Thin metal legs scuttled along the cobblestone street. A swollen arachnoid abdomen swayed back and forth, and violet curtains cocooned the wagon’s shuttered sides. Its thorax was indented with a bench well for its occupant whose hands were hovering over silver driving thread. 

Necromatic vehicles were powered by the soul of a departed beast; had Cassin truly understood what that meant, he might not have picked a wagon that tried to burrow beneath the ground every time it rained. One that spooked at bright colors or that continually tried to steal his food to wrap in a make-believe web. 

He was unwilling to get rid of it, though. Felt too keenly what it was like to be the wrong fit for a job you’d been thrust into.

The street was wide enough for several wagons to manipulate around each other. Scurrying by was a frilled lizard with a gramophone around its neck, broadcasting the most recent news. Around a corner stomped a bull as it exhaled smoke from its metal nostrils and carted heavy bricks in cargo pallets. Smaller wagons, tinier than even his in their dragonfly and feline shapes, moved solo passengers in quick transport. 

It was busy enough that Cassin was brought low to realize, once again, just how quickly things changed.

Norn used to be a village. It flowered from the flooded silver plains of Castain with thatched roofs of hellebore and aconite. Small goats would wander between them with bells around their necks. It was the epicenter of the Weaver’s Guild. For many centuries, Norn had been tangled in the Silken Cult. They’d created tapestries of blankets with prophecies inside their weft—some innocent, some malicious, but all decayed into corrupted destinies when it came out that they were stealing Fate’s thread. When the cult’s False God was disbelieved, so, too, was its craft.

After that, fishing became its industry and weaving its buried passion. The Drowned Coast pulled travelers from afar, and the village became a town became a city.

It spilled into the sea now, not gracefully, but slumped from the wounds where its vital organs had been stolen. The buildings were covered with scaffolding like spiderwebs, constantly under repair or construction, barely any stars to be seen between the heavy breathing of stone and neon ghost-lights.

The roofs no longer had wildflowers. Necromatic goats carefully manicured the grass. The newer versions of ghost-tech were less lifelike and more… something else. They stood against the dark horizon of the night with whorls and filigree along their crystalline horns and dead eyes. So still. Scanning every hour to mark the length of grass.

Cassin remembered when the grass used to be green.

The Lucent Era had brought with it many things, but the bioluminescence had taken the longest to get used to. Green was a color now seldom seen in nature. The grass was silver or red or orange. The trees were turquoise and violet. Flora and fungi drained all the colors from the distant galaxies in the sky.

Pretty, but alien. If he stared too long, his eyes began to hurt.

On the bench well in front of him, harp strings were crossed in a gossamer array that communicated with the spirit in his wagon. He plucked three soft notes. The wagon shifted off the thoroughfare of still-dark storefronts and down a side street. Lamps flickered overhead from bottled moth spirits that muddied the town’s colors until it looked like a rotten scab that never quite healed.

The alley opened to a small square with a fountain. The doors around it were boarded up, windows covered with fabric strips of death warding. The bottoms ended in frayed threads, entangling spirits that might try to escape, or so the superstition claimed. Behind the brick walls would be family tombs from when the old village was built over and repurposed. Any bodies left behind were long dead, forgotten lineages entombed in the city’s foundation out of respect. Cassin thought it morbid.

Forgetfulness so easily turned family to monster.

On the fountain, the flowers had been chipped and weathered down by wandering hands until they were a formless mass of shapes. A Tevish village once gifted the fountain to the ancestors of this place for their compassion in sending packages of textiles when Tevast’s coast was devastated by a hurricane. Both people had been dead now for many centuries. This act of kindness that once connected them was as rotten as their corpses were in the ground.

Cassin pulled his bitter gaze away from it and plucked a sharp note. The wagon stopped.

A set of dumpsters smelled like sour flesh in the corner. Above him were layers of balconies and windows. Neon signs advertised odd shops and dead-end boutiques. Small shrines were hidden amongst religious paraphernalia to the Lovely Lady: shallow offering bowls, teacups grown cold, and burnt candles in unsanctioned wax. Innocuous but for the eyes seeking them; whisperings to the Titans.

Throughout it all, loud music pulsed from every vein in the city. Drumming beats and screeching skips, bleeding from the windows like some siren call Cassin could no longer understand but wanted to.

With a rusted crack, the wagon settled between a bench and the stone corner. Cassin got off, landing heavily in thick black boots, shaking out stiff muscles.

