Apocalypse: What Rough Beast?

"But now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"
-William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming

For miles around Grimspire, the legions gathered, both his servants and those of the Enemy, in numbers to blot out land and sky. Demon swarms, ravening each other as often as the few fallen or crippled humans they passed amongst themselves for sport, tore at the leveled buildings as they waited. Angels, filling the sky with flame and light, waited. The Prince of Heaven, Bearer of Divine Vengeance, Patron of Artists, Commander of the Highest, and, since the unfortunate demise of Archangel Michael, Pinnacle of Might, Raphael of the Seraphim, waited, his wings of black fire tearing at the air, his eyes dark pits drinking in the field of battle below. The cloud-obscured, pale sky stank like a dying thing. Behind him, the city burned and tore at itself like a wild thing.

The Grimspire rose from the ashes of the world like the dark tree of the phoenix, untouched by such petty things as rebirth, not disturbed by changes in the world order. Even now, with its great machinery working to prevent entry of the mind and the restructuring of space that was magic, the Spire was invisible to mortal eyes. Raphael, who saw all things, could not penetrate the dark chitin of its outer walls, nor see through the mirrored glass windows. Its doors were locked. The Spire, for whatever reason, had never permitted any other connections between itself and the outside world. For eons, the black, gem-topped monolith had wandered through the omniverse, an acknowledged freehold that never opened its doors, never stayed long, and never was challenged.

From somewhere inside, the Seraphim felt a surge of subtle power, simpler than mechanism, deeper than magic. It passed around the battlefield, and paused for a moment, focusing on him, seeing, understanding, before it passed on. Raphael barely had time to manifest his great sword before the power, whatever it was, had vanished without a trace. This, he did not like at all.

The sun, unseen save as a dim impression of brilliance in the overhanging clouds, sank behind a building and reddened, casting the entire city in a bloody haze that poured syrup-like over angel, demon, and Freehold alike. Twilight, the time of greatest power for both halves of the Host. Angels shone more brightly, demons rose in their positions, gathering the fragile power of astronomical alignment into their cores. Raphael, being a thing above galaxies, felt nothing, but he had commanded for too long to dismiss the effect end-of-day held upon his forces. It was time.

He raised his hand, and something beyond fire and light and darkness and death detached from it, soaring upwards in a column of blinding power that was not quite light, not quite energy, not quite matter, but something deeper, from the core of his soul. Raphael's presence rose over the battlefield, shining darkly, and moments later another joined it, less brilliant and less ancient, but to the same purpose and for the same goal. Raphael frowned. The Seraphim's opposite number, then, was not one of the Maskim. They had dispatched a lesser being to command their forces. Either they were most unsure of victory, or their estimation of LaCroix's importance had changed in the recent hours. An unexpected quantity, but one that could be turned to his advantage nonetheless.

The presences of light mingled for a moment, testing each other in the game, and broke, flowing down to earth, to sky, to the forms and accidents of their soldiers. Raphael, in one moment and every moment thereafter, saw through a million angelic pairs of angelic eyes, and guided them all with one will, one thought, one breath. Elsewhere, he knew, his opposite number felt, breathed, saw, and loathed in equal quantity to its servants.

As one, the dual hosts rushed forward and attacked.

*

Kranhk and his brothers surged forward over the rubble, loping on two legs and four. His claws raked deep gouges in concrete as he passed, eyes blazing, trampling one of his broodmates in haste. Above, the hated lights struck in a blaze of flame and were repelled, as unlight kindled within the great jewel at the GrimSpire's cap. His brothers, and the numberless host around them, rushed towards the spire's foundation. They were slits in the long, twilight shadows, the lights of madness in their eyes, hatred dripping from their claws. Kranhk, barely twenty feet away from the Spire's ebony base, gathered himself to leap...

Unlight bloomed within his darkness, and he was no more.

*

"What the FUCK was that?!" Lester stared out the reconstituted window of the conference room at the great space below, spreading out nearly from the base of the Spire into a cone of bare, steaming earth stretching far beyond the three-mile diameter killing zone of the battlefield. An instant before, the had been filled with rubble, and over that rubble had stormed demons by the hundreds of thousands. Now, it looked as though a great portion of Khazan had simply been removed by an antimatter chisel. Not even bodies were left to mark the fallen. Angels pirouetted away from the emptiness, but more demons swelled to fill it even as he watched.

A weapon. Grimspire sounded distantly smug. If he had a personal representation, it would have smiled.

Lester glanced behind him, to the side. Stella brushed nervously at her hair, eyes fixed at the empty space beyond the window. Seryph and Bryn watched, too, both hands straying dangerously near their sword hilts. Sam simply... stood, hands limp at his side, the dark lights of his eyesockets staring out into the twilight. Outside...

Angels danced. Before, running, he had seen them as fireflies with confectionary halos, but here they flew, male and female, eyes and bodies and wings of fire and light. They were gold and silver, the dove, barrel-rolled to evade vollies from Grimspire's smaller weapons, rose to strike back with bolts of plasma and soul that splashed harmlessly against the Spire's armor plating. One of them detached from the larger swarm and dove inwards, spiraling, dodging the guns, the defense system, arcing in towards the conference room. Its eyes blazed with rage, and the flaming sword it carried pulsed ever-brighter as it approached.

Confucius say: Man who live in glass house...

It was almost upon them, raising the sword to strike through the fragile window. Lester staggered back, diving for cover. Seryph and Bryn drew their weapons with a whisper of steel and fell back into a defensive stance, Stell falling back behind them. Sam did not move.

Shall often eat the flesh of pigeons.

There was a sickening thud. The window flared brightly for a moment, dissipating heat. Something slid from the glass and fell, leaving a streak of rainbow blood and shimmering, adhesive flesh that faded away as Lester watched.

A silence followed. Outside, the battle raged on in explosions of light and sound, but not even sound could penetrate the Spire. Unable to control himself, Bryn smiled, and laughed. "You enjoyed that, didn't you?"

Yes. Would you like to see what else I enjoy?

Stella shook her head, "No. But I bet you're going to show us."

Indeed. Watch closely, please.

*

Raphael regarded the battle. It did not go well. The attacking forces were not suffering many losses, but at the same time, they were not doing much damage in return. A few sections of the Spire's chassis glowed cherry-red with black body radiation, but Grimspire's radiators relocated the heat with little effort. Quietly, the Seraphim directed a minor chorus to destroy the radiation vanes. It was unlikely that they would succeed without great effort, but minor damage would be sufficient for what he had in mind.

Excitement raced through his soul, for his body was not strictly corporeal as were those of the lesser choirs. He had no glands, no blood, no brain, but he could feel, and did so most powerfully. It had been quite some time indeed since he had faced a foe quite like Grimspire. The tower had not originally been old, he knew, but since it had seized life for its own, it could have gone anywhere, existed from any time to any time. It could very easily have been circulating the universe since the first days, if it chose, and could even return to those times if it survived this battle. All the resources of the omniverse were at its disposal for armor, weapons, manufacturing, and it was his job to see that the Spire employed them all to the best of its ability, and lost.

It was indeed a pity. As a Seraphim, he disliked destroying beautiful things. It brought back too many memories.

He had one advantage going for him: the Grimspire seemed a fraction more capable against ground forces. Below, several companies of Imps pried against Grimspire's armor, insensible to the change Raphael could see occurring beneath them. Teeth and claws scored into the dark chitin, not damaging, but providing tiny chinks in the armor where others could damage. They ran atop one another, screaming, jumping, their cries of triumph reaching even Seraphic ears, as if they could call back the One Who Was Away.

Then the quake began. For a moment, the sea of Imps and lesser Demons surged like a still pond when a great stone is cast into it. As the ripple traveled on, they died, crushed by falling rock, consumed by the earth which opened beneath them, impaled and rended by shockwaves. The screams, too, reached Seraphic ears, and Raphael smiled. GrimSpire's gem pulsed once more with unlight, sweeping through the ranks of angels, and many of Raphael's warriors were no more.

The Seraphim smiled no longer. The jewel, permitting the spire to rend time and space however inaccurately, would need to be removed. However, if he knew his opposite among the demons, as he did from the simple feint and guarded counterassault Gh'razk'hehz employed without fail, the responsibility for taking out Grimspire's primary would not fall upon his own shoulders.

He directed a few more divisions to concentrate their fire on the radiator vanes, and waited.

*

Seryph watched, and waited, drumming his fingers against the side of his leg. The battle raged on, but for the first time in quite a while, he had no idea who was winning or losing. For every firefly-angel blasted by Grimspire's guns, another swooped in to take its place. Every few moments, the great central weapon discharged, tearing vast swaths of destruction through the ranks of demons below, but more bubbled up, as if they had been seeded in the earth itself. Quakes shook the ground below, but he couldn't sense the slightest vibration in the conference room's hardwood floor. "Who's winning?"

Nobody. They have yet to damage me significantly, while I have not made a significant hole in their numbers.

"How long can this go on?"

Barring one side or the other doing something unexpected?

"Yes."

I can distract them long enough with earthquakes and strikes of the main cannon to prevent either demons or angels from puncturing my armor, but, depending on the generals of both armies, they may adjust tactics to compensate. This could go on for quite some time.

Behind Seryph, Stell stiffened. She shook her head, one hand flying to her temples. "Something's happening."

SHOW US.

The walls, ceiling, and floor blurred and disappeared. Demons stretched around them to the horizon, Angels owning the air as totally as their mortal enemies did the land. Four large, thorned creatures slouched near the battlefield's edge, power crackling between the Tesla coils of their outspread arms. Light surged, and the crackling spread forth over the field of rubble and warfare, already broken by earthquake and weakened with blasts of the great cannon, destroying what it touched. The thorned figures, silhouetted against the light they cast forth, grew thin and indistinct as it approached, gathering strength and speed into a ball a hundred paces wide, rolling faster and faster towards the Spire's outer wall. Backlashes of light consumed the creatures of thorn as their light slammed into Grimspire's invisible side. Tremors reached Seryph's shoes. The illusion of isolation flickered and vanished.

