My molluscan prime form flits through the air beside Bina’s hairy, cetaceous bulk. Below us, Saoirse sidewinds across the ruins of Heaven. Above us, Salome floats like a polar star. Our scout-forms and war-forms assemble around us. Shining glass, twisted metal, mossy fungus, barbed demon-flesh. A fearsome army. I wish I was confident it would be enough.

  We four sisters approach Ganea’s fortress.

  This ugly, crenellated cube of cyclopean black used to be the Father’s greatest war stronghold. It still bears the scars of the war to take Heaven. We laid siege to the place for many bloody years, only to find that He’d never been within, that He’d sealed himself further away and left His machines and relicts to fight a doomed war in his stead.

  Bugged the shit out of me, I’ll tell you that. But Ganea didn’t mind. Ganea lives for the fight.

  Her prime form uncoils itself from her black battlements. Massive and reptilian, like the dragons of human myth, plated in steel.

  Her red searchlight gaze lands on us.

  I don’t try to communicate with her in Diamantan. We use the Old Tongue. My enmity, my love, my sympathy and my vindictiveness—all of these intermingle in a whale song transmission that would take many thousands of pages to transcribe into a form safe for your ears.

  I’ll summarize:

  “Hello, sister. Where were we?”

  ???????????

  One last stop on the outskirts of Pastornos, before they’re in the city proper. An improbably upscale tavern on the edge of a dusky suburb.

  The Calfsport, it’s called. A fusion of old world glamor and the reflective darkness of modernity. Caspar walks with Jordan through its upstairs gastropub, where some late revelers wile away their final hours sheltered from real life, long after the kitchen’s closed.

  Jordan carries Peat Moss in doggy form. That gets some looks that bounce right off her aviators. Sunglasses indoors and at night. The regulars steer clear. These two strangers are clearly guests of the Downstairs.

  They descend into the Calfsport’s dark-dance basement. No show on tonight. Only chairs racked atop tables, a lone bartender cleaning up the sticky spills of the day. And, at a table still set up in the room’s central cavern, the gun-dealer.

  “Folks. So sorry.” From his station behind the chrome counter, the bartender flashes them an apologetic smile. “I’m afraid we’re closed. You’ve missed last call.”

  “We have an appointment.” Caspar slips a fifty-ducat bill across the bar. “With the purveyor.”

  The bartender’s wrist flicks and the ducat note is spirited away. “I see. My apologies.”

  “It’s all right, Harry.” The man at the cafe table waves them forward. “They’re late breakers, but they’re expected. Welcome, pilgrims. Name’s Carlo.”

  “Abe.” Caspar offers his hand.

  Carlo shakes it. “Interesting phone call you placed to me, Abe.”

  Caspar takes a seat across from the man. Jordan’s to his left. “Fellow in your occupation is used to interesting calls, no?”

  “Not with accents like yours.” Carlo pulls a silvery wand lighter out and sparks his cigarette. “Not so late and not so quick. But business is business and I’m always looking for suppliers or clients. Here’s the bad news: I didn’t bring guns, and I didn’t bring cash. I brought Everett.”

  Caspar watches carefully as the dealer’s friend detaches from his unlit corner. The man is a goddamn tower. It’s a credit to the modern, spacious digs of the Calfsport Tavern that exiting his lean doesn’t scrape his head across the basement’s crossbeams.

  Carlo takes a first drag as his muscle’s shadow falls across the table. “So if you’re looking for a shakedown, look elsewhere.”

  Jordan holds both her hands up. “No shakedown. Just two folks looking for a new, lucrative friend.”

  “Harry,” Carlo calls. “Usual, please.” The bartender nods his assent and starts plucking comestibles from the racks at his back. Carlo turns to Jordan. “Cute dog, mate.”

  “Thanks,” Jordan says. “I’d keep him at home, but he needs the exercise.”

  “Will you drink?”

