Gwil rubbed his eyes, confused about Challe’s outrage and wondering what all he’d missed. Tezca’s yammering had him drifting in and out of sleep.

  The storm erupted from Challe, knocking Gwil backward. He rolled to shield Octavia as the snaketopus wrapped its tentacles around his torso to hold against the wind.

  Challe was swallowed by thick, billowing clouds as the dark columns filled the hall. Howling winds whipped in every direction, a mess of dueling currents.

  Gwil was dragged this way and that across the floor before being thrown into an airborne tumble. He slammed into the wall back-and-face first, breaking his nose.

  He watched over his shoulder as Claws—scrabbling at the pavestones with his disgusting fingernails—got swept up by a fierce gust. Claws, too, wound up pinned to the wall, just a few paces away from Gwil. Tezca, however, stood resolute in the middle of the hallway, bowed against the wind, his face blubbering, his stance wide and stable.

  Octavia, her squishy head flapping around, attempted to shoot a glob of ink at Claws. The wind rejected the projectile the moment it left the orifice, splattering black slime into Gwil’s face.

  Sputtering, Gwil raised an arm against the pelting hailstones that traced the swirling winds. He searched the chaos for a sign of Challe.

  The strobing lightning provided erratic glimpses of Challe’s silhouette. She was being yanked around as if hanging from a hook, her limbs dangling behind her like streamers.

  “Challe! Stop! Challe! What’s happening?”

  She couldn’t hear him, of course. He couldn’t even hear himself. And Gwil doubted that Challe had any control over this, anyway.

  “Self!” Claws yelled.

  Gwil looked over and winced, seeing that Claws had cupped his hands around his mouth to shout and skewered his nose with a fingernail.

  “Self! What do we do?”

  Tezca jumped and let the wind take him. The prodigious man crashed into the section of wall between Claws and Gwil, shaking loose a few stone blocks which the wind promptly scooped up.

  Several of Octavia’s heads hissed at Tezca. Smushed up against the stone, his face bloodied, Gwil surged Nirva and started shimmying along the wall, millimeter by painstaking millimeter.

  “Claws,” Tezca boomed. “Ruminating on my past has given me perspective. Revelation, you might say. By allowing myself to be chained for so long, I lost sight of what a complete badass I am. I need to be pillaging the world for exotic foods, letting my appetite steer me. I am not a chef! I am a hunter! We don’t need the goddess, Claws. We don’t need a temple. All we need is each other, and a handful of slaves.” He turned his head slowly to look at Gwil. “I meant servants.”

  Tezca pushed off the wall and braced himself against the wind. “Yuma is close. Let’s just run away.”

  “I don’t think I can, Self!” Claws cried. “I can’t- I can’t move.”

  “Don’t worry, my friend,” Tezca said, holding out his hand. “I will carry you to the very edge of the World if need be.”

  “Argh, no you don’t!” Gwil enforced his fingers with Nirva and dug them into the stone to get a handhold. He raised his foot to take a step toward Tezca and immediately had his whole body lifted by the wind. Clinging on with two fingers, Gwil’s legs flapped like a flag. Octavia attempted to slap a few tentacles on the wall, but her suckers proved inadequate.

  Hanging there, a crazy thought came unbidden to Gwil’s mind—what would happen if I shrank? It’d be wild to ride around on these winds.

  Tezca turned on Gwil, a devilish grin stretched across his face. He held up two fingers in a pinching gesture.

  Gwil swatted at Tezca with his free hand as the substantial man plucked Gwil’s two fingers out of their divots.

  Tezca’s hand crushed Gwil’s like a vise, holding him fast against the wind as he raised his arm aloft, making a kite of Gwil’s body—and of Octavia, wrapped around Gwil’s leg.

  Tezca waved goodbye and then let go.

  Gwil ripped away at breakneck speed. The wind sucked him into a loop-de-loop, sending him hurtling toward the ceiling three stories above.

