Zogrusz basked in the river of dread flowing from the city. This was the wellspring for his worship; here the vintage had been aged the longest, its flavor deepening and becoming more complex. He suspected it would be the most delicious meal in the twilight of this world, and he was mildly surprised that Ycthitlig had come here so early in the feasting. But who was he to question the actions of an Old One? If now was when the Reaper decided to consume the city, then so be it.

HOLD> Ycthitlig commanded, the unexpected message booming in Zogrusz’s mind. He glanced in confusion at the Reaper and found that it had come to a halt hovering above the umber grass with its tendrils writhing and eye fixed on something ahead. A palanquin of white wood trimmed with ebony broke the monotony of the plains, its crimson curtains drawn closed. There was no sign of those who had carried it here, but the one who must have been its occupant was standing nearby. It was a woman late in her middle years, her once fair hair now threaded with gray, twining flowers picked out in colorful thread on her fine silken robes. A silver circlet rested on her brow, and in her arms she held a moon-colored cat.

Zogrusz extended a telepathic tendril and was surprised to realize he had felt the mind of this woman before. She had been a child then, searching for a kitten lost in the priest-king’s garden. Now she felt fear, but it was far more muted than he would have expected, given the circumstances. And it was not fear for her own life, but for the lives of all who remained behind her in the city, those who had not yet taken to the ships and fled into the sea.

he sent to Ycthitlig as the Reaper drifted slowly towards where the queen waited.

WE KNOW> came its echoing answer. THIS VERMIN SURPRISES. IN PAST CULLINGS THEY SCURRY AND HIDE, EMERGING TO PLEAD FOR MERCY AS THE LAST ARE CONSUMED. NEVER HAVE THEY DARED TO CONFRONT US SO EARLY. IT IS BRAZEN>

FOOLISH> Ycthitlig rumbled. BUT WE ADMIT TO CURIOSITY. LET US HEAR WHAT IT WOULD SAY>

They descended, the wind created by the Reaper’s writhing arms flattening the grass and making the queen’s long hair dance. Zogrusz’s taloned feet sank into the soft earth while Ycthitlig remained hovering, its pendulous body nearly brushing the ground.

“Zog.” Rhas’s voice cut through the wind like a knife. It had always been surprising how loudly the cat could speak, given its tiny form.

“World mind,” Zogrusz replied, adjusting his clawed grip on the silver haft of his spear. “You are brave to meet us.”

Rhas’s tail lashed. “If there is any place where you might be swayed, it is here.”

Zogrusz’s mouth-tendrils fluttered in amusement. “Swayed?”

“To stop what you are doing,” Rhas said tiredly. “I felt what has already happened, the extinguishing of so many. Surely you do not want to see the same done to this city. You must remember your feelings about this place, how the beauty of its artisans stirred your soul.”

Zogrusz shook his head slowly. “You speak of another. That one is dead, cast out. The Crawling Dread has poured the soul of an Eldritch Horror into the absence that was created. I am what I was always meant to be.”

“Are you?” Rhas responded sharply. “I was there watching when you arrived on my world. I witnessed your first meeting with my humans – even then you sought companionship, Zog. That was your truest self.”

Zogrusz tried to think back to that time, but his memories were muddled. He remembered being confused, uncertain, lost. He was none of those things now – his purpose had been revealed to him with blinding clarity.

“Dark Lord.”

The interruption surprised Zogrusz, and he shifted his attention to the woman holding Rhas. There had been only the slightest trembling in her voice, even though she stood in the shadow of Ycthitlig’s dreadful majesty.

“Do you know me? We spoke in a garden long ago.”

“I know you,” Zogrusz replied.

“Then you must remember that you told me you had come to destroy my city, that we had displeased you. Something I said then made you change your mind. Please, Dark Lord, we have exalted you, holding you as most high among all the gods and spreading your words to far-away lands. I beg you to show us mercy again, as you once did before.”

Another memory emerged from the haze in his mind, of standing in the priest-king’s garden with a kitten in his hand. The girl beside him had contained a soul unsullied by even the smallest blemish, so pure it had made his heart ache.

Something stirred deep inside him, but Zogrusz brutally tamped it down. His claws tightened on the spear he held, scoring the metal of its haft.

ENOUGH> Ycthitlig bellowed, and they all winced from the force as this reverberated in their heads. MY PATIENCE IS AT AN END>

Serpents of shadow twisted into existence, slithering towards the woman standing beside the palanquin.

