It's hard to tell just how real of a place the city surrounding the Cathedral really is. It has buildings, sure, and streets, and structures, and the appearance of a functional place, but more and more as she wanders its streets, Raika finds herself thinking of the golden Bishops that sit at the center of it. They each possess bodies that mimic functionality, speak with voices that more-or-less emerge from their throats, walk and shift and move like people do… but they aren't people. They're corpses. Every decoration, every detail, every movement or seemingly unconscious affectation is purposeful, intentional. They're play-acting at needing to move.

The city of Godsfall isn't a city. It's a corpse.

Raika can tell, from her own breakthroughs in lichdom, that there really is no need to maintain a functional body. It has advantages, sure, but it's no more than an anchor, built out of one's identity. Lu Karai doesn't walk because he needs to, he walks because he wants to- he could just as easily be a single golden skull, levitating through reality. Glorianna's expressiveness isn't born from subconscious tics, not when active willpower, choice and energy need to be expended to make even the slightest shift in posture- she could just as easily transmit words and formulas and monologues from a static, unmoving body as she can the presentation she made for Raika.

The city is the same. It doesn't need to look like a city. The only "people" she's found in it have been more dead bodies, always moving to a sequence. They bow to her, and some of them even speak if she asks them something, but for the most part they just perform actions as needed. The ones in the Cathedral of the Burrowing Saint all sit there, and suffer, and pray. The ones crafting the armor and tools and industry of war act as cogs in a wider system, responding to commands unprompted to create the constructs of bone and ichor and Death that prepare for war.

She's not even sure if they're conscious, really. She's not sure anyone in the entire city is really conscious besides her, her companions, and the Bishops. Whether or not there's malicious intent behind that, she doesn't know. Maybe they all died of natural causes and were bound back into their bodies later, given commands by the Church they all worship. Maybe, to them, this is an afterlife, one of servitude and contentment eternal.

Or maybe they're just dead, and worse at denying that fact than the true believers above it all.

The city needs buildings no more than the Bishops need limbs or voices or faces. Those that are occupied act as storage centers for the same black coffins she found during her first exploration of Godsfall, but most lie empty, dustless and preserved and meaningless. Shops and homes and gargoyles and courtyards and sanitation structures that exist for no one, and no reason she can discern. It would be more efficient, more true, if they were there for an intended purpose.

Maybe they need it this way. Maybe it's how they stay sane, so alone amongst ghosts.

Under the monochrome light of the distant sun, Raika the Dead walks among the ruins.

The Bloody. The Broken. The Burnt.

The Murdered.

It's still there.

The knife is still in her.

She keeps walking.

She really should be hurrying, she thinks. So many lessons to imbibe, so little time. Li Shu probably needs help. Jin's been spending all his days cooped up and studying, and despite her best efforts to make sure he's getting other stimuli, there's only so much she can cook, only so far they can walk, only so much they can talk about when they're surrounded by the stasis of this place. She should be focused on the future, on what's coming, on getting strong enough to collect the rest of her parts (because she can't, can't, be the only part that's survived of who she used to be).

Instead, she walks through the crowded and empty city, this place both lonely and content in its loneliness, and thinks.

She hasn't had much time for that, the last few months. Not as herself. Always she had minds that were also her thinking, always, boosting her processing and comprehension and subconscious awareness- but she was human once. She's somewhat human now. Humans aren't designed to come to conclusions and philosophies and internalize traumas instantly- they need time.

So she's making the time.

And also working a bit. But mostly she's just thinking. It's fine.

She's walked through the majority of the "downtown" district of the city, having emerged from lessons in the Cathedral. It's a good place for examination, and the corpses there still talk and think, or at least pantomime it. Sorcerers and necromancers and others working directly under the Bishops, their reactions only slightly rehearsed, their awareness only somewhat muted. She's walked from towering churches, laden with steeples and artistry, down long highways of many-storied houses that lay empty and aching, their windows like slack mouths and empty eyes. She passed places that should be markets, places that should be residential neighborhoods, places that should be warehouses and workshops, and they all still look like it, but their silence denies their former titles.

She walks now past the edge of the city limits.

There's a gate. It is a vast and towering thing, hundreds of feet high, corpses arrayed all along its mechanisms and the chains which pull it open. They don't need to be. Raika can recognize the runes and formulae carved onto the doors, the automated responses they will generate at the merest touch- but she supposes there's not much else for a bunch of dead bodies to be doing.

She touches the gate, and it opens, the arrays on it reacting and powering the machinery to allow her entry. The sprawling city, shaped ever-so-noticeably to the shape of a massive fallen body, reaches its end, and its gate creaks open like a hinged beast squealing in agony.

