The thing’s bulk was set on a stretched-out, humanlike frame—like a person walking crab-fashion, feet planted flat and hands flat backward on the ground, abdomen thrust ecstatically up in midair. But when I say hands and feet, think of hands and feet fed through a shredder, and then all the exposed bone and flesh banded back together with black-flecked orange shell. This was topped with great shiny plates of thorax, a big diamond-shaped thing, and a tiny-waisted abdomen. At its highest point sat a huge skull of something that might’ve been anything, so long as that thing wasn’t human. Its lines were obscured by great slabs of pulsing, greenish, comb-chambered flesh, and here and there someone had slapped on long wicked hairs as thick as your fingers. Which weren’t that thick. I’m just amending here; your fingers are fine. Great serrated beetle jaws emerged from either side of the skull’s maw, dripping steaming liquid, and it snapped meditatively as it stood—hung, actually: transparent wings buoyed it up, moving so rapidly that what with the steam and the blood and the heat and the dark I hadn’t seen them to start with. And as I watched, little pinpoints spun within the black craters of the skull’s eye sockets, and then great wet black eyeballs emerged from those holes.

This would have been a terrific moment for you to come back. It would have been completely sweet. I don’t care how much of a hot badass I’m meant to be, I was in the wrong body clutching a sword I’d never used, and you didn’t have any muscles, and I absolutely did not feel well. I felt bad. I needed a time-out. But the monster screeched in a weird, double-throated bleating chitter, two sounds simultaneously and both of them shitty, and those eyeballs swivelled round and round and round.

I lined up your front foot with your back ankle, thumb wrapped low around the hilt of your sword, which proves that you can put the swordfighter into the necromancer but you can’t, wait, hang on.

And I said, “Goddamn it, I told you to lift weights.”

The creature skittered toward us at an incredible speed. What followed was an absolute shitshow.