He was the closest to human that this world got anymore. He wasn’t all that different from a maven at first glance: two legs, two arms, ten toes and fingers. If one could boil it down to an elementary understanding, perhaps that would be enough. Back when the world hadn’t yet started to keep night’s time, he would have laid claim to that word. 

Human: a child of the Sun.

But Cassin was no longer the same person that stepped foot outside his snow-laden village over four thousand years ago. That Cassin was as long forgotten as the faded fountain in the square. A relic of something that no longer existed, kept around for no purpose other than to wane.

A hundred years was a long time for a single life.

A thousand? It was an absurd number. Grown more absurd for the fact that he kept expecting it to stop at some point.

It never did. Four thousand. Now that was an amount that would make an archivist laugh. His history had become madness, and his perception of time obliterated. All he could do was focus on here. Now. The present was the only thing he believed in anymore.

An awning stretched out of the wagon’s side as it twisted one of its limbs to stretch it like a strand of silk. The metal shutter rolled up, and from inside, a soft record spun a grainy tune that was old and out of melody with the city’s rhythm.

Such a quiet song should have been swallowed by the dark harbors around him, but the world seemed to hush instead. It bent its ear toward Cassin’s every movement as he laid claim to this small space, as much spinning his own web as the ghost-metal beside him.

“Rest your soul, my spiderling.” Cassin knocked his tattooed knuckles against the metal wall. It looked as if he’d dipped his fingers into the Abyss. Along his hands and beneath the hem of his jacket stretched spirals of black lines along his copper skin. “We have a few nights before they bite our heels, clattering cans and nattering teeth.”

The music grew louder, skipping a beat in the middle of Domni’s last opera. The man had never reached the fame that Cassin had thought was deserved, but Cassin had still loved to see him perform. Dim stage lights and a run-down theater could do nothing to drown true passion. Cassin finished setting up his roaming shop to the low, melodious refrain of a hunter lost in a never-ending forest.

The more things changed, the more he felt himself disappearing. The wilderness was now the city that surrounded him, and anonymity was better found in a crowd. There was no winning when you had lived to see oceans become ponds.

Like the world’s worst magician, he’d resurface between the centuries to remind himself what it meant to be alive.

While the sky above slowly passed, the darkness of moonrise giving way to star-speckled midnight, Cassin settled himself within his wagon. He sat upon a stool and leaned against the counter at the window, surrounded by the bodies of instruments like flies in a web. Woodwinds dangled from the ceiling, violins rested against the wall behind him, and percussion pieces were stacked near his window because children always went for the noisiest, most violent thing first. His instruments bled from his workshop and infected his life. The floor was scattered with curls of wood, nails and iron fillings were dusted across the surface of counters, and instead of knives in his kitchen there were chisels and hammers.

Music compelled him. It was his first language, and he got a vindictive satisfaction in inspiring that curiosity within those around him as much as possible. To keep the Sun alive in the only way that She existed anymore. A ghost of sound.

There were many places in which music was illegal, but not Castain, a safe harbor against most persecutions. Even for monsters like him.

If it wasn’t scholars chasing him down, trying to imbue a violin with the abstract concept of sorrow, it was children bothering him for penny pipes that could make animal sounds. He was the reason for quite a few disrupted classrooms at both the elementary and collegiate levels.

Cassin played along with his wagon’s song choice, an old guitar hugged naturally to his frame like the Dead Goddess had made him with it in his hands. Loose black curls hung past his nose. His eyes were best kept hidden. There was no sheet music in front of him, despite how his notes collided and then danced away from the record player. Pitch, volume, and melody never changed no matter how many centuries passed.

He used to be afraid that his mind would rot like the papers of his life he’d once coveted. Letters, notes, simple things that he scrounged from a village that no longer existed. He’d pressed them carefully between pages of books, but those had rotted, too. Once when an old wagon of his had fallen into a river. Another time when his things were stolen by bandits. Yet again, when a cruel winter had come and was so terrifyingly, familiarly bitter that he’d been forced to burn his own instruments for heat.

Now? Now he didn’t really think about his memory and rotting pages if he could help it.

City bells began to ring, chiming across the broken facade of Norn, announcing the release of its hordes from school.

Cassin’s calloused fingertips skimmed along the fated threads of his guitar. Mesmerizing as a fire’s flame, the melody travelled across sparking signs and red stone, slipping directly into the veins of Norn like a livewire.

“Missere Widow.” The moniker was whispered like scuttling ants. First a scout and then a swarm. Their voices ricocheted along the alley wall. Missere Widow. Castain was always so polite, turning his moniker into something fancier than the storybook villain Tevast characterized him as: Mister Spider.

