The air was alive. As Iris sped across the rooftop encased in armour, the Aether in the air seemed to seep through the cracks in her plating and suffocate her. She watched from her vantage point as red dome after red dome rose from the streets and towered over the skyline; there was no more question to whose houses facilitated their Sigils.

Higher Order units awoke from their slumber, the whirring of their engines just enough to overpower the Aether clogging her ear canals. Canon fire began in small bursts like fireworks across the city as Iris drew nearer to the Academy on her horizon, itself already encased in a dome.

The clouds had darkened, and snow had begun to fall, but when Iris looked upward, glowing lights caught her attention instead. The lanterns above the city never glowed until after sunset, and the hundreds lighting the sky seemed to pulse outward, like small parts of a bigger organism.

The small parts were people; oblong and unclear until she stopped to squint, but there were four limbs, lifeless and hanging from the torso like a dead puppet.

The missing humans. Iris did not want to jump to conclusions. In such a case, she wanted to do anything but.

But she knew there was no way she was mistaken.

The domes were converging, the cult was about to welcome their deity, and Caynes was about to take his final bow.

She started again, not wanting to test how close he was to succeeding.

The air was thick. Every Beak Evalyn had passed in the airport terminal had mentioned it through hushed whispers and uneasy muttering, and she suspected there was a truth to the shared instinctual feeling. Despite her queasiness passing, Evalyn could sense a tingle in the air: the sort that made her want to itch her skin incessantly.

With Colte waiting beside her, she dialled the final numbers into the pay phone and waited for the operator to answer. But the line was silent, ring after ring.

She put the receiver down and tried again, but the same numbers garnered the same result. Silence.

“The operators aren’t picking up,” Evalyn said. “What’s going on?”

“What? I wouldn’t know I landed with you,” Colte replied, opening his suitcase.

“Something’s happened in the city then.”

Colte undid the protective bundle of clothing around his Aether-Line telephone and turned it over, undoing the bottom and fiddling with the electronics. “Your calls go to your official address, right?”

“Yeah. They’re rerouted down an Aether line afterwards.”

“What’s the phone number for that line?”

“Zero seven four two, five five six nine three eight.”

Colte finished punching the numbers into the telephone’s face, and the tone began to ring through the receiver. Evalyn waited, crouched beside Colte as something rustled on the other side of the line.

“Who’s this?” Elliot’s voice said, although heavily distorted.

“Elliot, it’s Colte. We’ve landed, but the operators aren't picking up. What’s going on?”

“Colte? Thank god.”

“Thank god what? What’s going on?”

“Domes are springing up all over the city. It’s under attack.”

Evalyn grabbed the receiver off Colte and pressed her face against it. “Where’s Iris?”

“She was with Crestana and her aunt. Went by police escort to their house, but something has to have happened.”

The fear in her gut welled up to her throat as Elliot admitted he had no clue what had happened to their daughter.

“Something?” she cried. “Elliot, she walked into a trap! The family’s in on this whole damn mess! I have to find her before—”

“Evalyn, the city needs you right now more than she does.”

“I don’t care, I’m going to find her.”

“There won’t be a city left to search by the time you do,” Elliot said, his tone deathly cold in an attempt to keep his mind off reality and on the task at hand. He was a soldier, something Evalyn would never manage.

“Iris is still part Spirit, she’s survived those domes, and she can fight Caynes. Our little girl isn’t out of the fight yet, darling. You’ve trained her better than that. Right now, there’s bodies floating in the sky, and if what you’re saying is true and the family is in on it, then something worse is about to come.”

“What?”

“Crestana told us that the Spirit of Spirits isn’t just a name, it’s their deity that’s promising some sort of…change.”

“Then Colte and I can draw it into our Mind Palace and—”

“No,” Colte interrupted, prying the phone from Evalyn’s ear and keeping it between them. “If it can control Spirits in any way, then we can’t risk it invading our heads.”

“I thought as much too,” Elliot agreed. “But you’ll still need to draw it away from the city. Make an ash storm over Excala, that’ll at least disrupt it. Evalyn can taunt it out of the city, attack it from a distance.”

“Over the ocean, that’ll be best,” Colte suggested.

“No. Draw it north, over the plains. I’ll—“

The Aether line crackled and cut as sirens began to blare over the terminal intercoms, setting panic into the travellers before a voice began to speak, repeating the same message over and over.

