We were already several blocks away when the dust cloud from the collapsing skyscraper finally caught up to us. Thankfully, we'd already turned down a corner, off the street. I watched the torrent of debris inundate the street through my rear-view mirror.

Was this what a volcanic eruption was like?

The good news was that the going was pretty smooth after that. We had a couple more encounters—one with some zombies, another involving a fungus abomination that seemed to have grown up around the "mobile" set up in the park-space at the base of the Vaneheist Building. I'd never been able to drive past that bright red, abstract sculpture without imagining it ripping out of the ground and crawling down the street.

I never would have guessed that nightmare would come true, but—apparently—it had, and was covered in fungus like papier-mâché. Brand took care of the zombies, launching them off the street at a 45-degree angle. I didn't see where they landed, but it was several blocks away, if not more, so I imagined there wouldn't be much left of it. Angel help anyone unlucky enough to have been standing there when it happened.

As for the evil sculpture, Kurt did a really nice job of dismembering it, just ripping it apart, limb by limb, until the creature was little more than a collection of meat skewers with metal cores. He laid the pieces out on the street nice and neat, in case any hungry transformees happened to pass by. It was definitely a struggle for me to ignore those tasty-looking morsels, but it got easier once they were out of sight. Also, closing the driver's window helped a lot. (It was really distressing how delectable the stuff smelled to me.)

While all this was happening—rocket launcher included—there was also the matter of the spirits, which had been playing out the entire time.

Elpeck's streets made WeElMed's halls seem lively by comparison. Fog held entire streets in its grip, the wind's chilly hands having scuttled it there from off the water. I put several dopplegangers in charge of filtering the constant stream of new ghosts being uploaded into my consciousness, just to keep myself from being overwhelmed. Even so, every once in a while, a spirit would fall through my extended consciousness' grasp, leaving a ghost standing dumbstruck in the middle of the street. I had to suppress my panic response as my car passed through them like the fog.

The nearer we got to the Civic Center, the thicker the haze of mental static got. I felt lightheaded and oddly giddy; tipsy, only without the incumbent loss of coordination.

Finally, we arrived; we turned onto the Promenade

It says something about my city and its history that not even the end of the world could fully efface its beauty. The main boulevards came together like the points of a star, and the Imperial Promenade was the largest of them all. The roads split as we reached the Civic Center's heart, opening to embrace the spaces within

The Civic Center was surrounded by skyscrapers and ornamented high-rises, turning the whole area into a gigantic, octagonal room. Monorail lines swept through the air, curling around or threading through the newer skyscrapers. If you looked down the Imperial Promenade, you could see all the way to Elpeck Bay, and not even the fungus had ruined the view.

At least, not yet.

Cascaton Park sat in the corner opposite the Melted Palace. The grandest cathedral in Lassedicy loomed over the Basilica of the Hallowed Lass. The Basilica's massive stone-slabbed pavement abutted the edge of Elpeck Square, whose many tiles filled the space between the Palace and the Park. The Imperial Palace and the Trenton Legislature lay at either end of the street on the opposite diagonal.

Standing in the center of the Square, next to the Verdiger Fountain and its incomparable statues, you'd be surrounded by our city's greatest treasures, be they spread about in the grandeur of the space, or tucked down the long boulevards, among rotundas, arches, and colonnades.

I could only gasp at what those beauties had become. So many of the buildings were overgrown, roofs and spires honored with bioluminescent trumpets and pipe-organ sporestacks. The Cassation was a forest of the damned: trees stood like firebombed husks in a sea of moldering leaves. Many of the trees had pulled up their roots to go crawling across the landscape, though the vast majority of them still stood where they always had, only now repurposed into shuddering sporestacks. Fungus-creatures lumbered in the fading darkness, traipsing shadow-like between the glowing bulbs. Spores rose from the quag like a green mirage.

The tree-lined boulevards had fared just as poorly. Had the fungus not remade them into deathly woodwinds, in a couple months, they would have painted the city with spring's greetings of spring; the coral trees' reds, the fuji's regal purples.

But it was not to be.

The streets were grim afterimages of the photographs I'd seen in my grammar school history books. In the days of Prelatory, hardly a day went by without a military parade or piety rally marching down the Promenade and the Civic Center. You could say that the parades had returned for one last hurrah, though, unlike the original, the reboot had no sense of order, though it more than made up for it with fear. Abandoned vehicles were scattered everywhere; cars, as haphazardly as autumn leaves; buses, like fallen trees, blocking the way and the view. I counted two military tanks lying among the refuse. Their hatches had been left open, like the tabs on empty soda cans.

This place was an afterscape. Humanity should have been a memory, and yet, it wasn't. People had gathered here by the thousands. Days before, Nurse Kaylin had shown me aerial footage of the encampments—people gathered to hear the words of the Lassedite Returned. The encampments had exploded in size since then. In Elpeck Square alone, you could hardly make out the pavement among all the picnic blankets and tents. To my shock, many of the encampments were abandoned. Even now, people were continuing to abandon them.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

Everyone was flocking to the Basilica and the Melted Palace. The crowds filled the open space like tall grass, and like grass, they swayed and stumbled in the wind.

I wondered how many of them even remembered why they'd come here in the first place.

Ghosts flickered in and out of existence all across my field of vision. They stood as stiff as rods, moving only to look. I could hear them through the walls of my car; from across the block; maybe even from inside the buildings themselves. Consciousness flowed from them a continuous whisper, each stream like a radio channel. The sounds grew louder as I grew closer and receded as I passed them by.