They stopped just as they got to the edge of the entrance, shadowed faces peering at him, elbows shoving one another to see who would dare to come close.

They were monsters. Hidden in the shadows with gleaming eyes and fangs and claws. Like peering under the bed to a nightmare. So much was different now, beneath the Night Gods.

Cassin set his guitar to the side, leaning over the ledge of the window. He glared at them, the tattoos around his eyes heavy and black. “What are you, little mice? Is that any way to greet something scary? Where is your war face?”

Some of them shrieked at him talking. The older ones gave him snaggle-toothed growls. Cassin bared his teeth in a smile. “Is that it?”

The children poured from the alleyway like an army, chasing the bravery high of those untried by war. Cassin slammed his large hands on the ledge. The wagon rumbled with the force. Several children tripped back, hiding behind friends, while a few raced up to his counter.

“What do you demand?” Cassin leaned down close, drawing them into a whisper. “What tithe for the taker?”

One of them shuffled to the front. The kid was an archit, one of the folk who took form in shells or scales. Their pink skin was covered with pieces of ruby chitin. While their torso was humanlike, a centipede’s body lifted them up on many legs to peer over the counter. Archit weren’t common in Castain. It was a frigid place for the cold-blooded; knitted pink warmers covered each leg. 

Someone must love them very dearly.

“Have you time for a rhyme?” the child asked.

Cassin leaned his chin on a fist, short beard prickling against his skin. “You’ve a tale for sale?” The light behind him cast much of his form in shadow. Most of him was buried beneath a heavy thatch of hair and tattoos.

So much of him had been tailored to be forgotten.

The gaggle of children hushed, holding one another as they all crept forward until there was no more space. 

“There once was a frog named Spots,” the child said, holding on to the counter. “And he had a lot of good hops. And one night he jumped, and one night he leapt, and he tangled his legs up in knots!”

“Oh my,” Cassin said. He dutifully applauded the child’s prideful grin. “You’ve paid my tithe, so I suppose I can’t eat you tonight. Now—” Cassin opened his hands to the shop around him. “Have at it.”

Soon the back alley shrieked with drums and pipes and wailing clarinets as they were tested by children with little skill or knowledge of music. They lacked the hearing for it, although Cassin had met few mortals that had come close to a daylight comprehension of performance—such as Domni. For the children who would sit still and listen, Cassin walked through the notes of “The Rats Catch the Hawks” on a piccolo.

It was painful to listen to their notes, but he didn’t mind. The notes would fade in an hour when they grew bored and returned home with a story to tell, just as their memories of this moment would fade after a few months. In a hundred years, barely any would remain.

Even if the instruments broke, Cassin always had more time to make them again.

Always more time.

Never-ending time.

“Missere.” A hand tugged on the brightly colored sleeve of his jacket.

Cassin dredged his mind back from the eons it had slipped through, subtly pulling his arm away. His jacket was a few decades old, patched with orange, green, and violet like a quilt. It was so ugly that he’d purchased it immediately in a Mitegaiian street market. Fashion changed, ugly didn’t.

“Another rhyme?” Cassin asked, meeting the fractal gaze of the archit. Their eyes were large and black on their humanoid face, watching him without blinking.

The child smiled at him. Their teeth were crooked as an alligator’s. “No, missere, I want to purchase a pipe. That one.” They pointed at one hanging beside Cassin’s head, with pale pink petals trapped in wood and resin. Their antennae twitched excitedly as their eyes caught all the light of the flickering neon overhead.

Cassin’s lips turned thin in a frown. He had the kind of face that didn’t seem as if it had seen much happiness with the way grim fit so well upon it. “And do you know what a price from my shop entails?”

Most of the children had filtered from the alley as the excitement died down, leaving just a few stragglers behind. Two were mavens, tossing a variance ball between them; it shifted between a hard clump of mud in the hands of one to a diamond in the other. They were a sharp folk, more beastly than a human, with pointed ears and teeth like lions. They were as if violence had been given a human form: a warped mirror.

“Are you really going to eat my soul?” the child asked curiously, voice dipping like it was only a question about if it would rain.

“In a way,” Cassin replied. His nails were unnaturally black, colored across both the bed of the nail and his skin. Not a polish, but a stain of something deeper. They held a slight length for his guitar playing. He tapped them restlessly against the counter. “I have doubts of your need for such a deal.”

“People say that your instruments make miracles, though.” The child’s hands slipped away from the ledge. Their expression grew tenuous, like Cassin was drawing a thread out before them only to cut it. “That when you play them, you can change the world.”

