“Of course I must,” he said. “The saints tried to halt the destruction of the world. They gathered here and constructed this device to bind the Breaker and stop her tearing the world asunder, but in so doing they trapped the Breaker, and gave her all of mortalkind to play with. She created a place of wickedness, of depravity, a place of corruption that can never be expunged. Your Temple believes that all clayborn souls are doomed to Torment. The priests of the tyrant say that all saintborn are bound there. What none of them comprehend is that we are all born into Torment, and there is no escape from it in this life or the next.”

“No,” Isabelle said. “The world is full of suffering, but it is also full of hope.”

“False hope,” Hasdrubal snapped. “It is the hope of the mirage, of the oasis that is always just beyond reach. It is the hope that dies on the vine. In Torment, there is no human act that matters. It cannot be changed from within. The only solution, the only act that has ever or can ever have any meaning is to annihilate it, to erase it down to its roots so that it will never have existed. Only then, with the Breaker destroyed, will the Builder begin anew.”

“And if you’re wrong?” Isabelle got the feeling that Hasdrubal had spent a lot of time telling himself this story, repeating it over and over again until it was more real to him than the evidence of his senses.

“If our world is what the Builder intended, then the Builder is more a fiend than the Breaker ever was.”

“You’re insane,” she said, stepping forward through a whole constellation of worlds. She needed to get the reliquary away from him.

“You are far too late to stop me.” He removed the ring from his finger and pressed it against the image of Caelum as if it were a solid thing. The world sputtered and patches of decay spread across the surface.

Isabelle lunged at him, but he twisted his shape into that of a gorilla with an armored crackback shell and swatted her away. The blow would have broken human Isabelle in half, but Fenice Isabelle was tougher than iron. She bounced off the floor and slid to a halt against the wall.

“Stay down,” Hasdrubal said. “You are no match for me. You should feel privileged to be here at the end, to witness the one true act in all Creation.”

Isabelle rolled to her feet. Terror spread through her soul as corruption bloomed across the world, skylands crumbling into dust and then nothing, the whole world rotting away.

“You’re right, Isabelle is no match for you,” she said. “But Primus Maximus is.”

She turned to the breach and called, Primus Maximus, you have the helm. Get me into that ring!