A million lights shining out in the dark, clouds of gas of greater size and galaxies stretching between them, setting the heavens on fire with greens and purple. A thrum is everything, something so deep that it touches the fabric of reality, a sound too present that you hear it always but cannot realize until you are away. Away from the ground, away from the real, able to reach out and touch the filigree. A grand mechanisms stands in the heart of the universe sending a sound through the fabric, binding two to one, binding two to one, binding two to one, binding two to one. The machine becomes sight, an eyeless growth of exotic materia on hard angles, then the curvature of life, and now something beyond comprehension on this side. The machine becomes the universe; existence turns inside out, and the veil is passed.

  Weight on a metaphysical sense, the vast field of chaos too uncoordinated to be called stars shine through a field of hazy maroon and rivers of crimson. Yellow lights, sparks of crystal made to eclipse suns sparkly on their drift away from the center, shedding shards of their selves that fall into the universe below, seeds of souls for the life that pulls at this realm like gravity. The bright spots birthing the souls of mortals spin up from an explosion, and throughout the existence of this creation stretches the body of a slumbering giant, its fingers made of chaos, as big as galaxies. In the giant’s right hand, it holds a hammer made of a thousand thousand masses more dense than reality, its left-hand ends as a stump, bleeding a warm light that feeds all minds in the two realms outside of the truly ancient, outside of the enemy.

  A being appears from the chaos, a floating point of light with the power of a god and the forgotten name of one as well, untethered now from the real, returned as servant here. It waves a hand, and the shard begins to move away, set on course to rejoin into its original position inside the mass of the soul-birthers. Elation comes, a sense of return so powerful that it cannot be made into words, home, belonging, a final completion.

  Coriander gasps, sputtering, her chest heaving and more pain searing through her than she can ever remember. She tries to scream, but that is gone, her voice so cracked that it feels like it bleeds inside. She tries to move, but instead of a jolt of pain, only a horrible numbness comes. She remembers a light, finality, a sense of relief so palpable that it brings tears to her eyes, but it starts to fade from memory, gone like a dream.

  Again, she tries to move, and through the clearing tears in her eyes she see herself lying still. She is on a rock, body twisted and broken beneath her like she were some kind of discarded doll. Her right arm is a burnt remnant. She tries to speak again, but only manages a choking gasp.

  A face looms into her vision, so sudden but so still that it gives the feeling as if it has been there forever. From a mask of chalky white that looks like bone, two red eyes glow in deep and hollow sockets. Again, Coriander tries to pull away, but her body gives no indication that it hears her pleas.

  “Don’t…k…kill me,” she manages to whisper.

  The face moves closer, so near her own now that it is all she can see, shining eyes looking down at her like a hawk would stare at a mouse. “Kill you?” it asks, the entire plate of its face vibrating with the words. She can see the rest of it now, its body a mockery of a well-muscled man, skin made of white bone, gaps in the joints displaying sickly powerful muscle lying beneath. “My dear fairblood, you are already quite dead, killing you would be redundant. Besides, I would not end you now, not after I spent so much trouble to pull you this inch back from the veil.”

  Then she sees herself as the tears clear from her eyes, pushed away by the fear of this creature. No, she realizes now as she sees herself again, it isn’t her right arm that is burned but her left. Coriander stares down at her own back, neck a gruesome twist. “No,” she rasps, her voice a squeak through a twisted windpipe.

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  “Unfortunately, so,” The Thirty Seventh says. “Bother me not with whatever musings on mortality or sick emotions occur to you now, answer me.” It holds up a knife in front of her face, her knife. “Upon this blade clings the blood of Extinction. How did this come to pass?”

  Coriander stares at the knife, the blood staining the blade between circular patches of bright metal. She gawks up at the creature, made so small by its casual power. “That is Charlene’s blood,” she croaks.

  “Mmm…” The Thirty Seventh says, rubbings its chin. “Fate finds me treasures. I come to determine the success of my experiment, and The Highest hands me this boon. Truly, I must be in the course of good works, great works.” The Thirty Seventh looks back to the talking corpse of Coriander. “You call Extinction your foe?”

  “Charlene…” She looks down at herself once more. “She killed me. I’m really dead.”

  “Unfortunate for me to have lost even an ally of such meager substance.” The Thirty Seventh looks up the side of the cliff, the drop so high overhead, noticing the flecks of red painting the rocks. “My creation, my once neighbor and benefactor, you saw it did you not? Did you find it magnificent?”

  “You made that monster?” Coriander asks. A pressure washes from The Thirty Seventh at the word monster, pushing leaves from the floor, bending the limbs of trees to cracking, tumbling rocks from the cliffside. Coriander was never slow to pick up on social cues. “I saw it,” she says. “It was…powerful. It killed an administrator.”

  “Promising,” The Thirty Seventh comments, staring up at the sky. Through the haze of the trees, it can see the return of this land’s guardians to its tower. No matter how promising the subject had been, The Thirty Seventh never placed a bet against the hard arithmetic of numbers in a fight. The experiment will perish, though worse results could have come. If only The Thirty Seventh had not been delayed, it might have arrived in time to shepherd the experiment’s hatching, to make certain that it persisted as a reasoning and thinking creature. To cause so much destruction and woe to a guild like the Willian Guild though, even given how puffed up and important they carry themselves…promising indeed.

  The Thirty Seventh tosses aside the knife, letting the point stick into the soft dirt, the information it was after gathered. It would not do to linger. The Thirty Seventh bends and collects a case of steel from the ground, a little lighter for the years that have passed, but its contents were meant to be used.

  “Don’t leave me here.”

  The Thirty Seventh turns about, seeing the animated corpse of the fairblood still smashed upon the rocks. Wetness glimmers in the eye of the corpse, pain and anguish clear on its face. Such a waste to see a member of the fairer races, the natives of this world, reduced to such a state. Such sympathy wells deep in the left heart of The Thirty Seventh that it feels an outpouring of pity.

  “You are dead,” The Thirty Seventh repeats. “Return to the aether and find the natural end away from the dark. Your agency has been spent on this world, return your shard to the crystal from which you fell and give your experience back to the lord above all.”

  “No,” she dead elf girl begs. “Don’t leave me alone.”

  The Thirty Seventh does not sigh, its body has long been cured of such minor deficiencies like unintentional communication. Once, when the righteous had armed him, he would have the recourse to offering aide even to the freshly dead, not the even moderately dead though, never had he such armaments. The fear in her eye moved The Thirty Seventh. It set its case down once more, snapping open the latches that would only open beneath its touch. The Thirty Seventh retrieved from the case a single vial filled with a pink liquid the consistency of smoke.

  “I am afraid that your physiology may be too exotic for this,” The Thirty Seventh says, twisting the vial. A needle, long and stabbing like a dagger spins up from the head of the vial. “If you should perish once more, know that all of the pain is only a fleeting thing. Think back to the light. Let that warmth carry you through the agony.”

  As the needle stabbed down into Coriander’s dead eye, as the contents pulsed into her frozen and cold body, the scream that ripped up through her throat was so powerful that not even having her neck nearly twisted shut could stop it. The world became red and full of pain, any remembrance of happiness or relief vanished like a forgotten dream. That last conscious thought she has before sensation leaves her, is that death would have been better after all.

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