At last, the frozen forest opened into a clearing. Orange bled into blue. Heat and fresh air streamed in, creating a welcome breeze.

“Thank the Angel,” I muttered.

Kreston and I stumbled into the clearing and fell to our knees, and for once, the ground beneath us didn’t feel like the inside of a freezer. We shook out our limbs and snorted and coughed, bringing the warmth back into our bodies.

“We’re almost there,” I said, helping Kreston up off the ground.

Up ahead, Lantor’s snowy grit gave way to steppes of scrubland littered with bushes and orange-brown boulders. The land rolled down into a valley and then rose up in a hill on the other side. Beyond that, the land dipped down, and though I couldn’t see what lay in the second dip, the Precursor Bridge’s far end was clearly visible at the top of the incline behind it.

We really were almost there.

Maybe that was why I felt so much dread.

We weren’t quite home free yet. Bits of the incursion-world extruded from the valley and its hills like thick fangs. The rocky precipices fumed with pale gas and orange haze. Wisps of blue clouds rained down and dissolved into smoke where they glinted in the sunlight.

“C’mon,” I said.

Andalon grabbed Kreston’s hand as we moved down the terrain, winding between rocks and bushes. Behind us, the frigid incursion-landscape crumbled and fumed under the heat of the setting sun.

We made good time, quickly reaching the base of the first valley. The climb up the hill beyond it was invigorating. It definitely warmed me up. For a moment, I even forgot my dread, seeing nothing but the hilltop past the bushes and cacti up ahead.

With a burst of speed, I ran up the last few yards to the top. Gravelly soil crunched beneath my boots as I staggered to a stop.

I stood and stared. Andalon ran up behind me and hid and grabbed onto my hand.

“Mr. Genneth,” she said, in a quivering voice. She repeated my name over and over again in a terrified whisper. “Mr. Genneth. Mr. Genneth.”

I cursed under my breath.

“Fudge…”

Standing atop the middle hill with one valley at my back, I now had a clear view of the second valley down below, across which the Precursor Bridge lay waiting, at the top of a second slope.

“Holy crap…” Kreston muttered, coming up from behind. “What is that?”

“I…” I shook my head. “I think it’s a battlefield.”

That was really the only word that came to mind, though, if it truly was a battlefield, it was unlike any battlefield I’d ever seen.

Massive objects littered the scene. They were silver and oddly geometric, like chunks of quartz you might find in the dirt. Wide furrows scarred the land, stretching out from the objects—a crash trail, perhaps? Some of the objects had grown upward, almost crystal-like.

Also, none of the silver objects rested on Lantor’s soil. Rather, they sat in chunks of the incursion world that intruded on the valley. It gave the ground a mottled look: brown and darker brown. Clouds of hot steam rose up from where the river at the valley’s bottom got cut off by the alien earth. The steam mixed with billowing plumes of orange and blue, and the sounds of cracking ice.

“We…” I turned to Kreston. “We have to move as quickly as we can.” I pointed at the entrance to the bridge. “That’s our target, got it?”

“You can’t be serious,” he replied. “Look at all that smoke and stuff! I can barely see anything through it.” His wings shuddered as they folded against his back. “What if something’s there?”

“Mr. Genneth…” Andalon said. I didn’t need to see her to know she was speaking through tears.

I could feel her trembling behind me.

“,” I muttered.

There went my last spell slot.

Golden light briefly spiraled around me, filling me with strength. I felt my muscles bulk up a little, causing my scales to rustle against my armor.

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Then, without asking for permission, I turned around and hoisted Andalon up off the ground, cradling her in my arms.

She was crying.

“Let’s go,” I said, glancing at Kreston, “and don’t look back.”

He nodded, and then we ran.

Andalon started freak-out babbling, but I just muttered, “Quiet quiet quiet,” over and over again. Thankfully she seemed to get the message.

Some of the silver objects flickered in and out of existence as we passed them by.

Whatever these things were, their presence here was tenuous, to say the least.

The lightheadedness returned as we descended into the valley. The frigid particles in the air coated my mouth and nose. I could feel them bubble and hiss as they sublimated into gas. I coughed, spitting up blue.

As we crossed the river, we passed a cluster of the silver objects, underneath a massive tower of smoke and gas. Beyond them, the air cleared a little, which gave me my first glimpse of the last leg of our journey, and once more, what I saw stopped me in my tracks. The scales on the back of my neck stood up on end.

Everything tingled.

