For my sanity’s sake, I fixated on the idea that perhaps “Shiny Guy” was how Andalon referred to small, metal-plated statuettes. If that was the case, then yes, there were lots of Shiny Guys.

I needed confirmation. I desperately, desperately needed confirmation.

I’d come a long way in revising my understanding of things to conform with what I’d learned from and alongside Andalon, I was turning into a wyrm. Other people were turning into wyrms. Wyrms—and people who were turning into them—manifested psychokinetic powers, and the ability to create realities within their minds, and the ability to upload the souls of dying and the dead into their minds, so as to provide them with all the benefits you’d expect from a quality afterlife, because otherwise the forces of Hell would turn them into demons and use them to conquer the world during the Last Days. All these things were happening.

But none of them suggested that there was more than one Angel. It was like learning that, sometimes, 1 times 1 was 2. It threw everything for a whirl.

Fortunately, I wasn’t helpless anymore. I could present the information to Andalon in a format I knew she’d be able to experience in full. Resting my claws on the now-squeaky-clean tile on the floor in front of the toilet, I hyperphantasized an image into being, plucked from one of my memories. I willed for it to rise up from the tiled floor.

And rise it did.

A window of stained glass rose up from the bathroom floor, stopping just as it pressed against the ceiling. The window was from the church the family had attended when I was a kid. As a child, I’d looked up to it—always literally, but sometimes figuratively, as well—sitting in the pews of my childhood church, huddled up with the rest of my classmates—or perhaps my sister and Grandma Liza—our eyes glued to the priest by the altar, and the waves of dappled light that streamed down from above.

My paternal grandmother—Grandma Liza—was an unshakable mountain of faith, and whenever she came to babysit—which was often, at least when I was little—she’d take us to Church for Convocation, and if it wasn’t her, it was Sessions School. She was the kind of woman who never failed to leave sprigs of sacred herbs on the statues of Lassedites and Lucents outside Church.

Like any good church, ours had its fair share of stained-glass windows: one in the apse, behind the altarpiece and the ambulatory, depicting the Angel’s likeness; another, encircling the ceiling Eye, depicting all three Persons of the Godhead. The latter was probably the more magnificent of the two, but it was hard to see unless you were standing near the center of the Church. As such, it was the image on the apse that most held me under its shadow, and the hyperphantasy I’d conjured here and now was no different. The stained glass was recreated with Sunlight already shining through. It stood larger-than-life, with almost mystical inner light suffusing its many colors. The Angel’s glittering raiments pulsed in red and gold; His head pointed upward at the darker hues of the twilight sky, daylight shining unobstructed through the points of uncolored glass that dotted over His bronze visage. The pattern-wings were in purples and blues, merging with the upward gradient of an image of a darkening sky. The Sword—rendered in shimmering silver—He held aloft, ready to pierce the Veil of Night and guide the faithful to Paradise.

“Andalon… is this an image of a Shiny Guy?”

The little girl nodded in solemn affirmation.

“I remember him,” she said. Her gaze turned distant. “I asked the Shiny Guys for help. But they were such meanies.” She stuck her arms down and pouted. “They didn’t help at all. ‘Specially him.” She pointed at the magicked glass. “He said, ‘Andalon do this’ and ‘Andalon don’t do that’. He wasn’t fair! He wasn’t!”

Andalon crossed her arms and scowled.

And there we go. It was official. The Angel was, in fact, just one of many.

Boy, the sound of the world falling out from underneath your feet really is something, isn’t it?

Everything seemed to spin, literally. My floundering mind willed myself to hyperphantasize the bathroom revolving around me at a furious speed. My head hung limply atop my lengthened neck. I didn’t even flinch at the ear-chewing shrieks that came from where I’d unwittingly dug my claws into the satin-smooth white tiles.

“Oh, and Mr. Genneth,” Andalon added, “he wasn’t the only one.”

Great, I thought. Now she tells me!

“There were—”

—But I couldn’t listen after that. There was too much of a storm inside my mind. Inside my soul.

I could have pulled up the Testaments from the app I had on my console, but I didn’t have the patience to fumble through the pocket in my hazmat suit and look for my PortaCon among the remains of my hand sanitizer supply.

Fortunately for me, wyrms had excellent memories.