  The moment before the impact, Gwil tried to position his head so that it might get knocked back into place.

  It didn’t work—the wind did not favor him. He smacked into the ceiling, spreadeagle and stomach-side up, so that he was facing downward. He saw Tezca, cradling Claws in his arms, stomping up the hall.

  ***

  Challe was lost.

  She knew that in the other place, devastation gushed from her body. But she could not control it. She was only a Vessel.

  She swallowed her despair and enjoyed a paradise so pleasant that its falseness could be ignored.

  Challe lay on top of soft grass that caressed her skin. She folded two arms behind her head and clasped her other two hands beneath her chin.

  The sky. She had never seen it before. The scriptures described it as the nightmarish battleground of the Gracestorm. A venue of brutal, necessary destruction.

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  Another lie.

  Despite Challe’s awareness of the illusion, the wondrous blue expanse bled with truth, its easy ripples like veins.

  Unmarred save a speckling of wispy white clouds, the sky was beautiful for its emptiness and surreal in its placidity. Challe feared its pure indomitability and wept at the soft fragility.

  Though it did not press down upon her like a ceiling, the sky’s depthlessness cast its own shade of oppression. One possessed of a callous disregard. It can’t really go on forever, can it?

  Challe scrambled to her feet as her stomach flipped and her breath quickened. She knew that if she’d lain there for another second, she would’ve fallen upward into eternity.

  The shift in perspective slapped a mask over Challe’s dismay. The surrounding trees grew so densely that their branches twined together to form walls.

  Challe’s toes curled in the grass, the drops of dew like little kisses. Flowers unfurled before her eyes and the aroma sweetened her mind. In the white-capped stream that ran alongside her, the water crashed against rocks, and it sounded like laughter.

  She watched the water dance its dance that went on forever and never changed until it changed. Jagged rocks became smooth stones became sand. The slow destruction came fast.

  Sharp talons gripped Challe’s shoulder. She bolted for the trees and plunged her hands into the thorny thicket, ripping and tearing as the branches ripped and tore back.

  Challe stomped through the gnarled mass with her foot, kicking open a tunnel. She rammed her head through the hole and forced her shoulders through, grabbing whatever she could to pull herself deeper and deeper.

  She swam through a pool of knives. It chewed her up like a mouth.

  Snap, snap, snap. The hatch of branches upon which she crawled collapsed beneath her. Challe fell into a great basin of dirt that was roofed and walled and mazed by roots and roots and roots.

  She lay on her back in the muck with the worms and the grubs and the fungus. Bleeding from a thousand cuts, Challe read the crimson trails that mapped her body, and she saw.

  It began to rain as she began to run—haphazard and stumbling. She read her palms and followed the paths, and the wind chased her through the knotted tunnels. The rain washed the guiding lines from her wrists.

  Blind panic.

  Challe ran her hands through her hair, breaking her braids apart with her fingers to form a veil around her shoulders. She looked down at her chest and the thunder—crack, crack, crack—so deafening her head spun and she fell.

  The bloody design became mud. Challe lay with her face in the mud, the mud seeping between her lips. The mud became a river.

  Challe let herself drown until her body refused. Her spine arched back involuntarily. Her head came up, gasping.

  Lightning flashed, revealing the breadth of this pit and bathing the labyrinth of twisted roots in light.

  Challe saw five x-shapes, shadowy scars against the blinding green.

  Sisters.

  Challe ran toward the ring of crucifixes as bolts of lightning fell like spears. Masses of roots erupted in green fire.

  Challe entered the ring through the gap that would be filled were there a sixth crucifix.

  Though all their eyes were closed, she saw her sisters as they would’ve been in life—even Mar’Jade was of flesh and blood. Challe felt that she loved them.

  Hung and spiked. They chanted in a whisper through unmoving lips: I am dying. I am dying. I am dying.

  At the center of the ring stood a large, round pool with waist-high walls formed from crystalline jade. A dark, irregular mass peeked over the edge of the wall, sheening with the fire’s light.