Stell blinked. "Are you all right?"

Mostly. That strike knocked out many of the self-repair clusters on the lower levels of the easterly wall. I will have to manufacture new ones, which will take several minutes. My factories are already busy creating personal weapons, and a few... surprises, as well.

"What was that?" Bryn's eyes remained fixed at the point where, in Grimspire's simulation, the now-dead demons had struck. Seryph couldn't tell from Bryn's tone what he was afraid of more: that the hosts of Heaven and Hell could conquer them, or that the Spire could actually repel their advance.

"Departing souls." Stell lurched forward, steadied herself against the conference table, and waved off Seryph and Bryn's offer of aid. "A few lesser nobles of Hell, pooling their resources and the mortal souls under their control. They traded everything for energy, even themselves, and sent it against us. Were we in anything other than the Spire, there would be little left of us apart from a crater."

"Oh."

"So now what?"

WE WAIT SOME MORE.

\c(*)

Gh'razk'hehz, corpulent Lord of Hell and Commander of the Seventh Host on this brief campaign, lay guarded behind the walls of his soul, attended by concubines and pleasure-givers, mortals subsumed into himself thousands of years past. They gave him delight, and served him in whichever way he desired. In return, he gave them pain, and the ultimate lack of individuality that came of being subsumed by a Demon Lord. It was not a fair trade. Fair trades, in Gh'razk'hehz's mind, were not made for Hell.

Directing a number of concubines to scrape the puss from his bloated stomach, and others to pleasure him, he contemplated the battle, his province of the day. The enemy was incredibly well-defended, possessed of many strengths and weapons which Gh'razk'hehz had never before seen. Destruction of the earth was not a tactic often applied by fortifications, even intelligent ones. More unusual was the great main weapon, destructive beyond compare. He had seen nothing like it in all his aeons: the crystal itself bent time and space, fed by eternally redundant conduits of power running the entire length of the Grimspire. Where it struck, things were no more. He had purposefully placed some of his most heavily defended troops under the crystal's fire, and none had left so much as a quark behind for analyzation.

Oh, how he coveted that crystal! With its unique focus and his own unbridled power, perhaps he would finally be able to carve out a portion of Hell for his own. Never to challenge the Maskim, of course, never that, but at least then he could sit in state as a Prince... Have the best pickings of the souls, all the brilliant innocents sent down by mistakes, by belief, by their own needs for punishment. The very prospect caused pus to flow faster from the breaks in his chitinous hide.

But first, there were plans that had to be put in order. The abortive soul-strike of some minor Lieutenants had not punctured the Spire's hull as intended, but its repair functions now seemed much more limited than previously. Granted, the weakness might be temporary, but he could not afford to take the chance. Seeing through many a million pairs of eyes, hearing through many a million groupings of ears, he directed the brunt of his host's ferocity against the plate where his Lieutenants had struck. The lesser demons themselves did not know why suddenly they converged on one point. For them, it arose out of instinct, and it was cheerful happenstance that, beneath their blows of fists and plasma, hatred, power, and brute force, the plate buckled. Before any serious damage could be inflicted, the main cannon blasted into his troops, granting the repair systems a few more vital moments to work.

Gh'razk'hehz kept several of his own creatures in reserve for moments where more finesse or strength was required than could be afforded by the typical demon. They were his elite, each in their own way masters of a field. One could invade and kill hundreds as they slept, others could rend a man from crown to crotch with all the effort of opening a bottle with the proper tool, still others could infiltrate minds, bodies, souls. It was to one of these, a batlike entity of whom even demons could see little, and only then in direct light, that Gh'razk'hehz directed his next thoughts. Angelic strikes against several radiator vanes and conduits had proved relatively successful, knocking off one of the vanes already. There was a hole between vane and deckplate which had yet to be filled. The bat-thing was to go there, to enter into the Spire, and command the intelligence within to shut down all defenses, cease all attacks.

It screamed acknowledgement, detached itself from the shadows and rose into the darkening sky, leaving behind it a trail of foul green flame. In the dank slime-cave formed of his thoughts, Gh'razk'hehz turned his attention back to the battle.

*

Four figures rode through the floating dust and molten steel of a fallen city, their tires crunching over the prone bodies of the dead. Shadows and flame rolled in their wake, and whatever the fumes of their exhaust touched was consumed. In their lead was the Crowned One, white as samite, and on his brow shone the Diadem of Conquest. Within its pristine, untarnished silver circlet, dark things moved.

The Red Lady followed on his left, astride a crimson steed, hair falling in bloody waves past shoulders of red leather. A mirrored visor obscured her face, twisting light into a sideways grotesquerie of speed. To her right rode her brother, thin to the point of death, black-clad, staring out at the world through sunken, rotting eyeballs.

Behind the Three rode a Fourth, and death clung about him like a pale shadow, at times endowing him with terrible beauty, at times leaving him nothing more than an angel, bereft of station, riding a pale motorcycle in a worn Armani suit. The flanks of Death's Motorcycle shone beneath Uriel, shone through him, chrome and steel and exhaust pipes glistening with blue-white light. The single long score in the otherwise-flawless pale (there was no other appropriate descriptive word) paint shone like a line of newly-born suns.

There was a battle. The Four felt its currents in the air, and at a sign from Pestilence in the lead, swung a hard left. The light of dying angels flowed over War's helmet as they approached.

*

Pfez, chief infiltrator of Lord Gh'razk'hehz, had no difficulty sliding through the swarm of angels and quietly inserting itself into the radiation duct. Heat coursed through the hyperconductive metal around him, but as a Demon, it was more than used to heat. When the walls of the duct narrowed so as to prevent flight, it folded its gossamer wings and ran forward on all fours, tiny catlike claws ticking against the floor too lightly, too rapidly to raise a pressure alarm. It took several minutes to find a service entrance through which it could slip with minimal risk of detection. Making itself immaterial, it fell, wings unfolding just as it passed through the ceiling of the room below. It slowed to a halt mere inches off the floor, but that, it reasoned, would be sufficient to keep the Spire's alarm system unaware of an alien presence.

The service entrance, although clean and well-lit, held no access terminals. Exerting its will upon the world, Pfez folded its wings once more and floated through a doorway arch and into the heart of Grimspire.

After a few minutes' searching through septic hallways, clean as they had been long ago when the Spire's human population had died, Pfez discovered a bank of cubicles tied into the Grimspire's communications system. There were no cameras it could detect in this part of the building, and the uplinks were still active, even after so much time. It floated towards the keyboard, directing its thoughts into the glowing monitor. Words appeared even before its fingers descended to the keys, clawed fingers reforming into something more appropriate for arthropoid typing. Eight digits per hand became five, triple-claws thinned into fingernails, bone structure writhed and twisted to form an excruciatingly painful imitation of the human hand. Pfez smiled, bearing all three rows of teeth, and began to type.

Login: root
Password: *****

The overhead, fluorescent lights dimmed and went out. Pfez blinked and pulled away from the still-gleaming monitor, fish-eyes wide as it searched the darkness. Gravity cut out, which shouldn't have affected it, but somehow when gravity ceased, so did its control. The exertion of will that kept it floating sent it twirling, head over catlike feet, into the void. It did not strike the ceiling, but continued to rise. Or, at least, it thought it continued to rise. For some reason, its directional control had ceased working as well.

After a brief time of confusion, a voice echoed through the darkness, emanating (according to Pfez' echolocational sense) from everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

Good evening. This is a recording of myself, the Grimspire. My apologies for not addressing you directly at this time, but apparently my attention has been urgently required elsewhere. You have just attempted a login at one of my proprietary access stations. These are reserved for use only by Spire personnel (all of which are currently deceased), as well as by my personal agents, and are not accessed by password, but by personal consent. Any authorized persons would be informed of this prior to entering my grounds. As such, it must be assumed that you are not authorized to use this terminal.

A pause.

Your decision to attempt to subvert my self-defense programming just now using a mental assault on my direct circuitry, in addition to being 87.234% inefficient, has reinforced the prior conclusion. Please do not panic if you can detect the ninety-five Wave Mu Seventeen White Hole pulse cannons currently leveled on your position. These are simply a courtesy service, provided for the express security of my person and those residing within me. I would respectfully request that you not scream for fear of upsetting guests or damaging my sonic receptors, but since all air is being vented from the chambers as I speak, this option is not open to you in any case. Rest assured that your unique biological, metaphysical, and intellectual capacities have been analyzed by my scanners, and may be incorporated into future redesigns of my personal equipment, so that, even though your soul will be destroyed by the null-field sweep currently in place around this room, some form of you may continue inside a greater whole. Thank you, and have a nice day... The voice cut off, and for a moment all that could be heard in the room was a quiet hissing sound.

Then light broke the darkness, and there was nothing left in the chamber to hear anything any more.

*

Raphael looked upon the battle and was satisfied. Two of the radiator vanes on Grimspire's summit had been destroyed. Below, the hordes of hell had managed to severely damage most of the armor plating, although none had yet penetrated beyond the outer layers. The damage his own host inflicted lasted longer before being repaired. The upper ten floors glowed bright with black-body radiation. As the Spire paid more attention to fixing its armor, fewer external cameras remained active at full capacity, and its ability to counter-attack was increasingly impaired.

A balance had been struck. For the last five minutes, Grimspire had inflicted no casualties on the Angelae, but at the same time, they had not managed to penetrate his crisscross of automated fire to do significant damage of their own.

Raphael smiled, and extended his will.

*

"So, what's our situation?"

We are evenly matched. I inflict casualties on the demons, but they are more numerous. The angels are careful, and more difficult to destroy, but because they are careful they have inflicted very little damage upon me. Grimspire almost sounded cheerful.

