The radios no longer played

The light of progress snuffed

One man alone dares to run

Towards the fire.

Streams of people fled Lumia and the monster within. Some carried their every possession, lugging suitcases and even furniture onto wagons. Others brought nothing but their children. Either way, they fled, swelling the highway and fields with refugees.

Oliver fought the throngs, mashing the horn frantically. In all the world, he was the only one headed into the maelstrom.

Men waved their arms and shouted warnings for the boy, but he persisted.

“Nothing but death awaits in Lumia!” an old man cried. “Flee while you can, boy!”

Death like Lace – Charlotte – on the floor? Death like Alisandra? Oliver wondered. Death like Redeemer corpses strewn across an opium den in the rotting dark? Or how about two white tarps in the middle of the road outside a shattered parlour?

“Can’t you see the monster ahead?!”

He ignored the man.

A constable noticed the noble car headed in the wrong direction and approached. She stopped before the Mishkan car, planted her feet, and waited.

Oliver slowed to a stop and rolled down the window. What was he to say? Don’t mind the blood in back. That was just my friend. Her corporeal body vanished as her angelic core dissolved. I think. Don’t worry about it. If you don’t mind, I need to trespass on the noble hill to find the Angel of Witness and revive her. Could you let me through for a fiver? The dash prints gold notes on demand.

Spears of black ice shot through the sky, and the dragon laughed.

Satisfied that he had stopped, the constable approached the driver side.

Odd. She wore her black hair loose to the small of her back, smooth and neat as a doll.

Thea the Constable peered into the open window. “Hello, Oliver. Now is not the best time.”

“You are a constable too?” he asked. “How many of you are there?”

“A multitude. You should turn around, Oliver. We are in the process of evacuation.”

“I need to find Sebastian,” he replied firmly. “Alisandra died, Thea.”

The demon cocked her head in confusion. “I am quite certain that she lives.”

“Look in back!” he snarled. At the blood where her body vanished. At the stains of her heartblood!

“I do not have resources to explain Reverie at the moment. Suffice for the moment to say that she must find her own way home.”

“So you want me to just forget about her?!” His voice shook.

Thea jabbed her hand at the floating dragon. “You are needed here.”

The Wyrm beyond reared, inhaled, and buried an entire city block in black flame.

“Aure above…”

“If you will not flee, then join us in the evacuation. There are many trapped between warring powers who might find safety within the Cathedral of Fire.”

She wanted him to drive into the storm.

One good blast of that balefire would melt the car to slag.

A damned angel would not even hesitate.

He clenched the steering wheel.

Thea glanced up. “Your companion approaches.”

“What?”

Phi the phoenix flared her wings, landing on the hood ornament with a trill.

“She would stand with you against the fire.”

Oliver fought a sudden watering in his eyes.

She has the courage for us both.

“Okay,” he said, flexing his hands against the steering wheel.

Thea nodded. “I will guide you.” As a constable, she dove into the crowd, blowing a whistle and shoving people aside to clear a path.

From the dashboard of the car, her voice crackled to life. “Mirielle awaits you at Main Street and Visage Avenue.”

“Fantastic,” he muttered.

“She cloaks thirty-five civilians from the dragon’s sight. For now.”

Phi hopped onto the window and then to the dashboard. The phoenix pecked the talking dash once curiously and then chirped to herself.

Ahead, the dragon soared into view. A spear glanced off his hide, spun through the sky, and embedded itself into the crowded intersection ahead.

The people fled from the street, leaving an open path for one with the courage to drive.

The courage to surrender his life to the storm.

He slammed the pedal.

The Mishkan car roared, and he shot through the crowd like a bullet. The clogged tenements melted behind him, and he drove into a city abandoned and terrified. The street lights were dead, but the buildings smoldered with fire’s unnatural light. Strange, angry colors rippled through the atmosphere, and the stench of death wormed into the car.

Dragon and goddess warred at the harbor’s edge, and Oliver drove.

He drifted the empty intersections, accelerated into the abandoned wagons, and used the shattered streets as ramps to clear broken sections. He trusted in the strange strength of the car to survive impact, and he did not stop.

The dragon swept overhead, laughed, and idly melted the street before him.

“Take the left,” Thea advised from the dash.

“I know!” he shouted, frantically spinning the wheel. “Why the hells can’t you drive?!”

“I am unable to match the beast’s power. Stealth is my only recourse.”

“And what about the rest of us?!”

“If my theory is correct, then you should be glad you are capable of dying, Oliver Oshton.”

Two more spears of ice rammed into the building ahead, and the abused structure began to sag.

Swearing, Oliver accelerated through a rain of bricks. They smashed and clattered across the window, leaving a dozen cracks obscuring his vision.

What angel would need a car to save someone?

He mounted the sidewalk before Tower Mishkan, plowing through a burnt tree, and slammed the brakes before the broken doors.

What angel would skitter in the shadow of a war?

Without warning, the Mishkan car groaned and swelled. The metal ran and stretched perilously thin, metamorphizing into a new shape with a dozen neat rows of seats.

“How is this stealthy?!” Oliver demanded, an edge of hysteria bubbling.

“My aspect is not required for this machine,” Thea explained calmly. “The principles of living metal are quite mundane.”

“Would you people stop saying that?!”

Mirielle hurried into sight, driving the civilians before her like a shepherd. The air around her hummed with a strange absence of sound. Perhaps it was a marker of terror that the battered refugees stumbled meekly into an alien vehicle with a phoenix at the helm.

Mirielle came last, carrying the silence like a cloak about her.

“Is that everyone?” Oliver managed. He was mildly surprised that he could even hear his own voice.

“Everyone who lives,” Mirielle snapped. Her splendid dress was in tatters, and grief haunted her expression every bit as much as his own.