It felt like a mountain range between them, having the safety of the wagon holding him from the child’s expectations. Change the world. What a dangerous rumor, heaping hope in teetering piles upon the backs of those who would look to him for a deal. His instruments didn’t change the world—no one was capable of that. All they did was add noise to the clamor of the end.

Cassin felt a weight upon him. “What shadows in this world do you need to shift at such an age?”

Color flashed again across the child’s eyes, reflecting a sign above in blue and green that asked for the Lovely Lady’s blessing with its falling dice. It sat wrong in Cassin’s stomach. He wondered if She was looking in on this moment, and prayed that it wasn’t so, for the child’s sake. The child looked behind them to the few others left and then leaned forward, speaking softly.

“My puppy is sick. Mama can’t pay for his treatments.”

Sickness was a haunting reason for why many found him. Trading lives, promising wellness, wishing for a miracle cure. This child was willing to throw their life away for something so worthless as a beast. Cassin had lived too long and seen too many good people ruin their lives with well-wishes.

“How much do you have?” Cassin asked, folding his thick arms and leaning down to the child’s level.

The child dug through the pockets of their jacket, puffed and pink against the cold wind of Castain. It was almost winter. From their palms, they spilled three copper shades on the counter and a silver ration.

People had run the gamut of currencies ever since he could remember. Metals, bartering, crystals, paper for a little while, but that ended quickly because of how easily it rotted.

And rotted, and rotted, and rotted.

Focus.

Now they’d spun back around to metals, which Cassin preferred, as he could melt them down into pieces for his craft.

A random rock was unearthed alongside the money, speckled pink granite.

“I got this for helping my neighbor weed his frost garden,” the kid said. “I can get more in two nights, if you’ll be here.”

Cassin stared at the meager offerings, asking himself if he was truly considering this. “I’m only here until the wind changes,” he said. “It could be a week. It could be a night. I’m afraid I can promise nothing.”

“But—well. How much is it?” They pointed up at the pipe.

“Etie! We have to go home or we’re going to be late for dinner,” one of the mavens called of the last two that remained. “Come on.”

“I’m sorry for your beast,” Cassin said quietly. “Run along now.”

The child, this Etie, pulled a tumultuous pout. They scowled at their friends, antennae twitching. “Go without me!”

The friends shoved at each other and, after a moment of hesitation, dashed off through the alley.

Cassin breathed out slowly, past the way his lungs spasmed, past the noise in his ears, past the hunger in his soul that craved such an easy deal that this child was offering. Sometimes it was hard not to be the monster that he was now. Sometimes he didn’t care to try. But Cassin wasn’t starving enough to lose his sense of decency. Not yet.

The forming of a deal was ancient. It was a gift from Fate, a way to allow the Sun’s children to survive in a world of night; the energy they needed was no longer in a form freely given. All that Light was now trapped inside the night’s folk. Just waiting to be culled.

A parasite. That’s what Cassin was.

Fate’s gift came with a shackle. One he didn’t ask for. When Cassin made a deal, he gave his recipient a single miracle. Forever after, their thread was Fate’s to control—and Fate was not a loving goddess. She was a beast, chaotic and primordial, and saw all mortals as nothing more than a plague. It was never kind. No matter what Cassin tried to tell himself in the making of the deal, trying to justify such rotten corruption. 

It was never kind.  

He had tried tipping the scales, tried quitting altogether like an addict, tried running from all of society until his Light was burned out to the quick. He’d never won against Her game.

The futility of it all was bile in his throat.

“Go home,” Cassin said again. He reached up for the shutter on his wagon. “You aren’t the kind of clientele I’m waiting for.”

“Please, Missere Widow!” Etie leapt, hanging on to Cassin’s closest arm. They held so tightly that it was as if they clutched him to stop from drowning. “Please! My da got me my puppy and he can’t get another.”

“I’m sure he can find an abandoned thing on the side of the road,” Cassin said. He was strong enough that he could rip the child away, but he only wiggled his arm back and forth.

“But my da isn’t here anymore.”

“Mine isn’t either. Cry me the Drunken River.”

“I’ll scream.” Etie’s voice picked up dangerously, loud enough to contest with the thrumming music up above.

Cassin hissed at them. “Alright, alright, let’s not go serenading the guards.” While Castain was more forgiving than most countries, creatures like Cassin operated under a “don’t make a scene and you won’t get removed” sort of deal. He pried the kid’s hands from his arm, setting them carefully back on the ground so they didn’t fall. “I’ll fix your beast.”

