Elpeck would never be the same.

Neither will I, Karl thought.

There had been a savage beauty to the explosion. It was Dr. Rathpalla's swan song; he'd written it across the city and the Night with all the intensity of a broken dream. Karl hadn't thought an explosion could have been beautiful before.

He wrested control of his body back from Jonan to soar upward, both to leave and to look. Dr. Rathpalla's farewell dwarfed every explosion that had come before it. Purest light had popped up from the ground like a bubble from muck, destruction unfolding like an opening flower, with petals tall and bright. Darkened ruins evaporated into sheets of color in the blink of an eye, drowning in the light as quickly as it had appeared. Streets, skyscrapers, and their fungal skeletons disintegrated in the advancing waves.

Karl bent his head down and closed his eyes, covering them with his arms, but even that wasn't enough to block out all of the light. Heat and pain washed over him, with the force of the impact sending him flying, his backward path piercing through one ruin after another until, finally—with Jonan's help—he regained enough control of his flight to spin around midair, and shoot up just in time to escape the blast wave's fading edge.

Dr. Rathpalla's departure had blasted a pit open in Elpeck's eastern flank. It was like a footprint of the Hallowed Beast Itself. Shimmering motes fell through the Night over it. The Bay's water streamed into it, traveling through gullies the explosion had carved into the city's foundations. Massive columns of steam spewed upward as the sea spilled down.

Blobby afterimages throbbed across Karl's wyrmsight. Still, he managed to make out Dr. Nowston, Nurse Costran, and the other wyrms. They'd gathered over the pit.

Jonan spoke in Karl's mind. "C'mon, kid, get over there."

But Karl just shook his head.

Dr. Rathpalla…

Bever…

Frustrated, Jonan dared to take the reins of Karl's body, and to Jonan's surprise, Karl offered no resistance.

"Karl…" he said, speaking with the wyrm's nostrils.

I… I just can't, Karl thought-replied. First Sir Luxenderf, then Dr. Rathpalla and Bever?

"Kid," Jonan said, "and I mean this in the rudest possible way, you have no fucking idea what you're talking about."

Jonan flew over to join the others while Karl ached with disbelief.

Everyone was in shock. Karl was far from the only one to be moaning or screaming.

"He can't be gone," Karl mumbled.

Karl felt Geoffrey's spirit press his hand against his neck.

"Karl, he…"

"—That sonofabitch went out like a hero," Dr. Marteneiss said. Her spirit floated beside Dr. Nowston's wyrm-body.

Yet Karl protested. "But what if he didn't need to?" Karl protested. "What if we could have helped him?"

Dr. Marteneiss crossed her arms and shook her head. "If even the fricken' Angel Himself couldn't save us, what makes you think we can?"

"But… he helped me!" Karl said, sobbing pauses punctuating his wyrmsong. "When I was at my lowest, he lifted me out of the dark. I owe him! He saved me; I should save him! That's only fair! That's only just!"

"Kid," Jonan said, appearing alongside him, "both then and now, Dr. Rathpalla chose to help us. Just like we chose to spend the end of the world trying to save people. They don't owe us anything other than gratitude. The same goes for you and Dr. Rathpalla. The world doesn't keep score of our debts. What matters is what you do with the help and the gifts you've been given."

"Though I didn't know him very well," Dr. Nowston said, jostling his tail, "I don't believe Ibrahim was the kind of person who would have wanted others to feel indebted to him." He lowered his head in funereal respect. "He'd want you to live. He'd want all of us to live."

Mrs. Elbock cast fearful glances at the ruined city. "What are we going to do now? What if more of those things appear?"

Everyone was deathly afraid, and for good reason. They'd barely survived this last encounter. What chance did they have of surviving another one like it?

Karl looked up at the battle playing out in the sky. It stretched all the way to the horizon.

Dr. Marteneiss spoke up. "Y'all heard what Genneth said, didn't you?" She looked up at the sky. "Not all of these Vyxit fellas want to fight. Some even might be willin' to help y'all."

"What good will that do if &alon can make us her puppets?" Karl asked.

Yuth nodded. "Karl's got a point. Both of us know what it's like to have that little bitch take control of our bodies."

Even now, Karl couldn't help but shudder at the thought of it.

Yuth continued: "You've heard her. She calls the Vyxit 'meanies'; she wants them gone. What does it matter whether or not the Vyxit would want to help us, assuming they even could? I highly doubt &alon would allow us to defect to their side."

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Karl agreed with every word. It was a wonderful hope to have, but it was just that: a hope.

And look what good hopes did for Dr. Rathpalla.

But fortunes can change in the blink of an eye. The world is capricious. There is no justice in it, and why would there be, without gods to enforce it? The world gives and takes, and there is no rhyme or reason. We can only make do with what we are given.

Ibrahim certainly had.

Some would call that a curse, and in a way, I suppose it was. But it was also a promise: there will be goodness and kindness in the future, as surely as evil and suffering.

And for Karl and the others, as &alon's new commands washed over them, that future was now. And as the ramifications worked themselves out in their minds, there was one thing Karl was certain of: everything was about to change.

— — —

Jules couldn't quite recall when it started. She remembered the pain she'd felt beforehand. It made her resent the dead. At least, when you were dead, you didn't have to deal with a perpetual haze shrouding your mind while also leaving it feeling like someone had been pushing your brain through a fruit juicer. Jules dimly remembered herself and her brother rocketing upright from the makeshift deathbed at the seam where the bunker's walls met its floor.

After that, though, everything was puke.

