Night cloaked the battlefield in uneasy stillness, broken only by the distant thunder of siege engines and the sporadic crackle of dying fires. The flames guttered against streaming jets of oil, escaping arterial hoses. The stench of burning flesh and hair filled the air. Vashante moved quickly and quietly across terrain that was more graveyard than ground: a mangled expanse of ruptured flesh mounds, craters oozing black ichor, and colossal, fallen shards of Acetyn’s vast skull keeps. These once-formidable towers—grown in the likeness of colossal bone skulls to guard the approaches to the Pate Gardens—now lay in ruin. Their eyes, great circular portals that once glowed with the City’s living light, were dark. Their craniums had been blasted open by ancient cannon fire, leaving gaping wounds in the skyline.

  The Nesta Barshaum had done their grim work well. In the near distance, one of the ungainly siege beasts still loomed: a hulking crustacean-like construct of corroded metal and gene-spliced sinew, perched atop multiple segmented limbs. Its carapace bristled with long-barreled biocannons that glowed faintly from recent discharge. This living artillery piece emitted sporadic wheezes of steam and pheromonal exhaust as if panting from exertion. Vashante spared it a glance as it loomed—a titan on the horizon. The venerable machine-beast stood idle for now, its operators likely withdrawn after breaking the City’s defences. Above it, the real night sky glimmered. Silver starlight poured through, ethereal and cold, illuminating swirling ash where once a controlled dusk prevailed.

  Bee whimpered and shifted in Vashante’s arms as a distant explosion sent a tremor through the earth. The Eidolon paused, kneeling swiftly behind a toppled buttress to shelter the Lady from a sudden gust of hot wind carrying embers from a burning fortification. The wind howled across the plain, and for a moment, Vashante imagined it carried voices—cries of triumph, of agony, of zealotry—from earlier in the night. Echoes of the living and the dying. In the chaotic dance of shadow and firelight, it was easy to believe ghosts swirled around her. She held Bee closer, ensuring that her face remained tucked against her breastplate away from the ashen flurries.

  Step by careful step, Vashante navigated the maze of shattered bone and charred flesh that had been the outer defences. Destruction was absolute: Here lay the fused remains of a crenellated wall, half organic, half steel, split open like the charnel ribcage of some great beast. Beyond it, a crater glowed with a sickly light as the innards of the City’s living infrastructure bled bioluminescence into the open air. The skull keeps, once proud sentinels, were surrounded by piles of their own calcium debris and twisted rebar. It was said each keep housed a brain of wetware and loyal guardians; Vashante doubted any remained intact after the Nesta Barshaum’s bombardment.

  As she crested a mound of rubble that had been a parapet and was able to see within the expanse, the full vista of the war-torn gardens beyond opened before her. The Pate Gardens lay ahead, their once-ornate mausoleums and memorials now blackened silhouettes against a hazy bone sky. But between her and that corpse field of history raged a final skirmish, an island of violence in an ocean of quiet ruin.

  Near the blasted husk of the last Skull Keep, figures clashed in frenzied melee. Through her visor, Vashante’s keen eyes picked out the combatants in stark detail. On one side swarmed the Catabolites: her Lady’s own walking dead. They wore scraps of ruined armour and cloth wrapped around their mutated, phage-twisted forms, and many bore crude implants grafted haphazardly into flesh—metallic claws, extra jaws, steely plates bolted to the bone. Even now, after the rout of their main force, these Catabolite monsters fought with silent ferocity, silent but for the discharge of the weapon and heaving breath between gnashing teeth. Their number was small here, perhaps a dozen, but they attacked with the fury of starving hounds.

  Opposing them were the remnants of the Ossein Guardians. Once, these elite warriors had served the Lord of Bones as his sanctified protectors, clad in the pale-white carapace armour of their high order. Vashante did not recognise the changes made to their distinctive helms and maile—smooth, elongated skull masks and breastplates painted with rib-like patterns down the torso. Something about that seemed a contradiction to uncounted years of tradition.

  They were imitating their absentee new master.