“Dear passengers, a state of emergency has been declared in all districts of Excala City. For your safety, the airport has now entered lockdown. Please remain calm and do not move from where you are. I repeat—”

Colte threw down the telephone and stood. “We need to go. Now.”

Iris leapt from the roof of the nearest building, feet first towards the dome’s tattooed red membrane. With one hand, she guided her Spirit into the dome first, clenching her fist as it clenched its teeth. She slowed her descent with the other, conjuring a liquid cone that rushed to her feet. She landed, immediately feeling the fishhooks in her skin as she had before.

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Worse now, as though they were dipping in and out, threading string through it. She choked on her pain and clamped her jaw down on a makeshift mouthguard, but it wasn’t enough. All she could see of the school were its gates, the statues flanking it observed patiently, waiting to see if she had learnt anything during her time there.

She looked at her hand, her near loss of consciousness blurring the line between her armour and its surroundings. The purple was bleeding from the contours of her plating.

Not purple; not quite.

Purple gas. A layer was seeping from her armour, mingling with the gas around her before disappearing entirely in the overwhelming red. As she focused on the phenomenon, it allowed her to focus on the sensation, or lack thereof.

Up her arms, down her legs, on her cheeks, the stinging had subsided like she had gained immunity.

In her delirious, pain-inhibited visions, the red gas had once turned purple, but her mind’s coopting of the gas and its pain had been far less metaphorical than she had initially thought. It was trying to tell her something.

In between mind-numbing textbook monologues that entered through one ear and left through the other, her science class had taught nuggets of information that had stuck. Mixtures and solutions: mixtures were crude fusions of different materials capable of being physically separated. But there were no gas mixtures, only solutions.

Because gases always mixed. Whatever bonded with the red gas, she could control.

Iris exhaled and let go of her body. The purple in her hair, her nails and her armour began to jitter as she relinquished more and more control until, like popcorn, they burst free from her shackles. She caught it, never letting go of the plume’s edges and remaining wary of how far it travelled up her nose. Short inhales, long exhales. She kept a boundary between her and the gas, like a rowdy dog in need of discipline.

Swaying her arms through the air, she fanned the growing plume around herself and further forward, ventilating the contaminated gas outward before recalling it to her body. Like riding a bicycle for the first time, it was easier said than done. Half the work was subconscious, so Iris could focus on pressing forward.

The grounds were quiet. The further she ventured, the more she found it strange. There were no humans, but no Beaks either. Little commotion besides the blaring lockdown alarms resonating like a siren’s call through the fog. Nothing suggested Caynes ever strayed from his method of operation, but the fact Iris was still standing meant that the gas still preserved Spirit life, else she would have disappeared immediately. The answer was something else.

There was no clear place to start, but if the sirens were sounding, lockdown procedures had begun. Every court’s process was the same: gather in the court hall and lock the doors. With no pain inhibiting her thought process, she gathered purple matter under her feet and materialised it quickly enough to launch her into the air. A pair of lassos took her the rest of the way, stabbing through the crimson-stained snow cover and anchoring themselves into the roof.

She cleared the first hurdle and plummeted towards the courtyard, catching herself with another liquid cone and sticking a landing she took no time savouring. She ran for Gewen’s court hall, recalling where it stood from one of her many lunchtime wanders.

Two great doors loomed out of the suffocating red gas; the gaps between the wood and the stone doorframe offered no resolute protection from the gas, and a lack of windows left Iris wondering if her hope had been misguided after all.

An entire school of children.

An iron lock, a latch and a barricade stood in her way; she could surmise that from a previous examination of each hall’s doors. Lock picking was a luxury; she’d bust through instead. Like the sling of a catapult, she winded her arm backwards, the spikes along her gauntlet morphing into a battering ram.

“I wouldn’t try that, Iris,” a voice advised her.

Without thinking, she threw the fist to her right, launching the battering ram aimed squarely at Caynes’s chest. As much as she could hope, the attack never landed, disintegrating at the mercy of another Sigil before returning to her armour.

“They’re safe for now. More use to me as ransom.”

“Ransom?”

“Pays to have people on your side in a situation like this.”

Iris scowled under her mask, the subconscious call to arms her beast was waiting for.

Being selfish. Good guy, bad guy. It was right; she was wrong. The things she had first promised her beast had crumbled with each passing day she spent with Crestana, each time Crestana had asked her what exactly she fought for.

Right and wrong. The FSA, S.H.I.A., and even Wesper had convinced her that right and wrong only existed in her own head, and the right and wrong in her own head was all that mattered. Evalyn had told her that it was an unshakable fact of life, Wesper had suggested an alternative world.

