The waves of energy that had issued out from the Sword formed a crackling, ellipsoidal envelope several dozen yards long. Everything outside of it slowed to a crawl. Wyrms seemed to freeze mid-air. Death rays streaming down from Vyx ships inched forward like radioactive slugs. In and of itself, the slow-down wasn't surprising. I was used to dilating time by now. But this? This was different.

It was just like Suisei had said.

I held up the Sword in my arms.

"I…" I looked around. "I can still move?"

As if to answer, a calm light pulsed from the Sword.

I kept feeding it magic, channeling from my body's vastly larger increased power reserves.

"Godhead preserve us," Suisei muttered. "Genneth… it worked! You've created a time differential!"

"Is that a good thing?" I asked.

"I've never seen one as big as this, nor as powerful."

I looked at the Sword in my hands. I would have wept if I could.

"Better late than never, I guess…"

I set down in the middle of the road. I chose a spot where, in theory, she'd be able to see the sea.

Pel had always loved the sea. That had been one of her primary demands when we were shopping around for a house; it had to have a view of the waves. I stretched my body along the asphalt road as gently as I could manage, enclosing my wife in my coils. As I craned my neck and my head close to her, I could see—and hear—the faint vibrations of her wife's ragged, gravely breaths. They sputtered like a stalled car engine.

My God, her lungs must have been filled with fluid.

As I moved, I noticed how much heavier the Sword had become. Before, it had been nearly weightless, but now, I actually had to work to hold it up and move it around.

An effect of the time magic, I wonder?

But then Pel struggled to raise her head, and all my attention was on her.

"Is… is Daddy angry with us?" she asked.

Daddy?

She was thinking of her father?

"Are we going to the opera?" she asked.

Sheer force of habit made me try to bring my hand to my snout. It didn't reach all the way.

"Genneth?" There was fear in her voice. "Where—" She coughed and moaned and cried, and it was agony for both of us. "—…where are you?"

What could I say? She couldn't read my words if she couldn't see, assuming she even remembered how to read.

There was another painful irony. Finally, I was here for her, here in her time of need, but now, I had no way to let her know.

Enough!

I'd wasted enough time. I looked at the Sword. My power set its magic alight like a torch. I didn't know how long this miracle would last.

It was up to me to make the most of it.

Pulling myself back, I lifted my forepart up.

I looked up at the Sword. "Now, c'mon Azon, or whatever it is I'm talking to. Do your job! Hear me, and obey! Speed time along for Pel!"

"Genneth… what are you doing?" Suisei asked.

I turned to him. "What do you mean, what am I doing? I'm trying to do what you told me to do: make time advance for Pel faster than for everyone else!"

He stared at me with a look of apprehension and disbelief. "Genneth… this is it. This is what I recommended you do."

"What?" I asked.

He turned around to stare at our surroundings' frozen time.

"Time dilation doesn't change how we experience time. One second is one second, no matter where you are. What changes is how measurements in different reference frames compare to one another."

I clenched my claws. "So… I just have to keep it like this?"

"It's all that you can do."

"But for how long?" I asked.

Suisei looked at Pel. "However long it takes."

It was here that the Sword crackled with a bolt of energy. Strands of light arced out, like wings.

For a split second, time outside the spell's area of effect advanced normally.

Everyone's eyes widened in shock.

"Genneth, I don't think this is going to hold up for much longer…"

I shook my head. "No. No no no no no…" I slithered in nervous circles.

There had to be a way to make this work.

"What are you thinking?" Suisei asked me.

"I'm going to do what I set out to do: I have to make time pass more quickly for Pel, and for Pel alone. It's the only way!"

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The Sword was magic; divine magic. I'd already used it to slow time around us. I just needed to figure out how to do the reverse.

I'd long since figured out how to do the same for my psychokinesis—pushing, pulling, and all that jazz. The principle here was the same: reverse the freakin' polarity. So, I did the obvious thing: I willed the tab to push the other way.

Magic pulsed from the Sword once more, like a spectral butterfly's wings.

The time dilation's effect dissipated. Everything moved like before. In between panicking blinks, I tried to push the tab further in that same direction, opposite to where it had been when the dilation had been active.

Yet it didn't budge. A pressure weighed against my mind, like a joint that had gone as far as it would go.

Panicking, I pushed the tab back to its active state. Magic rushed out again, reigniting the time dilation.

"C'mon," I said, speaking to the Sword, "do your thing!" I shook the thing about.

Please, I begged. You saved me. Now, save her. Save my wife!

But the Sword didn't respond. I felt no glimmer of acknowledgment, or burst of heat.

"Doc," Lark said, "nothing's fucking happening!"

"Just, stop it!" I snapped. "Quiet! Let me think!"

Aha!

Music. I need to get back to music.

That was how I'd first gained control of my powers, right? I'd woven my will into a kind of music that I then extruded from myself in order to manifest my will as physical force.

I doubted I could make my intentions clearer to the Sword. If it wasn't going to respond automatically like it had before, maybe that meant I needed to be the one to give it the proper push.

I used weaves like symphonies and concerti, channeling my power into the Sword, which then flared with yet more layers of energy as it amplified my power and transfigured it into something more.

The air swirled in front of me, twisting my view down an unseen drain. Bits of the sky flaked off and dissolved into nothingness, revealing a churning maelstrom of color and light that pulled at me, dragging my massive body across the pavement, closer and closer and closer and—

—I silenced the symphony. The hungry void fractured into shards that evaporated into nothingness, replaced by the former sights of sea and sky and frozen war over ruined land.

"Let me try something else," I mumbled.

