings. Tensing his steely muscles, Finn leapt skyward with a push from all four of his legs, but revenants leaping down from nearby rooftops slammed into Finn’s flank, smashing into a building, back first. His wings crumpled against his spine. One of his feet bashed into doors, tearing through the wood and the stone like they were flimsy cloth.

Get off me!

Slicing more of the revenants to flaming pieces, Finn managed to create enough of an opening for him to launch himself forward, pushing off the wall with his hind feet.

The revenants tried flanking him once more.

I’m not falling for that again!

Finn met their serrated jaws and bony scythes with a bellow of his night-fire. A couple more bursts of breath cleared any obstacles up ahead. Ash coated the streets in black snow.

But this wasn’t a winning strategy.

At this rate, the whole city will burn to the ground before even half of the revenants are dealt with!

“Rayph?”

Finn ran, keeping his wings flush to his sides. He needed to get airborne.

It’s the only way I’ll catch him.

“Eadric!” Finn roared.

“Rayph?”

Finn’s gaze swept left and right, searching for a safe launching point.

Damn, the revenants are everywhere.

“Rayph Howle, I’m talking to you!”

Rayph pressed the pause button. The third-person viewpoint of Finn Logain froze; the pause menu appeared on the screen.

Rayph loved his mother, but sometimes she just had the worst timing.

“Rayph,” Pel said. “I need to use the television. Mass is going to start any minute now.” She was polite, but very insistent. I’d always found that demeanor of hers more intimidating than most people’s yells.

“Mommmm…” Rayph whined, “Can’t you wait just a little bit longer? I’m in the final battle.” He was having too much fun; it was so climactic. He wouldn't go down without a fight. He flickered his eyelashes at her. “It’s the final battle!”

Pel rolled her eyes. “You know I don’t like you playing that game, honey.”

Rayph smirked. “Because it’s sacrilege?”

As far as my son was concerned, ‘sacrilege’ was anything that made his mother make silly faces, huffing and puffing with indignation.

Honestly, I had no intention of ever trying to convince him otherwise.

“Yes!” Pel replied, huffing and puffing with indignation. “The Second Crusade is just as much a fact of history as the First Crusade, or your B- in Writing last year. There’s no such thing as black magic, and there certainly isn’t anything such as black magic that transforms people into monsters,” she smirked, “well, except for Neangelicals.”

Next to door-to-door Neangelicals trying to convince her and the family that the Church hadn’t resurrected itself properly after the failure of the Second Crusades and the collapse of the First Empire, nothing irritated Pel more than people who dismissed the faith as superstitious nonsense. She tried her best to remind Rayph of the truth—what little we knew about the event for certain.

Rayph remembered the explanation I’d taught him. “They were figurative monsters, Mom.”

“Sweetie, we both know that’s your father talking, not you,” Pel said. “All we know for certain is that Lassedite Athelmarch somehow lost the Sword. He definitely didn’t turn into a lion-dragon-arm thing.”

There was one more historical certainty regarding the collapse of the First Empire: the disappearance of the Sword of the Angel coincided with the first outbreak of darkpox in recorded history. Some audacious “scholars” claimed the two events were one and the same, and that the Sword became the darkpox virus (or somehow brought it into the world) as a result of Athelmarch’s abuse of the Sword’s powers.

“You, in fact,” my wife continued, “are supposed to be studying for that history test. You don’t get to skip out on your studies just because we’re staying home because of the pandemic.”

“But this is studying, Mom,” Rayph insisted. “It’s about the end of the First Empire. The crusaders did bad things. People got mad, both over there, and back home. People lost faith in the Church and the Empire. Angelicals came out demanding change, and then the Church did change: it got Resurrected.”

“And what about the people who didn’t like the fact that the Church changed?” Pel said.

“You mean like grandpa?”

Pel nodded. “Yes, like my father.” She spent a moment staring at the video game paused on the console screen. “I’m almost thankful Daddy isn’t still alive. If he knew a game like this existed… why, I think he might have actually tried to kill people over it.”

“Now, come on,” she said, “I’ve never done Mass remotely before. I need some time to figure it out. It’s important to do these things properly.”