Zephaniah didn't like the night. Never did. Maybe it was the innate fear of the unknown. Like something was lurking, waiting to pounce the moment he let his guard down.

  His apartment was only a few blocks away so most evenings had him walking as quickly as he could through the neighborhood while trying a little too hard not to look scared. That night, he didn't make it very far.

  He let his thoughts distract him.

  Why would Jodie lay on his lap like that?

  She had never done that to him before so why start now?

  Did she mean anything by it? No way! And it didn't matter anyway since Zeph was always a loyal friend to Eric, even if Eric wasn't always loyal back.

  He let himself ponder that thought.

  He was lost in could've-beens and memories, but barely made it to the end of Jodie's street when he felt a rumble from beneath his feet.

  An earthquake?

  Just then, a purple flash lit the sky behind him. If he'd have seen it, he might have stopped walking, realizing this was no ordinary earthquake.

  Too bad.

  He didn't see it.

  "STOP, you imbecile," A voice came in the wind, harsh but a whisper. It was so quiet, it could've been one of the moths, fed up with humans not listening to her pleas.

  He wasn't trained in any martial arts but he'd seen more than a few old Kung Fu movies. He froze in the ready position, armed with only his karate-chop hands looking for the source of the insult.

  "...H-hello?" Zeph asked the night, hoping it wouldn't respond.

  But a response did come

  "Go back, Zephaniah," It hissed, not soft at all. It was more like sandpaper angrily scouring against a glass pane.

  His hair stood on end and heat pooled in his ears.

  "Just go the fuck back."

  He turned his head around toward Jodie's place.

  Sure enough, there was a new car parked on the street outside Jodie's house.

  Confused, he started speed-walking back anxiously. The wind-voice abandoned him, leaving him wondering whose car was left idling on the side of the road. Even squinting, he couldn't make it out nor the person laid out on the lawn.

  A person.

  His pace quickened.

  Nearing a jog, he was still unable to understand the scene before him. For some reason, the vehicle parked in the street was from a local pizza shop.

  That didn't make sense.

  He was there a few minutes before and he was pretty confident no one ordered a pizza.

  He started to run.

  In the span of a few seconds, he was close enough to see the body sprawl out in the grass.

  He stole a glimpse of who was laid face-down on the lawn without slowing.

  They wore a polo with the pizza delivery logo on the back but they weren't really face down at all. Their body faced the ground, but their head was twisted the wrong direction, giving a dead stair towards the night sky.

  It wasn't Jodie, but that didn't mean she was safe. His eyes followed the path the body was headed before its ill-fated demise. They were headed in the direction, the front door of the house. There was something wrong with it, though.

  It was wide open.

  He sprinted through.

  "Jodie!?" He stopped just past the entrance. He looked left, then right, seeing no one in the kitchen or living room. Then, something heavy thumped the floor boards down the hallway from Dylan's room.

  The twist his heart took, twirling to the bottom of his chest, responded to Zeph's worst fears. "DYLAN! JODIE?!"

  His breaths were sharp and short as he rushed down the hall and pushed open the door to Dylan's room. There Jodie stood with her back to Zeph.

  She was clearly standing and clearly alive. Dylan was there too, on the other side of his mother sitting curled up on his bed. He figured he got to them before anything bad could happen.

  Zeph let the worry escape through breath as he relaxed. "Oh thank God! Jodie, why was the door open? I know I closed tha-"

  "ZTHEPH!" Dylan shouted out in a tone inexplicable to Zeph.

  It was confusing. There he was, safe with his mother but Zeph had never heard him so scared. Jodie reacted to the plea quicker than Zeph. She snatched him up by the throat, easily lifting him from the bed covers with one hand.

  Jodie was choking her own son.

  "Hey, stop!" Zeph pushed further into the room and reached for her. "Hey! What the fuck are you doing?" He yanked on her shoulder.

  She barely budged an inch.

  It was like pulling on a bronze sculpture, though he continued to tug regardless. She turned only her head to him with a deliberate slowness.

  Gone was her beauty from earlier. Her face was twisted, bent into an inhumanly furious shape. Her eyebrows were scrunched to a razor's edge and the muscles in her face pinched and winkled her skin in ripples of intense anger. Her eyes were hot coals and her clenched teeth ground enamel when she spoke. The words reeked like battery acid.

  "UUURRGHH, YOU HAVE BEEN A THORN IN MY SIDE FOR TOO LONG." Her voice was unnatural, seeming to curl and resonate in layers. The guttural growl squeezed through this tiny woman's frame in a sound better suited to three or four grown men speaking in unison.