  Vashante crouched in the lee of a cracked pillar to observe. The guardians moved with practised discipline, forming a defensive phalanx around the breach of the keep’s inner gate. They thrust their bone-forged spears in unison, driving back the frenzied Catabolites, but even when one Catabolite was impaled by a guardian’s jagged blade, they made no sound. The wounded Catabolite’s uncanny and stiff movements didn’t falter, even as bile-like blood spurted from between their armoured plates.

  Vashante’s eyes narrowed. She adjusted her visor to magnify the scene. The impaled Catabolite shoved itself further onto the enemy’s blade to get within reach, then calmly crushed the guardian’s windpipe with a single twist of their phage-empowered claw. It was a lethal, mechanical efficiency that sent a shiver up Vashante’s spine. Only when that foe collapsed did the Catabolite step back, wrenching the blade out of his own abdomen without a care. In the flare of a nearby fire, Vashante glimpsed something sparking beneath the rent pale armour—a glint of metal, a tangle of fibre-optic cables where viscera should be.

  They were still reforming. Their flesh, piece by piece, the being replaced by the machine. The meat replaced by murder.

  She had heard longheld stories whispered among the lower ranks and servants: of the horrific existence of such automata in part or in whole, old world machines clad in vat-grown flesh. Now she saw it in the real.

  One guardian seemed to realise it as well, for he screeched, “Heretic abominations! False flesh!” and fell upon a fallen Catabolite with manic fervour, blasting away a chunk of its skull plating with a crack from his biocannon. Beneath, in lieu of a mind, there was shining silicon, integrated circuitry, and pumping coolant spurting out amidst the blood pouring from the pierced scalp. The guardian’s triumph was short-lived; the momentary distraction allowed another Catabolite to ram a spear through the zealot’s back, pinning him to the husk of the automaton he was desecrating.

  The Catabolite’s rictus head tilted as if in cold curiosity, then withdrew the spear and moved on as the guardian gurgled his last breath.

  Vashante did not blanch at the gore—she was long inured to sights far worse—but a thought tickled at her mind: these Catabolites, somehow invoked by Bee, were likely following residual directives. Raise the dead? Fight this war?

  With Bee unconscious and being so far removed from whatever member of their force controlled their command hierarchy in Bee’s absence, they may view any interloper as an enemy, be it a freak or a friend. If she tried to carry Bee through that breach, the Catabolites might very well attack her on sight, Eidolon or not. And she could not afford a pitched battle now. One stray slash or misstep could endanger the Lady.

  She had to get past them unseen. Adjusting her grip on Bee, Vashante surveyed the structure of the sundered keep.

  The main gate was a lost cause, swarming with battle. But the keep’s flank had partially collapsed; an entire segment of the wall had fallen inward, spilling its entrails of corridors and chambers out like guts from a belly wound. Perhaps there was a path through the rubble that bypassed the melee.

  Keeping low, Vashante skirted the edge of the conflict. Shadows and smoke were her allies, concealing the swift spectre she had become. She moved from cover to cover: a toppled cannonworks here, a mound of charred corpses there—ignoring the stench that clogged even her helmet’s filters. Bee murmured something in her unconscious state, a dizzy whine, and Vashante instinctively rocked her ever so slightly, whispering soundless comfort. The Eidolon’s heart pounded; each time she darted between cover, she expected a zealot’s deranged howl—or worse, a Catabolite’s emotionless attack. But the skirmish was all-encompassing, each side oblivious to all else.

  When she reached the gaping hole in the keep’s flank, she pressed herself against a slab of fractured cement cast and peered inside. The interior was a ruin of hanging cables and fleshy conduits sparking erratically. It had been many years since she came this way in her service to the Lord. From what Vashante recognised, this level of the Skull Keep looked to be an armoury or guard post; racks of bio-forged weapons were scattered across the floor amid puddles of nutrient fluids and blood. The ceiling had partially caved, creating a ramp of debris leading to an upper gallery. That gallery likely connected to the wall walk, and from there, she could slip down into the Gardens beyond the fight.

  Mindful of Bee’s dangling legs and limp arm, Vashante clambered over the broken wall. Her armoured boots squelched in viscera as she stepped into the keep. A low hum of failing power reverberated through the structure. A dying breath. The Eidolon craned her neck, listening. Above, across the rubble ramp, she caught the clank of a guardian’s heavy footstep patrolling. A flicker of white armour passed by an archway—one of the Ossein sentries still inside, dutifully guarding an empty hall. Vashante held her breath and remained motionless in the gloom, silently praying Bee would not choose this moment to cry out.