Bryn had joined Sam by the window, staring out over the battle. The contrast was almost amusing, the thirty-year-old teenager against the eternal darkness of the skeleton, both watching, both silent, but there was one important difference: sometimes, whether from light or near misses, Bryn flinched. Sam had not moved since the battle began. But, whatever the reason, it was Bryn's eyes , torn briefly away from the whirling carnage below, that noticed the lights on the horizon.

The sun was almost gone, casting the whole land in a sea of red light diffused through cloud, when hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of lights detached themselves from the solar flame and approached. They moved fast, covering ground so quickly that they became a swarm of miniature comets, each followed by its own brilliant tail. "What are those?"

Sam shifted within his abyssal hood, raising his eyesockets to the horizon. Something changed in the air around the exiled Horseman, and, softly, he spoke. STELLA. YOU SHOULD SEE THIS.

A delicate swishing sound, the padding of sneakers over hardwood floor, and then Bryn's side: "Oh my God."

"What?" He turned from the lights, which had now covered half the distance between horizon and battlefield, to Stella, the sun painted red across her exquisite features. "What is it?"

"The Highest."

Seryph's voice reached them from the far wall. "Angels?"

"Yes." Stella's tongue ran nervously over her lips. "An elite wing, composed of the highest choirs, the best soldiers. The rank and file are Archangelae. Each group of ten travels with two Cherubim and a Gregori to scout out terrain, identify weaknesses in a foe. The unit commanders are Dominions, and hold higher rank than most generals of the Heavenly Host. Their subcommander is the Archae Zebediahl, who won his post by defeating with a team of twelve an adversary of twelve million. The entire unit is under the direct command of Raphael Seraphim, who has never lost an engagement since..."

THE GREAT FALL.

Stella nodded, hands clenched into white-knuckled fists. "Yes. The Great Fall."

"So," Lester deadpanned, "We should be running now?"

"Yes." She turned towards the door, leaving the battle behind her, but stopped short when Sam placed an arresting, cold hand on her shoulder.

WAIT. SOMETHING IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN.

*

The Highest fell into place around Raphael, their wings like the beating of hundreds of thousands of drums in perfect unison. They formed into spheres of light, ten strong around a pair of Cherabic eyes and the slight, almost invisible shadow of the Gregori. A thousand spheres organized into still larger spheres around the central form of a Dominion, each one perfectly loyal, each one linked by the soul to Raphael himself. They filled the sky, doming over the Grimspire in light, dispersing and reforming in moments to dodge blasts from the great main cannon. Blasts from the Spire's small arms simply stopped inches from the Highest's perimeter.

A blaze of light brighter than a thousand suns emerged from conversation with one of the Dominions and approached, its long cloth-of-silver robes flaring behind it like an extra set of wings. Zebediahl. He came to rest before Raphael, wings pounding with the force of sledgehammers against the air, and bowed both his classically-featured Roman head and the blaze of glory that encircled it. "My Lord."

Raphael smiled and traced the firm line of the Archae's jaw with his ebon forefinger. "Zebediahl." With the slightest pressure, he raised the other angel's head so that their eyes met, brilliant silver to eternal black. "My exquisite creature. How stands our host?"

"Ready."

Further confirmation was unnecessary. Raphael smiled, and drew his hand from the jaw of his subordinate to his own chin. "Then..." He paused. Something was happening below. Curiously, he turned his head to observe, and knew that Zebediahl turned with him.

*

They came, motors purring as they crossed the edge of the battlefield. Light, swirled perhaps with darkness, blazed from the Diadem of Conquest upon the brow of Pestilence. Demons, who by nature had great senses of preservation, fell back before them. Fine gravel and steel splinters gave beneath their wheels, and remnants of steel girders, scored and torn by the passage of demonic feet, melted as they advanced. In moments, fear rippled through the rank and file of Gh'razk'hehz's demon army, which stilled and fell back, providing a clear path between the Four and the Spire's sealed front door.

They came, and the terrors of the underworld, fanged and tentacled, composed of writhing maggots and coagulated of slime, wearing armor of spikes, or human flesh, or cloth, or flame, or no clothes at all, bearing weapons, bearing magic, bearing fear or technology, bodies like great squids of slime and crushed bone and tiny, spined insects, retreated before their gaze. Above, the Highest held position, and all the elite Host of Angels found their eyes drawn to the four figures who rode slowly down a corridor in the midst of the demonic horde.

Grimspire's weapons thudded into the dirt around their vehicles, or struck them and had no effect whatsoever. Uriel, in the rear, flinched as two bolts struck him at once, but they did not so much as singe his soiled suit, or disturb a hair on his tousled, formerly-styled head. The Spire's main weapon pulsed slowly, but it had already fired moments before their arrival, and could not do so again for a few minutes more.

As they approached the Spire's wall, the earth shook around them, and great crevasses opened under their wheels. Nevertheless, they rode on, wheels traversing empty air as easily as earth, or stone. Jagged mounds of earth rose exploded before them, and fell before their wheels were obstructed.

They were before the Spire's doors. Pestilence applied the breaks, and came to rest without the slightest lurch. Dark eyes, running with pus, stared at the Spire's double doors from sockets whose skin peeled and broke away. He did not rise, did not shift, did not even speak. A light bloomed within the Diadem upon his brow and lanced out. A few short days before, the same light had opened the gates of Hell. The Spire doors, although tough enough to withstand a Host of Hell, did not pose a moment's resistance. They exploded in a shower of submicroscopic sparks, revealing the vacant lobby beyond.

The Horsemen rode in, and the Hosts of Hell flowed behind them.

*

Raphael smiled. "Proceed."

*

As a wall of light descended upon them from all sides, Sam turned to Stella and nodded. THEY'RE HERE. NOW WE CAN RUN.

And they did.

*

Gh'razk'hehz cackled in delight. The arrival of the Horsemen was an unexpected bonus, enough perhaps to counter the presence of Raphael's Highest. The angels would make seizing victory much more difficult, even if they did him a favor by keeping Grimspire occupied in defending its now-vulnerable flanks. Wave after wave of light pounded the building, descending from the Host above, and now the whole ancient construct gleamed red-hot.

He gave his armies a final order for destruction, and move on to his ultimate objective: the crystal. It pulsed more frequently now, every facet glowing with the brilliance of space and time, more beautiful and appealing by far than the moment he first saw it. With the Spire's defenses breached, it was time to make it his.

In a thought, he subsumed his beautiful concubines and givers of pleasure, savoring the exquisite screams from their mouths as he drew them back to their cells in the recesses of his own rotten soul. Power flowed through him, and with a directive of will, his corpulent body shifted, rippled, and rose. The rock above him pulsed and shattered with a thought, and he rose into the night sky, all seven of his eyes locked upon the succulent jewel and on the miniscule rip of space and time that formed its fabric. Even as he rose, he directed power outwards, focusing magicks about it into a net, a web, slicing away the stabilizers that held it to the Spire's roof and, with a single Herculaean effort that caused sweat of blood to pour from the fissures of his scales and roll over the fat rolls of his body, causing the gem, every ton of it, to rise.

Smaller bat-creatures of his household rose with him, twirling about his form in a great, dark cyclone of screaming bodies. He soared now, a half-mile off the ground, far above his armies, and safely outside the perimeter of the Highest. Wind surged around him, cooling his slick flesh, rising as his power rose to enfold the Spire's jewel. It shook, wobbled slightly, and lifted itself a few vital inches off of the Spire's roof before a complicated network of power conduits halted it with a lurch.

Gh'razk'hehz roared in rage, but even as he redirected his will, a voice spoke, ever-so-softly, in his ear.

Hello. Please understand I mean this in the greatest disrespect.

Power surged into the gem through the conduits of the Grimspire, power sufficient, when coupled with the unique properties of the gem itself, to annihilate whole swaths of the Hordes of hell, to decimate the hosts angels and crack the crusts of planets. But now, instead of being directed at armies, at planets, at divinity, it was focused in a ten-foot by ten-foot cube completely enclosing Gh'razk'hehz's body.

The gem pulsed, and even the air and aethyr which would have carried the Demon Lord's death scream were expelled from existence. There was no dust to clear. All that was left where Gh'razk'hehz had floated was a rip in the fabric of space and time measuring exactly ten feet by ten feet by ten feet.

*

Stella and Sam led the flight from the conference room. As they ran, the building shook. Stell tripped and slammed to the warm metal floor, only crying out when Lester fell on top of her. In a tangle of limbs, she pried herself from underneath the shocked magnate, got her feet under her, and took off again, Lester panting apologies from the rear. A moment later, Seryph loped up beside her. Sword strapped firmly across his back, he had yet to even break a sweat. "How long can we hold out?"

"With them outside?" She shook her head, taking the brief pause to take in a quick, deep breath. "I don't know. The Spire might..." Another volley from the Highest struck the Spire, but this time Stell managed to keep her pace with little more than a stumble and a swaying of limbs.

Not long. Alone.

"Alone?... You mean... we have... help...?" Lester panted from the rear of the line.

Of a sort.

"What... do you...."

Just keep running.

And they did.

*

Even though the guiding mind behind them had been destroyed, demons told to kill and given an opportunity to do so generally do not need much in the way of direction. They loped, ran, flew, and oozed into Grimspire's great hall in a flood of putrescent bodies and nightmarish triumph. The Horsemen had moved on, their bikes leaving no tracks on the Spire's perpetually clean floors, but chaos enough reigned in their wake. Imps tore into wall circuits, upturned furniture, fractured delicate sheet marble with repeated blows from hammerlike fists, and scored the tile mosaics of the floor with the ripping claws of their feet. Others burned through walls and floor to the wiring, and the tubes of fluid that nurtured those parts of the Spire which were no longer precisely mechanical. All, upon penetrating the front gate, spread through the building like a drop of dark oil on the surface of still water.

