I had memories in my head from what the Mathers Giant had showed me that felt more real than what I was looking at right now.

“Fuck!” Sveta swore, pulling back. She withdrew tendrils, and her arm went from being a hundred individual strands, each no longer than my finger, to being arm-shaped again, each strand fitting into a configuration that had far too many holes in it. Some of the holes welled with blood, the blood running down her arm to her fingers. “Something’s in there.”

“It’s Bloodplay,” I said. That was the domino. One of many, tipped well before the Simurgh couldn’t see what she was doing. Because she’d seen the blind spot coming, and she’d set herself up to have the maximal number of answers to throw into that spot.

I knew I was mixing metaphors. Chess and dominoes. I knew I was thinking of her as a ‘she’ when the Endbringer was more of a natural disaster.

“That collarbone of yours looks really fucking bad, Vic,” Sveta said, eyeing my chest.

“She’s in there, winging her lasers around, probably going to hit Dinah by chance. I just told the Wardens to hold off until they got the signal, but if Dinah’s gone or out then they won’t get that signal.”

“She’s not there,” Sveta told me.

“How sure are you?”

“I’m not. Eighty percent? Seventy-five percent? Sixty? But if I keep reaching out and getting those reaching pieces of me sliced off or smashed… I think I’m going to break, and I’ll be more of a danger to anyone here than Bloodplay is.”

I looked around.

Above us, moving through the darkness, Dragon’s craft came down through one of the holes in the ceiling. The Simurgh was ready for her, and pillars that held up the ceiling broke. Like spears being used against horses in the medieval age, the pillars interrupted Dragon’s descent. The Dragon-craft’s mouth opened, and unloaded a hail of what might have been grenades.

Each one detonated into a brilliant white explosion with a smoky black exterior to the explosions, like smoke contained strictly to the explosion’s surface.

Too much of it was blocked, stopped by an intervening power from the swarm of renegade capes around the Simurgh.

Where the fuck was Dinah?

The Simurgh was pushing back, taking out a cape every five to ten seconds, starting with the stragglers.

The reality we saw. She connected to Fortuna and she screamed, and the world screamed with her. We were entirely at her mercy.

She’s not a person. She’s not a person.

She’s a force of nature, of fate, one that will destroy us. One that can’t be beat.

Not my voice, that last one.

She was taking us to pieces, but she wasn’t utterly destroying us, because she wanted a future where we were her playthings.