  Jordan shakes her head. Caspar, after a moment, follows suit.

  “Respectfully, Abe and friend,” Carlo says. “The business depends on trust. And trust comes from prior relationships and associations. You, here, out of the blue… it does things to the hair on my neck.”

  “I understand,” Caspar says. “But respectfully, Carlo and friend.” He leans across the table. “You aren’t the man we’re here to talk to.”

  The cocktail shaker rattles one more time and falls silent.

  “Ah,” the bartender says. “You’re Irene’s.”

  Caspar turns in his chair. “That’s right.”

  The bartender slices a wedge off a lime and garnishes it on the edge of the glass. “Sorry, Carlo. Sorry, Everett.”

  The dealer looks up from his table. “What—”

  The lime-cutting petty knife sprouts from his eye.

  Everett’s hand claps to his throat. There’s a two-pronged olive fork sticking from it.

  The Iron Butcher pours the cocktail into the highball glass in front of him as Carlo’s muscle crumples to the floor.

  “He tipped excellently,” he says. “I’ll have to take my pound of flesh, you making me do that.”

  Caspar gets to his feet as Carlo’s blood pools across the marble.

  Ganea’s eyes flash in bitter realization as our war-forms surge forth. The stronghold gates yawn open and a sea of many-legged steel manifestations emerges.

  “Before we begin.” The Iron Butcher places the cut lime on the counter. “Would anyone like a Gin Rickey?”

  Caspar’s upon the Butcher in two leaping strides, carapace pouring down his face and chest. Jordan brings their table crashing to the ground, skidding the water glasses across the floor. Peat Moss bounds onto Carlo’s abandoned seat and launches from it into a clattering skid onto the bar.

  By the time he lands, the Butcher has already broken Caspar’s collarbone. A pinioning grab and a sharp slam against the counter was all it took; the wood warps where Caspar rebounds off of it. He staggers back, his splintered bone sending sharp shocks through his spine as I repair him.

  Jordan fires a fan of .45 lead into the Butcher, but his armor’s already forging across his entire body. The one bullet that was fast enough to make it under the plate tears a chunk from his lung that’s already regrown in the time it takes Caspar to find his footing.

  The Butcher and Ganea are so in-sync that he barely needs to think it. Everything he does is easily twice as fast as what Caspar and I are capable of. He stands before them, shod head to foot in an ugly, pitted carapace. Brutal and functional, its contours akin to renaissance munition plate, its only adornment the dry blood and battlescars that have accumulated over violent years.

  “Peat!” Caspar throws his hand out and stills the fawn in his tracks. The Butcher holds a knife light in his hand, his spike-shoed feet planted, his eyes hidden behind the metal grille of his faceplate.

  The four warlocks form a loose circle; the Butcher behind the bar, Peat Moss atop its edge, Jordan in cover, Caspar breathing hard as the bone finishes knitting.

  The Iron Butcher reaches forward and takes up the Gin Rickey from the bar. “I’ll have it, then, shall I?”

  Caspar’s newly improved claws dagger out from his fists as he and Peat Moss pincer toward the Butcher. Peat’s headbutt is ducked; Caspar’s claws are deflected in a shower of sparks. The knife slides into Caspar’s hip and sticks there, a barb of white-hot agony. He didn’t even see the blade coming. The Butcher’s head tilts back as he finishes the gin in one swallow, then hurls the glass overhand into Jordan’s brandished handgun, knocking her shot wide.

  Caspar spear-tackles the Butcher, folds him in half as they both go sprawling behind the bar. My warlock ignores the screaming nerve endings in his pelvis and once more brings to bear his new claws. Stubby, cruel barbs, sharp and hooked, designed to puncture and tear rather than slice neatly. He grapples the thick talons against the Iron Butcher’s breastplate, grinds two of them into the shoulder joint and tears. Armor and flesh peel.