“What about the pipe?”

“It’s not a deal. Forget about the instrument,” Cassin snapped. He rolled the shutter down and took a deep breath, centering himself. There came an immediate tapping on the metal shell. His wagon rumbled, instruments shivering against the walls. He opened the side door and stepped out. The wagon shifted with the weight of him leaving. “Stop abusing my spider,” he grumbled. “It’s scared of strangers.”

Quick legs tip-tapped across the cobblestone. The kid collided with his knees, barely moving his hulking form. “You’re going to make a deal with me?”

Cassin’s lips thinned, staring down with glowing eyes shrouded by dark hair. “The deal isn’t a deal, but rather a... favor.”

“So, I have to do something for you?” Etie’s face wrinkled up in confusion. “My mama said not to do Missere Widow any favors. Said it’ll always be that he eats you in the end.”

Cassin sighed, closing his eyes for a weary moment. “And yet a deal is alright?”

“Well... actually, I don’t know.”

“Guide me to your beast.” Cassin started walking down the alley. If the children were walking home from school, they had to live somewhere nearby. The colors of the lights flocked to him as the spirits in the city pressed against their boundaries. 

Two small hands wrapped like a vise around one of his. Etie’s fingers were cold.

“You know,” Etie said, “you talk like a jerk, but all I hear is that you’re going to fix my puppy!”

“We’ll see,” Cassin muttered, trying to subtly shake off the kid’s hands as they walked.

Without his wagon, the city breathed down his neck. Cassin’s skin crawled, his muscles too tense beneath it and feeling every shift. He kept his head low and large shoulders pulled in.

The shops, with their flashing advertisements and flickering interiors, turned quickly into cramped apartments and loud lives through every curtain-covered window. Children were playing along the sidewalk with their grandparents’ knucklebones in a coin drop game. In a nearby alley, a body was keeled over and retching. From down the street, fast enough that Cassin swung the child to his other side, a wagon rushed past.

“Did you ever have a puppy, Missere Widow?” Etie asked. They were now swinging Cassin’s hand. Their palm was strangely sticky. 

The two walked past a flash of blue light as a huddled figure’s face flared a bright blue from a pill they bit down on. Cassin could hear the faded song inside their soul, the way that the air around them warped and wobbled with elation and despair from a small spot of manufactured happiness.

An intense longing for a similar echo filled him. There was a time in his life that he’d been under the same thrall, trying to find any escape, and it only made him hungrier. Chewed up from the inside out.

“No.” Cassin’s reply was like stone.

“You’d like my puppy. He’s very sweet.”

The child’s home was in a row of apartments with fabric hanging from the windows like colorful corpses in the gallows. Family tapestries. There was no door greeter, and therefore no one to chase the viper from their vulnerable nest.

The apartments were more homely than the world outside. An abandoned toy wagon with a small stuffed buffalo inside rested beside a closed door. A pair of shoes were kicked off to dry beside another. Cassin did not belong here.

“My mama doesn’t usually come home till late,” Etie said, leading him inside a violet door painted with little flowers along the bottom. “She’ll be so surprised!”

The door shut behind him with a muted sigh.

It was obvious, at first glance, to whom the home belonged. A pink rug over a stone floor, pink curtains on the wooden walls, and many drawings with pink figures and creatures in them tacked everywhere that small hands could reach. The child ran through, lighting the lamps in the room. Too poor, it seemed, to afford the death-worker needed for ghost-lights.

Cassin breathed slowly and moved even slower as he came to a stop in the middle of the small apartment. He felt soot in his lungs. “Bring it to me,” he said, unwilling to trespass further into such a sacred space. He was wrong, wrong, wrong for this.

“Right,” Etie said like a little soldier. They darted off down the short hallway to the one bedroom. He heard the faint murmurings of their young voice.

Cassin wasn’t sure when he’d last been inside a home. They hadn’t changed much, all things considered. He turned that thought around in his mind like a sore tooth.

“This is Missere Widow.” Etie was holding the beast carefully in their arms, a fluff of black that barely had its eyes open. Cassin could hear its rattling breath from where he stood. “He’s going to help you. He’s like a doctor, but for the soul.”

Cassin was more of a broker. He held his hands out and the child placed the dog carefully within them. His palms dwarfed the creature. Its nose moved softly against his thumb as it breathed in a new scent. Its heartbeat thrummed against his skin through its fragile rib cage, easily crushed if he just closed his fist.

