Darkness above, darkness below.

Merritt and the other wyrms were terrified. They flew about in a frenzy. The great serpent was an eruption unending, a solid tube of darkness the size of a mountain, rising up and up and up. Its mere presence was a gravity that pulled mass toward itself: ruined buildings, crumbling boulevards. Debris as fine as wyrmscale rushed past Merritt and the others and spiraled around the serpent.

Flailing her tail—snorting in terror—Merritt strained her powers to the limit in a desperate attempt to fly away from the serpent. It took nearly all her effort just to keep from getting pulled in.

Wyrms screamed.

"Run!"

"Help!"

"Get away! Get away!"

The Darkness' pull dragged wyrms skyward as the colossus rose.

With a roar, Bethany veered toward the column of darkness, speeding forward like a lightning bolt. But instead of crashing into it, she curved around it, braying in triumph as her blistering speed sent her rocketing away.

Then a shaft of Night sky fell on Bethany, and she was gone.

Merritt screamed.

Dr. Marteneiss stared, stammering in shock. "Well, sh-shit…"

Merritt couldn't have put it better herself.

"The sky is falling…" Storn whispered.

Evil's blood poured down from the sky and onto the city in cylindrical waterfalls. The shadow spread rapidly, opening abysses that swallowed up all that they touched.

The city of Elpeck fell away like a departing tide.

More darkness cataracted down from the sky, covering up the view of dawn approaching from beneath the horizon.

"We have to get out of here!" Yuth screamed.

"And end up dead like Bethany?!" Mr. Twist rebutted.

High above, the serpent's featureless head began to deform. It came apart like an inflorescence, forming countless petals that thickened and elongated as they strained toward the sky. The dark serpent continued to change; its blossoming head emboldened into a fell crown, malefic in its majesty, and then further still, into a bouquet of countless heads whose cymose necks swayed in rapture.

Angel preserve us, Merritt prayed.

It had flowered into a hydra.

Geoffrey bellowed astride Karl's back. "On your mark! Something's emerging from the creature!"

Many-shaped shadows budded from the darkness' sides, just like the ones from the dread procession. Some were like men, others like wyrms, or many another of &alon's foul creations. They were shadow through and through, rimmed with a thin lining of prismatic fire. They spread like dust in the wind. If there was any rhyme or reason in the shadows' movements, Merritt couldn't see it. Some swept across the land at brilliant speed, erasing everything they touched. Others flew into nearby skyfalls and merged with their darkness.

Screaming wyrms pelted the fiends with psychokinesis, but to no avail. Merritt could only watch in terror as their powers' threads spilled into the shadows and disappeared.

The wyrms climbed higher and higher.

"Nothing's working!" Karl said.

"Watch them!" Brand yelled. "Watch the fiends closely! When they're pulling the threads in, you can't hurt them, but when they're not, our powers get magnified!"

"That makes no sense!" Heggy said.

"It doesn't matter," Brand replied. "It's what we've observed, so we've got to roll with it!"

"Will it be enough to stop them?" Yuth asked.

"It's certainly better than nothing!" Brand said.

Merritt saw the threads of magic suddenly stop streaming into several of the shadow-creatures. They banked around the hydra's flank, flame-edged wings spread.

"There!" she yelled.

Kurt and Brand fired bursts of repulsion at the approaching shadows. The air visibly quivered the moment their pataphysics hit their targets, exploding outward in waves of force that flung everyone back. Though the shadows were undamaged, the attacks were enough to knock them into a nearby skyfall, which absorbed them into itself.

Yuth and Mr. Twist got flung far enough from the dark hydra's pull to fly up and away, but the rest of the group got pulled back in, Merritt included.

"Merritt!" Storn yelled. "Pull up! Pull up!"