But in that moment, all Iris saw was rage. Good or bad, she didn’t care. Selfless or selfish, there was only one reality that mattered to her at that moment.

“Kill him,” she muttered.

Her beast lunged at her command, gnashing its teeth as it aimed for Caynes’s torso. Just barely dodging the attack with a barrier Sigil and well-timed movement, Iris caught him by the ankle instead, wrapping an intestine-like rope up his leg before stepping forward and swinging her arm, flinging across the courtyard and into the far inner wall.

A Sigil flashed across the building before a circular opening sliced itself into the brickwork, saving Caynes from the impact.

Iris started on a pursuit, but a strong pulse made her stumble as though she’d been winded. She doubled over, struggling to maintain her breath as the gas around her grew stronger, both the red and the purple. She felt sick, and her fingers jittered uncontrollably. Aether influx, a level she’d never felt before.

It was too late to stop whatever was happening above the city. All she could do was go after Caynes.

A shockwave of Aether erupted the city, taking even Evalyn by surprise. Even with the little Aether she could sense, the surge had stopped her dead in her tracks and had her gasping for hair.

“Your tattoos,” Colte said, pointing at a golden glow peeking from her sleeve. “They're reacting to something."

Evalyn looked up towards the main street. Of the fleeing crowd running away from the converging golden lights, half had keeled over, clutching themselves and spasming in pain. Beaks, any Spirit for that matter was reacting in some way or form.

And there was something in the sky, appearing in the few moments her eyes had gone askew. Like the moon had descended from the heavens and chosen a new resting place above the city. An orb cast a shadow across Excala; its pearly-pale turquoise veneer arrogantly challenged the sun for its place.

Two rings, circular scrawls of Sigil markings wrapped themselves around it crosswise as lines began to spread across its surface like incisions made under the guise of a surgeon.

The skin split and bloomed, unfurling from its shape with all of the life of reanimated flesh. The six separate wings unfurled like ancient ferns; almost looking divine amongst the snow.

Another incision across the shape’s centre and the white flesh peeled backwards, behind it a world in inverse. Like the mirage of an oasis, there existed another Earth through the white gates of the Spirit of Spirits; one more rich with Aether and dense with Spirits. One utterly hostile to human life.

The Beaks around them that had felt the surge of Aether the hardest began to dissolve into the ground, their bodies morphing into their own shadows and leaving their masks behind.

“What’s going on?” Evalyn muttered.

“They’re Beaks, that’s how they were before they settled with humans,” Colte answered as he pulled out his pipe from his coat. “None of the Beaks alive nowadays even know how to do stuff like this anymore.”

Colte wrapped his head in a layer of smoke, the two burning eyes peeking through to Evalyn. “Let’s get this over with.”

He puffed his chest, ribs creaking as his lungs expanded twofold and blew a gust of air through his pipe. The ensuing ash storm was almost sudden, with the smoke billowing from his wooden pipe swirling faster and faster by the second.

“Go,” he commanded, and Evalyn nodded, armouring herself before grappling to the rooftops. She ran north, unable to tear her eyes away from the Spirit deity as the ash storm slowly descended onto the city, blackening the sky and blotching out the sun.

The surging Aether did not cease, but Evalyn could only hope the Spirit of Spirits had a pride to match its size, a pride she could use to lure it into a fight.

She thought of Iris and wished that the little girl could live in peace. But the world didn’t work like that. It never had and never would.

“Act II: Character.”

People didn’t treat power with respect or decency; not her, not Iris, not the Spirit of Spirits itself. The shackles circling its body were all but proof of that.

“Act III: Subtext.”

But there was a small piece of the world that would at least keep those shackles from being physical. Her home. Iris’s home. That was worth everything. That was more than enough to remind her why she fought.

The bow sprung from her hands, the string between the bow’s ends more taut than physically possible. She rested her fingers on it, forming an arrow between where the two delicate tips met the golden fibres.

“Come here.”

She pulled back and fired her arrow into the storm, Darminjung’s blessing guiding her shot into the black abyss where flashes of gold fired like lightning in a storm cloud.

She turned to move to her next position but found out that she couldn’t. Her armour had frozen, joints locked up and forming an airtight prison. She tried to shift herself, the human part of her panicking as she assumed the worst.

And the worst came.

She saw herself as though looking in the mirror, but there was no human behind the eyes of her armour. The world blinked, and a gargantuan square iris stared at her.