Primus expanded into her awareness, and for once she stepped out of his way. The rush and joy of battle filled her white-hot, like iron fresh from the forge. She felt her body as she never had before, every piece of her a weapon.

Primus charged, muscles like iron springs flinging them across the room so fast that Hasdrubal scarce had time to raise his guard. Sorcerous claws ripped through armored flesh and shattered Hasdrubal’s forearm with a crack like lightning splitting a tree.

Hasdrubal yowled and staggered back and shifted into a leaner, faster form with many arms and stingers for fingers.

Still the world crumbled, decaying like an apple left out to rot.

Now! Isabelle cried.

Primus surged forward and thrust out her spark-hand; it passed straight through Hasdrubal and grasped the ring.

Isabelle jumped, her spark self sliding into the reliquary. It was like swimming through a river of light, sparks flying by so fast she could hardly see them. Isabelle darted through the slick, bright channel all the way to the end. She could feel where the reliquary hooked into the world.

The whole thing was made of symbols so simple that she did not see how they could have any individual meaning, but they came together into an emergent complexity that defied comprehension.

With no time to wonder she slid into the flow of symbols and fell into the world. Not just any part of it. All of it. She emerged into bottomless sky and onto the broad, flat cratons. She flowed with rivers and danced with lightning and pumped in the blood of countless millions of people.

Terrified people.

She found the edges of the rot that Hasdrubal had inflicted, spreading not from anywhere but from everywhere, her world decaying from the roots up, from cell to organ, from organ to body. Down into the rot she dove, into the decay, and found there a discontinuity, a hole in the words that made up the pieces that made up the things.

Hasdrubal hadn’t needed to understand what he was doing any more than a bullet needed to know how a heart pumped blood. He’d just rooted around until he found something fundamental and ripped it out, and she had no idea how to repair it any more than she knew how to unbruise an apple or unburn a match.

She raced around the edge of the reliquary, the place where the gears of the tool meshed with the fundamental cogs of the world. The reliquary waited for her to give a message to send, words to start repairs and instructions on how to proceed. But the Builder’s language was beyond her …

Or was it?

When the world had stuttered and the void rushed in, three things had remained. The stars, the Builder’s artifacts, and us.