A group of figures stood on the other side of the river, on a patch of the incursion world’s soil, flanked by its thorny brambles and those gray leaf-things. The figures moved in spastic, laggy glitches; others lay on the ground, utterly motionless. None of the figures were complete. I only saw them in bits and pieces of them: here an arm, there a leg, there a wing. It took me a second to form a mental image from all the pieces.

Green feathers, along with whites and browns and patches of iridescent reds.

Beaks.

My tail stuck up behind me.

“Hummingbirds?” I muttered.

But they weren’t hummingbirds. Hummingbirds didn’t look like people. Hummingbirds didn’t stand three-and-a-hap feet tall with wings on their backs and scales on their arms and legs.

There are two kinds of impossible; two kinds of unknowns. The known unknowns, and the unknown unknowns. The difference is a matter of our awareness of our own ignorance. Hummingbirds weren’t an unknown. They were the sacred animal, a living symbol of the faith. Tales of them wove their way through Lassedicy’s myths and legends—but not like this.

No, nothing like this.

The ground rumbled. Andalon closed her eyes and she screamed.

“Run!” I yelled.

Kreston and I ran.

The hummingbird-people stumbled about. Shells of spherical light flickered in and out of existence around them. Some of them foamed from their mouths and fell to the ground, dead and twitching.

One of the silver objects surged with growth, rising up from the earth like a beanstalk from a fairy tale. Polyhedral chunks clustered in shapes like spiders and shrimp spilled out from the rising silver. The creatures spread and swarmed, their legs beating the earth.

Curtains of auroral energy swept across the landscape.

And then, from the jungle, a monstrous shriek.

Fungus-touched things crawled out from the alien trees. I saw gray praying mantises with flowers for heads, their limbs snapping off as the fungus devoured them. Trees uprooted themselves, whipping their tendrils about. Amalgams of the manta rays and the headless, cord-fleshed elephants swept their distended bodies in wide arcs, swatting at the hummingbirds and the geometry spiders. Swords clashed. Spears of light sliced through the fungal abominations, leaving seared wounds that cracked and fumed as they bubbled into gas.

I ran like heck.

Whole swaths of the nightmare flickered in and out of existence. One moment, the land was dusty badlands, shrubs, and a riverbed; the next, it was orange air and dusty clouds, with groves of furled gray and trees of bundled wires. The level of the ground changed beneath my feet, dropping by at least half a foot. I stumbled forward, nearly toppling, but managed to stay upright by sticking my tail out behind me, letting its weight pull me back.

Otherworldly sounds blasted behind us.

Kreston and I raced up the hill. My lungs burned for breath, but I waited until the sky was blue before I sucked in air. I pushed myself as hard as I could go.

I was almost there! The ground turned into Precursor metal.

Then Kreston screamed. “Dr. Howle!”

Turning back, I saw the boy had fallen forward, stumbling over the changing ground.

, I thought, activating it once more.

Thank the Godhead was a free action.

I moved Andalon’s increasingly tiny body into the crook of my arm as I shifted and grew, freeing my hands as they turned into forelimbs. Sparks flew as I scraped my lengthening claws against the bridge’s metal.

Spinning around in place, I whipped Kreston with the end of my tail, flinging him forward. It would have injured him severely, had ’s blue energy shield not softened the blow.

Bouncing off the ground, he skidded forward along the bridge like a water-skipped pebble, hurtling toward the hole I’d made in the bridge on my first outing in .

“No!”

So, scampering forward, I did the only thing any self-respecting pangolin could do in that situation.

I stuck out my tongue.

The slender, slimy thing had to be almost half as long as I was.

I wrapped it around Kreston, holding onto the energy shield like it was a big blue egg.

And then, slurping it in, I ran like heck, dashing across the snow-covered bridge, toward the invisible curtain that cut through the sky.

The curtain rippled as I passed through.

Now that I was back on my side of the world, the intruder’s landscape had disappeared from sight. But I could still feel its presence.

Fortunately, in having passed through the curtain, I’d gone from being just another truck-sized pangolin to a truck-sized pangolin with god-modding powers.

The first thing I did was to will myself and my companions up into the air.

The second thing I did was to raise my arms.

The third thing I did was to summon an impenetrable barrier of see-through crystal.

Below, the earth rumbled as my barrier grew, stretching to the ends of the horizon and the roof of the sky. Our pursuers slammed into it, denting it with a sound like concrete hail.

Canceling , I shrank back down to my good old half-pangol self. Gobs of my sticky pangolin saliva still clung to the Kreston’s forcefield.

“Now what?” he asked.

“Good question,” I muttered.