“To the abyss with you, monster!” hissed Rhas, baring his teeth at the looming Reaper. “You do not even have the courage to ask your Sower to destroy me, for you know he cannot! I sense his wavering, as do you!”

The strands of killing darkness hesitated, then dwindled into shreds of nothingness. Something Rhas had said must have struck true, because for the first time Zogrusz sensed a cold anger swelling in the Reaper.

YOU THINK THIS ONE IS STILL TAINTED? SUCH AUDACITY, VERMIN. AND YOU DARE CALL US MONSTER? WE ARE NO DIFFERENT FROM YOU>

“Lies,” Rhas snarled before leaping down from the queen’s arms. His hackles were raised, as if such a display could somehow deter the Reaper’s wrath. “We are life, and you are death.”

WE ARE THE SAME> Ycthitlig thundered. HOW MANY LESSER BEINGS DO EACH OF YOUR HUMANS EAT IN THEIR LIFETIME? COUNTLESS. THE STRONG CONSUME THE WEAK – THIS IS THE LAW OF THE UNIVERSE. YOU RAGE WHEN YOU BECOME THE PREY, BUT WHERE WAS YOUR INDIGNATION WHEN YOUR HUMANS WERE THE PREDATORS PERCHED ATOP THIS WORLD?>

“If you are so certain of your superiority, command the Sower to destroy me,” Rhas retorted. “Let us see if he truly shares your nature.”

THERE IS NOTHING LEFT OF WHAT HE WAS. SOWER! DESTROY THIS CREATURE>

“Yes, Great One,” Zogrusz muttered, shaking his head to clear it. Rhas darted away as Zogrusz stalked forward, disappearing beneath the raised frame of the palanquin.

WHERE IS YOUR CONFIDENCE, VERMIN?> Ycthitlig gloated as Zogrusz crouched down with his spear poised to stab the cat if it tried to run again.

Rhas growled at him from where he was hunkered behind one of the far poles supporting the litter. Zogrusz sneered, drawing back his spear to spit the cat.

Cloth rustled above him, and something emerged from within the palanquin’s curtain to lightly brush the top of his head.

It was like he’d been struck by lightning. Zogrusz jerked upright, but before he could see what had touched him he felt a powerful quivering travel through the haft of the spear, and it felt like it was trying to tear itself from his grip. It had started up where the dark crystal was affixed, and then surged in the span of a heartbeat down its length until it reached his claws.

And

something

happened.

Zogrusz reeled back, stumbling upright as a tingling numbness washed through him. He stared in shocked wonder at the Heart, then without hesitating turned to the massive Reaper looming over them all and hurled the spear at it with all his strength. Ycthitlig’s great eye widened in surprise just before the weapon pierced the very center of its pupil and vanished into its depths.

For a frozen moment, nothing happened as the universe held its breath.

And then, chaos.

A wave of force rippled out from the Reaper, every one of its distended mouths shrieking at the same time. Zogrusz was knocked backwards, and he tumbled into the palanquin as the frame shattered in an explosion of wooden shards. He bounced on the ground, and when he came to a rest he realized he couldn’t see anything because one of the curtains had somehow become wrapped about his head. Zogrusz ripped the cloth away and lurched to his feet, trying to orient himself even as the world spun madly.

He had changed again. His old self had come rushing back from somewhere else and collided with the identity Ycthitlig had forced inside him. That Zogrusz had not been completely destroyed, but now it was shot through with the being that he had been for centuries, emotions that had seemed so alien just moments ago now paramount once more. He cared for this world and his friends . . . and he despised the one who had hurt them.

Anger flooded Zogrusz as he focused on the Reaper. Ycthitlig had crashed to the ground and was thrashing madly, its vast tendrils drumming the earth. Black pus was welling up from where the spear had entered its eye and was sliding over its surface like oil, and the keening from its many mouths was drowning out all other sound. Zogrusz could feel the pain radiating from the Reaper, this psychic battering making it difficult to order his own scattered thoughts.

Movement made his head turn. Something was extricating itself from the remnants of the palanquin, fighting to be free of clinging silk. A small pink arm emerged, reaching up to pull aside an errant cloth and reveal matted golden curls . . .

Zogrusz’s jaw fell open.

Qala grinned at him impishly, then clapped her hands to her ears and winced as the screams spilling from Ycthitlig sharpened.

Her voice slipped into his mind.

Zogrusz could only gape at her.

The sudden cessation of the unholy sounds made them both turn back to the Reaper.

“Oh, no,” Zogrusz murmured when he noticed black bile pouring from the mouths surrounding the blinded eye.