It was one of these outriders, a group of Imps clustered around one of their superior brethren, slender, more slight, resplendent in its batwings, genteel slender claws, and deep, profoundly blue eyes, that first encountered Grimspire's second line of defense. Their screams traveled too slowly to warn those of their kind sill in the main lobby. Doors appeared in the lobby walls, and... things, somewhere between machine and creature, emerged. First came the humanoid defenders, of slender, uniform construction so durable that they could bend double backwards without strain. They fell upon the demons, tearing and pummeling viciously even as the demons clawed them away. Around and between them came the tanks, squat and slow. None of the demons in the hall at that moment possessed Gh'razk'hehz's fascination with Grimspire's immense primary weapon, but all recognized, despite their smaller size, the swaths of annulled existence bursting from the tank barrels. These were less powerful, incapable of such broad focus as to destroy whole bodies at close range. Instead, they removed limbs, swept off heads, punctured organs. Blood and ichor coated the floors ankle-deep as the tanks descended.

Just when the screams appeared to have reached their height, Grimspire activated the chandelier at a particularly high setting, raining down ropes of highly concentrated laser light on the enemy. The flowers of blood and flame were quite impressive.

But they were many. En masse, they overturned tanks, destroyed armies of humanoid servitors even as the Spire's factories struggled to compensate. Mown down by the thousands, by the tens of thousands, they pressed on as if the loss was insignificant, without the slightest concern for their own dead unless they looked culinarily appealing.

Grimspire fought on.

*

In all fields which mattered, the battle was now thoroughly pleasing for Raphael. The demons made headway below. Doubtless, giving the resourcefulness of his quarry, they would be heading for the exit, hoping to escape both hosts and leave them with a fruitless conquest. He could not feel their presence while they remained in the Grimspire, of course, but once they left...

Wave after wave of light and flame poured from the assembled Highest Host. They had suffered some losses, when the Spire had focused its primary into a spherical blast instead of a linear one, but their own range had since been properly adjusted, and the damage they inflicted was more than compensation. Such was the strain they placed on the building, some of its sections now glowed white hot, and holes were developing all along the upper levels. He placed his hand on Zebediahl's shoulder. "My child. I have a task for you."

Zebediahl looked over his shoulder, through the gap between his powerful wings, and nodded, eyes hungry. "Yes?"

"Soon, the quarry will have emerged, and primary objectives will be accomplished. All that will remain of us then is to destroy the cancer of Hell beneath our feet."

"Yes."

"To this end, I want you to enter the Spire, taking with you the best of our warriors. Penetrate to the core of the Spire, doing whatever you require to gain entrance, and take direct control of it. From the power core, you will be able to disconnect the computer systems, while providing power to the manufacturing plants and weapons at the same time. You will then take the computer's place at the machine's heart. You will become its guiding intelligence, and use it to destroy our enemies. It is a difficult assignment."

Zebediahl smiled delicately. "I expect nothing less. I will do as you say." And in those words, Raphael felt a companionship and loyalty stretching back to the First Days. Which was, of course, how it should be.

Zebediahl and twelve other lights detached from the greater host and streaked forward, into the heart of the Spire.

*

Sam was in the lead now, loping down the hall with a speed that disregarded such paltry physical concerns as muscles, length of stride, or fatigue. In short, to him, the run seemed quite normal. Stella, Seryph, Bryn, and Lester, following, were simply dragged along in the wake of the Horseman, pulled up in his speed. They matched his pace because it was necessary that they did so, and it was necessary that they did so because the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse was the one setting the pace.

They did not speak as they ran. Sam, lacking the considerations of lungs which would have to share breath between speech and muscular stability, was perfectly capable of holding a conversation, but saving the spire, there was no one to talk to. Even Seryph sweated now, after nine floors of descent. The Spire, for security reasons, had been constructed without a central stairwell, only several small staircases, no more than three or four floors in length, in opposite corners of each level. Should an invading force try and ascend from the lobby, or descend from the roof, they would have to cross acres of office and hallway that the Spire could easily transform into a killing ground. This, although they did not know it, was the reason that they were still alive: Zebediahl and his angels were stuck dealing the circumstances of their entry from above, while the demons waded through seas of manufactured warriors from below.

Every few moments, the building flooded with light, piercing through every awning, transom, and window as the Highest continued their percussive bombardment. The scream of Grimspire's primary weapon chimed in like a demented set of cymbals, but its blasts came more rarely, and far between. In rare intervals between blasts of the Highest and of the Spire, the building staggered and swayed like a drunk Russian.

There were no klaxons, no warning signals. The lights did not even change into a shade of threatening red. Grimspire knew that it was under attack. There were no personnel that it needed to remind, no battle stations needed to be manned. Conflict unfolded with breathtaking efficiency.

That is what Stell would have thought, if she currently weren't struggling so hard to force more energy through legs made of fire. Her nostrils flared, leg muscles toned to some small extent by long years of running the circle around Central Park pumped against the steel floor. Sam ran ahead of her, and every so often, the world jumped as he took a stride, moving ahead, to the left, to the right, down, but never backwards. Now, they ran through an office level, honeycombed with hallways and cubicles. Coming on an overturned desk, Sam did not pause to gather himself, just jumped, arcing over the tangle of plugs, monitors, chairs, and broken wood in a black blur. They followed without incident, even Lester, who screamed as the leap took him. The sweat that ran down their faces was more than exertion, more than fear. It was hot as hell.

Fire took the level behind them just as they passed through the door of the stairwell, the flammable components of the room igniting after a particularly direct hit from the Highest even if the walls remained firm. Lester, the last, pulled back scorched fingers from the metal door handle, but didn't have time to shake them cool before the run took him again.

They ran.

*

Grimspire looked out on the world through eyes which were not electromagnetic or photoreceptors of any kind, yet saw more clearly than those of men, machines, angels or gods. He had lived long, and intended to continue doing so. Breaking a habit, as someone he knew had once said (when? Two years ago? Two million? Two universes? Yesterday?), was a difficult thing indeed.

All the same, he had to admit the situation at present did not look good. The human (only two of whom were actually human) mortals (only two of whom were mortal in the conventional sense) had chosen (or, rather had had chosen for them) a route relatively free of enemies, hazards, or the Spire's own mechanical legions which now coursed like rivers through all levels of his palace. The demons, while being effectively contained, were creating mass damage, and several of them disturbed, in one way or another, his careful, nearly comprehensive internal monitors. He knew there were angels in the building, but they were old, powerful, and very good at not being noticed. Since they were not alive, they did not have heat signatures. Since their feet did not touch the ground, whether or not they were flying, they did not exude pressure on the world. Since they were not part of the spacetime continuum per se, they did not leave gravatic signatures that could be traced.

However, if they were in the building and not announcing themselves by destroying everything in sight, they would probably head either for his guests or for his power core. The guests could take care of themselves. The power core could not. He halfheartedly dispatched a corps of defenders. They would not stop his Heavenly guests. He did not intend for them to do so.

Double-checking the arrangements for those guests he intended to survive the next several minutes, he was satisfied. Then, slowly so as not to be noticed, he allowed the armor of the upper levels to fail.

*

Grimspire's voice spoke to them as they ran. Left. Right. Down those stairs. Through that duct. There was no time for questions. They followed his suggestions, and each time found themselves in a hallway that was, for the moment, undamaged and safe to traverse. Sam ran still, pulling the others like driftwood in the wake of his passing.

When they descended fifty-one floors, the Spire opened a teleportation gateway for them, and they dropped another three hundred in a burst of pain and light. Stell choked back her scream as a hundred million million pins and needles tore at her tired flesh, her mind, her soul, picked her up like a piece of meat and deposited her unceremoniously on hard steel. Her legs gave out beneath her, and she staggered to a nearby wall for support. It was warm to the touch, but not hot.

By the time she reclaimed control of legs, body and mind, the rest had come through, landing on the floor in a tangle of limbs. Sam alone was unperturbed, eyesockets searching shadows, head cocked back as if scenting the air. Far above, the building shook, followed by a faint crash as of broken glass.

When the Demon leapt out of the shadows, a mass of tentacles, each one punctuated with a baleful, staring eye, it was met by the glittering, blue-white arc of the Scythe, and ceased to be. Sam turned to the rest, and Stella felt a chill as his gaze passed over her. She thought he had looked different after returning with Seryph. Now, though...

He was still seven and a half feet tall. The dead eyes of a skull still glared out from beneath his cowl, interrupted by twin sparks of blue. His hands were still skeletal, and they still clutched the Scythe. But now, shadows writhed about him like lovers. Whenever her eyes touched the long darkness of his robe, the rest of the world faded into ghostly intangibility, as if the only things real in all the world were the cloak and the skeleton, the Scythe's blue-white sheen the only source of light. It looked as if something dark, other, but not entirely unwelcome, shone through him. This, for some strange reason, seemed the way things should be. The way the omniverse was supposed to work....

WE MUST BE CAREFUL. THESE LEVELS ARE NOT SECURE.

For a moment, Lester looked like he was going to retort, but nodded mutely instead. The rest followed suit.

Go down the hall. My servants should keep it free of nuisances. Down six more flights of stairs, you will find a vehicle. Get in it. Push the button. I have arranged things from there.

"Where's Phil?" Seryph's eyes darted through the hallway, looking for some sign of the Spire's attention.

Your companion will be taken care of.

"I'm not leaving without him."

He will be taken care of. The voice was perfectly nonlocalized and perfectly level, revealing nothing.

A muscle bulged at the side of Seryph's jaw, and something lit deep within his eyes. His voice, too, was perfectly level, but the level of the knife blade, not the concealing wall. "Listen to me, you son of a bitch. I want to see Phil before you take us anywhere. Do you understand?"

Stella blinked. It was the first time she had heard Seryph curse.

I'm sorry, Mister Gibbons. Mister Doyle must, of necessity, be taken out by another route. You need to leave. Now.

Light from the bombardment outside flooded the corridor, casting a battlefield of dead black shadows across Seryph Gibbons' face. He turned away. Stell knew that he knew it didn't matter, that the Spire could see him anyway, but some things are simply necessary. For a moment, standing there next to the dark-robed Sam in his carefully cleaned black jumpsuit, the shadows that shrouded the Horseman reached out and danced around Seryph, almost like wings.

