A plunge into the murky unknown. The animal eyes and sensory organs Bramble had been fitted with gave him the perception to navigate these umbral tunnels but Dimia could see not a thing. It was absolute darkness and all she could do was hear and feel and smell and none of those things were blessings in this despicable place. The unholy clamor of the city's wastewater flushing the echoing pipes, impossibly loud. The stench of shit and piss and who knew what else was poured down into these heinous corridors by the masses above. The sensation of the golem's bristly hides and beaks and furs and bones pinned against her body, working and jostling as he ran. How could she have ever cared for such an abomination? Dimia remembered the old incarnation of her captor through her fear and pain. Bramble had once been kind. A protector. Now he was changed, by time and sorcery and fire and hate. Dimia was overcome by the assault on her senses and vomited onto Bramble's nightmarish back. Deeper into the hell they went but the girl was spared more suffering for her mind went black as it had when she witnessed the zenith of horror of Marrow. And it was of that night she dreamt again.

— • —

Mulia struggled with newly hatched dragons on her coach-ride to Strotham Yard. Now she had the guilt of failing to protect Dimia to add to her long list of regrets. Perhaps the girl had just run off on her own and was already cavorting with anarchs and smite-hounds. Or babbling in some ditch about pigs and the dead. But what might Mulia have done? Strapped the girl to her bed? She could have sworn she had checked the locks on the windows. But could she be sure? So much was on her mind of late.

Upon her arrival at the investigative headquarters Mulia first met with old friends of Halo's, for he had briefly served at Strotham Yard prior to joining the Reapers. She reported Dimia's disappearance to them, told of the open window and empty bed and the girl's talk of the dead boy that Mulia had regrettably taken at the time as the simple nightmares of a child who had already seen far more than any mortal mind should behold.

"There's been a spate of child abductions throughout Camshire," said Croose, an inspector whom Mulia did not know, "and the suspect is still on the loose. We're doing everything we can to hunt him down. If you happen to remember anything, no matter how small the detail—"

"Of course," said Mulia. When they were done Croose and the others escorted her to the Yard's great lobby where hung tapestries depicting gryphons protecting babes from demonic shadowfolk. Officials and victims and the accused-in-chains shuffled past. It seemed Croose and his fellows had their hands full with Camshire's endless despicables. They said farewell and Mulia went on her way.

— • —

Camp Nothing's tents were roused like a colony of bats on the outskirts of Catatonia. Upon hearing the full report on the bandits and Thirteen's death, Commander Barda ordered that Nail send two men to burn the corpse and retrieve its Reaper dagger. Nail commissioned Blacwin and Addison for the job. Blacwin for being the soldier on whose watch Thirteen had died, and Addison for spite.

"And don't come back up," Nail warned, "until the two of you have settled whatever differences you have."

— • —

Upon arriving home Mulia found a package waiting in her study. There on the desk was a document rolled in a ring, standing on its end. She sat down and picked up the mysterious scroll. Slipped it from the band and unrolled it and lit a candle to read it by. The writ was a fresh copy of Donric's death certificate. Immediately she knew this was from Nayte. The ring was his proposal and the document was the one thing that stood in the way of her acceptance. She saw flashes of a new life before her. Nayte would be good to her daughters. She had to put them first, didn't she? Above herself and, yes, Donric, too? Nayte's family had a beautiful estate outside Camshire in a part of the country still relatively untouched by war or unrest. Mulia and her girls could stay there, away from the chaos and filth. They could sit on its rambling tree-studded lawn and read and entertain friends and find new meaning in life. It would be a better tomorrow than to go on alone. And in these deadly times people had to move on quickly. But could she truly abandon Donric like this? When he possibly needed her to remain true and strong the most? It pained her to think of him in some filthy pit as she married herself to another man. Mulia gathered herself and inked her quill. Tears filling her eyes, she put it to the paper. But she did not sign it and thus declare her true love dead. Mulia instead wrote a single word across the entire sheet in large letters and that word was 'NEVER.'

— • —

When next Halo woke from his torpor he found himself not in his body but in the sword. How he knew this was beyond him, but it was true as his undying love for Mulia and their dear children. He felt Rattanak's presence outside him. They had traded places. Rattanak had finally worked the sorcerous arithmetic to usurp Halo's body fully and detach his consciousness from the sword's stone. He did not rise to conquer the world as he had foretold. He did not utter the words to summon demon lords to do his bidding. He simply touched three of his runed fingers together and spoke words of fire. The dried husk of Halo's corpse easily took to flame. Soon all the runes were burned away, and Rattanak's mind with them. He had gone into them, exorcising himself from the blade, and snuffed them out. The August One, having learned too much, had lost all sense of purpose or will to live. The oracle had been right. The Heraspex's nihilistic curse had passed from Maxith to Rattanak and the malaise had been too much to bear.