Pointing her neck skyward, Merritt careened around the hydra in a madcap curve that sent her rocketing upward along its length. She spied a web of brightness gathering in the city from the corner of her eye, but she couldn't stare at it for long. The hydra's gravity pulled her in so close, she had to lift her arms to keep her claws from skimming across its surface. Aerial turbulence rippled down Merritt's flanks like earthquakes, but she fought it and endured. She fought because she wanted to live.

She was tired of all the death.

Up above, beneath the brightness of the moon, the battle loomed. The dark hydra spread its many heads in ravenous delight.

— — —

West Elpeck Medical Center was gone. Even its remains had been hollowed out twice over, first by Greg's emergence, and then ALICE's, leaving little more than rubble and éboulements, charred and burnt, spilled into a deep pit that stood where the garage had once stood.

Yet even here, there was life.

&alon had taken root, spreading through the layers of buried history, repurposing subway tunnels and forgotten vaults into the inner cavities of her jungles. Fungal underbrush thronged in dark, dreary basements. They shone with a pale light, guiding squelching, clambering shamblers racing through passageways.

Down where the matter printers made miracles once upon a time, another corrupted wyrm-tree bloomed. &alon's foliage was gray beneath its boughs, her sprigs of wildfungus wilted and crumbling. Their dust fell into the pool of liquid shadow seeing from the great tree's roots. Many-colored will'o'wisps hovered above the limpid pools, providing the last remaining light.

The tree that had been Letty Kathaldri, and the hijacked bodies of Drs. Cassius Arbond and Richard Question glowed with many-colored veins. The veins' pulsing light quickened and brightened as a shadow rose, crawling up the bark like a spreading burn. The creeping film pulled whole stretches of fungus along with it. &alon's flesh crumbled to ash as it fell into the darkness' abyss.

The tree's many heads quivered as the evil consumed them, nihilistic rage flaring in their eyes. A beam of light and dark shot up from the tree, shooting through rubble and emerging from the earth to rise up and pierce the sky.

— — —

Most of Rayph's interactions with his sister came in one of two flavors: those where she was angry with him, and those where she wasn't. The first flavor was far more popular. Even now, she was angry with him, though a lot of it got lost in her screams. Rayph was screaming, too, though for a slightly different reason.

Jules was screaming because she was certain she was about to die, and while my son was definitely worried about that, as both a matter of habit and preference, he chose to look on the bright side. In this case, that meant appreciating that he was living through the single most supremely awesome event of his entire life. It actually made him kinda disappointed that he wouldn't be able to go to school tomorrow and tell all his classmates about it.

He could've duct-taped together all the badass video game cutscenes he'd ever seen and it still wouldn't be even half as awesome as this. Dad—yours truly—was a snake-dragon wielding the Angel's own holy Sword, swinging out sword beams and detonating magic orb that ripped baddies to shreds.

What could be cooler than that?

Perzandebilis zoomed and spun, forcing Rayph to brace himself against one of the control panels at the ship's helm to keep from getting dizzy.

Holy moly…

The display screen was like the biggest arcade machine Rayph had ever seen—like, the biggest—and the only reason he wasn't spending every second watching it in awe was because there was just so much other awesome stuff to look at: the monster-aliens hard at work around him, or the wicked cool movements of Tal's fingers as he used the buttons and joysticks to pilot Perzy.

Any gamer who cared about gaming knew how important a good control scheme was. It was like the most important thing, after the CPU and graphics processor⁠.

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The control scheme reminded him of the Nabla arcade machine at the Yellow Balloon⁠ hair salon. The battle did, too, only it had fungus and wyrms and magic—and, somehow, even more lasers—than the classic Monimega side-scrolling shooter.

Rayph sparkled with delight. "This is so awesome!"

Jules groaned. "What is wrong with you?!" she yelled. "This is insane!"

Rayph grinned. "Yeah, I know!"

"No, I mean the fucking sky is falling!" Jules yelled. "It's literally falling!"

Perzy went into another corkscrew.