Their eyes locked, and he saw Mirielle anew. Not the minx, not the power in the shadows, but the angel who carved her own path.

Her eyes were blue as the sky and her hair corn blonde.

Oliver nodded in grim acknowledgement.

“The demon approaches!” a histrionic woman shrieked, and the refugees huddled in the seats as though the car would provide the faintest protection.

“Don’t mind me,” rumbled the Wyrm as he passed. A casual flick of his tail tore the top three stories from the tower – a gift for the vehicle below.

“Time to go!” the Inventor swore.

From that moment, Oliver drove. Accelerate and weave, dodge and brake. He deposited the first batch of civilians before the Cathedral of Fire – the only bastion still standing whole in this madness – and departed once more under Thea’s steady direction.

He tore through side streets at madcap speed, rammed obstructing cars, and squealed across rubble. He rescued children from orphanages; a barbershop quartet comical in their ashen finery; housewives with shrieking babies; a little boy with an injured dog; priests; merchants; cobblers; carpenters; masons; laborers; nobles; shipwrights; vagrants; addicts; foremen; electricians…

He blotted out the feeling of tires churning over corpses; the stink of charred bodies; the sight of the dead still clutching each other; the bright fragments of children’s dresses beneath crumbled walls.

People an angel would have been able to save.

He just drove.

Over the water-blasted remains of the road where he worked a site with Donovan, now littered with shattered black ice.

He drove.

Past the first tenement where he slept in a room with fifty people. Empty now.

He drove.

At a small church he found one of Thea’s dolls shattered on the steps, expression placid and one eye melted. She had attempted to shield a young man, but the fire had burned the youth to the bone anyways.

“We are too late,” the demon informed him.

He drove.

Then, after a time without consciousness, he heard Thea direct, “Return to the Cathedral.”

In back, three young women huddled together.

“The network has crashed. I can find no others.”

What else could he do?

He drove back to the Cathedral of Fire.

Entire buildings lay broken across the plaza, and corpses littered the ground. Some were charred and fallen mere feet from the holy steps, but no one remained outside to mourn them.

Dragonfire or Tempest ice, they end the same. Dead is dead.

Numb, Oliver escorted the last trio up the steps, ignoring the war behind him. For the moment the dragon and the goddess were quiet, conversing at the docks. Titans having a cup of tea before they returned to their genocide.

Inside the Cathedral, thousands of Lumians hunkered, prayed, and wept. They sang for Aure and hoped that the Cathedral would weather this storm as it had all before.

What could they do? They were mere passengers of Fortune now.

“Inside,” he heard himself say.

Another Thea in her Livery black beckoned the women inside. “Yes. It is time for all of you to enter.”

Oliver tarried. On the steps of the Cathedral, he witnessed his home. Docks reduced to tinder, tenements charred black, and skyscrapers felled. Lumia, city of Inventors, ravaged by a war beyond their ken.

His city, broken.

Alisandra would have been able to…

The Wyrm boasted. “Alas! That fifteenth stab in a row finally pierced my armor!”

Thea reached for his wrist. “Oliver, it is no longer safe for you beyond the doors.”

“Why am I yet a man?” he whispered, trembling. “Lumia dies, Thea! What more must I do?!”

“Your soul walks another path, Oliver,” Thea offered, little comfort.

He strained to find the spark in his heart. He shook, reaching for the Blooming, but he could not ignite angel fire in his breast.

“Mortality is no shame. Death must be.”

The ground trembled at the Wyrm’s latest blow, and the Stormmother screamed.

“Step inside,” the demon said.

“No.” He shoved aside her hand, descended the grand steps, and assumed the driver’s seat.

The dashboard spoke. “This will be your death.”

From deep in his torn throat, he snarled like a dog, “This is all I can do!”

All he was good for. The limits of a pale and fragile mortal. The skies broke, and the sun snuffed out. What was even the point of trying?!

Phi trilled softly, forcing her head into his hands.

Oliver stroked her with a broken laugh.

Then Phi hopped to the dash, flared to life, and whistled forward.

She, at least, knew her own heart – even if she was a fragile, mortal creature.

“You’re right,” he realized. “Thea said she could not find anyone else.”

He revved the engine.

“Not that there wasn’t anyone else.”

Where would the last ones be?

In the center of the conflagration, of course.

Oliver drove for the docks, the dragon, and the heart of madness.

***

Mirielle joined Thea at the door to the Cathedral of Fire. The Cathedral thrummed with power, a haven against the dark; the wards burned Mirielle even through her shoes, not unlike a body rejecting a parasite.

“That boy was a terrible Inventor,” Mirielle mused.

“His gaze lingers on the world that is,” agreed Thea.

“How proceeds the evacuation?”

“Where is there to run?”

“And House Mishkan?”

Thea shook her head. “Alisandra has fallen to Reverie, and I have located Sebastian’s body.”

“His body? He did not dissolve into Reverie?”

“He does not respond to inquiries, forceful or otherwise, but he is physically whole.”

Mirielle sighed. “Hells. So this is the fate of our better world.”

“The dragon is fond of games. Lynne may distract him a few days more.”

While the dragon played with his food.

The demon of indulgence scowled. “She has set a scourge upon the stars, and there will be nowhere to flee. No land safe for mankind.” Her grip tightened on her dress, nails digging into her sides. “I can hear his ravenous dreams…”

Thea grasped her companion’s hand, anchoring her to the world. “Dreams yet unrealized.”

Mirielle laughed weakly. “Thea…what are you hiding from me?”

The demon doll rapped a heel against the Cathedral tiles. “Aure has left his Works untended.”

After a moment, Mirielle laughed again – this time at her partner’s audacity.

“They call us demons, do they not?” Thea noted.

“Yes.”

“Shall we claim dominion?”