Some days, life just took your breath away. This was definitely one of those days.

A bubble of light had appeared in the sky, sweeping the clouds aside. The bubble flickered and, an instant later, dissolved away, revealing an object like a castle in the air, or a silver oak lain on its side. It was massive, as big as a storm cloud. Reflective facets scalloped and scaled its length. Oblong bipyramids erupted in clusters here and there, jutting out like half-formed limbs, crowned in ends like thorns. Slender spines jutted out across the surface, feathered with smaller and smaller protrusions repeated at fractal scales. There were lights and spires and antennae all over its surface, along with other mechanical features whose names or purpose I could only guess.

Swarms of tinfoil origami shimmered around the feather-spines, bearing strands, and wings, and pleated sheets. Many had taken flight, zooming around the impossible structure.

"Look!" Jules yelled, pointing a shaking finger. "Look!"

More of the light-eggs appeared elsewhere, like drops of white paint dripping onto a dark gray canvas. The other shells dissolved just as quickly, revealing more of the crystal log-castles, until the fleet dotted across the sky in a narrow band from one horizon to the other. Three of the objects were in view, with traces of a fourth sticking out behind the city skyline.

Even accounting for distance, the one in the middle—the first to appear—was larger and more developed than any of the others. Obviously, it was their leader.

Jules turned to face me, her voice trailing off. "D-Dad…?"

But I couldn't take my eyes off the things overhead.

"Scary-shinies…" I muttered. "Oh no. Oh no. Oh no oh no oh no oh no—"

"—What?" Jules asked.

I shook my head to bring myself back to attention.

"I've seen these before, after a fashion."

"Where?" Pel asked.

"It's kind of hard to explain…"

The origami things and the oblong metallocrystal? They were identical to the Scary-Shinies from the Lantor incursion.

"Andalon called them Scary-Shinies," I said, cringing slightly at how dumb that sounded. "I used to think they were in cahoots with the fungus, or perhaps another faction in the War in Paradise, but now…" I shook my head. "Now… I don't know."

Alarm cracked on Pel's face. "W-War in Paradise?"

"Guys! Guys!" Rayph yelled, pointing vigorously. "Something's happening!"

He was right on the money. The origami-forms were breaking free from the feathery spines en masse. They adopted a flower-like shape, with the petals opening backward, away from us, with stamens made of jets of bright blue fire. In seconds, their hundreds became thousands, as they gathered in glittering murmurations—a grim auguring, if there ever was one.

The blue jets were some kind of propulsion device, because the flower-ships started moving toward the ground with startling speed.

"What are they doing?" Pel asked.

In a matter of seconds, most of the blue lights disappeared as the origami ships turned to face us.

Fricassee me! They were so fast!

"They're coming…" I said. "They're coming!"

I immediately started slithering away.

I turned to my family. "We have to leave. Now!"

There was a soft, high-pitched whine in the distance—and it was getting louder. At first, I thought it was tinnitus, but then I remembered I no longer had ears.

"Come on, follow me!"

I slithered; they ran. We went out of the Old Theater District and onto the boulevard. Pel shrieked and coughed as a fungal shambler about the size of a small car tramped down the sidewalk. I whipped up a net-shaped plexus and cast it at the shambler with a dramatic handwave. My magic scooped the creature up and sent it flying, like a rocket.

Jules staggered and cursed. "Holy shit!"

I glared at her. "Language!"

She rolled her eyes at me.

I led them down to the side street where I'd parked the L85.

I stuck out my arm as Pel and the kids rushed toward the car. "Wait," I yelled, "don't touch it!"

The repulsion forcefield I'd set up around the car was still very much in effect, and by the looks of the twitching fungus amalgam splattered over the adjacent building, it had done its job well.

"I set up a protective barrier. I have to disable it, first."

A bit of focus dispelled the plexus. The circular loops I'd woven its filaments into came apart as the barrier dissolved.

"Alright, go!"

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Pel swept her hand over the door sensor; the car acknowledged her. The headlights flashed on as she opened the door. Out of force of habit, Jules and Rayph sat in the back.

Pel waved her hand over the ignition and the car revved to life. But just as she was about to slam the door shut, she stopped herself and looked at me in concern.

"What about you?"

"Close the door and hold on," I said, "and don't freak out. And don't open the windows, either."

She shut the door.

Bending down, I eyed the gap between the ground and the underside of my car. It was going to be a tight fit, for sure, but it was far from impossible.

Slithering up to the car, I pressed myself against the L85's side and then pushed myself up with my underbelly and the undersides of my arms. I crossed the roof and slid down the other side of my car, turning the world upside down in the process and bonking my head on the street, which was unpleasant, though not as unpleasant as the feeling of my hair, scalp, and back spines scraping against the pavement as I slid beneath my car. My spines reflexively fold against my back in response to the discomfort, giving me just enough wiggle room to gently—gently—wrap my claws around the doodads on the underside of the L85 and drag myself out from under the opposite side The few patches of human skin still left on my back did not like any of this, nor did my back spines, nor the L85—nor my family, if the sounds of banging and muffled curses were any indication.

It was a very tight fit.

Meanwhile, the whine of the Scary-Shinies far overhead was only getting louder.

I hurried as best as I could.