Bryn reached out, his hand blanching bone-white as it penetrated the shadow, and gripped Seryph's upper arm. "We need to go, Seryph."

Four Imps turned a corner and clattered down the hall, nails screeching against metal. Without turning, Sam swung the Scythe. Space tore, cross-stitched, and the hall was empty of everything but echoes. Far above, the Grimspire's primary screamed, tearing a swath through the armies of Hell outside. The building shook. Another crash reached them. Below, heavily muffled sounds of combat, death screams and final agonies, were audible through the rivets and steel of Grimspire's floor.

Slowly, like a tree falling in a forest to crush the only person around to hear it, Seryph nodded. "Yes."

*

The Three and a Half Horsemen of the Apocalypse did not have lives in the traditional sense, but they were having the time of them anyway. Carnage and death swirled around them like a whirlpool, their tires dripping perpetually with ichor, blood, and motor oil. Where Pestilence's gaze fell, rust devoured stainless steel and delicate computer systems infected themselves with millions of viruses spontaneously. War's sword rested still in its scabbard on her back, but her hands flashed, decapitating, rending flesh from bone. The inner juices of more than one creature slicked across her mirrored helm, and it was her cycle more often than not that varied from their diamond formation to crush the life out of a thing below.

Lasers struck at them, and they were unharmed. Waves of android defenders rushed them en masse, and died where they stood, power drained away as Famine watched and was satisfied. The sapient tanks rose up, and disintegrated from rust, or were torn apart by the hands and wheels of War. Uriel sat back and did nothing, although from time to time his mount twitched to the side just enough to separate a being, living or artificial, from its shell.

The legions of Hell were not spared from their advance. Demons, roaring with joy after being rescued from the flame of the defense systems, or the rending fury of the tank guns, or the crunching steel of an advance, fell before wheels, plague, appetite, gloved hands, or turned to rend one another where they stood as an unseen gaze watched behind a visor of mirrored plastic. The Horsemen were not present to grant victory, or ensure defeat. They were present because it was their job to be present, at the end of things. They were present because the order of the cosmos was such that they were there.

They were present because they searched for someone.

A wall interrupted them, and they rode through it without hesitation. The high-pressure alloy tensed and flexed at their advance, shattering as Pestilence's front wheel closed within five feet.

Amidst fire, blood, and death, they continued their search.

*

Darkness. Comfortable. Warm. There was no pain in the darkness.

Phil.

Something. Calling. A name? His name? Why a name? What was a name? And who was there in the darkness to give him one?

Phil.

Again, with a name, like fire and water at the same time, in a place that was not a place and was a highway to everywhere. He was not himself. He did not know himself. He did not know his manhood. Was he not everybody? There was something... important... about that. He remembered... but what was memory but a fool's finger painting, playing shadows and color against the eternity that enfolded him, surrounded him, was mother and grave to him/her/everyone?

Phil.

A third time, and a third time was power, but what was the meaning of power? Who defined it, set it apart from nothing? There was only him here, and if he chose, colors would spring from his eyes, and there would be firmament, and land, and water, and fire, but he did not choose, because all those things were within him, so why would he ever want to make them for another when there were no others? A freeway ran through his thoughts, and water trickled along it, but was that water or blood?

Phil. It is time for you to wake up.

And he was no longer alone. A city spread out around him to infinity in every direction, but it wasn't quite a city, more the idea of a city, like a spider's web of steel, glass and concrete spun in the empty places between the stars, and in the depths of the hearts of men and women. It scintillated, it shone, it pulsed, and within every curve and straight line, within every mirror and starlike streetlamp where lovers crouched hoping to remain unseen, in the twinkle in the eye of every one of the infinite men, women, children, and things that moved, lived, and breathed in the city that linked the world, there appeared a face.

It was familiar. It was his own.

Phil opened his eyes on darkness, strained with light from the splintered door. Tubes ran from his arms, bandages swathed his face, and electroencephalogram discs adhered tenaciously to his ribcage. Presently, he became aware of a pounding, and of sounds from beyond the door. With each impact, the door bent and splintered a little more, until finally someone struck it with the force of five sledgehammers, and it fell. The light which streamed in from the anteroom was almost blocked out by the great shapes that swelled in the portal, ruby eyes staring into the blackness of his chamber.

Phil's heart quickened ever so slightly, and the lead Imp blinked, bowed its head, and stepped inside. Others followed it, four, five, a few more, sliding against the cool metal walls and the white tile floor, coarse hair falling on delicate equipment, ruffled by the air from the cooler. They pressed close on all sides, their rancid, sulfur breath warming him intolerably under the bandages. Nostrils flared in faces painted blood-red with the fire of war. There was an air about them, as if they were not in a sickroom, but in a dining hall. Paltry light glittered off use-polished claws and crooked, self-sharpened teeth. Phil did not have to crane his neck to know that they were all inside the room, now. No one wanted to miss out.

He was one, and they were many. He was still in many ways an invalid, and they were strong. But beneath him, around him, radiating out from him like the limbs of a vast insect, he felt Khazan. All it took was to find the proper point and, ever so carefully, flex.

The sickroom shattered. Consoles exploded in showers of sparks and broken plastic that ripped and gouged at unprotected backs, IV trellises burst into clouds of steel splinters to shred flesh and bone, light fixtures fractured, driving glass into unblinking red eyes, even the rivets in the walls rocketed into clustered bodies with bulletlike speed. None of the Imps had time to scream. They simply exploded into a reddish-black mist.

Phil sat up and wiped a piece of demon-gore off his forehead. EEG discs ripped out of his skin as he pulled away, tiny drops of blood welling up on bare skin. The IV tubes took a little more delicate maneuvering: Phil pulled two out of each arm, one out of his throat, and three from each leg. He regarded the pile of inch-long needles and plugs, arranged one by one on his rumpled, ichor-splattered sheets. How badly had he been hurt, anyway? Remembering the first dream, his ghostlike haze over Khazan, he decided that he didn't want to know.

Swinging his legs over the side of the bed, he gingerly touched his toes to the floor. Not feeling any sharp fragments of bone, glass, or metal, he put his whole foot down. Hearing nothing, feeling nothing, he peered over the edge of the bed.

Blood ran in rivulets over the shard-carpeted floor, everywhere except for where his foot touched, which was clear of shrapnel and bodily fluids for at least a foot in every direction from his skin. Gingerly, he lowered his other foot, and blinked as glass, metal, plastic, and blood repulsed from where his skin touched the floor, leaving a space vacant even of dust. A smile spreading across his face, he stood and looked at himself in sick room's mirror, which had intentionally survived the rain of deadly slivers.

He was naked. First order of business: find some clothes. This room had a closet. He wiped the brassy doorknob off with a clean portion of bedsheet and looked inside. There he found a JLA dress uniform, white as ivory and smooth as silk, the winged crest emblazoned on its left shoulder. His smile widened as he found some boxers and pulled those on, the rest of the uniform following. The shoes came last, the finest quality dark leather, and by the time he had them laced and tied his grin was wide enough to swallow a horse.

Then, because he didn't think it would be wise to stay in this place for much longer, he walked into the mirror, reflections overlapping with just the slightest sense of a ripple in the perfect glass, and was gone.

*

The third flight of steps was misery, oven-hot from sun, bombardment, and fire outside, steep and winding on the inside. Sam took the stairs four at a time, and everyone else struggled to keep up with him. Sweat poured down Stella's face, trickling over the hollow between her shoulder blades, down her spinal cord. The building shook, driving her into the wall, scorching-hot even through the jacket, and she pulled back, gritting her teeth against the pain. The air weighed down oppressively on her lungs, making each breath a Herculean, nostril-flaring labor. Loose strands of hair, damp and clumped with exertion, played against the line of her jaw.

Sam burst through the door at the bottom of the steps, a cold wind hit her in a rush of steam, and she stumbled into the air-conditioned hallway. Involuntary shivers ran up and down her spine, and goose pimples covered her arms. For a few moments, while the rest of the company streamed, exhausted, through the open door, she was only aware of the dully gleaming metal beneath her feet. She gulped air, so cold that it stung her lungs, and coughed so hard she nearly vomited. Trying again, she breathed only through her nose, relishing the cold tin of recycled air and the false wind of overhead ventilation. A crash echoed from behind her as Lester collapsed from pure exhaustion.

By the time she raised her eyes from the floor, everyone save Lester, standing only with the aid of a nearby wall, had regained a fraction of composure. Sam stood, impassive as a tombstone. Seryph and Bryn looked calm in a way that made her feel all the more the hammerlike pounding of the heart in her chest. As for the rest of the room...

It was dimly lit and circular, perhaps thirty feet in diameter. The light did not come from nowhere; rather, it came from almost mirrorlike walls and floors, from the rivets in the metal, from the doorknob, even from their own skins. Everything save two glowed a brilliant white, down to her clothes and Seryph's raven-dark hair. Sam was one of the exceptions, the shadows of robe, cowl, and Scythe devouring light as eagerly as the rest of the chamber gave it off. The other was the large, oblong lozenge of black metal and plastic that took up most of the chamber's empty space, hovering a few inches off the ground. Her eyes slid off its curves, failed to stick even to the twin reddish spots where the headlights should have been on a normal car. She turned to Sam, who shrugged.

Strangely enough, Lester was the one who resolved their dilemma, his voice distant with something that was more appreciation than awe, all exhaustion left behind. "Model 2X-V black Escrima Turbo. Seventeen-cycle engine, triple redundant aerobraking system, onboard weapons rack, subquantum plating reinforcement, tri-bonded omnimorphic plasmoid exterior, singularity-powered air conditioning, side and front passenger airbags. Most perfect omniversal luxury machine ever made, manufacturing run of zero."

The black ovoid of the hovercar filled Bryn's eyes. "Why zero?"