  The footsteps receded.

  Timing her move between the patrols, Vashante ascended the slope of collapsed flooring, keeping her armoured form as balanced as possible so as not to jostle the Lady. Bee’s face was nestled against Vashante’s collar now, shielded from dust by a fold of cloak. At the top of the incline, the Eidolon emerged onto the remains of the gallery. The corridor stretched left and right. To her left, a collapse sealed the way; to her right, it led toward the main gatehouse, where lamplight and the sounds of battle flared. Instead, directly across from her was a narrow maintenance passage, half-exposed by the wall’s breach. It sloped downward, likely spilling out somewhere on the far side of the keep.

  With careful steps, Vashante entered the passage. Speckled bioluminescent markings patterning the damp walls, giving off just enough glow to see by. The air was thick with the coppery tang of blood and the chemical bite of coolant fluids—sickeningly familiar odours of the killing fields. She moved as fast as caution allowed, only to halt as a heavy shape loomed ahead. A guardian lay sprawled in the passage, its torso crushed by a slab of fallen ceiling. His pallid armour was smeared with dark fluids; it must have been caught in the initial barrage that breached the keep. Vashante edged forward, intending to step over the corpse—

  Without warning, the guardian’s arm shot up, seizing her ankle. Bee’s weight nearly shifted in her grasp as Vashante instinctively braced herself, tightening every muscle to avoid toppling. The guardian’s helm turned toward them, and in the gloom, its skull mask seemed a deathly specter given sudden life. Vashante snapped her free hand to her sword hilt, ready to draw. But the guardian did not attack further; it merely clutched her ankle with a relentless grip, managing a splutter of agony as he blocked her path. Its other arm was pinned under the slab, and its legs were a mangled pulp of flesh and metal.

  Red eyes behind the skull mask—focusing on Bee.

  A faltering whisper of a voice issued from it, breaking the silence.

  “Dame Tens… Is that…” He moaned in agony, barely able to summon another breath. “The grandchild…”

  At that, the guardian’s fingers released Vashante’s leg and twitched as if reaching for the Lady. Vashante’s blood went cold.

  They know. Of course, they know. Even this long-neglected soldiery would have been briefed of the Pilgrim’s desire: Bee, the prophesied one, the face, the grandchild of the Immortal. Perhaps the Pilgrim himself had emerged from his reclusion and spoken to them. Perhaps the Hand of Zolgomere or his lieutenant commanders had spread the word.

  She could not let this broken freak raise an alarm. In one swift motion, she drew Cartaxa’s star-metal sword. The blade’s terrible edge glimmered in the dim biolight.

  But then she paused.

  That was not malice in the guardian’s eyes.

  It was a pleading, furtive hope.

  A hope that his Eidolon had finally brought home to them salvation for this world and an end to all this suffering.

  “It is,” Vashante whispered, and the man sobbed in agony and relief. So Vashante set the sword aside. Instead, she crouched, enough that she could take the guardian’s hand and gently squeeze it. Then she reached and, almost tenderly, moved the hand from the floor and placed it on the guardian’s chest, folding his other limp fingers over it as if in funerary repose.

  “All will be well,” she said. “You may rest now.”

  The guardian’s red eyes closed. His head tilted up, and for the first time—perhaps in an age—a sound of quiet relief escaped him. A sigh. He finally passed, laid to rest. Perhaps, in another life, you were a true knight, she thought, a brief pang of respect stirring for the fallen guardian. No one should die in pieces.

  Vashante remained there for a moment, processing what had happened. Only when she was certain his breathing had ceased did she stand. He would never report what he had seen, she told herself, trying to focus on some sense of pragmatism.

  Then she stood once more.

  Bee whimpered again, possibly disturbed by the sudden jolt of movement. Vashante pressed on. The passage soon debouched into the open night again. She emerged at the base of the Skull Keep’s far side, the thick outer wall looming to her left. She had successfully bypassed the skirmish; the sounds of clanging weapons and screams were muffled behind her. Before her lay the final stretch of devastated gardens that led to the Basilica’s gates.

