I swam through the air, speeding up and away from the town of Springfield as fast as wyrmyly possible, and then faster still, as I realized the rifts around the town had grown a little bit. I strained my rearmost pair of eyes to focus on as much of the view behind me as I could, and I didn't stop until the remaining shadows lost interest in me and turned away. I immediately slowed my perception of time to a crawl, and—mercifully—everything around me stayed motionless, though at this point, I had very little confidence that things would stay that way for long.

I roared like heck.

"&ALON!!"

Obviously, she got the message, because the next thing I knew, she'd spirited my consciousness away to her private starry realm.

I clenched my now-human fist as I stood before &alon's supernal presence, trying my best to hide my fear beneath my anger, tossing any pretenses of comportment to the wind.

"What was that!?"

"It's the Darkness!" &alon said, yelling back at me.

We oddly mirrored one other in the way we squeezed our fists and held them up and shook.

"I told you!" she cried. "I told you and told you and told! I told everybody! I tell everybody! But nobody listens!!"

"So what?" I snapped, slicing my arm through the air. "Why should I listen to anything you say? Everything you've told me has been wrong! You don't even understand yourself! You're the one who's trying to steal the power from Kléothag's body!"

"No, I'm not!" she yelled.

"I don't believe you!" I stomped my foot. The blow shook the stars overhead.

"No, I'm not!" she yelled, louder than before.

With a wordless yell, I ran up to &alon in a fit of pique, grabbed her by the sides, and lifted her up and shook her. The screaming child fought back, smacking me in the face. The blow made me rag-doll, and sent me flying back. My back skidded across the water-filmed ground before I came to a stop, and when I did—

—Fricassee me…

Suddenly, a halo of blue fire twenty times my size flared from &alon's body. Her fiery aura stirred up the air, buffeting my medical coat with its blistering heat. The light was blinding.

I cowered before her, covering my eyes with my arm.

"It's not my fault that you made so many mistakes!" she said. Her voice was like the bellowing earth and the roaring of thunder. "I told you what I remembered, and I told you what I didn't, and you got mad with me! You did!"

Craning my neck, I rose up onto one knee and looked her in the eyes. They were as bright as two moons, and as blue as my dead world's sky.

"This isn't my fault!" I yelled. "I'm not the one who murders people and steals their souls!"

There was no way I was going to let this monster pass the blame onto me, not in this life, or any other.

&alon ranted and raved. "You just saw the darkness yourself! You saw it before, in the Lobby, and with Mr. Michi and Klay-oh, and in Dr. Suishi's rememberies! You see it and see it and see it and I tell you and tell you and tell you and you! don't! Listen!!" An outbreak of tears ripped through her temper-tantrum. "Were there any wyrmehs trying to help Klay-oh? No! Were there any wyrmehs trying to help Dr. Sushi? No! &alon is the fungus; the fungus is good! &alon is not the Darkness! The Darkness is bad! It—"

Shattering glass and dying earth erupted around us in cacophony as the starry skies shook. The floor tilted, flinging &alon and I onto the ground and shattering the fungal angel's halo. As I pushed myself up, I saw &alon lying prone on the ground, with her wings drooping behind her.

"No!" She shook her head and sobbed and screamed. "No no no no no!" Her face was contorted in terror.

"What's going on!?"

She stared at me, helpless and afraid. "It's waking up! It's waking up!"

Once again, the void rumbled. It didn't knock us to the ground this time, because we were already down on her knees.

&alon looked up at the sky like a broken angel, praying for rescue.

"We have to leave! We have to leave! But…" Tears grew heavy in her eyes. "They won't let us leave! The Vyxies aren't gonna let us leave and they're gonna fire their weapon, and the Darkness it… it…" She looked at me with ocean-wide eyes. "I can't stop it," she whispered.

And then she vanished, and I was shunted back into my body. I roared again looking around for her—as if that would do any good.

"&alon! &alon!" My desperate song echoed across the coast.

Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!

All I got was a whisper in my mind.

"The Darkness is gonna dig. It's gonna dig, and find Klay-oh, and it's gonna eat him, but if the meanies use their weapon, it won't need to dig. It'll happen so fast. Too fast."

All of a sudden, wyrmsong shrieked from one end of the sky to another. I heard voices scream for help and beg &alon to stop, but she didn't, and the next thing I knew, wyrms started rising up from the land and into the sky, like so many birds taking alight.

And their eyes were silver.

"No! No!" I stared up in panic at the afternoon sky. Terrified musings pranced across my mind.

How many former human beings had &alon just conscripted into her war against the Vyx?

"Leave them alone!" I screamed. "You can't make them fight! You'll hurt them!"

"I have to," she said. "It's the only way out…"

"&alon!" I yelled.

"I know you hate me, and that I'm never gonna be happy," she said. "But I'm not gonna give up."

"&alon!!"

"Goodbye, Mr. Genneth."

And then her presence vanished. She was still watching me, as if from a distance, but her regard was chilled by the stabbing pain of letting go.

I bent the length of my neck to bring my head between my arms, and then pushed my hands against either side of my skull.

And I screamed.

— — —

Angel, Beast, and Queen!

Talk about a SNAFU!