  There was no trace of her usual tired demeanor. Instead, her eyes were locked and washed with unbridled fury.

  "SOON, PAWN, I WILL KILL YOU MYSELF!" And with that she turned back to the boy.

  "What are you talking about, Jodie?!" He rushed past her, trying in vain to pry her hand from her son's neck. He yanked on her arm which was now veiny and swollen with muscle, trying to wedge his sweaty fingers between hers.

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  She was stone. Unrelenting. Immovable.

  "WAIT. YOUR. TURN!"

  On that last word, she clasped Zeph's wrist with her free hand. In one motion, she effortlessly flung him across the room.

  One moment he was fighting to stop Jodie, the next he was airborne. He had no contact with the ground or anything for that matter. He was flying through the air for only a second before he slammed into the wall behind him. A loud crack sounded from the collision and he collapsed to the floor.

  Dazed, his shoulder rang all the way down to his pinky.

  With his right arm, he reached to clutch at the pain in his left, but he couldn't feel it. He looked down at his hand instinctively, but couldn't find it. In its place were two splintered bones jutted from mangled flesh, fountaining crimson ooze all over his lap and other arm. His vision swam as realization set in.

  She ripped off his hand.

  He couldn't make sense of it. But as his gaze traveled upward, the pieces of the puzzle began to assemble themselves. Jodie non-chalantly dropped his rend hand to the floor with a thud.

  To her, it was nothing. It wasn't worth her interest.

  Leftover waste the butcher disposes after a cut.

  The room blurred and soon his eyelids fell heavy. They closed on his vision like a curtain-fall. His consciousness faded to black.

  In the darkness, he stood at the foot of a gigantic hourglass. It was as tall as a building and instead of sand, the top was dripping a swimming pool of blood. It poured faster than sand and there was someone inside wading within. He squinted to see who it was.

  It was him.

  It was Zeph himself

  The other Zeph was wading in the top of the hourglass frantically splashing to reach the opening beneath him. He was trying to plug it. He would gasp for air and try to shove his own arm into the opening where blood was flowing out to the bottom of the hourglass.

  Zeph watched his other self struggle and pant. His other self couldn't stay beneath the surface too long and had to come up for air. When he did, between gasps he would shout something that the glass didn't permit hearing. Muffled panicked screams barely reached the outside.

  Zeph stood there as he slowly came to realize what he was seeing.

  This was him struggling against death itself.

  Still, he couldn't tell what the other him was saying behind the glass. It was frantic but decisive.

  He could almost hear it as he leaned closer.

  When he finally heard the words, he was back in the room.

  Jodie was no longer choking Dylan. The two were floating above the ground. Her arm was still throbbing and extended to the boy. She was chanting her incantation. Invisible magic flowed from her fingertips. The boy would soon become the new Arbiter of the Apocalypse.

  She would soon be walking through the gate.

  She would soon claim her throne.

  As she chanted, the bothersome thorn in her side was muttering something she couldn't hear. He should've bled out by now but she assumed this was just the death throes of mortals.

  But, he got louder. And louder. Until the sound of his own voice woke him.

  "NOT YET!"

  Zeph was standing now. He wasn't sure when he stood up. "NOT YET!"

  He didn't care.

  Jodie must be stopped.

  "NOT YET! NOT YET! NOT YET!"

  Zeph threw himself at Jodie's extended arm. It was growing purple and bloated with muscle and vein. Even as he clung to it, the arm would not move, a fixture in realty. He wrapped his legs around Jodie, clutched her arm with his one hand and tugged again with all his strength. It wasn't enough. She kept chanting, unphased by his efforts.

  He had no choice.

  He had to stab it.

  He bit down on his own lip before plunging his jagged bone from his dismembered arm into hers, tearing and ripping at the plump flesh. The sensation was unlike any pain he felt before.

  So he stabbed harder. Pushing bone through flesh and the thought of pain to the recesses of his mind. He replaced the notion of self-preservation with singleminded focus.

  He stabbed again. And again. And again.

  To him, it felt like he was shoving a dirty dishcloth into the hollow bore of his own bones. The bulging demonic arm he clung to sprayed from the holes like a pressurized fire hose, misting him, the walls and everything in the immediate vicinity with thick black blood.

  His own fluids didn't have the same pressure as hers. It was slowing down, now just pulsing red ooze pitifully between haggard strikes.

  She screamed her chant like a banshee, forcing the words out over the pain of his grizzly attack. Her pitch black eyes locked on him as his strikes slowed and relied more on twisting inside the existing holes rather than making new ones. Finally, she gnashed her teeth and delivered a hammer fist downward onto him.

  He fell easily, knocked off of her once more like brushing off some bothersome insect.