Heavily, Cassin knelt one knee upon the ground, resting the back of his hands upon his other to steady the creature. He breathed in the scent of ash and life, dredging up his soul with which to work. When he breathed out, it traveled to the epicenter of his palms. Bled in golden light that turned his eyes into a lighthouse in dark waters. The light snuffed from the room, pulled away from its lanterns to nestle in his hands like dust when it floated through moonlight. It was delicate and sparked in small pops of a flame.

The years that he had traveled weighed down his voice, crumbling it into the depths of the earth as he coaxed a miracle to spark from what little reserves he had. It had been a long time since he’d done such a thing—sung in the tongue of his home. The language of miracles.

“Restless thing, come bow your head.

A weary life is long to tread.

Darkness comes, and long it lasts,

Abyss or Light,

Your final task.”

As his voice wove with the fabric of sound, it grew beyond the tenuous hold that his body gave it, rose up to a physical thing that surrounded the little beast—and then sank into its breath. He fell beneath its skin, past muscle and blood and bone, until he found an ember swallowed by darkness. 

It was this creature’s time to die. Sometimes you just weren’t lucky.

But Cassin was softer than he was wise. His empathy was a gaping wound that he’d stapled shut, ripping open every time someone asked for help. He hated himself sometimes, for not being able to say no. For being in this position in the first place. For carving away pieces of himself until he was sure there would be nothing left.

He took a piece of his Light and pressed it to that small ember, each breath stoking it higher, nurturing its flame as it burned away the shadows surrounding it. It wasn’t the delicate art of healing, but Cassin was capable of brute forcing his way to a wanted outcome.

When his song faded, and the echoing silence was too big to understand in its absence, Cassin opened his eyes. A small set of teeth bit down on his thumb.

Etie gasped in excitement, but it spilled into tears as they took the dog back from Cassin and held it close. The wriggling thing licked the child’s face and scrambled out of their grasp to dance across the floor in unbalanced hops.

Everything spun for a dizzying moment as Cassin stood. He felt the pull in his chest like a cavernous hole, an echoing punishment for chipping away at what he didn’t have to give. For a moment, his eyes couldn’t see the world around him, only the bright souls in the room, easily plucked and fed to the dying furnace in his chest. 

“Thank you,” the kid burst out, wrapping around Cassin’s leg.

He shuddered. Cassin pried Etie away, pushing them back several feet, hands no longer careful. “Don’t go looking for any more deals,” he said. His heart was pounding as adrenaline kept rising, a terrible thing inside his skin that was ready to hunt. He shoved it down and made for the door.

“Missere Widow?”

The dog bounded around his feet. Cassin shooed it away, almost tripping as he lunged for the exit.

Only for the door to swing open.

“Et brasca?!”

Etie’s mother was home early. He couldn’t even call himself surprised at Fate’s little prank. Cassin barely twisted to the side in time. Metal punctured the meat of his shoulder in a sharp punch of pain.

“No, Mama!” Etie cried.

It was a burst of chaos as Cassin grabbed the mother’s arm, twisting it away to escape, while the kid ran between. Blind noise filled the air. He hit the doorframe as he escaped into the hallway, the knife jerking from his shoulder in an arc of blood. He shoved the mother back, and she tripped on the dog as it raced around them and down the hallway. Cassin lurched after it.

He could feel it. The way the air suddenly pulled tight. How all the strings were being drawn upon by the spider in Her web.

Cassin wasn’t fast enough to stop the outside door from opening as a tenant walked in, nor could he stop their surprised stumble as the dog skirted their feet and dashed outside. Cassin slammed through the doorway—he heard a high-pitched shriek of a beast, the rumbling groan of metal, and he felt as if his soul might collapse entirely.

He tripped down the steps of the apartment complex, frantically searching for a tiny black body of fur. A wagon had come to an unceremonious stop against a signpost. He looked for blood. Listened for a whimper. He was about to lift the entire wagon with a rumble of starved power when a figure stepped around the body of the necromatic python.

The cold fear that had consumed him broke away into relief... and then sharply into annoyance.

“Voidspeaker,” Mayhem said, small dog clutched like a ball in the crook of his elbow. He was a tall vision of white priestly armor and whiter hair that was braided back. “I believe this is low, even for you.” His four black eyes, like seamless pools to the Abyss, narrowed at Cassin with something akin to hate. 

His severe persona was made ridiculous with the fluff of a beast gnawing on his sleeve.

