It was different this time. Dying. Endless darkness enveloped her in its cool embrace, and yet, not quite darkness. It was nothing. The complete absence of everything and anything. She both burned and froze for moments and eternities, trapped in her new surroundings and yet free as a bird. Alek shuddered, at least she thought she did. She couldn’t feel and yet she was overwhelmed by the sheer nothingness.

Before her stood a woman, though it was less seeing and more knowing. Instinct. Flowing hair darker than dark, a familiar face with skin paler than pale, and a crooked maw with several rows of teeth. Alek could see her in the back of her mind, closer to a memory. Instinctively she knew who she was. Despite the horrifically warped face of Artemis Valcari, she felt in her very essence that this was none other than Omera, the woman she gave her life to serve. Alek swallowed hard, or at least she would have if she had a body.

Omera grinned, a horrible imitation of the woman she may have called a friend, skin wound far too tight and ripping at the seams like a child’s overstuffed sack doll. “Here at last, lieutenant? My, my, have I been waiting for you.”

“Why her?” said Alek roughly, a lack of vocal cords unable to slow her down. “Why use her face?”

Omera laughed, or at least Alek thought it was. The sound rumbled through the space around them, like a tumble of rocks dropping onto a piano. Wholly unpleasant. Her form shifted and kept shifting, filtering through Alek’s memories and trying new faces as if she were looking for the correct key to open the lock. The right person to break the broken. Iarden. Eight-Year-Old Teddy. Her mother. A man she had only ever seen in passing. Iarden again. Finally, she stopped, skin melting into place over the mangled form of Raelyn Godrick.

“Is this any better for you?” teased the Goddess, voice strange and wrong coming from Raelyn’s fractured face as if she were a jigsaw that was forced into the wrong place yet still decently recognisable. Alek was glad she no longer had a stomach.

“Does it matter? You’re just my brain latching onto whatever it can before it finally gives out.”

Omera-Raelyn tutted and ran a hand down Alek’s not-cheek with the sensation of barely harnessed lightning. Crystal hands dragging down the absence of skin, trailing the imaginary line of a fixed jaw, down the mandible to the protuberance of her chin. Alek snarled, breaking away with fire in her eyes. She was real then, body and muscle and bone, if only for a few seconds. It was long enough to snap at too-long fingers and taste the blood of God.

“Wretched little thing!” howled the Goddess, form slipping ever so slightly. The drooping skin suit of Raelyn sloughing from the pearlescent bone. The Wretched Little Thing snarled again, more creature than woman. Beautifully feral in the face of the unknown.

Alek licked the ichor from her bared teeth, staring down the ancient bitch who wore her friend’s face like a cheap decoration. The Goddess schooled her features, reigning back into a comforting smile with too many teeth. She held out her hands all shiny and pure and wrong. It might have been a gesture of peace, a way to wave away her outburst after being bitten by her heretic.

“Try that again,” warned Alek, her voice low and reverberating through the vast space of nothingness, coming from everywhere and nowhere, “and you’ll lose a finger.”

“So hateful,” said her Goddess in a too-sweet tone, disappointment dripping from every syllable.

“I learned from you.”

Omera barked a laugh, brown skin falling from her crystallized skull. She was Omera now, truly. Alek could feel that in her missing gut. No more games, no more facades.

The heretic stood in oblivion, the blood of a God on her lips and undying words of her forced faith on her tongue. Sacred mother, light in the darkness, whatever and so forth. She was done. Tired. She had given her life once, and that was not enough. She had given her life twice, and that would never be enough.

A voice broke through their stand-off. Not just any voice. Raelyn Godrick. The real Raelyn Godrick, not the ghastly imitation of the deathless.

“I saw your god damn intestines, you are not dying on me now dickhead.”

Omera’s hold on Alek’s head tightened into nothing, like a bar of soap squeezed too hard and sending the damn thing flying. Raelyn’s voice came in the form of an anchor, bleeding courage into the vessel known as Aleksilkandrin.

“Whatever it is you’re doing,” said Alek, feeling as if she was barricaded from Omera’s crystal-bone fingers that sought to leech back into her mind one by one, “it won’t work. You mean nothing to me. You aren’t my Goddess.”

Omera chuckled, “oh, sweet child, do you think this was a battle? This was an introduction, a game. You are mine, lieutenant.”