"Omniversal economics. If one person has a thing, then somewhere in the omniverse there are infinite reflections of the thing. If nobody has it, though..."

The Avatar of Time blinked, stepped up to the car and ran his hand over the space-dark hull. Looking back over his shoulder - "So nobody bought it?"

"Au contraire, my temporal associate. Many bought it. It was not the possession of the material thing that marked off a member of the true elite, for material things are subject to change, to damage, to destruction. What they bought was the idea of the thing."

"So why was it made?"

Because I needed a way to get you out of here as quickly as possible. Now if you'll oblige...? The lights flared, and a hole appeared in the vehicle's midsection, right under Bryn's hand. Startled, Shima stepped back, then ducked inside. The repulsors did not even wobble under his added weight.

Following him, Sam laughed. It was not a joyful sound. THE IDEA OF THE CAR. HAH. His bony hands closed around the edge of the newly-created porthole, and he stole a strange glance back at Lester. He pulled himself inside, and Lester, leaving only Stell and Seryph, their skins and eyes glowing a faint whitish-blue. They both started for the opening at once, almost running into each other, stepped back, and laughed.

"After you." Seryph inclined his body towards her ever so slightly, and she smiled, taking the opportunity to jump up into the car that was never supposed to be built. The former Avatar of the Universe followed her, and the vehicle wall sealed behind him.

The interior of the car was as black as the exterior, the instruments of the driver's seat shining with a strange, almost biological luminescence. It was tall enough that Stella didn't have to hunch over, even though the top of her head brushed the warm ceiling. Bryn had found a bench chair growing organically out of the wall, and Sam was already in the passenger's seat.

I THINK I SHOULD DRIVE.

From behind the driver's seat, Lester laughed. "I'm not quite as foolish as all that, my friend."

I'M NOT YOUR FRIEND.

The rich man's hands worked unceasingly over the bank of switches, dials and keypads that replaced anything that looked like a steering wheel. "Whatever. You might be an old hand on a motorcycle, but a machine like this takes style to run."

I THOUGHT YOU SAID NO ONE EVER MADE A MACHINE LIKE THIS.

The repulsors were inaudible, and there was no lurch of motion, but through the strangely transparent windshield Stella saw them rise another few feet off the ground. "Ah, but what's the point in owning the idea of a car if you don't know how to drive it?"

SO... YOU PRACTICED DRIVING THE IDEA OF THE CAR. IN YOUR HEAD.

This time, Stell had to steady herself against the side of a bulkhead as the car lurched forward a few feet and came to an abrupt, unseemly stop. "Well, I would hardly put it so disparagingly..." Several more switches were depressed, various sounds echoed from invisible speakers, and Stell felt her way to the bench seat beside Seryph, who had already done the sensible thing and sought shelter. "But yes."

I STILL THINK I SHOULD DRIVE.

Not to interrupt anything, but you may want to go before this level finds itself disintegrated, or overrun by annoyingly small crawling things. Light, the red light of a nearly complete sunset, burned through the windshield's ebony filter as the wall in front of them completely dissolved, leaving an open portal to the world beyond, scorched by the fire of demons and angels, torn by earthquakes, gouged by blasts that rended space from time. The Highest filled the sky like brilliant, murderous constellations, and the demon armies overrun the earth in wave upon wave of sickeningly multicolored plague. Over the torn and blackened battlefield, miles away, brooded the broken and burning Khazan cityscape that would be their haven. And, Mister LaCroix, the gas pedal is on your right.

Lester nodded, glancing down at his feet. "Right. I knew that."

Stella leaned forward, and cleared her throat. "Maybe we should let Sam dri-" The word was cut off by a rising scream as Lester plunged the accelerator as far as fear-tensed muscles could drive it into the reinforced, triple-bonded omnimorphic plasmoid floor of the dream machine that was never intended to be built.

*

The Horsemen turned. The one they were seeking had left. They adjusted their course, rose on their back wheels, and screamed off towards the advancing night, breaking through several walls on the way.

*

Raphael did not need to turn to be aware. He looked down at the battlefield and smiled. A fire that was not fire crackled along the length and breadth of his polished marble-black skin.

*

At sixty miles an hour, barring impediments such as traffic, a vehicle moves at moderate speed and can cover 5,280 feet in a minute. At one hundred twenty miles an hour, barring impediments such as police officers, a vehicle moves at quite fast speed, and can cover 10,560 feet in a minute. At three hundred sixty miles an hour, barring impediments such as the border of a given atmosphere, a vehicle moves very fast, and travels 31,680 feet in a minute.

The 2X-V Escrima Turbo, driven by Lester William DuLupin LaCroix XVIII, accelerated smoothly from full stop, through moderate and very, to insanely fast in a tenth of a second. Had it not been for the automatic inertial dampening field, the human passengers would have been so much raspberry jam. As it was, the shock of acceleration was enough to send Stella, perched on the edge of the sideways bench seat, toppling off to the floor. By the time she recovered enough to stare up through the windshield, the world before them had stretched and blurred into a confused mixture of gray, red, and black. The one constant was the broken, burning skyline, which in two seconds had doubled in size, and doubled again as she watched. Below, the traces of black disappeared as they reached the outer edge of the demon horde.

Lester's hands flew over the control surface, jagging the hovercar left, right, up, down with all the practiced grace of a six year old in his father's Ferrari. Sweat shone on his face, his eyes jumping wildly from windshield to console and back again. Sam watched and said nothing. The buildings loomed closer, and Stell reflected that hitting the buildings going over four hundred miles an hour would be no different than being hit by a four hundred mile an hour building.

There was no time to count distances. Five seconds and they were still over a mile away from the line of undemolished buildings, four-three-two-one and they were face to face with a huge, blackened sign announcing "Khazan First City Bank Incorporated" only half the word 'incorporated' was melted off, and Lester's hands flew on the controls, the world rolled, pain blossomed tulip-like behind Stella's eyes as the back of her head hit the wall, hard, and they were still alive. Her vision trembled, but Lester's hands did not, planted firmly on the control surface, eyes wide open, lips mouthing a silent prayer. They wove around a hospital whose top portion had been broken off, under a makeshift arch constructed where one building had fallen against another, broke left to dodge an oncoming mall, and all the time they were slowing. Lester had discovered the brakes.

Stell was in the middle of letting out a long sigh of relief when the car shook, the interior temperature rose at least twenty degrees, the lights turned red, and Lester's softly glowing instruments sputtered and died. An alert siren crackled briefly, sputtered, and died as the Escrima Turbo inclined itself towards the ground. She pushed herself, panicked, to her feet, and joined in the babble of confused voices. "What's going on?"

Lester shook his head, trying desperately to ease life back into the controls under his fingers. "I don't know, I don't know!" The control panel unresponsive, he worked the switches, pulled handles, and failing everything else, pounded on the darkened screens. "Fuck!" Even without power, they still moved forward at a rapid clip, and even though they had reached a road before the car had stopped, they were coming up on a fork. "We need to get our fucking nose up!"

"Back here!" Seryph and Bryn stumbled to the back of the car, and Stell followed them, her eyes darting between the frantic Lester, Sam, who had not moved, and the fast-approaching Channel 4 News building.

LESTER. LET ME DRIVE.

"What? Hell, I can't even drive this thing now. Just get in the back."

LESTER. LET ME DRIVE. The Channel 4 building was closer now, huge and steel.

"Lester! Do it!" Stell called over the roar of the wind, now audible through the all-too-thin walls of the Escrima.

"Okay, okay!"

Sam shook his head. NO. YOU HAVE TO LET ME DRIVE.

Lester glanced from the blue, impassive sparks of Sam's eyesockets to the approaching silver and black of the news building, the flames surrounding it. "Sam. Drive."

THANK YOU. Disregarding the four pairs of shocked eyes on him, Sam raised his skeletal hands, pushed the voluminous sleeves of his robe back to his elbows, baring the dead white bones of radius and ulna. Interweaving his fingers, he reversed both hands, the sound of cracking knuckles echoing like a shot in utter silence. The news building was less than a quarter-mile ahead, even the utterly aerodynamic Escrima shaking without any power to keep it level. Carefully, Sam placed his hands on the dash, and the blue lights within his skull winked out, replaced with ever-deepening shadows.

The shadows of the Escrima's midnight interior deepened, softened, and Stell felt fingers catch at her, the long hands of the grave that chilled what they touched. Seryph and Bryn, next to her, shivered. Without so much as a twitch, the Escrima leveled. Before, Stell had thought it flew smoothly, but now, it seemed as if there was only one path that it could take, that deviation was not an option. The little she could see of Sam's bare bone glistened more brilliantly than she remembered. They didn't even need to bank left, gliding neatly into the center of the street without the slightest tug of inertia. Minutes passed, descending quietly, and when they touched down on a span of blackened, cracked pavement, there was no discernable moment of landing. Sam removed his hands, the shadows receded, and a sound like the sigh of a dying glacier echoed in their heads.

Sam stood, and for a moment Stell thought she saw his shoulders sag, before the new shadows returned to the darkness of his cloak. The side of the Escrima bulged, forming a new doorway. Lester, eyes wide, staggered out, and Seryph and Bryn followed. The plasmoid surface dulled the impact of Stell's sneakers against the floor. She touched his shoulder, and winced at the cold which penetrated skin, bone, soul. "Sam. Are you okay?"

For a moment, he did not reply, and she was afraid. Then, softly... I DON'T LIKE DOING THAT. IT BRINGS ME TOO CLOSE TO THE EDGE. YOU KNOW? IT TAKES FOREVER TO LEARN TO FEEL, AND ONLY A SECOND...

She tightened her grip on his shoulder, feeling the ridged bone of his shoulder through the dark robe. "Yes. I know. But we need to move."

He looked back over his shoulder, and the lights returned to the sockets of his eyes. YES. So they turned and stepped outside, feet settling to the dark, glass-sparkling pavement. Seryph spoke to Lester, one eyebrow raised.