With barely a thought, a copy of the Testaments blinked into existence in front of me—and not just any copy, but. My copy, with its crinkly pages, and its thin, fibrous dark-blue cover that felt like sharkskin as I held in my hands.

The book floated mid-air. I willed it to get bigger and rise higher, and it did. The pages doubled in size, and the ink-printed text grew with them. An unseen wind blew over the pages. The sheets of imaginary paper rippled like soft laughter as they flipped by. My thoughts lifted the words off the pages. Soon, a little flock of excerpts—bits and pieces of the Words of the Witnesses—hovered all around us.

He spoke of a Princess and of Memories Broken. He heralded the coming of an anointed one, of a savior who will rise and lead us out of the Night and its darkness.

The presence soared beyond my understanding. The roars of the four winds split through my mind. A shriek beyond sound revealed my shattered soul.

He came from the Light. He brought the Light. He was the Light. He returned to the Light.

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Oceans slept within His Sword. Oceans and storms. They held the Question of Creation. Her Question. The Question we must answer.

He Died for us. He Fell for us. He Suffered for us, to bear us up to Paradise.

He gave of Himself to placate the darkness and atone for our Sins. He heals that which was corrupted.

His face was the glory of the noonday Sun.

Until now, the Words of the Witnesses had been, first and foremost, food for my heart and spirit. The intellect could only grasp so much from them, due to the abundance of mystical, visionary language and outright contradictory statements. You could spend your whole life reading meanings into them, and people had; that was where much of the Elder Voices had come from. Some said the Words were a true and honest record of man’s encounter with eternity, the seeds from which our Faith had grown. Others contended the ancient words’ meanings were lost to time, and that what remained was only what we, ourselves, had read into being.

But now, in the light of Andalon’s revelations, pieces of the passages floating around me were transfigured. I hyperphantasized the key words and phrases rising up from the rest, glowing with divine fire. The words sent thoughts racing through my mind. These were heavy burdens, with a palpable weight to them. They rolled down flumes of implications, down, down, down into the depths where they settled at a precipice over the abyss of the unknown, piercing it with their revelations All the madness and mystery that had uprooted the world since the Green Death’s arrival crystallized under the force of my new revelation. In my mind, I screamed at them to stop, but the conclusions were ruthless. There was no escaping logic, and—fool though I was—I still had enough sense not to try to contravene it.

Were the Testaments… was the Angel…

The thoughts numbed as they passed.

…had they been talking about Andalon?

The floating words fell like dead butterflies. They quivered as they disappeared through the white, tiled floor.

“Mr. Genneth?” Andalon asked, concerned.

“He Suffered for us,” I said, “to bear us up to Paradise.”

“What are you saying?” she asked.

“Were they talking about us, Andalon? About wyrms and transformees?” I trembled. “Were the Words of the Witnesses talking about me?”

I averted my eyes, keeping my gaze fixed on the furrows my claws had dug into the bathroom floor.

“No,” I mumbled. “No no no no no…”

I’d thought I could put Lassedicy behind me. But no. We hadn’t just been wrong. We’d been out of our league.

“It was there,” I said. “All the time, it was there, waiting…” I looked Andalon in the eyes. “Princess,” I muttered. “Memories broken…”

She certainly looked like a little princess. And broken memories? That fitted Andalon to a T!

Was Andalon God?

I thought of what I’d learned: the Andalon I knew was only a fraction of a greater whole. A fragment of &alon.

So a piece of God? A fragment? Maybe even the Lass Herself?

I shook. I shivered. I stammered incoherently. Paresthesias danced across my body, lagging as they passed over the parts of my body that still clung to their humanity.

There was a very, very big difference between an agent of the divine and the divine itself. It was the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning. One showed you the way. The other was the way.

I prostrated myself before Andalon.

It was like a dam had burst. Old habits, long repressed, broke through the surface. My hands sputtered and twitched with years—decades—of suppressed Bond-signings. Bending my neck, I traced my finger above my forehead.

Across, down, across, up.

Across, down, across, up.

Across, down, across, up.

My lips fumbled, trying to speak all the holy words at once, thrown in by the library-ful by my perfect memory: prayers and devotionals, and songs of Convocation, and Lasseditic hymns, and Glories for the Sun, and—

—I gasped.

The mother of them all rose to the surface: the Tetralogy.

