I’ve found a body. A golem – a Trogbody. I missed the corpse the first time, dismissing the strange shape as just another part of the insane topography of this place, but I doubled back (without meaning to), this time with a glow-stick in my hand. (That’s what I call it when I find a way to break apart some of the glowing fungi and smear them on a branch or stick – it affords me reasonable light down here in the dark.) The golem lay collapsed against the wall, his geode head smashed open, the rose crystals glittering within. His body like lava rock: black and shot through with holes, for his flesh was once bubbles in cooling lava. He had a book, if you can call it that: a stone book, the pages slate and looped together with a binding of dry twine. Some kind of religious book, all symbols. But I remind myself that our alphabet is just symbols, too. I see eight pages with large glyphs carved upon them. I see a dead tree with a some kind of bottle in its hollow; a fat-bellied bell hanging from a bound scroll; a candle with a fly atop its wick instead of a flame; a gravestone with a horse-head at its crest; a monstrous pig with sharp teeth; a tower made of crystal; a musical note with a worm or snake wrapped around it; and finally, a lamb with a key held in its mouth and another around its neck. As I beheld the book, the voices in my mind returned with renewed vigor.

– from the Journals of John Atticus Oakes, Cartographer of the Great Below

Everything is fire. Everything is alive and angry and vibrating at a frequency Mookie’s never felt before. His fist pulses like a heartbeat. It’s covered in blood and flecked with bits of marble and splinters of wood. Pulling Sorago through the floor felt like the best meal of his life. Punching a hole through the one Snakeface and stomping the other’s head into a treacly mush and tearing that reaper-cloak fucker in half felt like that moment just after an orgasm: toes curling, then a deep and enduring satisfaction.

But now: hands around his daughter’s throat. Crushing her trachea. Her gray face going blue. Eyes popping out of her head. He’s killing her. He knows he is. And it feels great. Which in turn feels awful. Like he’s watching someone else do it from inside their mind. The Rage has him. It begs him to do it. To pop her head off her neck and throw it through the door.

He tries to quiet the fire. But this isn’t fire. This is napalm. This is lava. It sticks to the walls of him and won’t let go.

Her face looks suddenly unfamiliar to him. You don’t know her, a horrible voice inside bleats. She is a stranger. She is an enemy.