She flew on toward the heart of the city where something was, vaguely but persistently, calling to her. It was pleased with her, it wanted to reward her, and she wanted to give it the worship it so deserved.

Reality was crumbling all around her, but she was so eager to get to the heart of the darkness that called to her that she didn’t notice the nature of the buildings or the streets or the things that inhabited them.

The call got stronger and more insistent in her mind and she knew when she’d arrived at her goal.

A single building stood higher than the rest, but it seemed no longer to be made of stone and steel, but rather flesh and blood like a giant, static creature. Things crawled in and out of its windows and doorways, things like the worms of the earth and even more alien places. The beings that loitered around it were cone-headed creatures with bloodred tentacles in place of faces, and sentient slugs with transparent flesh, and armor-plated insects that crawled, hopped, and slithered on mysterious errands like no earthly creature.

Most impressive, though, were its two guardians. One stood in bloodred armor that shone so bright you could barely look upon him, fifteen feet tall. His name, the Angel dredged from some far recess of her memory, was Lohengrin. The other was even bigger, twice the knight’s size, and was an impossible conglomeration of garbage and worms and corpses, all of which flowed incessantly, never still but not alive, either.

They were marvels to behold and the Angel wanted to be one with them and the love that she felt wafting off them in palpable waves for their god who dwelt in the building behind them. Their dark, wonderful god who had promised her her heart’s delight.

“What is my reward, my lord?” she begged aloud and she felt a sudden twisting in her body, a sudden racking pain in the middle of herself. She fell to her knees, her arms clenched around her stomach. A hand sought the knife, forgotten until now but still belted about her waist. She pulled it out and slashed, not deeply, at her abdomen, though her skin sliced and blood came. She pulled away the leather jumpsuit from about her stomach, panting.

Her eyes closed and she fell and rolled to her back. Her stomach burned as a weight pushed down on it. She screamed as a woman giving birth and a head pushed through the unbroken, smooth flesh of her stomach, followed by a chest, shoulder, arm, and hand. Another hand popped out with lesser pain lower and nearer her side, but no more than a tiny hand and a forearm appeared above her own flesh.

She stared down at the little face, screwed up and wailing, at the fair hair, and plump-lipped mouth. It was a baby, a boy, she somehow knew. It cried angrily, but then a red tongue slipped out from between its Cupid-like lips and licked at the Angel’s blood that flowed from the shallow cut she’d given herself as she’d cut away the restraining jumpsuit. The lips worked eagerly. The tongue sought more blood.