The sarcophagus begins to hum; its white stone cladding glows. Misery scrambles backward. Her blighted survival instinct. She falls and continues her retreat on heel and palm, skin torn bloody by the stone. She can’t take her eyes off the sarcophagus, nor the piteous jumble of limbs at its base.

The strange white stone flows like lava, stretching and marbling over Alodia Lightning’s still form. Misery shivers. Her throat closes as bile plumes in her stomach. She can’t watch. She can’t think. Eyes shut, on her knees, she does the one thing that was drilled into her the moment she learned language. She prays. She prays to the Larex Forge, resister of the darkness, the dam that holds back the nullvoid, the hand that leads the lost from the darkness to the light. She prays to a Demiurge she had long given up on, who yet still extended Hir Grace to this stupid, insignificant moonrat, this nobody nothing really; she prays to be saved, for the one she brought here to be saved.

The cocoon of stone that contains Alodia Lightning rises from the ground and melts into the surface of the sarcophagus. It vanishes. A gong sounds. Misery collapses, nauseated, ears ringing. Silence descends upon the chamber once more, and it’s just Misery and the deathless stone, which has consumed the Imperial princess. She vomits, but nothing comes out of her wretched body.

Stone rumbles. A low noise ramping, avalanche, death approaching at speed, inescapable, coming to swallow Misery in its embrace.

The sarcophagus wakes.

The cavern shudders as the colossal outcropping of stone expands. Cracks open on its surface, following the outlines of the feathers, and light pours from them. The ground under Misery glows in concentric patterns: intersecting lines like the map to an unknown solar system. Like the patterns on her mother’s amulet.

The wings of the sarcophagus unfold.

The sarcophagus had appeared as a single massive pair of wings, one pulled over the other, forming a closed vessel. Now those wings unfurl and stretch outward, revealing more layers underneath: six wings, eight wings, eighteen, an avalanche chorus of shifting planes. Their gray stone surfaces melt and recede in scaly patches, revealing hidden iridescence. Wings of silver, wings of gold, wings of rainbow green. Glittering black opal wings. Wings shimmering and refractive as crystal. Luminescence, nova-bright, burning Misery’s eyes as she stares.

The wings are attached to something. An alien figure, floating, wrapped in a fetal curl. As the cocoon wings keep opening it too starts to unfold. Long, cool limbs of stone ripple and stretch out. Four arms: two long, two short. A tetrad of lower limbs, curved and sloping and strangely articulated. Hands with six fingers, feet with four toes. A pelvis tethered to a bisected torso by the suggestion of stone ribbons. A striated oval where a head should be, burning with terrible light.