Astonishment wreathed the Goddess, looking wrong on her glowing face as shock evolved into understanding. “You cloak yourself in your disharmony,” she whispered, the body she was in staggering back a step.

“Disharmony?” I echoed, looking at Bis, his feet clamped onto Al’s shoulder. There could be no disharmony without lines.

“You’re coated in the cost of perverting my will!” the Goddess said, her expression shifting to a hot anger, and Al began to chuckle. “It will not save you. I will burn it away, and you both will die!”

“Yeah? How much you got, bitch?” Al said boldly, standing up and dragging me with him. “I have a lot of smut.”

“It’s the smut!” Bis said, red eyes wide. “Rachel, it’s smut. She can’t get through it.”

Grimacing, the Goddess cried out, her wails becoming fierce as her fire raced over me and died. Al and I shared an aura—his smut insulated me. His smut?

“Get the rest,” I demanded, hope a bright goad. “Bis, go get the rest. We can do this!”

“Got it,” Bis said, launching himself out the hole the Goddess had made, pinwheeling to avoid her haphazard strikes.

“Al, don’t let her burn me,” I said, going still at a memory. Peter had once asked me to not let him burn. But I wasn’t committing suicide. There was a chance here. Wasn’t there?

“What?” Al said, looking from the Goddess for a brief second before throwing out a hand and blocking her desperate attack. “Rachel?”

“I’m going to need all the mystics she has,” I said, pulse quickening. “I’m going to let her in. See how many I can convert.”

Yes ... the mystics in me hummed, eager to make a becoming.

“No!” Al shouted, horrified as he understood. “Rachel, it will kill you!”

But there was no other way, and with a deep breath, I dropped the gates to my mind.

She wasn’t expecting it, and I felt the Goddess stumble as I flooded her with myself, setting seeds of my thoughts within her even as I swung out again.

You will be ended! I will not become! echoed in me, and I sent more mystics, knowing they’d be crushed but needing to distract her from the growing cancer I’d set festering within.

I will not become. I will not! she screamed, and I turned my thoughts to where the lines used to hum in my mind like great gates. If I could flood them with energy, just one, the way would be open and I could pull on the flow of energy to open the rest.

Bis, I called, finding his presence riding the chaos, his mind dipping and swooping freely in mine. Where are they?

They won’t come! he thought, his mood chancy as he rose up on the sudden swipe of emotion from the Goddess.