Jhedothar tensed as he approached. A pall atmosphere, a heavy pressure, all-encompassing, came over the churned ground as the profane serpent coiled before him. No mere hound—Jhedothar knew that new shape belonged to Blachaeus. The Vat-Mother’s favoured Grafter, now blessed and unleashed at her command. Scores of dead and dying men sprawled between them, the rancid wind carrying their groans and the iron tang of spilt blood. So Jhedothar raised his bestial visage and brandished his antler crown, ruby spear in hand.

  Where once the Eidolon represented a mantle of power tempered with grim purpose, her remains now jutted from the serpent’s war-twisted countenance. Pneumatic hoses and electronic servos entwined with remnants of bone and armour. Jhedothar felt his heart lurch at the sight of Blachaeus’ stolen jaw, hinged in a cybernetic grin, its shredded engines grafted straight into living scales and knotted sinews.

  For an instant, the carnage froze. Even the rancid desert wind seemed to die, refusing to stir dust through the air. Then Blachaeus spoke, or rather, his many throats vibrated in a perverse chorus, equal parts slither and rasp.

  “Jhedothar,” he said, each syllable scraping through that wet throng of devoured voices. “Look at you. Even now, you skulk, trembling, and defeated. I’ve watched you cower all this time.”

  Jhedothar refused. Gritting his teeth, he forced the words out, every syllable low and stiff.

  “I am not hiding from you.”

  Blachaeus’ wicked grin spread further, mechanical jaw parting in the grotesque mimicry of laughter. The battered armour across his serpentine hide glimmered with oily blood. Jhedothar glimpsed severed limbs reaching out of that monstrous shape, devoured but reaching out for one final instant.

  “Then kneel,” Blachaeus barked. “Kneel and beg. I will drag you before the Vat-Mother herself. Perhaps your traitorous life might yet be spared, if only you properly supplicate yourself before her. She can be forgiving.”

  Jhedothar felt his shoulders tense. He gave no response. Nothing was worth letting Blachaeus hear him grovel.

  With a slow hiss, Blachaeus dragged his gaze up the ridge to where the Lady Hash and her retinue of azure-clad freaks stood half-obscured by the twilight.

  “Or perhaps,” the serpent’s voice rolled, “I should ask you, Lady Isbet! Will you lay down your arms and take charge of this rabble, as you would your own? Return them to the Vat-Mother’s rightful fold? Prove your lealty…”

  Blachaeus spoke in a mocking tone, his words carrying across the distance. Jhedothar glanced toward Lady Isbet Hash—her expression turned stony, refusing to speak. Her gaunt countenance seemed to weigh the cost of submission, but in the end, she, too, said nothing.

  Jhedothar’s eyes caught sight of something clenched in Blachaeus’ enormous left hand—if it could be called a hand. A hundred writhing, mechanical-limbed arms spread from the Grafter’s composite flesh to take that shape. Locked in the middle of that mass was Cartaxa, pinned helplessly as an entanglement of surgical blades and barbed needles carved him to pieces. Cartaxa’s screams, desperate, cried out into the night as his organs were inexorably harvested, each chunk of meat drawn into Blachaeus’ twisted body.

  Blood spilt, dripping from the Grafter’s many fingers, each severed fragment of Cartaxa joining the devoured chorus.

  A wave of nausea gripped Jhedothar, but he swallowed it down and tried to hide it, knowing that it would only feed Blachaeus’ sadistic pleasure.

  Then the serpent turned all those inhuman eyes back towards Jhedothar.

  “I did not think even a former Knights Tyrant could be so honourless,” Blachaeus said, the jaw gnarled with mechanised sinew clacking with vile amusement. “Afraid to fight me. Afraid to face me. Cowering still.”

  Jhedothar’s breathing was ragged. His eyes narrowed.

  “I am not afraid to face you,” Jhedothar said, his voice heaving. “I have simply learned to stay out of her way.”

  Jhedothar jerked his chin past Blachaeus, across the battlefield and its half-collapsed lines. There stood Lady Bee—clad in black with gold trim, her face a tortured mask of fury and revulsion, fists tightening at her sides.

  Crimson breached the horizon. The evil moon—so close in its orbit that it dwarfed the glimmering stars—rose, looming as a harbinger light. Everything was cast in a deep, red haze, so bright it could almost be mistaken for daylight. Even the dust swirling through the air looked clotted and sanguine.