"You can barely even feel the ship moving!" Rayph yelled.

"Rayph, I swear, if you throw up on me again, not even the healing pods will be able to fix you!"

The Night's dark was spilling down from nowhere. Even just being grazed by the dark streams was enough to erase almost half of you from existence. Wyrms that touched the gigantic streams caught fire, burning in rainbow colors—flames flaring through their eyes—right before their bodies exploded. Freaky shadowy snake-things swam out from the explosions. They moved like ripples on a pond, distorting the space they were passing.

"Shut up, please?" Tal barked. "I'm trying to keep us alive!"

The Vyxit rebels' surprise attack seemed to have turned their civil war around. Luminous bursts thundered in the module storm. Loyalist starfighters scrambled to regroup.

The wyrms and fungus monsters seized the opportunity, charging at the Loyalist fleet. They blasted it with spore streams. Magics tore through shields and hulls. Hordes of fungus creatures mobbed ships, breaking them open like piranhas.

Twiggy glanced at one of the communication displays, and then skittered up to the helm in a panic. "Tal," he yelled, mouthparts clicking, "they're using the Epsilon Protocol!"

"The what?" Tal asked.

Jules ran over to them. "What are they doing?"

All of a sudden, the blue jets at the modules' back ends smoldered and went dark. Then the modules grouped into clusters and began to merge with one another, fusing hull to hull in silent, magnetic snaps. The fused ships changed before Rayph's eyes, building up into monstrous mechs.

"They look like wyrms!" Rayph said.

Heat-rays sprouted from the metal serpents' flanks. Invisible magic shaped the lasers into huge, fanning wings that beat against the fungal tide as their owners rose higher and higher. Screaming wyrms and flaming fungus rained down toward the earth. Isolated Vyx fighter craft crashed in little fiery bursts of red and blue. Others plunged into one of the darkspouts, or into the abyss-pools expanding around them and vanished without a trace.

Rayph could hardly recognize his own world anymore. This high up, it looked more like an abstract painting than anything else.

Tal flew Perzy like a madman, darting past one of the Vyx-mechs while swooping around one of the darkspouts. He turned the ship around one-hundred eighty degrees!

"What the hell is that?!" Jules said, shrieking like a banshee. She grabbed one of the control panels. "What the hell is that?!"

A hydra of shadow was rising into the sky, winding its way around the giant beam of light streaming into the sky.

Just looking at it made Rayph's blood run cold.

Shadow creatures swam out from the hydra's body, edged in rainbow fire. The monsters cut through everything they touched; wyrms, fungus, Vyxit, it didn't matter. Modules short circuited and imploded. Flailing wyrms crumbled into gray nothingness.

The darkness sucked up the debris like quicksand.

Off in the corner of the viewscreen, Rayph saw a second beam burst out from Elpeck's ruins. It moved even more quickly than the first one. Rayph had to crane his neck back just to follow it up and up. And then—

"No…" he said.

The beam hit the Moon.

"What does this mean?" Jules asked.

"Bad things!" Rayph said.

Off to the side, by several readout panels on the wall, Twignix was working at a frantic pace on. The insectoid Vyxit tapped spots on the panels as he looked over lines and lines of text or code.

Whatever it was, it looked scarily complicated.

"Dad!" Rayph yelled. "What's happening?!"

He heard my song translated into an odd, but clear, voice.

"Darn it! This is what &alon's been warning me about all along. The Darkness has woken up!"

"Elaborate!" Al demanded.

I did.

"&alon says, 'All the bad things', I can't help but agree with her!"

"What of the great hydra?" Qua'loc asked, clambering up to the helm. "And the two beams?"

"I'm trying to ask the wyrms, but that giant Night hydra is distorting our wyrmsong," I said. "Listen, the Sword has started glowing."

"What?" Jules said.

