“I’m trying, Octavia!” Gwil snapped, his cheeks flapping in the wind.

  A cacophony of hisses answered.

  “Gah! You’re all ganging up on me.”

  The ceaseless wind had Gwil plastered to the ceiling, so he had to move by wriggling like a worm. Three stories below, through the rain and the hail and the churning clouds, Tezca—carrying Claws in his arms—marched against the storm, making his way up the hallway.

  Though Gwil and Octavia shimmied along in hot pursuit, Tezca was making good progress. He would escape if Gwil didn’t do something quick.

  Dammit. It’d be way better if I could become giant instead of tiny.

  Everything stopped.

  It was startling not only for the suddenness but also because Gwil was now falling. The wind had died as if at the snap of fingers, and the storm clouds were breaking apart. The air seemed to soften with the lack of crackling lightning, though splotchy afterimages still marred Gwil’s vision.

  As the storm within faltered, the greater one outside the temple raged in answer, reaching a frantic, fever pitch.

  Pop. Gwil shrank to the size of an ant so he wouldn’t splatter against the ground. He twisted around as he fell and saw Octavia still clinging to the ceiling with her suckers. She raised two tentacles as if shrugging at Gwil.

  He landed softly on his feet in a crouch. A heartbeat later, he cringed as Challe smacked down on the pavestones, a heap of crumpled limbs.

  Gwil grew as he ran toward her, moving backward so he could see forwards. Challe was breathing and her bones were shifting beneath her skin, so he hurdled over her, sprinting to catch up with Tezca.

  With the storm ended, Claws was moving under his own power, and the two were hauling ass—they’d nearly reached the exit at the end of the hallway.

  The Malikauan temple shattered like glass.

  The floor and the walls heaved at the building succession of terrible crashes. Sharp, clattering, stone-on-stone collisions—these impacts were distinct from the storm’s forceful thunder. They had weight behind them.

  Splinters webbed across the ceiling. The entire thing collapsed.

  Gwil sidestepped a chunk of falling stone as he scanned the ceiling for Octavia. There—she was not falling, but flying upward, tentacles flailing.

  The storm bellowed—the true Gracestorm, the one that belonged to the sky.

  High above, at the peak of the Malikauan sanctuary, a chasm sundered the cavernous ceiling. Within that fissure, a black abyss roiled, spitting green lightning.

  No, no, no. Oh, no. Poor Challe.

  With the funneling curtains of rain and hail, the air above seemed a sheet of ice.

  “Octavia!” Gwil shouted.

  Biting his lip, he glanced both ways. Challe lay on the ground to his right. On the left, a mountain of rubble filled the hallway, blocking Tezca from sight.

  Pop. He shrank and jumped, letting the wind gobble him up. Flaring Nirva, he raised his arms over his head to block the debris. Whipping back and forth without a semblance of control, Gwil rose into the atrium.

  The uppermost levels of the temple were being torn apart. More of the bedrock ceiling crumbled as the storm chewed it away. On the exposed sides, the terraced balconies were collapsing, entire rows of buildings avalanching down.

  Within the cyclone of carnage, Gwil lost sight of the snaketopus. A flying stone block ripped one of his legs off at the knee, flipping him over and giving him a look at the floor.

  Debris plummeted downward, cratering the base level of the atrium. Gwil caught a fleeting glimpse of Cort and Leira—thanks to Cort’s bulbous body cast—huddling beneath a natural rock formation amidst a massive crowd of Malikauans.

  Gwil clenched his teeth and twisted himself back around. Octavia was too small to stand a chance against this mess—he needed to find her fast.

  He used Mir, revealing the ethereal tide of jade that filled the temple with gnashing waves. Looking through the chasm, into the storm’s shining green heart, he saw how it was blighted with Yalda’blood.

  Gwil shied from it, scanning the reaches of the atrium, trying to get his bearings while being thrown around. He saw Octavia above, a tiny smudge of purple.

  I need to get to her.

  Gwil shrank himself down even further, and the wind devoured what little control he had over his body. His vision shattered into fractal prisms, as if his brain could not function at this size.

  His eyesight returned as he flooded himself with Nirva. More than ever before. So much that a waterfall of excess poured from his shrunken body, a trail of multi-hued vapor speckling the torrent.

  So much that he became heavy despite his tininess.

