She’s in a cavern so dark she cannot sense her own body. The way the air moves tells Misery of its indescribable size. All of it is holystone, a type she has never encountered and perhaps unknown to all of humanity. She’s never been around so much sacred material at once; not even her days on the Capital and Angelsteeth can compare. The presence of the stone feels heavy the way humid air feels heavy.

In the darkness, a light grows. It starts as a pinprick, laser-bright, which swells and swells as Misery watches. First the size of a child, then the width of a room, then greater than the reefs on Rootsdown. By this time it is too much to look at, too hot for thought to process. Still the light expands: now the size of a warship, now the size of a jump portal, and Misery is like an atom in its blazing penumbra. Now it dwarfs planets, now it could swallow suns, now it spans all of Creation and still it grows ever brighter, inexorable, inevitable. Misery’s heart stills in her chest. Death has come and she is falling into its grasp.

Be not afraid, Misery Nomaki.

She knows this voice. Ruin. Her delusion. The creature that has brought her to where she is now. Zie is here, speaking to her.

She thinks, I am not afraid.

The light is a singular creature, an awestriking thing with no face and a hundred wings. Eight limbs and a nova where a head should be, tied to its shoulders and torso with twisted string. She knows what this is; she’s seen this form before. An archangel blazes before her, the highest messenger of the Larex Forge. A being of unimaginable size, made of the fires of Creation. This is Ruin. The first day they met, zie looked like this. But nowhere this intense. Nowhere this beautiful, ineffable, terrible to behold.

Ruin turns hir nuclear gaze toward Misery, and speaks. Every syllable, every vowel every consonant is the sound of a star being born, of galaxies bursting into life.

Long has been our journey together, Misery Nomaki. But you are not far from the destination I was sent to guide you toward. Soon you will see. There is a place you must travel to. Let me show you. Come closer, child.

The archangel develops gravity, and Misery falls toward it. There is no question of resisting. She has no power here. She can only obey her fate.