The world rang with screams, with shouting and moaning, with ululations in the face of foes, and Cleopatra pushed forward, the emperor still her focus. Augustus kept the precious bow behind his back. He felt a trickle of sweat run down his side. Agrippa stood beside him, shouting orders.

Surely the Romans must outnumber the beasts, Augustus thought. They would win. They had the advantage of order in the face of chaos. Chaos could not possibly prevail. A guard surrounded Agrippa and Augustus, tightly spaced, shields raised.

Lightning flashed in the sky, and thunder shook the earth. High above, the heavens echoed with the sound of something enormous, roaring. The hairs rose on Augustus’s neck, and he felt the air charged with the presence of the divine.

Beside him, Auðr’s hands twisted frantically in the air, her distaff spinning threads, trying to balance the dead with the living. The goddess and Cleopatra were both present, but the thread of the Slaughterer was a frayed end in the Underworld, and Sekhmet’s strand, where it had been braided to her child’s, was ragged.

Cleopatra had injured the goddess.

She had pulled a part of her soul away from Sekhmet, and yet she continued to war. Auðr still could not see the entire pattern. Her eyes flickered over the darkness, a swooning miasma. Her lungs were tight. She was not strong enough to hold the two fates, that of the queen and of the goddess, apart from each other for long, and she knew it.

Sekhmet is here, the seiðkona said, and Augustus heard it in his mind. She hungers for Rome. I cannot keep her from you. She will have you.

A bolt of lightning struck the earth just before Augustus’s pavilion, and he leapt backward, his skin singed. Agrippa stayed firm, fearless, devoted. Augustus shook off the terror and shouted orders at his guard.

The men looked toward the sky and panicked, as bats swooped down from above, into their faces. Shields began to flail. Swords lashed out at the creatures, who came diving downward on their thin wings, blacking out the stars. With them came the birds of night, their claws outstretched for eyes, their wings flapping into faces, their beaks spearing, their shrieks deafening.

The lines began to break down.

Men gasped, slashing at their feet as serpents flooded the ground, twining about their ankles and up their thighs, biting and coiling, tripping and tangling. A viper’s head, chopped off by a blade, rolled into the crater, staining the waters and leaving the serpent’s body, writhing headless, still strangling a dying man on the battlefield above. A mass of crocodiles, their bodies nearly invisible in the darkness of the rocky ground, lumbered out of the water, snatching soldiers’ legs and soldiers’ arms, dragging men into Avernus.

Augustus watched, horrified. Could he be losing this battle? No. Certainly not. Where were the rest of the legions that had come before them? Agrippa had sworn they would be there. Thousands of men. Agrippa had sent the orders himself. Augustus felt frantic, seeing his own Romans tiring, watching them slain and battling, falling to the ground and being trampled, killing one another inadvertently.