  The voices broke through in an outburst, shrieking with deranged laughter. Gwil’s leg grew back in an eyeblink. His Mir showed the storm not as a single monstrous entity, but countless shredded bits. And he could see the currents of the wind.

  Gwil rode one, flipped, and kicked himself off a hailstone, boosting upward, his Nirva slicing through the force of the wind. He pushed off a piece of rubble to alter his direction and then bounced from current to current until he reached an upward draft.

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  If he were bigger, Octavia would nearly be within arm’s reach.

  Gwil raised his tiny arms over his head and embiggened. He reached as far as he could—stretching until the tendons tore. Pop. He shrank into his fingertips. Pop. Again, again—like pulling himself up the rungs of a ladder.

  Normal-sized, Gwil wrapped his arms around Octavia’s bulbous head and curled up around her as they started falling, careening through the wind’s madness.

  The voices whimpered into silence. Gwil felt spent. His extremities went cold as his Nirva sputtered. He was woozy and lightheaded, and getting shaken around like dice in the hand of a desperate gambler wasn’t helping. All he could do was hold on tight.

  The ravaged temple swirled around him. The rain! Gwil realized. White-capped rivers of rainwater rushed down the ruins, flooding the base of the atrium.

  A crosswind grabbed Gwil and sent him spinning like a dervish. Everything blended together and just as he was hoping he wouldn’t vomit, his face slammed into something mouth-first, shattering all his teeth.

  Whatever he’d hit, it was surprisingly soft. Gwil fell a short way to the floor, splashing in ankle-deep water as he landed. Octavia scurried away, hissing.

  “Pwehlugh!” Gwil spat out a mouthful of blood and bits of teeth. Dazed and bleary, a towering green mass filled his vision.

  “Eeaiieee! Zeus’s shriveled phallus, what the fuck did you do that for?”

  Gwil put his hands on his head to stop it from wobbling and his surroundings clarified. “Thethcuh! O nuh! ‘y ung!”

  Tezca plucked a lump of bloody pink flesh off his shoulder and threw it at Gwil’s face.

  He caught it—relatively sure it was his tongue—and tossed it away. There was a ring of teeth—his teeth!—embedded in Tezca’s bald skull.

  Gwil laughed. It was a perfect bite, like a baby squid-shark. Tezca started prying out the teeth and beaning them at Gwil, one by one, swearing between each throw.

  “‘At udnna-gah!” Gwil forced every drop of Nirva he could muster into his severed tongue and most of it grew back. He still couldn’t quite talk right without his teeth—only little nubs had poked through his gums—but it was good enough.

  “That wouldn’t have happened if you’d fixed my head earlier,” he said.

  Tezca waved him off and went running back down the hall, high-stepping through the water.

  “Claws! Claws, can you hear me?” he called as he shoved his way through piles of rubble. “Where are you?”

  Gwil got himself up, knees a bit wobbly from the lack of Nirva, but it was working its way back.

  “Challe! Challe, can you hear me? Where are you?”

  Tezca whipped around. “Go away!”

  “How about you fix my head now?” Gwil said, splashing through the water to catch up to Tezca.

  “How about you fuck off?” Tezca spat. “We’re out of time, you imbecile. All of us. Party’s over.”

  Before Gwil could answer, the hallway’s wall crumbled under the weight of the collapsing floor above. A deluge of water poured in. A whole bunch of Malikauan bodies came with the wave, arms and legs sticking out everywhere. None were moving. Clouds of blood brightened the dirty water.

  It hit Gwil like a wall. The devastation. He grabbed two fistfuls of his hair as a melon-sized lump formed in his throat. Oh, Challe… I’m so sorry.

  “Arghhhh!” Gwil grabbed two chunks of broken stone and jumped up onto Tezca’s shoulders. He crushed Tezca’s neck between his knees and started bashing him in the temples with the rocks.

  “You stupid piece of shit! Look what you made her do!”

  Tezca reached up to punch Gwil in the face, but his fist only connected with the back of Gwil’s skull.

  Gwil kept hammering away. The fleshy, smacking sounds morphed into the hollow tone of rock against bone. Tezca went down on one knee and then slumped forward, going blue in the face.

  “This. Is. All. Your. Fault! All these people dying- Challe is gonna blame herself! How is she supposed to deal with that?”

  Tezca wrenched his head around just before the next strike connected. He ate the blow with his mouth and bit off Gwil’s finger.