"I don't know what it means either, but—"

—Suddenly, waving his arms, Twiggy whooped in joy. He reared up on his hind legs, splaying his forelegs on the wall. "The c-communication block coming from the Vengeance has been defeated, bested—ov-vercome! Comms are back!"

"Wait, what?" I asked.

"You heard him," Tal said, turning the ship on its side to fly between a dragon in a power-suit and a wyrm made entirely of fire-edged darkness. "The rebels' communications are back online!"

Outside, I could see-hear it happening. Waves of communication erupted across the Night like dueling musical scores.

Back inside Perzy, Rayph watched as symbols and code began to stream in all around the main viewscreen. Pop-ups popped up on Perzandebilis' silver walls, bearing text to the tune of a cacophony of voices.

"Tal!" I yelled. "You have to let everyone know: the Lodestars cannot be fired! If the Darkness gets access to their power, or to Kléothag's body, everything that's happened so far will seem like a prelude!"

I trumpeted the message on my end, too, singing out electromagnetic prose in all the Vyxit frequencies.

Qua'loc sat on his haunches, flicking his wings in dismay as he gazed at our world. "Dr. Howle, Kléothag is the god buried in our world, correct?"

"The one and only!" I said.

The manticore purred. "That must be why the Night is descending onto your world. It seeks the power buried within."

"I-Incoming transmission!" Twiggy yelled. "Incoming transmission!" The stilt-legged hexapod turned around to face the group. "We're receiving d-data from the rebel capital ships. It's encrypted; give me a m-moment."

"You hear that, Genneth?" Al said, raising his black beak and three eyes to the ceiling. "We'll have something for you in just a moment. Send it to as many wyrms as you can!"

But I didn't respond.

Rayph looked up at the ceiling. "D-Dad?"

"Guys," I said, "I think the Sword is trying to tell me something."

— — —

Something was happening to the Sword.

Ever since I'd claimed it, there'd been a presence within it working to help me. At first, I'd agreed with Suisei: the presence was some kind of automated assistant, to help the Sword's wielder use it. But now…

Not only had the Sword had reacted to me, now, it was reacting to the Darkness, too. That's what convinced me: this was more than just a nifty feature. Something was here, and whatever it was, it was waking up, just like the Darkness.

I couldn't help but wonder, and hope: might the Holy Angel still live?

It wouldn't have been the first thing someone had gotten wrong.

I felt the presence within the Sword more strongly than ever before. It had depth to it, glowing brightly in both my eyes and my grasp. It was a kind of animal awareness, pataphysical and hypnagogic, quivering on the edge of the world of dreams. It was like the Sword's energies had suddenly acquired a mind of their own.

Time and again, people had interfaced with the Sword and manipulated its power. But now, it seemed the reverse was happening: the Sword was manipulating its wielder.

Me.

Obviously, there was always the possibility that things were about to go horribly wrong, but I decided to give the Sword the benefit of the doubt. I'd gotten no complaints from this piece of God so far; I owed it at least a dollop of my trust.

I just wished it was easier to figure out what it wanted. The presence rustled through my body's energies like a hand fumbling about in the dark.

Suddenly, &alon floated around in front of me. "It wants you to use my power, Daddy Genneth."

"Wait," I asked. "you can understand it?"

"I… I think so?" She nodded. "Remember what you did in the hospipple, when the Lobby got all weird?"

"The turning, you mean?"

She nodded again. "I think it wants you to do that…" She turned to the monstrous hydra rising from my world. "…to the big bad wyrmeh."

'Big bad wyrmeh'; talk about an understatement!

The massive lanyard of particolored darkness rose from the face of my world, spreading across the battle and the Night. It was an apocalyptic vision, a nightmare made real. Objects passing near it were distorted by the proximity. Flaming debris and stray light wound around its body in orbits doomed to die. Silhouettes of forgotten things emerged from its depths, wriggling out from its mud. The horrors took flight, sweeping across the sky in with arcs of their baleful wings.