In his suicidal act, Rattanak had freed himself but doomed those trapped in that gemmed sword—Halo and Mouth and Narder and those trappers outside Marrow and Falvei and now Maxith—to that eternal prison so feared. Cursed to spend forever in that gem in that sword in that coffin in that tomb far below the wastes as the world moved on above them, forgetting them. Consigning them to the legions of those who marched through the past. Halo and the other souls fell into conflict in the resulting vacuum. A battle like none the world had ever seen in physical form, locked silently in a sword far below the desert floor, perhaps never to be disturbed again...

— • —

Blacwin and Addison made their descent down the slopes of that canyon toward the site where Thirteen fell in silence, rappelling on ropes made of treated ratsilk. Blacwin wondered about the strata of earth... he had heard that scholars claimed each layer was indicative of an entire eon. He pondered whether all of reality might be the same. An infinity of universes all the way up and down. He reeled at the thought as he dangled on that sheer face and steered his mind back to his mission and looked down to see if he could spot Thirteen's body with his sharp eyes. It was gone. Blacwin glanced up again to verify that they were indeed over the correct spot and as they drew closer he could see the dried blood splashed on the rocks. But Thirteen's body was nowhere to be seen. Nail had ordered them to bring back Thirteen's Reaper dagger and any other personals they could retrieve. But someone had beaten them to it.

"Well, let's start looking," said Addison.

They followed the trail of blood as Blacwin prayed Thirteen had not survived the fall or somehow been resurrected as a meat puppet. Perhaps Reapers had nine lives after all and this one had yet more to spare. The grisly path led them to a cave that was a sore in the skin of the earth. Had some sort of scavenger dragged Thirteen's broken corpse here? The men kept to the shadows. "Perhaps we should head back and get the others," suggested Blacwin.

Addison shook his head and drew his sword. "Coward," he muttered as he stepped deeper into the unnatural darkness. With a sigh Blacwin followed and kept alert for danger.

It soon came. Tall, rickety forms rose all around Addison in the depths. Silent shadows of which the foolhardy soldier was himself unaware. Blacwin only saw them thanks to his ylfish sight, and now had to choose—alert Addison to the dangers he could not see and thus reveal his own presence, or simply watch the man fall to the creatures.

"Look out," Blacwin braved. "Unknowns."

Addison backed away and, their cover gone, ignited his torch's magnesium trigger. The forms that had crowded around them shrieked at the sudden light. They were frail and white and beaked and draped in mottled robes. They had odd weapons of ropes and blades in their knobbed talons and beaks. It appeared as if they walked on stilts that ran the lengths of their bodies and up to their steep shoulders. Like carnival-goers in costume, or the plague-doctors with their black coats and beaked masks who combed through Camshire's pestilent streets tending to the sick and dying. One of the monsters, startled by the fire, swung at Addison, slashing his arm. Blacwin fired his crossbow in return, clipping the attacker. The beaked thing shrieked and fell into the recessed gloom. Its kin backed away, brandishing their arms. Blacwin took Addison by the shoulder and hauled him back toward the breach. They found a place to hide and recover in the stony bed of that canyon and spoke of their options.

"Can you go back up?"

"Not without what we came for," said Addison. "What were those things?"

Blacwin kept his eye on that slanted cave. "I might have an idea."

"And how did you see them so well in that darkness?"

"I did not," Blacwin lied. "I caught their scent. Perhaps your broken nose is to blame." He then saw movement at its edge and prepared his bow to fire. Two of the birdmen—true Qoldah, if Blacwin was right, those last degenerate remainders of their kind—emerged with caution, eyes scanning the area. They dragged something from their lair and placed it on the rocks beyond. It was a mangled body, Reaper tattoo on its arm and skull painted on its sconce.

"It's Thirteen," Blacwin said. "They brought him out for us. I think they mean no harm."

The birdfolk shuffled back into their craggy home. Blacwin saw intelligence in their eyes. And sadness.

Blacwin and Addison pulled Thirteen's body further from the cave door. The Qoldah, or whatever they were, had also returned his belongings. These the men gathered and then Addison put his torch to Thirteen and they watched him burn. Perhaps now he would no longer haunt Blacwin's conscience or Vulture's fantasies.