"You practiced driving the idea of the car in your head?"

"Sort of."

"But... wouldn't you rather just drive the real car?"

"Not at all. You see-"

And then, just as a smile fluttered across Stell's lips, just as she thought it might all turn out well after all, the blinding brilliance of night came over them, and a calm voice echoed in their ears.

"Hello. I am Raphael of the Seraphim."

*

Zebediahl's sword descended in an arc of fire, separating the last of the GrimSpire's humanoid defenders into two scalded pieces. Of the rest of his cadre, originally twelve strong, nine remained to stand in the thrumming power core of the GrimSpire, over the remains of hordes of robotic defenders. Circuitboard entrails of tanks, humanoids, and gun turrets lay scattered across the gleaming, multicolored control surfaces, around the pulsating, quadruple-redundant singularity containment system, about the glittering shield protecting the central processor module. They were tired, their halos glowing somewhat more dimly than they had been when they entered the Spire through the roof, but enough strength remained in them to do what needed to be done.

Zebediahl crossed, wings extended in full state, to the shield protecting the central processor, protecting the quantum-netted spell matrix of Grimspire's personality. He raised his sword, reverse-gripped in both hands, the tip all but touching the shimmering field...

Behind him, space and time rippled, but before he could turn to see what was the trouble, a voice riveted through his soul. It was a familiar voice, strangely unchanged from the last time he had heard it, years and years before.

YOU'LL EXCUSE ME, BUT I HAVE BEEN SENT TO RETRIEVE THAT PARTICULAR UNIT. I'LL TROUBLE YOU TO STEP BACK.

It was the voice of Sam that was, at this moment, urging Lester to let him drive. It was the voice of a younger Sam, still fresh from his exile from Heaven, a Sam who had wandered the earth searching for adventure, searching for life, and searching for a purpose. It was the voice of a Sam untouched by love, unknown to sorrow, a Sam who had never extended mercy.

Zebediahl turned, and had just enough time to see a seven and a half foot tall skeleton in a black robe, shadows wreathing his bones, Scythe glowing a heartless blue-white to match his eyes, standing in a room which had formerly been filled with his fellow angels. He did not have time to raise his own weapon before the Scythe descended in a gleaming blue-white arc.

The young Sam grinned. Crossing the room to the shield protecting the central processor, he dipped his hand through it and retrieved a small chip, echoes of things not quite material sticking to the subquantum tangle of circuitry and magic. It pulsed pleasantly in his palm, and a voice echoed through the room.

It is accomplished, then?

And, across the years, a younger voice echoed it back. You will have the best architecture, the fastest manufacturing facilities. You will emerge better, stronger, more powerful.

And the older: I know. It is, of course, what I did when I was in your position.

And, the energies which powered his shift fading, Sam thinned and faded back elsewhere, and elsewhen, for in an infinite omniverse, weren't the two things really the same anyway? But now, ten years before, the Grimspire owed him a favor.

With the power core empty, the Grimspire's personality gone, and over forty percent of both hosts inside its now-mindless shell, a process set out ten years before began. Manufacturing facilities died, defending units powered down, security systems and autorepair nanites faded into nothingness. Instead, all power joined an upward current, coursing, once and for all, into the heart of the great gem at the Spire's peak. It pulsed with something that was not quite light.

*

Raphael descended to the road with two powerful beats of his great, ebony wings. Shadows fled before him, shying from the radiance of his perfect form, his wavy, midnight hair. Seryph and Bryn rushed him simultaneously, just before his feet touched ground, their swords out and gleaming red in the light of sunset. Before they even broached the light which surrounded him, Raphael swung his hand around in a blurred half-circle. The space between them rolled, and both current Avatar and former flew backwards, slamming into the pavement at twenty paces and skidding ten more, their swords falling to the pavement with a metallic clatter.

Sam struck as Raphael took his first steps on the ground, the Scythe descending in a gleaming arc of light. The Seraphim's eyes burned black, and the soft slice of parting space and time shattered on the peal of a bell. Another ripple of space followed, and Sam blocked it with the Scythe-haft, even though it knocked back his cowl to reveal the gleaming white plate of his skull. He ran to close distance, the shadows which wreathed him parting Raphael's light without trouble, but when the Scythe descended this time, the Seraphim caught it by the blade, meeting Sam's blue-sparked eyesockets with the shadows of his own eyes. Rainbow blood dripped from Raphael's palm, but he did not wince, or pause as he forced the Scythe back against Sam's trembling grip.

Then Raphael's other hand gripped the center of the Scythe-haft, between Sam's two skeletal fists, and Seraphic muscles tensed, once. A crack of breaking wood echoed through the empty avenue, and Sam crumpled. With a twist of his wrists sent the Horseman flying backwards, still gripping the two sundered halves of his weapon.

His eyes swung to Stella then, standing alone amidst her fallen companions, and didn't leave her, even when he had to backhand Lester, who rushed him from behind wielding a bit of lead pipe. LaCroix crumpled without a sound.

Raphael did all this without smiling, but when his full attention returned to Stella, something very like amusement played across his perfect, thin lips. "Thus always to traitors, Miss Aurorae. Don't you agree?"

She edged away from him then, shaking her head, trying to keep her legs from trembling, saying nothing.

"Come now. You make this so unsatisfying. I should think you would do better." He gestured, and she crumpled over, pain blossoming as if someone had struck her, hard and fast, in the stomach. Another gesture, and her legs were swept out from beneath her. She fell to the pavement without a sound, another blow landing at the small of her back as she fell. She cried out then, lying on her side, curled up in a foetal ball on the shattered concrete.

He stepped closer, bare feet crossing easily over broken glass and slivered metal until he loomed over her, light sliding across his dark skin. His glow enfolded her, and she burned, if only on the inside, and she screamed. He bent down before her, rolled her onto her back with a hand that burned like fire and chilled like ice. "I mean to unravel your mysteries, Miss Aurorae. Not even the First among us can do that from a distance, so it has fallen to me. Do make this easier on yourself. Tell me your true name." His expression was genuinely sympathetic, at least until she worked up enough breath and courage to spit in his face.

He wiped it away, expression unchanged. "Your name, please, Miss Aurorae. I find this painfully necessary, although it is not, I believe, as painful for myself as it is for you."

A shadow obscured the last rays of the sun: Seryph, face battered and bloody, striking down with his katana in a vector of pure steel. Raphael did not look away from Stella's face, nor did he gesture, but Seryph was suddenly spread-eagled in midair, twenty feet above them, sword clattering harmlessly to the cobblestones. Raphael did turn, then, and gesture, and Seryph groaned in pain through gritted teeth.

Names. A name. Her name. Somewhere inside Stella, a current ran, deep and strong, one she was long accustomed to resisting. Raphael turned back to her and smiled, his eyes burning unbearably with black flame, searing her mind, her soul, and in that single instant of numbing, mind-blasting struggle, she gave in.

Stella threw back her head and screamed. Light, searing, flaming, incinerating, tore through her body, burning away organs and bones, fat, flesh, pouring out into the world through nonexistent pores and evaporated eyes, aqueous vitreous humor flash-vaporized into steam. Clothes blackened and burst into flame. Pain tore nerves which no longer existed, reaching a brain which had become so much gray, molten once-living matter inside a skull even now melting into slag. Still, she screamed.

The sound slammed into Raphael, full-force, tossing the Seraphim out of the way like a child's doll. His straining wings caught the air after a few seconds of confusion, in which he had been propelled forty feet backwards, and eighty above the ground.

This is what Bryn Shima smelled, calling him out of the faint which had taken his body after it impacted the pavement: Spring flowers and summer heat, something faintly burning, the first woman he had ever loved, twenty years and more ago, under a hunter's moon.

This is what Lester William DuLupin LaCroix XVIII felt, rising from the depths of a near-coma: warmth, and awe.

This is what Seryph Gibbons saw, looking down through eyes suddenly unclouded by pain: a creature of light and flame, female and achingly, painfully beautiful, white light dripping viscously from new-extended sixfold wings, springing from shoulders and the elegant arch of her back. Her face was that of the woman called Stella Aurorae, but there was an expression on it he had never seen before: pride, power, and a kind of amused rage. The woman's hands were bare, as was the rest of her body, but light flowed and twisted liquidly around them, cradled in the curved hollows of her fingers.

This is what Sam heard, struggling to stand, hands clutching the broken pieces of his Scythe: a voice, one he had not heard in long years, saying "A name?" And even though he made no words, two formed in his mind - MY LADY.

Raphael's eyes widened, and his lips moved, but he made no sound. Instead, he raised his hands, palms outward, and the light encasing his body became hard, acquired the painful glare of new-forged steel.

The woman who had been called Stella Aurorae laughed once, and the light around Raphael vanished, leaving the Seraphim floating naked in air. "You ask me for a name? After what you took from me? After what you did?" The words echoed long after her mouth formed them, and none of the mortals or immortals watching could be entirely sure if, in fact, those lips had ever moved in the first place.

Raphael's fingers twisted into claws, and space around the form of fire and light twisted, tearing, time pulling into void. Then, without even a word or gesture, the world was normal once more. Jade flame leapt from the cold eyes, so near to Stella's own, and Raphael slammed into the ground with enough force to raise a small cloud of dust and cause loose debris to rain down from the upper floors of nearby buildings. The dust was blown away, and Raphael stood in the midst of a Seraph-shaped crater. Six wings now spread out from his own shoulders, and his dark hair clung in wet clumps to sweat-slick shoulders. He held a sword of ebon flame.

Stella looked down absently at her empty hands, and raised one elegant eyebrow of gold-tinged light in surprise. Light quickened around her left fist, and she held a sword of pure, blinding white, red and orange crackling on its molecule-splitting edge. "You never studied the languages of the faith you constructed, did you, Raphael?"