Cassin shifted his weight from his heels to his toes. Blood made his jacket stick to his arm, but he could already feel it slithering back to the wound. “Why am I unsurprised that you’re here, tangling with Fate’s weave like a bull in a bramble. The beast belongs to them.” He pointed at Etie behind him as the child came dashing out. The kid’s mother was quick to grab them, shoving them behind her. She still had the bloody knife in her hand.

Mayhem was as if someone had taken stained glass and shattered it, all sharp angles and broken lines. He was an impes, descended from the dragons of the desert, two black horns curling back from his temples in cresting waves and the teeth of a pure carnivore. There were so few in existence, and yet in this whole wide world, Cassin couldn’t seem to shake this one.

There was a moment’s pause where the priest glared at Cassin like he was trying to pick apart each word for its lie. The runic fire inside Mayhem’s veins, filled with the magma flare that rose up from his chest and through his throat, slowly receded. Cassin could see the paths of blue rivers beneath his bronze skin, so thin and delicate on someone who was created to kill.

“You will come with me,” Mayhem said with a liquid accent that stretched like lava. He wielded Merc like a blunt spoon cutting a steak. For a language of bartering, there was no persuasion in his words. He marched across the street. “We have things to discuss.”

“Unlikely,” Cassin replied.

“You have no choice in this. The gods have dictated—”

Cassin did something then that could potentially be construed as “not nice.” With a note of power, he lifted his hand as if plucking something.

A loud curse exploded from Mayhem’s lips as the little fluff went shooting up several feet and he raced to catch it.

Cassin booked it. 

He leapt over the tail of the necromatic python and took off down an alley.

“Stop him!” Mayhem ordered, a bizarre plea to the civilians that would have no chance—

Lightning exploded in front of Cassin’s face. The hot sting of it sparked against his cheek as fragments reached out with no grounding. He barely turned on his heels in time to avoid the dark form of Dearth where she lurked in the alley. Coils of lightning sparked along the metal jewelry and implants along her skin. A rumble of thunder gathered in the air as she raised her hands again.

Cassin hummed a wordless song, shifting his center of gravity to lift him into the air as he leapt off the wall and over her head.

Instead of landing on the ground, a rope wound around his ankle, dragging him higher. No, not a rope. Cassin snarled at the vine, and then at the woman standing on the balcony of a roof. Thick greenery surrounded her, slithering against the stone and iron rails. She wore a lavender trench coat with flowers that spiraled down its collar: Barren.

He shifted his song, gravity dropping and being replaced with a burst of fire that combusted from his form in a supernova, immolating the vines. He hit the ground hard, racing around the corner of the alley.

A dumpster hurtled at him through the air.

It would seem Mayhem had brought his entire clergy. He was clearly upping his game from the last time they’d met. He was no longer underestimating just how little Cassin wished to be in any priest’s presence for longer than it took to say “Goodbye and die.”

Cassin let out an explosive shout, slamming his hands together, and the great beast of metal crumpled tighter and tighter as he opened a gravity well inside it, until the whole thing was no bigger than a kickball. He reversed the flow and sent it hurtling back toward Butcher where she stood lying in wait. He slipped past as she caught the cannon shot. She was the most dangerous—the last time they’d met, she’d sent a knife straight through his neck.

He didn’t know how Mayhem somehow attracted powerful mavens to do his bidding, as if he was anything other than infuriating at best and cold-blooded stone at worst.

Moving haphazardly, Cassin grabbed a wagon moving through the street, a rolling armadillo, and shifted its gravity so it crashed between the alley’s cracked stone. It wouldn’t be long until Butcher shifted it, but it bought him enough time to slip away. He threaded back through the labyrinthine city that sat atop the bones of its history.

He slowed as he reached the mouth of the alley where he’d hidden his wagon, holding his chest as his breath came too short. He was far too weak. He hissed between his teeth, frustrated at himself for spending more of his power on useless things—frustrated with himself for many reasons, really, the least of which that he was simply not like he used to be. When miracles came easy.

No matter. He would leave the city and travel down the coast to the next town. There would be more opportunities; he’d simply have to make do without for a little longer.

Cassin had starved for so long, he no longer remembered what it was like without hunger.

Wiping sweat from the back of his neck, Cassin entered the back alley, eyes naturally moving to where his wagon laid.

For a moment, he stood, silent, frozen, stunned at the absence where his makeshift home had once sat.

He’d had a wagon. He was sure he’d had a wagon.

Cassin walked cautiously to the space, a nervous hum bitten down against the side of his cheek as he tried to search for some hint that he hadn’t made it all up in his head. His memory—well. Being alone for so long wasn’t good for one’s memory. Sometimes his head got things confused.

