“Are you going to do it again?” She knows that voice, groping after her intentions from the world outside. The Lady Alodia Lightning. Breathy with fear. Or is it anticipation? She can’t worry about that. The holy obsidian is calling to her. Waiting for her input. Just as she’d done in the Grand Amphitheater, Misery reaches for it. Touches it. Lets loose its power.

With a force that takes the breath from her chest, the aegis snaps outward from Angelsteeth. A regular space station, built by the tender hands of humanity, turns into a blazing voidtouched horror. Tendrils of yellow shoot forth in every direction, insatiable and uncontrollable. What kind of nightmare must it look like, writhing and seething with want? The wakened barrier is hungry and it hungers indiscriminately. It carves sections off turrets and sensor towers and sends them to the void in a superheated flare. In the background a thin wail goes up, the station speaking its alarm at the destruction. The Heretic ship, skimming too close to this sudden outburst of eldritch horror, tries to back out of range. But it’s too late. One tendril snares it by the snout, pulling it in. A dozen more cut into its skin. The ship shudders deeply, then comes apart with a scream more imagined than heard. There’s no light, no fire, but Angelsteeth shakes from the bones up as a pulse of energy sweeps outward. And then there’s no ship save for glittering shards tumbling through space in a thousand directions.

In the distance, Beggar, Sailor, and Tinker flee. Space winks in repulsive patterns as they tear through its hidden foramen, and the enemy seraphs vanish into the voidholes that appear. Back to the clutches of whichever terrible hand sent them. The fight is over.

Misery releases her grasp on the holy obsidian. There. Done it. Is that Ruin’s laughter she hears in her head?

Misery slowly peels her eyes open and tumbles into the confines of the mundane world, coming down from a cosmic vantage point that was more imagined than anything. Delusional. Her flesh body welcomes the return of her awareness with a one-two of stress and dehydration. While her soul, or her voidtouched mind, had soared through space watching the destruction it wrought, her body was put through the fucking wringer. Her heart beats wild and electric in her chest. Misery unclenches her jaw and fists and feels the beginnings of a migraine working through every tendon in her neck.

Her brother’s words: There’s something wrong with you.

Something’s changed. The air in her mouth tastes different, as if what she’s done broke reality, and in that picosecond of dislocation the fabric of the universe realigned. She’s done it! She saved all their hides. Almost like a real Messiah.

“Your miracles keep coming, don’t they?” says a voice to her left.