  The Butcher clamps his elbow around Caspar’s forearm and rams his knee into the knife, driving it deeper. He maintains his hold as he stands. His right hand calcifies into a scissoring gladiator-blade which sings with speed as it bites into Caspar’s shielding pauldron.

  Jordan vaults the counter, pistol clubbed, and wraps all four limbs around the Butcher, bending him backward and slamming him to the floor. It’s a bare second before he’s returned to his feet, the inspector piggy-backed on him. The .45 roars two shots into the side of his head, but even at this range and against the thin metal of his faceplate, neither penetrates. Her third bullet pierces between the sliding plates in his spaulder and throws a fan of blood onto the bar; that’s as many squeezes of the trigger as she manages before he flips her forward over his shoulders.

  Caspar catches her and rolls her across the counter; she tucks herself against the other side and ejects the mag on her .45. Her partner weaves into the place she left, focusing his jabs on the fresh patch of blood Jordan painted, but it’s no use. The Butcher’s already healing.

  At his full power, our warlocks are doomed. They have one chance:

  Us.

  Ganea’s prime form leaps from the ramparts. She lands in the midst of her ocean of steel, crushing masonry and an errant manifestation that didn’t get out of the way quickly enough.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  Salome unleashes a glimmering tide of war-forms. Peat Moss’s acid dissolves a cooler and spills bottles of cheap beer across the floor. Bina’s teeth close around Ganea’s flank. The Butcher’s fist crushes a dent into Peat’s faceplate. Jordan finishes reloading and sends a bullet through the Butcher’s leg. Saoirse rolls a cloud of corrosive breath into Ganea’s face. Caspar locks a toe hold into their foe’s damaged knee. I whirl razor tendrils into my sister’s side, carving flesh from her bulk. The Butcher sinks an axe-handle heel into Caspar’s abdomen with his uncontrolled boot.

  Blood stains the bar. Mortal bones break and wounds open, then the gore reverses like some camera trick as they close up again.

  Ichor stains Heaven. A dozen manifestations die with each passing breath, disemboweling one another in alleyways or crashing in mid-air and spiraling to dash themselves on the frozen flagstones. Bloody claws, tearing maws, curtains of gore.

  Across two dimensions, we rip each other apart.

  Ganea hurls Bina into a tower; its upper half collapses. A cloud of rust and masonry billows forth as its pillars give way, burying Bina in titanic rubble. Jordan’s armor falters at the exact wrong time. A full bottle of top shelf reserve shatters across her face. She plummets onto the glittering floor.

  Caspar’s attention snaps to his sister. Bad move. Chitin squeals on chitin as the Butcher’s arm and biceps scissor shut across his throat.

  Caspar’s ears depressurize. There’s a grinding click in his neck. This isn’t a choke. The Iron Butcher is about to tear his goddamn head off.

  I’m trying to slide armor across Caspar’s throat, but Ganea’s prioritizing me, seeing how close to a kill her Butcher is. I’m swarmed with her steel beetles. Every iota of magic I send to Caspar is another defense dropped, another incision made in me. They’re inside now, excavating my corridors, shredding tissue. I summon war-forms within myself; in the slowed time of my demesne, instants become minutes, and in the space of a single exterior blow, entire skirmishes and ambushes are fought.

  Ganea doesn’t know about my sanctum, about the souls I’m keeping. I shift the pocket dimension deeper within myself to ensure she doesn’t find out.

  Saoirse twines herself around Ganea’s leg and dissolves a great stripe of black mold into her flesh. The Butcher’s gruesomely striated muscles lose their mistress’s enhancement. He doesn’t let go of Caspar’s neck, but his ripping grasp becomes a typical blood choke. He frowns in perturbed disbelief at the sudden absence of power.

  Peat Moss connects with a solid slamming headbutt to the small of the Butcher’s back. He drops Caspar into a heap before him.