  Bee stood amidst the wreckage, legs trembling under the heavy, choking weight of it all. Corpses, devastated machinery, and twisted bits of living, organic steel sprawled under the moon’s glow. Her eyes, wide and disbelieving, traced the devastation from that sundered one of the Nesta Barshaum to the mutilated dead and, finally, the battered forms of the living stumbling through the wreckage left behind.

  When her gaze finally fell upon Blachaeus, she saw the Eidolon’s remains set as his jaw. That half-plate of her face, drenched in gore… Bee swallowed back a breath as tears escaped her in earnest.

  Bee whimpered. It hurt to see. Her heart came undone for her protector. For her guide. For bright and bold Vashante Tens. She had always told herself she didn’t need to voice those feelings. She had told herself it was just the worms, just the worms plaguing her mind, and—... that maybe Vashante had known, anyway. But seeing Vashante’s face, her body repurposed and stolen into this monstrous body—

  Something broke inside Bee.

  Across the field, the old bone monk Yomnar Free, who had been putting pressure onto a wounded freak’s side, paused. He lifted his creaking head, sensing the disquiet in the air. When Yomnar saw the confrontation, he breathed a hushed, grief-laden sigh. Beneath his withered mask, old frustration rose behind his eyes.

  “Oh no,” he breathed, the words scarcely audible against the wind picking up dust again. “Oh, my dear Lady…”

  Not far away, hidden among the splintered plating of the cannon’s ruined husk, Slashex crouched. His many-legged cybernetic form cast a skeletal outline against the moon’s glow, pincers and rods splayed across rubble. The echolocation device stapled over his eyes clicked away, silent pulses scanning the living shapes beyond.

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  He heard it—the heartbreak in Bee’s breath, the way her voice threatened a scream before it was even formed. The corners of his lips twitched, predatory.

  “Finally,” Slashex whispered to himself, his words poison. “She will understand…”

  And Bee collapsed under the weight of that monstrous moon’s radiance, sinking to her knees. Her hands clutched the sides of her head, tears carving silent trails down her cheeks.

  “No,” she choked out, each time forcing it through trembling lips. “No… no…”

  The worms in her mind cried out a thousand-fold in their lamentations. Vashante was gone. All that remained was the hateful glow of the moon above, the dreadful quietude of an army shattered, the dead and worse innumerable.

  The world bled red around her.

  Blachaeus Tem Etal looked down upon her, a heaving coil of flesh and steel rippling beneath the evil moonlight. In that blood-limned glow, he stared upon Bee with a strange reverence with his multitude of eyes. She looked so human—or near enough that she made the Vat-Mother of Acetyn’s monstrous visage seem truly alien by comparison: her face, the svelte shoulders and slender limbs, but for the slender filaments of insectile wings, jutting from her back, glassy and chitinous, reflecting the sanguine gloom.

  He had seen countless freaks, pale, and even the impossible spawn of the Vat-Mothers’ creation. Yet nothing prepared him for the sight of Bee: the heave of her fury, the sincerity of her anguish, and her face so refined—so real—so unbearably human in this late, misbegotten age. Hesitation shut Blachaeus’ many throats. For an instant, she looked like the old iconographs made real; akin to the Immortal in the flesh and more. So much more.

  But the Lady Bhaeryn should have been dead. That was the plan. And yet here she stood. It was a shock and an affront to Blachaeus, more so than it should have been for the act alone. To see her—to actually see her. His mechanical jaw clicked, bright arcs of star metal gleaning from the Eidolon’s stolen body. Around him, a chorus of devoured voices hummed in confused, hungry unity. He hesitated. He could take her flesh and genetics for himself, but he hesitated.

  In that horrid quiet, his numerous eyes shifted across the battered lines of survivors. A short distance away, he glimpsed the prone body of Nence, the head severed in a brutal decapitation. It told a tale that hammered home the ill omen Bee’s presence signalled. The arcane blade had—somehow—failed.

  Blachaeus Tem Etal looked down upon the Lady Bhaeryn again.

  Kneeling, collapsed in the blood-stained ash, Bee gritted her chrome teeth, expression twisted with unmasked hate. She hissed, flutes in her back seething as she wrestled with ragged sobs. Only then did she look up to him, wracked with cataclysmic emotion, and screamed, voice raw.

  “I’ll kill you!”

  Blachaeus Tem Etal stood still for just an instant longer, something uncertain rattling through the monstrous mosaic of his devoured voices. Bee’s vow burned, echoing until it cut deep into his hearts. However, soon enough, that final fragile hesitation, perhaps an unspoken reverence for what she was, cracked and fell away.

