“No.” Her energy renewed, she starts pulling from the princess’s grasp again. “You were right. This whole time, this entire Messiah gig? It’s a lie. I fucking lied out my ass the whole time, Princess. That’s my nature. I lie, I steal, I cheat. That’s how I was back home. I homebrewed salves. I shifted goods. All under the nose of my brother, the man of the Church. But he was a liar too. He hid my mother’s sickness, and mine. I guess it runs in the family.”

“None of us here are free from sin,” says Alodia Lightning.

Why is she being so voidfucked stubborn? “No. You really don’t understand. My mother was voidmad. She had me when she was voidmad. I was born with the nullvoid in my flesh. It took her. I watched her die. And now it’s going to take me, too.”

She doesn’t know when she started crying, but she is, and the princess just stands there and listens to her sobbing in the dark. Everything is upside down and awful. Her chest hurts.

The princess asks: “So it’s all a lie, everything you said about messages from the Demiurge?”

“No. Yes. I don’t know. I mean, there’s a messenger, but zie’s a delusion. It’s the voidmadness speaking, you know? There’s this creature that calls hirself Ruin, that claims to be an angel, a messenger from the Larex Forge.”

“So. There is a messenger.”

“A delusion,” Misery repeats.

The princess doesn’t respond to that. Alodia Lightning’s thoughts are opaque at the best of times, and now—in the dark, with her head a wound and her heart a storm—it’s absolutely impossible to know what she wants. She says to Misery, after a pause: “You said you want to go to the seraph?”

“I have to. It’s calling for me.”

“All right. I’ll take you. I’ll go with you.”

“Really?” Misery’s heart is so loud in her chest, her temples shake with the beat. “I don’t know why—”

“I’ll tell you later. Let’s go.”

“All right. Wait. No—wait.” Her hand goes to her chest to check for Mother’s amulet. It’s there. They haven’t taken it. Good. She won’t be separated from it again. “Okay. You take the lead.”