  Jordan plants her gun against the nape of the Butcher’s neck and empties her fresh magazine into it. The gleaming white of his spinal column shows through the ruinous windows she’s drilled in him. His jaw’s pulverized; his flapping tongue hangs out of the rented tears in his helmet. He slumps to the floor; Caspar rolls to one side to avoid his timbering drop.

  Jordan is covered in blood and whiskey. Her nose is badly broken. She flips the emptied gun in her hand and mounts the Butcher, bringing the butt down again and again into his head. Her armor reforges; Bina bursts forth from the tower she was hurled into.

  Ganea shakes Saoirse from her and refocuses. The Butcher’s teeth, scattered across the floor, rocket back into the Butcher’s mouth. One pings straight through Jordan’s hand as it returns, punching a dime-sized hole in her palm and jittering the gun from her fingers. The momentary shock of pain is all the Iron Butcher needs.

  His hand shoots out and seizes Jordan around the busted face. He slams her armored head into the bar once, twice, three times. Her skull rattles inside her helmet like a bell clapper. Her clenching legs loosen and he rises to a knee, shifting his grip to her neck. With a chalky crunch, he breaks it.

  Her brain is severed from her body. Her breathing halts.

  Caspar’s leg comes whistling toward The Butcher’s head. He drops Jordan, jukes and catches Caspar around the calf without even turning around.

  Caspar detaches at the hip. The stumped leg dangles in the Butcher’s arms. Caspar still feels the bone pop and punch out through his flesh as the Butcher snaps it, still groans through gritted teeth against the pain, but he’s out from his foe’s clutches, and from the floor he darts out a vicious sweep kick that knocks the Butcher back onto his ass.

  Ganea’s warlock kips to his feet with a dancer’s grace and spins out of the way of Peat Moss’s charge. Swinging Caspar’s leg like a heavy maul, he swats the fawn out of the air, sends him crashing into the shelves of liquor in a cascade of glass and expensive bourbon.

  A tether of flesh lashes Caspar to his leg; so hellaciously strong is the Butcher’s handhold on his improvised weapon that, instead of snapping the limb back to Caspar, the spell instead slingshots Caspar up from the floor. A rare error from Ganea’s warlock. The momentum slams Caspar into the Butcher knee-to-gut and ricochets the man’s head off the reflective wall behind the bar.

  Lymph and blood weep from the sealing puncture as Caspar’s compound fracture sucks itself back inside. The magic is sluggish and accompanied by a flood of lactic acid. He’s pushing himself past his limits. He pivots on the newly fixed leg to throw a punishing combination of clawed punches into the pucker his knee knocked into the Butcher. Blood flecks out from the man’s helmet. He catches Caspar’s fist, unflinching even as one of my warlock’s claws shunts through his wrist. He twists his grip so punishingly taut that two of Caspar’s fingers pop from their knuckled housings.

  Two things happen at once:

  Peat Moss hocks a stream of acid at the Butcher’s outstretched forearm.

  Salome launches a mirror ball war-form with marksman accuracy into Ganea’s eye socket.

  It burrows into Ganea’s skull and then whirls itself apart, sending shrapnel blurring through our sister and ventilating her frontal lobe. She loosens a tyrannosaur scream and thrashes as she’s forced into emergency repairs.

  The Butcher’s gauntlet loosens and crumbles at the revocation of his mistress’s attention. Peat Moss’s acid splashes against the exposed forearm and boils the flesh into dirty fog. It melts like mozzarella, exposing the twin-span bridge of radius and ulna.

  Caspar’s fist hammers down and shatters them. The Butcher’s arm falls to the floor in a shower of bone shards. Caspar’s hand crackles back into position and he nearly swoons with pain and fatigue. The system strain is too much.

  A stinging snap. His healed hand shoots to his neck and for a moment he can’t comprehend the jagged fragment that’s stuck in it.

  The Butcher has thrown a lancet of his own broken bone like a dagger. It’s slid right through the strain-widened gap between helmet and gorget and into my warlock’s jugular.