  He lunged, snaking forward with monstrous speed, intent on snapping her body in his serrated jaws. A fresh roar boiled up from his throats—only to twist into an agonised bellow as a star-metal sword tore through one of his eyes. A geyser of black gore burst out with a hiss of pressurised flesh and oil.

  Jerking his head back, Blachaeus glared down, blinking shadows away from his remaining eyes. Sar-ek, battered armour in tatters, had wrenched the blade free of some fallen soldier and hurled it.

  “Back with you, bastard!” Sar-ek spat, voice ragged, raising his own sword.

  For that moment, his act of defiance rang out across the field. The moments bought. The cost, everything.

  Blachaeus’s massive hybrid fist slammed down and reduced Sar-ek to a pulp with a sickening, wet crunch.

  The Grafter’s many jaws shrieked fury, reverberating through the dust-clotted air. He tore his gaze from the ruin of Sar-ek’s body back to Bee, slithering forward again. His coiling muscle and metal left grooves in the gore-soaked surface.

  Suddenly, a flash of red carved a glowing fissure down Blachaeus’s side. The profane serpent hissed, whirling around in a lash of half-formed limbs, only to behold Jhedothar charging around the fray.

  The knight advanced at impossible speed, a centaurian body braced by layers of mechanical augmentation. Humming with renewed strength, he galloped and darted out of Blachaeus’ reach. The infamous ruby spear radiated with a brilliant glow that licked at its edges like a living flame.

  It was said the spear was built as a gift for his enfeoffment before the Vat-Mother of Aceytn by hands that grasped at a dream of that half-forgotten past. Legends of a moonlight blade—once wielded during the Pilgrim of the Axiamat’s final march to save the world. Built when the technoscavengers and the disciples of wires snatched from the world that was ill-conceived hope, when they still believed in the righteousness of some imagined past. Their forging had repurposed forgotten technology into gem-like stone, their misbegotten belief that the progenitors worshipped photonic lattices rather than utilising them for base functions. Yet, by some miracle, it had worked, even though its crafters knew not how they had recreated a miracle from the past.

  Now, propelled by Jhedothar’s raw momentum, wielded by his deft hands, that infamous ruby spear left molten grooves everywhere it struck, scorching Blachaeus’s corrupted hide.

  Again and again, the Jhedothar charged in, every blow a shimmer of ruby light against the monstrous darkness. Blachaeus recoiled, hissing in furious pain. Vile fluids sprayed across the churned City surface. Each strike carved a wicked, steaming wound—but never quite enough to truly stop him. Still, Blachaeus slithered on, half blinded, his roars shattering the air.

  Again and again, Blachaeus lashed out with serpentine aggression. Yet Jhedothar, fleet of foot, kept out of his reach. And in that boiling swirl of carnage, dust, and the evil moon’s red glow, Jhedothar pressed the fight, distracting the monster.

  Blachaeus—slick and reeking, lines of molten wounds carved across his snake-like form—coiled in place. Some primal instinct warned him to look up.

  Above him, Bee hovered on buzzing, insectile wings. Their translucent panes bent the wicked moonlight, scattering degrees of red across her pained features. Tears still traced the curve of her cheeks as fury contorted her eyes. And yet her exhaustion lent her face a pallor more terrible than her murderous intent.

  Her arms quivered as the gleam beneath her skin intensified, silhouetting bone and plate whenever the pink glow pulsed. Deep within her body, an unseen source turned radiant enough to shine through the skin and flesh of her body and the tattered folds of her gown.

  Bee seemed an avenging spirit of flesh, betrayal, and heartbreak in that breath of weightless, trembling stasis.

  Blachaeus roared, devouring the distance between them in one terrible surge. His half-blinded eyes narrowed on her, fangs parting as steel-laced muscles coiled—but before he could clamp jaws around her slight form, Bee’s head tipped back. Something intangible rippled through the air.

  A radio signal emanated from her crown. As her hair whipped around her face, something far worse than a blade sprang from Bee’s mind.

  She unleashed it.

  At once, Blachaeus seized, body spasming with grotesque intensity. Limbs contorted and began to pull away from his central mass, grafts undoing and interstitial tissues popping wetly. The monstrous bellow of a hundred throats stuttered into glitchy silence, each devoured voice turned awry by the command.

  Piece by piece, the Grafter’s stolen flesh tore itself apart. Biomechanical plating parted from scaly hide, lumps of cartilaginous matter sloughing free and slopping into the drenched City surface. The stolen jaw of the Eidolon fractured—an agonised shriek froze half-formed in Blachaeus’s open maw.