The experience was like having diarrhea—stringy, scratchy diarrhea—exploding out of her mouth, only somehow worse.

There was so much puke.

She'd been on her hands and knees with her butt in the air and her face to the floor and the better part of her guts jostling at the back of her throat.

Her chest was on fire. Every cough and heave made her whimper and scream. She begged for death, but death flaked out on her. Not even the reaper was gonna touch this shit.

In between the screams and the groans and the crying, Jules caught glimpses of the war crimes she'd perpetrated against the carpet in the bunker. No carpet had ever been wronged as terribly as this.

Every cough was a battle against the endless heaps of gunk that kept piling up in her chest, throat, and stomach.

Fibrous, ooze-slicked strings got caught on the back of Jules' throat, forcing her to reach in with her pitifully weak hands and grab the fucking tendrils and pull them out of herself.

Angel, she could feel it writhing against her throat!

She pulled, and pulled, and pulled, spontaneously wrenching every few seconds when her disgust couldn't bear it any more.

It was like giving birth, except through your face, and with a baby that didn't want to arrive.

The stuff came out of her nose. Her ears. Horrible, sweet smelling awfulness slapped and smeared around where the Sun don't shine.

She pulled out the final stretch of fungal rope. There was something like a knot at the end, and she spewed up a fresh tide of yuck as soon as it was free.

And then, she breathed in. It felt like rubbing chili peppers all over her insides. And yet, as she shuddered in pain, she realized something extraordinary had happened: the purgation had stopped.

Finally, Jules was free to give up, and she gave up with gusto, letting herself flop onto her stomach, splay her miserable limbs, and relax.

Not moving. Not thinking. Just hurting and breathing. Breathing and hurting, spread out along the carpet, lithe, and twisted, and so weak and tired and spent that she didn't even mind all the piles of stringy green-black goop she was resting on, not even when they wriggled a little, as they did, every once in a while.

Jules wasn't sure how long she lay like that—it felt like forever, though in truth it was probably no more than a couple minutes—when something bumped her from the side.

She groaned.

The bumper bumped her again.

Begrudgingly, Jules rolled onto her back. The traumatized carpet squelched as her shoulders and neck and hair and lower back and everything else compressed onto the ooze, and then tilted her head to the side to get a look at whatever Angelforesaken force had disturbed her.

Slowly, her thoughts cleared.

Oh, fuck, she thought.

The answer? One Rayph Kosuke Howle.

It was about then that she remembered she had a twerp of a little brother. It took her a minute to find the strength to choose her words, and then another minute of slow, burning breaths to muster the strength to speak them.

"You… look like shit," she said.

Rayph just moaned.

The two siblings lay motionless on the ground, just breathing.

In. Out. In. Out.

"Is this how it ends?" Rayph said, barely above a whisper.

He quickly rotated onto his side and started vomiting some more, but only briefly. A hideous black tendril dangled from his mouth like a rotten tapeworm, smearing pus and gunk across his hopelessly ruined samuei as he flopped back onto his back.

Jules stared up at the ceiling, rocking her head side to side, too weak to shake it. "I don't wanna die."

Tears trickled down her face.

And she breathed.

In. Out. In. Out.

Wait a minute…

Somewhere in the middle of the surprisingly nice afterglow of getting mouth-raped by puke, Jules realized she was no longer having difficulty breathing. Yes, it hurt like hell—she was certain she'd broken a rib or torn a muscle or something, not to mention every square inch of her insides felt like it was recovering from a stainless steel cheese grater's ministrations—and she was miserable, and starving, and probably never, ever, ever going to feel clean ever again, but—and it was a big "but", the biggest "but" that ever was—… breathing was no longer a struggle.

Ass.

Jules breathed.

In. Out. Chest rising, air sandstorming over her wounds.

"Rayph…" she said.

"Yeah…?" he said.

Fuck, she was thirsty.

"Can you… breathe?" she asked.

There was a pause, filled with the sounds of Rayph making a concerted effort to breathe.

"M-Maybe?" he said, meekly.

Jules grabbed her disgusting little brother and pulled herself into an upright seated position. Rayph yelped and spat as his sister's fingers pushed down on his face and chest.

Leaning onto Rayph's chest, Jules grabbed the end of the tapewormy nightmare trailing out of his mouth and onto his chest and pulled, drawing out a tangled clot of interlinked horrors like a clown pulling handkerchiefs from his mouth, in Hell.

She limply tossed the awfulness aside, where it smacked onto the wall with a wet slap.

By this point, Rayph was screaming. As he was still weak, in pain, and probably dangerously dehydrated, too, he sounded like an 80-year-old man crying on the toilet about being constipated.

As seconds turned into minutes, Jules realized she wasn't getting any worse. With every passing moment, her arms and legs felt a little less like jelly.

It was about then that the revelation hit her. It struck her like a truck, triggering tears that broke into ugly sobs that then erupted into a fresh spurt of ichor that her body refused to house for even one minute longer. She tried to aim it at the floor, or the wall, but quite a bit of it splattered across Rayph's chest. She kept on crying once the urge to wretch had passed.

They were tears of joy.

"He did it," she said. "Dad did it."

A few minutes later, Jules started to crawl toward the door. She reached up and grabbed the door handle, bracing herself against as she struggled to her feet.

"Wh-what are you doing?" Rayph asked.

She glanced back at him. "Finding something to drink, and eat."

Rayph crawled after his sister a second later, clambering up her body as once she was on her feet.

Jules turned the handle, and the door hissed as it opened.

The two siblings leaned on each other as they hobbled into the night.

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