  This fucking guy.

  He sweeps past my dazed, bleeding warlock and delivers a kick of such magnitude that it sends Peat Moss across the room like a football. The fawn bounces off a wall and crashes through a table.

  Finally, finally, the Butcher’s healing factor seems to falter. The arm he lost is regrowing in faulty wet ribbons that hang bonelessly like gory streamers. Ganea isn’t losing her fight with us—far from it—but the distraction intermingling with the system strain our warlocks have layered into the Butcher’s brain. The opening is here.

  But it’s no opening if none of our warlocks can take advantage. Peat just got cold cocked. Caspar’s bleeding out. Jordan’s seizing and thrashing as her nerve endings try to link back up.

  Ganea’s beetles—those who we haven’t already taken apart—course toward Bina, trapped within my sister’s serrated grip. Bina flails. Her power is too wrapped up in repairing her fractured warlock; if she stops, Jordan will die. She’s helpless.

  I know what I have to do. These mortals have borne enough pain for me. It’s my turn.

  I plow into Ganea with asteroid force. It wounds me much more than it wounds her, as the shockwave ripples through me, but I manage to wrap a set of tendrils around her enormous claw.

  I pull with everything in me. More war-forms spill from the cracks in Ganea’s steel carapace and skitter along my limbs, biting and scything.

  A bellow sounds from Ganea and a steel-girder squeal pierces the sky as I wrench her claw open just enough to free Bina, who darts away, trailing a fountain of blood from her weeping sides. I scramble from Ganea’s vengeful grasp, trying to latch onto her humped back where her claws can’t reach me.

  But I’m too slow. She catches a tentacle. I detach it in desperation, but not before she’s yanked it hard enough to jerk me back into her grip. Grappling barbs fire from her colossus and perforate me. She turns all her strength upon me. Her steel-shod talons sink in.

  This is going to hurt.

  My favorite manifestation drops like a falling comet into the undead town square that’s been built inside my prime form. I do everything I can to memorize its constructs; they won’t survive this.

  “Everyone inside the taphouse.” My voice amplifies and booms across the field. “Now now now.”

  A hue and cry and general commotion greets these words, but to my satisfaction they are obeyed. Edgar pauses in the doorframe. “We still can’t find that hermit fella Stephen,” he says. “What’s going on?”

  I curse and yank the ground like a tablecloth. From half a mile away, the yelping recluse spills into my arms. I shove him into the taphouse, follow him inside, and slap the door shut.

  I point at the windows. The glass frosts and thickens.

  “Ma’am.” Edgar again, staid and fearful, his voice the crowning bauble of a nervous commotion. “What is going on?”

  I surround the taphouse in a dense layer of blubber and leathery hide. Then I collapse at the bar and cling to the rack of taps to keep from seizing. “Keep your heads down and your eyes closed,” I say. “I’m about to be breached.”

  Caspar’s neck has sealed, but that’s all I can do; the rest of my power is pouring into mitigating the horrible thing that is about to happen to me. His ribs stay broken, his head stays ringing, his contusions remain like black storm clouds across his pummeled flesh.

  Ganea heaves. I burn off as many nerve endings as I can, but there’s only so quickly I can go, and I howl at the wrenching pressure. Bones crackle. Forests of tendon snap with thundering suspension-bridge twangs. A sickening, dangling lightness. I part.

  My elder sister tears me in half.

  I fail you as a narrator. I can’t describe how it feels. I can’t think. I’m out of metaphors. I don’t have words for it in your tongue. There’s nothing but pain.

  I’m sorry.

  Saoirse bounds through the new abyss between the two halves of me and wraps her serpentine folds around Ganea’s arms. My older sister has over-committed, spent so much of her strength on me that the constriction finally holds. Salome unleashes a war cry of pitch and volume that would curdle a mortal mind to cottage cheese to hear it, as her knife-edged manifold burrows into the flesh of Ganea’s vast thorax. Bina’s war-forms buzz through Saoirse’s fungal forest, intercepting Ganea’s next wave and dismantling them.