  For a moment, the Eidolon allowed herself to breathe. The most obviously dangerous part of the journey was over, but she knew the most harrowing part still lay ahead—crossing the Pate Gardens, where her deepest failures were buried among the bones of that Ossein Basilica. Squaring her shoulders, Vashante shifted Bee’s weight.

  The Lady felt lighter against her now, as if fate itself was helping Vashante in this labour. The thought gave Vashante strength. With renewed determination, she strode toward the blackened expanse of the Gardens, stepping over the broken remains of the last defensive wall. Behind her, another distant boom from the cannons echoed, but she paid it no heed. All her focus now narrowed to the Basilica and what awaited within.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  The Pate Gardens sprawled before Vashante in a tableau of utter desolation. The grand memorial, once a solemn expanse of cenotaphs and mausoleums dedicated to Acetyn’s dark and forgotten history, was unrecognisable. Charred trees of sinew and bone jutted from the ground like withered arms clawing at the sky. The ornamental flesh-grass that had carpeted the avenues was burned down to a black, rubbery sludge that squelched under Vashante’s boots. Monuments lay toppled and shattered—here, the plinth of a statue split in twain, there, the cracked dome of a mausoleum collapsed upon a heap of corpses. And corpses, there were many: scores of twisted bodies littered the grounds, pale-armoured traitors intermingled with starved cultists, all fallen where they raged.

  The last time she tread here, these grounds had been crowded with living beings; now, it was an open graveyard lit by the fitful glow of dying embers.

  Vashante walked at a steady pace, neither fast nor slow, as if in a funeral procession of two. Each step was accompanied by the soft slosh of the slick terrain and the faint creak of her armour. Bee’s slight form, wrapped securely in Vashante’s cloak, weighed heavy in her arms but not as heavy as the memories that descended on her with every yard crossed.

  All this suffering. All this ruin. For what?

  The questions swarmed unbidden, the ghosts of ages past stirring in the smoky air. Vashante’s gaze swept the darkness, and for a moment, she thought she saw movement at the periphery of her vision.

  There—beyond a mound of smouldering debris that might once have been a temple gate—two small grub shapes huddled together. A brother sheltering his sister.

  She blinked, and her enhanced sight clarified the image: fallen masonry. A mere trick of the light.

  You killed them. They were innocent. Does that mean nothing to you?

  Her thoughts raced, involuntary yet devastating. It was her own voice, and yet it was not. Vashante squeezed her eyes shut behind her visor, but the images only grew sharper: Inmi’s final scream as she was pulled into darkness, Betan’s blood spraying across Vashante’s visor slit in the dark. Her steps faltered. A wave of dizziness hit her, the trauma she had tried so hard to compartmentalise surging forth.

  She forced herself to take another step, then another. The remains of a collapsed shrine to the Progenitors lay directly in her path, its once-holy altarpiece—an effigy of a long-lost culture now broken in half.

  Vashante remembered this shrine; she had passed it many times in her duty. She had clambered past it while escorting the children, on the very day of the Pilgrim’s return.

  Then, it had been under the foot of some frenzied cultist singing of Paradise. She could still hear their chants faintly, a phantom chorus swirling with the hot gusts of wind.

  The same shrine was now silent, defaced with smeared excrement and charred handprints. On the altar’s remains, among melted candles and scattered votive bones, lay a graffiti mark.

  A NEW DAWN TO USHER IN PARADISE!

  Vashante carefully stepped around the shrine, adjusting her grip on Bee. The girl murmured and stiffened—perhaps sensing Vashante’s distress. Perhaps dreaming of her own losses. The Eidolon inhaled slowly, the respirator in her helm filtering out the worst of the smoky air but not the stench of decay. She had to stay focused on the present. Bee needed her now, alive now. The dead were beyond her help.

  Yet the dead would not release her so easily. As she moved forward, the landscape itself seemed to conspire to dredge up the past. She passed the scorched husk of a patcher drone, one of those insectile machines that maintained the City’s flesh. It hung impaled on a spike of bone protruding from the ground, its resin entrails hanging like garlands. They were rare, here, in the highest reaches. This one must have found its way in, following some mindless automation set by the City, and died for its attempt.