“What is that stuff?” Qala asked, wrinkling her nose in disgust.

“It can eat flesh,” Zogrusz said as the liquid reached the ground and began moving in their direction, the grass it flowed over dissolving into wisps of smoke. He glanced around frantically, looking for something they could climb onto to escape the approaching tide, but there was only the destroyed remnants of the palanquin, and he was certain the bile would devour that as well.

“I’ll have to carry you into the sky,” Zogrusz told her, flexing his stunted wings.

“But what about Rhas?” the girl said in concern, her gaze searching for the world-mind.

“I’m here,” came the cat’s deep voice as he scurried out from beneath some debris. The queen followed close behind him, looking dazed by everything that had just transpired.

“To me,” Zogrusz commanded, nervously watching the black liquid creep closer. He supposed carrying two humans and a cat would be awkward but not impossible.

The ground lurched, more violently than the shaking caused by Ycthitlig’s flailing arms, and Zogrusz stumbled back a step as something erupted from beneath the grass in an explosion of soil.

“Well met, friend Zogrusz,” Origenius rumbled, wiping a smear of mud from his rocky face. “I see ye hast returned to us.”

Relief washed through Zogrusz to see Origenius alive, but he also felt a sharp pang of dismay – there was no way he was carrying the stone warrior away from the crawling darkness.

“I can’t take you all,” he said, unable to keep the edge of panic from his voice.

“Worry not,” Origenius said, a chime sounding as he drew forth his malachite sword. “This foulness will never reach us.” He reversed his blade and thrust downwards, driving half its gleaming length into the earth. The trembling intensified again, and then a fissure opened where the sword had pierced the ground. This crack spread rapidly, apparently guided by Origenius’s will, widening as it formed a rough circle around where they stood. The black liquid reached this new-made moat almost immediately, pouring over its edges and disappearing.

The agony in Ycthitlig’s mental screams nearly drove Zogrusz to his knees.

The bone-jarring proclamations abruptly vanished from Zogrusz’s head, along with the splitting headache that had accompanied Ycthitlig’s enraged presence.

“What –” he began, but before he could finish Qala cut him off.

“I’ve walled our minds off from the monster,” she said with more than a little pride. “While you were doing awful things I was using what I’d learned from our first encounter to figure out a way to protect us.”

Zogrusz enjoyed Ycthitlig’s sudden absence from his skull, but the Reaper was still very much alive – despite the injury to its eye, its arms continued to thrash about while its mouths spewed forth more of the dark sludge.

Even though their situation was precarious, Zogrusz couldn’t hold back the questions he desperately wanted to ask.

“Why are you not dead?” he asked Qala.

The little girl nodded at where the stone warrior still knelt with his sword driven into the ground. “It was Ori.”

“Rock is the great protector,” Origenius said, clearly distracted by what he was doing. Zogrusz wondered if he was continuously pushing the chasms deeper so that Ycthitlig’s bile could not reach where they had found sanctuary.

“And how did you . . . bring my old self back?”

“You never went very far,” Qala explained with an expression of smug satisfaction.

“But I felt what Ycthitlig did. It shoved the . . . the human part of my mind out of my head and replaced it with the identity of an Eldritch Horror.”

“And it also released something deep within you,” Qala added, “a fundamental essence that had been waiting a long time to be born. You’re different than you were before that monster changed you. Luckily, you seem like the old Zog to me in the most important ways.” She staggered as a massive arm smashed into the earth, shaking the ground and sending up a geyser of dirt. “As to how I brought you back . . . the trick was not letting your personality dissolve as soon as Ycthitlig ejected you from your mind. The timing had to be perfect, and it was. I seized hold of you and pushed you into the Heart, and then kept you there for safekeeping. I actually tried to reverse the process immediately so you could help us fight, but the monster disrupted that attempt. And that was when I learned it was really hard to do this from afar, so we had to come up with a way to get me close enough to make physical contact.”

Zogrusz shook his head, in awe of what Qala had done. “You’re brilliant,” he finally said.

“Well, the idea was yours,” Qala admitted, smacking him lightly on the scaled thigh. “You came up with the plan after I told you I could store minds within the structure of the Heart.”

“I don’t remember that at all.”

“You wouldn’t – it was too much of a risk that you’d keep enough of your memories after Ycthitlig altered you that you’d know to abandon the spear. So I cut away the memory of the plan from your mind, with your permission.”

“Ah.”