The corpses pulling at the chains, saluting at her passage, "operating" the inner machinery all go still and silent as soon as she is past. They might remain that way another thousand years, if she doesn't come back this way. She genuinely can't tell if they mind. If they have a mind to mind with.

She keeps walking.

The grass too is dead. The plants are all dead. The things that grow here grow not because they are alive, but because they are designed to grow. It's a subtle difference, but an idea Li Shu told her about comes to mind- a virus. All the machinery of life, but none of the ability to change, none of the intricacy of reactivity. Just pieces moving as they're designed to, no more. The grass is a green so dark as to be near black, with bushes and taller variants hinting at ivory and pale white colors. The trees are like gnarled bone, arcing up towards the sky in convoluted patterns.

This isn't the only city in the Fallen Kingdom. She's heard of a few more. One, by the name of Viviae, supposedly has a living population numbering in the thousands. Supposedly, that's where most Witches in the Kingdom live, where necromancers and aspirants and refugees and wanderers tend to settle. Mortaris is one of the grand production centers, one of the few still-active places in the Kingdom, where most of their weaponry and industry resides. New Inquisum, home to the silent monks and their endless, bottomless halls of tomes, said to hold the stories of every dead soul to ever speak.

There are even more cities whose names she hasn't bothered to learn, because they've gone still.

That's what they call it here. Going still. Not dying, that has different connotations, but stillness, a point where nothing moves there. Nothing thinks, or acts, or changes there, and no one dead or alive can be bothered to claim it.

There are more of these cities than there are ones whose names she remembers. A lot more.

The Fallen Kingdom is barely a bunch of city-states, bound together by inertia, similar desires, and the fact that they can exist for centuries without ever doing anything outside their carefully practiced schedules. They're not dead, as the dead do not move, but they're not truly anything else, either.

Puppets, playing with their own strings.

The Fallen Kingdom doesn't rival the Empire. It can't. They adapt in response to things, but they don't change spontaneously. They number in the tens of thousands, if that, while the Empire numbers in the billions. They must have rivaled it, at one point- the maps she's seen indicate a territory that boggles the mind, hundreds of cities as vast and sprawling as Godsfall dotting the landscape.

But they're fallen. It's in the name.

She can't rely on them for victory. It's that simple.

She could learn every technique they have, understand every idea they've ever thought, recruit every one of the remaining members of its polities out from where they've entrenched themselves ideologically, and it wouldn't be enough. She could convince the entire nation of continentally powerful super-corpses that they aren't the sole arbiters of denying the world's End, that they aren't capable of being such, and it wouldn't be enough.

Once upon a time, it might have been. Once upon a time, this might have been a living place.

But it stopped changing. It stopped growing. It stopped evolving. It became static, and while it has refused to die, it hasn't chosen to survive, either. It is an empire fallen, because it chose to be. Because to be something different, to them, would be worse.

So she's taking their lessons. She's learning their sorcery. She's slowly figuring out the best ways to approach them, speak with them, understand them.

But she can't rely on them to save the world.

Many-Mouths seemed to believe that their best hope was to upset the status quo, enough that they might negotiate with the Empire. The Republic of Morae sought only to profit at all costs, to continue a system where the strong get stronger on the backs of the weak, and can't even see the existential threat coming their way. And the Fallen Kingdom is so convinced of its wisdom, its righteousness, its logic, that it can't even see that they do not command the future anymore.

So. None of the big factions on this side of the world are any real fucking help.

Together, they'll pose a serious threat. Enough to change things. Enough to shake things up.

But they won't come together on their own, and even with all their combined might, not one of them has a plan for the future.

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She doesn't either, per se. But she has people she trusts who might.

She thinks of Qen Hou and Hao Nera, working to create a new system of communication, of subverting the control they're all under. She thinks of Maen and Kaena, operating under a mad revolutionary but ultimately aligned to something more. She thinks of Li Shu, who wants a way forward, who's searching for a bigger picture she can heal into the world.

She thinks of Shin Ren, broken and rebuilt, looking for a tomorrow and a self that he believes in. She remembers the taste of his soul, burning alongside her under the gaze of the Heavens, and the feel of hunger, of want, for something better.

She thinks of Jin, who is so afraid and so full of wonder and so fucking earnest and who deserves better. She thinks of all the people who deserve better.

She thinks of old ladies kind enough to give cookies to orphans, and leaf-wrapped disciples willing to stand back up after losing everything, and soldiers who know nothing of the world but the need to protect those around them, and beasts who see the world as a place of herds and play and exploration. Of fungal humanoids, deep underground, cradling a Heart much like the one she's lost and trying to build a home for a people half-gone.

