Feeble as it was, the half-light still seemed strong to him after his days in underground darkness, and so at first Barrick did not notice the trembling of some of the huge statues in front of him until one of them swayed and then fell over, landing with a shuddering crash that almost knocked him off his feet. Two more statues toppled as the soil erupted before him in great crumbling chunks. A massive shape thrust itself up out of the earth and into the daylight.

At first Barrick thought in weary horror that it was some unimaginably large spider from the depths, all hair and malformed, corpse-colored limbs and gleaming, dripping fluids. But its appendages stuck out in unexpected directions, some shattered and peeling, all smoking and oozing like melted candlewax, as though the thing were some terrible combination of sea urchin or jellyfish and butchered animal. Then he finally saw the raw face hanging between two of the limbs, oozing with the glowing golden ichor that ran through it instead of blood. The horror that had cut off his escape still had a few tendrils of singed beard around the broken-toothed maw, and that single huge, mad eye.

“You wretched little ball of shit.” The demigod’s lower jaw was shattered, drooling a liquid that looked like molten metal, and so Jikuyin’s physical voice was an unrecognizable gurgle. The words were only in his head, but so powerful despite the demigod’s countless injuries that Barrick stumbled and almost sank to his knees. “Thought I was dead, didn’t you? But we immortals aren’t so easy to kill…!”

Barrick staggered to one side, praying he could dodge around the huge, crippled thing, but despite all his terrible wounds the demigod moved with devastating speed, scuttling crablike on his broken limbs to block the boy’s escape.

“Not so fast, man-child. Your blood will open the god’s house and I will be made whole again. This is only an inconvenience.”

Barrick’s head seemed too heavy to hold up any longer. He could not get past the thing and he certainly couldn’t outfight it. He could not go back, either. He was done.

Unless…

Barrick Eddon reached into his shirt and pulled out the mirror. For a moment he felt it warm in his hand, felt its power begin to bloom again as it had when the gray man had tried to take it, but Jikuyin held up a splayed, shattered hand—Barrick thought it must be a hand—and the burgeoning flare of light suddenly died.

“Whatever it is,” Jikuyin told him, “it is a lesser power than mine, mortal boy.” His single, bloodshot eye no longer had the means to show expression—the meat of his face was too ravaged for that—but Barrick could tell the demigod was pleased and even amused. Barrick knew also that what Jikuyin said was true—the mirror was now cold and inert. “After all, the blood of the great gods runs in my veins…!”

Something dropped down out of the sky, covering the demigod’s face for a moment like a living black shadow. Jikuyin let out a screech of startled pain that ripped through Barrick’s brain and knocked him to his knees. When he managed to climb back onto his feet, Barrick saw that the black shape was gone and that the spidery demigod was moaning and rubbing at his face. When he took his limbs away, the place where Jikuyin’s single remaining eye had been was now a welling crater of radiant gold.