  The silence was unbearable. Vashante realised, with a distant sort of surprise, that no living creatures stirred in these gardens now. Not a single mourner or fleeing traitor remained. No guardians or fanatics. No carrion worms crawled, no desperate mutants picked at the corpses. Even the wind had died down as if the City itself held its breath in mourning or fear.

  The absence of life was far louder than the riot of revolution had been. It pressed on Vashante’s ears, filling the void with the whispers of memory. Her mind played cruel tricks: in the distance, through the hanging pall of smoke, she glimpsed shapes and almost believed they moved—silhouettes of kneeling pale-cloaked knights flanking her path as they once did.

  But those knights were long gone, either slain or among the turncoats. The silhouettes were nothing more than cracked pillars and piles of bones arranged in coincidental form.

  A faint crack underfoot snapped her back to reality. She looked down to see she had stepped on a broken sword blade. Its edge was dulled, and the insignia on the hilt fragment caught her eye: the crest of the Lord of Bones. One of his personal guards must have made a last stand here. Scattered around were other weapons, many melted or bent: a wooden lance fused as it set root to a slab of silicon flesh, a pile of biocannons and armour charred to slag. The last defenders of the old order had fallen right here, defeated single-handedly by the Pilgrim.

  And she—she had been absent when it mattered most. Not only absent but conspiratorial and complicit, delivering children to their doom.

  Was it worth it? Did you get your taste of Paradise?

  Vashante’s jaw clenched. She pushed the thought down. Dwelling on her guilt now would paralyse her, and she could not afford that.

  Bee stirred and whimpered softly, perhaps sensing the turbulent emotions roiling within her protector. Vashante paused and shifted Bee higher against her chest, cradling the Lady’s head. The motion was instinctive, an attempt to comfort both Bee and herself at once. Bee’s face brushed the cold metal of Vashante’s gorget; her fever had left a sheen of sweat on her brow. The her features contorted as if in pain or fear, and suddenly she gasped, a tiny mewling sound, eyes still shut.

  “Shh,” Vashante whispered, lowering her helmeted head so that where a mouth should be nearly touched Bee’s forehead. Vashante’s helmet barred any further gesture, and she did the only thing she could: she hummed. A low, tuneless hum reverberated through her throat, a vibration more than a melody. It was something she remembered from childhood, a distant, buried memory of a lullaby-like drone her own father/mother had used. The sound was almost inaudible, but Bee must have sensed the vibration because her breathing gradually steadied, and the crease between her brows eased.

  In that moment of quiet, Vashante allowed herself a bitter realisation. The realisation steeled her resolve. To Vashante, it felt almost like a benediction—or absolution.

  She moved on, humming under her breath as she walked, using the soft sound as a tether to keep her grounded in the now. The path ahead was the final approach to the Ossein Basilica, a broad avenue that had once been lined with ossuary sculptures and banners of the Pale Faith. Those banners now lay in charred heaps, and the sculptures—intricate carvings of historical battles and ascendant saints—were blasted beyond recognition. A grand arch that once marked the boundary between the Gardens and the Basilica’s plaza had collapsed entirely, its two pylons leaning together to form a grotesque parody of an entryway. Vashante made her way under the slanting pylons, mindful of the precarious balance that could tumble down with a breath of force. Bee’s slight form remained still against her. The lullaby hum had quieted, but Vashante continued it in her chest, a vibration of reassurance as much for herself as the child.

  Passing under the ruined arch felt like crossing a threshold into another world—a world Vashante had hoped never to revisit yet found herself drawn back into. She was inside the outer boundary of the Ossein Basilica now. The wide flagstone plaza leading to the Basilica’s gate stretched out, surprisingly empty, even the butchered remains of the Otz Garzed long reduced to scrap plates. It seemed even the fiercest of the Pilgrim’s cult had baulked at storming directly into the seat of power after witnessing his ascent. Perhaps they feared the Pilgrim’s wrath as much as they had hated the Lord of Bones.

  They were right to fear him.