She doesn't have a plan to fix the world.

But she's met such a tiny part of it, and already she's found people who have more of a plan than she does. People she trusts. People better than the world asks them to be.

So she can bully these factions together. She can take from them as much as she can as fast as she can, until she has enough to come up with something beyond them. And she can blow shit up. And then she'll help pick up the pieces after, so long as she's picking them up with people she believes in.

She comes to a crest in the hill she's walking on. It might have been a farm once, but without a need for food or a living land to grow it from, the facsimile of nature of the Fallen Kingdom has overtaken it. It's a dead place, and its death has made it something other than what it was before.

Which makes it perfect for her purposes.

She sits on the grassy knoll, and just breathes.

She doesn't need to. She, too, could embrace efficiency more entirely.

But really, if efficiency is just the most direct and affordable way to get something done, then being herself, as herself, is more efficient than pretending she's always been dead.

Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.

A familiar practice. A grounding technique for a post-human mind as much as it was for a mortal one.

Inhale. Exhale. Inhale.

Her chest expands. Her ribs flex. Her muscles, stiff and cold, stretch as if alive.

She reaches up one hand, using the newfound surface tension in the skin, and tears open her guts.

She exhales.

In a field of blackened blood and too-dark grass, where once lived a world, she calls forth her Deaths.

In moments, she sits in a field of ghostly azaleas, spawned from mist and shadow and the edge where light turns to dark. There are hundreds of the flowers, most of them sized as one would expect for their species, and in them, she feels the lives she's taken, both as mindless war machine and as conscious killer. Beasts and soldiers and cultivators and mortals, all of them surrounding her, with the flowers that remind her most of her first kills the nearest. Their leaves whisper like long scarves, and their petals are stiff, like masks over too-delicate stalks.

And yet, they are not all of them shaped so normally.

At cardinal points around her, arranged artfully amongst the garden and bloom, are stranger plants. Pitch-dark and ivory white, four species of hybrids show her four true Deaths- one shaped as the splatter from a cranium, one grown to look like teeth and obsidian sparks, one towering and bright, its petals shifting like open flames.

And a few hundred shaped like . One is no larger than the palm of a hand, shaped to the splatter of a collapsing cranium, no larger than any of the field surrounding her- but more, somehow. Intimate in form. One is dense, smaller and richer than all but the greatest, its edges hinting at teeth-marks. Surrounding them are hundreds of lesser blooms, all shaped as pale and ghostly flame, exploding outwards brightly from their centers and filling out the fields.

And one is right in front of her. Facing her.

Its petals are darker than night, and each is shaped to the exact specifications of a knife.

It is closer than the last time it bloomed.

The knife is still in her. The person who killed her is still out there, and it seems impossible that he wouldn't know that parts of her remain. She has to learn, and wrangle these fuckers, and outpace the assassin that ended her and is still out there, lurking somewhere.

Coming closer.

She inhales. Exhales a sigh.

She reaches out the same hand she used to tear herself open and sifts through the mess of her organs.

It takes only a few seconds to fish out what she's hidden there.

Her worms have changed.

She still has some left, hidden away inside her body and nibbling at her corpse. They're great for carving runes fast, for a last-ditch source of stability for her non-functional biology, for a desperate sneak attack. But she needed more, and they were more than willing to grow.

So she started feeding them properly.

Slowly, as their siblings crawl free from her and begin to eat their way through the soil, carving lines and runes into the ground of her garden of Death, she lays the twelve cocoons she has hidden in her guts out before her.

They glow in the night. She has to squint, really push her eyes to see, but her senses remain inhuman and evolved, however muted. She shifts into that half-light Jin taught to her, and the cocoons glow like little stars, pale white and outlined in perfect black.

The Fallen Kingdom is not a place that wants for ghosts or dead flesh. She has eaten as much of both as she can get her hands on.

We Are What We Eat.

She has fed them like infants, or parasites, or seeds in the mulch of her corpse. They're almost ready to hatch.

She reaches into a bag at her waist, the animal-leather expanding to fit her bloodied limb down to the elbow, far deeper than its palm-sized form should allow.

When she pulls it back out, there is a jar in her hand.

The corpses here cultivate Death itself. Re-manifest it, embody it, empower it to their own ends, shape it to fit their desires. It's an intricate, mystical, and convoluted practice, one she's still getting a hold of. They use words like hexes and conjurations for things that provide lasting effects or summon constructs, effects, harm. But ultimately, power is power. Take, hold, change.

There's a rare story she's heard of once before, back in the third ring of the Empire. Something long banned except for use by the military, whose heroes could be trusted with darker secrets, that they might use them to enforce the Emperor's peace and protect the Empire as a whole.