"Let's not speak of these birdmen to the others," Blacwin suggested. "Let them live on in peace." He did not want to risk the eradication of these reclusive creatures by alerting his superiors of their presence.

Once the body was nothing but char and bones and ash they prepared their gear for the climb. As Nail had ordered, they left their misgivings in the canyon with Thirteen's smoldering remnants. The fallen Qoldah watched from their low rookeries as the strange apes made their ascent skyward. A reversal of fortunes for each kind.

— • —

Two more days passed on those silt plains and Tusk rocketed through the both of them. The sheer momentum and his numbness made it simpler not to stop. Just keep going and going. He felt after all that time spent lost in the trance of wind and sky and speed an integral part of heaven's clockworks, the sun's rise and fall as dependent on him as he was on it and whatever unknown axioms that had first set the cosmos spinning into motion. He reflected as he traveled at breathtaking speeds on his latest chapter. Tusk expected a strange life as a Reaper, but never so strange a journey as this. Had he never been caught by Tecneli and his sandmen Tusk would never have met Aoh or the Kashto people. As his new love said to him during their talks late into the night, her people saw life as an always shifting river. The metaphor rung true.

Tusk felt a wave of nausea in his gut, a growing condition that had been intruding on his numbing journey. Perhaps those worms sat uneasy in his bowels, or the looming spectre of heatstroke. But this peculiar sensation was new to him, unlike any sickness he'd felt before. Waves of strange feeling washed over him and he found odd cravings within for old tastes he hadn't sampled in years—the sweet licking cones his uncle would bring him when he was a boy, or a hunk of spiced kobold jerky marinated in dreyh. As an animalist and man of biology, Tusk would have diagnosed a subject with those same conditions as possibly being in the early stages of pregnancy. Of course that was an impossibility, laughable even, considering that he was a man. And then it dawned on the Reaper that he could be perhaps feeling the morning sickness and cravings of another person, thanks to the twinning glyphs all over his body. Tusk's heart fluttered with the revelation and its possible consequences. Could Aoh be carrying a child? His child? Should he turn back and race to her to find out? Did he even have the supplies to make it? New worries presented themselves. Freshly hatched dragons stirred to life. Tusk's mind raced faster than even that skiff on which he rode. If his theory was true, he would be bringing a child into the world that was half man and half hobgoblin. A poor soul that would be unwelcome in any society, even killed on sight. Yet he still felt exhilaration above all at the notion of being a father, ushering into the world a physical embodiment of the union he and Aoh shared. And then the vomit came. Tusk spewed the bile and half-digested siltworm out into the passing wind and the world heaved.

As these reckonings tumbled through his skull and his gut formed knots the Reaper saw a bright flash on the southern horizon's absolute brink from the corner of his eye. In the time it took him to turn his head it ballooned into a furnace that astonishingly burned out the entire sky. His vessel was hit with a wave of force that tore the sailcloth asunder and slapped the craft like the hand of some bodiless titan. Then came an unstoppable wall of silt that snapped the mast and splintered the hull and sent the skids askew. Tusk was toppled and taken by the merciless wave and after what felt like seasons of it he finally drew to a stop half submerged in a hill of sand and the wreckage of his raft scattered around his aching and ragged body. But the Reaper barely registered the pain thanks to the unimaginable image now painted against the far sky: a gigantic cloud of dust shaped like a toadstool that rose miles into the heavens and was surrounded by a set of slowly expanding rings.

The hellish pillar reminded Tusk of stories he'd heard of volcanic eruptions that laid waste to entire civilizations but he knew of no such cantankerous mountains in that direction. Whatever its cause, that terrible explosion had in an instant created a glare countless times more brilliant than the righteous fire of the sun itself. The blast had put even great Xul's brilliance to shame.

It had outshone a god.

— • —

Upon their return Nail and Barda made Addison a true Reaper and gave him Thirteen's dagger to keep as his own. Finally the man got his wish. Perhaps out of a renewed sense of loyalty or pure malice he told his superiors of the avian creatures that had been in the cave below, despite Blacwin's request. Blacwin watched on with disdain but said nothing.

— • —

Barda and Gossom gave Nail the news they had come to deliver that they no longer trusted to bird or messenger, only their own lips and his own ears: Team 9 had gone rogue. The Lone Reaper Cricket had been sent to check on them and now he too had gone dark. (On this last note Gossom seemingly held back strong emotions.) Team 3's next mission would be to investigate and, at their discretion, take them out.

"Now, I know you and Castle have history," said Barda. "That gonna be a problem?"

"No, sir," said Nail. "In fact it will be a pleasure and honor to put that son of a bitch down, if need be."

— • —