  Still, Ganea throws my sisters from her. Still, her horde outpaces and outbattles them. She’s too armored and armed. Her tower-sized lungs fill with Heaven’s rotten air and convert it into another earsplitting roar.

  Furious whistling breaths billow from the Iron Butcher as he brings his single remaining elbow down over and over across Caspar’s battered face. Both men are entirely disempowered now. A red darkness creeps in from the corners of my warlock’s vision. His consciousness is fading.

  A splash, a sizzle, and an acrid smell jerk him back from the brink. He watches the angry red patch of skin bloom forth from the Butcher’s shirt as acid eats it away.

  The Butcher turns, but the pain and the blood loss slow him down too much. Two percussive blasts open two pits in his stomach. He drops beside Caspar, shuddering on the blood-slick floor. Jordan plants her foot on his neck. One knuckle-scraped hand is holding her .45. The other is curled around Peat Moss’s midsection, hefting him on her shoulder like a bazooka.

  A hand cannon and glaring baby deer point between the Butcher’s eyes.

  “Ganea.” She spits my sister’s name out along with a broken tooth. “He evokes again, he dies.”

  Ganea screams. Ganea rages and roils. Ganea slams another barb through my face and pops one of my eyes like a vitreous balloon. Ganea sags to the ground, flattening a city block.

  I YIELD.

  I roll over, trailing a river of black blood from my torn-open body. One of my tentacles drapes across my floored sister.

  I hold her, what’s left of me, amid the ruin and the gore.

  Caspar’s wavering mind chooses this moment to pass out.

  ???????????

  Take a beached whale the size of a town and feed it to a colossal wood chipper. Hollow out a throbbing cavern in its flesh. Ensure it survives, but only just. This is where Caspar awakens. In me; in Hell.

  He staggers upright, feet unsteady on the spongy ground. I try to solidify the floor, to hide some of my bleeding biomass, and a spike of existential pain rocks me. I’e been hurt this badly before,, but not in many thousands of years. It’s all I can do to keep a flickering light and breathable air inside my ruined body for him.

  He creeps through me, careful to shield his eyes from where the pallid light of Heaven seeps through my mottled wounds. Broken masonry and cracked glass intermingle with the secreting flesh I can no longer conceal. Below their bending cartilaginous supports, my membranes tremor with effort as they keep tens of thousands of tons of barely alive Old One from prolapsing and crushing him.

  The bier he typically wakes up on is lodged halfway into a pile of pathetically flopping viscera. A manifestation curls nearby, shivering and malformed. Caspar crouches before it.

  “Don’t. No.” I raise skinless tendrils before my face. “Don’t look. Don’t look.”

  A tear rolls down his cheek and drips off his chin. He lays his palm on me.

  I claw at his chest. “I need to send you back. I need. I need to—”

  “Don’t you dare,” he whispers. He sits on the bleeding floor and pulls my broken, glistening body into his lap. He gazes at me. The fused flesh, the weeping wounds, the jellified pseudopods. I’m nothing. I’m hideous. I’m not even humanoid. Just a lump of pained meat. A deep-sea corpse washed up on the shore, helpless and alien. He was never meant to see me like this. He can’t see me like this. He can’t.

  “Caspar,” I sob. Only that. Only his name. Pitch-black tears of ichor drip onto his thigh.

  “Miss Irene.” He bends down and plants a kiss on my distended mantle. “I’m here, baby.”

  In the middle of this nightmare, the universal wound that my existence has become, he holds me. No hedge magic in his hands. No magic of mine, either. But somehow, his touch still blunts the pain.

  “I’m here,” he says again.

  His words echo through the dilapidated chambers of my heart. The space balloons them, as though this minuscule human’s voice was so much larger than it is.

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