  His body fell fast, only caught by the wood panels beneath him. Whatever strength found him before must have kept falling, lost between the gaps of the floorboards. With his dying breaths, he muttered the words that once offered him a second wind.

  "Not yet..."

  His eyelids were heavy and the final sleep beckoned. He could barely keep his stare fixed on the floating woman above him, still oozing an endless river of black from her wounded arm.

  The words stopped coming from his lips. He used all his remaining strength and will to lift his good arm and grab the fabric of the floating woman's pants. From his gut one final word bubbled to the surface, weak and pathetic.

  "Jodie..."

  She stopped chanting.

  "You just couldn't wait to die, could you, Zephaniah?" The pads of her feet descended gently into a black and red puddle of their blood. Her bloodied arm stayed raised, tracking the child still suspended in the middle of the room. She continued to funnel magic towards the boy.

  "Too late. Despite your efforts, it has already begun. But, before you die, I have a gift for you. Dunbal." With her free hand, she grabbed at the air in front of her and a blade materialized from nothing. It was a long dagger with a twisting edge that seemed to repel all light. It was a silhouette in the universe, a cutout of where a weapon should be. "None will accept you after this."

  And she plunged the blade deep into his chest. It pushed through his heart and pierced bone, pinning him to the wood beneath him. "Good riddens, pawn. The Queen must reign."

  His eyes moved from Jodie to Dylan. The ethereal blade had cut through both his body and soul. His last breath eked from his throat, the soft sounds of whimpering croaked from it. He blinked away tears, helplessly watching Dylan lose consciousness.

  A glowing orb crackled behind the boy flashing as angry as thunderbolts, and Zeph refused to look away. The blade in his chest seemed to melt and fill his veins, blackening and chilling his blood to what felt like ice. But, on the last beat of his heart, he still never took his eyes off of Dylan.

  Jodie once again took to the air, resuming the dark incantation. Zeph's fingers didn't hold grip on her pant leg and simply fell with a soft thump. Droplets of his and her blood floated in the air, suspended by an ancient magic.

  Reality around the boy bent and warped, stretched and pulled with the rhythm of the syllables of her demonic chant. The orb tore a hole in the very fabric of the universe and opened a hellish portal behind Dylan. The edges of the portal raged with swirling magical energy. Glowing sigils framed the opening, crackling with arcs of purple electricity.

  It cackled a storm in the small bedroom.

  Jodie continued the rant somewhat absentmindedly when she noticed the lightning begin to slow. The amount and frequency didn't slow. No, the bolts themselves seemed to slow in mid air. She watched the electricity flow like a river carving through earth, carefully choosing its path of least resistance before her eyes.

  It caught her attention but she did not stop the chant. She'd practiced it for decades leading up to this moment. Nothing would stop her. She could only watch the lightning creep as she continued the words flawlessly.

  Then it stopped.

  The lightning froze.

  Her eyes widened.

  Time wasn't slowing down. Instead, there was just more time injected into this moment. Somehow, someone managed to borrow time from somewhere else and put it directly into this exact point in time. It was a spell she was very familiar with as an Oracle. It only worked to inflate time but she couldn't figure out how it was happening to her at that moment, let alone why. She didn't know until she noticed movement in her periphery.

  Zeph was on his feet.

  His posture was that of a marinette, crudely lifted by uneven strings. The blood previously pouring out from him seemed to stop flowing. It puddled and rippled in a pool on his chest, defying gravity and refusing to fall. On his forehead, carved into the flesh were the hellish inscriptions that roughly translate to instinct.

  Deep purple light glowed from the sigils with a matching light pouring from his eyes. He lumbered one step toward the boy, assuming a stance in preparation for a huge burst of speed.

  Jodie managed to let out two words before he took off.

  "KILL HIM!"

  He launched himself upward, crushing the boards underfoot and soaring through the air toward Dylan.

  Zeph never took his eyes off him, even in death.

  His heart stopped beating but the rest of his body obeyed his command. It was faster than ever. Angrier. And it should've hurt. He felt both his femurs crack in several places under the enormous pressure of the leap.

  It didn't matter. Numbness.

  He needed to reach Dylan.

  His vision blurred but he knew his path was true.

  He didn't see the other figure in the room, hiding in the shadows. A demon witch lunged from the corner.

  She was closer but he was faster.

  Demonic tentacles emerged from the portal, only slightly affected by the time distortion.

  Zephaniah reached Dylan at the same time as the witch, all three of them colliding in front of the tentacles that ensnared them thereafter. The slimy beast dragged them through the portal, leaving the mortal world behind.

  Flashing lights became only darkness.