As I pulled myself up the other side, on the strip between the front and back windows, I used the part of me that was already pressed up against the car as a handle to help myself pull—a strange experience, to be sure. I stopped slithering forward once I could no longer feel any contact between the ground and my lengthy underbelly. This left my human bits squarely in the middle of my car's roof, with just enough slack for me to turn to face forward.

For safety's sake—not that any of this was even the slightest bit safe—I grabbed the side of my body with which I'd started the loop and slid my claws in between my underbelly and the car roof. Firmly clutching myself in this way was the closest thing I had to a lock to keep me wrapped around my car.

I thumped the roof of the L85 with my spare arm's elbow and yelled.

"Drive!"

For a split second, I worried my body was so thick that it had lifted the car high enough to break the wheels' contact with the road, but then we started moving.

There, one problem solved; now, to deal with the thousands more waiting in the wings.

I saw Pel look through the driver's side window and yell, though I had difficulty understanding her muffled words. Fortunately, I had some doppelgangers got to work replaying my memory of her words over and over again until they pieced together what she'd most likely said: "Where do we go?"

"The Expressway!" I bellowed, shouting over the wind. "That's the quickest way out of the city!"

I tightened my coils around the chassis of my car as Pelbrum turned off Palace Boulevard and onto Templar Way. The wind tore through my hair and bow-tie, and was trying to pry my eyelids open, when I realized there was an easy solution. I wove a pataphysical windshield in front of me, counteracting the air currents rushing over the roof.

Once again, that impossible sound thundered. It was like all the alarms in the world were blaring in unison.

If that wasn't some kind of signal, I swear, I'd eat a hat!

Unified, silver-eyed wyrmsong roared back at it, like call and response.

I was used to the sound of wyrms filling the sky with their alien choruses. But… this was different. This wasn't a madrigal, where each voice had its own part to play, it was a symphony, belted out in unison, and magnified by legion.

Monophony: the simplest musical texture, when all voices sing as one. The same sounds, the same notes.

I looked up.

"Oh my God…"

Holes were opening in the sky; mouths of corridors, filled with churning, mirror-like shards that glowed with their own light as they reflected the light around them. Silver-eyed wyrms poured out from the rifts the openings by the thousands, making the sky writhe with their movement. Some were so far away, they were barely more than threads above the dawn. Others swam out from tunnels that opened up a stone's throw above our tallest buildings. One wyrm that emerged from a tunnel near the Blackmount Building was so large, it cast a shadow over Templar Way that filled the space between the sidewalks.

The wyrms spiraled upward, toward the descending tinfoil swarm.

I yelled, "Pel, for the love of the Lassedites, don't slow down!"

Then the two forces clashed: flowers against wyrms.

The flowers moved like schools of fish; they darted and swerved, strafing their targets with red laser beams—heat rays?—of astonishing power. The heat rays incinerated wood, metal, and stone outright, sowing firestorms in their wide, sweeping paths. They also wielded translucent green laser beams which they waved over seemingly everything in sight, searching for the fungus. The green beams moved constantly, like a lobster's antennas.

Aim with green, fire with red.

They targeted the fungus, its moving pieces, most of all: the wyrms, and &alon's shamblers.

What had at first seemed to be chaos revealed an underlying order. The flowers wielded their heat rays with almost surgical precision, excising the fungus wherever they found it.

The rays tore through buildings like paper. My mane-spines went stiff at the sight. A single one of the heat rays was enough to make the bellow in agony; two or more rays converging on a single point sliced a wyrm in two. As I watched my fellow victims tumble out of the sky, I somehow knew they hadn't been killed, even though their bodies had been cleaved in two. They could regenerate from those wounds, but their hunger would be great, and the pain… Angel's breath, I couldn't even imagine how much it must have hurt!

Suddenly, Pel honked the car's horn.

I flinched, and then looked straight ahead.

More fungus monsters—and some zombies, too—dead ahead.

Some of the fungus creatures looked like rosettes of stolen spider legs; others, like winged flowers, or headless elephants with snarling hounds in place of limbs. The zombies ambled about, getting absorbed by the bodies of the trundling fungal behemoths.

"Fudge," I muttered.

Pel honked the horn—I assume to signal me, not the monsters. On a hunch, I tightened my grip on myself, and of my body around the car.

Fungal quadrupeds sprinted at us like bloodhounds.

Trying to dodge, Pel veered the car from side to side. I had to wrap my windshield forcefield around myself to keep the wind at bay.

Suddenly, as we entered a four-way intersection, a spore-trumpeting behemoth stomped down from a side street. It looked like a six-legged bear, if bears were headless and nearly two stories tall. A zombie horde ran out around its legs. They were barely even human anymore. Some of the bodies' heads and human limbs flopped uselessly as they galloped forward on fungal appendages, if they had any remaining human parts at all.

Focusing, I expanded my windshield forcefield into a glittering wall. I used the front end of the wall like a paddle, slapping creatures away while pushing back against the hordes. A handful of zombies coming at us from the right collapsed as they crashed into my barrier. Some of them splattered outright, while others scrambled onto the rising pile of bodies in hopes of climbing over.

Angel's mercy…

The behemoth charged at us, ramming forward with its tusks. My forcefield buckled under the enormous strain, with sheets of pataphysics cracking before my eyes.

I screamed: "Drive!"

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