Misery shuts her eyes and touches holy obsidian where it has a pulse. The holystone vibrates and keens as the light barrier around the field’s perimeter blinks from yellow to red and into the purples, going dark in wild tendrils like fast-setting gangrene. Alarm rushes through the audience: What is this? An attack? The void? The rows closest to the aegis lurch backward in fear, dropping their expensive snacks, ring-encrusted fingers scrabbling for purchase. The small amusement, the wannabe orator, wasn’t supposed to do anything. What is going on?

Misery feels like she’s floating, her body dissolving, her surroundings becoming immaterial while the aegis solidifies. It’s the only real thing in the universe. It’s part of her, as real as the bones in her fingers, and she can control it just as well.

She flexes her fingertips, and one of those purple tendrils takes form. A fat cord of swarming particulate lashes out from the writhing surface of the aegis. It rears backward, long as a transport ship, so big it clips the edge of the Imperial dais where she stands. The arena erupts in screams, but their terror is useless. The tendril slams forward into the spectator stands. Everything in its path instantly atomizes, molecular bonds dissolving upon contact: masonry, flesh, bone. The tendril carves a path through one sector of the stands and a hundred people are instantly vaporized, along with the seats and the floors and all their stupid finery. The air fills with ozone, shrieking, the smell of burnt meat. Those on the edge wail in despair as they slip on the crumbling stone, plunging hundreds of feet to their deaths. In the back, those still spared are running for the exits, tripping over one another, stepping on one another, breaking each other’s bones in the rush for survival.

Again, again, again. More tendrils awaken, lash out, devour the soft oily masses in their way. A whole section of seating collapses and destroys the rows below with a heavy crunch. Holy jade is indestructible, impervious to heat, blade, or laser, but it cannot guard from other kinds of holystone. It falls like everything else. Nothing will be spared. Misery’s mouth fills with the taste of metal, but her body is very far away from her consciousness. She has been taken over by a force much greater than she is. Break apart. Break open. Like skin splitting in a flash of blood and fat, swells of nullvoid shooting from the rupture.