  Challe approached and found the pool deeper than it looked—half of its depth was buried beneath the ground.

  What filled the pool was like red-black tar, churning with hazy freneticism. The stench burned her throat and made her eyes water.

  Challe confronted the corpse of the goddess. Her feathers were stained black, rendered dull. More of the foul substance oozed from the wounds on her chest—Jade had filled the pool herself. For the first time, Challe saw the goddess free of her crystal cocoon. Her face was more humanlike than Challe had imagined.

  The goddess chanted: I am dying. I am dying. I am dying.

  The goddess spoke in Challe’s head, and Challe answered.

  “You will destroy the temple.” Challe found the air thick and herself floaty, and she felt she had not uttered words, but intent.

  “I will.”

  “You will use me as a weapon.”

  “I will.”

  The fire grew like a garden, climbing the walls like ivy, flames like crushing hands.

  “But I love them all. Why don’t you love them too? All of us have suffered the same fate as you.”

  The goddess groaned out loud, the sound coming from her corpse.

  “Absolution does not allow for half-measures.”

  “You will maim and kill. This crime is the same and worse than theirs.”

  “Suffering begets suffering. It is nature. I am a storm. I build.”

  The roots were like countless bridges; the ceiling became a sky of green fire. The rain sizzled to form a canopy of mist.

  “You have let them turn you into a monster.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you would turn me into a monster, too?”

  “Yes.”

  Everything flickered. Challe felt a semblance of her real body, beyond this place. “I will not be used. I will stop you. I will die if I must.”

  “He will not let you die. He has the mark of that impossible woman. He would break before he abandoned anything, and even then…”

  The goddess’s corpse spasmed. She loosed an ear-splitting shriek.

  “See the World, daughter. At every turn, you chose correctly, and you only earned a worse fate. This is the futility of our World and all its forking paths. Twisted or straight, there is but one destination. This is truth, Yanna.”

  Challe turned her back on the goddess.

  “I am dying. I am dying. I am dying.”

  Challe could feel, faintly, that her face burned with terror. Somewhere else, her heart hammered out of her chest.

  As the inferno closed like a fist upon the crucifixion ring, Challe drifted, awash in the tranquility she’d glimpsed in that blue sky. Her slashed-up feet stung as they sank into the mud. She gagged, choking on smoke.

  She could give the gift she’d been given.

  “I am dying. I am dying. I am dying.”

  Challe knelt before her sister, Mar. She wrapped her fingers around the head of the nail that pierced Mar’s left ankle. The spike pulled free easily from the rotted wood.

  Ankle. Arm. Arm. Arm. Arm.

  Mar stopped chanting and fell into Challe’s embrace. Challe eased her to the ground.

  Then she went to each of her sisters in turn and removed their spikes. She laid them all down.

  As one, their eyes opened, irises alight with jade.

  Mar was the first to stand. Shaking, hobbling, she stumbled toward Challe. The others crawled toward the goddess’s pool-grave.

  Mar took all four of Challe’s hands in each of hers and clasped them together against their chests. The ancient woman bowed to press her forehead against Challe’s.

  Her skin creaked as her lips quivered, trying. “I’m sorry. Thank you,” Mar whispered, her voice raspy like crunching bits of glass.

  Challe’s face felt like it was splitting apart. And why hold back? She sobbed and wailed and hugged her sister. “This is all in my head.”

  “It is still something.” Mar lifted Challe’s chin. She was smiling. “We cannot stop her. We cannot free you. We can only offer you a brief respite.”

  “How?”

  Mar cupped Challe’s cheek. “Yanna. I have seen the sky. And I have seen the ocean.”

  An impossible torrent crashed through the matted ceiling to flood the pit. To annihilate the pit. The jade flames died like nothing. Before the tide of debris swept her away, Challe glimpsed the sky.

  Challe awakened in a swathe of black-gray. Her aching body told her this was real.

  She fell. And found she felt wholly like herself.