The rabbit holes running through Angelsteeth are brisk and spartan. Businesslike. Even lighting, textured metal floors, and poly-lined walls to cushion the sound of boots against said floors. The pack of prisoners-in-limbo make the filling of a goose with the General and major at the top and the grim-faced soldiers at the base. The farther they go, the denser the corridors become. Bodies jog through the conduits, fervent and determined. Siren song continues as Misery bounds along the trails of the two senior officers. Angelsteeth is subgrav, just like the Capital, and each stride threatens to launch her airborne. Here, even walking requires finesse.

Up ahead, the princess is asking the General: “Is this one of the regular raids?”

“It is.”

“Are we in serious danger?”

“It remains to be seen. I hope not.”

Regular raids, who by? The Heretics? Misery’s heartbeat accelerates on top of all the adrenaline she’s running. What of the so-called truce? The fleet that lurked above Rootsdown was an aberration, a defiance of the ceasefire. Now she’s learning that a base right in the capital duchy gets attacked on the regular? That doesn’t make sense.

“These raids,” she says carefully, “do they happen often?”

The General looks over their shoulder. “Regrettably so. These are conditions which we have to labor under.”

“Do the raids not violate the terms of the truce?”

“It’s in between. I believe the Heretics have their reasons for doing so.”

“But the Throne—surely they know of these incursions? And yet they allow them to continue?”

This time the General laughs, but it’s no belly-throated thing. Small, wry, and defeated. “The answer, I’m afraid, is yes to both of those.”

They pull their attention from her, but she has what she needs. The General is frustrated. Seething that the Throne basically shrugs at these incursions, while they’re out here with their soldiers’ lives on the line every few weeks. Means nothing to them in the Capital.

“Your presence here is a gift,” says Ruin, floating along. “Use this how you will, to your advantage. The Heretics are your tool.”

Heretics. The only battles Misery has seen are entirely fictional. Her closest real-life encounter with their dread enemy was with the blinking dots on Rootsdown’s radar, a remote threat hidden by the atmosphere. She’s never seen Heretic vessels outside of their depictions on wave dramas: spiny shapes and chitinous surfaces, playing on primordial fears kneaded into the ancient human brain stem millions of years ago. Threats from the sourceworld live again in the bristling, fanged, writhing forms of Heretic ships in popular imagination. The Heretics themselves are subhuman creatures, broken and feral with nullvoid infection, half human and half eldritch unknowability. But nothing in the fertile imaginations of drama directors compares to the horror of the nullvoid coming through. After all, these auteurs are storymaking for entertainment. Not to inflict indelible trauma upon their audiences.