“I have to say,” Rhas interjected, coming to rub against Zogrusz’s leg, “things have gone better than any of us dared hope. But we still have a maddened, blinded Eldritch Horror. Does it need its sight to send out that blackness to cover this world? Do you know if there is a way for it to eventually heal itself?”

Zogrusz shrugged at the cat’s questions – he was still largely in the dark about the capabilities of his kind.

“Friend Rhas,” said Origenius, raising a hand from the dark hilt of his sword to point at where the monstrous Reaper writhed in agony. “Something is happening.”

“What is that?” murmured the Amotlan queen, her voice heavy with dread.

Zogrusz peered at the wounded Horror, trying to see what had alarmed the others.

And then he saw it. Strange things were squirming from the ragged gash in the middle of Ycthitlig’s eye – they resembled huge maggots, but their forms were strangely insubstantial, almost wraith-like. After wriggling along the eye’s broken membrane they passed onto the Reaper’s flesh, spreading out along its body.

“I don’t think those things are part of Ycthitlig,” Zogrusz said slowly as more and more of the long, ghostly shapes poured from where the spear had punctured the eye. The Reaper’s movements had become more frantic, its limbs juddering madly, as if it was attempting to dislodge the swarming entities.

“Do you know what they look like?” Qala asked, glancing at Rhas. The cat stood perfectly still, watching intently what was happening.

“The snake men,” Zogrusz answered, remembering the way the dead inhabitants of the underground city had undulated. It did truly look like the same sort of movement . . .

“S’skesspa’s revenge,” Rhas whispered. “That Heart is full of souls reaped by an Eldritch Horror . . . and we know the world-mind within remembers what happened. Somehow they were released.”

“I wonder if transferring other minds in and out of the crystal allowed for this to happen,” Qala mused, running a hand through her snarled yellow hair.

“If only there was a giant snake skeleton buried under the ground here that the world mind could possess,” Zogrusz muttered, remembering the feeling of those sharp bones pressing into his flesh.

“It looks like they’re doing well enough anyway,” Rhas said, his tail lashing back and forth in excitement.

Zogrusz had to agree. The torrent of bile pouring from the Reaper’s many mouths had stopped, and the movement of its arms had grown more sluggish. It was hard to tell from this great distance, but to Zogrusz it looked like the wraiths were worrying at Ycthitlig’s flesh, rivulets of greenish ichor dripping from where they were fastened. The Reaper’s massive body was visibly deflating, sagging into the grasslands like a punctured bladder.

And then it was still.

“Oh, wow,” Qala breathed, and he felt her little fingers tighten around one of his claws. “I think it’s dead.”

The ghost snakes certainly seemed to agree. The edges of their hazy forms trembled, and then at the same time all over the motionless Ycthitlig they began to dissipate like smoke in strong wind. In moments they were gone, leaving behind lacerated eldritch flesh and splotches of green ichor.

“Look!” Qala cried, releasing his claw to point emphatically at the ravaged Reaper. “It’s still alive!”

It took Zogrusz a moment of closely examining the vast Horror to find what she had noticed. Most of Ycthitlig’s mouths were motionless, trickles of bile leaking from slack jaws, but one down near where the body of the creature rested on the grasslands was still moving strangely. The lipless maw twitched like it was on the verge of sneezing, then opened wider as something tried to emerge from within.

Qala gasped, and Rhas made a strangled mewling sound.

The figure was almost completely coated in blackness, but patches of red were still visible beneath the gunk matting her hair. She placed one hand on the bottom of the mouth and another on the top, then wrenched it wider so she could more easily exit the orifice. This violent action was so infused with anger that Zogrusz would have guessed who this was even if he hadn’t seen her swallowed earlier.

Anecoya clambered down from the mouth and dropped to the grass below. She wiped oily liquid from her face, then aimed a vicious kick at the rubbery flesh closest to her.

“Annie!” Rhas cried, and Zogrusz turned to see that the world-mind had swelled to the size of a large tiger and was gathering himself to leap across the crevice separating them. He cleared it easily, and then the great cat was racing across the still-steaming swamp of sludgy grass.

“Aw,” Qala murmured as Rhas reached Anecoya and nearly knocked her over with an overly-exuberant nuzzling. She collapsed into him, wrapping her arms around his neck as she buried her face in his fur.

“Excuse my impertinence, Dread Lord,” the Amotlan queen asked, her voice sounding strained. Which was understandable, he supposed, given everything she had just witnessed. “But who is that?”

“The goddess Anecoya.”

“Oh,” she said softly, and then fainted.