Jericho is gone, and in his place something else, also familiar. A dark room lined with red carpet, full of bronzed furniture, which Misery falls infinitely through while it stays static. She’s been here before. She recognizes this dream. There’s the mysterious saint, gender unknown, combing a shining curtain of hair, leaning over the rectangle of light where hir lover lives. Misery first had this dream on the Capital, and it’s repeated a dozen times since, but her dreams of Jericho have choked them out. Now it’s back. Now she’s back. Why? Who is this saint? She falls, she cries out. She reaches for that still, elegant figure as if zie would turn around to help her.

The saint turns. Misery catches hir eyes, pale and wide like Pyrex Imogen’s. And then zie’s gone, the room is gone, and Misery is falling through void, alone. Flailing.

Then she’s not alone in the void. Here is Ruin, the angelic terror: eight limbs, obsidian skin, rows of sensors glistening pale in hir elongated head. Even through the medium of dreams she feels the sear of hir impatience, hot as a thousand exploding suns. What a terrible thing is an angel enraged! Misery’s soul melts under that pressure; she cannot look away from the nova that is Ruin.

Come to me, Misery. You know what to do. Your life until now has led up to this.

Come.

Misery wakes with the taste of vomit in her mouth. She gains control of her soft mortal body, limbs thrashing in a damp darkness she doesn’t fully comprehend. She falls off a bed, landing hard on her hands and knees. The pain grounds her in the waking world, this horrific reality where force and gravity exert a hold. A mad impulse screams at her to get up. To go.

This is the medical bay, powered down, its confines outlined in the soft glow of auxiliary lighting. Misery doesn’t remember being brought here. Already the nullvoid is fracturing what she recalls and what she knows. She is no longer a person. She is merely a vessel for the nullvoid and its demands. The agonizing gravity of Ruin’s demand pulls at her from across the galaxy like a quasar of divine wrath. Come, the voice says in her mind. Come. She has to go.

Misery stumbles to her feet and fights to stay upright as the world tilts. Angelsteeth’s system and its indomitable directional arrows have primed her to accept this inexorable force pushing her forward. Her life will end when she gets to the transformed seraph and she knows that, but she can’t refuse. There is no way to keep living while feeling like this. And she’s always known the nullvoid would claim her someday. Better there than here.