  The only figures in the plaza were lifeless: bodies of a few daring revolutionaries who had rushed too far ahead and been cut down by guardian knights before those too bent the knee. Their corpses festered under the bone sky, some burnt, some riddled with spines, all mummified beneath the desiccation of time and their crawling quicksilver.

  As Vashante mounted the steps, a faint scraping noise drew her attention upward. High atop the Ossein Basilica, partially silhouetted against the shattered bone sky and the starlight that breached it, was a winged shape.

  The dragon. The Wire-Witch’s devoted. It still lived.

  The great dragon clung to the shattered upper ramparts of the Basilica. By firelight, Vashante saw its condition: the beast was grievously scarred. Much of its once-gleaming scale armour had been torn away, revealing raw musculature beneath and the glint of metallic implants at its spine.

  It was chained in place, just as it had been all that time ago when Vashante first beheld it during the Pilgrim’s ascension—a measure no doubt to keep this living weapon under control. Those chains still bound it to the masonry, though some hung slack where bolts had been ripped from the collapsing stone. The dragon’s six eyes glowed a dull ember-orange, scanning the plaza below. Perhaps it smelled the new arrivals; threads of smoke curled from its flared exhausts as it emitted a warning growl that rumbled through the night.

  Vashante froze mid-step on the stairway, one foot poised over a cracked riser. The dragon had been in a frenzy of pain and fear last she saw, shrieking as skinwelders tried to stitch its wounds. Now, it lay quiet, but a predator’s instincts could be unpredictable. Carrying Bee, Vashante could not hope to fight the creature if it broke free or unleashed its terrible weaponry. She considered detouring to a side entrance, but the Basilica’s design was such that the main gate was the most direct way in—and time was critical.

  Slowly, she resumed climbing, trying to present no threat. The Eidolon kept her profile small, turning slightly to shield Bee from the dragon’s line of sight. With each upward step, broken bones and rubble crunched softly underfoot, and each time, the dragon’s growl deepened, reverberating through the stone. Near the top of the stairs, Vashante came into clearer view of the beast. One of its eyes, a milky sensor on the left side of its armour-crowned head, fixed directly on her. The dragon shifted its weight, chains jangling. Its air-breathing engines whined. A few stray pebbles dislodged from the ruined rampart and clattered down the facade.

  Vashante braced herself, expecting at any moment an explosion of cannon fire. But instead, the dragon did something unexpected.

  Those ember eyes narrowed at Vashante—or rather, at Bee, hidden within her cloak. Then it turned away, scanning the periphery of the Basilica for threats without.

  The Eidolon realised the truth. She was being allowed to pass.

  Perhaps it was the Pilgrim’s will. Perhaps it was the dragon’s erstwhile master, the Wire-Witch. Or perhaps, in its tortured state, it smelled something else entirely and grew aloof in its regard.

  Whatever the case, the dragon did not unleash its fury. Instead, it let out a plaintive, rumbling groan that echoed across the plaza and then laid its head down upon the broken wall as if too weary to care further. In the silence that followed, Vashante could hear the beast’s laboured breathing. Its sides expanded and contracted slowly; one wing was splinted with crude metal rods, evidence of the skinwelders’ attempts to heal it that had been interrupted. The creature was in no shape to attack. It was a fellow casualty of this war, chained and pained, simply watching now as the Eidolon passed below.

  “Easy,” Vashante murmured, not sure if the dragon could register her voice. She didn’t stop moving—the sooner she was inside, the better—but she kept her tread measured and calm. The dragon’s eye followed her until she reached the top of the stairs and stood before the Basilica’s grand entrance. There, Vashante hesitated and half-turned, offering the dragon a long, assessing look. For an instant, the two regarded each other across the divide. The dragon huffed a breath from its engines. Its gaze dropped to Bee again, then back to Vashante.

  Vashante found herself nodding, a gesture of respect to the wounded beast. It had endured its own torment and seemed, strangely, to harbour no malice. Perhaps, if fate allowed, it would live to be free of those chains when this night was over.

  The dragon closed its eyes as if in answer, turning its massive head away as though granting her leave to proceed.