And if all of that wasn't unsettling enough, thick clouds of fog filled the back half of the basilica. They obscured the lower half of the Melted Palace's front façade, including the entrance. I had no idea why the fog was there, though, whatever the reason was, I knew in my bones that it couldn't be natural. Someone was making it.

Something evil was afoot.

An incoming call pinged on my car's dashboard console not long after our convoy entered the Civic Center.

Once again, it was audio only.

"Alright," Heggy said, coughing and then clearing her throat. "So, how's this gonna go down?"

"We're gonna get out and talk to people," Ani said. "We need to get them away from here ASAP, no matter what." She coughed. "Look around: there are plenty of usable vehicles strewn about. We can hot-wire them if we need to."

"Does anyone here even know how to hot-wire a car?" Heggy asked.

I opened a hole in my imaginary fishbowl. "My wife does," I said.

"Not helping," Heggy said.

"Jonan taught me," Ani said.

No one said anything in response to that.

"Whatever happens," Ani continued, "the wyrms will be waiting in the wings if and when things go wrong."

Another doctor spoke up: "What about the fog over by the Melted Palace?"

"It can't be natural," I said, "and it can't be good, either. I'll bet Verune's cult is making it to hide something… nefarious."

"Genneth, what are you going to do?" Ani asked.

"Actually, that reminds me," I said.

Starting up a second call, I dialed Pel's console using the dashboard.

It rang and rang, with no response.

I sighed.

"Genneth…?" Ani asked.

"I was calling my wife's console. She's still not picking up. So, I'm gonna have to park the car someplace safe, and…"

But I couldn't finish the sentence.

The tune Pel sang to me in her last message was the same one I'd sung to her on our ill-fated date night to see Biluše at the Bealsthiller. The theater was just past the Civic Center's edge, only a couple of blocks from the Melted Palace. As long as I parked somewhere in the vicinity it would be a short walk to the Bealsthiller.

And yet…

I had no way of knowing whether or not my family had escaped from Verune's clutches. Worse, with the cult likely preparing to consume hundreds if not thousands of people en masse, there was a non-negligible chance that my wife and kids, wherever they were, were about to become wyrm chow.

I couldn't take that risk, just as I couldn't abandon my friends.

Also, Verune and his goons had tried to kill us, and I was definitely still sour about that.

I sighed, breathing out plums of spores that whirled around the confines of my fishbowl forcefield before settling down at its base.

"I'm gonna head over to the Melted Palace and give the Verune a piece of my mind."

Unable to fidget with my lucky bowtie to my satisfaction, on account of having wyrm claws, I instead tightened my finger-grips on the steering wheel and twitched my tail.

I still hadn't gotten used to the feeling of my body sliding against itself when I did that.

I tried to get myself pumped up.

"They wanted the Sorcerer?" I said. "Well, they're gonna get him—and then some."

"Make sure you let the wyrms know," Heggy said.

"Oh, I will."

Then I ended the call.

The convoy moved clockwise, around the peripheral boulevard. Heggy, Ani, and the others parked at the edge of Cascaton Park, while I continued on to the opposite side of the Civic Center, and, from there, turned onto Sun Boulevard, and then took a left one block down.

The Old Theater District was an old-old open square just a stone's throw away from the Civic Center; the Bealsthiller was at the district's periphery.

Unfortunately…

"Riceroni sandalfish!" I cursed.

The road was blocked.

Shoving the thought of invisible legs on the pedal and brakes out of my mind, I wove up a great bulldozer of a weave onto the road, like a street-sweeper on cleaning day. The cars screeched and roared as I shoved them out of the way. The first few feet came easily, but then it slowed, and I felt dizzy and dazed. But, like when I'd fight to stay up late to help my kids finish their school projects, I pushed, and pushed until I'd moved them far enough into the intersection for me to drive around them.

With the street now clear, I drove forward until I reached an alleyway in between two townhouses that weren't completely overgrown with fungus. I turned onto the alley, but didn't drive all the way in.

Call me cautious, but I wanted to look at where I was going to park before I parked there.

There were a pair of dumpsters nearby. Trash and fungus and tattered clothes lay in and around them. I shuddered as my car came to a stop.

The clothes weren't empty, nor were the corpses within them. The fungus poked up from its cadaver-containers in luminescent globes, like little eyes brightly watching.

I put the car into reverse and pulled back out onto the street.

I was not about to park my car in the shadows of the dead.

The next alley over looked clean enough. My headlights illuminated a stain on the wall and street where a dumpster had obviously once stood, though, now, all that remained of it were a few scraps of metal.

A transformee must have licked the place clean.

Though that was revolting thought to contemplate, it did make me feel better about parking here; if there'd been anything dangerous, the hungry transformee would have eaten it.

Still, it didn't hurt to be safe.

Parking was the easy part. Extricating myself from the L85, on the other hand, took a couple minutes. Once I was out, I dismissed my magic fishbowl helmet, and, raising my arms, enclosed my car in a dome-shaped forcefield and set it to repel anything that tried to get in. To check its effectiveness, I pressed the tip of a claw against it. The seemingly ordinary patch of air began to quiver as a magnet-like force pushed back at me

Good.

Then, stretching my arms and tail, I slithered onto the street.

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