  That allowed Tezca to catch Gwil’s wrist and rip him off his shoulders. Gwil’s arm burned at the flash of Nirva as Tezca swung him in an arc and slammed him down on a pile of debris.

  Tezca spat Gwil’s finger out. “How dare you make me resort to such a disgusting act?” He turned away, cupping his hand to his mouth. “Claws! Claws! Hurry up and come out! I can feel that you’re not dead and I’d rather not… uh… Claws!”

  “Hey!” Gwil jumped up. “I’m not done with you. When Challe sees this, you better be dead.”

  “Huh?” Tezca turned around while heaving a block of stone. “Is that what you’re on about? You idiot. This wasn’t her. I mean, the storm, the flooding, the lightning strikes, the fires—yes that’s completely her, but—”

  “What?”

  “This wasn’t the Vessel. The storm didn’t destroy the roof.” He placed his hands on his hips, as if with great pride. “This temple has withstood thousands of Gracestorms. Look up, you fool, and see your death.”

  Gwil looked and saw that some hulking object covered over the breach in the ceiling. He spotted a bunch of big mechanisms whirring on the underside.

  “Yuma has arrived,” Tezca said. “He busted the ceiling open with one of his stupid machines. Bahaha! You’re doomed. I’m leaving. Our fight is over; let’s call it a draw. Good luck!

  “Claws! I’m gonna count down from ten.”

  “Fuck you,” Gwil spat, and drool did splatter from his toothless mouth. “You destroyed all these lives and you’re just gonna abandon them. You are such a coward.”

  “Nine! Yup,” Tezca said. “Don’t care. I won’t be goaded by petty insults. You obviously have no idea how scary Yuma is. If you think I’m such a shitty ruler—seven!—then here you go. The slaves are yours. Five!”

  “Self…” the voice was small. A rasp.

  “Claws!”

  “Here, Self. My… legs…”

  Claws’s head peeked out through a gap in the rubble. Water flowed over his crushed body.

  “Thank goodness,” Tezca said, slapping his thighs. “I was about to give up. I just wanted to say goodbye and tell you why to your face.”

  “Self?” Claws wheezed.

  “I know,” Tezca said, grimacing. “I was gonna save you, but I just remembered how much you fucked us over by forgetting to secure Jade’s statue. That really pissed me off.”

  “You never… told me to do that!” Claws cried before falling into a coughing fit.

  “You did an acceptable job. I’m sure the next generation of Claws will be even better!”

  Tezca snapped his fingers.

  Gwil stopped in his tracks as Claws’s body disintegrated, melting into bubbling pink goo. A cloud of shimmering silver aura drifted toward Tezca’s body. He raised his arms and roared as he absorbed it.

  “What?” Gwil shrieked. “Your own brother? I thought you were kinda funny, but you are the worst fucker I’ve ever met. I hate you.”

  In lieu of answering, Tezca spun around and ran back up the hallway. Gwil turned himself backward so he could run his fastest and gave chase.

  The water was thigh-high and fast-flowing. More poured over the collapsed edge of the atrium’s base, which now held a whole damn lake. Looking higher, waterfalls fell from the balconies.

  Gwil shrank, jumped off a piece, and hurled himself at Tezca.

  He grew back to size as he caught up and—

  “Pineapple Upside-Down Cake Technique!”

  Tezca’s fist crushed Gwil’s jaw.

  The bones in Gwil’s neck broke and numbness filled his body.

  But Tezca had struck with his off-hand, and Gwil’s head had snapped back around to face the right way. Gwil couldn’t move, but if he could, he would’ve smiled.

  “That’s not an apology,” Tezca said as he continued tramping through the water. “It’s an offering. In exchange, tell Yuma that you killed me.”

  Tezca stopped and turned to face Gwil. “And if by some miracle you beat the king, come find me. I’ll make you some eggs benedict.”

  Gwil groaned in trying to answer.

  Something crossed Tezca’s face. “Tell the Vessel… there’re some things I wish I’d done differently.”

  With that, Tezca continued on his way. He’d reached the archway at the end of the hallway by the time Gwil managed to sit up. And then he was gone.

  “Fucking hell,” Gwil said, shaking out his tingling limbs as his spinal cord seared. He thought he’d better hold off on passing that message onto Challe. She wouldn't care for it.

  Gwil looked up at the rampant destruction and the brutal storm. Oh, man. She’s gonna be so upset. This is really bad.