  She faced the gate. The doors of the Ossein Basilica towered above her: two colossal slabs of fused bone and steel, etched with bas-reliefs of the City’s founding myths. Those carvings were marred by lancefire and scorch marks. One door hung slightly ajar, forced open during the tumult. Memory assaulted her. Vashante’s pulse quickened. Bee shifted in her arms as if she, too, felt the aura of dread emanating from within.

  A lesser person might have turned back then, unwilling to face the nightmares that dwelled in that black cathedral hall again. But Vashante Tens had not survived the Pilgrim’s torture and a hundred battles by shirking fear. With a controlled breath, she pushed against the heavy door with her shoulder. The slab resisted, then moved with a drawn-out groan, scraping the floor. The sound echoed in the entrance hall beyond, disturbingly loud. Vashante slipped through the gap into the Basilica’s ruin. She cast one more glance back at the plaza — at the slumbering dragon and the hellscape of the Gardens. Then she pulled the door closed behind her with a resonant thud.

  Inside, darkness enveloped them.

  For a moment, Vashante stood still, adjusting to the gloom. The vestibule of the Basilica was lit only by the wan starlight seeping through cracks in the high ceiling and the occasional flicker of sparking wires dangling from torn biotissue walls. The grand foyer had once been opulent, lined with fleshy columns and biolum lights, but now much of it was demolished. The ceiling diaphragm had partially collapsed, spilling rubble and organs of the living structure across the marble-bone floor. The air was stifling and stale, thick with the mingled scents of rot and ozone. Each step Vashante took squelched on viscera or clicked on loose marble chips. She stepped around a fallen section of a rib-like buttress and proceeded inward.

  “Almost there,” she murmured to Bee, though the girl remained unconscious. The sound of her own voice was small and tinny in the vastness. She found herself reluctant to speak louder; the darkness here felt hungry for sound as if something might awaken if disturbed. Vashante had to be on guard.

  She advanced down a familiar corridor, one that sloped gently toward the inner sanctum. It was along this path that she had walked with the children and stepped into the great court where the Pilgrim took his throne. Her enhanced eyes picked out signs of recent passage: scuff marks in the dust, leading deeper in; a trail of ichor droplets glistening black that might have been from one of the Pilgrim’s meals or victims dragged this way. Bee gave a soft sigh against her chest, still oblivious to the world.

  The corridor ended at a pair of inner doors—smaller than the main gate but still imposing, engraved with the motif of an arrowhead encircled by a coiled serpent devouring its own tail. One door hung loose on broken hinges, the other was completely torn off and lay cracked in half across the threshold.

  There. Beyond that door, the dread sanctum of the Pilgrim renewed.

  Vashante stepped over the debris and entered the once-mighty throne hall of the Lord of Bones, now the Pilgrim’s seat.

  She turned away. That was not why she was here, she reminded herself. She needed the Wire-Witch or her profane laboratories.

  The sound of chittering movement snapped her attention sharp. Vashante spun around, sheltering Bee, her other hand on her sword hilt. Something was here. A soft clack of chitin on stone, a rustle along the wall high above. Her eyes scanned the gloom. On the far end of the hall, where deep shadows pooled inky and umbral, there was the slightest ripple of motion.

  “Who is there?” Vashante called, her amplified voice ringing. She positioned herself protectively between the source of the sound and Bee, swaddled in her cloak. Her senses strained; she heard nothing now, but she could feel a presence. It was as though the darkness itself held its breath.

  For a heartbeat, only silence. Then, a voice answered from the blackness, dripping with a malicious glee.

  “Dame Vashante Tens…” The way her name slithered off the tongue made her blood boil. From above, a form detached itself from the shadows on the wall and scuttled partly into the thin shaft of starlight.

  Vashante’s stomach churned at the sight. Trishek Hash emerged, clinging to the wall columns some fifteen feet above her like a grotesque insect. His upper body was familiar in its humanoid qualities: though hunched and gnarled, wrapped in a tattered robe, his elongated skull-like face grinning through layers of scar tissue and cybernetic grafts. But below the waist, where a man’s legs would be, stretched the nightmarish mechanical centipede body—segment upon segment of spindly metal limbs tipped with serrated claws that anchored him to the stone. He loomed above with a madman’s regard.

  Trishek’s faceted eyes glinted as he beheld the Eidolon fully.

  “Welcome, welcome, at long last...”