It's a myth about what happens if you put a bunch of poisonous bugs together in a jar, and wait until they all eat each other.

So too, there is ritual. There is the taking of something, the containing of it, the changing of it.

She keeps removing jars until there are three before her.

Then, slowly, she picks the flowers around her, one by one. Azaleas of pale white and purest black are lifted from their place in her Garden of Death, and placed reverently into the jars. A dozen or more of the deaths she has caused, and one each of the Deaths she has suffered, to bind them and that which will feed off of them.

Then, slowly, she places four cocoons, bursting with an un-life that almost hurts to look at, into each jar.

She binds the lids shut with strings of her own intestine, the ropes of organ obeying her will and stretching themselves into knots around each jar. Soon, the things inside will wake up and begin to consume the deaths, until the only option remaining is to consume each other. Then, if she's done this right, they'll… hatch.

The jars rustle a bit at the pressure inside them. That much power, even when using specially prepared and magically fortified materials, is hard to hold.

But they settle. They go still.

Slowly, reverently, she puts each jar into the earth, beneath the flowers of the Deaths she has caused and experienced.

Then she inhales, and exhales, and feels the last of her worms complete the ritual circle around her to her specifications.

She feels the world shift. She feels the underlying energies of reality itself fall into a new and smaller system of her own creation, guided by symbology and pattern.

And she turns to her left arm. Or, more specifically, to the stump where her left arm used to be.

She didn't give the body that is and has always been her an arm when she launched it out. She didn't have an arm when she died.

She inhales. Exhales.

She reaches back into the bag.

When she emerges, she is holding a prosthetic of pitch black.

It's not like her last Blacksteel prosthetic. That one was shaped like an arm, jagged and obsidian but whole nonetheless. This can barely be called a skeleton. It is a mechanical framework, stick-thin and empirically unliving. There is no connection point, no emergence from her flesh, no intricate and strange mechanisms by which it might exist.

Furthermore, this arm has sockets designed all the way to the shoulder.

She lays the prosthetic on the ground, carefully, reverently. It took time to acquire this much, even with the aid of the Bishops, and required help from both Li Shu and Raika's son to craft it as she intended. She treats it with the care that that demands.

And then she reaches up, the flesh around her digits pulling back to reveal the bone beneath the dead tissue, and digs.

She inhales. Exhales.

Dig.

Inhale. Exhale.

Dig.

And then, when it's loose enough, she pulls.

Her bicep, a chunk of her shoulder, and the remains of her elbow fall to one side, torn off not by magic or intent but by ritual mutilation. A small death, but a death nonetheless- of wholeness, of history, of self. It lands wetly across from her, worms within it and on the soil writhing as it is moved.

She doesn't bother waiting. There's barely any pain, anyways. She just takes the prosthetic and slams it into her socket joint.

Then there is pain.

The needles that anchor her to her form turn cold enough to burn, blackening the tissue around them with frostbite and carbonization. The memory of nerves scream louder than she's ever heard, demanding that she remove the source of harm, that she turn away, that she protect herself from this thing that is death and murder and torn-apart and unmade, the animal that still lingers in her screaming to be protected.

She grits her teeth.

She inhales. She exhales.

She shoves the sharp metal of the prosthetic in harder.

It is ugly. Brutish. No clean surgery, this, no art that might be displayed in a ballroom. And it hurts. Beyond even the death of flesh, the pain is loud.

Inhale. Exhale.

She shoves it one last time, feeling it click into its intended place with her socket, now torn apart and remade to fit the sharp-edged thing she has lodged in it.

I Am Me. I Am Mine.

I Can Change.

We Are What We Eat.

These things are True. Without the magics of runes, without the techniques and intricacies of cultivation, without spirit organs or ritual, they are True, because she says so, and because she has the power and the will and the madness to tell the universe it is so.

Inhale. Exhale.

Against dark and earthy skin, wisps of cold and pale flesh flow. Petals from the garden of death are pulled up from their place, bending in an invisible wind until they alight on her arm and bend into place over it.

Layer by layer, she builds a new arm.

Only when the last of the ghost-flesh has finished shaping her palm does she roll her new arm in its socket, flexing each individual digit and feeling the echo of what was and is now forever changed.

She inhales, and then exhales a final time.

Smiling, she turns to look at the part of the ritual circle opposite her, where she tossed the remains of her left arm.

"That wasn't so bad, was it?"

The corpse sitting where her arm was smiles back, worms and corpse-tissue and grave dirt still filling in its pieces.

"I wouldn't know. You tell me, me."

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