“Forgive me,” I said, “for I am broken! Forgive me, for I have sinned! Embrace me, for I seek the Light. Embrace me, O Holy Angel, because I am yours!”

I repeated it a second time, though, through my frightened sobs, it probably sounded more like gurgling than prayer.

And then, I felt a touch at the back of my head.

Her touch.

“Mr. Genneth… what’s wrong?”

Pushing off the ground, I skittered back on my cracking knees. I tumbled over my tail. My claws raked against the tile as I scrambled back to my knees.

Andalon knelt on the tile, across from me. There were tears in her eyes.

I reached for my lucky bow-tie, only to feel my claws slice through a patch of human skin on the middle of my neck. The cut was deep, but there was no pain.

My bow-tie was around the neck of the hazmat suit, draped over the toilet handlebars.

There wasn’t any blood, either.

“Andalon,” I whispered, petrified, “what are you?”

I know I’d asked the question before, but I had to do so again. Things were different now.

Before, Andalon was merely responsible for the wyrm transformation. That was the source of beef with her. She’d done it without asking me, and had dragged me into her quest to destroy the darkness. And not just me, too. All of us.

I’d gotten over that, mostly. I still resented the loss of my humanity, but the first-hand experience of all the good I was accomplishing by aiding the souls of the dead helped soothe that hurt.

But, now…?

If Andalon was God, or a part of God, she was responsible for a heck of a lot more than just wyrm transformations.

It would make her the reason why suffering existed.

It would make her the reason why the fungus hadn’t been destroyed in the time before the creation of the world.

It would make her the reason why my son died, my sister went insane, and my mother killed herself before I could ever know her.

I’d thought the Angel had abandoned us, and that Andalon was here to pick up the slack, but now, it seemed like she was part of the Godhead’s plan all along.

Slowly, Andalon shook her head. “I don’t know.” She started crying again. “Please, don’t be upset with me. Please! I—I—”

When next I spoke, I spoke from a place that I rarely, if ever, let out into the open. I spoke from that place of quiet, fragile light that kept me going, and gave me a reason to live.

It’s not every day that you get to have a heart-to-heart with a piece of God, let alone one that was crying for you.

“Andalon,” I gulped, “if you really are our salvation… if you’re God, or if you know God, or if you know even the slightest piece of truth about the whys of this world and the suffering that we endure… why would you…” I smacked my lips. “Is this some kind of test? Is it a punishment for not having believed? For not having believed enough? For having believed too much?”

Andalon lowered her gaze in shame. Her next words were barely above a whisper. “I don’t know.”

The questions just poured out of me. “Why is there suffering, Andalon? Why is the world so filled with pain? Why is there war? Why is there cruelty? Why is there death? Why is the plague here?”

“I don’t know…” Andalon said.

“Why did my mother kill herself before I could ever know her? Why couldn’t my father have made enough time for his kids? Why did my sister lose her mind? Why did she die? Why was my son born with a congenital disorder? Why did I push him to get a surgery that took his life?”

Andalon clenched her hands into fists. “I don’t know, Mr. Genneth!” She yelled, but I could tell she didn’t want to.

She was trying to be brave.

“If you’re God or a piece of God,” I said, in tears, “how can good be good when it comes with so much suffering? How can you be at peace with putting these burdens on us, and all the pain and heartache that comes with it and call it just? The sins of the fathers are not the sins of the sons, except by choice, and by choice alone. Why did it have to be this way, Andalon? If you’re God, and great, and good, why couldn’t it have been better?”

“Mr. Genneth,” she said, weeping along with me, “I… I don’t know, but… if I could do better, I would.” She nodded vigorously. “I would! I would!” She burbled. “Please don’t be mad with me, Mr. Genneth. Everyone is always so mad with Andalon. No one else has been Andalon’s friend, except you. Only you.”

Her words dumbfounded me into silence. It stemmed the tide flowing through me, leaving me feeling hollow and spent.

“I’m s-sorry, Andalon,” I said. “I’m not angry with you, I—”

—Andalon let out a wordless cry with quivering, limpid eyes as wide as the sky, and just as blue.

She lunged toward me. On instinct, I reached out with my arms, and—miracle of miracles—I caught her. She was diaphanous and ethereal—a dream of ice and substance, but I held her.

Then, embracing me, she wept, but not with sorrow.

She wept with joy.