The sheer immensity of the thing broke the mind. It dwarfed us all.

&alon froze stiff, eyes widening. "Wyrmehs!" She turned to me in panic. "Look," she pointed at the hydra, "they're there!"

Swarms of wyrms raced up through the atmosphere. They spilled in a great current, desperate to escape the hydra's inexorable pull. The wyrms sent pataphysical blasts across the air, knocking the night-fiends back. Strangely, either the pataphysics detonated at levels of force orders of magnitude stronger than anything I'd seen, sending out psychokinetic repulsion waves that scattered everything except the great dark, or they struck the darkness and its minions seemingly without effect.

"Daddy! You have to help the other wyrmehs!"

"Why can't you?" I asked.

&alon stammered and cried. "I—I—"

"—Say no more," I said, sighing out spores. I wasn't doing it for her; I was doing it for everyone else.

My spores perambulated, indifferent to gravity.

We'd gone so high up now. The world's curve was the only immensity that rivaled the hydra. Dawn was stretching across the earthcurve, crowning the horizon in glory.

Gently, I thumped my elbow on Perzy's hull. "Tal, take us in."

"What?" he asked.

"The hydra!" I said. "The dark hydra!"

"What!?" he yelled. "Are you nuts?!"

Honestly, I probably was. And yet…

Something like confidence was streaming out from the Sword. No, not confidence: reassurance. That's what it was. A kind of transience, even; the feeling that, however frightening this moment might be, it, too, would pass.

"We're going to have to go that way, regardless," Al said.

Jules screamed. "What!?"

"The Vengeance—hUen-dE's ship, and our fleet's flagship—is orbiting at a further remove from the planet than any other capital ship. It must be almost halfway to your moon," Al explained.

"Y-Yes," Twiggy said, "and the only way to stop—neutralize— the Lodestars is to take out the—"

"—No!" &alon fluttered behind me, clamped onto my neck and held on for dear life. "No no no no no no!" she cried. "Save me, Daddy Genneth! Save me!"

Against the Night's dark, you'd be forgiven for thinking the three serpents heading toward us were wyrms.

"The darkness took them!" &alon cried. "It wants to take me! I can feel it!"

I suppose they had been wyrms, once. Now, though, the darkness had taken them. They were creatures of pure shadow, edged in a thin lining of rainbow fire that spewed from their eyes like the breaths of a wild beast. They approached us erratically, darting one way, then twirling another, moving in spurts and starts, or sometimes not at all, simply quivering in one spot, and then reappearing elsewhere.

The Sword's light flared with urgency. I felt it reaching for a power I'd used before.

The weave revolved, features clicking in and out of place.

I yelled: "Are you ready, &alon?!"

"Save me Daddy, save me!" she cried and cried.

That was probably the best I was gonna get short of "Yes".

It was the twisted Lobby all over again, but with far more focus and intensity. Perzandebilis rocketed toward the corrupted wyrms and the great serpent and the looming Moon beyond. I loosened my coils just enough to stick myself out a little more as I drew &alon's power into the Sword. Azon's blade bristled with fractal light. Dendrites and coils and geometries of dust flashed around the Sword in a silent whirlwind. Power sandstormed though my limbs.

Then I swung. I swung with both hands, and let the fractals fly. The magic rushed toward the shadow wyrms like a breath of snow wind, ever revolving, growing and alive. It swept through the dark, twisting and turning space itself and the corrupted wyrms within it, sporting them away into the aether.

The way was clear. Perzy sped through the open space, untroubled by the dark.

I scarcely believed it. I kept staring, turning around even as my mount rocketed forward.

Was it gone?

"Are they gone, Dad?" Jules asked. "Are they really gone?"

"I—"

But then I heard a voice.

"—Genneth?"

I whipped my head around.

"Genneth! Genneth!"

A group of wyrms was flying toward Perzandebilis, and at their head was none other than one Mrs. Merritt Elbock.

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