The Commander of the Highest lunged at her, face contorted into a snarl of rage. His weapon swung through the air with relativity-defying speed, only to rebound off of Stella's own. While he was still in the process of recognizing that his strike had been blocked, a gleaming fist slammed into his gut with enough force to crack a planetary crust. "You forgot my name. The name of the Stella Aurorae. The Star of Dawn."

Raphael doubled over, and Stella kicked him hard in the face, sending him somersaulting backwards, trailing rainbow blood, before he slammed back to the cracked pavement, where he struggled to rise. The sound of wings echoed through the nearly empty street, and Stella was beside him, striking downwards with the flat of her hand on the fallen Seraph's collarbone. There was a crack, and a splurt of light from dark flesh. Diamond bone sticking through skin. "Did it give you pleasure to break me, Raphael?" She kicked him again, and he lay upon his back now, and did not try to rise, his sculpted chest little more than a bruised crater of broken bone. "Did you enjoy bringing the Star of the Morning low before your masters?"

The final rays of the sun glinted the deep crimson of true human blood off of Stella's upraised sword. Jade tears of rage rolled down from eyes of green-white fire. "Did you laugh when you cast down Lucifer Morningstar?"

The sword and night descended at the same moment.

A rolling sound filled the ears of all present for a few mind-shattering seconds, before the head of Raphael, Prince of Heaven, Bearer of Divine Vengeance, Patron of Artists, Commander of the Highest, came to rest on the pavement, its sightless eyes of shadow staring at the world. Then a wind came upon them all, and body, head, and blood were gone. All that remained were pitted craters of smoking rubble, and the six-winged figure of a naked woman, perfectly still, tears of green crystal rolling down cheeks of fire. Even the sword was gone.

Seryph blinked, and found himself on the ground, massaging a perfectly undamaged span of chest where moments before he was sure he had nursed at least a few broken ribs. His wide eyes rested only on Stella. Elsewhere, Bryn forced himself to swallow, and Lester remained as still as possible. The wind continued, and the shifting pebbles and broken glass on the asphalt sounded like a huge, distant serpent rising from its slumber. Far away, the Highest had fallen upon the demonic hordes, echoes and flashes of battle detectable even from where they stood. A cat, untouched by riots or Apocalypse, took off down a nearby alley with a clatter of fallen rubble. A motorcycle engine backfired several blocks away.

Sam stepped forward, his stride inaudible, the broken fragments of the Scythe cradled in his right hand, the sparks of his eyes tiny and distant as stars. He placed one hand gently on her shoulder, skeletal fingers folding into the ridge of deltoid and collarbone, and said, softly, STELLA.

Then, as quickly as a sigh, the wings were gone, the light faded, and a normal human woman, red of hair and green of eye, naked skin shining with sweat, shivered and fell, groaning, towards the asphalt. Sam caught her as she fell, and, shielding her with his body, lay her gently to the ground. This done, one hand reached up towards the neck of his cloak, and did something, and it slid from his back...

And he was a man of medium height and build, with dark brown hair and blue-gray eyes, wearing faded blue jeans and a loose-fitting black tee-shirt, completely unremarkable in any way save for his absolute lack of resemblance to Brad Pitt, kneeling by an unconscious girl draped with a cloth black as night. He stood, carefully in the gathering night, holding the Scythe-fragments like he might a dead child.

Up the street, someone applauded. "Well done, brother. Impressive total: One Seraphim dead, the exiled Lucifer incapable of resistance, yourself rendered, for the moment, absolutely ineffectual. I must admit, I could not have done better had I tried."

Sam did not need to turn to see the four motorcycles, white, black, red, and pale, at the near end of the street, or their riders. His voice, when he spoke, was the same, but a weight had gone from it, the piercing tones of the grave transmuted into something almost human. "I heard you coming."

"I do not doubt you. But, who have you to come to your defense, Brother? Not yourself, surely. The former Avatar of the Universe might have availed you some, had he not given up his mantle. As for our friend, the Avatar of Time, well... We live at the End of Time, and unto me has been given the conquest of all kingdoms, not merely the physical. Which, no doubt, is the reason Bryn Shima's attempts at exempting us from the timestream, which have occurred three times in the last minute, have come to naught. What protection may have availed you is, alas, as near deceased as makes no difference." Though Sam could not see it, for his back was turned to his brethren, Pestilence smiled, pus oozing from his split lip. "Checkmate."

"Not quite." The voice, though familiar, came from all around, from lampposts and broken buildings, from craters and exposed water mains, and all the components of a city. Seryph saw Sam's human grin, and knew that it was at least surpassed by his own for pure unexpected joy. Across the street, a reflection formed in one of the darkened windows: a great tank of a man wearing a white JLA dress uniform, his face and figure restored by the careful work of Grimspire's nanosurgeons.

"Phil!" Eight pairs of eyes swerved to rest on the white-clad form of the Lead Admin Guy as he stepped out of the glass and onto the street, black leather shoes grinding glass slivers to dust. Firmly standing on the ground, free of the twisted light of reflection, Phil looked even healthier than before, his back straight, eyes bright. When he turned to Seryph, tipping a hat which was not there, a giant's smile beamed from his lips.

"Got some work to do, old son. Hold on a minute, would you?" He turned back to the Horsemen, and his smile didn't so much as slip when he spoke. "So it's chess we're playing?" Silence. "Well, then. I haven't played for a while, but... castle." And he turned his back to them, bending over Stell and checking her pulse with two strong fingers.

The only warning the Horsemen had was a steely creak from the Channel Four news building on their left, and an immense black-walled apartment complex on their right. Then, amidst a great scream of tortured metal, pulverized concrete, and broken glass, both buildings collapsed on top of them. Dust rose from the heap of rubble, choking the few remaining streetlamps that, even in the midst of chaos, came on precisely five minutes after sunset.

When the dust cloud cleared, the two buildings had been replaced by a huge pile of jagged steel and concrete, rising at least a hundred feet high. Sam looked up at the pile, now quietly vibrating, and laughed. He turned over his shoulder to Phil, smiling. "Good trick. It won't hold them for long, but good trick."

Phil grinned toothily. "All it needs to do is keep then until we get into the next county." He checked Bryn and Lester, both struggling to their feet, and grinned, his eyes finally falling on Seryph. "Glad to see me?"

Seryph walked up and placed one hand on his shoulder, feeling the apparently-unharmed shoulders through the delicate weave of white fabric. "You're in surprisingly good health for an invalid."

"Sometimes I surprise even myself."

"And...?" He waved in the general direction of the pile of rubble which had once been two standing buildings.

"I'm apparently the Avatar of Khazan now. Fringe benefits. Long story." He sneezed. "Kind of overdid it, though."

Seryph's mouth climbed upwards in a bracketed smile. "You'll learn. Welcome to the family. It's small, so there's plenty of work to go around."

Bryn, standing, shook his head, one hand rubbing the back of his neck. "Avatar of Khazan? I didn't know Khazan had a consciousness..."

"Well, it does now. Brilliant woman." A pause, during which the vibrations of the rubble became increasingly pronounced. His black eyes stared into Seryph's blue, which stared back. Phil coughed, and looked away. "So, what's been happening on your end?"

Bryn coughed, feet shifting on the pavement in a gesture more suited to his fifteen-year old frame than his thirty-year old consciousness. "Well, Stella-"

"Needs to get to shelter before my... friends get out of their current predicament." Sam's voice was level, and even though his face was human, something unearthly shone through the eyes, and his grin was humorless as death. Bryn's eyes darted from Sam, to Stella, back to Sam, and he nodded. Seryph, pausing for a moment, nodded too. Even now, a voice echoed in his ears, with all the audacity of the stars: "Did you laugh when you cast down Lucifer Morningstar?" He shivered, although the early night was painfully hot.

Phil turned back to him, and blinked. "Speaking of friends, who's the new fellow behind you?"

Seryph blinked, once, and took his time to turn about. When he did, he saw a man leaning against one of the still-standing buildings. He wore a brilliant white suit, complete with long white overcoat and ivory hat, and his skin was pale as ice. Before Seryph could scramble for his sword, the man inserted an unfiltered Lucky Strike and lit it with a silver-and-gold Zippo. "Evening, gentlemen. Sorry, no time for chitchat.
We need to get you out of here while there's still a you here to leave here, which won't be here at all much longer." He shook his head, and blew out a smoke ring. "Sorry. That didn't make sense. It's been a long day."

And they were gone. Behind them, the sky darkened, but no stars came out.

*

The jewel which capped the Grimspire's shell pulsed now with enough unlight to cancel out a thousand suns, and still the singularity core sent more and more energy coursing through conduits and capacitators into the great, twisted anomaly of space and time that crystallized in the gem's core. Around it, demons and angels warred in twirling cyclones of light and flame, smoke pouring from the pitted landscape. The Grimspire's guns had silenced, and many of the warriors from both sides had sought refuge or position within the heavily-armored edifice. Those still outside, bereft of both heavenly and demonic commanders, had fallen upon each other, minds so caught up in the ancient struggle that they paid no mind to the pulses of the unknown mineral.

Inside, power born of the Spire's singularity core played around the edges of the crystallized spatial disorder, sending long-stable rifts into new states of flux, they curved back on themselves, and curved back again, throwing off photons as their edges overlapped and curved back on themselves. New universes formed inside those folds, pockets of vacancy cut off from the continuum of space and time, and disappeared once again as the compression increased, adding more energy to the morass of power collected inside the not-quite-matter of the Spire's crowning stone.

No cycle could last forever. The physical accident of the gemstone shivered and dissolved, for matter could not hold under the pressure of conflicting tides of time and space. Within, the rifts contracted, widened, contracted again, folding upon themselves until there was no more room in any dimension for their pure, unadulterated mass, no place left to collapse into...

And exploded. Unlight flooded over the arraigned armies of Heaven and Hell, and faded.

When the world reconciled itself once more, the Grimspire and its environs were gone. In their place, a glass-smooth crater stretched for ten miles in every direction from the epicenter, where a freehold had once stood.

---