I wove psychic threads with thinner textures. Chamber music. A string quartet. A piano trio with cello and violin. The space in front of me tied itself into little knotted clusters as I felt the streaming-sand sensation buzz inside me. Some of the clusters passed through the road, and the road flowed into them like water speeding up a cliff. The space untangled itself as I silenced the music in my thoughts. Fragments of fungus sandwiched between rock and shattered roadstuff fell out of the air and back onto the ground.

Tensing my many nostrils in frustration, I turned to Suisei once more. "Suisei! You're still the one with the most experience using the Sword. What should I do? How do I make it work?"

He crossed his arms. "What do you want from me, Genneth?"

"Help me. I have to make this work! There has to be a way to make it do what I want it to do, or to make it last long enough for Pel to ripen!"

Suisei looked around. "Genneth… I don't know what to tell you." Sighing, he closed his eyes and shook his head. "You already know everything I do."

"No!" I yelled. "After all I've been through—all that I've suffered; all that I've lost; I deserve a victory!" I pointed a claw at Pel. "She deserves it! The whole beasteaten world deserves it! There's too much pain, and I can't take it anymore! God couldn't do it! I'm all that's left! I have to do it! Because if—if I can't—I… I…" I shook my head again. "Suisei, please," I begged, "tell me what to do!"

"Genneth…"

"No! There has to be something! "

Suisei's expression turned grave.

I narrowed my eyes at him. "What is it?"

"I think I know why you've been having difficulties."

"Tell me. Tell me!"

"In order to advance your wife's time-frame, but no one else's," he said, "you'd have to accelerate everything but a tiny region of space centered around her. I…" He turned back to me. "I don't think even the Sword can do that." He shook his head. "I'm sorry, Genneth. I should have thought it through more before I'd suggested it."

"W-What if I just accelerated myself? That would make everything else—including Pel—move forward in time more quickly, right?"

"Yes." He glanced at the lasers hanging frozen midair. "Including the Vyxit and their weaponry."

"Then what if I accelerated myself and all the Vyxit, but not Pel?"

Suisei looked up at the rising Night. "Then whatever is brewing in the Night will get the extra time as well, and it might just hatch."

"No…"

Dread folded my spines against my back.

I looked up at the Sword again. "Please! I'm begging you! Help me! Help me!"

I scooted my body around, pointing myself at Pel once more.

There had to be a way. I wouldn't give up.

I tried, I tried again, and again, and again. Each attempt was a failure, and each failure only fed my desperation.

I was spiraling. I knew I was spiraling. But I couldn't stop. I refused to.

I tried every genre of music I could think of. Patches of &alon were everywhere, growing out in the open on plants or on the corpses of people or animals.

I tried rock. I tried jazz; I tried funk, grunge, and pop. I had plenty of targets to practice on. I knew I'd have no trouble destroying the fungus. Gravitational collapse, spatial rifts; rotations into higher, unseen dimensions; fudging with the very fabric of time; the Sword could do all that, and probably quite a bit more.

But none of it worked. None of it was enough.

I pushed myself to the point of hunger, although—unlike with the shadows—I did not lose any of my biomass.

I hung my head low, defeated and ashamed.

In my desperation, I turned to the unthinkable. I yelled in my thoughts, too ashamed to let my spirits hear.

&alon! &alon, please! Is there something you can do? Anything? Please!

She answered me, though not in words. Her response was a feeling, a bitterness that seeped into my being and made me shudder. It trickled in slowly, distorted by the time differential. But there was no mistaking what she felt. It was as clear as day. It was the bitterness of a petulant child locking themselves in their room and refusing to come out… exactly as I had asked her to do.

I roared in rage.

Echoes of my wrath still vibrated in the air when I heard Pel cry out. I slithered back to the hut.

Her eyes were a gauzy mix of black and gray. They no longer moved the way eyes should.

She was blind.

"Genneth…? Genneth…" Blood and black ichor oozed over her lips. "It's time for breakfast."

I couldn't believe it. Her mind was gone, yet not far gone enough. How much more time did she need? It couldn't have been more than an hour! Maybe it was only minutes!

I could still try to force the Sword to stretch out the passage of time for us for as long as it could manage, even if that meant destroying the Sword in the process. But what good would that do? I'd save my wife, only to doom us all at the hands of the Vyxit, or the Darkness.

Or both.

"No no no no no no." Trembling in terror, I lost control of my fishbowl weave. My spores rained down onto us.

Pel's next breath was long, like the sigh of a broad wave.

Angel, how I wanted to tell her how much I loved her! I wanted her to know that I was there for her. I was finally there for her, even if she couldn't remember me.

And all I could do was watch her die.

I couldn't take it. My failure was too much for me to bear. It ripped old wounds wide open.

Mom's suicide. Dad's death. Dana's death. Rale's…

And now…

I wanted to scream, but I had no mouth. I wanted to sob, but a wyrm's eyes weren't made for tears.

The time wall flickered.

I roared.

Angel…

I didn't just roar. I sang. I sang from my heart. The strains of my Sonata—my precious, incomplete, adagietto—filled the air, trapped in that moment of time. Each one of my nostrils was a voice all its own. I played both parts—melody and accompaniment. My wyrm song transfigured it into something otherworldly.

Every "word" of it was I love you. I love you, and I'm sorry.

I'm so, so sorry.

In that moment, it was the only thing I could do to even hope to dull the pain.

And then, I heard a voice. I understood it in words, even though how it spoke to me went beyond them. The world vibrated in response to my music. Then the Sword's auroral wings sputtered as everything turned white.

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