But he was sure. He was sure he’d had one.

His hands twisted together, knucklebones knocking as he wrung his fingers, absent of his instruments. His guitar. His nothing. Nothing again. Just absence. Just him and the wind, cutting cold and empty as it hollowed his bones and played him like a flute.

“If you would listen—” He hadn’t even heard Mayhem’s boots over the echoing silence in his ears. “I would have been able to tell you that you have become a target for Hemlock.” He didn’t even sound out of breath.

Cassin shifted a bare increment, watching Mayhem from the corner of his eye. 

Mayhem had stopped at the entry of the back alley. He was a long line of white, collar stiff against his neck and long coat running down past his knees. He looked like something that might crawl out from beneath a bed. In his white-gloved grip was a black envelope.

“This was left in its place. Seeing as I also have business for Hemlock, we may see to an accord,” Mayhem continued, unfaltering in the face of the silence pouring from Cassin’s tense form. “My dreams have led me here—three times we have met, and this the third. Fate need speak no louder than that.”

“Fate.” Cassin spit the name like a rabid beast. He drew in a slow breath and curbed his anger into a quiet reply. “I don’t serve your gods. And you don’t serve mine.”

“Look at me when you speak to me.”

Cassin’s teeth ground together, facing him.

Behind Mayhem were three shadows as his clergy drew near, but perhaps he was wise enough not to try and corner Cassin again. Or maybe he was nervous to let his fragile mortals close enough to the Voidspeaker. Cassin hadn’t held back when he’d stabbed Mayhem in the leg during their first meeting, hoping it was warning enough to stop seeking him out—that was what had brought on Butcher’s ire.

“I was there when your gods were born,” Cassin whispered. “And I will be there when they die. State your business. Your teeth are wearing thin at my ankles.”

The neons of the ghost-lights above were a galaxy in the priest’s eyes. He was grotesquely beautiful. 

“I do not understand you.” Mayhem’s voice grew harder. He shook his head abruptly. “There was a… misunderstanding, the last we spoke,” Mayhem continued, as if their fight had been a round of insults at the dinner table and not a bloody altercation among the bones of giants. Or the second time they’d met and caused a fire in Kavin’s marketplace. “One way or another, you will help me, Voidspeaker. This invitation has been written for your soul Signature; only you may deliver it to the door of Hemlock’s estate. But should you allow us to accompany you... I would owe you a favor. Take it as you will.”

Cassin didn’t want a favor, he wanted a deal. He hummed deep in his throat, lower than the night’s children could usually hear, yet the priest flinched. Cassin’s voice was a pinpoint target, grabbing the letter from Mayhem’s hand to float across the ocean between them. He snatched it from the air, tearing open its seal.

To the established Missere Widow, whom we have tried to contact previously. We hope to have your attention. You are invited to a night of remembrance and rebirth. Madame Luraine Bell hosts a gala of great wonders, none so magnificent as the room of Dwell. Come and see the resplendence of your home, exhumed from the darkness and cast once more into light. We are humbled to offer you the position as guest of honor.

Rage caught in his throat like barbed wire. No one should be taking anything from out of Dwell, it was a tomb of a country. The last pieces of his civilization hidden behind the safety of Terror-infested wilderness. His hands shook from a chaos inside him. He couldn’t breathe.

“I would assume that your wagon was assurance that you would show,” Mayhem said, a sledgehammer of monotone nothing. Cassin couldn’t read anything in how he talked, no inflection, no notes, no song in the words that left his lips. When Cassin came from a world where a hum could hold a sentence, it was torture to be amongst those that spoke so wrong.

“Get out.” The invitation was wrinkling in his hands.

“I would like a clear answer. I must make plans tonight on infiltrating the estate. The Dream Eater believes you to be the best path—”

“Get out!” Cassin thundered, smoke rising from his hair and cracks splitting his skin like volcanic vents. The air in the alley grew dangerously hot and dry, the fountain drying in a cloud of steam. His lips peeled back in a snarl—dull, round teeth, not made for this world of violence and darkness.

Mayhem’s hand moved to rest on the hilt of the axe at his side. “I will be at the Grave Tender’s, should you wish to amend your choice.” He didn’t turn his back on Cassin, inscrutable black eyes only flickering away when stone was once more between them.

Cassin hissed out a gout of smoke as he crushed the invitation in his hands. He fell to a knee, holding his chest tightly as he burned inside. It was several minutes more before he felt as if he might not explode.

He sat down in the empty space of the back alley and tried to pull himself together, once again. Eternally.

✦︎

The Journey Continues