So, yeah… it turned out that "the Darkness" &alon kept blabbering about was actually a thing, totally separate from the fungus. To be clear, this did not vindicate &alon. She was still an idiot god and a destroyer of worlds, one too immature to have any cognizance of the enormity of her wrongdoing. But… she was not solely responsible for all of the bad things, just most of them.

I know, I know, this doesn't paint me in the best light, either. I probably would have noticed it if I hadn't been so darn stubborn, but, in my defense… Sword stab me, I'd been brokenhearted and scared out of my wits.

I sighed, snorting out spores.

The land rose up in hills as I moved away from Springfield. I flew down to one of them and took shelter, nestling among a dead copse. Tree branches reached up from the fungus-matted earth, rotten and skeletal. Fungal masses clung to them in places like insects' cocoons, slowly growing.

Looking up at the sky, I couldn't help but shudder, flattening my spines against my back. The Sun might have been out, lighting up the atmosphere in a beautiful blue, but behind it and the ongoing battles, the Night was there, lying in wait.

&alon's words from before played in my head:

The Darkness! There it is! The starless sky, it's alive. It's the Night. It's been here, and I didn't see it! I didn't see it!

To think, all this time, doom lay directly over our heads, hiding in plain sight.

It made me shiver.

Like the shadows of Springfield, the Night was feeding. My third pair of eyes and the enhanced wyrmsight they provided showed pataphysics and other forces being drawn up into the starless sky. The threads and filaments filled the air like flashes of rain.

I thought back to Kléothag's fight with the darkness. Would that happen here?

"There has to be something you can do, Dr. Howle."

Turning, I saw that Nina's spirit had stepped out of me and materialized on the ground, wearing jeans and a dark tank top. She stood beside me, boots on the ground, joining me in looking up at the sky. Raising her hand, she ran her fingers through the turquoise beads strung up in her hair.

A nervous tic, I supposed.

"Weren't you going to get the aliens to help stop &alon?" Lark said, stepping out alongside Nina. The singer wore a simple, stylish dress, with her hair done up in a bun.

At this point, I wasn't holding any of my spirits back. They could come and go as they pleased.

I could certainly benefit from their counsel.

"If the Darkness really is as big of a threat as &alon has made it out to be, just getting her under control won't be enough," I said.

Oh God.

"For the love of God," Lark snorted, "please don't tell me you still have any doubts about this." She pointed at Springfield. "Do we need to go back to that nightmare factory for another round? I'm enjoying my post-life life; I'd rather not lose it."

I shook my head. "No no, you're preaching to the choir." I nodded. "It's…—"

"—What?" Lark put her hands on her hips. "What is it now?"

"It's scary!" I said, with a flick of a claw that sent several branches flying down the hill.

I stared at them for a moment, back spines flaring, terrified something was going to leap out at me and strike.

Thankfully, nothing did.

"To think," I said, carefully shaking my head from side to side, "despite all the power &alon has, she's petrified of the Darkness."

"Well, it did take out one-third of your god," Lark said.

"Two thirds, actually. It killed Azon and Kléothag, and Ooüm, too, not that I ever worshipped Him. It eats through time and space like they're nothing! And if it got its hands on the residual power in Kléothag's corpse…" I shook my head again. "That might be even worse than &alon did it. All would be lost." I looked up at the sky once more. "The Vyx's superweapon is just going to speed the process along."

"That's it!" Nina said, turning to me and nodding excitedly.

"What is it?"

"Screw trying to get the Vyxit to help!" she said. "You can worry about that after taking those Lodestars thingamajigs out of commission. Right now, you should see if you can use their Network to sabotage the fleet from within."

I crossed my arms. "While I appreciate the suggestion Nina, I've already considered it. While it's certainly possible—maybe—I don't see how I can get away with sabotaging the Lodestars or any other part of the Vyxit fleet without totally ruining whatever tiny, tiny, infinitesimally tiny chance I have of persuading the Vyxit to not genocide all wyrms, let alone help us to be free of &alon."

"So," Nina said, with a glare, "you'd just sit here and do nothing? I thought you were better than that."

"Think about it, Doc," Lark said. "Ingratiating yourself to somebody is kinda thorny when both people involved suffer from a terminal case of being dead. Little Miss &alon said she was gonna take the wyrms and leave this world, right? Well, once that happens, you'll be in the clear! Then, you can spend as much time as you like trying to make nice with the very angry hummingbirds and their very angry friends and find a way to teach the fungus a lesson. I mean, I guess you could also sit back and wait for the Darkness to kill all of us—that certainly would stop the conflict—but, as I said, I've become fond of existing and would like to stay that way."

"&alon said the fleet is keeping her from leaving," I said. "That makes it kind of difficult for us to just skedaddle. And, even if we could, the Vyxit don't deserve to get destroyed by the Darkness," I said.

Various nightmare scenarios passed through my mind as I imagined how that destruction might play out. It was awful.

I wouldn't be able to live with the Vyxit peoples' annihilation weighing down on my conscience, just like I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I allowed &alon to continue destroying worlds.

Mass murder was almost certainly not a good thing, and if there was a case where it was, I'd rather not find out.

I sighed out spores. "I guess this means that, in addition to rescuing Suisei, I have to find a way to stop a doomsday weapon." I flicked my tail around me.

Well, it wasn't like I wasn't used to fixing other people's problems.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.